Brian's Return (2 page)

“All right . . .”

Brian was past hearing Carl. He was past anything. He was in a place where normal rules didn’t apply. Carl was temporarily blinded, but he was far from finished in Brian’s mind. With Carl’s face covered, his stomach was open and Brian struck there, pleased to find he was overweight and soft. A place to aim, a place to hurt. He hit again and again, still using the heels of his hands, his wrists rigid, the blows up and into the top of the stomach, forcing air out of the diaphragm so it whistled from Carl’s nostrils.

Carl’s hands dropped to cover his stomach and Brian went for his face again, pounded the eyes so they were swollen shut, blow on blow until Carl’s hands came up again. When Carl crouched, tried to protect everything and left the back of his head open, Brian took him there, clubbing down with both hands joined, pounding until Carl was on his hands and knees, his nose bleeding, the air wheezing from his lungs.

It can’t get up, Brian thought, surprised how cool he was. He wasn’t angry. I can’t let it get up or it will hurt me, he thought. At first he didn’t realize that he was thinking
it
and not
him.
It has to stay down. I have to keep it down.

Carl was on the edge of being senseless but something—perhaps the training of football—would not let him collapse completely. It would have been better if he had. Brian couldn’t stop. He kept clubbing down, working silently, crouched on his knees now, bringing his joined hands in a double fist again and again onto the back of Carl’s head as if he were cutting wood.

Somebody was screaming and other people were running toward them, clawing at Brian, pulling him up and away, but he kept working at it, centered, focused on clubbing Carl down even as they pulled him off. They would pull him away for a moment and he would tear loose and attack again.

“Don’t let it up,” he said. “I have to keep it _down _. . .”

Police came to the pizza place. They called an ambulance and took Carl to the hospital, where it was found that the skin around his eyes was severely bruised, as were his ribs and his stomach. Though it was not really necessary they kept him in the hospital overnight for observation, which made his condition seem much more severe than it was.

The police handcuffed Brian and put him in the backseat of the car while they interviewed witnesses. Susan came to the car but the police pulled her away.

“No talking,” they told her. “No talking to the boy.”

“But he didn’t do anything wrong. Carl attacked him. Brian was just—”

“No talking to the boy.”

In a short time the police came back and removed the handcuffs but they wouldn’t let Brian go. Instead they drove him home and he had the unpleasant experience of having police with him when his mother opened the door. She was thin, and dressed for work in her real-estate blazer.

“Brian? What…”

“There was a fight at Mackey’s Pizza. Your boy was beating up on another boy.”

“Brian? Is that true?”

Brian said nothing.

“Brian, is that true?” she repeated. “Were you fighting?”

He looked at his mother. He thought briefly of trying to tell her the truth: that it hadn’t been the Brian she knew but a different one, a totally different person; that it hadn’t been a fight but an automatic reaction. It hadn’t happened because it hadn’t been him—it had been some kind of animal. A boy animal. No, an animal-boy. I am animal-boy, he thought, and tried not to smile.

“It is most definitely
not
funny.”

He shook his head. “I know. I didn’t mean it’s funny. I don’t know exactly what happened . . .”

“Did you fight? Like the policeman says?”

He thought a moment. “I was . . . reacting. Protecting myself.”

“The boy was beaten senseless,” the policeman said. “He didn’t know his name.”

“He attacked me.”

“We were told several versions,” the policeman said to Brian’s mother. “Apparently they were fighting over a girl.”

“A girl?” She looked at Brian. “You have a girl?”

Brian shook his head. “No—it wasn’t that way at all. I was coming in the door and he slammed the door open and Susan was knocked down and he hit me and I . . .”

But they didn’t hear him. Even if they had listened they wouldn’t have heard him, not really. They would never understand him.

So he shrugged and played dumb and let them think what they wanted. It didn’t matter because he was starting to understand it now, was starting to see what had to happen, what he needed to do.

I know someone, a counselor,” the policeman said. “He’s a retired cop and works with boys. I’ll give you his name.” The policeman took out a notebook and wrote a name and number on a page, tore it out and gave it to Brian’s mother. “Here. Call him and he can talk to your boy . . .”

Animal-boy, thought Brian. Not boy, animal-boy. But he didn’t smile.

“. . . maybe he can straighten him out.”

Not unless he can see into my heart, Brian thought.

The sign was hung on the side of an office attached to a house.

CALEB
LANCASTER

Family Counseling

Please Come In

It wasn’t really an office as much as it was a room stuck on the corner of a two-car garage. It had probably been a workshop, Brian thought. He stopped at the door. This cop retired and is making money on the side by counseling boys in his old workshop. Great. Just great. He’ll tell me to get good grades, don’t fight, don’t do drugs, obey my parents—
and
the police—and send me on my way. After getting a check from Mom, which is really a check from the money I’ve saved, since Mom doesn’t have any money. Great.

He had talked to a counselor briefly the first year after he’d come back but there hadn’t really been anything wrong then. He hadn’t started to miss the woods as much as he would later—and football players hadn’t attacked him yet either, he thought, looking at the sign.

For a moment he played with the idea of turning and leaving. This was so stupid. There was nothing wrong with him. He had come back at somebody who was attacking him. He had come back a little hard, maybe, but just the same . . .

His hand turned the knob without his really meaning it to and the door opened.

“Hello. You must be Brian.”

Brian stopped just inside the door and his eyes moved and in two seconds he had taken in everything in the room. Plain white walls, some cheap pictures of woods and mountains that didn’t seem to match the rest of the space, a framed document of some kind. The desk was gray-green metal. There was one chair facing the front of the desk—an old iron office chair. Along one wall was a gray-green metal bookcase filled with books so heavy the shelves sagged. The floor was clean gray concrete.

It was maybe the ugliest room he had ever seen.

Behind the desk sat what Brian could only think of as a wall of a man. He wasn’t fat, just enormous and richly black, with a smile that grew wider as he stood and held out his hand. Brian almost moved back. This man had to be nearly seven feet tall. He literally almost filled the room.

“I’m Caleb.”

Brian took his hand and felt himself being moved toward the chair across from Caleb.

“Take a seat, any seat.” He laughed. “As long as it’s this one.”

Brian sat, waited.

“They tell me you’re the boy who lived in the woods. The one who was all over television a couple of years ago.”

Brian nodded.

“Is that right?”

Brian nodded again and realized with a start that Caleb was blind. “Yes . . .”

Caleb laughed, deep and booming. “You were nodding.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t know . . .”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s flattering that you took so long to see it.”

“Did it happen when you were a cop?”

Another laugh. “Not really. I got a headache one day, a really fierce one while I was working, and three days later I was blind.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. The doctors had some fancy names for what happened but I like to keep things simple. I had a headache. I went blind. That’s it. But we’re not supposed to talk about me. We’re supposed to talk about why you beat the hell out of that football player.”

Brian leaned back.

“If you want to.”

Brian took a breath.

“Or we could talk about something else.”

“I didn’t beat the hell out of him.”

“They took him to the hospital . . .”

“He attacked me.”

“Over a girl,” Caleb said.

“No. Or maybe. I don’t know. He just slammed out the door and hit me.”

“And you hit him back.”

Brian nodded, then remembered. “Yes.”

“Tell me about the woods.”

“Pardon?”

“The woods. Tell me about them. I’m a city boy and don’t know anything about woods. What are they like?”

“I . . .” Brian shrugged. “They’re all right.”

“All right? That’s all? After all you did that’s all you can say? I heard you had to eat bugs and almost died. What was it like—
really
like?”

Brian paused, remembering. A blade of grass that moved, the way a rabbit turned its head just before an arrow hit it, a flash of color when a fish rolled in the water.

“I don’t think you would understand. Nobody who hasn’t been there can really know . . .”

Caleb nodded and was silent. Then he spoke softly. “Tell me one thing then.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me one thing, one part of it that I can see in my mind and understand. You can do that, can’t you?”

Brian shrugged. “I guess so. Which part do you want to know about?”

“You pick it.”

Brian thought for nearly a full minute. Moose attacks, wild wind, good kills, near misses, food—lord,
food
when he was starving—and the fierce joy that came when a hunt worked. All of it was there, every little and big thing that had happened to him in a summer and a winter, and in the end, he decided to tell Caleb about a sunset.

There had been many sunsets and they were all beautiful; every one had had different light, different sounds, and he remembered them all the way somebody who watches a wonderful movie can remember every bit of the movie.

The one he described for Caleb was in the winter. It had been a still, unbelievably cold day when trees exploded and the sky was so brilliantly clear that when he looked into the blue it didn’t seem to have a limit, didn’t seem to end. It was late afternoon and he had eaten hot food inside his shelter and gone outside to get wood in for the night. The sun was below the tree line but there was still light and the sky was rapidly turning a deep cobalt blue and Brian could see a single bright star—or was it a planet? Venus, perhaps, near where the sun had disappeared.

Suddenly—and it was so quick he almost missed it—a spear of golden light shot from the sun and seemed to pierce the star. Like an arrow of gold light, one brilliant shaft there and gone, and while he watched, transfixed, another shaft came and then another. Three times. Three light-arrows from the sun shot through the star.

It made him believe, made him
know,
that there was something bigger than he was, something bigger than everybody, bigger than all. He thought it must mean something, had to mean something, but he could not think what. Three arrows of light. Three-Arrow. Maybe a name, maybe a direction. Later, after he came back and was trying to understand all that had happened, he read that early Inuits in the North saw the northern lights and believed them to be the souls of dead children dancing. Brian knew it was really the ionosphere ionizing but he still wanted it to be the souls of dead children playing, wanted it to mean more, and it was the same with this sunset.

It was so beautiful it took his breath and he stood, his arms full of wood, staring at the sky until the sun, the star and the light were gone, wanting it all to mean more.

He tried to tell Caleb everything about the sunset every color, every shade, the small sounds of the ice crack-singing on the lake, the hiss of the cold sky, the rustle of powder snow settling.

Told it all and when he was done he looked across the desk and saw that Caleb was crying.

“Did I say something wrong?”

Caleb wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. “No. I was just . . . moved . . . by how it must have looked. It sounds so incredibly beautiful . . .”

“It is. It’s . . . It’s everything. Just everything.”

“And you miss it.”

There it was, out in the open. The thought had been in Brian’s mind ever since the police had brought him home, and before that without his knowing it. Small at first, then bigger and bigger. And Caleb had seen it.

“Yes. More than anything. I miss . . . being there. I feel I should go back . . .”

“Is it running away or running to?”

Brian frowned, thinking. “It’s neither. It’s what I am now—for better or worse. It’s more that I just can’t be with people anymore.”

“You hate people?”

“No—not like that. I don’t hate them. I have friends and love some people. My mother and father. And I’ve tried to do things with people and go to school and be . . . normal. But I can’t—it just doesn’t work. I have been, I have seen too much. They talk about things that don’t interest me and when I talk about what I think about, what I see, they just glaze over.”

“Like the sunset . . .”

Brian nodded, then remembered again that Caleb couldn’t see. But he’d “seen” more of Brian than anybody else. “That and other things, many other things . . .”

“Can you tell me some of the other things?”

“Like the sunset?”

Caleb nodded. “If you wish. Whatever you want to tell me.”

Again Brian paused, thinking.

“If it’s too private . . .”

“No. It’s not that. It’s more that what I’ve seen is different from how people think things really are. Television makes them see things that aren’t real, that don’t exist. If I tell you how it
really
is you won’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

Brian sighed. “All right. Mice have houses and make towns under the snow in the winter.”

“Make towns?”