The Buffalo Soldier

  I could. And we could both move to a condominium in Florida. Start walking the malls in our tennis sneakers, and elbowing the other codgers in the buffet lines at the early-bird suppers. But that’s not who I am. And it’s not who you are, either.

  They were quiet for a moment, and then almost at the exact same time they looked at their wristwatches, pulling back the thick, elasticized cotton at the cuffs of their jackets. They were due at their daughter’s house for Thanksgiving in just about two hours. If they left right away, they would only be a few minutes late.

  “Rule number two: They are to think. This sounds obvious, but out here you’d be amazed how easy it is not to.”

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  NOVEMBER 18, 1873

  Alfred

  He sat on the very bottom of the basement steps and watched Terry fire staples into the edges of the last of the new insulation in the ceiling. The man had spent Thanksgiving morning repairing the sections that had begun to sag like stalactites, making easily half the basement resemble a cave. Alfred had helped him where he could, but he wasn’t tall enough to hold the long pieces of insulation in place between the joists, and Terry didn’t want him unrolling the great hay bales of fiberglass or slicing the pieces off once he had determined a length: He said he feared the boy would cut his small fingers. Mostly, therefore, Alfred handed Terry the utility knife and the staple gun when he needed them, and found the tape measure when it disappeared under the debris.

  He figured he would actually have been happier upstairs watching the parade on television (though he still didn’t understand why the town didn’t have cable or why these people wouldn’t get a dish so there would be something decent on the tube), and he didn’t believe Terry would in reality have cared if he jumped ship on what he had heard Laura refer to with a smile as their “male-bonding project.” But he knew Laura would be disappointed if he left Terry alone, and he decided everyone would be happier in the long run if he feigned interest in insulation.

  Still, he thought to himself, this is why people smoke cigarettes. He imagined the pleasure of having a cigarette right that moment, and then snuffing the butt in the mud floor just beyond the cement pad at the base of the steps.

  Almost abruptly Terry sat beside him, his staple gun still in his hands, and stretched out his legs. We did it, he said.

  Well, you did.

  The man nodded. I guess. He surveyed the ceiling, and the crisp, tight strips of fiberglass that rolled to the very top of the cement and stone walls. In a corner, there was a large pyramid of the insulation he had removed, and it looked to Alfred like a pile of wet, muddy sheep’s wool.

  So, Terry asked suddenly, you like it here? The question caught Alfred completely by surprise. He had been asked it by other foster parents, but neither Terry nor Laura had ever brought the subject up. Moreover, if anyone was going to ask whether he was content here in Cornish, he would have guessed it would have been Laura.

  Yeah, sure, he answered, his mind briefly spinning. Was now the time to bring up the girls? he wondered. Ask Terry where they had died? Or should he take advantage of this moment to address a secret—and perhaps easily satiated—want? A Game Boy, perhaps. That BB gun, maybe.

  He realized he would have loved to tell Terry that sometimes he wished they lived in town—or, at least, a place where there were sidewalks, other children, and noise—but he didn’t dare. After all, what could they do about that? Nothing.

  Who are your friends? Terry went on. He reached for a mug on the step behind them and drained the last sip of his cold coffee. I know sometimes you pal around with Tim Acker.

  Alfred shrugged. Was the man asking this because he was curious, or was there more to it than that? He thought he heard concern in Terry’s voice, as if he was either worried about him or about his choice in friends. Foster parents, it seemed, were either way too interested in who you hung out with or completely uninterested. There didn’t seem to be an appropriate middle ground.

  He decided that if he chose to answer truthfully (or, at least, completely), he would tell Terry that he was pretty sure Tim Acker filled out the list. Tim was about as good as it got. Maybe he could add Schuyler Jackman’s name, though he’d never spent any time playing with Schuyler alone. He only knew what the boy’s house looked like because Tim had pointed it out to him when they passed it as they walked down the street.

  One time he’d had lunch in the cafeteria with Joe Langford, when Joe’s real friends, including Schuyler, were all home with the flu. And once he’d climbed that massive old maple tree at the edge of the schoolyard with John Patchett.

  You can invite kids over here, you know, Terry continued when he didn’t say anything in response to his question.

  Alfred thought about that, too. Never in his life had he ever brought a friend home to wherever it was he was living. It had simply never crossed his mind. Why would it? The Ryans’ apartment over the bus station was tiny and always seemed to smell of gas fumes, and the Fletchers’ house, while big enough, was a pigsty. Loralee Fletcher sure as heck never cleaned up, and the one time he and Isabel had gotten out the vacuum, their foster mother took it as a personal affront and grounded them both for two days.

  They’d both snuck out, of course, because Loralee never kept close tabs on any of the kids in her care. Still, it had been a pretty nasty scene.

  He was about to say something to Terry. Thank you, maybe. Perhaps even admit that he might decide to invite kids over after all. Before he could speak, however, Terry was on his feet, and so he stood quickly, too. Then the man started up the stairs, observing that they could clean up the mess on the floor after getting a breath of fresh air. In a moment, he was through the door that led into the kitchen, and Alfred could hear him rinsing out his coffee cup in the sink.

  He followed him, wishing that he’d spoken sooner—allowed some words to escape reflexively from his mouth for a change. He wasn’t sure, but he had a feeling he had inadvertently irritated the man with his silence.

  BEFORE THEY LEFT for Terry’s mother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, he went to the room in which he slept, took out his small photo album from the back of the closet where he kept it, and sat down on the foot of his bed. In the album were pictures of most (though not all) of the places where he had lived, and many of the people who had raised him—or had been, for better or worse, a part of his life. The first photograph was an image of a woman with skin considerably lighter than his—cinnamon-colored, though in truth it was shinier than that. Renee, his mother, had straightened her hair and pulled it back into what looked like a painfully tight bun the day the picture was taken, despite the fact that she couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. She was standing before a brick building somewhere in Philadelphia, wearing a raincoat that was almost fire-engine red. Her hands were in her coat pockets and she was smiling, but her eyes—almost Asian, he decided years later, after he had befriended Tien—were sad.

  On the next page was the second of the two photos he had of his mother, and in this one she was sitting on a couch in an orange-colored T-shirt, with a newborn baby on her lap. The baby was sound asleep, its eyes slits between a cap and the small puff balls that passed for cheeks. The baby, he knew, was him. His mother looked exhausted and scared, and the apartment was a mess. Empty Burger King bags lay discarded beneath the table in front of the couch, along with the greasy wrappers that once held the food. Magazines and newspapers and a TV Guide were piled on a second table to Renee’s right, next to a baby bottle that sat on its side like a torpedo.

  The album held one four-by-six picture per page, and it was fat now with photos. Almost full. He flipped past the Howards and the Ryans and the Fletchers, pausing longest on the Christmas card that Mrs. Howard—he’d called her Elizabeth, hadn’t he, the name she used when she signed the card?—had sent him a few months after he was sent away,
explaining in it that Richard was sick but they were praying hard that he might get better. He glanced at the images of the different children he’d lived with, the foster kids who moved around like he did, as well as the regular kids with their regular parents. He realized that Isabel, one of the children he’d lived with at Loralee Fletcher’s house, was probably sixteen years old now. Maybe even seventeen, if they ever straightened out her birthday. She might even have her own place.

  He spent a few extra seconds studying the picture of Tien, a pretty girl his age sitting on a bench on Church Street in downtown Burlington. If he were to pick a couple of people he would like to see again, Tien would be on the list. Maybe he’d ask Louise, the new social worker who looked in on him once in a while, to hook the two of them up again. After the incident when he hitchhiked to the city alone earlier that fall, he didn’t dare try to do it himself. But Louise worked for the state, she had access to kids’ records, so maybe she could figure the whole thing out.

  He realized his door was open, and he hopped off his bed to shut it—closing it quietly so that neither Terry nor Laura would venture upstairs to see if he was up to something. Then he slowly removed his discovery from the back pocket of his blue jeans, where it had sat since he placed it there that morning while briefly watching the parade on TV in the den. He had figured out why there were no pictures of the two girls on display anywhere in the house—or, at least, where a heck of a lot of them were stored. He’d come across a pile of photo albums in a cabinet in a bookshelf against the far wall, and they were filled with pictures of the two kids. There was a picture, it seemed, from every imaginable holiday—Easter and Christmas and Halloween—and a photo of the girls in every single dress or shirt they must have owned. There were pictures taken outside and inside and in places he couldn’t begin to recognize. Florida, maybe. A place with a beach. What he guessed was the ocean, though he had never been to the seashore.

  He stared again at the snapshot of the girls who had once lived in this house, the girls who he suspected were with him when the bedroom was dark in the night, and he reassured himself that no one would care that he’d taken the picture. Probably no one would even miss it, there were so many. Then he slipped the photograph into one of the few remaining clear plastic sleeves at the back of his thick little book and returned it to its hiding place in the back of the closet.

  ON THEIR WAY to Terry’s mother’s house they passed a group of a half-dozen boys playing three-on-three soccer in the wide side yard of a home he didn’t recognize. But he did spot Tim and Schuyler and Joe Langford in the group.

  Oh, look, Laura murmured from the front seat of the car, there’s your friend Tim.

  One of the boys he didn’t know, a goalie, caught an attempt at a score and punted the round ball away as if it were a football. Despite the sound of the car’s engine and heater and the fact that the windows were closed, he could hear the kids screaming as they ran in the opposite direction, and he wondered how long they’d been out there. He imagined they’d been kicking the ball around while he was sitting in the basement with Terry. For a brief moment he began to wish that someone had called and asked him to join them, but he pushed that thought away as fast as he could. Besides, the game would probably be breaking up pretty soon anyway, and then the kids would scatter to their own homes for their Thanksgiving suppers with their families. He hadn’t missed much, he told himself.

  You know the kid in the Giants cap, Alfred? Terry asked.

  No.

  I don’t, either. Must be a cousin or something.

  Neither of the grown-ups said anything for a long time after that, and the silence made even him uneasy. He had the sense that Terry and Laura wished they hadn’t passed this group of fifth-graders, and suddenly he grew embarrassed that no one had asked him to play.

  HE SANK DEEP into what he viewed as an old person’s armchair—massive and comfortable, though the fabric had pilled and grown coarse—and allowed himself to be dwarfed by the faded cushions. He tried to watch the football game on television, but he could feel Terry’s brother and Terry’s brother’s new girlfriend observing him. The two were on the couch off to the side of the armchair—slightly behind it, actually—and so they could see him though he couldn’t see them. Still, he sensed that they weren’t watching the game the way he was. They were a little drunk, and he could hear the sounds of small kisses and whispers behind him.

  In the dining room most of the adults were still talking and drinking coffee, but a few were in the kitchen sealing up the uneaten food and beginning to clean the mountains of plates and buckets of silverware they had used. Terry, he knew, was carving the remains of the turkeys—Terry’s mother had roasted a pair of medium-sized birds instead of one big one, so the men would have four drumsticks to fight over instead of two—and Laura was cleaning the roasting pans.

  Alfred had been surprised when he discovered that he was the only kid who was going to be there. He had always assumed that real Thanksgiving gatherings had plenty of children present. But not this one.

  Russell, no, he heard the girl murmur, a small giggle separating the two words in her short sentence.

  Terry had two younger siblings: the brother in the living room with him, and a sister who was at that moment in the kitchen. Terry’s sister had married the year before, but she and her husband hadn’t had children yet. And Russell...well, even Alfred didn’t think Russell was ready for marriage or fatherhood. He drove a truck for a cola company, delivering soda to supermarkets and general stores in this corner of the state.

  Including Terry’s two aunts and uncles and Terry’s mother, Alfred had counted eleven other people squeezed around the dining-room table. And squeezed was indeed the right word, because although this aging house and everything inside it was huge, including that table, some of the adults who were sitting around it—especially the older ones—seemed awfully big, too. The only exceptions were Laura and Russell’s new girlfriend, Nicole.

  It was hard to believe that the youngest person in the house, other than him, was Nicole.

  Finally, when he heard her once more whisper Stop it! to Russell, Alfred got up to leave. Nicole’s voice had been playful, but the pawing behind him was making him uncomfortable. He figured he’d wander around outside. There wasn’t much of a yard because the house was smack in the middle of Saint Johnsbury, but maybe there was a tree or something he could climb.

  Hey, Nicole said, and he knew instantly she was talking to him, you don’t have to go.

  I know.

  Don’t you like football?

  He looked at the television set. It’s okay, he answered.

  We were going to go for a walk anyway, she went on. Weren’t we, Russell? It’s a gorgeous afternoon, and it won’t be dark for at least another half-hour. Want to come with us?

  Russell didn’t say anything, but Alfred could see he was annoyed by his girlfriend’s suggestion. He guessed Nicole was in her early twenties, a good five or six years younger than Russell. He knew she was a nurse at the local hospital, and he was pretty sure this was her very first job—real job, that is. That was a distinction that had seemed to matter to her when she talked about it at the dining-room table, and so he assumed she had had other jobs before going to nursing school.

  Come with us, Nicole said. It will be fun.

  He might have gone if Russell had felt like going for a walk, too, but it was clear even to Alfred that the man didn’t want to. And so he said simply, No, thank you.

  But then he wasn’t sure what to do with himself, because he couldn’t go outside now, not if this pair was going that way. It might make them mad that he hadn’t been willing to go for a walk with them. He was considering the kitchen when Russell spoke.

  You don’t say much, do you? he asked.

  Alfred knew from Russell’s tone that he wasn’t going to like where this conversation was headed. The girl was standing with the fingers of one hand draped lazily on Russell’s shoulder, but the man was still collapsed
on the couch with a leg dangling over the armrest.

  I guess I don’t, he admitted.

  Russell, no ten-year-old kid says much, Nicole said, especially when he’s in a weird house.

  This is not a weird house.

  Strange house, she said. Pardon me: Strange house.

  There’s a difference. I grew up in this house, you know, and there was nothing weird about it.

  I know, she answered, and she sounded annoyed.

  Me? he went on, and he stared straight at Alfred. I’m a big talker. That’s my deal. I probably talk way too much. You think so?

  I don’t know.

  Well, I do, Nicole said. And at the moment, at least, you’re talking when we should be outside. I think you could use a little more air and a little less beer.

  Russell let his leg drop to the floor, and his foot made a large stomping sound even though he’d taken his boots off when he arrived and was now wearing only heavy wool socks on his feet.

  You want a cigarette?

  Russell!

  Come on, I wouldn’t really give him one. But I bet he’d smoke one if I did. That right?

  He shrugged, knowing he shouldn’t tell this man the truth, but unsure he could pull off a convincing lie.

  Seriously, son, you always this quiet?

  I guess.

  See, here’s the thing: When a man doesn’t talk, you don’t know what he’s thinking. And when you don’t know what a man’s thinking, you can’t trust him. At least not completely. You follow?

  Alfred looked at Russell and felt himself growing flushed.

  I follow, he answered.

  Russell reached for the open beer on the table beside him, and the little cloth doily—it had probably been white once but was now the color of oatmeal—stuck to the bottom of the can. The woman reached for the doily, but Russell misunderstood the gesture and thought she was trying to stop him from taking another sip of his beer.

  Don’t touch my beer, he snapped, whipping the can away from her, but then added, please. Please do not touch my beer when I am about to drink from it. Okay?