The Runner (15 page)

Frank just sat staring at the photograph, getting morose. “She's a good kid, spunky, you know? I never thought I'd like having a kid.” Bullet looked at the photograph, too, and the muscles around his ribcage tightened.

He looked at Frank, who was just staring into the picture. Frank's mouth drooped down a little at the ends. “If I had the fare, I'd go up there right now, tonight; I could use a dose of Liza. She loves me—you know how she is—she really does love me, just me. I mean, I'm okay and all that, but I'm not such a great guy, you know?”

Yeah,
Bullet agreed. He wanted to get out of there, but Frank blocked his way. He was about to bust Frank one in the face and he wanted to get out.

“I'm terrific, you know, but not much of a friend—sort of . . . Oh, hell, it doesn't matter. What's it matter, anyway—right, kid? The stupid cow loves me. It doesn't matter to her, whatever I do.” He looked at Bullet without seeing him. “Or don't do. I got something to tell you, kid. You listening to me?”

Bullet's jaw ached, and the eyes suddenly focused on him.

“I wouldn't try it, kid. You don't last as long as I have without knowing how to take care of yourself. And you don't know anything, not anything. You hear me?”

Bullet heard, and he believed Frank, and he was angry—there was nothing he could do, there was never anything you could do, but he wanted to do something: he wanted to take Frank Verricker's teeth out.

“She won't marry me. Don't get me wrong, I don't much mind not being married. I told her I'd marry her, when she was pregnant. But not Liza. She even gave the kid her name, because I wasn't at the hospital to stop her. Tillerman, like I had nothing to do with it. She wouldn't have done that if I'd been there, I wouldn't have let her, you can believe me. It's not my fault—I told her I was willing. But not Liza. Just like her, too, stupid. If we were married they'd send her half my wages, more than half with a kid or two.” At that he grinned again, and his voice got sentimental. “Old Liza,” he said. “I wonder if . . . do you think Honey'd give me the money to get to Boston?”

Bullet shoved Frank out of his way and got out of the booth.
Just like Liza—stupid,
he thought, between waves of anger. He shoved his way out of the room, not caring who he plowed into.

Outside, it was growing dark. He stood in the crowded parking lot, trying to force air into his lungs. The cars were lined up, nose to nose. The long silver nose of Honey's car hung up over the cement curbing.

Bullet went around beside the roadhouse, seeing what there
was lying around on the ground, until he found himself a long, thick pipe. He came back with it to Honey's car. He lifted it back and swung it, down, onto the hood of the car. Metal rang on metal, echoing itself. He swung again, and again. The hood bent, dented, clanged—its smooth line got pocked. Breathing heavily from the effort—but it wasn't hard work, Bullet thought—he threw the pipe down on the ground.

Damn Frank Verricker.

He kicked at the front tire and strode out of the parking lot. At the road he turned toward town and ran. He ran tight and hard, his fists clenched as his arms swung up close to his chest.

*   *   *

It was after six when he got back. They were eating. They heard him come up the back porch, and his mother's eyes watched him enter the kitchen. His father did not look at him, but reached his fork out to the platter in front of him and speared another pork chop. His father wore a jacket and tie, his mother wore her fancy red blouse. Bullet stood by the sink in his jeans and T-shirt. At least he didn't have to change for dinner anymore.

He stared at the two of them. He had half a mind to tell them about Frank Verricker, he had half a mind to just sit down and grab a pork chop. And eat it with his fingers. What could the old man do, after all? Pick him up and tote him away from the table? The old man couldn't do anything to Bullet. As if Bullet wanted to sit down and eat with them.

They'd sit up and listen if I told them. I could tell them something that would make them sit up, if I felt like it.

The words burned their way up from his stomach. He took a breath, to start letting them out.

“Your father is wondering when those barn doors are going to be fixed,” his mother said. Her eyes were fixed on his face, and they had no expression he could read.

His mouth clamped shut.
Right now.
Her head nodded at him, once, as if she had heard him.
Getting her to do his dirty work, always getting her to do it.

Bullet went back outside. The evening light added to the light oozing out of the kitchen windows was enough to work by. He stood by the open barn doors, considering. He shoved with his shoulder against the one on the right. Either it would be fixed at the top, where the hinge hung askew, or it would be fixed at the bottom, where the wood bit into the uneven ground.

Bullet went into the barn, making his way into the darkness where the tools were kept. He felt around for the sledgehammer on the wall. Holding it over his shoulder, he went back to work on the doors.

The old wood gave way easily, with crackling sounds. He assumed they could hear the noise in the house, but nobody came out to watch him at work. Fixing the barn doors.

B
ullet hooked school the next day: he just got off the bus and went his own way. The thick, triple story of brick waited like a prison, and he didn't go in. Nobody could make him. They could, he guessed, capture him and drag him inside, if they could get a rope onto him—which he doubted.

Anyway, the question never arose. Hanging onto his lunch bag, he moved around the building and down to the playing fields. A couple of first-period gym classes were doing calisthenics, but he went on by them. Nobody asked him any questions. If anybody had, he wouldn't have answered, and if they'd come chasing after him he wouldn't have run. Nobody was going to make him run.

At the oval track he put down his lunch bag and stripped off his sweater and jeans. He folded them into a little pile, the bright red sweater on the brown earth. It was chilly, but the sun was already burning off the morning mist, and the day would grow warm. He ran the cross-country course, ran it five times, ran it hard. Nobody was going to stop him from running.

When the sweat on his chest had dried, he put on his shirt and tied the sweater around his waist by its arms. He walked along down into town, following the main street right up to where it ended at the water. Then he followed the water around to Patrice's, going through shallows when there was no public
pathway. By the time he got out there, his sneakers were sodden and muddy and his jeans clung to his calves.

Patrice wasn't home. His truck was gone. Bullet went out and sat on the deck of
Fraternité
for a while. He would have hosed her down except she was always kept clean. He ate his sandwiches, then went back along the dock to drop the crumpled-up bag into Patrice's incinerator. He hung around the yard for a while, seeing what Patrice was up to. The fourteen-footer was almost finished. The ribs were in and boards ran its entire curved length—fitted so neatly you almost couldn't see that it was made of separate boards. A new transom lay nearby, needing sanding before it could be set into place, the joints cut out like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Bullet ran his hand along the sides of the boat, sanded to silky smoothness, ready for an undercoat. He didn't know how Patrice stood it, all that slow work, but he surely admired the results, and even admired Patrice for being able to achieve them.

He turned and looked around the yard. A couple of hulls, an empty boat trailer digging its nose into the ground, motors and propellers. Then he stepped over the picket fence.

The road by Patrice's was lined on both sides with little houses, each house surrounded by a yard and fence. The other yards, past which Bullet jogged, were planted and tended, kept neat. It bothered his neighbors that Patrice didn't plant and tend his lawn. Every now and then, somebody would write him a note, anonymous, of course, or a group of men would come to try to talk to him about keeping up the neighborhood. Patrice never minded them, but it made Bullet mad, and these little boxed-in gussied-up yards didn't show him anything either.

His return route took him through one of the colored sections. Not the higher income one, that was downtown. This was shacks along the roadside, built from tar paper over cinder-block
footings; or old trailers with patches of vegetable gardens beside them; or once even an old bus, with a bedspread hung for a door. Bullet jogged past the section fast; it made him angry.

He arrived home by midafternoon and went right upstairs to get his gun. He stopped in the kitchen for a couple of glasses of milk, which he drank standing up, looking out the window over the sink. He could see his mother off around the corner, checking the sheets on the clothesline. They weren't dry yet, but a late-afternoon breeze was building up and that would probably finish the job. The cool milk flowed down his throat.

He heard heavy footsteps behind him, the old man. He didn't turn around, didn't hurry himself. He felt the old man's anger wash over him from behind and almost smiled. Slowly, he lifted the glass to empty it. Slowly, he turned on water, rinsed the glass, set it down slowly on the washboard. He wondered what the old man would do if he turned around to face him. He'd said he didn't want to lay eyes on Bullet. What would he do if Bullet turned around? . . . Run out of the room?

Bullet turned around.

His father was staring at the toes of his shoes and his eyes didn't even flicker, so Bullet knew the man had been staring at them all the time he'd been standing there. He could have laughed.

“There is nothing quite so childish as getting even by wanton destruction,” the old man said to his shoes.

Bullet wondered what would happen if ten little voices answered back: “Yes, sir . . . yes, sir . . . yes, sir,” overlapping one another like waves coming into shore. He stared at his father's bent head, to where the face began, under the white crown. He stared hard, wanting to force the guy to look up and eat his own words.

“You'll repair the damage you did.”

I did what I was told. They close now—I checked that.

“They'll need to be completely rebuilt now.”

So what?

“Then rehung. On new hinges.” The orders came marching out. “You'll have to rebuild the frame first.”

You can't make me.

“If not right away, you'll have to do it sooner or later, whenever—”

Bullet knew what he was about to get to.
Unh-uh, you're not going to do that to me.

“When it's yours.”

You can't make me.

“So that you have succeeded only in fouling your own nest. Like any other animal, like some nigger. I am not surprised at that, not surprised at all.”

—not going to hang that around my neck. Box me in with it. Use it that way. Take it away from me.
Because nothing felt under his feet the way the rich, flat acres of home did.

“Because the farm is yours, or as good as. Not that I particularly want to give it to you.”

You don't want to give it to anyone, you want to pull it into your grave after you like some blanket.

“And I hope it chokes you like it's choked me.”

Anger burned up in Bullet's guts and his bones closed in around it. He got his hands on his gun and got out of the room. His father wanted to make Bullet take it from him because he hated it; he couldn't make Bullet take anything from him. Nobody could do that, but nobody. They kept trying to box him in, and he kept breaking out—and he'd keep on breaking out, damn them.

He went around behind the barn and into a thin patch of woods. He moved fast, and his noisy progress routed two crows
out of the branches. Without thinking, he shouldered, cocked, aimed the gun and fired twice. He got one. Not bad. Even with this second-rate gun, his marksmanship was okay, maybe even good. When he could pick up the Smith and Wesson in Salisbury, he'd be good enough for it.

Bullet slowed down, moving more quietly. In another couple of weeks the hunting season would begin, and he'd have to get himself a bright orange hat. But now he didn't have to worry about being picked off by some jerk from some city who mistook him for a deer, or maybe a duck. He thought, sliding the clip into place and shoving the bolt home, if he saw some ducks he might shoot for them. Game wardens stayed home as long as they could, earning their salaries by shuffling papers on a desk until they had to get out into the cold to actually keep an eye on things. It wasn't even cold yet, just crisp in the shady woods. If he flushed any ducks and was close enough, he might just shoot for them. Who'd see him here? Who could catch him?

All of his senses alert, he walked the woods and fields as the afternoon gathered in around him. Once he got a shot at a rabbit, off to the left inlaid, but he missed. He opened the bolt, picked up the empty casing and jammed it into his pocket, then slid the bolt home again, hearing the bullet click into place. For a while, he sat in a clearing, just in case a deer might come browsing by near enough to justify trying for it. Across the open space, the bare trees rose into a gray sky, each branch clear. A breeze flowed along the land, running for the water. It soughed through the pines, and the top-heavy loblollies swayed under its hands. No deer came by.

When Bullet moved back into the woods, it was twilight there, darker than in the open, the light dim and shadowy. He stopped, pulled his sweater over his head, and then—holding the twenty-
two ready, like a pistol at his right hip—he tossed a couple of dead branches up into a pine, seeing if anything flushed out. Nothing moved.

But something moved off to his right, low and on the ground, at the edge of his vision. . . . He got the shot off before he even properly saw, a sweet reflex shot, his whole body coordinated and working like a perfect machine.