“Naw, I’ll feed her tomorrow. She can wait.” Jerry laughed shrilly. “Fat cat!”
“You might not be able to get there. When do you leave? What’s your bail?”
Jerry spread a hand across his face and squeezed.
Charlie turned to the guard. “Do you know when he’ll get out of here? His trial date, or what his bail is?”
“Nope.”
Charlie turned toward the screen. “I’ll feed the cat, Jerry. Okay? Until you come home. What does it—she—eat?”
“Nine Lives,” Jerry said. “But watch for dented cans—botulism, and the chemicals, it’s all part of the same— And you’ve got to bring water in.”
“I’ll go tonight.”
“Not at night! You can’t find her at night!” Jerry started bobbing again. “I’ve got a thing going, Operation Die Marker, an anti-infestation-infiltration barrier—it’s got infrared, watchtowers, sensors. Bad idea to go at night, very bad, and if you go in tomorrow, don’t walk straight, you have to weave cloverleaf and don’t go taking a dump there ’cause I’ve got this other device that senses shit, a Shit Detector—”
“Okay, okay.” Charlie looked frantically at the guard. “He needs help—he should be at a veterans hospital where they know—”
The guard spoke into a crackling walkie-talkie. Almost instantly, the younger man who had led Charlie in appeared on the other side of the screen, where he turned Jerry’s face toward him and, in an almost tender manner, held it still, his hand clamping Jerry’s chin. “
Shut up
, Silva. I didn’t finish my tour to listen to this crap.”
“You heard of punji stakes?” Jerry asked him with the enthusiasm of a collector. “I once knew this guy who—”
“
Pare-o!
” The guard let go of his face and stepped back. “
Está mentalmente doente!
Pare conversa sobre la guerra! Pare-o!
”
Jerry answered back in a rapid stream of Portuguese. Another whole language, he had; it shouldn’t have surprised Charlie, but it did.
Casa
, he heard (was it
house
, as in Spanish?), but other than that, he couldn’t pick out a thing.
“What did he say?” Charlie asked the younger guard when Jerry finally stopped. “Did he say ‘house’?”
“He’s just ranting.”
“Jerry, listen. I’ll feed your cat”—Charlie stepped close to the screen and Jerry’s face—“and keep the indigo macaw safe. Okay?”
Jerry met his eyes and nodded, and what passed between them was a slower, more labored version of the look they’d exchanged on the side of the road in June—
Help me, follow, help
—but something else now too: not knowledge of each other, exactly, but knowledge’s bent cousin, shadowy and wordless, an animal low to the ground. Jerry’s eyes were bloodshot but also liquid brown and full of pained intelligence. Charlie, holding steady, held his gaze.
Why, of all the people in the world, did you have to take up with a nutcase?
It was the rarest kind of seeing, being seen.
JERRY’S PLACE WAS NOT A
rustic one-room cabin in the woods. It had no stump for a table, no roll-up bed. The clearing where it stood was surrounded on all sides by brambles, just about as hidden as any place in southeast Massachusetts in 1970 could be. There was a small vegetable garden, but everything in it, save for a few tomatoes overripe on the vine, was dead. All around, for a good half mile in every direction, Jerry had posted a series of misleading markers, painted arrows nailed to trees, signs reading This Way, even Welcome, each one sending the intruder (it might have been a prank out of Lewis Carroll) the wrong way, or no way at all.
All that, though, was farther in. As he first entered the woods, Charlie saw just the familiar sight of trees, undergrowth, and to his left the bulldozer site with its piles of dirt and downed trees, now ringed by yellow Keep Out tape. He’d waited until the late afternoon when the workers had gone home, filled his backpack with cat food, a can opener, a thermos of water, an apple. He’d walked to the spot where he always dropped Jerry off, looked both ways down the road—no one—and darted into the woods. Now, as he followed a rough farm road until an arrow painted on a piece of plywood directed him to take a right, a calm settled over him. Passing through a small clearing, he came upon a rusty old car near what looked like the concrete top of an old well, and beyond it, a brook with skunk cabbage rising, prehistoric, from its marshy banks. There, the mosquitoes and deerflies found him. Swatting, he followed the first arrow to the second, which circled back to the first.
“Here,” Charlie said aloud every few minutes as he walked. “Here kitty, here kittykittykittycat!” Jerry hadn’t told him the cat’s name, and now he wished he’d thought to ask. He must have circled for nearly half an hour before he finally stumbled upon an old fence, the cheap roll-up kind, mud-red slats held together by wire and peeling with age. It was partially hidden by a camouflage screen made from cut boughs. Gingerly, he followed it for some fifty feet until it ended, simply ended, barricading nothing, keeping nothing in and nothing out.
And there, a clearing, the grass uncut and scratchy, up to his knees. To the right stood a ramshackle building—a broken-down stable, maybe, long and low. To the left, a crater of a stone foundation, filled with grass now, and a lone white pine sapling. He walked over to the building, opened a rough wooden door. The place seemed deserted, old hay still on the floor of the open stalls. A bird flew from out the rafters and exited in a clean shot through a hole in the roof. He walked along the row of stalls, kicked a can out of his path, found a rusty horseshoe and put it in his backpack. “Kitty,” he called again. “Cat. Kitty-cat. Here kitty kitty, here?”
Jerry’s house—home? hovel?—turned out to be well beyond the other end of the clearing, after the terrain became wooded again. Charlie might have missed it were it not for a tin smokestack poking up, weak sunlight glancing off the silver tube. To get there, he had to lie on his stomach and crawl, pushing through what was not much more than a rabbit trail, a passageway all green, brown and yellow, all scratch and push; his stomach itched, his backpack slowed him down. Around this corner, what, around this corner, who? Finally, the tunnel ended and he looked up to see another plywood sign—“Jerry Silva, Lord of 10,000 Acres”—and behind that a smaller clearing, and in it, finally, the place where Jerry lived.
It was an old metal milk truck with the wheels removed, painted army fatigue green so that it blended into the bush, but you could still see some letters through the paint—an
S
, a
V
. Next to the truck was a small round fireplace rimmed with stones, and behind it a heap of cans, mostly Buds—and empty whiskey bottles. Behind the milk truck, on the other side, a foul smell, and there (he gagged) a bucket full of shit, a cloud of flies. On the third side of the truck, two wide, neatly sawed off, upright log stools (finally, something he had imagined), set up near each other as if ready to host a conversation, and a woodpile, wedge and ax. Charlie came back around the truck toward the door and was stopped by another sign—“Do Not Enter, Signed J.S., Guardian of 10,000 Acres Master of None.”
“Cat?” His voice returned, tentative. “Are you inside? I’m—what the hell—I’m coming in.”
He ducked into the truck, his eyes adjusting. It was tiny in there, and strange. One small window, high on the wall, let in a slice of dusty light, but the front and side windows were covered with green garbage bags. He pushed the door farther open to let in more light and dilute the rank smell. Jerry’s bed was an old cot mattress on the floor. On it lay a sleeping bag, faded green and lined with red flannel covered with deer and hunters—the kind of bag a boy would take to camp. Instead of a pillow, a pile of clothes. Instead of a table, an overturned oil drum—and on it, a food-encrusted plate and spoon. There was a flashlight; he turned it on. There was a woodstove, the stovepipe rising through a hole cut in the roof. In one corner, fishing net hung, creating a hammock for more clothes. And other things, details he would remember years later, mostly for how they didn’t add up. A diagram, drawn on the wall in black Magic Marker—lines labeled “a,” “b,” “c,” leading to a jarlike shape. Below it, a piece of delicate embroidered linen was affixed with masking tape. On the floor next to the bed, a pink girdle, lacy and muddy, and a potholder appliquéd with yellow balloons. Two bowls, one empty, one half full of murky water.
Had Jerry done this all alone? Had somebody helped him, or had he come upon the place unoccupied but furnished (such as it was), or had it been his father’s—a hideaway or hunting shack? There had clearly been a farm here once, and here, maybe, its milk truck, left to rot. Reclaimed. On the floor, Charlie found a bag, and in it a bar of soap, a pair of new work gloves, a prayer card of Saint Francis flocked by birds:
O Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace.
Then the books, housed in crates. A few were library books:
Silent Spring
, Emerson, a how-to book on electrical wiring, another on trapping. These, dutifully, Charlie put in his backpack to return. There were dog-eared thrillers, a book on foraging for native plants, a mushroom guide, a few tattered copies of
Playboy
(he opened one, felt a stirring, put down the magazine). A
Time
magazine with Barry Commoner on the cover. But it was the last book in the second crate that stopped him short. The
Social Register
, black and red, dated Summer 1968. His parents received one in the mail every year, his grandparents too. His own family was listed in it, he had always assumed, though he didn’t actually know how it worked. Did you have to be from a Mayflower family? To make or have inherited a certain amount of money? The
Register
was, to him, like an outdated encyclopedia set—part of the furniture; he’d seen the book but never looked inside. But to find it here, to see it here. Had Jerry taken it from a house in Ashaunt?
Look at Dilatory Domiciles Always to Ensure Accuracy
, read the small print on the cover. Was the milk truck (Red House, Big House, Portable) a dilatory domicile?
He had just sat down on the mattress and begun to look up his family in the
Register
when something rushed through the door and brushed against his leg. By his feet, a plump gray-and-white cat opened its mouth to show its tongue. As Charlie put down the book, the cat sprang toward the door. He stepped outside to see its tail disappear into the brush. From his backpack, he took out a handful of kibble and scattered it on the ground, then filled a bowl with water and sat back to wait. And there, again, was the cat, trotting toward the food. She ate the kibble. He ate his apple. He opened a can of 9Lives; she ate, cocked her head, meowed. “Meow,” he answered and put out more kibble. The cat ate that too, then lapped the water in the bowl.
She was mottled gray and white, missing part of one ear, with a broad, suspicious face, but when she’d finished eating she came up and rubbed against his leg. She circled his calves, weaving, flicking her tail, stopping to look at him through slitted yellow eyes. Finally, he bent and picked her up. Through her bulk, her heart beat fast against his hand. She scrabbled up his chest, climbed her front legs over his shoulder and lay draped over him, a living stole, until a noise—a squirrel in the branches? a cop?—put both of them on high alert. Then, digging her claws through his shirt into his skin, the cat tried to spring away—he yelped in pain—but he tightened his grip and held her fast and took her home.
W
HAT BEA HAD
not known before her trip to Forfar was that homesickness was like a virus lying dormant; it could be housed inside you for years, attached—or so you might think—to a single person, a mother in this case, hers (why go back if she was gone?), only to be woken by a place itself. Bea had thought herself more or less indifferent to location; it was people she cared about, children, friends, good-natured men who could make her laugh. She had never been particularly moved by either landscape or mortar, but now she couldn’t stop thinking about the shape of the Angus hills, the shades of green, the streets of Forfar, which she had started walking in her mind.
Also houses, the insides especially. She and Agnes had always enjoyed leafing through the home-decorating magazines—she for the crafts and colors, Agnes because she liked picturing herself or the characters in her romance novels living in this house or that. But now, as they sat in one of their rooms or on the Big House porch in the August heat, it was adverts they read.
Seaside cottage for sale. Condo. retirees, all amen, free pkng, pool
. In Dartmouth and Fall River, Westport, even Rhode Island, the ads on leaflets left in the mailbox with grocery store flyers or printed in the classifieds. They learned to read the codes—
2b/1b/hwf/gh
—and translate the descriptions:
Handyman’s project
(piece of rubbish).
Up and coming neighborhood
(unsafe for ladies on their own). And the ones that truly played on your emotions:
Victorian cottage, Pfct for 2. Gardener’s Delight. Empty Nesters’ Dream. Lil Piece of Paradise.
It was a game, a sort of amusement, though they both knew without saying to fold the pages over if anyone came by. The prices were shocking at first, then a little less so, but it was a pipe dream anyway, so didn’t matter. Why would they want to buy here, where the winters were raw and everyone they knew was far away? Better in New Jersey or even Scotland. In their more sober moments, they agreed that it might not be the worst idea to consider someday having a place of their own, for what was money for, if not to spend wisely (so said Agnes), and real estate seemed the most, well,
real
investment, a house being something you could enjoy in a daily way, as well as a roof over your head. Money, even her own, still remained a bit abstract to Bea. After a childhood of her parents fretting about it, she was glad it was not a worry for her, but beyond that, she paid it little mind. It was Agnes who read and filed the investment account reports that first Mr. P. and now Paul gave them each month. Bea just signed where she was told to on the tax forms, though she kept her savings and checking account ledgers herself, using the money for gifts, clothing and incidentals, with a bit left over each month.