The Train of Small Mercies (6 page)

On screen a camera panned across the congregation, which showed Jimmy Durante sitting a few rows back of a bespectacled Cary Grant.

“So many people are going to be on that train, they're saying,” Angela said. “Ethel's going to feel like she has to entertain them all. What she'd probably like to do is just ride the whole way with the casket and not have to focus on anyone else.”

“But she's going to want to be with her children, too,” Delores said quickly. “Kathleen is almost seventeen, and she can maybe help.”

“I have two kids, and my husband is alive, and I still don't know how I make it through the day,” Angela said. Her girls were ten and twelve, and she and her husband had just sent them off to their first summer camp, a hundred miles away.

“Where did you say the boys were again?” Angela asked. “Or did you tell me?”

“They're with Arch's mother,” Delores said. “I had to make up two big—” She mouthed the word “lies.” She had a small laugh at this—at the very idea—but then glancing back at the television, she quickly fell back to her somber expression.

“What did you tell her?” Angela blew on her paint. Delores glanced over at Rebecca, who had now discovered the baby bottle filled with green.

“I just said that R had an early B-I-R-T-H day event in the morning and the boys would make it miserable if I had to drag them to it, and that in the afternoon I was signed up to deliver meals for the church, and the boys would go crazy if they were cooped up in the car like that on a Saturday. I ask that kind of thing of her so rarely, and you should see her—” Delores let her mouth drop, and she narrowed her eyes to little slits. “‘Well, I guess if you don't have any other option.' She's always talking about
options
. As much as Arch works, I have about as many options as I do fur coats.”

Angela might have laughed at that, but lately she had grown worried about Delores, who seemed to constantly be making some reference to her difficulties or unhappiness. What Angela knew was that in the last year, Delores's boys had both been suspended from school—Brian, eleven, for fighting, and Greg, twelve, for writing “Fuck Face” on the blackboard when the teacher stepped out of the classroom. She knew, too, that Arch was increasingly bothered by her spending time with Angela—and Faye and Betty Jean. All three friends' husbands were members of the Rotary Club. They all belonged to the local country club, and all of them went to the First Presbyterian Church, and once a month one of the couples would throw a barbecue. Delores and Arch were always invited, but they almost never attended. Arch called the group the Cocktail Club, and with that name he believed he had picked out a particularly despicable moniker.

The four families all lived within a few blocks of one another—Delores and Arch were the latecomers, having bought the house five years ago. Only Arch hadn't attended college, but he had grown his modest tire business, which he started when he came back from the Korean War, into the town's biggest tire supplier and service center. Tire King, he called it, and that's how everyone referred to him. The company's three tow trucks all had the logo emblazoned on the side, with Arch's grinning face painted underneath.

Once a year, in the summer, Delores could persuade him to come out for an afternoon on the lake—Faye and her husband had bought a lake house an hour or so outside of town—and she could count on Arch to be polite and hold an expression of contentment for most of the day. He wouldn't shy away from small talk, since there was common ground enough around the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Arch sometimes had insights into automobile manufacturing that the other men were interested in. But before he and Delores would climb into bed that night, Arch would quietly work himself into a litany of complaints about them.

“They've got everything all figured out,” he was fond of saying. Though only one of the husbands had gone to an Ivy League school, Arch referred to their Harvard degrees and their “perches from their ivory towers,” and he was fixated on the generally soft-looking appearance of their hands.

Lately, when Delores did mention that she had been with Angela or Betty Jean or Faye, Arch made it a habit to ask what they talked about.

The night of the California primary, Delores said, “What? Do you want to be in on our makeup tips?”

“I just know how they like to talk, is all. Life is more complicated than they like to believe,” he said. “There's a lot going on right now in this country, and more and more people are going to have to choose sides. And all I'm saying is, don't let them fill your head with their revolution talk. And all that baloney.”

The day after RFK's assassination, Delores stayed fixated in front of the television. Because there was a gun involved, Brian and Greg were modestly interested, and only complained of boredom by the mid-afternoon. They wanted her to take them to the Moose Lodge to go swimming, but Delores couldn't tear herself away. For dinner she ordered fish plates from Captain Jim's, and as Arch and the children ate at the table, Delores ate from a TV tray in the other room.

There was no uncertainty about what Arch thought of Kennedy. Over the last year, as Kennedy had gone from downplaying any interest in the presidency to actively campaigning that spring, Arch had called him “a mama's boy” and “arrogant,” and when Kennedy began to more sharply criticize America's policy in Vietnam, Arch said he wouldn't mind “taking a swing at those big Kennedy teeth of his.” Now, after he had the children help clear the table, he threw a leg over the easy chair in which Delores was sitting and squeezed his arm around her. “An Arab,” he said. “A stinkin' Arab, of all people.”

“So what if Arch asks little R about the birthday party?” Angela asked. “How are you going to keep from getting caught?”

“I haven't figured that out yet. Do I tell R to L-I-E to him? Maybe. God, what have I gotten myself into?”

“Would his mother really have said no if you had just told her you were going to see the train, the same thing that
thousands
of people are going to be doing? Is she really that bad?”

Rebecca was done with her paints and had moved to Delores's lap. Delores was becoming frustrated with her friend's questioning. She stared at the television as she stroked Rebecca's hair. A camera set high above showed Ethel, her black veil flowing over her shoulders.

“It's him, not his mother. Arch would hit the roof, the way he feels about the Kennedys. No, today Rebecca and I are regular fugitives from justice.”

M
ichael Colvert was lying on his bed, the rubber soles of his shoes pressed delicately against the wall, and he pulled back the leather pouch of his slingshot once more. He had sent nearly a hundred imaginary stones through the air.

He was glad to feel the smooth wood handle in his hand once more. He had tried to explain what a good shot he had become to his father, but his father hadn't seemed much impressed. Michael wondered if his father thought he was a little old for slingshots and was, instead, ready to have his own gun—for hunting, though his father hadn't said anything like that. To his friends' bewilderment, Michael wouldn't shoot at birds or squirrels, and used the slingshot only for target practice—soda bottles, old gasoline cans, school crossing and speed limit signs by the road—and now he could hit small targets from fifteen yards away. None of his other friends could make such a claim.

In the kitchen, he could hear the soft drone of his mother's voice. In the last week, since he had returned home, she had spoken in hushed, halting tones every time someone called to see how the boy was doing.

“Well, we're just taking it slow and easy,” she would say.

“We're not really talking about that very much right now, to be honest.”

“A little quiet, but that's to be expected, considering all that he's been through.”

In these moments she was quick to turn to see if he was listening, which caused him to direct his attention out the window at the neighbor across the street, who was forever mowing the yard, or if he had a copy of
Boys' Life
in his hand, he would read the headline “A Sailor's Knot Saved This Scout's Life!”—letting his lips move for effect—for the tenth time without reading any further.

James Colvert and his wife had separated nearly a year ago; he then moved to Michigan, where an old college friend had offered him a partnership in a shipping business. Michael had spoken to him a few times on the telephone since then—on Michael's birthday, at Christmas, and when the Knicks made the playoffs. He promised to have Michael come visit him once he got settled into his new home, his new job, but mostly Michael's mother had done what she could to erase him from their lives. Their marriage had been marked by long stretches of silence in between too many cruel arguments, and in a relatively brief spate of years they arrived at a general state of shock that they could have ever loved each other at all. There were no pictures of his father in the house, except for a snapshot Michael kept in his drawer of the two of them on a Ferris wheel at the state fair, with Michael holding a candy apple nub and his father flashing his crooked grin as the bright lights beneath them swam like colored fish.

Three weeks earlier Michael's father had pressed his face against the narrow pane of glass inside the thick oak door, his eyes scanning the classroom, and Michael watched him for several seconds before recognizing him. Before Michael could say anything, the man gently opened the door, and Mrs. McCauley, the sixth-grade math teacher, walked over to him, her powdered face squeezed into an expression of concern, as he whispered into her ear. She nodded once and said, “Michael, your father needs to see you.” Whether any of this seemed unusual to Mrs. McCauley, Michael could not tell. He nodded and bounded out into the hallway, his heart racing.

“Well, here he is in the flesh,” James Colvert said. “Let me look at this fine-looking young man.” He put his warm, heavy hand on Michael's shoulder, and at that moment Michael thought he might collapse from the weight of it.

“Now that's what you call growing,” he said. “How tall are you now?”

“Fifty-seven inches, exactly,” Michael said quickly.

“I'll bet you're a hundred pounds, too,” James Colvert said.

“Almost,” Michael said.

His father nodded, and then turned to look over his shoulder.

“Well, let me explain the plan we've got going here, and then we can skedaddle. I've got a carload of fishing equipment out there in the car waiting for us, and all we have to do is hop in and take off.”

“Where are we going?” Michael said. He was aware of his voice bouncing off the lockers in the empty hallway.

“The Great Lakes State, where else?” James Colvert said. “Fishing, hunting, camping, whatever we like. But we have to go now is the thing. I talked to your principal all about it, so we're all square there.”

“What about Mom?” Michael asked. He looked back in the window to see Mrs. McCauley drawing a pie chart on the blackboard.

“Mom knows all about it,” he said. This was a lie, and James Colvert was surprised at how much he enjoyed saying it. “She's just kept it a secret, like I asked her. She's good at keeping secrets, your mother. Case in point. But like I said, we have a whole heck of a lot of driving ahead of us, so we should get started.”

“What about school?”

“Yeah, your teacher's in on it, too,” James Colvert whispered, but this wasn't true, either. “It's all right for you to miss the last few weeks, since you're doing so well.” Earlier in the spring, he had called the school's secretary for the date of the last day of classes, but by the time he booked their cabin, the available dates didn't mesh with Michael's school dates. That morning, after he watched Michael head off to school from his car parked down the street, then saw Michael's mother drive off to work, he left a postcard in the mailbox explaining that he was taking Michael camping and that he would have him back by the end of June. He left no telephone number, and didn't say where they would be—omissions he particularly relished.

James Colvert began walking down the hall, and Michael noticed the scuffed boots under his father's khaki pants, which were severely worn, with a hole in one of the back pockets. Michael looked once more to his classroom, but Mrs. McCauley was out of view, and then someone said something to cause the class to laugh before she could quiet them down. Michael raced to catch up.

“Wait, my books,” he called out.

“You won't need them,” his father said. “Your teacher will take care of them.”

There was a sparkling red Mercury Monterey out front, where the school buses would start to line up in the afternoon. Michael watched the bald spot on the back of his father's head and tried to remember if it had been there before.

“Now was I lying about the fishing gear?” his father said, his arms held out like an eager salesman. There were at least four fishing rods that Michael could make out, and a large metal tackle box that sat on the vinyl seat. There was a net and a pair of adult-size waders lying on the floor.

Michael smiled—for the first time, he realized. “That's a lot,” he said. “You could catch a whole lake with that.”

James Colvert snorted. “The car's brand-new, too. I flew in a few days ago and picked it up for the trip.”

Michael felt light-headed; it was as if he had stepped inside one of his Richie Rich comics.

Traffic on the Garden State Parkway was light, and the stubby pines that had been planted just a few years earlier were towering over the roadside signs. When a truck carrying fruit out of the state and, some miles later, a truck carrying steel pipes passed, Michael was sure that the drivers were craning their heads to admire the beautiful car.