Second Nature (10 page)

“Now you’re getting it,” Connor told Stephen. “There’s a rule for everything.”

“Problem, Officer?” Robin said when George came up to the driver’s window.

“I thought this was your vehicle, Robin,” George said. “Maybe your friend would like to show me his license.”

“He’d love to, George, but he’s learning to drive. Don’t give us a hard time.” She held up the apple pie she’d bought at the store, then warmed in the oven, so her grandfather would think it was homemade. “Old Dick’s waiting for us.”

Stephen noticed the gun George wore near his waist, but he forced himself to stare straight ahead and keep his hands on the steering wheel. He knew what guns did; they blew into you so that whatever you had been once seeped into the ground. He’d had brothers taken that way: men always appeared suddenly, and they called out some sort of curses before they fired the first shots. When that happened, Stephen knew, you had to run, and even then you might not get away. The muscles along Stephen’s jaw tightened. He wished he were wearing the black coat. Then, if this man reached for his gun, Stephen could pull out his knife. He could do it so quickly that the gun would never be fired.

“I hope your friend’s got his learner’s permit,” George said. He was usually the last one to hear gossip, but even he knew that Roy had reason to be bitter. This guy didn’t even have anything to offer her, that’s what got to Roy most.

“Come on, George,” Connor said. “Give him a break.”

George wrote up a warning, which Robin tossed in the glove compartment.

“We can go now,” she told Stephen. George had already driven off, but Stephen hadn’t pulled back onto the road. “Stephen?” Robin said.

He slammed his foot on the gas pedal and the pickup skidded onto the road.

“All right!” Connor said as they careened toward Poor-man’s Point.

“Slow down,” Robin told him. “There’s a speed limit.”

Stephen had broken into a sweat. He was thinking about that gun, and the way blood froze when it fell onto the snow. He was thinking about the maps in his room, and the cool, clear taste of water up high on the ridge, and the way Robin always stood outside his door to say good night before she went to bed. Now she was sitting so close he could feel her leg against his. She smelled like apples and soap.

“Thirty-five miles an hour,” she told him.

Stephen had believed he was making progress, but as he made the turn into the long gravel driveway, he wasn’t so sure. Was it progress to learn to pretend to be something he wasn’t, because that’s what he’d have to do to be a man. Even the way they killed, from a distance, with a piece of cold metal, belied who they were in their hearts. Thinking about this, he could feel himself closing up. He kept his head bowed as Ginny opened the door and threw her arms around Robin and Connor, then tilted her head to study him. Ginny’s white hair was pinned up on her head and she used a cane to help her navigate the stairs and the cluttered hallways.

“Your grandfather had a hard night,” Ginny warned Robin. “His heart is murmuring. I’m not certain he’s up to three visitors.”

“You’re not my watchdog,” Old Dick called from his bedroom. “Send them in.”

“He probably won’t even notice you,” Robin whispered to Stephen. “If he says anything rude, just smile. He’ll think you’re stupid and he’ll leave you alone.”

They filed into the bedroom and blinked until their eyes adjusted to the murky light. Old Dick was propped up, his head resting on three feather pillows. He’d had difficulty sleeping and now he was more ill-tempered than usual.

“I didn’t mean you,” he said to Ginny. “I can see you anytime. I see you too much as it is.”

“There you go,” Ginny announced, before she went to the kitchen to fix tea. “He must be feeling better.”

“You’re so nasty,” Robin said to her grandfather.

“My pie,” he said.

Robin put the pie on the bureau and sliced it into pieces. “This is Stephen. A friend of ours,” Robin told her grandfather as she handed Connor a plate of pie.

“What are you staring at?” Old Dick demanded.

Stephen was in the doorway, and just seeing him, Old Dick was reminded of a thousand things he’d been trying to forget. His hunger for his own youth left a terrible taste in his mouth. Old Dick didn’t need facts to know that this man in the doorway had everything he wanted. He could run for miles, he could fuck a woman all night, he could probably see the smallest newspaper print with no trouble at all.

“That’s right!” Old Dick said. “I’m old. Take a good look at me.”

“Grandpa!” Robin said. “That’s enough.”

Old Dick sat up as best he could; he was shaking from the exertion. The newspaper he’d struggled to read fell into a pile on the floor.

“Come over here,” Old Dick shouted at Stephen. “Look at me!”

“What’s wrong with him?” Connor whispered to his mother.

Robin put her arm around Connor and drew him to her. “Look at what I’ve become,” Old Dick believed he was saying. But in fact, no words had been spoken. Old Dick had simply lost the ability to do what most people did every day of their lives. He couldn’t pretend there was enough time. He was crying in front of them all, and it didn’t seem to matter.

Stephen glanced at Robin, then approached the old man. He should have been hesitant, but he wasn’t. As Old Dick wept, Stephen was remembering the most terrible winter he had known, with nights so cold he thought his blood would freeze. Day and night were both white, thick with falling snow; to get one drink he’d had to lap at the ice covering the green stream below the ridge. Deer were nothing more than hide and bone; owls were silent. And then, just when it seemed winter was over, and the bears had already emerged from their dens, there was a sudden early-spring storm. The black wolf, nearly crippled by arthritis in his legs and spine, froze to death half a mile from home.

When they found him, the big dog pulled at her own fur until she bled. She paced back and forth in front of the black wolfs body until the ice cut the pads of her feet. She took off, by herself, and didn’t come back till morning, though her new pups, now fatherless, whimpered in their den and went hungry. When the big dog returned, she seemed confused. Every evening at dusk she went off, they could hear her singing, but the song was so lonely no one dared to answer. For days she didn’t eat or drink, but she continued to nurse the new pups, three silver males whose hunger was never satisfied. The big dog was old, though she was the same age as Stephen; her teeth were worn down to nubs and she limped. After only a few months, when the air had turned blue and summer was at its height, she lay down in a patch of sunlight and stopped moving altogether.

That evening Stephen went off by himself. He climbed high on the ridgetop, and when his brothers down below called to him mournfully, begging him to return, he just climbed higher. He had never once cried, not when he was cut or hungry or sick, but he cried now and he could not stop. It did not seem possible for the world to exist without the big dog, and yet it did. He waited for the world to end, nearly starving, tearing out his hair, and in the morning he went back to his brothers. Suffering did not stop the clouds from appearing in the east, it didn’t change the sound of the wind in the trees, or the hunger you felt, or the thirst you would always have.

When Stephen reached the side of the bed, Old Dick covered his face with his hands. Stephen sat down anyway, in the chair beside the window. The glass was smudged, making it impossible to tell the true color of the leaves on the trees. Stephen raised the window higher. At first the green leaves seemed tinted yellow, but it was only the bees; they could hear them now, a low constant hum. Ginny had rushed back to the bedroom. When she saw Old Dick crying, she threw her hands up.

“Look what you’ve done!” she said, but Robin motioned her to be quiet.

A sparrow had come to the window ledge. Its song was so common that Robin had never listened before. She had never even heard it. Old Dick peeked out from behind his hands. Every breath he took was a shudder, every breath hurt. Stephen put his palm down flat on the ledge. The sparrow had flown the length of the island just that morning; its nest was in a cherry tree, in the tallest branches. If the sparrow knew that nothing lasted forever, would it still sing? Would it still build its nest with the same exact pieces of twine and straw? Old Dick, who could not read past the newspaper headlines, suddenly saw that there was salt on the bird’s wings. Its beak was stained red from the cherries it had eaten only minutes before. The sparrow hopped onto the back of Stephen’s hand, and then it flew away so quickly it was back in its nest, way on the north side of the island, before Robin had served her grandfather his first piece of pie.

 
 
People in town got used to the sight of him running. Every evening, as she walked home from the recreation center where she was a counselor in training, Jenny Altero waved to him as she turned the corner onto Cemetery Road, and he always waved back. Dogs out in the backyards began to bark all at once, and their fierce echo could be heard across the island. How fast Stephen ran was a matter of debate. Boys on bicycles couldn’t keep up with him. Cars stopped at red lights had no chance of overtaking him once he’d hit his stride. Roy often followed in his patrol car, close enough to keep an eye on him but not so close that Stephen would notice. But of course Stephen knew anyway, and he paced himself accordingly whenever Roy tailed him, never revealing his true speed. When Roy told his buddies Stephen wasn’t nearly as good as everyone was saying, and practically limped after a quarter-mile, he thought he was telling the truth, and got white with anger when no one believed him.

Stephen had given up any hope of ever learning to drive. The last time he’d tried he’d plowed right into a parked car, denting the front end of Robin’s truck. There were too many rules and regulations, but with running he could just let go. At first, the foot that had been shattered in the trap seemed to have trouble keeping up with the rest of him. The sneakers on his feet were uncomfortable and the asphalt was harder than dirt, but after a while these things didn’t matter so much. He concentrated on the road to Poorman’s Point, where the trees were twisted by the wind. He listened to the sound of the gravel driveway as he passed by the place where the tulips once grew.

Ginny left the door open for him; that way she didn’t have to go up and down all those stairs. She often set out a snack on the dusty cherry-wood table that filled up the whole dining room, though she never would have admitted that the cookies or shelled pecans were for Stephen. Usually, Ginny was fast asleep in front of one of her programs at this hour, a pot of cold tea on the table beside her. Stephen took off his shoes at the front door, so he wouldn’t wake her or track mud inside. Sometimes the old man was asleep, too, and Stephen would sit in the chair by the window and read the newspaper until he woke up.

“What are you? A cat?” Old Dick would say when he opened his eyes to see Stephen’s bowed head as he read editorials and comics. “Don’t you announce yourself? Don’t you ask before you steal a man’s newspaper?”

Stephen would fold the newspaper then, and pretend to put it away, until Old Dick suggested that since he was fiddling with the
Tribune
anyway, he might as well read it aloud. Old Dick, who could grumble about almost anyone and anything, never once criticized the halting way Stephen read. Birds often came to the window, as if to eavesdrop, but perhaps they were there only because Old Dick had taken to leaving crumbs along the sill. Old Dick had lived longer than anyone else on the island; he was the first to choose a place for himself in the cemetery, on the highest knoll, with a view of the north beach and the marshes. More and more headstones were raised each year, and still Old Dick’s piece of ground continued to wait for him; the grass there grew taller, wild asters bloomed. To Stephen, it didn’t matter that Richard Aaron could no longer move from his bed or that he needed his food softened by boiling. Old Dick knew things someone younger couldn’t begin to imagine. Every day, as the light began to fade and the shadows across the lawn grew longer, Stephen tried to ask him what it meant to be a man, and every day his tongue wrapped around itself so that he could not ask.

“What?” Old Dick sometimes said for no reason at all, when he drowsed off, then woke suddenly. “What is it?” he asked.

And still Stephen could not ask what he needed to know. Instead, he readjusted the old man’s pillows and closed the window, to make certain the night air wouldn’t chill him.

“Don’t think you have to come back here,” Old Dick often called out when Ginny brought his dinner in on a tray and it was time for Stephen to leave.

“Pay no attention to him,” Ginny whispered, even though it was clear that Stephen paid more attention to the old man than anyone had for years.

Stephen always took the same route back, but it was more difficult for him to pace himself on the way home, and he often ran flat-out. His plan was the same as it had always been, even now that he knew how great the distance was. With the use of a magnifying glass, he had found Cromley on a map, but Cromley was a town, with a hospital and a post office, and where exactly he’d come from he had no idea. His sense of direction was based not on miles or lines drawn on paper, but on the land itself: the rock in the shape of an eagle, the meadow bordered by streams, the place where the rabbits hid in late summer, where the brambles grew taller than a man.

He couldn’t rush it, he knew that now. He had only just learned to look both ways before crossing a street, especially at night. Last week, he’d narrowly missed being hit when he was running down the road and a set of blinding headlights had appeared before him. After that, he stayed close to the curb. He was so fast now that nothing could have stopped him if he had known the way back home. Or maybe he still would have taken the same old route to Robin’s.