Just Like That

by Gary D. Schmidt

  “This is an Obstacle, isn’t it?” Meryl Lee said.

  Dr. MacKnockater nodded. “It is.”

  Still holding the Awful Dignity’s hand, Meryl Lee felt a small, small bit of Resolution remaining, that same Resolution that had stayed her so well on the stage. She decided to use it all in one shot: “I should love to come to Thanksgiving dinner with you, Dr. MacKnockater,” she said.

  “Four o’clock, then,” said Dr. MacKnockater, “unless you come early, in which case we shall mash the potatoes and cream the onions together.”

  Then, the Resolution expended, and the Blank not too far away, Meryl Lee ran out onto the commons.

  Without a word, she walked back to Netley with Marian and Heidi. And when they got to Heidi’s room, they sat on her bed and Meryl Lee, exhausted, let any small wisps of Resolution flow away and she said, “I . . . I’m . . . my . . .” and that was all.

  And because Heidi Kidder and Marian Elders knew that the Tin Woodman is usually right, they held on to Meryl Lee as she stared into the Blank, and wept.

  Nineteen

  1967

  At night—even on cold November nights—Matt would climb up the ladder in the chute, past the cabinet where the pillowcase was stored, and open the skylight and go out onto the roof to watch stars so close he could almost inhale them.

  Sometimes, he’d shiver in the cold.

  Sometimes, he’d shiver, remembering.

  * * *

  Matt had left Portland on the earliest bus out of the city, long before the sun was shining over the Azores. He might have fallen asleep—but he didn’t, because whenever he looked up toward the bus driver, the driver was watching. He’d seemed suspicious from the moment Matt had boarded the bus. Maybe it was the pillowcase. Maybe it was because he got on the bus so early. Maybe it was because Matt took a seat at the very back. Maybe it was because he was alone. Maybe it was because, when the bus driver asked where he was heading, Matt had to look at his ticket to be sure. Or maybe, somehow, the bus driver just knew what it looked like when you ran.

  Matt watched the dawn come up as they stopped outside of Yarmouth. While the bus idled in its schedule, the driver came back and nodded at Matt. “You okay, kid?” he asked.

  “Yup,” said Matt.

  “You sure?”

  “Yup,” said Matt.

  “Tell me where you’re heading, again.”

  Matt looked at his ticket again. “Augusta.”

  “You got business in Augusta?”

  “My Aunt Helen lives there.”

  “I live in Augusta. What’s your aunt’s last name?”

  “I’m really tired,” said Matt, and laid his head against the side of the bus.

  The bus driver came back again while they idled in Freeport.

  “You remember your aunt’s name yet?” he said.

  “Helen.”

  “Helen what?”

  “Tush.”

  “Tush?”

  “Tush.” Matt laid his head back against the side of the bus.

  The driver came back again while they idled in Brunswick.

  “I never heard of any Tushes in Augusta.”

  “People don’t have tushes in Augusta?” said Matt.

  “Don’t be smart, kid.”

  The driver came back again while they idled in Bath.

  “You know,” said Matt, “I’m getting off here.”

  “I thought you were getting off in Augusta.”

  “I meant Bath.”

  “Bath’s a long way from Augusta and your Aunt Helen Tush.”

  “Thanks for the ride.” Matt stood and shouldered his pillowcase.

  The bus driver put his hand on Matt’s arm. “You don’t know a guy named Leonidas Shug?” he said.

  A moment passed, and Matt pulled his arm from the bus driver’s hand. “Nope,” he said, and headed down the aisle of the bus.

  “You sure?” the driver said. “Because he’s looking for someone a lot like you.”

  “I hope he finds him,” said Matt, and made himself move slowly down the steps, slowly across the lot, and slowly into the bus station. He made it into the bathroom and into a stall—which he locked—before he let his arms clench his shivering body.

  He stayed there until he thought the bus had probably pulled out for Augusta.

  * * *

  Matt ate three hamburgers and a chocolate shake at a diner, sitting as far from the windows as he could. Then he found a route out of the city, staying close to the river. He was an idiot, he thought. He should have waited until the weekend. A kid traveling alone, in September, on a school day—he was pretty obviously up to something. Every other kid his age would be in school for another couple of hours, and here he was, walking with a pillowcase over his shoulder.

  So he headed toward the water, and it wasn’t long before the streets grew narrower, the houses less frequent, the cars going by fewer. He passed a woman putting up laundry on clotheslines, and an old guy scraping paint off the hull of a boat pulled up on shore. Matt kept walking until the hamburgers and shake were only a memory, and still he kept going, until there were hardly any houses at all, and then it was dusk and past dusk, and he knew he’d need a place to sleep. He took a dirt road that led sharply down to the shore, and there he found a shack that wasn’t locked because there wasn’t anything worth locking up: an old wood stove, a rusted lantern, a wire bed with no mattress except a sheet of plywood, a water pump in the sink that worked, sort of. But the shack was sturdy enough, and when the rain came later that night, he stayed dry, pretty much. He’d seen some shingles stacked against the outside walls when he came in. He’d fix the roof tomorrow and call it good.

  The next morning he hid the pillowcase under the floorboards under the wire bed, washed himself down by the river—Pastor Darius would have said that the water was cold as sin—and then Matt walked back to the outskirts of Bath. He found a diner—“Scrape four,” he said, and they did—and then he found a hardware store and bought a hammer and nails and a sleeping bag they had on sale and a small cast-iron fry pan and six white candles and a box of matches. Then he went to an A&P and bought eggs, bacon, milk, a couple loaves of bread, Concord grape jelly, peanut butter, three cans of tomato soup, and three boxes of Fig Newtons. He walked back to the shack with the bags at his sides; he had never known how heavy a cast-iron fry pan could be after a couple of miles.

  For the next week, Matt made this trip every day unless it rained. At the hardware store, he bought the essentials: a couple of plates, a bowl, two knives and forks and spoons, two glasses, a scraper that he really needed for the cast-iron fry pan, a hatchet to cut up branches for the wood stove, some duct tape because there’s not a day that goes by when you can’t use duct tape, some TP and a shovel for related needs, a flashlight and extra batteries, some fishing line and hooks, a Buck knife. The store was run by Evelyn, who smiled across the counter as if she were about to hand you a homemade cherry pie. “You’re one of my best customers,” she said one afternoon, “and I don’t even know your name.”

  “Tush,” Matt said.

  “Tush?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was all. Matt knew what could happen if he got to know someone.

  At the A&P, he bought food—and the inessentials: soap, a toothbrush, tooth powder, a towel, a postcard of Commercial Street in Portland that showed a corner of the Chowder House, dish detergent. After a raccoon began to show up, scratching at his door once the sun went down, he bought dog biscuits, too. It was good to have some company, and the raccoon was as faithful as the tide, which Matt could see rising and falling along the rocks a few steps from the shack. And the raccoon didn’t ask his name.

  He called the raccoon Georgie.

  Sometime toward the end of September—he couldn’t be sure, since a calendar was really an inessential, he figured—he came home with his bag from the A&P (sausages, cooking oil, a fryer, a bag of carrots, and a bag of potatoes) and his bag from the hardware store (a sharpening sto
ne, some more cedar shingles he could nail around the leaky windows, some caulking, and a Phillips screwdriver to tighten the clasps on the stovepipe), and he found four boys sitting in his shack, smoking cigarettes and eating his Fig Newtons.

  “Who are you?” one said.

  “I live here,” said Matt.

  “No one lives here,” said the boy.

  Matt put his bags on the ground. “Look around you, doofus,” he said.

  The boy snuffed his cigarette out on the wall.

  “It’s ours,” he said. “We come when we want a smoke. Thanks for fixing it up so nice. And thanks for the Fig Newtons. You can go now.”

  The other boys laughed. One snuffed his cigarette out on Matt’s sleeping bag. Another knocked the two glasses off their shelf and they shattered on the floor. “Sorry,” he said, and laughed again.

  There were four of them, prep-school boys, two of them a little bigger than Matt.

  But they were in his house.

  He hit the first one square in the face, as hard as he could, hoping he could break his nose and scare them with the blood. But the guy fell back onto the bed, and the three others came at Matt, who learned pretty quickly that these guys might have been in school fights before but probably never in a fight they really, really had to win, a fight where losing meant you got hurt so badly you might die.

  So they were pretty surprised when Matt got on the first guy—who was still on the bed—and pounded his eyes shut. And when they pulled Matt off, they were pretty surprised when his teeth drew blood, and when he kicked the guy who snuffed his cigarette on the sleeping bag hard and several times in a place he’d never been kicked before, and when he picked up a shard from a shattered glass and held it so tight to the neck of the guy who’d knocked the glasses down that a thin line of blood oozed out.

  “You’re crazy,” the guy who’d been bitten yelled. “You hear that? Crazy!”

  Matt stepped toward them again, holding the broken glass out in front of him, and they backed out of the shack, the one who’d been kicked sort of hobbling.

  “You’re nuts! You think this is over? Nuts!”

  Then they were gone up the dirt road, the one boy well behind the others, still bent over.

  Later, Matt sat on the rocks above the water, trying his first cigarette from a pack left behind. He gave it a couple of drags, decided he didn’t like it, and threw the cigarette and the pack into the water, where they drifted away. For a while he went down to the shore and skipped stones, but the water was too choppy for it, and he climbed back up, lay against the rocks, and watched the sun turn yellow, orange, red—then disappear. The stars began to announce their visit, and Matt headed back to the shack.

  Georgie would be there soon.

  * * *

  A few days later, Matt asked Evelyn what the date was. She was surprised he was speaking to her.

  “The date?” she said. “October 1, 1967.”

  “Thanks,” said Matt.

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  He shook his head. “Just these,” he said, handing her some candles. Then he went to the A&P and bought a small cake. Chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

  He figured he’d missed his birthday over the summer.

  He figured he was something around thirteen—give or take a year. He might as well celebrate now.

  So he ate the whole cake.

  Twenty

  1967–68

  A winter in Maine, by yourself, in a lobsterman’s shack that had never even thought about being insulated, will teach you a lot about cold.

  Matt learned the rules quickly.

  Never let the fire go out.

  Pine boughs around the foundations of the shack—such as they were.

  Never let the fire go out.

  Keep the well pump working so it doesn’t freeze up.

  Never let the fire go out.

  Shovel snow over the pine boughs.

  Never let the fire go out.

  Stuff the cracks, especially around the windows, with all the socks and underwear you’re not wearing right now.

  Never let the fire go out.

  Sleep in two sleeping bags, one inside the other.

  Never let the fire go out.

  Keep the clothes you’re going to wear the next day in the foot of the sleeping bags.

  Never let the fire go out.

  Hang a blanket over the closed door, with rocks on the bottom to keep the wind from blowing in.

  Never let the fire go out.

  Never, ever let the fire go out.

  That winter in the lobsterman’s shack was long and dark.

  So spring was as welcome as daylight. Matt almost kissed the first golden buds on the maples. He could taste the air when he pulled his socks from the window frame and pushed open the glass. The snow melting quickly, the scent of dark earth and pine, the unrolling of fiddleheads, the bright green of the moss, the stretching of the leaves, the love calls of the birds and the peepers, the ballet of the deer he watched from the doorway—they were all as welcome as daylight.

  That early spring, bathing in the cool waves in the morning, skipping stones in the dusky evening. And then, suddenly, Mrs. MacKnockater with her strange name and stranger accent. And that summer, being out on the water again, a hand on any boat a lobsterman would let him get on. Then in the fall, meeting the Captain and Affliction. He actually didn’t mind winter that much, but the seasons between winters were heaven.

  And Matt was beginning to feel that he had always been here, in this shack, above the sea and its longings, the scent of the pines always around him, the seasons coming and going. It was as if he had never been anywhere else.

  But, of course, he had been anywhere else. And he thought often, late at night, of Pastor Darius and Sophia, and the Second Baptist Church of New Bedford, and Milly’s quilts, and even Mrs. Nielson’s Brussels Sprouts Surprise. “The door of our house is always and forever open to you,” Pastor Darius had said. Always and forever is a really long time, but it had already been a long time, and Matt felt the need deep inside to go see them.

  A little bit more than a week into September, a couple days after a lobster dinner at Mrs. MacKnockater’s house, he decided to go. He put a sweater on over his T-shirt, and a sweatshirt on over the sweater—it would be colder by nightfall—and headed out.

  In Bath, he purchased a round-trip ticket to New Bedford.

  “Do you always walk around with hundred-dollar bills?” said the ticket man.

  “It’s from my aunt,” said Matt.

  The bus left at 10:06 in the morning. He slept most of the three hours to New Bedford but woke up when the bus began to move slowly into the city, into places he knew well.

  It wasn’t a long walk from the New Bedford bus station to Second Baptist’s neighborhood, maybe twenty minutes. Maybe less. And as he got closer, Matt found himself starting to run and grinning like a loon—but he didn’t care.

  Always and forever.

  It was a Monday. Pastor Darius would just be finishing the cleanup after yesterday’s services.

  Closer now, and Matt watched to see the white steeple fingering up into the sky.

  Looked up.

  Looked up.

  The steeple was gone.

  He stopped. He stepped into the road to angle himself toward where he knew it had to be.

  Gone.

  He walked slowly the rest of the way, keeping himself close to the buildings as if to stay in their shadows, until he turned the corner and saw the blackened wreck of New Bedford Second Baptist Church.

  He heaved everything inside his stomach right into the street.

  It was hardly remarkable that it was Mrs. Nielson and her son who found him on his hands and knees, the two of them carrying bags of donated day-old rolls for the Tuesday lunch. They told him about that night. Two, some said three, men broke into the church. Pastor Darius practicing Sunday’s sermon. Beaten to within an inch of his life. Second Baptist set
on fire, but by a miracle, Pastor had managed to crawl out, even after the rafters burned through and the steeple dropped into the sanctuary. No one could understand how. “Safe and secure,” was all he’d said.

  But now, he was blind.

  And he was still insisting on the Tuesday and Thursday community lunches. Imagine that, she said.

  Matt had no trouble at all imagining that.

  Mrs. Nielson said he should come home with her. She’d call Pastor Darius. He’d be so glad to see Matt again.

  See me again, Matt thought.

  Matt said he couldn’t. He couldn’t. This was his fault. He couldn’t. Mrs. Nielson’s son started to help him up from the sidewalk.

  “It’s not your fault,” said Mrs. Nielson.

  Then, “It looks like it’s true,” said a voice behind them. A voice that sounded like cool and satisfied Hate.

  Matt looked up.

  “They always come back to the scene of the crime.”

  The Big Guy from the Alley.

  “You just have to wait long enough.”

  Matt thought he was going to heave again.

  “Who are you?” said Mrs. Nielson.

  The Big Guy looked at her. “The Devil,” he said. “You better go away.”

  “I’ve never been afraid of the Devil,” said Mrs. Nielson.

  The man stepped closer. “You should be afraid of this Devil,” he said.

  Mrs. Nielson sniffed. “You wear too much cologne,” she said. “It stinks.”

  It was probably not what the guy from the Alley expected.

  Matt stood. “Mrs. Nielson,” he said, “you’d better—”

  “You got no business here,” said Mrs. Nielson’s son.

  “This boy’s my business,” said the Big Guy from the Alley. “And you don’t want to get between me and him.”

  But Mrs. Nielson’s son did. He turned to Matt, mouthed, Run, kid, looked once at his mother, and then threw himself against the Big Guy. But Mrs. Nielson’s son was a lot smaller than the Big Guy from the Alley, who tossed him into the street, reached into his coat, and drew a knife as wicked as his grin. Matt broadsided him, but the guy didn’t go down. A couple of quick slashes tore through Matt’s sweatshirt. “Matt, get out of here,” he heard, and he turned, saw Mrs. Nielson’s eyes wide and her mouth open, and he felt a quick and deep line of narrow heat slash low across his back, felt his left arm jerked behind him, felt it twist cockeyed off his shoulder, and then suddenly he was knocked to the ground and Mrs. Nielson’s son was pounding the Big Guy’s face.