What Hearts (5 page)

Asa doubted this, too. He hated to doubt it, but he did. While it was true that he had changed his mind about Joel—coming to appreciate the boy's open-minded readiness to like anyone or try anything with a foil heart
and reckless energy, at the slightest encouraging sign—he had been unable to slip into the relaxed carelessness of friendship. Joel needed too much handling for that. The responsibilities Asa had to adopt toward him simply prevented spontaneity, trust—equality. The role was set. He was Joel's manager.

The week zipped away. Joel missed two of their daily practice sessions, once so that he could work on a tree house his younger brother was building in their backyard. Asa called him on the phone and complained. Joel said, “But I promised him I'd help. It was a deal.”

“What about your deal with me?”

Joel thought about it. “It's different. See, I'm not
helping
you. The guy who's doing the
helping
, it's, it's like—”

“I know,” said Asa drily.

“Sure,” said Joel, “I guess you do. And, boy, do I know what a good helper
you
are. You're my idol when it comes to helping, believe me.” He laughed. “Anyway,” he added casually, “he's my brother, see.”

“That,” said Asa, despising himself, even as he spoke, for the obvious self-pity, “is of course something I know
nothing
about,” and he hung up softly.

Later that night, Joel called him back and recited twelve new lines, making no mistakes. Asa praised him gratefully. He also suspected that perhaps Joel had been reading to him—not in the spirit of cheating, for Joel was not deceitful, but to make Asa happy. He wished the idea of Joel fudging had not been so automatic, but there it was.

The next day at school Joel was as bright and breezy as ever, and Asa was contrite. He suggested that they make up for the missed time by pounding through two tremendous sessions over the weekend. Joel agreed happily. So, on Saturday morning, Asa made lemonade and baked a whole sheet of chocolate-chip cookies, while his mother assembled two huge submarine sandwiches, her specialty. Everything was cooling in the refrigerator when the telephone rang. Asa answered.

“
Tlot-tlot
,” said a dramatic voice.

“Hi man,” Asa said, looking at the clock, Joel was due in ten minutes. Obviously, he would be late. “What's up?”

“Hey, what's up is just the question to ask. What's
up
, what's
way
up, is the tree house. We finished it. Right now it's swarming with second graders, but guess who reserved it for a solid hour this afternoon, so we can practice our robbers and red-coats?”

“You're supposed to come here. You're—you're supposed to
be
here. Now! For
three
hours. What's the matter with you? Are you crazy?”

“An hour in a tree house is worth three in a stuffy old room any day. Come on. Get your mom to bring you. We can scare the little guys and stuff. It'll be fun.”

So Asa packed his knapsack with the subs and cookies and a thermos of the lemonade. Dave was off with the car, playing golf, so he had to ride his bicycle. Joel lived five or six miles across town, in an area of fine old houses that seemed as big as ships to Asa. It took him almost an hour to get there, and the only thing that kept him from pumping with anger was
the chance to pretend that he was himself the highwayman, narrating his own harsh and noble deeds with the wind in his teeth.

After arriving at Joel's house and parking his bike, he headed toward the sounds of wild hooting and howling far behind the house. From fifty feet away he saw the tree house, about twelve feet up in a big beech. Around the trunk were eight or ten younger kids, looking up and yelling, jumping and shaking knotty little fists. Most of them were quite wet. As he watched, Joel's head and shoulders suddenly shot up over one wall made of an old tin sign bearing a peeling portrait of the Sinclair gasoline brontosaurus. Joel's face was a beaming, bursting cartoon expression of devilish delight at finding the young kids beneath him; he wagged his eyebrows and shook his hair and roared, and the kids howled back and started laughing in fright and pleasure. At just the right moment, when it seemed they would all incinerate with happy dread, he stood up tall and began lofting water balloons at them. Wobbling in their arcs like live things, the balloons—shiny green, blue, red, yellow—caught sunlight
in their watery interiors and held it in a glow. Then each of them exploded on the head or shoulders of a shrieking second grader.

Asa found he was crying. He left unseen.

THREE

His mother called him to the telephone. The caller was an adult woman with a rich Carolina accent who identified herself with her entire name, then added that she was Joel's mother.

“Ah,” said Asa. “Hello.”

“Asa,” said the woman rather musically, “I'm sure you know why I'm calling.”

“Well, not exactly.” He hesitated, then said innocently, “Perhaps it's something to do with the presentation Joel and I are making tomorrow night?”

“You're sweet to be so optimistic, son.”

“Ma'am?”

“Now, Asa, bright as you must be, I'm sure I don't have to spell it out for you. I'm well
aware of what you've been trying to do for my Joel, so I know
you're
aware of—well, let's see—shall we say, the peculiar nature of the dear boy's intellectual gifts.”

“Ma'am?”

“My, you
are
going to make me pull the flag all the way up the pole, aren't you? Look, my dear. Joel is full of sweetness and light, he was born full of sweetness and light, he'll live to be a hundred and the angels will be waiting for him with robes of gold,
but—
as his father and I and his teachers and I suspect you too know—while he's on this earth Joel could not find his own fanny with both hands. He is as close to helpless as you can get without being put on a leash. I love him more than any human since Clark Gable, but honey, let's be frank: when it come to little things like time and space and words and numbers, Joel is missing something between the I. and the Q.”

“You're telling me he hasn't memorized his part of ‘The Highwayman.'”

“See? I
told
you you were bright. Indeed, Joel has not memorized his part of that dreadful endless poem you two lit on reciting.”
She sighed dramatically. “We had him all set up with something simpler, which was hard enough, mind you—and it took him a week to remember what color ‘Little Boy Blue' was, but we got almost all of it memorized somehow. Then you come along, all good intentions I'm sure, and of course it
is
a much finer piece of writing, but my God! it's long as a catfish's old age. He was all excited and eager to try it, and, of course, he looks on you as something between Mickey Mantle and Jesus. I couldn't tell him no—it's hard to keep saying no when he wants to try something, and the child is eat up with gumption—so I held my breath and prayed you were the kind of young man you've turned out to be. He's told me. You've been a saint. You understand him. But I can't help noticing you've given up your practices, and I wonder what you're thinking now about tomorrow.”

Well, Asa had been wondering that himself. She was right: since his visit that Saturday, he had not tried to schedule any practice sessions with Joel. They had talked in class, Joel always
eager to speak a couple of lines to show his readiness
—tlot-tlot!—
and Asa always complimentary and encouraging. But he had given up. Joel was on his own. Asa figured their part of the show would be a disaster.

On the surface, in the daylight of his public self, he had accepted this. On the surface, he was calm, resigned, cool. But just out of view, in the shadows where the real thinking was done, his scheming mind spent every hour trying to figure out a way to dump Joel and do it all himself. This was awful of him, but he could not stop wishing: maybe Joel will get chicken pox, maybe Joel will get stage fright, maybe Joel will move to Nebraska. Asa told himself he wasn't wishing like this for his own sake. Somehow, he felt, it was just for the sake of the poem itself, and the act of reciting it. There simply was a right way to do it, and when there was a right way, it should be done. It was as if there were a perfect movie of this event floating in the air somewhere in advance, and it was up to him to match it, word for word, motion for motion.

Now, on the phone with this odd woman, he sensed something like opportunity opening up before him. It was coming, if he could play this right. He said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I was just kind of going to show up and see what happened.”

“Ha.” She was silent for a moment. “Am I correct, Asa, in assuming that you know this entire poem, all by yourself?”

Carefully, as innocent as possible, he said, “Well—yes, I guess I do.”

“You
guess
you do, do you. I get the feeling maybe you're about three curves ahead of me here, but you'd just as soon I did the suggesting, so I will. Here's what I think. I think Joel ought to kind of miss the big show and leave you to struggle bravely on. What do you think about that?”

“I think he'd feel terrible.”

“Well, that's nice, but if I took care of things just right, it would probably be a week before he even remembered, and then it would be so far gone, he'd tend to regard it as a pleasant memory of what might have been. Even if he faced it straight up, he wouldn't get too low
about missing out; he snaps back faster than a fat man's suspenders, Joel does.”

“Well…” said Asa. And he let her talk him into it. She had it all worked out: she would give Joel the day off from school, and they would go out and buy a football he wanted, then eat lunch at his favorite restaurant, then take in a submarine movie that was playing downtown—“Just a good old day of a boy and his momma being sweet on each other.” She'd make sure his father and brother didn't mention anything about the show at dinner, after which they'd have a checkers tournament. That was Joel's favorite family activity, she said; he played the three of them at once on three boards, and murdered them.

He let her talk. And as she talked, he tested every seam of her plan, first figuring whether or not it would fool Joel, and then whether or not it would hurt him. In his head, the plan worked. Joel would be fooled; and as far as pain went—well, she knew Joel better than he, didn't she? Okay: Joel would not know. Okay: Joel would not be hurt. Okay. Okay.

He would do it alone.

FOUR

Onstage, two girls were dancing in taffeta costumes. One of them had been allowed to wear makeup, and she was dancing much better than her friend, whose pale face was streaked with the trail of dried tears; she had been forbidden to “doll up,” and her misery threw her steps off. In the wings, boys were laughing as the pale girl stumbled. Asa watched, sympathetic.

From his position in the dark he could see out into the auditorium, across a band of the audience slanting from the front row to the rear. He did not recognize anyone, but he had guessed the identities of a few groups by seeing how they perked up as particular performers took the stage. His mother and Dave were out there somewhere. Asa did not know where they were sitting; they had dropped him off early, gone out for Chinese food, and come back in time for the show. Asa had gone to “green room,” which was what Mrs. Brock called their classroom tonight. Everyone was
in there, the girls squealing and fidgeting, the boys looking pointedly disdainful and nervous. Mrs. Brock, wearing a shiny blue dress and rather more makeup than usual herself, darted from one performer to the next with quizzes, reminders, stagecraft tips. After everyone knew without exception to lick his lips, to hold her chin up, to look straight into the audience without actually focusing on a face, fifteen minutes remained before they could take their places backstage. Everyone was too finely tuned to relax, too close to fever to back coolly off, so after a couple of beats Mrs. Brock stood on a desk and sang them songs in a perfect alto voice that sounded as if it had been roasted. They were not children's songs; the lyrics were full of desperate inquiry about strange love, and the tunes meandered like smoke from a slow-burning cigarette. The children sat and stood, holding their juggling stuff or their instruments, silent, wondering. The minutes passed. Finally Mrs. Brock closed a verse on a low, full note, hummed a whole chorus, and stopped. She looked at them as if she were somewhere else. Then she smiled and said,
“Songs by a lady named Holiday. Oooh
—sad
songs. Now, people, go to your places.”

So far, most of the performances had been better than anyone could have hoped. Hands caught and tossed precisely, memories flashed, voices found a key and held it. Asa was amazed. Something about the oddness of Mrs. Brock's impromptu singing had cleared the nerves of his classmates. He had a feeling he too would be enjoying the same ebullience if his nervousness merely came from the prospect of standing up in front of a bunch of adults and doing something artificial. But his nervousness was different. He was thinking about Joel.

Asa was worried that of all the performances onstage tonight, his would be the only one with consequences that stretched into the future. He knew hurt feelings could last. And the more he thought about it, the more he was certain Joel would be hurt. What could his mother have been thinking? Or, more to the point, what could
he
have been thinking?

The ballet dancers finished with twin spins, each slashing the air with a satin foot held high and curved. The girl without makeup had
recovered her enthusiasm toward the end of their dance: her last few steps were sharper, and her leaps higher, than those of her partner, and as they stood panting slightly, grinning at the audience's applause, her face shone with a pink radiance that shamed the powder and technique offered beside her. Asa, breaking the rules, clapped. The girl waiting to go on in front of him—Amy Louise, dressed in a baggy gray uniform that might have fit General Lee—turned in horror and shook her head. He stopped. The ballerinas curtsied twice and came off. In her joy, the second of them gave a flip to the velvet side curtain with her hand. Asa happened to be looking at her, and as the curtain swayed, it gave him a glimpse of the rear doors of the auditorium. In that instant, he saw Joel's mother dash in, looking distraught.