The Night In Question (8 page)

We turned down the alley beside the Odd Fellows hall and skirted a big lot full of school buses, then cut through a construction site that gave onto a park where I’d once been chased by some older boys. On the other side of the park we crossed the bridge over Flint Creek, swollen with a week’s heavy rain. Beyond the bridge the road turned into a series of mudholes bordered by small, soggy-looking houses overhung by dripping trees. By then I’d stopped asking where we were going, because I knew. I had been this way before, many times.

“I don’t remember Freddy having any airplane canopies around,” I said.

“He’s got a whole barnful of stuff.”

“I know, I’ve seen it, but I didn’t see any canopies.”

“Maybe he just got it.”

“That’s a big fat maybe.”

Clark picked up the pace.

I said, “So, Mr. Top Secret, how come you told Freddy about the plane?”

“I didn’t. Sandra told him.”

I let that ride, since I’d told Sandra.

Freddy lived at the dead end of the street. As Clark and I got closer I could hear the snarl of a chain saw from the woods behind the house. Freddy and I used to lose ourselves all day in there. I hung back while Clark went up to the house and knocked. Freddy’s mother opened the door. She let Clark in and waited as I crossed the yard and mounted the steps. “Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” she said, not as a reproach, though I felt it that way. She ruffled my hair as I went past. “You’ve grown a few inches.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Freddy’s in the kitchen.”

Freddy closed his book and stood up from the table. He
smiled shyly. “Hi,” he said, and I said “Hi” back. It came hard. We hadn’t spoken in almost a year, since he went into the hospital. Freddy’s mother came in behind us and said, “Sit down, boys. Take off your coats. Freddy, put some of those cookies on a plate.”

“I can’t stay long,” Clark said, but nobody answered him and he finally hung his jacket on a chair and pulled up to the table. It was a round table that took up most of the kitchen. Freddy’s brother, Tanker, had carved pictures all over the tabletop,
Field and Stream
-type depictions of noble stags and leaping fish, eagles with rabbits in their talons, cougars crouched above mountain goats. He always kept his Barlow knife busy while he drank Olympia and told his stories. Like the stories, the pictures all ran together. They would’ve covered the whole table by now if Tanker hadn’t been killed.

The air smelled like laundry, and the windows were misted up. Freddy shook some Oreos onto a plate and handed it to me. I passed it on to Clark without taking any. The plate was dingy. Not encrusted, no major food groups in evidence—just dingy. Business as usual. I never ate at Freddy’s unless I was starving. Clark didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed a handful, and after a show of indecision Freddy’s mother took one. She was a thin woman with shoulder blades that stuck out like wings when she hunched over, as she did now, nibbling at her Oreo. She turned to me, her eyes so sad I had to force myself not to look away. “I can’t get over how you’ve grown,” she said. “Freddy, hasn’t he grown?”

“Like a weed,” Freddy said.

“By leaps and bounds,” I said, falling into our old game in spite of myself.

Clark looked back and forth between us.

Freddy’s mother said, “I understand you boys are building an airplane.”

“We’re just getting started,” Clark said.

“Well, that’s just wonderful,” Freddy’s mother said. “An airplane. Think of that.”

“Right now we’re looking for a canopy,” Clark said.

Nobody spoke for a while. Freddy’s mother crossed her arms over her chest and bent down even farther. Then she said, “Freddy, you should tell your friends what you were telling me about that fellow in your book.”

“That’s okay,” Freddy said. “Maybe later.”

“About the mountains of skulls.”

“Human skulls?” I said.

“Mountains of them,” Freddy’s mother said.

“Tamerlane,” Freddy said. And without further delay he began to describe Tamerlane’s revenge on the Persian cities that had resisted his progress. It was grisly stuff, but he did not scrimp on details or try to hide his pleasure in them, or in the starchy phrases he’d picked up from whatever book he was reading. That was Freddy for you. Gentle as a lamb, but very big on the Vikings and Aztecs and Genghis Khan and the Crusaders, all the great old disembowelers and eyeball-gougers. So was I. It was an interest we shared. Clark listened, looking a little stunned.

I never found out exactly how Tanker got killed; it was a motorcycle accident outside Spokane, that was all Freddy told me. You had to know Tanker to know what that meant. This was a very unlucky family. Bats took over their attic. Their cars laid transmissions like eggs. They got caught switching license plates and dumping garbage illegally and owing back taxes, or at least Ivan did. Ivan was Freddy’s stepfather and a world of bad luck all by himself. He wasn’t vicious or evil, but full of cute ideas that got him in trouble and made things even worse than they already were, like not paying property taxes on the basis of some veterans’ exemption he’d heard about but didn’t bother to read up on, and that turned out not to apply to him. That
brilliant stroke almost cost them the house, which Freddy’s father had left free and clear when he died. Tanker was the only one in the family who could stand up to Ivan, and not just because he was bigger and more competent. Ivan had a soft spot for him. After the accident he took to his bed for almost a week straight, then vanished.

When Tanker was home everybody’d be in the kitchen, sitting around the table and cracking up at his stories. He told stories about himself that I would’ve locked away for good, like the time his bike broke down in the middle of nowhere and a car stopped but instead of giving him a lift the guys inside hit him over the head with a lunch bag full of fresh shit. Then a patrolman arrested him and made him ride to the station in his trunk—all in the middle of a snowstorm. Tanker told that story as if it was the most precious thing that ever happened to him, tears glistening in his eyes. He had lots of friends, wise guys in creaking leather jackets, and he filled the house with them. He could fix anything—plumbing, engines, leaky roofs, you name it. He took Freddy and me on fishing trips in his rattletrap truck, and gave us Indian names. I was Hard-to-Camp-With, because I complained and snored. Freddy was Cheap-to-Feed.

After Tanker got killed everything changed at Freddy’s. The house had the frozen, echoey quiet of abandonment. Ivan finally came back from wherever he’d disappeared to, but he spent most of his time away on some new enterprise. When Freddy and I got to the house after school it was always dim and still. His mother kept to herself in the back bedroom. Sometimes she came out to offer us a sandwich and ask us questions about our day, but I wished she wouldn’t. I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed, and in failing opened up the view of a world I had only begun to
suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best.

One day Freddy and I were shooting baskets in the driveway when his mother called him inside. We’d been playing horse, and I took advantage of his absence to practice my hook shot. My hook had Freddy jinxed; he couldn’t even hit the backboard with it. I dribbled and shot, dribbled and shot, ten, twenty times; fifty times. Freddy still didn’t come back. It was very quiet. The only sound was the ball hitting the backboard, the rim, the asphalt. I stopped shooting after a while and stood there, waiting, bouncing the ball. The ball was overinflated and rose fast to the hand, making a hollow whang shadowed by a high ringing note that lingered in the silence. It began to give me the creeps. But I kept bouncing the ball, somehow unable to break the rhythm I’d fallen into. My hand moved by itself, lightly palming the pebbled skin and pushing the ball down just hard enough to bring it back. The sound grew louder and larger and emptier, the sound of emptiness itself, emptiness throbbing like a headache. Spooked, I caught the ball and held it. I looked at the house. Nothing moved there. I thought of the woman closed up inside, and Freddy, closed up with her, swallowed by misery. In its stillness the house seemed conscious, expectant. It seemed to be waiting. I put the ball down and walked to the end of the driveway, then broke into a run. I was still running when I reached the park. That was the day the older boys chased me, their blood roused by the spectacle of my rabbity flight. They kept after me for a hundred yards or so and then fell back, though they could’ve caught me if they’d had their hearts in it. But they were running for sport; the seriousness of my panic confused them, put them off their stride.

Such panic … where did it come from? It couldn’t have been just the situation at Freddy’s. The shakiness of my
own family was becoming more and more apparent. At the time I didn’t admit to this knowledge, not for a moment, but it was always there, waiting in the gut: a sourness of foreboding, a cramp of alarm at any sign of misfortune or weakness in others, as if such things were catching.

Freddy had asthma. Not long after I ran away from his house he suffered a severe attack and went into the hospital. Our teacher told the class about it. She had everyone write get-well notes, and handed out mimeographed sheets with the address of the hospital and the visiting hours. It was an easy walk. I knew I should go, and I thought about it so much that whatever else I did that week seemed mainly to be
not going
, but I couldn’t make myself do it. When Freddy came back to school I was unable to speak to him or even face him. I went straight home after the bell rang, using the main entrance instead of the side door where we used to meet. And then I saw that he was avoiding me, too. He ate at the opposite end of the cafeteria; when we passed in the hallway he blushed and stared at the floor. He acted as if he had done me some wrong, and the shame I felt at this made me even more skittish. I was very lonely for a time, then Clark and I became friends. This was my first visit to Freddy’s since the day I bolted.

Clark worked his way through the Oreos as Freddy told his gruesome tale, and when he came to the end I started one of my own from a book my brother had given me about Quantrill’s Raiders. It was a truly terrible story, a cruel, mortifying story—the star sociopath was a man named “Bloody Bill.” I was aware of Freddy watching me with something like rapture. Freddy’s mother shook her head when the going got rough and made exclamations of shock and dismay—“No! He never!”—just like she used to do back when the three of us watched “Queen for a Day” every afternoon, drooling shamelessly over the weird, woeful narratives sobbed out by the competing wretches. Clark
watched me without joy. He was impatient for business, and too sane for all this ghoulish stuff. I knew that he was seeing me in a different way, a way he probably didn’t like, but I kept piling it on. I couldn’t let go of the old pleasure, almost forgotten, of having Freddy on my hook, and feeling his own pleasure thrumming through the line.

And then the back door swung open and Ivan leaned his head into the kitchen. His face was even bigger and whiter than I remembered, and as if to confirm my memory he wore a red hunting cap that was too small and sat his head like a party hat. Black mud encased his pant legs almost to his knees. He looked at me and said, “Hey, by gum! Long time no see!” One of the lenses of his spectacles had a daub of mud in the middle, like an eyeball on a pair of joke glasses. He looked at Clark, then at Freddy’s mother. “Hon, you aren’t gonna believe this—that darn truck got stuck again.”

A damp wind was blowing. Freddy and Clark and I stood with shoulders hunched, hands in our pockets, and looked on as Ivan circled Tanker’s old pickup and explained why it wasn’t his fault the tires were mired almost to the axle. “The truth is, the old gal just can’t pull her weight anymore.” He gave the fender a rub. “Past her prime—has been for years.”

“Yessir,” Freddy said. “She’s long in the tooth and that’s a fact.”

“There you go,” Ivan said.

“Ready for the pasture,” I said.

“Over the hill,” Freddy said.

“That’s it exactly,” Ivan said. “I just can’t bring myself to sell her.” And then his jaw started quaking and I thought with horror that he was about to cry. But he didn’t. He
caught his lower lip under his teeth, sucked it musingly, and pushed it out again. His lips were full and expressive. I tended to watch them for signs of mood rather than his eyes, which he kept buried in a cunning squint.

“So. Gotta get the wood out. You fellows ready to use some of those muscles?”

Freddy and I looked at each other.

Clark was staring at the truck. “You want us to unload all of that?”

“Won’t take an hour, strapping boys like you,” Ivan said. “Maybe an hour by the time you load her up again,” he added.

The truck bed was filled with logs, stacked as high as the sides and heaped to a peak in the middle. Ivan had been clearing out the woods behind the house. Most of it was gone by now, nearly an acre of trees turned into a stumpy bog crisscrossed by tire ruts filled with black water. Behind the bog stood the house of a family whose pale, stringy daughters quarreled incessantly with their mother, screaming as they ran out the door, screaming as they jumped into the souped-up cars of their boyfriends. The father and son also drove hot rods, maintaining them on parts cannibalized from the collection of wrecks in their backyard. They came out during the afternoons and weekends to crawl under the cars and shout at each other over the clanging of their wrenches. Freddy and I used to spy on the family from the trees, our faces darkened, twigs stuck in our hair. He wouldn’t have to steal up on them now; they’d be in plain view all the time.

Ivan had been hard at work, turning trees into firewood. Firewood was cheap. Whatever he got wouldn’t be worth it, worth all the green and the birds and the scolding squirrels, the coolness in summer, the long shafts of afternoon light. This place had been Iroquois wilderness to me, English
forest and African jungle. It had been Mars. Gone, all of them. I was a boy who didn’t know he would never build a jet, but I knew that this lake of mud was the work of a fool.