The Tin Can Tree (27 page)

Mrs. Pike and Simon came out of the dining room, Mrs. Pike’s hand still on Simon’s shoulder. She said, “We called collect. I’m sure you’re relieved to hear that,” and then laughed a little and looked down at Simon. “They’re going to relay the message to Simon’s daddy,” she said.

“Well, I’m glad you got through to them,” said Clara. “Will you have a seat?”

“Oh, we couldn’t. I’m sorry, I know I haven’t said two words to you. Mr. Green, it’s nice to see you.” She advanced, smiling, heading straight for James’s father and holding out one plump hand. He had to rise from his rocker to take it. She said, “You’re smaller-boned than James or Ansel. But you’ve got Ansel’s fair skin.” The way she spoke of him made him seem like a child being compared to his parents, but he smiled graciously back.

“James gets his skin from his mother,” he told her.

“I guessed that.”

“He’s back in this house now.”

Clara said, “Mrs. Pike, I wish you’d sit down and have some lemonade.”

“No, we really can’t. I have to get Simon home—and
I do thank you for taking care of him.” She said that directly to Clara, and Clara smiled at her with her narrow, gaunt smile. “He don’t
usually
run away, I don’t want you thinking—”

“He’s too young to be on his own,” said Mr. Green.

“He’s
not
on his own.”

“James used to run away.” He sat down in his rocker and looked up at her, staring out from under white arched eyebrows. Mrs. Pike waited, and then when she saw that he wasn’t going to continue she turned to the others.

“I thank my Lord we found him,” she said. “I feel it’s some kind of sign; I’ve been let off with a warning.” She squeezed Simon tight against her, and he smiled at the middle button of her dress and then broke away.

James stood up, preparing to leave, and Mrs. Pike said, “James, I thought we could go back by bus. You probably want to stay on a bit, now you’re here.”

“No, I’ll drive you back,” said James. He crossed over to his father and said, “I guess I’ll be going.”

“We still have your old bed,” said his father, but he seemed to know beforehand that James would say no. He rose again from the rocker, very slowly, and shook James’s hand while he looked at the floor. It was a small, clean hand, that offered no resistance when James pressed it. To Mrs. Pike, James’s father said, “It began when he was four. He ran everywhere.”

“What?” asked Mrs. Pike.

“James.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m glad to’ve met you, Mr. Green—” and she shook his hand once more, holding her wrist slightly curved and offering just the tips of her
fingers. “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done; any time you’re in Larksville you just stop in on us.”

“We locked doors and tied knots,” said Mr. Green, “but he was like Houdini.”

Mrs. Pike shook hands with Claude and Clara and made Simon do the same, and James followed behind them. He shook Claude’s hand but Clara he kissed, feeling that she would prefer that. Her cheek was bonier than he had expected, and the skin dry. She would probably never get married, he thought. None of them would.

When they went out the door his father followed them, and stood on the porch in his slippers. “Well, goodbye, James,” he said. “You’ll be back someday, I expect.” But his smile when he looked up at James was timid and uncertain, and James smiled back.

“Tell Madge hello for me,” he said.

“All right.”

They climbed into the pickup at the edge of the yard-Mrs. Pike at the window, and Simon in the middle next to James. Simon said, “Hey, James, can I steer?” but James was starting the engine up and didn’t answer. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw his father still standing on the porch, his arms hugging his chest, his knees bagging, his small white head strained toward the truck. As long as James took getting started, his father remained there, and when he drove away Mr. Green lifted one arm for a goodbye and stayed that way until the truck was out of sight. James drove staring straight ahead for a while, holding that picture of his father in his mind.

When they had turned into the center of Caraway again, Mrs. Pike said, “It’s a nice town, isn’t it?”

“Some ways,” James said.

“Yes.” And she settled back, one hand patting the back of Simon’s neck. Simon was restless and fidgety after all his adventures. He sat on the edge of the seat, kicking one foot nervously and gritting his jaw in that way he had when he’d had too much excitement. The passing streetlights gleamed briefly on his face and then left it dark again, and his eyes were strained wide against the night.

“Sit back in your seat,” James told him.

“I am.”

“No, you’re not. You’ll go through the windshield.”

“Yes, Simon,” said his mother, and pulled him back. Simon leaned against her side, still kicking that one foot.

“James,” he said, “will we ever go back visiting there?”

“I don’t know.”

“I better tell Ansel.”

“Tell him what?”

“I bet New York is better any day.”

“Well, maybe so,” James said.

“Those earrings were just teeny gold wires, you know? And there
weren’t
no feather hats.”

“Well, that was just one summer they had those,” James said. “Some kind of free sample.”

“Why didn’t he tell me that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did he say it was all year every year?”

“Go to sleep,” said James. “I don’t know.”

J
oan arrived at the Pikes’ house in Mr. Carleton’s taxi, rattling over the gravel road in pitch dark with the taxi’s one headlight making a swerving yellow shaft in front of them. Her suitcases were on the back seat, where they bounced around at every bump in the road, and she sat up front with Mr. Carleton but she didn’t talk to him. Twice he tried to begin a conversation. He started off the first time with, “Well, now. Well, now. I didn’t know you were even
gone
, Miss Joan.” And when she didn’t answer that, except for a single motion of her head that might have been a nod, he rode on in silence for a while and then tried again. “Wherever you were,” he said, “I sure hope the weather was good.” But Joan’s face was turned away from him, and she went on looking out the window without even changing expression.

When they turned into the Pikes’ yard Joan sat up and opened her straw handbag. She didn’t look toward the house. Mr. Carleton said, “Some kind of party?” and then she heard the noises that were floating from Ansel’s window. Music, and voices, and someone laughing. The light from that window flooded the yard, fading out the pale yellow of the taxi’s headlight. The rest of the house was dark. “I don’t know,” she said,
and reached forward to hand him his money. “Don’t worry about my bags; I’ll take them in.”

“They look pretty heavy for you.”

“I can take them.”

He climbed out his side of the taxi to drag the bags from the back seat. Somehow the bag that had been her father’s had had a strap broken; the strap dangled, looking ridiculous and defeated. When Mr. Carleton handed the bag to her she swayed for a minute, surprised by the weight of it, and then she said, “Okay. I’ve got it.”

“You sure now.”

“Sure. Thank you, Mr. Carleton.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said. “Good night.” He climbed back into the taxi, slamming the door behind him, and backed out into the road. Joan started for the porch.

The suitcases were hard to get up the steps. She swung them onto the porch one at a time, and then she climbed the steps herself and picked them up again. This all felt so familiar; how many times had she lugged these suitcases into this house? She thought of the first time, coming here in a dust storm, met on the steps by Janie Rose who wore nothing but her underpants and carried one half of a brown rubber sheet that they hadn’t been able to get away from her in those days. Now there was no one at all to meet her. When she opened the front door the house was so empty it seemed to echo. She turned on a lamp, and it threw long, black, lonely shadows across the parlor walls.

The first thing she did was put her suitcases back in her bedroom. Whether they had noticed she was gone or not, she didn’t want them to come back and find those suitcases. Then she closed her bedroom door and went directly to Simon’s room. He wasn’t there. The
room was black and the door was open, and everything had a strange blank look.

Downstairs, she poured herself a glass of milk from the refrigerator and then wandered through the rooms drinking the milk and switching on every light she came across. Soon all in the house were on, but it didn’t seem to change things. When the motor in the refrigerator started up she jumped a little, half frightened for a second. Then she set down the glass of milk and walked very slowly and deliberately out of the house, with that feeling of loneliness prickling the back of her neck as she walked.

The way the music was pouring out, she couldn’t identify the voices from Ansel’s window. All she heard was words and phrases, and occasional laughter. She stopped at the Potters’ window and peered in, but not a single light glimmered there, not even from the very back of the house. They couldn’t be far, then. If they planned to be gone for any length of time they turned all the lamps on and sat up a cardboard silhouette of a man reading that was guaranteed to fool burglars. And they couldn’t be in bed; it was no later than ten o’clock. She turned away from the window and looked out at the yard, hoping they might come walking up, but they didn’t. The only thing left to do was to go on to Ansel’s.

No one answered when she knocked. It was too noisy for them to hear her. She opened the screen and knocked once more on the inner door, hard, and then she heard Ansel say, “Wait! Did someone knock?”

“I didn’t hear anyone,” said Miss Lucy.

Joan knocked again, and Ansel said, “See!” She felt the doorknob twist beneath her hands; then Ansel was standing there, swaying slightly and smiling at her,
leaning his cheek against the edge of the door. “Came back, did you,” he said.

“What?”

“
I
saw you go.”

“I don’t—”

“But I didn’t tell,” he said, and then swung the door all the way open and threw back one arm to welcome her. “Look what
we
got!” he called to the others. “
Who
we got. See?”

Joan stepped inside and looked around her. The room was full; it looked as if someone had tipped the house endwise so that everyone had slid down to James’s parlor. Now they sat in one smiling, rumpled cluster—the Potter sisters, the Pikes, Ansel, and James. When Ansel shouted at them they all turned toward Joan and waved, with their faces calm and friendly. The only one who seemed surprised was Simon. He stood up and said, “Joan!” but she frowned at him. “Hush,” she said. The voices rose again, returning to whatever they’d been talking about before. Simon shouted, “What?”

“I said,
‘Hush’!
” called Joan.

“Oh, I didn’t tell. It was like I promised you, I didn’t—”

The rest of his words were drowned out, but Joan understood his meaning. Nobody had told. Maybe they thought she’d just been to a movie, or off visiting. Maybe they knew that wherever she’d gone, she’d be back. And now they sat here, cheerful and in a party mood—but what was the party about? Just by looking, she couldn’t tell. Miss Lucy and Miss Faye were making a silhouette of James—Miss Lucy holding a lamp up so that James winced in the light of it, and Miss Faye tracing the shadow of his wincing profile on a sheet of paper held against the wall. But that was
something they always did; some instinct seemed to push them into making silhouettes at parties, and now everyone in the house had at least one silhouette of everyone else. Nor could she tell anything from Mr. Pike, who seemed to be a little tiddly from some wine he was drinking out of a measuring cup. He sat smiling placidly at something beyond Joan’s range of vision, tapping one finger against the cup in time to a jazz version of “Stardust” that the radio was sawing out. And the person who confused her
most
was Mrs. Pike, sitting in a chair in the corner with her hands folded but her eyes alert to everything that was going on. “Fourteen!” she called out; she seemed to be counting the swallows Simon took from his own glass of wine. But her voice was lost among all the other voices, and Joan had to read her lips. She turned to Ansel, to see if he could explain all this. He had lain back on his couch now, like an emperor at a Roman festival, and when he saw her look his way he smiled and waved.

“Have a seat!” he shouted. He pointed vaguely to several chairs that were already occupied. “We’re celebrating.”

“Oh,” Joan said. “Celebrating.”

“Simon ran away.”

“
What?
”

Simon smiled at her and nodded. “I went to Caraway on a bus,” he said.

“Oh, Simon.”

“I saw those gold earrings.”

“But how did—”

“James and Mama came and got me. They made a special trip,” he said. “We’re drinking Miss Faye’s cooking wine.”

Joan felt behind her for a footstool and sat down on it. “Are you all
right
?” she asked.

“Sure I am.”

“Oh, I wish I hadn’t gone off and—”