A Gift of Time

by Merritt, Jerry

  That night I found myself sitting alone in my study, the air redolent with the scent of oak and old wallpaper, and the memory of Joey asking if he could go camping with me. Almost as an afterthought, I pulled the piece of stationery I had filled with equations almost a year earlier from the bottom of the stack in my desk drawer and stared blankly at the formulas. They meant no more to me now than when I had jotted them down. In my frustration and weariness I crumpled the paper as I leaned back and closed my eyes and, in that instant, the calculations began to churn in my head. In the blackness of my mind formulas stretched out across a deep and boundless emptiness. And at the nadir of that desolation, all but hidden beneath the lesser calculations, lay two indistinct equations. Next to each other. Somehow related, if only I could see the connection. But, try as I might, I could not. The formulas just wouldn’t emerge from their dark void. I shook my head and popped back to reality. Then, not understanding quite why, I resolved to return to the gift of math Ell had given me. I sat up and tried writing down what I had so dimly seen.

  Chapter 26

  It was November before I could get Arlie back over to my house. It wasn’t my parents that were the problem. They had understood the situation Arlie had found himself in and knew he never realized his daddy had killed a lot more people than just his mother. It was Arlie. He still blamed himself for Joey’s death.

  “If it hadn’t been for me following you and Joey home, he would be okay today,” Arlie said. “I got myself in that fix you had to help me out of. Then Joey ran off by himself.”

  He could never bring himself to say that his father had killed Joey. Nor did he ever indicate he understood if he had turned his daddy in for killing his mother only Presley Poole would have been on the loose and Joey would never have run across him. Probably. But, then, who knows. Maybe Poole would have found us anyway and killed us all if Arlie’s daddy hadn’t been available to blow his head off.

  It seemed from my vantage point the old French proverb was true. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I had changed everything I could, but the outcome had not budged so much as a jot.

  With Joey gone, my return had become a lost cause. I was left with only one remaining problem I had any hope of solving, and that was whether I had changed things sufficiently that Arlie would not kill himself in a few years. I was pretty sure I had, but, then, I had been pretty sure about Joey’s safety too. At least Arlie seemed in good spirits with the Goodwilloughs. And they liked him as well. Mr. Goodwillough was a wiry, deeply tanned man barely as tall as Arlie. Blue eyes stared out at you from under a shock of snow-white hair. His easy smile made him hard not to like.

  Mr. Goodwillough had bought Arlie a used three-speed and fixed it up with new pedals and tires. Now Arlie careened down the road at high speed, still seeming a split second away from a spill but never quite augering in. His riding was a caricature of his entire life. He rode the verge of disaster.

  We slowly revived our flagging repair business eventually fixing and selling all of the dozen or more lawnmowers Old Man Quintin had hoarded under the eaves. We never did figure out why he had so many mowers nor did Arlie remember him ever bringing any home. Like the Universe, they had just always been there. And the radios began coming in again as well. We stopped making house calls at Mom’s insistence, but the drop-offs increased so that we spent most Saturdays repairing mowers and radios now.

  We began camping trips the next spring when the weather warmed and visited Aunt Cealie with a pot of frozen stew every week. The trip through the swamp to her cabin was painful for me. I could still hear Joey’s laughter ringing through the distant stands of cypress. Aunt Cealie sensed my growing discontent and often sent Arlie off on some made-up errand for her so we could talk.

  “Micajah, you ain’t still blamin’ yourself for Joey is you?”

  “I am to blame, Aunt Cealie. I was given a chance to save him and failed.”

  “Well both you and me knowed what was likely to come along that day and couldn’t both us together put truck to it. Maybe they weren’t no way ever to stop it. Some things just gots to be ‘fore the world can git on its way again.”

  “You don’t really think Joey’s terrible death was necessary do you? I don’t see how such a thing could be possible.”

  “Maybe that’s ‘cause you don’t see ‘cept what you eyes sees. And they only sees what out in front.”

  “You don’t believe there’re things going on behind the scenes controlling all of us do you? Things we can’t see.”

  “I knows they is.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Cause you here. That thing done dropped you off was behind the scenes ‘fore it slipped out from the deep of night shakin’ the ground and all. It changed you, then, poof, it were gone like January. Jus’ a cold memory. But I suspect it still out there somewhere. Ain’t it?”

  I let out a wistful sigh at the thought of Lovely Pebble. “I see what you’re saying. I guess the same thought had crossed my mind when I first met the thing that came asking for my help. It had to grant me a wish. Had to. Like that genie in the lamp.”

  Aunt Cealie nodded sagely. “An’ we all know ‘bout them wishes granted by them genies. They’s always a catch somewhere ain’t they.”

  “But I got to know this genie. Spent a lot of time with her. It. I know it wasn’t a rigged wish. I knew her better than I know you.”

  “We don’t never know nobody for sure, Micajah. We only knows what our eyes sees and our ears hears. Then we takes that and makes up a somebody. Maybe it’s jus’ like the somebody we sees and hears; maybe it ain’t. Mostly ain’t, been my ‘sperience.”

  Then Arlie turned off the trail and came back across the bridge. “I couldn’t find any purple swamp lilies, Aunt Cealie, so I just brought these white ones instead. I hope that’s okay.”

  “They’s wonderful, Arlie. I thank you so much. I loves flowers. Just stick them in that busted pitcher over there and sit down here with us for a time and we can chat a bit more.”

  ***

  On the way back to the camp site I mentioned to Arlie that the swamp lilies he had brought back had clean cuts on the stems and asked how he had done that. He reached behind under his shirt and came out with a black metal stiletto about seven inches long including the handle.

  “Ah, that looks wicked,” I noted, a touch of disapproval creeping into my voice.

  With a quick movement he extended his arm, and the stiletto stuck with an authoritative thwonk in a cypress trunk about ten feet away.

  “When did you learn to do that?”

  “After Hartley and his buddies beat me senseless.”

  “I always wanted to be able to throw a knife like that.”

  “It just takes a lot of practice,” Arlie said, in echo of my revelation to him that practice would make a better ballplayer of him.

  “How much?”

  “Way more than I thought at first. I bet I’ve thrown that knife a million times. I’ve almost put a hole in the back wall of the Goodwillough’s garage. He hasn’t seen it yet, but my butt will be grass and he’ll be the lawnmower when he finds it.” Arlie stepped over to the cypress and worked the stiletto back and forth until it pulled free. Then, with an across-the-chest motion, he embedded the knife in a red bay fifteen feet to his right. I was duly impressed.

  “You know that little blade could kill someone don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t have put all this effort into learning to throw it if I didn’t know that.”

  I shrugged and shook my head in acceptance of Arlie’s not unreasonable desire never to be beaten senseless again. “Well, just be careful how you deploy that thing. You don’t want to end up in court on aggravated assault charges. Or worse.”

  “It’s a last resort, Cage. If I had been able to do this on the first day of school, Joey would be here with us now.”

  That pretty much shut me up.

  After dinner I sl
id off my log seat onto the sand and sat quietly gazing into the fire. It wasn’t long, though, before Arlie began tossing leaves and dried twigs into the dying blaze and asking why animals were afraid of fire and whether bears could run as fast as people. As I answered his questions one by one, dusk settled in around us. Finally I remembered the tin of Mom’s brownies in the bottom of my pack.

  By the time we finished the last brownie, the evening’s clouds had dissipated revealing a full moon hanging low over the woodland. As the white river sand picked up the silvery radiance, tall pines cast their lean and ghostly shadows like prison bars across our camp locking us into the evening’s gloom. Even Arlie fell silent. Beyond the trees, the muffled booms of nighthawks diving along the river punctuated the dulcet call of chuck-wills-widows. I leaned back against the old log and considered how changed Arlie was from a year ago.

  It was more obvious to me than ever his life had been one long trauma. First his mother murdered leaving him with only Old Man Quintin, her killer, for refuge. Then being picked on in school. Beaten. And finally brutally rejected by his father later the same day. Yet, here he was, still hacking his way through life. He was perhaps the strongest person I would ever know. And I suspected he would need every bit of that strength as life closed in around him. But for now, the summer was ours. As our fire crackled slowly to guttering embers, I pushed up from my resting place.

  “So, Arlie. Want to hit the river before turning in?”

  “The last time I went swimming with you we ended up running naked through half the town with barking dogs and police cars on our tail. I think I’ll pass.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ll be neck deep in the cool water if you change your mind.”

  But Arlie didn’t change his mind.

  Chapter 27

  The only class Arlie and I shared in junior high was study hall. I worried about Arlie making his way through the day without me because Hartley and his buddies were back in public school again after their year in the reformatory. And I knew Arlie had English class with Hartley and math with one of Hartley’s stooges.

  “They’re not so tough when they’re separated,” Arlie said as one of Hartley’s little camarilla passed us in study hall with a studied glare before dropping heavily into a seat in the back of the room. It seemed to me Hartley’s group stalked Arlie from a distance. I could see how they might have projected all of their failings and subsequent year of reform school onto Arlie. Projection, after all, was the refuge of the stupid, ensnared in traps of their own design and unable to grasp that their inane flailing about had triggered the deadfall to drop on their own heads. Still, I feared for Arlie. Stupidity was a fearsome enemy when it showed up in numbers.

  But we were both careful and stuck by each other, and seventh grade passed with nothing in particular to remember it by.

  Eighth grade was altogether different.

  I knew the company Dad worked for would go bankrupt when the Eisenhower administration cancelled most of the small public works projects to concentrate on bigger programs like the Interstate Highway System. Dad’s company had made copper fittings for solar water heaters. The only company installing solar heaters was Pan American Solar Heating in Tampa and most of their work was on public housing. When they went under, Dad’s company went under right behind them. I knew by end of school he would get a job offer from a company in California that produced military grade fittings for what would become intercontinental ballistic missiles to heave our newly invented hydrogen warheads into the Soviet Union should we ever think of a good reason to do that. But California was still months in the future.

  At the moment, I was worried about what would happen to Arlie when I abandoned him for the West Coast. I was the only friend he had. And he had more than enough enemies in Hartley and his minions.

  Arlie had finally put on a little bulk and was almost as tall as me, but both of us remained a bit small for our age. I knew I had a growth spurt coming in the tenth grade that would carry me to six feet, but I was an ectomorph in bone structure and a hundred and seventy-five pounds was the most I had ever weighed. Arlie was small boned too. He always looked like it wouldn’t take much to break him permanently.

  Meanwhile, I struggled to keep things straight in my head. My former friends passed by but were now only nodding acquaintances. It was hard to keep track of who knew me and who didn’t. I passed a girl I had previously known since fifth grade but we had never met this time through. I greeted her casually, “Hi, Colleen.”

  She turned with a blank look. “Oh, hi, yourself.” She had no idea who I was.

  And suddenly neither did I. I found it impossible to decant off my former memories. I was remembering things that would never happen. And worse, I suspected in the clarity of hindsight, Joey’s death the first time around had probably precipitated my need to sustain the emotional distance I had kept throughout my life. And now I had two memories of Joey’s death. And both were crushing.

  But what could I do?

  I could try starting over out in California. Leave all of the Stubbinville baggage behind. Arlie being not the least of the problems, I suspected. Yet my friendship with Arlie had gone a long way in overcoming my early detachment from others. Now I was leaving him behind for yet another life in yet another place and realized I needed his unswerving friendship more than ever.

  So I ended up doing what I had always done. I persevered, hoping something would change. And eventually it did. On the last day of eighth grade.

  Arlie and I were pedaling our bikes slowly down the quiet street we always took till we had to part ways for our respective homes. Arlie was going on about the usual banalities of the day when all four of Hartley’s gang stepped out from behind a holly hedge and wrenched the handlebars of our bikes to the side spilling us onto the street. As I scrambled to my feet, Hartley stood swishing a baseball bat and sporting an optimistic grin. His carrot-topped understudy stood next to him twirling an old golf club.

  Hartley decided to toy with Arlie a bit before beginning the festivities. “We all had a really bad year last year thanks to you, Tinker Bell.”

  Arlie didn’t seem to be afraid anymore. Not of anything. With unflinching audacity he corrected, “Actually it was year before last, but how was that my fault? If none of the four of you cowards could figure out ganging up on me and beating me unconscious might get you in trouble, you must be stupid times four.”

  It took Hartley a few seconds to come up with a retort. “Yeah, well you got a real smart mouth don’t you, Tink.” But that only opened him up to further insult.

  “Not really. But I can see how it might sound smart to someone stupid as you. If you four can scrape up an IQ of 70, you’ll leave me alone. Last time you messed with me it cost you a year in reform school. This time it will cost you a lot more. I promise.”

  That brought forth a flurry of snorts and chuckles. “Ouuuuu. We’re shakin’ in our boots, Beanpole.”

  Arlie’s eyes drilled into Hartley’s holding his attention like a mongoose might hold a cobra’s. Hartley blinked several times. “Just remember. I warned you.”

  But Carrot Top, who had moved to Arlie’s right, raised his golf club. “Yeah, well here’s a warning for you, Beanpo…”

  Arlie was too fast to follow. He must have removed his stiletto while I was getting to my feet and eyeing Hartley’s baseball bat. When I looked in the direction of the gurgle, Arlie’s little, black knife had taken up lodging in Carrot Top’s throat just below his formerly slack-jawed face now agog with newfound wonder. His crossed eyes focused in on the end of the haft protruding from just under his chin. Arlie stepped over and yanked the weapon out and Carrot Top slid earthward like the tripped blade of a well-oiled guillotine.

  Hartley’s eyes bulged in disbelief for a second before he remembered he held the baseball bat. It took him slightly longer to raise the bat for a swing than it took Arlie to dive down between Hartley’s legs and drive the stiletto deep into his inner thigh slicing an opening I think
I could have stuck my whole fist into. Hartley still swung the bat, but Arlie was out the other side and starting to stand up behind him as the bat splintered on the pavement. Hartley stared in dismay at the broken bat for a few seconds before realizing he was pumping prodigious quantities of blood out of his femoral artery.

  “You really are stupid aren’t you,” Arlie hissed in Hartley’s ear. “Remember how just a few seconds ago I told you to leave me alone or you’d regret messing with me? So how smart do you feel now, Jackass?”

  But Hartley didn’t rise to Arlie’s taunt. Like Carrot Top before him, Hartley had grown acutely aware of an unanticipated personal problem that required his undivided attention. He dropped the bat handle with a squeaky, “Oh shit,” and grabbed his thigh with both hands, squirting streams of blood out onto the pavement as he clamped down. Meanwhile, Carrot Top lay wide-eyed in the road whistling through the hole in his windpipe as he blew out foamy mounds of reddish bubbles. Having not foreseen any of this, I walked over in a near trance to pick up Carrot Top’s nine iron. There was no hurry. The fight was over.

  Behind me Arlie was yelling, “Run, you fat-assed, chicken shit.” The inane notion I should take him aside and teach him how to swear properly crossed my mind. I turned just in time to see him kick Hartley in the butt as he hobbled up the street after the other two who were now a half-block ahead of him. Harley called out plaintively, “Hey, wait up,” just before he stumbled headlong onto the pavement.

  Arlie turned calmly back toward me, his face serene in the afternoon light. “That felt really good,” he said as he walked over and carefully wiped the blood off his stiletto on Carrot Top’s pants. Belatedly, it came to me that I should have used my eighty years of experience to talk our way out of the confrontation. We would have been on our way back home by now. But Arlie had been handling the situation so well. He had brought Hartley to a near standstill in their one-sided battle of wits. Until Carrot Top’s ill-advised flanking attack. Then without warning, it was over.