Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  This time when his grades came he had a handful of Very Good, only two Satisfactory (he was never going to be any good at math, he told Maris) and one Excellent. Even Maris allowed as how this wasn’t too bad at all.

  As the weather warmed for good, he was allowed to swim in the pond again, and usually Will joined him, hot from his work in the greenhouse, where he was busy readying the scion sticks for grafting. Even supper usually got eaten outside, on the back deck, where Will barbecued chicken or hamburgers, and they ate salads with lettuce and tomatoes from the garden, and the most incredible kinds of fruit from the market in Healdsburg. Strawberries from Watsonville (though Maris’s were almost ready in the greenhouse), peaches and apricots from even further south.

  There was the occasional shadow. Maybe apples did better than Simonson the realtor realised, but sometimes it was hard to see how, and late at night he heard tense conversations going on between Will and Maris, with words and phrases, none of them sounding happily spoken, like ‘mortgage’ and ‘price per pound’ and once even ‘bales’, though he thought Will had already pre-sold all the hay to a farmer on the other side of Geyserville.

  Then one afternoon Maris planted wild onion plants on the sandy bank behind the greenhouse. Jack was nervous about it – ‘I thought there were rattlers around here.’

  Maris looked at him. ‘Jack, there’re rattlers almost everywhere in this entire county. But when was the last time you saw one?’

  He had to think for a moment. ‘There was a dead one last autumn up on the road near Truebridge’s.’

  ‘See what I mean? There are plenty of snakes around, and I’ve always told you to be careful about picking up big rocks or stepping where you can’t see. But they’re a lot more scared of us than we are of them.’ She stopped and looked at Jack, smiling as she added, ‘Well, maybe not. But they’re shy enough to get out of your way. They’d have heard us coming over here and made themselves scarce. Okay?’

  And it was, except that it didn’t answer the question now forming in Jack’s head, which was why Will had told him to stay away from this very bank precisely because of snakes. And why never to explore the area up at the top of the bank. And it was these unanswered questions, and the sense he had from time to time of a shadow coming over all of them – for reasons he couldn’t specify; the tensions of the apple business didn’t help, but that didn’t seem to account for all of it – which prompted him to try and figure out just what was going on.

  For something was. He knew that, and he found himself unwilling to respect the no-go areas Will had set out.

  First, the tangled acres above the sandy bank behind the greenhouse where his uncle said he must never play. He was scared of rattlesnakes, of which there were more than a few around, but since talking to Maris he was confident it wasn’t true about the bank. And thus he went and saw for himself, taking a big stick along just in case he saw a rattler, and not fifty yards from the top of the bank he found, in the middle of dense undergrowth, an area of cleared ground, shaded by the overhanging branches of a circle of eucalyptus trees. In this space there were three now-raggedy rows of plants, green stalks with small abundant leaves the colour of bright, light emeralds, almost lumi-nescently coloured. They had a skunky smell as well, though he could not be sure if this didn’t come from the swamp which began behind them. And he wondered, Is this sinsemilla?

  If it was, he figured out as he lay in bed that night, then it didn’t seem much of a crop, and pretty obviously it hadn’t been harvested the year before. In which case what was the point of having it at all?

  He found the answer by accident, when he violated the second no-go prohibition. Will was in the Valley Orchard, cutting early grass with the tractor, and Maris was grading a math test imposed by the state authorities, sitting at the table in the big room in front of a stack of multiple-choice answers. He told her he was going to the pond, but kept on going around it to the greenhouse.

  Inside it seemed unfamiliar. The strawberry plants had been moved out and planted along the edges of Maris’s vegetable plot, and most of the scion bud packs were now grafted onto the root stock of older trees in the Valley Orchard. He walked around the wooden trestle tables, largely empty, trying to think what could have been happening to explain his uncle’s sternness about his unaccompanied presence here. He happened to look back and then, intrigued, looked again. There was a faint shape, the trace of an outline, against the back wall of the greenhouse. A door? How could this be, since the greenhouse abutted the hillside, which formed its back wall? He brushed aside the leaves of a ficus plant barring his way, stepped around several large tins of paint, then moved an old wooden stool. With these obstacles out of the way, he could clearly see that the outline on the wall was indubitably the frame of a door, but mysteriously there was no doorknob. Closer inspection revealed an indentation in the outline, just above the floor, and when he crouched down he saw a brass-coloured slide of metal. Reaching with his hand, he pulled on it, and it turned at right angles, extending outwards, so that by gripping it he could pull. He did, and the door moved, opening smoothly, silently towards him.

  Beyond the door it was pitch black, but as he stepped forward he sensed a cavernous space, like a cellar carved out of the side of the hill. A hidden room, which excited his curiosity even more than it did his apprehension. He stood just inside it, slightly spooked, trying fruitlessly to adjust his eyes to the dark so he could gain some sense of the volume of the space before him. He put a hand tentatively forward, then felt around the sides of the inner side of the door. He found a switch and flicked it. Nothing at first, then after several seconds came the wavering, shaky onset of strange square lights, across the low ceiling of the room, set in two rows of horizontal strip.

  But the lights only briefly held his attention. For beneath them in individual black plastic pots, sitting on planks covering a rough earth floor, were plants, four or five feet high, each with a long thin green central stalk, off which hung small green leaves. He stepped forward to look at them more closely.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  It was Will in the doorway behind him, holding a claw hammer which he now put down on a shelf.

  ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Will,’ Jack said, swallowing rapidly.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you not to come in here without me?’

  Jack started towards the door with his head down, planning to walk past his uncle. It was as he passed him that he suddenly felt his head rocked, detonated by a terrific slap across the cheek. At first he simply didn’t know what had happened – had something fallen from a shelf? – but looking at Will as his ears literally rang and the pain grew, he saw Will was furious.

  He hit me, and all Jack could think of next was his mother, and how when she used to slap him she would follow up the first big hit with a series of supplementary smacks, some of them just as hard, and though Will looked a little astonished now too, Jack wasn’t going to wait around and watch whatever internal debate his uncle might conduct about what to do next. So he charged out the door and into the ‘normal’ greenhouse, then through its outer door. Once outside, he didn’t stop, but ran around the far side of the pond and into the copse, heading for the tree house, his sanctuary. He came to the Monterey pine and climbed quickly, then regretted his choice, since it would be the first place his uncle would go to look for him. And indeed as he climbed down and stood on the forest floor of soft needles again, he heard his uncle coming through the ferns, calling out, ‘Jack! Where are you, Jack?’ He didn’t sound angry any more, but Jack didn’t want to know.

  He turned around to climb back up, and this time on impulse he didn’t stop when he reached the plank floor of the tree house but kept climbing, up the packing crate slats of its side walls, pulling himself up onto the pitched roof, where the flat plywood panels bowed under his weight but did not give way.

  He stood up carefully on the slanted pitch of the roof, and moved cautiously up to the gable line, where he teetered on both feet; from here he r
eached up and grabbed a large knotted limb of the big Monterey pine. He pulled himself up and found that where the thick branch joined the trunk of the tree, another branch, from a neighbouring Douglas fir, slanted across and ran next to the arm of the pine. The two of them lay side by side, and formed a kind of platform, a floor of limbs that was wide enough for the boy to swing both legs up and lie on, fully extended. He rested with his legs out this way, and his back leaning against the pine trunk. He was not uncomfortable, and when he leaned over to look down all he could see was the roof of the tree house several feet below him. The ground below on either side of the tree house was blocked from view by the thick and shaggy arms of the Monterey; the other trees of the wood obscured any sight of him from further away. He was invisible from the ground.

  Within seconds he heard his uncle arrive, fifteen feet below. ‘Jack,’ he called, and the boy assumed he had been spotted. But then his uncle called again. ‘Jack, are you up there?’

  He said nothing. After a moment, he heard his uncle swing a leg up onto the boards hammered to the tree trunk, which served as steps for climbing into the tree house. Then his uncle’s boots rang from the tree house planks. ‘Shit,’ his uncle exclaimed, and the boy heard him sit down heavily, not much more than eight feet below him.

  He thought about making his unseen presence known, maybe even trying to scare his uncle at first – he could snap a twig off and drop it onto the roof of the tree house, say, or make a clicking noise, rolling his tongue under the soft inner side of his mouth, a pale imitation of a rattlesnake which lately he was practising, to Maris’s distraction. His uncle didn’t sound angry any more, and he would probably laugh, but then Jack felt the stinging on his cheek and thought, Hell no, let him wait.

  And then he heard Maris calling out, and his uncle called back, and after a moment she too came through the chain ferns, stopping at the base of the big pine. ‘What are you doing up there?’

  ‘I was looking for Jack.’

  ‘I thought he was swimming in the pond.’

  ‘He was supposed to be. I found him in the greenhouse. Looking at things he shouldn’t be looking at. I kind of lost my temper when I found him there.’ He added in a low voice, ‘I smacked him one.’

  ‘Oh Lordy,’ she said. ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘I didn’t hit him, Maris,’ Will said, managing to sound both aggrieved and guilty. ‘I slapped him. And yes, I know I shouldn’t have. But it’s his pride that’s hurt, more than anything else.’

  ‘That depends how hard you slapped him. Come on: let’s go find him.’

  After they left, Jack waited almost twenty minutes before he made his way down. He was still a little stunned, but he was relieved that his uncle was contrite and pleased that Maris wasn’t indifferent about it. He knew now that Jerry Simonson was right, and that his uncle was growing sinsemilla or marijuana or whatever the right term was in a secret room with special lights in the greenhouse.

  He took his time going back to the house, where both Will and Maris gave him relieved hugs and asked him where he’d been. Walking in the Valley Orchard, he replied, and did not let on about the niche he’d found above the tree house. He liked the idea of having a hiding place entirely to himself.

  At supper there was an air of tension between Maris and Will. Jack excused himself early and went upstairs, since there was nothing good on television. He read an old-fashioned baseball story by John Tunis until he was half asleep, and had just managed to get undressed and put his pyjamas on when Maris came in to say goodnight, then heard her tell Will not to bother since he was probably already asleep.

  And he was soon asleep, but the tense earnestness of the talk below must have wakened him. He wanted some water, and in his fatigue had forgotten to fill his night side glass, but when he moved towards the gallery he slowed down and stood on tiptoe. It was not the volume – for all her sharpness, Maris never shouted and Will, even when stressed, spoke in mild and folksy tones – but the tenor of the conversation, which sounded unprecedentedly stressed, and made him stop and hide his presence up above them, within earshot.

  Maris was saying, ‘You know I don’t like this business. I wish you would stop. You know I do.’

  ‘Sure I can stop. And then what do we live on? Apple juice?’

  ‘My salary’s not that bad. We’d get by.’

  ‘We might have before, but now we’ve got another mouth to feed.’

  ‘It’s not like he costs very much. And he helps out with the orchards.’

  ‘Sure he does. But it’s not now I’m thinking about. What happens in a few years when he wants to go to college? What do we do then if I don’t have two nickels to rub together.’

  ‘This situation may not last forever.’

  ‘Why not? Who else is going to raise him? My sister? Pigs might fly and I might win a trip to Hawaii. And he’s better off here than with Gram. At least I think he is.’

  ‘Of course he is. And don’t act like I don’t want him here. All I mean is that I’d rather be poor as church mice than have money in the bank and you in a Federal penitentiary. Or worse. I bet Jack would feel the same way.’

  ‘Hey!’ His uncle must have stood up while they were talking, because he was standing on the front side of the big room and turning back had an excellent view of Jack eavesdropping in his pyjamas. ‘Have you been listening in?’ his uncle said, but his tone was only slightly accusatory.

  He doesn’t want to think I heard him, thought Jack, and he shook his head. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I was just going to the bathroom to get some water.’

  ‘Go ahead. But then get on back to bed.’

  The rest of their conversation downstairs was conducted in whispers, and the next day when Jack came home from school he found Will inside, upstairs on the gallery. He was surrounded by tools and had a band saw set up; he’d built a wall frame to make a separate room out of Jack’s bedroom space and was busy nailing in stud partition board. ‘I thought it was time you had some privacy,’ was all he said to Jack.

  But that was not the end of it.

  He caught a cold the next week, which at first he endured while going to school. It seemed ridiculous to have a cold when the temperature was seventy degrees and the sun shone all day long and he should be enjoying the hours outside the classroom, but instead he just felt miserable in his head and blew his nose about every forty seconds. He was worse when he woke up the next morning, and Will had already gone to see a man about insurance first thing down in Santa Rosa, and Maris was about to take him to school with her when she looked at him and declared that he was staying home. ‘You stay here today, and don’t you dare watch television downstairs. I want you in bed where you belong. Will should be back at lunch-time to look after you. If there’s any problem, phone the school and they’ll find me.’

  And in truth he felt so rotten that he did stay in bed. Even reading tired him out and he slept on and off all morning. He heard Will come back and park his truck, and then come into the house, and he was about to shout down to him when he heard Will go out the front door again, its screen door swinging shut with its usual whack, and then he heard another truck come into the turnaround. There were voices, and he could make out Will’s, but then they trailed off slightly, and out of curiosity Jack got up, feeling slightly dizzy, and opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the deck.

  He saw Will and a taller man wearing a sharp-brimmed cowboy hat, walking towards the barn, while a third man backed his pickup truck towards the barn. He was going to shout out hello, but it occurred to him that Will did not know he was home, and as he watched, leaning out around the edge of the deck’s railing, he felt there was something stealthy in the visit of these other men. It was the same feeling he’d had once when, as he sat downstairs, Maris came out of Will’s bedroom naked. She must have thought Jack was outside, and he watched as she went along the gallery to the bathroom, and by the time he thought to cough or say something it was too late, for if he did that she would know he had b
een watching her.

  Now too he froze, as he watched one of the men lift a bale wrapped in black plastic and throw it into the back of the truck, where the driver climbed up and covered it and another bale Will brought out with a tarpaulin.

  It was far too late to make his presence known; caution overcame his curiosity, and Jack moved fast and silently back into his room and into bed. And he pretended to be asleep when some time later, which seemed an hour but he knew was probably only minutes, he heard the truck drive off. Will came into the house and must have seen Jack’s school books on the kitchen table, because he came upstairs at once.

  ‘I didn’t know you were home. Something wrong?’

  Jack simulated a lengthy yawn. ‘Maris told me to stay home because my cold is a lot worse.’

  Will nodded and Jack thought he had carried it off. But then Will pointed at the sliding door. ‘Why’s that open?’