by ALEXANDER_
I was still boiling with fury when Barry said, “No one’s going to hurt Moxie, Chuck. So keep your shirt on. She just said that to irritate you. When will you learn?”
Meg had got up and come to the door. “Come on, Chuck. Let’s go.”
As we walked down towards the road I finally said, “All right. She laid the booby trap and I walked into it. But why does she do it?”
“Does it matter?” Meg said. “Besides. You know the answer. She has to be number one, like in the commercial. ”
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“But why me?”
“Because you’re handy. Because you let her get to you. Because she’s jealous of you.”
“Jealous of what, for the love of Mike? You mean from when we were babies?”
“Maybe. I wasn’t around. You’re good-looking and people like you. Gloria’s good-looking, too, but people don’t like her. She tries hard to make them, but after a while they ail go away. You’re the opposite. People would like to get closer to you but you won’t let them. Were you smoking pot yesterday?”
The abrupt switch threw me off. “Is that any business of yours? I suppose now you’re going to tell Barry.” That was dirty and I knew it and was ashamed right away. But I felt so all-around lousy that I had to make somebody else miserable, too.
Meg stopped dead in the road. “No, I won’t tell Barry, though sometimes I think I ought to. If you’re going to go and be a drug addict I don’t think I’m doing you any good by not telling anybody. But I don’t care as much as I used to, because you’re not my friend any more. I guess you must be McLeod’s friend. But I don’t see why you can’t be both. But you needn’t bother now because I don’t care any more.”
“Megsy!”
“Let me go. I’m glad Barry is going to marry Mother. You just think I’m a nuisance now, but he likes me.” She pulled her arm away and shot across the road towards the beach.
Joey once had his horoscope read and was really turned on because the swami or fortune-teller said Joey was going to have a great political career, except maybe he was also going to jail. But, as Joey said, today one often goes with
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the other, and maybe he should take up law as a preparation for politics.
I said law might also be useful if he got put in jail, and he agreed.
But what I’m getting at is I’d always looked on the whole horoscope scene as bull, but I was beginning to wonder if my moon or planet or whatever was in some undesirable place these past couple of days, because nothing was coming out right.
I was still sore at McLeod and I was thinking about this when I suddenly remembered the other thing that was bothering me: I had ratted on him.
I stopped walking. I had told Pete about McLeod’s drunk driving and killing a kid. I now wished to God I hadn’t. When I thought of what they could do with that—and how inevitably that would get the news to Mother about what I was doing all day—sweat broke out all over me. I’d done it because I was mad and, I suppose—I didn’t like to think about this—to buy my way back into the good graces of Pete and the others. Talk about a fink!
I started walking again. The rest of the walk I tried to convince myself that in view of the way he’d acted towards me, I was justified. It didn’t work too well. I still felt like a ratfink. If the whole family situation hadn’t got worse instead of better, what with Barry joining the troops and adding one more body to our apartment, I might have turned back. But it had, so I went on.
CHAPTER 8
When I walked into the library McLeod was standing by the fireplace staring down into what were probably last
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night’s ashes. It sounds loony, but up here, even in early August, fires feel pretty good at night.
He looked up.
“Sorry to be late,” I muttered, and slid into my seat at the table.
“I want to talk to you,” McLeod said abruptly. For one sickening minute I wondered if he had already heard about my telling on him.
“Yes?” And added, without much conviction, “Sir.” But it wasn’t what I was afraid of. It was somehow worse. Typically, he went straight to the point. “I’m sorry about— about what happened yesterday. I told you once that I had lived alone too long. I accused you of always running away. Well, that’s what I did. Only instead of running I built a wall. Being a writer made it easy; easy to be up here earning a living, easy to be alone and keep clear of people.” Stubborn pride made me say, “It doesn’t matter.”
He looked at me then. “Doesn’t it, Charles? Then why did you leave so abruptly?”
I had no answer to give. Or rather, I didn’t want to answer, so we didn’t say anything for a bit.
“Well?”
Nothing.
“If you can make me believe that I didn’t make you angry, or hurt you, then I’ll stop.”
It was a hand held out, but I wouldn’t let myself take it. How could I after ratting on him?
“Why can’t we just forget it?”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Then let’s get back to Vergil.”
But it wasn’t. As we crawled through the whole dreary Carthage bit, what I had told Pete was there like a ghost,
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getting larger and larger. Words that I knew perfectly well I couldn’t remember. Whole parts that I knew we had gone through might as well have been new. Finally McLeod put down his book.
“What’s the matter with you? You act as though you’ve never seen this. We went over it a few days ago.”
That strange unfocused feeling was back. Pot didn’t affect any of the other kids this way—at least not that I knew of. But then I remembered hearing in school or reading in one of those dumb pamphlets they’re always giving out that some people can’t take it, like some people can’t drink. This made me think about my father. Why, I don’t know. Then I remembered the dream I had at the cove.
“Charles!”
McLeod’s voice cracked like a whip. Suddenly he was standing over me. “What did you do yesterday?” he asked. “After you left here?”
Mother had asked that, but it wasn’t the same. Besides, I had left her and come here. Now there was no more place to go to, and if there had been I wasn’t at all sure I could get it all together and go there, or that I wanted to. .
“I went to the cove where my gang hangs out.”
“And?”
“Smoked some grass.” So now I had ratted on Pete and the others. But it didn’t feel like ratting the way it had about telling on McLeod. I waited for him to wade in.
But he didn’t. Not right away, anyway. Then he said wearily, “Oh, my God,” and went and stood by the window.
“If your generation drinks, what’s wrong with mine smoking grass? When you were in school didn’t you ever sneak beer?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s all the flak about?”
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“How do you feel?”
“Fine. What’s that got to do with it?”
“Because you’re not concentrating very well—as you know.”
“So? Did you ever have hangovers?”
“I thought marijuana wasn’t supposed to give those.” “I’m not hung over. Look, Me—Mr. McLeod. What I do when I’m not here is my own business.”
The moment I said that I knew it was a mistake. This was the perfect opening for him to remind me that it was my idea being here, not his. I held my breath.
“That’s true. But since trying to teach you when you’re like this is like trying to get a bell tone out of cotton wadding, I’d appreciate it if you would desist while I’m coaching you. That is, if you want to pass that exam—and not waste my time and yours.”
That sounded more like the old McLeod. But it was so much milder than I had expected that I felt almost let down. Besides, I had no intention anyway of smoking grass again.
He came over to the table and closed the book. “You might as well give yourself
a holiday. You’re not doing anything. Come back when you feel better.”
I went back the next day. I still wasn’t up to form, but I wasn’t as zonked out as the day before. Another good night’s sleep had helped a lot.
As the days passed I worked hard, harder than I had done before. After a while I realized that I was trying to get things back on the footing they’d been on before I’d made that stupid move in a burst of sympathy or something. It felt like a year since that morning, but it was only a week. I found myself thinking about it a lot, whenever I wasn’t actually working. I still didn’t understand it. I didn’t under
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stand McLeod. I didn’t even understand me. But I saw what he meant about a wall, because he was back behind it.
In the background, I was vaguely aware that Mother and Barry were fluttering around on a kind of party circuit. Barry, who was now on vacation from his law firm, was nominally staying with some friends down the beach road, but every time I was at home he was there, amid much talk of wedding dates, apartment hunting, and what Gloria once acidly referred to as creeping kitsch. I tried a couple of times—but not very hard—to talk to Meg, but since she had left off visiting at her usual dawn hour and I was away from home during the day I didn’t get much of a chance. What with my early rising, walking to and from McLeod’s, and my six hours’ work in between, I almost went to sleep with my head on the dinner table. Fortunately, Mother was too starry-eyed to ask any more leading questions about where I was going and what I was doing. Also, with Gloria the only holdout from the general rejoicing, they were concentrating on winning her over. They took her and Peerless Percy to anything they showed the faintest interest in going to—swinging parties, any summer stock in the area, a couple of music festivals with all-day picnics listening to Beethoven under the trees. Not so dumb, my sister Gloria. She was melting, but not rapidly enough so that their solicitude and desire to please should flag in any way. I could see their progress at dinner. Instead of the usual scowl, there’d be a soft smile and a sidelong glance at Barry. Whether it fooled Barry or not, I somehow doubted. But it made Mother happy which, I grudgingly had to admit, was for him-the all-important thing. I finally also decided that he wasn’t as dumb as I had always thought, either. In his own way he was playing Gloria’s game as cannily as she was, which in his case meant sitting there as stolidly as a tree stump while
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she whinnied and pranced and did the siren bit, so that she couldn’t know she’d gotten anywhere—and (naturally) stop trying to please. But he’d pile on the outings, so she couldn’t get sour through failing to score any goals.
When Gloria wasn’t around, Barry’s frozen front would thaw. Meg knew, I guess, what he was doing and why, because when Gloria wasn’t around he’d kid and joke with her and she’d glow like a miniature sunflower. She was so happy, in fact, that she began eating less and looking less like a tub and more like the beginnings of a female. Not that I was up to noticing that much. But both Mother and Bury commented on it, and Meg lit up some more.
Nobody paid much attention to me. I think Barry had convinced Mother that my going to St. Matthew’s was not a catastrophic idea. Because other than saying once, ‘ ‘I don’t think you get enough exercise, Chuck,” she let me alone.
Curiously, McLeod one day said the same. I was in sort of a limbo these days. After what had happened down at the cove I had no desire to go there. Just thinking about Pete made me feel guilty. On the other hand the kind of open-door relationship with McLeod that had kept me up there until after five in the past seemed gone. Sometimes I felt he had slammed the door. Other times that I had. I wasn’t happy. I wanted to be friends with him, but every time I tried somehow to get through to him again I’d feel like Richard balking at a jump. I couldn’t account for it because I had never felt this way before. I’ve always been a loner. Mother—and all five school analysts—have talked to me about that ad nauseam. Until now, I’ve felt it was a good thing. It kept me loose. Now ail I could think about was that I had ratted cm McLeod. It made me sicker than ever. All by itself it got to be a wall around me getting higher and higher. And the higher it got the less I could do
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about it, and, with a real show of logic, the sorer I got at McLeod.
Then one day as I was being particularly thick-headed He said, “I think you must need more exercise.”
“I get enough.”
“Doing what?”
“Climbing up here and down again, for one thing.” “For a boy—and an athletic one—of your age, who are you trying to kid?” He paused. “What about swimming?” “It’s too cold.”
“I didn’t know you were in such bad physical shape.”
I could see by the clock on the chimney piece that it was eleven twenty. “Isn’t it time for your ride?”
“That can wait.”
He was looking at me and I was trying to read his expression. It certainly didn’t show the warmth I had once seen. Sometimes I thought I would give almost anything to see it again, but the moment I thought that, a wave of sickening guilt came over me. Then I’d be like a stalled car.
“Well, this isn’t getting us anywhere.” He got up and left the room. Relieved, I waited to hear Richard’s hooves. But in a few minutes McLeod was back carrying a knapsack in his hand.
“Come on.”
“Where?”
“Never mind. Just come.” The command was given in his usual autocratic fashion and was easier to obey than argue with. Besides, I didn’t have much fight.
To my surprise he led me outside across the path to his car. “Get in.”
“Where—?”
“Just get in.”
It vaguely occurred to me that someone might see me
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■
with him. But that didn’t seem important, either. When we got to the gate, instead of turning left onto the main road, he turned right into the cliff road that grew narrower and bumpier as it climbed. But the view from the top was really spectacular. I’d never seen it.
“Wow,” I said. The sea was so blue it was almost green.
There wasn’t a house or a soul in sight. Just dark green rocky hills at left and in front, and to the right, the high edge of the cliff and the sea.
“Okay. Out you get.”
I got out. “Where’re we going?”
He came round the car. “We’re going to play follow the leader. I lead. You follow.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” I muttered. What did he think I was— a scout troop? But man, could he move!
We went straight for the cliff edge and then to my horror he stepped down into what looked like nothing. He turned, saw my face and laughed. “Don’t worry. There’s a path here.”
There was: rocky, winding slowly down where, for a change, the cliff bulged out instead of in. Part of the path was where the rock naturally shelved out. Part looked as though it had been hammered out.
“How’s your head for heights?” McLeod asked.
“Okay.”
He started down. I followed.
I said, “You must be a climber.”
“Yes.”
“Where’d you climb?”
“Tetons, Rockies, Alps, Dolomites.”
“What’s the matter with Everest?”
“Too crowded.”
A few minutes later we were down onto big, flat boulders.
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“Here.” McLeod pulled some towels and trunks out of his knapsack. “Put these on.”
They fit, but they looked ancient. “Where did these come from, the Ark?”
“I suppose you’d think so. They were mine, when I was about your age.”
He had put his own on underneath his jeans, so all he did was step out of them and pull off his sweater. I guess he must have ridden Richard here a lot because he was tanned a lot darker than I. But all over one side of his body and down his leg were bums, some red, some paler, the skin shiny. Like his face, the other side was go
od—very thin, except for the hard muscles around his shoulders and arms and thighs.
“Dive in, Charles. It looks like an armchair but isn’t. There’s a current underneath. I’ll go first.” With that, he stepped to the edge of the rock and dived in. He came up about thirty feet away. “What are you waiting for?”
I went to the edge and headed in. It had been about two weeks since that day in the cove, and the water here, on the other side of the point, was colder. The shock almost paralyzed me. I came up by instinct more than anything else.
McLeod had swum back a little to where I was. “AH right, now. Swim. Straight out.”
I didn’t hesitate—not with that cold. I plunged out. Feeling came back and suddenly I felt much better. Taking great mouthfuls of air I cut through the water. I hadn’t swum like that in a long time, because mostly at the cove and the pier and the beach we just fool around. I kept on going until I was ready to stop, McLeod about two yards to one side and keeping even. Then I started to play. I rolled over and
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duckdived, then came up and rolled over some more and lay on my back, thrashing my feet, and then tried a backward dive. Coming up, I saw McLeod above me in the water and butted him gently in the stomach then shot away laughing as I came up. I felt marvelous. He turned, shaking the water out of his hair, and started after me. I knew I couldn’t outswim him, so I went down again and swam underwater and looked around and there he was, so I surfaced and changed course and then went down and butted him again on the side.
I forgot he was an adult and a teacher and forty-seven years old. I even forgot what I had done to him. I forgot everything but the water and being in it and chasing and being chased, far from the shore with nothing around or moving except us. It was like flying. I thought suddenly, I’m free. And the thought was so great I poked him again on the way up. We swam some more, this time parallel with the shore, then played some more, then back to where we’d been.
“Okay. Let’s go in,” he said and turned towards the shore. I turned and we went together, although he took about one stroke to my three, if I hadn’t seen how far one stroke carried him I would have thought he was just fooling around.
When I pulled onto the rock I realized that if I had been out any longer I would have been tired instead of just relaxed. The sun was hot and we lay on towels on a big flat rock above the one we used as a diving board.