My only complaint about the movie Sugarland Express was that it wasn’t near long enough, not by far. I didn’t really follow the plot, I was just conscious of Kay, and I carefully refrained from moving the slightest bit even when her head on my shoulder gradually cut off the blood supply to my arm.
When the movie ended and people began filtering out, Kay put her hand on my arm, keeping me in my seat. We sat quietly until the place had mostly emptied, and then she stood. “Let’s go this way,” she said, leading me to the glowing exit sign in the front of the theater. We fumbled in the dark to a door that squeaked when we opened it, and then we were in the alley, facing each other awkwardly.
“That was a really good movie,” I said reverentially.
“It was,” she agreed.
“This is fun,” I told her, cleverly thinking that by keeping my comment in the present tense she’d agree with me that the night was far from over.
“I have to go meet my friends,” Kay replied.
Okay, not clever enough. I looked into her eyes. She was so nice and kind, so generous and caring, that there was no hint in her gaze that she knew she’d rescued me from social humiliation.
I nodded at her, struggling to come up with something to say. Thank you? I love you? She smiled at me. “Bye, Charlie.”
“Okay. Yes,” I responded with admirable idiocy.
I watched her walk out of the alley and vanish from view.
The stars were out as I strolled home, a blaze of them against a black sky that was on occasion scored by the straight white line of a meteor making its mark. Because of an astronomy report I’d given in fifth grade, I could look up and identify Ursa Major, the Great Bear, watching over me. It didn’t look very ursine to me, though.
Naturally, given what was to become my life’s interest in bears, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Ursa Major. Why did so many cultures look up into the night sky and see a bear? The Romans, the Navajo, the Iroquois, and the Algonquins. Ancient texts in Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic speak of the great bear of the heavens. Homer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Tennyson wrote about Ursa Major, and van Gogh painted it. Is there something comforting about having a bear up there? Is there some significance beyond needing to name the constellation something that they picked a bear even though it has a tail more like a lion?
Did I care about any of this that particular night? Of course not. If it didn’t have anything to do with Kay, it didn’t have anything to do with me.
I figured that at that point my life had pretty much peaked. I was happier than I could ever remember being, certainly happier than I’d been since the day my mom and dad told me about the sickness. My ebullient mood lasted all the way home, right up until I turned down my driveway and saw, to my dismay, my father sitting in the living room, waiting for me.
chapter
NINE
AS it turns out, the penalty for going off to a movie while grounded was to be confined to quarters for the first month of school. I didn’t even get credit for time served, though I’d practically finished out my sentence for premeditated disposal of Yvonne’s tuna noodle.
It was, I reflected as my dad scolded me, what happened when you didn’t have a mother around to soften a father’s harsh judgment. The first month of school, when friendships and alliances are formed, and I was grounded? My mother would have reasoned that what I had done was bad but not ruin-my-life bad. I mean, it wasn’t like I went next door and murdered the neighbors. But to my father the whole issue was that he was the man in charge and I disobeyed orders. To drive home the point that my life was in his hands, he took it away from me.
I normally view the first day of school the way I’d view the bottom step of the gallows, but that year I was pretty much ready to burst out of the house and would have gladly joined a chain gang to get out of there.
Funny how it didn’t occur to me until the school bus squealed and quaked to a halt at the top of my driveway that things were going to be different on the ride in. Dan and I had always sat together in one of the front seats on the bus, a habit we’d gotten into in grade school, but that wasn’t likely to be true anymore, was it?
I stepped up the metal stairs to the bus interior that first day, nodded at the driver, and took an uneasy survey of the sparsely situated passengers. Dan’s house was ahead of mine on the route, as was his buddy Jerry’s. The two of them were sitting next to each other in one of the very back seats—that’s where the older kids, the ninth graders, always took up residence. I started to head back their way, faltered, and wound up dodging into a seat just a few rows from the front. I didn’t know where to sit. I didn’t know who my friends were.
I was the freak with the dead mom. Maybe I didn’t have friends.
I did notice that when the bus admitted a group of ninth graders they made Jerry and Dan move up a few rows, but it didn’t give me any particular satisfaction. When the bus got crowded and there were no more open seats a newly minted seventh grader, quaking with low self-esteem, slid in next to me and eyed me nervously, as if he had been assigned to be my prison cellmate because I’d killed the last one. I gave him a tough look to intimidate him and it worked: he blanched and turned away from me, perched on the lip of the seat so that he was practically falling into the aisle.
I sort of regretted doing that. It would have been nice to have someone to talk to.
It felt good to get off the bus, but as it turned out, that first day of school was nothing but one long, agonizing disappointment.
I’d been betrayed by my body again, which just hadn’t been in the mood to grow taller or more muscular over the summer—I was the same size as most of the despised seventh graders and a bit shorter than a lot of them. That morning as I slipped into what I called my clean jeans—basically just the pair of pants I never wore to the creek—I had felt gratified at the familiar feel of the soft, faded denim. Many of the other boys, I knew from experience, would be wearing creaky new jeans, so darkly indigo they were almost black. Now, though, I realized my clothing announced my complete lack of growth as loudly as a broadcast over the school intercom system: There’s Charlie Hall, wearing the same clothes from last year!
The girls all wore miniskirts because it was the first day of school. Somehow, girls just knew what to wear. I had on a striped T-shirt I’d first worn in sixth grade and believed people knew this. I looked like a kid from grade school who had gotten on the wrong bus, except that I had a pimple flaring on my chin—my body couldn’t produce growth hormones, but it could crank out a new zit!
When the bell rang the hallways vibrated with happy energy, kids greeting each other and grinning. Not me, though. I belonged to a sad subspecies, scurrying from room to room with eyes down, part of no clique, member of no gang. Just hours into eighth grade and it felt as if I’d failed the year. I’d spend my days isolated and alone.
Dan was in my science class, sitting a few seats behind my desk. I noticed him as I slunk into the room but kept my gaze averted, not wanting to meet his eyes. As the teacher tried to figure out everyone’s names, Dan leaned over and hissed at me, “Hey, Squirrel!”
I had never been called Squirrel before. It didn’t sound as if it were intended as an endearment. I twisted around and looked at Dan with a question on my face.
“Why didn’t you go out for football?” he asked. His freckles stood out against his skin more vividly than the year before—I don’t know why, but this is what I focused on as I mulled over his question.
I wasn’t able to come up with an answer. Football was, last time I checked, a sport that depended on size, strength, and speed. I had struck out on all three.
After science class was lunch. During seventh grade I’d sat at a table with a gang of boys that included Dan, a bunch of us, all low status, finding comfort in our numbers. Even though they were now eighth graders, the same boys sat at the same place. I didn’t dare carry my tray over there—I’d no doubt that I’d wind up being treated exactly the same way as I’d been tre
ated in the movie theater.
I felt like that guy everyone was talking about, Philippe Petit, who a week or so before school had walked across a tightrope strung between the World Trade Center towers, 1,350 feet above the streets of New York. One wrong move and he would have been dead, and then when he did make it he was arrested.
I found an end spot at one table that was sparsely inhabited by a couple of nervous new kids and a seventh grader who never looked at anything but his lunch tray. I hurriedly bolted down my food, tasting nothing. I don’t remember what I ate, but it was probably meat loaf, which was what they almost always served. Sometimes they put spicy gravy on it and called it Salisbury steak, sometimes they put it on a bun and called it hamburger, sometimes they served it in a hard tortilla and called it a taco, and sometimes they decided just to be honest and call it meat loaf. I’m sure we must have had other things for lunch, but when I remember junior high school all I remember eating is the same gray serving of ground beef over and over.
A couple of times during lunch I raised my eyes and spotted the searching glances of other rootless boys, but I didn’t hold anyone’s gaze for fear of being lumped in with a bunch of losers.
After lunch I made my way to the boys’ room and sat in one of the stalls, my pants puddled at my ankles, letting my nervous stomach play out its undesirable symptoms. I was oddly at peace in there, so naturally some loud boys marched in.
When I was in seventh grade and needed to go number two, some ninth-grade boys would stand on the toilets on either side of the stall, looking over the walls and jeering and laughing at me. I had no idea what was so funny; I was just a sevie hoping for some privacy while I pooped.
I had calculated that with those guys off to high school and me promoted to eighth grader I would at last be afforded some dignity, but alas, this was not to be so. The boys, ninth graders for only a day, banged into the surrounding stalls and their heads popped up on either side and they laughed and pointed at me. My misery was complete.
How did the new ninth graders even know to do this? Was there some sort of secret ceremony, an initiation into the society of boys who stood on the toilets to hoot laughter at some poor guy who was just trying to evacuate his bowels? Or did eighth graders witness the hazing and think to themselves, I can’t wait until next year when I get to do that?
The last class of the school day took years to arrive. We were all itchy from being cooped up after a summer of freedom and the students reacted to the bell as one giant reflex, leaping to our feet and rushing out of the classrooms even as teachers called final instructions to us, usually having something to do with the idea that we weren’t allowed to leave until we were properly dismissed.
Dan, Gregg, Jerry, and a couple other boys were waiting at my locker for me. I didn’t see them until it was too late to turn away.
“Charlie. You and me are gonna fight,” Dan told me, his lips twisted in an ugly grimace. He stood close to me, crowding my space.
He really wasn’t much bigger than I was, and I couldn’t help but feel that this newfound hostility was somehow fake. We were friends. This didn’t make any sense to me.
I looked into Dan’s eyes and saw something unexpected there: fear. The skin had gone pale under his freckles. I don’t think Dan was afraid of fighting; I think he was afraid of everything else, of trying to learn his place in this strange place, this in-between consignment where we were neither ninth nor seventh graders, where many of the boys—twelve- and thirteen-year-olds—had gotten it into their heads that it was time to tough their way into manhood.
“How?” I asked.
This call to the logical part of his brain unbalanced Dan a little. “What do you mean, how?” he responded, forgetting in his bafflement to sneer.
“How are we supposed to fight? We’d be suspended.”
“Only if you fight on school property,” Gregg objected.
“Or if someone tells on us,” I continued. “And then how do we get home? Is your mom going to pick us up? Because my dad can’t; he’s at work.”
The concept of beating me up and then getting in the car with his mother—How was school today, boys? Why is Charlie profusely bleeding?—froze Dan in place.
I slammed my locker shut and turned away. “It’s not a good idea. It doesn’t make any sense.”
This response was so entirely unexpected that I was able to walk a good five yards before they reacted, and then it was with a chorus of jeering laughs rather than a pursuit and a hallway mugging. I made it safely to the bus and pretended my interest was entirely absorbed by the open English textbook in my lap when I sensed Dan swaggering down the aisle.
“Hey, Hall. Hall!” he called to me.
I couldn’t hear him, so fascinated was I with the description of adverbs and their uses.
“Squirrel,” he taunted over his shoulder as he took his seat.
Please, oh Lord, don’t let that become my official nickname.
chapter
TEN
AS soon as my feet touched down at the bus stop I was running. Maybe everyone on the bus thought I was running from Dan and maybe in some ways that was exactly what I was doing, but I always ran full speed up Hidden Creek Road and I hoped the kids on the bus knew that.
Hidden Creek Road was originally cut into the hill to give loggers access to the trees at the top of the rise and they didn’t waste money on reducing the slope more than they strictly had to, so it was a pretty hard climb. On a couple of the turns the road had to be literally blasted out of the side of the mountain and the rocks were scored with thin half-pipes where the crews had hammered in the dynamite—the striations looked as if a massive animal had clawed the granite.
I walked in the front door panting and starving. I ate a bag of Hostess sugar donuts and two glasses of milk, which made me think of another hungry animal. There was nothing, I thought glumly, I could do about it.
As I remember it now, I spent most of my incarceration that September standing in the big picture window at the back of the house, looking for signs of that grizzly bear. I took a page out of Scotty Beck’s book and held binoculars to my eyes, spotting deer and elk and skunk and fox and all manner of squirrels and birds, but no bear. Some of the creek was visible from that window, but most of it was obscured by the landscape, including the shallows where I’d committed the crime that got me grounded to begin with.
Where was the bear? Had he wandered off to find some other boy to spend his time with? Was he hungry? If he was trying to survive on his fishing skills he was probably starving. I was anxious and concerned for my ursine friend but was honor bound to stay inside the house, going crazy with the conflict.
What he was probably doing, I now know, was eating berries and grubs. Back then I assumed grizzlies were savage carnivores who held the same opinion about vegetables as I did—a burger beats a carrot any day. But grizzlies not only find berries and roots more abundant than meat; they actually seem to prefer them. I’ve seen a captive bear turn up his nose at hamburger in order to get to a pile of avocados. I also know that the younger the grizzly, the more likely he is to be frustrated in his search for food—and this was a young bear. He probably was not starving, exactly, but he also was most likely struggling to get enough to eat.
When the school bus came I went from one prison to another. Nobody was talking to me—I was alone and a loner. I evaded Dan Alderton as best I could, devising routes through the hallway that kept me from accidental contact and mastering the art of ignoring him in science class. I ate lunch with my eyes downcast. I hated every minute of it.
My father severely tested my loyalty during those four weeks by seeing Yvonne socially twice. That’s how he put it: “I’m seeing Yvonne socially on Saturday.” The whole lament about him not liking her was apparently a big fat lie. My father said no more about the matter, though he seemed to hesitate a little when he told me he was going off for his social seeing, like he was waiting for me to challenge him. I didn’t give him the satisfaction.
I just gazed at him with a blank expression on my face, hoping my lack of reaction was driving him insane.
If it was, he gave no indication. He was better at the expressionless look than I was.
Being stuck inside for the thirty days hath September gave me more than ample opportunity to wallow in the sadness that swamped me whenever I thought about Kay. She was the perfect woman for me in every way except her boyfriend.
Maybe her date with the military guy, whom I referred to in my thoughts as Sergeant Lunkhead, was all just for show, designed to make me jealous or something.
“Why did you put your head on my shoulder, Kay?” I asked the empty house.
Because Charlie, Kay’s voice answered, I love you. I’ve loved you ever since you gave me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
My urges weren’t sexual—for me those storms, while building on the horizon, were still a little ways off. I wasn’t picturing Kay naked, though it had not escaped my attention during Lifesaving that she did know how to fill out a bathing suit better than the girls my age. I was thinking about her in a much more pure and frankly unrealistic fashion, as a woman who would be devoted to me forever, who would never leave me, ever. That’s all I wanted.
Talking too much to yourself can lead you in unexpected directions. “Mom,” I said out loud one afternoon, but I didn’t finish my sentence. I’d tried a couple of times since her death to converse with her, to feel her presence and speak to it, but even in the cemetery it didn’t work. She was gone. She couldn’t hear me. My heart was aching and I needed to talk to my mother about it, but she was dead.
I felt a flare of anger, a twisted bitterness, at her for dying and leaving me motherless, trapped in a house with a man who often acted as if he were the one who died. It wasn’t fair! I hated her for getting that wretched disease and taking so long to die that when it finally happened, yes, I felt relief. Who wouldn’t?