The True Detective (5 page)

“What should I say?” Eric says.

“You know what I said to say! Now you do it! When were you most proud of your brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do! Now you say it!”

“I don’t know,” Eric says. “The time, I guess, he took me to the football game at the high school and took me around the field and stands and explained stuff. I guess.”

Eric is looking away from his brother, but Clarie is relieved. “Hear that, Matt?” she says. “There’s a time Eric looked up to you. Aren’t you glad of that?”

“I guess.”

“Good. Now it’s your turn.”

Quickly Matthew says, “The time he stomped on the mustard.”

As the two boys laugh, Claire, unable not to join them, says, “What?”

“Nothing,” Matthew says, even as he and Eric keep giggling.

“Well,
tell
me,” Claire says.

“Well . . . we were down by Mister Donut, and this bossy woman told us to clean up the sidewalk. We were just standing there, and this woman who I guess thought she was the principal of the world said, ‘You two—’ And Rockport just took a look at her—”

All three are laughing hard.

“He just took a look at her,” Matthew cries, “and lifted his foot—and stomped! And the mustard went
bloop
. . .”

“Okay,” Claire is saying. “That woman shouldn’t have been so bossy, but that wasn’t a very nice thing—”

“Oh, Mom,” Matthew says.

“Okay,” Claire says. “But tell me when you were really proud—”

“Then!”
Matthew says, and a new explosion of laughter breaks from the two boys.

“Well, tell me something else, too,” Claire says.

“Well, I guess the time he spotted this big pheasant down by Damart. It was in a field there—this humongous bird—it scared me when I saw it. Old Rockport though—I mean Eric—went right after it like some big-game hunter. I thought, gee, he’s a pretty tough little kid.”

Eric, thrilled and embarrassed, cannot help laughing, and listening.

“You caught a pheasant?” Claire says.

“No, we just chased it,” Matthew says.

Claire glances from one to the other. “Eric, see? Matt likes you. As his brother. Don’t you, Matt?”

“Yes-yes-yes,” Matthew says.

“And you like Matt, too, don’t you?”

“I guess I do,” Eric says.

“Pride . . . is a kind of love,” Claire says. “You know?”

There is no response. “Okay, that’s all I wanted to hear,” she says. Getting up from the table she adds, before the moment is lost, “Have some chili now, if you like.”

Moving to the stove, raising her eyes to the ceiling in amazement—with them and with herself—she dips the wooden spoon into the pot. She is going to take a taste but doesn’t. She glances back at the two boys, on a thought—to tell them to hold fast to each other as long as they live—but it is nothing she knows how to say.

P
ARKING IN THE
S
HOP
’
N
S
AVE PARKING LOT
, V
ERNON CROSSES
the street to walk through the campus, to kill a few more minutes. The front of the library, his destination, is a couple hundred yards away.

Lines and puddles of melted snow are forming; they look black but sparkle and flash the white-orange of the unusual sun. A Molson empty is stuck in a crust of snow beside a walkway. The bottle is green, the snow is layered with dirt. He passes other bottles. Green, clear, brown. One appears filled with piss. College life. It has never quite worked for him, he thinks. Almost every day here, from the very first, he hasn’t been happy. Or not alone. Until half a dozen weeks ago.

The dirt path he is on leads behind the Union Building, through a ravine, and meets other paths in the center of the campus. There are more bottles along the path. There are fir trees overhead and needles on the ground and mixed in the old snow. Some bottles pick up sunlight as it glances through the trees and reflects in flashes. Over a brook, the path leads to a tarmac walkway which leads to a series of flights of cement steps which, climbed, lead to the front of the library. The time is at hand.

Once, going to a dentist as a child, he felt like he does now. He tries to smile over the thought but has no luck.

It wasn’t sex exactly that he wanted, he thinks, and that may have been his downfall. What he wanted was what came after. He thinks.

Sex is sorcery, he thinks. Black magic. In parks, public bathrooms, he had reached and made gestures a few times, shown it as instructed and assumed one position or another under the sorcerer’s spell, and longed afterwards, sick at heart, to have himself back again. He wanted it, but when it was over, he was left confused, cut in half.

Should he warn Anthony of the danger? As if he didn’t know.

Up the stairs, he returns to the sunlight. There is the library with its million volumes about everything, and there, posing in the sunlight on a low wall before the entrance, is his friend, Anthony. He sits in his neck scarf, facing the sun, resembling some character from
Masterpiece Theatre,
although one cast too young for his part. Vernon cannot help smiling faintly, however nervously, in the same old way. “God, you look, so decadent,” he manages to say, however uneven his breath.

There is the boy, who is sixteen, who has power over him, to whom he would have difficulty denying a request that he step from the top of a building. Shifting, holding one knee in both hands, Anthony looks, smiles faintly, mischievously. He doesn’t speak—not yet—continues posing, Vernon observes. The silence grows. It might as well be autumn in England somewhere, Vernon is thinking, glimpsing a stunted, leftover leaf stuck to the pavement and the private loss it conveys.

Not to him, but to the space before him, the boy says, “I’m enjoying this—in a way. I’m sorry your feelings are being hurt and I don’t enjoy the pain that might cause. At the same time, I feel I have command of something. Like the air. Or the sky. I feel good, because I’m being honest. Does that make sense?”

“I guess it does. I don’t know.”

“I know this is a new experience for you,” the boy says. “I’m sorry for that because I know rejection can be painful. It’s hurt—that isn’t yours to control. But I know you’ll be okay.”

Vernon more or less nods.

“Everyone you see walking around—if they haven’t gone through this, they will soon enough.”

“It’s this other person?” Vernon manages to say.

“And other things, too.”

“What things?”

The boy hesitates. “It’s not worth it,” he says.

Vernon says nothing; the boy keeps looking at him. It’s just, Vernon is thinking to say, that he will be alone again. Like he was before. He doesn’t say this. He says, “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Anthony says.

Vernon feels his throat thickening. In a part of his mind he is considering making some plea, asking if he might not have another chance, calling up the intellectual excitement he has discovered and experienced through the person before him, the companionship . . . and the small town silence and aloneness to which he sees himself forced to return. He doesn’t make a plea. Rather he says, “I won’t be there anymore. If it doesn’t work. I won’t come back.” Surprised at himself, he holds the other’s gaze, feeling his hands begin to tremble. The boy nods.

“I’d like to just speak, if we should pass,” Vernon says then.

“Of course.”

“You won’t just look away?”

“Not at all.”

“Well—” Vernon begins, his breath getting in his way.

“I’ll go,” the boy says.

“No, please. I want to.”

The boy looks; looking back at him, Vernon sees a tremor in his face he feels in his own. “I—” Vernon begins, but lifts his shoulders, unable to finish whatever he was going to say.

On a turn he is walking. He becomes aware of himself walking—time has skipped a beat again—aware of a feeling of
self-consciousness about his shoulders and ears as he makes his feet walk away.

On another turn, going down steps, he knows he is out of view. At a sidewalk intersection then he turns in the wrong direction, going on to cross a pedestrian bridge over a runoff. Nothing seems to change.
You can’t let yourself go to pieces over something as slight as a brief friendship,
he is telling himself.
There are more important things in life to worry about,
he is telling himself. Still, nothing in the air about him seems to change.

C
LAIRE STANDS LOOKING AT THE POT OF CHILI
,
AT THE PROBLEM
of moving it to its destination. It’s something she’s known all week and has kept putting off. How—without a car—is she going to get all this chili over to the Legion Hall on Islington Street? Her agreement with Smitty was simply to show up with the goods; he’d give her fifteen dollars over her receipts, he’d said, if he didn’t have to have anything else to do with it. Not too smart, Claire thinks. Here she is holding the short end of the stick, because of her dumb need to please. The story of her life.

Studying the volume of chili, Claire is trying to gauge if she can make it fit into her assortment of plastic containers. Even so, she thinks, how will they get them there? Walk back and forth? She and Eric? Even if she could get Matthew to help—who
knew where he was by now?—not even the three of them could manage this great big tub. What in the world had she gotten herself into?

Crossing to the doorway she looks in on Eric where he is lying once more before the television set. Watching him, she wonders what is going on inside that head of his. All that war stuff he likes to read about and watch on television. It would be a lot better for him, she thinks, if she could shoo him outside to play. He could look for animals or build a tree house, do something other than have his head filled with laser beams and destruction.

“Eric, how are we going to get this chili to where it has to go?” she says.

“I don’t know,” he says, keeping his eyes on the screen.

She watches him another moment before returning to the kitchen, asking herself, what in the world has gotten into him now?

At least they’re okay, she tells herself. At least she doesn’t have that to worry about. Of course she worries about it anyway, if only in four-fifths of her mind. That has to be why she likes to cook, she thinks. Because when all three of them are sitting down to eat, they’re a family and her mind and heart can be at ease, can bask even, in a pleasure of family love. It may not be so passionate, she thinks, but it’s what she has, and it’s the most important really—isn’t it?

Betty. Betty is her only possibility; she has to face up to it. Not Betty, of course, but her husband John. He’d be glad to move the chili in his station wagon. They could spread it out among several pots so it wouldn’t spill, and refill the main pot at the hall.

Claire’s thought isn’t on John, though, but on Betty. It’s an old, vague problem and one she has handled a number of times once she had learned it was a problem. Betty was the one she’d have to ask. Betty was her friend, Betty and John were her friends, still
she knew enough not to ask the wrong one of them first. As a single woman she’d been shut out by wives more than once where their husbands were concerned, even if she was, she was sure, the last person in the world they had to worry about. It seemed almost silly to think of such a thing, but she knew it wasn’t silly at all. She’d never forget the time at the Legion Hall when, on his invitation, she walked over to join Bill and Maggie Zimmerman in a booth for, of all things, a cup of coffee. On a Sunday morning.

“Y
OU KNOW
,”
SHE
calls to Eric, looking away from the unpleasant memory. “Betty and John have their station wagon. Think I should ask them?”

“We could pull it in my old wagon,” Eric says.

“The whole pot?”

“Sure. Or buy a car.”

“What would you like, a Cadillac or a Buick?”

“Ask John,” he calls back to her.

A
T THE TELEPHONE
, pausing, it occurs to Claire how funny it is that she is thinking to ask for Betty should John answer. Not funny, of course, but too bad.

The phone rings almost under her hand, however, and startles her. The sound of Matthew’s voice is reassuring; wherever he is out there, it means he is safe. “Cormac stay overnight?” he says.

She cannot refuse, although she knows the time isn’t right. “I don’t want you two giving Eric a hard time,” she says.

“No problem,” Matthew says.

A moment later, Betty is saying the same thing. “It’s no problem at all,” she says. “I’ll pick you up whenever you say. Then you
won’t have to worry about it, Claire. That kind of thing can just drive you crazy.”

Before the stove once more, she takes up her stirring. She imagines the two boys, at the table, eating. She imagines their friends with them. Cormac. Maybe the other Eric from down the street. She imagines a plate of saltine crackers in the center of the table, glasses of cold milk, and their milk mustaches and horseplay. Is she supposed to want something more than that? she wonders. Something different? If so, it is clear she’s forgotten what it was. She has learned to do without, to appreciate what she has. “Eric,” she calls suddenly.

“What is it?” he says.

“Nothing,” she says. “I just wanted to hear you say something so I’d know you were there.”

“Mom, you’re weird,” he says.

V
ERNON IS DRIVING AGAIN
. H
IS CAR
,
LEFT IN THE SUN
,
HAD
grown warm inside, but he feels chilled. It
is
February, he tells himself. There is warm sunlight out there, but frost in the shadows. He is only trying to settle down. On the radio, “Torn between two lovers/Feeling like a fool” is playing, and within him everything is churning.

He doesn’t know what he wants or where he is going. Things aren’t so bad, he tells himself. He only needs to settle down. Along a two-lane road north of the university, he considers driving to Portsmouth. Hah. There is gay life there and along the beaches to the north. So he has heard. It’s something he hasn’t tried before and the thought of it frightens him as he thinks of it now. Still, the thought keeps coming up in him.