A Good and Happy Child (6 page)

J u s t i n E v a n s

“That must have been very difficult.”

I said nothing.

“Do you think about your father?”

I shrugged again.

Richard held his gaze on me a few moments. “Maybe we should discuss this more,” he said, “next time. I think there’s more here for us to talk about.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“Well, then, until next time.” He smiled.

I stared at him.

“Oh,” I said, finally understanding. “Do I go home now?”

“Yes, George.”

Outside, it was a chilly autumn evening. My mother’s car idled at the end of the walk. The headlights were on, exhaust curling from the muffler. The cold grabbed my neck, an icy hand. I shivered. I had the feeling that, just behind me, something had slipped out the clinic door, like the wild stray dogs that followed people down at Slopers Creek sometimes, hoping for scraps. Practically breathing on me now. I ran to the car.

That night I collapsed into bed and wrapped myself in blankets. Richard Manning’s probing had exhausted me. It also filled me with an unexpected sense of safety: I felt that, in the care of those sympathetic, sad eyes, there were certain things I could let go of, stop fretting over: if Richard handled the artificial life, I could get on with the real one. I drifted into a deep and grateful sleep.

When I awoke, it was the middle of the night, and I felt groggy. I stirred, and it took me several seconds to open my eyes. When I did, I jerked upright with a horrified gasp.

“Wha’s that?”

I sat there, chest damp, exposed and chilled. The room was entombed in darkness: the hour of night when not so much as a squeaky brake disturbed the silence. But I had seen something in an instant, a a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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single flash. A child lying next to me in the bed. Grinning, eyes narrowed in mischievous glee, chewing its fingers, wondering if it would be caught in a naughty, practical joke. I sighed. Of course—it had been my Friend.

“Are you there?” I whispered. “Are you there?”

r r r

After school. An uneventful Monday. Byrd and Toby, with their adjacent lockers, barked details to each other about an after-school basketball game. I stood watching, balancing with difficulty my French horn, lunchbox, and bookbag, waiting to be invited.

“There’s a basketball game?” I said, finally.

“Yeah,” said Toby, studiously filling his backpack. “But there are too many people already. I’m not sure I’m gonna go.”

“Oh, there are too many people?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, okay.”

A voice came into my head.

Maybe I’ll go for a walk.

“Maybe I’ll go for a walk,” I heard myself saying. Byrd’s voice dripped with contempt. “Go for it,” he said. I made my way outside and walked alone down the steep incline of Ruby Hill, past blocks of small, sooty houses. The Julius Patchett Middle School, the town’s formerly “coloredonly” school, now integrated, was named for a 1940s black minister and civic leader who had grown up on Ruby Hill—symbol of the town’s black section, the north-facing slope that descended to Main Street and the trickling creek that ran alongside it. Next to the columned mansions on Early Avenue, the homes on Ruby Hill were dollhouses. The narrow streets clung to the scrubby hillside; each lot seemed cramped between the curbs; and on a single block, prim yellow wood-framed houses with fresh paint and hanging plants might alternate with shacks, built from crates whose Sunbeam and Coca-Cola insignias remained branded on the wood.

38

J u s t i n E v a n s

Every day white kids were driven here, in Audis and Mercedes, to attend a school named for an integrationist. They came from the prosperous white sections, lined with long drives and houses with twocar garages and swimming pools and rec rooms, on streets named for Confederates—Hill Avenue or Beauregard Road. Their parents were lawyers, dentists, realtors. The old “white school” now served as the elementary school; and the high school—Preston High,
Go Hornets!
—

closed the loop of school system and social class by linking Preston students to the county—to Pumphouse Hill, Home of the Hicks. In Preston ethnography, the hicks were the black kids’ natural enemy, so it was only natural that, from a topographic perspective, Pumphouse Hill actually abutted Ruby Hill, with only a dip in the landscape and three hundred yards between them. It was equally natural that, to drive between them, you would need to circumnavigate a three-mile loop—no street connected the two. Aluminum-sided houses, studded with satellite dishes and pickup trucks, characterized Pumphouse Hill; and if the rich white kids with their white-and-watermelon turtlenecks had pretentious names such as Tobias and Violet and Byrd; and the black kids had names (female) like Tameka, Latrina, Sharnaya, with the boys seemingly all named Boo; then the hick kids, tending to the fat, had perhaps the most unintentionally comical names of all: sets of twins named Goldie and Pearl, or Earl and Erwin; and boys with such doggedly unoriginal handles as J.J., or Tex. I walked down Ruby Hill, and I felt alongside me the presence from the night in my room—my Friend. He was like a shadow, following right out of the corner of my eye. He made no noise, but as he walked behind I constantly fought the desire to jerk my head to the side and catch a glimpse of that tremor or flicker on the border of my vision.
We’ll go for a walk, and I’ll show you something.
All right.

That feeling of hyperreality came over me. Two tiny, identical, scruffy houses lay ahead, where a girl I went to school with lived with her nine brothers and sisters (lore had it the family was so large they lived in two houses). The afternoon sun struck the whitewashed walls a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

39

and they glowed a despairing yellow-gold—
Like the color of surrender,
my Friend suggested. He was filling my mind with pictures, sensations. I tried to focus on walking—the lunchbox under my arm and the French horn in my hand—but I could not keep my eyes from the yellow houses; the intensity of the color was almost overwhelming, hypnotizing; the quarter mile down Ruby Hill dragged like five. I wondered whether I would ever reach the bottom.

It’s because it’s daytime,
came the voice.
What is?

The harshness.

I reached the grounds of Early College. That campus, normally a French garden of a university—all red colonial brick and whitewashed Doric columns rising over trim lawns—became a rage of noise. They surfeited my senses: the students, young men in khakis and baseball caps boisterously crowded at picnic tables eating junk food; the bulletin boards overstapled with flyers announcing a Fiji Night or a concert by The Bar Codes; yards of chained bicycles; the boxwoods planted in banks of pine mulch, their cloying odors rising. It was too much;
Too much,
I told him, though he continued to lead me with his voice, that whisper just slightly beyond my hearing, until I reached the footbridge, and then at last the harshness and the grating colors and the noise began to peel away. I knew from my father that the bridge was the longest footbridge in the United States, a stone-and-concrete structure fifteen feet wide and some three hundred feet long, spanning the gorge dug by Slopers Creek and offering a view of the mountains that sprang up beyond the football and soccer fields of campus. That day the footbridge was empty, or nearly so; there ahead of me at the midpoint, my Friend waited for me. He stood bareheaded, his sandy hair scruffy and wild, his face obscured by a smudge. We crossed the bridge together in silence. We passed all those landmarks of order and community that the university imposed on this fringe of the countryside—its modest football gridiron, the tennis courts with their broken fences and weeds choking the pavement, the chalklined green sports fields—toward the wilder places, beyond campus. We climbed the hill on a dusty track, until the ruins of the old Revolution
40

J u s t i n E v a n s

Hall stood before us, that husk of hearth and stone wall, held together by preservationists’ wire. Beyond it was a brush of thistles and bracken and reeds, cooked brown by the autumn sun, giving way to uninterrupted miles of rolling forest.

Ready?

Okay okay okay okay.

We plunged into the brush, following a narrow dirt path. My vulnerability to sensation, here in the woods, was rewarded by heightened perception—every twig snap, fluttering bird, or subtle shift in afternoon light caught my eye and caused me to shiver with pleasure. We were tromping downward, on a path cut by cross-country runners, toward the river.
It’s about your father,
said my Friend.

What is?

All of this.
I understood at once that he meant the walk. My father and I had followed this route many times.

What about him?
I was breathless.

We were down by the James River now, at the bottom of the trail where the river opened up fat and sluggish under a thick overhang of pines. My Friend was serious, importunate, showing me yet another side of himself. Suddenly his voice was like a hiss. His blurry face was close to mine—though I could not make out its features, I sensed a grimace—and he spoke with such wild urgency it was almost a shriek.
Somebody knows what happened to your father!

I recoiled from the outburst. But the face kept coming nearer.
Somebody knows!

I put my arm up to shield myself, but felt my Friend come closer and closer, so that I fell over backward into the brush.
What do you mean, knows? Everybody knows how he died, he was sick.
Somebody knows, somebody wanted it!

The voice was loud and thin and unbearable.

Who? Who knows?

And then, in a horrible gesture I will never forget, my Friend turned—slowly, smilingly—toward the path that stretched along the a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

41

river. His voice simultaneously mocked, insinuated, and exulted into a squeaky high pitch, and he lifted a finger to point.
He’s coming this way!

I looked, in horror, but at first saw nothing. Heard nothing. My Friend had disappeared. I was alone, listening to the whisper of drying leaves in a wind and the faint rush of the river heaving along below. Then, bit by bit, I began to hear the rhythmic rustle of footsteps along the path where my Friend had indicated. I sat frozen. The rustling came closer. I squinted ahead. Suddenly a figure appeared. It
was
something from a nightmare: a towering figure in long coat. Then, it stopped. It had spotted me.

I tried getting to my feet but the underbrush made me lose traction. I heard footsteps move rapidly toward me. I scrambled to my feet and tried to run away. An iron grip seized my arm.

“George!”

I whirled around. Then I screamed.

I saw a face, strangely familiar, and yet horrible: it was ashen and flimsy, and the flesh of its cheeks seemed to quiver as if they were not quite attached to the skull underneath. It peered at me fervently, imploringly, its mouth moving but no words coming. The anatomy of the thing was horribly apparent, like a model from a biology classroom made from real human tissue by mistake: it was a study in death.
This is
what happens when you die,
a voice said inside me.
This is what your
father looked like inside his casket. Just a piece of meat that rots when you
leave it out of the fridge.
The face opened its mouth and roared. I closed my eyes. The blackness in that throat would swallow me.

“George!” it said. “George!”

“Get away!” I squeaked.

“George, what are you doing here?” The voice was familiar.

“I don’t want to see,” I said, still scrambling to get away.

“See what? George, look at me!”

I turned. The white, clouded sunlight glared. I lifted my hand to shade my eyes. Finally I was able to focus.

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J u s t i n E v a n s

Crouched over me was Tom Harris, in a bulky black overcoat with the collar turned up around his face like bats’ ears. His face was pinched and pale.

“George, it’s me, Tom!”

“You!” I said.

“Yes, me. Who did you expect?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know who to expect,” I said, a phrase that puzzled Tom Harris. “What are you doing here?”

“I come out here all the time. Clears my head, after a lecture. But what are you doing? Why did you try to get away from me just now?

Didn’t you recognize me?”

But I was not listening. What did this mean?
Somebody knows,
somebody wanted it.
Wanted what? My father to die? Tom Harris, who came to my house, who spoke to my mother about
not being alone
anymore
? At that moment, everything my Friend said suddenly made sense. I felt a wave of gratitude.

“I do now,” I said, and gave him a knowing glance. Though I had not intended them to, the words escaped with an insinuating tone. He had been trying to dislodge a stubborn leaf from my pant leg. Now he stopped. “What do you mean?” he said.

I pulled away from him and began backing away to make sure he did not follow.

“Just leave us alone,” I said.

He stood watching me, his face grave.

“Who is
us
?” he said.

But I turned and began walking, trotting, running back toward town. He called after me, following with his long stride; but whenever he caught up, I would run, so at last he simply trailed me at about twenty yards. We walked that way all the way into town. I turned several times, but he was always there, watching me, a tall figure in black following with his gangly-legged walk. At the sidewalk to my house I turned one last time. He was gone.

January, This Year

My wife lay in bed, her face in the pillow, her mass of curly black hair splaying across the bed. Street light filtered through the blinds. I smelled cigarette smoke—the night doorman, three floors down, would be pacing under the awning in his coveralls. It was between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M. Generally I knew from the noise level on Second Avenue what time of night it was. Until two, even on weeknights, revelers from the bar around the corner—cabs, trucks, garbagemen, yowling party girls stumbling home late—kept the Manhattan streets near our apartment abuzz. Between two and four, peace reigned. After four, the day slowly churned to a start again, with the buses and the delivery trucks, the commuters pouring through the bridges and tunnels. Now the apartment lay in unaccustomed quiet. I sat up in bed, listening hard. There’s nothing, I told myself. Go back to sleep. But I remained rigid. I focused on the sliver of hallway visible from the bed. Is it better to get up and check, or stay here? I asked myself.
What are you afraid of ?
came the answer.
You’re supposed to be
the man of the house. What are you going to do—shake Maggie awake and
ask her to check for noises?