Five Classic Spenser Mysteries (40 page)

It was after five when we finished. The bugs were out and it was getting cool. Last fall Susan and I had bought a cheap stereo and put it in the cabin. I put on the Benny Goodman 1938 jazz concert while I made a fire. I had a beer while I started supper. Paul came in from looking at the lake and got a Coke out of the refrigerator. He went into the living room. In a minute he was back.

“Didn’t you bring a television?” he said.

“No,” I said.

He snorted angrily and went back in the living room. I figured he’d stare at the record player. Anything in a pinch.

I opened a large can of beans and put them in a pan to heat. While they heated I put out some pickles and rye bread, ketchup, plates, and utensils. Then I panfried two steaks. We ate at a table in the living room, the kitchen was too small, listening to the Goodman band, watching the fire move, and smelling the wood smoke. Paul still wore the pea coat although the room was warm from the fire.

After supper I got out my book and started to read. Paul picked up the record albums and looked at them and put them back in disgust. He looked out the window. He went outside to look around but came back in almost at once. The bugs were out as it got dark.

“You shoulda brought a TV,” he said once.

“Read,” I said. “There’s books there.”

“I don’t like to read.”

“It’s better than looking at the lamp fixtures till bedtime, isn’t it?”

“No.”

I kept reading.

Paul said, “What’s that book?”

“
A Distant Mirror
,” I said.

“What’s it about?”

“The fourteenth century.”

He was quiet. Sap oozed out of the end of a log and sputtered onto the hot ash beneath it.

“What do you want to read about the fourteen hundreds for?” Paul said.

“Thirteen hundreds,” I said. “Just like the nineteen hundreds are the twentieth century.”

Paul shrugged. “So why do you want to read about it?”

I put the book down. “I like to know what life was like for them,” I said. “I like the sense of connection over six hundred years that I can get.”

“I think it’s boring,” Paul said.

“Compared to what?” I said.

He shrugged.

“I think it’s boring compared to taking Susan Silverman to Paris,” I said. “Things are relative.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I know more about being human when I know more about their lives. I get a certain amount of perspective. The time was full of people that killed, tortured, suffered, struggled, and agonized for things that seemed worth anything to them. Now they’ve been dead for six hundred years. What’s it all about, Ozymandias?”

“Huh?”

“ ‘Ozymandias’? It’s a poem. Here, I’ll show you.” I
got up and found a book in the box I hadn’t unpacked yet.

“Listen,” I said. I read the poem to him. Deliberately in the firelit room. It was about his level.

He said, “She your girl friend?”

I said, “What?”

He said, “Susan Silverman. She your girl friend?” “Yes,” I said.

“You going to get married?”

“I don’t know.”

“You love her?”

“Yes.”

“How about her?” he said.

“Does she love me?”

He nodded.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then why don’t you get married?”

“I’m not sure. Mostly it’s a question of how we’d affect each other, I suppose. Would I interfere with her work? Would she interfere with mine? That sort of thing.”

“Wouldn’t she quit work?”

“No.”

“Why not? I would. I wouldn’t work if I didn’t have to.”

“She likes her work. Makes her feel good about herself. Me too. If you just did it for money, of course you’d want to quit. But if you do it because you like to.…” I gestured with my hand. “What do you like to do?”

He shrugged. “That guy Hawk your friend?”

“Sort of.”

“You like him?”

“Sort of. I can count on him.”

“He seems scary to me.”

“Well, he is. He’s not good. But he’s a good man. You know the difference?”

“No.”

“You will,” I said. “It’s a difference I’m going to help you learn.”

The next morning I woke Paul up at seven.

“Why do I have to get up?” he said. “There’s no school.”

“We got a lot to do,” I said.

“I don’t want to get up.”

“Well, you have to. I’m going to make breakfast. Anything special you want?”

“I don’t want any.”

“Okay,” I said. “But there’s nothing to eat till lunch.”

He stared at me, squinting, and not entirely awake.

I went out to the kitchen and mixed up some batter for corn bread. While the bread was baking and the coffee perking, I took a shower and dressed, took the corn bread out, and went into Paul’s room. He had gone back to sleep. I shook him awake.

“Come on, kid,” I said. “I know you don’t want to, but you have to. You’ll get used to the schedule. Eventually you’ll even like it.”

Paul pushed his head deeper into the sleeping bag and shook his head.

“Yeah,” I said. “You gotta. Once you’re up and showered you’ll feel fine. Don’t make me get tough.”

“What’ll you do if I don’t,” Paul muttered into the sleeping bag.

“Pull you out,” I said. “Hold you under the shower. Dry you, dress you, Et cetera.”

“I won’t get up,” he said.

I pulled him out, undressed him, and held him under the shower, It took about a half an hour. It’s not easy to control someone, even a kid, if you don’t want to hurt them. I shampooed his hair and held him under to rinse, then I pulled him out and handed him a towel.

“You want me to dress you?” I said.

He shook his head, and wrapped the towel around himself, and went to his room. I went to the kitchen and put out the corn bread and strawberry jam and a bowl of assorted fruit. While I waited for him I ate an orange and a banana. I poured a cup of coffee. I sipped a little of it. I had not warned him against going back to bed. Somehow I’d had a sense that would be insulting. I wanted him to come out on his own. If he didn’t I had lost some ground. I sipped some more coffee. The corn bread was cooling. I looked at his bedroom door. I didn’t like cool corn bread.

The bedroom door opened and he came out. He had on jeans that had obviously been shortened and then let down again, his worn Top-Siders, and a green polo shirt with a penguin on the left breast.

“You want coffee or milk?” I said.

“Coffee.”

I poured some. “What do you take in it?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never had it before.”

“May as well start with cream and sugar,” I said. “Calories aren’t your problem.”

“You think I’m skinny?”

“Yes. There’s corn bread, jam, fruit, and coffee. Help yourself.”

“I don’t want anything.”

I said, “Okay,” and started on the corn bread. Paul sipped at the coffee. He didn’t look like he liked it. After breakfast I cleaned up the dishes and said to Paul, “You got any sneakers?”

“No.”

“Okay, first thing we’ll do is go over to North Conway and buy you some.”

“I don’t need any,” he said.

“Yes, you do,” I said. “We’ll pick up a newspaper too.”

“How you know they sell them over there?”

“North Conway? They probably got more flashy running shoes than aspirin,” I said. “We’ll find some.”

On the ride to North Conway Paul said, “How come you made me get up like that?”

“Two reasons,” I said. “One, you need some structure in your life, some scheduling, to give you a sense of order. Two, I was going to have to do it sometime. I figured I might as well get it over with.”

“You wouldn’t have to do it if you let me sleep.”

“It would’ve been something. You’d push me until you found out how far I’d go. You have to test me, so you can trust me.”

“What are you, a child psychologist?”

“No. Susan told me that.”

“Well, she’s
crazy
.”

“I know you don’t know any better, but that’s against the rules.”

“What?”

“Speaking badly of another person’s beloved, you know? I don’t want you to speak ill of her.” We were in Fryeburg Center.

“Sorry.”

“Okay.”

We were quiet as we drove through the small open town with its pleasant buildings. It was maybe fifteen minutes to North Conway. We bought Paul a pair of Nike LDVs just like mine except size 7, and a pair of sweat pants.

“You got a jock?” I said.

Paul looked embarrassed. He shook his head. We bought one of them and two pairs of white sweat socks. I paid and we drove back to Fryeburg. It was ten when we got to the cabin. I handed him his bag of stuff.

“Go put this stuff on and we’ll have a run,” I said.

“A run?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t run,” he said.

“You can learn,” I said.

“I don’t want to.”

“I know, but we’ll take it easy. We won’t go far. We’ll run a little, walk a little. Do a little more each day. You’ll feel good.”

“You going to make me?” Paul said.

“Yes.”

He went very slowly into the cabin. I went in with him. He went into his room. I went into mine. In about twenty minutes he came out with the new jogging shoes looking ridiculously yellow and the new sweat pants slightly too big for his thin legs, and his scrawny upper body pale and shivery-looking in the spring sun. I was dressed the same, but my stuff wasn’t new.

“We’ll stretch,” I said. “Bend your knees until you can touch the ground with both hands easily. Like this. Good. Now without taking your hands from the ground, try to straighten your knees. Don’t strain, just steady pressure. We’ll hold it thirty seconds.”

“What’s that for?” he said.

“Loosen up the lower back and the hamstring muscles in the back of your thighs. Now squat, like this, let your butt hang down toward the ground and hold that for thirty seconds. It does somewhat the same thing.”

I showed him how to stretch the calf muscles and loosen up the quadriceps. He did everything very awkwardly and tentatively as if he wanted to prove he couldn’t. I didn’t comment on that. I was figuring out how to run with a gun. I normally didn’t. But I wasn’t normally looking after anyone but me when I ran.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re ready for a short slow run. Wait till I get something in the house.” I went in and got my gun. It was a short Smith & Wesson .38. I took it from its holster, checked the load, and went out carrying it in my hand.

“You going to run with that?” Paul said.

“Best I could think of,” I said. “I’ll just carry it in my hand.” I held it by the cylinder and trigger guard, not by the handle. It was not conspicuous.

“You afraid they’ll find us?”

“No, but no harm to be safe. When you can, it’s better to deal with possibilities than likelihoods.”

“Huh?”

“Come on, we’ll jog. I’ll explain while we run.”

We started at a slow pace. Paul looked as if he might never have run before. His movements seemed unsyn-chronized, and he took each step as if he had to think about it first.

“Say when you need to walk,” I said. “There’s no hurry.”

He nodded.

I said, “When you’re thinking about something important,
like if your father might try to kidnap you again, it’s better to think of what the best thing would be to do if he tried, rather than trying to decide how likely he was to try. You can’t decide if he’ll try, that’s up to him. You decide what to do if he does. That’s up to you. Understand?”

He nodded. Already I could see he was too winded to talk.

“A way of living better is to make the decisions you need to make based on what you can control. When you can.”

We were jogging up a dirt road that led from the cabin to a larger dirt road. It was maybe half a mile long. On either side there were dogberry bushes and small birch and maple saplings under the tall white pines and maples that hovered above us. There were raspberry bushes too, just starting to bud. It was cool under the dappling of the trees, but not cold.

“We’ll hang a right here,” I said, “and head along this road a ways. No need to push. Stop when you feel the need and we’ll walk a ways.” He nodded again. The road was larger now. It circled the lake, side roads spoking off to cabins every hundred yards. The names of the cabin owners were painted on hokey rustic signs and nailed to a tree at the head of each side road. We had gone maybe a mile when Paul stopped running. He bent over holding his side.

“Stitch?”

He nodded.

“Don’t bend forward,” I said. “Bend backward. As far back as you can. It’ll stretch it out.”

He did what I told him. I hadn’t thought he would. An old logging road ran up to our left. We turned up it. Paul walking with his back arched.

“How far did we run?”

“About a mile,” I said. “Damn good for the first time out.”

“How far can you run?”

“Ten, fifteen miles, I don’t know for sure.”

Walking on a felled log, we crossed a small ravine where the spring melt was still surging down toward the lake. In a month it would be dry and dusty in there.

“Let’s head back,” I said. “Maybe when we get back to the road you can run a little more.”

Paul didn’t say anything. A redheaded woodpecker rattled against a tree beside us. When we got back to the road I moved into a slow jog again. Paul walked a few more feet and then he cranked into a jerky slow run behind me. We went maybe half a mile to the side road leading to our cabin. I stopped the jog and began to walk. Paul stopped running the moment I did.