Silent Boy

by Torey Hayden

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

  Slowly, he nodded.

  ‘So what do you want? Hot chocolate?’

  ‘No, nothing. I can’t eat. I feel like I want to throw up.’

  ‘Well, I’m having hot chocolate. I’ll be right back.’ And I rose to go to the counter and order. When I came back to the booth with my cup, Kevin had disappeared.

  ‘Kevin?’ I looked around. ‘Kev?’

  A tug on the leg of my jeans. I leaned over.

  Kevin had slid under the table.

  ‘Kevin! What are you doing under there? Come on. Come up and sit on the seat.’

  ‘I can’t!’ he replied plaintively.

  Oh dear. I felt myself redden. Quickly I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed that my companion had decided to sit under the table. No one seemed to.

  The least objectionable thing appeared to be to simply sit down at the table with my hot chocolate and wait for Kevin to come out. If he weren’t so big, I might have taken a more charitable view of our predicament but as it was, I had to admit to being mightily embarrassed and in no way wanted to draw attention to what was going on. So it seemed best, if possible, to wait him out.

  I hunched over my cup. Neither of us said anything, not that conversation would have been easy on two levels like that. I could hear Kevin rustling around down there but he stayed clear of my legs. The fixed seats of the booth made a small but effective place to hide.

  It was seven-thirty when we arrived. As I sat, sipping the chocolate as slowly as possible, I watched the minute hand creep around to eight o’clock and then toward eight-thirty. The young man behind the counter came over and asked if he could get me anything else. I asked when they closed. Eleven, he said. I agreed to have another cup of hot chocolate.

  The faces changed. The young kids hanging around the juke-box gave way to couples, still in their teens but older. More quarters clinked into the jukebox. I heard one song by ABBA eight times.

  ‘Kev, how you doing down there?’ I whispered, saying it over the rim of my fourth cup of hot chocolate. I had an order of French fries too, to soak up all that liquid.

  He moved but did not answer. I knew he was crying. We had been there almost two hours, he cramped into that tiny space under the table and me, trying to look nonchalant as I sat alone, waiting and waiting.

  What was I going to do? Should I call Jeff? Or one of the aides? Perhaps I just ought to get down there and haul him out myself.

  I think my biggest worry was humiliating him. Kevin worked extremely hard at preserving what little self-respect he had managed to grasp. He had quite a bit of dignity for a kid in his circumstances. And it had taken a hell of a lot of courage to do what he had done so far this evening. Even sitting under a table in the Frosty-Freez was a huge step forward. So I didn’t want to humiliate him by creating a scene, if I could help it. Undoubtedly, he was embarrassed enough on his own without my help.

  Yet, what were we going to do? It was already 9:30 and there was only an hour and a half to go. My own embarrassment over the situation had long since passed. All I felt now was desperation that we should be able to resolve this with the minimum amount of fuss possible.

  ‘Kev? You about got yourself together?’ I asked. I brought my foot out to fake tying a shoelace so I could talk to him more easily. ‘They close here at eleven. We got to go before then.’

  I had a Dr Pepper this time and another order of fries. French fries were the easiest thing to stretch out over a long period of time. I was half sick from all the junk but I felt obliged to keep eating something. The boy behind the counter continued glancing in my direction and the only thing that put him off was if I kept ordering and eating.

  But it was getting to be too much. By 10:15 I leaned over again. ‘Kev, I’m going to leave for a few minutes, okay? I’ve been drinking stuff all night. I need to use the bathroom. I’ll be right back.’

  That wasn’t a complete lie. I did need to. But I needed a phone too.

  ‘Jeff?’ I whispered. I didn’t want Kevin to hear me. I didn’t want the kid behind the counter to hear me either. ‘What am I going to do, Jeff?’

  He didn’t know either and thank God, he didn’t laugh. It was blessed just to hear his voice. Actually, that was all I really needed, someone to share my predicament with, because when I went back to the booth, I still had no idea other than waiting Kevin out. But at least I wasn’t alone in it anymore. Someone else knew. Someone else thought I was doing the best thing. So I felt better.

  ‘Kevin, we got fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes that guy over there is going to shut this place up, and if you aren’t out of there by then, I’m going to have to tell him and it’s going to be awful. Do you hear? We got fifteen minutes.’

  The sound of a shifting body came from under the table.

  ‘Kevin, do you hear me? You’ve got to come out from under that table. Do you hear?’

  Silence.

  I shifted my foot around until I located him. I sharply nudged whatever part of his body I had found. ‘Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes,’ came a hoarse whisper.

  ‘Good. Okay, listen, I’m going to get up. I’m going over to the jukebox and put a song on, and if you want to get out from there, this will be a good time to do it. No one will see you.’

  I rose, went over to the machine and read all the songs listed. I didn’t like any of them very much. Finally, I chose something loud and raucous by Elvis Presley to cover up Kevin’s coming out noises.

  When I returned, Kevin still wasn’t out.

  ‘I thought you were getting up,’ I whispered. ‘Now, Kevin, you got to.’

  ‘I will. Gimme another chance.’

  ‘Do you want me to go away again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So again I rose. I went back to the jukebox. We were the only people in there now except of course for the young man behind the counter. He was definitely giving me odd looks by this point. I had no idea if he understood what was going on. Probably not. Without a complete script none of this made much sense, no matter how you looked at it. Even if he had never noticed Kevin’s existence at all, my behavior had been strange enough on its own.

  I stayed at the jukebox several minutes and chose another song.

  ‘We’re closing soon,’ the boy called to me. I nodded.

  Back at the booth I found Kevin. Red-eyed and puffy cheeked, he sat with his head clasped between his hands. Relief washed over me and I wanted to hug him. I couldn’t because of the table between us, so I just touched his face.

  He was still crying.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ I said.

  ‘I wet my pants,’ he bawled.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Come on. Let’s get out of here. Fast. Let’s go.’ I got up. Reaching across the table, I grabbed his arm. With a tug, I dislodged him from the booth and we galloped out of the door of the Frosty-Freez and down the street.

  Kevin continued to sob. All the way back to the home, he bawled, mostly over his wet pants, I suspect.

  ‘Well, we survived that, didn’t we?’ I said to him as we waited for the security guard to let us into Garson Gayer. ‘Barely, but we did, huh?’

  He nodded through his tears.

  The night shift, whom I had never met, had questions in their faces as we went past but they didn’t ask them.

  Inside Kevin’s room I pulled his pajamas out from under his pillow and tossed them to him. ‘Here. Get these on. And no one will ever know about your pants, will they? I’ll go stand outside the door. Hurry, now. Change. I’ll be back.’

  Kevin was under the covers when I returned. His clothes had disappeared into the laundry bag. I perched on the edge of his bed.

  ‘So, what do you think? We did it, didn’t we? We got you outside.’

  ‘It was horrible.’

  ‘Well, yes, it wasn’t exactly flawless, was it? But we did it. You can’t expect perfection. I mean, three and a half years is a long time.’

  Ke
vin nodded.

  ‘But we did do it.’

  ‘That guy probably thought we were nuts.’

  ‘Yeah, probably,’ I said and smiled at him. ‘Can you imagine what he must be thinking? You know, I had four cups of hot chocolate, two glasses of Dr Pepper and three orders of French fries? I was running out of money and had to use my parking change. It’s all nickels and dimes and pennies.’

  Kevin nodded.

  ‘And I kept having to listen to that song by ABBA. You know, I counted it fourteen times altogether. I think I got the words forever in my brain.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Kevin. ‘I have a dreeeeeeeam, a song to siiiiing,’ he burst out in shaky falsetto.

  I giggled. ‘And after me sitting there for three hours all by myself and no one comes in and then suddenly we go dashing out together, when he probably never even knew you were there. He probably really wonders where you came from. We could make a movie about this. It’d be really funny.’

  That made Kevin smile too. ‘Yeah. You and me could star. We could call it the Mystery at the Frosty-Freez. Or no, we could make it a spy movie. That guy probably thought you were a spy or something, the way you were hanging around. And the way I came out of nowhere.’

  ‘Yeah, probably.’

  ‘We’ll have to go there again,’ Kevin said, ‘and really confuse him.’

  ‘I don’t know. Better not. I didn’t have much money left. After all that, I only left him an eight-cent tip.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Kevin said. ‘I left him a puddle.’

  And we both fell about laughing.

  Chapter Sixteen

  While Kevin moved ahead with leaps and bounds, one person in my life was going, if anywhere, backward. That was Charity.

  I knew things hadn’t been going well for her. While there had been no crises, so to speak, her whole life was sort of a slow-boiling catastrophe. Charity’s family was a huge, indistinct group that expanded and contracted like a sleeping animal. An uncle or an aunt or a passel of cousins would move in one night, a grandmother or a sister would be gone the next. There were about four or five branches to Charity’s family from what I could make out, two in town and two or three out on the reservation. The main bulk of the members seemed to move regularly from one residence to another. So I never knew exactly who was who when I went to the door. Different people were forever answering it, but they all knew me. I relieved them of Charity for a few hours.

  Within this sprawling clan festered many problems, alcoholism, brawling and, I suspect, prostitution, involving Charity’s mother, were the most notable. But there were good things too. They had a tremendous sense of kinship and a lovely oral tradition of stories. Her grandfather on her mother’s side, whom I never met, seemed to have a wealth of information about the old ways, which he regularly passed on to Charity and the other grandchildren.

  The most influential person in Charity’s life appeared to be her mother. Her name was Michaela and she was very young, quite a bit younger than I, I thought. She had a dark, wild-eyed look about her and a nervous mannerism of jerking her shoulders. She seemed a tortured soul fluctuating between violent outbursts and withdrawn piety. She had had Charity baptized into three different religions and took her regularly to two church services on Sunday. Yet Michaela locked herself into different parts of the small house and often drank herself into unconsciousness. And of course, as Charity had pointed out, Michaela worked every night except Mondays.

  Charity seemed to cope with the problems in her home life in quite creative fashion. When I had first met her, she had seemed such a down-to-earth sort of kid. It came as a rude shock to me to discover that nearly everything she had ever told me about herself was false. She had no sister Sandy. Indeed, she had no sisters at all. She was not the youngest but the oldest. She had four small brothers. For Charity the world was never good enough as it stood, so she embroidered on it. The lies were usually harmless enough, although exasperating because I never knew what was actually true and what was not. But for Charity they were all true. What she could not have in fact, she gave to herself in her heart. Her stories were the way things were for her. And she’d deck anyone who dared to disagree.

  I knew Charity was having problems at home. And I tried to do something about it. I made countless phone calls to the organizer of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program and then to social services. But it was one of those hopeless affairs where one could not treat the problem until it got too big to treat. So I was going day to day, week to week, with Charity blithely taking over my life, like someone from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was an old song and dance, this one, one I thought I had finished dancing when I had walked out of the classroom, one of the few things about teaching I had never regretted leaving behind.

  In bleaker moments I even considered dropping out of the Brothers/Sisters program. I especially thought that at 6 A.M. on a weekend morning when Charity was banging on the door for breakfast, or in the middle of the night when she had ostensibly run away from home to my house for the millionth time. But I knew I never would drop out. I knew she had no other recourse and that I, what little comfort I was, was all that held soul and body together in some instances. I couldn’t drop out. I knew I couldn’t. I was too soft in the head. Besides, she had such creative catastrophes.

  The phone rang at the office one morning mid-March.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Hayden?’ a man’s voice asked. ‘This is Officer Cooper down at the police station. We have your daughter down here at the Seventh Street Station.’

  My jaw dropped. Before I could tell him I had no daughter the telephone changed hands.

  ‘Listen, Mom –’

  ‘Charity! What are you up to? What the heck is going on?’

  ‘Listen, Mom, I’m kind of down here at the police sta –’

  ‘Charity!’

  ‘Well, could you sort of come down?’

  ‘What did you tell them I was your mother for, Charity?’

  ‘Well, they said for me to call my parents. ‘There was a long pause. Charity would never have called her own mother. For one thing, they had no phone. For another thing, fox that she was, Charity knew I wouldn’t lay a hand on her. Not the way her mother would.

  ‘Listen, Charity, they’re not going to believe you when I walk in there. They’re going to take one look at me and know I’m not your mother. It’s pretty obvious.’

  ‘Oh but, Mom,’ she pleaded, ‘I already told the nice man how wonderful you are, how you and Daddy gone out and adopted this poor little Indian kid. I know I’m a lot of trouble to you but you got such a good heart.’

  ‘Charity!’

  The policeman came on the line. He was a kind-sounding man with a patience in his voice that caused me to suspect he hadn’t been totally taken in. I didn’t confirm or deny anything. Instead, I asked why she was down there in the first place.

  ‘Well, ma’am,’ he said politely, ‘she was trying to derail trains.’

  Only Charity.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t, Torey. Honest, I wasn’t! I was just trying to see what they looked like. You know. If you put stuff on the track it gets all ironed out when a train goes over it. And I just wanted to see what it looks like. That’s all.’

  We were in the car going I didn’t know where exactly. I had had to do more than a little fancy talking and show my clinic ID and everything but my passport to get her released to me without phoning her real mother. Now I had her and I didn’t know what I was going to do with her.

  ‘Why ever were you out there in the first place? It’s a school day. Why aren’t you in school like you ought to be? Then you wouldn’t be getting in trouble for putting things on the tracks.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Don’t shrug at me. Answer me. This is serious business, Charity.’

  Are you mad at me?’

  ‘In a word, yes. This isn’t funny. That officer was right, you know, you could have really hurt someone doing that. You could have made a train go off the track.
It could have caused a lot of damage. And maybe someone would have been hurt or even killed, just because of the silly thing you were doing.’

  ‘But I wasn’t trying to make them run off the tracks.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Charity. The point is, whatever you were doing down at the train yard, you weren’t supposed to be doing it. You were supposed to have been in school, plain and simple.’

  I didn’t know what to do with her. I was driving toward her school but I knew Charity well enough to realize she wasn’t going to be very impressed with the seriousness of this sort of behavior if I just drove her back to school and let her out. She’d be out flattening things on the track by afternoon. On the other hand, I did not want to drive her to her house. What would her mother do? Beat her for it? Ignore it? Most likely, there would be a couple of good swats for causing trouble and Charity would be turned loose again while Michaela would sink into bleak depression over the incident and drink herself senseless. That was, of course, supposing anyone was home.

  I was in a terrible position. I had no real rights, no legal responsibility, nothing to put me in a position of power over Charity’s life. It was ten times worse than my powerlessness as a teacher had ever been. No matter what I did now, whether it be talking to her mother, seeing her teacher, contacting the social worker or the welfare people, I could do nothing vital myself. I was just a voice in the wilderness. Without legal rights, I was like a ghost, there in spirit and no more.

  ‘Look, Char, have you had breakfast?’

  She shook her head.

  I turned into a McDonald’s. ‘Well, let’s stop and eat and see if we can’t sort some things out.’

  Charity sat hunched over her Egg McMuffin. The fight had gone out of her. I think she realized I was serious, really serious, and things looked a little black to her. Her shoulders sagged, her head was down.

  ‘So you want to tell me about it?’ I asked. ‘How come you weren’t in school?’