Trouble (20 page)

Black Dog did not want to hurry back, and Henry figured that since she'd been stuck in the pickup for such a long time, she had a right to run around now. And so he let her pull him through the trees, even though his face kept snapping off small, sharp twigs, and twice he had a branch whip back against his knees. But Black Dog found a whole lot to explore, and it wasn't until Henry thought he was starting to smell something distressingly like a skunk that he dragged on the leash and headed back through the pines toward the shining headlights. Three more sharp and brittle branches smacked him in the face before he got out of the woods.

He took off Black Dog's leash and let her into the cab seat, where she climbed onto Sanborn, who did not move. Then Henry got in as well. "All set," he said to Chay.

But Chay didn't answer. His head was back and his mouth open. He was as deeply asleep as Sanborn.

Henry looked at Black Dog on top of Sanborn, circling into comfort. Then he yawned, and reached over to turn off the lights and the ignition. All sound died. Chay did not move. Henry put his hands between his knees to keep them warm, and closed his eyes.

He slept lightly.

He woke every time Black Dog got up and curled around Sanborn and into sleep again.

He woke up when Sanborn snored—which wasn't just a few times.

He woke up twice when Chay moaned.

He woke up sharply whenever he dreamed—but he didn't remember any of the dreams.

At first light, he woke up for good.

Chay was gone.

Black Dog, too.

Henry rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He was surprised that Chay had been able to open and shut the pickup's door without waking him. He sat up and wiped the condensation from the windshield. A wispy fog drifted over everything, as white as a hospital room. He stretched and felt the kind of weird tiredness that comes with sleeping while sitting up in clothes he'd been wearing too long; he supposed there was no chance he'd be brushing his teeth anytime soon.

Henry got out, climbed up into the bed of the pickup, and opened his pack. "Black Dog!" he called. He pulled a new shirt out and changed into it as quickly as he could, slapping away a handful of mosquitoes. He could see his breath in the chilled morning air. "Black Dog!"

"She's here," he heard Chay call. Henry looked toward the voice. He could just make out Chay on the other side of the stone wall, walking slowly through the graveyard, looking carefully at each of the gravestones. Black Dog walked beside him, stopping when he stopped, waiting for him to finish reading and to walk on. In the fog, Chay looked like a drifting ghost, searching for the spot where his body had been laid.

Henry tightened.

"Is it morning?" Sanborn called out from the pickup's cab. He asked this very slowly.

"If you open your eyes, you'll be able to tell," Henry said.

"It's too early to open my eyes."

"What do you do when your mother tells you to get up for school?"

"My mother has never once in her life told me to get up for school," said Sanborn.

Henry figured that Sanborn could take care of himself. He climbed down from the pickup's bed and went around to the front to watch Chay, still drifting slowly among the graves of the dead. Sometimes the fog that blew across him grew so thick that he disappeared entirely, as though he had suddenly descended into the earth to join the rest of them there. But then, another breeze, and there he would be, his arms held around himself, resurrected until the next descent.

Black Dog stayed beside him.

Henry leaned back against the front of the pickup, and felt immediately the deep dent in the grill and the hood. Even down to the bumper. He stood and looked at it, his eyes wide, suddenly nauseous. He put his hand where the hood had been pushed in, and then let it down slowly to the wide crease in the bumper. Then, hardly believing he was doing it, he turned around and filled the dent with his own body, pushing in against the metal.

They had built their house so far from Trouble. But Chay Chouan had found them anyway.

He looked across the stone wall at Chay again. With Black Dog. With his dog. And he hated him as Franklin would have wanted.

He heard Sanborn get out of the car and head over to the pines. Black Dog lifted her head, saw Henry, and barked happily. Her thwacking tail disturbed the patterns of the streaming fog.

Henry left the pickup and climbed over the stone wall. Slowly he walked through the fog and the gravestones, passing generations of the dead sleeping deep beneath mossy swellings of the ground. All the stones were tall and thin and white—everything in the fog seemed white. Here and there he could make out a name: Holcomb, Barnard, Kittredge, Sawyer, Hollis, Griffith, Hurd. How many times had families come to this graveyard and lowered someone they loved into a dark hole forever? For him, once had been enough.

Henry looked up and saw Chay, not far.

He walked toward him.

The last few yards he took at a sprint.

Black Dog barked once, not understanding.

Then Chay turned around. At exactly the right moment.

He didn't even raise his hands.

Henry smashed his fist into the side of Chay's face.

Chay toppled to the ground and rolled over, his back coming up against one of the gravestones. Black Dog began barking desperately. Henry stood above Chay, breathing heavily. "Get up," he said.

Chay felt his jaw, and winced when he tried to see if it still closed the way it should. "You waited a long time," he said.

Henry leaped over Black Dog and threw himself on Chay, pushing him against the gravestone. Chay held him off while Henry pounded at him wherever he could, connecting time and time again, and each time, he felt something satisfying deep within him, but it maddened him all the more, and so he pounded all the more. He could hear Chay's breath when he knocked it out of his lungs and guts.

He did not know how many times he had hit Chay before he felt his arms weaken and grow weighty. It was harder and harder to lift them up, so that when Chay pushed him off, it was harder than anything he had ever done to go back into him again. But he did. And he pounded until he felt Sanborn pulling at his shoulders, and he swung once more at Chay's face and opened the skin above his cheek before Sanborn pulled him away and threw him onto the wet ground beside another gravestone.

Black Dog stopped barking.

They all stayed that way. Henry, on the ground, covered with a shroud of fog, the heat of his sudden sweat clammy with the wet of the fog. Chay, on the ground too, his hand up against his bleeding face, watching Henry with dark, indeterminate eyes. Sanborn, standing, poised between them to stop the next assault. Black Dog, looking back and forth among them all, ready to bark again if it would help. Ready to do anything if it would help.

And they were all watched over by the white winged skulls that peered from the gravestones beside them, hovering in the fog that was starting to shred with the rising of the new sun.

"Well," said Sanborn, "I guess it's good to get that out of our systems."

No one answered. Henry and Chay lay against their gravestones and stared at each other.

Until Chay finally stood, grimacing as he got up. He walked past them, saying something sharp and Cambodian to Black Dog as he went by. She lay down quickly beside Henry, and Chay moved along the stone wall until he came to an opening. He went across to the pickup and started the ignition. Then he waited.

Henry watched him the whole time. He put his hand out to Black Dog, and she began to lick it. She was probably licking off Chay's blood.

"You going to spend the morning lying on a dead guy?"

"Shut up, Sanborn."

"You don't want to start with me, Henry. You're so winded, you wouldn't stand a chance. Not that you ever stand a chance."

"Looks like I stood a chance with him. He's the one with the bloody face." Slowly Henry got to one knee.

"Henry, you're a Great American Hero. You can beat up a guy who isn't fighting back."

"What do you mean, he wasn't fighting back? You saw him."

"I saw him. He was letting you beat on him, Henry. He didn't throw one punch—and the way you fight, he could have."

"You need glasses, Sanborn."

"I see fine, you jerk. Maybe you should try wearing some." Sanborn helped Henry to stand up.

"I don't care if he wasn't fighting back. It's about time someone beat Franklin up. He deserved it, after what he's done."

Sanborn looked quickly at Henry.

Henry whistled to Black Dog, who bounded up and around them. "So what do we do now?" said Henry.

"Well, since our packs are in the pickup, and since he's the only ride we have, and since he's waiting for us, and since no one is going to stop for two guys and a—"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," said Henry.

They walked across the graveyard and to the wall. The stones were dark with the dew, but already the sun was laying its beams on some of them, and the mica embedded in the granite was spangling the light back. Henry didn't think he could climb over them just then. He suddenly felt as if the air he was breathing was too heavy; he had to work hard at shoving it down into his lungs.

He felt, almost, nothing.

Sanborn took his arm and led him along the wall until they came to the opening that Chay had gone through. When they got to the pickup and Sanborn leaned over to open the front door, Black Dog jumped up into the cab and thrust her snout into Chay's face and licked it.

"Black Dog," said Henry. "Black Dog, down." Which did about as much good as if he had asked her to sprout wings and fly overhead. So Henry reached in and pulled her out of the cab, and then he dragged her back into the pickup's bed. She fussed and wagged her tail and licked him while he tied her up, because she wanted to be sure that he knew she could watch over him better if she was up in the cab and she thought he tasted good.

Henry finished, and when he went around to the cab, he saw that Chay had taken his shirt off, balled it up, and was holding it against his bleeding cheek. Already two bruises were starting to darken along the line of his rib cage. Henry thought that should have been satisfying, and maybe it was a little bit. But not much.

"Just a minute," he said.

Chay looked at him.

"I need something in my pack."

Chay turned off the ignition and Henry went around back again, opened his pack, and dug in for the bag of first-aid supplies he'd included—not because he thought he would ever need them, but because Franklin had always insisted. He took out a tube of antiseptic cream and a wide Band-Aid. He stowed the bag away, and then, as a last thought, took out a clean shirt. The largest one he had, since Chay was bigger than he was. One of Franklin's rugby shirts, with the blue and yellow of Longfellow Prep.

He got back into the cab. "Let me see," he said. Chay waited a couple of seconds, then dropped his hand and shirt. The cut wasn't long, but it was bleeding well enough. Henry took Chay's shirt and wiped away what he could, and then he put some of the cream on the end of Chay's finger and told him to wipe it into the wound—which he did. Then Chay took the Band-Aid that Henry opened for him and used his mirror to put it on. Henry handed him Franklin's shirt, and Chay, after a moment, leaned forward a little bit and quickly pulled it down over his head.

"Thanks," he said.

"Stay away from my dog," said Henry. Then he and Sanborn got in.

Chay said nothing. He reached out and turned on the ignition again. As they drove onto the road, Henry looked at the graveyard one more time. The last shrouds of the fog were dissolving into the brightness of an early summer day.

T
HE AIR GREW BRIGHTER
and brighter as they drove—heading north. They passed stands of maples with boldly green leaves, and bright quivering aspens, and wispy white birches, and pines looking proud of their sturdy winter endurance. They drove by long stretches of rock that engineers had once cut through to make the highway; the deep scars of the drill bits that explored them slanted down into stones that had never seen the light of anything but a primeval sun.

After one very long rocky stretch, the rocks opened up and let a hayfield slope gently to the road. Its long grass was beaded and tamped down by the dew, but here and there it was already drying and standing up high again, ready to be mowed. And right by the road stood a white clapboard diner with a small sign hanging on its outside: MIKE'SEATS—which was good enough for Sanborn, who suggested that if they didn't turn in for breakfast, he might die, which would be homicide by refusal to allow breakfast, and they'd have a whole lot of trouble hiding the body.

So Chay parked beside a huge pile of split wood, a pile much taller than the pickup. They got out, and Henry went around to scratch Black Dog behind the ears and tell her what a good dog she was and to promise her some bacon—though after the failure of the fried clams, he wasn't sure she'd believe him. But he promised as sincerely as he could, then followed Chay and Sanborn inside.

The diner wasn't a big place—half a dozen tables—and no one was sitting at them when they came in. All the windows were opened, so Mike's Eats smelled of fresh grass and sunshine and butter. It was the kind of place that probably hadn't changed much since it was opened fifty years ago—about the same time as the Chowder Mug. There were wooden tables and chairs with green-striped tablecloths and cushions, black and white linoleum tiles worn by the table legs, yellow curtains with white decorative frills at the bottom, red plates on a rack that ran around the room. Even Mike turned out to look as if he was playing the part of the cook from a 1950s rerun: white pants, white shirt, white apron, white hat. He waved at them from the door to the kitchen, telling them that they could sit anywhere, that he'd be with them in half a second, that there was a three-egg omelet and bacon and orange juice and toast and coffee special today, and that if they didn't see something on the menu that they wanted, just tell him because he'd heard it all and there wasn't anything he couldn't make if it could be made on a griddle.