Inside, the shack is stripped of everything except a stained mattress, a three-legged table, and an icebox with a few pieces of petrified fruit. Animal droppings speckle the floors.
But when Hartley checks the closet, he sees this tan jacket crumpled in the corner, the same jacket his father always wore when they played baseball in the park. Hartley picks it up. Going through the pockets, he finds an old strip of pictures taken in a photo booth in Grand Central when Hartley was ten, snapshots of him and his father mugging for the camera.
When I started reading all this, I did pretty good. I was using my pauses, doing all the accents, etc. I was getting a few laughs, maybe not as many as I expected, but enough to keep me encouraged.
Then, when I was about halfway through, something weird happened. You know the scene in The Exorcist where the devil’s voice starts coming out of Linda Blair? It was sort of like that. Eerie as hell. It was as if the words just took over. All my pauses, all the cool bits I’d planned to act out, all the marks in the margins to remind me to make meaningful eye contact? I went sailing past them like an Eskimo on a runaway dogsled. I was lost in the story.
When I looked up at the faces around the table, I saw they were lost in it too. Wayne was squeezing his wife’s hand, Bryn had her eyes closed like she thought she was at some sort of séance, and Rex was as still as a sphinx, chin resting on his knuckles. You had to figure it must have been pretty rough on the guy, realizing that he could write another fifty books and he’d never be able to write anything half as good as what he was listening to.
But something even weirder happened when I got to the part where Hartley is looking at the strip of pictures of him and his dad. He’s feeling sadder than he’s ever felt in his life, but he’s pissed off too, pissed off that he’s come all the way across the country for nothing, pissed off that his mother might have been right when she kept telling him he needed to forget his father, that he wasn’t the man either of them knew anymore. Something had happened to him, his mother keeps saying, and all the best doctors in New York couldn’t tell them what it was.
Hartley still can’t understand it. How could a person turn into another person? How could his father, who had once loved him, who’d shown him how to throw a curveball, who’d spent hours helping him with his science projects, who had made up stupid songs to make him laugh, turn into this big fat zero, this tumbling tumbleweed?
Eleanor’s still saying all these cute things, like did fish ever sleep, and through the window Hartley can see Alex leaning against a fence with one shoe off, checking his blisters.
Eleanor wants to see the pictures and Hartley finally hands them over. “Is that you?” she wants to know.
“No,” he says. “That’s someone else.”
“But he looks like you.”
“Maybe so.”
She offers him the pictures. “You want them back?”
“No, you can keep them.”
He hangs the tan jacket up in the closet. But before he shuts the door, he grabs the sleeve and covers his nose and mouth with it, hoping to catch at least a whiff of his old man, but all he gets is a snotful of coal dust.
So when I came to the part about the jacket, I started to cry. When I looked up at everybody, they were all crying too, some of them biting their lips, the president of the university pinching the corners of his eyes.
God knows why I broke down like that. Probably it was all Wayne’s fault, getting us all worked up the way he did. Maybe it was just my allergies. Or maybe reading it all out loud just brought it all back, me walking out on my son, my father walking out on me.
One thing I know for sure. Rex was totally wrecked. I swear, V. S. Mohle was right there in the room with us. And if he’d driven a shiv into my heart, he had to have driven one into Rex’s heart too.
Chapter Fourteen
Way too early the next morning the phone rang. I flipped over, groped blindly for the receiver, and finally found it.
“Hello?”
“V.S.?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Rex.”
“Rex! How you doing?” I rubbed the sand out of my eyes. The clock on my bedside table said seven a.m.
“I’m doing fine,” he said. “I have a proposal for you.”
“What’s that?”
“How would you like to go to Waco?”
“I’m sorry?”
“There’s a mammoth museum up there I want to take a look at.”
“You mean woolly mammoths?” I said.
There was a long pause like he thought I was an idiot. “No, Columbian mammoths. Ramona was going to drive me, but there’s no reason you and I can’t handle it. Make it a boys’ day out.”
I glanced out the window. It was barely light. “What time were you thinking?”
“Why don’t you show up here at nine?” he said.
I hung up the phone and staggered off to the bathroom to splash some water on my face. What the hell could this be about? The man might have said something about what a triumph my reading had been, or how moved he was, just as a matter of courtesy, but he was such a strange bird, you never knew what was going on in his head.
When I drove up to the house two hours later, Rex and Ramona were on the front lawn waiting for me. Ramona didn’t seem happy. A small cooler had been packed with treats and drinks, and the decision had already been made that we were taking the van rather than my wreck of a Volvo.
Ramona had all sorts of instructions for me, a map, and a list of numbers to call in case of trouble. As we pulled away from the curb, Rex gave her a wave through the window, like a little kid going off to camp, but she was already walking back toward the house.
Rush-hour traffic on the interstate was a mess. It took an hour to get past all the Dennys and the El Chicos, the Taco Bells and the Wendys, but after that we were out in the open country where it was mostly farmland and abandoned fireworks stands.
If we’d been traveling with Ramona, Rex would have been in the back with his pillows and blankets, but because it was just the two of us, he got to be up front. He fiddled with the radio for a while, but it was hard to find much except sports talk shows, sermons, bad choirs, and right-wing survivalists selling canned peaches that would last a hundred years. It wasn’t long before he snapped it off. We hit some road construction around Jarrell and everything narrowed down to one lane. I bent over the steering wheel, stifling a yawn.
“That was quite a night last night,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. “It’s a great little program you’ve put together here.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Not a problem,” I said.
“What exactly do you do up there in Maine all day? Just sit and stare at the ocean?”
“Not as much as you’d think. Not these days.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s a bit of a story.”
“Please, go ahead.”
On uneven pavement, the steering wheel vibrated in my hands. It looked as if the moment I’d been waiting for had arrived. “You know I live on this island,” I said.
“Right.”
“Once a week I ferry across to get my mail. I usually go by the 7-Eleven to buy groceries. For years I’ve seen the kids sitting outside with their bedrolls and mangy dogs. Sometimes they’ll hit me up for cigarettes or a few dollars. You know how poor that part of Maine is. I’m not sure it’s ever made it out of the Depression.”
A big-roofed church sat in the middle of a pasture. A couple of men in cheap suits and cowboy hats got out of their pickups, Bibles under their arms. I felt my stomach fluttering. Was I really ready to do this? But if I just let it go, when was I ever going to have another chance?
“One day I asked a couple of them to help me load firewood in the back of my truck. I paid them a little something for it and we got to talking. Turned out there was a gang of them living under this bridge. Over the next few weeks I would ask them to do a little work for me from time
to time. The stories they would tell, good God, you couldn’t make them up . . .”
Frowning, Rex massaged his knee. “What kind of stories?”
“The girls were selling themselves to the truckers coming down from Canada. They guys were stripping copper wire out of abandoned buildings to sell for scrap.” If it wasn’t bad enough that I was an imposter, I was now a plagiarist as well. “These kids really had been through something. One of them had a crack-addicted father who stuck the poor girl’s head in the oven and turned on the gas . . . It was a miracle she survived . . .”
I spotted a cop car camped back in a grove of trees. When I tapped my brakes, Rex put a hand on the dash to brace himself.
“But there was one of these characters that kind of got to me. This little wet rat of a kid, maybe twelve or thirteen. He was a funny guy, always went around with this beat-up teddy bear his mother had given him before she died.
“He’d been in a dozen different foster homes and busted out of all of them. He took to me. I don’t know what it was, maybe just that I’d put a couple bucks in his pocket, fed him lunch a few times. His name was Freddie. The kid really cracked me up. I swear he could have been a stand-up comic. I remember giving him an old winter jacket of mine. He thought it was the best damn thing in the world, even if it about swallowed him up.”
Out of the corner of my eye I kept track of the old geezer. He cleaned his fingernails, flicking the dirty bits away with his thumb.
“Maybe that’s where I went wrong,” I said. “Maybe it was like feeding seagulls. Once you start, you know you’re going to have a problem on your hands. It wasn’t very long before I could barely get rid of him. This was right when I was trying to get back to my writing. I’d look up from my desk and there he’d be, right outside my window, raking up pine cones. Or eight o’clock in the morning, there would be a knock on the door and there he was again, bringing my mail up from the ferry.”
“Hah.” Rex’s laugh was not a good one, dry and unfunny.
“I must have lectured him three or four times about how I needed my privacy, how I couldn’t have him hanging around all the time. But he was such a needy kid. He wouldn’t show up for a week or two and then he’d be back again, like one of those bad pennies.”
I was walking a fine line. I wasn’t trying to suggest that the kid was actually Rex’s son. That would have been loony. Hell, after all these years Rex’s kid would have been close to my age. All I wanted was for it to seem like one of those amazing coincidences. All I wanted was to delicately remind the old guy of what a shit he’d once been.
“The whole thing came off the rails when I had to go down to Boston for a few days to take these tests. When I got back, I pulled into the 7-Eleven to get some groceries and there was this cop. He told me that one of the sheds behind my house had burned down.
“Apparently some of Freddie’s older buddies had talked him into taking them on a tour of my place. Things got a little out of hand. They’d gone in, gotten into my liquor cabinet. They didn’t have enough nerve to party in the house, so they went out back to the shed where I kept my tools. But it wasn’t just tools. I had a lot of boxes stored in the rafters, filled with manuscripts I’d never finished, notes for all those books I’d never gotten around to writing . . .”
“Jesus,” Rex said.
“Sometime during the night, one of the kids tipped over a candle, and when the fire caught they were all too crocked to do anything but run. The cops said if it hadn’t been raining the house and half the island would probably have gone up as well.”
“So did they catch these kids?”
“It didn’t take them long. It sounded like Freddie sang like a canary. At first everybody was making noises about sending them off to reform school, but I went in to see the county judge and talked him out of it as best I could.”
“Are you telling me you just walked away from it all?”
“I didn’t walk away at all. When I got hold of Freddie I gave him the dressing down of his life. I let him know just how disappointed I was in him. I told him that for him to do something like that, after all I’d done for him, was like a dagger to the heart. I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I called him a punk. I called him spineless. A loser. I told him I never wanted to see him again. Tears were streaming down his face and he was hugging that teddy bear to his chest, begging me to give him another chance.”
Rex fumbled through the glove compartment and finally came up with a packet of Nabs. I could tell I had him agitated. The only question now was how far did I want to push it.
“And where was this?” he said.
“Right out in front of the 7-Eleven. All his buddies were watching. He kept grabbing at me, but I finally just swatted his hand away and walked off.”
In the field to my left, a monster piece of farm machinery I didn’t know the name of spewed great clouds of chaff.
“I didn’t see him all that winter. A couple of times I asked some of the other kids if they knew where he was, but they didn’t. The guy at the hardware store said he’d heard a bunch of them had caught the bus down to New York City. I thought about the boy a lot. I regretted being so hard on him. Regretted saying some of the things I’d said. But what was I going to do? He was gone.
“There was a record snowfall that winter. Spring took a long time coming, but finally the eaves started dripping, a few of the birds came back, and the snow started falling out of the trees. One April morning I’m out with my shovel, trying to clear a path down to the shore, when I see something brown in one of the snowbanks. At first I think it’s just a dead woodchuck or a squirrel, maybe. Up in that part of the world, all kinds of things die in the winter. They’ll be buried and you won’t find them until spring—deer, porcupines, all kinds of small animals. But when I go to check it out, I see it’s the teddy bear . . .”
The glance Rex shot me was a killer, as if he thought he’d been accused. But I’d gone too far—I had no choice but to go on.
“I pick it up. It was solid ice. I swear it must have weighed five pounds. One of the button eyes was missing. I had no idea what to do. I look around like someone was supposed to help me. But then I see this frozen sleeve.”
“What do you mean, frozen sleeve?”
“It was there. In the snowbank. The frozen sleeve of the coat I’d given him.” A sound came out of Rex and he raised a hand in protest. “I’m sorry, Rex,” I said. “You don’t need to know this.”
“No, go on. Tell me.”
“I got down on my knees. I was like a dog digging for a bone . . .”
“So was he there?”
“He was.”
Rex tore at the cellophane wrapper of the Nabs with his teeth and then, when he couldn’t get it open, tossed the packet into the backseat.
“When I finally brushed all the ice and snow off him, he looked so peaceful, as if he was just taking a nap. One of his boots was missing and he had an arm in the air as if he was waiting to be called on. I don’t know how long I sat there, just staring at him. My fingers were burning from digging in the snow. I remember the gulls crying and once in a while the booming of the ice breaking up in the bay. Why am I even telling you this, Rex? I’ve never told anybody.”
Head bowed, Rex stared down at his veiny hands.
“You know what really got to me? That he was just a hundred yards from my house. The coroner said he’d probably been there for a couple of months. They found an old sleeping bag and some food in one of the other sheds. I kept imagining him standing out in the pines, too afraid to come in, watching me at my desk. That’s when I made a vow.”
“What vow was that?”
“That I was never going to turn my back on those kids again.”
“Uh-huh.” He wiped a bit of cellophane from his tongue. “So what have you done about it?”
“Well, over the years I’ve been buying up these little parcels of the island. Right now I’ve got myself a sizable piece of real estate. I’ve decided to donate it
all to create a place for these kids.”
“What kind of a place?” His voice was low and distracted.
“It’s sort of a school, sort of a shelter. I’ve been talking to a lot of people.”
“What kind of people?”
“Experts,” I said. “People who know a whole lot more than me. Harvard Education School types.”
“Right,” he said. We passed a closed fireworks stand. “Is there anybody going in on this with you?”
“Going in on it with me?”
“On the money.”
“Well, there was a guy.” This was always the tricky part. The road opened up to four lanes. I stepped on it, zipping around a long line of Army trucks with their lights on, soldiers huddled in the back. “I probably shouldn’t mention names, but he’s from this lah-di-da Massachusetts family and he’s going through this messy divorce. It looks as if it’s put the kibosh on the whole deal.”
“How much was he going to pony up?”
“Five million.”
The number made him sit up straight. You would have thought someone had just given him a whiff of the smelling salts. “Five million?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“It is.”
“You really think it’s going to solve anything?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What you’ve been through . . . Good Lord . . . but I don’t know that throwing money at it makes it any better.”
Stone-faced, he stared out the window and didn’t talk for a long time. So many things raced around in my head. I cursed myself. I’d had the man on the ropes, but the talk of money had brought him back to the land of the living, to the world where everyone was sure to hit him up, sooner or later.
A hint of a smile on his lips, he looked back at me. “V. S. Mohle as Florence Nightingale. It’s quite an idea.”
“I guess it is.”
He leaned back to retrieve an orange from the cooler. “Is there any way you’re going to be able to get out of it?”
Famous Writers I Have Known Page 18