Torch: A Novel Part 6

Joshua didn't want R.J. to come but was afraid to say anything that would get him in trouble with Vivian again. "Okay," he said, and they left.

He dropped R.J. off at the bowling alley, where he would play pinball and then walk down the street to the Midden Cafe, where he would play Ms. Pac Man. He did this almost every night.

Once he was alone in his truck, Joshua drove away slowly, convincing himself that he had time. Plenty of it. A full half-hour before he and his mom technically needed to be on their way to Duluth. His house was a twenty-minute drive from town when the roads were good. He told himself these things, watching the clock that he'd glued to the dash of his truck, but a strange panic rose in him anyway. Why had he wasted his time after school? Why hadn't he come home during seventh hour instead of walking around town? He became aware of the fact that he missed his mother, ached for her in his gut. The thought that maybe when he arrived at home his mother would be dead entered his mind and would not leave. He tried to make himself relax by imagining her doing what she was most likely doing now: lying on the couch, storing up her energy for the trip to Duluth. He imagined himself walking in the door and taking her hand. He imagined her saying what she said every day to him when he got home: "How was school?"

"Good," he'd say, like he always did.

But when he walked in the door his mother was alive and well and standing in the kitchen drinking a gla.s.s of water. He didn't go to her and take her hand.

"How was school?" she asked.

"Good," he said, standing in the door, keeping his voice flat and disinterested. "Are you ready to go?"

She was dressed in a manner that she called "funky" or sometimes "all hipped out," in an outfit that embarra.s.sed and repulsed him: cowboy boots and grape-colored tights, a black miniskirt and a slim lilac sweater that ended at her waist but had a cascade of yarn ta.s.sels that came down almost to the edge of her skirt. Her legs in the tights looked bony and taut, like those of an adolescent girl.

"Well, I had a pretty good day myself. I raked the stalls. I'm not so nauseous. I think it's thanks to the weekend being off radiation." She wore lipstick the color of rust; the rest of her face was bare, which made the rust of her lips even more striking, her eyes more blue. She put her hat on, another funky thing, velvet leopard print, a get-well gift from her friend Linea.

"I'll be in the car," he said.

"Wait, hon. I'm coming right now."

Spy and Tanner wagged their tails, pus.h.i.+ng up to Teresa as she put her coat on. "Oh, you think you're going with us, don't you?" she said in her baby voice, bending to let them lick her face. "You're saying, 'We want to go too!' You're saying, 'Where are Mommy and Jos.h.i.+e going?' Aren't you? Oh, yes you are."

"Mom, they're not saying anything, okay? They're dogs."

"Spy thinks that Jos.h.i.+e is grumpy today," she said in a baby pout voice.

"Don't call me Jos.h.i.+e," he said savagely. "I told you. Don't ever call me that again."

He walked out and slammed the door so hard the dried-flower wreath that hung on the front fell off its nail. He hung it back up crooked. He didn't know what he was doing. All he knew is that everything about his mother enraged him, especially her habit of reporting what the animals were thinking and saying, as if her mind were the conduit of all things. For hens and horses and dogs and cats his mother delivered a steady stream of translation to anyone who would listen-even to R.J. or Tammy or whoever he had over.

She stepped outside. "What's wrong with you today?"

"Nothing's wrong with me, Mom. It's what's wrong with you. Did you ever think of that? That maybe it's you? That maybe you don't know what the dogs are thinking? Or maybe that you don't know everything in the universe?"

"Oh, but maybe I do," she said like a sorceress, smiling, impervious to his mood.

This enraged him even more. He got in the driver's seat and turned the engine on.

She got in next to him, buckling her seat belt. "So, how'd Mr. Bradley's cla.s.s go today?" she asked happily, tapping his knee. "Who's your wife?"

At school the next morning Ms. Keillor intercepted him before he went to cla.s.s.

"Mr. Wood," she said dispa.s.sionately. "You're to come with me."

"Why?"

She turned and began to walk away from him.

"I didn't do anything," he said, but then followed after her, down the hallway, past the bathrooms and drinking fountains, one low, one high, through the gym doors and through the glossy, peaceful, honey-colored world of the empty gym, to the door at the back that had a warning, EMERGENCY ALARM WILL SOUND WHEN OPENED, emblazoned across it, though the alarm never sounded when Ms. Keillor opened it with her key. She wore the key on a yellow bracelet that looked like a telephone cord. The princ.i.p.al's office was in a trailer out behind the school, and Ms. Keillor's job was to escort students there, to take papers back and forth, and to keep track of the accounting in the cafeteria.

"After you," she said, holding the door open for him, but then walked ahead of him once they were outside. She was barely five feet tall, slightly plump all over, like a teddy bear.

"You don't have to take me. I know the way," he said, but she ignored him. He unwrapped a stick of Big Red gum and put it in his mouth.

There were two trailers out back-both had small patio porches in front that had been built by the students taking shop. One trailer was for the princ.i.p.al and his secretary and the copy machine and teachers' mailboxes, the other was where the special-ed and developmentally disabled students had their cla.s.ses. Beyond the trailers was the playground for the elementary kids and beyond that a football field and bleachers, all of it covered in snow now. Ms. Keillor went up the stairs to the door and then turned to him. "Dr. Pearson is expecting you. You can tell Violet."

He nodded, waiting for her to step aside so he could go in.

"I wanted to say that I heard about your mom and I was sorry to hear that."

He nodded again, less perceptibly this time, chewing his gum, the cinnamon so fresh in his mouth it almost hurt. What did she expect him to say?

"You all don't eat meat, do you?"

"What?"

"Your family. You're vegetarians."

He was used to this. He nodded again.

"We thought we'd make a dish and send it home-the ladies in the school would like to do something. We thought a pan of scalloped potatoes with something instead of the ham. Maybe peas or carrots."

He couldn't bring himself to look at her. He concentrated instead on her white Adidas.

"Which would you like better?"

The wind picked up and a wooden cardinal that was hanging on a fis.h.i.+ng wire from the eave banged rhythmically against the outside wall of the trailer. He reached up and stilled the wooden bird.

"That's not your property," Ms. Keillor said.

He let go.

"So why'd you feel the need to skip seventh hour yesterday?"

"Because I felt the need to walk to the river and get high."

Deep pink splotches appeared on her face, then spread like a rash down onto her throat. "Why are you saying that? Why would you do that?"

He shrugged, blus.h.i.+ng too, surprised at his own admission.

"You know there are people who you can talk to about this, Josh. There's Mr. Doyle. That's exactly what he's here for. Those social-problem-oriented issues." She put her hands into her coat pockets. "The brain does not do well on drugs, I don't think I need to tell you." Her face was slowly going back to its normal dough color. "Okay. You'd better get inside. And I'll tell the cooks that scalloped potatoes would be fine. Which do you prefer, carrots or peas?"

He didn't prefer either, but told her peas.

"That's what I thought too," she said. "Peas are awfully nice for color. And we wanted to help. I know that at a time like this, every family would need some help."

They stood together for a moment on the porch. Joshua put his hand on the doork.n.o.b. He didn't know what to say. Goodbye? I look forward to having scalloped potatoes? His mind was blank.

"Thank you," he said, and walked inside.

He had to eat his lunch in detention, going to the cafeteria to get it at 10:45, before the rest of the students arrived. He saw Lisa in the empty hallway as he walked back to the detention room.

"My husband's a prisoner," she said. Her face was pale against her hair, as black as a crow's wing, French Canadian.

"s.p.a.cey won't even let me sleep," he said, holding his tray. They both looked down at his food, chow mein, covered with a waxy brown sauce that had formed a skin on its surface.

"Did you write your rough draft?" she asked him.

"What rough draft?"

"The one that's due today." She looked at him, irked, but smiling. "We were supposed to write our dreams and share them with each other to see if they match. Didn't you pay attention? What am I going to do today when you're not in cla.s.s?" She held a block of wood the size of a rolling pin with HALL Pa.s.s written in red marker on all four sides.

"I'll write it now," he said.

"But how are we going to discuss them if you're not in cla.s.s? They have to match or it won't work out." She took a slice of apple from his plate and ate it.

"What are your dreams?" he asked. "Just tell me and I'll say what you said."

He felt like they were very alone and intimate, sharing food. Her s.h.i.+rt was nearly as black as her hair, the sleeves translucent and speckled with glitter.

"Well. We have the dream about being astronauts and having lots of kids. I wrote about that. And the importance of having a good relations.h.i.+p," she looked at him. "Those are my dreams."

"They're my dreams too," he said.

"Joshua!" Mrs. Stacey yelled from a doorway down the hall.

His desk in the detention room had its own little cubby, half walls rising up on three sides. He ate his chow mein and the rest of the apple sections and drank two cartons of milk with his back to Mrs. Stacey.

"How's your sister?" she asked when he was done eating, walking over to get his lunch tray.

"Fine." Teachers often asked him about Claire. She was something of a local legend. Aside from getting the scholars.h.i.+p to attend college, she'd been the valedictorian of her cla.s.s, the queen of s...o...b..ll, voted by her cla.s.smates the "Most Likely to Succeed," and also "Girl with the Prettiest Peepers," a distinction that had instigated what seemed to Joshua hours of Claire gazing at herself in the bathroom mirror. "Do you think my eyes are pretty?" she'd asked him, ignoring his pleas for access to the bathroom. "No," he'd answered, dragging her out the door. He'd been bullied, throughout his childhood and adolescence, to tell her whether she was fat, whether she should get highlights in her hair, whether her b.u.t.t seemed hideously large, or her thighs too squat. Whatever he said, she never believed him or took his advice; she simply presented the same questions to him all over again the next time.

"I wondered if she was coming home, to help out and all," Mrs. Stacey said, blus.h.i.+ng. Everywhere he went now people alluded to his mother's cancer and then went red in the face, embarra.s.sed to have to mention it at all.

"On weekends," he said. "She's got college."

"Of course she does. She'll go far, I'm sure." She looked down at him, still holding his lunch tray, as if seeing him for the first time. "The two of you look like twins-just like your mom too. Like triplets."

Joshua nodded, feeling humiliated but unable to disagree. He'd been told this all of his life: same eyes, same hair, k.n.o.bby noses that were variations on a theme.

A bell rang, and he could hear the low roar of students out in the hall, going to lunch. He ached to be among them. "Can I take my tray back? I mean, so you don't have to do it."

Mrs. Stacey smiled at him, bemused. "I don't know, can you?"

He stared dumbly at her for a moment, then asked, "May I?"

"No," she said matter-of-factly, turning from him. "You may not. But I will do it for you." When she left, he went to her desk. Her purse sat in an open drawer. Inside he could see a gla.s.ses case and a small spiral-bound address book and a fat red leather wallet. He went to the doorway. The hallway was empty, but he could hear a dim commotion in the direction of the cafeteria. He began to walk, not thinking of what he was doing until he was doing it, going calmly but quickly toward the side doors at the end of the building, and then out into the parking lot, past his truck.

He crossed the street and his insides jumped, giddy to be free. He walked past the motel, through the bakery parking lot, past a metal for sale sign that blew and squeaked quietly in the wind, onto the highway. He walked south, toward Len's Lookout, but veered off the road and into the woods before reaching it, not wanting Leonard or Mardell to see him. Through the snow he followed a path he'd worn all winter down to the river, to the spot on the bank behind Len's that he and Claire had claimed as their own when they were kids. The river wound through town, going under roads, past houses and buildings, past countless towns, to Minneapolis and St. Paul, and farther south, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, but this spot of the Mississippi was their spot-Claire and Joshua's-and when they talked about it and said the river, each of them knew precisely what the other was talking about. He didn't come back here with Claire anymore, but he came often on his own, and sometimes with R.J.

He climbed onto a rock that sat near the frozen river's edge. He could hear the water beneath the ice, gurgling, as if it were going down a giant drain. He smoked from the one hit he had in his pocket and walked to the river. Several holes had melted through the ice, and he could see the water raging by. He put his hand in to see how cold it was-freezing-then shook it and put it, wet, into his coat pocket.

The three towns of Coltrap County were all situated on the river. Flame Lake was twenty miles to the north of Midden, Blue River thirty to the south. The river started out so narrow that even in Midden it was still more stream than river, with not a hint of what it was, or would become: "The mighty Mississippi," his mother would say, "the father of all waters." Blue River had a festival each year in the Mississippi's honor, as if the river were theirs, as if the river were blue, as if it weren't the color of mud three hundred and sixty-five days a year, as if it didn't flow through Flame Lake and Midden first. When Claire and Joshua lived above Len's Lookout, when the river was their main playground, they had a game called Blue River p.i.s.s Off! Claire had started it one day, standing in the river.

"You're peeing!" Joshua yelled, swimming frantically away from her, kicking his feet to splash her.

"Shhh ..." she said. "I'm doing something. I'm saying, 'Blue River p.i.s.s Off!' " Her face was serious, concentrating, and then it became wild and frenzied and she spun and shrieked and dove upstream.

From that day forward, whenever one of them peed in the river they would chant "Blue River p.i.s.s Off!" and laugh like hyenas. When the river was too cold or too fast to go in, they would throw things in it, orange peels and apple cores, pieces of string and blades of gra.s.s, and yell "Blue River p.i.s.s Off!" letting the water take it, watching it go. They felt a surge of power, a sense of righteous rage. Blue River had a Burger King, a hospital, a jail. There was the courthouse with a broken clock, a park with a gazebo painted white. The people who lived there thought they were better than all the rest of the people in Coltrap County, thought themselves more stylish and smart.

Joshua picked up a stick now, a branch the length of his arm, and set it into the water, in a place where the ice had melted. "Blue River p.i.s.s Off," he said.

The branch caught on the ice, half of it in the water, the other half jutting up. He threw a rock at it, but it wouldn't budge. He wished Claire would come home, though when she did they fought. She'd been home each weekend since their mother got cancer and on the other days she called several times. When their mother wasn't feeling well enough to talk, she spoke to Joshua. "How is she?" she'd ask, serious as an actress in a movie, suddenly grown up.

"I don't know. Okay I guess," he'd say.

"Okay?" she'd ask. "Define okay."

"Okay as in f.u.c.king OKAY, okay?" he'd yell, wanting to hang up. Sometimes, ultimately, he did hang up, but then she would call back, angrier than before.

He wondered what he should do now. It was just past noon. He stared at the river and saw that the branch he'd thrown into the water had freed itself from the ice and disappeared.

Bender was home. His semi was parked in the driveway out front. He'd be gone for days at a time and then inexplicably be home for weeks.

"Did they let school out early?" Vivian asked, opening the door. Joshua followed her into the kitchen, where Bender sat eating a taco.

"You can make one for yourself," he said to Joshua, waving to the bowls and dishes of food on the table. Joshua picked up a taco sh.e.l.l and piled it full of cheese and salsa and ate it standing up.

"Where's your sidekick?" Bender asked.

"At school. I had detention, so I thought f.u.c.k that."

Bender nodded. He was a small man with an elfin face. In the silence, Joshua could hear his mother's voice murmuring from the radio on the counter, saying something about natural cures for insomnia. The station was playing reruns until she got better. The volume was turned so low he could almost keep himself from hearing it if he tried. He heard her say, "Now let's talk about homeopathic remedies. Are there any you can recommend?" He cleared his throat to drown her out.

"Vivian told me about your mom," Bender said. "That's a shock."

Joshua nodded. "She's getting better. She's having radiation."

"Tell her hi from us," Vivian said, and tapped the ash of her cigarette into an empty can of c.o.ke.

"I will."

"We were just listening to her show," Bender said, gesturing toward the radio.

"She's taking a break until she's done with radiation," Joshua explained. "She's only got three more days of it."

"I always liked that show."