Smoke (8 page)

“Have a seat.” Doc John gestures to a formidable oxblood leather chair. He lifts the top of his desk and fishes inside to find a small silver key in one corner. He moves to unlock the medicine cabinet and Buster can't tear his eyes from the bottle of whiskey there—Old Log Cabin, with a dusty label and a top that looks as if it's never been opened. It might as well be gasoline and matches at which he is staring for his poor sooty heart pumps like thunder inside his chest and he feels unusually warm. Hot. He pulls his checked shirt away from his body. By now Doc John is hunched over with his hands on his bony knees for balance, searching the shelves. “This old body,” he complains with a cobweb tickle in his throat. “Can't seem to make it do what I want any more.” He moves objects around on the top shelf, the middle, tries to reach under to the bottom but clutches at his stomach when the gnawing pain returns.

“Are you all right?” Buster approaches, kneels on the floor. “Here, let me help.”

Doc John sucks in his breath and tries to straighten. His energy has dissipated in recent months and the pain in his abdomen has become more frequent. His voice creaks like an unhinged door. His hands fumble and drop things. Used to be he'd chase Alice around the kitchen while she giggled and swatted him away. Used to be he'd try to catch her and pin her to him for a lingering kiss, but now he can feel that his running and kissing days are almost over. “Just a stitch,” he says. “It should be there. Right where I left it.” He points with an arthritic finger while his other hand holds his ribs, more feebly than Buster has noticed before. Buster's been so accustomed to looking at everything and everyone from a patient's point of view that he finds it awkward to discover the family doctor to be merely human after all. He crouches lower.

“I see an inkwell. That what you want?”

“No, no, what else is there?”

“Um, a watch fob.” Buster holds up the long chain. Doc John shakes his head. “The only other thing is this box.”

“That's it. Give it to me.” Doc John stands, moves to his chair, his breathing laboured, and Buster notices that he wears lifts in his shoes. He follows the old man across the room carrying the small dusty box, hands it over and watches as the doctor opens the lid and places his hand on top of a blue felt cloth, closing his eyes and sighing as though an old friend has finally turned up. “I've had this since I was not much older than you, if memory serves. Kept it all this time for sentimental reasons. I don't mind passing it on if you'll take good care of it. Nothing foolish, hear?” Buster nods, not knowing to what he is agreeing and yet already caught up in another of the doctor's stories. When the old man reaches his hand under the cloth, Buster's eyes follow.

“There are times when living … when a person starts wishing things could be different. If only this or that hadn't happened, right? He gets angry and tries to bully his way through each day hurting the people who care most, sounding off at every turn. A man can turn bitter like cider vinegar, if he lets himself.” Buster averts his eyes. “A person might think he has no real friends to speak of,” the doctor continues. “No future in sight, though he'd be wrong. He'd be wrong to think like that. What he needs most is to keep busy until things change again. Oh sure, I know what a boy needs. I'm not
that
old. Cars. Girls. Adventure, I know.” And with that, he pulls a .38 Special out from inside the box and hands it to the boy with no thought for what he might be providing other than entertainment. “Maybe you'd like it?”

Buster reaches out, trembling as if a live wire is twitching in his hand. It's thrilling to be this close to power, the power to destroy. Now it's within
his
control. He clutches the pistol tightly and feels a shift in attitude. For some it would be a new crop, or maybe a paintbrush or even a warm body to curl into. For him this old gun holds all the potential he thought had been destroyed in the fire.

“Wait a minute. I almost forgot.” Doc John retrieves the pistol, opens the chamber and removes all six bullets, placing them inside his desk. Then he turns and relinquishes the gun for good. “Go on,” he says. “What am I gonna do with it now except watch it collect dust? Mind, no need to mention this to anyone. This is not a toy. She's a thing of beauty, hardware like this. Deserves respect. Every time you hold her I want you to repeat after me. I know who I am. I know who I am.”

“What?” Buster shifts his weight from foot to foot. What good is pretending to shoot?

“C'mon, let me hear you.”

“Um,” he clears his throat.

“C'mon.”

“I know who I am?”

“No, not like you're asking permission. Like this.” Doc John raises his narrow shoulders high and expands his chest. “From the gut. Like you mean it. Like you
really
know.” Buster imitates the doctor's posture. “Good. Better.” Doc John relaxes. “At least once in his life every man asks himself, Who am I? It's not always easy to answer, son. Now, you hang on to this and maybe it'll help you like it did me.” The boy turns the pistol in his hand. He's never seen one this old in his father's case.

“Where'd you get it?”

Doc John stands, moves to the small bathroom, ducks inside and returns with a white fedora, a black ribbon around its base. “A friend gave it to me. Long time ago.”

“Raymond Bernstein?” Buster can hardly contain his excitement. “Ruthless Eddie?”

“I knew some people who knew them.” Doc John plunks the hat on top of Buster's head. “This'll help keep the sun off your face.”

“Were you friends with the Purples?” Buster asks. “Or a rival? Were you
really
there? You can tell me. I won't squeal, I swear. C'mon, tell me everything!”

Everything?

Doc John shudders at this. Everything is a maelstrom he can't afford. The hair on the back of his neck stands on end. “You'd best get going,” he says. “School's waiting.”

Buster reaches for the box and places his new gift inside as delicately as if he's lifting an infant from a crib. “I'll take good care of her, sir. I swear.”

“You do that,” the doctor whispers. “You do that.”

B
USTER TAKES THE BACK ROADS,
stops to lie down in a cornfield with the gun box on his bony chest and examines the gun in the bright sunshine. It's blinding to look at it out of doors. Clouds roll overhead and he imagines all the times it's actually been fired. Who might've pulled the trigger? Who was injured, even killed? He will find out soon enough, but today the edges of his village move with pigs and cattle and there is no urgency for answers.

From a distance the long, narrow troughs of the Walker farm hold swine as big as calves. Sturdy enough to be ridden, Buster knows from experience. Hank often volunteered to train a few to compete in the fall fair. The best ribbon would go to the smartest, the pig that could count, the pig that could sing along.
“Su Su Suey!”
everybody would scream over the fence, and
“Suey!”
the prized pig would snort in return. Young men no different from Buster before he was burned, boys like Ivan and Donny, sneak from their homes and slip into these pastures on balmy nights. They move up behind cattle, creeping like snails barefoot and holding their breath. Then in unison, from years of practice, they shove into the side of a targeted animal as hard as possible and laugh as the dingbat cow falls over, humiliated. A boy like Ivan wanders into the field with other thoughts too, thoughts he doesn't share with his comrades. He'll encounter a calf who reaches about waist high, grab it from behind, fists full of flank, lift the tail, force himself inside and ride the animal until he finds release.

Buster lifts the pistol, aims it at the sun and pulls the trigger.
Click
. He hears it fall on an empty chamber. Squinting and partially shaded by his hat, he studies its design with the same intensity that some of his schoolmates will soon be showing for their new assignments. If the anatomy of a weapon were assigned as a topic for a school essay instead of that bloody and not-so-distant battle at Dieppe, he might become an A-plus student. He knows the violence of local games as expertly as any Rhodes scholar knows his books. He understands that sulphur and saltpetre are the primary elements in gunpowder. He's hunted partridge and pheasant for sport and wild turkey for Thanksgiving with his father and his brother. He knows the difference between the casing and the bullet as sure as he knows his family name, and how the hammer, when retracted and released, pops rather than bangs as most people expect. Once the pin sends the casing and the bullet rotating out of the chamber and through the barrel, the spin, the curve and twist, is what makes firing most powerful, like the spin of a well-thrown football. Lounging about, Buster realizes that, even knowing these things and even knowing pain at its worst, there is still so much he doesn't know. Like, how to return to school with his head held high, and what ever happened to Raymond Bernstein?

He remains hidden in the corn, dreaming and scheming and sheltered under a big blue sky, until late into the afternoon. He stares up at the clouds with the unloaded gun tucked into the waist of his blue jeans and it doesn't matter that he has no bullets. The simple fact of holding a gun, an all-powerful appendage that he can produce at will, is enough protection. The hat fits snugly on his head causing his temples to pulse, and it shades his eyes and makes him feel taller and broader and capable of real damage. Deep in those stalks on the edge of the village, distance is as far and wide as he needs it to be, and possibility endless.

Eventually he sits up and stretches, looks around for a good spot and buries the box in the middle of the field. He heads home with the pistol hidden in his jeans and budding intrigue beating close to his wounded heart.

The next morning, Buster walks the two miles to school. He arrives before any of the others and props himself up on the cement steps in front of the large doors, one leg crossed over the other knee. He's wearing his most comfortable pair of blue jeans, roomier than he remembers, a short-sleeved white T-shirt, his jean jacket and his good black leather boots, already spit-polished. Before long, Ivan and Donny come his way. Ivan spies him first.

“Look,” Ivan says, lighting a cigarette.

Donny glances at Buster sitting by himself. “I hadn't figured on him coming back. Not this soon, anyway.” He thinks about the time he's had riding in a flashy car, talking trash in the park with Ivan and having girls pay him attention. He isn't sure he wants to give it up just yet.

“He's asking for trouble,” says Ivan, blowing large smoke rings into the air. They hover and separate and dissolve like ghostly outlines.

“He's all right.” Donny swats the dirt from his jeans and steps away from the car. “I'm going over to say hello.”

“Suit yourself.” The stub of Ivan's cigarette dangles precariously between his lips.

Donny mounts the wide cement staircase to where Buster is sitting at the top, his knobbly knees bent and his spindly arms folded across them like twine tied too tight on a paper package. He notices that his friend's face is stretched, engraved and staring up at him crooked, carved out and two-tone. He feels his stomach turn.

“Hi Buster.”

“Don. What finally brings you around? Slumming it?”

“Just wanted to say hey.”

“Hey.” Buster chews a stick of bubble gum.

Donny shifts his weight to one side. Tries to appear casual. “So … how's it going?”

“It's changed,” Buster says flatly.

Donny drops his head. Kicks at the school wall. “Sorry about him.” He turns his back to Ivan, who is staring. “He's a goof.”

“And now you're like him?”

“Um, no. Not really.”

“Yeah that's what I thought.” Buster gestures sharply to Ivan with his chin. “Why don't you just go on back where you came from. No one's asking for your company here.” He spits on the steps at Donny's feet, a big clear gob.

Donny lowers his voice. “C'mon, I know it's rough but—” “You don't know squat,” Buster snaps. “Now, get lost. You're good at that.”

Donny feels the space between them stretch out thinner and thinner like a rubber band. “Listen, why don't you come check out my new wheels? She's a '51 but she lays rubber in all three gears. I worked tobacco for Mr. Rombout to pay for her.”

As soon as Buster saw Donny hanging there at school with Ivan like the weakest link in a chain of command, he knew for sure that he'd be washing his hands of his closest friend for good. When he speaks again there's no irony in his voice, no prankster's smile leaking from his otherwise serious expression. “What for?” he says. “I can see it fine from here and you know what? It looks kinda yellow.”

Donny drops his arms to his sides. “Have it your way.” He takes a step back. “If this is how you get your kicks now, fine by me.” He lowers his voice further. “I meant to come by, you know.”