Boomer was talking to him. And still Pete refused to look. And he refused to stop walking. So Boomer had to inch the truck along next to him.
“See, this is why you should always do what your daddy tells you to do,” Boomer called out.
Pete had been vaguely aware of something brewing inside him. But he had only been half feeling the pressure of it, and had not yet been able to decipher what it was. But when he heard Boomer’s voice it boiled up to the surface, and it was rage. Pure rage.
He stopped, and turned to face the truck, and Boomer stepped on the brake and dropped the smarmy grin completely when he saw the look on Pete’s face.
“Did you always do what your daddy told you to do, Boomer?”
Pete wasn’t sure why he had asked that question. It seemed like a digression from the more important matters at hand. But somehow Pete knew he was being given advice that Boomer probably never followed himself, and he wanted to start by getting the man to admit it.
“Well, no, not really,” Boomer said, the irritating grin half returning. “But that’s a little different, because my daddy was crazy as a loon.”
Pete walked to the truck and stood at the open passenger-side window, feeling the rage. Pushing and playing at it to keep it just at the surface of things.
“Did you hurt Justin?” he asked, his voice strangely level.
“What’s a Justin? I don’t know nobody by that name.”
“Well, unless you hurt a great big crowd of people in the last couple or three days, Boomer, it’s still a pretty easy question.”
“Oh. Right. The dark-as-night boy.”
Boomer raised his right hand and pantomimed a bottle being brought down. It was strangely familiar, because it looked exactly the way it had looked when Justin had imitated the same gesture.
Which stood to reason, Pete realized, because they were both there when it happened.
“I heard his daddy got whomped on pretty good, too,” Boomer added. “Seems that whole family’s got a problem knowing where they do and don’t belong.”
If Boomer had been standing outside his truck, standing on the sidewalk with Pete, Pete would have assaulted him. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself. He would have flown at the older man, head crashing into gut, fists flailing. Despite the fact that he would lose. And probably get badly hurt. But he would have taken every good shot he could get before that inevitable end to things.
Instead Pete just stood there, feeling the heat and redness build up around the tops of his ears. Then, because his voice didn’t seem to want to work, and because he knew no insults grave enough to suit the moment, he simply raised his middle finger and extended it in Boomer’s direction. With a kind of fierce emphasis driven by his anger.
“Why, you little . . . ,” Boomer began.
He trailed off without finishing the sentence, and then he was out of his truck, out on the street.
Pete took off running. Not so much out of fear, though he was afraid. But it was not his fear that caused him to retreat. He still would have liked a piece of the terrible man, and he could have chosen to stand his ground. But he didn’t want to give Boomer the satisfaction of making Pete pay for what he had done. He wanted to win. He wanted Boomer to feel defeated.
Pete sprinted down the street, made a quick turn into a driveway, and sped up as he approached its six-foot chain-link fence. He jumped, grabbed, climbed. Swung one leg over the top. A jolt of pain ran through him as the deepest of the scabbed-over welts ripped open, but he didn’t cry out loud. Just jumped down on the other side of the fence and turned to see how Boomer was doing.
Boomer was climbing the fence much more slowly and clumsily than Pete had done. He wildly swung one leg over, and his filthy work pants caught on top of the wires. As he struggled to untangle himself he lost his balance and fell backward, ripping the cuff of his pants and landing with a whump in the driveway.
“Got . . . damn it all to hell!” he shouted.
Pete gave him the finger again.
“Yeah, you see that, Boomer?” Pete howled, holding the finger in place. “I hope you broke your damn back. I hope everything bad that can possibly happen to a person happens to you. I hate you!”
Pete turned and trotted away.
He glanced once over his shoulder to make sure Boomer hadn’t really broken his back. Truth be told, Pete didn’t seriously want that and would have gone for help if help had been needed.
But Boomer was on his feet, cursing and hobbling back down the driveway toward his truck.
It struck Pete that Boomer knew exactly where he lived. And that Boomer would be able to drive there faster than Pete could walk.
In other words, now Pete couldn’t go home.
He crossed the fenced yard and scaled the chain link on the other side, then slipped quickly through the empty space between the fences, where garages lined up back to back.
He reached around to feel, through his shorts, the spot he’d reinjured. His fingers came away bloody.
He decided if he couldn’t go home he’d go to the lake. It would be the first time he’d given himself that little bit of pleasure all summer. Considering a sudden change of plan was needed, Pete figured there were far worse plans than a good hot-afternoon swim.
Pete stood on the muddy shore of the postage stamp–sized lake, enjoying the shade provided by the thick canopy of trees over his head. His sneakers left sucking prints in the slippery muck as he unbuttoned his shirt and removed it. The slight breeze felt good on his bare skin.
He pulled his feet out of his shoes without bothering to untie them, stepping on each heel with the opposite foot. He draped his shirt over a fallen branch and waded into the glorious water. It wasn’t really cold. It felt barely warm against his skin, but he knew the water would at least turn refreshingly cool deeper into the lake. So he dove forward and swam.
He stopped when the temperature was just right, just the way he liked it, and treaded water. All of his anger and fear and confusion felt as though they were leaving him at last. Washing away.
He turned his head and spun around in a full circle, enjoying his surroundings. But as he did, he could not help but notice a small trail of blood following him through the water.
And then the moment of bliss ended. Just like that. It had been there, he had reveled in it, then it was gone.
“Oh, hey, there you are, Petey! Where the hell you been?”
Pete knew the voice. He didn’t see Jack, but he didn’t need to. He knew who had discovered him.
“I been by your house half a dozen times,” the disembodied Jack voice continued, “and you’re never home, and I ask your dad where you been, and he always says he don’t know. And I thought, well, that’s just plum weird, because since when does Mr. Solomon not know where you are? So I asked him to have you come by soon as he saw you, but this morning I went by there again and he said you were home last night, but you never came by. So did he not tell you to come by, or are you staying away from me on purpose?”
By the middle of the last sentence, Pete had been able to follow the voice to the small figure of Jack hunched over the two fishing lines he was tending. Jack sat under that big gnarly tree, the one with the tangled roots that reached into the lake. Jack liked to fish there because trout hid in that labyrinth of twisted roots. Pete liked to avoid the spot because every time he hooked a fish there it managed to wrap the line around a root and break free.
“Both,” Pete said. “He didn’t tell me you came around asking after me. But even if he had, I’m staying away from you on purpose.”
“What did I do so wrong?”
Pete swam a bit closer, though it was really more like treading water with some direction involved.
“I think you know.”
“The damn dog, right? You’re still mad about the damn dog.”
“Right. I still am.”
“Well, that’s better than ditching your best friend altogether. Not just for one morning.”
&nbs
p; “Except I ditched you for a reason. Because I got a good look at who you really are, Jacky. Not just to be selfish.”
On that note, Pete decided he’d had enough of the conversation. He turned and swam slowly away.
When he reached the other side of the tiny lake, the spot where he’d left his shirt and sneakers, he pulled to his feet and waded ashore, his feet slipping in the mossy ooze.
He shook the water out of his short hair and then straightened his head again. Just as he did, something smashed against the bone outside his left eye. He stumbled backward, then righted himself. He looked up to see that Jack had apparently run around the shore of the lake after him, and was now standing with his fist still cocked. Still ready to fight.
“What the hell was that for?” Pete yelled, rubbing his bruised eye socket.
“That’s for thinking a dog is more important than me. And because now I know it’s true what they’re saying about you. I’m getting a good look at who you really are, too, Petey. You got a new friend, just like they say, and it’s somebody you ought never to go anywhere near. You ought to know better. I kept saying no, Pete would never do something so stupid as that, but now I know. I never knew you at all, Pete. I’m glad you’re not my friend anymore. You go be friends with that—”
But he never got to say the word he had lined up ready to go. Because Pete hit him full on in the gut with his lowered head and sent him flying. Jack hit the ground hard, and Pete landed on top of him and heard all the air fly out of Jack’s lungs with a big “oof” sound.
Pete held an index finger in Jack’s face as a warning.
“You don’t talk about him! You never say a word about him or his father! You hear me? You got no right. You never met them, so just keep your mouth shut and stick to what you know something about.”
Nothing happened. No words were returned, and Jack still seemed unable to breathe, so Pete got up off him and turned his back and put his shirt on and slipped into his shoes without even bothering to wash the mud off his feet.
He looked back to see Jack half sitting up in the mud, one hand to his chest. Barely breathing.
“I’m gonna forget I ever met you, Pete,” Jack said in a strained whisper.
“Good,” Pete said.
Then he walked home. Boomer Leggett or no.
There was no tow truck parked in front of his house. So Pete stepped inside.
He found his dad lying in bed, in pajamas, the covers pulled up to his waist. As if it weren’t the middle of the damn afternoon.
“Well, well,” his dad said, loosely indicating Pete’s face with a motion of his hand. “Looks like you ran into something or somebody who’s even madder at you than I am.”
Pete had no idea whether Boomer had come by and ratted him out. So he wasn’t sure how to play the situation.
“Jack’s mad at me,” Pete said.
“Seems you got a whole lot of people mad at you, boy. You seem to be developing a talent for ticking people off.”
“Yes, sir,” Pete said. “Seems that way to me, too.”
“Where the hell you get off talking to Boomer like that? I was ashamed to hear some of the things you said.”
“He probably made half of them up,” Pete said.
He was feeling defiant and he couldn’t hide it. Couldn’t even bring himself to try.
“So you didn’t give him the finger? Or tell him that you hoped his back was broke?”
“Oh. Well. Yes, sir. That was all true.”
“Didn’t I teach you to treat your elders with more respect than that?”
A fuse that had been lit in Pete earlier that day reached the powder, and there was no holding back the explosion.
“I’ll never respect Boomer Leggett!” Pete shouted. “He’s a horrible, horrible man. He broke a bottle over a poor helpless kid’s head and cut his scalp so he could’ve bled to death, and he was laughing about it to me like it was funny. I don’t care how old he is, I’ll never respect a man like that, and nothing you can say to me will ever make me. You can punish me till the cows come home, but you can’t ever make me respect somebody I don’t.”
Then Pete paused, ready to receive the blowback from what he had done.
His father’s face, his eyes, looked troubled and dark but strangely calm.
“I see. We’re feeling quite the big man today, aren’t we? You got anything else you want to teach me about life, little man?”
“No, sir. But I do have a question for you. I want you to look right in my face and tell me you had nothing to do with what happened to Justin.”
Pete realized as the words came out of his mouth that he was speaking to his father the way parents speak to their children. Or at least the way the person in control speaks to someone they’re controlling. But it was too late to call the words back. So he just waited to see when and how—and how much—he would pay for what he had done.
“I shouldn’t have to,” his father said, still abnormally calm. “You can see I can’t get around much these days.”
“Not that you didn’t do it with your own two hands. That you had nothing to do with it.”
A silence fell. It felt long, but it might only have been a single handful of seconds. It tingled, that silence. Pete could feel the tingle.
“I had nothing to do with it,” his father said.
Pete didn’t speak. He was busy feeling a huge amount of breath leave his body. He wondered how long he had been holding it.
“Now if you’re done holding court, little man, you can go straight to your room. You will not get dinner tonight. And I’d best see a change in that attitude over the next couple of days, or you’re going to be one mighty hungry boy.”
Pete was hungry already. He had missed lunch. He had left the doctor’s house before it was served, and had been walking and fighting at lunchtime instead of eating. He sighed at the news, but made sure the breath of his sigh was silent.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
As he walked to his room it struck him that he’d still gotten off easy. Easier than he could possibly explain to himself in his poor exhausted brain.
Pete was lying facedown on his bed when he heard the soft knock on his bedroom door.
“What is it?” he asked, without much life in the words. Without much life in him.
The door opened partway, squeaking on its unoiled hinge.
“Just one more thing I wanted to say to you.” His dad’s voice sounded more the way Pete was used to hearing it. More in charge. Not quite so calm. “Next time you come home to my house talking to me like I got to account to you for what I do, you’re about to find all your clothes out on the front yard. And you can just get your room and board elsewhere. Do I make myself clear, boy?”
In a strange way it struck Pete as a relief. To have things back the way they had always been. Not so mysterious. A kind of bad he could easily understand.
“Yes, sir,” Pete said.
Chapter Nineteen: Dr. Lucy
“How does it look?” Justin asked.
She had just peeled the old dressings away from his head wound and deposited them in the examining room trash can.
“I’m happy with it,” she said. “It’s healing well. But you need to keep it clean and dry for a few more days.”
“Yes, ma’am. I was really careful when I took my bath. I didn’t wash my head at all. I washed my face and my neck but not my head.”
He sat on her examining table in a pajama top she had given him. It fit him like a dress, coming down to his knees. His bare lower legs dangled and swung, looking matchstick-thin and vulnerable. His hands remained invisible within the overlong sleeves. Dr. Lucy instinctively reached out for those sleeves and rolled them up until Justin’s hands came back into view.
“That’s good,” she said. “I’ll just put a fresh dressing on this and then we’ll get you off to bed.”
As she was working she noticed a cord around his neck, worn like a long necklace, but it disappeared under the pajama top i
n the front and she couldn’t see what weighted it down.
“What’s on the cord?” she asked, hoping it would be a house key. The boy needed his belongings from home.
“Oh, this.” He grabbed at the cord and pulled it up and out. A shiny new-looking key emerged. “So I can get in and out of the house while my dad’s at work.”
“What would you say about loaning that to me for tonight? When it gets good and dark I’ll go over to your house and get as many of your clothes as I can find.”
“Yes, please. Thank you. And my toothbrush.”
“Right. And your toothbrush. Your dad told me you’re fastidious about your teeth.”
“And . . . ,” he began.
But he never finished the thought.
“And? Something else at home you need?”
“No, ma’am. Never mind. Doesn’t matter at all.”
She tucked him into bed in the guest room, in the bed nearest the window. She sat with him for a moment, unsure why. Unsure of what to say. It seemed a lot of words were resting uncomfortably between them, wanting to be spoken. Mostly—if not all—concerning Calvin.
But I’ll be damned if I know what words they are, she thought.
Justin broke the silence.
“Dr. Lucy? Do you have kids?”
“I had a boy.”
“Had a boy? Where did he go?”
So that’s the difference between a grown-up and a child, she realized. The child has no idea what not to ask.
“Well. First there was the divorce. And he went to live with his father.”
“Why? Why didn’t he live with you?”
In the pause before she answered, she noticed that he was clutching the light blanket to his chest in a way that betrayed insecurity. It struck her that he might be asking questions because he was afraid of the moment she walked out and left him to sleep all alone.
“When my husband and I divorced, we gave him the choice of where he wanted to live. He picked his father.”
Don’t ask why, she thought. Do not ask why.
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