Going Where It's Dark (8 page)

They were soon joined by a grandmotherly-looking woman whose blond hair didn't quite match her face.

“You know that man in the corner?” Holly asked.

“How do I know if I can't see him?” Pearl answered.

Buck had to drop his chin down to his chest and hold his shoulders rigid against the laughter swelling up inside him.

Pearl came out from around the counter and joined Buck's mom at the corner booth. The two women stood looking down on Mel, and then Pearl reached out and lightly shook his shoulder. “Excuse me,” she said loudly, “but the kitchen's about to close. Won't be serving dinner for an hour. You want anything, you best tell us now.”

Mel only grunted and Charlie rapped his spatula against the grill to disguise a chuckle. Buck wondered if Mel's watch wouldn't give him away, but perhaps the sleeve of the old Windbreaker kept it hidden.

Mrs. Anderson turned toward Charlie. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked.

“Tell him he can't sleep here, to move on,” Charlie told her, deadpan.

Holly, watching from the kitchen doorway, agreed. “Not good for business, folks walk in, see that.”

“You think we ought to pour some water on his head?” Pearl suggested.

And suddenly the rumpled jacket moved, the cap rose up, and two hands reached out, one to grab Doris Anderson's arm, the other, Pearl's.

The women screamed and stepped backward, and then the cap fell off.

“Mel!” Buck's mother cried, hitting at him, and she and Pearl both whacked him over the head with the menus while he roared with laughter, and Buck and Charlie joined in. Holly, trying to hide a smile, turned away with a shake of her head.

“You
tramp,
you!” Mom said, laughing too now. “Where'd you get that dirty old cap and jacket?”

“I keep 'em in the truck, case I have to change a tire in bad weather,” Mel said, wiping his eyes, and guffawed some more.

“Well, I was about to call an exterminator to get rid of you,” Holly told him. “But now that you're here, I suppose you'd like some coffee.”

“If you please, ma'am,” Mel said, making her smile. “I'll have that last piece of coconut cake too, and I'm paying.”

Mom brought over the cake, the coffeepot, and some cups and sat down across from Mel. Buck took his bread pudding and joined them.

“I don't know how I tolerated a brother like you!” Mom said, reaching up to tuck a loose lock of hair under her small pleated cap. “Like to give me a heart attack, grabbing at us that way.”

“Good for your reflexes,” Mel said. “Keep you looking young.”

“Why didn't you call and let us know you'd be home for dinner? I don't have a single thing on my mind to cook tonight. Figured I might buy something here to take with me.”

“Don't you worry. Buck and I are going to pick up some ribs on the way back. We'll even have the table set. All you'll have to do when you get home is sit down.”

“Now, that's the best news I've heard all day,” said Mom. Then she looked at Buck and back to Mel again.“You guys!”

He was heading downstairs in his stockinged feet that evening when he heard Katie talking about him to Mom in the kitchen. Buck paused in the hallway, one shoulder against the wall.

“He just acts so strange sometimes, Mom. My friend Colby looked at me and said, ‘What'd I
do
?' I had to explain it's because he stutters. Buck didn't even say hi. How can I introduce him to people if he acts so weird?”

His mom murmured something—Buck couldn't make it out—and then he heard her say, “I don't know, Katie. I really don't.” She sounded tired.

Katie went on: “It didn't use to bother me, but…but I see how it's going to hold him back. What will happen to him when he gets to high school? Kids tease him on the bus—I hear it every day. I can't go around apologizing for him forever.”

“Buck's going to see the therapist at school in September.”

“Yeah? He's been through that before. I
worry
for him, Mom. What kind of job is he going to get when he's grown up if he can't talk to anyone?”

“Now don't say he can't. You've heard him talk as good as anybody.”

“But not when he really needs to!” There was exasperation in Katie's voice. Buck rarely heard it when she was talking with him, but he heard it now. “I want to help him, but I just don't know how.”

“I don't know either, Katie. I don't know the answer to any of it,” his mom replied wearily. “Each and every one of us will have a cross to bear before this life is over. Looks like Buck just got his a little early.”

Buck turned and went back upstairs as softly as he had come. But when he sat down on the edge of his bed, he wheeled about suddenly and pounded the pillow. Again and again and again.

T
hursday after school, Buck rode out to check on the Hole. He couldn't keep away any longer. He told himself that all he wanted to do was make sure he could still find it.

Mel was sound asleep on the sofa, glad for some time off before his next run, and Katie had gotten off the bus a few stops earlier with one of her friends. Buck could get to the old Wilmer place and be home again well before dinner.

He left his backpack by the stairs so everyone would know he'd been there, and climbed on his bike.

Early June was a nice time in the valley, with the Blue Ridge Mountains beyond your backyard. Not yet too humid, the way it got in D.C., not as hot as North Carolina. The birds were going crazy, challenging each other's territory, and the air was sweet with their songs and the scent of honeysuckle.

As he neared the place, Buck had a momentary wave of panic because there were several fences that reached as far down as the road. Did he really remember which one he had followed before? But then he saw the edge of the woods coming closer and, more sure of himself now, he wheeled his bike off the shoulder, down into the gulley and up again, and left it beneath a gooseberry bush along the barbed wire fence that sagged in places and was completely down in others.

He tramped through the weeds, avoiding the nettles that sprang up here and there, and as he came close to the trees, he began counting the heaps of rock that spilled out into the pasture—the first, then the second, watching for the place where the ground dipped next to the tree line, the little heap of fox or dog bones. Yes, there they were, and his heart pounded with excitement when—there it was—just as before, the Hole, almost invisible.

Buck crouched on the rocks, feeling the cold draft coming up out of the earth, and pulled back the grass that hung heavy and wet over the entrance. Yes, the sides of the Hole inside were wet and sticky, and he knew that if he were to climb in there in the next few days, he would be covered with mud.

Now there was still another factor to consider. Not only would he need more equipment to go exploring again, not only did he need a full day, with everyone in the family gone so they wouldn't miss him, but it had to be a time the earth had a chance to dry out a little. An unexpected rain could ruin everything, no matter how well he planned the rest.

The important thing, though—it was still here. Still his. Once again he found himself smiling. Then he stood up and retraced his steps, back along the tree line to the road.

He was just wheeling his bike up out of the ditch when a car came around the curve ahead of him, and he stood there waiting till it passed.

There were two people in the front seat, and as it sped by, Buck saw that it was Ethan Holt and his dad. Ethan's face had a look of surprise as they passed, and then the car was gone.

Here it was: last day of seventh grade. And the worst.

In civics, Miss Gordon had a game. She was a young teacher in her second year, and near the end of class, she smiled as she handed a sheet of paper to each person in the front seats. Few teachers expected any serious learning to take place the day before summer vacation began, and often had something fun to do.

“There are six quotations on each sheet, and each sheet is different,” she explained. “These are famous quotations on all sorts of subjects. Each person in the front seats will read their first quotation aloud and see who in the class can guess who said it. Then you'll pass the papers to the person behind you, and they'll do the same. We'll see how many we can guess before class is over.”

Buck, in the third seat from the front, wished with all his heart that he had taken the back row when he came in. Instead, he had followed Nat, taking a seat just behind him, and now he mentally calculated how long it would take before the sheet in their row got back to him. Each class was forty minutes long. Five rows, with four people per row…

He and Nat had eaten lunch together again today, and if Nat remembered his recent weirdness, he didn't show it. Now, Buck thought, if he could just get through this class without a major blockage…

“ ‘Four score and seven years ago…' ” came the first quotation, and almost everyone got it right: Lincoln.

“ ‘One small step for man, one giant step for mankind,' ” read the first person in the next row. Most of the class seemed to know it was said by the first astronaut who stepped on the moon, but only a few remembered that it was Neil Armstrong.

The quotes continued until the last person in the first row of seats had read his, and then all the sheets were passed to those behind them. Buck looked at the clock. This was going faster than he'd thought. He could feel perspiration trickling down his back.

For a long time the class was stumped on “ ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.' ” A debate broke out, and Buck watched the minute hand moving around and around.

“Well, let's move on, class,” Miss Gordon said. “But I'm surprised you didn't know that was President John F. Kennedy.”

“ ‘Give me liberty or give me death,' ” read the next girl, and several voices answered at once: “Patrick Henry!”

Buck's heart began to pound. There was a quote by Julius Caesar that no one guessed, and it was six minutes before the bell. Two more students, and the papers would be passed along to the third row. Four minutes…Three minutes…Two…

Then the sheet of paper came gliding over Nat's shoulder and sailed onto the floor. Buck swallowed as he leaned down to pick it up in slow motion.

When he righted himself, his eyes traveled down the paper and settled on the next quote in the line. He felt his throat going tight:
To be or not to be; that is the question.

Almost every single word began with a problem letter for Buck, a letter demanding explosive kinds of sounds:
T
s and
B
s were the worst—sharp sounds that even hurt his tongue to look at them, that stuck in his throat where they wouldn't come out. Choose another quote, he told himself, and he scanned the page. No, the next one began with a
D
….

“Buck?” the teacher said.

He looked at the clock and down again. One minute left. One minute of absolute torture and humiliation. People were beginning to look his way.

“T…t…t…t…,” Buck began. The
T
was trying to get through, but his jaws were so rigid they even held his tongue prisoner.

He was running out of breath. He stopped, his shoulders sagging, took a monstrous breath, and tried again: “T…t…t…”

Someone giggled.

“Take your time,” Miss Gordon said.

“He is!” someone said, and a few of the kids laughed.

“T…to b…b…be…be,” Buck said, gasping, and when he finally got to the last part of the quote, the part he could probably say, the bell rang.

Nobody stayed around to hear how perfectly he read the rest. And before Miss Gordon, with her sympathetic eyes, could make her way back to him, before even Nat could say anything, Buck scooped up his books with one hand, backpack with the other, and half walked, half galloped out the door.

On the bus, he sat four rows up from Pete Ketterman and his gang at the back. He positioned himself so that his body took up the whole seat, and neither Katie nor anyone else made a move to sit with him. He was glad, in fact, that Nat rode a different bus because he wouldn't have wanted to share the seat, even with him.

Buck wished more than ever that he was in the Hole right now, surrounded on all sides with rock and roots and earth, neither seen nor heard by anyone.

“Hey, Buck-o!” came Ethan Holt's voice over the rattle and chatter. “What were you doing out on old Bluestone Road?”

Buck almost stopped breathing. He refused to turn around.

“He was clear out there?” Rob asked.

“Yeah. Pushing his bike up out of the ditch. You ride off the road, Buck-o?”

“What do you
think
he was doing?” said Pete. “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

The four boys laughed, and a few girls ducked their heads and giggled too.

Except for the embarrassment, Buck was almost glad that this was what they thought. Just a brief pit stop down in the weeds.

“Hey, Buck-o, it's the last day of school,” Pete called out. “Come September, Ethan and Isaac and me won't be on the bus anymore. Aren't you gonna miss us?”

That was
one
thing to be grateful for, Buck thought, except that Rob would still be here.

They tired of their heckling after a while, however, and talked about which bus they'd be catching in September, how early they'd have to get up to catch it. But it made Buck think about all the tricks they'd played on him the last two years—the embarrassment of knowing his face was Christmas red, that everyone was looking at him, whispering about him, and Pete Ketterman didn't care. Pukeman Ketterman just loved to watch him squirm. Boy, was Pukeman ever going to get it when Buck got home.

It was Isaac's stop, but Pete and Rob and Ethan usually got off with him. They always had something going, the four of them—they were just like Buck and David used to be—close.

As they passed Buck's seat, one of them whomped him on the head, and Pete said, “What
were
you doing down in the weeds, Buck-o? Wet your pants?”

“Shut up, Puke Face,” Buck muttered, and felt his jaw freeze.
Had he said that?

Pete came to a dead stop, Ethan bumping into him from behind.

“What's that? What's that?” Pete asked, leaning down, his face only inches from Buck's.

Buck didn't answer.

“You hear what he called me?” Pete said, turning to the others in mock horror. “The weirdo called me Puke Face. What d'you think we ought to do with him?”

“C'mon, fellas. Out! Out!” the driver yelled. “The rest of these kids want to get home too!”

Issac sent Buck's cap sailing toward the back window, and the four boys tumbled off the bus, laughing. Outside, however, Pete thumped hard on the window next to Buck, and he was only half grinning.

“Oh, Buck-o!” Isaac shouted. “You're in for it now!”

Now there was another thing to be careful about: not letting any of Pete's gang see him out on Bluestone Road again. Surely they'd be more than curious. If
they
found the Hole before he could explore it…That was the worst nightmare of all.

Buck was waiting for the day his dad and Joel would be out cutting down trees again, Gramps in charge of the sawmill; when Uncle Mel would be on another run, and Mom at work, Katie wherever…Maybe in the next week or two, if he was lucky.

On Saturday, his first day of vacation, he took the hoe to both the bean patch and the carrots, then lay on his bed, propped up on one elbow, and began a new Pukeman comic strip. “Pukeman Makes Spaghetti,” he titled it in heavy black pencil.

In the first square, Pukeman was wearing a chef's apron and mixing the dough.

In the second square, he dropped the dough in the funnel of a big machine.

In the third square, with nothing coming out the other end, Pukeman stuck his head in the funnel to see what was wrong.

In the fourth square, his two feet were waving in the air as he was sucked down into the funnel, and in the final square, he was coming out the trough at the other end in ribbons, his body divided into noodles.

It was satisfying to draw, and now and then Buck found himself chuckling out loud. But in the end, it really didn't change anything, did it? Pete Ketterman was Pete Ketterman, no matter what happened to him on paper.

Mom had the day off. She came in Buck's room and sat on the edge of his bed, one hand resting on the green quilt, the other on her knee. Buck pretended to keep on drawing even though he'd finished the cartoon. He was glad she couldn't see it. He didn't want any questions.