Pilgrims Upon the Earth Page 8

  You and that girl were going off.

  Yeah.

  Terry rubbed the left wrist with his right hand and did the other one the same.

  You’re not old enough.

  Terry shook his head.

  Yeah, he said.

  He rubbed his wrists some more.

  You see what happens?

  Yeah.

  The tow beat them. The car sat in the driveway facing the house. The policeman stayed in his car and Terry got out and came around the trunk and the policeman waved him at the driver’s side. His other forearm was on the sill, a scuffed gold watch at the wrist and another tattoo above the watch, cowboy pistol with the hammer pulled back. It was blue lined, dark and faded, like the other. He took the arm away and leaned to the passenger seat, raised back straight and held a folded knife through the frame. Terry looked at him, and then he looked at the knife.

  Take it.

  It was heavy, lock blade, a wooden handle with brass at both ends, deep blood groove on the blade.

  I’m not supposed to give knives out. Keep it low now.

  Terry put the knife in his front shirt pocket. It pulled down the cloth inside.

  I won’t say anything, he said.

  We pick up lots of things from people. I mean I got a trunk full. Clubs and chains and spikes.

  Terry nodded, fingered the handle at his chest.

  You know how to use it?

  He took the knife from his shirt, turned it over and studied it. He unfolded the blade and held it straight up, waved it and got lost in the point back and forth in the light. He pointed the blade at the policeman and pushed it toward him. The policeman looked down slow at the knife and then he looked at the boy and cocked his head some at one side.

  Turn it around, he said.

  Terry turned the knife handle first. The policeman took it at the wood grip, folded it shut, looked hard at Terry for a few moments, not speaking. He nodded quick and held the knife to him.

  Terry watched the car grow small on the road, beneath yellow lamplight. He stood at the front door. The house was locked, empty, everything same as the morning. What he thought was, this is my lot. His father was still at work. He pulled shut the front door of the house and turned the dead-bolt from the outside.

  Later he opened the passenger side and leaned on the floorboard with the knife. He went beneath the seat and cut the electric tape holding the paper bag to the bottom. He shut the door and went to the other side. He pulled the seatbelt over his chest. He thought to leave, finish what they’d started, back from the driveway and make west, and he cranked the car and let it idle and clenched his left hand at the drive stick a few times. He smoked some of the dope with a metal pipe and it heated and burned his lips. He listened to cars on the street behind him.

  HE RAN hot water and a bar of soap through the work gloves and dried them in the oven, wore them on his hands while he slept, and in the morning his father didn’t wake him, and he didn’t wake him the day after, and Terry slept to late afternoon and woke dry mouthed, body sore. The back of his thighs ached, in the center, down to the knee bend, and a muscle running from his left shoulder up his neck to his head felt twisted and wound tight. The fabric stuck at the cuts leaked in the night and he pulled them off in the kitchen, wrung the gloves with water and soap again and set them to dry on the counter, and then he washed his hands with dish soap, and no blood then, but the cut lines were puffed and raw. He made fists. Light broke trees in the backyard, the pine twitched. He heard the front door shut hard in the frame.

  His father found him smoking on the back steps. He held the door for him to come back inside. He sat near the middle of the couch, and Terry sat on the chair facing him, both hunched over their knees.

  You still tired?

  Terry nodded, and rubbed a spot on the back of his neck.

  You sore?

  My neck hurts some.

  You need to get some ice.

  Alright.

  Benjamin Webber looked at him, and then he turned his face down to the space between his thighs. He stayed that way and pushed on the backs of his hands with his thumbs.

  You can’t run away again. Terry nodded. They’ll take you off. I won’t do it anymore.

  You don’t want to come with me. I know that. There’s no choice here though. You understand that?

  TWO DAYS he stayed in his room and kept the door locked. His father knocked hard a few times. Terry didn’t say anything. Clouds through his window were low and gray, full of a storm to the south. He thought of her as a dark shot of birds over a field, a spray of black wings and chatter, all one thing, beating with many hearts. His father knocked again.

  Listen.

  Go away, Terry said.

  His head rocked. He couldn’t sort anything out, not her gone to ash, or the man past the door.

  I need you to be away from that door.

  You can say whatever you want, his father said.

  Leave me the hell alone.

  If talking to someone is what you need.

  I fucking hear you, now leave.

  He didn’t mean for it that way, but the words came a scream. His face jerked a sob; it clenched, hard, and he felt each of his teeth at once when he bit down. He put a hand over his eyes and turned to his lap. He took the policeman knife from his pocket and threw it closed against the door. It broke a notch shoulder high, chipped the floor when it fell. His father put a fist hard on the wood. The thud jerked him. The room was quiet, and then his father struck the door harder, and then three times quickly, with more weight. Terry went back to the dark clouds through his window.

  You got nothing to say to me.

  There was a pause, and then the hardest knock yet. Terry’s face slacked. He breathed slow, waited for footsteps backed away.

  He tried to cry afterwards, but nothing came, and he stayed in his room smoking dope. He burnt candles until the wick lilted and they melted on his dresser. He put the tips of his fingers into the wax, and it didn’t hurt so much. He took the knife from the floor and unfolded it and cut slits on top of his knuckles. He kneeled at the floor vent, and put his face close; the air came through cold. He shut his eyes and spoke into the vent.

  Tell me where I am, he said.

  THEY BURNED her very hotly, and then she was ash and wind. He I didn’t sleep at night. He went to school at seven-thirty and slept in class. He slept through a knifing in the gymnasium, and then he slept through most of what the principal called a riot; in the courtyard, on lunch hour, kids from all four grades set flame to trash and textbooks in the metal bins, and then they lit cans in the halls. He woke up in detention when he heard the shrill firebell, the teacher beside him, rocking his shoulder, forearm at her mouth, eyes watered. He coughed, stood up and followed the rest of them outside, smoke from the windows and doors, low over the buildings like a factory burn.

  THE MENTHOL display next to the register in the gas station had all kinds, light and regular and ultralight and short and long. He dropped a handful of five-cent pink chewing gum at the counter. The old man went slow counting the pieces. Terry got two packs at his beltline. He went back the next afternoon. After four days he had ten packs, six days he had twenty

  Curtis Rigby came over to buy some. Terry stood at a small fire he built in the backyard. He tossed one shoe. It caught, the canvas bent the fire blue, and he let it go a few minutes. Curtis stood beside him. Terry got a stick and poked the shoe in the fire. He scratched the back of his head. He scratched it some more.

  Something is wrong with you, Curtis said.

  Probably.

  He tossed the other shoe.

  It’s good luck dammit, Terry said.

  Who told you that?

  I can’t remember.

  My legs hurt. They’re sore.

  Must have run somewhere in your dream.

  Can I get those smokes, man?

  Terry took the stick from the fire and pointed it at the porch, the tip coal orange.

  Up
there, he said.

  Curtis went up to the porch and rustled the paper bag. He came back to the fire, carried one pack at his armpit, thumped another against his forearm.

  How old are you? Terry said.

  Fourteen dammit. Same as you.

  I’m fifteen.

  Oh.

  Curtis gave him two dollars. He charged double on the risk. Curtis started off from the yard, and Terry watched him leave. He scratched his head some more, and then he went up on the porch and got another pack of cigarettes. He went fast down the steps and yelled at him in the road. Curtis turned around and started to come back.

  That’s all the money I’ve got man, he said.

  Terry held the pack to him, and then he went to his pockets and gave him back the two dollars. Curtis looked at him confused, and then he said thank you, and Terry nodded at him, and didn’t speak, and then he left Curtis in the road and went back to the yard and the fire.

  Terry cut a deep gash on his index finger messing with the knife. He pressed the finger hard against his thigh for a few minutes to cap the blood but it wouldn’t stop. He pressed the finger some more and still the cut stayed open. He cut the sleeve from an old shirt and then he cut a strip from that and wrapped it tight around the cut. He was out of cigarettes. He went up to the filling station. It was almost eleven at night. The night clerk was there. He didn’t see her much. He pointed at the cigarettes in the rack behind her and she turned around and got them and then she put them on the counter. Terry held over a dollar. She rang the cash drawer open. She put the change in his hand and looked at the cloth bandaged on his finger.

  What’s wrong with your finger? she said.

  Nothing’s wrong with my finger, he said.

  You got that wrap on the end of it. It’s all bloody.

  A shark bit it, alright?

  When?

  When I was in the ocean.

  Oh.

  When I was swimming around in the ocean.

  Was it a big shark?

  I tried to poke it in the eyes with my thumbs. I saw that on television.

  But it bit you on the finger.

  Yes.

  You’re brave.

  I know.

  He got his cigarettes and left the store.

  THE GIRL sitting ahead of him came in mornings smelling woodstove and destitute. Terry’s head itched, and he scratched at it with his tooth-bit fingernails. The civics teacher, a man shaped like an apple, called Charles Hawthy, stopped talking and asked him to come up front. Terry raised from his desk, up front stood with his back to the class, at one side of the teacher’s metal desk. Terry smelled the aftershave he used, the kind on television with the pearl white bottle and the pirate ship on front, and felt his stomach turn when he did. He hated the smell; it made him think of the rich man, Nola Walker, and others like him, handshakes and white tooth smiles, church clothes and money clips. Charles Hawthy looked close at his hair and shook his head.

  Leave now, he said. Go straight to the nurse.

  Terry didn’t understand. The girl in front of his desk wrote at her paper. Charles Hawthy got him by the arm and tugged him at the door.

  All of us will end up with it, all of us, he said. Can you be responsible for that? Can you?

  He pushed Terry into the hall and shut the door hard. Terry scratched one side of his head, and then the other one, and then the top and the back.

  The nurse found lice. She wore plastic gloves and picked at his hair. How did you get this? she said. I don’t know, Terry said. Do you wash your hair? Sometimes.

  How much?

  Sometimes.

  She went to a cabinet and got a small white bottle and gave it to him. He looked it over.

  Use it twice today, twice tomorrow, then you need to wash your hair every day, soap, hot water, it doesn’t matter.

  Terry nodded and put the bottle in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  They start to come back, you see me alright?

  Thank you, he said.

  He walked past the door to his class, and he kept going, and then he pushed the double doors near the front offices and made down the main walk. No one came after. He walked on the shoulder.

  TERRY TRADED the hatchback even for an eleven-year-old Monte I Carlo with tee tops. The engine was eight cylinder, and the paint job something for a bowling ball, shiny and metal green. The roof section was black cloth, and torn in a few places. He pressed the brakes long before he wanted to stop; through a rusted hole in the floorboard he watched the road pass beneath. He didn’t take the windows off to let the roof open, but he thought of it; the idea of a roof with windows he could take out and put in the trunk made him dizzy it felt so unnecessary and glamorous. The windows came with padded storage sleeves, dark green vinyl, like the inside of the car, heavy brass zipper on top to hold them safe.

  Terry woke standing, naked in the fore room, except for the red band work socks sagged at his ankles. He was going at a piss; for how long he was not sure; he dreamt of rain, and the sound of his piss against the wood panel sounded like rain pelting the roof, and he thought, still, it was rain, when he looked down at himself, head still half in dream, and he watched the piss for a few moments, thought, at the same time, it is raining, and too, I’m going on the wall.

  He held the piss and ran outside, socks damp in the early dewed grass, stood on pine straw bedded thick around an oak, and he went there, back to piss, first on the bark and then at the root-knobbed base of the tree. He kept going when it started to rain. He looked up, heard winter thunder above him, past the branches.

  HE MEANT to scout the place. He watched television, so he knew I thieves and robbers and that kind, people who did things like burgle houses, they cased joints before a break-in, studied people for the comings and goings, did it a week, sometimes a month. He drove his car early, on a Monday, a few blocks over, locked the doors and walked a path through the woods. He crouched near the treeline behind her house, smoked cigarettes, part of a joint. He admired the rose garden in back. He put a hand through his hair. It was soft from the lice shampoo the nurse gave to him, smelled of strawberries and chlorine. He scratched above his right ear. His head itched less. He watched her parents leave close to eight; first the father, then the mother. She was an inventor, owned a restaurant supply store full of clear plastic beverage pitchers. She conjured one with two wide pouring spouts on the sides, plus the one on front, and her patent wouldn’t expire for many years. Her father worked there, for her mother.

  Late afternoon he woke in the same spot. He rubbed his eyes, and then he checked the sun for the time. The mother came home after four. She parked the car in the yard and got out, had a cigarette in her mouth, white, long and skinny. She was tall, wore a knee-length black skirt, and she walked the drive and pulled the smoke a few times, twisted the end at grass lining the walk. She checked to see if the tip still burned, put the stub in a shirt pocket, and then she stuck the key to the brass deadbolt above the doorknob.

  The father pulled in an hour later. He was round and short, had dark slicked hair, wore a powder blue oxford, tan slacks with severe pleats. There was a sticker at both sides of the bumper on his four-door burgundy sedan. One read, RIDE A BIKE TODAY! The other, TAKE A HIKE!

  Terry watched the house quiet until dark and cut grooves at his left knuckles with the police knife. He pressed hard to break the skin.

  Next morning he went back, worked again at his knuckles with the knife and watched Alice’s parents turn their cars, exhaust from the tails like great storms in the early weak light. He watched them back down the drive, same as the morning before. He waited a half hour, folded the knife and stuck it to his sock pulled high above the bootlip. He wrapped his hand in part of his shirt and held it tight at the cuts, and then he squeezed a fist and waited for blood that did not come back.

  The house smelled clean and quiet, like fruit, or snow. In the main room he stood at the mantel and stared on the pictures; one of Alice a baby, one of her sister Nora in
Colorado. She stood on a great field, the whole of the world behind, bright and blue and absent of cloud. She held her arms high. Terry picked up the frame, turned it over. It was silver, glass at the front. He looked at the wood floor. He dropped the picture, and then he bent down and gathered it up. The glass cracked. He got a few pieces on the floor, tossed them at the ashes in the fireplace and covered them over, and then he put the silver frame in the fire and covered it too. He folded the picture and stuck it to his back pocket, looked again at the one of Alice on the mantel, turned it facedown.

  He opened closet doors in the hall and looked inside at their brooms and winter coats. He stood at the open doorway of her parents’ room at the end of the hall and crossed his arms over his chest. He lit a cigarette, went inside and sat down on the bed, knocked ashes in the pillows, and then he went to the bathroom and put the cigarette in the toilet.

  Alice’s room was next to her parents’. The walls were bare. He opened drawers at the water-stained dresser; towels, sheets. In the bottom right there were a few of her things; Virgin Mary night light, old black camera, cassette tapes, a picture of her and her sister and mother and father in front of a Christmas tree with white lights, yellow coffee cup filled with pennies. He closed the drawer and sat down on her bed. He pressed one hand into the mattress, got the picture from his back pocket and held it up and read the back and looked on front at her sister in the field. He lay down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling and let the picture sit flat on his chest. The fan moved slow and dizzy. He pulled the pale blue cover at one side of the bed over his shoulders, put his face into it and breathed hard through his nose. He meant to smell her, but nothing, and then he was asleep.

  Her mother stood above him and smoked a cigarette, one arm crossed a slant on her chest and tucked beneath the other one. She held the cigarette high, near her face, blew smoke in the room. He blinked hard a few times to make sure. She knocked ashes to a hand.