He thinks of California.
And then, heading west in the opposite lane, he sees a second vehicle, a converted pickup, its flatbed vertically sectioned by large panes of clear glass—a roving window in search of a house. And for the instant it’s even with his position he is granted, as if by some higher power, insight through its crystalline lenses to the other side.
He snaps this mental picture, not knowing what it means.
Then the truck is past, and all views everywhere revert to the obscure.
The tips of his father’s brown lace-ups are badly scuffed from his mad dash along the roadside: the man’s been out running, too, chasing his son. Pale dust coats his pantlegs to the shins, and dark islands of sweat stain the armpits of his white button-down.
“I still know some people around here—” His father bends over—hands on his knees—to catch a wheezing breath, then slowly straightens again. “Come on … I can find you half a dozen lawyers better than that pompous asshole.”
“Forget it.”
“Sam, listen to me—”
“No.”
“Dammit, we need to do everything we can here.”
“ ‘We’?”
His father looks away. Sam repeats the question, his anger growing, as a yard away a minivan passes them in a rush of dust and fumes.
His father breathes out. A public service, in essence: trying to expel something potentially harmful to them both.
“You don’t want to go where I went. Never. You don’t want any part of that.”
“Doesn’t look like it killed you.” Out of bounds now, Sam lets it fly. It almost feels good. His father stares at him, takes a step closer.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. It’ll ruin your life. Rot you from the inside out.”
“Too late,” he says softly.
(He is five again, and across the room his parents are killing each other.)
“Listen to me—”
He turns to get away. But a hand shoots out, grabs him high up on his left biceps. Strong blunt fingers that know what damage is dig into the soft tissue between muscle, sending a knifelike pain shooting up his shoulder and down his arm.
Before he can stop himself, his fist flies out: he punches his father in the face.
They both see it at the same moment: his father’s fist cocked in the stunned air, about to deliver the return blow.
And then his father, running.
RUTH
DRIVING EAST ON 44 from Cutter’s office, on the lookout for her son, she is thrown back to an afternoon a good decade in the past: raised voices out on her front lawn, a man’s and a boy’s, where Norris is tutoring his indifferent stepson in the mysteries of the short game in golf. Then a sudden loud clatter—her husband’s prized pitching wedge tomahawked into a tree—and by the time she peers out the bedroom window to see what the fuss is about there’s only her son’s sweatshirted back, tearing up Larch Road at a jackrabbit clip.
Sam disappears from sight even as Norris, arms akimbo, flails in the driveway like a discombobulated traffic cop. And, observing her husband from this judicial distance, Ruth is finally able to conclude what she’s probably known all along: that here is a man who doesn’t know anything—anything—about kids.
Meanwhile, her son has run away. For more than two hours she drives around the area alone, trying to guess where he might have gone. (Norris remains at the house, ostensibly in case of Sam’s early return, but really so he won’t miss any of the third round of the Masters on TV.) And when, still searching, she senses darkness beginning to fall, hot waves of grief roll across her brow and down her neck as though she is suffering the early onset of menopause. Yes, it is before and after, youth then age. She returns home an old woman, prepared to call the police, only to find her son sitting on the porch steps as if she is the child who went missing and he the haunted parent.
And for a rageful moment, rushing at him from the barely parked car, slapping his face actually seems possible. For terrorizing her as no one should ever be allowed to terrorize another. But by the time—maybe five seconds—she’s actually got her hands on him, the threat of her anger has been sapped; the threat of her, period. She can no more imagine hurting him than letting him grow free.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” she whispers harshly, pulling him to her and squeezing the breath out of him.
He promises he won’t. He says he’s sorry.
Out her windshield, half a mile east of the law office, she spots him, a man now, dressed in the respectable clothes she demanded, sitting hunched on a bench that the proprietor of Maya’s Arts & Crafts established beside her odd little kiosk of a store. Oblivious of passing traffic, he’s staring at his hands gripping each other in an awkward joined fist between his knees.
He doesn’t look up till she beeps the horn.
She shoves open the passenger door, and he ducks inside.
“You okay?”
He won’t even glance at her.
“Seat belt, please,” she says.
She pulls back onto the road. He brings the belt around, fastens it. The knuckles on his right hand are raw, as if he’s burned himself. She stops herself from inquiring about it, instead redirecting her focus, seeking an acceptable angle.
“Did your father catch up with you?”
His grunt is more or less affirmative.
She waits, but he won’t elaborate. Her eyes go again to his inflamed knuckles, then back to the road. The truth is that a good part of her doesn’t really want to know.
She makes herself ask anyway, assuming she won’t get an answer.
“What happened?”
He’s silent.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t care.”
She sighs. “All right, Sam.”
She drives on. The sun hazy, the afternoon growing late. They pass the Elks Club. They pass the two-lane bowling alley, probably to be closed soon, now that all the kids prefer hanging out in front of their keyboards to actually getting together. They pass Fanelli’s, a locals’ bar she’s never liked. They pass Gray’s Ice Cream stand, outside which on steamy summer afternoons when Sam was small he and his friends used to hold contests to see who could eat an entire double blackberry cone before any of it dripped on the ground. Their faces violet as clowns by the end. He never won that she can remember, though maybe that was the point.
A mental scene that morphs into another, older and still more unaccountable: Sam with his father on the beach in Cotuit, engaged in an elaborate “wipe-out” contest. Dwight the self-proclaimed champion, allowing himself to be comically pummeled by one wave after another, big rag doll of a man, flopping and hamming it up in the shallows for his son’s delight, Sam laughing so hard he has seawater coming out his nose.
While, in a sunroom in a house long sold, her mother is speaking to her from the grave: For God’s sake, Ruth Margaret, quit arguing with your life all the time! You’ll never win.
She’s relieved when the commercial buildings are soon behind them, the road running straight for a mile between gray stone walls before crossing the creek and doglegging north into Wyndham Falls. A town deeply familiar to her, if not exactly her own. A town plucked out of some high-end catalog of towns. A town innately organized to martial into a livable pattern all those stray memories that otherwise will peck you bloody like Hitchcock’s birds as you try in vain to imitate the healthy people who can take it or leave it.
She, unfortunately, has long proved herself to be not this sort of healthy person. She can take, all right, but leaving is something she has never mastered. She’s of the stubborn bag-lady genus: bringing it all with her wherever she goes, hoarding the past not because it’s better but because it’s the only thing she seems to own.
“Mom?”
Beside her Sam’s voice is soft, almost pleading, unlike the superhero’s body he possesses. But she’s driving over a tricky stretch of road and doesn’t feel she can risk peeking at him. Her
hands choking the steering wheel. The tires clattering across the little iron bridge stretched across the creek. She turns the wheel and the car follows the sharp curve, at the end of it more stone walls, and the clean white houses of one of the prettiest towns in Connecticut.
DWIGHT
I RUN TILL I CAN’T RUN ANYMORE. Run from my own hands, which keep following me—no getting rid of them. Run till the sweat’s leaking out of my hair and I’m bent over the littered side of 44.
Cars shoulder past going east and west, a furniture truck. Eventually I raise myself and stand looking up the road, hands on my hips. Two football fields distant is a bar I used to haunt. An after-work sort of place, Fanelli’s, with a pool table and a TV. Off-duty state troopers from the Canaan barracks used to drink there, house builders and roadworkers, the odd white-collar. I head for it now, my lungs gradually settling, the sweat drying on my face. A neon Pabst sign flickers in the unwashed front window. The place is open, and I go in.
My eyes are slow to adjust to the gloomy, secondhand light. Two solitary men hunched over drinks at the bar in the long narrow room, and a single couple nursing beers at one of the back tables. Nobody speaking. The less-than-regulation-size pool table where grown men used to play pickup games with stacks of quarters for cheerleaders. Barren now. The old jukebox gone; speakers built into the nicotined ceiling ooze easy-listening country.
I take a seat at the end of the bar, as far from the wall-mounted TV as I can get. Oprah’s on. A young man about Sam’s age with a soul patch under his bottom lip shuffles over to take my order. He’s sporting a heavy-metal T-shirt under an open flannel shirt, and has a wad of dip stuffed between his cheek and gum. On his way to me he stops and with pinpoint accuracy spits a stream of brown juice into an empty Snapple bottle on the backbar.
“What’ll it be?”
I order a double Jim Beam with a draft on the side.
He stands there a few moments, staring at my face a little too long, in a way I don’t care for. I’m about to ask if he has some kind of problem, when he moves a pile of bar napkins in front of me.
“Your lip’s bleeding,” he offers in a confiding tone.
I thank him for the information.
He goes off to get my drinks while I dab a napkin at the corner of my mouth. It comes away streaked red. I keep dabbing till the blood stops, by which time the napkin is almost entirely ruined, the blood’s starting to dry and darken, and the bartender has returned with my drinks. He glances at the bloody napkin before he goes away, but not at me.
I drink my order. And when those drinks are finished I raise a finger, and before I know it, without intervention, fresh drinks arrive. I drink those, too.
What I see is my own hand cocked in the air as I stand by the roadside. My hand that is a fist. The violence in it already born. As if the rest of me that’s always wanted to be good is just dead skin over the old, true self, which is the fist. The skin sloughed off in an instant, revealing the fist, and all the fists before it. The fist raised by me against my own son in the falling light of day.
PENNY
AS IT HAPPENS, the day following Dwight’s confession and departure, the nagging hollowness that she feels in the pit of her stomach while delivering her annual lecture to the undergrads on the last days of Sylvia Plath has little to do with the tragic happenings in anybody else’s oven. It is purely her own drama, and all the more confusing for it. An unacceptable, even shameful, gap seems to have opened between her understanding and her heart. She never knew the boy Dwight killed, of course, and, no matter how hard she tries, can’t seem to create an image of him in her mind. This is the gap in herself that follows her from the lecture hall to her office; from her office to her car. That sits with her in traffic on the drive home. That overcooks her daughter’s dinner. That takes a shower with her, and watches The Wire with her. That stays up much of the night with her, because it, too, can’t sleep. It resides, somehow, where she believed her judgment of him would rise up in moral outrage. But instead of judgment there has been this strange, urgent welling of compassion for him, a compassion not unlike love.
SAM
HOME AGAIN IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, he makes straight for his room, taking the stairs two at a time.
His father hasn’t returned yet.
He stands in the middle of the room. Daylight, shadowed but not yet disappearing, seeps through the two front-facing windows, exposing his nostalgic arsenal of trophies and sports equipment for what it is: the littered remains of a failed belief system that he wasn’t even aware, until now, of having bought into.
He sits down at his desk because it’s there. After a while he opens the single drawer, revealing two ballpoint pens and a blunt yellow pencil that belonged to a boy he once knew. These he aligns in a row, as if solving a puzzle of his own design. And there are loose paper clips, too, which he herds into small piles; and the ticket stubs to an old Sox game; and a black-and-white speckled composition book that for a few weeks when the boy was thirteen and on the verge of some ascending darkness he used as a journal.
The book, never close to being completed, appalls him now; as does the handwriting on the cover, like the ragged scrawl of an unschooled child.
In the last moments before the sun dips behind the visible line of trees, he opens his laptop and discovers her email:
Sam,
I’m here for the summer.
Get in touch if you feel like it.
Hope you will.
Emma
For a long while he sits with her message, as his room—everywhere but the glowing screen with its five lines of print—gradually withdraws into shadow.
Finally, he types back:
What are you doing tonight?
And with a long outbreath like a sigh, clicks Send.
RUTH
THE KETTLE BEGINS TO MOAN, those last few seconds before true boil. She reaches the stove in time to disarm the apparatus before its shriek can crack her glass house of repose. She pours the water and the steam wafts up—
“Mom?”
The calming scent of lemon verbena still in her nose, she turns and sees him standing in the doorway. One of his feet extending into the kitchen, the other planted sideways like a tug-of-war contestant, geared for resistance, already pointing out the front of the house toward some misinformed notion of freedom. He’s replaced the decent clothes he wore for their meeting with Jack Cutter with torn jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt, along with thick-soled work boots.
“Can I take the car?”
She checks the wall clock—almost nine. “Where were you thinking of going?”
“See a friend.”
“Anybody I know?”
The slight movement of his head means yes—or no, impossible to tell.
An old hand, a professional, she waits him out.
“Just a girl,” he says to the floor.
She studies him, the points of his cheekbones inflamed as if by fever. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
She lets the response stand, holding it up to the light so they can both see the holes in it. “Where are you meeting her?”
“Fanelli’s.”
“Sam, do you really think you should be going to a bar under the circumstances? You think that’s the smart choice?”
He shrugs as if he honestly doesn’t have a clue.
She is starting to hate the sound of her own voice; hate her idea of what a question is, or its purpose. She takes a spoon from the dish rack, scoops the tea bag from the cup, and drops it into the sink. She’s given up using sweeteners, but she would like something sweet now.
“The keys are on the dash. Be home by midnight.”
He comes into the kitchen. He seems to want to hug her to show his gratitude or maybe his pity, but she does not want to be touched at the moment, not even by him. And this is the saddest thing.
“Go,” she murmurs, waving him away as she might have when he was little, a fluttery shooing motion of the kind that says
Now get along, honeybun, I’ve got muffins to bake; except there’s honest-to-God pleading in her voice, unmistakable to them both.
Well, she’s still his mother, isn’t she? Will be as long as they both are breathing. And he goes.
She drinks her cup of tea, fires up the kettle for another. Keeps the television on, the little cook’s set with the rabbit ears and the fuzzy-wuzzy reception—showing Law & Order, the sound on low. So many different kinds of Law & Order, and—on TV, at least—the guarantee of a neat resolution to every problem.
Earlier, she went up and stood outside his room and asked through the closed door whether he’d like some supper, and when he said no in such a small and tired voice she ached for him, believing he must be like her, gutted by the afternoon, his insides turned upside down. But now she understands that she was mistaken—he is not like her. She’s been in the kitchen since late afternoon, numbly watching talk shows and news and reruns, drinking cup after cup of herbal tea, each time trying like some matronly Buster Keaton to reach the kettle before it can shriek her lights out, eventually eating a single-portion can of lentil soup, while all along he was up in his room getting himself prepped for a night at a bar. She’s been down here replaying in her mind Jack Cutter’s carelessly cruel, yet undoubtedly accurate—she can’t question the man’s intelligence, only his heart—rendering of the probable legal realities facing her son, while the son himself was already moving away from those realities, surfing the Internet or texting with some girl, dreaming his way right out of her house.
Maybe the main thing, the only real goal, is to not get trapped alone with one’s feelings; to continually start and restart reality in the hope that the next episode might offer greater resolution, clearer meaning; that although the show will still appear on the same old channel they might somehow all come back different, better, wiser, younger, able to start again, rewind to the beginning.…
Northwest Corner Page 17