Without a word, Paul began edging his way up the face with his feet and right arm while holding the beer with his left. I followed but quickly fell behind. The grade was just gentle enough for us to climb it with relative ease, but steep enough that a slip and a tumble was sure to result in serious injury. I was determined, however, not to be left behind.
Every twenty feet or so, I stopped, panting and heaving, waiting for the burning in my legs to subside. Before long, Paul was just a speck above me, sitting just below the tree line above a rocky hump jutting out of the face, surveying the valley like a jaded emperor.
By the time I reached him, Paul had already finished one cigarette and was preparing to light another. I turned and sat with my head between my knees, catching my breath.
“Want to try one?” he asked.
He held out his pack of cigarettes and shook it gently so that the filter ends slid out toward me.
I’d been watching Paul do it for long enough. I practiced often, with pencils and straws and even Paul’s own cigarettes when he left a pack in his room and no one was around to see. I took one out and popped it into the corner of my mouth like a pro.
Paul cupped his hands around the end to light it for me. I took a small puff and blew out the smoke and rested my hand on my bent knee, the cigarette perched between the tips of my right middle and index fingers.
“It doesn’t do anything unless you inhale,” he said.
He told me to breathe out all the air in my chest and hold the cigarette to my lips and suck in a quick, short toke. I choked and coughed. Instead of laughing, Paul quietly encouraged me. It was almost sweet.
Paul handed me another beer. We sat there together, drinking and smoking as the sun turned the sky pale orange and indigo.
“They call this place John’s Gap because a kid named John got lost here back in the seventeen hundreds,” Paul said. “His folks were frontier people. One day he was out with his dad, sitting on a stump while his old man cut timber. John’s daddy was really into chopping those logs—he was going at it pretty hard. He stopped for a minute and turned around to say something to John, but when he looked at the stump where the boy had been sitting, John was gone.”
Paul paused and stared at me, his face blank, emotionless.
“They looked for little John for three days straight and didn’t find a stitch of clothing or a hair from his head.”
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Want another cigarette?”
“OK,” I said.
Once again he shook one out of the pack for me and cupped his hands to help me light it in the wind. My throat was dry and itchy. I was starting to feel sick. But I lit up anyway and kept on smoking.
“Some folks thought Indians might have crept up behind his old man and snatched him right off the stump without making a sound, covering his mouth so his daddy couldn’t hear him scream.”
“You’re just trying to scare me,” I said.
“It’s true,” Paul said, “as far as I know.”
I pictured a hulking, nightmarish Indian warrior with black eyes and long, death-black hair.
“Sometimes at night,” Paul said, “they could hear little John in the woods, calling to them. They’d run out and look, but they never found him.”
I felt dizzy. When I looked back up the hill at the tree line, the woods seemed darker and closer. Paul flicked his spent cigarette down into the gap, and it went careering off into the falling night, a tiny little hot orange bullet on a field of darkening blue.
The air had grown cold. I dropped my cigarette and let it roll away. Without my asking, Paul pulled out the pack and shook another one loose. I took it and let him help me light it one more time.
My eyes lost focus. I clung to the rock beneath me, yet still felt as if I were tumbling through space.
“Could have been a coyote, I guess,” he said.
I dropped my head to the rock and retched. A beery, bilious mess gushed out beneath me, spewing across the sandy surface of the limestone.
I couldn’t stop heaving. I choked and gagged and spat, with Paul beside me, still smoking. Except for when he sucked on his cigarette and the ember at the tip fanned out in a little gold bloom over his face, he was invisible.
When I tried to stand up, I felt myself falling forward. I saw myself bouncing down the mountainside, piled up on the rubble, my mangled corpse covered with a layer of soot, as if it had been rolled around in the ashes of a thousand Camel Lights.
I fell sideways and hugged the slope. The rock was cool against my face. When I looked up, Paul was gone.
I whispered his name. I was sure that I had missed him in the darkness, or that he had merely stepped from my field of vision. Lifting my head, I looked up and down and sideways. I howled his name and listened to it echo back to me from across the gap. I cried out again and again until, panting, I put my head back to the rock, listening to the echoes of my cries trickling off into silence.
SOME YEARS LATER, my mother told me a story about how Paul had come to take me out of school and, in one of those odd chance instances, had found me waiting in the principal’s office. He might have known what he was going to do all along, or he might just have taken the opportunity as it presented itself. Life happens in moments, she said to me. Sometimes the most thoughtless, accidental, seemingly irrelevant choices seem to ripple on endlessly. Sometimes the weight of the choice is obvious.
That morning Paul had driven home from Ohio. The day before, he had watched Anne, his mother, be lowered into the ground. There was no open casket at the funeral. Anne had passed out drunk in her bed with a lit cigarette in her hand.
Paul had sat there in the church with what was left of his mom’s people, looking around for the Old Man, but he wasn’t there. Maybe Jimmy Hutter’s father was right. There’s a strong case to be made that only a cold, arrogant son of a bitch would allow his first son, still essentially a boy, to bury his mother alone. But that’s how it went. After that, Paul came for me.
I HAD FALLEN into a fitful sleep plagued by murderous Indians lurking in the woods nearby when I felt Paul pull me up and into his arms. I spat and coughed and rubbed my nose on the sleeve of his oxford shirt. He told me to wrap my legs and arms around his neck and back and he crab-walked down the slope with me clinging to him and trying not to gag from the smell of smoke in his hair.
Paul helped me into the backseat of the car. With my face buried in the crook of my elbow, I listened to the purr of the engine and the pebbles flicking up from beneath the tires until we reached the top of the hill, where Paul hooked a smooth, deliberate left back onto the paved road. As we drove on, I thought of poor little John, wandering around in the hollow, wailing at the night. I imagined a boy about my age, dressed in a frontiersman’s knickers and calico shirt and hat, smoking a Camel Light.
After what seemed like a long while, the car came to a stop. I sat up and looked out the window. Paul had parked in front of Twin Oaks. The house was dark, but the exterior was illuminated by a new set of floodlights installed in the flower beds beneath the windows. The remodeling job was nearly finished. The Culvers were set to move in less than a month later, after their return from a vacation in Europe with their college-age daughter, who had been living in England since graduating from a boarding school there.
“Can you walk?” Paul asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
He opened the door for me. I climbed out into the cool night air. I still felt a bit ill, but much better. I had no coat—just a pair of dungarees and a long-sleeved rugby-style shirt. I could still taste the bile and the beer and the cigarette smoke. My lips began to tremble.
I followed Paul out to the edge of the driveway and peered down the hill. In front of our house sat a police cruiser.
“I’m sorry, Rocky,” Paul said.
“You left me,” I said, more as an observation than an accusation.
“I know,” he said.
“Why did you do that?”
I looked for his face in the darkness. A whimper broke in my throat.
“Don’t cry, Rocky,” Paul said.
I felt his hand on my shoulder.
“I want to go home,” I said.
“I’m going to have to let you go from here,” Paul said.
“I don’t want to go alone,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
Paul kneeled and grabbed my shoulders and pulled me into him. He held me there, unsteady on his knees, his arms shaking. I could hear his heart rumbling in his chest like the beat of a fast, familiar song.
When I think of that moment, there on that hill, I imagine Paul standing at the edge of a terrible abyss.
“There,” Paul whispered. “Just walk toward the porch lights. I’ll watch you all the way.”
I did as he said. I trudged down the hill whimpering, my stomach still sick, the dew soaking through my tennis shoes and the cuffs of my dungarees in the high grass.
When I reached the bottom of the hill, I turned and looked back. I could just see the faint flicker of Paul’s cigarette lighter and the yellow bloom of his face illuminated by the flame in front of the stark, freshly painted white columns of Twin Oaks.
At last I came into the light of our front porch. As I walked up the steps and reached for the door handle, I looked back and saw the Nova’s headlights flick on and heard the faint rumble of the engine coming to life. Down deep, I must have understood as I listened to that sound that I was hearing it for the last time.
Part Two
All That False Instruction
5
THE EVENING AFTER PAUL left me there in front of Twin Oaks, Judge Bowman called our house. His voice was loud and angry enough to be easily overheard through the receiver cupped to the Old Man’s ear.
“That bastard son of yours has stolen my daughter,” he bellowed.
Once he left me, Paul had raced back to Leigh’s house in Charlottesville. After an intense discussion on the porch, Leigh led Paul inside and into her room. The next morning, Becky and the other girls found a note from Leigh on the kitchen table. A neighbor had seen the two of them loading Leigh’s backpack and sleeping bag into the trunk of Paul’s car.
“You’ve got to press charges, Dick,” Judge Bowman said.
“For what?” the Old Man asked.
“For kidnapping.”
“It doesn’t sound like he kidnapped her to me,” the Old Man said.
“Not her,” Bowman snapped. “Your boy.”
Judge Bowman knew what Paul had done; by that time, the whole town knew, but Bowman was among the first to hear about it, thanks to my mother, who had asked him to contact Leigh. This was the call Leigh’s roommate Becky was referring to when she asked Paul if someone had died.
“He transported your son over sixty miles without consent,” Bowman said. “That’s a federal crime.”
“He brought him back,” my father said.
“Don’t you see, Askew?” Judge Bowman said. “If you’ll press charges, I can get the FBI involved.”
“I don’t know, Prentiss,” the Old Man said.
“You can drop the charges later if you want,” Bowman said. “After they’re brought home.”
“I’m not sure it works that way, Prentiss,” the Old Man said.
“Don’t tell me about the law, Askew,” Bowman thundered. “I’m a goddamned judge, for Christ’s sake!”
“I’m sorry, Prentiss,” the Old Man said.
“Damn it, man!” Judge Bowman cried. “My daughter!”
Some seven months later, in October, Bowman looked up from the dinner table to find Leigh standing there in jeans and a filthy T-shirt, her hair smelling of woodsmoke, tears streaming down her face.
I heard little about where they had been or what they had done—just that Leigh had come home on a bus ticket that originated in New Mexico. When asked why she had left with him, Leigh offered a simple explanation.
“I failed my econ test,” she had said.
What degradations Leigh Bowman might have endured on Paul’s behalf became the subject of considerable gossip. We were never able to ask Leigh what really happened or where Paul could be found. Before we even heard she’d returned, her father had already sent her away, “to rest.”
The Old Man hired a private investigator to scour the campgrounds and hotels and loitering spots around Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but nothing came of the search. After a while, the glimmer of hope we had felt on Leigh’s return faded back to the dull ache we’d lived with in the long months since Paul had disappeared.
I often found the Old Man staring absently out the windows of his study, chin propped on his hand, his eyes cast up to the horizon. Perhaps he was looking at the columns of Twin Oaks and remembering that long-ago night when he picked Paul up from the floor and took him in his arms and carried him across the long, wet field to safety. Or maybe he was still waiting for the purple car to appear at the end of the driveway so that he could run out to meet his son, once dead and now alive again, lost and found.
I WAS NO LONGER “ROCKY.” There was no one left to call me that. Paul was gone, and so was Leigh—first, sent off by her father to some undisclosed locale, and then, after a while, back to school somewhere far away. Her father, at least, knew where she was. There seemed to be some understanding that we were not to be told.
After a brief reign as the folk hero of Langhorne Elementary for having escaped Swift Justice by getting kidnapped by my own brother, I went back to being the quiet boy in the back of the room. The summer came, and another year, and another. By the time I passed on to middle school, I had regained my anonymity. Like Annie Elizabeth, Paul became a face in a picture frame, the things he did before he left like the half-true stories about Frank Cherry and Twin Oaks.
Ronald Reagan took office, ushering in a great leap forward for the nouveau riche. Reaganomics might not have worked for most of America, but it was very good to the Old Man—for about seven years anyway. All the wealth enabled by those tax cuts and low interest rates had to be insured, after all. The Old Man managed to get on several boards and committees of small companies and charitable organizations, raising his civic profile and earning him invitations to play golf and cards with some of Spencerville’s most prominent snobs.
After a while the Old Man stopped staring out the window hoping to see Paul running down the driveway. Still, he refused to allow my mother to box up Paul’s things.
One afternoon when I was thirteen, I overheard my mother and the Old Man arguing. I shook my head in disbelief. Paul could still get between them, even after he’d been missing for four years.
The disposal of Paul’s room had become a point of contention. Mother wanted to “redecorate,” she said. She thought the house needed another guest bedroom.
“Why?” the Old Man asked. “We never have any guests.”
“This is a home, not a memorial, Dick,” my mother said.
They were talking in the kitchen while I sat on the other side of the door, doing schoolwork at the dining room table.
“You didn’t do this after Annie Elizabeth,” my mother said. Even through the door, I could detect a tremor of caution in her voice.
“Annie Bet isn’t coming back,” the Old Man said.
“What if he isn’t coming back?” my mother asked.
Nearly half a decade had passed since Paul had disappeared. Still, I didn’t want the Old Man to answer the question. Until we learned otherwise, I thought, why should we behave as if he would never return?
“I’ll take Paul’s room,” I said, loudly enough to make the crystal vases vibrate on the sideboard behind me.
I rose from the table and pushed through the swinging door. My mother was leaning against the edge of the sink; the Old Man stood with his arms crossed in front of the stove.
“I’ll take Paul’s room,” I said again, more quietly.
“It’s a smaller room, Richard,” my mother
said.
“I like the windows,” I said. “I’m always in there anyway. Listening to records.”
The Old Man’s eyes drifted off to the window behind my mother’s head.
“I’ll keep everything the same,” I said. “For when he comes back.”
The Old Man beamed. My mother sighed.
“All right,” she said. “On one condition.”
“Name it,” I said.
“You must promise me that you will never smoke a cigarette in this house.”
“I promise,” I said.
She had nothing to worry about. Paul’s cruel prank forever purged me of even the most remote desire to put a cigarette in my mouth ever again for as long as I lived.
THUS DID I appoint myself caretaker of Paul’s memory. My once burgeoning stardom in the Spencerville Little Theater having been abandoned and forgotten, I cast myself in the lead part for a production with a phantom audience of one. I spent all my allowance adding to what I thought of as “our” collection of what were already being called “classic rock” records. Aloof to Michael Jackson and Prince and Madonna, to new wave and hardcore and hair metal, I cultivated a curator’s taste in the likes of Steely Dan, Zeppelin, the Who, Dylan, Rod Stewart, and all the other minor saints in the pantheon beneath the holy trinity of John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and Neil Young.
That fall I entered the ninth grade at Paul’s alma mater, Macon Prep. Macon was still all-male then, though the board of trustees was already moving to admit girls as soon as possible as a means of boosting tuition revenues and attracting donations from alums whose philanthropic interest in Macon waned when their children were born without testicles. There were about two hundred boarders and sixty day students in grades seven through twelve. With the exception of a few scholarship students, we were all either children of alumni or miscreants from wealthy families on their second or third stop after getting booted out of Woodberry, Episcopal, or one (or more) of the tonier New England schools. Everyone was a snob, a racist, or both. But the faculty and staff were good people—warm, kind, and idealistic. The rules were a little extreme, but I didn’t mind what most of my classmates couldn’t stop bitching about—especially the dress code, which enabled me to borrow from Paul’s collection of navy blazers, oxford shirts, and regimental ties.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart Page 6
