Torch

  When he turned into his driveway, he saw that Joshua was home, almost every light on inside.

  “Where were you?” he asked, sitting at the kitchen table, when Bruce walked in. Joshua, who himself was rarely home, was almost never accountable for his whereabouts.

  “I went and had dinner.” In one hand he carried a pie that Kathy had baked for them. He set it down on the table.

  “Where?”

  He gestured in a southeastern direction, and then, seeing that would not be enough, said, “Over at the Tysons’.”

  Joshua nodded. Bruce knew he thought the Tysons’—Kathy’s parents —not Kathy herself. Inexplicably, he allowed him to think that. “Because I made dinner,” Joshua said. “I made hot dogs and Tater Tots.”

  “Thank you,” Bruce said, sitting down. He looked around. “Is Lisa here?”

  “Nope.”

  “Is everything okay? I mean, with you and Lisa?”

  “Yep.”

  “She seems nice.”

  “I love her,” said Joshua with real emotion, his eyes flaring as they did on occasion, which allowed Bruce to glimpse the Joshua he used to know, instead of the one he saw most of the time now, who kept his eyes dim and impossibly private.

  “Is that where you’ve been staying so much? At her mom’s house? She has that trailer, out past the dump, right?”

  “But her mom’s hardly ever there. Her boyfriend’s John Rileen, and they stay over at his place most the time.”

  Bruce remembered who Lisa’s mom was now. Short and plump with very blond hair, she worked back in the kitchen of the deli at the Red Owl. “Pam Simpson,” Bruce said. “That’s her mom.” Joshua nodded. Bruce had not yet opened the card that Lisa had given him. It sat on top of a pile of other unopened cards on Teresa’s old desk. “I didn’t really know her in school. She’s a few years older than me.”

  “I know. She told me.”

  “So you and Lisa—tonight you decided to take a break?”

  “Not a break,” Joshua said, irritated. He held an empty bottle of Mountain Dew in front of him, pulling its label off in wet shreds. He so closely resembled his mother that, at times, Bruce had to look away.

  “You just decided on a night apart,” he said.

  Joshua’s eyes flared, then dimmed and became private again. “I wanted to hang out with you.”

  It had been years since he had expressed an interest in spending time with either him or Teresa. “Well, I’m sorry I missed it.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t miss it,” Joshua said. “It’s only ten.”

  “True.”

  “You have something on your teeth.”

  Bruce rubbed his front teeth with his finger and loosened a piece of black bean and swallowed it. “What would you like to do? We could play cards.”

  Joshua sat thinking, as if considering whether he was in the mood for cards, then he said, bitterly, “Cards are boring.”

  They sat together not doing or saying anything for ten minutes. Bruce got two beers from the refrigerator, wrenched the caps off, and handed one to Joshua. He got the tune box that had the Kenny G tape inside of it from his bedroom and plugged it in next to the toaster. When the tape started, Joshua looked at the stereo uncertainly, as if about to object—he was adamant about his music—but remained quiet.

  Bruce shook two cigarettes from the pack he had in his shirt pocket, lit them both up, and handed one to Joshua, who took it without a look of surprise. Who was he to say the kid couldn’t smoke? Cancer, it seemed like lightning to him. It wouldn’t strike twice.

  They went outside and stood on the top stair of the porch without their coats on, leaving the front door open so they could hear the music filtering out to them. After several minutes, the tape came to its end and clicked off, and they stood in the silence, looking at the sky.

  “What are you going to do now?” asked Joshua.

  “Now?”

  “I mean, now that Mom’s dead. What are you going to do?”

  Bruce almost said live. He almost confessed that his plan had been the opposite—that he had planned to die—but he stopped himself. He almost said, I’m going to do my best to have a happy life because that’s what your mother would have wanted. Or, Push on. As we all will do. He almost asked, What do you mean, what am I going to do? Do I have a choice in the matter? And he almost reached out and put his hand on Joshua’s shoulder and said, Suffer for a while, but then we’re going to be okay.

  But he said none of those things. He wasn’t that man. Not in this instant. He was a man so alone that he could not speak. He remained silent for so long that the silence seemed to absorb the question entirely, so that it would have been stranger to answer than to leave it be. He heard the flapping of the plastic that covered the porch screens, where it had come loose from its staples. He found a loose edge and pulled the whole sheet off, popping the staples one by one. Joshua did the other side and then they balled the plastic up into a bundle and tossed it onto the porch so it wouldn’t blow away in the night.

  Bruce picked up his bottle of beer and took the last swig. “Can you smell that?”

  Joshua nodded.

  “That means it’s spring.”

  It was the smell that came to Coltrap County about this time every year, when the ground remained frozen, but whatever lived above it had finally begun to thaw. The smell of old snow mixed with something alive but slightly rotten, like the stems of cut flowers left too long in a vase. A sudden wave of wind came up and hit their faces, so they smelled it even more. The wind was cold and it pushed into their collars and blew through the thin cotton of their shirts, but they didn’t move to protect themselves from it. They stood in place, still as statues, until they couldn’t take it anymore. Together, they shivered.

  10

  THE APARTMENT ABOVE Len’s Lookout was penitentiary now that no one lived there. An oven hulked in the middle of the room, detached from everything, and a gathering of objects sat in the corner: a rolled rug with gnarled tassels, a chair from the bar downstairs that was missing a leg, a box taped shut that had Mardell’s writing on it: Christmas things. On the wall hung a perfect mirror. Joshua held his lighter up to it. His face was ghoulish in the yellow slash above the flame, so much so that he scared himself and had to turn away. His thumb grew hot, but he kept it pressed down on the little button of the lighter anyway as he walked around the apartment on that first night. From then on, he brought candles.

  After sleeping undetected for seven nights in the apartment, Joshua decided it was safe to change one thing. By then his mother was in the hospital, so he could have gone home—being home no longer entailed having to hear his mother’s comings and goings throughout the night, her cries and moans and suffering—but he’d begun to prefer the apartment over anywhere else. The thing he changed was the oven: moving it from its place in the center of the room would make the apartment more pleasant, and he doubted Leonard and Mardell would notice. It was too heavy for him to lift by himself, so he squatted and wrapped his arms around it, clutching it into a bear hug, and walked it from edge to edge until it sat against the wall.

  He hadn’t had to break into the apartment. The key was still in the place his mother had designated years before, when they’d lived there—in the snout of the iron pig that sat at the bottom of the stairs. In the summertime violets bloomed from a flower box that filled its body, cascading down the pig’s sides. Joshua was careful never to arrive before midnight, before the bar had closed, and each morning he left by ten, before Mardell and Leonard arrived to set up for lunch. Each night he parked his truck in town, in his old spot behind the Midden Café, and walked along the highway carrying his things—candles and sleeping bag, notebook and pens and headphones and CDs. When cars approached he stepped into the darkness of the ditch so they wouldn’t stop to ask if he wanted a ride.

  Most mornings he didn’t go straight to his truck. Instead he followed the trail that went th
rough the trees behind the Lookout to the river, to sit on the rock there and smoke from his one hit. Since he’d been suspended from school he hadn’t bothered to return, so there was nowhere he needed to be all through February while his mother was so sick that he could not bear to look at her, and into March, when she began to die and then did. And all through April, when she was dead and gone and nothing would bring her back.

  On occasion he made an appearance, showing up at home a couple of times a week for Bruce or Claire so they wouldn’t worry, and at least once a day he saw Lisa Boudreaux. But mostly he liked to be alone, in silence, or listening to his music as he lay on the unfurled rug in the apartment or sat by the river on the rock, not remembering where the world was. Remembering it, but willing himself not to. Often this meant that he could not allow a single thought into his mind, and he got good at it, forcing his mind to go separate and blank, imagining himself not human, but rather an animal that hibernated or went into torpor. He became a beaver, a hummingbird, saving his energy up, breathing slow and shallow, allowing his heart to beat only so fast. He brought his notebook and pens, but drawing made the world come back, the one he was trying to keep at bay, so he couldn’t use them. The world he could tolerate was the apartment at night or the rock by the river in the day, where no one knew to look, and in that world he felt safe and secret and powerful the way he had when he was a child and built a fort in the woods or burrowed into enormous nests in the high summer grass, where he could peep out onto everything without everything peeping back.

  The apartment was his and no one knew it, and so was the rock by the river, and so was the river, the mighty Mississippi, and so were the cattails and milkweed that grew in the bog on the other side of the river, which he watched when he sat high up on his rock in the mornings. In February and March their stems had poked up through the snow, so brittle and frail it seemed that it was the snow that was holding them up. But then, by April, the snow melted and the cattails and milkweed remained standing and Joshua saw that they’d been standing on their own volition all along.

  When the wind blew they knocked against each other and made a clattering sound like tiny seashells rolling in a jar.

  One morning Mardell came to work early and found Joshua sitting on his rock. He leapt from it the moment he saw her emerging from the trees, thinking in a flash that he would run, but he remained still.

  “What a surprise!” she exclaimed, not actually appearing to be surprised at all. She wore yellow sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt that had a rabbit on the front. Before the bar opened she would change into jeans, but the shirt she would wear all day. “I didn’t see your truck.”

  “I walked from town.”

  “It’s a nice morning for it,” she said, standing before him now, a bewildered expression on her face. “Don’t you have school?”

  His cell phone began to play the national anthem. He reached for it but didn’t answer it, knowing who it was. Vivian or Bender, wanting him to pick up some bags. He pressed a button and the phone went silent.

  “Would you get a load of this mud?” Mardell asked, looking at the ground.

  “Yeah. Bruce got stuck on our road. It’s real muddy out our way. We had to get the Tysons’ tractor to drag him out.”

  “It used to be you couldn’t go nowhere this time of year,” Mardell said with her hands on her hips. She was a plump woman with a big rear end. “It would be a week or two where you just stayed put and that was that. School was cancelled. Everything. That was back when none of these roads were paved, you know, so everyone was affected. We called it mud days. And then I go off to the Cities, you know, after graduating, and that’s when I hear all about this spring break. All the city people taking their spring break. Spring break, I said. All’s I got was mud days. Can you imagine?” She laughed so hard then that Joshua could see the work she’d had done at the back of her teeth until she covered her mouth with her hand, self-conscious. She was shy, but not with people she knew. When she finished laughing she took her glasses off and rubbed her oily eyelids and cleaned the glasses with the edge of her sweatshirt and then put them back on. “Heavens, I miss your mom,” she said suddenly, and grabbed him.

  Joshua allowed himself to be hugged, to be folded into Mardell’s arms without folding her into his own. He could feel the cool swath of plastic that formed the rabbit like a placard on the front of her shirt and her plush breasts beneath it, pressing against his chest.

  She let go of him and took several steps toward the river, looking out across it into the bog. “Well, I said to Len last night, I said, I wonder when we’ll see the first of the bears. They usually show their faces about now. We’ll start putting the food out for them any day now, I guess, though Len always likes to wait and see them first. I said, Len, why do you think they’re going to come if we don’t got food out to entice them over?” She looked at Joshua, as if it had been him, not Leonard, who had disputed her about the bears. Mardell and Leonard had been married to each other for more than forty years, but they were always haggling good-naturedly, pulling whoever was around them in to their disagreements.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, you tell Len that. He won’t listen to me.” She laughed and squatted to get a closer look at something in the mud. “You know, your mom used to say that it’s good luck whoever sees the bears first. Whoever among us, I mean, not counting the customers. Whichever one of us sees them first, it’s good luck.”

  “That sounds like my mom,” he said. “She believes in things.”

  Mardell turned abruptly toward him and then looked back down. Years before she had taught him how to make a whistle out of a blade of grass held between two thumbs. “What’d you find?” he asked.

  “Some kind of bug. The little devil looks like he’s got his wings all mucked up.” Very delicately she picked the bug up by one of its legs and set it on a patch of ground that was drier, and they watched as it limped back toward the mud.

  Mardell stood and patted the dirt from her hands. “Why don’t you come up to the bar and I’ll make you some breakfast,” she asked, though she did not say it like a question. “Len’ll be there by now. We drove separate today ’cause I got a hair appointment at three.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got to get into town.”

  “What am I thinking?” she smiled. “I forgot all about school. In fact, you should be there right this minute. Come on up and I’ll drive you.”

  “I want to walk, but thanks.”

  Before she could say another word he began to make his way along the path he’d worn when he’d come here all winter to skip school.

  “Do me a favor and come for dinner one night. All of you, the next time Claire’s up,” she called after him.

  He waved one hand in acknowledgment, without looking back.

  His phone rang the moment he turned it on, only this time it wasn’t the national anthem, but a sound that seemed to him what the wave of a magic wand would sound like if there were such a thing as a magic wand and it made a sound. It was Lisa.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  He’d known her most of his life, and for most of it she’d been nothing to him, but now everything had changed. Now he got a certain feeling inside whenever he saw her or heard her voice, like a swarm of bees had been let loose in his stomach, like someone had walked up behind him and said boo.

  “In town. Almost in town.” He stopped walking so he could get better reception. “I’m by the bakery.” He knew she assumed that he was in his truck, driving; like everyone else, Lisa didn’t know about the apartment.

  “What are you wearing?” she whispered in a tone of mock seduction, and then burst into laughter. She was at school, using her cell phone, which was forbidden there, her head tucked into her locker so no one would see. Joshua could tell by the way her voice echoed.

  “Come and meet me.”

  “I can’t!”

  “Behind the café. In five minutes.”

  “J
osh. Just ’cause you’re not in school.”

  There was a for sale sign hanging on a metal frame a few feet away from him, rusted now after having hung there all winter long. He put his hand on it.

  “Well then, after.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Okay. I gotta go. I miss you.”

  “Me too.”

  “I love you,” she said, her voice husky and serious, almost sad with the weight of what they had between them now.

  “Me too.”

  He clicked off his phone and began to walk again. He hadn’t meant to fall in love with Lisa, but now that he was in love with her he couldn’t believe he’d lived any other way, or that she had; that a couple of months before she’d been engaged to Trent Fisher. Lisa had been the one to start things up. She called him one night to discuss the assignment they had to do together for their class, but then after he told her he wouldn’t be doing it, that he’d dropped out of school, she didn’t want to hang up. She talked to him about an argument she’d had with her mom, about how she sometimes had to go to Bemidji to visit her dad’s parents even though she had met them only the year before, about whether she should go out for track or not. He was in his apartment when she’d called—she’d gotten the number of his cell phone from R.J.—and he lay in his sleeping bag listening to her in the dark of a Sunday night, which was really the wee hours of a Monday morning, well past when either of them should have been asleep. She told him that she couldn’t sleep when her mom was gone, that her mom was gone three nights a week, staying over at the house of her new boyfriend, John Rileen. His mother was gone too by then. In the hospital, two weeks away from dying, though he didn’t know it then. Lisa talked and talked that first night, roaming her house, taking the phone with Joshua on the other end of it wherever she went. She sat on the edge of her bathtub and shaved her legs while they talked. She played music and held the phone up to the speaker so he could hear her favorite parts of songs. By the time they got off the phone they were in love with each other, though they didn’t say it for weeks, until after they’d spent several evenings in Lisa’s bed together and Lisa had worked up the courage to break it off with Trent Fisher.