Offspring (6 page)

“Once he sees them I think I can guarantee he’ll be careful.”

The phone rang. Amy got up and answered it.

Melissa was holding on to Claire’s finger again, cooing happily.

Amy listened to the voice on the phone, too amazed to say anything, though there were a thousand things to say.

The voice went on for what seemed like a very long while. “Wait a minute,” she said.

And when she came back to the table it was hard to keep the fury off her face. For Claire’s sake, she tried.

How dare he?
she thought.

She reached for her baby.

“It’s for you,” she said. Claire looked puzzled.

“It’s him,” she said. “It’s Steven. He says he’s coming up here. He says he’s on his way.”

The day was turning hot and slightly humid for this time of year.

David was with Will Campbell under the deck, the tarps pulled back so that Campbell could inspect the lumber.

Luke was there. He’d asked David’s permission to go through his toolbox. Most of the tools had once belonged to David’s father—which meant that they were basically unused—but David saw no harm in letting the boy root around in there. Through the open door to the shop he could watch Luke pulling out layers of sandpaper and packages of nails and screws to get at the hammers, rasps and screwdrivers underneath. He knew Luke was listening, interested for some reason in what they had to say, though he doubted the boy could understand very much of it.

They were standing by a pile of twelve-foot-long two-by-sixes tinted green, southern yellow pine that
they’d use for the bottom layer, heavily treated against damp rot and insects. Planning the attack on the addition.

Will Campbell was a thin rangy man of about fifty, his face so deeply lined and tanned that to David he always seemed to be frowning.

He stamped out the butt of his Pall Mall. His hand moved gracefully over the board he was sighting.

“Pretty good,” he said.

That coming from Campbell was high praise. David knew next to nothing about lumber but he was glad to hear it.

“But we gotta get ’em down fast,” Campbell said. “A day in the sun and they’ll warp like swizzle sticks. They’ll do the trick, though. Now these . . .”

He stepped over to a much larger pile about four and a half feet high by four feet wide, a mix of spruce and balsam. Two-by-tens mostly, ranging from eight to twenty feet long. This was the framing lumber, the underpinnings for what was going to be the firststory flooring.

“. . . these are
fine,”
he said.

“Fine?” He smiled. He’d never heard Campbell use the word.

“Good local stuff right out of the Big Woods. Hardly any reaction wood at all that I can see. Good and regular.”

“What’s the Big Woods?” asked Luke. He stood in the door of the shop, a claw hammer in his hand that was much too heavy for him, pounding awkwardly at invisible nails.

“You’re in it, son, sort of,” said Campbell. “Scrappy
little part of it of course, way out here on the coast. But from Bangor on up’s all Big Woods territory. Old growth. Logging country. Red spruce, black spruce, white spruce, cedar. Rivers, lakes, streams. You can pull trout out of the streams and you can flush a bear or a moose if you’re of a mind to.”

“You can?”

“Sometimes.”

“I want to see a bear!” Luke took a wider swing, hammering a bear skull.

Campbell laughed. “In the wild? No you don’t.”

“Yes I do.”

“A bear can move fast as an automobile over short distances and start up even faster. Think you can outrun a car, son?”

Luke frowned and thought about it. “Well, maybe if I was standing kind of far away I’d like to see one. Like through binoculars.”

“Maybe then,” said Campbell. “Sure. Why not?”

“Look over on the first shelf there,” said David. “Right behind you.”

Luke walked into the shop. The shelf, David knew, was just about reachable for him. He was tall for his age, with long thin arms like his mother’s. They watched him look around and find them. He started to reach up and then caught himself, stopped and turned.

“Can I?” he asked.

“Sure you can,” said David.

The binoculars were his father’s too, old and not particularly high-powered, but in working order.

Luke looped the thong around his neck, dropped
the claw hammer noisily into the toolbox and looked through the lenses.

“Know how to focus?” said David.

Luke shook his head. David walked over and showed him.

“See, you’ve got two images here. Now you break the lenses either toward your nose or away from your nose until you’ve got just the one image,” he said. “Only one. Then you turn this knob until whatever you want to see is good and clear.”

Luke tried it, pointed them at Campbell.

“Hey!” he said, smiling.

“You got it, huh?”

“Yeah!”

“Good.”

He turned the lenses out toward the field and focused again.

“Radical!”

Our Turtle friends again
, thought David. He wondered who Luke’s favorite was, Michelangelo or Donatello. Personally he leaned toward Leonardo, though he guessed that basically Turtle Power was Turtle Power. As opposed, for instance, to the Power of Greyskull.

“You like ’em?”

“Yeah!”

“I’ll loan them to you for the duration.”

“What’s a duration?”

“As long as you’re here.”

“And then I have to give them back again?”

“We’ll see.”

Luke looked hopeful. David guessed he was at that age when kids got very much into possessions.

“I’m gonna go look around, okay?”

“Go ahead.”

He headed through the oak trees out into the field, stopped and turned and focused on the windows of the house. Campbell lit a cigarette and they watched him for a while.

“Seems like a nice boy,” said Campbell.

“He is,” said David.

“I’m not the sort of man who minds kids,” said Campbell. “If he wants to hang around some when we start working it’s okay by me. Sometimes it helps a boy to feel he’s useful. ‘Specially a boy with trouble.”

“Trouble?”

He hadn’t told Campbell a thing about Luke, or for that matter about Claire and Steven. Only that Luke was his godson and that he and Claire would be staying awhile.

“I’ve raised two boys and a girl myself, and I’ve built a lot of houses for a lot of people. Things come out in people when they’re building houses. Things you sometimes don’t really want to see. Stress, I guess you’d say. There’s a lot of money involved, of course. House is a big investment. There’s a lot of decisions that look small, but aren’t. Not at the time. Hell, they’re crucial. I’m not saying I’ve seen it all by now, but I did see a pretty good fella kick his dog one time just because his windows hadn’t arrived the day we were ready to set ’em. Kids get trouble too. You see it sometimes.”

It was the most he’d ever heard Campbell say on a subject. Any subject.

Campbell pulled on the Pall Mall and pointed to the deck above.

“We’ll do this here in tongue-and-groove quarter-sawn fir,” he said. “Soon as we finish the addition. You’ll see. It’ll look real nice.”

Luke came to the edge of the clearing and put up the binoculars. The woods sprang into focus. Suddenly deep.

He wondered if it was okay to go in, if there were any bears in there. He wondered if bears could climb trees or if he just had to look for them along the ground.

Well, he was going in. He was an explorer, a scout looking for Indians or bear and he was going in.

He wouldn’t go far.

The woods were cooler, damper. He liked the feel of the air in there, on his face and bare arms. He liked the green smell. He was glad he wasn’t wearing shorts because in places the brush was thick and he had to plow through. He knew enough to watch for stickers and go around them. Sometimes if the brush wasn’t
too
thick he’d jump right in and then crash through like you’d do if a bear were chasing you fast as a car. Then he’d come to a bunch of trees and slow down and there would be only the soft brown needles crackling under his Reeboks.

He was in a place like that now.

He was standing on a hill in a grove of pine trees and it was shady all around.

He raised the binoculars. He scouted the ground as far as he could see for Indians creeping through the brush below.

This was
fun
.

This was
scary
.

Partly it was scary because the game was scary, because Indians and bears were naturally scary, and partly it was the woods, because the woods was a wild place, a place he’d never been to before—and he
was
an explorer in a way. That part was real.

Something moved in the brush to his left; he heard the rustle, but by the time he turned and focused it was gone.

There were birds above him; he could hear them calling each other. He decided to try to find a nest. He was an explorer and he was starving in the wilderness and he needed the birds’ eggs to keep him from dying.

Starving, he trudged forward to the very top of the hill.

Exhausted, he raised the binoculars. He scanned the trees.

He saw the platform immediately.

It was lodged between the branches of an oak tree the next hill over. The hill was a little bit higher than this one. He’d be able to see everything all around.

He forgot about starvation.

He ran down the hill until the ground turned mossy beneath him, slippery. Then he walked. He avoided a patch of stickers. The uphill climb was rocky and not too steep so his footing was good.

And there it was.

The treehouse was old—he didn’t know how old but the wood was gray, weathered like David’s porch. He wondered if it was safe. It was pretty high up. Maybe five times bigger than he was.

Scary
.

He didn’t want to fall.

The steps nailed to the tree trunk looked okay, though. The wood was thick and each step had two big nails hammered into it and none of the boards were cracked that he could see.

He’d start with the steps and see how it went.

The tree had grown at an incline, leaning slightly, so his climb wasn’t hard. He didn’t look down, just up to see if the next board above him seemed safe. There was one toward the top that was cracked at one end from the nail on over so he tugged on it to see if it would pull free. It didn’t. He kept going.

Soon he was up.

There were four posts supporting a railing that went all the way around the platform at what looked like about waist level for him. He grabbed one of the posts and shook it. It wobbled a little, but it was pretty sturdy.

He looked for breaks in the platform flooring. There were leaves scattered around so he couldn’t see it all, but what he could see didn’t discourage him.

He hauled himself onto the platform.

He stood and squinted into the sunlight.

It was like being at the top of the world.

From here you could see all the way through the woods to David’s house. He was a little surprised at how far away it was, how far he’d come. He raised
the binoculars to see if he could spot David or Mr. Campbell but he couldn’t, there were too many trees.

He looked down. And that surprised him too.

He really was way up there.

For some reason looking
out
was a whole lot better than looking down so that was what he did. He walked carefully to the other side of the platform, testing each step. The boards held. Through the trees the sky seemed to glint at him. He raised the binoculars again. He was amazed.

From here you could see the sea
.

And now that he thought about it, you could smell it, too. Something salty and seaweedy coming toward him on the breeze. It reminded him somehow of the breath of a cat. Nice, but a little rotten.

It reminded him of the day his dad had taken him to Sandwich. They’d spent most of the day in a bar with a friend of his. Business, his dad had said—though it didn’t sound like business. But then later in the day he’d let him go alone down to the ocean, to the rocks there, and look for crabs in the water. Maybe that was when they talked about business, he didn’t know. He’d seen a couple of crabs he liked watching and when his father came to get him he didn’t want to leave.

He cried. His dad had walked away from him.

He wondered how far away the ocean was from here. You couldn’t tell exactly.

Thinking of his dad made him angry and sad the way it always seemed to do, a funny lonely feeling that made him want to punch or kick something. Like there was nobody around anywhere but him, just
him, whether he was up in a treehouse really completely alone or sitting at his desk at school with his teacher and all the other kids around. And having to have that feeling, it wasn’t fair at all. He knew he wasn’t
really
alone. He knew it was dumb because his mom was always there, he had Ed and Tommy, he had friends, but there was still this stupid alone feeling and he still wanted to kick or hit something.

He didn’t dare kick anything up here but maybe some leaves. Kicking a bunch of leaves wouldn’t do him any good. But he did it anyway.

And something rattled across the platform.

Something white.

He squatted and sifted through the leaves.

Bones!

He didn’t know what kind but they were bones, all right. Small, most of them, about the size of the bones of the model Tyrannosaurus that sat on his desk at home. Just a little dirty from being under the leaves, with some little red ants crawling over them.

He brushed away the ants. He collected the bones carefully one at a time and put them in his pocket. He got a pocketful.

He’d ask David what they were. David would know. Or Mr. Campbell.

Awesome!

What a neat place!
His
place. His
secret
place.

He grabbed the post and started down the ladder.

And got two steps down when something shook the tree above him.

He felt it on the ladder. A trembling in the tree itself. He froze there. Looking up.