Calling Home (14 page)

But I could not take them. I don't know why. It was not fear of being discovered in the act of stealing. It was not compassion for my mother. I simply could not do it, the way a person on the high dive decides that he can't step off over all that glittering water. I turned off the light after locking the case and replacing the jar of Vaseline.

I turned on the television and watched one of those handsome men with perfect hair describe the usual train of rotten things that happen to people. I was afraid to watch anymore, so I put my finger on the little metal plunger and pushed it. As soon as it was off, my mother was at the door, staggering with two bags of groceries.

I took both of them from her, and set them on the kitchen table. She did not speak, and went at once into her bedroom to change clothes. I listened for any sound of a discovery that something was wrong, but there was nothing, only the bustle of my mother.

24

It wasn't coming.

Ted's breath steamed in the fog, and he shoved his hands into his coat to protect them from the cold. The freeway hammered and hissed behind us, and the ground was uneven with decomposing cans and frayed tires. Gray grass whispered at our shoes.

“Anytime,” he said, talking to me, to the fog, to the railway and the gravel.

We had been there for an hour and a half. It was obvious to both of us that it wasn't coming.

“I had no idea,” he said, “that it would be so cold.”

I felt embarrassed for him, and said that the cold was fine with me. This had been his idea.

“It's worth a wait,” he said.

Then, to give both of us something to do, he dug into his pocket and brought out a penny.

“What do you think?” he said. “I'll put it on the track.” He put the coin on the shiny lance of the rail. “Most of the time when you do this, the train just knocks it off and you never find it again.”

When he set the penny on the rail, it made the slightest sound, a faint
ping
.

He had invited me the day before. Old Jefferson, a locomotive built in 1894, was making its last trip. It was heading down from Los Angeles to a rail museum in Portland. “Wife wouldn't come along for all the world,” he had said.

We stirred our feet to keep warm along the rust-stained gravel. I kicked a knot of driftwood, and a bird with long, thin wings squeaked away from me. The wet air smelled of sulphur and car exhaust.

A gust shook us, and the sun appeared on the horizon, a white aspirin that dissolved as we watched. Ted sighed, and looked at the gray weeds at his feet. He shook his head.

I flicked a squashed beer can with my foot, trying to flick away Ted's disappointment. “I don't mind,” I said. “We can wait all night.”

He shrank a little. He didn't want to speak. At last he said, “Boiler split, maybe. Anything could have happened.”

The two rails probed south, eaten away by the fog like steel in acid. A new, darker bank of fog took us, and the rails shortened even more as the weeds shivered.

He shrugged. “Well—” he began.

No, don't say it, I thought. Don't give up. We have to stay, I shouted in my mind. We have to wait until it comes.

He cleared his throat. “We ought to head on back,” he said.

We didn't move. We stood there, bent into the breeze that blew the fog through our hair, through our jackets, into our bodies. We leaned into the wind.

And the fog changed. It began to rise, to lift upward into the sky, so that the rails grew longer, and the gravel darkened. The fog lifted and then it began to vibrate. The individual droplets trembled as they suspended before us, and neither of us spoke.

The ground shook. My insides trembled.

It was upon us with a blast of heat and hot sparks. It hammered the air ahead of it with heavy, lung-shaking blows. The hugeness of it thundered and twisted the world for a second. I was waving, despite myself, and an arm hailed us, waving from high above.

And then it was gone. A short train with a fluttering flag. Then, the empty fog. Coal flakes continued to sprinkle us for a few moments, a fine rain of black sand.

“It came!” I cried. Everything was silent now, except for the rattle of the freeway, a cheap noise that was a kind of silence. Ted climbed the gravel bed slowly, and bent to touch the rail. He laughed.

The rail was alive as I touched it, vibrant, and I saw how suddenly a train could kill a person.

“Look,” said Ted. He held open his hand. The penny was there, gold-bright, smeared out of shape like a pat of butter.

25

The day was warm, with a yellow sky. It was Saturday, a day I had, at one time, always enjoyed. I didn't like weekends anymore. At school there were distractions. On weekends, there was nothing but drinking Cream Sherry or Tawny Port in my bedroom, until I could not remember anymore.

It was morning. My mother must have enjoyed her date the night before. She sprinkled Wheaties all over the counter, and hummed a tune she seemed to be making up as she went along.

The phone shrilled. It had a high, squeaking cry, not unlike my mother's voice when she sang. My mother snatched the phone eagerly, but her voice fell. “It's for you,” she said.

She had just bought the bone-white telephone, a cordless model that was always lost under newspapers. It was sticky from her grip, a smudge of blackberry jam that I got on my own hand, and licked clean. I think my mother thought that if she got a new telephone, new men would call her.

It was Lani. “We have to do something to help them.”

“Who?”

“Mead's parents want to talk to you.”

“Why do they want to talk to me?” I was hung over, and my brain was slow.

“I don't know. But you really should go see them. They look so lonely. I went by to see them again, just to cheer them up, and Mr. Litton said he wanted to see you.”

“I don't know what I can do.”

“Maybe you'll remind them of Mead. Just seeing someone who knows him. I'll go with you.”

“It might depress them to see someone who reminds them of Mead. I mean, I have too much regard for their feelings to just barge in.”

Lani had no tolerance for lies, half-lies, or any sort of dissembling. “Why don't you want to go? You sound afraid.”

“I don't mind going.”

“You sound pretty reluctant to me.”

“Sometimes a person can sound one way, and actually feel quite the opposite. There's no way you can tell what's going on in a person's mind.”

Their house looked smaller, grayer. There was a rolled-up newspaper on the front porch. There were brown leaves in a corner of the porch, and the chair Mead's dad used to sit in was gone. I turned to see the view, the palm tree which had dropped its fronds like giant feathers, the apartment building across the street. They were getting ready to paint it, and the cracks had been slathered with spackle like lightning turned to plaster.

The house was dark and warm. Mead's dad stood carefully. He shook my hand, and made an effort to have a strong handshake. His face was creased, and his hair uncombed. Mead's mother seemed happier to see Lani, but then Lani and I were left alone with Mr. Litton. He groped for his cane and held it on his lap. Newspapers were scattered everywhere at his feet.

“It was kind of you to visit,” he said.

“Peter and I have been talking about Mead,” said Lani.

“I'm not surprised. I think about Mead with every breath. In fact, there's a reason why I wanted to see you, Peter. A very special reason.”

I found it hard to breathe.

“There's been something I've wanted to do for days now. It's very simple: I want to ask you a question. Just one question, and I want you to be honest. Can you do that for me?”

I cleared my throat. “Sure.”

“Do you know where he is?”

The abruptness of the question, which I had been anticipating in the back of my mind, made me blink. I started to speak, but he held up his hand.

“I don't want an automatic ‘No.' I think—I don't know for certain—I think that you've been in touch with Mead. This is only a guess. But I think you not only know where Mead is, but that you're covering for him.”

I shivered, a quick shudder that looked like a denial.

“Let me finish. Mead has been calling here for the last few weeks. My wife always answers the phone. I'm a little slow on the draw.” Even now he managed a smile. “I won't be on anyone's track team. But she's been talking to Mead on these calls, and we bought an attachment for a tape recorder I have. It's a gizmo like a suction cap, like the end of a rubber dart. It has a wire on it, and it attaches to the back of the receiver and records the caller. Sort of a telephone tap, except not secret. At least, not to the person who uses it. We got one of the calls—the last one—on tape.”

He paused, as though for effect, but then ran his fingers through his hair. I realized that talking wearied him. “I've been listening to it. I get up in the middle of the night and listen to it. I've written down what the tape says, and I've come to a conclusion about the phone calls.”

Mead's mother had reentered the room, and she sat in a chair across the room, listening, watching.

“I've come to the conclusion, gradually, that the voice on the telephone is not Mead. It sounds a lot like Mead. So very strange—a voice almost exactly Mead. But not Mead. Not quite.”

He fumbled in his shirt pocket, and took out a cassette tape. I was paralyzed. Of all the things in the world I did not want, I certainly did not want to hear this recording.

The tape clicked into the player. Mead's father stabbed a button.

The voice was tinny, distorted by the cheap equipment. “Mother, I don't want you to worry.”

“I am worried, Mead. I can't help it.” Her voice was too loud, vibrating the speaker of the recorder and the lamp beside it.

“Stop it. I'm all right.”

At last, the call ended. There was a click, then several clicks, and a dial tone. Mead's father switched off the recorder. He studied the recorder for a moment, then turned to ask his wife if she was all right.

“Yes,” she said, barely audibly.

Mead's father studied his cane. He examined the grain of the wood, and then he looked hard at me. “Do you know what I think?”

“No,” I said, amazed that I could say anything at all.

“I think that the voice on the tape is you. I think Mead asked you—I don't know why—to pretend to be him. I think Mead is gone. I think he may be far away, and that he doesn't want us to worry.”

He waited, but I said nothing.

“We haven't called Inspector Ng. They could do a voice print. I don't know much about such things. Who wants to know about detectives, and voice prints? I'm happy I've never had to deal with them before now. And, frankly, I'm puzzled. I've always liked you, Peter. I thought you were a good influence on Mead. Mead is so fast. You're slow, and careful. Serious. And, I've always thought, caring. I was glad to see you and Mead together. So I want you to think. I don't want you to answer now. Not this morning. Maybe not today. Maybe you promised Mead you'll keep his location secret. A promise is a promise. I respect that.”

“Tell us, Peter,” said Mead's mother. “Tell us where he is, if you know.” She wept, and my insides writhed.

“Take your time, Peter,” said Mead's dad. “Think about us, and our feelings. And think about Mead. Is his plan—your plan—so wise?”

He smiled, looking very weary and weak, and yet tough, too. Able to endure. “Of course, we might be wrong. We may be mistaken, entirely. It might be Mead's voice. You might know nothing.”

I shook his hand, and he climbed to his feet. The cane rustled on the newspapers, then tapped the hardwood floor, a dull thump of rubber on wood.

“Think about it,” he said. He looked withered in the daylight, and I told him that I would think. “But I don't know anything,” I said.

He made his tired smile, my lie discarded like a piece of trash.

Lani and I walked together without speaking. We reached Dimond Park, and the grass hissed under our feet.

“It sounded like Mead,” said Lani. “Exactly like him. The recording wasn't very good, though.” She sighed. “I feel so sorry for them. They must feel awful. We should have taken them some flowers or some candy or something.”

I was trembling, and icy. My arms glistened with sweat. Something terrible was about to happen to me. I could feel it in the tears that streamed down my face.

“Peter?” she asked softly. She touched my arm. “Are you all right?”

We reached the dry creek. We walked without speaking up the dry bed where Mead and I had broken bottles with his slingshot. The dust was a tangle of footprints, bicycle tracks, and motorcycle scars.

“This is where Mead killed the jay,” I said. I knelt in the place where the jay had fallen, and touched the empty dirt.

“Peter,” Lani said. “What is it?”

“Lani, it's so terrible. You'll never believe how terrible it is.”

“Nothing can be that bad, Peter. What is it?”

She touched my arm, and I could feel her strength, and her trust in me, and in life.

I was worthless.

And I was sick.

An empty place opened in my vision. The black spidered outward, like plastic touched with a match. I was hot, and I dragged in breath and pushed it out again.

“Peter, it's all right,” said Lani's voice from far away.

I was Mead. I looked at my hands and they were Mead's hands. I spoke, and it was Mead speaking.

I was glad to be alive. I felt Mead's smile on my face, and Mead's quickness in my arms and legs as I crouched, ready to jump into the air. I could do anything, avoid any mugger, play any game, because I was Mead, and Mead could do anything, like a human being made of light.

“Lani!” I said.

Just one word, in Mead's voice. I did not will it, and I could not have stopped it. “Lani!” Happy to be with Lani, because I had not seen Lani for so long.