Torch

  “How’s your sister?” she asked when he was done eating, walking over to get his lunch tray.

  “Fine.” Teachers often asked him about Claire. She was something of a local legend. Aside from getting the scholarship to attend college, she’d been the valedictorian of her class, the queen of Snowball, voted by her classmates the “Most Likely to Succeed,” and also “Girl with the Prettiest Peepers,” a distinction that had instigated what seemed to Joshua hours of Claire gazing at herself in the bathroom mirror. “Do you think my eyes are pretty?” she’d asked him, ignoring his pleas for access to the bathroom. “No,” he’d answered, dragging her out the door. He’d been bullied, throughout his childhood and adolescence, to tell her whether she was fat, whether she should get highlights in her hair, whether her butt seemed hideously large, or her thighs too squat. Whatever he said, she never believed him or took his advice; she simply presented the same questions to him all over again the next time.

  “I wondered if she was coming home, to help out and all,” Mrs. Stacey said, blushing. Everywhere he went now people alluded to his mother’s cancer and then went red in the face, embarrassed to have to mention it at all.

  “On weekends,” he said. “She’s got college.”

  “Of course she does. She’ll go far, I’m sure.” She looked down at him, still holding his lunch tray, as if seeing him for the first time. “The two of you look like twins—just like your mom too. Like triplets.”

  Joshua nodded, feeling humiliated but unable to disagree. He’d been told this all of his life: same eyes, same hair, knobby noses that were variations on a theme.

  A bell rang, and he could hear the low roar of students out in the hall, going to lunch. He ached to be among them. “Can I take my tray back? I mean, so you don’t have to do it.”

  Mrs. Stacey smiled at him, bemused. “I don’t know, can you?”

  He stared dumbly at her for a moment, then asked, “May I?”

  “No,” she said matter-of-factly, turning from him. “You may not. But I will do it for you.” When she left, he went to her desk. Her purse sat in an open drawer. Inside he could see a glasses case and a small spiral-bound address book and a fat red leather wallet. He went to the doorway. The hallway was empty, but he could hear a dim commotion in the direction of the cafeteria. He began to walk, not thinking of what he was doing until he was doing it, going calmly but quickly toward the side doors at the end of the building, and then out into the parking lot, past his truck.

  He crossed the street and his insides jumped, giddy to be free. He walked past the motel, through the bakery parking lot, past a metal for sale sign that blew and squeaked quietly in the wind, onto the highway. He walked south, toward Len’s Lookout, but veered off the road and into the woods before reaching it, not wanting Leonard or Mardell to see him. Through the snow he followed a path he’d worn all winter down to the river, to the spot on the bank behind Len’s that he and Claire had claimed as their own when they were kids. The river wound through town, going under roads, past houses and buildings, past countless towns, to Minneapolis and St. Paul, and farther south, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, but this spot of the Mississippi was their spot—Claire and Joshua’s—and when they talked about it and said the river, each of them knew precisely what the other was talking about. He didn’t come back here with Claire anymore, but he came often on his own, and sometimes with R.J.

  He climbed onto a rock that sat near the frozen river’s edge. He could hear the water beneath the ice, gurgling, as if it were going down a giant drain. He smoked from the one hit he had in his pocket and walked to the river. Several holes had melted through the ice, and he could see the water raging by. He put his hand in to see how cold it was—freezing—then shook it and put it, wet, into his coat pocket.

  The three towns of Coltrap County were all situated on the river. Flame Lake was twenty miles to the north of Midden, Blue River thirty to the south. The river started out so narrow that even in Midden it was still more stream than river, with not a hint of what it was, or would become: “The mighty Mississippi,” his mother would say, “the father of all waters.” Blue River had a festival each year in the Mississippi’s honor, as if the river were theirs, as if the river were blue, as if it weren’t the color of mud three hundred and sixty-five days a year, as if it didn’t flow through Flame Lake and Midden first. When Claire and Joshua lived above Len’s Lookout, when the river was their main playground, they had a game called Blue River Piss Off! Claire had started it one day, standing in the river.

  “You’re peeing!” Joshua yelled, swimming frantically away from her, kicking his feet to splash her.

  “Shhh …” she said. “I’m doing something. I’m saying, ‘Blue River Piss Off!’ ” Her face was serious, concentrating, and then it became wild and frenzied and she spun and shrieked and dove upstream.

  From that day forward, whenever one of them peed in the river they would chant “Blue River Piss Off!” and laugh like hyenas. When the river was too cold or too fast to go in, they would throw things in it, orange peels and apple cores, pieces of string and blades of grass, and yell “Blue River Piss Off!” letting the water take it, watching it go. They felt a surge of power, a sense of righteous rage. Blue River had a Burger King, a hospital, a jail. There was the courthouse with a broken clock, a park with a gazebo painted white. The people who lived there thought they were better than all the rest of the people in Coltrap County, thought themselves more stylish and smart.

  Joshua picked up a stick now, a branch the length of his arm, and set it into the water, in a place where the ice had melted. “Blue River Piss Off,” he said.

  The branch caught on the ice, half of it in the water, the other half jutting up. He threw a rock at it, but it wouldn’t budge. He wished Claire would come home, though when she did they fought. She’d been home each weekend since their mother got cancer and on the other days she called several times. When their mother wasn’t feeling well enough to talk, she spoke to Joshua. “How is she?” she’d ask, serious as an actress in a movie, suddenly grown up.

  “I don’t know. Okay I guess,” he’d say.

  “Okay?” she’d ask. “Define okay.”

  “Okay as in fucking OKAY, okay?” he’d yell, wanting to hang up. Sometimes, ultimately, he did hang up, but then she would call back, angrier than before.

  He wondered what he should do now. It was just past noon. He stared at the river and saw that the branch he’d thrown into the water had freed itself from the ice and disappeared.

  Bender was home. His semi was parked in the driveway out front. He’d be gone for days at a time and then inexplicably be home for weeks.

  “Did they let school out early?” Vivian asked, opening the door. Joshua followed her into the kitchen, where Bender sat eating a taco.

  “You can make one for yourself,” he said to Joshua, waving to the bowls and dishes of food on the table. Joshua picked up a taco shell and piled it full of cheese and salsa and ate it standing up.

  “Where’s your sidekick?” Bender asked.

  “At school. I had detention, so I thought fuck that.”

  Bender nodded. He was a small man with an elfin face. In the silence, Joshua could hear his mother’s voice murmuring from the radio on the counter, saying something about natural cures for insomnia. The station was playing reruns until she got better. The volume was turned so low he could almost keep himself from hearing it if he tried. He heard her say, “Now let’s talk about homeopathic remedies. Are there any you can recommend?” He cleared his throat to drown her out.

  “Vivian told me about your mom,” Bender said. “That’s a shock.”

  Joshua nodded. “She’s getting better. She’s having radiation.”

  “Tell her hi from us,” Vivian said, and tapped the ash of her cigarette into an empty can of Coke.

  “I will.”

  “We were just listening to her show,” Bender said, gesturing toward the radio.

  “She’s ta
king a break until she’s done with radiation,” Joshua explained. “She’s only got three more days of it.”

  “I always liked that show.”

  “It’s very informative,” Vivian said.

  Joshua turned the radio off. He wasn’t usually so bold, but he wasn’t able to keep himself from doing it. He said, “So, Viv was telling me about maybe me and R.J. selling for you.”

  Bender laughed. He was tan, despite the fact that it was winter, but his face turned red from the laughing. “Sure, I got plenty to sell,” he said. “I got some new things too. We’re branching out. R.J. said he showed you the meth I made.”

  “Where’d you make it?”

  “Out in the garage,” Bender said. “There’s more money in meth than there will ever be in weed.”

  “It’s not just anyone we would trust, Josh,” Vivian said. “I hope you know that. Because if you fuck with us, your ass is grass.”

  “I know.”

  “Good,” she said, putting her hand on Bender’s shoulder. “ ’Cause you’re just like a son to us.”

  He went to school the next day acting like nothing had happened the day before.

  “Well, hello there,” Ms. Keillor said when she saw him in the hall. And then added, “Come with me” before he had time to say hello in return.

  They walked out to Dr. Pearson’s trailer without a word. When they got to the door, Ms. Keillor opened it and said, “I’ve got a dish to send home with you. I’ll send it up to Mrs. Stacey by the end of the day.”

  He walked into the trailer, over the plush cream carpet, to Violet’s desk. Before she looked up from her computer screen, Dr. Pearson appeared in the open doorway of his office.

  They entered without speaking. Joshua sat down on the varnished wood chair he’d sat on the day before, and the week before that.

  “You’re skipping school,” Dr. Pearson said. “And now you’re skipping detention too.” He stared at Joshua, as if waiting for the answer to a question he’d posed. Joshua tried to meet his gaze, but then looked away at a row of metal balls that hung on wires from a stand on the desk. He reached for one of the balls and then let it go, so it hit the other balls and they all swung and banged into each other.

  “Do you have something to say about that?” Dr. Pearson asked.

  “Not really,” Joshua said, trying to sound polite. He didn’t mean anything personal against Dr. Pearson and he considered telling him that.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I said, no. I don’t. I have no explanation for skipping school.”

  “And skipping detention.”

  “It was boring.”

  Dr. Pearson smiled. “Well. That’s a shame. I’m sorry to know that we didn’t keep you well enough entertained.”

  “I wasn’t saying you had to.”

  They sat in silence again.

  “You know what’s next, don’t you?”

  Joshua shook his head.

  “I think you’re lying to me. I think you know full well what’s next. In fact, I know you do because I told you yesterday.”

  Joshua waited.

  Dr. Pearson leaned against the back of his chair so that it rocked away from the desk. He took his glasses off and set them on his knee. His brown hair grew only in a ring that ran around the sides of his head.

  “You did this to yourself, do you understand?”

  “Yeah,” Joshua said.

  “You’re to sit in detention the rest of the day, all right? And it doesn’t matter if you’re bored. I don’t give a rip. You’re to stay there. And then tomorrow you don’t come at all. You don’t come until next Thursday. You’re not welcome here. You understand? You’re being suspended for one week. Those are the consequences, Josh. You know that full well.”

  Dr. Pearson stared at Joshua for several moments, then put his glasses on and stood up. “Ms. Keillor will send a letter home to your folks and it will tell you what work you need to do while you’re out. Being suspended doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for the work you miss. You do all the same work. Violet will walk you back.”

  Joshua spent the morning drawing engines, carburetors, air filters, and cans until Mrs. Stacey saw what he was doing and took all of his paper away. He read for a while, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, poems he was supposed to have read three days before. He went down the list, checking them off as he read, twenty-six in all, poems by Stevie Smith, W. H. Auden, and HD. He had no idea what they were about. At least most of the poems were short. He shut the book and wrote porno in pen on his forearm and then, next to it, drew a man with a long beard and horns.

  When the last bell of the day rang Mrs. Stacey came in with a casserole dish covered with aluminum foil. “Ms. Keillor asked me to give this to you.” And then when he took it from her she said, “You can bring the pan back next week when you come.”

  He walked out in the crowded hallway, mortified to be holding the pan. He hesitated, considered setting it on top of the pop machine and walking away. Kids laughed and talked and ran and screeched all around him, happy to be done with school. He spoke to no one, carrying the pan, his silence almost making him feel invisible. He went out to his truck in the parking lot. R.J. was nowhere in sight. Maybe he had skipped seventh hour. Just as he drove out of the lot, Trent Fisher pulled in. He saw Lisa Boudreaux in his rearview mirror, running from the school doors to Trent’s Camaro.

  “I brought something from Ms. Keillor and the cooks. Scalloped potatoes,” he said to his mother when he walked in.

  “That’s nice,” she said, lying very still on the couch. “That’s what you can have.” If she moved, if anything moved, if the light in the room changed, it hurt her. He could see that.

  “How was school?” she asked, with her eyes closed.

  “Good,” he said. “Are you ready to go?”

  She didn’t answer for a long while and then she opened her eyes, as if she were startled to see him.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Oh—I thought I said—we don’t have to go today. They decided I should take a day off because the radiation is making me so sick.”

  He sat down on the floor next to her, next to the dogs. He rested one of his hands near her hand, near where Shadow was sleeping, curled up like a lima bean against her hip.

  “I thought the radiation was supposed to make you better.”

  “It will, honey. It just takes a while to kick in.”

  She turned to him. “Bruce is working at the Taylors’ place—he’s got so much work—but he wants to finish up there tonight. He’s not going to come home until it’s done, so he’ll be late. You can go ahead and have what you brought for dinner.”

  “Okay,” he said. Shadow’s tail waved slowly up and down, grazing lightly against his hand.

  “You got the application from the Vo Tech today.”

  “I saw.”

  “I know how well you’ll do. You don’t even have to go—you know so much about cars already—but they like you to have your degree, the places that hire now.”

  He took his shoes and socks off. “I heard your show today.”

  She didn’t reply or make any indication that she heard him.

  “It was the one about not taking sleeping pills. About how you can do things like drink chamomile tea instead.” She’d done that with them for years, made them chamomile tea before bed. She grew the chamomile herself out in the yard. “Do you want some tea?” he asked, though it seemed she was already asleep.

  “No thanks.” She opened her eyes. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Well, then, you should eat. But help me to bed first. I think I’ll just spend the night in bed to get my strength back. I need you to arrange the pillows right.” She stood up and he followed her into her room.

  Once she was settled he sat on the couch eating the scalloped potatoes, picking out the peas. Even the dogs wouldn’t eat the peas. He washed his plate and then dried it immediately and put it away, trying to be helpf
ul. He got a glass of water to bring to his mother, to set on the shelf near her bed so it would be there when she woke, but then he couldn’t make himself go into her room, feeling strange and shy all of a sudden. He could see her bare feet poking out from under the blankets from where he stood in the hallway. It struck him how familiar her feet were to him, even the calluses on the insides of her big toes. His stomach hurt, and he was acutely aware of all the sounds she made, the small moans and shallow coughs, her body shifting in bed. He went back into the living room and sat down on the couch in the nest of blankets his mother had left behind. He wished they had a television. He would never forgive his mother and Bruce for denying him that.

  It was silent except for the damper of the wood stove clicking the way it did when the fire began to die down. He got up and stoked the stove and went to the phone. Why hadn’t anyone called—Claire or Bruce? He dialed Claire’s number and David answered, told him Claire was at work, that she worked until midnight, but would be “so glad to hear he’d called.” Hearing David say this made him want to rip the phone out of the wall for a reason he could not comprehend. What did David know about him and Claire? What did David know at all?

  “Do you want me to have her call you when she gets in—is it urgent?” He could imagine David sitting there with a little pad and pen, waiting to write down whatever he said. He said no thanks and hung up. He called R.J. and R.J. picked up.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” R.J. said. “What about you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you tell your mom and Bruce about getting suspended?”

  “Nope.” There was a corkboard near the phone and Joshua rearranged the thumbtacks so they formed a J.

  “What are you going to do tomorrow?”

  “Nothing,” Joshua said.

  When he hung up, he turned the lamp off and lay down on the couch. The moonlight cast shadows on the walls, on the outlines of the furniture and his mother’s paintings. He sat up and looked out the window for a while at Lady Mae and Beau, who stood in their pasture, and then lay back down, covering himself up with the blankets.