She leaned close to him and said softly, affectionately, “Step, when you say ‘Thank you for your concern’ it always sounds like you’re just accidently leaving off the word butthead.”
“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” said Step. “Everybody always thinks I’m being sarcastic when I’m not.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said DeAnne. “I’ve never been there when you weren’t being sarcastic.”
“You think you know too much, Fish Lady.”
“You don’t know anywhere near enough, Junk Man.”
He kissed her. “Give me a minute and I’ll be ready to put our Betsy Wetsy doll back in her place.”
He heard her muttering as she went back to her door: “Her name is Elizabeth.” He grinned.
Step got back to wiping down Betsy’s seat.
“I didn’t even hear that cop come up,” said Stevie.
“Cop?” asked Robbie.
“Go back to sleep, Road Bug,” said Step.
“Did we get a ticket, Daddy?” asked Robbie.
“He just wanted to make sure we were all right,” said Step.
“He wanted us to move our butts out of here,” said Stevie.
“Step!” said DeAnne.
“It was Stevie who said it, not me,” said Step.
“He wouldn’t talk that way if he didn’t learn it from you,” said DeAnne.
“Is he still there?” asked Step.
Stevie half-stood in order to see over the junk on the back deck. “Yep,” he said.
“I didn’t hear him either,” said Step. “I just turned around and there he was.”
“What if it wasn’t a cop and you just turned around and it was a bad guy?” asked Stevie.
“He gets his morbid imagination from you,” said DeAnne.
“Nobody would do anything to us out on the open highway like this where anybody passing by could see.”
“It’s dark,” said Stevie. “People drive by so fast.”
“Well, nothing happened,” said DeAnne, rather testily. “I don’t like talking about things like that.”
“If it was a bad guy Daddy would’ve popped him one in the nose!” said Robbie.
“Yeah, right,” said Step.
“Daddy wouldn’t let anything bad happen,” said Robbie.
“That’s right,” said DeAnne. “Neither would Mommy.”
“The seat’s clean,” said Step. “And the belt’s as clean as it’s going to get in this lifetime.”
“I’ll bring her around.”
“Climb over!” cried Betsy merrily, and before DeAnne could grab her, she had clambered through the gap between the bucket seats. She buckled her own seat belt, looked up at Step, and grinned.
“Well done, my little Wetsy doll.” He leaned in and kissed her forehead, then closed the door and got back in to the driver’s seat. The cop was still behind them, which made him paranoid about making sure he didn’t do anything wrong. He signaled. He drove just under the speed limit. The last thing they needed was a court date in some out-of-the-way Kentucky town.
“How much farther to Frankfort?” asked DeAnne.
“Maybe half an hour, probably less,” said Step.
“Oh, I must have slept a long way.”
“An hour maybe.”
“You’re such a hero to drive the whole way,” she said.
“Give me a medal later,” he said.
“I will.”
He turned the stereo back up a little. Everybody might have been asleep again, it was so quiet in the car. Then Stevie spoke up.
“Daddy, if it was a bad guy, would you pop him one?”
What was he supposed to say, Yessiree, my boy, I’d pop him so hard he’d be wearing his nose on the back of his head for the rest of his life? Was that what was needed, to make Stevie feel safe? To make him proud of his father? Or should he tell the truth—that he had never hit anyone in anger in his life, that he had never hit a living soul with a doubled-up fist.
No, my son, my approach to fighting has always been to make a joke and walk away, and if they wouldn’t let me go, then I ran like hell.
“It depends,” said Step.
“On what?”
“On whether I thought that popping him would make things better or worse.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, if he’s a foot taller than me and weighs three hundred pounds and has a tire iron, I think popping him wouldn’t be a good idea. I think in a case like that I’d be inclined to offer him my wallet so he’d go away.”
“But what if he wanted to murder us all?”
DeAnne spoke up without turning her head out of her pillow. “Then your father would kill him, and if he didn’t, I would,” she said mildly.
“What if he killed both of you first?” asked Stevie. “And then came and wanted to kill Robbie and Betsy?”
“Stevie,” said DeAnne, “Heavenly Father won’t let anything like that happen to you.”
That was more than Step could stand. “God doesn’t work that way,” he said. “He doesn’t stop evil people from committing their crimes.”
“He’s asking us if he’s safe,” said DeAnne.
“Yes, Stevie, you’re safe, as safe as anybody ever is who’s alive in this world. But you were asking about what if somebody really terrible wanted to do something vicious to our whole family, and the truth is that if somebody is truly, deeply evil, then sometimes good people can’t stop him until he’s done a lot of bad things. That’s just the way it happens sometimes.”
“Okay,” said Stevie. “But God would get him for it, right?”
“In the long run, yes,” said Step. “And I’ll tell you this—the only way anybody will ever get to you or the other kids or to your mother, for that matter, is if I’m already dead. I promise you that.”
“Okay,” said Stevie.
“There aren’t that many really evil people in the world,” said Step. “I don’t think you need to worry about this.”
“Okay,” said Stevie.
“I mean, why did you ask about this stuff?”
“He had a gun.”
“Of course he had a gun, dear,” said DeAnne. “He’s a policeman. He has a gun so he can protect people like us from those bad people.”
“I wish we could always have a policeman with us,” said Stevie.
“Yeah, that’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” said Step. Right, nice like a hemorrhoid. I’d have to drive fifty-five all the time.
Stevie had apparently exhausted his questions.
A few moments later, Step felt DeAnne’s hand on his thigh, patting him. He glanced over at her. “Sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to contradict you.”
“You were right,” she said softly.
He smiled at her and held her hand for a moment, until he needed both hands on the wheel for a turn.
Still, all the rest of the way into Frankfort he couldn’t get Stevie’s questions out of his mind. Nor could he forget his own answers. He had stopped DeAnne from teaching Stevie that God would always protect him from bad people, but then he had gone on and promised that he would give his life before any harm ever came to the children. But was that true? Did he have that kind of courage? He thought of parents in concentration camps who watched their children get killed before their eyes, and yet they could do nothing. And even if he tried, what good would Step be able to do against somebody bent on violence? Step had no skill in fighting, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t one of those things that you just know how to do. Any half-assed hoodlum would make short work of Step, and here he had kids who were looking to him for protection. I should study karate or something. Kung fu. Or buy a gun so that when Stevie is fourteen he can find it where it’s hidden and play around with it and end up killing himself or Robbie or some friend of his or something.
No, thought Step. None of the above. I won’t do any of those things, because I’m a civilized man living in a civilized society, and if the barbarians ever knock on my door I’ll be helpless.
They pulled into Frankfort and there was a Holiday Inn with a vacancy sign. Step took it as a good omen. Officially he didn’t believe in omens. But what the heck, it made him feel better to take it that way, and so he did.
2
MAGGOTS
This is the house they moved into: The only cheap wood siding in a neighborhood of red brick. No basement, no garage, not even a roof over the carport. Brown latticework around the base of the house like the skirting around a mobile home. Blue carpet in the living room, which wasn’t going to look too good with their furniture, an old-fashioned green velvet love seat and overstuffed chair Step had bought from Deseret Industries when he was in college back at BYU. But it had four bedrooms, which meant one for Step and DeAnne, one for the boys, one for Betsy and the new baby when it came in July, and one for Step’s office, because they still hoped he could do some programming on the side and then they could go back to living the way they wanted to, and in a better place than this.
In the meantime, the movers had piled the living room six feet high with more boxes than they could ever unpack and put away in a place this size, and they had a single weekend to get settled before work started for Step and school started for Stevie. Monday, the deadline, the drop-dead day. Nobody was looking forward to it with much joy, least of all Stevie.
DeAnne was aware of Stevie’s anxiety all through the weekend of moving in and unpacking. Stevie mostly tended Robbie and Elizabeth, except when Step or DeAnne called for him to run some errand from one end of the house to the other. As always, Stevie was quiet and helpful—he took his responsibilities as the eldest child very seriously.
Or maybe he just seemed serious, because he kept his feelings to himself until he had sorted them out, or until they had built up to a point where he couldn’t contain them. So DeAnne knew that it was a real worry for him when he came into the kitchen and stood there silently for a long time until she said, “Want to tell me something or am I just too pretty for words?” which was what she always said, only he didn’t smile, he just stood there a moment more and then he said, “Mom, can’t I just stay home for another couple of days?”
“Stevie, I know it’s scary, but you just need to plunge right in. You’ll make friends right away and everything’ll be fine.”
“I didn’t make friends right away at my old school.”
That was true enough—DeAnne remembered the consultations with Stevie’s kindergarten teacher. Stevie didn’t really play with anybody until November of that year, and he didn’t have any actual friends until first grade. If it weren’t for his friends at church, DeAnne would have worried that Stevie was too socially immature for school. But with the kids at church he was almost wild sometimes, running around the meetinghouse like a movie-western Indian until Step intervened and gathered him up and brought him to the car. No, Stevie knew how to play, and he knew how to make friends. He just didn’t make friends easily. He wasn’t like Robbie, who would walk up and talk to anybody, kid or adult. Of course Stevie was worried about school. DeAnne was worried for him, too.
“But that was your first school ever,” she said. “You know the routine now.”
“When Barry Wimmer moved in after Thanksgiving,” he said, “everybody was really rotten to him.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
“So not everybody.”
“They made fun of everything he did,” said Stevie.
“Kids can be like that sometimes.”
“They’re going to do that to me now,” said Stevie.
This was excruciating. She wanted to say, You’re right, they’re going to be a bunch of little jerks, because that’s the way kids are at that age, except you, because you were born not knowing how to hurt anybody else, you were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won’t understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you’ll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you.
For a moment she toyed with putting it to him in exactly those terms. But it would hardly help him if she confirmed all his worst fears. He’d never get to sleep if she did that.
“What if they were unkind to you, Stevie? What would you do?”
He thought about that for a while. “Barry cried,” he said.
“Did that make it better?”
“No,” said Stevie. “They made fun of him crying. Ricky followed him around saying ‘boo hoo hoo’ all the time from then on. He was still doing it on my last day there.”
“So,” said DeAnne, partly to get him to talk, partly because she had no idea what to say.
“I don’t think I’ll cry,” said Stevie.
“I’m glad,” said DeAnne.
“I’ll just make them go away.”
“I don’t think that’ll work, Stevie. The more you try to make them leave, the more they’ll stick around.”
“No, I don’t mean make them go away. I mean make them go away.”
“Do you want to hand me that roll of paper towels?”
He did.
“I’m not sure I’m clear on the difference between making them go away and making them go away.”
“You know. Like when Dad’s programming. He makes everything go away.”
So he understood that about his father, and thought it might be useful. “You’ll just concentrate on your schoolwork?”
“Or whatever,” said Stevie. “It’s hard to concentrate on schoolwork because it’s so dumb.”
“Maybe it won’t be so dumb at this school.”
“Maybe.”
“I wish I could promise you that everything will be perfect, but I really don’t think they’ll treat you the way that Barry Wimmer got treated.” DeAnne thought back to the couple of times she’d seen the boy when she brought treats or some project or a forgotten lunch to school. “Barry’s the kind of kid who . . . how can I put it? He’s a walking victim.”
“Am I a victim?” asked Stevie.
“Not a chance,” said DeAnne. “You’re too strong.”
“Not really,” he said, looking at his hands.
“I don’t mean your body, Stevie. I mean your spirit is too strong. You know what you’re doing. You know what you’re about. You aren’t looking to these kids to tell you who you are. You know who you are.”
“I guess.”
“Come on, who are you?” It was an old game, but he still enjoyed playing along, even though the original purpose of it—preparing him to identify himself in case he got lost—was long since accomplished.
“Stephen Bolivar Fletcher.”
“And who is that?”
“Firstborn child and first son of the Junk Man and the Fish Lady.”
Of all his regular answers, that was her favorite, partly because the first time he ever said that, he had this sly little smile as if he knew he was intruding into grownup territory, as if he knew that his parents’ pet names for each other were older than he was and in some sense had caused him to exist. As if he had some unconscious awareness that those names, even spoken in jest, had sexual undertones that he couldn’t possibly understand but nevertheless knew all about.
“And don’t you forget it,” she said cheerfully.
“I won’t,” he said.
“Mom,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Please can’t I stay home just a couple more days?”
She sighed. “I really don’t think so, Stevie. But I’ll talk to your dad.”
“He’ll just say the same thing.”
“Probably. We parents are like that.”
The worst moment was at breakfast on Monday. The kids were eating their hot cereal while Step was downing his Rice Krispies, looking over the newspaper as he ate. “This is almost as bad a newspaper as the one in Vigor,” he said.
“You aren’t going to get the Washington Post unless you live in Washington,” said DeAnne.
&n
bsp; “I don’t want the Washington Post. I’d settle for the Salt Lake Tribune. Salt Lake is still a two-newspaper town, and here Steuben can’t even support a paper that puts the international news on the front page.”
“Does it have Cathy? Does it have Miss Manners? Does it have Ann Landers?”
“OK, so it has everything we need to make us happy.”
There was a honk outside.
“They’re early,” said Step. “Do you think I have time to brush my teeth?”
“Do you think you could stand to get through the day if you didn’t?”
He rushed from the table.
“Who’s early?” asked Stevie.
“Your dad’s car pool. For the first week or so one of the men from work is picking him up in the morning and bringing him home at night so we’ll have the car to run errands and stuff.”
Stevie looked horrified. “Mom,” he said. “What about school?”
“That’s the point. You’ll be riding the bus after today, but your dad’s carpooling so I’ll have the car to take you to school.”
“Isn’t Dad taking me for my first day?”
Too late she remembered that when Stevie started kindergarten, she had still been recovering from Elizabeth’s birth, and it was Step who took Stevie to his first day of school.
“Does it really matter which one of us takes you?”
The look of panic in his eyes was more of an answer than his whispered “No.”
Step came back into the kitchen, carrying his attaché case—his jail-in-a-box, he called it.
“Step,” said DeAnne, “I think Stevie was expecting you to take him to school this morning.”
“Oh, man,” he said, “I didn’t think.” His face got that look of inward anger that DeAnne knew all too well. “Isn’t it great that I’ve got this job so I can’t even take my kid to school on his first day.”
“It’s your first day, too.”
He knelt down beside Stevie’s chair. Stevie was looking down into his mush. “Stevie, I should’ve planned it better. But I didn’t, and now I’ve got this guy outside waiting for me and . . .”
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