Skeleton Crew (5 page)

For Billy, the mist had lost its novelty. He had fished the flag and a tangle of lanyard out of the water. We spread it on the lawn to dry.

“I heard it was wrong to ever let the flag touch the ground, Daddy,” he said in a businesslike, let’s-get-this-out-of-the-way tone.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Victor McAllister says they lectercute people for it.”

“Well, you tell Vic he’s full of what makes the grass grow green.”

“Horseshit, right?” Billy is a bright boy, but oddly humor-less. To the champ, everything is serious business. I’m hoping that he’ll live long enough to learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude.

“Yeah, right, but don’t tell your mother I said so. When the flag’s dry, we’ll put it away. We’ll even fold it into a cocked hat, so we’ll be on safe ground there.”

“Daddy, will we fix the boathouse roof and get a new flagpole?” For the first time he looked anxious. He’d maybe had enough destruction for a while.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re damn tooting.”

“Can I go over to the Bibbers’ and see what happened there?”

“Just for a couple of minutes. They’ll be cleaning up, too, and sometimes that makes people feel a little ugly.” The way I presently felt about Norton.

“Okay. Bye!” He was off.

“Stay out of their way, champ. And Billy?”

He glanced back.

“Remember about the live wires. If you see more, steer clear of them.”

“Sure, Dad.”

I stood there for a moment, first surveying the damage, then glancing out at the mist again. It seemed closer, but it was very hard to tell for sure. If it was closer, it was defying all the laws of nature, because the wind—a very gentle breeze—was against it. That, of course, was patently impossible. It was very, very white. The only thing I can compare it to would be fresh-fallen snow lying in dazzling contrast to the deep-blue brilliance of the winter sky. But snow reflects hundreds and hundreds of diamond points in the sun, and this peculiar fogbank, although bright and clean-looking, did not sparkle. In spite of what Steff had said, mist isn’t uncommon on clear days, but when there’s a lot of it, the suspended moisture almost always causes a rainbow. But there was no rainbow here.

The unease was back, tugging at me, but before it could deepen I heard a low mechanical sound—
whut-whut-whut!
—followed by a barely audible “Shit!” The mechanical sound was repeated, but this time there was no oath. The third time the chuffing sound was followed by “Mother-fuck!” in that same low I’m-all-by-myself-but-boy-am-I-pissed tone.

—Silence—

—then: “You cunt.”

I began to grin. Sound carries well out here, and all the buzzing chainsaws were fairly distant. Distant enough for me to recognize the not-so-dulcet tones of my next-door neighbor, the renowned lawyer and lakefront-property-owner, Brenton Norton.

I moved down a little closer to the water, pretending to stroll toward the dock beached on our breakwater. Now I could see Norton. He was in the clearing beside his screened-in porch, standing on a carpet of old pine needles and dressed in paint-spotted jeans and a white strappy T-shirt. His forty-dollar haircut was in disarray and sweat poured down his face. He was down on one knee, laboring over his own chainsaw. It was much bigger and fancier than my little $79.95 Value House job. It seemed to have everything, in fact, but a starter button. He was yanking a cord, producing the listless
whut-whut-whut
sounds and nothing more. I was gladdened in my heart to see that a yellow birch had fallen across his picnic table and smashed it in two.

Norton gave a tremendous yank on the starter cord.

Whut-whut-whutwhutwhut-WHAT!WHAT!WHAT!
...
WHAT!
...
Whut.

Almost had it there for a minute, fella.

Another Herculean tug.

“Cocksucker,” Norton whispered fiercely, and bared his teeth at his fancy chainsaw.

I went back around the house, feeling really good for the first time since I got up. My own saw started on the first tug, and I went to work.

 

Around ten o’clock there was a tap on my shoulder. It was Billy with a can of beer in one hand and Steff’s list in the other. I stuffed the list in the back pocket of my jeans and took the beer, which was not exactly frosty-cold but at least cool. I chugged almost half of it at once—rarely does a beer taste that good—and tipped the can in salute at Billy. “Thanks, champ.”

“Can I have some?”

I let him have a swallow. He grimaced and handed the can back. I offed the rest and just caught myself as I started to crunch it up in the middle. The deposit law on bottles and cans has been in effect for over three years, but old ways die hard.

“She wrote something across the bottom of the list, but I can’t read her writing,” Billy said.

I took out the list again. “I can’t get WOXO on the radio,” Steff’s note read. “Do you think the storm knocked them off the air?”

WOXO is the local automated FM rock outlet. It broadcast from Norway, about twenty miles north, and was all that our old and feeble FM receiver would haul in.

“Tell her probably,” I said, after reading the question over to him. “Ask her if she can get Portland on the AM band.”

“Okay, Daddy, can I come when you go to town?”

“Sure. You and Mommy both, if you want.”

“Okay.” He ran back to the house with the empty can.

I had worked my way up to the big tree. I made my first cut, sawed through, then turned the saw off for a few moments to let it cool down—the tree was really too big for it, but I thought it would be all right if I didn’t rush it. I wondered if the dirt road leading up to Kansas Road was clear of falls, and just as I was wondering, an orange CMP truck lumbered past, probably on its way to the far end of our little road. So that was all right. The road was clear and the power guys would be here by noon to take care of the live lines.

I cut a big chunk off the tree, dragged it to the side of the driveway, and tumbled it over the edge. It rolled down the slope and into the underbrush that had crept back since the long-ago day when my dad and his brothers—all of them artists, we have always been an artistic family, the Draytons—had cleared it away.

I wiped sweat off my face with my arm and wished for another beer; one really only sets your mouth. I picked up the chainsaw and thought about WOXO being off the air. That was the direction that funny fogbank had come from. And it was the direction Shaymore (pronounced
Shammore
by the locals) lay in. Shaymore was where the Arrowhead Project was.

That was old Bill Giosti’s theory about the so-called Black Spring: the Arrowhead Project. In the western part of Shaymore, not far from where the town borders on Stoneham, there was a small government preserve surrounded with wire. There were sentries and closed-circuit television cameras and God knew what else. Or so I had heard; I’d never actually seen it, although the Old Shaymore Road runs along the eastern side of the government land for a mile or so.

No one knew for sure where the name Arrowhead Project came from and no one could tell you for one hundred percent sure that that really was the name of the project—if there was a project. Bill Giosti said there was, but when you asked him how and where he came by his information, he got vague. His niece, he said, worked for the Continental Phone Company, and she had heard things. It got like that.

“Atomic things,” Bill said that day, leaning in the Scout’s window and blowing a healthy draught of Pabst into my face.

“That’s what they’re fooling around with up there. Shooting atoms into the air and all that.”

“Mr. Giosti, the air’s full of atoms,” Billy had said. “That’s what Mrs. Neary says. Mrs. Neary says everything’s full of atoms.”

Bill Giosti gave my son Bill a long, bloodshot glance that finally deflated him. “These are
different
atoms, son.”

“Oh, yeah,” Billy muttered, giving in.

Dick Muehler, our insurance agent, said the Arrowhead Project was an agricultural station the government was running, no more or less. “Bigger tomatoes with a longer growing season,” Dick said sagely, and then went back to showing me how I could help my family most efficiently by dying young. Janine Lawless, our postlady, said it was a geological survey having something to do with shale oil. She knew for a fact, because her husband’s brother worked for a man who had—

Mrs. Carmody, now . . . she probably leaned more to Bill Giosti’s view of the matter. Not just atoms, but
different
atoms.

I cut two more chunks off the big tree and dropped them over the side before Billy came back with a fresh beer in one hand and a note from Steff in the other. If there’s anything Big Bill likes to do more than run messages, I don’t know what it could be.

“Thanks,” I said, taking them both.

“Can I have a swallow?”

“Just one. You took two last time. Can’t have you running around drunk at ten in the morning.”

“Quarter past,” he said, and smiled shyly over the top of the can. I smiled back—not that it was such a great joke, you know, but Billy makes them so rarely—and then read the note.

“Got JBQ on the radio,” Steffy had written. “Don’t get drunk before you go to town. You can have one more, but that’s it before lunch. Do you think you can get up our road okay?”

I handed him the note back and took my beer. “Tell her the road’s okay because a power truck just went by. They’ll be working their way up here.”

“Okay.”

“Champ?”

“What, Dad?”

“Tell her everything’s okay.”

He smiled again, maybe telling himself first. “Okay.”

He ran back and I watched him go, legs pumping, soles of his zori showing. I love him. It’s his face and sometimes the way his eyes turn up to mine that make me feel as if things are really okay. It’s a lie, of course—things are not okay and never have been—but my kid makes me believe the lie.

I drank some beer, set the can down carefully on a rock, and got the chainsaw going again. About twenty minutes later I felt a light tap on my shoulder and turned, expecting to see Billy again. Instead it was Brent Norton. I turned off the chainsaw.

He didn’t look the way Norton usually looks. He looked hot and tired and unhappy and a little bewildered.

“Hi, Brent,” I said. Our last words had been hard ones, and I was a little unsure how to proceed. I had a funny feeling that he had been standing behind me for the last five minutes or so, clearing his throat decorously under the chainsaw’s aggressive roar. I hadn’t gotten a really good look at him this summer. He had lost weight, but it didn’t look good. It should have, because he had been carrying around an extra twenty pounds, but it didn’t. His wife had died the previous November. Cancer. Aggie Bibber told Steffy that. Aggie was our resident necrologist. Every neighborhood has one. From the casual way Norton had of ragging his wife and belittling her (doing it with the contemptuous ease of a veteran matador inserting
banderillas
in an old bull’s lumbering body), I would have guessed he’d be glad to have her gone. If asked, I might even have speculated that he’d show up this summer with a girl twenty years younger than he was on his arm and a silly my-cock-has-died-and-gone-to-heaven grin on his face. But instead of the silly grin there was only a new batch of age lines, and the weight had come off in all the wrong places, leaving sags and folds and dewlaps that told their own story. For one passing moment I wanted only to lead Norton to a patch of sun and sit him beside one of the fallen trees with my can of beer in his hand, and do a charcoal sketch of him.

“Hi, Dave,” he said, after a long moment of awkward silence—a silence that was made even louder by the absence of the chainsaw’s racket and roar. He stopped, then blurted:

“That tree. That damn tree. I’m sorry. You were right.”

I shrugged.

He said, “Another tree fell on my car.”

“I’m sorry to h—” I began, and then a horrid suspicion dawned. “It wasn’t the T-Bird, was it?”

“Yeah. It was.”

Norton had a 1960 Thunderbird in mint condition, only thirty thousand miles. It was a deep midnight blue inside and out. He drove it only summers, and then only rarely. He loved that Bird the way some men love electric trains or model ships or target-shooting pistols.

“That’s a bitch,” I said, and meant it.

He shook his head slowly. “I almost didn’t bring it up. Almost brought the station wagon, you know. Then I said what the hell. I drove it up and a big old rotten pine fell on it. The roof of it’s all bashed in. And I thought I’d cut it up ... the tree, I mean . . . but I can’t get my chainsaw to fire up ... I paid two hundred dollars for that sucker . . . and ... and . . .”

His throat began to emit little clicking sounds. His mouth worked as if he were toothless and chewing dates. For one helpless second I thought he was going to just stand there and bawl like a kid on a sandlot. Then he got himself under some halfway kind of control, shrugged, and turned away as if to look at the chunks of wood I had cut up.

“Well, we can look at your saw,” I said. “Your T-Bird insured?”

“Yeah,” he said, “like your boathouse.”

I saw what he meant, and remembered again what Steff had said about insurance.

“Listen, Dave, I wondered if I could borrow your Saab and take a run up to town. I thought I’d get some bread and cold cuts and beer. A lot of beer.”

“Billy and I are going up in the Scout,” I said. “Come with us if you want. That is, if you’ll give me a hand dragging the rest of this tree off to one side.”

“Happy to.”

He grabbed one end but couldn’t quite lift it up. I had to do most of the work. Between the two of us we were able to tumble it into the underbrush. Norton was puffing and panting, his cheeks nearly purple. After all the yanking he had done on that chainsaw starter pull, I was a little worried about his ticker.