Empire Falls (30 page)

Miles nodded.

Mrs. Whiting, eyebrows arched, shook her head.

I
T WAS NEARLY THREE
in the afternoon before Miles drove back across the Iron Bridge into Empire Falls. The day had gone gray by the time he pulled in behind the Rectum, the clouds framing the accusing steeple now heavy with rain. Which was not the worst of it. Seated on the porch steps, in apparently pleasant conversation, sat the old priest, Father Tom, and Max Roby, who looked up and grinned when his son switched off the Jetta’s ignition. After a few minutes, Miles having made no move to get out of the car, Max shuffled over and motioned for him to roll down the passenger-side window. Evidently Max felt safer with the entire width of the car between them.

“What are you doing here, Dad?” Miles said, rubbing his temples with his fingertips.

“Waiting on you.”

“What for?”

“I’ve
been
waiting on you for two hours.”

Old Father Tom was still sitting where Max had left him, but he now fixed Miles with his baleful gaze. Though the old man’s lips were moving, he was too far away for Miles to guess whether any of the words they were forming might be “peckerhead.”

“Let’s go to work,” Max suggested.

“It’s about to rain,” Miles said, pointing at the sky.

“Maybe not,” Max said.

“It’s going to rain,” Miles assured him.

“You should’ve come earlier,” Max said. “The sun was out.”

“I know.”

“You don’t need to pay me for the two hours I was waiting.”

“I don’t have to pay you for anything.”

Max considered the unfairness of this, then stared down at the Jetta. “What happened to your car?”

“None of your business,” Miles told him, preferring not to explain. When he’d walked up to the Jetta in the drive outside the Whiting house, he saw a darting movement and suddenly remembered that he’d left the passenger-side window partway down. The car’s interior was now full of tiny floating particles of foam from the shredded passenger seat.

“Don’t get mad at me,” Max said. “I didn’t do it.”

“I know that.”

“I didn’t make those clouds, either. I didn’t do anything. I’m just an old man.”

Miles studied his father, whose stubble had a strange orange tint. “Your beard’s full of food. Cheetos?”

“So what?”

He had a point, and Mrs. Whiting, Miles sadly reflected, was probably right. People were just themselves, their efforts to be otherwise notwithstanding. Max was just programmed to be Max, to have food in his beard. Looked at from another angle, it probably
was
admirable that his father never battled his own nature, never expected more of himself than experience had taught him was wise, thereby avoiding disappointment and self-recrimination. It was a fine, sensible way to live, really, much more sensible than Miles’s manner as he went about his business, disappointed by his failure to scramble up ladders, blaming himself for his wife’s infidelity, perversely maneuvering himself into situations that guaranteed aggravation, if not outright distress. Maybe, as the old lady had suggested, it
was
all that catechism, its rote insistence on subordinating one’s will to God’s, so many of these lessons administered by the now senile priest who was seated a few yards away and giving him the evil eye. What in the world could these old goats have been discussing, Miles wondered.

“Mrs. Whiting says you called her again,” Miles said.

Max shrugged. “So what?”

“You said you wouldn’t.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said with breathtaking dishonesty. Max firmly believed there was a brief statute of limitations on all promises. “Her and I are related, you know. The Robys and the Robideauxs. Same family.”

“You don’t know that,” Miles said. “You just wish it. Besides which, it doesn’t give you any right to call her up late at night begging for money.”

“She never answers during the day,” Max explained. “She lets her machine pick up.”

“People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with,” Miles told him. “In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology.”

“All I wanted was enough money to get down to the Keys. If you’d cough it up, I wouldn’t have to ask her. You’re a closer relative than she is, you know.”

“She says if you call again, she’ll sic the cops on you.”

Max nodded thoughtfully. “They’ll probably send that Jimmy Minty. My
God
, he was a stupid kid.”

Not as stupid as yours, Miles would’ve liked to confess. Leaning over, he rolled up the window, effectively concluding the conversation, and got out. At least outside the air wasn’t drifting with foam particles. Miles walked around and opened the passenger-side door to study the shredded seat, then wisely turned and walked away from the whole mess. After all, the destroyed cushion wasn’t the worst of it. Because leaving the Whiting house he’d done something so perverse that even now, fifteen minutes later, it nearly took his breath away.
What
, he wondered, had he been thinking?

What he’d done was stop back in the house on his way out and invite Cindy Whiting to accompany him to next weekend’s high school football game. Homecoming, it was. Dear God, he thought now, staring up at St. Cat’s flaking steeple. Why didn’t he just climb the ladder all the way to the top, step off the son of a bitch, and be done with it? The truth was, Mrs. Whiting’s cynical assessment of his character had rattled him. Maybe the old woman didn’t know everything about him, but she knew enough—which made him want to do something to prove her wrong, not just about human nature, but about
his
nature. He’d wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to act unselfishly, thereby validating his mother’s belief in the necessity of sacrifice. Except he now suspected that by asking Cindy out on what she’d no doubt consider a date, he’d proved the very point he hoped to challenge. The middle road. He’d permitted guilt to maneuver him into offering a weak, hypocritical gesture he was pathetically unprepared to follow through with. Twenty years ago, at his mother’s request, he’d asked Cindy to the prom, and now he’d done almost the same identical thing again, and he could imagine Mrs. Whiting sitting across the river in the gazebo and having a good chuckle at his expense. Once again, she’d played him like a fiddle.

And the subject of the beer and wine license, which he’d promised his brother he would raise, had never come up.

CHAPTER 10

T
HREE WEEKS
into the fall semester, Tick looks up when the cafeteria door opens, and the principal, Mr. Meyer, enters with the virtually comatose John Voss in tow. Dressed as usual in a too large black T-shirt with a stretched-out neck, thrift-store polyester golf slacks, and tennis shoes with broken laces, the boy is carrying before him, with both hands, a lumpy, crumpled paper bag, from which Tick deduces that she’s to have a luncheon companion. If “companion” is the right word for a boy Tick has never heard speak. Had Justin not featured John Voss in his constant heckling of Candace, Tick wouldn’t even know what to call him. The guys on the football team, who take special glee in tormenting him, just call him Dickhead. After materializing in their midst—what, two years ago?—John Voss has remained a mystery. Tick has no idea where he lives, why he’s silent, why he dresses as he does, why he doesn’t respond to external stimuli. Obviously, he doesn’t have a single friend, which makes him unique, since the school’s other pathetic social outcasts have formed a loose society. Actually, the person John Voss most resembles, now that Tick thinks about it, is Tick. At least now that she’s no longer part of Zack Minty’s crowd. If it weren’t for Candace pumping her for information during art class, Tick herself would probably go all day without speaking a word to anyone. For all she knows, in the eyes of the other kids at school she might look as pathetic as this silent boy now standing before her.

At the moment, he’s staring at the floor, awaiting a command from Mr. Meyer, who, lacking one, studies the boy for a moment as you would a uniformed guard at a wax museum, waiting for him to move so you can be sure he isn’t part of the exhibit. Is it possible, Tick wonders, for a boy to possess less natural grace? He looks like he’s been taking lessons in the art of human movement from a Disney World robot. When Mr. Meyer tells him to take a seat anywhere he wants, he shuffles to the other side of the cafeteria, sits down, and stares at his brown paper bag for an exaggerated beat before opening it and peering inside. Whatever is inside does not immediately motivate him to further action.

Mr. Meyer continues to watch for a minute, looking especially clueless even for a high school principal. To Tick he resembles a soldier who’s been parachuted into the middle of a battlefield and instructed to make weapons out of whatever materials are at hand. When he motions for her to join him outside in the hall, she reluctantly complies.

“I’ve found someone to have lunch with you,” Mr. Meyer reports once the door is safely shut between them. Tick can’t help but stare at him. The fundamental dishonesty of adults never fails to amaze her, their assumption that you’ll believe whatever they say just because they’re grown-ups and you’re a kid. As if the history of adults’ dealings with adolescents were one long, unbroken continuum of truth-telling. As if no kid was ever given a reason to distrust anyone over the age of twenty-five. In this instance Mr. Meyer would apparently have Tick believe that in the two weeks since allowing this solitary lunch privilege, he’s been thinking of nothing except finding her a companion. Whereas Tick doubts that she’s crossed his mind until provoked by the larger problem of what to do with this wretched boy, who by virtue of being friendless, voiceless and graceless has become the target of lunchroom bullies who consider it fine sport to hit him in the back of the head with empty milk containers, broken pencils, thumb-shot rubber bands and any other handy missile, launching these objects from all the way across the cafeteria for maximum impact.

Tick’s strategy for dealing with lying adults is to say nothing and watch the lies swell and constrict in their throats. When this happens, the lie takes on a physical life of its own and must be either expelled or swallowed. Most adults prefer to expel untruths with little burplike coughs behind their hands, while others chuckle or snort or make barking sounds. When Mr. Meyer’s Adam’s apple bobs once, Tick sees that he’s a swallower, and that this particular lie has gone south down his esophagus and into his stomach. According to her father, who’s an old friend of Mr. Meyer’s, the man suffers from bleeding ulcers. Tick can see why. She imagines all the lies a man in his position would have to tell, how they must just churn away down there in his intestines like chunks of undigestible food awaiting elimination. By their very nature, Tick suspects, lies seek open air. They don’t like being confined in dark, cramped places. Still, she likes Mr. Meyer better for being a swallower. Her father, who lies neither often nor well, at least by adult standards, is also a swallower, and she approves that his lies go down so painfully. The snorters, like Mrs. Roderigue, and the barkers, like Walt Comeau, are the worst.

“John has the same scheduling difficulty you had because of art class,” Mr. Meyer continues, studying her to see how this second lie will play, his Adam’s apple bobbing again. John Voss has no such scheduling difficulty, Tick knows. Except for computer studies, at which the boy is reportedly brilliant, he’s in all low-track classes, and art fits this program like a glove.

When Tick remains silent, Mr. Meyer breaks into a nervous sweat. What is this—
two
comatose kids? If coming to the aid of floundering liars weren’t against Tick’s religion, she’d be tempted to toss him a rope. She hasn’t forgotten his kindness the afternoon that Candace sliced her thumb open with the Exacto knife, and she hasn’t forgotten that she repaid his kindness and concern with duplicity by slipping the knife into her backpack, where it has remained ever since.

“Actually, I have a favor to ask you, Christina,” Mr. Meyer continues, his Adam’s apple stationary now, so this part of it must be true. He nods at the door. “John Voss is a very unhappy boy. More unhappy than anyone suspects, I fear.”