by Pete Dexter
Peets left him alone fifteen minutes. If the old man didn't want some time alone, he wouldn't of come an hour early. Finally, though, he turned off the radio and got out of the truck. He slammed the door so the old man would know he was there.
Old Lucy stayed where he was. He didn't turn his head or stand up. Peets crouched down beside him. "Mornin', Lucy," he said.
"Peets."
"Radio says we got a good day to work." Old Lucy didn't say anything. "You been all right?" Peets said. "I thought of comin' over to your place, but, you know, you don't want to go buttin' in."
"I got it settled," the old man said.
Peets nodded. "Sometimes it can take a while," he said.
"Took that boy his whole life," Lucy said. Peets let that alone, and after a while the old man said, "But it do settle. Ain't nothin' so bad or so good you can do that it don't settle, and in the end you became what you been." He was looking down the wall he'd started, at the work that had been done since he left. It was the most Peets had ever heard him say at one time.
Peets started to put his arm around Lucy's shoulder, but he patted him once on the back instead. "I'm glad you come back," he said. He said it and then he pulled away from it.
"I mean, lookit that wall. I can't get no work done here alone, Lucy."
"I can see that," Lucy said. Then he looked at Peets and didn't try to hide what the settling had done to him. "I might be old now," he said.
Peets stood up on bad hinges. He said, "I might be headed that way myself." And in a few minutes they walked over and uncovered the cement bags, so they could get back to building the new wing of Holy Redeemer Hospital.
* * *
Mickey woke up, and the air was warm and still, and it smelled like the glue they used to stick the place together. Bird had bought the mobile home used, for $12,000, and he and Sophie paid the man forty dollars a month for the space in the lot. Most of the spaces were sixty dollars, but theirs was on the far end, away from the recreation center and the site of the proposed swimming pool. One side of the mobile home backed up to the woods, and every morning after Sophie and her new friends had finished worrying over tornadoes and their flowers, she and Bird went back into the trees and practiced shooting the pistol.
It was Bird who insisted on it. He'd set up bottles and cans in a clearing back there, and they'd take turns shooting. "I don't say nothin'," he'd tell Mickey, "'cause I don't want to scare her, but, you know, they're comin'. And we got to be ready, right?"
Then he'd ask if it was all right to go practice now. Mickey would say it was all right.
And Bird would smile and take her out into the woods, and she smiled and went with him, and they depended on Mickey like he was their father.
The mobile home had three bedrooms. Mickey's was in the back, the air conditioner was in front, and it was that still, warm air that woke him up every morning. Sometimes he woke up thinking about Jeanie, and sometimes, like this morning, it was the reporter. What had he said? "It's all light and dark"?
He got out of bed with a headache and listened. He heard them outside. He put on a pair of pants and went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Bird had put tape around the handles of all the toothbrushes and written each of their names on the tape. "Yo, Mick," he'd said. "I got an idea. What if I write everybody's names on their toothbrush? Would that be all right?" `
Sometimes they walked into the woods together, past the clearing scattered with broken glass and shell casings, all the way to the river. It was wide and muddy and slow, and it flowed north. "See, what'd I tell you, Mick?" Bird had said. “See, what d'ya think?"
It took a while to get used to how Bird and Sophie was away from Philly. They clung to him like something that floated after the boat sank. He didn't pull away from it, though. He guessed his own boat had sank too.
He brushed his hair and laid his toothbrush next to Sophie's on the sink. Then he went back in his room and found the yellow alligator T-shirt Mickey and Sophie gave him the first night he was there. He put it on and went out the door. "Watch your step," Sophie said.
The first step out was a yard down, and they always told each other to be careful. Mickey even noticed himself saying it. She and Bird were sitting in lawn chairs on the little piece of grass that went with the trailer lot. Sophie was in the shade, holding a water can over her flowers. Bird had taken off his shirt and put his face into a three-sided sun reflector. He said good morning without opening his eyes. Mickey smiled at them. There was some people shouldn't take off their shirts in public.
Sophie said, "You want some breakfast, Mickey?"
He shook his head. "I can't even think about food, this time of the morning," he said.
Bird folded the sun reflector and sat up, sweating. He looked at his watch awhile. "We better go practice," he said. "You want to come along, Mick?"
"I think I'll just read the paper."
"You don't mind if we go?"
"No, it's all right," he said. "Just be careful."
Aunt Sophie picked up a big straw purse off the table and looked inside. Then she reached in and got the gun, and then a box of shells. "Lemme carry those for you," Bird said, and she gave him the shells. She leaned over and kissed Mickey on the cheek and then the two of them walked off into the woods. She carried the gun behind her back, the way young girls in the movies carried their hands when they flirted. Bird waded through the weeds like a sunburned heron. Sometimes, when Sophie was with her new girl friends, Mickey and Bird talked.
"We got to be ready, when they come," Bird would say.
Mickey never knew what to tell him. They might come and they might not. In the old days, you wouldn't of had to wonder.
"Bird," he'd said, "I can't live off you and Sophie forever. I got to get a job, start somethin' .... "
"You'll be here when they come," Bird said. "You'll know what to do."
He sat down in the chair Bird and Sophie had bought for him and picked up the Gainesville Sun. It was different from the Daily Times, calmer. He wondered what he would do if they came. It wouldn't make much difference, of course, they wouldn't come in stupid like at the flower shop. If they came at all.
He'd give it another month, or two.
It was quiet awhile, and then he heard the shots a long ways off spaced minutes apart, breaking the quiet Florida morning like unexpected reminders of the people he'd loved.
They were out there in the woods most of an hour, Bird and Sophie, shooting at bottles.
FEBRUARY 5, 1983
TIMBER LAKE
Cicil, New Jersey