Smoke (15 page)

“Just tell me you'll put a stop to the rumour.
Please
.”

“All right,” she agrees. “I'll see what I can do.” She reaches for his hand, a gruffer version of her own, but he yanks it away, turns his face.

He doesn't remember what it feels like to be her boy any more. To be the son his mother or father wants. He is something new altogether now, an unnamed creature caught between fleeting worlds. Maybe he
is
an outlaw. A cold ache fills him up, chilling even his teeth; it's neither deadness arriving at last nor a new life force leaching in, but another fuel. He can't rattle on like this for even one more day. His body is a coffer. Home is a cage. He can't wait any longer to find out what will happen to him.

Buster rolls an extra pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt and stuffs them into his fishing bag with wool socks, a toothbrush, his gun and the latest copy of
Sports Cars Illustrated,
which he found in the rumpus room. He packs a scarf into the pocket of his winter coat and slips from the house in his black boots while Hank watches
Maverick
on television and his parents smoke cigarettes and play honeymoon bridge at the kitchen table. Lizzie stops crying the instant the front door opens.

Buster hurries. He isn't going to be the crippled son of the tobacco king any more. He's not hanging around to find out what else people will say behind his back, what they will make of him. There's never been a disfigurement of his kind in Smoke. Sure, men lost limbs using machinery or working at the cannery, occasionally the hanger sprained an ankle or broke an arm falling off the top tier of a kiln, and of course there were amputees after both wars. But no one's ever been so changed and lived to walk among them. Not that he knows. They're all busy looking ahead but the future can change for the worse, can't they see? Who you
are
can change. You can even disappear.

The dirt roads look shorter already. They snake through the village and off across its borders into faraway places, places he can reach. Reckless places like the ones Doc John has been describing for months. His father once told him that the dust kicking up from a Smoke country road could never be washed out of his eyes, that it would stay with him until they closed for good. Buster intends to prove him wrong. He'll be like Ray Bernstein, he thinks. Or one of the other Purples. Might as well since people already think it of him. He'll roam and land wherever he wants. Best of all, he'll be just like any boy again, answering only to himself. Quick-witted, with no one counting on him and no one to disappoint. Why not? He has nothing left to lose.

He jogs to the road and walks a good distance in case someone should see him, and then when he's sure that he's out of sight, doubles back across his father's field and slips westward into the woods. Trees break the cold wind and silence falls around him like a shroud of ash. He can see two, maybe three feet ahead under the moonlight, but knows the path well. His father hid eggs there every Easter when he and Hank were boys. And he and Donny, and sometimes Ivan, had waged battles with sticks and pellet guns, scoured these parts for hidden treasures. Once they found a brown jug filled with pennies half-buried in a tree stump. They'd staked out the area every day for a week, hiding in the brush hoping to catch a glimpse of the fellow who hid it there. No one was found and eventually they divvied up the fortune, two dollars and seventy-five cents a piece. He and Donny each bought Marvel Comics. Ivan bought a slingshot.

The woods is a different place for a boy alone at night in winter. Sound is muffled and yet amplified—the creaking of icy branches, the sleepy movement of cardinals and owls, dry breath. Trees take on ominous shapes in the dark, large deformed monsters. Giants of the underworld. The plan is to hitchhike to Windsor and then cross the border to Detroit. He'll find work on the shady side of the law—surely Detroit still has gangs, and his scarred appearance should qualify him. He's already got a gun.

The woods come out onto another farmer's field. He marches across it and decides to make the long trek over to Tillsonburg. Most locals use shortcuts, he knows, and avoid the main stretch at night. The speed limit slows them and police cars are hard to spot. He's bound to run into someone he knows on the roads. At Tillsonburg he finds the bright yellow light of Highway 19. He crosses both lanes and when he sees a car approach, stands by the side of the road and sticks out his arm to thumb a ride. A Ford passes without slowing, then two more cars in succession—no one he recognizes. He waits another hour and by now is wearing his scarf. He begins to walk south. Finally, an old Studebaker pulls up alongside and slows. Its driver reaches across the seat to open the passenger-side door. This is his chariot, this is his way out. He starts towards it, places his fingers on the handle and opens the door. “Thanks for stopping,” he says. “I've been out here a while.”

“Going as far as Windsor,” says the driver. “Hop in.” Then seeing Buster's face clearly for the first time the driver startles, puts his foot to the gas pedal. He lurches away, leaving Buster to jump back and be doused in car exhaust. The Studebaker swerves across the centre of the lane and back again when its driver reaches to pull the passenger door shut.

“Thanks for nothing.” Buster waves his fists in the air. “Lousy son of a bitch!”

The Studebaker vanishes and night creeps down to earth like loose ink. Everything grows heavy and black except the few feet on either side of a streetlight. Buster steps out of its glare and back into invisibility. He doesn't look up again for close to an hour, when it begins to snow. He doesn't bother to stick out his thumb when passed by an Oldsmobile carrying two hundred dollars in stolen bills in its trunk. He simply crosses the street once again and slips onto a farm, resigned to his fate. The driver of the Olds watches him and notes his path through his rear-view mirror.

The river is frozen. Fresh snow decorates the field beyond Buster's window like wedding confetti. The window is covered in frost. He wakes to the sound of his parents down the hall. To firm and fleshy bodies merging, and the frantic stutter of the headboard against the wall as passion explodes. They do it all the time. It's disgusting. His heart aches with fear of unrequited longing and then bitterness takes over, blunts the senses. He sits up, yawns and falls backwards into warm covers. He slips his legs over the side of the bed, bare feet touching the chilly floor, and stands to stretch. He crosses the room, opens a dresser drawer and reaches a hand into the elastic waist of his pyjama bottoms where he lifts the pistol from his underwear, sets it inside the drawer under a stack of clean, folded T-shirts and makes his way out of the room and down the hall towards the shower before Hank, as usual, has a chance to use up all the hot water. After, he will dress and sneak downstairs and out the patio door, past the old oak, before either of his parents rise in time to stop him.

He approaches the Grays' veranda mustering the courage to knock on the door when it opens and Doc John steps out sporting new leather gloves. The old man takes one look at the boy—sees his boots unlaced, their tongues hanging long and dry, his coat partially open, and he knows. He knows that Buster knows something. But what? Before he has a chance to offer a greeting, Buster is upon him.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

Doc John closes the door to his office. His palms are damp. “Tell you?”

“About the rumours. You should have warned me.”

“Oh, that.” The doctor takes a deep breath, feels the acid in his stomach settle. “I don't pay attention to gossip.”

“I thought you were my friend.”

The old man digs his walking stick into the floor of the veranda, turns its handle like a corkscrew. The comment pinches. There is nothing worse than being lonely and lonely in its purest, most distilled form is what he hears in Buster's voice—a desolate, last-ditch effort to cling on to the rest of the world for dear life. Alice warned him the boy is troubled. He makes his way down the steps.

“I am your friend.”

“Then help me.”

He examines the boy's face and recognizes its fierce quality. Buster has been bargaining for a different life with a God he is no longer sure he believes in. Made a pact for the future in the hope of exchanging common happiness for his imperfect self. Cocoons are woven by creatures less delicate than monarchs and swallowtails, the doctor thinks. A human being can change so dramatically the world has no time to catch up. Buster was once a vibrant, active child. One who looked incapable of failure or misery. And now here he stands, defeated, the boy he delivered and caught with his own two hands. Doc John considers Buster, as he does all the children he's delivered, in some small part as his own. How can he bear to watch Buster in this kind of pain and do nothing to relieve his suffering? Anguish is no less debilitating than physical injury. And like all physicians, he'd taken an oath—
I will keep them from harm and injustice. I will come for the benefit of the sick
. He wants to offer reassurance—shake hands, slap Buster's back, for he knows that in a closed system even an outcast must remain inexorably part of the fabric. “You're right,” he finally concedes. “I should've warned you before you heard it from someone else. But you think that would've made any difference? Knowing something doesn't always change it.”

Buster shrugs and in his eyes there pools a familiar fragility. Doc John rests his arm around the boy's shoulders and guides him along Main Street. They walk, barely advancing, with the doctor leaning on the boy for support. Most of the houses they pass are garishly lit. Red and green and gold lights. Homemade wreaths. Bejewelled trees visible through front windows. Doc John fiddles inside his left glove, feels the thick gold band loosen around his crooked finger. He hadn't worn a wedding ring when he and Alice married, but upon their tenth anniversary she'd presented him with one and he hasn't removed it since. “I ever tell you about the time Mo Axler cleaned me out,” he says, “right down to my last penny?”

Buster wipes his cold, runny nose on the sleeve of his coat, shakes his head.

“Well he did. Waged everything I had and you know what? I lost it all and more. How's that for knowing something?”

“What was the bet? I mean what were you so sure about?”

“I was sure about a girl.”

“A girl!”

“Not just any girl,
Mo's
daughter. She was fine fine fine, with sheer silk stockings, a yellow chiffon dress and the scent of lavender dabbed behind her ears.” Doc John pokes Buster in the ribs. “Mo Axler was a man with connections so you can imagine that I had to be darn sure of myself taking
him
on.”

“What'd he do?”

“Hold on now. Don't rush me, son. It started when I rented office space on the cheap. I had a small practice. Back then you could only acquire liquor legally if it was prescribed by a physician and the lineup at my door for prescriptions was impressive. It wasn't long before I realized I was treating every lush and half the gangs in the state, along with their families. At the end of one day this girl came around for a checkup. She was maybe twenty, a real looker. And sent by her father. I had no idea who she was, Mo being Ray Bernstein's right-hand man. If I'd known that … well. She came back each week at the same time, before close, always claiming to have a condition that needed tending right away. A fever, I think it was the first time, but I couldn't detect one. A sore throat the next. Bad nerves. Of course it hit me that she wasn't only turning up for my medical opinion so I wrote her the prescriptions. She kept coming back though, and soon we got to going for walks.”

“What was she like?”

“Let's see …” They pass before the bank and Doc John glimpses his reflection in the decorated window. “She was about my height. Dark eyes, dark hair cut short. It was wispy in the style of the day; kiss curl. Any room we entered and she was the centre of attention. She cottoned to hooch as much as her daddy did, I guess, because in the middle of the night she'd sometimes sneak away in fancy clothes and meet me on Lakeshore Road near Woodland, by the big Ford House. Sometimes over at Belle Isle where there weren't many folks about at that hour. We'd make our way to the blind pigs, one on every corner back then. This one night we crossed the river and tried the Canadian roadhouses for a change.