She seemed to jump at a sound, but I couldn’t hear it. “Don’t you argue with me!” she shrieked. She took her glasses off and held out both hands. “Think I’m a weak old woman, do you? You don’t know how deep I run in these communities! I’m the one who had them books taken off the shelves. Remember me? Oh, you hated it--not being able to fill young minds with your pestilence. Took them off high school shelves and out of lists—burned them for junk! Remember? That was me. I’m not dead yet! Boy, where are you?”
“Enchant her,” I whispered to the air. “Magic her. Make her go away. Let me live here with you.”
“Is that you, boy? Come with your aunt, now. Come with, come away!”
“Go with her,” the wind told me. “Send your children this way, years from now. But go with her.”
I felt a kind of tingly warmth and knew it was time to get home. I snuck out the back way and came around to the front of the house. There was no car. She’d followed me on foot all the way from the farm. I wanted to leave her there in the old house, shouting at the dead rafters, but instead I called her name and waited.
She came out crying. She knew.
“You poor sinning boy,” she said, pulling me to her lilac bosom.
Richie by the Sea
The storm had spent its energy the night before. A wild, scattering squall had toppled the Thompson’s shed and the last spurt of high water had dropped dark drift across the rocks and sand. In the last light of day the debris was beginning to stink and attract flies and gulls. There were knots of seaweed, floats made of glass and cork, odd bits of boat wood, foam plastic shards and a whale. The whale was about forty feet long. It had died during the night after its impact on the ragged rocks of the cove. It looked like a giant garden slug, draped across the still pool of water with head and tail hanging over.
Thomas Harker felt a tinge of sympathy for the whale, but his house was less than a quarter-mile south and with the wind in his direction the smell would soon be bothersome.
The sheriff’s jeep roared over the bluff road between the cove and the university grounds. Thomas waved and the sheriff waved back. There would be a lot of cleaning-up to do.
Thomas backed away from the cliff edge and returned to the path through the trees. He’d left his drafting table an hour ago to stretch his muscles and the walk had taken longer than he expected; Karen would be home by now, waiting for him, tired from the start of the new school year.
The cabin was on a broad piece of property barely thirty yards from the tideline, with nothing but grass and sand and an old picket fence between it and the water. They had worried during the storm, but there had been no flooding. The beach elevated seven feet to their property and they’d come through remarkably well.
Thomas knocked sand from his shoes and hung them on two nails next to the back door. In the service porch he removed his socks and dangled them outside, then draped them on the washer. He had soaked his shoes and socks and feet during an incautious run near the beach. Wriggling his toes, he stepped into the kitchen and sniffed. Karen had popped homemade chicken pies into the oven. Walks along the beach made him ravenous, especially after long days at the board.
He looked out the front window. Karen was at the gate, hair blowing in the evening breeze and knit sweater puffing out across her pink and white blouse. She turned, saw Thomas in the window and waved, saying something he couldn’t hear.
He shrugged expressively and went to open the door. He saw something small on the porch and jumped in surprise. Richie stood on the step, smiling up at him, eyes the color of the sunlit sea, black hair unruly.
“Did I scare you, Mr. Harker?” the boy asked.
“Not much. What are you doing here this late? You should be home for dinner.”
Karen kicked her shoes off on the porch. “Richie! When did you get here?”
“Just now. I was walking up the sand hills and wanted to say hello.” Richie pointed north of the house with his long, unchildlike fingers. “Hello.” He looked at Karen with a broad grin, head tilted.
“No dinner at home tonight?” Karen asked, totally vulnerable. “Maybe you can stay here.” Thomas winced and raised his hand.
“Can’t,” Richie said. “Everything’s just late tonight. I’ve got to be home soon. Hey, did you see the whale?”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. “Sheriff is going to have a fun time moving it.”
“Next tide’ll probably take it out,” Richie said. He looked between them, still smiling broadly. Thomas guessed his age at nine or ten but he already knew how to handle people.
“Tide won’t be that high now,” Thomas said.
“I’ve seen big things wash back before. Think he’ll leave it overnight?”
“Probably. It won’t start stinking until tomorrow.”
Karen wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“Thanks for the invitation anyway, Mrs. Harker.” Richie put his hands in his shorts’ pockets and walked through the picket fence, turning just beyond the gate. “You got any more old clothes I can have?”
“Not now,” Thomas said. “You’ve taken all our castoffs already.”
“I need more for the rag drive,” Richie said. “Thanks anyway.”
“Where does he live?” Thomas asked after closing the door.
“I don’t think he wants us to know. Probably in town. Don’t you like him?”
“Of course I like him. He’s only a kid.”
“You don’t seem to want him around.” Karen looked at him accusingly.
“Not all the time. He’s not ours, his folks should take care of him.”
“They obviously don’t care much.”
“He’s well-fed,” Thomas said. “He looks healthy and he gets along fine.”
They sat down to dinner. Wisps of Karen’s hair still took the shape of the wind. She didn’t comb it until after the table was cleared and Thomas was doing the dishes. His eyes traced endless circuit diagrams in the suds. “Hey,” he shouted to the back bathroom. “I’ve been working too much.”
“I know,” Karen answered. “So have I. Isn’t it terrible?”
“Let’s get to bed early,” he said. She walked into the kitchen wrapped in a terry-cloth bathrobe, pulling a snarl out of her hair. “Must get your sleep,” she said.
He aimed a snapped towel at her retreating end but missed. Then he leaned over the sink, rubbed his eyes and looked at the suds again. No circuits, only a portrait of Richie. He removed the last plate and rinsed it.
The next morning Thomas awoke to the sound of hammering coming from down the beach. He sat up in bed to receive Karen’s breezy kiss as she left for the University, then hunkered down again and rolled over to snooze a little longer. His eyes flew open a few minutes later and he cursed. The racket was too much. He rolled out of the warmth and padded into the bathroom, wincing at the cold tiles. He turned the shower on to warm, brought his mug out to shave and examined his face in the cracked mirror. The mirror had been broken six months ago when he’d slipped and jammed his hand against it after a full night poring over the circuit diagrams in his office. Karen had been furious with him and he hadn’t worked that hard since. But there was a deadline from Peripheral Data on his freelance designs and he had to meet it if he wanted to keep up his reputation.
In a few more months, he might land an exclusive contract from Key Business Corporation, and then he’d be designing what he wanted to design—big computers, mighty beasts. Outstanding money.
The hammering continued and after dressing he looked out the bedroom window to see Thompson rebuilding his shed. The shed had gone unused for months after Thompson had lost his boat at the Del Mar trials, near San Diego. Still, Thompson was sawing and hammering and reconstructing the slope-roofed structure, possible planning on another boat. Thomas didn’t think much about it. He was already at work and he hadn’t even reached the desk in his office. There was a whole series of TTL chips he could move to solve the interference he was sure would crop up in the design as he
had it now.
By nine o’clock he was deeply absorbed. He had his drafting pencils and templates and mechanic’s square spread across the paper in complete confusion. He wasn’t interrupted until ten.
He answered the door only half-aware that somebody had knocked. Sheriff Varmanian stood on the porch, sweating. The sun was out and the sky clearing for a hot, humid day.
“Hi, Tom.”
“Al,” Thomas said, nodding. “Something up?”
“I’m interrupting? Sorry—”
“Yeah, my computers won’t be able to take over your job if you keep me here much longer. How’s the whale?”
“That’s the least of my troubles right now.” Varmanian’s frizzy hair and round wire-rimmed glasses made him look more like an anarchist than a sheriff. “The whale was taken out with the night tide. We didn’t even have to bury it.” He pronounced “bury” like it was “burry” and studiously maintained a midwestern twang.
“Something else, then. Come inside and cool off?”
“Thanks. We’ve lost another kid—the Cooper’s four-year-old, Kile. He disappeared last night around seven and no one’s seen him since. Anybody see him here?”
“No. Only Richie was here. Listen, I didn’t hear any tide big enough to sweep the whale out again. We’d need another storm to do that. Maybe something freak happened and the boy was caught in it...a freak tide?”
“There isn’t any funnel in Placer Cove to cause that. Just a normal rise and the whale was buoyed up by gases, that’s my guess. Cooper kid must have gotten lost on the bluff road and come down to one of the houses to ask for help—that’s what the last people who saw him think. So we’re checking the beach homes. Thompson didn’t see anything either. I’ll keep heading north and look at the flats and tide pools again, but I’d say we have another disappearance. Don’t quote me, though.”
“That’s four?”
“Five. Five in the last six months.”
“Pretty bad, Al, for a town like this.”
“Don’t I know it. Coopers are all upset, already planning funeral arrangements. Funerals when there aren’t any bodies. But the Goldbergs had one for their son two months ago, so I guess precedent has been set.”
He stood by the couch, fingering his hat and looking at the rug. “It’s damned hard. How often does this kid, Richie, come down?”
“Three or four times a week. Karen’s motherly toward him, thinks his folks aren’t paying him enough attention.”
“He’ll be the next one, wait and see. Thanks for the time, and say hello to the wife for me.”
Thomas returned to the board but had difficulty concentrating. He wondered if animals in the field and bush mourned long over the loss of a child. Did gazelles grieve when lions struck? Karen knew more about such feelings than he did; she’d lost a husband before she met him. His own life had been reasonably linear, uneventful.
How would he cope if something happened, if Karen were killed? Like the Coopers, with a quick funeral and burial to make things certain, even when they weren’t?
What were they burying?
Four years of work and dreams.
After lunch he took a walk along the beach and found his feet moving him north to where the whale had been. The coastal rocks in this area concentrated on the northern edge of the cove. They stretched into the water for a mile before ending at the deep water shelf. At extreme low tide two or three hundred yards of rocks were exposed. Now, about fifty feet was visible and he could clearly see where the whale had been. Even at high tide the circle of rock was visible. He hadn’t walked here much lately, but he remembered first noticing the circle three years before, like a perfect sandy-bottomed wading pool.
Up and down the beach, the wrack remained, dark and smelly and flyblown. But the whale was gone. It was obvious there hadn’t been much wave action. Still, that was the easy explanation and he had no other.
After the walk he returned to his office and opened all the windows before setting pencil to paper. By the time Karen was home, he had finished a good portion of the diagram from his original sketches. When he turned it in, Peripheral Data would have little more to do than hand it to their drafting department for smoothing.
Richie didn’t visit them that evening. He came in the morning instead. It was a Saturday and Karen was home, reading in the living room. She invited the boy in and offered him milk and cookies, then sat him before the television to watch cartoons.
Richie consumed TV with a hunger that was fascinating. He avidly mimicked the expressions of the people he saw in the commercials, as if memorizing a store of emotions, filling in the gaps in his humanity left by an imperfect upbringing.
Richie left a few hours later. As usual, he had not touched the food. He wasn’t starving.
“Think he’s adopting us?” Thomas asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe he just needs a couple of friends like you and me. Human contacts, if his own folks don’t pay attention to him.”
“Varmanian thinks he might be the next one to disappear.” Thomas regretted the statement the instant it was out, but Karen didn’t react. She put out a lunch of beans and sausages and waited until they were eating to say something. “When do you want to have a child?”
“Two weeks from now, over the three-day holiday,” Thomas said.
“No, I’m serious.”
“You’ve taken a shine to Richie and you think we should have one of our own?”
“Not until something breaks for you,” she said, looking away. “If Key Business comes through, maybe I can take a sabbatical and study child-rearing. Directly. But one of us has to be free full time.”
Thomas nodded and sipped at a glass of iced tea. Behind her humor she was serious. There was a lot at stake in the next few months—more than just money. Perhaps their happiness together. It was a hard weight to carry. Being an adult was difficult at times. He almost wished he could be like Richie, free as a gull, uncommitted.
A line of dark clouds schemed over the ocean as afternoon turned to evening. “Looks like another storm,” he called to Karen, who was typing in the back bedroom.
“So soon?” she asked by way of complaint.
He sat in the kitchen to watch the advancing front. The warm, fading light of sunset turned his face orange and painted an orange square on the living room wall. The square had progressed above the level of the couch when the doorbell rang.
It was Gina Hammond and a little girl he didn’t recognize. Hammond was about sixty with thinning black hair and a narrow, wizened face that always bore an irritated scowl. A cigarette was pinched between her fingers, as usual. She explained the visit between nervous stammers which embarrassed Thomas far more than they did her.
“Mr. Harker, this is my grand-daughter Julie.” The girl, seven or eight, looked up at him accusingly. “Julie says she’s lost four of her kittens. Th-th-that’s because she gave them to your boy to play with and he-he never brought them back. You know anything about them?”
“We don’t have any children, Mrs. Hammond.”
“You’ve got a boy named Richie,” the woman said, glaring at him as if he were a monster.
Karen came out of the hallway and leaned against the door jamb beside Thomas. “Gina, Richie just wanders around our house a lot. He’s not ours.”
“Julie says Richie lives here—he told h-h-her that—and his name is Richie Harker. What’s this all about i-i-if he isn’t your boy?”
“He took my kittens!” Julie said, a tear escaping to slide down her cheek.
“If that’s what he told you—that we’re his folks—he was fibbing,” Karen said. “He lives in town, closer to you than to us.”
“He brought the kittens to the beach!” Julie cried. “I saw him.”
“He hasn’t been here since this morning,” Thomas said. “We haven’t seen the kittens.”
“He stole ‘em!” The girl began crying in earnest.
“I’ll talk to him next time I see him,” Thomas pr
omised. “But I don’t know where he lives.”
“H-h-his last name?”
“Don’t know that, either.”
Mrs. Hammond wasn’t convinced. “I don’t like the idea of little boys stealing things that don’t belong to them.”
“Neither do I, Mrs. Hammond,” Karen said. “We told you we’d talk to him when we see him.”
“Well,” Mrs. Hammond said. She thanked them beneath her breath and left with the blubbering Julie close behind.
The storm hit after dinner. It was a heavy squall and the rain trounced over the roof as if the sky had feet. A leak started in the bathroom, fortunately right over the tub, and Thomas rummaged through his caulking gear, preparing for the storm’s end when he could get up on the roof and search out the leak.
A small tool shed connected with the cabin through the garage. It had one bare light and a tiny four-paned window which stared at Thomas’s chest-level into the streaming night. As he dug out his putty knife and caulking cans, the phone rang in the kitchen and Karen answered it. Her voice came across as a murmur under the barrage of rain on the garage roof. He was putting all his supplies into a cardboard box when she stuck her head through the garage door and told him she’d be going out.
“The Thompsons have lost their power,” she said. “I’m going to take some candles to them on the beach road. I should be back in a few minutes, but they may want me to drive into town and buy some lanterns with them. If they do, I’ll be back in an hour or so. Don’t worry about me!”
Thomas came out of the shed clutching the box. “I could go instead.”
“Don’t be silly. Give you more time to work on the sketches. I’ll be back soon. Tend the leaks.”
Then she was out the front door and gone. He looked through the living room window at her receding lights and felt a gnaw of worry. He’d forgotten a rag to wipe the putty knife. He switched the light back on and went through the garage to the shed.
Something scraped against the wall outside. He bent down and peered out the four-paned window, rubbing where his breath fogged the glass. A small face stared back at him. It vanished almost as soon as he saw it.