Sons of Liberty (7 page)

Lately, now that their mother didn’t stray from home, their father was having to do all the grocery shopping and school shopping and clothes shopping, even for Brontie. He would arrive home from work at night with armfuls of packages, like Santa Claus.

“You’d think Mom could help out a little,” Rock complained once to Cliff. “I know we only have the station wagon, but remember how she used to drive him to work so she could keep the car? Why doesn’t she do that anymore? It must make Dad annoyed, all the extra work.”

“He likes it.” Cliff had flicked Rock in the forehead, hard. “Dad likes for Mom to be all dependent on him. Cowboy George wants to control the whole corral. Don’t you get it?”

“Shut up, spudface,” Rock had growled. He hadn’t thought about it that way before, that their father actually liked doing all the shopping. The flick left a mark, too, a little red circle like a bull’s-eye. Don’t you get it? the mark seemed to laugh. Rock had covered it up with some of Cliff’s acne cream.

His mother was slowly sinking back into the delights of her cookbook, her flowery script neatly adding one thing, then another, to the growing list.

“Bye, Mom,” Rock called. She blinked up at him, surprised, and smiled. Rock felt a tug of wishing for the old days, for the softly read books and the soothing feeling that his mom knew everything and could protect him from everything. Now she was like Mr. Faella’s snowflake sweater, a memory of something that used to be good but now was getting all worn out and unravely.

Liza lounged on her side in front of the couch, wearing her red thermal pajamas and watching cartoons. She’d curled Trev into the bend she’d made of her body and was absently dragging her fingers through his curly hair. Both their mouths drooped open and the images on the TV screen flickered dully in their eyes.

“Hey-a, Liza.” Rock waved. Liza looked up.

“Hi.”

“I got your homework assignments from Mrs. Zukoff from yesterday. I put ’em on the front table, along with some of my old
Rolling Stones
that you wanted.”

“Thanks.” Liza nodded distractedly, her eyes glazing over as they fixed back on the cartoon.

“How’s your head?”

“Better, a little. You see Trev’s new swing set Timmy’s putting up? Slide and everything.”

“Yeah, I’m going out there in a minute.” Their sentences trickled as thinly as water poured back and forth from doll teacups. The conversation made him restless.

“I’ll go out and help, then.”

“That’s a good idea, there, Rock.” Arlene strode into the living room, her watering can in hand, armed to nourish her spider plants. “Go make yourself useful. Liza’s resting now.”

“How you, rapscallion?” Timmy whistled at Rock between his teeth. “You need a haircut there, buddy. Starting to look like a woman.”

“Naw.” Rock flipped his hair out of his eyes.

“Well, seeing I’m most about done here”—Timmy tapped the top of the monkey bars with his hammer—“I don’t need your help. No woman’s work needed out here, no suh.”

“All right. I’m going, then.”

“See you round like a record.” Timmy waved. They both laughed at his dumb joke. So much fakeness. The fakeness at the Mobleys’ house could really bother Rock. It was tough to scrape up so many phony smiles and hollow laughs without feeling tired out from the effort.

Rock took off on his BMX, heading for a place where he knew he could be left alone. At the edge of the pond he dropped his bike on the grass and heaved the banked JennAir over onto its belly, then dragged it down to the water’s edge, where he launched it and himself out into the pond. Slush and icy water licked the edge of his jeans and soaked his sneakers, but he didn’t care. The winter at Valley Forge had frozen off soldiers’ fingers and toes, and then they’d gone ahead and eaten the fallen-off parts just to stay alive. That was bravery. Whenever Rock felt cold, all he had to do was think of biting into his own toes and immediately he felt a little tougher. Cold water, in comparison, was nothing.

No one living around Moose Hill Pond knew what the JennAir was exactly. It was named for the words that appeared in lacquered script along its side. Most guesses were that it was some kind of giant washtub, a fancy Jacuzzi-style tub that one of the summer families must have discarded. Now it belonged to everybody. The JennAir could hold four, sometimes five kids at a time, although five was a squeeze, and it could spin you all around the pond, safe and lazy as a donkey ride. Which was just the pace Rock wanted.

On the other side of the pond was the milk store, which Rock started paddling to for a candy bar, until he got halfway across the pond and realized that he didn’t have any money. So he let the JennAir drift him in lazy circles while he stretched out on his back and looked at the sky. The aloneness of lying in a tub in the middle of a pond of half-frozen water began to steep a calm inside him. He pictured his mind like a glass of soda set in the sun, and he felt the pops and fizzes of his thoughts and concerns slowly escape him, leaving him flat and still.

He began to sing, something he liked to do when he was all by himself. The vibrations in his vocal cords were more pleasing to him than the sounds of his actual voice. Then his singing just turned into weird noises, sounds that would have freaked him out if he didn’t know where they came from. It was astounding, the range that hummed and piped inside one person.

“Hey, yooouuu.”

Rock lifted his head. Liza, in a blur of pajama bottoms that now were paired with her purple ski parka, was waving at him from the rickety dock.

“Want me to row in?” he shouted. He wondered if she’d heard him making those dorky noises, and he flushed. The purple blur on the dock jumped up and down. Rock grabbed the paddle and began steering himself inland. The early afternoon had darkened, lumpy clouds hiding the little bit of sun the day had decided to offer, and daytime seemed finished before it had ever really begun, which happened a lot in January.

“Thanky, sir.” Liza saluted, grabbing at the tub prow and spidering herself into the JennAir once it slid within her reach. “Brrr—it’s so cold. Cliff came by. He knew you’d be out here. Cliff can always predict what you and Brontie are up to.”

“No, he can’t,” Rock answered quickly. He didn’t like the idea of Cliff having some kind of magic eye trained on him. Liza smirked. She lifted the paddle and began to row with sure, long strokes, out to the middle of the pond.

“Don’t you wish it was always so quiet?” she asked with a sigh, once the JennAir was twirling in the middle of the water again. “I think it rots when the snobby summer people come and fill up the houses around our pond and Linwood Drive and Sheffield.” She paused and nodded in the general direction of the summer cottages tucked around the bank. “Look how empty. It belongs to us all year, and then for three months all those people—‘Hey, hon, can you tell me how to get to Masonfield, can you tell me how to get to the Fiddlehead Inn, duh, can you tell me where the farmers’ market is?’ ”

“Or how about, ‘Duh, you kids, don’t moor your boat on our dock, don’t pick those raspberries on our property.’ ”

“Yeah—‘Don’t put your beach towels over our fence, get off our land.’ They rot, summer snobs.” Liza set aside the paddle and braided her fingers together against her mouth, breathing warm air over them. “There was summer snobs in Skowhegan, but not this bad. It was more spread apart, up there.”

“Rich people fork out megadollars to have a summer place near water.”

“Water’s a good thing any time of the year.” Liza looked over the side of the JennAir, into the pond’s deep bruise-colored murk. “I bet there’s cave treasures down there,” she remarked, pushing at an ice chunk with the tip of her finger. “When I get older, I’m fixing to go cave diving, you just watch. If you get spooked when you’re cave diving, your feet kick up all the dirt and sediments on the bottom of the ocean, then you can’t see, and you die slow and painful. You gotta be pure calm, like James Bond. Ever hear of cave diving?”

“Yeah, sure,” Rock lied. How did Liza always hear about guy things before most guys did? He hoped she wouldn’t press him for any more information.

“Hey, Rock, you know, I’m thinking of cutting loose, maybe head to California.”

“Oh yeah?” Rock looked up sharply. He hadn’t expected those words. Liza nodded.

“All you guys thinking that? Of moving away?”

“Just me. Nobody else.”

“You think you’d be okay on your own?”

Liza looked down at the water and said that she did.

“Well.” Rock pinched his lips together. “You’d know best.” He took a breath and plunged ahead. “I don’t think it’s such a bad idea, maybe, if Timmy keeps you missing school like you do.” Even as he spoke, he felt a prickle of sweat break out in his armpits. He hoped his words didn’t get Liza all mad, or drive him out to somewhere in the conversation he didn’t want to be.

“Uh-huh.” Liza pushed out her mouth like a kiss, thinking. “Anyhow, Cliff says it’s a good idea, too.”

Cliff. Rock didn’t know why, but a fierce flame of anger suddenly lit up inside him. Liza was talking privately to Cliff. They’d spoken together about Timmy, about California. Important conversations had already happened, without Rock.

Oblivious, Liza continued, “Cliff says maybe there’s not enough room for me in Timmy’s family. Could be he’s right. Cliff says I probably remind Timmy about how Ma used to be together with my dad and not him.”

“Maybe your mom could talk to Timmy. Tell him to quit being so rough, you know?” Rock felt the pointlessness of his words, but it sounded like the mature thing to say. The whole plan made Rock feel slightly hot-tempered anyway—thinking of Cliff talking, Cliff observing, Cliff noticing stuff that Rock didn’t see. Cliff was always trying to be the big Superman, ever since that first time a couple years ago.

Cliff could never let that day go, even after they’d met under Cliff’s bed that night to hash through the details. Cliff scratched at that day like a permanent mosquito bite that even now could always twitch Rock into a bad mood.

That day, he and Rock had been hanging out at the Mobleys’, working at the table in the front room. Earlier, Arlene had made homemade Play-Doh for Trev, dyeing it red and yellow and blue with food coloring, but then Trev went down for a nap, so Cliff and Rock and Liza decided to surprise Trev by building him a giant Play-Doh spaceland for his Power Rangers. They were drinking iced tea and eating Chex mix and listening to the Casey Kasem Top 40, laughing over the dumb, lovesick long-distance dedications. It was just a regular, after-school day. Rock would probably have forgotten all about it if the next thing hadn’t happened.

Rock couldn’t remember if he’d even heard the grind of the truck on the gravel. Maybe first Arlene had looked out the window and said, “Timmy’s home,” or maybe they’d all listened to the stomp of his work boots on the welcome mat. What Rock did remember was his voice, words that had weighted Rock to his seat and run a chill through him, like the tip of a knife skimming from the base of his spine up to his neck.

“Who left my tools out in the rain?” The voice had paused, waiting, maybe, for an answer, then continued. “What dumb little bastard was trying to build some stupid piece of junk and left my tools out in the rain? Is there a dumb little bastard in this house who wants to come here and tell me why my hand saw and my hammer and my drill bit are rusting wet on this lawn?”

“Maybe you boys should go. It’s almost dinnertime,” Arlene said crisply. She began to pluck up bits of loose Play-Doh, mashing all the colors together into an empty margarine tub.

Liza kept working, rolling her Play-Doh into a tube that lengthened and thinned in the blur of movement between her hands. But Rock and Cliff were both stuck in their seats, their gazes fixed on the doorway, watching for the face that belonged to a voice so low and tough that it sounded only a little bit like Timmy’s.

But then Timmy appeared; suddenly just regular old Timmy was standing in the kitchen archway, wearing his same faded jeans and battered baseball cap, but under the shadow of the brim his face was hard.

“That you, Liza?” he said.

“What if it was?” she asked. In the silence that followed, the Play-Doh tube became a cigar, then a soda straw, then no thicker than a loop of red yarn that drooped over Liza’s hands. She didn’t look up.

Slowly Timmy clomped over the table and reached for Liza like he was lifting a pot of hot water—two-handed, a balanced and careful grip under her arms. He lifted her right up so that her face was level with his face and her eyes had to look into his eyes, and her legs in their gray sweatpants twisted and kicked at the air like an upside-down beetle.

And then he tossed her, just like that, straight across the room.

It almost looked graceful, the way it happened, a gasp of movement shared between two dancers. Liza’s whalebone body sprang up so high, vaulted so weightlessly across the space; if the door had been open, she might have sailed right out and flown into the sky like Peter Pan. But the door was closed and it stopped her. She hit the wood and dropped like a sack and made a funny noise as the breath popped out of her.

Cliff jumped up, banging the table. A glass of iced tea fell over with a bump and splash, its loose, liquid tentacles spreading wide. The tea made islands of the Play-Doh lumps, dribbling over the edge of the table and dripping onto the carpet.

“Hey Timmy, hey Timmy,” Cliff kept repeating. His voice was loud, confident like when he practiced reciting his Boy Scout vows. And Liza had been sort of laughing, Rock remembered. The stupid, insane cheeriness of the two of them.

“Aw, I’m not hurt.” Liza was laughing, but her laugh was stuck inside her; it was just a smile and a choking in her shoulders. Arlene kept perfectly silent. She’d dashed off to the closet when Cliff knocked the tea, bringing back a pile of dish towels, which she began stuffing everywhere, patting them over the rug, over the Play-Doh—suddenly rags were everywhere to catch the drips.

“Hey Timmy, it was my fault. We were both making that go-cart and then this song came on Casey Kasem.” Cliff spoke with smiling intensity. He reminded Rock of a game-show player trying his jaunty best to guess the right answer for ten thousand dollars. “It came on and we forgot and we went inside, we forgot. I forgot.”