by Norman Green
Louis made a right turn off Route 1 onto a small two-lane road that meandered more or less westward along the bank of something too big to be a stream and too small to be a river. The surface of the water was still, with patches of green lily pads here and there. The forest beetled down close upon the water on the far side, mostly fir and spruce. On the side we were on, the woods were mostly hardwood, the leaves long gone except for the brown oak leaves that were hanging on stubbornly. Here and there you could see an evergreen, stark against the bare branches of its neighbors. Even the trees self-segregate, I thought. They’re most comfortable with those like themselves, except for the occasional odd duck who insists on living far away from his relatives.
Louis braked, downshifted to second, and turned up a steep gravel driveway. “I really appreciate your doing this, Louis.”
“Nothing to it,” he said. “Used to be a motel ’bout fifteen miles noth, but she burnt down a couple yeahs back. Hate to see anybody get stuck, so far away from home, with no place to stay. Besides, you can give me a couple days’ rent on the trailah.”
“It’s a deal.”
There was a tall yellow house on the knoll at the top of the driveway, high narrow windows, peeling paint, front porch with no railings, two sheds appended single file to the back of the house, connected to a large barn of weathered gray wood spotted here and there with touches of red paint. You could see through the side of the barn and out the back because some of the siding had been removed and a few of the beams were gone, and the back third of the structure looked like it was thinking about laying down.
Louis opened his door, paused. “Mrs. Avery ain’t been out of the house in a long time,” he said. “She loves company, other than mine, mowah than just about anything in the world. You’ll be doin’ me a favor, give her another couple sets of eahs to chew on for a while.” He winked at Nicky. “Besides,” he said, “yo-ah son ought to get a taste of country living while yo-ah up heah. Do him good.”
There was a tall oak tree in the side yard. Two blue jays were flying in and out of it, calling to each other raucously. I took a couple of steps over and watched. I didn’t see any other birds, just the jays flapping around and making a racket up where the first big branches of the tree met the trunk, about twenty-five feet from the ground. There was some bird shit around the base of the tree, though, and a little furry gray ball, maybe half the size of a golf ball. Nothing exotic about blue jays, but in my mind they are no less beautiful for being ordinary, brightly colored, opportunistic, fearless, and smart. Louis saw me looking.
“He out?”
“He who?”
“Scritch owl,” he said. “Lives in a hole up in that oak. Jays get all upset when he comes out in the daytime.” He walked over, shading his eyes and peering up into the tree. “Don’t see him,” he said, “but he’s hard to see, anyhow. Feathers just the color of tree bark, he blends right in. That ought to tell you what business he’s in.” He kicked at the little gray ball. “Hocked up a bunch of mouse hair and bones.” He looked at me and grinned. “That’s the way to do her,” he said. “Swallow yo-ah dinnah all at once, then just heave up what don’t agree with you and be done with it.”
Houses inform on their inhabitants. A place long heated by a woodstove will have a particular smell, even in late September when the stove has been cold for six months. It is a comfortable smell, maybe even primal, because I had never experienced it before I walked into Louis’s house, but I still knew what it was. She baked bread in there, too, another good smell. Of course, I was assuming it was her that did the cooking, and that she was his wife.
There was a cast-iron Franklin stove right in the center of her kitchen, with a brick chimney standing behind it. Cupboards lined the walls, going from floor to ceiling on three sides. On the fourth side, the one abutting the main part of the house, they only went waist high, topped by a soapstone counter. Eleanor Avery was a compact woman, gray hair pulled straight back, round wire-rimmed glasses, pale skin unadorned by makeup of any kind, strong hands, ice blue eyes. She might have been about sixty, but it was hard to tell. She reserved judgment when she met me but she lit up when she saw Nicky. Louis made introductions, explained about the broken van. “I thought they could use the back bedroom for tonight,” he told her. “Too late to bother with the trailah now, but theyah gonna stay for a few days, ’till Gevier gets the cah fixed. Otherwise, he’d have to rent a cah and drive all the way up to Calais. We can move them ovah to the trailah tomorrow.”
“Of course,” she said, looking over at me, smiling at Nicky. “That trailah’s gone empty too long. Nice to have someone use it once in a while. But you’ll stay with us tonight. I’ll just go make up the bed.” She held her hand out to Nicky. “Would you like to come help me?” He was still hanging on to me, doubtful. “After, I’ll take you out to see the animals. If your father says it’s okay.”
“Animals?” He looked up at me with his mouth open, relaxed his grip on my leg.
“You wanna go see the animals?” He let go of me then, went over to her with that look of wonder on his face.
“Why don’t you put some coffee on first, Eleanor?” Louis asked.
“I think you can handle that,” she said, steel in her voice. “And go turn on the water to the back bathroom.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Louis said, winking at me. “Right away, ma’am.”
“Don’t get smaht with me,” she said, glaring at him. I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.
Louis winked at me again. “If I’da shot her thirty yeahs ago,” he said, “they’da let me back out by now.”
Nicky was so excited when they got back that he couldn’t stand still. “A hoss!” He started telling me about it at the top of his lungs. “They got a hoss! A great big one! You gotta come see it!”
“No yelling in the house,” I told him.
He tried whispering. “They got a hoss, and they got chickens, too, and some cats. Come and see ’em! You gotta come see!”
“How do you know it’s a hoss?” I asked him, mimicking his pronunciation. “How do you know it ain’t a moose?”
He pointed at Eleanor. “She says it’s a hoss. And mooses have horns, silly. Like Bullwinkle.”
There was no holding him back. We went through the back door of the kitchen into the shed, and out of the back door of that into the Averys’ barn. I am not going to admit to being afraid of horses, okay, but they are way bigger than I am and there’s no way of telling what the hell they’re thinking. I watched from a safe distance while Eleanor, Nicky, and the horse made friends. It didn’t matter anyway, Nicky was so entranced and his enthusiasm was so infectious that neither he nor Eleanor paid any attention to me at all. Louis was right, this was going to be good for Nicky. I was almost glad the damned van had broken down.
And there was something about Eleanor Avery’s cooking, too. At least I thought so. Maybe it’s just me, but institutional food is institutional food, you know what I mean? It fills the hole, and it’ll keep you alive, but it tends to make eating into another chore you have to do before you can go to bed. When I am out on my own, I mostly eat in restaurants or delivery, like Chinese or pizza. Eleanor made a deer-meat stew. I sat there and watched her do it. She took things out of glass jars and mixed them up in a pot, she didn’t once look at any kind of recipe, she shook and dusted different spices without seeming to pay any attention to what she was doing, there’s no way she could know what this was going to taste like. That’s what I thought. I was wrong, though. Like I said, maybe it was me, but that had to be the most amazing meal I had ever eaten.
I washed the dishes, after. She didn’t want me to, then she said I could dry, but I didn’t know where anything went so I won the argument. Louis told Nicky he thought one of the cats had just had kittens, and that if he could refrain from shouting and stomping around like Jim Kelly’s ox they might be able to see them. After the two of them left, Eleanor looked at the tattoos on my forearms. You gotta roll up your sleeve
s to wash dishes, after all. Tactical mistake.
“He seems like a wonderful child,” she told me. “Does he take after his father?”
Smooth, I thought. Nice way to do it. “No, he doesn’t. He is a special kid, though.”
“His mother, then? Where is his mother?”
“She died when Nicky was two. She had a bad reaction to some medicine she was taking.”
“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. So all he has is you.”
I grinned. “Ain’t that a thought? But it’s true, all he has is me.”
She laid a hand on my forearm. “I’m sure you’re a great father. What is it that you do, Manny? I hope you don’t mind me asking.”
“I don’t mind. You ought to have some idea what kind of character you got sleeping in your spare bedroom. I work with computer software.”
“Is that right? I wanted Louis to get us a computer, but he says no one ever explained to him why he needed one.”
“Well, you don’t need shoes, either, strictly speaking, but it’s a little hard to live without them once you’ve had a pair.”
She laughed. “I can see that,” she said. “I guess Louis and I are behind the times.” She sounded wistful. I felt myself warming up to her in spite of myself.
“I have a laptop in my bag,” I told her. “Would you like to see what the Internet looks like?”
“Oh, I’d love to,” she said. “Can you do that from here? Don’t you have to do something with the phone company?”
“You guys have a telephone?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all we need. I don’t know how far away the server is, though. Probably not a local call. You think Louis will mind?”
“Oh,” she said, “Louis doesn’t need to know every little thing that goes on.”
She really was a bright woman, she was intuitive, she asked good questions, she had an organized mind, and she wasn’t afraid to try new things. I found out she’d been a history teacher, and it wasn’t long before she was doing it all by herself, chasing her curious nature all across the Web. Louis and Nicky came in after a while and stood watching us, but neither of them was very interested in what we were doing, and they wandered off to amuse each other some other way. After a couple of hours, Eleanor looked down at her watch.
“Oh my,” she said. “I have to stop. My head is spinning.” She stood up. “Does this cost a lot of money?”
“Doesn’t have to,” I told her. “If you don’t mind reading ads, all you really have to pay for is the phone service.”
“Don’t computahs cost thousands of dollars?”
“Hundreds.”
“I’ve got to get this.” She looked at me. “Louis is going to be seriously pissed off at you.”
A couple of things kept me awake that night. The first one was what I’d seen after Eleanor gave me back the laptop. I logged on to a site in Denmark that permits truly anonymous surfing, and then I looked at the Daily News Web site. The Bitch, the woman at the foster home, surprised me. She must have reported Nicky missing, because there was a short item and a picture of him that was probably a year old. He’d had shorter hair, but that face was pretty recognizable. Kids go missing all the time, their faces show up on posters and flyers and milk cartons, and whoever looks at them twice? But Nicky had one of those faces that jump out at you.
There was another story, too, a bigger one, about the Russians and their stock market scam. I didn’t really care what happened to the Russians, but there was a line at the end of the story, how a gang had ripped them off just before the SEC got around to shutting them down. Yeah, right. What bothered me was the line about the cops seeking two men for questioning about the holdup. They didn’t have names or pictures, so I assumed Rosey was still one step ahead of them. I believe in riding your luck, but I was beginning to feel like I was out on a fine edge, here. And then, just before he fell asleep, Nicky asked me when we were going home. I had a cold shiver run up my spine when he said that. “Home” is one of those loaded words. I never know what to think when I hear it. It’s like when someone asks me where I’m from, I’m tempted to tell them I’m from a curb in Williamsburg, down on Broadway, a couple of blocks from the bridge. It’s as good an answer as any. Home, like, where do you really belong?
No such place.
I laid there for a while after Nicky fell asleep, but I was feeling antsy, so I eased out of the bed and put my pants back on. He stirred, rolled over, and sighed. I went over and pulled the blanket back up over him, and he seemed to settle back down into sleep. As I looked at him, I wondered what went on inside that head. He put himself in my hands without hesitation, he trusted me in a way I had never trusted anyone in my life.
I grabbed my binoculars, sneaked through the kitchen, and stepped out into the Averys’ yard. I closed the door behind me as quietly as I could. He was there when I glassed the oak tree, I could make out his shape among the branches, right where the blue jays had been fussing him out a few hours earlier. He knew I was looking at him, I could swear his head swiveled in my direction as soon as I put the glasses on him. You can’t sneak up on a predator that hunts by sound. There’s no way I could stay quiet enough for him not to notice me.
He took off then, an unlikely shape in the darkness, ear tufts on a big head, stubby body, short pointed wings. I doubt he was afraid of me. I doubt any predator is truly afraid of a human being. When an animal sits at the top of his food chain, what does he see when he looks at you? You’re either too big to eat, not to his liking, or dinner, nothing more. I figured the owl took off because I was making too much noise and spoiling his hunting. I followed the wagon track up the hill behind the Averys’ house, past the barn and the fenced-in garden, in the general direction the owl had taken. I wanted to mark him down on my list, but I couldn’t, not yet, I had not really seen him, just his outline, just his shadow. I couldn’t take Louis’s word for what he was, either, that’s not the way this thing works. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, it was just that, if you’re going to cheat, what’s the point?
The wind picked up as I climbed the hill. I turned and looked back. The shape of the buildings came and went in the darkness as the moon played hide-and-seek among the cloud cover. A sudden scattershot of big drops sprayed me as I stood staring. The wind began gusting then, and I could almost see the big trees whirling and dancing just beyond the edge of the field. I knew then that the owl was not going to show himself to me again that night. That’s the way it goes sometimes: you get one quick chance, and if you fumble it the moment passes by and is lost. Damn, you think, damn, I had him, I had the bastard but he slipped away, and it’s no good going back and writing “eastern screech owl” on your list when you know in your heart he could have been any one of a half dozen different birds.
I turned and continued up the hill. Very quickly Louis’s house and barn faded from sight. The wind tore at my jacket and splattered me with raindrops again as though it held something against me personally. “Who are you, you fuck, and what are you doing up here? You better watch your ass. . . .”
The wagon track reached the tree line, and the utter blackness of the night woods stopped me. Where the hell are you going, Manny? What do you really want? I don’t know why but right then it seemed like it was the first time I had ever asked myself that. I guess when you spend most of your life running you don’t often wonder where you’re headed. Something is trying to catch you, either that or something you desperately need is fast receding in the distance and you’ve got to haul ass, you’ve got to go right now, shake your moneymaker, Jack, you don’t have time to sit mooning.
Nicky had changed all that.
What did I want? I really had no clue. It was almost as if those questions were so foreign to my way of thinking that I had no real way to go about answering them, because I did not understand the underlying premise. Is it really possible, does anyone really sit down and decide, Hey, I want to be a nuclear physicist, and then set about becoming such a thing? Ho
w can you when you’re already dancing up on the wire, with no net to catch you if you make one mistake? If you go hungry when you can’t scare up dinner, next month’s rent becomes a long-range goal.
I had been riding that horse for a long time, though. Maybe it really was time for me to get off it, to quit feeling sorry for myself. Making the rent was no longer an issue, the money I had stashed in that Jersey warehouse had kicked financial insecurity off of my list of excuses. Stop thinking like a loser, I told myself. You got to start being a father now, not just a progenitor. If you want Nicky to have a chance, you had better start thinking about growing up yourself.
You could feel the rain coming, the air held a pregnant dampness and the wind was flexing its muscles. I headed back down the hill feeling like a foreigner, like none of the survival tricks that Brooklyn had taught me would serve in this strange place.
3
The little bastard woke me up at five o’clock in the morning.
“Poppy!” he bellowed. I came instantly awake, bolt upright in the bed, my heart pounding as my brain struggled to remember where the hell we were. “Poppy, the hoss!” I might have known. “He’s getting away!”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Poppeeee . . .”
“No yellin’ in the house. Didn’t I tell you that already? You probably woke up the whole damn neighborhood.” I could hear Louis Avery in another room somewhere, chuckling. “Lemme see,” I said, and rolled out of bed and went to kneel next to Nicky in front of the window. The horse was standing in the pasture behind the barn. In the early-morning light it looked cold outside. The storm or squall or whatever it had been had blown on past during the night. At the back of the pasture, right up next to the wagon track I had walked up last night, the storm had ripped a huge tree from the ground, roots and all, leaving a big black gout of exposed earth behind where the tree lay sprawled in the grass. “The horse is not running away, he’s eating his breakfast. Did you brush your teeth and wash your face and hands and all that stuff?”
