Crooked (12 page)

19

LO SIENTO

When he walked in, Clara's father was carrying a paper bag in one hand and Ham's leash in the other. An untethered Ham trailed happily behind.

“Dad, could we give someone a ride home?”

Her father set the bag down and looked around. “Is there someone here?”

“There was. A friend from school. He lives on my paper route, and I think he's walking home now.”

“
He?
So it was a
male
friend?” Her father winked. “Now that's interesting.”

But her father didn't seem anxious to go out again. From the bag he withdrew potato toppings—scallions and plum tomatoes for him and sour cream for her. Clara said, “What does
lost
mean when it's in a sentence like
We lost our grandfather
?”

Her father said, “Well, you could literally lose him, in the woods, say, or at Disney World. Or...” His face became suddenly serious. “Why do you ask?”

Clara wanted to explain that Amos had said he'd just lost his father, but it seemed too startling to be possible. It didn't make sense that Mr. MacKenzie could be dead, and yet what else could Amos have meant?

“The boy who was here was Amos MacKenzie. His father's Mr. MacKenzie, the one who delivers our milk. Except Mr. MacKenzie was in the hospital today and I think something bad happened to him.”

Her father had gotten his serious face. He felt in his coat for his car keys.

While they were getting in the car, Clara told her father where Amos lived and wondered what it would be like to get a phone call saying your father was dead. It would be like her mother being gone, only permanent. Immediately, Clara had a thought she knew was terrible.
At least then you'd know your
mother or your father didn't
want
to leave you.
Still, Clara didn't want her mother to die.

Her father drove slowly and studied the sidewalk on his side of the car. Clara could hear the crunch of snow beneath their slowly revolving tires while she peered out and tried to see footprints. The trouble was that paths had been made in the snow already and then frozen there.

“What exactly did the MacKenzie boy say?” her father asked.

“He said he was looking for his sister because his mother called from the hospital and said they lost his father.”

“Oh,” her father said in a soft voice, and Clara knew she was right about
lost
referring to the worst possible thing. “Was he sick?” her father asked, and then, as they approached the intersection, “Which way?”

Clara pointed and said she didn't know if he'd been sick. It was strange driving in the dark like this on a route she knew by foot. The road had still been faintly light as she did her route. Now, from her father's warm car, she saw lamps in windows, chain-link fences, and broken porch rails, but Amos was nowhere to be seen.
He must have cut through an alley,
she thought,
or gone
another direction to find his sister
.

Her father let the car idle in front of the MacKenzies' house. It was dark. “Well, shall we go back home, or do you know where else to look?” he asked.

The MacKenzies' house was more than dark. It reminded Clara of a TV screen that had been playing a sitcom full of laughs but then had been suddenly switched off right in the middle of things. “I don't know anywhere else,” Clara said.

The next day, Clara's fears were confirmed. No sooner had she gotten to her locker than Eddie Tripp materialized behind her. “Guess who croaked?” he said.

Clara turned away and began pulling out the books she needed.

Eddie said, “Your little boyfriend's old man.”

Clara, flushing with confusion and anger, turned and looked steadily into Eddie's eyes. “I don't have a boyfriend,” she said.

Grinning now, Eddie said, “Well, that's good. I was a little afraid you did.”

“And I'm not looking for one,” Clara said.

Eddie nodded slowly. “Well, if you ever do, it'd be pretty disappointing if you picked out somebody who was not only a smudge but a stoolie.”

“Who's a stoolie?”

“Well,
you
weren't one the day you caught us hooking goods at the market.” Eddie's face relaxed and became almost handsome. “That was pretty cool of you.”

Clara flushed at the compliment even while wanting to dispute it. “I wasn't sure what I saw that day. That's the only reason I didn't say anything.”

Eddie shrugged, smiling.

“So I repeat. Who's a stoolie?”

Another shrug. “Ask around. Start with the Milkboy. Everybody's hero.”

Eddie tugged on an earlobe, smiled, and shambled off. When he'd pulled on his ear, his sleeve had ridden up and exposed a fine linear scab on his arm.

Clara would've liked to talk to Amos about all this, but because of a “death in the family,” as her homeroom teacher put it, he wasn't in school at all that day.

That night, when Clara couldn't concentrate on her homework, she wanted in the worst way to call Gerri or Amos but knew she needed to wait until they called her. Finally she went to her father's study, where he sat in front of his computer. Slim columns of figures filled the screen. Her father peered down at the papers on his desk through his glasses, his hand on the back of his neck.

Clara noticed something. The photo album was not in the same place she'd set it the night before. Which meant he'd probably been looking through it. Clara looked over her father's shoulder, then began leafing through the album while he continued to work. “Weird clothes,” Clara said, and her father, chuckling but not looking up, said, “We didn't think so at the time.”

Then Clara said, “Do you still see any of the people in these pictures?”

A strange look seemed to come and go on her father's face. He considered his answer. “Rarely, if that often,” he said. Then, “Why do you ask, Polkadot?”

“Oh, I just wondered what they look like now.”

Her father chuckled. “Not much like they did then,” he said. He stretched and yawned. “Hey, don't you have some homework to do?”

She did, but she didn't care. Still, she couldn't say that to her father. She was back in her room reading an old
Mademoiselle
when the phone rang. Clara, hoping it was Amos or Gerri, waited for her father to call her to the phone, but he didn't, not right away. But ten minutes later, he appeared in the door of her room.

“It's your mother,” he said in a stiff voice. “She wants to talk to you.”

The serious way he said this made Clara's heart pound.

“Hello?” she said into the receiver, and after that, she hardly talked. She just listened.

Her mother was calling to say she'd just accepted a teaching job in Spain.

Spain? Her mother was going to Spain? Clara looked at the calendar on the wall and read the numbers like some sort of code.
26. Your mother's leaving. 27. Your mother's gone.

“Sweetie?” her mother said.

“You don't even speak Spanish,” Clara blurted, and began to cry, but it was no use. Her mother was speaking in the calm, steady voice she used when she described things that had become fact.

“This is just something your mother feels she owes it to herself to do,” her mother said.

Why was she calling herself “your mother,” as if she were delivering this news on behalf of someone else? “Well, what about what my mother owes
me?
” Clara said, but as soon as she said it, she knew it hadn't come out right. It made Clara sound like the selfish one.

“Lo siento,”
her mother said. “In Spanish, that's
I'm sorry
. It's the one phrase I already know.” There was a silence. “I'll call, sweetie. I'm hoping you'll come visit me in Spain. You could even go to school there if your father agreed.”

Without another word, Clara put the phone down and raced down the hallway. She was headed for the attic, and when she got to the top of the ladder, she slammed the trapdoor and stood perfectly still in the dark. She hated the school in Spain for wanting someone who would only speak English in the classroom, and she hated her mother for staying calm and not crying even when Clara did.

She turned on the light that illuminated the shelves of her mother's books:
The Art of Egypt, A Picture Book of France, The
Culture of Ancient Egypt, Conversational French, In the Louvre,
and on and on. There were volumes about Russia, too, and medieval Europe, but not a single book about Spain. She stared at the books and kept hearing her mother say, “You could even go to school there.”

She would never go to school there.

Clara, crying, began pulling the books down from the shelves one at a time, letting each one lie where it fell. When she got to the last book, she opened it in her hands and began tearing out pages, one by one.

She heard her father push up through the trapdoor, and she wiped her face with one sleeve. “Clara?” he said. He pulled himself up into the room. He was still wearing his reading glasses, and his hair looked very short. He had such a serious face, and he suddenly looked much older, more like the photographs of his own father. He didn't say anything else to her, and somehow that made it possible for her to walk toward him when he held out his hand to her. Once he had her against his shirt, he touched the top of her head and said, “It's not you that she needs to leave for a while, Clara,” he said. “It's your father she's leaving, and that's hard, too, but you'll have to suspend your judgment for a few years, okay? When all the facts are in, when you're married, too, then you can decide. But for now, we're just going to try and be a family anyway.”

20

MORE SNOW

On the morning of his father's funeral, Amos had gotten up around five A.M. and pulled open the curtains of his bedroom window and stared out. It was a day he dreaded and wanted behind him. Ever since his father's death, the house seemed to have fallen under some strange kind of siege. Relatives and friends of his parents kept dropping by with covered dishes. Sometimes they came and went in short order, which was fine by Amos, but usually they stuck around, speaking in low voices. Amos's mother and—a surprise—his sister, too, had somehow gotten used to conversing in these hushed voices, explaining the specifics of the failed operation, saying the same things over and over, but Amos just wanted everyone gone. He wanted the house back. He wanted to walk around in torn pants and his favorite T-shirt, drink milk out of the bottle, watch some TV, sit outside watching his pigeons. He didn't expect the house to be the same with his father gone, but it would be more the same when the intruders left.

Last night, when there were again guests in the den and his aunt Amelia came looking for him, Amos had ducked into his parents' bedroom and eased the door shut. He stood there in the dark, absolutely still, listening to his aunt softly calling his name and cracking open the door to his room and finally moving back down the hall—Amos knew the map of its creaks and groans— and saying to somebody, “I don't know where he's gone, unless he's down in the basement.”

Amos switched on the light near his parents' bed. The room looked the same, but it was changed. He could feel it. It was as if the walls had changed color, not much but maybe one shade, or maybe all the windows had been moved half an inch to the left. He went to the dresser and picked up and held in his hand the coins on the counter that his father had emptied from his pockets the day before the operation. He stared at his parents' wedding picture—his mother shy and uncertain, his father brash and broad-smiling. He quietly opened drawers. When he found his father's V-necked T-shirts, he held one to his face to inhale the faint scent of his father. It was the shirt at the top of the stack, the next one his father would have pulled from the drawer if...if what? If this cancer had just chosen some other stomach to grow in? Without really knowing why, Amos refolded the V-necked undershirt and gathered up a pair of his father's gray socks and a pair of his father's striped boxer shorts and took them all back to his room.

Now, on the morning of the funeral, Amos showered, straightened his bed, and laid out the clothes his mother had bought for his baptism—black shoes, gray coat, gray pants. Next to them, he laid out what he intended to wear beneath all that— his father's white V-necked undershirt, his father's gray socks, his father's striped boxer shorts. He stood in front of the full-length mirror on his closet door, and then he pulled on boxers, undershirt, socks. What surprised him was that they more or less fit. Still, they were his father's clothes, a man's clothes, and Amos felt like a kid trying to play an adult in a school play.

A tap on the window and Amos turned, startled. Looming there on the roof, smiling wide, was Bruce's face.

Amos wound open the window, reached through, and gave Bruce a quick Dutch rub. “Hey, Crook, am I glad to see you.”

“You are?” Bruce seemed genuinely relieved to hear it. “I didn't know if I ought to come by or not.” He seemed abashed and stared down at his boots. “I don't know anything about this stuff. I've never even had a pet die.” Then he quickly added, “Not that this is anything like having a pet die.”

Amos didn't know what to say, either. He didn't know how to describe what he was feeling. It was just this awful dark feeling that went from dull-achy to sharp-achy, depending on the freshness of whatever little reminder you'd just run into. “It's weird,” he said to Bruce. “Friends and relatives coming into the house, pretending they're not watching you while they do.” Then he said, “Besides, you had your mom die.”

Bruce shrugged. “I was like ten months old. I don't remember the specifics.”

“No. I guess not.”

Another silence. Finally Bruce glanced pointedly at Amos's underclothes and said, “So what are you doing in the weird underwear?”

Amos looked down at himself and felt his face redden. “Trying on clothes for the funeral.”

“Never seen you in boxer shorts before.”

“Yeah, well.”

Bruce stood there in the cold grinning at him. “I say stick with the jockey shorts. The gals like to know what you've got to offer.”

Amos laughed. It felt good having Bruce there, saying stupid things. “It occurs to me the gals might be happier not knowing what you've got to offer.”

“Maybe in your case,” Bruce said.

Amos laughed again. “So, you got any money?”

“Why is it you ask?”

“I was thinking maybe we'd go out for breakfast.”

“McBreakfast? I could absorb a McBreakfast.”

Amos threw on some heavy clothes, then he and Bruce ducked through the window, edged out to the eaves, and plumped into the snow. Amos stood there exhilarated, brushing himself off, taking the raw cold into his lungs.

“Stuffy in there, huh?” Bruce said.

“Sort of, yeah. I guess I just don't know how to do things the way adults do.”

“Who does?” Bruce thought about it. “Who would want to?”

They ducked through the side yard, behind the cars lining the driveway, and turned up the street, Amos leading the way. Neither of them said anything for a time while they walked. Then Bruce said, “Well, anyway, I'm sorry about your dad.”

Amos felt the achy feeling suddenly sharpen. He said nothing and kept walking.

“The thing about your dad was you were always glad to run into him, you know? He always made you feel smarter or funnier than you thought you were. Or something like that.”

Amos took a deep breath of cold air. “Yeah.”

There was a short silence. Then Bruce said, “The strange thing is, I keep thinking I'll just turn a corner and run into him again.” He paused. “I guess it's because it all happened so fast.”

Amos kept striding ahead, trying to beat the achy feeling back into dullness. The bad part, the really awful part, was that when his father was there, Amos hardly ever gave him a thought, and when he did give him a thought, it was usually negative. He'd been embarrassed by the clothes he wore, the corny jokes he told, the job he had, the Moose Lodge meetings he went to. Things that, he knew now, didn't matter one little bit.
The things that matter to me go way beyond surface beauty.
Wasn't that what his dad had said that day to Clara?

Ten minutes later, they stopped off at McDonald's for turnovers and hot chocolate. It was warm inside, and uncrowded—a businessman reading the sports page, a couple with a road map spread on the table in front of them, two older guys in black leather jackets, who gave Amos and Bruce a fractional glance before dismissing them. Bruce finished off his hot chocolate and began idly ripping the paper cup into narrow strips. “I've been in Iowa, in case you were wondering.”

“Iowa? I thought you were suspended.”

“I was. But the Judge didn't want me home unsupervised because he was afraid I'd find his hooch or something, so he shipped me off to my uncle's outside Council Bluffs. They have a farm. It's calving season. All night long, they get up every two hours to check to see if any of those moonfaced heifers need help giving birth to moonfaced calves. My father gave my uncle orders that I had to make all those rounds with him so I'd begin to appreciate the life I lead here in Gemstone. It worked, by the way. I got to drive my uncle's truck some, which was fun, but otherwise it was one l-o-n-g week, partner. I was dying to come back. I wouldn't be here today except my uncle thought my suspension only went through yesterday instead of the rest of the week. So here I am, back on holiday.”

“That was pretty good you didn't give them Foley's name.”

“Yeah. I don't know what got into me.”

“What'd you do with the other pictures?”

“Destroyed 'em. Just like I told them.”

“How come?”

Bruce folded his empty chocolate cup into itself. “I just started thinking it wasn't that fair to Anne Barrineau to have her pictures flying all over the place. I mean, Foley was passing them out like party favors.” He looked up, ready to change the subject. “So you go and look at your dad's body beforehand, that's what my brother told me.”

“Yeah, we did that last night.”

“What did he look like?”

Amos considered it. “Like a wax dummy of my father except whiter and smaller.”

“You didn't touch him or anything?”

Amos shook his head, but the truth was he had. He'd lagged behind his mother and sister and gone back. First he touched the suit. Then he touched his face. It didn't feel like skin. He didn't know what it felt like, but it didn't feel like skin. Amos had looked at the body and said good-bye out loud. Now, to Bruce, Amos said, “I was mean to my dad the night before he died.” Amos thought of the Chinese checkers, and the sharp-achy feeling came rushing back. He fell silent.

Bruce started to say something but held back. Finally he said, “We all screw up sometime, Amos.”

Amos stared out the window. “It'll snow,” he said. He wondered what Clara was doing right now. He'd decided that after showing up and acting like a zombie the other night, he would have to call her and try to act completely normal, but he knew he should wait until after the funeral.

“Want to head back?” Bruce said.

“Naw. Not yet. Besides, there's something I want to check out.”

They hiked up the old school hill, then, following Amos's lead, swung left on Adamson.

“What's the destination?” Bruce asked, and was ignored. They walked another three blocks, and Bruce said, “Well, then, how about the estimated time of arrival?”

“Thirty minutes.”

When they got to Foothill Park, Bruce stopped to watch some girls sledding in stretch pants, but Amos kept walking until he reached the farthest soccer field. Foothill Park adjoined and overlooked Fairhaven Cemetery. From the last soccer field, Amos stared down at the cemetery layered by snow, the headstones stark and gray, the trees bare. Perhaps a hundred yards beyond the woody lilac hedge, near the grave sites of Amos's grandparents, a large yellow backhoe was droning and clanking. The huge toothed bucket bit into the frozen earth, turned stiffly, dropped the dirt into a growing pile to the side. Another worker stood near the hole holding a Styrofoam coffee cup and smoking a cigarette and glancing up at the sky as the snow began. Amos watched the grave digging for a while, for a longer time and more intently than he realized, because when he finally turned around, he was surprised to find that Bruce was standing silently behind him, watching, too.

It was a dry snow, large flakes floating through the stillness. Bruce stared at Amos for a moment, his face full of awkward misery, and then, suddenly, Bruce tilted his head toward the sky and, closing his eyes while opening his mouth wide, let the snow fall into it.