A Ship Made of Paper (49 page)

“Mrs. Davis!” Daniel calls out, when she is nearly out the door. “Wait!”

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She turns toward him with a practiced, opaque expression, unap-proachable. “Yes,” she says in a tone that says no.

He doesn’t know exactly what to say, but he is suddenly afraid to be in charge. “Is there anything I need to know here?”

“When’s Mrs. Welles coming home?” Mrs. Davis asks.

“In about an hour and a half.”

“That man ain’t going nowhere in the next ninety minutes,” she says, moving past Daniel and out onto the porch. An old Ford Taurus is at the curb, with an immense kid of about eighteen at the wheel, wearing a sleeveless shirt. The car rattles as it idles, inky exhaust pours out of the tailpipe. Daniel stands on the porch and watches Mrs. Davis hurry toward the waiting car—had it been there all along? The driver starts to get out but she waves him back in; she goes to the passenger side and lets herself in, and a moment later the Taurus pulls away with an unmuffled roar.

Daniel goes back into the house and as soon as he is inside he can tell by the quality of the silence that the children are no longer there. He goes to the kitchen and looks into the backyard. An olive-green tent has been pitched between two hemlocks; Nelson is standing next to the flap while Ruby crawls in, and then he crawls in himself. Daniel wonders for a moment whether he ought to go out and show the flag of adult supervision, but then he thinks it would be pointless.

He wanders through the house, looking for a spot where he can un-obtrusively sit while the time passes. What had seemed at first like a favor he was capable of doing for Iris seems now perilous, foolish, and strange. The entire success of the gesture hinges on Hampton staying asleep, and though Daniel is still enough of an optimist to believe that Hampton will not awaken before Iris’s return, now that he is in the house—with its signs of suffering everywhere, a cane in the corner, a table filled with amber medicine bottles, brightly colored plastic baskets filled with laundry, piles of blankets for the frequent house guests, the loving family who come when they can to share the burden of Hampton’s a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

affliction—now that he is breathing the Lysol-tinged heat of this airless, sunny room, Daniel realizes not only that he is perched on the precipice of disaster but that he has been on this increasingly exhausting edge for months now.

He sits on the sofa facing the empty fireplace. Next to it is a large wicker basket filled with mail. Idly, Daniel looks in and sees that it is all for Hampton. Daniel scoops his hand into the pile, lets them fall; it’s like a write-in campaign, an appeal to the governor for neurological clemency. Free the Hampton One, let him come back to renew his sub-scriptions, make his donations, place his order, balance his checking accounts, look after his investments, go to Bermuda.

Scarecrow comes waddling down the stairs, roused from her spot next to Hampton’s bed. She seems to have aged years in the past six months. Her rump is massive now, her gait slow and uncertain, her brown eye is alert, but her blue eye, once keen and electric, is now milky and opaque. She moves toward Daniel, lowers her snout, and pushes the top of her head against his legs. He strokes her silky ears, and she emits a deep, mellow groan of pleasure.

“Oh, Scarecrow, Scarecrow, what in the world are we going to do?”

Daniel says, in that plaintive murmur people sink into when they are opening their heart to an animal. The old shepherd raises her snout, looks up and her tongue unfurls from her mouth, lands on Daniel’s chin, and then sweeps up over his lips. “What are we going to do, Scarecrow?

What’s going to happen to us? It’s pretty messed up, isn’t it, Scarecrow?

How did everything get to be so broken?”

Daniel slumps back in the chair, continues to pet the dog. He closes his eyes and is about to sink into sleep when he is startled and revived by the sound of footsteps directly overhead. Hampton is awake, awake and moving. His first impulse is to hide; he stands up and his legs tremble for want of flight, his good eye looks for the quickest way out of the room.

He tries to calm himself by thinking that perhaps it is someone other than Hampton upstairs, or even if it is Hampton, then he may not be coming down—he is going to get a drink of water, or take a leak, or

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maybe he has heard the children in the backyard and he is going to a window to gaze out at them. But no: this is merely a story Daniel is telling himself, a little explanatory fable that will allow him to believe that the worst is not about to happen.

Now the footsteps are on the stairs, coming down, and Daniel has not run, he has not hidden. He sits down. He will seem less threatening, less intrusive, seated. He crosses his legs, left to right, then right to left, and then leaves them uncrossed, the knees slightly parted, his clammy hands folded between them. He ransacks his mind for something to say, an explanation for why he is here, an apology, a bit of small talk, and then he remembers what should have been impossible to forget—Hampton cannot understand a word, not spoken or written, and all Hampton himself can say is that single stunned syllable: da. Da Da Da.

How strange, then, to finally see him, this strong, beautiful man whose throat was pierced by a rocket, this ruined prince who has lost everything. He is dressed in copper-colored pajamas, with white piping around the pockets and down the leg. The top buttons of his shirt are open, the scar just below the Adam’s apple looks like a wad of chewed-up gum, and someone has spread talcum powder on his throat all the way down to the chest. He is freshly shaved but his eyeglasses have been snapped in two and then repaired with tape á la Ferguson Richmond. It seems unthinkable that Hampton would be wearing broken glasses, it is, for the moment, the saddest thing in the world. Sadder than his slack mouth, the corner of which is yanked down and to the side, sadder than his dull, unblinking eyes, sadder than the cologne Mrs. Davis has splashed on him, and sadder, even, than the fact that he is wearing his wristwatch, with its lizard-skin band and nineteen jewels, its expensive Swiss nervous system, its mini-clocks at the bottom giving the time in London and Tokyo.

“Hello, Hampton,” Daniel says. He knows he cannot be understood, yet he can’t simply stand there and say nothing. And even if the words are gibberish to Hampton, even if to his bombed-out brain the sounds Daniel makes are no more decipherable than the chattering of a monkey, a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

perhaps the context will do, the logic of the moment, the gesturing hand, the smiling mouth, the deferential little bow.

“Da,” Hampton whispers. He shuffles forward a step. He hasn’t noticed that Scarecrow is underfoot now and on his second step he catches the dog’s paw beneath his foot. She lets out a high, piercing yelp. Hampton is startled. His eyes widen, his mouth opens—his expressions are guileless and large. His personality, no longer projected through the scrim of language, has now an intolerable purity. He looks down at the dog and smiles. At first it seems to Daniel that there is some cruelty here, but then Hampton pats the dog’s head with a wooden herky-jerky movement, and Daniel realizes that the smile was one of recognition: Scarecrow’s cry has made more sense to Hampton than Daniel’s hello.

When he has comforted Scarecrow, made his amends, Hampton straightens up again, looks at Daniel, taking him in in a long, silent gaze.

Daniel feels he must somehow communicate, but the only sign language he can think of is gestures of supplication. He folds his hands, lowers his head, and sorrowfully shakes his head.Yet even this does not seem enough—what could be? He wants Hampton to be restored. Short of that, he wants to be forgiven, he wants Hampton to give that to him, to lift him off the hook and set him free, to place an exonerating hand on Daniel’s shoulder and admit to the idea—submit to it, if that’s what it takes—that what happened in those woods was a fluke and had nothing to do with Daniel and Iris. Daniel will not allow himself to beg for mercy, he will not try to urge Hampton to see that the two of them are simply men who have been caught in the Rube Goldberg machinery of life.

Then, for no particular reason, he has a fleeting thought: Ruby. How long have those two been out there? A half hour? More?

But the thought evaporates because Hampton is crying. He is drumming his long fingers against his head—shaved by Mrs. Davis, nicked here and there, the cuts left to dry in the air—and he is shaking his head, more vociferously than a simple no, he is shaking it to clear it, to dispel

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some merciless, obliterating beast that lives within, eating his words.

Tears as thick as glycerine streak down his cheeks, and his mouth is twisted into a scowl of grief. Daniel’s heart, in a convulsion of empathy, leaps, as if to its own annihilation.

Inside Nelson’s tent, the sunlight, filtered through the nylon, is pale green. The unmoving air smells of dirt, candy, and child. Nelson and Ruby sit on two beige bath towels that serve as the floor in Nelson’s hide-away. Between them is a Styrofoam cooler that Nelson uses as a recepta-cle for his playhouse provisions.The lid is off and he is showing Ruby his treasures one by one, some of them his, some of them appropriated. A bottle of Elmer’s glue, a manicure set in a leather case, a half-eaten PowerBar, an eyecup, a flashlight, several batteries, loose kitchen matches, a hand puppet of some kind of American Indian princess, a block of baking chocolate, and a gun, given to Hampton by his own father for the safety of the house, stored and then half forgotten in the drawer of his night table, on hand in case a robber should enter the house, or some vicious white kids looking for a little racial adventure, a gun sneaked out of the house by Nelson several days ago, which has gone unmissed, a pistol that has seen its better days, the front sight chipped, the blacking on the trigger guard and the barrel peeling off, but with an aroma Nelson finds entrancing, narcotic, a mixture of old steel and oil.

He picks it up, careful to keep the barrel pointed toward the ground, and bends his head ceremonially over it, breathes in the blunt, manly bou-quet, and then he lays the pistol in both his hands and holds it out there for Ruby to take her turn.

Hampton walks across the room and sits on the sofa Daniel has occupied. He covers his face with his hands, his feet move up and down as if he were walking. There is room on the sofa, but Daniel cannot sit there. Instead, he kneels in front of Hampton. Hampton uncovers his face, and tentatively, as if he and Daniel were creatures, different species, he offers his hand. And Daniel, upon taking it, and feeling the cool weight of it, the simple skin and bone of it, realizes in a grievous instant a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

what he has at once known and prevented himself from knowing all along, the knowledge he has carried in his belly and denied: they are all of them ruined, Iris, Hampton, and himself, ruined.

“Oh, Hampton,” Daniel says.

Hampton looks away, a sheen of dullness shrink-wrapped onto his eyes. “Da, da,” he says, barely audibly.

“I’m sorry,” Daniel says, knowing it cannot be understood. But maybe God is listening. “I’m so sorry.”

“Da.”

“Do you want anything? Something to drink or eat? Anything. Is there anything I can do?”

“Da.” Hampton turns further on the sofa, twisting his body, almost looking behind himself now. The fabric stretches between the buttons of his copper pajamas. His feet continue to pump up and down, his legs waggle, he is squirming like a child desperate to relieve himself.

The children have a gun. The gun is loaded. The safety is disengaged.

And when the gun fires the sound is so far removed from Daniel’s expectations and so divorced from his experience of life that at first he barely reacts to it. A truck’s backfire, a sonic boom. But Hampton responds immediately. He leaps off the sofa, runs across the living room toward the kitchen and the back door, and Daniel, awakened to reality by Hampton’s response, follows, and now he knows that what he has heard is a gunshot.

Hampton and then Scarecrow and then Daniel race across the backyard. Daniel is shouting now; he can’t really understand what has happened. In the few seconds it takes to get from the back porch to the tent, Daniel has two thoughts. Only one shot was fired, is the first thought, and let it be Ruby who is unhurt, is the second.

Hampton, in his rush, has lost his slippers. Daniel, who must wait for Hampton to crawl in before he himself can enter the tent, shouts out Ruby’s name, but there is no answer, and then he calls for Nelson and is likewise met with silence.

Finally, Hampton is in the tent and Daniel follows, and the children

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are there, Ruby a frieze of fear, Nelson cool, a blank, but it’s clear in his slightly narrowed eyes and the stubborn, impervious set of his mouth that he is ready to deny everything. The bullet has gone through the side of the tent about a foot above Ruby’s head, and a brilliant, slow-turning rod of light shines through the hole. Daniel stares at it for a moment as if it were the presence of God.

The tent is too small for the adults to stand up. Daniel rises into a simian stoop and gathers Ruby into his arms. The feel of her, the comfort of her heft, causes him to straighten, and the pressure of his head against the top of the tent unfastens it from its pegs. The center pole wobbles and a moment later the entire tent deflates, tips over.

“You’re wrecking it!” Nelson screams.

“Where’s the gun, Nelson?” Daniel says. His voice is calm, gentle.The children are alive, unhurt, the anger is gone. Life is so precious, time is so short, we’re all in it together . . .

“You’re wrecking the tent!” Nelson continues to shout.

“Da da da,” Hampton says, sobbing, the tears coursing down his stricken face. He places his hands on Nelson’s shoulders, pulls him close.

“Da,” he cries. And then, lifting his face, he shouts it out again, toward heaven.

“Where’s the gun, Ruby?” Daniel murmurs into her ear, and she points to the Styrofoam cooler, which is now partly concealed by the collapsed tent. Daniel places her on the ground—her frightened little hands grip his trousers—and he pulls the green nylon off the cooler’s lid, opens it up, and there, on top of Nelson’s heap of treasures, lies the pistol.