Empire Falls (74 page)

“Not that you cared if I felt bad or not,” he added.

“Do me a favor, Jimmy?” Miles asked when he eased the Camaro out onto Empire Avenue.

“Sure.” He seemed anxious to demonstrate that despite being habitually and cruelly misused, he wasn’t the sort of man to withhold a favor if asked nicely.

“Ask my brother to make sure Tick gets down to Boston on Sunday.”

His promise to his daughter was the thing he’d forgotten, the thing that, had he remembered it, might have kept him from heading down this very wrong road. He remembered thinking a few minutes earlier that there’d be plenty of time for regret later. How quickly “later” had arrived.

CHAPTER 30

T
HE
B
LUE TABLE
has the blues. Is it even remotely possible, Tick wonders, that this is somehow due to the continued absence of John Voss, who’d been more absent than present back when he was still sitting there? Even Candace, who usually could be counted on to talk from one bell to the next, is quiet today. What Tick’s trying to fathom is not the girl’s silence, which she understands, but how things work: more specifically whether they happen fast or slow. She knows from recent experience that the whole world can change in what feels like an instant, but she suspects that the swiftness is really just an illusion.

Take Candace, for instance. Did they become friends yesterday, or has their friendship been growing since September? Clearly it’s caught both of them off guard. The expression on Candace’s face yesterday afternoon, a mixture of gratitude and disbelief, was vivid testimony to how surprised she was to see a swollen-eyed Tick on her doorstep. For the last month she’d been suggesting that Tick stop by some afternoon after school so they could take a walk along the river, but her offhanded manner implied that she didn’t really expect this to happen.

Tick had no trouble finding where Candace lived with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend of the moment—a three-story building on Front Street. Front ran parallel to the river, below the falls, the worst neighborhood of Empire Falls, settled by the poorest of the French Canadian immigrants back when it was a company town. Houses had been built only on the north side of the street, and for good reason. In the glory days of Empire Textile, the solvents and dyes used on the fabrics were dumped directly into the river, staining the banks below the falls red and green and yellow, according to day of the week and size of the batch. The sloping banks contained rings, like those in a tree trunk, except these were in rainbow colors; they recorded not years but the rise and fall of the river. Even now, fifty years later, only the hardiest weeds and scrub trees grew south of the pavement on Front Street, and when the brush was periodically cleared, surprising patches of fading chartreuse and magenta were revealed.

The apartment was on the second floor, its entryway at the top of a rickety exterior staircase. The woman who answered Tick’s knock was big and braless and dirty-haired, and didn’t look old enough to have a sixteen-year-old daughter. When she pulled the door open, Tick felt a blast of unhealthy heat and saw a man who looked about her father’s age, wearing a fishnet tank top and seated at a dinette, concentrating grimly on the flyer from the Fairhaven Wal-Mart. “Hey, Moron!” the woman called over her shoulder, without bothering to say hello to Tick, “Candy! You got company!” Then she walked away from the open door, leaving Tick to either come in or not, as suited her. To remain outside suited her best. The sight of this awful woman had the effect of putting Tick’s recent argument with her own mother into a whole different perspective.

When Candace saw her from the kitchen doorway, her face lit up and then darkened with perplexed embarrassment at the presence of a girl like Christina Roby in their shabby neighborhood. The last time she’d been this surprised was back in September, when the same girl took up residence in art class with herself and the other Boners.

“Hi?” she offered, apologetically.

“Could we maybe take that walk?” Tick said.

“Sure.” Candace’s face quickly brightened again, as if at the opportunity of a lifetime.

“A
NYWAY,”
C
ANDACE SAID
after they’d climbed down the bank, “I’m in love with Justin now.”

At the end of a dry October, the river was running low and they were able to leap from rock to rock pretty far out into the current. From shore it had seemed like they might be able to hopscotch all the way to the opposite bank, but Tick now saw that the farther out into the river they got, the farther apart the rocks actually were. The wind was also more bitter away from the sheltered bank, so they changed direction and headed downstream toward the bend. There the indented shoreline would provide a windbreak.

“Justin,” Tick repeated when they found a couple big rocks to rest on. She couldn’t help smiling at the idea of Candace and Justin Dibble, who’d spent most of the term tormenting her by describing the monster crush he claimed John Voss had on her. She also suspected that Candace didn’t realize that by flitting, emotionally if not physically, from boy to boy, she was imitating her mother.

“He really loves me,” she explained, as if the boy’s feelings for her were the deciding factor, as opposed to her feelings for him.

“What about Zack?”

“There’ll probably be a fight when he gets out of the hospital,” Candace admitted fatalistically.

Strange, but fights over Candace appeared to be backing up. Earlier in the week, Bobby, the girl’s former boyfriend from Fairhaven, who Candace claimed had been in jail, showed up at the high school, just off school grounds, looking for Zack Minty, whom he didn’t know by sight, unaware that the boy whose ass he’d come to kick had been admitted to the hospital that morning with an infected gash on his shin. For some reason he’d waited a long time to have the injury looked at, claiming he didn’t even remember how he’d got it but speculating it must have happened at football practice. It hadn’t looked like a football injury to the emergency room physician, who immediately put him on antibiotics. For a long time Zack’s fever had refused to come down, and yesterday the doctors still wanted to keep him under observation, though they’d promised both him and his father that unless his fever spiked again, they’d release him on Friday and wouldn’t stand between him and playing on Saturday, the last home game of the season.

“Do you think Justin would win?” Candace wondered idly, as if this were a conundrum, on the magnitude of Superman versus the Incredible Hulk.

“Against Zack or Bobby?” Tick asked, though it made no difference, since Justin stood no chance against either.

“Zack,” Candace clarified. “I don’t think Bobby’d fight Justin. He just wanted to get it on with Zack because he heard Zack’s tough.”

Even sheltered from the worst of the wind, it was still cold—and getting dark too, though it wasn’t yet four o’clock. Still, coming here had been a good idea. Tick could feel her spirits gradually picking up. Her shoulder still hurt from being dragged by her backpack, but what happened had frightened more than injured her. And, as was often the case, talking to Candace buoyed her spirits, though she did wonder if the mere fact that somebody was worse off than you was a proper basis for friendship. Both girls were silent for a while, listening to the water slide by at their feet.

“When you and Zack were together,” Candace finally said, “did you ever play the gun game?”

Tick studied Candace’s expression and saw the fear in her eyes. “Once,” she admitted.

“He said you used to play it all the time. He was trying to get me to.”

Zack called it “Polish Roulette,” which was supposed to be a joke. He’d broken one of his father’s revolvers open and shown Tick there were no bullets in the cylinder. Then you were supposed to put the barrel of the gun against your head and pull the trigger. The idea, as he explained it to Tick, was to see how rational you were. If you knew by the evidence of your own senses that the gun wasn’t loaded, then you had nothing to fear. Except it was still a gun and your mind couldn’t forget that. “It’s a rush, though,” he admitted, grinning at her, “ ’cause, like, what if you were wrong and there was one bullet in there you missed?”

“Don’t you hate it when you find out people are lying to you?” Candace said, apparently referring to Zack’s claim that he and Tick had played the game all the time.

“Candace,” Tick said, “promise me you’ll never do it?”

“Okay.” She shrugged, her fear apparently evaporating the instant she shared the story with her friend.

“No, I mean it,” Tick said. “Promise me right now, or we’re not friends anymore.”

“Okay, okay,” Candace said, more seriously now. Then: “We’re friends? I can tell people we’re friends?”

“Sure. Why not?” Seeing how badly Candace wanted that made Tick wonder whether it would have made a difference if she’d told John Voss the same thing. What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

It was nearly dark now, and when they started back toward the riverbank a movement on the shore attracted their attention. About fifty yards upstream, right where the river began to bend toward Empire Falls, stood a group of men in suits, huddled and shivering but attentive. They seemed to be listening to a woman Tick recognized as Mrs. Whiting, who owned the Empire Grill and, according to her father, most everything else in town. Just barely visible through the bare autumn trees, a white limousine idled on the roadway, and it was this that had caught Candace’s eye. “Wow,” she sighed. “How’d you like to ride in one of those someday?”

What Tick noticed, however, was that the woman had noticed
them
as well. And even though she and Candace were standing close together on a big rock, somehow she was certain that Mrs. Whiting was smiling not at Candace but at her.

S
LOW
, T
ICK DECIDES
. Things happen slow. She isn’t quite sure why this understanding of the world’s movement should be important, but she thinks it is. It could even be the reason that guy Bill Taylor isn’t a very good painter. His art happens fast, and he’s always talking about how swiftly light changes, about how important it is to “attack” your painting, to get a record of what you’re seeing, because you’ll never see that exact thing again. Tick understands what he means, but can’t help feeling that the opposite is equally true.

Take her parents. At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in dissatisfaction and need—in their personalities, really. Maybe the whole thing had come on
Tick
suddenly, but in reality her mother’s slow march from eye contact to flirtation to infidelity to divorce to remarriage was a Stairmaster journey whose culmination was probably the beginning of another climb that would prove just as slow and inexorable.

And that’s the thing, she concludes. Just because things happen slow doesn’t mean you’ll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you’d be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. “Slow” works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there’s plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you’ll always be slower.

The art room has a long bank of windows facing the rear of the school and a huge parking lot that’s never filled except during boys’ basketball games. This afternoon only the first four or five rows of parking spaces are occupied, and from her seat at the Blue table Tick can see straight down a corridor between the third and fourth rows of cars, which means that eight or ten drivers have actually respected the yellow lines painted on the blacktop. Beyond the lot is a gentle, sloping bank and the oval cinder track her father once told her a funny story about. Beyond that, open field runs to a line of trees where the wetlands begin. Here Tick spots an almost imperceptible movement off in the distance between the rows of cars. What it looks like is a small ball bobbing in a gentle breeze on a placid lake, except there’s no water where she’s looking.