A Good and Happy Child (8 page)

I asked.

“Translation?” It was as if she had forgotten what the meeting was for. Tom Harris cocked an eyebrow. “Oh. This is what you call schmoozing,” my mother said. “Hobnobbing. Sniffing each other out. He wants to see if this crazy professor will be presentable to his client. Wonder if I’ll pass the test?
Für aufsehenerregende Ergebnisse,
” she sang out, “
Wenden Sie sich mit dem Fingerspitzen an!
”

Tom Harris smiled slightly, gliding back into his faraway look. Maybe I would run away just to prove what a loser he was as a babysitter. After finishing my homework, I came downstairs. Tom Harris was sitting in the kitchen. He was sipping a cup of coffee at the table. His hands were all tendons and veins, with a dusting of thick brown hair. Most people drink coffee with some kind of entertainment: conversation, magazine, television. He sat in silence at an empty table, his long limbs folded into the chair like a wire hanger bent the wrong way. I stood in the doorway. He did not even look around.

“Have a seat,” he said coolly.

I sat down, as instructed. “You’re a weird babysitter,” I said.

“I don’t need one anyway.”

He sipped his coffee.“Your mother seems to think you do.”

“She thinks I’m still a kid.”

“You’re not very mature for twenty-three.”

“I’m only
eleven and a half,
” I corrected, scornfully.

“See what I mean?”

“I’m not a kid,” I said. “For instance, I know something about you.”

“Oh, really?” His eyes danced, his head bobbed. He seemed ready for a little playful jousting—until he heard what I said next. a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

53

“I know you like my mother.”

He straightened up. “Your mother is one of my oldest and dearest friends, George. Of course I like your mother.”

“That’s why you’re here all the time,” I said sarcastically.

“What are you getting at, George?”

“You want to marry her.”

A shower of clear laughter burst into the room and bounced around the walls. “If I want to marry your mother, what am I doing here with you?” he said.

Now it was my turn to hesitate.

“That wasn’t it,” I snarled. “I know something else about you.”

The bubbling feeling from Tom Harris’s laughter faded, and in its place came the tingling thrill I had felt in the presence of my Friend. I felt a surge of adrenaline. This was my chance to find out the truth.

“You know what happened to my father.”

The laughter stopped. Tom Harris’s eyes opened in surprise. The feeling of exultation continued. Then something strange happened. I felt myself lean forward, grinning fiercely at Tom Harris. I could feel the muscles of my face tighten, grow hot from the intensity. I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the panel of the kitchen window. The pane distorted my image. In the ripples of the glass, my lips seemed to have stretched themselves into a muscular furrow, baring my teeth from root to tip like a dog, and my eyebrows curled convulsively. Tom Harris leapt to his feet as if I’d tried to scratch him. His eyes were wide. He seemed genuinely frightened.

“What’s gotten into you, son?” he said with alarm.

“I’m not your son and I never will be!” I snapped. I touched my face. It seemed smooth again. “What do you know about my father?”

“What?” he stammered.

“You know something that you’re not telling me or Mom. Don’t you? About Daddy and why he went away. What is it?”

Tom Harris backed away from the table. He seemed disoriented, a boxer retreating from an opponent.

54

J u s t i n E v a n s

“George, that’s a serious accusation.”

“Is it true?” I shouted. “Is it?”

“George, your father was my friend for twenty-five years.” He tried a stab at humor: “Fine, you can stay up for the late show. Just drop the angry act.”

But he’d grown pale. If there were any need for proof of what my Friend had told me, it was written on Tom Harris’s face as clearly as black ink. “I do know things about your father that you don’t know,”

he said softly. “I do know things about how he died.”

“You admit it!”
I was shrieking.

Tom Harris stepped forward and continued in that soft, careful voice. “I asked your mother if I might come here tonight because I am worried about you, George. What you say gives me further cause for alarm. Not because you are wrong,” he said. “No, because you are right. These are things that no one on earth could know—except a few friends, whose trustworthiness is absolute.”

“Tell me!” I could not believe what I was hearing. The more I looked at Tom Harris’s craggy, greasy face, the angrier I grew. “Why won’t anybody tell me?”

“Because some things are not for little boys to hear!” he said loudly. He was angry now, too.

“Oh my God,” my head was spinning. “You mean
murder
!”

“Stop saying that! Stop it!” Tom Harris towered over me and shook his finger. “How do you know these things, George? Tell me!”

But I could not. I ran from the room, with the hall, the stairs, swimming past in a blur. Tom Harris was close behind. I was near swooning. In my room, in the dark, I slammed the door and propped up a chair against the handle like I’d seen in movies. I heard Tom Harris’s voice outside, calling my name, and I blocked it out, repeating,

“Get away! Get away!”

Get away. Get away.

That scowling face.

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55

It was quiet now. Dark in my room, but there was light under the door, meaning that my mother was still out and Tom Harris was still in the house. I was in my room, in pajamas, but roused into the heady, world-warped atmosphere of my Friend. I felt like a patient under the ether, when the tables and chairs in the operating room shimmy in excitement and the fear hooks of surgery loosen and let go, amplifying the delicious drumming in mind and ear and spine. My Friend stood at the bottom of the bed. He was staring at me from out of the dark, among the moonlit shadows. His face was vivid to me: he had hair like straw, and a sooty face.

You scared me,
I said.

I can’t scare you anymore,
he said into my mind.
Are we going into the night?
I asked.

Yes.

Next I was floating unattached in the ethereal night, as before, and the “upless” feeling passed almost immediately. The gray night swirled around me, and this time, it caressed me. I felt a powdery, choking sweetness at the back of my throat. All of it felt higher pitched than before; it was musical, soaring, climactic. My Friend pointed, I followed. We passed the great black shipwreck, the earth. All the little windows were alight, blazing, as if the shipwreck were aflame.
Why is it so much brighter?

It’s not brighter,
he said.
You just see it better.
Am I a Beacon?

He grinned.
Oh yes.

And then into my mind poured a whole new vision. It came into me like music—richer, more complex than what I had felt before, serious and somber, like a cello sonata. I felt sorrow here. I began to feel like weeping. The cello music was so passionate and sad, I trembled. Grief was all around me.

What is this?

We’re going deeper.

The very atmosphere began to take on words. It was my Friend speaking to me:
This is what you wanted.

56

J u s t i n E v a n s

Suddenly I was in a room.

It was a dry place, painted white, with bare floorboards. Muted daylight, as from an overcast day, radiated from a window I could not see. The room was familiar, and yet was not a room at home or school: it was some neutral space, like a waiting room.

My father was there.

He was just as he was before he left for Honduras. Sad, deep-set eyes, with crow’s-feet at the corners, and thick brown hair. His nose was long, strong and pointed, and his skin was brownish, almost swarthy. To me, he was an Indian warrior: lean-limbed, tall, and grim. In life, when he was working or thinking, he stalked around the house in khaki pants and a ratty blue sweater, in forbidding silence. Now his dark eyes stared at the floorboards. He was garbed in pajamas. It felt like I was visiting him in a hospital.

George,
he said.

You’re tired,
I realized.

Very tired,
he said.
I’ve been carrying a secret.
He placed a hand on my shoulder. I could sense the comfortable cotton rustle of his pajamas. Then he began to speak, his brown eyes blazing.

I am caught on a threshold, George,
he told me.
This is a way station.
I pictured a train station where the train does not come. There are no other travelers, no noise or movement, no clocks to measure the passing time, and no people. Just stifling silence.
It’s a terrible high summer
where I am, George,
my father said, and I could picture it. Like a southern mill town, choking on an August heat.
As still as noon. My memories
never leave me alone.
There, in my mind, followed snapshots of situations: the chronology of how he died (
from his sickbed he stared at the
opening in the tent, a mere patch of white daylight, where he hoped good
news would appear, a medevac helicopter, or the supply truck that would take
him away on rough, rutted roads, which it did,
the visions told me,
but it
was weeks
). Through a flurry of dim pictures I saw some of my parents’

friends, with names attached,
Clarissa, Freddie;
I felt the sad love he had a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

57

for my mother, and I saw her face through his eyes on the day he left home for the camp—unreachable and unhappy, her sympathy for him so withered that even had he decided to stay, it would have made little difference.

Then he stopped, squeezed my shoulder, and said,
The worst of
these memories, is this.

What?
I was desperate to know.

Someone hoped I would be killed down there. Tom Harris, whom you
already seem prepared to adopt as a foster-father . . .
I protested.
I don’t! I hate him!

. . . he was the one who goaded me along, pushed me into going.
I knew it!
I triumphed.
How?

He played to my principles, convinced me I was unfulfilled, and dressed
up this idea, this Catholic idea, of a calling.
My father pronounced the word
calling
with the contempt he once reserved for novels he called
bogus
and
cheap-deep.
Instantly I shared his hatred.
It was an idea that he
whipped up into a passion. He drove me to think I could accomplish some-
thing, by helping people endure a disaster that was far beyond me. Stupid
and vain, do you understand, George? He manipulated me.
I understand,
I said.

Tom Harris,
my father said,
is in love with your mother. He would
come by afternoons when I wasn’t home and talk to her, sometimes for
hours. Made her resentful over my plans to go to Honduras—the same trip
he goaded me to take! Sometimes he would still be there when I came home
and would barely look at me as I came into my own house, as if I were
a monster and he were ashamed to be my friend. Do you see what he did,
George?

I see!
I said.
I remember that. How could you let him do it?

I could not force him to stop. Your mother said she needed sympathy,
and not from her own friends. She said it was better to have someone who
understood me as well. She understood no better than I did that Tom Harris
was as good as murdering me. I was outsmarted.
Another wince of pain shot across my father’s face.
Can you understand how this is agony to me?

58

J u s t i n E v a n s

I felt a burning humiliation so deep it seemed to reach back thousands of years, to the epoch of tribes and chieftans—as if my father had lost in single combat with Tom Harris. He had believed Tom Harris’s jaunty charms and had been duped by his intelligence, and now we both were shamed.

What can I do?
I pleaded with him.

First, listen,
he said.
Your godfather, Freddie Turnbull, was part of this
scheme. Freddie has letters of mine. He keeps them for Tom Harris, letters
they rescued from the house when I died. These letters prove everything I say.
Prove?
I asked.

But I felt the reality shift under me. That calm, cool room was jarred; distorted, like someone disturbing a reflection in a birdbath.
What do I do with them?
I shouted desperately into the vanishing remnants of the waiting room.

Just find the letters. You’ll see how Tom Harris twists the knife.
A howling rose around me as if tigers and dogs were held at bay behind the curtain of the warm night. I saw the gray mass, I felt chaos and motion. I heard my Friend whisper close in my ear:
They’ll never
tell you where they are. You will have to lie to them.
Who are they?
I asked desperately.

And then: a pounding and scraping.

“George,” came a voice.

I rose in bed. The door: the chair I propped under it was still there. Someone was trying to enter. The door was shaking, jostling the chair aside.

“George!”

Finally the chair fell over. The door opened, and my mother’s silhouette filled the bedroom door. Yellow light from the hall burned around her.

“George, are you awake? What is this chair doing here?”

She crossed into the dark bedroom.

“How was your night?” I asked, trying to be casual.

“I thought I heard you talking. Were you talking in your sleep?”

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59

“I guess so.”

She sat down next to me. She smelled of sweet perfume gone rotten with scotch and the faint mingled scents of cooking oil and bleach—