Safe Passage (10 page)

    
"Get yourself together, Percival," Patrick said. "You have a month to train for the
regionals
if you want to go.

    
Percival sniffed. He looked a mess. He wanted to go.

    
He started running four miles in the morning and four miles at night. It was summer, humid. Percival hated humidity, but he ran. "No pain, no gain," the track coach told him.

    
"He's only eleven,"
Mag
said.

    
"Let him learn to get himself under control," Patrick said.

    
Patrick ran with him sometimes, barely keeping up. They ran in the rain. "No rain, no gain," Percival said, dripping onto the floor. He was smiling. Stoic. He was too tired to fight with his brothers.

    
Most of the best runners did not show up for the regional race. They were training for the East Coast Invitational the following week. The day was sunny, not humid,
cool
for July. All the boys in
Percival's
race went out together—teeth clenched, too fast, a little uneasy.
Mag
could not breathe. One boy took the lead on the first turn, and another in the backstretch. Then both leaders fell back and Percival and another boy were in front.
Percival's
legs rose and fell in a great arc, like the legs of a deer. He stayed on the other boy's shoulder, as Patrick had said he should, letting the other boy do the work of leading. On the last lap he passed just as Patrick had told him to—going around him fast, so that the other boy could not
repass
. He ran as if he'd been racing always. He beat the other boy by at least ten meters—panting, white-faced, victorious.

    
Mag
shouted until she was hoarse. Shouted him around the last turn, down the straightaway, through the finish line. She knew if Percival could keep running like that, he would live easy in his spirit, like a deer. For a moment, she was as dedicated a mother as Beth O'Neal. She did not know then that Percival would hold himself together and be under control and be the stoic only when he was winning. She did not know that Gideon would run faster. She stood in the stands, shouting, thinking: Let the running consume him. Let him not fight in the car. There is nothing I can do with him. Let him leave me alone. But that was not really what she wanted.

     
Alfred had turned her records off. Patrick shifted position on the family room couch, blind. "Dad, you used to say the worst thing that ever happened to Percival was winning so early," Alfred said.

    
Mag
looked from father to son, startled. "I was just thinking about those early races," she said. She did not like Alfred reading her mind or appearing to agree with Patrick. Patrick believed those first victories accounted for
Percival's
troubles later—that winning had come too easy, so the rest of life came hard. Patrick said that cutting school, quitting the track team, joining the
Marinei
—all were a form of running away. Alfred must agree with him or why would he mention it? Father and son believed Percival deserved whatever fate he got.

    
Mag
said bitterly, "Better to win early than not at all, if that's all you're going to have."

    
"What?" Patrick mumbled. The washcloth was hiding his eyes.

    
"Nothing."

    
Alfred walked over to her, touched her on the shoulder. "It
is
better than nothing, Mother. No one's saying it's not." And then, in a strange, fatherly tone: "Mother, you better get dressed." As if he were the parent. As if she were the child.

    
Everything was coming around. If Alfred wanted to send her upstairs to dress, why should she be surprised? Hadn't she said, "You are the oldest, you have to look out for the others"?
Percival's
death would be as chaotic as his life, ending in a blaze of fireworks. And responsible Alfred would spend his life caring for another man's sons. It was the punishment. She turned and went up the stairs, not even noticing the sound of Simon's shower in the bathroom or considering that—as usual—he would stand under it until all the hot water ran out.

CHAPTER 4

    
If the spray came down hard enough, it would always block out what was in Simon's mind. Little knots of water would hit him all over, and he would be skin under a hot rain, nothing else. He rubbed soap into his hair,
mushing
it in with his fingernails. When he was a kid, his mother had told him that was a good way to get his nails clean. He'd rub his temples with the balls of his fingers, and he'd actually be able to feel his mind inside, under the scalp and the scrubbing fingers, going empty.

    
Today it wasn't working. He rubbed, but he kept seeing the picture of the headquarters building on the TV set. He kept seeing the building falling down, like a little kid's blocks. That image had been with him even when he was out delivering the papers, even with his hood down and the rain slopping all over his face. The only time the picture had gone away was when Monster chased him—and it seemed wrong, selfish, to forget another person's welfare when you were caught up in saving your own skin. He'd even laughed when his mother told him she'd dropped the owners' paper in the puddle. But as soon as he'd finished laughing, he remembered the headquarters building. It was like a curtain coming down. A cry had been gathering in his throat ever since they heard the news, and at that moment it had come back bigger than ever.

    
He was trying his damnedest not to let it out. Downstairs his father had a headache and couldn't see, but it was as if his father were looking at him all the same. Patrick said Percival might be all right, it was even all right to deliver papers. In a way, actually delivering them wasn't so bad—knowing he could do whatever he had to. But there was nothing he could do for Percival. He hadn't even been
thinking
about Percival when the dog came at him. So the cry had kept piling up in the back of his throat like cherry pits, heaping up until he could hardly swallow.

    
The water ran tepid and then cool. He climbed out of the shower and knew he needed some way to keep himself together; otherwise he'd lose it, go off in all directions, and his father would have a fit. So he said to himself: It's yesterday. His father said you could believe anything you wanted if you worked at it hard enough. "You can believe you re a winner or you can believe you're a loser—and that's very powerful, don't think it's not," he used to say to Percival, back when Percival was running in races. So maybe he could believe it was yesterday, and maybe that would keep the cry from flying out of his throat.

    
He put on his underwear and stood in front of the mirror. Yesterday he was a tall kid whose muscles hadn't filled out. He was too skinny and his voice hadn't changed. He was a kid who could never keep from arguing with Hope
Shriber
, the Jesus freak in his class. He loved telling Hope the things Patrick liked to say: "You can believe God is watching your every move if you want to, but since you can't ever know for sure, it makes more sense to act as if the power isn't with God but with yourself." Hope always started to get red in the face when he said that, but Simon went on. "It's crazy to put responsibility for your life onto some Higher Being," he'd tell her, in exactly the tone his father used. Red color would spike across Hope's face then, in little jagged streaks, but Simon would just look down at her in a superior way. He was six inches taller than she was, easy.

    
Finally Hope would say, "I don't see how you can talk like that, Simon," in a real small voice. Then she'd quote the Scriptures and her voice would get stronger. Sometimes she'd yell at him, and once he almost made her cry. He knew that was wrong, but it took an effort not to argue with her. That was all he had to worry about yesterday. He would make it be then.

    
But he couldn't. Yesterday Percival had been alive. Yesterday the headquarters building had been standing. No matter how much he believed, he couldn't make time go back to that. The things he had done yesterday seemed separate from him, like games he had played back when he was a kid.

    
He looked at himself in the mirror. Usually when he looked in the mirror he would pretend he was black like his friends
Pooter
and Boozer and even talk to himself as if he were black.

    
"You call me a scruff, punk?" he would say to his reflection, in a voice as close to
Pooter's
voice as he could get. "I
ain't
no
scruff." But that seemed impossible now. In the mirror he saw that his hair was wet, slicked back from his face to reveal the smooth flat place where his ear was supposed to be. Usually it was not the ear but his hair that he noticed, and the way he had to wear it so long that it wasn't in any kind of a style. If it were yesterday, he would be worrying that he couldn't have a hairstyle like
Pooter's
—black fuzz shaved short all over his head—or Boozer's braided dreadlocks. He knew that as straight and thick as his hair was, he'd be able to wear dreadlocks himself if he didn't have to keep his ear covered up like an overgrown Buster Brown. But today that didn't seem important at all.

    
Today he didn't care about his hair. He cared about the walls of the sand-colored building tumbling down in Beirut. If Percival was under the building, he knew how it would be. He knew because of having his tonsils out when he was five. It seemed to him that being crushed under the building would be exactly the same. The feeling of cherry pits in his throat slid down as if he'd swallowed it and settled in a heap in his chest. He remembered pain and fear and nightmares.

    
He'd felt pretty good before the surgery. His mother said he'd had one sore throat after another, but he didn't remember that. He only remembered the hospital. They took blood from his arm and made him pee in a jar. Then they made him wear a nightgown like girls wore, the kind that tied in the back. They wheeled his bed to the operating room. His parents couldn't come. The light was bright and the operating room was cold. They strapped him onto a table. He was crying but his parents couldn't come. "We're going to put you to sleep now," they said. They strapped his arm to a board. They put him to sleep by sticking a needle into his arm. He woke up feeling like he was coming from under water. He'd been swimming underwater and he'd had trouble coming all the way up. His throat hurt and he was sick to his stomach. He threw up all over the warrior action figure his parents gave him.

    
After he went home, his legs felt rubbery when he walked. He didn't feel like his regular self; he felt like he was dreaming. When he looked down at his stomach, there were big red blotches all over it. He might have been dreaming except that they itched. His mother told him not to scratch. More blotches came out on his arms and legs. "He's blooming," Darren said. Simon didn't think flowers bloomed like that. Flowers were bright, clear,
good
. He felt really lousy.

    
Something had gone wrong with his feet. His mother tried to put his shoes on to take him to the doctor, but his feet had swollen so much the shoes didn't fit. He thought they would keep growing, get big and misshapen like the pictures he'd seen in the
Medical
Museum
of people with elephantiasis. One of those people was sitting on his own leg. You had to look at the picture for a minute to realize it was
his own
leg and not a bench. His feet would get so big he'd be able to sit on them. He wouldn't be able to walk. He walked across the room while he still could. He was sick and the bottoms of his feet felt cushiony. He was cold inside.

    
His mother put Merle's outgrown shoes on him so they could go to the doctor. The doctor gave him a shot. The welts got smaller and didn't itch so much. Back home he slept a lot, but not a nice kind of sleep. He slept because he couldn't get enough air inside him to stay awake. Sometimes he woke up choking. He would start coughing while he was asleep. If he woke up, his mother would give him medicine to make him breathe right. A lot of times he didn't wake up right away, or his mother didn't hear him coughing because she was busy with the other kids. He kept sleeping, dreaming how he was coughing, with the gunk in his lungs rolling over and over. Really he
was
coughing, and he was dreaming it, too. Sooner or later somebody would shake him awake and give him the bitter-tasting medicine. Sometimes it was Alfred but usually it was Percival. He would be all right for a while and then he would sleep again, and cough.

    
It took a long time to get better. The whole time he was sick he felt like he was on the other side of himself, a dark side. That was how you felt when you had an operation. His mother said no, that was how you felt when you had an allergic reaction to some medicine they gave you
after
the operation, but Simon never believed that.

    
He thought of Percival under the building. If he was crushed, he might feel the same dark way Simon had when he was sick. The dark feeling was how you felt before you died. Nobody could go into the dark with you, and you were alone. You hurt and then you died, alone.