Light from a Distant Star (22 page)

Maybe Max had come, she thought, and she’d missed him. So maybe that’s what had been going on. Maybe he’d been down cellar working the whole time. But his truck wasn’t in the driveway. Maybe he’d parked on the street. Opening the front door and seeing nothing, she went outside. The heat stung like a fiery blast as she walked around the sun-beaten house. When she came to the side yard it took a moment before her eyes adjusted from the glare on her glasses to the stingy shade of the house’s shadow across the lawn. And there, close by the dusty lilac bushes, sweaty, disheveled, red faced, pressing his left hand to his neck, and his right hand in his pocket as he gauged her myopic approach, was a man. She jumped.

“Mr. Cooper!” she gasped.

“Yes!” he declared with almost theatrical calm. He stepped away from the branches. His fixed, glassy stare made her think he couldn’t remember her name, which happened with adults, especially one with so many kids of his own to remember. “Your dad … I don’t see his car.”

“He’s at the store,” she said, noticing his scratched chin
—from the bushes must be
, a conclusion rendered not in actual thought, so much as a flash, an impression, a child’s need to impose logic on confusion.

“Oh. Well. Just some papers. I’ll come back.”

“I can give them to him if you want,” she offered uneasily, recalling Ruth’s journal entry linking their parents’ possible divorce with the sale of the store. At that moment she wasn’t even thinking of Mr. Cooper’s furtive trot down the street only nights before.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll try him at the store.” And then he was gone.

It was another half hour or more before Max finally pulled into the driveway. She called the store to say Max had come, but the line was busy. Boone was so excited he leaped out of the truck. He wiggled against her, but she ignored him. Wanting to be petted, he kept butting his snout up under her hand to lift it. She folded her arms. He, too, would pay the price of her annoyance.

“He’s real happy to see you,” Max said, patting the dog’s head.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I am?” Max had arrived clean shaven with slicked down hair, which got her mad to think that after fishing, instead of coming straight over, he’d taken the time to spruce up in hopes of seeing Dolly.

“Yeah, we’ve been waiting, Henry and me. And now we can’t go to the mall.”

“Want me to ride you there? I can do that. If your mother says.”

“It’s too late.”

“Mall’s open till nine. I’ll drop you off.”

“We were supposed to go at noon. After you got here.”

“Well, I didn’t know that, now, did I?” Max chuckled as he followed her to the outside cellar door. He seemed to enjoy her irritation and Boone’s goofy need for her attention. “Charlie didn’t tell me till I got back,” he said with a glance up at Dolly’s window.

“Last night he said you’d be here first thing. He told my mother.”

Max shrugged. “Musta forgot. Only thing he said last night was maybe I oughta stay in the house from now on. ‘Not him though,’ he goes. ‘Not that fleabag.’ And poor old Boonie, he knew. That’s why he’s so hyped today. Fraida bein’ set loose again.”

She ran her hand along Boone’s hard bristly tail but not so Max could see. All his chatter was for Dolly’s benefit, especially since she wasn’t saying a word.
Maybe, she’s looking out the window
, he was probably thinking.
Maybe if she sees me being nice to the kid, she’ll treat me better
. Which only irritated her more, being used like that.

As far as she was concerned, the day had been ruined and it was all his fault. He’d been off having a great old time fishing, without taking her, which she managed to be bitter about even though she knew her mother never would have allowed it.

The hot-water tank from Charlie might look pretty beat up, Max was saying as she unlocked the cellar door, but it was in decent enough shape. Could last a couple months or a couple years, he said, then drew back, startled by the roar of the fans as they entered the cellar.

“Can’t even hear yourself think,” he shouted, turning them off.

Only three bulbs lit the long, dim cellar. It had dried out but with a harsh damp odor. Their stairs were at the front end, with Dolly’s at the back, near her rusty hot-water heater. In the sudden quiet Max’s voice seemed to boom—for
her to hear
, Nellie figured. Why else was
he was telling her all that the job entailed? “Yeah, that’s what we’ll do,” he said, shining his flashlight on the cobwebby pipes above the failed tank. “Just take a look here—see how much work we got, getting this old sucker out.”
So he does
, she thought;
he wants her to know he’s down here, at this very moment right under her feet
. “I’m gonna have to shut the main off. You maybe should go tell her.” He tapped a pitted copper joint. “The young lady up there,” he said loudly.

Whether it was that quick clang or some other sound that set Boone off, suddenly he charged up the stairs. He sniffed under the door to Dolly’s kitchen, snuffling his nose along the narrow gap with whiny yelps that upset Max.

“Come!” Max called, but Boone ignored him. It wasn’t just odd, but creepy, Boone’s flattening himself on the stairs, as if in desperate need to squeeze under the door. “Come!” Max kept demanding, then he’d swear under his breath. “Goddamn it! Jesus Christ! Come!” More than mad, he seemed nervous, as was Nellie, fully expecting Dolly to come raging out at them. “Come!” Max smacked his hands together, agitating Boone even more. He began to bark and wouldn’t stop. “Get! Get!” Max shouted, bounding up to him. “Get down here!” He grabbed the dog’s collar and dragged him, yipping down the stairs. And every bony strike of Boone’s legs hitting the steps was a jab in the pit of her stomach.

“Don’t hurt him!” she pleaded.

“Hurt him, I’ll damn well hurt him if I have to,” Max growled pulling the struggling dog along with him.

“But he stopped. He’s okay now,” she said on Max’s heels through the cellar.

“Not when he don’t come he ain’t!” he said with a vicious yank through the door, out to his truck. He shoved the whimpering dog up into the cab and closed the windows. His face twisted with the same rage she’d seen when the truck driver wouldn’t pick up the asbestos pipe he’d dumped.

“It’s too hot! He’ll suffocate in there.”

“Then he’ll learn, won’t he?” Max muttered, stomping off to the back of his truck. Boone was panting. Strings of drool dangled from his tongue as they regarded each other, she through smudged eyeglasses and he through the nose-smeared window. How utterly sad his
watery eyes were. And humiliated. Suddenly, she disliked Max. She understood how he’d been able to crack that pit bull’s skull open. He just hadn’t cared. He didn’t have normal feelings like other people. He could be one person one moment, then entirely different another. Just like that. And while he may have saved her brother’s life, anyone who’d treat his own dog like that was not a good person. And with his hot temper, it was her guess that Boone had seen his share of hurt. And maybe his family’d been right, maybe he had shot his own brother on purpose. Wrenches and a small saw in hand, Max headed toward the cellar.

“That’s not right, that’s just cruelty to animals,” she called after him and he spun around.

“He’s gotta obey. The minute he hears my voice.”

“Well, that’s not how to teach him. Putting him in a hot truck.”

It was a long glaring moment. There was a struggle going on inside his head, too. He didn’t like her much either, right then, only difference was, she knew, he couldn’t afford to show it. “He’s my dog. And how I raise him’s my business.”

“Not if you don’t treat him right.” Her heart was pounding, but she stared straight back into his squinting meanness. “There’s a law about that.”

“Lemme tell you something.” He gave a close gesture with the lug wrench. “Obeying, that’s the most important thing. Only thing’ll keep him safe.”

He disappeared inside. And for a long time after, she would remember that, those exact words. Because maybe obeying can get in the way of things, of a life, she would later think. And because maybe when Boone barked, if they’d opened that door at the top of the stairs and looked inside together, then everything might have turned out different.

She marched into the house and looked up the number of the Springvale SPCA. The phone shook against her sweaty ear, she was so mad and so indignant.

“Helloo,” she said in a low, deep voice to the woman answering. “I’d like to report a dog that’s in a boiling hot truck.”

“Could I have your name, please?”

“No. This is anonymous. But—”

“I need a name, that’s all.”

“Louisa Humboldt.”

“Okay, all right then, so where’s the dog? I need the address. Can you—”

She hung up. Not only would she get in trouble for using Miss Humboldt’s name, but Max would know it was her, not that it should have mattered, she knew in her
Get Tough!
principled heart. She might have brought down Bucky Saltonstall with one of the major’s holds, but standing up to an adult was a different kind of toughness, one that went against everything she’d ever been taught, and now she couldn’t very well call back saying she was someone else. She could hear Max working downstairs. Unnerved by the spiteful racket of banging, clanging, rattling pipes, the cellar door opening and slamming shut, she went outside and asked Henry to come in the house with her. She needed his help. It would take only a minute. She wanted him to call the SPCA, but she didn’t tell him that.

“Can’t,” he grunted from his squat on the sidewalk. He was pinching ants as lightly as possible from a teeming sand hill in the cracked cement, then flicking them into a jar. Never had she been so resentful of his single-minded intensity that everyone else called brilliant, but she knew the truth. Her brother was a selfish creep and she was through sticking up for him. She needed help and he wasn’t the least bit interested. She went back inside. She took a bowl from the cupboard and held it under the faucet, but only a drip came. So instead, she filled the bowl with milk and carried it out to Boone. The truck doors were locked. She pressed her forehead against the window, wanting the poor creature to know someone cared, which only got him howling. She set the bowl on the ground and went into the cellar. Max stood on a wooden box aiming a small blow torch at a water pipe.

“The Springvale SPCA just called,” she said breathlessly. “Something about a dog barking. Somebody complained. A neighbor, they said.”

“Jesus!” He turned off the flame and she noticed the cloth wrapped around his hand, green and white striped, from her mother’s ragbag, which hung by the clothes dryer, and the thin blood streak on the
front of his shirt. He hurried out to the truck, then returned with Boone. But the dog shot right back up the stairs and started whining and yelping under the door.

Before he could drag him back down the stairs again, she asked if Boone could come with her. He let her take him up their stairs into the kitchen. She was having fun rolling the tennis ball to Boone and wasn’t noticing the time, so she wouldn’t know how long Max was alone in the cellar that time either. But it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, insignificant enough, it would seem, to keep to herself. Even Henry wouldn’t recall her trip out to the sidewalk, so focused was he on his ants. And besides, what happened next seemed logical enough, except for Max’s agitation, charging up their cellar stairs, banging on the door, and yelling that he needed to get in Dolly’s apartment and she wasn’t answering the door.

But the way she told it, she’d been down cellar the whole time with Max and Boone. Partly, it was guilt for taking the dog into the house when she shouldn’t have because of Ruth’s allergies, but then came fear. She’d already told everything that needed telling to the first policemen on the scene. They knew her parents and kept assuring her and Henry, who were both crying, that they were safe. Nothing else bad was going to happen. They even made taking Max to the police station sound routine. A few questions and he’d be back for Boone. Before the State Police crime scene unit arrived, she was questioned by Detective Des La Forges, a large man of no little self-importance. He also knew her father, but he was all business, terse and suspicious. He kept pressing the same questions on her, rephrasing them this way and that, as if he thought she was lying.

So what about Max’s cut? The one on his hand. If you were down there the whole time, you must’ve seen him do it then
.

No. I told you, I was at the other end, playing with Boone. (But upstairs, the part she left out.)

Did you ask how he got it?

No. He just said. From a jagged pipe.

Did he yell or swear or anything?

No.

What about the blood on his shirt?

Same thing. He even pointed to it, the jagged pipe.

I mean, what’d he say?

He didn’t. I just figured it was from his hand.

He didn’t tell you he’d already been in the apartment?

No.

But you said he seemed upset
.

No, I didn’t. I said, bothered. Like he had to get in there so he could finish.

Bothered, upset—that’s not the same thing?

No. It was the pipes. He was having a hard time.

He said it was the pipes?

I could tell. He was, like, flustered, that’s all. Because of the pipes.

And that’s why he wanted you to go inside the apartment with him? To help with the pipes?

No! He just wanted me to unlock the door, that’s all.

But it wasn’t locked, was it?

No.

B
UT OF COURSE
she hadn’t known that. She told Max she wasn’t sure where the apartment key was, but that she’d go look. The last time Dolly had locked herself out her mother had been really annoyed. She told Dolly there was only one spare key left, so she’d just have to go get her own made. There had to be one here somewhere, Nellie said and kept pawing through drawers and cupboards. Maybe there was one at the store—her father always used to cut extras, she said. But when she called the store, the line was still busy. She waited a minute, then tried again. Still busy. Max didn’t seem to be in a hurry or anything, just quiet. He stood there, by the kitchen door, staring down at Boone, who sat at his feet, the perfect dog, not wanting to be punished again. She finally found the key in a bank envelope in the pantry junk drawer. When she went to give it to him, he said she should come, too, so they headed back down cellar. Boone tried slipping out with them, but Max stopped him.