Going Where It's Dark (2 page)

W
hen Buck got home about four, only Dad was there, his old Chevy parked at an angle in the clearing. The shower was running upstairs, and then Buck heard it cut off.

Mom had the day shift at Holly's Homestyle, so she'd be back around five, and Joel and Gramps closed the sawmill at six on Saturdays. If Katie, Buck's twin, was there, she'd be either at the large farm table with her sketchpad and magazines or watching TV. The kitchen was empty and the television was off. This meant that Buck had the downstairs to himself, long enough to eat some peanut butter crackers and get his muddy clothes in the washer before his dad came down.

He opened a Coke and had just started toward the table when the phone rang.

Buck stood holding the soda in one hand, crackers in the other. If he was alone, he had to answer. If he wasn't, he let someone else pick up. The phone rang again. Then again.

Upstairs, the bathroom door opened.

“Buck?” yelled his dad. “You home?”

Another ring.

“Yeah…,” Buck answered.

“Well, get the phone, darn it!”

Buck set his can on the counter and walked across the green-and-white-flecked linoleum to the wall phone. Mom's cuckoo clock hung just above it, except that the bird didn't come out on the hour as it was supposed to. Uncle Mel kept promising to fix it, but he hadn't yet.

Buck watched his left hand reach forward and interrupt the phone in mid-ring. “ 'Lo,” he said.

“Joel?” came a young man's voice.

“N…no. This is B…B…Buck,” Buck answered.

“Oh. Hi, Buck. It's Larry,” said the voice. “What time do you think he'll get home?”

Buck felt the familiar ache in his jaws as his muscles tightened, and there was perspiration between his fingers and the handset. “I s…s…suppose around…ssssixth…th…”

“Great,” Larry said. “Have him call me, would you? See if he wants to watch some wrestling tonight.”

“Okay,” Buck said, and hung up.

“That for me?” his dad called from the top of the stairs.

“No. J…Joel.”

“All right.” And then his dad said, “You've got the rest of that carrot row to weed, you know. Don't go putting it off.”

“Uh…I won't,” said Buck, knowing his dad meant, like, right now, before dinner. When he'd set off that morning, he'd forgotten that he hadn't finished his work, and now he was going to have to hustle before Mom got home. First the hoeing. Then his clothes in the washer.

“We've all got our jobs, and this one's yours,” Dad had told him once. “Nothing prettier than a long straight row of beans or lettuce, not a weed in sight. You should get your work done in the mornings when it's cooler, Buck. Then you'd have the afternoons this summer for yourself.”

Buck agreed with him about working when it was cool, but he could think of a lot of things prettier than a row of carrots. Their fine lacy tops were hard to distinguish from weeds, and occasionally Buck pulled up a whole plant by mistake. Sometimes he wished he worked at the sawmill instead, like Dad and Gramps and Joel. Still, working alone, he never had to take orders, or worse, answer the phone.

“I'm going to pick up a few things at the store,” Dad called down. “You want anything?”

Flashlight batteries!
Buck thought, but then Dad would ask what for.

“No.”

“Okay.”

Buck went outside, picked up a hoe, and tramped to the back of the garden.

Today, not even weeding carrots could dampen his excitement. Not even a phone humiliation. He dropped clumps of weeds into a bucket without even thinking about the scrapes and blisters on his hands from all that rock crawling. Man, what he had to tell David! And only David.

Except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Andersons ate their meals in the kitchen. No one had an official seat at the large, rectangular table, except for Gramps at one end, Dad at the other. Mom and Joel, Buck and Katie sat in varied arrangements on either side, and Mel pulled up a stray chair wherever he could find a spot when he was home. Katie's main job was to start dinner, following whatever instructions her mom had left for her that morning—put a casserole in the oven, boil some potatoes, make a salad….

Tonight it was spareribs, and nineteen-year-old Joel was in a good mood because it was Saturday and he'd be meeting up with his buddies later. No matter how much he ate, he still remained the tall, slim young man with a slight bump on his nose where a baseball had hit it when he was nine. He had a smile that turned one side of his mouth up a fraction, the other side down, and he was smiling now.

“Had a pencil tucked under two fingers when I measured a board for Mrs. Ebert today,” he said, grinning down at the red-skinned potatoes he'd just heaped on his plate. “She says, ‘Joel! What happened to your hand?'—she can't see worth a hoot—and I say, just as quick, ‘Lost a couple fingers to the saw last week,' and she pret' near' died.”

Everyone laughed.

“So that's what all that screechin' was about,” said Gramps. His shaky hands made the wooden fork he was holding vibrate against the rim of the salad bowl. He fished out a couple of snap peas and passed it on.

“Oh, she's a good sport. And she's teased me plenty when I was little,” Joel said.

“She told me I was pretty once,” said Katie, her saucy eyes daring her brothers to contradict her.

“Well, you are, but pretty on the inside is what's important,” said Mom. A short, sturdy woman, Doris Anderson was still wearing her green and gray Holly's Homestyle uniform, and after she buttered a roll, she turned her attention to Buck. “What did you do today, Buck? Saw your sneakers there on the back porch. Looked like you'd been through a swamp.”

His sneakers! He'd forgotten about those. “J-just riding around,” Buck answered.

“Alone?”

“Yeah. Wish D…D…David was here.”

Without looking up from his plate, Dad said, “Good chance to make friends with some other boys.”

“Way out here?” Buck said.

Dad's voice was as deep as he was big. He and Mom made quite a pair, because she was five foot two and he was six foot one. “You got a new bike, and you ride all over the county. Not like I work you to death.”

That was true, and they'd lived here all Buck's life. Not like he was new in town either. But David was easy. With David he could talk or not talk. If he stuttered on a word, David didn't get antsy. Didn't jump in and say it for him.

Gramps, though, had turned the conversation to the sawmill. “Think sometimes I should've gone into the plywood business. Can't hardly keep it in stock. Used to be we could make a living out of the wood we cut. Now we've got to sell plywood too, and I don't know what-all.”

Buck gratefully reached for his iced tea. His grandfather had the typical Anderson face—narrow, with an especially long distance between the nose and upper lip. “A horse face,” he'd once said of himself. But a gentle horse, Buck thought. There were lines on both sides of his mouth, so deep they'd hold a penny, Buck figured.

Mom and Katie, with their round faces and puffed cheeks, were the exception, but everyone shared at least a few characteristics with the others—smile or hair pattern or the way they laughed.

So how was it that out of the six members of this family—seven if you counted Uncle Mel, twenty-three if you counted Grandma, who was gone, and all of Buck's assorted aunts and uncles and cousins—he was the only one who stuttered? For the rest of the family, talking was as natural as breathing.

“How hard is it to just open your danged mouth and get the word out?” Dad had asked Buck once in exasperation.

Harder than anyone knows,
Buck had thought.

He had texted David right after dinner and was waiting for him to answer. Now he sat on the edge of his bed, trying to stop the jitters in his chest. He felt like he had the day he and David jumped over a four-foot gap in the rocks with a twenty-foot drop below. The same way his heart was thumping when he balanced his way across Hazard Creek on a poplar that had fallen over in a storm.

How could everything in his room look so ordinary when he felt so different inside? The small red radio on the top of his bookcase was the same; the catcher's mitt and the photo of him and Gramps holding a string of fish. The racing car model, the football helmet Uncle Mel had worn back in the eighties, and the
National Geographic
poster of mountain climbers next to the window. His excitement dimmed a little as his eyes scanned the Baltimore Ravens calendar above the dresser, because it was almost summer, and his goal had been to stop stuttering by his last semester of middle school. That was only one year off, and he wasn't even close.

But that was beside the point at the moment. He had to plan. Carefully. The right time. The right stuff. His eyes traveled back to the football helmet Mel had given him as a souvenir of his quarterback days in high school. He wished he had a caving helmet with a headlamp, but he didn't. For now his bicycle helmet and flashlight would have to do.

Okay. What else? Professional cavers were equipped with rope, duct tape, electrical tape, knives, headlamps, flashlights, wet suits, gloves, canteen, knee pads, elbow pads, matches, goggles….He sure could have used a headlamp when he was down there today, and wondered how much they cost. Dad was going to pay him a dollar a row to keep the garden weeded, and each row reached from the edge of the backyard to the creek. It might take all summer before he could afford one.

Buck opened his notebook and started a list.

What was taking David so long? When he hadn't immediately responded to Buck's text, Buck had simply thumbed in the words
NEWS! r u there?
and waited. After the Weinsteins had moved away, Uncle Mel gave Buck his old cell phone, and the boys usually texted at least once a week. Sometimes once a day.

Buck didn't like to admit it, but he worried sometimes that David had made a new friend—someone who was taking up time David could have been using to text him. It wasn't that he wanted David to remain friendless. And he knew that David's mom was filling his life as full as possible to make up for yanking the boys apart when she got a job transfer. It was just that Buck had had more fun with David than any friend he'd ever had.

He rarely spoke to him on the phone, though. Never spoke to anyone by phone if he could help it. The minute he tried to speak, his vocal cords went into spasms of paralysis, and every word was a struggle. When Buck had to carry on a phone conversation, he could sense his jaws tightening, his teeth clenching, his lips quivering. Sometimes at school, especially if he had to speak in front of the class, he could feel his face and neck burn. He would blink repeatedly, and his mouth and lips felt as though they were cast in concrete.

“Stupid freak,” Ethan had called him once.

But now, sitting on the floor of his room, his back against the bed, Buck could punch in the letters faster than he could talk, and tonight Buck willed his cell phone to buzz. Tonight, he'd even try talking if he had to.

David always had the most to say, even with thumbs. How he hated his new school but liked their apartment; that they were buying a dog; that he'd just seen
The Man Without a Face;
that his mom's boss was a dork.

Even when they'd been together, it was David who talked the most, and when Buck stuttered a reply, David waited him out. Sometimes, if he asked a question and it was taking Buck more time than usual to answer, David would say, “One…one thousand, two…one thousand…,” and they'd both laugh. That was as far as it went. In the two years they'd been friends, David had never once asked Buck about his stuttering. David jiggled one knee when he talked; Buck stuttered. That was just the way they were.

His cell phone buzzed and Buck texted in seconds:
yo!