Читать книгу Into the Sun - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 20

JUSTIN

THE FIRST TIME he heard about the family, he had an impression of a story from his English class or something he’d seen on TV, about desperate, wandering people, and he was surprised that such characters might actually exist.

They’ve been living in a motel near the overpass, his father said. The brown one. Right after the exit ramp. They spent Christmas there. I told them they can move in on the first.

Justin was reading on the couch, and in the kitchen, his mother asked, Why not sooner? The carriage house is empty.

I’ve no inclination to rent to desperate people, his father replied. If they can’t wait three days, they’re not the right tenants.

That evening, Justin and his friends rollerbladed along the lakeshore’s wide concrete path, racing, picking up speed, and then slowing to catch their breath. As they started back, Justin hesitated.

A white teenage boy stood on the shore with the black fishermen, watching where their lines disappeared against the water. His shoulder muscles ridged a threadbare T-shirt, his arms veined like a man’s. His ratty clothes weren’t jock or prep or even redneck. Justin’s friends glanced over too — the girls a little longer.

On New Year’s Eve, Justin went to a party, squeezing into the packed car of Adam McCaskill, who’d just gotten his license. Though Justin didn’t drink, most of his friends did, and not long after arriving at Douglas Breaux’s house, they were wasted and hollering about the millennium. When a girl told Justin that her older brother was on a retreat in the woods, purifying himself for the Second Coming, he asked why she hadn’t gone with him. She said she believed in Christ already and would be taken to heaven. Not tonight, she specified. The millennium is off by like a few months. The Rapture will probably happen in March.

He realized then that she’d never kiss him, and it was already too late to pair up with another girl, so he called his father for a ride home.

The next morning a small U-Haul truck and battered gray Ford sedan pulled into his driveway and past the garage, behind the hedges to the parking area next to the carriage house. Justin ate his cereal at the window as a lanky man unloaded the U-Haul, his face so full of harrowed lines that his forehead, cheeks, and mouth resembled a series of descending brackets.

A girl got out of the sedan. She looked young enough to go to his school, but like a TV star: dark bangs and shoulder-length hair, a black trench coat belted at the waist. The tall boy from the lakeside loped past her, his shoulders curved as if he might pounce.

Don’t eat standing up, Justin’s father said. He’d come downstairs in his golf clothes, his shirt tight across the chest, his big bones and residual muscle making his body seem lumpy.

Justin sat back down at the table, angled toward the window.

They won’t be here long, his father said. People like that, they’re running away from something.

Why did you rent to them?

It’s hard to find a renter in the middle of the school year, and they didn’t tell me they had a boy. But now I’m seeing the situation clearly, and I have no doubt they’ll be gone before we know it. Just keep your distance. There’s no point making friends.

His father normally rented to graduate students from McNeese State, but the girl who’d lived there had dropped out and moved home, leaving a rhyming handwritten note on the door. He’d ranted about the kind of person who absconds and apologizes with poetry.

He went into the garage. As the door mechanically rose and the Lincoln started up, Justin returned to the window, cradling his cereal bowl.

The carriage house was tiny, just a bathroom, an alcove kitchen, and a single room partially divided by shelves. His father was right. The family would soon be gone.

As the boy came out and walked down the driveway, Justin went to the living room and stood just inside the drapes. The boy stopped at the street. He was now visible in profile, and far bigger than he’d appeared leaning on the railing at the lake.

Justin didn’t think he’d ever seen someone so still — the way he pictured the first woodsmen in America. His friends twitched with energy, rolling their ankles to stand on the edges of their feet or popping their knees in and out. This boy stood like an animal listening in a forest. He set off down the street.

Justin went to his room and read a chapter in a World War II memoir his father had given him for Christmas, his head propped on a pillow so he could look outside each time the screen door clapped.

The lanky man and the girl left with both vehicles and came back in a sedan. The man was so tall he had to stoop to go in the carriage house. The girl wasn’t wearing her jacket, only a black tank top and jeans. Justin put his book down and crouched at the windowsill.

She had tattoos on her shoulders and on the inside of her wrist. There was a hint of another one near her cleavage. In her jeans, her hips were narrow, their curve just wider than her waist. She stood behind the car, opening the trunk, taking out groceries, moving almost dreamily, pausing before each action, as if she were underwater.

THE BOY DEPARTED first thing each morning and didn’t come back until after Justin was in bed. Saturday evening, Justin read, staying up to see when he’d get home. He fell asleep and woke at dawn to the squeal of the sedan’s engine. Ashen light filtered through the pecan tree, the mass of branches transformed into distinct shapes. At the wheel, the lanky man hunched like someone fearing a bullet from behind. The sedan lurched and then accelerated toward the street.

Justin couldn’t get back to sleep. When the boy came out, Justin was watching from the dining room. The boy leveled a long glare in his direction and then walked down the driveway.

At church, Justin’s father elbowed him awake.

I’ll not have this kind of behavior, Justin George Falker.

The grogginess lasted through his chores. His father had long ago made the rule that his weekly tasks had to be completed before dark on Sunday. He quickly trimmed the hedges that ran the perimeter of the yard and had grown up densely on either side of a chain-link fence. He was moving along the hedge’s inside, behind the carriage house, when he felt himself waking up, his peripheral vision expanding. The bathroom window was near his shoulder, the venetians so old and broken their gaps offered glimpses of the tub. The girl lay with her head against its edge, her nipples at the surface of the water.

Justin moved the electric clipper carefully now, catching every protruding leaf, slowing to tug at the extension cord, as if it were snagged on the cinder blocks that supported the corner of the carriage house. Each time he passed in front of the bathroom again, she was still there.

The sun hung low over the neighborhood trees as he gathered the fallen pecans into a bucket, raked leaves and clippings, filled a garbage bag, tied it, and put it by the trashcans.

The lanky man hadn’t come back. A smaller hedge divided the carriage house parking area from the yard, and Justin trimmed it last, in the twilight, making sure the boy wasn’t around.

He left the rake and a box of plastic garbage bags out, along with the bucket of pecans and the clipper. This way he’d appear to have good reason to be wandering around, picking things up. His parents were having dinner with friends.

With the lawn free of leaves, his step was silent. He neared the carriage house wall until his nose almost touched it. The siding’s white paint scaled off. It smelled of decaying wood.

The bathroom window glowed at the crushed edges of the venetian blinds. He lifted his foot and quietly shifted to the right, moving one eye in front of a gap.

The crescents of her lashes lay against her cheeks. Her wet bangs were pushed back and her hair clung to her shoulders like weeds. Her collarbones spread just above the line of water. Her pale breasts floated slightly, the water rippling faintly around them.

A yellow lamp was lit on an end table in the corner. The bathwater had a greenish tinge and no suds. He couldn’t understand why she’d stayed in it for so long.

Her waist narrowed and her hips spread, a faint dark patch where her thighs shadowed together. A Celtic design circled her belly button. On her shoulder, there was a heart in a cross of melting ice. Above her breast, a square of barbed wire opened on a colorless heart suspended like the moon in mist.

He touched his erection. That was crossing a line. He didn’t want to become a pervert like the ones in the newspaper.

He steadied himself and moved away. He put the rake, the clippers, the bucket, and the plastic bags in the shed. He ran upstairs and grabbed a towel from the hamper and pulled off his shirt. He lay on his bed. He pushed down his pants and was gasping as soon as he started. He panted, seeing her in the bed, over him. The second time the pleasure was stronger.

He was hungry. He went downstairs and ate, and then put on his rollerblades.

The night was cool. He soared along the asphalt, the wheels swishing and skittering over dead leaves. He enjoyed hitting cracks, the instant, intuitive repositioning of his body. He raced through parking lots, jumping concrete dividers, and swept across empty streets. He reached the park along the lake and followed the path, picking up speed.

The boy was with the fishermen again, staring over the water toward the glow of the oil refineries on the far shore. One of the fishermen murmured to him, and the boy replied in a low voice. The men laughed.

Justin pivoted on his rollerblades and passed again, but by then the boy had turned, clearly realizing he was being watched — his face flushed, charged with anger.

Justin looked around as if he’d been deciding where to go, and skated off. The strength and angularity of the boy’s bones lingered in his mind, like something he might have seen on a field trip — a savage fossil behind museum glass, a set of prehistoric jaws beneath a light.

JUSTIN LEARNED THE boy’s name at school. Clay Hervey. No one knew anything about him, and Justin didn’t divulge where he lived or that his father had left and never returned, abandoning him and his sister. Clay was in his homeroom, sitting in the back corner, his hands loose on the table, the skin scuffed off their knuckles. In place of his middle fingernail was clotted flesh.

The teacher introduced him and asked him if he wanted to say something about himself.

That’s okay, he told her, his voice like a man’s but soft, faintly hoarse.

Nothing? she asked.

Nah, he said, with the distant gaze of a soldier on parade.

How about where you’re from?

Maine.

Thank you, Clay.

You’re welcome.

Justin wondered if Clay knew, as Justin’s father had asserted, that he wouldn’t be here for long.

In the hall, Clay carried his books in one battered hand, his muscled arm slack. He kept his eyelids low, his focus somewhere between the floor and the horizon. Girls watched him. Boys edged away, trying to decide whether they could mock him. He was six foot two and had the hard, cooked-down muscle of a man, not the bloated bulk of young athletes.

After a week, kids started calling him weirdo behind his back. Girls who’d smiled at him and been ignored muttered creep or psycho.

In gym, the boys played basketball — shirts against skins. Justin scored two points. He and Clay were shirts. Clay intercepted passes, loping across the floor to feed the ball ahead. He probably didn’t play often. Justin had seen other athletic kids who weren’t good shots and didn’t want to look bad work the defense like this.

The skins were rallying, and Dylan, their best player, kept blocking shots violently. He intercepted and threw a hard pass, and Clay lunged for the ball and caught it.

Dylan moved in to keep him from dribbling or passing. He was the largest boy in the grade, taller even than Clay, towheaded and so pale veins shone beneath his skin. He had a black belt and told stories about karate tournaments, and when he rammed his sweaty armpit into players’ faces on the basketball court, they didn’t retaliate. He tried this now, but Clay twisted away, the ball between his hands, his forearms parallel to the floor. Dylan closed the gap, and Clay swung back, his elbow catching Dylan’s solar plexus — a hollow sound like a drum. Dylan’s knees hit the floor. Justin felt the vibrations through the soles of his sneakers.

Between classes, kids talked about how Clay had braced with his foot, dipping his knee inward the way a boxer drives a punch. Dylan hadn’t been able to stand up for ten minutes and was now announcing that he’d get revenge. In the hallway, as he was walking away from his girlfriend, Melody, Clay came up behind her.

Hey, he said. That was all the other kids heard. He leaned in and whispered something in her ear. Though she had the black hair and olive complexion of a Cajun, she turned red from her hairline down. She hurried to her next class, clutching her books to her chest.

Before lunch, Dylan found her at her locker, and as he lowered his head to speak to her, she backhanded him. Like he was a bitch, kids would later joke. He retreated, the imprint gathering in the stung, red skin.

Dylan found Clay in the cafeteria and squared off.

What did you tell her?

The truth. I heard what you said in the locker room. Why don’t you own up?

Clay’s words had the same low, gravelly restraint as when he’d spoken in class.

The lunch monitor was calling other teachers, not wanting to get between them by herself. Dylan made a fist and moved his shoulder back. Clay hadn’t budged, hadn’t even lifted his hands.

You’re a liar, Dylan said, his voice suddenly whiny.

If I am, take me down. Prove it.

The lunch monitor was shouting, moving her arms as if directing traffic. Dylan walked away.

Over the next few days, everyone agreed that Dylan had bragged about what he’d done with Melody at the New Year’s party in an upstairs bedroom, and one afternoon, in the lockers, a group of boys led by Melody’s brother pushed him down, punching and kicking him.

Kids began gravitating to Clay, walking next to him between classes and sitting with him at lunch. He shared little about himself, keeping his answers simple: he was from Maine; neither the economy nor the weather was much up there, so his family came south. People repeated this. Justin told it to his father one evening, and his father sighed.

Son, Louisiana isn’t exactly Silicon Valley. I wouldn’t trust a word that boy says.

But Clay’s reputation grew: his natural prowess in sports, his simultaneous competence and indifference in class, his modesty and adult disregard for most of what went on around him. Occasionally, he passed Justin in the hallway, and they nodded.

One afternoon Justin left his rollerblades in his locker and timed his departure with Clay’s. Heading home? he asked.

Yeah, Clay said, and extended a hand. Hey, man. I’m Clay.

Justin.

They shook hands. Clay’s irises were brown at the edges, green spreading raggedly from his pupils — small pale stars whose brightness eclipsed the rest.

I’ll keep you company back. Most of the way at least.

I just wanted to say that what you did with Dylan was badass.

Clay shrugged, his stride loose and relaxed.

Dylan’s soft, he said. You see the lunches his mother packs? Organic crackers and cookies. And his binders are all organized, with labels in a woman’s handwriting. He’s never kicked anyone’s ass.

Justin said nothing. His mother helped him organize things and used to make his bed until his father called an end to it. His parents had fought for a week over her pampering — his father’s word. That was just the previous summer.

Anyway, man, it was good to meet you, Clay said when they were a block from the house. He extended his hand. They shook, and he kept on past the driveway.

For the rest of the week, Justin walked home with Clay. He asked him questions — How long have you been practicing pull-ups? Did you run track at your old school? — but didn’t mention team sports since it was clear Clay hadn’t played them much.

Over dinner, Justin’s parents speculated about whether Clay’s father would return, whether that woman — Justin’s father didn’t seem to know what to call her — would get a job.

She’ll have to put her trench coat back on, he said. And the boy doesn’t even live here. He comes at six in the morning, eats, I guess, and leaves.

Monday, a few kids gossiped that Clay had shown up at a party and that when Melody got drunk, he took her home in her car.

That afternoon, as he and Justin walked back from school, Clay said, Can I tell you something?