Keeping Watch (25 page)

He was not one of “them” anymore. He might be, peripherally, in the future, but not for the next few months. The next months belonged to him, and to Rae. And so throughout that summer he lived on the island called Folly with his beloved madwoman, and he saw his brother from time to time and once even their father, and he had long talks with Ed, and he tried to tell himself he really wasn't bored and he was not in the least worried about a slim, dark-haired boy in Montana.

But when the letter came the third week of August, Allen knew that he had only been waiting for the other shoe to hit the boards above his head.

Chapter 22

Jamie tried, he really did. He wouldn't exactly say that he'd got used to the smell of animal shit, and the sound of the cows and roosters jolted him out of sleep when it was still night outside, and the constant press of people and talk made him jumpy—even the milk the family drank was weird, tasting too . . . alive for him to swallow except if it was icy cold. But he felt he had honestly made an effort. And the endless work on the farm was a revelation, just how much labor went into putting a meal on the table and a roof over a family's head when you had to do it yourself. If the country's industries went under tomorrow—if the oil wells ran dry or a bomb froze all the world's machines at once—by the next day about ninety-nine percent of the population would be starving or freezing or both. Except for people like his new family.

Were the rest of the world to vanish, the only thing these people would notice would be that
Jeopardy
disappeared from the television and the sugar bowl would go empty. And no doubt Pete would soon have sugar cane planted and Rachel would construct a board and invent topics for family
Jeopardy
games around the kitchen table. The pantry looked like some kind of health-food supermarket, they had their own gas pump and electrical generator, and shopping once a week was more for entertainment and luxuries (corn flakes, bananas, and the Sara Lee cheesecake Pete adored) than from anything resembling necessity.

Rachel even made a lot of the family's clothes—not jeans or underwear, not that he'd seen so far, but all kinds of shirts and dresses and things. He didn't know anybody did that, but there she'd sit, bent over the whirring engine of the shiny black sewing machine stitching together unlikely shapes cut out from the cloth she'd bought in town (at least she bought
that
!) and somehow making them come together in a shirt that fit his cousin's shoulders as if they'd been born together, or a wodge of multicolored scraps that turned inside out and made a puffy pillow. Once she'd embarked on a series of long, long seams on some patterned cloth that Jamie had told her he didn't mind too much, and produced a set of curtains for his new room. Sometimes when he woke up in the morning, up in the white-walled room at the very top of the house, the light was just coming through those curtains, and he just stared and stared at them, like they were the most wonderful thing in the world, magic or something. If he hadn't been there when they were made, he wouldn't even have noticed them, or if he had, he'd have thought, how hard could they be to make, really, just curtains?

The day she'd made them, Rachel had known he was standing in the doorway watching her—not that she said anything, just did that little humming thing she did under her breath like she was singing with the whirring machine. But when she got to the end of one of those seams that seemed to go on for ten minutes, she lifted the cloth, clipped the threads, and asked over her shoulder if he wanted to try. Of course he said no, but somehow she'd talked him into it, maybe because they were alone in her sewing room, and so he sat down at the machine and held the cloth down in front of his chest like she had, then eased his sneaker down onto the foot pedal. The machine leapt into life and whirred madly, biting furiously at the fabric and jerking it around so much that in an instant the flat metal foot was sewing air. He dropped the cloth and snatched his foot from the pedal, and he would have abandoned the attempt except that Rachel was already standing close behind him, her cheek resting against the side of his head and her arms pushed through his, and she was telling him to put his hands in front of hers on the seam and press down his foot. He didn't want to, really, felt so nervous he thought his throat would close up, but he didn't want to look like a jerk or a coward, so he'd gripped the edge of the cloth like she did, and pressed down gingerly with his shoe. The little machine jerked to life alarmingly, but with her hands in control, the cloth stayed in a straight line. After a minute he began to relax, and then it was kind of fun, seeing the needle blur up and down, and the thread feed through the guides in a series of continuous jerks, and the cloth steer itself through like magic. The flowered cloth of the dress that Rachel wore had brushed his arms, and she smelled warm, more like one of the cows (although he'd never tell her that) than any woman he'd ever met, because she didn't use perfume and deodorant and stuff, just soap. And the long seam came out a little wavy, but smooth enough by the end, even after she let her fingers go and he was guiding the cloth through all by himself.

So that was why he looked at the curtains in his bedroom up high in the house as if they were magical or something, not because he liked them that much.

There were, he had to admit, things he did like about being here. Rachel's cooking was great—not as fancy as the food Mrs. Mendez made when his father was around, but satisfying, kind of . . . motherly. And really, he got along okay with his new “cousins,” even the littlest kid Sally, who was kind of a pain, but secretly, only to himself, he'd admit that he sort of liked the experience of being looked up to. He was somewhat nervous around Pete Junior, the seventeen-year-old, who had, as Allen had said, a grown man's shoulders but also the potential for devastating scorn, if he decided to turn it on Jamie. Not that he had, he seemed pretty nice in fact, but Jamie didn't know enough people that age to be sure. And the other two kids were okay, thirteen-year-old Eli, who'd been away at a band summer camp for the last week, and bossy eleven-year-old Vera, who tried to be as grown up as her old-lady name was, helping Rachel in the kitchen a lot.

Then there was Terry. He still didn't know what to make of that, still woke up barely able to believe that the heavy lump on top of his feet wasn't his imagination. When Pete had driven off, two days after Allen left, Jamie'd had no idea, none at all. Sometimes, in fact, he replayed the whole morning in his mind, making a kind of movie out of it: Pete driving away in the dusty pickup with his elbow resting on the door, Rachel sitting the kids down at the kitchen table with enormous bowls of cherries in front of them and handing each a weird gadget that turned out to be what you used to remove the pits. Only she called them “pips.” They could eat as many of the huge, black, tart-sweet cherries as they wanted, but she wanted each bowl empty before its owner was free for the rest of the morning. Eli and Vera whipped through theirs at warp speed, and even Sally seemed to pit two to his one. It was humiliating, but Rachel just hummed away and pretended he was nice to go slow and keep her company. Anyway, he finally got through his bowl and took his purple fingers outside, where he didn't have anything to do but stare at the stupid chickens and wish that he was allowed to watch TV during the day. Not that there'd be anything on the three channels they got but farm shows and soap operas. How could you live without cable? And the computer—he was allowed half an hour a day, like everyone else, on the same line the house telephone worked on.

If you'd told him six months ago that he'd be living on a farm with no online games, he'd have said you were nuts.

So he went upstairs and got the well-thumbed paperback of
The Fellowship of the Ring
that he'd borrowed from Pete Junior. He started to lie on his bed to read, where it was quiet and there was a chance nobody would notice him, but it was already hot upstairs (no air conditioning, either!) and Rachel had promised that they were free for the morning. He knew what adult promises were worth, and the relative security of his bedroom made even the sweating seem attractive, but then he heard Eli's voice from the barn, and he felt a small surge of defiance. He went down the stairs and marched openly through the living room to the porch, where he settled down in the wide, two-person porch swing, just waiting for the adult recall to work. The first few pages were distracting, but when no one came to claim him, or to berate him for wasting his time, the treacherous words began to settle on the page. In a while the screen door screaked open and he braced himself (
I
knew
she wouldn't go through with it!
), but without a word, Rachel just set a tall glass of lemonade down on the wobbly wicker table next to the swing and went back inside, leaving him in perfect peace.

After lunch he helped her make labels for the cooling jars of cherries, lined up on the sideboard and looking like a magazine illustration. One of them gave a loud
ping,
and he looked over to see if the glass had broken, but Rachel explained that the noise was the metal tops locking down over the fruit, when the hot contents had cooled into a vacuum. Pretty neat, he had to admit.

With the jars labeled he was free to go back and read for a couple of hours, and he had just reached the part where the Dancing Pony was being invaded by the black riders when he heard Pete's truck drive in and around the back of the house. His body's automatic response to the arrival of a vehicle was dry mouth and racing heart, but having been here for a week now he was able to tell himself that it was only Pete, and try to settle down again into the swing. Still, Pete's return might not bring threat, but he wouldn't be surprised if it heralded the next round of chores, no matter what Rachel had promised. And sure enough, in a couple of minutes the screen door screaked again. He dog-eared the page (it was only a paperback) before looking to see what Pete wanted, and was startled to find the whole family in the doorway, staring at him. He jerked upright, wondering what the hell he'd done now.

Then Pete stepped forward, big, silent Pete with his arms even thicker than Howard's, both enormous hands held out in front of him. Jamie instinctively scrambled backward to get out of the man's reach, but before he could get free from the porch swing, Pete's hands were an inch from his stomach, and Jamie could see that he held some object, which he settled gently onto Jamie's lap.

It was white and brown and warm, waking up in confusion, shiny black beads of eyes settled into a wide forehead beneath ears almost too soft to prick to attention, wet nose snuffling Jamie's shirt for clues.

“It's a terrier, a Jack Russell terrier,” Pete told him gruffly. “Had to drive halfway to Butte to find one. If it makes a puddle in the house, your aunt won't be happy.”

Jamie stared at the man for a moment, utterly speechless, before tucking his chin down to peer at the puppy. It was trying to stand on the uneven surface of his lap and get its unbelievably delicate paws onto Jamie's chest. It stumbled; without thinking, Jamie reached out to steady the animal as its tongue found his chin and its cold nose traced the line of his jaw to his hairline. He squirmed at the sensation of the creature snuffling into his ear, its wriggling warm body pressed itself against him as if trying to get inside his shirt, or his skin. Jamie's eyes sought out Pete. “You mean, it's for me?”

“Allen said you'd talked about that kind of dog one time, seemed to me we could use another dog around here anyway. If you don't like it, I can take it back, look around for another kind, a Lab or something.”

Jamie's arms hunched forward, as if Pete had moved to take it away, and he shook his head fiercely. “No, I like it fine. I don't . . . I haven't had a dog in a long time. It's so small. What if I hurt it?”

“They're tough little guys,” Pete reassured him.

The puppy abandoned the assault on Jamie's ear and half tumbled onto the swing seat. Gingerly, Jamie closed his hands around the creature's round belly and lifted it down onto the porch before it fell there, and the family watched their newest member explore his home, stump of a tail in the air, every hair bristling with fascination. Rachel laughed aloud, and Jamie glanced up at her, his wary disbelief giving way to wonder.

“What's his name?” Sally asked her father.

“He doesn't have one yet. That's up to Jim.”

It's a boy, Jamie thought. At least they hadn't made him ask.

“Call it Jack,” Vera suggested prosaically.

“Its name is Terry,” Jamie told them. And that was that.

So yeah, there were some good things about living here, in spite of always seeming to have cow shit on his sneakers. He managed to keep Rachel and Pete happy most of the time, and so far he hadn't kicked anything but chickens (which seemed not to mind) and his hands hadn't done one of those weird compulsion things where they just reached out to hurt something—the puppy, or even worse, the little kid—and the chores were manageable and he was getting used to the quiet and all in all he thought he could get used to pretty much everything, if only he could only have a little more time on the computer. He just couldn't get used to going to bed when it was still light outside, for God's sake, and lying there playing with Terry's ears while the rest of the house snored and the computer just sat there, with nobody on it, nobody even needing the phone line because in all the time he'd been here, five weeks now, they'd never had one single call after nine o'clock at night. The games and the chat rooms were going on in the absence of RageDaemon and Masterman, as if he'd never existed. It had been months since Father had made him smash the computer, weeks since he'd even had the limited but unsupervised freedom of the library terminals. Here, the computer was in a corner of the living room, and anybody was likely to walk by and comment on the goriness of the game you were playing or look to see what your conversation was about.

So he tried, he really did, but that keyboard downstairs in the sleeping house just called to him, and the more he tried to ignore it, the more his fingers craved it. Rachel just couldn't understand that he didn't need all that much sleep, not like he needed the computer. If she really understood, he knew she wouldn't mind. What would it hurt? And anyway, he wouldn't have to tell them—he knew where all the creaking steps were. And if he carried Terry down, the dog would just curl up and go to sleep on his lap, and provide a ready excuse for being there if anyone came downstairs—puppies always needed to go out and pee. He could eject the game and be offline and on the porch in seconds if he heard someone on the stairs. Nobody in this family would think to check and see if the computer was warm.