Blood Ties (14 page)

So the family traveled around, living like gypsies. Young Stephen could remember Lawton, Oklahoma; Crockett, Texas; Jefferson City, Missouri; Mound City, Arkansas; Peoria, Illinois; Scottsdale, Arizona, and a dozen other places, big and small.

His mother was only a vague smear of recollection, disconnected from specific events or time. A story about a fox and a rabbit, the details of which were as indistinct as a Monet haystack. The pressure of her hand against his cheek. A thin scar on her thumb—whether right or left he could no longer recall.

He remembered the sound of her voice. “Come on, Stevie Boy. Time for bed. Did you remember to brush your teeth?” Even after twenty-five years he heard it in his dreams. He remembered her face, and the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled.

The memory of her smile was vivid. She seemed hardly able to look at him without smiling.

When Stephen was seven, she simply disappeared. His father told him she had left, didn't love them anymore, had gone away. Her son had cried and cried but, finally, inevitably, had accepted it all as true. He and his father had continued their travels.

Schools were places you wandered in and out of. Some of them were like concentration camps but, never mind, you would soon be gone and this or that town would fade into memory. Only the road was real.

They lived in rented houses, usually a mile or so outside of town, sometimes near a wood or surrounded by cornfields. They were lonely places, with no one else nearby.

And the life father and son lived in those houses was strange and silent—strange perhaps only in memory, but the silence he remembered as something almost tangible. There were no visitors. There were only the two of them, and his father was a difficult man to approach.

The silence made him miss his mother all the more. It was as if her departure had dropped him into a dark place where he was utterly alone.

And the houses were always cold, always sunless, even in summer. Was this also just a trick of recollection? Was the cold something to be read on a thermometer, or was it merely a projection of his state of mind? He could no longer be sure.

What sustained him? His memories of his mother, who had loved him. That love was not a myth he had created for himself. It had been a fact of daily life.

And because he knew his mother had loved him, he began to suspect his father's scanty version of her disappearance from their lives.

“She just took off,” he said. “She packed up her clothes and went. Maybe she got in with some fella she liked better'n us.

“Now don't ever ask me any more questions, because I don't like to think about it.”

By the time he was nine years old, or perhaps ten, Stephen had worked out for himself that his father was lying. His mother would never have left him behind. Therefore, she had been driven away, or had herself been left behind or she was dead.

And there had been no scene, no tears or shouting. Only silence.

It was not that Stephen didn't love his father. He could no more stop loving his father than he could stop breathing. So his conclusions were drawn reluctantly. They were forced upon him by his attempts to find some order in his life, some coherent explanation of events.

And they did not obsess him, at least not until he began to push against adolescence. He had plenty of other things to think about.

Occasionally his father would take him along to jobs, and he taught his son the elements of many different crafts. His father was a good teacher: orderly, precise and patient. Those were good times.

At other times Stephen would be alone in the empty house. His father wouldn't come home for dinner, wouldn't come home until the next day, once in a while wouldn't come home for two or three days together. There was never any explanation.

Stephen could take care of himself. He could cook, in an elementary way, and he cleaned up after himself because his father hated a mess.

What he feared, above all else, was abandonment. Would his father finally not come back at all? Was that what had happened to his mother? Had he simply left her somewhere?

And the world in which he would be alone was such a fearful place. He knew this from the newspapers.

Wherever they happened to be, his father always brought home the local papers. It was his evening entertainment, to spread them out on the kitchen table and read them. Stephen never saw his father read a book, but the newspapers were a kind of passion with him.

And their pages were full of death.

Much of the time Stephen was alone in the house, and what schoolwork he brought home was ridiculously easy. So he picked up his father's habit of reading the news. There were always murders.

It would start with the discovery of a body. A woman's corpse would be found in some out-of-the-way place. The police didn't like to comment, but generally someone would provide the shocking details. Then the county medical examiner would release his report—wrongful death. The investigation would drag on and on and, eventually, there would be another, suspiciously similar crime. The papers would be full of it.

And sometimes versions of the story would find their way into school yard gossip. The little girls would talk about how their mothers had started taking them to and from school.

At first, Stephen assumed that murders just happened, that they were a normal occurrence, like thunderstorms. Women just got cut up every now and then. It was like being killed in a traffic accident.

It was only gradually that he began to understand that, wherever he and his father went, the newspapers would start carrying murder stories.

It was just bad luck, he thought. Only toward the very end did he begin to consider the possibility that luck had nothing to do with it.

In the meantime he had another mystery to solve—the fate of his mother.

They were migrants. They traveled light. The houses his father rented were always furnished. They didn't really own anything they couldn't put in the back of the pickup truck.

But there was always one suitcase that Stephen never saw open. Dad would take it up to his room and put it in the closet. They just carried it around with them.

Finally, one day when Stephen was alone in the house, he decided he would have a look. He went upstairs to his father's room, opened the closet door and took the suitcase out. It was a white, hard-shell Samsonite. He discovered that it was locked.

This presented a problem.

But a lock implied a key, and Stephen knew that his father kept all his keys on a ring he carried around in his pants pocket.

When his father returned, Stephen said, “Dad, it looks like rain. You want to get the truck into the garage?”

His father was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper. At first he seemed not even to have heard, but then, without even looking up, he took the keys out of his pocket and dropped them on the table.

“You do it,” he said.

“Okay.”

Stephen was eleven and tall for his age, and he had been able to reach the gas pedal for over a year. So driving was just another of the skills his father had taught him. On back roads where there weren't any cops, his father would let him have the wheel. He wasn't bad at it.

The garage was just a shack, detached from the house, and it was kept padlocked. Most of the time Dad couldn't be bothered and would just park his truck in front of the house. But these days he was working as a painter and he had a couple of canvas tarps in the cargo bed. It wouldn't do to let them get wet.

It was summer, and even at seven in the evening there was plenty of light. Stephen went through his father's keys as he walked out to unlock the garage. There was the key to the truck, the house key, one for the padlock on the garage, another for his toolbox and a smaller key with a short blade that might do well enough for a suitcase.

Stephen was tempted to take this one off the key ring and put it in his pocket, but he gave up the idea almost at once because his father would probably notice there was a key missing.

But at least now he knew where it was.

Over a workbench that nobody ever used was a single lightbulb dangling from the garage ceiling. Stephen pulled the string to turn it on and scanned around for something that might allow him to take an impression of the key.

There was a small can of wood dough, which he managed to pry open with the house key. He found a piece of cardboard about the length of his finger and smeared some of the wood dough over it, rolling it smooth with the side of the can.

By then he was beginning to feel horribly exposed and decided he had been inside the garage long enough. He went back to get the truck.

Once he had the truck bedded down, he pressed the suitcase key blade into the wood dough, first one side and then the other. Then he closed the can, putting it back where he had found it, and wiped the key clean on his shirttail. The entire operation took no more than about thirty seconds.

He switched off the garage light.

Of course, now there was the problem of what to do with his key print. It needed time for the wood dough to harden, so he couldn't very well leave it out in the rain. And he dreaded taking it inside the house with him because Dad would expect his keys back first thing. He considered just chucking it away and forgetting the whole business, but then what if his father found it in the yard the next morning?

How long had he been outside? Four, maybe five minutes. Dad probably hadn't finished the paper. The stairs were less than six feet from the front door. The kitchen was in the back of the house. He set the piece of cardboard on the third step and then went into the kitchen.

Dad was still sitting there. He didn't even raise his eyes when his son walked in and set the keys down on the kitchen table.

Stephen went to the refrigerator and took out a can of Coke.

“I got some reading,” he said, his voice as flat as he could make it.

His father looked up, seemed to consider the matter for about three seconds and then nodded.

“Okay.”

From the stairs he picked up the piece of cardboard and carefully carried it up to his room. He put it in his desk drawer. He would think of a better hiding place tomorrow.

Then, for perhaps twenty minutes, sitting at his desk, holding a math book he had checked out of the public library, only the fear of being heard kept him from sobbing. He wanted to go back downstairs and confess everything to Dad. He was a bad boy. His father was certainly right and his mother had deserted them. He hated her, but even more he hated himself.

Gradually the fit began to wear off, yielding to a sullen misery. His mother had loved him. It was impossible to believe anything else. And she was gone.

What else mattered?

About an hour later, his father came up the stairs, pushed the door open a few inches and looked in. “Go to bed, Steve.”

“Okay, Dad.”

His father went back downstairs.

Stephen slept in his underwear and, as he was taking off his trousers, he happened to glance at the desk drawer that held his key impression. Suddenly he was afraid his father would come in while he was asleep and search his room. He had never done anything like that—at least not that Stephen knew about—but Stephen had never before given him a motive.

The wood dough had hardened nicely. He had a winter jacket with pockets deep enough to keep his hands warm. He slipped the impression into the right-hand pocket, closed the closet and went to bed.

As he waited to fall asleep, he began to experience a certain feeling of triumph.

*   *   *

Over the next few days, Stephen considered the possibility of casting a key from the impressions in the wood dough. He thought of melting down a tin can, but he had no idea how to do that, or how to handle the metal once it liquefied. Besides, it would probably just burn up the wood dough. Finally he gave up on the idea.

But could he file down an existing key to fit the impression? The luggage key was small and there were only two teeth on the blade, about an eighth of an inch apart. It seemed a realistic possibility. All he needed was a key and a small file.

The key was not a problem. Rented houses were full of long-forgotten keys. Stephen found one in the basement, in the top drawer of a beat-up old dresser some previous tenant had left behind.

The tools were almost as easy.

Stephen enjoyed considerable liberty. He and his father lived about two miles outside a place called Lewisburg and he could hike into town any time he felt like it. He didn't have to ask permission. Dad didn't care what he did.

There was a movie theater in Lewisburg, and Stephen went to the first matinee every Sunday afternoon, when the price was two dollars. He earned the money from odd jobs around town. After a residence of four months, he knew all the storekeepers, and he would drop in and ask, “You got anything needs doing?”

Sometimes he pushed a broom, sometimes he washed the windows, sometimes he helped with the stock. He was a good worker, careful and clean, and he was cheap.

It took him exactly a week to earn enough to pay for a Six Piece Needle File Set (price, $4.49) and a pair of locking pliers (price $2.39) he could use as a vise, but he would have to skip the movies that Sunday.

Another week went into making the key.

Dad was a pretty good locksmith, although he was rarely employed at it, saying the pay wasn't that great and he didn't like being shut up in a shop all day. But he changed all the locks on every new house they moved into, cutting his own keys. In about ten minutes he could cut a key by hand, which was almost a lost art. Stephen had had plenty of opportunities to observe the work.

But making this key involved special difficulties.

First he had to find a place to do it, since it wouldn't do to leave any brass filings around the house. He found a spot outside, across the road, beside a creek where there was plenty of concealment and the sound of the fast-rushing water would partially cover the scraping of the file. He even found a tree hollow where he could hide his tools.