Wild Things Page 13

  “Zoë,” Henry said flatly, “that cat of yours trusts me more than you do.”

  It stung when he said that. I looked down at my lap, not wanting to look him in the eye.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” he asked.

  I thought about the bow peeking out of the boy’s bag. The last thing I wanted to do was get him in trouble.

  “You said you didn’t know that boy,” Henry said.

  “I don’t,” I told him. “But I’ve seen that deer in the woods between here and the cabin, three times counting today, and each time I had the feeling that another animal was with her, one I couldn’t see.”

  Henry nodded.

  “Until today, I thought it was just another deer.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You know that old cabin?”

  He nodded again.

  “I’d fixed it up, made it nice. But Hargrove and his cousin went up there and tore everything up, broke the windows, stole my stuff, wrecked everything I’d done. I wrote about the cabin in my journal. The one that got stolen.”

  The phone rang then, and Henry answered. Sheriff Bean. While they talked, I tried to picture the sheriff being five and Fred and Henry being the boy’s age. I thought of the boy and the white deer alone in the woods tonight. After today, I didn’t hold out hope for that deer to survive hunting season. I hoped they were all right for now.

  Henry hung up the phone. “The sheriff says from what little anybody in town knows, that boy’s a transient, in and out of the migrant community, a picker, probably illegal.” He stood up, came around his desk, and stood over me, looking serious. “I need to get back to our guests. Will you promise to think about what we’ve discussed, please?”

  “I promise, Uncle Henry,” I said.

  “Then I’m going to trust that you and I can work this through in our own way,” he told me. “All right?”

  “Okay.”

  “Coming with me?”

  “Not just yet,” I said, and he nodded once and went out.

  I headed upstairs without saying good night. Bessie was still fussing, telling Fred he’d forgotten what it was like to be young. I took the little carved cat from my nightstand and turned it in my hand. I’d completely forgotten to tell Henry about it. But what could I have said? I wondered now if the wild boy had made it and the others Hargrove had stolen, or if he knew who had. I thought about the crazy events of the day, about Harlan showing up and Maud with her possum, cats, and crippled dog, about Henry and Fred saving little Garland, but most of all about the boy and his deer. Seemed like I had the pieces of a puzzle, if only I could see how they fit together.

  I took the small book called The Boy Who Drew Cats from my bedside table drawer. I opened it and looked at the pictures, trying to quiet my mind, but the story had the opposite effect. I liked it so much I read it twice, about the Japanese boy who drew cats everywhere, on walls, in books, on furniture, because he couldn’t help it, because he had “the genius of an artist,” and how his cat drawings came to life one night to kill the goblin rat and save his life.

  Before I turned out my light, I slipped the book and the cat carving under my pillow, so I could reach for them in the night.

  15

  After Thanksgiving, Bessie pressed Henry into hiring Harlan to put the cabin right. Everybody but me liked the idea right off. Harlan would bunk with the Padre and help out evenings at the church, while working days at the cabin and providing what Henry called “a presence” in the north woods. That was the deal Henry struck with the sheriff and the condition he set for me. I could go up to the cabin and wander the woods so long as Harlan was around.

  The mayor let his reward offer stand: Any squealing no-account could collect five thousand dollars for proof of who’d hurt Hargrove. The sheriff thought Maud had winged him, and I’d kept the boy’s bow a secret. There’d been no sign of him or his deer since Thanksgiving. They seemed to be long gone.

  My journal never turned up either. At the request of the mayor, Mr. Reardon moved Hargrove to another fifth-grade class, which suited me fine. Except for glimpses of Hargrove at recess, lunch, or assemblies, I hardly saw him anymore. Mad as I was about the cabin, I had better things to do than spend any more energy on someone that hateful and weird. If he stared at me across the playground or came anywhere near me in the halls, I just sidled up to Shelby or one of my other classmates and started up a conversation. I went about my business as though I was deaf, dumb, and blind to his existence—until one strange day right before Christmas break.

  Thursdays Uncle Henry spent the day volunteer-doctoring at the Sugar Hill free clinic, picking me up at school afterward. He was always late, though, and on this particular Thursday he was later than usual. I didn’t mind. I went around behind the school to see Sparky, who belonged to our custodian, Mr. Sylvester. Sparky was a little brown mutt-terrier, sweet and loyal. Mr. Sylvester had rescued him from a traffic island on a California freeway. Sparky was pacing the island back and forth, trapped by traffic going seventy and eighty miles an hour on either side. Seeing Sparky’s trouble, Mr. Sylvester got off at the next exit and circled back around, and when he pulled off on the left shoulder and opened the door, Sparky hopped right in. He’d been riding shotgun for Mr. Sylvester ever since.

  I could hear Sparky whining and barking as I went around behind the school. Mr. Sylvester always tied him to a mulberry tree in the back, where he waited patiently for his savior to quit work. As I turned the corner, I saw he’d gotten his leash wrapped tight around the tree, entangling his back legs. Somebody whose face I couldn’t see was hunched over Sparky, talking baby talk to him and helping him get free. Untangled at last, Sparky rolled on his back and wriggled with pleasure as he got a stomach scratch from none other than Hargrove Peters. Hargrove seemed to be enjoying the experience as much as Sparky.

  “Good boy,” Hargrove was saying in a soft voice I’d never heard him use before. “Wish my daddy’d let me have a cute little dog like you,” he crooned. “We could have all kinds of adventures together, couldn’t we, boy? We’d go camping and fishing. I could draw your picture and you could sleep in my bed. But Daddy says mutts are common and people would laugh at a boy who had a mongrel or rescued a dog from the pound.”

  A sad look came over Hargrove’s face when he told Sparky that. But he bucked right up again when he switched to scratching Sparky behind his ears, sweet-talking him all the while. I stood dumbfounded, hardly believing my ears or eyes, trying to make sense of what I saw. Mr. Sylvester peered out the rear doors then, to see what all the noise had been about, just as Henry’s pickup pulled up behind me in the school parking lot.

  I didn’t know what to think about having Harlan around again, either. At first I felt like I’d gone back in time to a place I didn’t care to revisit. But I had to give him credit. Within two weeks he’d cleaned the trailer till it shone, fixed the cabin’s windows, rechinked the logs, and replaced the rotted porch boards, and in his spare time he was overhauling the old motorbike he’d found on the cabin’s front porch. He said he’d teach me to drive it once he got it working, but I’d put him off so far, saying I’d see.

  He was tinkering with it one Saturday morning when I walked up the path.

  “Hey, Harlan,” I said.

  He looked up from where he sat on the ground, six or eight greasy metal parts in front of him. He set down his wrench and wiped his hands on a rag. The rest of the motorcycle was leaning against the trailer. Mr. C’mere, poking along behind me, crawled underneath the trailer to sleep.

  I handed Harlan a grocery bag full of sandwiches and fruit Fred had sent, and he set them inside the door. “You sure are thin,” I said.

  “I know it.” He looked down at his belly that still curved in rather than out. “Drinking did that, and it won’t put back on. Them church ladies been feeding me like a pig.”

  I stood there, not knowing what else to say.

  “If you want me to go, I will,” he said, like it
had been on his mind.

  I didn’t say anything. If he’d said that on Thanksgiving, I’d have said fine, go, good riddance. But Bessie said Harlan was a stray like Mr. C, and as deserving of our kindness.

  “I was wanting—” he began and stopped. He looked down at the ground like he was searching for something he’d lost.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how to put it.” He studied his feet and sighed. “I ain’t got words like you do.”

  “Say feelings, then.”

  He thought. “I want to say I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to be sorry for. Oh heck, that’s not right.”

  I waited.

  He sighed and started again. “I’m sorry about your mama dying the way she did and I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you while I was with her.”

  “You did what you could,” I offered, not really meaning it.

  “But it didn’t do no good!” he said, shaking his head. “That’s what I mean to say. I just want you to know how sorry I am. If I can do something now, I’ll do it, even if that something is leaving.”

  He looked me straight in the eye, waiting. I couldn’t bring myself to be hard. “It was like it was,” I said, looking away.

  “I know it,” he said. “But it ain’t right. For a smart kid like you, I mean. You got a good way of looking at things. I admire that.”

  It pleased me a little when he said that, I don’t know why.

  “So you just say the word and I’m gone. You’re doing real good and I don’t want to mess with that.”

  Negative as I felt toward anything having to do with Mama, I couldn’t tell somebody that pitiful to get lost. “Harlan?”

  “What?”

  “Was there good in Mama?” I asked.

  “You mean something good about her or something she was good at?”

  “Either.”

  He stood up, walked over to the trailer for his water bottle, and sat down on the middle step. He went quiet, sipping and thinking.

  “That’s what I thought,” I said, turning to go to the cabin.

  “Now, wait a minute, hold on,” he said, a little curtly. “I’ve killed a lot of brain cells since that time. She could be real funny, I remember; she liked to laugh. And she had a pretty voice. One night you had an earache and I remember she sang to you. She sang a long time, too. Rocked you and sang till you fell asleep.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You might not. You were bad off.”

  “What did she sing?”

  “Let me see now.” He hummed a little, but he wasn’t musical. “I can’t pull it up. Something pretty, though. She didn’t sing much, said it reminded her of her own mama, made her sad.”

  “I don’t remember very much,” I said. “Right after she, you know, died, Ray took all her stuff to the dump. Everything. He was real mad. I didn’t really blame him.”

  “Even so, it was mean to throw everything away.”

  “I don’t know. I might’ve done it myself if he hadn’t. Taking all those pills was a rotten thing to do.”

  Harlan looked far off. “It sure was that,” he said. “But I guess you could look at it that if she hadn’t done what she did, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “What?”

  “God, I shouldn’t’ve said that,” he said, suddenly disgusted with himself. “Should’ve kept my mouth shut. Never have been stop signs between my brain and my mouth.”

  “No, I want to hear. What do you mean?”

  He stared off in the distance and slowly shook his head. “Let it lie. Let it all lie.”

  “Please,” I said.

  He turned back to me. “All right. You want to know, I’ll tell you. I spent nearly a year with your mama, and the first half of that year was passable, she and I had some fun. She was real pretty and good company as long as she was getting her way. But the last half of that year was the worst time of my life. Where she was concerned, I mean. By then I wasn’t staying for her, I was staying for you.”

  “Me?”

  He nodded. “I kept thinking that however bad her drinking and drugging and lying and meanness and craziness were for me, it was your whole life to you, all the life you knew. I even went to a lawyer one time to see if I could get you away from her, but he just laughed in my face and said, ‘Not a chance.’ His exact words. So, all I’m saying is, bad as what she did was, her doing it cut you loose. Brought you to Henry.”

  Just then I had a picture of how I’d be living now if Mama was alive. She’d still be sick and not doing anything about it, in and out of the hospital, bringing home one bloodsucking boyfriend after another, one step ahead of the bill collectors and the law—thinking only of herself. I thought of Henry standing between me and that hunter’s gun, putting my life before his own, something Mama had never done.

  “Henry’s good people,” Harlan said. “Not like some.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Maybe the Padre’s right,” he went on, an edge in his voice. “He says, ‘Where there’s life, there’s hope.’ Maybe that’s right, but I can’t believe it about your mama, knowing her like I did. Even if you weren’t here with all these good people, even if you were in some home, or out there on your own, you’d be a million times better off without her in your life. Maybe that’s a hard thing to hear, but I believe it. Maybe the best thing about her is the second chance she give you. Maybe that’s the good in her you’re looking for. And maybe she didn’t give it to you on purpose, but so what?”

  I stood there staring at him. “You really went to a lawyer?” I asked.

  “Cost me a week’s pay.”

  “You really stayed just for me?”

  “Till she kicked me out.”

  “I never knew.”

  He shrugged. “Now you do.”

  “Thanks, Harlan,” I said. “You don’t have to be in any rush to go, okay? The cabin’s looking real nice.”

  He smiled crookedly. “I appreciate that.”

  Harlan headed down the path to borrow some tools from Henry. I shimmied underneath the trailer, where Mr. C was curled up, asleep.

  “And you think you know people,” I said.

  Two minutes later they came. I heard them before I saw them, both of them all care and apprehension, especially him. I saw his work boots and the raggedy cuffs of his coveralls and her slim legs and ash-gray hooves right behind. He dipped a drink of water from the well and set it down for her. I admired that. As she lowered her head into the bucket, her pink eyes caught sight of me under the trailer. She didn’t seem to mind me. I could only see him from the knees down, but he was facing the cabin, and I guessed he was taking in the improvements. He went inside, and after a few minutes he came out and stood in the yard facing me, like he’d known I was there all along. I inched forward, out from under the trailer, waking Mr. C as I did. He took one bug-eyed look at the boy and the deer and bolted into the woods toward Henry’s. I kept still so they’d see I wasn’t a threat.

  The boy seemed perfectly calm. He looked much like he had on Thanksgiving: dirty all over but not minding. It had the effect of blending him into the land and trees. His long black hair was flecked with leaves and pulled back off his face. He looked fourteen, maybe fifteen. His dark eyes studied me, and I saw then the purplish rings underneath them, how worn-out he looked, like somebody who hadn’t slept in a while.

  We stared at each other. I tried to think what to say, how to start a conversation with a complete stranger I already knew.

  “I’m Zoë,” I said lamely.

  He nodded. He’d probably heard Henry and everybody else shouting it on Thanksgiving Day.

  “I live just south of here with my uncle Henry, the bearded fella who makes all the big metal contraptions in our yard.”

  “Wild things,” the boy said, nodding again.

  “Wild things,” I repeated, smiling. “I’ve been coming up here regular for a while now.”

  “Saw you the day you came,” he said, something like
amusement in his face and tone. “Most days since.”

  “Is that a fact?” I said. “Well, I didn’t see you, not till Thanksgiving, but I’ve felt you nearby a few times when I saw your deer, except I—”

  “You didn’t!” he scoffed, interrupting. He took the strap of his canvas bag off his shoulder and let it drop to the ground. He slid something from his pocket and sat down cross-legged in the dirt. He opened a pocketknife and started whittling on a little piece of wood. “You didn’t even wake the night you got lost and I carried you home. Isn’t that right, Sister?” he said, glancing at the deer over his shoulder.

  “You?” I said. “But I thought—”

  “Or the other time when you were sick and I watched you. Walked right in and up the stairs, nobody the wiser.”

  “But I dreamed that!” I said, feeling my heart beat faster.

  “Or the day those two boys came up here looking for you!”

  “Me?”

  He nodded. “I fixed them!” Full of pride, he burst out laughing.

  I blushed a little, feeling uncomfortable and foolish. “Well, then, I guess you know everything,” I said a bit sharply. “Nothing I can tell you. Not one thing.”

  I sat quietly and folded my hands in my lap. A bit of fear and worry crept into his face. He snorted, trying to cover it, then turned to the deer behind him, as if she’d just asked him a question. “Sister wants to know what you’re always reading and scribbling.”

  I looked at the deer. Her ears twitched. Our combined attentions confused her, but otherwise her pink head seemed as empty as a gourd.

  “I read and write stories mostly,” I said.

  “We like stories, don’t we?” he said, looking back at the deer and then at me. He leaned toward me a little. “She’s not much for writing,” he whispered to me. “Doesn’t know how.”

  “Maybe she’s hungry?” I ventured. “I brought sandwiches and fruit.”

  The boy turned to inquire. Her pink nose twitched. “She could eat.”

  I stood slowly to get the bag of sandwiches Harlan had set inside the trailer door, and slid the grocery bag toward the boy. He opened it, took out two sandwiches and two apples, and slid the bag back to me. He sliced the apples for Sister with his knife and fed her the slices one by one before he took one bite himself. “Thanks,” he said.