A Troublesome Boy (13 page)

“And orphans?” said Cooper.

“Weren't too many orphans around. Dad, he'd say, ‘Roger, we got way too much food for just the two of us, and we've told each other pretty well all the stories we know, so let's go round up someone to come over and entertain us.'” Rozey laughed. “So we'd put the turkey in the oven and then drive around and bring in the strays. Sometimes just one, sometimes two. Once we had four. We'd eat and just talk. People love to talk. Especially people who normally spend their whole days talking to their cats or their dogs. Oh, boy, the stories.”

“Tell us one,” said Cooper.

“Well,” said Rozey. “Just up the road here about a mile and a half there were two bachelor brothers. George and Harold Crosley. They lived with their mother on the old farmstead that their father had farmed and his father had farmed. The smallest little house you can imagine. There's one big back room right across the house and then in the front there's two bedrooms and that's it.”

“No bathroom?”

“Nope,” said Rozey. “They had an outhouse. No running water, no electricity. The boys shared one bedroom and Mother had the other. The boys slept in the same bed from the time they were this high up until their mother died. They were in their sixties. They went to bed in the same clothes they wore all day. Once a week, they used to take their clothes off and have a bath in the kitchen in a big tub with water heated on the woodstove, their mother scrubbing their backs like they were still six or seven. Anyway, Mother had been dead for six or eight months and one night George — it was him we had over for dinner, Harold being dead — George turned to Harold and said, ‘Harold, I reckon we don't have to share a bed anymore, do we?' and Harold said, ‘No, George, I don't believe we do,' and George got up and moved next door into Mother's old bedroom.”

“Took them six months to figure out there was a spare bed?” said Cooper.

“Oh, no. But neither one wanted to hurt the other guy's feelings by being the first to move.” Rozey laughed and laughed. “Ain't that the best?”

“What I wouldn't give for a brother like that,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Cooper. “What I wouldn't give for a brother, period.”

“What about you, Teddy? You have a favorite Christmas?”

“When I was eleven,” I said, “we went to Florida for Christmas. We had a little house right on the beach. White with an orange roof. There were palm trees all around the patio looking out over the ocean. I'd never seen the ocean before. Christmas morning we went out to the patio, my mom and me, and my dad brought our breakfast out on a tray and we sat there looking at the ocean, eating bacon and eggs and toast. Then we spent the day swimming, hanging around on the beach.”

“You have a turkey dinner?”

“Nope. Dad went out and bought a bucket of chicken. Chicken and biscuits and corn and beans. And key lime pie for dessert. It was the last time we were really all happy together. When we got home things started going sour. My parents started fighting. I hid out in my room or went over to friends' places. And then my father started to disappear on us. And then two years ago, he left.”

Rozey and Cooper were both holding their knives and forks, but they weren't eating.

“I remember the last night he was in the house. I woke up all of a sudden. There'd been some kind of crashing sound, like breaking glass. I went downstairs. My mother was in the living room crying. I asked her where dad was and she pointed to the kitchen. I went in and turned on the light. The window in the back door was smashed. My father was sitting on the counter with a towel around his hand. The blood had soaked right through. He looked at me and said, ‘Turn off the light, Teddy. It'll be better for my hand.' So I shut the light and went over to the counter. I asked him what happened. ‘I had a little accident,' he said. ‘You go back to bed.' In the morning when I came down he'd already gone off to work.” I cut another piece of turkey and started eating. “He never came back.”

“Jeez,” said Cooper.

“That's a sad story,” said Rozey. “Not the first part. The first part was nice, but it's a sad ending.”

We all went back to eating.

A minute later Rozey looked at Cooper. “You have a favorite Christmas?”

“This one,” said Cooper. He helped himself to more stuffing.

Rozey looked a little startled. “Well, say.”

We finished our meals. Cooper and me cleared the table, started doing the dishes.

“Leave that, boys. I'll do it later. Time to get into the presents.” We made our way into the living room. Rozey leaned down and picked up two parcels from beneath the tree, handed one to Cooper, the other to me. We tore away the wrappings.

He'd bought me
The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway;
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
for Cooper. “Hazel down at the library helped me pick them out. They ain't new, they're from the used-book bin. But they're in pretty good shape.”

Cooper looked at the book and then at Rozey.

“I feel so bad, Rozey. We didn't bring you anything.”

“Spending the day with you is all the present I need.” Rozey looked at his watch. “I ought to be getting you back.”

Twenty minutes later we were standing on the sidewalk, thanking Rozey again and again. Then Cooper slammed the door of the pickup and we waved and headed toward the school, rounded the corner and walked up the drive. Cooper pulled open the front door.

“Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing boy
 . . .
”

“Wordsworth?”

“Of course.”

We went up to the locker room and put our presents away, then took a pass on supper and headed to the boiler room. We hunkered down on the floor and had a cigarette.

When I looked over at Cooper, he had tears in his eyes.

“How come you're so sad?”

“I'm not sad, you idiot. I've never been so happy in my life. That was the best Christmas I've ever had. That was the sweetest thing anyone ever did for me, and he's almost a complete stranger.” He took off his glasses, wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands.

“What I want to know is, where's he been all my life? How come I got to be fourteen before someone actually went out of his way to do things for me? Take me fishing, take me tobogganing, cook up the best Christmas dinner in the history of the world, sit and talk, sit and listen. What I wouldn't give to be his son. I could've been a great son if I'd ever had the chance.” He was biting his lower lip. “Instead, roll of the dice and they came up snake eyes.” He lit up another smoke. “Shit.”

7

YOU KNOW HOW
sometimes you wake up in a cold sweat thinking of something awful you did or said, something you can't go back and fix, no matter how bad you wish you could? Well, one morning there I was, wide awake, my palms and forehead all sweaty. Heart racing.

What woke me up was the face of Alan Christie, the kid I'd told Cooper about when he asked me about the worst thing I'd ever done. Christie's nose and mouth bloody from where I'd punched him, tears streaming, dark brown eyes staring up at me like big question marks. He was flat on his back on the grass at the back of my old school. I was standing over him, one foot on either side of his scrawny little chest. I felt like picking him up by the scruff of the neck and hammering him a couple more times. Little prick.

“You say another word about my old man, I'll break your fucking neck.” I left him there, all bloody and snotty, wondering what hit him. I could still hear his voice as I walked away: “I'm sorry, Teddy.”

This was a couple of weeks after my old man did his disappearing act. It was lunch hour. I was hanging around with Billy Bedford, my absolute best pal, and then Christie came weaseling up. I never did like him. He had a way of trying to get under your skin with little comments. He'd never just come right out and say something. It was like he was talking sideways. Anyway, he comes up and looks at me and he has this little smirk on his face. “See your old man has a new girlfriend. Looks like she's young enough to be your — ”

He never got the last word out of his mouth. By that time he was on the ground, bloody and blubbering. I just left him there. I was so mad I couldn't see straight.

I was about a block and a half from the school before Bedford caught up with me, all winded from running. I just kept walking as fast as I could. I was still so pissed.

Finally Bedford grabbed me by the sleeve and we stopped and stood there on the sidewalk staring at each other.

“What's with you, Teddy?”

“You hear what that little shit said to me?”

“Who gives a shit? He's a little weasel. No one pays any attention to him. And besides, he's about half your size. What's going on with you?”

Who the hell knew? All I knew was that I was angry all the time. I felt like I wanted to shove my fist right through things, like my dad did the night he took off.

I didn't care about any of the things I used to care about. My grades were in the toilet. I stopped hanging out with my friends. I spent a lot of time riding my bike down around the harbor or along the river. Sometimes Bedford came looking for me. But eventually he just sort of gave up.

“What's with you?”

Jeezus. Cooper caught me completely by surprise. I was out in the alcove having a smoke, but in my head I was still on that sidewalk back home, Bedford giving me shit.

“Daydreaming,” I said.

He hunkered down beside me, lit up a smoke. “What about?”

“Just thinking of a pal of mine back home.” I told him about Billy, his goofy knock-knock jokes, the time he put a lizard in the girls' dressing room in the gym. Stuff like that.

“You miss home?”

“Depends.” Sometimes I did. I'd get to thinking about the friends I used to have, the fun we used to have goofing around. I even missed my old school, weird as that was. It was hard thinking of the way things had turned out by the time I left town, how I'd become kind of a loner.

But thinking about that made me feel sad, and feeling sad shows on your face faster than a crop of zits. There was nothing the priests and kids like O'Hara couldn't read on your face and you didn't want to give them the edge, that's for sure. Besides, there was no way I could go back and undo what I'd done to Christie. No way I could go back and make up with Bedford. That was all history.

“At least you got a home to miss.” He spiraled his cigarette out into the yard, looked at me. “What's your home like?”

“My former home?”

He laughed. “Yeah, that one.”

“Nice. Up on a hill overlooking the bay.”

“Big?”

“Big enough. Two stories. Four bedrooms.”

“What's your old man do?”

“Builds houses. He built that one.”

“You go with him? When he's building?”

“Sometimes.”

“He let you help?”

“Drive some nails. Hand him his tools. Things like that.”

“Was it fun?”

Mostly it was fun just being with him. Watching him do things that he could do really well, working with guys who seemed to like him a lot. Made me feel proud.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

Cooper didn't say anything for a few minutes. “The letters you get, who sends them?”

“My mother.”

“She miss you?”

A year ago I would have said yes. Now? “Your guess is as good as mine. Once her boyfriend moved in, it was like I went out with the trash.”

He looked at me, then away. “What about your dad?”

“What about him?”

“He ever write?”

“Nope.”

“How come?”

“Beats me.”

“He know where you are?”

“I guess.”

“Go figure, eh?”

What made it all so weird was, me and my dad used to be so close. He was always interested in what was going on in my life. I'd tell him what I'd learned in school, what me and my friends were up to. He'd laugh in all the right places. Always made me feel that what I did and what I thought really mattered.

How could someone go from caring so much to not caring at all? Made you wonder if it was all bogus from day one.

I looked at Cooper. He was staring down at the ground. “If you ever saw your old man,” he said, “what would you say to him?”

“I'd like to tell him what an asshole he was. But I don't know. You?”

“I don't know, either.”

I looked over at him.

“You finally got a letter from your mom?”

He didn't say anything for quite a while. Then he said, almost a whisper, “I wrote it myself.” He had his hands jammed in his coat pockets, his shoulders hunched up, collar pulled up around either side of his face. The wind was brutal.

“What?”

“I couldn't stand seeing all the other guys getting letters and never hearing my name called out. It was pathetic.”

“But you were crying when you read it.”

He stood there for a couple of minutes, staring out at the yard.

“I'll tell you this much. No one's gonna miss me when I'm gone.” Cooper pushed himself away from the wall and walked away.

Second time he'd said that.

—

THE DAY STARTED
out all right. I didn't get centered out in geography, math or history and actually found it sort of interesting talking about what things were like out on the prairies, all the wheat they grew out there, things like that. I was in a pretty good mood. Didn't last.

The worst thing about English was it was the last class before lunch. You could hear stomachs growling up and down the aisles. We were all thinking more about sandwiches and cookies than
Oliver Twist
.

“Mr. Clemson.” Sullivan had wandered down our row and stopped right beside me. Must have seen an X on my forehead, got it in his crosshairs.