Heading Out to Wonderful (18 page)

Charlie and Sylvan enveloped him with their warmth and their breathy voices and something else he couldn’t name, something about the way they looked, as though they had been waiting for something, as though the thing they had waited for all along had finally arrived, and then they went upstairs and left him alone, to talk, he figured, about grownup things, things a boy wouldn’t know or understand. Sometimes Sam felt that the thing they had been waiting for all along was him, and it made a kind of warmth in his heart.

They left him, and they left him with books and cookies and a dog, but they left him with no instructions, and sometimes he didn’t know how to pass the hours. He would try to read, to figure out the words, or he would sit on the porch in one of the rockers, while Jackie ran around the yard and chased squirrels.

He thought of his own mother and father. He thought of how they never left him alone for more than five minutes, how they were always with him to make him laugh or understand one new thing about the world, one thing which suddenly occurred to him as though he had never noticed it before, the hunger to know how something worked, where the voices came from on the radio, who those people were and how they lived. Where the light came from when the night got dark.

And he thought of Charlie and Sylvan. He felt something for them he couldn’t name, something beautiful, but he couldn’t tell what it was. He felt safe. Nothing bad would ever happen to him when Charlie was around; even if he was in some part of the house to which Sam had never been asked, Charlie was there, his big hand, his sharp, short whistle that he had promised to teach Sam someday calling Jackie in from the yard. He wanted to learn that whistle.

There was so much he wanted to know. He didn’t know when it started, but suddenly everything came into focus, and, at the same time, everything was mysterious. Everything worked, somehow, but he didn’t know how, and his mother and father would sit with him, and explain it in ways that he didn’t even begin to understand.

Sometimes, it was enough just to know that they knew, even if he didn’t understand. He’d ask the same questions over and over, sometimes for days on end, and sometime his father would say, “Damn, Sam, you asked me that yesterday and the day before.” But his mother would never do that, not even once, so she’d show him how the bread got all puffy when you left the dough in a warm place on the stove, or she’d sit and watch while that old beetle crawled its way slowly across the porch and tell him how many legs it had and what it ate for dinner when it got home.

“Where did I come from?”

She had him on her lap, her sleepy child.

“I’ve told you.”

“Tell me again. I like hearing it.”

“You came from heaven.”

“How did I get here?”

“I got all big and fat and puffy and then you popped out.”

“Out of where?”

“Out of my stomach.”

“Why did you get all fat and puffy?”

“Because I was waiting for you. I was waiting for you for a long time. So was your father.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes, Sam. It hurt.”

“For a long time?”

“No, darling.”

“How old was I?”

“You were zero.”

“What did you do, when I came out?”

“I sang, ‘Happy Birthday to you . . .’ ”

“How old am I now?”

“You tell me.”

“Silly, I’m five. You were at my birthday. But I’ll be six soon. You know that, right?”

“Right.”

“How many days is five?”

She thought for a minute. “One thousand eight hundred and twenty-five. Twenty-six. Leap year.”

“And how many is six?”

Every question opening up to another one. What year leap?

“Three hundred and sixty-five more than five. And you know what happens on every one of those days? You go to bed. And it’s time for you to go to bed again.”

Sometimes he couldn’t go to sleep for a long time. It seemed as though he were climbing a long staircase, each step a question, until he stepped off the last step and into the darkness, surprised, every morning, and glad, that he was in his bed, in his room, his mother’s hand on his hair, her kiss on his forehead the minute he opened his eyes. And the minute he saw the light, he couldn’t remember the questions that had led him up and up and into the darkness.

Usually, sitting with Captain America, or out in the yard, watching Jackie Robinson rooting around, he had a million questions, about what made it hot, or cold, or where the long trail of ants led to, where they lived and what they ate. Why was it that, for him, nothing moved in winter but everything moved in summer, but for Jackie Robinson, in any season, there was always something moving, something happening he couldn’t see? But he wasn’t here to ask questions. He knew that his questions weren’t part of it. Not here. Not with them off in the house wherever they were. No, his part in this was to wait, and he did, always, so by the time Charlie reappeared, tucking his shirt into his pants, his shoes in hand, he’d forgotten what he meant to ask.

One day, a slaughter day, so it was getting to be dusk already, about six weeks after they had first started coming to Pickfair, he was in the yard and he forgot that part of the bargain. He forgot he was supposed to stay outside. He forgot that they went up the stairs and into that place where he was not supposed to go.

It was rainy. He was tired. Jackie Robinson had run off after something, a rabbit, a turkey, some one of the thousand scents he was always chasing, and Sam forgot that his end of the bargain was to wait. Just to wait.

He wanted to go home. He suddenly wanted his mother and his father and his own house, more than anything in the world, more than cookies or funny books.

So he went in the house, into the warmth and the light and the just-baked smell of the kitchen, and he wanted to know where they were, so he could tell Charlie, so he could tell him that he was sorry, but he had to go home now.

He listened, but there was no noise. He wandered the rooms of the downstairs of the house, rooms with no lights on, so that he could barely make things out, and they weren’t there. They were upstairs, where he’d never been. Then he started to get scared.

He had had a dream, once. It was a bad one, and he woke up, and he wasn’t in his own room any more. He was alone in the dark in a strange house and something had happened, something bad. Something bad had happened, his father had died, or his mother, or they had decided they didn’t want him any more, and they had wrapped him in blankets in the night and taken him somewhere else, and left him there.

He had started to cry, very softly, because he was so afraid in this new house, afraid of the people he would meet in the morning, new people, people who didn’t know him or know how to take care of him. But he didn’t make any noise when he cried, because he didn’t want to wake the new people, whoever they were, wherever they slept.

So he lay awake all night, until the first gray started to lighten the black of the night, until the frames of the windows, unfamiliar, oddly placed, began to come into view. The gray began to turn a pale pink, and he closed his eyes because he didn’t want to know, didn’t want it to start. He didn’t open his eyes again until he could feel the pink turn to a soft orange and he knew he couldn’t put it off any longer, and so he opened his eyes, slowly, slowly, just a crack, so afraid, and saw the windows and the curtains and the wallpaper, and they were strangely familiar and completely different at the same time.

The table by his bed was at his feet, the same lamp with the paper shade, right next to the board where his mother heaped up pillows for his head as she read to him before sleep came.

And then he knew. He was upside down in his bed, backward. In his bad dreaming, he had somehow turned around, so his feet were at the headboard of his bed, it was crazy and backward, but it was his room, his own room in his own house, his own pillows and blankets.

Nothing had happened. Everything would be just the same today as it was yesterday. Nobody had died in the night and he hadn’t been bundled up and delivered into the hands of strangers.

But it could have happened. He knew that, and he never forgot it. It could have happened. As safe as he was, he was never completely safe, and never would be, and he felt that now, wandering the neat, empty rooms of a house at twilight, everything there but ghostly, Charlie and Sylvan somewhere and he needed Charlie here, now, and he needed to go home.

So he did something he’d never done, never been asked to do. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, and looked down the hall at the neat rug and the four closed doors and he opened them one by one, each swinging into a neat, spare, empty room, all but the last, which he opened, sure, now, that he would find the same clean emptiness, but he didn’t; he found something. He found them.

It was the only room with a light on, a glow from a lamp that was a painted figure of a Japanese lady in a flowing patterned dress that came down to her tiny feet, with a silk lampshade floating above her elaborate black hair, and he saw the lamp and knew that he would never forget it, and he saw that the light from the lamp was shining on the immense skin of two grown people, a man and a woman, Charlie and Sylvan with no clothes on, the only grown people he had ever seen naked, and he knew he would never forget that, either.

Charlie was on top of her, his face buried in the side of her neck, and the skin of his back was glistening with sweat, every muscle tight, his neck, his shoulders, his back, everything taut and strong and the color of a rose, a dusty red rose, and there was hair beneath his arms, dark and tangled with sweat and his forearms were strong, and slick, and even his hands, strong, tight, although they lay with such gentleness on her skin, hardly touching her at all. He was on her, skin to skin, body to body, and still he seemed to be floating, stringing and unstringing like a crossbow on top of her, completely covering without even touching.

She was still as a pond at sunset, and as pale. Her face was turned toward him, her eyes closed, a smile playing across her face, her hair a brilliant yellow fan in the Japanese lamp’s light, the soft silk shade of the lamp fringed with golden, like her hair. Her eyes were black slits, like the Japanese lady’s and, even though she was here, in the room, in the bed on top of the tangled bedsheets, she seemed to be far away, as though she had been turned inside out, as Sam had himself turned around backward in his bed, sometime, sometime before this, before this time which was the only time that ever existed.

Her white white skin was as thin as the silk of the lampshade. He could see the veins of her body through her skin, and she was all softness, without muscle, no way to move, covered as she was, although she arched her back and rose into Charlie and then fell again against the white sheets.

Sam didn’t know what to make of it; he didn’t know what was happening, whether he was watching a scene of violence or tenderness, so fine was the line, but he knew he must not, could not move. Whatever was happening, it was happening only to them, happening on their skin and in their bodies.

The noises they made were not speaking, but they were saying something, not even to each other, each was speaking to himself but not with words, with sounds he had never heard, and their bodies, moving together, made noise, a sucking sound like boots in soft mud. Somehow, Sam knew. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be seeing this, it was a private thing, like the way he wasn’t supposed to open the door when somebody else was in the bathroom. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be hearing these sounds, that they were private sounds and that, whatever they were saying, it wasn’t meant for him to hear.

But the sounds coming from them were getting stronger, her head moving slowly side to side, the breath coming in short bursts from Charlie, not from his nose, but from his mouth. Somebody was going to get hurt. Somebody was in pain. He could no longer tell which sounds were coming from which person, they seemed to come together from somewhere else in the room, and he wished the Japanese lamp lady would turn her head away, he wished he could leave the spot where he stood in the doorway, but he couldn’t.

He wet his pants. He felt the warmth flowing into his jeans and he was suddenly ashamed. And then he started crying, at first without a sound, and then louder, and then howling, and that changed everything, she heard him, only Sylvan, Charlie lost in his own howling breath, and she slapped Charlie on the shoulder, once, quick, hard and flat, red as a flat quick hand on a hot woodstove, screamed, “Charlie! Charlie, the boy!” and Charlie, wild and bucking, looked up, saw the boy and suddenly everything moved, their bodies, their faces, the bedsheets, the Japanese lady toppling off the table and shattering on the floor so that the room was thrown into near darkness, deep violet, but not so dark that Sam could not see Charlie’s body, his whole body at once. Charlie covered himself with a sheet, ashamed like Adam in the sight of God as he leapt away from Sylvan, rolled like a cat onto the floor and raced and fell on his knees and clutched Sam in his arms and held his shaking body against his chest, shushing him, whispering in his ear, quick hands smoothing his hair, his back, wiping the tears from his face, kissing his cheek, his neck, something he’d never done before, catching his breath and saying, finally, “It’s all right, Sam. It’s nothing. It’s over now. Please, Sam. Everything’s fine.”

Just holding him, not caring that Sam’s pants were wet and he was afraid and ashamed, just holding him in his arms, relaxed now, not caring that his naked body was pressed against Sam’s clothes. “It’s all right, Sam. Sam, look at me.”—and he did—“It’s fine. It’s fine, son.”