Salvation City (10 page)

Cole stopped scrolling and went upstairs to get his cigarettes.

It was chilly outside but he didn’t put on a jacket. He paced back and forth on the porch, shivering, as he smoked a Marlboro down to the butt—first time he’d ever smoked a whole cigarette all at once.
Cough, cough, cough.
It stung his lungs and made him so woozy he had to sit down. He was afraid he might throw up.

The sky was the solid blue of any fine Midwestern winter day. Across the street, on the graveled drive, the calico sat cleaning itself just as if the end of the world were not taking place.

She should have woken him. It was all wrong.
She was always wrong!
He felt the heat expanding in his chest, the heat of his rage, but at the same time he was ashamed, for to be so angry at his mother now was all wrong, too.

He stared up the street, toward the house of the man who’d been in their house last night, an old geezer Cole had only glimpsed once or twice. Lumber jacket, ear-flap hat. One of the last people to touch his father. Cole beamed his anger there. That man should have stayed with his mother. That man should have done more to help them!

Cole was freezing now, his teeth actually chattering so that he bit his tongue. He went back inside.

A whole Marlboro turned out to be way strong—almost strong enough to knock you out.

He weaved up the stairs, but instead of going to his own room he found himself walking into his parents’ room and diving into their rumpled bed. Immediately, his father’s smell engulfed him. He pulled the covers over his shivering body, he pulled them up over his head, he burrowed his face in the pillow, inhaling the smell of his father.

The bed went slowly round and round, borne on a lazy tornado.

His mother was lying. His father was gone—hadn’t she wanted to be rid of him?—but he wasn’t dead. It was part of her plan. Maybe his father was in on it, too. They had plotted together to
pretend
he was dead . . .

Later Cole would call this the sickest and craziest thought he’d ever had.

His parents had talked to him about death. They had talked about it at length after his grandparents died. What had they said? That it was irrational for a person to be afraid of death because if you were dead you didn’t know you were dead, and how could you be afraid of something you didn’t know. But also that it was perfectly natural to be afraid. Even people who got to live a long time weren’t happy to die, they said. Death was always tragic, they said. But the worst tragedy was to have your life cut short. To die young.

When he thought about it, though, Cole didn’t believe it would be such a bad thing to die. Even before the pandemic began, he’d caught himself thinking this. It was another one of his secrets (he knew his life would become unbearable if his parents ever found out). He imagined the actual moment of dying as something like sinking into Lake Michigan: deeper and deeper, colder and colder, darker and darker. He imagined it was something like being frozen stiff. And then you’d be dead but you wouldn’t know you were dead, so you couldn’t feel bad. You couldn’t feel anything. You’d be free. Never to have to worry again about how people were looking at you, or talking about you. Never to have to pretend how awesome it was to be alive, how lucky to be a kid, enjoying every minute of your precious kid time.

A few weeks earlier, someone in Chicago had called to tell them Cole’s old classmate Ruthie Lind had died. It wasn’t that Cole hadn’t felt sad for Ruthie; he’d felt very sad, even if he hadn’t cried. But he’d felt something else as well. A funny, nagging, must-keep-secret feeling. And already many times since hearing the news he’d caught himself thinking,
She got out.

But his parents believed life was too short no matter when you died. They hated growing older, and once, when they heard Cole tell someone his grandmother had died because she was old, they had rushed to correct him. Sixty wasn’t old, they explained, it was middle-aged. And to
die
at sixty was to die
young
.

His father was forty-nine.

His father had wanted to live forever. That was why he ran every morning.

Cole wanted to know, though he knew no one could ever tell him, if somehow, at the moment you died, you understood what was happening to you. He tried to imagine then how his father might have felt, and he could not imagine this except as something extremely frightening and painful. He could not believe that, in his father’s last seconds, there had been any thought of rest or quiet or sleep or peace. What he imagined his father seeing and smelling and hearing was a saber-toothed tiger pouncing to tear him apart.

The year before, his father had had some kind of symptom, some stomach pain, and he’d gone to the doctor, who ordered some tests, one of which came back “iffy.” The doctor had ordered more tests, and it was while they were waiting for the results that Cole had seen what a hard time his father was having. Though his father had gone about his business as usual, it was clear in everything he did, including repeating the same joke—at which his mother always laughed dutifully, though each time with a little more strain: “Who has time to die?” The day the doctor called with good news his father said he felt ten years younger. “And you look it, too!” said his mother, dabbing at tears of relief.

From time to time Cole had sat in on a class that his father was teaching. In fact, the last time he’d done this had been just three weeks ago. He had sat in on one of his father’s lectures. It was a happy memory. His father complained endlessly about teaching, but that day he was clearly enjoying himself, and Cole had been particularly impressed with how he held the attention of those fifty or so students, even getting a couple of good laughs out of them. Anyone would have thought he and Abe Lincoln were bros. Cole remembered how bitter his father had been about not getting tenure. “If it was up to the kids, it’d be a different story. Just read their evaluations.” The students loved him, his father insisted, and whenever he said this Cole would wonder how those students would feel if they knew what awful things Professor Vining said about them and how much he made fun of them, sometimes reading from their papers to his mother, the two of them roaring with laughter.

When the lecture was over, several students crowded around his father while Cole waited, staring at one girl with multicolored hair and glossy red-black lips and jeans so low-slung he could actually see some hair. She waited till the others were gone before approaching his father, and Cole had watched as she flirted with his father and his father flirted back.

And later, at the restaurant they’d gone to for lunch, his father had flirted with the waitress. Usually it bothered Cole when his father paid attention to young women, which he did any time Cole’s mother wasn’t around. But that day for some reason Cole hadn’t minded. His father was having a good day. He’d had a good run, taught a good class, and in the space of an hour two pretty young women had shown their attraction to him. Cole knew his father was proud of his fit body and his still-thick, mostly still-black hair, and how happy it made him when people thought he was much younger than he was. That day, he was wearing a turquoise shirt that made his blue eyes almost glow. People were always saying what beautiful eyes he had. The kind of eyes, his mother said, that flirt all by themselves.

There would be a time when the thought that he’d never see his father again would crush Cole with a weight he feared he could not survive. But what he felt mostly in those first hours of grief was overwhelming sadness for his father himself. He felt sorry for his father, who would never see or do anything in the world again—more sorry than he had ever felt for anybody in his life. He saw how terrible it must be to be afraid to die, to want to live and live, and to not have any power to change what was going to happen to you. He told himself he would have been willing to die in his father’s place—he would have done anything to save his father! And maybe if he had gone downstairs last night instead of going back to sleep, maybe he could have done something.

Why was he trying so hard to stop crying when he knew there was nothing wrong with crying, when the wrong thing would have been for him
not
to cry, and anyway there was no one to see? What did it say about him that he had an overwhelming desire to masturbate and that he did not think he was going to be able to resist?

They were on a motorcycle, it was nighttime, and Cole was very tired—too tired to hold on tight to his father’s waist. He kept falling asleep. His father had to keep reaching back with one arm to catch him, and each time he did this the bike veered and wobbled and they nearly crashed, until they did crash, and Cole sat up with a splitting head and a shout loud enough to wake his mother.

 

 

 

It was completely up to him, she said. If he didn’t want her to go, she’d stay home.

“I know it must seem weird to you that I’d want to be with a bunch of strangers right now, but my sitting around here crying isn’t going to help anyone. And you know the best thing for me is to keep my hands busy. But you still come first, Cole. You just have to tell me if you don’t want to be alone, even for a couple of hours.”

She asked him if he was feeling okay and he lied and said yes, hoping she wouldn’t feel his forehead. If she knew the truth, she’d never leave.

She made him promise to keep the door locked and not let anyone in. “Even if they tell you Jesus sent them.”

“There’s still some raisin bread and some peanut butter, I think, though unfortunately not much else. I’ll try to bring some food back with me. My god.” She shook her head rapidly back and forth, as if to throw off her own unbearable thoughts. “It’s like we’re in a movie, isn’t it? Or some crazy survival show. Oh, Cole, do you absolutely swear to me you’ll be okay?”

He nodded, and she went to hug him. He twisted awkwardly in her embrace, hating himself when she pulled away and he saw her eyes brim.

It was hard, but he said it. “Bye, Mom. Love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said with a look she might have given someone who’d just saved her from drowning.

He wanted to ask her something, but he couldn’t. He wanted to ask if sleeping in his father’s sheets could have given him the flu. He hadn’t thought about it yesterday when he crawled into bed. It had struck him only after he woke up, and he’d left the room in a hurry so his mother wouldn’t find him there. He thought of the story about the American pioneers who gave blankets infested with smallpox to the Indians in the hope of killing them all off. The idea that he might have caught the flu from his father and that he, too, might soon be dead was both thrilling and terrifying.

If it was true—if he really was infected—he wanted to keep it from his mother as long as possible. But now he saw that this could not be very long: his mother was hardly gone from the house when he started coughing.

PART TWO

He had missed so much school, he figured he was going to have to repeat seventh grade. But since this had to be true for so many other kids as well, it didn’t really bother him. He was even feeling a little excited about being back in school again. Then Pastor Wyatt told him to get ready for something different.

“I know the idea of homeschooling probably scares you somewhat. I’ll bet you’ve heard all kinds of nonsense on the subject, but you’ve just got to give it a chance. And anyhow, the nearest school still open round here is so far away you’d have to spend a couple hours just getting there and back each day. And I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t like that, now, would you, son.”

Back when he was still in school, in Little Leap—and before that, in Chicago—Cole had been aware of kids who were taught at home by their parents, even though their parents weren’t real teachers. But he’d never actually known anyone who was being homeschooled. Now it was just the opposite. Cole didn’t know any kid in Salvation City who wasn’t being homeschooled. Most of their parents had been homeschooled when they were growing up, too.

From now on his teachers would be Tracy and Pastor Wyatt. But it turned out the only subject he studied with PW was the Bible.

“I know all this is new to you, so I have to explain some. But if you aren’t studying
the
Book, there isn’t much point in studying any other book. When we’re reading Scripture, that is one of the times—another is when we pray—when we’re able to bring ourselves closer to God. It’s when he sees we’re paying attention to him and trying to get at his truth. In fact, when we’re engaged in reading the Bible with our absolute undivided attention, it really amounts to the same thing as prayer. We’re not saying that math and science and all the other subjects aren’t important. We’re saying the Bible is altogether something else. Those other subjects will teach you plenty of things that are good to know, but all of them put together can’t teach you how you should live.”

Among the many books in Cole’s parents’ library had been a Bible, but the only thing he remembered about it was that it was the most ridiculously long book he’d ever seen. He could not imagine anyone reading it.

“Uh-oh,” said PW. “I see that look on your face, and you can just chill right there. Nobody’s saying you’ve got to learn everything in a day. We’re going to take things slow, and trust me, nobody’s going to make you sit in a corner and read the whole Bible cover to cover like some kind of punishment. So wipe that frown off and come give me a hug.”

It had taken some getting used to, PW’s eagerness to hug and be hugged. At first Cole had dreaded these moments, when he never knew quite where to place his hands or which way to turn his head. His face would color and he would hold his breath and stare at the floor. After a while, though, he lost his excruciating shyness and awkwardness, and now there were times when he wished it weren’t over so quickly, that PW would keep holding him longer.