“Don’t try to make me the bad guy, Ted,” Duncan told him. “I’ve always been square with you.”
He looked at the floor, embarrassed, because he knew Duncan was right.
“Get your shoes on. Come on.”
He nodded and went to the living room to turn off the television. He took his keys from the kitchen table and walked back to the front door. He stepped into his shoes and grabbed his sweatshirt off the back of the chair beside the door. It had a slight smell of cigarette smoke.
They passed the entrance to Sandy Creek in silence. The boy eyed all the buttons and switches on the dash. The radio squawked now and again. When they neared Woodbury Heights, Duncan slowed the car and they turned in. He drove to the culvert at the top of the road and stopped. He put the car in park and looked over at the boy. The boy was afraid to turn his head.
“Hand me my lunch?” Duncan pointed to the brown bag near his feet.
He bent over and returned with the bag. He handed it over.
“I like to come up here to eat,” Duncan said. “It’s quiet, out of the way.” Duncan opened the bag and rummaged around inside. He came out with a cellophane-wrapped sandwich.
“You like egg salad?”
The boy shrugged.
“Here,” Duncan said, holding out half the sandwich. “My wife makes great egg salad.”
“That’s all right,” said the boy.
“Take it.” Duncan thrust the half-sandwich at him. “I’ve got a whole other one in here.”
He took the sandwich and the two ate.
“It’s good,” the boy said, holding up the sandwich.
“Told you,” Duncan said. “Chips?” He held out an open sandwich bag full of crinkle-cut potato chips.
The boy reached in and took one.
“Take a handful. You’re doing me a favor. If I ate everything my wife packed, I’d be a blimp.”
The boy reached over and took a few more chips. A little later Duncan offered him a cookie and he took it.
“You know why we’re here?” Duncan said.
The boy shrugged. “Something with the Dennison case?”
“Yes and no.” Duncan chewed and swallowed his last bite of cookie and chased it down with a sip from a can of diet cola. “They had a little incident over by the high school last night and I thought you might know something about it.”
“What happened?”
“Someone tried to set a car on fire.”
“Huh,” the boy said. “Sounds pretty crazy.”
“Don’t play stupid, Teddy.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m going to say this once,” Duncan said. “You have no idea how much shit you are in at the moment. And you better get it through that head of yours that I’m trying to help you.”
The boy shook his head.
“You don’t get it, Ted—this is just the beginning. Look at your life since this happened. You’re falling like a homesick rock. You think that getting off these charges is going to stop that? Two wrongs only make way for more wrongs. You screwed up—you loaded the gun. You can’t change that, but you can tell the truth.”
“It was Kevin and Bobby,” the boy said.
Duncan shook his head. “Yours are the only prints on the bolt,” he said. “Kevin’s came up on the casing and the trigger and everywhere else, but yours are the only ones on the action of that gun, Ted. They’re waiting for a few more test results, but they have what they need to file charges against you.”
“No way,” he said.
“They’ve got the physical evidence to corroborate Kevin’s story,” Duncan said. “What is there to back up yours?”
“My word.”
“Pardon me for saying this, Ted, but your word is looking a little shoddy at the moment. And if this little firebomb incident sticks, you’re not going to look so repentant.”
The boy shook his head. He looked out the window at the tree line. “It was their fault,” he said.
“This isn’t about them. This is about letting yourself off the hook. You need to understand that. I’ve seen other boys like you, Ted—boys who never get it and they just keep screwing up and screwing up, just like you’re doing now. If you don’t come clean, you don’t have a chance. I know it.”
“I’m not screwing up,” he said.
“The day before Bobby was killed you admitted that you and Terry were up here on the Darling property. That day I found the remains of three Molotov cocktails up here in the circle. Last night two very similar incendiary devices were used to light up a car belonging to one of these Young American kids and they’re pointing the finger at you, Ted.”
“They’re just pissed because I stole one of their girlfriends.”
“You don’t even want to know what they’re saying about you and her,” Duncan told him.
“I know what they’re saying and it’s crap. Go ahead and ask Colleen.”
“I hope you’re right, but you’re missing my point, Ted. I’m not trying to get you in more trouble—I’m trying to keep you out of it. If you just tell the truth, I think we can get you out of most of this mess.”
“Take me home,” he said.
“For Christ’s sake, Ted, we know you loaded the gun. And if you get up there and lie to the judge, it’s going to reflect very poorly on you. Lying in court—perjury, Ted. It’s a crime. It can be added to whatever else they get you on.”
“Take me home.”
“I don’t have to tell anyone about the broken bottles I found up here, Ted. We can get you off the arson charges. And if you tell us what happened with the Dennisons, I think it’ll be clear to everyone that it was just an accident.”
“You’re lying,” he said. “She said you’d do this. I say what you want and then you put me away and they sue us for everything.”
“Your mother loves you very much. Too much, Ted. She’s not seeing this clearly.”
“Take me home now.”
“You got to trust me,” Duncan told him.
The boy opened the door of the cruiser and pushed himself out. He got his feet under him and sprinted for the tree line, not bothering to close the door of the car. He ran as far and as fast as he could, dodging trees and small saplings, hiking his legs up and over the downed limbs and rocks in his path. When he stopped, his lungs were raw from the fierce breathing. Terry’s cigarettes the night before hadn’t helped. With his hands on his knees and his head hanging, he heaved several times until the remnants of the egg salad, chips, and cookie poured out his mouth and fell to the dry leaves on the ground. He hacked and spit several times and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. He looked back in the direction of Woodbury Heights and was happy to see that Duncan hadn’t followed him.
The floor of the forest was deep with downed leaves and the boy kicked and crashed through them. He jumped a couple of deer as he crested a small knoll. He heard them before he saw them, and then only caught a glimpse of their white tails as they bounded away. On the other side of the knoll, he found the old stone wall he was looking for. If he followed it to the right, he would come to the small creek that eventually crossed the road just down from his house. Instead he turned left on the wall and walked until the stones took a sharp right turn. He knew to bear slightly left from the corner of the wall and walk until he came to the swamp.
When he was young, when trouble had erupted in the house, when his parents had exploded at him or each other, he ran for the woods, where it was quiet and safe. He built small forts and dreamed of never returning. He thought that if he could build a warm enough place to sleep, he could sneak back into his parents’ home while they were at work and steal the food and supplies he needed and stay away forever.
The feeling struck him again. He wished he never had to go back to any of it. But even as a child he knew the futility of his escape plans. The evening air poured through the flimsy walls of his small huts and lean-tos. No matter how tightly he thatched the branches t
hat he broke from the surrounding trees, light from the rising moon and stars poured through the makeshift ceilings. The cold and the solitude sent him shivering home every time. Upon his return, he found his parents glued to nighttime television. They looked up, even greeted him, but never seemed to acknowledge his absence. He felt somehow robbed, unable to drum up their attention—they never even acknowledged the familial strife that had sent him running in the first place.
He came to the swamp and walked the edge of it for some time. After fighting through a small stand of young pines, he poked out into his uncle’s backyard.
He crossed the small patch of grass and climbed the wooden stairs that led up to the porch. He held a hand to his brow and looked in a window. It wasn’t much past noon and he figured his uncle and aunt wouldn’t return until five or six. He reached above the light fixture at the top of the door and came down with the spare key. He unlocked the door and returned the key to its hiding place.
The house was quiet and smelled of food. He found some bread and deli meat and made a simple sandwich. He took a box of off-brand cheese-flavored crackers from the top of the refrigerator and poured a small pile of them on the side of his plate. He pulled a beer from the door of the fridge and went to the table to eat. When he finished, he washed and dried his plate, took another beer, drank half, and poured the rest down the drain.
He went into the basement and let himself into his uncle’s room. The deer heads stared, wide-eyed and unblinking. The gun cabinets reflected the light that came in from the small cellar windows just below the ceiling. He walked around the room and stopped at the cabinet that held the guns from his house. He pulled at the door but it was locked, so he reached his hand up and ran it along the top of the cabinet. He found the small key and fingered it into the lock.
His father’s shotgun was older than the boy but the father had kept it well and the age did not show. There was ornamental carving on the wooden stock and the blue steel receiver of the Remington 1100.
In the years before the Darling land was sold, the father pulled him from school for the first week of deer season—no matter how much his teachers objected. In the woods, on the planks of a tree stand, the father stood with his back to the tree, the boy with his back to the father, the shotgun standing before them both. When the cold finally overtook him, and the boy’s body shivered uncontrollably, the father unbuttoned his heavy Woolrich coat, pulled the boy to the warmth inside, and closed the garment around them both—the three, father, son, and firearm, becoming some strange totem.
The boy reached to the floor of the cabinet and fingered open a yellow-and-green box of double-ought buckshot. He let a shell into the chamber. With one hand he released the action, and with the other he let it slowly close. He thumbed the rest of the shells from the box into the belly of the firearm.
He sat in his uncle’s chair and stood the gun vertically, stock down, between his knees. He found it difficult to get his top teeth over the front sight. Once past his teeth, the sight dug into the roof of his mouth. When he exhaled, there was a new sound: the hollow call of his breath around the barrel. He closed his eyes and clicked the safety off with his index finger. It was all he could do to focus on the placement of his fingers. There wasn’t room for the guilt, for the sick feelings that over-ran him. There was just enough space for the concentration it took to keep his fingers off the trigger.
He wondered what Lawrence had felt in his final moments behind the barn. For the boy, there was little feeling in it. The concentration it required seemed to quash that part of him. His grandfather’s words ricocheted through his head, Some ways are just no way, some ways are no way, some ways are no way at all.
The steel of the gun was cold in his damp hands. The smooth wooden stock was slick with his perspiration. He felt guilty for implicating the firearm in such an egregious act, for somehow tainting all the good memories.
He ran his finger along the rounded edge of the trigger guard. The pad of his finger stopped where the guard returned to the stock, where the trigger entered the receiver. His finger slid down in the direction of the floor and found the round button of the safety. He popped it back on.
“Some ways are no way,” his whispered when the barrel was free from his mouth. He rested the butt of the stock on his inner thigh and drew back the action. He held out a hand and caught the ejected shell. He closed and opened the action four more times until the magazine was empty.
He took his shirtsleeve and gently wiped the barrel free of the moisture from his breath. He wrapped the cotton around his finger and twisted it inside the muzzle. After he finished with the barrel, he wiped down the receiver and the stock.
With the gun back in the cabinet, he thought how foolish he had been—loading more than one shell, as if one wouldn’t have done the trick.
He twisted the lock and pulled the door to his uncle’s home closed behind him. He took the porch stairs two at a time and loped across the lawn. Again he fought through the small pines and followed the edge of the swamp. He found the stone wall and walked the length of it. Instead of following the creek to his house, he jumped across it and fought his way up the small hill on the other side. The ground was slick with leaves and he grabbed at small trees to help him up the incline.
Darling’s Rock hulked just past the crest of the small knoll. The granite boulder was an oddity in the landscape—it was the size of a small bungalow and sat perched atop the hill. The side he approached was pointed like a shark’s snout on one end and slightly rounded on the other, making it look like a distorted map of the United States. He walked up close and rested a hand on the cool, coarse rock. He bent to look into the mouth of a small cavern beneath it—as a child he climbed inside and had immediately felt a wash of terror when he realized the immense weight that hung over him. He’d scampered out and shown his father a souvenir from the cave: a small rounded ball, brown and about the size of a grape or olive.
“It’s shit,” the father said.
The boy looked closer.
“Porcupine,” the father said. “They like places like that.”
The boy quickly flung away the turd and wiped his hand on the leg of his dungarees. His father laughed. The boy asked how the rock got there and the father explained glaciers to him—how the huge sheets of ice could move such things at random. The boy tried to imagine it.
“What about the trees?” he asked.
The father passed a flat hand horizontally across the landscape. “No trees.”
The boy, now grown and leaning on the rock, tried again to imagine the terrain—nothing but ice, and when it melted, nothing but stone and mud and water in every direction. He walked around the rock, under the overhang of the shark snout, to the flat face of the far side. Names and dates were chiseled into the stone, the oldest going back to the 1700s, when the surrounding area was most likely nothing but pasture—having been logged barren again.
What little he knew of his family history told him they had not yet arrived in the area at that time. They were French-Canadians who had fought in the Civil War in exchange for American citizenship. Even after fighting for the Union, the early French immigrants were ostracized by the town. They were forbidden to attend the local Catholic church, and so built their own—St. Peter’s, the parish the boy’s family still attended when holidays brought them around to mass.
He turned from the rock and looked out into the forest. He realized that his family was not unlike the folks who now populated the new developments. They came, clung close to one another, and bore the brunt of the locals’ condemnation. Their acceptance required time, and more than that, another new group to persecute. For the first time, he saw a fundamental flaw in the Youth doctrine—they fought to preserve a status quo where there had never been anything but change.
He left Darling’s Rock and followed the ridge up and around until he saw the open backyards of Sandy Creek. He quickly jogged between two houses to the street. From the edge of the pavement, he followed th
e brick walkway up to the front steps of the house. He looked at the chandelier and walked to the door. He reached out and touched the glowing doorbell. He heard the chime inside and he heard footsteps approaching. The door opened and Mrs. Dennison stood in front of him. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t cry out or fly into a fit of rage. Mrs. Dennison stood in the open door and looked at him. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a blue sweatshirt. She didn’t look mad or sad or much of anything.
“Theodore,” she said.
“Mrs. Dennison.” He looked at her feet. She had on white leather sneakers.
“Kevin’s at school,” she told him.
“I know,” he said.
“Why aren’t you at school?”
“I didn’t feel good.”
“Are you feeling better now?”
He shook his head.
“Do you have a cold?” she said. “The flu?”
“I’m awful hung-over,” he said. He looked up at her and she nodded.
“Kevin’s been drinking and smoking marijuana something terrible,” she said. “We don’t know what to do.”
He nodded.
“I can’t say I blame him,” she said. “If I thought it would help, I’d do it too.”
“It doesn’t,” he said.
“I know. I’d ask you inside but the house is a mess. I haven’t had the energy for that sort of thing. You want to sit?” She stepped out of the house and motioned to the steps. He turned and took a seat on the second step from the top. She sat on the step above his, on the opposite side. “Thank goodness we have someone to take care of the yard,” she said. They looked out at the lawn, the shaped shrubs, the small mulched island planted with a variety of small flowers. They sat for a moment without speaking.
“I loaded the gun,” he said.
“I know you did,” she said.
He looked down at his hands. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” she said. “There was a time when I hated you for it, but I’m through that.”
He nodded.
“Did you ever hate me?” she said.
American Youth Page 16
