"Fast friends," Martha said, turning abruptly into the kitchen.
Ben led James into the kitchen. Meyer pulled off his plaid jacket, folded it over the back of a chair. He sat at the long kitchen table, pointed James to another setting his wife was making. Only when they were both seated with coffee before them did he turn his gaze to Weston again.
"So, you had yourself a sleep in my orchard last night. Mind if I guess the rest?"
James tasted the coffee, which was good, then smiled mildly. "Sure."
"Let's see." Meyer scratched at his chin, which had not been shaved. "You didn't come from New York City. That's for sure. Would have chased you straight off if you had. Don't like that place. But maybe you live in a big city."
Weston smiled. "So far, so good."
"I can't quite figure your accent. Mix of things. Good portion of upstate New York. California, maybe. I figure you live out there, now. Some other places, also. Maybe you traveled the country, picked some things up as you went."
Weston nodded, enjoying his coffee.
"And one other place, sort of like Canada, but not quite."
"Vancouver."
"Ah. Okay. Now your clothes, I can't figure. You didn't steal 'em, your frame's too tall and I didn't peg you for a thief. Except for apples, which is food to feed a belly. The clothes mystify me. That how they dress in Vancouver?”
“Not exactly—"
"Don't tell me, let me guess." He rubbed his chin, turned to his wife, who was opening eggs into a large skillet. "Martha, care to have a try?"
Martha turned around, leveled her gaze on James like a shotgun, and said, "He's an actor, Ben."
"Actor!" Meyer made a dismissive sound. "I never heard such foolishness—"
"She's right," Weston said.
"What!" Meyer turned with astonishment to his wife, who paused from scrambling the eggs in the skillet to give him a mild look. "It's no mystery, Ben. I saw him on TV."
"Well, I'll be damned," Ben said. Then suddenly Weston and Martha were laughing, and Ben joined in, too.
Their conversation halted while Martha served the eggs, with big slabs of Canadian bacon, slices of toast. She took off her apron and sat at her own place.
"You have to tell me how you guessed so much about me," James said.
"Tell him how, Ben," she said.
Ben waved his hand. "It's nothing. I traveled a lot, when I was younger. Army man for a while, then I sold things. Aircraft parts, oil-rig machinery, hydroelectric power plant fittings. When you spend a lot of time on the road, you listen to people. You observe. That's all there is to it." He turned to Martha. "And I observe this young man, who likes the way you cook, could use some more coffee."
With the mild knowingness that seemed to be her nature, Martha rose to fill James's coffee cup, as well as her own.
"When did you start growing apples?" Weston asked. Ben smiled. "Oh, that would be . . .”
"Nineteen sixty-five," his wife said.
Ben nodded. "I was fifty years old that year. Tired of being on the road. Martha here, she saved all the money, and I asked her what she wanted us to do. She said grow apples, like her daddy did. That was it."
"It's a good way to farm," Martha said. "My dad made a good living at it, and this town was a good place to do it." Her eyes seemed to drift away, to another place. Suddenly she fumbled with her coffee cup, got up, put her cup in the sink, and began to wash dishes.
Ben leaned over to whisper to James, "Don't mind her. It's just a way she gets."
Suddenly Martha turned off the sink tap and turned to level her gaze at James. The hurt, distracted look was gone from her face, replaced by puckish seriousness. "So tell us, Mr. Weston, is everything they say about you in those supermarket tabloids true?" Her mock frown deepened. "And just what are you doing on the road alone, in actor's clothes, with a stray dog that ain't your own?"
"Martha!" Ben scolded.
"I got an observer's eye of my own, Ben Meyer, and I notice things. Mr. Weston doesn't have to answer, if he doesn't want to."
James found himself smiling. "The two of you are like Sherlock Holmes. Rusty I picked up in Iowa. And no, almost none of the things you read in the supermarket are true. I just . . . had to get away. I was working on a picture, and the day it ended, I decided I had to be by myself for a while."
He thought that would satisfy them, but both Ben and Martha were eyeing him as if waiting for more.
"All right." James laughed. "I was seeing that soap opera star for a while, but that ended. She walked out on me, just like the newspapers said. But that's not why I left. Or at least not the whole reason. I was sick of California, sick of somebody doing everything for me. I was sick of being an actor, of pretending to be someone else all the time."
That satisfied Martha, who went back to her dishes. "You have things to do?" Ben asked. "You'll be moving on?"
"Well . . ."
"You see, I was going to ask you to stay a little. It's time to pick Ida Reds, and I'm going to need help. That is, if you want to."
James now found genuine laughter welling up from inside. He threw his head back and let it out, and eventually the laughter subsided and he met the expectant gazes of Martha and Ben Meyer. Rusty had come to stand beside his chair, and James put his hand down to bury it in the thick coat of hair behind the dog's ears. He looked down to see the same expectant look in the dog's eyes; the black terrier had already curled up beside Rusty, appeared to be contentedly asleep.
"Want to stay, Rusty?" James asked.
The dog huffed in answer.
"If you hadn't asked me," James said to Ben Meyer, laughing, "I would have asked you."
5
October 7th
Sometimes, Davey Putnam wished he was back in grammar school. Things were simple, then. You worried about going to the dentist, you worried about getting a shot at the doctor's, you worried about nothing else. Dad went to work, Mom cleaned the house, you watched TV when you came home from school, and you did your homework at six o'clock. Sometimes you played touch football in the street until it began to get dark and the streetlights buzzed on in the autumn cold, or on Friday afternoons, you went looking for Indian arrowheads. On Saturday, you raked leaves in the morning, smelled them burn in steel-webbed trash cans in the afternoon. Sometimes you and your friends raked the crisp leaves into a huge mountain and rode your bikes at top speed into them. On Sunday, you went to church in the morning and read the funnies when you got home, ate
Mom's bacon, and crumb buns from the bakery, and watched cartoons on television. Sometimes Dad had a catch with you in the backyard, throwing perfect spirals with the football until it was time for the Giants game to come on TV. Sometimes you watched it with him, or went down into the cellar to run the HO train set on the board he had helped you build, or your friend Bobby Doyle came over and you went through your comic collection, or argued that football cards would never be better than baseball cards. In two days the World Series would start, and the Yankees would win again, and Reggie Jackson would hit a bunch of home runs. In a couple of weeks your biggest worry would be what to wear on Halloween, and what kind of bag to keep your candy in.
And then, overnight, they tried to make you grow up.
Oh, the world had been like that, then. That had been the real world, then. But then another real world had come and knocked on the door with a big fist, and the dentist, or a shot on the butt with a doctor's needle, had not been big worries anymore, only baby fears that were put to sleep with all the other baby toys, like Sunday afternoons and your mother's rotten meat loaf, which you hated but which sometimes made you cry now, when you thought about it, because you really did love it after all because it was hers. The big fist of the other, second real world was a simple thing, as simple as a small woman in a big car who didn't watch where she was going and rammed headfirst into your father's two-year-old Buick, throwing your mother in the passenger seat through the windshield, turning her into a vegetable in a dirty white ro
om somewhere for a few months before death came, and killing your father outright. The little old lady walked away from the accident and said she was sorry, she made just too wide a turn in that Cadillac, she really never drove that often.
You were eleven when the second real world came knocking. And your uncle Rich up in Buffalo couldn't really take you in, he wasn't married and they had always said he was funny anyway, and bingo, there weren't any other relatives. So, at the age of eleven, the foster homes started, and the nightmares that became the real world, replaced the old one.
The old real world was like a receding dream, something Davey had once had and that the Big Fist had pushed away, and he watched it push farther and farther back into his memory, like something he had seen once on TV, maybe after school, a funny cartoon, and could barely remember.
He twisted the cap off another bottle of beer, stowing the empty he had just finished carefully in the bottom of the paper bag between his knees. Oh, they would kill him all right if they found out he was drinking beer. How they would disapprove. And the social worker never even looked in the refrigerator where the smiling asshole, good old Jack Carpenter, had twelve cold ones stowed away, plenty of empty cases out in the garage, if the girl with the sweater and the new college degree had bothered to go out there and look, or bothered to ask him anything at all instead of avoiding his eyes. So ole Jack merely waited for the idiot from social services to leave, then started in on his wife. The punching bag, ole Jack liked to call her. Tiny as a mouse, with the big eyes. Meek as a stuffed animal, until Davey had found she had climbed into his bed with him one night, after ole Jack had passed himself out, and was doing things to his privates even he hadn't thought of. The Mouth, Davey had called her after that, sometimes to her face.
Davey took a long swallow from the beer and stretched his blue-jeaned legs down the porch steps. The backyard was dirty. That was another thing they never looked at. Ole Jack cleaned it when he knew they were coming, but usually it was tobacco road, bald tires leaning like drunks against the paint-peeled garage, empty cat food cans on the shadow side of the porch, crabgrass a half foot high between the dirt patches. The neighbors had tried to have them kicked out once, an ordinance for them to clean up. Ole Jack had cleaned up. They told him they would take the boy away, a sixteen-year-old shouldn't live in this kind of environment, but no one bothered to tell social services, and when the new idiot came the next week, another sweatered, flat-chested, earnest girl with photocopied forms, everything was fine. And then she went away, and the crabgrass grew back up, and they fed the cat on the back porch and let the cans fall off, and the front of the house was just as unmowed, and ole Jack never took the garbage cans in from the curb.
The beer was gone. Davey reached into the bag for another. "Shit," he said. The bag was all empties, but then he found a single cold bottle sitting among the warm empties and pulled it out. He twisted the cap off, tossed it at the bag and missed; a cursory search did not turn it up.
"Screw it," he said, turning the cold bottle up to his lips.
"Davey boy, what you say?"
For a moment Davey froze, the bottle to his mouth, thinking it was ole Jack home early from work. But his blood began to run again, and he turned to see Buddy Scalizi, the gate open behind him, entering the yard.
"Close the gate," Davey said.
"Sure." Scalizi smiled. He retraced his steps, using his bopping gait, head moving up and down as if he were snapping his finger to some beatnik beat in 1959. He was short, disheveled, thin black wisp of a beard tracing his chin around his lip. He wore a stained denim jacket. His eyes were a striking blue, and his teeth, when he smiled, were almost pure white, standing out.
"What's shaking, Davey?" Scalizi had closed the gate, was looking at Davey's beer bag with interest.
"Sorry, last one," Davey said with only a trace of apology. He finished it down before Scalizi could inevitably ask to have it.
"Shit," Buddy said. "Got any money?"
"Broke as your old man's car," Davey said.
Buddy laughed. "You can bet on that. What you been up to?"
Davey shrugged, dropped the empty bottle into the bag. He carefully rolled it closed at the top, readying it for disposal.
"Bet your old man'd whack you good, he caught you drinking." Scalizi made a face. "Especially that Genesee ale."
Davey made a slight smile. "What's going on, Buddy?" Scalizi shuffled his feet. "Not much. You been to school?”
“Screw school," Davey replied.
"They're talking about sending Johnston around for you again. I was in detention yesterday, heard in Dean Whitiker's office—"
"Screw Whitiker, too. And Johnston. I'm not going back."
Scalizi shook his head. "Wish I had your balls, Davey.”
“I bet you do." Davey grunted sarcastically. "Rubbed your own just about off."
Scalizi paused between laughter and anger, until Davey abruptly laughed.
"Jeez, Davey, sometimes I don't know whether you mean things or not."
"I never mean things, Buddy." He looked away, out over the backyard. "It's all bullshit."
"Well . . ."
Davey turned his eyes on Scalizi. "You gonna tell me why you came?"
"Yeah, sure—"
"Is it Backman, again? College boy been bugging you?”
“Sort of. Say's I'm a chickenshit."
"You are." But then that thin smile again, and Buddy smiled, too.
"Want me to kick his ass for you?" Davey asked.
"If you got nothing else to do."
Davey stood, moved the muscles in his shoulder under his jacket. He picked up the rolled bag of empty Genesee bottles in one hand, abruptly reached out to punch Scalizi lightly on the shoulder.
"Shit, no, I've got nothing else to do."
New Polk was an easy town to walk, a neat square bordered by main roads, surrounded by flat farms and apple orchards, rising up quietly from the Hudson Valley. Davey and Buddy walked the neighborhood, through the park with its shedding autumn trees, kids on playground rides, a few sweatered college kids with their girlfriends, high school boys playing touch football or grouped together to talk about girls or tomorrow's big game. The high schoolers moved aside when Buddy and Davey came near; when Davey deliberately veered close, they moved even farther away, with desultory glances, trying to look as if they had been thinking of moving anyway. Davey recognized his childhood friend Bobby Doyle among them. Davey walked with a practiced strut, a James Dean affectation that, with his open leather jacket and white T-shirt, his tight jeans and boots, made him look as fearsome as he wished. He had worked at his bad reputation, and people stayed out of his way. Scalizi followed behind with his bopping walk, looking like a puppy following his master.
Through the park and out the other side, past the sloping green of the University of New Polk to the left, the leafy, shaded, now-denuding oaks of the more affluent section of town on the right. They strode into this neighborhood, parting its waters like the Red Sea. There were nurses with baby carriages, BMWs and Jaguars parked at the curbs, sleek black driveways leading to white New England clapboards and the occasional contemporary with cedar siding and domed glass skylights set like monstrous portholes in the roofs. The lawns were tended, still green, the inevitable rock gardens trimmed, bright with late annuals. Davey kept his eyes averted, passing one particular house, white with deep-green shutters that had once been red, the house of his other, first real world . . .
They turned right, passed similar scenery, turned left on another corner.
A black-and-white police cruiser appeared ahead. "Uh oh," Scalizi said.
Davey said, "I see it."
They slowed their walk, banished the strutting. The patrol car approached, angled toward them, stopped to let them catch up.
The window on the driver's side rolled down, and the hard-lined, crew-cut, unsmiling face of a uniformed police officer regarded them. "Out for a stroll, Putnam?" he said humorlessly.
"Yes, Officer Johnston, I am," Davey said, forcing irony into his politeness.
"I thought I told you not to stroll here," Johnston said. "Especially not with Scalizi."
"I'm sorry, Officer. I guess I didn't hear you."
"Get your hearing checked. What are you doing here?”
“We're on our way to Nick Backman's house to get help on some of Buddy's homework."
"What about your homework, Putnam?"
Davey said nothing.
"Get what you need and get the hell home." The officer turned back to his steering wheel, revved his engine. "I'll be around to talk to your old man."
The officer let the patrol car begin to roll, then braked it. He turned to glare at Davey. "You hear me?"
"Yes, Officer," Davey said.
"Any trouble, it's your ass I haul in, whether it was you or not." This time he hit the accelerator.
"What is it with that bastard?" Buddy said. "Why is he always on your tail?"
Davey watched the patrol car turn the corner. "He had some trouble with my old man once." Before Scalizi could say anything, he added, "My real father."
Nick Backman's house was a block ahead, painted the inevitable white with black shingles. The driveway, which sloped slightly down to a garage set into the foundation, was empty.
"Let's go around back," Buddy said, resuming his strut.
They walked the flagstone path to the left of the driveway. There was a green chain-link fence at the backyard, tripped with a latch. They opened it and entered. The backyard had just been mowed, wheel marks of the mower in fresh ranks. The pool, near the back right corner of the yard, was covered with a tied green tarp, flecked with blown leaves and grass.
They went to the sliding glass door off the porch. It was locked, covered on the inside by a curtain. The windows along the back of the house were curtained.
October Page 5