“No,” she interjected into his pause. “Actually, I don’t. I think it’s just careful enough. Oh. I should go tell Justin it’s okay if he wants to come in. I told him to stay out of sight.”
“So you do get it, then.”
“I’m afraid I do. The police—and just about everybody else in town, come to think of it—were taking way too much of an interest in me for a while there. Do you think anyone does know he’s here?”
“Not so far as we can figure. Nobody’s been coming around here for a few days, right?”
“No, thank God.”
“I wouldn’t think anybody’s gonna guess a white lady is taking care of the boy. No, I think if they was to go looking for him it would be on the other side of town. Not literally so much, but . . . you know what I’m saying. Likely they don’t care much about the boy. Likely they cared more about you and the grown man. But it’s best to be safe.”
“Yes. Good. So how did Calvin manage to get a message to you?”
“He didn’t have to. I went by the county jail to see him. I work at the plant. I was there when it happened. I saw the police come take him away. I wanted to be sure he was okay.”
“So you saw the fight?”
“Yes, ma’am. It wasn’t so much a fight as they just jumped him. Two of the guys at the plant. Just ambushed him. They said a few things, but I’m not going to repeat them to you of all people. He tried to defend himself, but it was two against one, and Calvin’s not the biggest guy in the world. And then the foreman came and broke it up. And the guys said it was Calvin started it, but that was nothing but a lie, ma’am. Just to save their own skins. I tried to say otherwise but the foreman called the police anyway.”
“Was he hurt badly?”
“I wouldn’t say badly. They banged him up pretty good. Nothing broken or anything. That was mostly why I went to see him, though. See if he needed some kind of medical help he wasn’t getting. Not that I guess there was much I could’ve done about it, but I felt better going to see. The bruises’ll heal on their own, I expect. There was a second part of the message, before I forget. He wanted me to tell you that he appreciates so much what you’re doing, he’ll spend the rest of his life trying to make it up to you. He loves that boy with all his heart. I’m sure you know that. If he couldn’t count on the fact that Justin was safe here with you . . . Well, I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. It’s not something anybody really wants to think about.”
“He doesn’t owe me anything,” she said quietly.
She moved around the kitchen in silence for a minute or two, setting up the coffee to percolate. She wondered if William knew there was something between Calvin and herself. She couldn’t imagine Calvin would have told him straight out. Not after working with him for only a few days. But people know things at a number of different levels.
“I wish I could go visit him,” she said.
She didn’t realize until she heard the tone of her own words that if William hadn’t known, he probably did now.
“I wouldn’t recommend it, ma’am.”
If he had other thoughts he kept them to himself.
She plugged in the pot and stood staring out the window for a moment. Then she broke herself out of the silence.
“I’ll go get Justin,” she said.
“That would be good,” he said. “I’ve got a message for him, too.”
“Justin, this is William,” she said. “He works at the plant with your father.”
“Worked,” William said. “In the past. They won’t let him come back now.”
A silence, during which Dr. Lucy found herself gently holding Justin by the shoulders to keep him from backing up. She couldn’t imagine he would find William threatening, and so had to assume that it was William’s access to news that made Justin feel afraid.
“Your daddy says to tell you this, son. He said, ‘Tell Justin we been through worse. And we’ll get through this, too.’ And he said to say you should keep your head down at the doctor’s house. Try not to let anybody know you’re here. And everything’ll be okay again. He’ll get back to you just as soon as he can.”
“How long?” Justin asked, his voice scratchy and small.
“Sixty days,” Dr. Lucy said.
“That’s a long time,” Justin said, his voice a little stronger.
“It’ll go by, son,” William said. “That’s the thing about days. No matter what your opinion of days, they always go by.”
“I don’t know what to think about this world,” she said.
They sat drinking their cups of coffee, together at the kitchen table. Justin had slipped back outside.
“I wouldn’t be the one to help you with that, ma’am.”
“I didn’t really mean you should. Just thinking out loud, I suppose.”
She pulled the pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, knowing as she did that she would quit them in the next sixty days. It would be hard, but she would do it. She hadn’t cared enough to do it for herself. When she had heard the news of some link to cancer a couple of years earlier, she hadn’t been able to find it in herself to care. But Calvin cared whether or not she got cancer. So she would quit them before he got back.
She held the pack out to William and he gratefully accepted one.
“I mean, I’ve known for a long while that people could be pretty awful sometimes,” she said. “But now I see that I only had part of the picture.”
“It’s good that you see that,” he said, accepting the lighter from her. “Not everybody sees that when it’s right in front of their face. A lot of people only see the world the way they want it to be. They see what agrees with the thinking they’ve already got. The rest just falls away unnoticed.”
They smoked in silence for a minute or two. Dr. Lucy was missing cigarettes already, even though she was smoking one as she nursed the thought.
“Did he tell you anything about me?” she surprised herself by asking.
She realized too late that she was doing a miserable job of playing her cards close to her chest.
“Not a lot. He said you were different.”
“Different. Is that good?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. That’s very good.”
Dr. Lucy sat back in her chair, nursing a buoyant feeling in her chest that had been missing exactly as long as Calvin had been away.
When he had finished his coffee and his cigarette she offered to drive him back. Save him the long walk.
“No, thanks,” he said. “It’s good of you to offer, but I’ll walk and then take the bus, just like I did to get out here. You’re in this deep enough as it is. Nobody wants any more trouble.”
She thanked him for coming, but he didn’t answer in words. Just tipped his hat to her on his way out the door.
Pete didn’t get back until after seven.
“You’re much later than I thought you’d be,” she said as he walked the bike up onto the porch and leaned it against the house.
“That’s because I got a job. I don’t suppose you saved me any dinner.”
“Of course I did. You have to eat.”
“Nice of you to look at it that way, ma’am.”
He followed her through the hall and toward the kitchen.
“Wait,” he said.
She stopped. He held out his hand to her, offering whatever he was holding. She reached out her hand, and he dropped a dollar bill and two quarters into it.
“Oh. They put you to work right on the spot.”
“Yes, ma’am. I worked three hours.”
“Doing what?”
“Well, that’s the great part, ma’am. They got me feeding horses and mucking out their stalls. They breed Quarter Horses. Their son used to do the work, but he’s off backpacking around Europe because he graduated high school, and when he comes home in the fall he’ll be going off to college. So my timing was really good, knocking on their door. They been trying to do all the work themselves, but they’ve got forty-two of them—horses, th
at is—and they’re not as young as they used to be. The people, not the horses. So it’s morning and afternoon, feed and clean. Seven days a week, because horses have to eat on the weekends, too. Fifty cents an hour, and they didn’t ask about any working papers. So I could be making around three dollars a day. That’s twenty-one a week.”
She stared down at the money in her hand.
“That would help,” she said. “But I feel guilty taking it from you.”
“You shouldn’t. That’s why I earned it. Besides, you do a lot for me. You even saved me some dinner. And we need to get Justin a new pair of glasses. He can’t go two months hardly able to see.”
He stood there looking up into her face, waiting for some kind of reaction, his expression open and unguarded.
“You’re such a nice boy,” she said.
She couldn’t quite read the look on his face. If she’d had to guess she’d say he either hadn’t known she had that sort of overt, affectionate praise in her, or he didn’t realize he was a nice boy. Or both. It seemed amazing to think he could not know that about himself. But nothing surprised her about human nature. Not anymore. Not even that.
PART TWO
SAY GOODBYE FOR NOW
August 1959—Two Months After Calvin is Jailed
Chapter Twenty-Two: Pete
Pete jumped off the bike as it rolled up the gravel pathway to the doctor’s front door. He walked it as quietly as possible to the porch, where he leaned it against the railing.
He slipped around the side of the house, surveyed the backyard, then crossed the grass to Prince’s kennel run.
“Oh, crud,” he said, standing a moment and watching the animal’s ceaseless movements. “You’re still pacing. That’s too bad.”
He let himself into the run and latched the gate behind. Then he dug into his back pocket and took out the piece of bacon he’d saved—at great personal sacrifice—from his own breakfast. As he unwrapped it from its double paper napkins the wolf-dog continued to pace.
There was something agitated about the pacing, and the agitation had been growing more extreme each day. That day it bordered on frantic. He held out the strip of bacon, but Prince just paced by without stopping.
“I saved this for you. It’s bacon. How can you not want bacon?”
The wolf-dog stopped. Sniffed. He took the bacon gently from Pete’s hand and, from the look of it, swallowed without chewing. Or at least without chewing much.
Pete reached out to pet Prince’s head, but he wasn’t fast enough. The wolf-dog had already resumed his pacing.
“Oh, there you are,” Pete heard Justin’s voice say. He looked up to see Justin standing on the other side of the chain link. “Dr. Lucy says she wants to talk to you. She said as soon as I see you I should tell you to find her.”
“Okay,” Pete said. But he noticed his voice betrayed the fact that it was not okay. He wondered if Justin noticed as well. “Where is she?”
“Upstairs, I think. What about yesterday? I gave you the same message yesterday. Didn’t you ever find her?”
“Not really.”
“Hmm,” Justin said. “That seems strange.”
Pete let himself out of the run and into the yard. He stood in front of Justin for a moment, not answering the indirect question. He thought about cutting around the side of the house again, but he didn’t feel he could do so with an audience. What would Justin think?
“Okay,” Pete said.
He let himself into the house through the back door. He slipped as silently as possible along the narrow carpet that ran through the hallway. Just as he was reaching out for the knob of the front door, he felt a hand close firmly on his shoulder.
He froze, but did not turn around.
“Well, if it isn’t the elusive Pete,” the doctor said. “I’ve been waiting to have a word with you for days. If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were trying to avoid me.”
Pete kept his eyes trained on the door so she couldn’t look into them and see the guilt.
“Why would I do that, ma’am?”
“Maybe because you know what I’m going to say and you don’t want to hear it?”
“I don’t know what you’re going to say. How could I know that?”
Pete noticed that the hand remained firmly on his shoulder, holding him in place. She was smart enough not to lose him this time.
“Let’s play a little game,” she said. “Let’s say, just for the sake of conversation, that there was a hundred-dollar reward for the right guess. There isn’t, but let’s just make believe. What would you guess I wanted to say?”
Pete turned to her in that moment, and lifted his gaze up to hers. And she let go of his shoulder. Because she knew she could now. All of his evasion was draining away. He couldn’t fight this anymore, and they both knew it.
“That I need to let Prince go now.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. It was obvious.
“Too bad that hundred dollars was just pretend,” he said, trying to joke the emotion of the moment away.
Neither one of them laughed.
“I wanted just a little more time,” Pete said.
They stood in front of the kennel run, all three of them, watching Prince pace. If anything, staring at the wolf-dog only made him pace more frantically. As if he knew when people were trying to make a decision. As if he couldn’t bear to hold still to see what that decision would be.
No one answered, so Pete talked on.
“If I hadn’t had to work a job all summer, I’d have had more time to tame him.”
“Pete,” Dr. Lucy said.
He didn’t like the sound of his name in this case. It sounded like a plea for him to think about what he was saying. It also sounded like a complete sentence. As though she had no plans to say more.
He waited, but that impression seemed to bear out.
When he couldn’t stand the waiting anymore he asked, “What?”
“You’ve spent an hour or two a day with him for the last couple of months.”
“Yeah. Well. If I hadn’t had a job I could have spent more.”
“But a couple of hours a day for two months is a lot. It should have been enough. If he was tired of life on his own and wanted to cozy up to people, even a couple of hours once should have done it.”
Pete shifted from foot to foot, unable to settle.
“He seemed so tame when he was in the little cage inside the house. He used to lick my fingers and try to lick my face. Remember that?”
“I do,” she said. “When he was absolutely helpless he accepted having you close by. Now he’s back on his feet and he’s moving in the opposite direction. He wants to be independent again.”
“Just a couple more days.”
“Pete, if two months didn’t do it, a couple more days isn’t going to help. But I’m not going to force you on this. I’m going to let you make your own decision. You always had the best interests of this animal in your heart. If you didn’t, he wouldn’t be alive right now. So I’m going to trust you to make the right choice. You stand there and watch him pace, and you decide how long you’re willing to keep him in these conditions.”
Much to his humiliation, Pete began to cry openly. There was no holding it back. He didn’t wipe the tears away with his sleeve, or turn his head in a more private direction. He just accepted it. Allowed the flow.
“Could you guys leave us alone for a few minutes?” he asked. “I want to say goodbye to him.”
“Of course,” Dr. Lucy said.
She placed her hands on Justin’s shoulders and steered him inside.
She stopped partway across the yard and looked back at Pete.
“He might not like it out there,” she said. “He might not be able to hunt as well as he did before the accident. And if that’s the case he knows where to find us. So just say goodbye for now.”
Pete nodded, needing to wipe his nose but not doing it.
He opened the gate again and sl
ipped inside with Prince. It was harder every time. Pete had been noticing that. The wolf-dog was looking for a chance at that open gate. Pete had to be fast.
“Please just stop pacing for a minute so I can say goodbye to you.”
Prince did not stop.
“I promise I’ll let you go as soon as I say a few things,” he added, the tears still flowing.
No change in the wolf-dog’s movements.
Pete flopped into a sitting position on the concrete floor.
“Okay, so you don’t know what that means. Right. I get it. You don’t understand any English. So you pace and I’ll talk. I had a plan. But you didn’t know about it. And I guess I can’t force it on you. But I had this idea that you could stay with me and be my dog. I know Dr. Lucy said that’s not safe, but I guess I sort of figured that could be a good thing. I could walk you on a leash except when I was in the house. And you could stand real close to me all the time. Just think. That day in June when I gave Boomer Leggett the finger. Boy, if you had been standing by my side, he would’ve stayed in that darn truck. Bet on it. And then out at the lake. I could’ve told Jack to leave me alone, and he wouldn’t have run around the banks and socked me in the eye. Not with you there.”
Pete paused for a breath and watched the wolf-dog pace. It was wearing Pete down. The sheer desperation of it was grating on him. As though he could feel Prince’s discomfort in his own gut.
“And my dad. My dad would never raise a hand to me again. Who hits a kid with a big wolf standing right by his side? But that’s not the only reason. It wasn’t all selfish. I was getting to like you. Aw, hell. Who am I kidding? I liked you from that first day I met you. I thought we’d be good company for each other. And you could be my bodyguard.”
Pete fell silent and admitted to himself—without words—that he had hoped this last conversation would get through to Prince somehow. That he could explain his intentions, and the emotion of his words would transcend the indecipherability of the words themselves. And that Prince would settle. Come to his side.
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