The Progress of Love (11 page)

“Go on,” said Ross.

“Go on what?”

“Go on and tell about the anniversary party.”

“Oh, Ross,” said Glenna. She got up and turned on the lights in the colored plastic lanterns that were strung along the wall of the house. “I should have made Colin get up and put some in the cherry tree,” she said.

“Well, Colin was thirteen at the time and Ross was twelve,” Sylvia said. “Oh, everybody knows this backwards and forwards except you, Nancy. So, twenty-five years married and my oldest kid is thirteen? You could say that was the problem. Such a long time without kids, we were just counting on never having any. First counting on having them and then being disappointed and then getting used to it, and being used to it so long, over ten years married, and I’m pregnant! That was Colin. And not even twelve months later, eleven months and three days later, another one! That was Ross!”

“Whoopee!” said Ross.

“The poor man, I guess he got scared from then on I would just be dropping babies every time he turned around, so he took off.”

“He was transferred,” Colin said. “He worked for the railway, and when they took off the passenger train through here they transferred him to Peterborough.”

He had not many memories of his father. Once, walking down the street, his father had offered him a stick of gum. There was a kindly, official air about this gesture—his father was wearing his
uniform at the time—rather than a paternal intimacy. Colin had the impression that Sylvia couldn’t manage sons and a husband, somehow—that she had mislaid her marriage without exactly meaning to.

“He didn’t just work for the railway,” said Sylvia. “He was a conductor on it. After he first was transferred, he used to come back sometimes on the bus, but he hated travelling on the bus and he couldn’t drive a car. He just gradually quit visiting and he died just before he would’ve retired. So maybe he would’ve come back then, who knows?”

(It was Glenna’s idea, relayed to Colin, that all this easygoing talk about throwing her own anniversary party was just Sylvia’s bluff—that she had asked or told her husband to come, and he hadn’t.)

“Well, never mind him, it was a party,” Sylvia said. “I asked a lot of people. I would’ve asked Eddy but I didn’t know him then so well as I do now. I thought he was too high class.” She jabbed Eddy’s arm with her elbow. Everybody knew it was his second wife who had been too high class. “It was August, the weather was good, we were able to be outside, like we are here. I had trestle tables set up and I had a washtub full of potato salad. I had spareribs and fried chicken and desserts and pies and an anniversary cake I got iced by the bakery. And two fruit punches, one with and one without. The one with got a lot more with as the evening wore on and people kept pouring in vodka and brandy and whatever they had and I didn’t know it!”

Ross said, “Everybody thought Colin got into the punch!”

“Well, he didn’t,” said Sylvia. “That was a lie.”

Earlier, Colin and Nancy had cleared the table together, and when they were alone in the kitchen Nancy said, “Did you say anything to Ross?”

“Not yet.”

“You will, though? Colin? It’s serious.”

Glenna coming in with a platter of chicken bones heard that, though she didn’t say anything.

Colin said, “Nancy thinks Ross is making a mistake with his car.”

“A fatal mistake,” said Nancy. Colin went back outside, leaving her talking in a lowered, urgent voice to Glenna.

“And we had music,” Sylvia said. “We were dancing on the sidewalk round the front, as well as partying at the back. We had records playing in my front room and the windows open. The night constable came down and he was dancing along with us! It was just after they put the pink streetlights up on that street, so I said, ‘Look at the lights they put up for my party!’ Where are you going?” she said to Colin, who had stood up.

“I want to show Eddy something.”

Eddy stood up, looking pleased, and padded around the table. He was wearing brown-and-yellow checked pants, not too bold a check, a yellow sports shirt and dark-red neckerchief. “Doesn’t he look nice?” said Sylvia, not for the first time. “Eddy, you’re such a dresser! Colin just don’t want to hear me tell the rest.”

“The rest is the best,” Ross said. “Coming up!”

“I want to show Eddy something and ask him something,” Colin said. “In private.”

“This part of it is like something you would read in the newspaper,” said Sylvia.

Glenna said, “It’s horrible.”

“He’s going to show Eddy his precious grass,” said Sylvia. “Plus, he really does want to get away from me telling it. Why? Wasn’t his fault. Well, partly. But it’s the kind of thing has happened over and over again with others, only the outcome has been worse. Tragic.”

“It sure could’ve been tragic,” Ross said, laughing.

Colin, guiding Eddy around to the front of the house, could hearRoss laughing. He got Eddy past the string fence and the new grass. In the front yard there was some light from the streetlight, not really enough. He turned on the light by the front door.

“Now. How good can you see Ross’s car?” Colin said.

Eddy said, “I seen it all before.”

“Wait.”

Colin’s car was parked so that the lights would shine where he wanted them to, and he had the keys in his pocket. He got in and started the motor and turned on the lights.

“There,” he said. “Take a look at the engine now while I got the lights on.”

Eddy said, “Okay,” and walked over into the car light and stood contemplating the engine.

“Now look at the body.”

“Yeah,” said Eddy, doing a quarter-turn but not stooping to look. In those clothes, he wouldn’t want to get too close to anything.

Colin turned off the lights and the motor and got out of the car. In the dark he heard Ross laughing again.

“Somebody was saying to me that the engine was too big to be put in there,” Colin said. “This person said it would break the universal and the drive shaft would go and the car would somersault. Now, I don’t know enough about cars. Is that true?”

He wasn’t going to say that the person was Nancy, not because Nancy was a woman but because Eddy was apt to regard anything Nancy said or did with such mesmerized delight that you would never be able to get an opinion out of him. It was not easy to get opinions out of him in any case.

“It’s a big engine,” Eddy said. “It’s a V-8 350. It’s a Chevy engine.”

Colin didn’t say he knew this already. “Is it too big?” he said. “Is it a danger?”

“It is a bit big.”

“Have you seen them put this kind of an engine in this kind of body before?

“Oh, yeah. I seen them do everything.”

“Would it cause an accident, like this person said?”

“Hard to say.”

After most people say that, they go on and tell you what it is that is hard to say. Not Eddy.

“Would it be sure to break the universal?”

“Oh, not sure,” said Eddy agreeably. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“It might?”

“Well.”

“Should I say anything to Ross?”

Eddy chuckled nervously. “Sylvia don’t take it too well when you say anything to Ross.”

Colin had not been into the spiked punch. He and Ross and the half-dozen other boys did not go that close to the heart of the party. They ignored the party, staying on the fringes of it, drinking only out of cans—cans of Coca-Cola and Orange that somebody had brought and left beside the back steps. They ate potato chips that were provided, but did not bother with the food set out on tables that required plates or forks. They did not pay attention to what the adults were doing. A few years ago, they would have been hanging around watching everything, with the idea, mostly, of making fun of and disrupting it. Now they would not give that world—the world of adults, at the party or anywhere else—credit for existing.

Things that belonged to adults were another story. Those were still interesting, and in the cars parked along the black lane they found plenty. Tools, shovels, last winter’s chains, boots, some traps. Torn raincoats, a blanket, magazines with dirty pictures. A gun.

The gun was lying along the back seat of an unlocked car. It was a hunting rifle. There was no question that they would have to lift it out, look at it and comment on it in a knowledgeable way, aim it at imaginary birds.

Some said to be careful.

“It isn’t loaded.”

“How do you know?”

Colin never heard how that boy knew. He was thinking howRoss must not get his hands on this gun, or, loaded or not, it would explode. To prevent such a thing happening, Colin grabbed it himself, and what happened then he absolutely did not know, or remember, ever. He didn’t remember pointing the gun. He couldn’t have pointed it. He didn’t remember pulling the trigger, because
that was what he couldn’t have done. He couldn’t have pulled the trigger. He couldn’t remember the sound of a shot but only the knowledge that something had happened—the knowledge you have when a loud noise wakes you out of sleep and just for a moment seems too distant and inevitable to need your attention.

Screams and yells broke on his ears at this same time. One of the screams came from Ross, which should have told Colin something. (Do people shot dead usually scream?) Colin didn’t see Ross fall. What he did see—and always remembered—was Ross lying on the ground, on his back, with his arms flung out, a dark stain spilled out from the top of his head.

That could not actually have been there—was there a puddle?

Not despising the world or help of adults anymore, one or two boys raced down the lane to Sylvia’s house, yelling, “Ross is shot! Colin shot him! Ross! He’s shot! Colin shot him! Ross! Colin! Ross!”

By the time they made the people sitting around the table in the back yard understand this—some had heard the shot but thought of firecrackers—and by the time the first men, running down the lane, came to the scene of the tragedy, Ross was sitting up, stretching his arms, with a sly, abashed look on his face. The boys who hadn’t run to get help had seen him stir, and thought he must be alive but wounded. He wasn’t wounded at all. The bullet hadn’t come near him. It had hit the shed a little way down the lane, a shed where an old man sharpened skates in the wintertime. Nobody was hurt.

Ross claimed he had been knocked out, or knocked over, by the sound of the shot. But everybody, knowing Ross, believed or suspected that he had put on an act on purpose, on the spur of the moment. The gun was lying in the grass by the side of the lane, where Colin had thrown it. None of the boys had picked it up; nobody wanted to touch it or be associated with it, though it was clear to them now that everything must come out—how they took it from the car when they had no business to, how they were all to blame.

But Colin chiefly. Colin was to blame. And he had run.

That was the cry, after the first commotion about Ross.

“What happened? Ross, are you all right? Are you hit? Where is the gun? Are you really all right? Where did you
get
the gun? Why did you act like you were shot? Are you sure you’re not shot? Who shot the gun?
Who?
Colin!”

“Where is Colin?”

Nobody even remembered the direction he had gone in. Nobody remembered seeing him go. They called, but there was no answer. They looked along the lane to see if he might be hiding. The constable got into the police car, and other people got into their cars, and they drove up and down the strets, even drove a few miles out onto the highway to see if they could catch him running away. No sign of him. Sylvia went into the house and looked in the closets and under the beds. People were wandering around, bumping into each other, shining flashlights into bushes, calling for Colin.

Then Ross said he knew the place to look.

“Down at the Tiplady Bridge.”

This was an iron bridge of the old-fashioned kind spanning the Tiplady River. It had been left in place though a new, concrete bridge had been built upriver, so that the widened highway now bypassed that bit of town. The road leading down to the old bridge was closed off to cars and the bridge itself declared unsafe, but people swam or fished off it, and at night cars bumped around the
ROAD CLOSED
sign to park. The pavement there was broken up, and the streetlight had burned out and not been replaced. There were rumors and jokes about this light, implying that members of the council were among those who parked, and preferred darkness.

The bridge was only a couple of blocks from Sylvia’s house. The boys ran ahead, not led but followed by Ross, who took a thoughtful pace. Sylvia stuck close to him and told him to get a move on. She was wearing high heels and a teal-blue sheath dress, too tight across the hips, which hampered her.

“You better be right,” she said, confused now about which son she was most angry at. She hadn’t had time to recover from Ross’s not being shot when she had to wonder if she would ever see Colin again. Some party guests were drunk or tactless enough to wonder out loud if he could have jumped into the Tiplady River.

The constable stuck his head out of the car and told them to remove the roadblock. Then he drove through and shone his headlights on the bridge.

The top of the bridge did not show up very well in this light, but they could see somebody sitting there.

“Colin!”

Colin had climbed up and settled on the iron girders. He was there.

“Colin! I can’t believe you did that!” Sylvia yelled up at him. “Come on down off that bridge!”

Colin didn’t move. He seemed dazed. He was, in fact, so blinded by the lights of the police car that he couldn’t have climbed down if he had wanted to.

Now the constable ordered him, and others ordered him. He wouldn’t budge. In the midst of the orders and reproaches, it struck Sylvia that of course he didn’t know that Ross wasn’t dead.

“Colin, your brother isn’t shot!” she called to him. “Colin! Your brother is alive here beside me! Ross is alive!”

Colin didn’t answer but she thought she saw his head move, as if he was peering down.

“Get those stupid lights off him,” she said to the constable, who was a sort of boyfriend. “Turn the lights on Ross if you want to turn them on something.”