B
ECAUSE OF THE SHABBY CHARACTER
of the boy's mother and also that of the man she had married the very day she found herself legally divorced and able to marry again, and because the two had determined to live far away from New Hampshire without even bothering to send him their address until several years later, Tom had raised Buddy practically by himself. And he had seen his son through hard times, especially as the boy got older, such as when he was in the service that one year and later when he got himself beat up by the guy with the baseball bat and spent six months flat on his back in Tom's trailer learning how to talk again. So of course when Tom walked into the Hawthorne House for a beer, even though, after the bright afternoon sunlight outside, he wasn't used to the darkness inside, he recognized the boy right away. You can do that with your children, you can tell who they are even in darkness, when all you can see of them is their height and the position they happen to be standing in. You just glance over, and you say, Oh yeah, there's my son.
Tom didn't know the girl with him, though. Not even when he drew close to her and could see her face clearly in the dim light of the bar. She was sitting alone in the booth next to the juke box where Buddy stood studying the songs. Tom could tell she was with Buddy and not alone because of the way she watched him while he studied the names of the songs on the juke box. It was the way girls always watched Buddy, as if they couldn't believe he wasn't going to disappear from in front of them any secondâjust poof! and he'd be gone, a curling thread of smoke hanging in the air where a second ago he had been smiling and chattering in that circular way of his. Nobody knew where Buddy got it from, his good looks and that way he had of talking so interestingly that people hated to see him come to a stop or ask a question, even, because his mother Maggie, Tom's ex-wife, had been pretty (back when she was Buddy's age, that is) but she had never been as outstandingly good-looking as Buddy was, and Tom, even though he had a square and regular-featured face, was not the kind of man you'd compliment for his looks, and of course neither Tom nor his ex-wife owned what you'd call a gift for gab, especially not Tom, who usually seemed more interested in listening than in talking anyway.
Tom walked past the girl, who looked to be around twenty-five, which made her four years older than Buddy and which was also usual for him. The girl was dark haired and pretty, but actually more stylish than pretty when you got up close, with a round face and grim little mouth. Her short hair was all kinked up in a way that was fashionable just then, which made her somewhat resemble a dandelion, until you looked into her eyes and saw that she was awfully worried about something. You couldn't tell what it was, exactly, but it was clear that she was not at peace with her circumstances.
Tom stopped behind his son and next to the bar, and as he moved up to the bar, he reached out and absently tapped his son on the shoulder, and the boy turned around and smiled nicely. Tom didn't smile back, he didn't even look at Buddy. He looked across at Gary the bartender who also owned the place and ordered a bottle of beer.
“You're keeping your door locked now, Dad,” Buddy said, as if Tom didn't realize it.
“I know.” Tom turned around and faced him.
Buddy reached out and shook his father's hand. “This here's Donna,” he said, nodding toward the girl. “Donna picked me up outside Portland on the Maine Pike, and we sorta got to be friends in a very short order, which is certainly nice for me because I'm nothing special and you can see that she is.”
Donna gave Tom a thin smile, and she did not look like a person who was glad to find herself where she was finding herself, stopped in a dingy, mill town New Hampshire barroom to have a chat with her new boyfriend's father. Tom didn't give a damn about her, though, one way or the other. If she wanted to drive all over the countryside in her Japanese car just because she thought Buddy looked good beside her, it didn't matter to Tom, because women were always doing things like that, and so were men.
“How long you in town this time?” Tom asked his son. Gary the bartender delivered the bottle of beer, and Tom turned back to the bar and drank off half the bottle. He was feeling weighted and metallic inside, as if his stomach were filled with tangled stovepipe-wire, because even though Buddy was his son and he could recognize him in the darkness, he didn't like it when he saw him. Not anymore.
“So, Dad, you're keeping your door locked nowadays,” he said again.
Tom was silent for a few seconds and did not look at the boy. “That's right. Ever since you left and took with you every damned thing of mine you could fit into that duffle of yours. My tape deck, tapes. You even took my cuff links. I must be stupid.” He finished off the bottle of beer and Gary automatically slid a second over. Gary was a tall, skinny, dark-haired man with a toothpick in his mouth that made him look wiser than he probably was. He was the fourth owner of the bar in the last ten years.
Once again, Buddy smiled in that easy way he had, like a summer sun coming up, and Tom felt his stomach clank and tangle. “C'mon, Dad, I only
borrowed
that stuff. I only planned to be gone for the weekend, me and Bilodeau, that kid from Concord. It was a weekend, the weather suddenly got warm, you probably don't remember, but it did, and we were planning to chase some girls Bilodeau knew over on the coast near Kittery. But things just got screwed up, and before the weekend was over, we ended up going in different directions with different people. You know how it goes⦔ He showed Tom both his palms, as if to prove he wasn't hiding anything.
“That was last April.” Tom knew his son was lying, and there was no damned sense trying to catch him out or somehow prove the boy was lying or get him to admit it, because he'd just go on lying, topping one lie with another, canceling one out with a new one, on and on, until you just gave up out of fatigue and boredom. He was one of those people who are always ready to go a step further than anyone else, and after a while you could see that about him, so you'd stop, and he'd be standing there just ahead of you, smiling back. It was almost as if he didn't know the difference between right and wrong.
“April?” the girl said. She lit a cigarette and looked at Buddy through the smoke. “So what's been happening since April? This is June,” she observed, as if she had got a glimpse, from the conversation between the father and son, of what might be in store for her if she went ahead with her plans and hooked up for a while with this good-looking, smooth-talking, slender young man. It had probably started out as a whim, picking up and spending the weekend with a guy she'd seen hitchhiking in Maine. It would make a funny story she could tell on herself to her friends in Boston or Hartford or wherever she had originally been headed. But now things were starting to look a little off-center to her, not quite lined up, which is how it always was with Buddy, how it always had been. He was so damned good-looking, all white teeth and high cheekbones and quick-sloping narrow nose and deep blue eyes, the all-American boy, and he talked sweetly and in a strangely elaborate way, all in circles and curls that kept you listening, so that pretty soon you forgot what it was you were planning on doing and instead you plugged into his plans, but then someplace down along the line, things started to look a little bit off-center, as if a couple of basic pieces hadn't been cut right. And you couldn't tell which pieces were off, because the whole damned thing was off.
Buddy peered down at her as if he couldn't quite place her. “What's been happening since April?” he asked. “You really want to know?”
“No. Not really. It just seemed a funny thing, that's all⦔
“Funny. What's funny?” Buddy asked. Tom watched the two carefully from the bar.
“Nothing,” the girl said. “Forget it.” She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them, her expression had changed, as if she had turned Buddy into a total stranger, as if she were seeing him for the first time all over again but this time with the knowledge of him that she had gained since morning, when she first saw him at the Portland exit with his thumb out and his duffle and suitcase on the road beside him.
“Forget funny?” Buddy said, smiling broadly. “Who can forget funny?” He turned away from the girl and faced his father and suddenly started talking to him. “Listen, Dad, that's why I stopped down at the trailer before I came up here. To give your stuff back, I mean. Hey, I couldn't do it way the hell up there in Maine among the trees and lakes, and then Donna here was nice enough to drive all this distance out of her way just to help me drop these things off at your place, before we resume our wanderings. Listen, Dad, since April I been way the hell out on a narrow neck of land in northern Maine, working on a lobster boat.” He had laid a hand on his father's shoulder.
Tom didn't believe a word the boy said. He had decided long ago, as policy, not to believe anything his son told him. And that, he told himself, was one of the reasons he kept his trailer locked now, for the first time in his entire life. You're supposed to love your son and trust him and protect him, and while that would have been easy for Tom, it always had been, this new way of treating him was a burden, and he hated it. For years Tom had loved his son and trusted him and protected him, behaving precisely the way he knew the boy's mother, his ex-wife Maggie, would not have behaved. Maggie would have let the boy down. Maggie wouldn't have been home that night the state troopers brought him home all drunk and raving, and the boy would have ended up in jail. Maggie wouldn't have known how to handle it when he got his head bashed in by that guy with the baseball bat in Florida. She would have let him rot in that charity ward in the Florida hospital before she'd have brought him home, set him up on the living room couch in front of the TV, and then every night for six months taught the boy how to talk again, until finally he could make those looping, charming sentences of his again, and people would sit back in their chairs and listen with light smiles on their faces to see such a clever, good-looking young man perform for them. Maggie never would have borne up under the weight of Buddy, Tom knew. The proof of her weakness, if he'd ever needed proof, he'd obtained the summer Buddy turned twelve, when he had taken the boy by Greyhound all the way to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit his mother, at her request, while he, the father, took a two-week holiday alone farther west, visiting Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm and Universal Studios and watching the surfers at Huntington Beach, the only time he had ever seen real live surfers. When the two weeks were up and Tom had called back at Phoenix for his son, things had changed, and he left the boy in Phoenix, at the boy's request, presumably for good (at least that was Maggie's and her husband's intention and Buddy's as well). Tom returned to New Hampshire, and didn't hear anything from his son until September, when the boy showed up at the trailer. She had put him alone on a Boston-bound bus in Phoenix connecting to another bus to Concord, New Hampshire, and the boy, more travel-wise by then than he'd been in June, had hitchhiked the twenty-five remaining miles home. No, for Maggie it was the love and the trust and the protection that made the burden. For Tom, the burden was in withholding that love, trust and protection. That's what he believed.
For it wasn't simply Buddy's stealing his father's belongings that had turned the man against him, though of course that helped. And it wasn't that the boy seemed incapable of telling the truth about anything (he would lie when there was nothing to be gained by it, he lied for the sheer pleasure of lying, or so it seemed, and if you asked him was it raining outside, he'd look out the window, see that it was raining and say no, not yet, and when you stepped out the door into the rain, you'd turn around and look at Buddy, and he'd say with great delight that it must have started raining that very second). And it wasn't that the boy was reckless and troublesome, that he seemed incapable of avoiding the kind of person who happened at that moment to want to hurt someone, especially someone young and pretty and mouthy. Buddy would find himself in a bar, the Hawthorne House, say, next to a crossed-up truck driver or some hide-stacker from the tannery, and he would do everything he could think of to make himself look even younger, prettier and mouthier than he was, and of course he'd end up getting himself thrashed for it. And then somehow he'd get himself back to the trailerpark, and he'd drag himself to the door, swing open the door and fall into the living room, where his father would be sitting in front of the TV with a can of beer in his hand and the open newspaper on his lap.
“Buddy! What in hell's happened now?”
“Oh, Daddy, did I ever get myself into one this time! They got some mean and dirty-fighting rattle-snaking bad-ass cowboys hanging out nowadays at the Hawthorne House, and it's just not your family restaurant anymore.”
No, it wasn't any of those actions and attitudes and incapacities that had turned Tom against his son, had made him lock his door against his boy. In fact, if anyone had asked him why, Tom, have you suddenly gone and turned against your boy after all those years of standing by him, Tom would not have been able to answer. All he knew was that it had begun for him about a week after Buddy left this last time, back in April. Right off, Tom noticed that his son had taken with him his tape deck, tapes, a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey, his cuff links, two shirts, and probably a dozen more possessions that he wouldn't find out about until he needed them and went looking for them. He merely observed that once again his son had made off with everything of his that he could lay his hands on, and he was, once again, glad that none of it was irreplaceable. Nothing Tom owned was irreplaceable, even though that was not by intention. In recent years he had worked off and on as an escort driver for a mobile home manufacturer in Suncook, hiring out with his own pickup truck and CB radio, usually as the lead man, the one with the sign
WIDE LOAD FOLLOWING
on the front of his truck, and before that he had driven an oil delivery truck, so while he had always made enough to house and feed and clothe himself and his one child, he hadn't made much more than that. Certainly he had never made enough money to buy anything that was irreplaceable.