No Book but the World: A Novel (26 page)

He ate the dry cereal with a spoon, standing up, looking past the fan blades out the window. No one was around. The sky was very pale, although in the far distance there began to be some colored streaks. He looked at the chain-link fence and the clotheslines and the electrical wires and the flat, brown mill river, until all those long, straight lines began to make him feel dizzy and anxious, and he turned around and continued eating with the cluttered dresser as a table. First he had to push aside some glasses and a bra and an ashtray to make room for his bowl. Then he ate while studying up close the picture of the boy with the dark floppy hair and the big front teeth. The boy looked him right in the eye, smiling, not a big smile, just a chink. Like he knew a joke.

“What time is it?” asked Loreen, her voice froggy. “Jesus, Sailor, you always get up this early?”

“Ah-no.” Fred wondered if his crunching had woken her. Cap’n Crunch without milk was pretty loud.

Loreen got up and went to the bathroom. Through the open door he could hear her peeing. Then he could hear the toilet flushing. It flushed a long time without stopping. Then he could hear the scrape of the toilet tank lid being taken off and the flushing stop and the scrape of the lid going back on. She shuffled back into the bedroom, sat on the mattress, picked up a bottle of cola that was on the floor and took a swallow.

“Who-ah,” he said, “who-ah’s that boy?” Holding the picture out to her.

“Put it back. That’s Jimmy. My kid.”

He put it back. “How come-ah, how come I never ah-saw him?”

She looked at him a long minute. Her hair was squashed flat on one side, sticking out on the other. She shrugged. “Staying with my folks right now.” She searched with her hand for something in the sheets and found it: her little green lighter. “Anyway, you should be worrying about things that concern you. You know what day this is?”

“Ah-no.”

“Sunday. Your asshole buddies took our money Friday. Now it’s Sunday.” She ran her thumb over the ridged metal wheel and made a flame lick out. Then she let it go. She did this again several times, making little tongues of flame and killing them. He began to feel dizzy and anxious again. She gave a little laugh through her nose. “Maybe you’re supposed to be our collateral.”

He didn’t know what collateral meant but it seemed like she was mad now, too, like Tonya or Tee, because she had said asshole, and she was looking at him as if she’d just now noticed something bad about him. “What-ah, what do you mean?”

She gave another laugh, this one like a crumb had gotten stuck in her throat. “Collateral damage, more like.” She leaned over and picked up the plastic tube thing she kept by her bed. She held her lighter to the little metal cup piece and stuck her whole mouth into the tube and sucked up thick white smoke. The water in the tube made a gurgling noise. She lifted her face and said in a voice that was like a skinny tunnel, “Ayuh. They must of sailed without you,” before letting out her breath in a too-sweet fog.

The Cape had sailboats. Did she mean Dave had gone back to the Cape?

You always liked the Cape. You always liked the ocean.
June told him so, after her hair had all gone to wisps and her face lay yellow on the pillow.

“Well, you can’t stay here, that’s for sure.” Loreen gurgled into the tube and then released another plume of sticky smoke. “Even if you do have your
charms
.”

Later she said she was going out. She went in the bathroom and stayed there for a while and when she came out she looked again like she had that night in the bar: her hair was star-shaped, sticking out around her face in pale, stiffened tufts. She wore a black leather cord around her throat with a teardrop sparkle hanging from it and a denim dress that came to the top of her thighs. “Goin’ to see a man about a dog,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. Then she slung a purse over her shoulder and left.

Fred wondered if he was supposed to leave now. He curled up on her mattress and wrapped his arms around his knees and hoped Tonya or Tee wouldn’t come in. He wished he had his notebook with Dave’s phone number in it, and Ava’s. He wished he had June’s letters and her maps. He wished he could see June, even if her face was yellow on the pillow and she didn’t smell like June. Even if her eyes wouldn’t stay open long.

A sharp bang shook the whole house. Fred’s body startled. He braced himself. What would come next? Another bang? Someone charging through the door? He waited, frightened, listening for pounding footsteps, furious voices, battering fists, but there was nothing. Only the drone of a car engine, dwindling.

A bird, Fred soothed himself, curling his body tighter. Only a bird. And saw himself sitting at the kitchen table in the Office with Neel and June and Ava, a dark hurtling shape cracking against the window beside them. All of them had turned to look and there was nothing, only the sassafras tree and the eggshell sky.

And then June, realizing what had happened, made a sad sound with her tongue. “A bird.”

“A bird what?” said Ava.

Neel said, “Think.”

Ava said, “What are you talking about?”

But Freddy knew! It was exciting and funny, because so often he didn’t know things that other people did. But he had understood the hurtling motion, the thud of the small body stopped by glass, even before June said
a bird
, and he flapped his hands at the wrists and laughed. He knew what a bird felt like, too, because he had held one in the woods, a small bird he found on the ground with no feathers and purple soft skin and a translucent beak. He’d built it a nest of grass and leaves, and placed a berry beside it. Humans shouldn’t eat berries they found in the woods because they might be poisonous, but the same berries that could kill a person could be good for a bird. Later when he’d come back to see how the bird was doing, the berry was uneaten and a flea was crawling across its eye.

Fred must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew he was waking stiff and pasty-mouthed in the hot gray box of a room. Loreen was standing above him, gleaming with sweat, and she dropped something heavy on the floor beside the mattress. “Looks like I was right. You’ve been ditched.”

He looked over the edge of the mattress. His orange knapsack.

“It was on the doorstep.” She shrugged. “Along with, thank God, Tonya’s shit.” She set the other thing she’d been holding, a small package wrapped in brown paper and string, on top of the TV. Picking her way across the mattress in her platform sandals, she positioned herself in front of the window fan and plucked at the front of her denim dress, trying to let the breeze go down her neck, but it was too tight. Giving up, she braced her palms against the window and leaned into the fan, head tilted back, eyes closed, her sticky bright throat curved forward like a bent pipe. Fred lifted the knapsack onto the bed and recalled the sound he’d heard after the scary bang: the low whine of an engine and the whoosh of tires fading down the street.

“Dave-ah left it?”

“Apparently. It’s yours, right?”

“Ah-yeah.”

“Left it, left you.” She gave a little snort. “You’re lucky, though, Sailor. Lucky I like you.” Her eyes still closed, she tilted her head this way and that before the heavy blades of the fan. The stiffened spikes of her hair remained immobile in the breeze. “Found you a place to crash.”

H
E SAW THE BOY
through the toaster-sized window in the bathroom of the garage apartment. Some speck of movement caught Fred’s eye as he stood groggily in front of the toilet, and he turned to see someone climbing on a pile of car parts. At first Fred couldn’t tell it was a person. He thought it might be a scavenging dog or even a coyote—he’d spotted these, along the rim of the soybean field out back, a few times while walking in the still-misty morning or as the light drained from the evening sky—but when he looked more closely he saw that it was a boy on all fours, using his hands to help him scrabble up on top of a rust-flowered hood. It was barely past dawn. The sky was milk blue. Late September, as far as he could guess. Middays still got hot, but the evenings were getting cold and the morning air could be stiff with chill.

The boy, in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, continued his nimble, almost delicate climb over disembodied fenders and doors and grilles. Fred thought he could see, through the bleary glass, feathers of breath coming from the boy’s mouth. Every now and then he’d stop, pick something up, and hurl it toward the stand of trees that huddled thinly along the rear edge of the auto salvage yard.

Fred had been staying in the garage apartment a few weeks already by then. This was the place Loreen had found for him to stay. Until Dave came back. That’s what Fred said, when she told him he could stay there:
Until-ah Dave comes-ah back
.

“Sure,” she said, “whatever you say.” She led him up the metal staircase that clung dubiously to the outside of the building and pushed open the unlocked door. “Ta-da. Not bad, huh, Sailor?”

He followed her. It was dark inside. She was speeded-up that day, walking fast and talking fast and cracking her spearmint gum. “You’re totally lucky because Ed, who was here for like ever, took off a little while ago and my dad hasn’t had any luck replacing him. He says if you keep an eye on the place and haul trash once a week, you can stay until he finds a paying tenant, which means forever because come on, no one’s going to rent this place. I mean, it’s nice though, isn’t it?”

Even after she switched on the light, the apartment had a murky, underground feel, with its dark paneling and swamp-green carpet. A long plaid couch hugged the opposite wall. With its sagging cushions, it looked like a mouth hanging open. Beside it was a door, taken off its hinges and set flat on crates. Doorknobs still stuck out of it, one above, one below. At the back of the apartment was a single window, long and narrow like in a camper, and a sticky band of sunlight fell across a kitchenette: sink, counter, hot plate, mini-fridge. Fred recognized the smell of Borax from Dave’s bungalow on the Cape, and layered over that was the half-sweet smell of damp particleboard.

“Whatcha think, Sailor?” Showing her gum, a skinny neon-green wad imprinted with tooth marks.

What did he think?

You always liked the Cape
. June had said that, reaching forward to touch his knee.

Fred thought of the Cape, its beach plums and scotch broom and salt sting in his lungs; the quick-vanishing footprints of piping plovers as they ran along the wet strand; Dave’s house with its swollen moldings and grains of sand caught between the floorboards and warped windowpanes with tiny bubbles trapped in the glass; the ocean always in the distance, muscular and tossing.

There was no ocean here. Even the skinny, snaking mill river seemed far from this room above the auto salvage yard. They’d walked a long way to get here from the place Loreen shared with Tonya or Tee. Fred wasn’t sure he’d even know his way back.

“Well?” she said, doing a twirl with her palms held up to the ceiling.

“S’ah . . .”

“I know, I know. You’re like, how’m I ever going to
thank
this girl? Well, don’t you worry about that, Sailor. I got some ideas. Let’s just say I got that one covered.” And with a laugh and another flash of her bright green gum, she stepped right up close and stuck one of her small hands quick down the back of his pants.

The first few weeks she came over often, never at predictable times, never for more or less than a few hours, always leaving him exhausted and with some new minor scrape or bruise. On the first visit she showed him how the couch could open up into a bed and it had stayed in that position since. Each time she came she’d say, “Brought you a present,” and then take out an object from her bag: a candle in a jar that smelled like pineapple when it burned, a tube of Vaseline, a pair of furry pink handcuffs, a black satin eye mask. One time she brought a razor and shaving cream, but instead of letting him use these on the beard that had grown thick over the past several weeks, she insisted on shaving his legs, straddling his waist as he lay back and bending forward over his shins. Another time she flopped on her stomach diagonally across the couch-bed and went through his wallet, taking out his driver’s license (
Oh my God, you look like Lurch
), his old Freyburg Public Library card (
This is so cute it makes me cry
), the business cards he’d picked up in diners from Lake George to White River Junction (
You got a fetish?
), and the whole wad of paper money that was everything he’d earned that summer painting houses with Dave (
Who’d a thunk?
). She put everything back except the money (
So I can bring you food
), and the next time she came she did bring him groceries, which she presented to him one at a time, pulling each item out of the bag with eye-rolling flourish, as if she herself were joyfully amazed to discover its contents: milk, Cap’n Crunch (
I know you like this stuff
), frozen pizzas, frozen chicken nuggets, canned peaches, bread, peanut butter, toilet paper and a case of Genny Light (
I bet no one’s ever treated you this good, huh, Sailor?
).

“Ah-thank you,” he said.

But most of the time he was alone. Fred had never lived alone. All the travels he’d done in the past had been supervised by someone his parents had known—friends, former students, friends of former students—and always before, in each new place, he’d been expected to do some kind of work: fill bait bags for the lobster pots, haul buckets of sap to the sugarhouse, clean out gutted fish at the cannery, stack baled hay on the loading dock, even babysit, sort of, which was maybe the best job he’d ever had. It wasn’t real
baby
sitting, though. Maybe it wasn’t even a real job. He wasn’t sure because they’d never given him money and they’d brought him home early. Usually he didn’t like to think about it, but now in these days when he was so much alone, he found his mind wandering to the time he’d accompanied a former Batter Hollow family to the Magdalen Islands as a companion for their son. Thor had been a skinny twelve-year-old with the lightest eyes Fred ever saw and hair like dandelion fluff and a small, pale mouth.

Thor was the second person he’d ever met who reminded him of the Little Prince.

“I really don’t know what to do about him this summer,” Fred had overheard Thor’s mother telling June. This was before the trip, before anyone had the idea of Fred going along. Thor’s mother taught college, and so did Thor’s father, and they looked like brother and sister because they were both tall, sandy-colored people with long, narrow faces. The mother lowered her voice a little. “He has no friends, really. No one we could ask to come along. He’s too old for a sitter, but we can’t just send him off by himself, and of course Roger and I both need to spend a good part of each day writing.”

The two women had been sitting at the picnic table behind the Office, pitting cherries for pie, and Fred could hear them because he’d been lying on the roof outside his bedroom window, a thing Neel and June had asked him not to do because it was dangerous and also the slates were fragile. But he could not help it: the feeling he got, lying on top of the house with his body at that steep angle and the clouds like pieces of cotton scudding close to his face was so intensely like the feeling he used to get when he played in the woods with Ava and Kitty and they’d make him lie on the stone slab and stretch a silk above his head and then let it go, let it float down slowly,
Lie still, Freddy, or we’ll have to tie you
, and the colored square would grow larger and larger as it neared, finally blotting out the world as it settled over his face, burying his eyes and nose and mouth in soft, sunlit color.

“Freddy’s been going off by himself for years,” offered June. “Since he was younger than Thor is now.”

There followed a silence. Then June spoke in a rush, and Fred could feel her blush mottling his own neck. “Not to compare—I’m not saying Thor . . . well, I just meant, if Freddy could handle going off on—”

“No, that’s all right,” said Thor’s mother. She trilled a little laugh. “I take no offense.”

There followed another silence. He could hear them pitting the cherries, tossing the fruit in one bowl, the pits in another.

It was Thor’s mother who broke this silence, her voice scurrying to mend. “What you and Neel have done,” she began. “I mean, who doesn’t admire . . . You don’t just talk the talk—so many people spout principles. You’ve done such an incredible job of letting him”—she gave a laugh—“be!”

Fred felt dizzy on the sun-baked slates, as if the roof had pitched itself steeper. He closed his eyes and held tight, pressing his fingertips against the crumble-toothed edges.

“Well,” said June.

Then nothing for a bit. Just the sound of cherries and their pits.

Thor’s mother said, “A lot of families would’ve sent him somewhere.”

June did not reply.

“Not that you and Neel ever . . . it’s just admirable, what you’ve done.”

Still nothing from June.

“I don’t know that Roger and I could’ve managed . . .”

Be quiet.
Fred could feel June think it, sharp as the blade she slid into the cherry.

“The toll it must take on other . . . well, everything else.”

Be quiet!
It was Fred’s own thought now, surging through his body straight down to his feet, which kicked, his heels landing hard against the slates. Bits of shingle skittered down the roof, bounced over the gutter, rained onto the lawn.

Thor’s mother let out a cry.

“Fred!” said June, sharper than her knife. She stood and turned in a single motion toward where he lay on the roof.

“I had no idea he was there!” Thor’s mother pressed a hand against her heart.

Fred, shinnying down toward his open window, set more flecks of tile spattering noisily down.

“Oh, Frederick Robbins,” said June. He scrambled over the sill and fell into the cool shadow of his bedroom. When he peered back around the curtain he saw her still on her feet, gazing up at his window, and was that a smile tucked in the corner of her mouth?

Somehow this had all led to (or anyway not prevented) Fred’s accompanying Thor’s family on their trip to the Magdalens for six weeks that summer. The entire time Thor’s mother addressed Fred in a slow, loud voice with oddly formal precision and bestowed on him endless little pinched smiles that made a groove appear between her eyebrows. But Thor’s father treated him easily, almost offhandedly, and the two boys—the twelve-year-old and the twenty-three-year-old—were given leave to spend the greater part of most days out-of-doors, exploring, so long as Thor wore his protective clothing: long-sleeved shirts and pants of special lightweight fabric that blocked the sun’s harmful rays, and a khaki hat with a wide brim all around, because his skin was so sensitive to burning. “It’s very, very important he wears his hat,” Mrs. Thor told Fred (unsure what he was supposed to call Thor’s parents, Fred called them nothing, but thought of them as Mr. and Mrs. Thor). “You understand, right? I cannot stress it enough.”

They had suited each other, Fred and Thor, neither having much use for conversation, both preferring to be outdoors rather than in, both content to walk without talking for hours on end. Fred helped Thor make a good bow and arrow with Neel’s pocketknife, and together they used the compass Thor’s father lent them to navigate daylong hikes, on which they explored wind-battered bluffs and dank beach caves and trails of crumbly red sandstone. Sometimes they’d invent games—races, scavenger hunts—or dare each other to jump, to climb, to roll, to balance, or make up obstacle courses and then take turns navigating them backward, or with eyes shut, or with eyes shut and both hands clasped behind their backs.

When they got hungry they’d open Fred’s orange knapsack and eat the butter and salami sandwiches and small hard plums and Pal-o-Mine candy bars Mr. and Mrs. Thor had packed. When they got tired they’d lie down wherever they were and drink in the scrubbed landscape, spread thickly with buttercups that shone like wet paint, and studded in the distance with figures of cows, dainty as toys. And always beyond them, in whichever direction they looked, the sea and sky running through their endless repertoire of blue.

They did not get bored.

Mrs. Thor insisted on Thor spending part of each day doing his summer reading, which consisted of three books his school assigned to all entering seventh-graders. Mr. Thor suggested they take a book with them on their excursions, but when it became clear, after a few days, that Thor had progressed no more than a page, Mrs. Thor made a rule that he had to spend two hours each afternoon back in the little gray chalet they were renting on Havre-Aubert.

During those hours, Fred was unhappy. After so many years of spending so much time alone and never once wanting for companionship or direction, he encountered for the first time unwelcome idleness. He couldn’t sit inside with Thor, in the bland silence of other people’s reading and writing—Mr. and Mrs. Thor each in their respective rooms, bent over stacks of books and loose papers, and Thor in the small living room curled on the couch, motionless except for the turning of pages and the minuscule movements of his lips as he read. Thor offered Fred one of his other books, but after a sentence or two the printed words and their meanings seemed to part ways and the object to become a taunting, dumb thing, inert on his knees.