by ALEXANDER_
“I said shove it.”
“My, aren’t we sensitive? Who said you could come out here, anyway? You aren’t one of us any more.”
“Yeah? So who’s gonna make me move?”
They were so bombed I felt pretty safe saying that, although even if they weren’t I could take any of them on
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alone, even Pete, who’s heavier than I am. None of them is exactly what you’d call athletic.
There were no takers, but I knew I was on very dicey territory. Somehow, I didn’t know how, they knew what I was doing and they’d read me out of the club. I lay back and thought about it. It didn’t take a genius to arrive at the answer: Meg had meant well but they knew I wasn’t being forced to study. If this had been Mother’s or the school’s idea I would have been down here every afternoon griping about it. What’s more, it would have been the same time every day—the second school was out. That would have made it okay. I would have been just another victim of terrible parental and school pressure to achieve. It was doing it on my own that made me a leper. But they hadn’t told anybody, or Gloria would have heard it. Mother would have heard it. Meg would have heard it. And you can believe that by sundown I would have heard it. By the same logic Meg hadn’t known this morning, which now seemed a year ago. Or did she? She might have been going to tell me that when she left in a huff. That made me think of McLeod, whom I’d been carefully keeping out of my mind since I’d lammed out of his house. Bastard.
“How’d you know?” I asked Pete.
“Saw you go up a couple of times and followed you.”
“Fink.”
“You’re the fink. What’s the matter with school in New York?”
“Nothing. I just want out from home.”
There was silence. I waited for him to say something about Gloria and his brother, half wishing he would and half wishing he wouldn’t in case I would have to clonk him over the nose. But he didn’t. I also wanted to ask him if
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Percy knew about McLeod, just to reassure myself. But that would have been a major blunder.
“Have a drag,” Pete said, holding out his joint.
This is what I was afraid of. I’d gone along with the talk about finding pot because I didn’t think there was a prayer of getting any. At school I was always in training for something or other—baseball, football, basketball, hockey— which was an acceptable excuse if you were a jock. The one time I’d smoked it with some of my class in the locker room, I had gotten so stoned they were scared to let me go home. Not that the faculty cracked the whip—most of them smoked grass themselves. But any cop who saw me would know exactly what I’d been doing, and in the state I was in I’d probably tell him where and with whom. Actually, the whole thing scared me and I was glad to have the training excuse. I had a weird—but strong—feeling that pot was not for me, not because of the law or all the crap they hand out at school, tongue in cheek. And it didn’t have anything to do with what anybody else did. It was just like there was some steering gear in me that kept pointing away from it.
But now I wasn’t in training and Pete didn’t know what had happened at school and I was tired of being out instead of in. I said as casually as I could, “I get sick on that stuff.”
“Listen to the boy scout! You’re just too good for us, Chuck. Maybe you’d better run back to teacher.’”
“He’ll probably tell teacher, anyway, all about the nasty boys smoking grass.”
“I told you, shove it! Here—” I took the joint out of Pete’s hand. The mention of McLeod had done it. Gingerly,
so I wouldn’t show what an amateur I was, I took a drag,
t
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inhaling as little as I possibly could. Nothing happened. Then I took another.
“Here,” Pete said. “Have one of your own.”
In the beginning, it wasn’t like the last time in the locker room, probably because I went at it cautiously. I lay back against a boulder. After a drag or two I started feeling relaxed. Then I felt good, like absolutely everything was going to turn out all right. And if it didn’t, it still didn’t matter.
“How’d McLeod get the scar?’’ Pete said.
Since everything had slowed down, it took me a while to answer.
“In a car accident,” I said dreamily. McLeod had really shoved me back. The memory of that morning sliced through my pleasant fog, bringing with it a muffled jab of pain and anger, so I added, “He was drunk and he had a kid with him who was burned to death.”
“Wow! Hear that, you guys?”
The good feeling went. Something had gone wrong. I was afraid if I learned what it was everything would get worse, so I took another deep drag.
I can’t explain what happened after that. Afterwards I figured I just passed out. Went to sleep. Had a nightmare, whatever . . .
The sky and water seemed to swim together. Gulls were flying. After a while they seemed to be flying in formations and then I noticed they had jet engines and weren’t gulls after all—they were planes. Then came a great, wonderful, floating feeling, because I was in one of the planes and sometimes I was in the sky and sometimes I was floating in the water only it was all the same. I got happier and happier. Then I landed on the water, just like one of the gulls, and got out of the plane and splashed through to the
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shore to my father, who was standing there. I knew it was my father because the sun was blazing on his yellow hair. It was funny, though. I couldn’t see his face because the sun was shining in it and it was just a blur. I said to my mother as I walked towards the shore, “But you must have another picture of him somewhere. How am I ever to know what he looked like?” And she said, “But that’s why I threw the pictures away. I don’t want you to know what he looked like, because then you might get to look like him and then you would hate me the way he did.” Which is just the kind of thing you can expect from a female.
“But you were the one who hated him,” I said. “That’s why—”
I stopped because I suddenly realized I now could see Father’s face very well. It had a red scar on one side, but it was getting smaller and smaller. It was odd, though, about his hair. I could have sworn it was yellow. I could see now it was black and gray. All of a sudden it was McLeod, minus scar. He was smiling and holding out his hands. I gave a shout and started running towards him. And that’s where things went wrong, badly wrong. How, I don’t know, but the sky was almost black. McLeod’s face was as white as the stones and he was terribly angry. He was so angry I knew I would never be forgiven and that, anyway, I was going to die because I had forgotten about the undertow which was pulling me out and down, down into the water where I couldn’t breathe. ...
“Push his head down again,” Pete said.
“No,” I tried to say, as the water filled my mouth.
“Now you’ve drowned him.” That was Sam.
There was a stinging slap on my face, then another. Slowly I came to. The sky wasn’t black, it was its usual watery sun-and-blue effect.
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“Come on, Chuck! Wake up! Do you want to get us all in trouble? If your mother sees you and squeals, we’ll have the pigs all over this place.”
I was standing, fully clothed, hip-deep in the water. The others, naked, were standing around. Pete gave me another slap. “Wake up!”
I tried to launch a blow that would knock his head off, but all I did was lose my footing and I had to be held up. “I’m all right. Lemme go.”
“Man! you weren’t kidding, were you, when you said you got sick.”
I pushed him away and staggered to the shore. I had barely gotten up onto the stony beach when I really got sick. Maybe it was the pot, maybe the sea water I had swallowed. Whatever it was, I felt like I was bringing up my breakfast of day before last.
I was shivering and my forehead was clammy with sweat, but, after a minute, I managed to crawl back to the water, wash my face, and slosh some up on the beach to clean it up.
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“You’d better stick to straightsville,” Pete said, putting on his pants. “You’re a walking menace.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You can go back in the rowboat,” he went on grudgingly. “One of us can row the dinghy back.”
“I can row it back myself.”
“Suit yourself. I don’t have to tell you that if you open your big mouth about this, we’ll total you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said sarcastically. “Your secret is safe with me.” I swallowed the bad taste in my mouth. “What I told you about McLeod. Keep that to yourself, too.” “Who’d I tell?” Pete said, getting into the boat.
I tried to convince myself that since McLeod was a creep
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he deserved anything I did to him. But I couldn’t make myself quit feeling lousy, like I had started something I couldn’t stop. Shakily I got into the dinghy and, keeping the other boat well in sight, rowed back around the point.
For the first time in that putrid day, fate seemed to be for me. There was no one in when I got back to the house.
I got out of my wet clothes, put on a dry pair of shorts and a sweater, laid the wet ones out on the garage roof outside my window where they could get the setting sun, and passed out on the bed.
The next morning early I sneaked down to get some milk and breakfast. I was starved. But even after I had eaten a couple of bowls of cereal and four pieces of toast with butter and honey and drunk two glasses of milk I didn’t feel the way I usually do—rarin’ to go. I felt like my head was stuffed with cotton and what I wanted to do was go back to bed. I also didn’t want to go up to McLeod’s. As a matter of fact, it was the last place I wanted to go. I didn’t know what to do.
I was sitting there, too zonked out even to move, when the door opened and Mother came in. What’s more, she looked wide awake. If I hadn’t been sitting down you could have knocked me over with one of Gloria’s false eyelashes. Mother had on a silky blue robe that looked as if it had been made in Hong Kong or somewhere, and her dark hair was piled on top of her head and tied with a matching blue ribbon. She looked pretty enough to eat. If she had but known it, I was sitting there like ice cream on a dish for her to have. Luckily, I guess, she didn’t know it.
“Where were you yesterday, Chuck?”
So that was the game. “With the gang.”
“What were you doing?”
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“What we always do. Swimming, shooting bull.” “Were you smoking marijuana?”
“No. Where would we get it around here?”
“Then why were you out like a light when we came in? Both Meg and I tried to get you up but you wouldn't stir. I’m worried about you, Chuck. Meg tells me you’ve found someplace to study. If that’s what you were really doing, then all I can say is what I’ve been saying all along. You’re studying too hard. You should be out with the others.”
I pulled myself together. “First you grill me about what was I doing with the others, then you tell me I should be with them more.” Against every inclination I stood up. “It doesn’t matter what I do. It’s wrong. Well, I’m going to pass that exam so I can go to St. Matthew’s next year. That’s why I’m studying.”
“I don’t want you to go to St. Matthew’s. I don’t want you to go to boarding school at all. You know what I think of them. I’m not sure whether I’ll let you go even if you pass the exam.”
It was funny. A couple of minutes ago I didn’t think I ever wanted to see McLeod again and going up there to study seemed about as desirable as going to jail. The trouble with Mother was she didn’t know when the odds were on her side. “I’m not going back to school in New York. If you don’t let me go to St. Matthew’s, then I’ll dropout.”
She looked frightened. “You can’t—you can’t drop out until you’re sixteen.”
“Then I’ll leave home, and you can’t stop me. Do you know how many kids my age are walking around the country? I’ll go where you won’t find me and don’t think I don’t have the contacts, because I do, any kid I know does.”
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Which was sheer bull, but Mother didn’t know that. And given the way things are today, she couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t get away with it.
At that moment the screen door opened and in walked Barry.
“Hi,” he said. Then he did something that absolutely knocked me out. He went over and kissed Mother, right on the mouth, like he had every right to. Mother turned pink and her eyes looked bigger and browner than ever. It made me furious.
“Help yourself,” I said nastily.
He turned around. Barry could lose twenty pounds, but I’ll say this for him, he doesn’t have a paunch and it’s not flab. Square face, bluish eyes, light hair, what there is of it—Mr. Average, almost as pink as Mother, which didn’t suit him the way it did her.
“Your mother has agreed to marry me, Chuck. I came by to tell you. I guess that was a tactless way of doing it.” He sounded apologetic, which turned me off. All I could think was that McLeod, if I had handed him lip like that, would have said something icily sarcastic that would have cut me down to size. Thinking about McLeod didn’t make me feel any better, either, especially when I remembered that I had given him the bridegroom’s role. For a second I tried to imagine him kissing Mother. I couldn’t. It didn’t work. I didn’t know why it didn’t, but it didn’t.
“Congratulations,” I said. “That’s just what I need, another stepfather.”
Barry looked at me, eyeball to eyeball. “Yes, Charles. That’s what I think you need.”
“Chuck!” Mother said. “Please be nice!”
I was about to say something else nasty when I remem
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bered what we were talking about when Barry walked in.
“All right. Best wishes and all that. But I’m not going back to that school in New York.”
“Is that St. Matthew’s you want to go to?” Barry asked, going over to the stove and pouring himself some coffee. “Yeah.”
“It’s not a bad school.”
I'd been all braced for a fight and was therefore surprised. “I thought it was supposed to be terrible,” Mother said. Barry took a swallow or two of coffee. “It went through a bad patch. It’s okay now. And they’ve got a new headmaster who’s beefing up the curriculum—Evans, I think his name is.”
“That’s the guy that wrote to me.”
Gloria walked in. The two horizontal strips of knitted nothing she had on would not have filled a teacup. Other than that she looked like a free-floating thunderstorm.
“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to feel constricted in all those clothes?” Barry said.
“Gloria, go up and put on a shirt or something,” Mother said. “You’re practically naked.”
“So what? It’s my house.” Gloria put some water in the kettle and put it on the stove. Then she got a bowl and poured herself some cereal.
“Please, Gloria.”
“After I’ve had breakfast. Maybe.”
Mother looked unhappy.
“Heard the news?” I said, curious as to whether that was behind her scowl. “Mother’s going to marry Barry.”
“I heard it yesterday.”
“Don’t overdo the delight,” Barry said amiably, “it might go to my head.”
Gloria went on eating. Barry walked over and stood be
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side her. “Look, I’d like us to be friends. It makes it a lot easier for me, and, more important, for your mother. She’d like a little moral support.”
“It’s not as though it were the first time.”
“In view of you and Chuck and Meg, that’s on the whole rather a good thing; don’t you think?”
Gloria didn’t look at him. She swallowed another mouthful of cereal. “You’ve got Meg.” That’s our Gloria—if she’s not first, she won’t play.
“Yes, thank heaven,” Barry said. “And here she is. Just like the Marines.”
I don’t know whether Me
g had heard all that or not. She went over to Mother and gave her a smack on the cheek. Then she went to Barry. She not only gave him a smack. She put her arms around him. He bent and gave her a bear hug and lifted her off the floor.
“You’ll get a hernia,” Gloria said.
Mother looked at her quickly. “Gloria—that’s mean!” Barry put Meg down. “It would be well worth it. We’ll go on a diet together after the wedding, Meg.”
What I wanted to do was go back up to bed and sleep off this cottony feeling in my head. I don’t mean my head hurt. But I felt funny, sort of unfocused. The house was obviously no place to sack out in today. Besides—more than ever I wanted to go to St. Matthew’s now. And, for once, it looked like I might have some support.
I plunked my cereal bowl and the plate in the sink and headed for the door.
“Chuck, where are you going?”
“To study.”
“Where—where do you study?”
There was a short silence, then I had an inspiration. “Up
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above the cove.” The beauty about that was that it was true. McLeod’s cliff was above the cove—by a couple of hundred feet. I just didn’t add that it was also several miles further along the coastline.
“Well where do you keep your books?”
“There’s an abandoned shack there.” Also true. I could even shove a couple of old texts there for any snoop.
Barry was watching me. So was Gloria. I could feel my face beginning to get hot.
“S’long,” I muttered, and started to leave.
“By the way, Chuck,” Gloria said, getting up and pouring hot water into the drip pot, “that mangy animal of yours nearly bit Percy yesterday. You know if he ever bites anybody the we’ll have to put him away.”
“And what was Percy doing to him?” I said angrily. “Just trying to take a woodchuck away from him—like any humane person.”
“Moxie has to hunt. Nobody feeds him around here. You have no right to interfere and you can tell your scrofulous boyfriend to keep his filthy hands away from him, or I’ll—”
“You’ll do what—lick him? He’s on every team in his college. He’d make mincemeat of you, Chuck.”