Do Not Pass Go (4 page)

Deet was very careful at his grandfather's house, trying to avoid Grandpa's sarcasm (“Born in a barn?”) when you didn't shut the door fast enough, or Grandma's picky complaints (“Don't sit in that chair with those dirty pants!”).

He swept the snow off his feet outside the front door, stepped inside the porch and removed his boots, set them neatly in the corner, and knocked on the door. Here everything was organized and precisely planned the way he always wanted things to be at home, but there was something wrong with it. There was something cold and gray about organization at his grandparents' house.

His grandmother came to the door, looking fake surprised—“Look who's here, Grandpa!”—though she certainly knew he was coming because she'd called his mom to ask that he be sent over after school.

She was thick and stocky, with short gray hair like all the grandmas in the world seemed to have. He'd seen pictures of her when she was young, and she didn't look anything like she did now. Maybe getting fat erased all your own features and made you look like
everyone else. Grandpa didn't have a bit of fat on him, so he looked a lot the way he did in his old pictures. But Grandma had lost all her distinguishing features. They'd been blurred and erased, and now she was a sort of generic grandma.

She sat back down at the kitchen table where her sewing basket was and picked up the pair of Grandpa's black work pants she'd been patching.

“How was school today, Deet?” she asked as she always did.

“Fine, Grandma,” he answered as he always did.

Inside the house everything was neat and clean and quiet. They never had the radio on, and Grandpa wouldn't allow a television in the house. Hard to imagine Dad as a little boy in this silent house. Maybe people become the way they are because they want to be the opposite of their parents, like he wanted to be all organized and efficient. Maybe Dad had wanted to be happy-go-lucky instead of being wrapped too tight like Grandma and Grandpa.

Their house had its own smell, which Deet could never identify. Dad said it was sourdough in a crock
on top of the cabinets, which Grandma used nearly every morning for hotcakes. Maybe it was, but there was something else that smelled like meanness.

Maybe it was the smell of dead animals. The bearskin nailed against the living room wall, moose horns nailed over the porch door.

There were three guns hanging on the wall, a .22, a .30-06, and a .357. Grandpa'd go hunting every fall for a moose, and shoot forty or fifty spruce hens as well, which Grandma plucked and put in the freezer. He prided himself on providing the meat.

That was one of the big problems between Grandpa and Dad. Dad wouldn't hunt. He hated killing things. When he turned eighteen he left the mining camp and went to mechanic school. And he wouldn't go hunting with his father anymore. Dad let Deet make up his own mind about hunting, but Deet had shaken his head no when Grandpa wanted to take him out for spruce hens the first time. He didn't want to kill things either. “You're making an old woman out of this boy,” Grandpa snarled at Dad, “just like you.”

The stove gleamed and a shining teakettle sat in its
place on the back burner. On the wall by the stove was a framed picture of hands, just hands, no face, no arms, just hands, praying. Deet had always disliked that picture. It gave him the creeps.

What was the point of praying, anyway? If this god was all-powerful, all-knowing, he knew about someone's troubles already, didn't he? Once Deet had asked Grandpa about this. Grandpa's eyes had snapped blue sparks. “You know,” he said, “you can go to hell for asking questions like that just as sure as you can from stealing.” Well, if he was a good god, he wouldn't have to be asked to do a good thing for someone, would he? He'd just
do
it. Mom said the good thing about Deet was that he'd do stuff without being asked. She said it was twice as good to have a favor if you didn't have to ask for it. Shouldn't this god be like that? Should he have to be begged?

Like those prayer things organized for someone in the hospital. “We all prayed for you to get well.” Like god kept a tally.
Okay. Three hundred and seventy-five prayers. I guess I can heal him now.
Or what about,
Only two hundred prayers. Not enough. Let him die.

Deet didn't believe in god at all, because everything people said about god was so silly. Illogical. Another way he was different from everyone he knew.

The curtains hung stiffly at the window, and the braided rug sat where it always sat, precisely in front of the rocker.

His grandfather sat in the rocker as he usually sat, and he gave Deet a critical look before he folded the newspaper and stood up. The look, Deet was sure, indicated that he thought Deet should have been there earlier.

“I just got off the bus,” he said in answer to that look. His grandfather grunted.

Even though he wasn't really Deet's grandfather, he never seemed to make any distinction between Deet and the girls. He always treated Deet the same as the girls, but it was not as if there was a lot of enthusiasm over any of them.

Grandma kept pictures on the bookcase in the dark living room: Dad at eight or nine, looking no different from his grown-up self; pictures of the girls as babies; a picture of Mom and Dad and Deet before the girls
were born. There was a picture from the mine, the year they had such a big clean-up, Grandpa posing proudly with the gold pan full of nuggets and gold dust.

Grandpa's parents had brought him from Finland when he was just a baby. Deet had read that the Finns had been invaded by hordes from Mongolia, and that was why some Finns had slanted eyes and broad cheekbones. Grandpa certainly would have approved of Genghis Khan, who was not an old woman.

“Have something to eat first, if you want, and then I want you to help me with the propane bottles.” Those bottles were hundred pounders, and Grandpa had handled them all by himself for as long as Deet had been around. Now he was asking Deet for help. Deet looked quickly into Grandpa's face, but it was stony, no answers there.

“I'm not hungry,” said Deet. He put his boots back on and went out with Grandpa to carry the five bottles into the woodshed.

The night it happened was a
cold, hard night, thirty below. Ice fog covered everything, but by the light from the kitchen window Deet could see frost crusted on the trees by the house, bowing the branches with its weight.

He was doing his homework at the kitchen table. He usually did his homework in his room, but when the weather turned cold Deet's room was the coldest in the house, because the heat registers weren't working right. Dad was going to get around to fixing it this weekend, he said.

Deet was having a hard time concentrating on his social studies book, the Constitution this week, because his mom was washing the dishes and chattering away as she usually did while she worked. She was telling him, word for word, the plot of the movie
she'd seen last night on television. Some World War II thing about a guy in a German prison camp. Actually, it sounded interesting, and Deet had to frown hard at the Bill of Rights to stay in focus. The television in the living room was on too loud as usual.

P.J. and Jam were already in their pajamas, playing on the living room carpet, surrounded by their Barbie dolls, which Deet hated, because Barbies never seemed to have anything on their little minds but clothes and Ken. He was irritated by the tone of voice they used when they played with Barbies, the tone that implied that whatever was happening in Barbie's little world, it was of great importance, the center of the universe, in fact, the highest development of civilization. When he was finished outlining the Bill of Rights he was going to sabotage their little plastic lives, give them something real to worry about, like nuclear disaster, or cancer, or something.

Deet had just discovered that his social studies book was sitting in a little puddle of ketchup left over from dinner, and he was trying to wipe it off with a paper towel when the phone rang.

His mom dashed to the phone, a dish towel thrown
over her shoulder and a pot in her hand, breathless when she answered. It was her long, long silence after she said hello that made Deet look up from his book. She seemed to freeze on the spot, and she didn't say a thing, except “Yes.” Then she hung up, her face absolutely still.

The television announcer's silly, enthusiastic voice blared in the living room.

“Put the girls to bed, Deet,” she said. She didn't look at him.

Deet lowered his eyes to the table. The blood felt as if it were draining from his face, leaving his skin feeling tight and itchy. He could hear his heart begin to thump hard, could hear his blood pounding in his ears.

Something terrible had happened, just as he'd always thought it would.

A dozen things might have happened. An accident. Maybe Dad had had an accident. Maybe Grandpa had had a heart attack. No, none of those things. She would have said something like, “Where is he? I'll be right there.” She hadn't said a thing. This was something worse, something there were no words for.

When he got up from the table, his knees were shaky. He went into the living room to get the girls.

“Pick up your stuff. Mom wants you to go to bed.” His voice was as shaky as his knees. P.J. started to collect the fluffy little bits of Barbie clothes, minuscule shoes, tiny purses, but Jam charged into the kitchen. “Mom, just a little while longer?”

Deet went back to the kitchen to collect Jam, and he could see that she had seen their mom's face.

Deet put his hand in the middle of Jam's back and propelled her toward the door. Jam gave another glance at their mother before she left the kitchen. Before Deet could follow her, P. J. dashed into the kitchen and searched for her favorite cup in the dish rack, the pink plastic one with the ballerina.

“Mom, there's this boy at school who has a baby fox,” she said. She'd turned on the faucet and was testing the running water with her fingers, waiting until it was just cold enough. “I wish we had a fox. That would be really cool.” She filled her glass and drank it down, then turned to see if there was even the smallest hope of getting a fox and saw her mother's face. P.J. looked
quickly at Deet, who jerked his head at her to tell her to come. She put the glass down and followed Deet.

As soon as they were in their bedroom, P. J. asked, “Is Mom mad at us?”

“No, silly,” said Deet. He couldn't think of anything to head them off, so he said, “She's just worried about something.” Both girls blinked at him, stony faced. He was sorry he'd said that, because Mom never worried about anything, so it certainly wasn't going to reassure them that everything was all right. So he said sternly, “Get into bed by the time I count three or I won't read anything!”

Jam jumped into her bed with mock-fearful screams. P.J. arranged her bears in the certain way she said they liked to sleep, while Jam contorted her pillow into the right shape. Deet pulled the book of fairy tales from the shelf by the door. It didn't have any illustrations, so he could sit in the corner by the window and read until they fell asleep, and they wouldn't be continually asking to look at the pictures.

He started with the first one in the book, about the twelve dancing princesses, who always reminded him
of Barbie dolls themselves, thinking of nothing but parties and dances. Ordinarily he would read the story with sarcastic asides, but tonight he read woodenly, not knowing a word he read. Jam fell asleep halfway through, but P.J. was still awake, so he read the one about the Pied Piper. It took another fifteen minutes before P.J. fell asleep. He wished he could read forever and never stop. As soon as he stopped he was going to have to know what was happening to them.

By the time he'd finished reading, his knees had stopped feeling so shaky and a hard, dead feeling had taken over his stomach. He closed the book and looked at their clean little faces and felt a stab of sorrow that he couldn't protect them from whatever dreadful thing was coming.

He shut the door to the girls' room and went to look for his mother. She wasn't in the kitchen. He found her sitting on the edge of her bed, holding her stomach and rocking back and forth. The pot was on the floor by her feet, and she had the dish towel wadded against her mouth.

“What was that call about? What's wrong?”

She didn't look at him, just kept rocking. Mom, who never stopped talking, unable to speak. He put his hand on her shoulder and shook her, his voice husky with panic. “Mom, tell me. Is Dad hurt?”

She took a deep shuddering breath and looked at him at last. Then she began to cry silently, the way Jam did when she scraped her knee or something, her mouth square. And just like Jam, when she stopped crying she could hardly speak for the hiccupy gasps, so Deet wasn't sure he heard her right.

“He's been arrested! He's injail!”

“Jail,” said Deet, as if he'd never heard of it.