Lone Wolf (19 page)

23

I
REMEMBER IT
like it was yesterday.

I am twelve years old.

My mother is standing just inside the front door, looking back into the house, two suitcases packed and at her side, my father at the top of the stairs, saying, “Evelyn, don’t go.”

It is raining outside, and Mom is wearing her tan raincoat, with the long dangly belt that is always slipping out of the loops, over a blue striped dress, and if she had just come in from the outside, you might have thought those were two raindrops running down her cheeks.

I am standing next to my sister, Cindy, who’s fourteen. Mom looks at me and tries to smile and says, “You two look after each other, okay? Your dad’s going to be busy and won’t be able to look after everything.”

I am numb. What is going on here? Why does Mom have suitcases packed? Where is she going? How long is she going to be gone? I get this horrible feeling that if she goes, she is not coming back. That she is leaving forever. What has Dad done to make her so angry she has to leave?

“Where are you going?” Cindy asks. “Will you bring me something back?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” I snap at her. “She’s not coming back.”

Cindy shouts at me. “Shut up! You don’t know anything!” She’s so angry, she must have some idea that this is actually the truth.

Mom swallows. She is crying. “I’ll send you something,” she says. “And I’ll call you all the time.”

Dad shakes his head. “This is crazy. You can’t do this. We can figure out something else.”

Mom looks at him. “Arlen, I think you know why I have to do this.”

There are tears in his eyes, too. He turns away so we can’t see him wiping them away.

There have been arguments in the night. For a few weeks now, it seems. Sometimes, in bed, I pull the pillow over my head so I won’t hear their muffled voices through the wall.

I know Dad drives her crazy on occasion, but I’ve never thought his behavior would drive her out of the house. I mean, he drives me and Cindy crazy, too, but we aren’t leaving. It seems no more a choice for Mom than it does for us, as children.

It has not been that long since the infamous Emergency Brake Incident. Five or six months, maybe.

We have a white Volkswagen Beetle, with the motor in the back, and it distresses Dad to no end that his wife can’t remember to pull up on the emergency brake when she parks the car. She figures leaving the gearshift engaged holds the car in place, and on level ground, you can get away with that, I suppose, but there is a slight incline to our driveway, which means that if the shifter were to somehow become disengaged, our Bug would roll back and out into the street.

Dad reminds her time and again that she has to put the emergency brake on, and sometimes she remembers, but most times she forgets. Mom is a bit forgetful at times, easily distracted. She explains that she’s the one who keeps the house running, that she has a lot to keep track of, and if she can manage to make twenty-one meals a week and change the sheets and do the laundry, can’t she be forgiven if she doesn’t always remember to put on the emergency brake?

It doesn’t help that our other car, a 1965 Dodge Polara, has automatic transmission, and even Dad rarely bothers to shove the emergency brake foot pedal down in it. Mom must figure, if she doesn’t have to remember it in the Dodge, why does she have to remember it in the Volkswagen?

One day, Dad decides to teach her a lesson.

She’s returned from grocery shopping, and Dad slips out to see whether she’s remembered to put the brake on. He does this almost every time she comes home, and if she’s slipped up, he’ll come in right away and let her know. If she’s remembered, he says nothing. Sometimes, soon as Mom gets home, I’d slip out before Dad can and if Mom has forgotten to pull the brake on, I’ll do it.

This one particular day, I guess he’s had enough.

He gets into the Beetle and coasts it back, just far enough that the back end is hanging into the street about a foot. Then he slips it back into gear, resists the temptation to put the emergency brake on, and goes back up into our garage, where he finds Cindy’s red and white tricycle, which we still have, even though she hasn’t ridden it in six years or more. The garage is filled with stuff we’ve outgrown, including a turquoise pedal car I once used to tour the neighborhood and pick up hot four-year-olds.

Dad takes the tricycle and carefully wedges it, tipped onto its side, under the back of the car. The handlebar he links in with the bumper.

Dad has staged the event in such a way that it can be seen from our front door.

He comes back inside and walks into the kitchen, where I am making a peanut butter sandwich, and Mom is glancing at that day’s paper. He says, casually, “Did you hear something?”

Mom says, “What?”

“Out front. I thought I heard something a second ago.”

Mom decides to go check. I don’t think it even occurs to her that there is a problem with the car. Maybe she’s thinking Dad heard the mailman arrive. Dad waits in the kitchen. He’s grinning, and at this point, I have no idea why. It’s only later I learn how he’s set this all up.

So I have no idea why Mom is suddenly screaming, “Oh my God!”

I bolt from the table, ahead of Dad, and when I got to the front door I can see Mom running flat out to the end of the driveway. I see the trike jammed under the back of the car, and I recognize it as Cindy’s, and even though I know she doesn’t ride it anymore, I feel this jolt. I guess Mom felt it, too. I shudder at the thought of what else might be found under the car, in addition to a tricycle.

Mom drops to her knees, looks under the car, gets up, looks around, as if maybe she might spot some injured child attempting to crawl home.

Dad is leaning in the doorway, arms folded, looking unbearably satisfied with himself. As Mom walks back across the lawn, saying something about maybe they should call the police, there might be a hurt child wandering the neighborhood, Dad says, “Looks like maybe you forgot to put on the e-brake.”

That stops her cold. Not, I suspect, because she is trying to remember whether she did apply the brake or not, but because at that moment she realizes what has actually happened. That her husband has staged this event. That he has allowed her to think, if only for a moment, that she is responsible for a monstrous tragedy.

She walks up the steps to the house and, in a blinding flash, slaps my father across the face.

I have never seen my mother hit my father. Nor have I ever seen him hit her. For all his faults, he is not that kind of man.

This is not some little slap, either. It actually knocks him off his feet and into the shrubs at the side of the door. And then she goes inside, and doesn’t speak to him for three days.

Dad apologizes endlessly. It doesn’t take him long to figure out that he may have crossed the line here.

It is painful to recall this incident, not just because it shows my father, basically a good man, in such a bad light. It also shows how little we can learn from our parents’ mistakes, how we can know, even as children, that what they’ve done is wrong, and then, when we grow up ourselves, we go along and make the same kinds of mistakes. I had to make my own, with disastrous consequences, before I learned to tone it down.

Looking out the window of Dad’s cabin, one memory links to another, and then, suddenly, there is Lana Gantry.

Not outside the cabin, but in my memories.

The Gantrys live up the street. I hadn’t remembered it all that clearly when I’d been reintroduced to Lana earlier in the week, but now things started coming back. Mr. and Mrs. Gantry. His name is Walter. He works at the Ford plant. He’s the first person in the neighborhood to have one of the new Mustangs. My parents get together with them once in a while. They play bridge, or barbecue out back. One time, they actually play charades.

After three days, Mom starts talking to Dad again. It is summer, and they’ve already invited the Gantrys over for dinner that weekend, so some sort of peace accord is reached.

I see the four of them out back, Dad and Mr. Gantry with beers in their hands, laughing, the women shaking their heads and smiling, sharing jokes about their husbands’ foolishness. They are all friendly together. Mr. Gantry talking to Mom. Dad talking to Lana.

Sometimes, slipping his arm around her waist. Surely, I think, this does not mean anything.

And then, not long after, Mom at the door with her suitcases.

And not long after that, the Gantrys move away.

And the four of them never get together again.

But now, a decade after my mother’s death, here is Lana Gantry again. Back in my father’s life.

Living in the same town as a young man she refers to as her nephew. Orville Thorne. Who, I guess, is about thirteen years younger than I.

And who, I now realize, looks an awful lot like me.

It doesn’t seem possible that Mom would walk out on Dad for the better part of half a year over the Emergency Brake Incident. But I can imagine her leaving him for fathering a child with a woman from down the street.

The night before she leaves, I hear snippets of her argument with my father in their bedroom, snippets which, up until now, more than three decades later, never meant anything to me. I hear the name “Gantry.” And I hear the word “baby.”

“I can’t live here,” I hear my mother say.

“The shame,” I hear her say.

And then I pull the pillow down harder on my head so I won’t have to hear any more. There isn’t anything else from that argument to recall now.

She keeps her word, though. She does call all the time. She talks to Cindy, and then my sister hands the phone to me, and she asks me what is going on at school, and whether I am doing my homework, and what I am doing with my friends, and I tell her everything I can think of, about
Star Trek
and this episode where Kirk and Spock go back to Earth in the 1920s to find Dr. McCoy, who’s met this woman who will change the course of history, and I am ready to tell her every detail of the entire episode because I want to talk to her for as long as possible, but finally, Dad nudges me aside, mumbles something about long distance, because Mom is staying with her sister in Toronto, but what he really wants is to talk to her himself.

Once he has the phone, he asks me and Cindy to leave the kitchen, to go watch TV or something, but sometimes I hide around the corner and hear my father say, “I still love you. It’s my fault, not yours. I’m ready to start all over again. How are you feeling? Are you feeling okay?”

After six months of this, Mom comes home, and our house is whole again.

They are both different after that, but especially Dad. He still has his quirks and phobias. He gets the oil changed in the Dodge every four thousand miles, and if he’s even a hundred miles overdue he can’t sleep at night for fear the engine will seize up and cost him a thousand dollars to fix. He still drives me and Cindy nuts, but he is never so critical of Mom again. He lets stuff go. He even trades Mom’s Volkswagen in on a compact Ford with automatic transmission, doesn’t care anymore whether she uses the emergency brake. And maybe, after a year or two, they are signs that they actually love each other.

But there are also times when I notice a faraway look in Mom’s eyes, and I will ask her what she is thinking.

“Oh, nothing,” she says. “Nothing at all.”

It’s the day she leaves that stays with me. Her standing in the door, waiting to leave, the suitcases at her side. The rain coming down outside.

Cindy rushes to give her a hug, but I hold back. I am so angry that she’s going. That no matter what Dad has done, she can’t put it aside to take care of us.

“Zachary,” she says, “can you give Mom a kiss goodbye?”

I run to my room and watch from my window as Dad helps Mom take her bags to the car and toss them into the back seat of the Volkswagen. And then she gets in, Dad standing next to the car as though he expects her to roll down the window and say one final thing to him. But she does not.

The Bug comes to life with its distinctive, throaty roar. She puts the wipers on, then backs out of the drive.

That’s when I notice that one end of the belt to her raincoat has become caught in the bottom of the door, and is dangling down, swinging an inch above the wet pavement.

I run from my room and descend the flight of stairs in two jumps, burst out the front door, run past Dad standing in the driveway, and after my mom’s car, screaming, “Your belt! Your belt!” But Mom does not look back, and then the Volkswagen turns the corner and is gone.

Standing there, in the rain, I cry enough tears to drown the world.

24

I
CAME OUT OF DAD’S STUDY
and walked past him and Lawrence at the kitchen table. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Dad, not directly, anyway. I reached into the fridge, found some orange juice, and poured myself a glass.

“Lawrence here was saying,” Dad said, “that you don’t really choose to be gay. You’re born that way.”

I said nothing. I looked at Lawrence, who was smiling at me.

“That’s kind of interesting, don’t you think?” Dad said. “Maybe it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pick on gay people if they can’t help it.”

“That’s very charitable,” Lawrence said.

“Well,” said Dad, who’d evidently detected some sarcasm in the air, “you know what I mean.”

I leaned up against the counter. “You’re not joining us?” Dad asked, nodding toward an empty chair. “What’s with you?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“It’s this Leonard thing,” Dad said, happy to provide me with an excuse for my unwillingness to participate in the conversation. “I’m upset, too. Shit, I’m the one, I guess, who’s going to have to find some sort of family, have them come up here and pick up his car and his stuff. Hey, where’s Leonard’s backpack?”

“My car,” Lawrence said. “I can go get it for you.”

“No hurry. I just don’t want to forget about it.”

“What do you want to do?” Lawrence asked me. I was looking at the floor, and when I didn’t say something right away, Lawrence said, “Hello? Earth to Zack?”

I raised my head slowly. “So, Dad,” I said, “I finally remembered Lana Gantry.”

Dad looked around. “Hmm?”

“From when I was a kid. I didn’t remember her at first, but it came back to me today. All kinds of memories.”

“Oh,” Dad said. “Okay.”

“She and her husband, they used to come over, right? I can remember you guys barbecuing in the backyard. Coming over to play cards, watch stuff on TV.”

Dad made an effort at trying to recall. “Yeah, yeah, I think we did, now that you mention it.”

“I seem to remember you guys laughing, having a good time. There was even a time, I think, when I walked into the living room and you were all playing charades.”

“Charades,” Lawrence said. “People really did that, huh?”

I said, “You all seemed to get along really well. You and Lana, you were friends years ago before you reconnected up here.”

Dad swallowed. “We all got along very well.”

“So, what happened? Did they move away?”

“That’s what Lana told you the other day,” Dad said. “Weren’t you listening? They sold their house, moved away, and years later, I ran into Lana in town here, and we kind of renewed old acquaintances. Her husband’s long since dead, you know.” Getting a bit defensive. “And your mother’s been gone a long time, too, Zachary.”

“Did I say something?” I said. I looked at Lawrence. “Did you hear me say something?”

“Hey, man, I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

“I’m entitled to a life,” Dad said. “Who I see is none of your goddamn business.”

“Did I say it was? Of course, who you see
now
is none of my business. I couldn’t agree more. But what about when I was a kid? Still living at home. Under your roof. Would it be any of my business then?”

Dad’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. He was getting ready to say something, but then stopped himself.

“Tell me about Orville,” I said. “I’m a bit curious about him. You go out of your way to defend him sometimes. Have you noticed that? You tell me I’m being too hard on him. Why do you do that? What do you care? What’s he to you?”

“He’s Lana’s nephew,” Dad said quietly. “I just want you to show a bit of respect, that’s all.”

“Is that really what he is? Lana’s nephew? She’s his aunt?”

Now it was Dad’s turn to be sarcastic. “That’s sort of how it works, Zachary. If you’re my nephew, I’m your uncle, or aunt.”

“It’s not possible that he’s something other than Lana’s nephew?”

Dad stared at me, hard. “Zachary,” he said slowly, “I don’t know what you’re thinking, or what you’re getting at, but you need to leave this alone. It’s none of your business. It’s not any of your concern. I’m telling you, don’t go stirring up all kinds of shit. It’s not going to help anyone.”

I looked Dad in the eye. My mouth felt dry.

“Here’s my other question,” I said. “About Orville.” I took a breath. “What exactly are
you
to Orville?”

“Zachary, for Christ’s sake, what the hell are you talking about?”

“I guess what I’m wondering is, if Lana’s not exactly his aunt—”

“I never said that.”

“—if Lana’s not exactly his aunt, and I’m just supposing here, isn’t it possible that you’re more than just some citizen of Braynor that Orville’s sworn an oath to protect?”

Again Dad started to say something, then stopped himself.

“I sent Sarah a picture of Orville,” I said.

“You what?”

“On the computer. I told her that ever since I’ve arrived, there’s been something about him that seemed familiar to me. Couldn’t put my finger on it.”

Shouting. “You had no business using my computer!”

“Dad, I’ve been using it since I got here. And I didn’t snoop around in it. I downloaded the picture into it. That’s what I sent Sarah. And you know what she said? I felt like an idiot when I read her note, it suddenly seemed so obvious.”

Dad waited, thinking he knew what I was going to say, but not sure. Lawrence was looking pretty interested, too.

“She said he looked just like me. That we could be brothers.”

Dad glared at me, and then, in a flash, he swept his arm across the top of the table, sending his and Lawrence’s cups and plates and cutlery and the salt and pepper shakers and napkin holder crashing onto the floor.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” he bellowed. “Mind your own fucking business!”

Lawrence had jumped back in his chair when everything hit the floor, and now he was on his feet, looking at Dad, then at me, then back at Dad again. He stooped to start picking things up off the floor.

“Leave it!” Dad said, and Lawrence straightened. No one moved, no one said a word for several moments.

Dad eyes were welling up, and he put his hands over them so we couldn’t see.

“Dad,” I said.

He took one hand away and waved me off, then put it back over his face. Lawrence took a step toward me, caught my eye, and said quietly, “Come on. Let’s take a walk.”

I felt this was the wrong time to walk out, that we were on the verge of something here.

“Dad, I just want to know—”

“Get out,” he said to me. The tone suggested he was not in a mood to debate it.

I slipped out the door with Lawrence. We started walking, with no particular destination in mind.

“Well,” said Lawrence. “I don’t know whether I’ve had a chance yet to thank you for inviting me up here. I’ve only been here for, what, three hours, and we’ve already had a guy killed by a bear and you’re having a family meltdown. What’s happening after dinner?”

I picked up a stone from the gravel lane that led up to the highway, threw it into the trees. “I think I have a right to know about these things,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I’m sure that right is enshrined somewhere,” Lawrence Jones said.

“Don’t you think, if Orville Thorne is my half brother, that I have a right to know that?”

Lawrence raised his face to the sun. “I don’t honestly know whether I’d want to find out Orville Thorne was related to me. Although, from what I’ve seen and what you’ve told me, he’s inept, easily intimidated, and totally unsure of himself. So I guess it’s possible.”

We were coming to the bend, where the lane branched off to the Wickens place.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t ask you up here to get in the middle of a dispute between me and my father. I didn’t expect that e-mail from Sarah, what she’d say, but when I read it, pieces started fitting together.”

“What sort of pieces?” Lawrence asked.

“There’s the whole thing with my mother, how she was so angry with Dad that she left home when I was twelve. Then, Lana and her husband moving out of the neighborhood, after they’d been so close to my parents. And now, years later, with her husband dead and my mother passed on, it’s like they’re picking up where they left off years ago. And look at Orville, he’s about twelve, thirteen years younger than I am. It’s been bugging me from the first moment I saw him, thinking that he looked like somebody I knew. He looks like me, Lawrence. The son of a bitch looks like me.”

Lawrence thought about that. “Yeah, there’s a passing resemblance, I admit. It’s not really obvious, but if you know there’s a connection, you can see it.”

“No wonder I’ve been wanting to give him a wedgie since the moment I first met him,” I said. “I just want to put him a headlock and run my knuckles over his head.”

We were twenty feet away from the Wickens gate. Lawrence took in all the threatening signs. No Trespassing. Beware of Dogs. “So these are your friends,” he said. He looked into the yard, at the abandoned appliances, the piles of wood, the old white van with blacked-out windows, a couple of beat-up trucks, an old four-door Pontiac economy car.

“Looks like they’re going to open a used-car dealership,” he quipped.

“Dad’s got so much work ahead of him, if he ever gets them out of there.”

We’d been spotted. Gristle and Bone appeared from around the far side of the house and were running toward the gate, their paws pounding the dirt, propelling them forward, their hackles raised. Their chorus of angry growls sounded like broken gears trying to mesh together. They locked their jaws on a gate board, went berserk chewing on it, splinters of wood dropping to the ground. They seemed to think they could eat their way through to get to us, and given enough time, probably could.

“Cute,” Lawrence said. “What do you think you’d have to do to dogs to make them this mean?”

“Let’s walk back,” I said.

The dogs remained in their frenzied state until we’d disappeared behind the trees. “Think they could eat someone?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Lawrence. “But then, so could a bear. Actually, those dogs could probably eat a bear.”

We headed down to the lake and perched ourselves on a large rock at the water’s edge, upwind from the fish bucket.

“What should I do, Lawrence?” I asked.

“About your dad, or about everything else?”

“My dad is my problem. How about everything else?”

“Well, even if there really is a bear, and Morton Dewart was killed by one and not by Satan’s puppies up there, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve still got a bunch of McVeigh worshippers living on your dad’s property. You’ve got another dead guy and a shitload of missing fertilizer that’s ideal for making things blow up good, your mayor’s getting death threats, and you’ve got a public event coming up, what, tomorrow, that has a lot of people riled.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s like when they issue a tornado watch. It’s not a warning. There’s no tornado on the horizon. But all the conditions are right for one.”

“You think there might be a tornado coming.”

“The conditions are right.”

“So, what next?”

“I guess we start doing a little surveillance, talk to the people involved. I need to get to know these Wickenses a little better.”

I heard a plop in the water, and craned my neck around to look farther up the shore. It was ten-year-old Jeffrey Wickens, his jeans rolled up, standing in six inches of water, tossing stones.

“I guess we could start right now,” I said. “Come on. I’ll introduce you.”

We got off the rock and ambled along the shoreline. Jeffrey was hunting around in the water, looking for flat stones, then attempting to skip them. He got his index finger wrapped around the edge of a stone, then flicked it out across the water, but he couldn’t seem to manage more than a single skip.

“Maybe the water needs to be a little calmer,” I said, and Jeffrey whirled around. He smiled warmly enough at me, but as soon as he noticed Lawrence, his expression turned wary.

“Hi, Mr. Walker,” he said.

“Hope you’re not still in trouble about going to play video games,” I said, thinking back to when I was having the coffee with his mother.

“Grandpa was mad for a while, but not anymore,” he said. His eyes kept darting to Lawrence.

“I’d like you to meet my friend,” I said. “Lawrence Jones.”

“Hi,” Lawrence said, and extended a hand out over the water. Tentatively, Jeffrey took a couple of steps and shook it, then withdrew his hand quickly, like he might lose it if he didn’t act quickly enough. I saw him glance at Lawrence’s light-colored palm.

To Lawrence, he said, “Do you know about Lando Calrissian?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think. From
Star Wars
, right?”

“I don’t have him anymore,” Jeffrey said. “How about Mace Windu?”

Lawrence looked doubtful. “You got me there.”

I stepped in. “The new crop of
Star Wars
movies. Starting with
Phantom Menace
. Played by Samuel L. Jackson.”

Lawrence nodded, getting it now. The black contingent from
Star Wars
.

“Would those be real Negroes?” Jeffrey asked. “I mean, because it’s another galaxy, and there’s no Earth there, if there are Negroes, are they really the same as Negroes here on this planet? Because they’d have different origins, right? And blood? And wouldn’t they have different DNA and stuff?”

Lawrence looked at me, but I figured he could handle this one, even if he wasn’t as well versed in science fiction lore.

“Those are actors,” Lawrence told Jeffrey. “Black actors.”

Jeffrey rolled his eyes. “I know
that
. But if they’re playing people from other planets, are they still Negroes in the movie?”

Lawrence paused. “What makes you ask?”

“Well, if I could explain to my grandpa that they’re not really colored people, because they’re from another planet, then maybe he would let me have their figures.”

“Figures?”

“Action figures,” I told Lawrence. “They’re very collectible.” I paused. “I have a number of them.”

“Okay,” he said. “Jeffrey, why wouldn’t your grandpa want you to have those figures, regardless of whether they’re…Negroes or not?”