Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (22 page)

Around noon, Lomax came out of the house. He was wearing a scuba mask, which was pushed up on his forehead. A towel hung around his neck. He was carrying scuba flippers and a duffel bag that read MIDDLEVILLE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL in white lettering. William T. was taking a break, reclining in the backhoe and eating a sandwich.

“Whoa,” Chic said to his son. “You're a little early there, kiddo. Pool's not done. Couple more weeks.”

“I'm going to Kennel Lake,” Lomax said. He kneeled down by the water spigot and unscrewed the garden hose.

Chic wondered what he was going to do with that hose. “If you wait a few hours, I'll drive you.”

“I'll just ride my bike.”

Lomax went into the garage and got his bike, a red Schwinn Phantom with a banana seat. Balancing his load—the hose, the flippers, the duffel bag, the swimming towel, and the scuba mask—he wobbled down the drive and took a left.

“I have a strange son, Willie,” Chic said when Lomax was out of view. “What's he going to do with a garden hose at Kennel Lake?”

Willie took a bite from his sandwich.

“The other night, I walked past his room, and he's hunched over something, kneeling on the floor. I stopped and watched him. He's got a pocketknife and a cutting board from the kitchen and he's cutting something. I went in for a closer look, and he's got a pile of fingernails. He told me he'd been collecting them for a year. Imagine that.”

“Didn't you have a collection of something in your desk in Mrs. Horn's class?” Willie said. “What was it again?”

“I didn't have a collection of anything . . . ”

“Spitballs, that's it. You had a collection of spitballs.”

“I did? The things we forget.”

“He's a kid,” Willie added. “He'll grow out of it.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Later in the afternoon, after William T. had knocked off for the day—he'd gotten about half the pool dug—Chic wheeled the Weber grill from the garage into the driveway. He went inside the house and got his barbeque apron, a spatula, and a plate of burger patties. The sun was beginning to set and the shadows from the trees were stretching out across the driveway. He put the burgers on the grill, the meat sizzling on the wire rack. From down the street, he could hear the kids playing baseball in the empty lot. Chic put the grill lid on and walked down the driveway toward the street. There were six kids playing ball. There wasn't any sign of Lomax among the group, not that Chic had really expected him to be there. He never was, but Chic had hoped Lomax would be there this time because he had been gone for hours and Chic was starting to get a little worried.

Diane came out the back door and put her hands on her hips. She seemed worried too. “See what you did. You're too busy digging a pool to pay attention to your son. So now he's . . . where is he?”

“He said he was going to Kennel Lake.”

“You let him go by himself?”

“I told him I'd drive him.” Chic picked up the lid and flipped the burgers.

“You're overcooking them.”

“You don't think I know I'm overcooking them? Do you wanna cook them yourself?”

“You don't have to yell at me.”

“You don't have to tell me what I already know.”

“Someone is in a bad mood.”

“Yeah, well, I'm trying to make this better, you know. I'm trying.”

Diane turned and went back into the house.

The sun sunk behind the neighborhood trees and roofs. The streetlights came on. Diane had made up a plate for Lomax and poured him a glass of milk. The kitchen window was open, letting in the sound of the summer crickets. Chic told Diane he was going to drive out to Kennel Lake, but he didn't move. Both of them stared at the empty chair, their plates in front of them, the kitchen getting dark and neither of them getting up to turn on the light. Chic wanted to hear his son coast up the driveway on his bike. He wanted to hear him park his bike in the garage. He wanted to hear him come in the back door, stomping his feet the way he stomped his feet.

Finally, Chic stood up and looked around for his keys. Just then the phone rang.

It was Sheriff Hewitt.

Kennel Lake was a sportsman's paradise that featured trap shooting, a clubhouse for fish fries, a canoe launch, and a beach with a floating dock that the kids did cannonballs off of. At one end of the lake was a bunch of cattails. Diane and Chic pulled up to the clubhouse. The one streetlight in the middle of the lot was on, and there were three police cruisers and a fire truck near the boat launch. A half-dozen men were raking their flashlights over the bank and the black water. Sheriff Hewitt came up to the car carrying a cardboard box containing several mason jars and an empty MIDDLEVILLE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL duffel bag.
He told Chic and Diane that the night watchman had found a johnboat beached in the cattails by the spillway. He said they had some men getting ready to go in the lake. He motioned to two guys putting on their scuba fins. Diane put her hands over her face. Chic wanted to know if he was sure Lomax was in the lake. Couldn't he be in the cornfield? He probably just left the boat and got distracted chasing a firefly or something. He had to be around here somewhere. Did they check the clubhouse bathroom? Did they check along the bank? How about the cattails? Or a creek—wasn't there a creek around here? Did they check the road? He's a good kid, and he's got to be around here. He has got to be. Sheriff Hewitt reached through the window and squeezed Chic's shoulder. Diane was softly crying in the passenger seat.

Diane's parents showed up a few minutes later, and the four of them stood by the car waiting, watching the flashlights bob around the lake. The two men in scuba masks floated on the surface of the water. A boat was next to them, and a guy trained a flashlight on the water. A couple of other men waded in the shallow water poking cane poles in the mud. Diane looked dead-eyed, staring out over the lake. Her father kept rubbing her back and telling her it was going to be okay. Sheriff Hewitt checked on them. He couldn't bring himself to look Chic in the eye. He told them they were doing their best and that some state officers were on their way.

“It's going to be all right,” Chic said. “They're going to find him.”

Diane's eyes welled with tears.

“I have this image of him coming out of those trees over there. He's fine. Everything is going to be fine.”

Diane's father looked at Chic.

“It is,” Chic said. “It's going to be fine.”

Diane's mother hugged him.

About an hour later, Chic heard a diver on the opposite side of the lake yell, “Over here.” His voice was tiny, echoing. The flashlights raced toward him. He was standing in waist-deep
water, not far from the canoe launch, not far from the patch of cattails where they had found the abandoned boat.

A man with a cane pole waded out to him, poking the pole up and down in the water. “It's something.”

The diver went underwater and was gone for a few seconds. When he resurfaced, standing up, he cradled something, lifting it out of the water. A body. Water cascaded off of it. Lomax's body. He was wearing his socks and one scuba flipper. He squeezed the garden hose in one hand. Seaweed was stuck in his hair.

Diane's body went limp. Her father caught her and gently set her down on the grass next to the car. Diane's mother grabbed Chic to hug him, but he didn't want to be hugged. He didn't want to be touched. He stepped away from her. The diver carried Lomax out of the lake and up the muddy bank and laid him down in the grass. His son's body was lifeless like a washed-up seashell. Chic wanted to reach out to him. He wanted to touch him. He wanted to run to him and kneel down and breathe life into him. He wanted him to stand up. Stand up. But he just lay on the bank, the men surrounding him, looking down at him, shining flashlights on him. The hose was still in his hand and trailed out into the water. His son was no longer the boy pulling a briefcase behind him, the boy dressed in knickers and a paperboy hat, the boy who spent his evenings sitting on the floor of his bedroom translating Bascom's letters into English, the boy whom had once unraveled an entire baseball to get to the core, the boy who he held when he was a baby, the boy who was his son, the boy he, Chic, should have protected. Diane was right. He'd made a mistake. He'd made a lot of mistakes. How could he keep making so many mistakes? Diane's mother and father knelt next to her, hugging her, petting her hair as she cried. Chic didn't have a mother and father to console him. He had no one. He was alone, his emotions bubbling inside of him, throbbing in his chest. He felt like he was going to cry, but he couldn't let himself cry. He had to be strong. He had to be strong for Diane. She needed
him. He needed to finish the pool and be strong. That's what he needed to do now. He looked up into the night sky—the stars. His son was up there somewhere. He hoped it was a better place. It had to be better than this, a place that allowed Chic to feel alone and hurt the way he was hurting. What kind of place was this? A tear trickled down his cheek, and he wiped it away with the palm of his hand.

The morning his father died, he had gone downstairs into the kitchen after he heard someone stomping snow off their boots. His mother was crying, and Tom McNeeley told him that he should go to his room, but Chic didn't go to his room. He wanted to do something, but he didn't know what to do. He wanted to console his mother but he didn't know how to console her. His mother squeezed Tom McNeeley, hugging him, clawing at his back. She gasped as she cried, sucking in air, and Tom McNeeley whispered to her. Upstairs, Chic heard his brother come out of the bathroom and pad down the stairs. Buddy was on the verge of tears. His voice cracked. “He went behind the barn and killed himself, didn't he?”

Tom McNeeley looked at Buddy. “Go upstairs,” he said.

“That's why those men are here?” Buddy said.

“Just go upstairs,” Tom McNeeley said.

“What are we going to do now?” Buddy said. “

Just go upstairs,” Tom McNeeley said.

Chic stared at his brother. He was trying to make sense of what was happening. He tried to slow it down and stop it. But he couldn't. His brother was right: what would they do now? Out the kitchen window, he could see the snow in the field behind the house and the blue sky and the backyard tree branches swaying in the wind and the arrow of the weather vane on top of the barn pointing in the direction the wind was blowing.

 

While getting ready for the funeral, Buddy drank two Bloody Marys and smoked three cigarillos. He didn't feel drunk. He pinched his cheek to make sure. He wasn't, not yet at least. He put on a racy Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat. This was what happened when you betrayed your brother, when you violated him, when you stomped on his toes and sucker punched him in the stomach. This was the what-goes-around-comes-around.

On the drive to Roth Cemetery, Buddy thought he saw his father in the backseat. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and checked the rearview mirror. The empty road stretched out behind him. He swerved over the center line, then jerked the car back into his lane.

At the cemetery, he kept his distance, standing under the shade of a sycamore tree about fifty yards away. The hearse pulled up, and men in suits unloaded the small casket. Buddy uncapped his flask of bourbon and took a quick nip. Chic and Diane wore sunglasses and looked like they'd been ravaged by a massive wind. Diane was wearing only one shoe; she'd lost the other one while walking to the gravesite. Lijy was bringing up the rear carrying her bastard son. He didn't want to see her. He didn't even want to be within a thousand feet of her.

The funeral was officiated over by Father Eugene, a frail old man with shaky hands who continually blessed everyone and spoke in Latin. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, Diane's father squeezed Chic's shoulder while Diane unleashed a
high-pitched banshee scream that echoed out over the cemetery and made a neighborhood dog howl.

Buddy held up his flask. “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. It's gonna rain and we'll all turn to mud.” He took a pull and wiped his mouth. His father was also buried at Roth Cemetery, in the plot beside Lomax's. (The mourners were actually standing on his father's grave.) Buddy remembered his father's funeral—his mother standing with Tom McNeeley, the wind whipping off the surrounding pumpkin fields. (The fields were gone now, replaced by houses; the backyards of some of these houses abutted the cemetery: swing sets, dog houses). When his father's casket was in the hearse and no one was around for a moment, Buddy peeked inside. His father was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and red tie, his hands folded over his belt buckle. His eyes were open and he had that same look on his face that he had when the men carried him from around the barn. Buddy hated that look. It taunted him, telling Buddy that his father knew something he didn't. “What do you know?” Buddy whispered. Just then, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around. “You okay?” Tom McNeeley asked.