Smoke (14 page)

Buster knows the answer of course; 1949. But why in hell would he grant a moron like Mr. Kichler the satisfaction of a truce? The only reconciliation he will ever concede will be with himself. He stands, gathers his books and charges out of the classroom, knocking the wreath from the door. The other students pretend not to notice.

Jelly Bean is filled with envy watching him depart. She's always been partial to Buster. She's watched him on his bicycle, tearing through the village with the other boys when they were younger. She's seen him win snowball fights, sat beside him in Sunday school. Now, since his accident, she is even more drawn to him. All year she's been stared at by the other boys, once Ivan even grabbed her when no one else was looking, but Buster hasn't seemed to notice the changes in her body; he's been preoccupied with his own. She is sure she understands how he must be feeling; the scrutiny, no escape from prying eyes. More than this, she longs to know what it is to break things and not have others even blink with surprise, and Buster knows. She longs to exist outside the bounds of good manners, where for once she might not catch herself sideways passing a windowpane, not feel the need to fix her hair or straighten her skirt or say just the right thing. She wants to be left beyond the need for approval, beyond approval's reach, but girls relentlessly trying to be beautiful can never escape their own vanity. She has little choice in the matter; she is vain to the point of paralysis most of the time, vain until it hurts.

Buster isn't looking to be found when she races up to him at the far end of the hall beside a row of lockers. His is open and he's packing books into a fishing bag. He slips into his winter coat, slams the door shut and swings his bag over one shoulder.

“You following me?”

“Where you going?” She's out of breath.

“You're always gawking. Hovering like the bloody horizon. I'm not here for your amusement.” He feels like a cad for treating her dismissively; she's always been friendly, never once been rude or mean, and she's the only girl who bothers to talk to him any more. Still, he can't hold back these minor explosions.

Jelly Bean stares. She wants to reach out and touch the distorted skin on his face, know what human feels like after all,
real
human, for her own features so fine and clear and uncomplicated leave only a bland, unremarkable sensation on her fingertips. Like painting white on white, she thinks. “I'm sorry. It's … um … well, people are always looking at me too. Trying to fix me. As far back as I can think people have tried to make improvements. They comment like they own me. Nobody owns you.”

Buster stops what he's doing, raises his eyes to meet hers. Yes it is tiresome, gruesome, always being stared at and the thought that she knows it slides a light, buoyant feeling under his boots. “That's right. I'm my own man.”

Jelly Bean sees the opening in his face, the splinter and tease of connection behind his eyes. He isn't indifferent to her, merely withholding. She is encouraged. “Do you think how you feel is more important than how you look?”

“Don't get weird,” he says, spinning the dial on his combination lock.

Jelly Bean places the toe of one saddle shoe over top of the other. “It's just sometimes I can't tell the difference any more.” She says this as an afterthought.

“I've got stuff to do.”

She straightens. “What kind of stuff?”

“See you around.” He waves over his shoulder.

“I know anyway!” Jelly Bean calls out. “I overheard.”

Buster stops midway down the hall with the senior art class mural behind him. A painting of a spruce tree is decorated in red ribbons. He turns to face her. “What did you hear?”

“That you held up the dairy bar. That you're the bandit.” She bites her fingernail.

“What are you talking about?”

“He took two hundred dollars—everything in the register. It was you, right?”

“Have you lost your marbles?” Buster approaches fast. “You're making it up. It's a lie!”

“No, it's true, I swear.” Her eyes are as big and dumb as a cow's. “Everyone says so.”

“Everyone. Who's everyone? Who's been talking?” He grabs her by one arm, fingers denting flesh. “Who's been talking about me?”

“Ivan. Susan. My parents. Let me go!” She tries to pull away. “Mother said—” But before she can shake loose Buster has released her and is off again, bounding down the hall.

He is out the front doors of the school and down the steps, across the yard and along the side of Highway 59 in a flash. He runs as fast and as hard as he can in the snow, until his lungs pinch and then he slows, bends over and catches his breath. Being reminded that he's an outcast by someone as ham-fisted as Jelly Bean Johnson is as painful as when he first saw his cauterized face after the accident. Ugliness seems to enlarge. Ugly was a foreign country before and now it is home. He's filled with shame and walks the rest of the way with that terrible ratty curtain descended over him again, a feeling he hasn't had in months. He reaches for the gun and grips it tightly through his jeans. Maybe he should find a bullet and be done with the whole mess altogether? Imagine
that,
he thinks. Jelly Bean could stumble on me all red and bloody in the middle of a snowy field. That should satisfy her curiosity. His head is heavy, simmering and weighted down as if concrete has been poured over top. People are talking behind his back. He feels as he has on many other occasions, picking tobacco in the hot, hot sun. Sweaty and parched with tight, sore muscles, only now it's every muscle.

Minutes later he knocks on the Grays' door and peers frantically over Alice's shoulder.

“Is Doc John around?”

“He's been feeling punk, Buster. He's napping. Can I help you with something?”

“I need him. When'll he be up again?” He steps back. “Never mind, I'll just wait.”

“C'mon then.” Alice opens the screen door and ushers him inside. “I can see you're determined. There's no point having you stand out and catch cold.” She hugs herself for warmth. “Whew, it's blustery.”

Buster removes his boots and coat and Alice motions for him to sit at the table. The kitchen in the afternoon light is bright and spacious, a serene room filled with quiet domesticity. The window above the sink is fogged and condensation drips along the inside. There are plates hung on the walls—most with English patterns like his mother's good dishes, which never get used. A tall corner cupboard is decorated with a glass chicken collection—covered dishes in milky white, yellow, iridescent blue and gold, all the same mould. He fiddles with the Christmas tablecloth and notices that the red and green pattern makes row after row of miniature bells with bows. It isn't customary to pry but today he doesn't care.

“Is Doc John very sick?”

“Just a cold. Knock on wood.” Alice raps her knuckles on the table as a preventative measure. “He hasn't been able to shake it yet I'm afraid.”

“He should call on Doctor Baker.”

Alice moves to the counter, her right hand beginning to itch. “I was preparing frozen strawberries. John likes them after his nap.” She pours half a cup of white sugar over the berries and mixes them together, keeping her back to the boy all the while. She scoops some into a bowl, grabs a dessert spoon from a drawer, turns and moves to the table. “Here you go.” She hands the spoon and dish to Buster and sits.

“Do folks really think I'm the bandit?” he blurts.

“Well now,” she says, with a voice as steady as her eyes. “Is that what this is all about? Oh I suppose I ought to let John speak with you, but yes Buster. I have heard some talk.”

“I can't believe it.” He shovels two heaping spoonfuls of strawberries into his mouth. “It's not me.”

“Of course it's not.” She pats his hand. “You wouldn't do such a terrible thing.” But there is never absolute certainty. “Have you spoken with your parents about this? After you finish here you should go home. See John when it's all sorted out.” She looks at the clock on the wall and at the windowsill where she saves a jar of lard so that John might oil the cork on his clarinet. She fishes up her sleeve for a hankie but doesn't use it. “People talk, Buster. You know that. Soon enough they'll be on to something else.”

Buster feels refuge drain down his spine. He knows that in Smoke if you have no known past one is fast provided through gossip. Whispers. Stories to fill the disquieting gaps. Is this what they say when your
future
goes up in flames? He takes a couple more spoonfuls to be polite, stands, his tongue cold and stiff and unable to form words. He forces out a sound that resembles a “thank you” and steps into his boots, grabs his coat and pulls the screen door shut tightly, his heart sinking into his scrawny chest. They all think he's a criminal now. He wonders if it's because he pulled a gun on Ivan or if it's just because of how he looks. All at once he realizes what it really means to be an outsider, a person who is feared, even despised. A person set apart. How did the Purple Gang manage it? Didn't Raymond Bernstein ever miss being regular? A migraine presses up behind his eyes. He wants to tear his gnarled face off as though removing a tight-fitting rubber mask.

B
USTER TRIPS OVER LIZZIE'S PLAYPEN
as he sprints into his own kitchen twenty minutes later. The house smells of roast pork and buttery mashed potatoes. He slips from his coat and tosses it across the counter, bounds through the living room, faster around the corner and up the staircase—taking two, three steps at a time. He races into his parents' bedroom without knocking and finds his mother nursing Lizzie in the rocking chair. Isabel lifts a finger to her lips. “Shush, I just got her down.” She covers the baby's head with a white receiving blanket and adjusts the collar of her housecoat.

“You know what folks are saying?” Buster pants, rage tearing up his insides. His hands dig deeper into his jeans pockets.

“Saying about what? What's got into you?”

“They think
I
robbed the dairy bar in Tillsonburg. And it's all on account of this.” He hits himself in the face with closed fists.

Isabel stops rocking. “What?” She struggles to her feet with Lizzie in one arm, pushing herself up with the other. She moves gingerly so as not to tear her stitches. “I can't believe anyone would think you … I'm sorry, Brian.” They face each other and she wonders when he ever grew to be taller than her. “Some people have too much time on their hands, I guess. Just ignore them.”

“That's your answer? Ignore it! How exactly am I supposed to do that?”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Mom, are you blind? I'm deformed!” Buster is hollering now. “People will believe anything about me.” Hot tears stream down his cheeks like trails of clear molten lava. “I've been trying, stuck like this. I can't take it any more. I don't want this, it's not me.”

Isabel holds Lizzie closer, as if she's cradling a younger Buster. As if he'd never grown up and away from her. “There, there,” Isabel rocks. She is struck by the humiliated, abandoned tarnish about her son. Has it been there all along? How has she not noticed it? “I thought you were getting on with things. You never want my help. I thought you were okay now.”

“Okay? I don't exist any more. Cripes, can't you see? If there's even a chance I can be normal again. Even the slightest chance,
that's
what I want.” But as he hears himself speak he knows he's never going back, back to normal. There is only forward now, a tide of different, different, different rolling over into a hardened, leathery reality to match his face. Even if, by some miracle, he could look like his old self again, everyone he knows would still see the scars. He flops down on the edge of his parents' bed crying, shoulders curled in defeat.

Isabel finds the will to raise her lifeboat eyes. “You'll always be handsome to me,” she says, moving closer to him. “You will.”

And there it is; that familiar and infuriating glaze Buster has wanted to stamp out. The tight bind that strangles him, coy gestures and a trivial, flirtatious tone that protects his mother from too much hurting. He recognizes it without understanding it for it has always been there, even more so since his accident, like a sieve through which she filters his corrosive troubles. He can't stand it one minute more. “A lot of good that does me.”

Isabel feels him pull away but doesn't know how to prevent it. Yes she has a way of turning a blind eye and why not? She knows what a cold isolation being left out is, to sit knees to chest in the chilled stone windowsill of an orphanage waiting for someone—anyone— to pass by the room, point, and say that she is the child they want. It never happened. And yet week after week she'd tried her best to win over prospective new parents by smiling prettily. Looking industrious. She had begged and she had cried for acceptance, giving away what little dignity and pride she had, and when that didn't change a thing she'd cultivated defences. She would wait for no one's approval or permission again. She sees what she pleases, usually the best version, because there has been too much ugliness already. When will Buster learn to do the same?

“I wish we could get along again,” she says. “Remember?” She means the easy manner they once knew, the jokes they shared intuitively, inside jokes that Hank and Tom didn't pick up on. And the special way that only Buster allowed her to behave in his presence— binding. Possessing. Until the premature birth of her daughter, a miniature version of herself, no other person in Isabel's life permitted her to feel as rooted as her youngest son. He used to understand his place in the order of things. Smoke and the farm were his birthrights. He had been for the land without being against her and never once questioned the meaning of home. That's all changed though, and she's left scrambling for a way to get it back. She long admired Buster's inherent satisfaction, something she herself has never been safe or secure enough to know. “Lizzie reminds me of you,” she adds. “Here, you hold her.”