Toughing It

by Nancy Springer

  “Never damn mind.”

  I said, “More than this store makes in a week, right? Tell me how much. I want to pay you back.”

  “Just never goddamn mind, Shawn.” He was busy trying to get the glass out of his car without breaking it.

  I took a couple steps closer and I said, “Listen, somebody told me people are taking up a collection for a funeral for Dillon.”

  “That right?” He stopped messing with the glass a minute and looked owl eyed at me. “We’ll have to get a jar or something in here.”

  He didn’t fool me. Sometimes he could see right through me, and sometimes I could see right through him. “You turkey,” I said to him, “you put it together, didn’t you? All those phone calls.”

  He didn’t say yes or no, just got real embarrassed, like I’d caught him with his pants down.

  I said, “Thanks.” Damn my throat closing up on me again. I couldn’t say any more.

  He was barn red. “Damn it, Tuff, you don’t need to thank me. Just help me with this goddamn glass.” I got hold of the other end of it, and we wrestled the thing out of the car and carried it around front. A couple minutes later he said, “If I had my druthers I would have just done it myself.” The funeral, he meant. “But I don’t have any money, either.”

  “Is it—do you think there’s going to be enough?”

  “Looks like. Anyway, the undertaker says no rush to pay him.”

  So there really was going to be a funeral. “When…?”

  “Thursday. The coroner released the body to your mom today.”

  “Where?”

  “At the funeral parlor.”

  “I mean, where they going to bury him?”

  “Oh. I got the Gardens to contribute a plot.”

  He said it like it was nothing, and it was the nicest cemetery I knew of, on a hill by the river, one of those places that don’t have headstones, just little markers, so it looks like a park. A real classy place. Thinking about it put me in kind of a daze while I helped Pen pull the old glass out of the window and fit the new glass in and putty it in place, him on one side and me on the other. We couldn’t talk to each other. He smiled at me now and then.

  We had chicken sandwiches for supper, and for once I was hungry. After we were done eating I asked him, “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you do it for Dillon?”

  He gave me a funny look.

  “I mean, I guess if you’re my dad, then you’re Dillon’s dad, too.” This was hard to talk about. “Were, I mean. But…”

  I wanted to ask him a lot of things. How long had he and Mom been together? Why had they split up? Where had he been since? Why hadn’t he come to see us? Why hadn’t he been a father to us? He seemed like the kind of guy who would have at least tried. And now he was taking care of his kid’s funeral when he hadn’t taken care of the kid. It was strange.

  But I didn’t feel like I could ask him any of those questions. I liked him a lot, but I hadn’t ever called him Dad. In some ways I felt really close to him, but in other ways it was like there was a glass wall between us.

  He sat back drinking his coffee and watching me, and he said, “Tuff. Tell me about Dillon.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just tell me about him.”

  “I—I dunno what you mean. What about him?”

  “Anything. What was he like?”

  I got out my photo of Dillon and me and showed it to him. “No wonder he had girls,” Pen said. “Good looking.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re going to look just like him in a couple of years.”

  “Sure. Tell me another.”

  “You are. I mean it. So what was he like? Was he fun to have around?”

  “God, yes.” All of a sudden I understood what he meant, what was Dillon like. “He would do crazy things. We used to sneak out at night and hitch a ride to Quarryville, or go dock fishing, or sneak a rowboat from the rental place and go to the islands. By moonlight.” I started to grin, remembering. “We used to make fires and chase each other through the trees. We found an island with Indian rock carvings on it once, but we could never find it again. We used to let the current take us clear down to Confluence sometimes. Then we had to row upstream, and we wouldn’t get back until morning, and the boat rental people would threaten to call the cops, and Mom would scream at us.”

  Pen sat there smiling. “So you were a pair of river rats,” he said.

  “We sure were. We used to go swim in the river at night. Under all them stars.…” I couldn’t think how to make him see the way it had been, but maybe he knew how the water felt warm and every sound echoed beautiful and the fish flashed silver in the water. “Swam up to some guys poaching deer onshore once, and they thought we were beaver or something—they shone the light in our eyes and we scared them. They ran like they’d seen ghosts.”

  Pen sat there for hours, listening while I told him about Dillon. I told him about the worst thing Dillon ever did to me, which was when I was little and he gave me one of those chocolate laxatives and told me it was candy. I told him about one of the best things Dillon ever did for me, which was not too long ago, helping me out when Mom’s old man came after me with a belt. If the drunk son of a bitch had tried to whip me, I would have fought him, and God knows what would have happened. I’m not little, but I’m sure not big enough to take that ape. But Dillon stepped in, and the yutz knew he couldn’t fight both of us.

  “Dillon stood up to that gorilla?” Pen said, impressed. “That’s something. I wouldn’t want to do it.”

  “You’d rather grab a copperhead with your bare hands, huh?” The man had saved my life. Even Dillon had never done that.

  “That was nothing. That was easy. Handling a mean drunk is hard.”

  We talked till Pen yawned and said, “Time for bed.”

  I jumped up. “You told me we were going to go ask around at bars and stuff tonight!”

  “It’s kind of late for that now, son.”

  For a minute I just about hated him. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? To keep me here, keep me talking, make me forget what I gotta do?”

  He was watching me in that quiet way of his. He said, “Tuff, c’mon. Give me a little credit. Chill out.”

  “Damn you,” I said, and I went to the sofa and lay there spitting mad while he sighed and told me good night and went to bed. I didn’t sleep much, just lay there in a rage at him and myself. I damn near decided to lift his keys and borrow his car and go cruise the bars on my own, the way Dillon and I used to borrow boats. I didn’t have a license, but I knew how to drive. Had been borrowing cars and driving back roads since I was thirteen. Trouble was, probably they wouldn’t have let me into the bars. Pen would have had to be with me.

  Dammit. I was going to have to wait another day. Only one thing helped me calm down a little, which was that I promised myself I would get some answers at school in the morning.

  5

  Tuff, how are you doing, dude? You making it okay?”

  “Tuff, everybody’s really sorry. We all want you to know we’re sorry.”

  “Tuff, you okay, man?”

  My chest ached, my eyes stung, and I didn’t want to be that way. I didn’t want kids seeing me soft. I needed to be hard, like a snapping turtle armored in its shell. I needed to remember what I had to do for Dillon.

  “Tuff, is there anything we can do?”

  Just tell me who killed him.

  I didn’t say it, but I thought it, and it helped. Without the anger to hold me together I felt watery, like I wasn’t solid; it was so strange being there with the school looking just the same when everything had changed.

  “Tuff, we’re so sorry about what happened.”

  “Tuff, if we can do anything.…”

  “Thanks,” I said to kids, moving toward my locker. “I’m okay. Thanks. No, not really. Sure, I’ll call you if I think of anything.”

  Just tell me who killed him!

 
I kept looking for Monica, and finally I saw her, hanging back, blending in with the crowd. I wanted to go over to her, but kids kept coming up to me, getting in my face. There were a couple of girls hanging on to me, crying, telling me they had loved Dillon.

  JUST TELL ME WHO KILLED HIM!

  “Do you think it was the mountain man?” some twitchy kid asked me.

  My heart pounded so hard I could hear it in my ears. I wanted to grab the kid by the throat. I managed not to do that, and I didn’t scream—because. I almost lost my voice. I croaked at him, “Who?”

  “You know, the mountain man. He lives up there in a cave or something.” The twitchy kid grinned. He had scummy yellow teeth. “Eats raw meat. Hardly ever comes down.”

  “He does not eat raw meat,” said a girl. “Why would he eat raw meat?”

  “Hey, he’s crazy,” somebody else said. A bunch of them had followed me into homeroom and were clustered around. What a way to get popular. “I saw him in town once. All he is, is skin and bones and dirty clothes and a big old beard with spooky eyes looking out of it, you know?”

  I had heard about him before, I’d just forgotten. River people don’t pay that much attention to hillbilly stories. But you’d better believe I was paying attention now.

  “He doesn’t live in a cave,” some guy said. “It’s just a cabin.”

  “Yeah, but it’s way back there. No road leading up to it. He only comes out twice a year. Anybody comes near it, he chases them away.”

  “On Sid’s Mountain?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  I knew where he lived. I knew that cabin.

  “He chased my dad with a gun once,” some kid said. “My dad was deer hunting and got too close to his cabin, and he ran him off.”

  It had to be, it had to be, it had to be. I’d known all along that the cops were wrong, thinking it had something to do with Dillon and me, enemies and all that crap. That wasn’t it at all. Anybody could have run into that gun trap. No, it was something about the place, the mountain, not about us kids—that was why I kept going back there. Somebody had put that shotgun in that tree. Somebody wanted to keep that mountaintop to themselves. And it made sense that it would be a crazy mountain man.

  “My dad says he’s an escaped prisoner, that’s why he hides up there,” some girl said. “He’s wanted for murder in Mexico or somewhere. One of those countries where they still shoot people.”

  That was what I was going to do to him: shoot him. Blast him with a shotgun. Watch him bleed. Kill him the way he killed my brother.

  No. Slower. A lot slower.

  I don’t know how I made it through the day. Every minute, my blood was rushing like a dam had just burst somewhere. I wanted like fire to go kill the guy—I wanted to do it right away—but I knew I had to wait. Be smart. Take time to think about it. Do it right. Do something right for once in my life.

  During lunch period, I spotted Monica sitting on the edge of a group, and I shook loose of the crowd around me and went over to talk to her. I felt like coffee in one of those insulated cups, boiling hot on the inside, trying to stay cool on the outside. I had to talk to somebody, and for some reason I felt like I could trust Monica. “Kids think they know who set the trap,” I told her kind of fierce. “They’re saying it was some mountain man.”

  She looked up at me with wide, scared eyes. “Shawn, don’t listen to them. Don’t believe them.”

  That hit me in the gut for a minute. It had to be serious when she called me by my real name. I sat down across from her. Maybe she knew something I didn’t. “Do you know him?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t know a thing about him. What I mean is, neither does anybody else. It’s all just talk.”

  But it was talk that made sense to me. I said to her, “Who else would have killed Dillon?”

  “I don’t know. But you can’t go believing rumors, Tuff! People always say bad things about anybody who’s different.”

  Dammit, she made sense, too. Better sense than the kid with yellow teeth. I couldn’t go out and swipe a shotgun just yet.

  “You can’t go accusing somebody when you don’t have any proof,” Monica said softly.

  The way she looked at me, I realized she liked me. Maybe not the way she had liked Dillon, but she liked me some.

  I muttered, “So what would you do?”

  “If I was suspicious about somebody, I’d go to the cops.”

  “Hell, no.” The cops didn’t care. I felt myself starting to boil again and got up to leave before I went and showed her my nasty side. I didn’t want to do that. Things were ugly enough already.

  Anyway, I knew what I could do. I told her, “I’m going to have a talk with this mountain man.” If I knocked long enough the guy had to let me in. “I’ll just go out and talk to him.”

  “No, Tuff, don’t!”

  “Monica, it’ll be okay.”

  “Tuff—”

  But I had walked away.

  First thing when I got home from school, I said, “Pen, can we go to Quarryville tonight? Talk to people?” I’d figure out how to get to Sid’s Mountain once he said yes to Quarryville.

  But he was way ahead of me. He said, “Tuff, listen, we have to go get you some decent clothes tonight, because the viewing’s tomorrow.”

  I could tell he had it all planned, how he was going to keep me out of trouble. The nearest real mall was thirty miles away, and he would take his time getting there and back. He didn’t want me to find out who killed Dillon. He just wanted me to leave it alone.

  But how could I not go along with him? He had pulled off a funeral for Dillon, for God’s sake. Now he wanted to get me a suit to wear to it. Not to mention he had saved my life. Not to mention I liked him, sometimes I damn near loved him, and he seemed to like me. I felt ashamed about the way I’d cursed at him the night before.

  I felt dead tired.

  “We can get supper someplace,” Pen said. “You like Taco Bell?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Taco Bell sounds good.”

  It was funny, how the anger came and went. I could be cool awhile, a few hours, maybe even a day, but then all of a sudden it would hit like lightning out of nowhere, and I would be so mad I couldn’t see. Though now that I look back I can tell I was never really without it, even when I thought I was cool, even when I was trying to sleep, because I needed it to keep me going. It was my friend, staying with me so I wouldn’t be lonely, whispering in my mind all day and all night that I was going to find the guy who killed Dillon.

  But it was like having a snake for a friend. It could have turned on the wrong person. It could have turned on Pen.

  “You like pizza better?” Pen asked. “Pizza Shack?”

  “Fine. Either.”

  I was okay, I had it under control. I let Pen take me to Taco Bell. And I let him take me to the mall and buy me a suit and two dress shirts and a tie and some good shoes. He even bought me socks and a baseball jacket to wear to school. Each place we went he had to try different charge cards until he found one that was not quite maxed yet. This guy, up to his earlobes in debt, was spending money on me?

  On our way out, he stopped and threw a quarter into the fountain. “Make a wish,” he said.

  I shook my head hard. My only wishes were about Dillon, and they hurt too bad.

  Pen looked at me. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Stupid thing to say.”

  I made it back to Pen’s place okay, but that night, lying on the sofa, I hurt all over. I curled up with hurting. I wanted Dillon so bad—but no, goddammit, wanting was no use, wishing I had him back was no use. The only thing worth squat would be to blow away the guy who killed him.

  Then the anger coiled like a blood-red rattlesnake and hissed loud enough to drown out the pain. I didn’t need to curl up anymore. I lay there straight and still and very quietly tore apart a sofa pillow with my bare hands.

  Kill. Kill the bastard who shot Dillon.

  Thinking about it really helped. It got so I
was hard like a knife lying there, sharp and wide awake, waiting. Around three in the morning, when I was sure Pen had to be sleeping like a log, I got up.

  I soft-footed into Pen’s bedroom and looked at him first, kind of saying good-bye, because I knew what I was about to do might turn him against me. I knew it was serious and I couldn’t expect him to forgive me.

  There he lay, on his back with his belly sticking up, snoring a little, just an ordinary-looking guy sleeping in his undershorts. Polka-dot ones. Skimpy little hairs catching the light around his navel. He had more peach fuzz down there than he did on his bald spot. His ears were stupid looking, kind of fat on top. I had only known him three days. Why should he matter so much to me? Just because he was my father? Where had he been for the past sixteen years?

  Dillon mattered more. Dillon came first, before anybody else.

  I eased out of there, being very careful not to make noise. I opened the door to the store little by little, then slipped in. It took me awhile to find the key to the drawer where Pen kept his gun, but like I said I was real, real calm, in a strange stone-angry way. I just kept quietly feeling around until there it was, hanging on its hook. Once I had it I unlocked the drawer, pulled out the pistol, checked to make sure it was loaded, and hefted it in my hand. The glass cuts still hurt me some, but I’d figured I could handle a gun, and I was right. I took a box of ammunition, just in case, and closed the drawer. I locked it again and put the key back where it belonged.

  I was crazy. I mean, I didn’t understand it then, but I was insane. Grief can do that to a person if they try to tough it out.

  The gun felt heavy and chilly and good in my hand. Dangerous, powerful. I liked that feeling of power, like I was finally in control of something.

  I took the gun back in to where I was supposed to be sleeping, closing the door to the store very quietly behind me. I found my new baseball jacket and zipped the pistol and ammo in a pocket and laid the jacket so the bulge wouldn’t show. I put a blanket over the sofa pillow I had ripped up. Then I lay down on top of it and waited for morning.