The True Detective (4 page)

Duncan is fixing instant coffee. “I thought I heard you come in late,” he says. “I mean even later than me.”

“I was out,” Vernon says. He would say more; he would explain something, but as usual he cannot.

“I bet it wasn’t drinking that kept you out,” Duncan says slyly.

“No,” Vernon says, pleased that Duncan is teasing him. “Not drinking.”

“Vernon, you got some little sweetie out there, don’t you?”

Again, Vernon smiles. “No,” he says, like a child.

“Me neither,” Duncan says. “You want to go steady?”

They laugh; Vernon laughs as if for the first time in his life. His eyes fill.

Duncan sips coffee. “Vernon, listen,” he says. “I’ve been meaning to ask you to help me with my calculus. I don’t know why I need it for economics, but I do. I mean sometime when you have a chance. But soon.”

“Sure,” Vernon says.

“You’ll help me?”

“Sure.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Okay.”

Sipping again, looking at him over his cup, Duncan says, “Man, are you okay?”

“Sure,” Vernon manages to say.

Duncan keeps looking at him. “I mean you’re always sort of weird,” he says. “But lately, you really do seem weird.”

“I’m fine,” Vernon says.

Watching him still, Duncan nods. Carrying his cup then, he starts back in the direction of the bathroom. “Okay,” he says. “Calculus tomorrow.”

Vernon sits at the table. He’d like to have said more, as usual, but didn’t. It could be so pleasant, he thinks. He could so enjoy someone being friendly with him. Taking the lead, though, because it was something he’d never been able to do. Did any of them have any idea how much he suffered by his reticence?

Getting up, believing he has heard a voice—it would have to be Leon or Wayne in the other bedroom—Vernon slips back to his own bedroom, to close himself in. He couldn’t face those two right now, he thinks. Not today.

Sitting at his desk, next to the door, he hears them moving around in the kitchen and bathroom. At times like these Leon always wore a pair of gray sweatpants that revealed the droop
of his genitals, which embarrassed and angered Vernon. Something about Leon always seemed to say, look, see what I have here—so Vernon sensed—which made him avoid looking at all costs.

This is awful, he says to himself, sitting in his room. What is so strange, he thinks, is that the one person who could lift him out of his depression on nothing more than a couple words is the one person who isn’t about to.

He sits at his desk. In a moment, on a thought, he digs into the bottom of a drawer to remove an erotic magazine—in a manila folder—he has had in his possession since childhood. Called
Summertime Friends,
the magazine is something he had yet to show to his friend, and he is wondering now if it would have any effect on him, if it would excite him—two prepubescent boys engaged in page after page, scene after scene, of sex play? Would it help now?

He glances through the magazine, scans its pages. It’s been a long time, months, since he has last looked at his two young friends, but he knows the pages well and feels some comfort now in their presence. There were times in his life when the two boys seemed to be—they were—his only companions, and glancing over the pages, it seems less the two of them he is seeing now than himself, himself alone, perhaps studying the photographs, kissing them, tracing them, daring all sorts of things with them in the kind of escapes they allowed him to experience. Childhood.

The telephone in the kitchen rings. Vernon’s heart stops; he doesn’t move as he hears someone walk past his door.

The telephone rings a second time. Vernon holds.

He hears Duncan speaking. Hearing Duncan laugh, he knows the call isn’t for him. It means he’ll have to go ahead with the meeting.
If I don’t call . . .

Duncan would be getting a call from his father in New Jersey. This seemed to happen every weekend, when they caught up on how all the sports teams in the East had fared since they had talked last. Was that how fathers and sons talked? Was it a secret code?

Vernon closes the magazine cover and the manila folder. Checking his watch, coming around, exhaling, he decides he might as well go on his way, go ahead and get it over with.

On his feet, he checks his pants pocket to be sure he has his keys. He leaves the secret magazine where it is on his desk. Does he hope it will be found? he wonders. Turning out his desk lamp, he leaves his bedroom, pulling the door nearly shut.

Crossing the kitchen—his coat is on a hook in the doorway—he raises a hand to say so long to Duncan, as does Duncan in turn, capping the phone and saying, “Later, Quiet Man. Calculus tomorrow.”

In an odd leap, as if through a blank space, Vernon is outside. Perhaps the momentary time lapse had to do with the weather, he thinks, for the air outside is immediately sunny and warm. The air is almost hopeful. He walks around the cabin to a row of cars in the sun, to unlock the door of the third and last in line, a faded, silver gray 1975 Pontiac Sunbird.

K
ATHLEEN
M
OREAU
! E
RIC THINKS
. Y
ES
—
YES
, K
ATHLEEN
Moreau! She is so small and shy. She sits on the edge of class and never in the middle. Just like someone else he knows, he thinks.
And she has looked at him. Leaving the building, on sidewalk and stairway, across their busy room and in turns at the board, glances have slipped from her small dark eyes like folded notes. Gee, he thinks. They could end up getting married. Talk about going off the deep end.

A girl, he thinks. It’s so strange that on the slightest attention from a girl he’d find himself sidetracked like this. A Navy Seal turning to mush, all at the hands of one of those puzzles with brains and long hair.

Her small ankles, though, and the shanks of her legs. There is her profile, too—around the side of which her glances seem to
click
—and the small bones of her shoulders like seashells within her blouses and sweaters.

Out of control. Kathleen Moreau.

He rolls over. Well, it could be somebody else, he is telling himself when, suddenly, the bottom of his foot is kicked, hard, and hurts at once.
“Hey!”
he cries out.

Matthew, standing over him, slaps his head as he tries to pull away, as Eric cries, “What’re you
doing?”

“See you got a valentine from Frieda,” Matthew says.

It’s an old line of teasing. Not the previous summer, but the summer before that, at an outdoor camp, girls from a neighboring camp visited one afternoon for field events and a marshmallow roast, and a young girl named Frieda was said to “like” Eric because he was “nice.” The girl lost a bracelet, and Eric, taking on a search—any search challenged something in him—found the bracelet and returned it to her. When the boys in turn visited the girls a day later, the girl invited Eric, within his brother’s hearing, to play shuffleboard, and the teasing, launched by Matthew’s raised brow at the time, had never quite ceased.

“Mom,” Matthew is calling out. “See the valentine Rockport got from Frieda.”

Making a face at his brother, Eric tries a new tack. “Neat, ain’t it,” he says.

All at once, but harder, Matthew backhand slaps Eric’s head. Stung, tears starting, Eric whips his foot around in a kick at his brother’s shin and misses.

The fight—and Eric’s tears—are under way. Matthew kicks a foot, smashing Eric’s ribs under his arm as he tries to twist to the side. The fight is real, but there is their mother, shouting at them,
“Stop it! Both of you! Stop it right now!”

“What a jerk he is,” Matthew says.

“No more!” Claire says. “Eric, my gosh, will you get these cars out of the way!”

Stung again—what did his cars have to do with anything?—Eric picks up one car and then another, and tosses them into the shoe box. He would cry out that he hasn’t done anything, but it doesn’t seem to matter this morning.

“I won’t have any more teasing from you,” his mother is saying to his brother. “Certainly not because a girl sent your brother a valentine.”

“Oh, Mom, nobody sent me anything,” Eric cries.

“Well who did what then? What’s this all about?”

“He’s such a dope,” Matthew says. “Stupid card’s from his teacher. Why’d you even bring it home, you dumb jerk?”

“Up yours!” Eric wails. “You think you’re God or something?”

“Enough!”
Claire says. “Not another word from either of you.”

Shoving his shoe box of cars and soldiers under the TV table, Eric feels his heart is sinking away. His
teacher?
What an idiot he is, he says to himself. His
teacher!
Mrs. Ackman?

Going along the short hallway, he locks himself in the bathroom and stands with his back to the doorknob. How could anybody be so
dumb?
he thinks.

He sits on the stool cover in a slump, too disappointed with himself to cry. He hopes his brother will try the locked door, in which case he will say he isn’t through yet, which answer he will give for two hours at least, hoping Matthew will be unable to avoid disaster.

It isn’t Matthew, though, who taps on the door. “Eric?” his mother whispers.

“Who is it?” he says, about to cry again.

“Eric, please open the door,” she says.

“I didn’t do anything,” he says.

“Just open the door. I don’t care who did what. Open the door now before I get mad.”

He doesn’t move, not yet.

“Eric!” she says.

“Okay,” he says, going over and turning the handle.

“What is going on with you?” she says, letting herself in.

“Nothing.”

She stands there. Who knows about childhood hurt, she wonders. He’s had his share, at the hands of his brother mostly, she thinks. Years ago, accidentally Matthew said, he hit Eric across the nose with a baseball bat, an injury that blackened both his eyes. But it was less the injury after all that hurt Eric than a realization later that his nose might all his life bear a somewhat flattened bridge. She recalls finding him closed in this unlighted bathroom, late on a summer afternoon, caught up in unmanageable heartache. What in the world was wrong? His nose, he cried to her at last. Matthew and the other kids—they said his nose would
always
be like that.

Holding him now, Claire says, “I just don’t understand why you two can’t get along.”

In a breathless whisper, Eric says, “Why is he so
mean
to me? I don’t do anything to him.”

Claire pauses, looking down at him. Well, she says to herself, that’s it. It’s gone on long enough. That’s it.

“We’re going to have a talk,” she says to Eric. “Just don’t be upset now. We’re going to have a talk.”

Leaving the bathroom, headed for the living room, she is wondering again how a father, a man, anyone, would handle this. Uncertain what she is going to say, afraid already the two might turn and laugh at her, she strides into the living room, her heart turning one way and another.

Matthew is on the floor, watching the flickering screen. Above him, Claire says, “We’re going to have a pow-wow. Right now. Just turn off the TV.”

“I’m
watching
this,” Matthew says.

“I said turn off that TV!” Stepping over him, she snaps off the set. “Get in the kitchen—now! Don’t make me say it again.” For a moment Claire is filled with a desire to fight.

The two slink along before her.

“Matthew,” she says. “One thing. One thing. Your brother’s name happens to be Eric. It is
not
Rockport—whatever that is supposed to mean. I don’t
ever
want to hear you call him that again. Do you understand?”

“Yeah.”

“And don’t say ‘yeah.’ Don’t you sneer at me. This is a family emergency. And it’s going to be straightened out—now. Or nobody’s leaving here—all day long.”

They sit there. She wonders if she has gained some ground.

“Okay,” she says. “It’s just high time you both understand that we are a family and what that means. We’re a different family, because we don’t happen to have a father here. But we’re still a family, and we sure don’t have any business hurting each other for no reason at all.”

“Oh, Mom,” Matthew says.

“You—just clear the cobwebs out of your ears. It’s you I’m talking to! You act like a juvenile delinquent around here. Maybe I should have laid down the law a long time ago. I don’t know.” She takes a breath, feels she is getting off track. “Now,” she says. “The little boy sitting next to you is your brother. He will turn out to be the best friend you will ever have. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? He’s going to grow up to be a strong young man, and
you
are going to be
proud
of him. I guarantee you of that right now. You’ll be as proud as can be that he’s your own brother. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Matthew says.

“Eric. I don’t think hardly any of this is your fault. Now don’t say a word, Matthew, because it isn’t his fault. Not as much, even, as it’s my fault. I know you’re going to say I favor him, and maybe I do, sometimes, because he is the youngest, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love both of you just the same. Matthew, do you hear what I’m saying?”

“I guess so,” he says.

“Okay. Now, there’s something I want both of you to do. And you are not going to get up from here until you do it, either. I want you to promise me that you’ll try, really hard, from now on, to get along with each other.”

Looking at their faces, she adds, “That doesn’t mean there won’t be times you’ll feel mad. That’s only natural. But you are brothers. And we are a family, even if we don’t have a lot of money. Do you hear what I’m saying? Matthew?”

“Yes.”

“Eric?”

“Yup.”

“Good. Okay. Now what I’m going to do, I’m going to ask you, both of you, to say, right now, the time you were most proud of each other.”

“Oh,
Mom,”
Matthew says.

“I know that sounds corny. But this is an emergency. Nobody leaves. Nobody does anything until you do as I say. That’s all there is to it. That’s the way it is going to be.”

The boys exchange a glance of the faintest amusement, and Claire says, “Eric, you go first.”