Salvation City (20 page)

And now he could not imagine himself in Mason’s place. He could not imagine himself touching Starlyn the way he’d seen Mason touching her—like he owned her. But lately all that—kissing, touching, having sex (whatever that was
really
like)—had begun to take up more and more space in Cole’s head. It was another one of his “ideas” (he didn’t know what else to call them): you could never grow up, let alone be a hero, without the help of a girl. And say it didn’t happen. Say you couldn’t find a girl who would help you. Well, then, you’d be hopeless. Whatever else you might do in your life would be meaningless; there’d be no point in growing up at all.

He remembered how, in the period right after he got over the flu, it was as if he’d aged backward. Night terrors. Bed-wetting. Fear of the dark, fear of being kidnapped or lost—all his little-boy horrors had come back to him. He was smaller then, too, he’d lost so much weight, and it seemed to him his voice was higher—maybe the flu could do that, too. Later, studying himself in the mirror, he was dismayed at the scrawniness of his arms and legs, the thinness of his waist, and his sharply protruding ribs and shoulder blades. His butt looked like a baby’s. He had skin like a girl’s: too pink and too pale. Even at its biggest the Yearning Worm did not reach the six inches he knew was the absolute minimum requirement. And who would ever want to kiss a mouth ringed with acne?

But he had gained back all the weight he’d lost plus a few new pounds, and he was a good two inches taller. His voice wasn’t exactly deep, but it had a certain resonance now, a huskiness at times, like when he had sinusitis. And he was shaving every other day. He knew he could barely be called a teen, let alone a man—even a man as young as Mason was obviously way different from him. But you couldn’t call him a child anymore. He was not a child. He had caught up. He had moved on. And now that he was almost there, fourteen felt even older than he’d thought it would feel.

 

 

 

It was all set. Early on the morning of Cole’s birthday, he and PW were going on a three-day camping trip. Not to the Bible camp some kids from Salvation City went to every summer and where Cole, too, would probably go later that year, but to a site in the Kentucky hills where PW used to go when he was a boy.

Ever since he’d been promised this trip, Cole had been looking forward to it. There’d been days when he could think of little else. He was still looking forward to it, but he wasn’t jumping up and down inside like a little kid anymore. In fact, he was embarrassed to remember how overexcited he’d been. He couldn’t say exactly why things had changed, but it saddened him to have to admit that the trip had lost some of its magic. He was afraid PW might figure this out and be saddened, too.

If it ever came out that he’d seen Starlyn and Mason making out and kept quiet about it, Cole was sure PW would understand. What he wasn’t so sure about was the way he’d caught PW looking at him the day of the party. It mortified him to think PW could have read his thoughts then. How many times had PW already told him, “If there’s anything you want to talk about, anything to do with girls, any feelings or urges or questions you might have, you just let me know. I believe you’ll always find me open to that kind of chat.” But Cole had always shied away from that kind of chat. He didn’t want PW to know how he felt about Starlyn. He wanted him to look the other way. Now he worried that sometime while they were away PW himself might bring up the subject.

Sex had been a topic in Bible class (“Good Sex Is Clean, Not Seen, and Never Mean”), and Mason had explained that, in this particular case, Jesus’ example was not meant to be followed. A man cleaving to a wife and the two of them creating a family—that’s what the Lord wanted to see. (“Cleaving,” though he knew what it meant, bewildered Cole and gave him a physically uncomfortable feeling.)

Cole was thankful sex was not one of the subjects he had to tackle with Tracy—though, since the day of the radio show, his feelings toward Tracy had changed. Whenever Cole thought back to that awful day, the most awful part was remembering what he’d done to her. A knee to the chest had to be a very hard thing for a woman to forgive, he thought. He’d been told that, for a woman, being hit in the chest was like a guy being hit in the balls. Not that he’d meant to hit her there—he hadn’t meant to hit her anywhere! On the other hand, he
had
been trying to push her away, so you couldn’t say it was purely accidental, either. Like the time his father threw his phone at the living room wall. He hadn’t meant to break the phone, or to mess up the wall. But, like Cole’s mother said: “It doesn’t matter what you fucking meant, it’s what you fucking did.”

“I won’t lie and say it didn’t hurt,” Tracy said. “But you know, any time I feel any kind of physical pain I think about our Lord’s three hours on the cross.”

Even weeks later, remembering her full and instant forgiveness could bring a lump to Cole’s throat. He had always wished he could like Tracy more than he did. He’d still have given anything not to have to sit through lessons with her. (“What I don’t know about geography could fill all the tea kettles in China.”) But to see her with different eyes—to feel a new affection and respect for her—was blessing enough.

 

 

 

“What’s wrong? You forget something?”

“Nope.”

“Then why do you keep looking back at the house? Didn’t we go over the checklist? You homesick already?”

PW was teasing. They had already had this conversation. The words hadn’t come easily to Cole, but he’d wanted it clear: he wouldn’t have any problem with Tracy coming along. In fact, it was her not coming along that had become the problem. Wouldn’t it hurt her feelings to be left out?

“You kidding? She’s probably happy as a clam to get us two lugs out of the house a couple days. Besides, she’s no camping fan. The great outdoors is definitely not that woman’s thing.”

But Cole had seen photos of Tracy in the great outdoors. She’d looked pretty happy to him.

“Yeah, well, maybe once upon a time.”

Was it Cole’s imagination or was PW annoyed with him? The suspicion alone hurt his stomach.

“But don’t take my word for it, Cole. Ask her yourself.”

“Sleep on the ground? Wake up with the birdies? Snakes and bats and creepy-crawlies everywhere? Yuck!” It was true she’d gone camping many times in the past and enjoyed it. But now: “I guess I’m getting soft in my old age.”

It was something, Cole thought, the way adults could almost always find ways of not telling the truth without actually lying.

So why couldn’t they all go on a different trip, then? It was his mother’s voice he heard asking this, and he thought how it wouldn’t have happened back then. He couldn’t recall ever going on any trip with just his father—a thought that was immediately overshadowed by a more significant one: he was starting to think of PW and Tracy as his parents.

This was another subject he was afraid might come up sometime in the next three days.

“We’re not going to push you, son,” PW had said. “We just want you to promise you’ll devote some serious time to thinking and praying on it.” And Cole had promised, but in fact he’d been mostly avoiding thinking and praying on whether or not to be adopted.

It felt good to be wanted—and PW and Tracy had a way of making him feel like the most wanted boy in the world. In most ways they were easier to live with than his parents had been. They were certainly a lot happier than his parents had been. He had heard them quarrel a few times, but he had never heard them curse each other, and he could not imagine Tracy walking out on PW. He knew how happy he would make them both if he agreed to be adopted. And why shouldn’t he make them happy? They loved him, they were kind to him, and what could there be to stand in the way? It wasn’t like anyone else wanted him.

And if he could have agreed to be adopted without having to see his parents’ horrified and wounded faces, then probably Cole would have done so.

There had been a time in his childhood when he used to pretend quite a lot that his parents were not his real parents. And sometimes then, when he was out in public, he would see a particularly cool-looking couple—a couple who looked like they never fought and never worried about money—and he would spin out fantastic reasons why they, his true parents, had had to give him up. (“It would’ve been wrong to expose a child to the dangers of our lives as secret agents.”) It was never a question of their not having wanted him but rather of their having been forced to make the supreme sacrifice.

When he looked back now it seemed to Cole he had played this game for years, and he writhed to recall those scenarios in which his long-lost mom and dad whisked him off to their private island or rodeo ranch or traveling circus or spaceship.

And he remembered how, when he was still in the hospital, he had convinced himself that once he was well Dr. Hassan was going to adopt him—a fantasy that had
not
conjured up his parents’ scandalized faces. On the contrary, Cole was sure his parents would have approved of his being adopted by someone like Dr. Hassan.

But if dead was dead—if they were truly
nowhere
and
nothing
now—how could his parents be horrified at anything? How could they approve or disapprove of any decision he made? How could he hurt their feelings?

This was why he avoided thinking about adoption. It was too hard, too painful and bewildering. Sometimes it made him want to scream or break something; other times it just made him cry.

 

 

 

Up in the dark, and even though she wasn’t coming along Tracy was up with them, fixing peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches and filling the cooler with iced tea while Cole and PW loaded the minivan with their gear.

Now that the day was finally here, all Cole’s excitement had bubbled up again, and in that hushed hour before sunrise it was as if something epic was about to unfold. Once again, as on that day years ago when his parents came to pick him up from summer camp, he was overwhelmed by the terrible power of happiness, how it threatened to crush you, or to suck all the air out of your lungs, and his hands shook as he helped PW pile firewood into the van.

It was spring, but all that week had been hot as July and even at dawn the air felt like something sprayed on your skin.

“Now, don’t you all get eat by a bear,” Tracy warned.

PW said black bear—the only kind of bear to be found where they were going—didn’t eat people. And as long as you didn’t rile them they wouldn’t attack. Even so, Tracy said, she’d sleep better knowing PW had his gun.

The gun had taken Cole by surprise. Not one of the hunting rifles from the gun cabinet in the den but a 9 millimeter Cole had never seen before, and which he figured was kept somewhere in PW and Tracy’s bedroom. But how close would the bear have to be—

“It’s not for bear, son.”

“It’s not?”

“No. Now, don’t you worry, I’m just playing it safe. I wish it were otherwise, but the truth is, the scariest thing out there goes on two legs, not four.”

The rifles in the den hadn’t been used in years. It was one of Cole’s favorite stories. PW and some buddies had been out tracking a whitetail when one of them was accidentally hit by another hunter. PW had been standing close by when it happened.

“Saw his cheek explode, got splashed with his blood, even thought for a couple heartbeats I’d been hit myself. Well, poor Carter survived, but I wasn’t much of a happy hunter for a while after that. ’Course it didn’t help seeing him all the time with his face so messed up. He had a bunch of operations, but I never did see much improvement. He still made Mason look like a beauty queen. I don’t like to say, but his wife up and left him. After that he stopped going to church and started talking crazy. He was going to
finish the job
. Anyone could tell he meant business. That’s when I promised the Lord I’d give up hunting for good if he’d do a work in Carter’s heart.”

“And that’s what happened?”

“Carter met a girl—much prettier than his wife, I don’t mind saying. He married this girl, Shane, had three kids with her, worked his tail off making a nice life for them all. Then the flu got him. And where he is now it don’t matter what his face looks like. His life is one pure joy.”

Hunting was second only to church in Salvation City. (“There’s a reason the Indians thought of heaven as the Happy Hunting Ground,” said Boots.) All the boys and more than half the girls Cole knew did some kind of hunting, and there were kids his age who’d been doing it for years. Clem had killed his first turkey at seven and his first deer at nine. There was no shortage of people eager to train Cole to hunt any time he was ready. But the idea did not sit well with the animal lover in him. He’d gone fishing just once and even that had been too much for him, his stomach mimicking the convulsions of the hooked fish.

Tracy was no hunter but she knew how to shoot, as she knew how to load a rifle and how to take it apart and clean it, too.

“My daddy always said that’s how you prevent accidents. Not by keeping young’uns away from guns but by teaching them how they work.”

And what was it with people who were scared of keeping guns in their homes? For her it was just the opposite. “I could never sleep in an unarmed house, especially after what happened with the flu,” she said. “And when you think about what might be coming, well, what are you going to do, just sit there defenseless?”

Defenseless was how she looked to Cole that morning as he and PW drove away. Smaller and smaller through the van’s rear window, in her short hot-pink bathrobe with white pom-poms at the belt ends, waving two-handed like a child.

The sun popped into view behind her just as she vanished from sight.

 

 

 

PW liked to drive fast. Once they got to the highway they would zoom up to eighty or ninety and maintain that speed most of the way. He turned on the stereo and they listened to Veronica playing their new song, “So Angel.” He kept the volume high, the way he did only when he was driving alone or when it was just the two of them. Cole thought Veronica was an awesome band and that “So Angel” was their best song yet.