The Runner (7 page)

Bullet had grinned, and turned to picking up the splintered mess he had made. And he had fixed the baskets too. Patrice had shown him how, then had left him to do it.

While Patrice made lunch, Bullet took a long, hot shower.
They didn't have a shower at home, only a big old tub with claw feet. When he emerged from the bathroom attached to the back of the one-room house, he wandered around the little yard while Patrice washed up.

Patrice had no grass, no garden, and only one little pine growing in the clayey soil. A low picket fence surrounded the plot of land that he rented, its white paint bright and clean. The yard was crammed with outboards and dinghys, each at some different stage of repair. Patrice bought or salvaged these boats and motors, fixed them up and sold them at a profit. That day, he had three boats, the longest fourteen feet, lying upside down in a row, on top of logs. Several motors, from three to twenty horsepower, lay around. Some of them had the casing off and the parts spread out—spark plugs, pull cords, propeller blades. It looked messy but was, Bullet knew, kept neatly, as neatly as the cabinets inside where Patrice stored his paint and tools and spare parts.

They ate inside, at the card table. Patrice had made a thick potato soup, which he served with sandwiches made out of the rolls, split and stuffed with meat he had chopped and mixed together with boiled eggs, olives, and green peppers. They ate without speaking, until they were full. Patrice poured himself fresh coffee. Bullet refilled his glass from the tap. Patrice lit a thin cigar.

“All the same, we will be oystering soon. I should take down the tongs this week.”

Bullet looked up to where Patrice kept his oyster tongs, hung on the wall. Their twelve-foot handles and thick, stubby rakes looked as heavy as he knew they were. The metal of the teeth glowed with the careful cleaning Patrice and he had given them at the end of last winter's season. “Okay,” he said.

“Such enthusiasm,” Patrice said.

Bullet changed the subject. “You got a new boat.”

“I found her washed up into the marshes. She looked salvageable.”

Bullet snorted: “It looks to me like you'll be replacing more than half the thing.”

“So? Did you also notice she is not so broad as most fourteen-footers? She would have been a fast little boat.”

Bullet just shook his head. Patrice always salvaged and rebuilt. He threw nothing away. He worked with metal and wood, soldering, sawing, refitting. “What else is there for a man to do in the evenings?” he asked. He didn't expect an answer.

Evenings, Bullet's father read books, silent at his desk, alone in the living room with the door closed. His mother baked, preserved, knitted, sewed, cleaned. Bullet stayed away: Most evenings of the year he ran; in winter he withdrew upstairs right after dinner, up to the second floor he now had entirely to himself. The other two bedrooms were empty except for furniture; the first thing his mother did, after Johnny left, after Liza left, was take their stuff up to the attic. Winter evenings, when it was too cold to run, Bullet went up to his room and did nothing. He could have done homework during the winter, but he never did it at any other time and couldn't think of any reason to make an exception for winter.

Johnny, he remembered, would be in the kitchen, building something or looking at library books with plans, or doing his homework, or reading. Liza might help their mother, or sing at the piano if the old man wasn't around; sometimes she would play checkers with Bullet. She always lost. Even at Parcheesi she always lost. And Johnny always won—well, he was years older, bigger, smarter, faster. He could always make Bullet do what he told him. He wouldn't mind taking Johnny on now, Bullet thought,
I could hold my own and maybe then some.

He bit into another of Patrice's sandwiches, almost wishing Johnny was still around, to show. But that was all before, anyway,
before Johnny started locking horns with the old man. As Johnny got older, it was like that, like two bulls in one yard. Dinners, year after year, night piled up on night, and the old man always got the last word. Except about college, and then it was their mother who tipped the scales.

“There's nothing you can't learn here,” their father kept telling Johnny, “while you learn how to work the farm that'll keep you in food.”

“You just don't know,” Johnny had answered. “You don't even know how much you don't know, even about farming.”

The old man chewed on that one for a while, while everybody sat quiet. “Children always think they know better. They never do. You'll be staying here, and if you've got the character, you'll study,” he finally said.

“You haven't got any say in it, not anymore,” Johnny told him. “I've got a scholarship, I don't need anything from you.”

“I don't see you putting your own food on your own plate,” the old man said.

“You know what I mean,” Johnny muttered.

“I know how unrealistic you are,” the old man said.

“I'm going,” Johnny said, stubborn.

“College is a luxury, and we can't afford luxuries,” the old man told him.

“I'm going,” Johnny said.

Finally, Bullet's mother broke in. “Then go, and let's have this question settled. Unless you settle to stay.”

Johnny looked at her: “You want me to go, don't you?”

Her mouth moved, but no words came out. Liza's fat tears spilled out of her eyes, but she didn't say anything. Bullet knew his mother didn't want Johnny to go, not the way the two of them were using that word, to mean go away and stay away. “Yes,” she finally said, “go.”

Bullet opened his mouth to stop Johnny, who was scraping his chair away from the table, but she said, “You, boy, keep your mouth closed.”

Johnny looked at her again, at that, but he didn't know what she meant, and he was supposed to be so smart; even Liza knew what she meant, and the old man sat smug and smiling tight at his end of the table. Johnny went, figuring he'd won out after all, and the old man figured he'd won out, and Bullet knew then it didn't do any good to be smart, that being smart didn't keep people from boxing you in. The two of them, they'd boxed her in, and they'd boxed themselves in. But nobody was going to get Bullet that way, he made up his mind to that.

“But, Pop,” he remembered Liza starting to say. Bullet kicked her hard, in the shin, and she looked at him then and shut up. Which was what he wanted her to do.

He thought, finishing the sandwich, finishing up his bowl of soup, his belly full now, that if he'd been Liza he'd have kicked him back. But Liza didn't. Maybe she knew how useless it was, anyway. He never could tell what Liza knew, anyway. That night she had just got up to clear the table and help with the dishes—which was what Bullet did now, too. He took the plates and bowls and piled them by the sink. Patrice finished his coffee, then—holding the cigar between his teeth—offered, “Let me show you what I'll do with her.” They went back outside to look at the fourteen-footer.

It had once been painted, but the coats had worn down to a dusting of colorlessness over the weathered boards. It looked as gray as a dock. Gaping holes had been smashed through its floorboards.

Patrice put his hand on the curiously rounded keel. “This is called carvel-planking,” he told Bullet, his palm following the curved line of wood back to the curved transom. The planks on the sides, except for a couple of places, looked okay, but the
gunwales were mashed down, sprung loose as the ribs of the boat had twisted with whatever strain it had been subjected to. The transom was useless, split down its center.

“Even you can't do much with this,” Bullet said.

Patrice leaned forward to pull one of the floorboards up. “I will enjoy trying. See how they are grooved to fit? Beautiful. It must have been rough weather to damage something this well made.”

“You think maybe it floated up from the ocean?”

“No, the ocean would have broken up even this boat. The ribs are sound, and the sides. I'll replank the bottom. I've never attempted such work—” and Patrice was off, talking about the steps of it, cutting the length to match, cutting the board to square, then planing it down to the right curve to run from stern to bow. Bullet listened with half an ear, he wasn't interested. Patrice just liked talking. He didn't mind that, and Patrice didn't mind if he listened or not. “I'll need to find some oak,” Patrice concluded.

“That'll cost you.”

Patrice shrugged.

“Planing it yourself will take hours. You'll never make your money back on it, Patrice.”

“Oh well, I'll have put real work into it, and that is something too.”

“Besides, who has the money for a dinghy like that, anyway?”

“She'll take fifteen horses when I finish with her. Can you see how she'll look? White, clean and white, with maybe a blue stripe showing at the waterline. I'll let you help with the painting.”

“You're going to paint oak?”

“Sometimes a man just wants to do the best he is capable of. And why do you yourself run your races, do you ever think of that?”

“What're you going to ask for it?”

“With a motor—the right motor—five hundred dollars. Maybe six.”

Bullet shook his head. “We'd better go after some oysters. You're going to need the money.”

“And you, my friend, you also. Perhaps I will sell her to you?”

Bullet laughed. “No chance. What would I do with a boat? But you ought to paint it red, if you're going to paint it. Fire engine red.”

“You think so? No, I don't agree.”

“Anyway, I've got to go. I've had my orders for the weekend.”

“Is he punishing you? For the hair?”

“He can't do anything. He just refuses to have to look at me, no big deal.”

Patrice studied Bullet briefly, out of thoughtful brown eyes. “Your father puzzles me,” he said. “I feel sorry for him.”

“I don't.”

“No, of course not, and why should you? You're his victim. But I've never met the man, and he has no power over me, so I feel sorry for him. Which matters nothing, not to him, not to you, not to me. Do you have one of your meets next Saturday?”

“Yeah. The first.”

“Good luck to you then, which you do not need. I'll look for you on Sunday.”

“Oysters?”

“We'll know that later in the week.”

Bullet jogged the five miles back to the farm. He plowed the second field along the driveway that afternoon, plowing under the dried and broken cornstalks, burying them into the earth to rot and fertilize. As he pulled the tractor out into the driveway, he looked back at the lumpy brown field ready to hibernate for the winter, as if he had pulled a blanket up over it and tucked it in. Fed it too, he thought to himself, turning the tractor into the empty barn. He shoved the sagging barn doors closed behind him and went into the kitchen. They were eating, some kind of
hash made out of ham and potatoes. Neither of them looked at him as he ran a glass of water then stood at the sink to drink it.

“We need engine oil,” he said, speaking to the center of the table.

Nobody said anything for a while, they just ate away. Bullet turned to put his glass down.

“You might start a shopping list, Abigail,” his father's voice said. “I may be going to town at the end of the week.”

Bullet felt his hand tighten around the glass—he could break it, and easily, crushing it, letting the splinters pierce his hand. He put the glass down carefully and looked out the window over the sink, toward the vegetable garden and the marsh grasses beyond. What the old man was doing was forcing her to sail into town for the groceries. The old man didn't like messing with bags of groceries. Or something. There wasn't anything much left to eat, not even canned soup. Bullet was going to have oatmeal without milk for the third night in a row. Oatmeal they had in abundance. And she'd do it too, because she never just told the old man there wasn't anything to eat, or gave him oatmeal.

“Those barn doors need rehanging,” his father's voice said behind him. It was an order.

You don't think I can, do you, on my own.
Hanging doors, especially doors that big, and with the hinges rusting up and the wood behind the hinges rotten—that was at least a two-man job. They'd been getting worse and worse for a couple of years. Now they dug into the ground when you shoved them closed. If he hadn't been so pissed, Bullet could have laughed at how obvious the old man was.

Bullet walked out of the kitchen, moving slowly down the path to the dock, to run. Halfway there, OD emerged from the golden grasses, wagging her tail to greet him. “Get away, you stupid mutt,” he told her. She stood wagging her tail and watching him as he passed her by.

B
ullet waited in the broad doorway of the lunchroom, paper bag in his hand, looking things over. Lou caught his eye, then indicated with a tilt of her head the empty seat next to her. He slid his eyes past her, not even glancing at the other three. That Monday he went to sit with some of the football squad.

Bullet slid onto the end of the wooden bench, and the four others on that side slid down to make room for him. “Hey man.” “How they hanging?” “Long time no see.” “Hey, Bullet, have a meatball,” offered Jim, who pronged one from his green plastic plate of spaghetti and leaned across the table to shove it at Bullet's face. “It's not really shit, it just looks like it. And tastes like it. You want some?”

“You're kidding.” Bullet unwrapped his packet of sandwiches. Just jam this lunch; they were out of peanut butter. It was lucky his mother bought flour by the hundred-pound sack and saw to it that the old man always picked one up when he went into town. They never ran out of bread.

“Where you been?” Pete asked.

Bullet fixed him with his eye: “In school.” They laughed.