The Year We Disappeared (29 page)

“Time for dinner!” Mom yelled. I shoved the red crayon back into the box, then stuffed the crayons deep into the pile of the things I didn’t want anymore. They were melted anyhow.

WE rented a twenty- foot U-Haul truck, and with help from Dave, Tony, Craig, Rick, Don, and their wives, we started packing it up. Then it was on to the van, which we packed with as much as it could hold and still have room for the kids, and we were ready to roll. We had a last good-bye with everyone and hit the road for central Tennessee—have blender, will travel.

Max, our killer dog, was sold back to the training center where we got him, and the town of Falmouth was kind enough to let us keep the money from his resale. About five hundred bucks, and we would need every cent of it. The town also ordered a police escort for us as far as the Bourne Bridge: good-bye and good riddance. We weren’t their problem anymore. I assumed the so-called “investigation” into my shooting would end as soon as we cleared the bridge that morning—and I was right.

I drove the truck and Polly drove the van. We spent the first
night in a hotel in Connecticut, a small place with a pool where the kids could swim. The next day, driving through the Adirondacks, we pulled over into a rest area, and when the kids piled out to use the bathroom, Shawn ran into an old friend of his whom he had been close to in elementary school. They were on a vacation, and the kid’s dad asked where we were headed, but of course we couldn’t tell them.

It was early July, and the farther south we went, the hotter it got. The boys rode in the truck with me, and Cylin rode in the van with Polly and our cat, Pyewacket. Neither vehicle had air-conditioning. The sun coming through the windshield was unmerciful, and when we arrived in Cookeville, it was 104 degrees in the shade. The rental truck died in the driveway of the hotel.

There was some sort of paperwork screwup with the new house, so we had three days in limbo. We rented a room at the Howard Johnson’s in town; they had a pool, and we spent most of our time in it. There were no pets allowed, so we had to leave Pye out in the van, but we let him out of his traveler, parked in the shade, and put all the windows down. I had planned to sneak him in under a towel or something when it got dark, but that didn’t end up happening. Instead, Pye took it upon himself to jump out one of the open windows and waited at the front door of the hotel until someone let him in—so much for no pets! We found him wandering the hallway, meowing for us. He was practically at the door to our room; he had tracked us down, huffing and puffing and none too pleased. He was a Maine Coon cat, and
his long, heavy fur was all matted and wet, and his tongue was hanging out; he could not handle the heat. Rules be damned, he curled up on Cylin’s cot in the air-conditioned comfort and recovered nicely.

Each morning, looking east was like staring into a blast furnace. I’d spent over half a year in Texas in the Air Force but had managed to miss the summer months. This heat was something none of us had ever experienced. It was over 90 degrees by 7:00 a.m. and the humidity was over 90 percent. Unbelievable. My body weight was still way down, but sweat ran off of me anytime I was out of the air-conditioning. We were used to the beach, ocean breezes, and summer temps in the seventies and eighties. Cookeville was a whole new place, and we were indeed strangers in a strange land.

Move-in day, it was 107 degrees at 3:00 p.m., so we delayed until the evening, when it was only 104 degrees. We did amazingly well getting everything in and the beds set up by 10:00 p.m. We all slept on the living room carpet since it was the only room with air-conditioning—a small unit designed for a much smaller area than it was servicing. Opening windows was futile; we just had to crank this little machine up to max and let time do the trick. The next day, we bought a monster A/C unit running on 220 volts. It weighed a couple hundred pounds and had to be professionally installed, but it kept the house cool even on the hottest days.

The house was a good size bigger than our home in Falmouth, ranch style, and redbrick, just like all the other houses in
town. Bricks were plentiful here, the red dirt everywhere was proof of that. The house had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, one just off the master bedroom, the other in the hallway for the kids. Eric and Shawn would share a room, and Cylin would have the small room at the front of the house. Eventually I planned to convert the full basement into a den and family room, a game room, and a large bedroom for the boys to have some privacy.

In back of the squat redbrick house was a circular driveway that ran down to the garage on one side. You could pull into one side of the drive and circle around behind the house and come out the other side, or go straight back to the barn. Directly behind the house was a white fence and beyond that, a big red barn with four good-sized animal stalls, a small tack room, and a loft. The barns were built to air and dry tobacco crops, so the ground floor was open inside, with plenty of space, and the loft ran along either side but was open in the middle. When we bought the house, we inherited a couple of resident barn cats—an old gray female called Mitzi and her sister, Diamond, also gray but with a perfect white diamond-shaped mark on her forehead. We had no idea at the time that Mitzi would go on to have several litters of kittens every summer, starting in the early spring and continuing until the late fall. We were constantly giving away kittens to anyone who would take them. Diamond was either fixed or just couldn’t reproduce, but she would usually try to take one of her sister’s babies and keep it for herself—we had to
watch her to make sure she didn’t hide them somewhere and not give them back.

Pyewacket was not a country cat and didn’t care for the weather. He went outside occasionally but mostly opted to stay inside. One night he didn’t come home, but we weren’t too worried about him—he didn’t like it outside enough to run away. But the next morning he showed up with his eye socket torn open, wounds all over his body, drooling from what looked like a broken jaw, and an ear almost ripped off. He’d been in a fight with another tomcat in the neighborhood, and it looked like he’d lost. I held him wrapped up in a towel while Polly tended to his wounds with hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin. It took him about a week or two to feel better. I was surprised to see him at the door one morning, ready to go out—I couldn’t believe he wanted more of the same. He was tougher than I thought. But this time when I let him out, he didn’t come back. We wondered what happened to him, and it was especially hard on the kids to deal with the loss of yet another pet.

Months later, when the weather finally cooled down and I was feeling better, I took up running again, along the empty country roads. I’d never do the distances I used to do, but it was a start, and I’d missed the runner’s high. Early one evening, I was trucking down the road, listening to a clicking that I heard in my head now—something that wasn’t there before I was shot. About a mile and a half down the road from our farm, I saw a Maine Coon crossing the long front lawn at a neighbor’s house.
He came all the way out to the road to see me, meowing that old familiar meow. It was Pye, and he knew me, even seemed happy to see me. He looked good—fat and sassy; he’d been living well. I looked at the farmhouse. It was a nice place where I think an older couple lived, no kids. After some petting and a scratch behind the ears, Pye turned and went back to the house behind the white fence. It was his house now, I could tell by the way he walked up on the front porch and curled up in a little basket that had been set there just for him. I picked up my run, marveling at the little guy.

Sure, he’d had his ass kicked by some tomcat who let him know he wasn’t welcome. But Pye was no fool; he nursed his wounds, packed his bags, and moved on down the road. Found a place where he would be welcome and didn’t have to look over his shoulder all the time. Sometimes, it’s not the worst thing in the world to give up, pack up, and move on.

TENNESSEE was hot, hotter than anything I had ever felt in my life. Once we got all moved in to our new house, even our cat couldn’t take the heat and just laid on the floor in front of the air conditioner. The house was bigger and nicer than our house back home, with wall-to-wall carpet and two new bathrooms, but we hardly had neighbors and we were miles from the nearest store. The first morning we woke up in the new house, we were on the floor in the living room in our sleeping bags. Mom had gotten us a few things at the grocery store, so we had cereal out of the mugs that had been unpacked and used plastic spoons. While Mom and Dad tried to organize the house, Eric, Shawn, and I went out to see if there were any other kids around. On our right side was a big open pasture owned by someone way down the road—there wasn’t a house or a barn or anything, just acres of open field. To the left lived an older couple who didn’t seem to have
any kids. Directly across the street was another farm, but their house was set back far from the road down a long dirt drive, closed off with a white fence. You couldn’t see enough of their yard to tell if they had a swing set or any other signs that kids lived there.

About midmorning, a guy in a white pickup truck pulled into our driveway and asked to speak to our parents. He had a strong Southern accent, like everyone else in town, and we could hardly understand him. He called me a “young’un.”

“Young’un, your ma and pa around?” At first I thought he was talking about grandparents; then I got what he meant and got my parents from the house. When they came out, the guy introduced himself as Mr. Carter and welcomed us to the neighborhood. Then he asked if we’d like to lease our pasture. “Cattle’s done chewed ours down to the nub,” he explained. He took off his hat when he met my mom, and I saw that he had really thick black hair, combed back with something greasy in it. His face was tanned a dark brown and had a lot of deep wrinkles. He looked like a piece of beef jerky—all brown and dried out.

Mom looked over at Dad. “What do you think? Want to lease the pasture?” Dad nodded his approval. Mr. Carter didn’t seem to notice that Mom did all the talking, or at least he didn’t ask about it.

In a few hours, Mr. Carter was back with a huge truck full of black and white cows and a couple of younger guys to help him. Dad also helped to back the truck up alongside the barn. One
guy went up into the truck and started yelling at the cows and swatting them to get them to move out, which they did slowly, walking down the big metal ramp at the back of the truck. They wandered around in the field and started eating the grass at their feet.

There were two old bathtubs half buried in the dirt alongside the barn, and we used a hose to fill them up for the cows to drink from. The farmer also brought along a big white square that was about the size of a shoe box that he put down on the ground between the bathtubs. When I asked him what it was, he told me it was a salt lick for the cows. “If you don’t care to keep these tubs full for those cows,” he said, “I’ll pay you five dollars when I come back.” I couldn’t really follow his Southern way of talking—if I didn’t “care” to? But I understood that he was asking me to keep the tubs full, and I told him that I would.

“Do you have any kids?” Shawn asked Mr. Carter as he walked back to his truck.

“Naw, they’re all grown,” he said. He was chewing a big wad of tobacco and had a rusty can with him that he kept spitting brown liquid into.

“Are there any other kids on this street?” I asked.

“Well, let’s see,” he said. “There used to be a little girl over here at this place.” He pointed to the house next door to us on the left. “But that was a long time ago. Prettiest girl you ever saw; she went to New York City to be a model and got the depression. Killed herself. Her ma hasn’t come out of the house since.”

I looked over at the white house next door. The curtains were all drawn; there was no car in the driveway. “Why did she kill herself?” I asked.

Mr. Carter shrugged and spit into his can. “Who can say? It’s the damnedest thing.” He shook his head. “Sure was a pretty girl.”

“Any other kids around?” Eric asked.

“There’s the Simmons twins down the road a few miles,” he said. “Ya’ll just head on down to the holler and you’ll meet ‘em.” He spat in his can again. “I’ll be back in a couple days for them cows,” he said, then climbed into his truck and drove off.

After he was gone, I stood in the shade of the barn and watched the cows. There were about fifty of them, all black and white, and all eating the grass in the pasture very slowly. I watched them for a while, and they didn’t do very much, just stood and chewed grass. None of them came over to drink from the bathtub or lick the salt block. When it got too hot, I went inside. Dad said he would take us to the mall for a little while just to stay out of the heat and to get something to eat. Maybe we could meet some other kids there.

We hung out at the video arcade while my parents shopped for new towels and sheets at JCPenney. Eric and Shawn ended up talking to a couple of guys playing a race-car game who looked about their age, but there weren’t a lot of girls in the arcade. I decided to head over to the bookstore next door to see if I could meet anyone and to look for a new book. I passed a group of girls on the way over who didn’t seem much bigger than me,
but they had lots of makeup on, fancy skirts, and feathered hair, so I assumed they were older. It didn’t matter, since they didn’t even look at me.

The next day I got up and checked the tubs up by the barn first thing. It was already about 90 degrees out, and the tubs were only half-full. I got out the hose and filled them up again, then watched the cows for a little bit. They had eaten the long grass down in some spots to where you could see the red dirt below it. Then they would just move on to a new spot and keep eating. I went into the barn and looked up in the loft for the two cats that lived there, and I found Mitzi. I sat and petted her for a while, and she started to purr and fall asleep. The loft of the barn was so hot, you couldn’t really move around in there. It was okay if you just sat still, but even then the sweat would run down my back under my T-shirt and along the sides of my face.