The River King

by Alice Hoffman

  Carlin was laughing, unaware of the rain; her hair was damp and silvery. Harry knew right then that he had to have her, never doubting for a moment that like everything else he had ever wanted, she’d be his before long. He began to attend swim meets, watching from the bleachers, applauding her efforts with such vigor that before long everyone on the team was whispering about Carlin’s not-so-secret admirer. In the dining hall, he watched from a nearby table, his interest so apparent and scorching that girls all around him wilted from the heat.

  “You’d better watch out,” Gus Pierce said to Carlin when he observed Harry McKenna. “He’s a monster.”

  But of course, as soon as she heard that remark, Carlin did what any sensible girl might have done and looked for herself. She expected to find some leering creature, but instead she caught sight of the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen. Yes, she’d been aware that someone had been rooting for her at swim meets, and she’d known that someone had been following her, and she’d surely heard Amy and Pie gossiping about her Harry, how gorgeous he was, how unattainable. But Carlin had had her share of admirers and she hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to this one, until now. She smiled at Harry McKenna for an instant, but that one look was enough to assure him that with the right amount of patience and fortitude he would get what he wanted.

  Harry had always been well versed in seduction; he had a gift for such things, as though he’d been born with compliments tumbling from his mouth. Already, he’d been through the prettiest of the senior and junior girls. There were girls whose lives he had ruined, and those who persisted in calling him long after his disinterest was evident, and still others who waited steadfastly for him to return and be true. He was bored by such girls and primed for a challenge, and it amused him to wait for Carlin outside the gym. When she came out with her teammates, there he’d be, so obvious in his intentions that the other girls would elbow one another and trade jealous remarks. Before long, Carlin had begun to walk back to St. Anne’s with him. They held hands before they looked into each other’s eyes; they kissed before they spoke. It should not have brought Carlin pleasure to know how the other girls at St. Anne’s envied her, and yet it did exactly that. Her skin flushed prettily whenever she felt their resentful eyes upon her. If anything, she had become even more beautiful. In the dark she was luminous, as though she’d been ignited by the other girls’ spite and lust.

  Of course, she told Harry nothing of her real background; he had no idea that she hadn’t the money for a cup of coffee at Selena’s, had barely enough for books, and that her wardrobe was sorely lacking. She had no decent socks, no winter clothes, no boots. She’d been forced to take Miss Chase’s suggestion and had begun to work for Miss Helen Davis, twenty hours a week of shopping, cleaning, and running errands. As for Miss Davis, she found that having Carlin around was not as dreadful as she’d imagined it might be. This particular girl was quiet and quick. Unlike most of the spoiled students at Haddan, she knew how to use a mop and a broom. Carlin had begun to fix Miss Davis’s supper, nothing fancy, a broiled chicken breast perhaps, prepared with lemon and parsley, served with a baked potato. There was a cache of old cookbooks in the cabinets, never used, and she began to experiment with desserts, preparing grape-nut pudding one night, cranberry-prune compote the next, graham cracker chocolate cheesecake on Fridays.

  These suppers were by far the most delicious meals that had been set upon Miss Davis’s table for some time. She’d spent the past fifteen years eating canned soup and crackers in the evenings rather than face the ruckus in the dining hall. “I hope you don’t think I’ll raise your grade because of this,” she said every time she sat down to her supper.

  Carlin no longer bothered to remind her employer that she was not in Miss Davis’s freshman class, having had the bad fortune to be scheduled into Mr. Herman’s Ancient Civilizations seminar, which she found a complete bore. Still, she never replied to Miss Davis’s remarks. Instead, Carlin remained at the sink washing dishes, her posture straight, her hair ashen in the dim light. She rarely spoke. She only stirred the pot of soup on the rear burner of the stove, nearly ready for the next day’s lunch, and dreamed of a pair of boots she’d noticed in the window of Hingram’s Shoe Shop, black leather with silver buckles. She thought about the way she’d lied to Harry McKenna, not only about her family’s background, but about her own experience in matters of love. In truth, she had never even been kissed before. She’d been running from love, exactly as her mother had raced straight toward it, headlong and without any doubts. Now, her involvement with Harry had knocked the wind out of her. She had set out on a path she neither understood nor recognized, and because she was accustomed to being in control, the whole world seemed to be spinning past her.

  “What’s the matter with you anyway?” Helen asked one evening. Carlin had worked for her for several weeks and hadn’t said more than a mouthful of words. “Cat got your tongue?”

  Helen’s own cantankerous cat, Midnight, was sitting on her lap, waiting for bits of chicken. The cat was ancient, and although wounded in many battles, it insisted upon going out every evening. It leapt down and scratched at the door until Carlin went to let it out. Twilight was coming earlier, and the low clouds turned scarlet at dusk.

  “I’ll bet you’re in love.” Helen was quite smug about her ability to tell which girls had been stricken each October.

  “Did you want custard?” Carlin returned to the stove. “It’s butterscotch.”

  Rather than admit she was desperate for money, Carlin told people she was helping Miss Davis in return for a community service credit. She had planned to tell this to Gus also, if she ever got the chance to talk to him, for it seemed he had begun to avoid her. If he noticed her heading toward him, he’d manage to disappear behind a hedge or a tree, skittering down a path or a lane before Carlin could catch up. He disapproved of Harry, that was the problem, and lately it seemed as if he disapproved of Carlin as well. In fact, it was a single image that kept him at bay. One afternoon, Carlin had leaned over the gate outside St. Anne’s to kiss Harry good-bye, even though she should have known better than to share a kiss over a gate, an action that it is said to cause a rift between a girl and her beloved before the day is through. When she looked up, Carlin saw that Gus was watching. Before she could call out to him, he had vanished, like those foolhardy assistants in magic shows who crawl into trunks to be dismembered and put back together again. Unlike those individuals, however, Gus had not reappeared.

  People said he was taking his meals in his room, and that he no longer changed his clothes, and there were those who reported he would not respond even when called by name. Indeed, he had been cutting classes, preferring to spend his time wandering through town. He had gotten to know Haddan’s topography, particularly the deserted areas beside the river, where the marbled salamanders lay eggs in the green waters of Sixth Commandment Pond. He walked the lanes, watching as large congregations of blackbirds flew overhead. Plenty of Haddan residents were enjoying the outdoors at this time of year. It was the height of the fall colors, and meadows and woods offered dizzying displays of yellow and damson and scarlet. The fields were thick with blooming redtop and ripe wild grapes; on porches and in backyards all over town there were pots of chrysanthemums and asters in shades of crimson and gold.

  In spite of his rambles, August Pierce was not especially drawn to the landscape; rather, his nature walks served only to help him avoid the Haddan School. By the time other students were in morning classes, Gus was already at his regular seat at the pharmacy lunch counter, ordering black coffee. He hunched over the counter as he worked on a crossword, often staying right on through noon. Ordinarily, Pete Byers didn’t care for students hanging around during class time, but he had come to appreciate Gus and he sympathized with the boy’s trials at school. Pete had been privy to more personal matters than anyone else in town; he knew people’s appetites and their downfalls far better than their own husbands and wives ever did, and he was quite
familiar with the private lives of Haddan students as well.

  People who were well acquainted with Pete knew he didn’t gossip and he didn’t judge. He was as pleasant to Carlin when she came looking for earplugs to prevent swimmer’s ear as he was to old Rex Hailey, who’d been frequenting the drugstore all his life and who liked to chat for an hour or so whenever he came to pick up the Coumadin that would hopefully prevent another stroke. When Mary Beth Tosh’s father was going through colon cancer and the insurance money wasn’t on time, Pete gave Mary Beth whatever medicine was needed without any charge, happy to wait for the correct payments. In his long career, Pete Byers had seen too many people sick and dying, far more, he would wager, than those young doctors over at the health center in Hamilton ever had. These days, people never seemed to have appointments with the same doctor twice, with HMOs shuffling their patients around as if they had no more weight and importance than playing cards. Dr. Stephens, who had kept an office on Main Street for forty-five years, was a great old man, but he’d closed up his practice and moved to Florida, and even before the doctor had retired, it was Pete people came to when they wanted to talk, and as a matter of fact, they still do.

  Pete had never discussed any of the information he’d been told, not even with his wife, Eilecn. He wouldn’t think of telling her which member of the garden club had bunions or who was trying out Zoloft for her nervous condition. Once, years ago, Pete hired a clerk from Hamilton, a fellow named Jimmy Quinn, but as soon as Pete discovered that his new assistant had taken to perusing customers’ medical histories while eating his lunch, Quinn was fired, let go that very same day. Ever since, Pete has kept his ledgers under lock and key. Not even his nephew, Sean, sent up from Boston in the hopes he’d finally fly right and manage to finish out his senior year at Hamilton High, had access to the files. Not that Sean Byers was the type to be trusted. He was a dark, handsome kid of seventeen who had managed to mess up his life fairly well, at least well enough to convince his mother, Pete’s favorite sister, Jeannette, to step in and take action when Jeannette had always been the easygoing type, preferring to leave well enough alone. Sean had stolen two cars and been caught with one of them. Because of this, he had been placed under his uncle’s watchful eye, away from the evil influence of the city, stuck in the middle of nowhere. When Sean reported to work after a day in Hamilton High School he was always grateful for Gus’s company. At least there was one other individual in Haddan who hated the town as much as he did.

  “Maybe we should trade places,” Sean suggested to Gus one day. It was late afternoon and Sean had his eye on a table of girls from the Haddan School, none of whom would have given him the time of day, despite his good looks. His job in the drugstore spelled instant invisibility to girls like these. “You go to the public high school and come here to wash dishes, and I’ll sit in your classes and stare at all the pretty girls.”

  Gus’s hands were shaking from his high level of caffeine and nicotine consumption. Since his arrival at Haddan, he had lost ten pounds from his already scrawny frame.

  “Trust me,” he assured Sean Byers. “I’d get the better part of the deal. The Haddan School would do you in. You’d be jumping out a window in no time. You’d be begging for mercy.”

  “Why should I trust you?” Sean laughed. He was a boy who always needed proof, particularly when it came to issues of faith. He had lived the sort of life that had soon revealed that any man who asks for undying loyalty is the man most likely to get you killed.

  Gus decided to take Sean’s challenge and prove his worthiness. He had ordered one of the hot rolls that had just come out of the oven, exactly what he needed for his next trick. “Give me your watch,” he demanded, and although Sean wasn’t so quick to hand it over, he was interested. Sean had been through a lot, yet in some ways he was an innocent, which made him the perfect mark.

  “Don’t you want to find out if you can trust me?” Gus asked. The watch had been a gift from Sean’s mother on the day he left for Haddan. It was the one thing of any worth that he owned, but he unhooked the band and deposited the watch on the counter. Gus made the prerequisite movements to distract his reluctant audience, and before Sean could tell what had been done, the watch was gone. Even the Haddan School girls had begun to pay attention.

  “I’ll bet he swallowed it,” one of the girls declared.

  “If you put an ear to his belly button you can probably hear him ticking,” another girl added.

  Gus ignored them and concentrated on his trick. “Do you think I lost your watch?” he goaded Sean. “Maybe I stole it. Maybe you made a big mistake trusting me.”

  Sean was now as interested in the manner of the watch’s reappearance as he was in the watch itself. All his life he’d thought he knew the score. Get the other guy before he gets you; live fast and fierce. But now he realized he’d never thought of any other possibilities. Maybe the world was not as simple as he’d always believed. He placed both hands on the cool countertop and he didn’t care which customer called for a check or who demanded a coffee-to-go. His attention was riveted. “Come on,” he said to Gus. “Make your move.”

  Gus took a knife from the counter and cut open the roll on his plate. There, amidst the dough, lay the watch, steaming hot.

  “Man.” Sean was impressed. “You’re amazing. How’d you do that?”

  But Gus merely shrugged and went to pick up a prescription Pete had filled for him. Gus wasn’t about to tell Sean the details of the trick. You had to be careful what you divulged, but now and then even the most wary had to take the leap and put his trust in someone. Like so many before him, the person Gus had chosen to confide in was Pete.

  “What about my other problem?” he asked the pharmacist as he signed the insurance form for his medication. It was the thirteenth of the month and Gus had been hoping Pete might help with his problem at Chalk House.

  “I’m working on it,” Pete assured him. “I’ve got a few ideas. You know if you went to school instead of sitting here all day you’d show the other fellows how smart you are, and you’d win out. That’s what I’ve been telling Sean.”

  “Have you been telling him about the tooth fairy, too? About truth and justice and how the meek shall inherit the earth?”

  Gus was already convinced that the meek were not about to inherit anything in Haddan, which is why he packed a bag that evening and went down to the train station. He had no intention of participating in the barbarous rituals of the Magicians’ Club. At the hour when Nathaniel Gibb was unwrapping a bloody rabbit’s foot from the cotton handkerchief his grandmother had given him at Christmas, Gus was keeping an eye out for the eight-fifteen into Boston. It was a chilly evening, with frost soon to come. Waiting for the train, Gus thought about his father and the high hopes the elder Pierce still had. He thought about how many hours it took to get to New York, and how many times he’d transferred to new schools, and what a disappointment he must be. And then, before he could stop himself, he thought about Carlin Leander’s silver hair and the way she smelled like soap and swimming pools. At a little before eight a police car drove by, and one of the cops leaned his head out the window to ask Gus what he was waiting for. Gus hadn’t the slightest idea, and so he took his suitcase and walked back to the school, the long way, through the village. He went past Lois Jeremy’s perennial garden, with its mums the size of pie plates; past Selena’s, where Nikki Humphrey was closing up for the night. At last, he turned onto the path that would lead him past the weeping beeches Annie Howe had planted long ago. He did so grudgingly, returning to the place he feared most, his own room, for on this dark, blue night when the weather was about to turn, August Pierce had nowhere else to go.

  * * *

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, MAUREEN Brown noticed a patch of bloodied grass in the far meadow. Intent upon searching for specimens for her biology lab, most especially the shy leopard frog, she went farther, making her way past birches and pines, at last inching along beneath thistles and thorns to the p
lace where she found the carcass of a rabbit with one foot cut off. It was the time of year when the leaves on the wild blueberry bushes had become flame red and woody stalks of goldenrod could be found everywhere, in the fields and gardens and lanes. Deeply shaken, Maureen took to her bed after her dreadful discovery. She had to be carried up to her room on the third floor of St. Anne’s, and afterward she refused to return to classes until she was allowed to drop biology Although it was halfway through the term, Maureen was allowed to enroll in Photography 1, bringing with her a hurt expression and absolutely no talent. Due to the circumstances, however, Betsy hadn’t the heart to turn her down. Eric couldn’t understand her pity.

  “Imagine finding something like that,” Betsy said to Eric as they walked down to the pharmacy for a late breakfast on Sunday morning. “What a shock.”

  “It was only a rabbit,” Eric told her. “When you think about it, they have rabbit on the menu over at the inn. They boil them and saute them every afternoon and no one says boo, but find one in the woods and it’s a huge event.”

  “You’re probably right,” Betsy said, even though she was far from convinced.

  “Of course I’m right,” he assured her. “The death of a rabbit, however sad, is hardly a federal case.”

  In the past few weeks, Eric and Betsy had been so overwhelmed by their duties they’d hardly seen each other. In all honesty, they both had been too busy for intimacy and it didn’t seem possible to find any privacy at the school. If they were in Eric’s rooms, there was always the fear that a student might knock at the door and interrupt. The few times they’d managed to get the least bit romantic, they’d been awkward with each other, like strangers who’d gone too far on a blind date. Perhaps their estrangement was unavoidable; what little energy they had was given over to students, such as Maureen, whose traumatic experience in the woods had taken up most of Betsy’s week.