After Eli (15 page)

And I kept thinking how great it would be if Isabelle didn’t have to leave at the end of the summer but just stayed on at the Sowers house, with her mother painting orange cows and her dad maybe teaching his history at the community college over in Johnson City, which is the next town past Fairfield but is a lot bigger, with a shopping mall. I’d tell Isabelle how I felt about her, and she’d realize she felt the same way about me too, and she’d talk her parents around, because nobody could resist Isabelle. Maybe when my mom met Isabelle, she’d get interested in things again, and my dad would see that with a girl like Isabelle, I had a future after all.

Men make plans and the mice in the ceiling laugh.

T
he problem with letting sleeping dogs lie, like Emma said, is that they don’t stay lying down. You know what dogs are like. There they all are, flopped out flat on the porch like a bunch of fur pancakes, snoring up a storm, but when you try to sneak past, even creeping along on tiptoe and holding your breath, in like two seconds they’re all riled up and jumping around and barking their fool heads off.

Though of course my sleeping dogs might have stayed asleep a little longer if it hadn’t been for bad luck, bad timing, the green bus, and the twins. With my sleeping dogs, it was like I put on football cleats and stomped on their tails.

The green bus belongs to Henry Jones, who was the oldest friend of old Mr. Pilcher, Jim Pilcher’s grandfather. When old Mr. Pilcher died, Henry Jones was so sad over it that he was drunk for two straight weeks. He just sat on his porch in his undershirt and pajama bottoms and drank rye whiskey out of the bottle and cried. Then he sobered up and said he was done with his period of mourning and it was time for him to move on. Then he went over to Springfield and bought himself a secondhand school bus. His wife said that grief had deranged his mind.

It wasn’t a big full-size school bus. It was one of those little ones, like they use for the special kids and the preschoolers in the Head Start program. Henry Jones painted it green, and in good weather he’d drive it around all the country roads and pick people up and take them into Fairfield, and then later he’d collect them and bring them all home again. He charged two bucks a person, round-trip, except for kids under five, who were free. Lots of people rode the green bus, because it was environmentally better than everybody driving all the time in separate cars and enriching the big oil companies. Also it was friendly. Also it was a way of getting to town if you weren’t old enough to drive and your dad said he had better things to do than ferry you around, and what did you think he was, a goddamn chauffeur?

So one day along the middle of August, I rode the green bus into town as part of my job, to order chicken wire and four yards of mulch for the blue-potato farm and to pick up prenatal vitamin pills for Emma, which was an aside. The twins came along too, because they were going to the library in hopes of finding out how to make nitroglycerin. They were both wearing T-shirts and jeans. Journey’s shirt was covered with little rhinestone hearts, and Jasper’s said
GOOD MORNING — I SEE THE ASSASSINS HAVE FAILED
.

Also on the bus were Henry Jones’s friend Clarence Carmichael, who always went along for the ride to keep Henry Jones company, and the entire membership of the Fairfield Women’s Book Club and Coffee Circle, who were going to Bev’s Caf to drink coffee and discuss
Othello,
Evelyn Perry’s divorce, and pasta recipes.

Back before Eli died, my mom belonged to the Fairfield Women’s Book Club and Coffee Circle. She used to like it a lot, particularly on the last Friday of every month, when it turned into the Fairfield Women’s Movie Club and Wine Bar and they met at different people’s houses to watch chick flicks and do manicures. They’d come home all giggly, with funny-colored fingernails, smelling like cabernet and popcorn and acetone. I thought of my mom now, just lying there alone at home, and I wished she were back in the Movie Club and Wine Bar. I thought if she’d just be that way again, I wouldn’t make fun of her purple fingernails, and I’d even agree with her about how great Julia Roberts was in
Pretty Woman,
though I am not a Julia Roberts fan.

We all got off the bus and I walked the twins to the library. It was hotter in town. Some little kids in the park wearing nothing but underpants were jumping in and out of the fountain, while their mothers sat off under a tree. Eli said I used to go in that fountain bare naked, back when I was too young to remember. I’d always hoped he was making that up.

“So what’s with the nitroglycerin?” I said.

“Jasper read about it in
The Golden Book of Chemistry,
” Journey said. “Nitroglycerin is a powerful and dangerous explosive.”

“If I knew how to make it, I would win the science fair,” Jasper said.

“Nobody’s going to tell you how to make it,” I said. “Why don’t you just build paper airplanes or something, like everybody else?”

“Because I am exceptionally intelligent,” Jasper said. “I need a challenge.”

After I dropped off the twins, I went all the way to the east end of Main Street to Fournier’s Farm Supply and ordered chicken wire and mulch like Jim told me, and then I trudged all the way back to the west end of Main Street to Whitman’s Drugstore for Emma’s vitamin pills, by which time I felt like a desert explorer dying of sunstroke. When I passed the library for the second time, the twins were sitting on the front steps, looking dismal and forlorn due to not having found any instruction manuals on the manufacture of death-dealing explosives. Instead, the children’s librarian had collared them and made them check out a copy of
The Wind in the Willows.
She said they could learn a lot from studying the reckless character of Toad.

“If I were in
The Wind in the Willows,
I would not be the reckless character of Toad,” Jasper said bitterly.

“You would both be the reckless character of Toad,” I said. “Let’s go to Bev’s Caf and get some ice cream.”

I figured ice cream should make up for them being deprived of the opportunity to blow up the county, or at least the Sowers carriage house. Also it was really hot.

Bev’s Caf has little tables with umbrellas on the sidewalk where you can sit outside in summer, but those were all full of people with shopping bags having iced tea and a guy with a briefcase doing the crossword puzzle on the back page of the newspaper and Henry Jones and Clarence Carmichael having lemonade and arguing about Chevrolets.

“There’s Walter!” Journey said.

“Where?” I said.

“Right there!” Journey said, pointing. “See? Hey! Hey, Walter!”

And there was Walter, sitting in Bev’s window and having a Coke, which usually wasn’t the sort of thing Walter would do, except it turned out later that he’d come into town on the green bus too, only earlier, because his mother had called from work to say that she’d forgotten her wallet, and then he’d brought her the wallet, and then he’d gone to the library, only before the twins, and now there he was, sitting in Bev’s Caf and waiting for the green bus to take him home.

“Hey, Walter!” Journey yelled, jumping all around and waving.

Walter looked up and saw us and gave us a sort of funny little smile.

“I bet
he
knows how to make nitroglycerin,” Jasper said.

“I bet he won’t tell you,” I said. “Now shut up about it unless you want to spend the rest of your life being escorted to the bathroom by a social worker.”

The twins went racketing up the steps and into the Caf, with me following along with my bagful of prenatal vitamins.

Bev’s Caf isn’t fancy, but it’s nice. There are booths along the wall, upholstered in some stuff that looks like leather but is more resistant to spills, and tables with flowered tablecloths in the middle of the floor, which were all shoved together just then for the Women’s Book Club and Coffee Circle, and a lot of photos on the wall of all the people Bev likes. Some of them are famous people, like Katharine Hepburn and Johnny Cash and Martin Luther King Jr. and Princess Diana, but there are pictures too of all Bev’s kids and grandkids, and one of her and her husband, Roy, both a lot skinnier and wearing headbands and fringed jackets, back in 1969, the year they went to Woodstock. Eli’s picture was up there too, with him wearing his football uniform and giving his crookedy grin.

“Why, hi, Danny,” Bev said. “We haven’t seen you in a while. How’s your mom?”

“She’s okay,” I said, which I knew and Bev knew and I knew Bev knew was a lie. Everybody knew my mom had been kind of nuts ever since Eli died.

The twins were scrambling into the booth with Walter.

“How do you like working for Jim?” Bev said. “That going pretty good?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“They’re good kids, Jim and Emma,” Bev said. “Jim’s mom says they’re having a baby. I guess she’s counting on a girl, because last time she was in here, she had this great big sack full of pink yarn. You tell them I said hi, okay? And tell them not to be such a pair of strangers.”

“Sure,” I said.

“No,” I heard Walter saying to the twins.

“You going to sit over there with your friends?” Bev said.

I looked where she was looking, which wasn’t toward the twins and Walter. Peter Reilly and Amanda were sitting in a booth across the room. Peter was wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, and it looked like his biceps had gotten even bigger over the summer, what with hauling all those boards and cement blocks around. Amanda was wearing a strapless sundress, and it looked like parts of her had gotten bigger too. I hadn’t talked to Peter since Ryan Baker’s party, but he waved me on over anyway.

“Have a seat, Anderson,” Peter said.

I looked over at Walter and the twins. Walter was staring down into his Coke like he was sighting sea cucumbers at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. I knew he’d just told the twins to pipe down and leave me alone, because Jasper was saying, “
Why
do we have to pipe down and leave him alone?” and Journey was saying, “Isn’t he going to sit with us? He said we’d get ice cream.”

Tell the twins: tell the world.

“Or are you
too busy
?” Peter said. “Or do you need to go read some
Play-Doh
? What’s with you, Anderson? Am I smelling weird?”

“Oh, stop it, Peter,” Amanda said.

Walter hadn’t taken his eyes off that Coke. Like if he didn’t watch it, the Loch Ness monster or something might jump out of it.

Then I knew that Walter telling the twins to leave me alone was like giving me the go-ahead to sit with Peter and Amanda. He was telling me it was all right to pretend he wasn’t there. And I thought how easy it would be to just pretend and go ahead and sit down.

And right off I started rationalizing how it was okay really, how Walter wouldn’t mind. I could make it up with Walter later. Peter Reilly and I would still be friends, and I’d still sit on the back seat of the bus, and I’d still be on Peter’s team. I thought how lousy I’d feel if I got off the bus and Peter and Mickey and Ryan and all were going
whoo-oo-oo
together and laughing and flicking jelly beans at me.

Then I thought how I’d promised Emma I’d quit being scum and how back when I was eight and under the dining-room table, Eli had said never to wimp out on a real friend. For a minute I thought about my pirate ship, which I hadn’t thought about in years. I wondered if there were still pirates out there and how you got to be one. Right now seemed like a good time to run away to sea.

But instead I said, “Come on, Reilly, give it a rest. That Play-Doh thing isn’t funny anymore.”

Which doesn’t sound like much as life-changing statements go, but then when you think about it, a lot of life-changing statements probably aren’t very grand. Like how Rosa Parks wouldn’t get up out of her seat on the bus. What I bet she said was something like “I’m staying right here; my feet are tired.” And then the whole civil rights movement started.

Not that my statement was as life-changing as hers. But it was a lot for me.

Then I thought,
This is dumb to get in a fight over.

So I said, “Hey, why don’t you guys come over and sit with us?”

“No, thanks,” Peter said.

Then he said, “You sit with whoever you want, Anderson. You hang out with any weirdo you want to. I could give a rat’s ass. But don’t try crawling back later. I don’t do weird.”

And when I just stood there, thinking what to say next, he said, “Go on, get the hell away from me,” and he grabbed a bunch of those sugar packets that Bev keeps in little bowls on the tables and threw them at my face. So I grabbed him by the T-shirt and he jumped out of the booth and we started punching each other back and forth and Amanda started screeching. Walter told me later that the twins were trying to stab Peter in the kidneys with a couple of Bev’s forks, but he nabbed them in time. Then Bev’s son, Arnold, who’s built like a tank, came out of the kitchen and threw us all out, but not before I got a black eye.

Walter says this isn’t because Peter hates me all of a sudden. Peter acts that way because he needs to be in control of stuff because he’s insecure.