Heading Out to Wonderful (17 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

H
E KNEW IT
was all part of the promise he’d made to Charlie, part of the secret. He had to forget. It took an effort every time he sat down with his mother and father, but he could never mention that he had been with Charlie in the Glass house and eaten Mrs. Glass’s cookies and read her funny books and heard what he’d heard, not that he knew exactly what it was.

But he couldn’t forget. He thought about it all the time. The warm kitchen, the oilcloth, the sounds from upstairs, sounds meaning what? No, he couldn’t forget, and he couldn’t stop being afraid. Afraid for Charlie.

What if something bad happened, the way Charlie had said it would? What if Charlie died? Who would take care of Jackie?

At night, after he had said his prayers and his mother had left him alone in the dark, he saw it all in his mind, happening over and over again, and he prayed his own prayer to the same Jesus, that Charlie would not die. If Charlie died, it would be his fault, he knew, because the only thing that could make Charlie die was telling the secret he knew, and knew he could not tell.

And he wanted to go back, he wanted to go back again and again until he knew it all, until he was sure Charlie was safe. So he woke early on Wednesdays, and waited patiently while his father read the papers to him and Charlie served the customers, then they walked home to a lunch his mother threw together, now that school was back on, and then they walked back to the shop, and everything between his father and Charlie was no different, as though this thing Sam knew was going to happen was not going to happen. Charlie didn’t rush, he just went about his business and sharpened his rosewood-handled knives on the whetstone and the butcher’s steel until the edge was fine as a razor, and then finally he said, “You ready, Sam?” and Sam would answer, as though it wasn’t a big thing when it fact it was everything, “Sure, Beebo,” and they would take Jackie Robinson and get into the truck, which took longer and longer to start in the cold now, and then they would go do the butchering, a thing Charlie did quickly now, still careful, still expert, but quick; then, on the way back, they would pull into her drive and up and behind the house.

It was always the same, and it was always different. Jackie came in the house with them now, because of the cold. She didn’t wear those red lips, after that first time, but she was always dressed in a beautiful dress, none of them the same, none like anything he’d ever seen before, and there were always cookies and milk, and new funny books, and those magazines with the beautiful women on the covers, wrapped in fur or filmy cloth, always the big eyes, the hopeful, waiting mouth. Sometimes, when the door had shut and Charlie and Mrs. Glass had gone upstairs, Sam stared at these women and then he kissed them softly on their lips, their eyes, their powdered cheeks.

Sometimes they were gone a long time, and sometimes it was no more than ten minutes. Sometimes there was a lot of noise, and sometimes there was hardly any. Every time Charlie made a sound, Jackie would stop sniffing around the kitchen and freeze, perking up his ears until the sound had passed and Charlie was quiet again.

Once Charlie came down, shoes in hand, his shirt unbuttoned, and caught Sam kissing the magazine cover. He just laughed and came over, took a look and touched Sam on the head. “That’s Ava Gardner,” he said. “She comes from right down there in North Carolina. All the women down there, in that county, look like Ava Gardner.”

“They do not,” said Mrs. Glass, standing in the doorway in her white slip, smoking.

“They sure do,” Charlie said, lacing up his shoes. “I’ve been there, Sylvan. One Ava Gardner after another. They’re part Indian down there. I’ll take you there one day. You’ll see.”

“Oh, Charlie,” she smiled at him for a long time. “Wouldn’t that be fine? Divine?”

He looked up from his shoes, stared at her and said, and he wasn’t smiling or laughing any more, “Well, I don’t know about you. But it’d be just fine with me.”

She stopped smiling.

“I never been anywhere,” she said.

“ ‘I’ve never,’ ” he corrected her. “Not ‘I never.’ ”

“Thank you. It’s true. I’ve never been anywhere, except for that trip to Hollywood, so I guess that’s somewhere. You couldn’t see anything, I just saw their stars on some sidewalk in front of that Chinese theater, and I saw plenty of that railroad car with Boaty. Supposed to be so nice. Supposed to be what I’d always wanted. It wasn’t anything like that. He grunts like a pig, and he sweats all over you. I mean, it wasn’t like it was the first time, but I never knew, until you . . . well, I never knew anything, did I?”

“You learn quick, girl.”

“ ‘Quickly,’ you mean.” She laughed. “See? You do it, too.”

Sam always had to be told the excuse, the reason why it was taking so long at the slaughterhouse, in case they asked. After Charlie had cut up the side, and laid it on a clean white sheet and tied it up in another one, even though there weren’t any flies anymore, he would get in the cab and start the engine and tell Sam what had taken them so long. Flat tire. Potter was late again. Damn truck broke down, but don’t say damn. Sometimes it was over so fast they didn’t even have to make any excuses at all. Besides, they never asked, his parents. They looked worried, but they never asked.

They didn’t want to know. They knew Charlie wouldn’t harm Sam, and they assumed they’d been out hunting, or gotten lost tracking one of Charlie’s pieces of land. They didn’t know how to ask the things that were on their mind, so there they were, all locked together, complicit, and nobody said anything to anybody.

“Say my name again,” she said one day, as Charlie was putting on his shirt.

“Sylvan,” he said, looking down, then at her. “Sylvan Glass.”

“He never says my name. I made it up, you know.”

“I figured. What’s your real name?”

“Ha. You’ll never know as long as you live, Charlie Beale.” And she ran laughing up the stairs, and they left quickly, just leaving everything scattered around the table, for her to clean up later.

Sometimes, if it was quick, Charlie would come down and sit at the table with Sam on his lap, reading to him about Donald Duck or Captain America. He would tickle Sam in the ribs when they came to the funny parts, so Sam would know they were funny, and laugh out loud.

With Captain America, Sam could feel the vibration of Charlie’s deep voice against his small, thin back, and the tingle gave him a certain knowledge of the adventures the masked hero was going through, how close the danger, how great the triumph over evil. Mrs. Glass would sit in the other chair, smoking and reading her magazines, and, once in a while, laughing as Charlie read to Sam.

Sam hoped she didn’t know that he’d just been kissing the woman on the cover of the magazine she held so loosely in her hand. What if they knew? What if they looked through the floor like magic when it was quiet, and saw him kissing some magazine cover? It scared him. But they never let on; just went on as though they were ignorant, and Sam hoped they were.

“What do you want for your birthday, Sylvan?” Charlie’s voice was always so soft and kind when he spoke to her, Sam could feel it like a cat’s purr through his back.

“Nothing you can give me, I guess. He’d know. You can’t hide anything from him. He never gives me anything. He’s got a woman, everybody knows it, twice my age, up in Staunton. Charlotte somebody. He gives her things, I bet. Nice things. A fur coat, maybe. A house. Sometimes he doesn’t get home until ten o’clock. Some nights he doesn’t come home at all. Couple of times, he said he was going to Washington. Staying in a hotel. I bet he takes her. I bet they have fun. She can have him, for all I care.”

Her voice was wistful, girlish when she spoke. “No, I never had anything. Nothing at all that ever belonged to me.”

“I’ll think of something.”

“You don’t have to give me anything. You give me enough.”

“What do I give you?”

“I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

They got so used to Sam, they talked as though the boy weren’t even there, as though Sam were as much of a mute, untelling pet as Jackie Robinson. He called her baby, or little girl, and she called him darling in a funny, slow kind of way.

One morning in late winter, Boaty came in the shop and told Will he was going down to Nags Head fishing with some of the boys for the weekend, drinking and fishing for blues, and Charlie looked up sharply, and, at the end of the day, he carefully packed up some meats, chops and steaks and hamburger.

“That’s a lot of meat,” Will said quietly, with the voice he used when he was telling Sam not to get too close to the woodstove.

“I’m going camping this weekend,” Charlie answered quietly, “stay in a tent out down by Natural Bridge.” He was out of there and cleaned up before sundown, and his truck was gone until Sunday morning, and, not that it was any mystery where he really was, Sam worried about him, and about Jackie. He could see in his mind the funny books lying on the kitchen table, the magazine pictures of the women unkissed, and he tried to picture in his mind how Sylvan and Charlie were spending their time together.

Charlie pulled up in front of his house that Sunday before the sun was up. Sam was the only one who saw him come in, and then Charlie and Jackie Robinson went into his house, and he didn’t come out again until late afternoon. He sat on the porch in a clean white shirt, not even noticing the chill, and he wrote in his diary. He wrote beneath her name: “If she whistled, I would come. If she slapped my face, I would turn the other cheek. I would die for her. I would spend an eternity in hell.”

He looked like a boy of eighteen. His heart raced like a man in the full headstrong freefall of love.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

H
E BOUGHT A
house, another house. This one was out past the slaughterhouse, beyond the reach and eyes of the town, an old farmhouse that was set in the middle of a wild thick grove of old maples. Saturdays and Sundays, he would drive out there alone and fix it up, putting in a new woodstove, plumbing a whole bathroom with the help of Carl Hostetter, and putting in a new water heater, and filling it with furniture he bought at the auctions, except this time he went all by himself. Whenever he saw something she might like, he bought it. The fancier it was, the more likely he was to buy it, thinking of her. He didn’t care about the price, just kept his hand in the air until everybody else dropped out.

When it was all done, he walked down to the courthouse, and he signed the deed over to her. It was completely secret. You could still do that then. You could just say not to put it in the newspaper, and nobody would ever know. The clerk of the court was an honest spinster with an eternal yearning for handsome young men, and Charlie wrote “Do Not Publish” on the deed while she watched, and she honored that, as he knew she would. Anybody could have looked it up, but nobody ever did.

He gave her the deed for her birthday. She was twenty by then. He put a blue ribbon around it. He met her there, hidden by the dense grove of trees, and carried her across the threshold on the first Wednesday in May. It was the only floor she ever walked on where every board on which she put her foot was hers.

It was enough, that first time, to walk through the house, room by room, holding hands, while Sam and Jackie Robinson sat on the porch, listening to the birds in the greening trees, and watching them through the windows as they strolled from room to room and Sylvan touched every chair, every table, picked up every piece of china.

It was just an old farmhouse filled with used furniture and bits of other people’s lives, but it was hers, the first thing she’d ever owned. She gave the house a name. She called it Pickfair, because she’d been to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s house in Hollywood.

They went there every chance they got. Every Wednesday, when he went to the slaughterhouse and did his work, afterward he would find her there, waiting to cook up the pork chops or the steaks he had brought, cornbread cooling on the counter.

And then bed, while the boy sat at the table with his funny books and Jackie Robinson dug holes in the yard. It was always quick, and it was never enough, but it was all they had, and, for a while, all they needed.

Most Saturdays, Boaty would go off on one of his trips, to fish or to hunt in his inept way, never coming home with anything, unless some other man took pity on him and gave him some trout or a rabbit. When Boaty was gone for a whole day, and Charlie had no work, they had more time.

Charlie would wait until he saw Boaty’s big car glide out of town, and then he would take the dog and get the boy, fishing rods or gun in hand, and he would drive straight to where he knew she would be waiting. Will and Alma thought the fresh air did Sam good; he always came home tired and red-cheeked. They began to notice more and more, though, that these expeditions produced nothing in the way of a catch.

They never went fishing. They never saw a deer. They saw the inside of Pickfair. Sylvan was always waiting, dressed like a movie star. She met them at the door as though greeting royalty, and her lovely laugh and her strange, rounded accent brought them into the house.

The day passed, Sam in the company of Donald Duck or Captain America, Jackie Robinson at his feet, pacing silently around the kitchen, nosing for bugs, Sylvan and Charlie waited less and less time until they vanished into the darkness of the sitting room and up the stairs, where Sam could hear them moving about as though dancing, but only for a while, and then silence, silence and cookies and comic books.