The Boy With Penny Eyes (7 page)

"I woke up and felt I had to come out here," Mary said. "I don't know why, but I had to. I thought that something had happened to you. But when I got by the side entrance, I saw you weren't here, and I became afraid. But I couldn't leave. I had to come and look. He was lying there."

"There's nothing to be afraid of, Mary," Beck said.

Jacob Beck held his shivering wife tightly. He had never seen her like this before. He turned to the boy, who still sat quietly at the far end of the bench, looking at them out of those eyes.

"Who are you?" Reverend Beck asked, trying to make his voice both kind and commanding.

The boy had turned away from him to unfold a neatly creased black golf jacket and put it on. He picked up his rucksack.

"Who are you?" Jacob Beck repeated.

"My name is Billy Potter," the boy said calmly.

There was an infinite moment of silence as Jacob Beck realized that the boy must have been with him, alone in the church, the whole night.

Awake.

Billy Potter's eyes opened. The ceiling rippled; a thick, long bar undulated like the surface of the ocean seen from a great height. He heard a whirr somewhere, and the lap of water against a shore.

He sat up.

The shades in the room were half drawn, but still the brightness of the day outside streamed in. The room was large; the walls were bright peach, with wallpaper showing tiny flowers. The furniture was white lacquer. There was one tall bookcase, with only one shelf filled with books, the rest lined with knickknacks and a row of identically faced dolls dressed in different national costumes. There were stuffed animals everywhere—bears, mostly, with rabbits, a large pig, and something huge and white wearing a Mexican sombrero and sunglasses. A Snoopy poster, framed, was mounted over the desk, next to which was a box filled with record albums.

There was an aquarium on a wrought iron stand on the other side of the desk; the slap of the ocean came from its gurgling pump, and the rippling on the ceiling from the outside light reflected from its surface. A few fish moved lazily within, finning their way through a stone castle and around green plastic plants. One large, cautious thing in the shape of a goldfish hid in one corner near the bottom, moving its fins listlessly and barely staying off the pebbles.

Billy put his feet on the floor. His shoes and socks were on the desk chair, his shirt and pants draped carefully over the back. He put them on. His rucksack was hung over the back of the chair. One of the straps had been opened. He refastened it. He left the backpack where it was and went to the door.

It opened with a creak onto a long silent hallway bordered in dark wood. There were other rooms. There was a bathroom with a huge white porcelain tub on black lion's feet, and a toilet with a pull chain on an overhead box. There was another bedroom, large and dark blue, with a huge poster bed, and filled with dark oiled furniture that resembled the wood in the hallway and looked like it had been built with the house. Across from the bedroom was a small room with a sewing machine in it; next to that, a room with a television, couch, and a couple of stuffed chairs. At the end of the hall was another bathroom, similar to the first but much smaller, with just a porcelain washstand and toilet.

At the end of the hallway was a huge, tall window. There was a tree close by, but its branches were sparse and the window had an almost unimpeded view of the town. There was brown rolling lawn, the sharp line of a tree-lined road, and, beyond that, a dense cluster of white houses trimmed in blue or white. To the left, close by, was a traffic light marking the main street, a pleasantly wide ribbon of small shops and the newer, necessary effluvia of any modern town: a McDonald's, a fried chicken franchise, a Burger King a scant two blocks from its rival. Beyond the main road, another dense cluster of trees and houses, roofs barely visible, and, at the edge of vision, a cleared area with a square red brick structure that was the grammar school, the chain-link fence, the swing set, and the high slide just apparent.

Billy turned from the window. There was a wide stairway, and he went down it to the first floor of the house. He walked through the kitchen, the dining room, a wide entranceway, and a living room with Victorian furniture in it, dust-free but so stuffy it looked like dust must be jammed into the furniture, generations of it waiting to burst out. Everything smelled of lemon polish and age.

He opened the front door.

The day assaulted the Victorian atmosphere of the house. Billy stepped out into air that was a little chilly, which told him that it was still morning.

He heard faint sounds from around the side of the house. He walked that way. There was the small garden he had walked through the night before, filled with roses. Then he stood before the side entrance to the church. From within, he heard a single voice, rising and falling.

He opened the door and went in. There was a short hallway, then an open area that almost looked like a stage. At a lectern stood the man who had taken him from the back of the church. The view Billy had was like that from the wings of a stage; he saw the man in profile.

"So these are simple words," the man was saying. "'Hate the evil, and love the good.' Deceptively simple. You might ask, 'Isn't it easy to love good and hate evil, simply because good is good and evil is bad?' Think about it." He gestured with his hands. "Man is a funny creature. Hating evil sounds logical, but evil is so often easy to take, so common, that it is easier to accommodate it than to hate it. And accommodation can be, in its own way, a kind of love. Evil makes itself easy to love . . ."

There was a narrow, winding stairway to Billy's left. He ascended it. The man's voice was muffled at first, then began to come back to him, amplified and echoing. The staircase opened onto a narrow loft with a pipe organ against the back wall. The organ was covered with a tarp. Billy sat on the single bench and looked out as the man at the lectern below him went on.

"Think of little things," he said, holding up his index finger. "Think of voting, for instance. How many times, when Election Day rolls around, have you thought, Why bother? I know I have. Maybe it's raining outside, or there's an early snow, or it's just plain cold. It's a day off for many of us, and the temptation is there just to stay in bed and watch TV. We think it doesn't make any difference. The same politicians always win, and politicians are all the same. The good thing to do, the right thing, would be to go out to the school and vote, no matter what the weather is, no matter what you feel about politicians. But what's the easier thing to do? Can you honestly say you'd love to do the good thing in that situation? I can't. You'd love to do the bad thing—and many of us often do. And that's just a small example."

There was a pause in Reverend Beck's talk, and Billy saw him look up and see him in the organ loft. Surprise crossed the man's face. Then he turned back to his notes.

"We can take nothing for granted," Reverend Beck continued. "That is the lesson of today's reading. Good demands of us; to love good and to hate evil is constant work. It's not as easy or as simple as it sounds. To paraphrase, if I might, 'Good is a harsh mistress.' But, if we are to make ourselves better human beings, we must be willing to take that mistress on."

There was a stirring as Reverend Beck tapped his notes back into square. He held up a hand. "Before we go on, I should mention our upcoming cake sale . . ."

Billy looked at those below him. The church was about three-quarters full: bald men in shirts and ties, women in dresses holding babies, impatient teenagers moving restlessly in their seats. There were two older women; a family of four boys poking one another, their parents turning to quiet them with a slap or whispered warning; an old woman and her husband, eyes upturned to Reverend Beck, attentive. Near the front on the left side sat a boy with short black hair, with a tall man and woman and a little girl.

As if feeling heat on the back of his neck, the boy rubbed there with his hand, and then he turned, looking up at the organ loft. His eyes went, wide. He mouthed a word, staring for a moment until the tall woman, sitting beside him, said something to him and laid her hand on his arm, gently turning him around. The boy glanced behind him again, up at the loft, but now it was empty.

Billy descended the steps and crossed the hallway to the side entrance of the church. He opened the door and went out. He stood for a moment looking at the sky; the sun was high now and it looked as though autumn would hold off for at least another day. It would be warm later, the advent of Indian summer in this late September.

He felt in his pocket where his cigarettes were and found they were missing. His matches, too. The other things he kept in there—loose change, a tiny pocketknife on the end of an empty key chain he had bought in a vending machine in a gas station washroom in Virginia—were still there.

Suddenly he was very tired. He thought of the bed he had left, the unaccustomed, soothing softness of it. He had to sleep. He knew that, before long, he would grow used to sleeping in a soft bed again, just like he would grow used to all the other things that went with staying in one place with other people. In time, he would grow used to the routine of daily living again, and his back, which had slept on the ground for these past months, would conform to the curve of a soft mattress.

At least while he was here. While he did what he had to do.

He walked back to the empty house.

She was back in the tent.

In the house, empty while Jacob conducted service next door, in the dark, in the bathroom with the door locked and the light off and her eyes closed, with her hands clenched and her back against the door, even with her eyes screwed so tight that tears were drawn from them with her mind screaming, Mary Beck was back in the tent.

God, tell me what to do!

She heard the sounds, and even smelled fresh-cut sawdust on the tent floor. She heard wooden folding chairs being creakingly sat upon. Coughs. The sound of spitting. Moaning and, from somewhere in the back, sobbing and the sound of a soothing voice. The sound of chant-like reading. An errant laugh, quelled. The close-by, crushing press of human flesh and spirit.

"Go on," her mother said to her.

She didn't want to go. She never wanted to. She would hide back here with her fear and they would all go away. She would be alone in a grass field, lying in the grass like that girl in the painting called Christina. She would be that girl, alone with only herself, and God somewhere way up there above the clouds, above the moon even, like He was supposed to be. He wouldn't be here next to her, in her mother, putting His hand around her heart and pulling the bottom out from her stomach, telling her what to do. She would be that girl, she would be Christina . . .

"Mary, go."

The stern voice, the stern face. God's conduit.

She opened her eyes.

"Please, Mother."

The look: the blazing deep certainty on her mother's face that stretched down to her very fingers, the nails hot, the flesh sinewy as cooked meat, the blaze of glory itself . . .

"Go."

Had her mother's face always been like that? The thin long lines, set mouth, sharp bony chin and thin-fleshed cheeks. Gray hair, always pulled back, knotted in the back with a rubber band. The thin body, the frame of a scarecrow, the look that knew what the world was and accepted no other way but her own.

No. Not always like that. The hardness had not always been there; the face and body were the same but the hardness had been added that day in that other tent, when Mary had opened her mouth to say those words, words she would take back now and swallow, hold down with all the bile, words that had changed the world and made her mother hard.

She went.

There was almost applause. It seemed there should be; the same rustle, small intake of breath, whispers of recognition, as at any talk show or lecture. She thought that if there ever really was applause, she would flee, away from her mother and God, away from everything. That would be the end of it; she would live up in the mountains, in a cave or an abandoned cabin. When winter came, she would cover herself with leaves and tree bark, deep and warm, and she would hibernate and think of nothing, and no one would find her.