Whippoorwill (18 page)

“I know. Why don't we try it and see how it goes?”

I knew it was something Dad proposed to make me feel better. He was worried about me, and I understood that.

“Don't you have to work today?” I asked Dad as we walked out to the truck.

“I'm taking a sick day.”

“Wow.”

“Let's just see how it goes. You said Wally was doing better.”

“Much better.”

“So, who knows?”

We followed the same route that Danny and I had taken. We found Wally at the SPCA in Bolston. It wasn't more than a glorified trailer, but it had runs in back and even a corral where a horse came over to watch us. A little old lady with a volunteer tag on her smock made us fill out some paperwork and pay thirty dollars for boarding the dog. She said the police had dropped him off. Two hikers had found Wally out on a hiking trail running loose, so they tied a bungee cord to him and brought him down to town. They turned him over to the police, and that's how Wally arrived at the SPCA. The police had known whom to call.

“He was some hungry, too,” the woman said, leading us into the back. “Almost ate us out of house and home. But he's in good shape. None the worse for wear.”

I started to cry when I saw Wally.

He reared up on the cage door, crazy to see us, and he stood nearly as tall as my dad. I told him off, but he didn't listen, and I had to squeeze through the door by pushing his weight away. When I finally got inside with him, he started to whine. It was the old whining, the sound I used to hear late at night in the winter, and I put my arms around his neck and tucked my face into his fur.

“I'm sorry,” I said to him.

The old lady and my dad didn't do anything or say anything. I held on to Wally and felt my heart turning and ripping, and Danny was mixed up in it, and sorrow for things I couldn't name.

We stopped at the fly-fisherman statue on the way home. It looked better now that the vines had finally fallen away from gravity and the wind blowing. The wind turned the statue and sometimes the lower gears moved. It was clever the way my mom had constructed it. The statue contained motion but was still a statue, and that required a good eye and a steady hand to bring off.

“It's bigger than I remembered it,” my dad said, circling it slowly. “More dramatic, too.”

“It's a pretty cool statue.”

“Your mother had talent. She didn't have all the follow-through in the world, but she had talent.”

“Who bought this?”

“I'm trying to remember. It was a commission or a contest, I'm not sure which. She was very excited and she stayed up here for a week installing it. They did a little ceremony when they unveiled it. They called it an unveiling, but it wasn't like it was covered or anything. Your mom was happy.”

“Was I here?”

“Of course,” he said, appearing surprised that I'd ask. “Where else would you have been?”

“I don't know.”

“You were just a toddler. Maybe a little older than that. We have pictures of the day somewhere. Probably up in that plastic crate thingy in the sewing room.”

“I'd like to see them.”

Dad nodded, but his eyes stayed on the statue. He made a full circle.

“We could clean it up for her,” he said. “Oil it and polish it a little. You want to do that?”

“When?”

“Right now. We have the day off. We can get the stuff at a hardware store. There must be one around here somewhere.”

“You'll need a ladder.”

“Maybe. But if we park right next to it, we can probably climb up high enough to do it some good.”

My head felt light and dizzy. I didn't want him to do it to satisfy me, to inoculate me against feelings I might have regarding Danny. My brain couldn't follow a straight line about it.

“I'd like to see Danny,” I said.

He looked at me. He nodded.

“Of course.”

“He's alone.”

“I think you should see him when you're ready.”

“Soon.”

“I'll look into it,” Dad said. “What it takes and so on.”

“And I want to train Wally so that he's a great dog.”

“Okay. How about the statue? You want to clean it?”

I nodded. Dad looked at me seriously for a while, then finally crossed his eyes at me and made a face. I didn't laugh or acknowledge the face at first, but he kept doing it until I made a face back. We both laughed, and it had been a while since that happened.

A disciplined dog is a free dog, Father Jasper says. That's why Danny wasn't free. No one had taught him to be disciplined, and now they had caught him and locked him up. He wasn't much different from a dog.

We did a good job, a thorough job, of cleaning the statue. We pulled the pickup next to it, and I climbed on the roof to get at the highest parts. We polished everything and greased the gears. Dad said he could remember Mom working on the statue, how she had suddenly seen its shape emerge from the pile of bike parts, and how excited she had been when the unveiling had taken place. A town band played at the event, and the head of the select board had read a short speech about the value of art in a community. Mom had been excited and happy. It was one of the good days, Dad said. One of the best.

When we finished, we stepped back and judged our work. The statue gleamed and the slightest breeze made the parts move. It was only when we got ready to leave that I saw Mom's signature on the I-beam. It would have been impossible to sign the statue itself, given the thinness of most of the parts, but Mom had signed near the foot of the angler. I showed Dad. He put his fingers on it and smiled a sad smile.

“I didn't know she had done that,” he said. “Funny I missed that all these years.”

“She must have been proud of it.”

“She was. She loved this statue. I'm glad you came to see it.”

“Do I look like Mom? Mrs. Cummings says I do.”

He put his arm around me.

“Sure you do.”

“She was prettier than I am.”

“No, that's not true. You're very pretty, Clair. Your mom thought you were the most beautiful baby she had ever known. She said you were going to be a heartbreaker.”

“Mom was very pretty.”

“She was.”

“I'm glad we cleaned the statue.”

“So am I. I feel bad we ignored it all these years. I ignored it, I should say.”

“It gleams. And when the wind turns it, it's really something.”

“That's your mom standing there. I mean, not really. I guess it's a male fisherman, but your mom is in the parts. I don't know if she meant to do it, but she left her stamp there. Do you see it too?”

I nodded. We watched it awhile longer, then we drove home.

O
N THE BUS
a few days later, Cow Bell said he saw Danny on the news.

“Bonked his dad with a car battery! That's some kind of strange. My mom said they had a picture of you on the news too, but only for a second. I guess they did an arraignment, right? I think that's what she saw.”

Cow Bell hung over the back of the seat in front of me. His breath smelled like pretzels and milk. He wore a camo cap pulled down close to his ears.

“Leave me alone, Cow Bell,” I said. “I don't feel like talking.”

“He left him on the ground to die, that's what I heard. Right on the kitchen floor.”

“Shut up, Cow Bell.”

The bus stopped. More kids climbed on. Cow Bell seemed to think about the next way to approach the subject while the other kids found their seats.

“You think he'll go to prison?” he asked when the bus started moving again.

“He's in prison now, Cow Bell. If you hit someone in the head, you go to prison. That's just the way it is. It's not like in the movies when people get away with stuff.”

“Dag, that's crazy. He'll come back all tatted up and you'll be some prison wife kind of thing living in a trailer somewhere. It's wild.”

Cow Bell slid down into his seat. I tried to read my French textbook, but I couldn't concentrate. Cow Bell pulled out his cell phone and played a game. His arch-enemy, Larry Grieg, wasn't on the bus for some reason.

Holly met me at the bus stop. She didn't often do that, but today was a big day.

“You were on the news last night! Did you see it? I tried to call about a million times, but you didn't answer!”

She carried her books against her chest. I knew she was dying for information, for any gossip I could give her, but I didn't want to do that to Danny. I felt protective of him, and I told her I didn't want to talk about it.

“Things have been crazy. We went back up to bring Wally home. They found him on a hiking trail.”

“Well, that's good at least. Right? That's something. Are you going to keep him?”

“I think so. I hope so.”

Then she had to get to the topic du jour.

“Seriously?” she said as if she were merely answering a question someone else asked. “I can't believe Danny could do something like that. I mean, can you? Can you believe a guy you dated is now in prison?”

“I didn't date him, Holly. Don't even say that to people.”

“Well, whatever it was. He's now in prison. Danny Stewart. It's wild.”

I stopped and looked at her.

“I need you to help me,” I said. “I need you to help me protect Danny. I don't want everyone talking about him and making fun of him. He doesn't deserve that. Promise me you won't let it be this lurid thing that happened to someone we know. He's real, Holly. He's in real pain, I bet. We both know Danny wouldn't do something like that if he didn't have to.”

Holly nodded. She looked me dead in the eyes and then she nodded hard as if she finally understood. She put her arm through my arm and walked me to the school entrance.

I got away to see Mrs. Cummings between third and fourth periods. She was down in her office shelling peas. She looked nice; she seemed brushed up and carefully dressed for a change. As soon as I walked in, she hugged me. I nearly broke down being in her arms. After a little she made me sit and gave me some broccoli tops she had cut up for the raw bar.

“You okay?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“I can't imagine you are. You can't blame the kid, honey. He just fought back is all. You can't blame him for fighting back finally.”

“He almost killed him.”

“He hit him, that's all. Isn't that right? That's what was reported. I know how people will go on, but that's all that happened. A person can't take and take and take forever. No one can. If he had been a little older, maybe he could have moved out. He probably didn't know his options and he had no one to help him at anything except you.”

“I didn't help him. I may have made the situation worse.”

She grabbed my hand.

“No, no, no. Don't blame yourself that way. That doesn't get you anywhere you want to go.”

I realized she wasn't wearing her gray cardigan. That was what had changed.

“What are you dressed up for?” I asked. I ate two broccoli tops, but they tasted too green for the mood I was in.

“My hubby is taking me for a ride on the
Mount Washington
.”

“The boat?”

“On Lake Winnipesaukee. It's a company thing for him and I wanted to look nice.”

“You do look nice. Really nice.”

“Well, I do what I can. So anyway, sweetie, don't turn your fellow into some sort of gangster. He was just fighting to survive.”

“I know.”

“My husband knew Elwood Stewart from back in the day. He talked about him when we saw it on the news last night. He said Elwood was a devil, a real devil. Of course that's not an excuse to cause him physical harm, but it provides context, now, doesn't it?”

“Danny's not a mean kid.”

She nodded. Then to change the subject I told her about going up and seeing the statue. She listened. She smiled when I related how my father had helped too, and the statue looked almost new.

“Well, isn't that something? Good for you. Your mom would be proud. Something nice can come out of even the worst situation, see? I may get my grumpy old husband to drive me up there someday to look at it. I'd like to see it. I'd like to have a picnic right beside it.”

“It looks good now. It turns in the wind.”

The bell for fourth period rang.

“I've got to go,” I said.

She hugged me once more.

“Stay brave,” she said. “Remember, you know in your heart what's what, and don't let people try to talk that away.”

She took a mint and tossed it in her mouth. Then she washed her hands with sanitizer. She put the peas on a tray next to the broccoli tops and carried them toward the cafeteria.

Holly rode the bus home with me after school. Technically she wasn't supposed to do that unless we had a permission slip, but the driver, Lenny, never checked, and to him Holly was simply one more brat to drop off. She sat next to me, and Cow Bell left us alone.

We didn't talk about Danny. Not then. She told me about a boy she had met from the next town over, John something-or-other, who worked at the rock-climbing barn in Plymouth and was really cute, climber cute, with wiry legs and arms and hair down to his shoulders. Then she told me about a skirt her mother had found for her at the Gap, and it made her look short, everything made her look short, but it worked pretty well. Blue with polka dots, but not old-lady polka dots, she said, young polka dots.

It was nice listening to her. I liked not having to talk. It was like hearing rain.

Cow Bell got off ahead of us at Riley's convenience store. I realized, for him, it was a pretty good day. He rode back and forth to school without being terrorized by Larry Grieg.

“See you, Cow Bell,” I said, because he was Cow Bell and no one else was going to say goodbye to him.