Sons From Afar

  Sammy guessed he just couldn’t understand that.

  “They used to pan for gold, too. Like the old miners, they’d be up there beside some stream, panning for gold.”

  “Did he find any?”

  “Not enough to spit on, he says. At camp we’re going to do a lot of trail riding. Hiking, and climbing, too. There are marksmanship contests.”

  Custer was really looking forward to the summer, talking fast. Their line moved slowly forward.

  “My dad says he thinks I’ll make a marksman, because I’ve got a steady hand and a true eye.” Then, as if he could see that Sammy was getting tired of hearing all this, Custer asked, “What’re you doing this summer?”

  “The usual.” Custer knew what that was. “I was going to see if you wanted to be in the crabbing business with me, but I guess you can’t.”

  “I guess not.” Custer didn’t sound like that bothered him.

  Sammy shuffled forward with the rest of the kids. He could see why Custer would rather go to camp out West, and learn how to shoot a gun, and all. It wouldn’t make sense for Custer to wish he could stay in Crisfield and go crabbing with Sammy—Sammy wouldn’t wish that, if he were Custer and his father wanted to take him West.

  “I thought your brother—” Custer started to say, but then he fell into the silence that was spreading backward from the head of the line as Ernie stepped onto the scales. Everybody always wanted to know how much Ernie weighed. It was a standing joke. Sammy stuck his elbow into Custer’s ribs and Custer punched him lightly on the shoulder. They stood side by side to watch. One PE teacher settled the height bar on top of Ernie’s head, while the other adjusted the metal weights on the scale. Ernie slouched there, chewing gum; he didn’t care. His gut hung down over his belt, all around his body. Ernie already looked like he had a beer belly.

  “One forty-seven,” the teacher said, neither raising nor lowering her voice. The third teacher entered the figure on a piece of paper, then called the school nurse over. “Just stay right there, young man,” she instructed Ernie, who had started to slouch down off the scales.

  Ernie looked back at the kids. He lifted his arm and scratched at his armpit, letting everyone see how bored he was. He grinned, making his face hang loose, like a retard’s face. Then, slowly, he started to pick his nose.

  “Ugh,” Custer said, turning his back. But Sammy watched. He hadn’t had much to do with Ernie for years, not since second grade when he was new and thought he had to prove he wasn’t a sissy, and Ernie had been the biggest and meanest kid in the class. Mostly, now, he didn’t even notice Ernie was in the world. Nobody had anything much to do with Ernie; nobody was even frightened of him any more. Everybody just—didn’t like the kind of trouble Ernie got into. Ernie got in trouble for cussing at teachers, which was pretty stupid, and for saying the kinds of things you were never supposed to say to girls. He’d slam little kids around in the hallways, sometimes. And here he was, standing there, picking away at his nose, trying to gross everyone out. And succeeding.

  Maybe that made him happy, Sammy thought, although he kind of doubted it. What made Ernie happy was being able to bully people, only now he couldn’t any more.

  The nurse came up and Ernie gave her a bored look. At least, Sammy thought, with Ernie around, things got knocked off their rails. The nurse started talking at Ernie about diets and health. Ernie slouched there, his head lowered so she couldn’t see his face, his face bored and inattentive. “I’m going to have to talk with your parents,” she finally said.

  “Go ahead,” Ernie answered. He didn’t care.

  “Don’t they worry about you?”

  “Nah,” Ernie said. “My father says he went through a heavy phase, too. He says I’ll outgrow it.” In Ernie’s voice was absolute confidence that his father knew better than the nurse, better than anyone.

  “Lucky for you that he knows all the answers,” the nurse said, sarcastic.

  “Yeah. He says besides I can always be a wrestler on TV. Can I get down now?”

  The nurse wanted to keep him there and talk at him until he changed, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good, so she let him go. Ernie slouched on away. Sammy watched him slouch along. He’d be willing to bet Ernie was ashamed of himself, but he wasn’t sure he’d win that bet. Ernie sounded pretty sure of what his father said. Sammy didn’t know—he sure didn’t want anyone telling him that what wasn’t true was true. And asking him to believe it.

  You certainly wouldn’t want to work on a fourteen-foot boat with Ernie. Sammy looked around, trying to think of someone else to ask, someone he wouldn’t mind spending hours in the boat with. But he didn’t know how to tell who’d be able to work and who’d give up easy. He knew how these people behaved in school, and who played sports how, but that didn’t necessarily mean that would be a person who could haul crabs, day after day. What you really needed was patience, Sammy thought, but how could you tell if someone had enough of that? He thought, some people did know how to tell, because people hired men to do jobs, so they must be able to tell something.

  For reasons he didn’t quite understand, it was the new kid, Robin Kelly, that Sammy asked next. He asked Robin while the boy was waiting in the bus line after school. He tried to explain how hard the work was, but he could see by the excited way Robin kept interrupting that the kid was more interested in being asked than in anything else. He wasn’t listening. There wasn’t anything Sammy could do about that. Besides, he thought, while he was trying to say how early you had to go out, and how uncomfortable it often was, he’d really picked Robin because Robin looked like James—dark and skinny—and like Jeff Greene, too. Sammy had worked with both of them, so Robin literally looked like someone he could work with. That wasn’t much of a reason, but Sammy knew it was as good a reason as any.

  “I’d have to have my mother’s permission,” Robin was saying, practically bouncing up and down. “Boy. Boy, does that sound great.”

  “I’m trying to tell you—” Sammy tried to tell him.

  “She’ll have to meet you. Because . . . anyway, she won’t say yes until she meets you. So you should come home from school with me tomorrow, and you could stay and have dinner with us. My mother’s a good cook. Ask your parents, okay? I’ll ask mine. Then we can all talk about it. They like to all talk things over. Once they meet you, they’ll see.”

  See what? Sammy wanted to ask, but didn’t. “I have a bike.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll get a note so I can walk. It’s not that far. Don’t forget to ask?”

  “I won’t,” Sammy said.

  “This is great,” Robin said, again. “Boy, would I like to be able to.”

  Sammy just went to get his bike and ride home.

  The Tillermans talked things over too; that was what families did when there was something one of them wanted to do. Sammy pedaled energetically, listening to the wind in his ears, feeling how strong his legs were. Just because you didn’t have parents, that didn’t mean you weren’t a family. He pushed down, standing up to get more power into his thrust—left, right, left. His speed built up. A car overtook him, and passed him, with a rumbling motor sound that drowned out the wind.

  In that temporary windless second after the car had rushed on, where he heard only echoing silence, a voice in Sammy’s head called his name.

  “Sammy.”

  He heard it, clear. He looked around, as if he weren’t sure the voice was really in his head, although he knew it was. This had happened before, not too many times, but enough. He’d heard his name being called, like some kind of optical illusion in his ear. When he was little, he’d almost thought it was Momma calling, and he’d try to rehear the voice, trying to hold on to it. He’d finally figured out that it wasn’t, and it couldn’t be. It was something like a dream that happened in your ear while you were awake. Sammy didn’t know if other people had the same experience, because he’d never told anyone about it.

  But something was different this time, he thought, sitting do
wn on the bike seat, slowing down. The voice had seemed closer, realer. He didn’t know the voice, but he thought it was a man. He knew he didn’t believe in ESP and things like that, but there was something strange here.

  He wanted there to be something strange. He hoped there was some ESP going on. But that wasn’t like him. What was like him was to see how things really were.

  He could almost still hear it, if he concentrated on remembering, the way the voice had called the two syllables of his name. “Sammy.”

  Sammy shook his head, but the voice stayed hooked there in his mind. He reminded himself to ask Gram about having supper at Robin’s tomorrow, and that he had to finish the rough draft of his English report that night. That would give him the weekend to recopy it. He had done it on the Greek myths about the sun god, and he’d had a pretty interesting time doing it.

  Now that he’d distracted himself, Sammy listened inside his head for the voice, to hear if it was still there. He couldn’t find it, but he thought it was still there. He could almost re-create it from his memory—but that was a pretty strange thing to want to do. In fact—he turned onto the driveway and rode fast over the ruts, bouncing himself in the seat and laughing aloud as the bike jolted and twisted under him, like a bucking bronco—he was having some pretty strange ideas recently, now he thought of it. Sammy decided not to think of it.

  CHAPTER 9

  Robin lived a couple of miles inland, in one of a half dozen ranch-style houses lined up on the road’s edge, backed by fields of corn and soybeans. Sammy walked his bike, because Robin didn’t have one. “I wish I did. I’m old enough to ride to school,” Robin said. “You ride to school most of the time.”

  Sammy just nodded his head.

  “My dad says it’s because we used to live in the city, because we lived in Kentucky before they got married. He says my mother keeps thinking Crisfield is the same as Louisville, with city streets. But it’s not at all like a city.”

  “I guess not,” Sammy said.

  “He’s not my real father,” Robin said.

  “Who isn’t?”

  “My dad. They only got married last Christmas. He’s a French teacher but my real father is a jet pilot, in the air force. He flew in the war, in Vietnam. He’s got lots of medals. He’s a colonel.”

  The kid was really proud of his father. Sammy guessed he could see why.

  “I’ve got his picture, I’ll show you,” Robin said.

  They turned off at one of the houses, different from its neighbors only in being light brown instead of white or red. There was a car parked beside it, with Kentucky plates, a beat-up blue sedan. “Is that your car?”

  “My mom’s. She’s a teacher too, but she teaches art, in the elementary school. But she can’t get a position until next fall, so she just substitutes. She promised she’d never substitute for my class. Her name’s Norton, not Kelly.”

  “Okay,” Sammy said.

  Each of the other houses had a car parked beside it. Each house sat on its little flat square of lawn in exactly the same position, like houses on a Monopoly board. A couple of the backyards had swing sets in them, but most just had grass that stopped abruptly at the edge of the field that lay behind, where soybeans grew low and bushy. Robin waited by the back door at one end of the long rectangular house while Sammy kicked down the stand to park his bike. The front door of the house was smack in its middle, facing the street, just like all the rest of the houses. It was all so neat and tidy, and all so much the same, it made Sammy nervous.

  “Are you coming?” Robin asked.

  “Okay,” Sammy said.

  Sammy expected the inside of Robin’s house to be boxes, like the outside. But the inside didn’t match the outside at all. The inside felt bigger than it could possibly be. They entered into a kitchen, where plants in brown clay pots hung down in front of the windows, and the walls were crowded with posters in bright crayon colors. A little table in front of the windows had two glasses and a plate of cookies set out. “I’m home,” Robin called. A woman’s voice answered him, but she didn’t appear.

  “Hungry?” he asked Sammy.

  “Sure,” Sammy said. He sat down at the table, in one of the three chairs, and looked around the room. He liked those pictures, with their shapes that almost looked like something, almost like a person or almost like a flower, almost like stars. He liked the way the counters and refrigerator and stove sparkled. This kitchen was entirely different from his grandmother’s kitchen, which was old wood colors and yellowy light. This one was bright and new looking. Sammy knew he liked the old, worn-down-with-living look of his grandmother’s kitchen; but he liked this one, too. Every place he looked he saw something to like: the potholders, their colors as bright as the pictures, hanging over the stove; a wooden bowl filled with apples and oranges and bananas on the counter by a shiny metal toaster; the leaves of the plants hanging down ferny green in the sunlight that came through the window. Robin poured two glasses of milk and sat opposite Sammy. “We just moved in, practically,” he said. He picked up a cookie and ate it. Sammy did the same. These were peanut-butter cookies, made from scratch, with marks where the fork had flattened them and a perfect, almost crumbly, texture. He took a couple more.

  “Your mom’s a good cook.”

  Robin, his mouth full, agreed. “It’s because she isn’t working. She has lots of time for cooking and things when she doesn’t go to work. Want to see my room? We have to wait for Dad to get home, anyway, before we can discuss things.”

  Sammy finished his milk and put the glass in the sink. He grabbed some more cookies and followed Robin out of the room. They went through a long combination living and dining room, a wooden table at one end with a bowl of flowers on it, Indian rugs on the floor, and bright nubbly cushions on the sofa and chairs, then down a narrow hallway. Robin opened the second door.

  Robin’s room should have been just a little box with two windows, but it had been turned into something wonderful. “Hey, wow,” Sammy said, looking around.

  He saw a ladder, leading up to a kind of loft, and underneath that, in what looked almost like a cave, was a desk, with bookcases beside it. A bureau and some open shelves filled with games were on the opposite wall. The floor had a bright red and blue rug on it. “Neat,” Sammy said.

  “Dad built the bed, go ahead up,” Robin said. Sammy scrambled up the ladder and saw that the whole loft was a bed, with a wall light above the pillows, and a shelf to put books on. The ceiling above the bed wasn’t painted white, but covered with an intricately designed fabric that hung over the bed like the underside of a fancy cloud. There wasn’t room to stand up, but there was plenty of headroom if you were sitting up. Sammy sat there for a minute, trying to forget the boy below. In this bed, you’d almost be in a tree house; it felt a lot like a tree house, the bed. It would be like sleeping in a tree.

  He leaned over. “Your father built it?”

  “No, Dad did. And Mom found the fabric for the ceiling. She made the rug, too. She weaves.”

  “I thought you said she was a teacher.”

  “She does crafts and all kinds of things. Weaving, sewing, too.”

  “Did she do those paintings in the kitchen?”

  Robin started to laugh. “You mean the Matisse cutouts? Wait’ll I tell her you thought she’d done the Matisse cutouts.”

  Sammy didn’t know why Robin was laughing at him. “So what,” he said. “So what’s so funny?”

  “Because Matisse is—I’m sorry, Sammy, I know you wouldn’t know anything about Matisse. I’m not laughing at you.”

  “Yes, you are.” Sammy climbed back down the ladder.

  Robin started to object, then stopped. “Yes, I guess. But I am sorry, I know it’s not your fault if you don’t know something. I mean, I only know because my mom’s been taking me to museums from about the minute I was born. That’s one of the things my father didn’t like. Look, here he is.”

  The photograph had been put into a silver frame. It was an offic
er, with his cap on exactly straight, and his expression serious. He had dark hair, like Robin, but his face was more square, the jawbone square, the mouth a thin straight line. He didn’t look alive, Sammy thought; he looked like a wax figure, not a person.

  “That was five years ago,” Robin said. “He gave it to me. I guess he’ll look older now, probably. You can’t see his medals.”

  “What do you mean five years ago? Haven’t you seen him?”

  Robin shook his head. He looked at the picture, not meeting Sammy’s eyes.

  Understanding, Sammy had a little jumping feeling inside him; not a nice feeling at all, he knew, like a little black imp jumping up and down; because he guessed things weren’t so exactly perfect for Robin after all. But why should that make Sammy glad? Unless he was jealous? But Sammy didn’t get jealous of people, and why should he envy Robin, anyway. Why should he envy anyone? He didn’t, that was the truth. Except for just that little short jumping feeling—gone now.

  “Let’s go outside. Do you have a soccer ball, or another lacrosse stick?”

  “We’ve got a baseball and two gloves,” Robin said. “Let’s.”

  Mrs. Norton was in the kitchen as they went through, and Robin introduced her but Sammy barely paid attention other than to say hello. “The cookies were good,” he said, turning at the door to tell her.

  For some reason that made her laugh. He didn’t mind.

  They had to play out in the narrow backyard, because Robin said he wasn’t allowed to play in the street. “It’s because we lived in a city,” he said. He had an okay arm, and the ball went back and forth between them with satisfying speed. “Dad says all Mom’s reflex reactions are a city person’s. So we have to be patient with her, until she gets used to how different things are here.”

  “Dad?” Sammy was having trouble keeping these fathers straight.

  “He’s my stepfather but he wants to adopt me. So I call him Dad.”