Going Where It's Dark (6 page)

U
ncle Mel had only been home four days when he was off again, this time all the way to Idaho. He used to joke that there were places in the United States he could get to before he'd even started out. That was when Buck was five and didn't know about time zones.

Buck wished he were in a big semi with his uncle right now, going anywhere except down the road toward Jacob's. He'd rather be doing almost anything than this. He stopped at the mailbox, then wheeled his bike up the gravel driveway and leaned it against the grimy car. Uncle Mel had dropped by there on Tuesday before he left, so Buck was doing Friday solo.

A bumblebee was making slow irregular circles in the air just outside the screen as Buck went up the concrete steps. He rang the bell and waved the bee off as he stood there in his cutoffs and a Ravens T-shirt. He waited ten or fifteen seconds, glancing out at the Volvo and wondering when Jacob had driven it last, then rang again and waited some more.

He hoped Jacob wouldn't have a long list of jobs to do. Hoped, in fact, that Jacob wouldn't want him today at all. He'd dropped his book bag home right after he'd gotten off the bus, grabbed a handful of Oreos, and wished now he'd had a soda too.

Buck rang the bell a third time, letting up on the button almost as soon as he'd pressed it as the door handle moved. And when Jacob Wall appeared at last, leaning heavily on his cane, he stared down at Buck as though he were a complete stranger. He was wearing a faded army-green T-shirt with two eagles facing each other on the front.

“Mr. Wall?” Buck said. “It's F…Friday, and my uncle's out of t…t…town.” He hated the way the word stuck in his throat, as though the sharp edges of the
T
caught on the back of his tongue, and he felt his face redden as he tried to spit it out. The harder he tried, it seemed, the more he stuttered. It made him look as though he was afraid of the person in front of him, and that wasn't the case.

Jacob made no reply. His eyes, half hidden beneath his bushy white brows, continued to stare down at him, and Buck realized he was still holding the man's mail.

“I b…b…b…brought your m…mail,” he said, opening the screen and handing over the clutch of envelopes and advertisements.

Mr. Wall accepted it wordlessly in his free hand, then turned away, leaving the door open behind him. Buck entered and stood just inside the screen.

“There's the garbage,” Jacob called gruffly from the kitchen, pointing to an overflowing trash basket by the wall. “Goes out to the can by the side of the house.” And when Buck started forward, Jacob said, “And there's an olive pit or something down the disposal. See if you can get it out, take it with the garbage.”

In the kitchen, Buck warily thrust his hand through the slimy rubber opening in the sink and felt around. He couldn't help imagining the man with the piercing eyes putting his own hand on the switch and turning it on while Buck's fingers were probing the blades. But a few seconds later, he fished out the olive pit and a small piece of bone. “Pukeman Repairs a Garbage Disposal,” he thought, and pictured digits flying through the air. He'd remember that when he drew his next comic strip.

He took the sack of garbage outside and, when he returned, surveyed the dirty dishes on the counter. It was Friday, and if he expected to be paid…

“I could do those d…d…d…dishes for you,” he said.

Jacob gave an almost imperceptible nod and laboriously sat himself down at the small table, reaching for his coffee mug. Out of the corner of his eye, Buck saw that the man was watching him, and he began to resent the audience, the silence. Then suddenly:

“How old are you?”

The question shot through the air unexpectedly.

“Thirteen,” Buck answered.

“Go to school?”

What did the guy think? That he was stupid or something? “Of c…course,” Buck said.

“Public?”

“Yeah.” Buck gave an impatient glance over his shoulder.

But Jacob looked irritated too. “Your uncle set this whole thing up, didn't he?”

This time Buck turned and stared at Jacob. “Yes! Like he t…told you, he'll be d…d…doing m…more long-d…distance hauls. Asked if I wanted to t…t…t…take over while he's g…gone.” What he
wanted
to say was
Look, I don't want to be here any more than you want me. I'm doing this for Mel, not you. And for the five bucks, if you really want to know.

There was a longer silence now in the kitchen when Buck turned back to the pots and pans. He focused on the grimy faucet handles of the sink, the grease spots on the wall above the stove top. Jacob's place had the kind of dirt that accumulated because there was simply too much for one person to do. Even when Jacob used his cane, he had to lean against something when he was standing, Buck noticed, but as far as accepting help, he sure didn't make a person feel welcome.

“You can go when you've finished up here,” Jacob said.

“Fine,” said Buck through clenched teeth. The guy was lucky Uncle Mel had ever stopped by at all. Lucky that anybody cared about him. Buck sure didn't.

He poured bacon grease from a skillet into a tin can on top of the stove, then wiped the skillet out.

“Okay, I'm off,” he said.

Jacob made no move to stand up and didn't acknowledge Buck's leaving. Buck let the screen door slam behind him and got on his bike. He was already past the mailbox when he realized he hadn't been paid. A deal was a deal, and the old man had stiffed him. No way, however,
no way
was he going back.

Bealls' Country Store stood at a crossing, and the smaller room just off the entrance served as post office for the town. Mrs. Beall was the official postmistress, but most of the time she was helping out in the store.

Buck wheeled into the dirt lot and rested his bike against the porch. Then he stomped up the wood steps and lifted the lid of the giant cooler. Frosty cans of Pepsi and Mountain Dew, of 7UP and Orange Crush rested in disarray in the ice. He selected his drink, then stepped inside where Mrs. Beall was talking with two women at the cash register. He raised the can so she could see it, and when she nodded, placed his dollar bill on the counter and went back out to his bike.

He drank as he rode, one hand lightly on the handlebars.
Jacob should have paid me and I should have asked.
The chilly liquid cooled his mouth but not his temper. Finally, however, when the drink was almost gone, his feet moved more slowly on the pedals, and he let his shoulders relax, liking the feel of going in and out of shade.

He had just about concluded that maybe Jacob had been in the army once, and was used to bossing people around. But then he remembered the paperweight on his desk with an anchor imprinted on it. And the photograph of a ship in the hallway, with two signatures at the bottom. Maybe Jacob had been in the navy. Maybe the ship had gone down with his two best friends on board, and Jacob hadn't been the same since.

Oh, to heck with Jacob anyway, he decided. He had better things to think about. And the first one that came to mind was the Hole.

The sawmill sat in a clearing off the old county road among the oaks and poplars. The sign, back at the turnoff, read
ANDERSON MILL AND LUMBER
, and the
A,
the
M,
and the
L
were spelled out with little logs, Mom's idea, when the sign was changed seven years ago. It used to read simply
SAWMILL
in big black letters, and that was all anybody needed to know.

A high chain-link fence surrounded two acres bare of trees, where a thin layer of pine needles and sawdust covered the ground. A low cinderblock building was set back from the gate, with two carport-like additions, one on either side. Under the corrugated tin roof of one was a stack of four-by-eight plywood sheets, waiting for customers—contractors, hardware stores, and weekend carpenters. Next to the plywood was a pile of eight-foot pine planks. These had come from Gramps's own saw. And propped against one side of the addition were fence posts, also made on the premises.

Buck pedaled around to the other end of the building.

He was wrestling with not only
what
he would take with him the next time he went caving but
when
he would go. It had to be a day no one would miss him—when Mom was working and Mel was gone; when Joel and Gramps and Dad, all three, were here at the sawmill, preferably for the whole day. The old Wilmer place was eleven miles off, and Buck had to allow time to get there, pull on Mel's overalls, do his exploring, take off the overalls, hide them somewhere nearby, ride home again, shower, and put the rest of his clothes in the washing machine before anyone saw him. He didn't worry about Katie.

“What happened to
you
?” she might ask, staring at his muddy clothes. Buck would joke that he'd fallen off a cliff and was swept downriver and ended up in quicksand. “Ha-ha,” she'd say, and go on sketching or reading or watching TV, and forget about it.

A high-pitched whine split the air, meaning that someone was using the huge diesel-powered saw. Buck steered over to one of the posts holding up the tin roof of the second portico and parked his bike.

Grandpa Anderson—Art, to his friends—was leaning slightly forward, palms resting on a thick log he was splitting. At least an inch of sawdust covered the ground. Joel stood next to him, ready to reposition the log. The saw whined again.

When the old man saw Buck approach, he grinned and nodded a greeting, and Buck waited. Two log-slider tractors were parked some distance away next to a two-ton truck. Gramps had invested everything he had in the business, and somehow, after dozens of sawmills had stopped operation a decade or two ago, Anderson's kept going.

When the log was cut and Joel went off to get the forklift, Gramps reached for his water bottle and took a long drink. “Just one more week of school, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Buck.

“Nothing to do at home today?”

Buck shrugged. He didn't know what it was, but Gramps always looked like a little old professor, even in his battered gray work cap and overalls. The way his glasses balanced on his nose, maybe.

“Just r…r…riding around. Dad going to be c…c…cutting timber anytime soon?”

“Why? You want to go along?”

That wasn't what Buck had in mind. If Dad and Joel went timber cutting, they were definitely gone all day, and Gramps was here at the sawmill. All Buck wanted to know was when. He shrugged.

“Well, a man's got a couple acres he wants thinned out west of here. You're on vacation. I 'spect you could go along.”

“Just asking,” said Buck.

He liked being in the woods with his dad and Joel all right, but he wouldn't go this time. With everyone gone all day, Buck could set out in the morning, not come home till afternoon, and no one would even know he was gone.

The biggest questions went unanswered: when he went into the Hole again, just how far would he go? Could he trust himself not to do something stupid?

T
he talk was of tornadoes that evening. May was almost over, and there had been few of them around the country.

“Down in Texas, they're still remembering what happened in Saragosa that one time,” Mrs. Anderson said, placing the scalloped potatoes, Gramps's favorite, directly in front of him. “My cousin said they always mention it in Sunday service—the thirty people who died.”

“Didn't have any warning?” asked Joel.

“Town didn't have a siren. The warnings that came on the radio were in English, and most of the town speaks Spanish. Twenty-two of the people were in a church that collapsed on top of them.”

Katie stopped chewing momentarily and shuddered. “Well, if I had to choose, I'd take tornadoes over earthquakes. At least
someone
knows it's coming. With earthquakes, the ground just opens like a huge mouth. You're walking across the street and all at once you fall in this gaping hole and you're suffocated by dirt and mud. Like the earth swallowing the Israelites.”

“What?”
said Buck.

“Whoa,” Dad said. “Not quite like…”

“One of the seven plagues,” Katie continued. “You know—the frogs and grasshoppers and stuff.”

“Locusts,” said Gramps. “God sent locusts.”

“The Israelites died in an earthquake?” asked Buck. “I thought they m…made it across the R…R…Red Sea.”

Mrs. Anderson's face registered both shock and consternation. She'd lifted her fork, and now set it down again. “I can't believe that my children don't know their Bible any better than that. There were
ten
plagues, Katherine, but an earthquake wasn't one of them.” She took a bite of turnip then, but her frown still rested on her daughter.

“I remember that God got angry and the earth swallowed somebody,” Katie insisted.

“Just three of them, and they deserved it,” said her mother. “Look it up in the Book of Numbers.”

Down at their end of the table, Joel and his dad exchanged amused glances. It always got Mom going when someone forgot their Bible study. Buck's thoughts, however, were not on the Israelites, but on Katie's description of the earth caving in around you. He didn't much like the thought of that either.

“Never argue with a Sunday school teacher, Katie,” Dad said, grinning, and reached across Buck for another roll.

“Well, I'd like to send a plague on whoever's stealing my plywood,” Gramps said.

“You still going on about that, Pop?” Dad asked.

“I'm goin' on about it 'cause it's still going on,” Gramps replied, “and don't tell me it's not, Don, 'cause I can count. We started with sixteen sheets of plywood on Monday when we restocked. I've checked off every sheet we sold since then, and two more's unaccounted for. Last time it was four went missing.”

“You're telling me someone's come by at night, crawled over an eight-foot fence, pulled two four-by-eight sheets of plywood off the stack, and hauled 'em back over the fence?”

Gramps was getting hot under the collar now, Buck could tell.

“I'm not tellin'
how,
I'm tellin'
what.
Unless he walked out with it in broad daylight when we were open, the three of us blind as bats…”

“Yeah, we'd have seen him,” said Joel. He ate with both forearms resting on the table, out of either weariness or habit. There was a new pimple blossoming on his forehead, and it looked as though he might have tried smearing something on it before dinner.

“That's what I'm saying.” Gramps picked up his iced tea and looked around the table. Then he shook his head. “Things are sure different now from back in the fifties. Didn't even have to lock the fence at night. Nobody would dream of drivin' up to a lumberyard, going in, and taking things didn't belong to him. Not around here anyway.”

“But you
do
padlock the fence at night, don't you, Art?” asked Mom.

“What do you think?” Gramps huffed. He seldom raised his voice to his daughter-in-law. “Now I got to get me a junkyard dog to guard the place? I just want to know who around here's doing a little remodeling—a little fixing up. That'll be my clue.”

Dad wiped his napkin across his mouth and studied his father, bemused. Buck could tell by the look that passed between him and Joel that they weren't all that sure of Gramps's memory. “Heck, Dad, it could be anyone with a truck. From another county, even. A few sheets of plywood won't break us. Let it go.”

“At twenty-six dollars a sheet? It's the way they're doing it, a little at a time so's we won't notice!” Gramps was fuming. “Well, I notice, and wonder what else they've taken we don't know about.” His forehead was now as red as the plaid in his favorite shirt. “Anyone's kept a business going long as me, he's got to have an eye for detail. And I tell you, this thing upsets me.”

For just a moment, Gramps's scowl reminded Buck of Jacob Wall's face when Buck had left him that afternoon. The difference was that Gramps only soured on the world now and then. With Jacob, it seemed, it was all the time.

The last week of school.

Uncle Mel had gotten home from his cross-country trip to Idaho the Sunday before, and left again on another run Monday morning to Michigan. As Buck rode to school on Tuesday, he wondered if wherever Uncle Mel was on the highway, it was raining as hard as it was here.

Stop! Stop!
he begged, staring out at the dark sky. A downpour like this would make the Hole a waterfall, and he'd slip right down into it when he went in again. It could make the whole passageway a mudslide.

The huge rubber blades that swept across the windowpane with their rhythmic
swish, swash, swish, swash
provided the bus driver with only intermittent views of the road before the glass was covered again in wavy rivulets of water. Buck liked being in the seat at the very front, where the road rolled out before them like a movie set. Especially liked being away from Pete Ketterman and his friends, who were hooting it up in back.

Everyone talked excitedly about summer and how they were going to spend it. Not many went to camp in this part of Virginia—cost too much money, for one thing—but camp was all around them every day: the Appalachian foothills, the streams, the hiking trails….

Thirteen and fourteen were too young for most jobs in town, but some of them, like Buck, would be working for their parents.

In the late afternoon or evenings, they gathered at the small grassy knoll outside the pharmacy on Center Street. It was just wide enough for two benches, facing each other, and a small dogwood tree that bloomed white about the middle of April.

Like the other kids, Buck and David used to ride their bikes along the popular two-block stretch of Center Street, past the Pizza Place, the shoe repair store, Jay's Optical, the Sweet Shop, and ended up parking their bikes at the rack outside the Palace Theater.

Friends would see how many of them could squeeze together on the two wood benches, and laugh at the tricks the guys were pulling on each other. Buck and David mostly watched, but all the kids wished they were old enough to hang out at the B&I across the street.

There was probably no other store in the United States named Billiards and Ice Cream, Doris Anderson had remarked once. Grandpa said it was started back in the forties because the man who owned it liked to play pool and his wife liked ice cream. And though a number of places along Center Street sold ice cream, including the Sweet Shop and the drugstore with its old marble soda fountain, the only one in the whole downtown with the word “ice cream” in its name out front was the B&I. It was a favorite hangout for anyone over sixteen, and even after it got its liquor license, the new owners kept the name and the ice cream.

The summer before, when Buck and David hadn't been exploring, they'd mostly sat straddling their bikes, providing an appreciative audience for Nat Waleski and his friends, who competed with each other to see who could balance a Snickers bar on end the longest, or juggle cellophane packs of jelly beans, three or four at a time. But as vacation approached this year, Buck wasn't thinking about Center Street or even the B&I. He had other plans.

At lunchtime in the school cafeteria, Buck always sat near the windows where he and David used to sit. Sometimes people joined him, sometimes not. Today, red-haired Nat, in one of his trademark black T-shirts with mythical beasts and Latin phrases on the front, sat down across from him, the obligatory apple provided by the school rolling around on his tray.

What Buck liked about Nat was the very thing he hadn't liked the first time they'd eaten together.

“What's the matter with your sandwich?” Nat had asked, looking at the Tuesday Special Buck had barely touched. Getting in his space already, and they hardly knew each other.

Buck had managed to shrug and mumble, “M…m…mayonnaise,” sure that Nat was just trying to get him to stutter. Instead, he was surprised when Nat said matter-of-factly, “You care if I eat it, then?” and when Buck slid it toward him, he said, “Thanks,” and ate the whole thing, even the half-circle imprint Buck had left in the bread.

After that, Buck was prepared for Nat's curiosity: “You like being a twin?” or “What's your shoe size?” he'd ask without sounding rude in the least. After a while, Buck even found it entertaining. Nat's whole face was interesting—the way his eyes, nose, and mouth were bunched together in the middle, with all that white space around the outside. His complete lack of self-consciousness made him popular with the other students.

“Whuzzup?” he was saying now, and took a huge bite of his cheesesteak sandwich, one finger poking a dangling grilled onion back into his mouth.

Buck smiled and shrugged. “N…nothing much.”

Nat chewed, turning the cheesesteak around and around in his hands, studying it from every angle before he took his next bite. “I don't know why…they don't just let us out…a week early,” he said as he chewed. “The teachers are only wasting time.”

“Yeah.”

“In Earth Science, we watched the same video we saw back in sixth.”

“ ‘The Ice Age'?” Buck asked, and they both laughed.

“Yeah. Were you in Rasmusson's class last year?”

Buck shook his head.

“You know what he did the last day of math?”

“Mmmmmade you do his income t…tax?”

Nat laughed, and Buck felt good about his joke.

“No, but almost as bad. He comes in with this big pile of newspapers, and wants us to circle all the ads for a used Honda. Says he's looking for another car. And when we'd finally finished, he said, ‘Thanks, class. You've saved me a ton of work. Have a good summer.' ”

That made them both laugh.

A girl came by—a pretty girl with braces on her teeth, a friend of Nat's, obviously. She sat down sideways on the chair next to him.

“I finally decided on my elective for next year,” she said. “Speech and Drama. What did you choose?”

Eighth graders were allowed to choose one elective course—another reason to enjoy being in the top tier of middle school.

“Guitar,” Nat told her.

“Cool!” The girl turned her green eyes on Buck. “What about you?”

All the self-confidence Buck had mustered in the conversation so far seemed to evaporate like steam on a mirror. The word he wanted—the only word possible—loomed up in front of him like a concrete wall, and he instantly felt the familiar shot of panic. Each syllable of pho-tog-ra-phy seemed to be imprinted there, one obstacle on top of another. The
ph
sound was tricky, and
T
and
G
were letters that usually felt like explosives to Buck, trying to get them out. For a moment he thought of substituting “camera” in its place, but a hard
C
was just as difficult.

He could feel his jaws turning rigid, his throat swelling. Air was escaping from his lips without a sound to go with it. Two people were waiting for him to speak—two normal people who could just open their mouths and say anything at all without a problem.