Shaper

by Jessie Haas

  “Queenie!” Julia screamed. “Queenie!”

  Queenie paid no attention. She darted at the coon, but halfheartedly, as if she sensed something wrong. She looked as if she wanted to be called off, but Julia’s shrieks didn’t penetrate. “You guys have pretty much burned that cue,” David had said yesterday.

  Chad pulled out his clicker, his stolen clicker. He ran down the deck stairs while Mom and Gib and Julia yelled, “Chad!”

  He leaned over the railing halfway down and waited till Queenie’s circling brought her to face him.

  Click!

  Queenie looked up, her big ears straight like funnels to catch the sound. Chad clicked again.

  Queenie gave one quick, worried glance at the coon. Was this right? Then she came directly to Chad.

  Click! Chad caught her around the neck. He rubbed her chest and whispered, “Good girl! Good Queenie!” He led her up the stairs and into the house, and while the rest of the family said, “Whew!” and “Wow, you got her!” and “Chad, don’t you ever do that again!” he got out the hot dogs and gave her two.

  Then he joined everyone else at the window. The coon blundered against the wire mesh fence and huddled there. It must be hot all through; that must be what rabies felt like. Every cell must be burning.

  “Poor thing,” Mom said. They’d been afraid, but it was the one in trouble. In all its wandering, looking for ease, it had ended up here against their fence. If it would die, if it could only just die!

  But it faltered on, slowly, bumping into the wire. Mom went to the phone. “Dad,” she said in a moment, “we have a rabid coon here. Can you come down?”

  Chad didn’t want to look at the coon and couldn’t stop watching. Only when he heard Jeep’s truck did he go upstairs, sit on his bed, and plug his fingers into his ears so hard it hurt.

  For a while nothing happened. What was taking Jeep so long? Maybe the coon wasn’t … no, it was sick. So sick. With his lids squeezed shut, Chad saw the green glow of its eyes, burning inside, and nothing could put out—

  The sound of the shot went through him, dense and blunt as the bullet itself. He kept his fingers in his ears a long time, but when he took them away, he heard a shovel striking into dirt.

  Later, below him in the kitchen, Mom said, “We need a gun in this house. We shouldn’t have to call my father every time something like this happens.”

  “This is the first time something like this ever has happened,” Gib said. “I’m a child of the suburbs; I don’t know how to shoot!”

  “He never taught us girls, but shouldn’t one of us know how? To protect our kids?”

  “A gun in this house would threaten your kids, every minute of every day. You’ve got a wild daughter, a depressed and withdrawn older son, and a little boy who’s into something every minute. Do you really want a gun?”

  You also have no doors, so maybe you should lower your voices when you talk about your children! Chad thought.

  Mom said, “Oh, I know. But—”

  “But a man’s not a man if he can’t shoot things!”

  “That’s silly, and you know it! But sometimes you have to, and we can’t, and it makes me feel as if I’m not a grown-up. If we’d come along after Shep got hit, we’d have been helpless!”

  Gib sighed, heavily enough to be heard all the way upstairs. “I know. Though what Chad’s putting him through—”

  Chad sat up on his bed. What I’m putting him through?

  “What I love about your father,” Gib said, “after his upbringing, all he’s done, he’s still—he’s like a tree trunk. It looks dead, like it couldn’t possibly be hurt, but nick it and it’s full of sap.”

  “Mmm!” It was the sound of a hug. They were quiet for a moment. Then Mom said, “Should we get Chad into therapy?”

  “I had therapy at his age,” Gib said. “Know why? I was building space stations in my mind—every waking moment! But the therapist didn’t want to hear that, so I made stuff up.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Let’s just say it would have kept me from ever being drafted!”

  “Chad’s not building space stations.”

  “I have a lot of faith in Chad,” Gib said. “This stuff he’s doing with David Burton is making a difference.”

  You can say that again! Chad thought. They were observing him more closely than he’d realized.

  And what did they know? Nothing!

  Still, when he went downstairs for supper, he liked them, all of them, even Sky. Even Queenie. They were precious, though not perfect—mixed blessings, as Gib often said of Sky.

  All weekend they were nice to one another.

  CHAPTER

  16

  MONDAY IT ALL went sour. At breakfast not one of his family seemed like any sort of blessing. Sky dribbled milk down his chin disgustingly, and Mom didn’t seem to notice. Gib read the newspaper. He’d jogged to the bottom of the road for it in the loudest of his shirts and the shorts where the dye job divided exactly between the cheeks. Chad remembered making that pair. It had been a joke. He’d never expected anyone to wear them, let alone his father.

  Julia was Julia. That was all it took.

  This time last week he’d been heading down to his job. Done with that already, like a toy broken by Christmas afternoon.

  He lingered at the table when the rest of them left, trying to do the newspaper crossword puzzle. None of the clues made sense. Mom came to put on the teakettle. “Hadn’t you better get going, Chad?”

  He shrugged and waited, determined to make her ask and have it out in the open.

  “Chad? Is something wrong?”

  That wasn’t the question he wanted to answer. He shrugged again, but she didn’t go on, and he finally said, “I’m not going.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just decided not to.”

  “Decided not to? Chad, it’s a job! You can’t just decide not to show up!”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because he’s counting on you!” The kettle boiled. Mom switched it off and poured her cup of tea. “Did something happen down there that I should know about?”

  Chad shook his head. It was a little hard to say, even to himself, what had happened. “Door,” he wrote into an open four-letter slot, ruining the crossword.

  “Then what are you going to do?” Mom asked. “Don’t keep shrugging. I can’t stand it!”

  Chad couldn’t help shrugging again. It was all he had in him to do.

  “Chad, you can’t just mope around for the next month! You aren’t playing baseball; you have to do something!”

  Chad’s shoulders started to shrug again, all on their own. Mom’s hand clapped onto his neck. Her fingernails touched him, not digging, but almost digging. “Don’t!”

  Then she snatched her hand away. “Oh my God, look at me!” She turned to the stove. He heard a little splash. “Ow! Ow!”

  That was something, anyway.

  The sunbeam slanted deeper into the empty kitchen.

  “Want to play the ambush game?”

  Chad bent over the ruined crossword. Sky circled him and hauled at his arms. “Play with me! Play with me! Please, please, please!”

  “Chad, play with him!” Gib barked from the computer table in the corner.

  “You can’t make people play!” Chad muttered, under cover of “prettypretty prettyplease!”

  Gib looked up. “Wanna bet?”

  For Gib he seemed dangerous, though thin and not very muscled, and with his long, meek ponytail hanging down his back. Something hard in Chad, something alarmingly independent of his normal self, considered. Could Gib make him?

  His shoulders twitched in a shrug. He followed Sky out onto the deck, to the broken-legged plastic horses and the one-armed cowboy.

  Sky sat down with the toys, in a tangle of deck furniture all on its sides, and picked up the blond horse. “We have to be really quiet,” he said in a piercing whisper. “Here comes the bad guy riding down the canyon—”


  “I don’t see a bad guy!”

  Sky looked at him as if he were an idiot. “ Pretend! Now you have to make the good guy ride.” He pushed the handicapped cowboy into Chad’s hands. “He wants to catch the bad guy and make him tell where the money’s hid. Ride, ride, ride.” Sky made a whispery sound that was supposed to be whistling.

  Chad jumped the cowboy over the fallen chair back. He kicked the cowboy’s legs against Sky’s horse and, accidentally, against Sky’s brown, soft hand.

  “Ow!”

  Chad kept kicking with the cowboy, knocking the horse over. “Blam-blam—killed him and his horse! Game’s over.”

  “No! That’s not—”

  “Game’s over!” Chad got up and vanished around the corner, hearing Sky’s roar behind him and his father’s angry voice.

  He headed up the road. Halfway he met Jeep and Helen driving down. So no one was at the farm.

  No one was in the barn either, and he went inside it.

  It was dark in there, after the bright outdoors. The scent of new hay pressed down, heavy and sweet. A year ago he and Jeep had spent an hour, on a morning just like this, checking the bales to see if any were overheating. Packed this close, hay that was a little too green could generate an awesome heat—enough to set the barn afire.

  The bales were strewn askew on top, and loose flakes of hay lay on the barn floor. Jeep must have checked by himself this year.

  Jeep’s tools leaned against the wall. Here was the anvil; here were the chains; here was the gambrel-stick by which the butchered pig and steer were hung, year after year, splayed open to cool in the November air. Harnesses and horse collars gathered dust, and deep in one corner, dustiest of all, was Jeep’s red goat cart. When Jeep was twelve and had moved in with a family that was kind as well as hardworking, he’d been given this cart. It was the ambition of his life at that time to own a goat and drive it.

  He’d had to move on. Chad never knew why. The tales had come according to what the two of them were working on at the moment, so he’d never pieced together Jeep’s growing up to make a full, real story. Somehow from that farm, Jeep had gone on to others, then to driving for a small trucking company at the age of fifteen, and then into the army, the war in Korea, and back here to marry Helen. After he bought this farm, he visited the kind family. The goat cart was still there, and someone remembered that it had been given to Jeep.

  All it would take was a bale falling off the high stack, arcing inexplicably toward that corner.…

  He couldn’t quite do it. Not quite.

  He went outside, to the pigpen. The pig got up when it saw him and came over with a friendly oink. It was pinkish white, with twinkling little eyes behind stubby lashes.

  “You’re meat!” Chad told it. “Dead meat! You’ve only got till fall. Don’t you know that?”

  The pig gave a rich grunt and pushed its flat nose at him. He picked a broad dandelion leaf. The pig smacked it down.

  It glanced up at him again and then along the fence, communicating with its eyes the way Shep used to. There, between two posts, lay Jeep’s flat stick for scratching pigs’ backs, weathered silver-gray, the edges rubbed smooth against generations of bristles.

  Chad felt his heart swell and heat. Without thinking, he opened the latch and pushed the gate back.

  The pig squeezed through the opening. Its head was down now. It didn’t have anything more to say to Chad, or he to it. He went out into the woods and spent a long time throwing sticks in above the waterfall and watching them be swept downstream.

  CHAPTER

  17

  THE PIG ENJOYED itself in Helen’s beans and her dahlia bed, and all week the rest of them heard about it. “Spend a little money, I told him, and build a proper pigpen, or at least close the gate!”

  Jeep didn’t say much. The first time he saw Chad, afterward, he gave him a short, steady look from under his lowered brows.

  But Chad didn’t see much of Jeep, or Helen, or anyone. He spent the week walking every trail that crossed the hillside: the old roads, where Jeep had logged when Mom and V were children; the newer roads, where he got his firewood out now; the back pasture, where the young stock used to summer, grown up to juniper and rosebushes in the years since Jeep had sold his dairy cows. Sometimes Chad managed to leave Queenie behind. Sometimes she came with him. It didn’t matter. What mattered was pushing himself, making his legs hurt. Sometimes if he went fast and far enough, he’d notice suddenly that the bruised feeling in his chest was gone. Noticing was enough to make it come right back.

  Another week began, Monday and then Tuesday passing slowly moment by moment, but swiftly, too, because it was already eleven days since Chad had quit.

  Eleven days ago had still been July. Now it was August. At the end of August Louise would go.

  And let her! Let her! But it seemed to Chad that he could feel her down the hill there. If he let himself forget for a moment, it was magical. She was there. He might meet her.

  She might kill him.

  But he couldn’t stay away any longer. By secret paths he passed the white house, often several times a day. Once he saw Gib there, and for a few days afterward his parents stopped looking quite as anxiously at him.

  Another day Jeep was there with a forked stick in his hands, dowsing the line of the water pipe. David looked impressed, though it wasn’t that special. Several volunteer fire fighters could find underground water this way.

  Louise was never outside.

  Then one afternoon, when he crossed above the house on a worn deer trail, there she was. At first Chad didn’t see her. His heart drummed hard and quick, though he didn’t know why, as if someone else were beating it.

  A sapling shape near the edge of the lawn lifted its arms in a graceful oval to frame a dark-haired head. Chad’s heart broke into a gallop. This felt magical, dangerous, magical.

  Now Louise dropped her arms disgustedly, shook them out, and slowly lifted them again. Chad saw no difference, but she seemed satisfied. She drew herself up, rising onto her toes. She believed she was alone. I should go, Chad thought. But at that moment he saw the glint of chrome through the trees.

  Jeep’s truck. Always Jeep, prowling this road a dozen times a day. He pulled across the end of the green driveway and spoke to Louise out the window. She went toward him, and Malkin appeared from somewhere to follow her. Chad saw the white flash of Jeep’s teeth. Jeep was handsome, even from this distance, and especially when he smiled. The teeth seemed like a flash of spirit, a true communication. The smile was what Jeep withheld. The smile was his power.

  Louise went to work to make him smile again. She must have, because he did smile. She stepped closer to the truck.

  “Don’t!” The sound of his own voice startled Chad, made him notice himself, hidden on a deer trail above a lonely house. He’d become a Peeping Tom, the kind of guy of whom people say, afterward, “He was quiet, a loner. But I never thought he’d do anything like that!”

  The harm he’d done was to himself. A door, he thought. What was so bad about a door?

  All right, it wasn’t just a door. It was Queenie. It was finding out how he’d been shaped to train her, to like her. David shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t.

  The sound of laughter rose from the yard. Louise stepped back with Malkin in her arms, and the pickup rolled on down the hill, very quietly.

  Chad drew a deep breath and held it. Louise had turned to face uphill. She stared straight at him, and Malkin did, too, ears and whiskers and the whole shape of his face funneling Chad in like a satellite dish.

  Chad stood still. They couldn’t see him. Could they?

  After a minute Louise walked toward the house. Over her shoulder Malkin’s round face turned, tracking Chad, homing in on him.

  CHAPTER

  18

  HE WOULDN’T SPY on them anymore. He’d stay away.

  The trouble was he missed them, both of them. He even missed training Queenie. He missed doing something new
and hard with his mind, and he missed wondering if he’d see Louise for a moment, if he’d think of something to say this time.

  Thursday morning he filled his pockets with oyster crackers. “Let’s go for a walk, Queenie.”

  Her eyes met his for an instant. That’s what I want, Chad thought. “Sit” and “heel” and “come” were useful, but what he wanted was a dog that met his eyes.

  So click her.

  Too late. She stood ready to go, her nose an inch from the doorknob. Chad let her out and followed her golden tail down the driveway. He didn’t want to train her to meet his eyes. He’d had that with Shep without ever trying.

  Queenie paused at the bottom of the drive, looking back at him. Which way?

  Uphill. Things being what they were. He angled his shoulders that way, and with something of a slump Queenie turned. She’d rather go to David’s.

  “Know what you mean,” Chad said. She looked at him. His hand was in his pocket, his thumb was on the clicker. What the heck! He clicked and tossed her a cracker.

  Fresh horse tracks marked the road. Big tracks. Rocky. Chad opened his senses wide, trying to drag in the scent of Louise’s violet perfume. Nothing. The tracks might have been made this morning, or two hours ago, or fifteen minutes.

  “What do you think?” Queenie looked back at him. Click! Cracker. And now, downhill, the quick rub-a-dub of galloping hooves. Chad’s heart pounded.

  But it wouldn’t be Rocky, not coming that fast. Chad put a hand on Queenie’s collar and stepped to the edge of the road. Tiger swooped around the corner, head high and pointed straight like a lance, Julia braced against the reins.

  Tiger didn’t seem to see Chad until he was right beside him. Then he made an explosive sideways leap. One hind foot plunged into the ditch opposite. A forefoot knuckled over. He nearly went down. Julia lurched onto his neck in a flapping of loosened rein.

  Then Tiger scrambled up and on, Julia shouting, “Dammit, Chad!” They disappeared over the crest of the hill in a spatter of flying gravel.