No Book but the World: A Novel (27 page)

He would wander outdoors then, into the world in which he’d always felt at home, with its indifferent warmth and its equally indifferent harshness, its ceaseless, ceaselessly amazing changes. It didn’t care whether it disappointed or delighted you. It didn’t care whether it held or harmed you. Neither did it care if you stroked it or pounded it, gouged it with your fingers, broke off bits of it and flung them as hard as you could. Everything was part of the world, him included. He never didn’t fit when he was outdoors, never didn’t belong. There was always somewhere to go in the world, always something to do, if only walk, if only rest with his back against a tree. If only lie with his ear pressed to the earth and listen to the faint sounds inside it: insects crawling, roots extending, subterranean moisture dripping. How could he ever be lonely in this world? How could he ever be bored?

But that summer in the Magdalens, on the island of Havre-Aubert, during those hours of the afternoon designated for reading, he did feel lonely and he did feel bored. It was the first time he’d ever truly known either of those states, and it was a result of his having experienced something else for the first time: a friend. Sometimes by the time Thor put aside his book and came outdoors, Fred was so eager to see him he’d pick him up around the middle and spin him around.

In the rented chalet, Fred and Thor shared a bedroom with a bunk bed, Fred on the bottom and Thor on top. They didn’t talk in bed, not because they weren’t allowed but because neither of them was a conversationalist. But sometimes they’d rap messages to each other with their knuckles through the bedpost. Thor tried teaching Fred Morse code, but it made Fred’s forehead hurt to practice it (the effort of trying to bind rhythms to meaning when all they wanted to do was shimmy free), so they sent nonsense messages to each other instead:

dit da da dit dit

da dit da dit da dit dit dit dit

Whole conversations they’d have this way, and Fred profited more from these nighttime knockings than from any spoken conversation he’d ever had. They contained their own private jokes, long spells of syncopated intensity, and confessions of nameless melancholy that echoed long after Thor had fallen asleep. Lying there in the narrow bedroom with the moon slopping its light through the window and Thor’s breath falling gentle as snowflakes down over him, Fred knew for the first time the gladness of sharing wordless agreement with a kindred spirit.

Never would he have wished what happened the fourth week of their stay, or maybe the fifth—at any rate the last, because they’d had to leave almost right away then, ahead of schedule, so that Thor could see a specialist back in Boston where the Thors lived. Never would he have allowed to happen what Mrs. Thor thought was all his fault (never mind that she did not say this aloud; it was there in her voice, in the terse control with which she addressed him after that).

He had come, Fred, over the wind-scrubbed hill with its sweeping silvery grasses and down the footpath to the back door of the chalet with Thor in his arms; Thor with his own arms still behind his back, bound at the wrists; Thor white with pain (strange that his skin could get any whiter) but uncomplaining except for occasional keening sounds that issued thinly from his tight mouth as Fred carried him from the place where he had fallen all the way back to the rented chalet. He didn’t know how far he walked, only that his back ached and his legs felt watery and the sun had slid lower in the sky before they crested the hill and the back of the little gray chalet came into view. Only that by the time he reached the back door, his shirt, even with the strong, drying wind, was soaked through with sweat.

He did not have a hand free for the doorknob, so he thumped it with his foot. Mrs. Thor came rather quickly and opened the door and cried, “Roger! Roger!” and went to lift Thor from Fred’s arms, but Thor gave a kind of scream that made her freeze. Instead she led them with a weird catch-step, almost skipping, to the couch, where Thor had earlier that day left his summer reading book splayed, as his mother had more than once scolded him about, facedown. Now whisking the book away, she directed Fred to set him down—“Careful! Careful!”—and flew to position herself between them, so that Fred stumbled backward a little.

They had been playing one of their dare games. It had been Thor’s turn. The dare was to walk twelve paces back, parallel to the edge of a sandstone cliff, without looking. To prevent peeking, he’d worn a red bandanna knotted around his eyes. To make balancing harder, he’d worn a blue bandanna knotted around his wrists behind his back. The bandannas were Thor’s, part of his sun protection gear. The idea to use them as binding was Fred’s, but Thor had eagerly agreed. He’d even asked Fred to tie the knots for him.

As Thor took his backward paces, he strayed from his parallel path, veering nearer and nearer to the line where cliff met sky. Fred, his stomach fizzing with excitement, had exclaimed, “Ah-whoa . . . ah-whoop!” with every step Thor took, flapping his hands in a kind of projected ecstasy, for when it had been his own turn just minutes earlier, the dizziness of stepping backward, blind and buffeted by the stinging salt wind and the rushing sound of the sea below, had been a glory to him.

Thor, sightless, threw his head back, the sun irradiating his translucent nimbus of hair, and let out his own loonish chortle at the sound of Fred’s whoas and whoops.

Then he disappeared.

Astonishment beat wings inside Fred’s rib cage. He gasped for air. He gasped again. He felt not fright but the shock of the sublime. In that single, shining, ruthless instant life was no less good, no less strange, no less fierce, no less fine, no less clear, no less impenetrable than it had been the instant before.

Was this what made Fred hateful?

That Mrs. Thor found him hateful—had found him hateful all along—seemed clear to him now.

Not that he tried to describe this feeling or even tell this part of the story to Mrs. Thor back at the chalet as she grabbed a kitchen knife and cut through the bandanna that bound Thor’s wrists, nor when she flung the ruined cloth to the floor and handed the knife to her husband, who’d come out of his own study yawning as though he’d been taking a nap. He didn’t try to explain what happened when Mrs. Thor sank to her knees beside the couch, weeping and stroking Thor’s hair, nor when Mr. Thor came back into the room after placing the emergency telephone call and then remained in the doorway, his arms folded across his chest, looking grimly at Fred. He hadn’t tried to explain while they all waited for the emergency men to come and strap Thor onto their black and yellow wheelie thing (
Fractured patella
, the man at the island medical center would say later.
Completely shattered . . . surgery advisable . . . Prince Edward Island . . . airlift . . . as soon as possible . . . if you’d rather . . . notify Mass General . . .
), nor during the ferry ride back to the mainland with Mr. Thor, nor at the hospital where they met Mrs. Thor in the waiting room, and the two grown-ups walked to the opposite side of the room and spoke in quiet voices while Fred sat where he’d been told, in the pink chair next to the vending machine, jiggling his knees and bobbing his head, finding comfort in the rhythm.

He didn’t try to explain how giddy, how gorgeously hollow-boned and glass-skulled it had made him feel to witness Thor-there and then Thor-gone, while everything else in the picture remained exactly as before.

But he saw from the way Mrs. Thor looked at him from across the hospital waiting room that she knew. She could tell that the first thing he’d felt was wonder. That his first sucked-in breath had been one of elation.

Only in the next instant had Fred gone to the place where Thor had stood moments earlier and seen how the red sandstone must have crumbled suddenly away under his feet. Only now did he realize they’d seen a sign, elsewhere on the island, warning of exactly this: a yellow sign with a silhouette of a person falling backward off a breaking bit of cliff. Fred squatted by the newly gouged edge, some yards from the former edge, and looked down. He did not know what he expected to see. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps just emerald waves frothing around the base of the cliff. An empty sea, a beautiful day. Perhaps Thor’s disappearance would continue, seamless and sublime, into the future.

But no. The cliff face was not that sheer, and the boy lay humped on a ledge no more than a dozen feet below Fred. His wrists were still tied behind his back, but the red bandanna, the blindfold, seemed to have shaken loose in the fall. At first Thor lay so still, Fred was reminded of the bird he’d once found, featherless and damp, with purply skin and a translucent beak, and how he’d built it a nest with his own careful hands, and how it had been dead the next time he went to see it. Then Thor moved. He rotated his body sideways and tried to sit upright, but it must have been hard to do without his hands. An enraged cry tore from him, making Fred leap back in fright. There followed a series of thin, almost watery mewlings, and Fred crept back to peer over the raw red gash where the ground used to extend. There was Thor, curved now in an awkward crescent shape, propped on one elbow, his thin chest heaving with quiet sobs.

Fred scrambled down the steep slope and dropped onto the ledge. He worked on the knot that held Thor’s wrists fast, plucked at it with his fingers and then with his teeth. It was no use. So Fred tried to lift Thor to his feet, but as his right leg began to straighten, Thor’s face crashed shut like a pair of cymbals and went shiny with sudden pricks of sweat. He stood there leaning against Fred, panting, eyes squinched shut, his face awash. Fred gathered him in his arms as gently as he could, cradling him baby-style, and began the difficult zigzag climb up the crumbly slope.

They said nothing to each other, Fred and Thor. Once they’d regained the level top of the cliff, Fred headed back in the direction of the chalet. They crossed a string of meadows, each one a basin of silvery grass. Butterflies quavered like material bits of light, fragments snipped from the sun. Fred put one foot in front of the other, over and over. It was what he had to do. He breathed heavily through his mouth, trying not to jostle. In his arms Thor breathed more shallowly, the tiniest wire of keening noises emitted from between his clenched teeth. Their hearts beat nearly chest to chest. Fred’s own pounded hard with his labor, but he could still feel, between the close walls of their bodies, Thor’s beating softly. No matter that his back ached and sweat stung his eyes: this was a kind of elation, too. This was a kind of glory.

•   •   •

O
N HIS FIRST DAY
in the apartment above the garage, he had unpacked his orange knapsack and made two stacks on the rug. One for
The Little Prince
and June’s map and Neel’s pocketknife with the toothpick missing. The other for his clothes. He sorted and lined up on the kitchen counter the single-serve packets of jelly and syrup, and in the bathroom he arranged his toothbrushing and shaving things on the back of the toilet. Whoever had stayed here before had left in one cupboard a box of crackers and a box of pasta along with some canned food, soup and olives. In the other cupboard he found some pans and plastic plates and utensils, and also matches, a can opener, and a stack of the kind of magazines that showed naked bodies. He found a drawer full of supermarket coupons and rolls of flypaper, and another drawer with a rust-stained dish towel. Wadded on the floor of the closet were a thermal shirt, a wool hunting jacket that reeked of smoke, and a green coverall; on the shelf above it, a lightbulb that tinkled when he shook it, a straw boater with a punched-out crown, and a dusting of dead moths. That was all.

The morning he looked out of the bathroom window and saw the boy climbing the junk heap, it had been over a week since Loreen’s last visit. Possibly over two weeks. The milk, the Cap’n Crunch, the bread and the peanut butter had run out. The nights had gotten colder and Fred had taken to wearing the wool hunting jacket to bed. After the first couple of nights, he didn’t notice the smell so much. A baseboard heater ran along the wall, but he couldn’t find a way to turn it on. At Dave’s house, there had been a knob on the wall.

When Fred thought about Dave, he’d get the feeling again of a little hard machine inside his chest, the handle cranking and the metal gears biting.

Loreen’s dad was named Mr. Ferebee. He was a large man in a dirty green coverall with short white bristles growing on his face and neck and out of his ears. Some of the time he’d be in the office in the garage beneath the apartment where Fred was allowed to stay. Some of the time he’d be out roaming the salvage yard, picking up and setting down parts, or leading another man or two over to the big aluminum shed out back. Other times Fred didn’t know where he was; for days at a time, the salvage yard would remain deserted, the corrugated garage doors padlocked shut and a heavy chain strung across the mouth of the driveway. Mr. Ferebee spoke hardly ever. When he did, his voice was like a foghorn, and it delivered no more than one or two words at a time (“Nope,” “Ayuh,” “Trash day”). He blew his nose by pressing a finger against one nostril and exhaling sharply through the other, regardless of whether he was standing out in the yard or inside the garage. He rarely looked at anyone, addressing his sparse remarks into the middle distance. The few times he did look at Fred, it was in the silence immediately following an utterance, and he kept his chin tucked tight against his neck and moved only his eyes, which were droopy and red-rimmed, with half-moons of white showing beneath the eyeballs.

The first few weeks Fred had hoped maybe Mr. Ferebee would give him other jobs on the lot. He would’ve liked to try taking apart some of the junked cars or sorting the loose parts, but Mr. Ferebee let him know he had better keep his hands off anything but the trash, which he was to haul from the garage to the Dumpsters at the end of the driveway by the end of every Tuesday.

With nothing else to do, with Loreen’s visits having dwindled or stopped (Would she ever come again? Had she forgotten or grown tired of him? Did he even miss her company? He thought of the neon green gum shooting across the cavern of her mouth, the black satin mask she liked to fit over his eyes, the pineapple wax she’d once dripped on his stomach, her strange, excited laugh when he’d cried out, the hungry concentration on her face while she peeled it off after it had cooled), Fred had begun filling his time by taking longer and longer walks. Sometimes he’d stick to the county roads, where he’d take refuge on the narrow, weed-congested shoulder whenever the occasional logging truck or baler rumbled past. Sometimes he’d pick up the mill river, which ran as a muddy creek beyond the auto salvage yard and wound snakily, eventually straightening out as it neared town. It was here on the residential streets that he noticed, some mornings, bins of cans and bottles at the curb, and he began to carry with him a garbage bag he took from the garage. Sometimes on the Cape he had gone with Dave to the grocery store and they’d fed their empty cans and bottles into machines that spat back tickets you could use to buy food. He found machines just like them at the grocery store in Perdu, and fed the cans and bottles in and it worked. He bought more Cap’n Crunch and milk and bread and peanut butter and also, thinking of June, a bag of carrots.