Envious Moon (12 page)

I
n the mornings I drove those winding roads to the nearest good-sized town, Litchfield, and I ate either McDonald's or Burger King and then I drove by the school to see if anything was happening. The place was deserted. Occasionally someone who looked like a janitor or a maintenance person was walking around but that was it. No students that I could see. There was also no sign of the police car I had seen the first time I drove by and this made me feel better. No doubt half of Rhode Island was looking for me, but they hadn't figured to look here yet. Though perhaps that was only because Hannah had not arrived.

With my one piece of work taken care of, I had nothing to do but kill time. Once I went to a matinee movie at the theater in Litchfield, which took up most of the afternoon, but I knew I couldn't do that every day. There weren't a lot of Portuguese boys my age in that town and like on Cross Island, I stood out. The rest of the days were interminable, to tell you the truth. I sat around my campsite and thought about home, and about Hannah, and about everything that had happened. I bought some firewood from the camp office and at night I built a fire
and at least this was something to look at. I'd watch the burning logs for hours, stirring the coals with a long stick. I wished I had some beer or wine but I didn't. I smoked cigarettes until I got so tired there was nothing left to do but curl up on my bedroll and go to sleep.

My third day there, I returned back to the campground to discover that the campsite closest to me was now occupied. It was through some thin poplars and also next to the brook. Parked there was a rusty pickup truck and one of those small popup campers in front of which, on a lawn chair, sat an old man with gray hair as long as a woman's. It came down either side of his face and partway down his chest. He had an ample belly. It wasn't even noon yet, but he had an open can of beer and a cigarette. He waved to me when I pulled up and I waved back. I got out of the car and stood at my meager site trying to figure out what to do about this guy who would soon know that I didn't have a tent. That I was sleeping on the ground or in my car. I didn't know much about camping, but the one thing I knew is that no one slept on the ground intentionally. You were on the run from something, most likely, and were probably someone to be avoided.

And as I stood next to the brook thinking this, the old man called to me. I didn't hear what he said but I knew he was addressing me. I turned and looked at him through the small trees and he was raising his can of beer at me. I heard him clearly now. He said, “Have a beer.”

I wasn't one to drink in the morning but I also didn't know how to say no to that. I walked through the trees to his campsite and when he saw me coming he stood and climbed into his small camper. I didn't know what to do so I stopped but a moment later he emerged and he had another lawn chair.

“Come on, sit down,” he said. He had a deep voice, gruff-sounding but friendly enough. I went over to him and was going to shake his hand but he just motioned at the chair. It was only about a foot away from him and facing the same way, toward my campsite, so that to look at him, I had to turn sideways. He handed me a beer and said, “I'm Terrence.”

“Anthony. Thanks.”

When I took the beer, I got a better look at him. He wore a white T-shirt and jean shorts, wool socks and sandals. His wrist had a tattoo of an anchor and on his calves, veins as thick as noodles stuck out of his skin.

“Some day, Anthony,” he said.

I looked up at the blue sky over the woods. “Yeah,” I said.

“You just passing through?” he asked.

For some reason I told him the truth. “I'm waiting for a girl.”

Terrence laughed at this. “Waiting for a girl? Doesn't seem a great place for that.”

“She goes to the school the next town over.”

“The one on 75?”

“That's it,” I said.

Terrence took a cigarette out and lighted it and I got one of my own and did the same. “I should be working,” he said. “But I just got here. Take a day off and start tomorrow.”

“What kind of work?”

“Mushrooms,” he said. “Yup. I harvest mushrooms.”

“For real?”

“Oh, yeah. These hills are full of 'em. And if you get the right ones, they're worth a pretty penny.”

“So you just go into the woods and look for them?”

“No, no, there's much more to it than that.” He pointed
to his head. “You got to use this. Know where they're hiding. What kind. Chanterelles and oysters, lobster mushrooms, hen-of-the-woods, you name it.”

“Hen-of-the-woods?” I said.

“Yup. Those are huge. Found one at the base of an old tree a few miles from here last year. Thing barely fit in the bed of my truck. Got three hundred dollars for it from a restaurant owner in New York. That was a good day. Bought a lot of beer that did.”

“I bet,” I said.

“Anyway,” Terrence said, and for a moment we sat in silence. I had not really talked to anyone since Victor came into my small yard in Galilee and I realized how much I missed other people. Then Terrence said, “What do you do when you're not waiting for a girl, Anthony?”

“I'm a fisherman,” I said.

“Yeah? Where's that?”

“Galilee, Rhode Island.”

“Ah,” he said. “Know it well.”

“You do?”

Terrence pointed to his wrist, and the tattoo of the anchor. “Merchant Marines. Twenty-five years. I been in and out of that old harbor more than a few times.”

“I work on a swordboat,” I said.

“That's some work,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “I miss it.”

“That's what girls will do to you,” he said. “Mess up what you like. I travel light myself. Of course I'm not your age anymore. I used to wait for girls, myself.”

“This girl is worth it,” I said.

Terrence reached down to the cooler underneath his chair
and brought out two more beers. “Drink up,” he said, and I drained the rest of that first beer and took the second one from him. “Drink up and tell me about her.”

I looked over at him. I saw his eyes for the first time clearly and they were the strangest shade of gray. I looked at his tattoo and his long hair and then I looked beyond him to his rusty pickup truck. And I thought that there are whole bunches of people that nobody knows about who live outside of normal things. Men who live on their own terms and make a living how they can, even if it means picking mushrooms in the woods. Who go where they want and when they want. Who answer to only themselves. Terrence was one of these men and I realized sitting next to him drinking beer in the morning that I was too.

I said, “She's something.”

“What do you like about her the most?”

“Her eyes,” I said. “Maybe her freckles.”

Terrence nodded. “The eyes. What color?”

“Green. But not just any green. Bright. Beautiful.”

“What color is her hair?”

“Kind of red. More blond. It changes with the sun.”

“I like that,” said Terrence. “Especially redheads.”

“Yeah, it's nice.”

“How about her titties?”

I laughed. “Her titties?”

Terrence smiled. “She got titties, don't she?”

“Yeah,” I said, though I didn't really like the question.

“How are they?”

“They're fine,” I said, a little firmly.

“Is she skinny or fat?”

“She's skinny.”

Terrence made a
hrmph
sound. “I like a little meat on mine,” he said. “Some cushion, you know what I mean.”

I drank from my beer. I had a sudden feeling of not wanting to be there anymore. I looked over at Terrence and I saw him differently now, less benign, and I knew it was because I didn't like him talking about Hannah like that. He didn't know her and it was none of his business what she looked like. But there was something Terrence could do for me that I couldn't for myself.

I said, “Terrence, what do you think about buying me some beer? My money. I buy, you fly. Some to buy some for yourself too.”

His eyes narrowed. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

He pulled on one side of his long hair. “I took you for older. All right,” he said. “You got to drive, though.”

We finished the beers we had and then we drove into Litchfield in Victor's Chevy. We must have looked like quite the pair, the long-haired heavyset old man, and the thin Portuguese boy. In the car, Terrence smelled funky, like cigarettes and beer, but like the woods too, perhaps like the mushrooms he harvested for money. I was glad he was getting me the beer, but I think I was even happier to get some separation between us. We could split up when we got back. We could split up and I wouldn't have to answer any more of his questions about Hannah, and have to see through his eyes what he thought about her.

T
errence asked me to eat with him that night. He had a small cookstove and I didn't know how to say no and so we sat together and got drunk on beer and ate some cheap steak he fried up with onions in a cast-iron skillet. He made some potatoes out of a box too and it was lousy food but it tasted sort of good after all the fast food I had been eating.

Afterwards we sat in the lawn chairs and it was a clear and beautiful night though the wind that came through the trees held some of the winter to come. I put on my coat but it still made me shiver. All that beer had completely gone to my head too and this might have contributed to the cold I was feeling. Terrence and I talked about fishing for a while, and then he told more about his life. How he chased the good weather, moving south when winter started to come.

“Anywhere there are woods, there are mushrooms,” he said.

He spent his summers in the Northeast and in the winter he generally went down to the Carolinas. He camped the whole time and he worked when he wanted and it sounded like a decent life to me.

When we had exhausted that conversation we sat for a time in silence and smoked and kept our thoughts to ourselves. I was thinking of Hannah, of where she was, and whether or not tomorrow might be the day I would see her. On my morning drives past the school I kept expecting to just see her in front of one of those buildings, helping her mother unload a station wagon with all her things. Of course, I wouldn't be able to approach her just yet. I would need to give it some time, to pick my spot. I had no idea how she would react. And that was what was going through my mind when Terrence said, “How long they been looking for you?”

“Who?”

“The cops.”

“What are you talking about?”

Terrence leaned forward in his chair and he brought his cigarette up to his lips and in the dark I sensed his eyes on my face, though I kept looking straight ahead, toward my campsite, to where the brook ran through the trees. “I been around a long time, boy,” Terrence said. “I can tell when a man's running from something. You don't even have as much as a tent. Sleeping on the ground in the woods.”

“Nah,” I said. “I just don't have a tent.”

“How long?” Terrence said. “Listen, I got no love for cops.”

I leaned back and sipped from the can of beer. I didn't feel like lying. “Four days,” I said.

“'Cause of what you did to the girl?”

“I didn't do anything to the girl.”

“They know you're here?”

I shook my head. “I don't think so.”

“What they want you for?”

“An accident.”

“An accident?” Terrence said. “Cops never want people for accidents.”

“A man died.”

“How?”

“I don't want to talk about this,” I said.

“Just tell me how and I'll let you alone.”

“My buddy and I were robbing a house on Cross Island. Not even robbing it really, though it doesn't matter. We thought it was empty. It wasn't.”

Terrence nodded. “Sounds like a bitch.”

“It was,” I said.

“Tell me one more thing,” he said.

“What?”

“What's the girl got to do with it?”

I sighed. “It was her father.”

“What you going to do to her?”

I looked over at him. “I'm not going to do a thing to her. I love her.”

“There's a lot to this then,” said Terrence.

I lighted a cigarette. “Tell me about it,” I said.

We didn't say much more that night. We sat in the dark for a time and finished our cigarettes. Above us the tall pines shook with the autumnal breeze.

T
he next morning I woke to the drizzle of rain and I had a hangover. I stood up and opened the door to the car and for a few minutes I sat in the driver's seat with the door open and watched the soft rain fall. Terrence's trailer was there but his truck was gone. He must be in the woods.

I drove over the rolling hills to Litchfield and at the drive-through picked up a coffee and a sandwich. The day was cloudy and gray and the rain now was just a misting on the windshield. I came back down 75 and as I went I wished Victor's radio worked. It would be nice to listen to the radio. I passed the white sign that said
WELCOME TO LINCOLN
and then I was coming on the school when I saw all the cars. My heart flipped in my chest. This was the day.

I slowed down coming past the school, and everywhere, on both sides of the road, expensive cars were being unloaded by well-dressed men and women with their daughters. Bags and bags, clothes on hangers. I drove as slow as I dared and I scanned the people as I went but to tell you the truth, their faces were all blank to me. I was looking for Hannah and for Hannah only. Where was she? It seemed as if everyone had arrived at once,
and I did not see her among them. I was almost past the school, and about to turn around and make another pass, when I saw the cars. Three of them, all state police cars. Most ominously, one of them had the colors of Rhode Island. We were more than two hours from Rhode Island. They were parked in a row in a small parking lot next to a large white house with pillars on the front. One of the Connecticut cars and the Rhode Island car were both facing toward the main road. The other car, in between them, faced back toward the athletic fields. Through the glass I saw the shadows of the men who sat in them. I kept on driving and when I looked in my rearview, they had not pulled out. Either they had not seen me, or they did not know yet what they were looking for. Because one thing was crystal clear: They were here for me. I didn't know what they knew. Did they just think I might decide to come here? Or did they know from Victor that this was my plan?

But one other thing was beyond dispute that morning. Hannah was here, or was about to be here.