Those Who Favor Fire (25 page)

“And you’ve wandered pretty far from home. There’s no one else out in these woods. No phone. No car. Just the two of you and your guns. And all of a sudden, your father gets bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake. He’s going to die if he doesn’t get help quick, but he knows that the faster he moves, the more the poison will spread. And then, even though he’s dying of this snakebite, your father picks up his rifle and shoots a doe. Kills it. And starts limping toward its body.” Joe stopped short and waited. He, too, was learning how to give people room.

Rusty was not too proud to meet him in the middle. “Why would he shoot a deer when he’s dying of snakebite?”

Joe held the book out toward Rusty, who looked at it with a little less loathing than before. “How many thousands of words do I have to read before I find out?” the boy asked.

“They’ll fly by,” Joe said.

Within the month, Rusty had taken to waiting for Joe on the steps of the Kitchen, light pouring out of his eyes. He now carried his own library card with him everywhere he went and had begun, unbidden, to read. Books from the school library that smelled like french fries, with sticky, ragged pages.
James and the Giant Peach, Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Call of the Wild
.

As long as they stayed within the boundaries of stories, in the company of characters like King Arthur and Daniel Boone, Joe and Rusty got along like bread and jam. But on occasion, when Joe forgot the rules and was heavy-handed, acted too much like a father, or when Rusty asked Joe about his boyhood, forgetting for a moment that Joe
would not answer … when either of them trespassed on such forbidden ground, a wall went up between them, leaving them stranded.

“Hey, Rusty, this book is a week overdue.” It was a blazing August day, and neither of them was in the mood for anything but Raccoon Creek and a rope swing. But as much as they could, they stuck to their habit of meeting at the Kitchen for an hour every other day, usually to read together in easy partnership, sometimes to talk about what they’d witnessed between the covers of their books.

“Big deal. A nickel a day. My mom’ll pay for it.”

Joe thought about Angela, hard at work long before dawn every day of the week.

“You ever take a good look at your mom’s hands?” he said. “I don’t think she should have to do even thirty-five cents’ worth of work just because you’re too goddamned lazy to return a book on time. You were my kid, I’d make you pay the fine yourself out of money
you
earned.”

Rusty picked up the library book. Got out of his chair. “My mother and me are none of your business,” he said. And walked out the door.

Joe sat in the Kitchen for another ten minutes, thinking about his own mother. And about his father. Then he got up and went looking for Rusty.

He found him coming out of the library. When Rusty walked past him, Joe took his place by the boy’s side and they walked up Maple Street without a word. When they got to the bridge over Raccoon Creek, Rusty shimmied down the steep bank and straight to the water’s edge. He took off his shirt and shoes, wedged them in the fork of a tree, and stepped into the cool creek water.

Joe stood on the bridge and watched Rusty from above. He was afraid to make matters worse between them, worried that what had started over a library book might end in a place they wouldn’t easily get beyond. Not unless he chose his words carefully.

“I’m sorry, Rusty,” he said, leaning on the rail of the bridge just over the boy’s head. “I like your mother a lot, but I’ll never love her one millionth as much as you do.” Rusty had found a stick and was stirring up the water along the bank of the creek, hoping to spook crayfish. He didn’t look up, give any sign he was listening. An old man, walking along Maple Street, glanced twice at Joe as he passed, wary of someone who made speeches from a bridge.

“I never earned a nickel in my life, until I came to Belle Haven,” Joe said. “Which makes me something of an idiot to be preaching at you.” He had seen Rusty working in the Kitchen and had never heard him complain about it, not once. When he thought about it, Joe realized that it was not only understandable but entirely reasonable, even desirable, for Rusty to misbehave now and then, especially with someone who could be counted upon to let him.

“I will mind my own business,” he said. “From now on. I promise.”

Rusty finally looked up.

“It’s okay,” he said after a moment. “I don’t much mind.”

“Good,” Joe said. “And while we’re at it, it’s ‘My mother and I are none of your business,’ not ‘My mother and
me.’
”

At which Rusty picked up a clod of creek mud and lobbed it at Joe, who ran down the bank hollering and into the creek, shoes and all.

In September Angela asked Joe to tutor Rusty in other subjects. “He’s a smart kid, and he does pretty well in school. But it’s not enough to be smart and I don’t give a good goddamn about grades. He loves to read now. I want him to love to learn.”

So Joe and Rusty continued to meet at the Kitchen, on the ball diamond, on the banks of Raccoon Creek. Joe made the town’s meadows into classrooms, teaching Rusty about the migration of hummingbirds, the stunning unlikelihood of metamorphosis, the indispensable gift of bees. He made baseball a matter of math and physics as well as of pure, immeasurable joy. Together they catalogued the clouds and the leaves of the trees, sought the burrows of earth dwellers, studied the kingfisher taking its plunge.

“I used to know a lot about frogs,” Joe said as they waded along the bank of the creek one day in late September. Rusty had caught a fat frog and held it cupped between his hands. Its legs dangled between his fingers, and its head popped through the collar Rusty had made with his thumbs. He held the frog’s face up close to his own and studied the speckles on its cheeks, the twin globes of its frightened eyes. “We dissected them in biology class when I was in eighth grade,” Joe said, the remembered tang of formaldehyde stinging his nose.

“Cool.” Rusty looked at Joe with envy. “I’ll bet the girls screamed a lot.”

“I went to an all-boys school,” Joe said.

“All boys?” Rusty looked as if he were weighing the pros and cons of such a place. “No girls at all?”

“The lunchroom ladies.”

Rusty snorted. “They don’t count.”

“I do remember one French teacher …” Joe made an hourglass in the air.

Rusty grinned. “But no real girls?”

“Nary a one.”

Rusty turned the frog this way and that, upside down, and then set it free. It sat on the bank, getting its bearings for a moment, before leaping into the rushes that grew along the water’s edge. “I don’t think I’d like that too much,” Rusty said. “Sounds boring.”

“It was,” Joe said.

They both realized, suddenly, that except for the one brief reference to his father, this was the first time Joe had spoken to Rusty of his past.

“I don’t remember a single thing I learned from picking a frog to pieces,” Joe said.

And for the rest of the afternoon, they scoured the banks for amphibians, scrutinized them gently, and then went home empty-handed.

Joe had not asked Angela about her absent husband. He had quickly learned that the people who lived in Belle Haven did not like to be questioned even though they were, as a rule, a talkative bunch. And despite the fact that he had been schooled among rude young men—perhaps because of this—Joe knew without thinking about it that to speak casually of Angela’s husband would be like speaking casually of the newly dead. Angela herself was the one who brought it up.

“Has Rusty told you anything about his father?” she asked Joe at the end of summer while they sat together in Angela’s living room, waiting for Rusty to come home with a Sunday trout. It was the only supper that the Kitchen did not serve—Sunday supper—and Angela’s only chance to sit down to a proper meal with Dolly, Rusty, and, quite often now, Joe.

“No, not really.”

She lit a cigarette, killed the match. “Has anyone?”

“No, Angela.” Joe liked to say her name. He had decided that the
women in Belle Haven had the nicest names he’d ever heard—Rachel, Angela, May, Coral, Ophelia, Anne, Helen, June. “And you don’t need to tell me anything either,” he said.

“Well, maybe I do,” she said. She smoked her cigarette for a moment, never moving it far from her lips. “You may eventually hear something or other, and you need to know what’s really true and what you may hear from Rusty.”

“The two aren’t the same?”

“Not like I wish they were.” She sighed, went into the kitchen to fetch some more iced tea.

“It was the strangest thing,” she said, coming back. “Buddy was a really good boy. Buddy … that was his name. Still is, I guess. He had beautiful manners. Never got into any trouble. Got along with his folks. But so … so
exciting
, too. I’d never met anyone quite like him. I saw him for the first time at a corn festival in Randall, where he lived. We were both sixteen. We were watching a tractor pull, and I got splashed with mud. He ran and found a wet cloth somewhere and helped me get the worst of it off. And then we began to see each other the way young kids do, at movies, ball games. He played the harmonica. Looked a lot like Jimmy Dean. I was in love with him and him with me before we turned seventeen, and it was the real thing. Didn’t matter how old we were. Not then.” Angela took a long swallow of tea and put her bare feet up on the coffee table. Joe sat with his back bowed, his head hanging, his elbows on his thighs. It was how he listened, now that he had learned how.

“We got married, right after high school, even though everyone wanted us to wait a while, especially Buddy’s folks. Buddy was good with cars, so he took a job at a garage in Randall. I sold stuff door-to-door. Makeup, mostly. Had to get all painted up and walk around in high heels.” She made a face. “I’d drive Buddy to work and then take the truck around Randall, Fainsville, Jupiter. But the outfit I worked for didn’t like the idea of an old pickup, so I had to park it somewhere and do each block on foot.” Angela held a foot in the air, turned it one way and then the other. “By the time I got home at night my feet looked just awful. God, they hurt.” She took another drink of tea.

“Then I got pregnant with Rusty when I was still only eighteen and after about a month I got fired, which saved me the trouble of quitting. I kept having to stop to throw up in somebody’s petunias.
And my feet got much worse. It wasn’t working out at all. After that we couldn’t afford to pay rent on our own place, and Buddy’s parents didn’t have any room, so we moved in with my mother. She was still living down by the school at the time, in the house where I grew up.” She glanced over at Joe, smashed her cigarette in a tray as big as a football.

“Before you have kids, you just can’t know what it’s going to be like to have a baby come along and change everything. Everyone told us what was coming, but hearing about it didn’t do a thing to prepare us—not for the joy
or
the hurt. And Buddy was so excited about having a kid, always walking around with a big smile on his face. He didn’t seem to mind living with his mother-in-law. He watched me get big as a house and lose all my color and have my hair falling out all the time, and he treated me like I was a goddess of fertility or something. He had stars in his eyes. I was very happy that whole time, thinking about what kind of father he would make.” Angela lit another cigarette.

“In the first few days after Rusty was born, Buddy could barely speak. He was absolutely overcome. He had this perfect little son and I was okay and everything was fine.” She hung her left hand on the back of her neck. “And then Rusty got the colic and cried for four months straight.

“After the first month, Buddy started sleeping at the garage or out in the truck or sometimes on his parents’ couch. He’d come home and try to help me, but he just couldn’t stay. He tried, though. I’ll give him that. But there was something very wrong, all of a sudden. He came home one night when Rusty was about twelve weeks old, and the poor little kid was bawling his head off. Buddy had a beer and he watched some of a ball game on TV. And then he came over to where I was rocking the baby and he picked him up—I thought he was just going to walk him a bit—and he started to shake Rusty so hard his … his little head was snapping back and forth. I thought it was going to break right off.” Angela tried to smoke her cigarette, but it fell out of her lips and she had to scramble for it. “I finally got Rusty away from him and I ran into the bedroom and Buddy stood out in the living room and screamed until he was hoarse. He kicked in the television and he threw a lamp through the front window, and then he sat down on the floor and cried.” Angela rubbed some flakes of ash into her blue jeans. “When he came around he got really scared and
ran out of the house, bunked with a friend for a couple of days. Then he finally came back home and we all sat in the living room and stared at each other. Me, Buddy, Rusty, and my mother. She sat in the corner and didn’t say a word, but she wouldn’t leave us alone either.”

Angela smoked her cigarette some more. “You don’t know her very well yet, Joe, but my mother is one hell of a woman. Quiet. Keeps to herself. But she’s as solid as a rock. Sold her house so I could buy this place. I never even had to ask.” She stared, remembering. “Anyway, she sat there with us so Buddy would behave himself, I guess. I had Rusty in my lap. He’d been crying all day, and he still was. Buddy got down on his knees and begged me to forgive him, and I did. I was feeling pretty desperate myself, and I thought I could understand how he had lost control for a minute like that. But after an hour in the house with Rusty crying the whole time, Buddy all of a sudden started to look wild again. My mother went in the nursery with Rusty and shut the door, and I stood outside it while Buddy paced around the house, pulling on his hair and cursing and looking like he was going to break something. And then he left the house and got in the truck and drove off.” Angela’s cigarette was all ash now.

“I know it doesn’t seem very likely that a man would run off over a crying baby. But that’s what Buddy did. I didn’t believe it at first, had the police looking for him for weeks. But about six months later I got a letter from him. Even when I sat down and read it, I had an awful hard time believing that the man I had known so long could suddenly change so much. He hated Rusty. He hated him. And of course he hated himself—I mean really
hated
himself—for feeling that way about our little baby. But there was something … 
wild
about Buddy by then. He was like a grizzly or maybe a hyena. Some kind of animal that kills its young.” She closed her mouth, and Joe could see that she was chewing the lining of her cheeks.