2

DAVID CAME THROUGH THE DOOR INTO THE WARM HOUSE expecting to smell something to eat—he’d imagined roast beef, he supposed because his mother’s, Rachel’s, as he thought of her, birthday was coming up, and he’d been thinking about that, what to get her, and that she’d always liked to have roast beef for her birthday, but there was nothing, nothing but the patter of Janie’s feet. She came running barefoot up the long hallway and scooted behind the washer/dryer alcove, peered impishly out at him. This made David’s eyes glass up, and he had to turn his head aside, was too embarrassed to let her see.

“David?” his mother called from her room down the hall. “David, is that you?”

Janie stepped out into the hallway and gave David a stern look, mimicking their mother. Janie was just seven, and very pretty, but it was this . . . pixie something in her that David loved. He loved Janie.

They were in this together, had been for years.

“She’s all mad because you promised you’d call if you were going to be late again.”

David swung his bag onto the table by the door and shucked off his wet jacket.

“David?” Rachel called again.

“No, it’s the boogeyman!” he called back.

Janie saw the mud on his boots and knew he’d climbed the fence and run across the highway. She pointed, and David shook his head and put his finger to his lips. Now Rachel came up the hallway, her reading glasses on, pressing a strand of her hair back behind her ear. She’d been doing her office work at home again. Janie smiled at her.

“I thought you said you were going to call?”

David shrugged. He wasn’t about to tell her she’d forgotten to pick him up after practice, because that would be another cause for Rachel to go on one of her crying jags. Or to get depressed and lock herself in her room, or maybe even worse, she’d hug him, and apologize, and tell him what a rotten mother she’d been.

She’d done that once, and it had just about killed him. Anything but that. So he said, “I’m sorry. I got caught up in that nerdo High Q thing after practice and just forgot.”

Rachel gave him a stern, sideways glance. She knew David didn’t spend much time with the High Q group now that he had cross-country; she’d gotten him into the group, and he’d made friends there, ones he went to a movie with now and then, but only that.

Years earlier, this had made her nervous, how he never stuck with one group, until she’d realized it was just David’s way: He was, in large part, solitary. Liked most to read, science books usually, and make things, rockets, and flying model airplanes, kept odd pets, like salamanders, or newts, loved anything alive, or with fur, and to be outside.

And now, too, he was crazy about running—and Janie, always Janie. The two of them were always kidding around, Janie making David laugh.

“You weren’t out with Vern or Cleve Ellis, were you?”

David wasn’t going to go near that one. Vern and Cleve were brothers David used to hang out with; both had been sent up to Shattuck, a military academy, for messing around with drugs.

“He was playing chess,” Janie said.

Chess was the catchword for whatever he’d been doing when he came home late. Rachel never checked his story out. Chess. Or bowling. David smiled at that, his mother across from him giving him that dubious look again. David ruffled Janie’s hair.

“Come on, Sport, do you have to give all my secrets away?” he said.

Janie beamed from ear to ear, and David felt some darkness in him lift.

“What’s for dinner?” he said, even as he moved off toward his room at the back of the house.

“What do you want?” Rachel said, behind him.

David looked over his shoulder. They were back into their usual ritual, and he felt safe. She would ask, and he would offer to make dinner. It had been that way since his father had left, and that’s just what they did.

Later that night, he was hunched over his desk, working on differential equations. He had to be up early, for zero-hour German, which he hated, another of his father’s great ideas, one that reached down into his life and messed things up. The best research in ophthalmology is being done in Germany right now, his father had said. David did not know why, exactly, he couldn’t say no to his father, but he couldn’t, and so he’d signed up for it, and he hated it, but then he didn’t care much for high school, with the pep rallies, and nonsense about our team, and the school colors.

It all bored him. Like these differential equations, he thought. What was the point? Who cared what the volume of this bookmaker’s irregular object was? Jesus.

David lit another cigarette and was careful to blow the smoke out the window so his mother wouldn’t smell it. He was sure she did anyway, but she didn’t say anything, and maybe she was just resigned to it.

David was taking a deep tug on the cigarette when he saw something move in the doorway. He fixed his eyes on his calculus text, waiting—here would be another lecture from his mother, but no heart in it.

That’s what killed David now. And this sense of suffocation in the house.

“David?” Janie said.

She put her head through the door, her eyes porcelain blue and with that kid-something there that just grabbed him. He felt bigger around Janie, stronger, not in a boastful way, but almost as if he were his sister’s father, and not her brother.

“What, Sport?” he said.

“Can I come in?”

“Of course you can.”

She pattered on bare feet to his bed beside the desk and leapt in and pulled the covers over her head, then slowly lowered them to peek out at him, giggling.

“Okay, what is it?”

Janie laughed, then got a serious look. “She’s crying. I can hear it through the wall again.”

David let go a long sigh. He knew Rachel wasn’t crying, and that Janie had resorted to this lie in order to talk to him made him feel tired—Rachel did cry some nights, but it was David who’d told Janie about it.

Janie said now, “You’re not supposed to smoke.”

“Don’t you go smoking,” David teased.

“I won’t,” Janie said.

“Well, don’t.”

“Then why do you?”

David shrugged. He closed his calculus text and spun his chair around. He got up and sat on the end of the bed, his back to the cool wall.

“Pull your feet in, Sport,” he said.

She did that and he yanked one of the pillows from the head-board and wedged it behind his back.

“So what is it, really? Mom’s sleeping by now, kiddo.”

Janie considered this, averting her eyes. She smiled at him, and he saw she was holding something in and he rumpled up her hair.

“Come on, Sport, you can tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Did you have another dream?”

For a second Janie turned away, pulled the blanket over her head again. David pulled it down.

“You did, didn’t you.”

David didn’t ask her to recount it. She’d done that one time, and it had upset her—the dream had been so dark and violent, it had surprised even David—Max had been cutting David into pieces and putting him in a bag—so now, as he had in the past, he reached for a book on his shelf, and he read to her.

“‘The mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs . . .’ ”

David read on, glancing over at Janie. As in the past, Janie didn’t make it much past the first page before she was fast asleep, and David reached to the foot of the bed and covered her with the quilt. Janie was a cold sleeper, sensitive to temperature; even when it was in the fifties outside, she always had to be bundled up against the weather.

David carefully went back to his desk. Janie liked to sleep with the light on, so it was no problem to open his calculus text and work now, and he lit another cigarette, and for a second, glancing at Janie’s elfin, smooth-skinned face, felt settled. He worked a problem with enjoyment, Janie sleeping to his left.

But then he remembered Rick Buddy. After practice tomorrow, he’d run into him.

Always, on Fridays, the cross-country team used the track behind the school, and recently, to the amusement of all, Rick Buddy waited there to get his jabs in. It made David feel leaden, and then he recalled what his father had said years ago. Some bully goes after you, you gotta just hit first and hit hard. You hit any bully hard enough and he’ll back off, and no one’ll be calling you a sissy. I don’t ever want to hear any whining from you about bullies, because bullies you take care of yourself. Got it?

Well, he had Buddy to himself, all right. Buddy, who’d promised to get him. And get him good.

I’m gonna cripple you, kid, he’d said that first afternoon when the football and cross-country teams had shared the field. I’m gonna cripple you, and right when it’ll hurt you the worst. Right in front of everybody.

All right, David decided. No matter that Rick Buddy weighed two-forty. He’d move, and move fast.

There at the desk, the light on, his heart raced imagining it, knocking Buddy down, but in his heart of hearts he wasn’t convinced. Yet here was his father speaking to him again.

It’s all willpower. You decide to do things, then you get the job done.

David had known, always, when his father said these things, that it was some drill sergeant of years past talking to him, somebody in the army. Not Max. Somebody who had formed his father, who’d had no father.

Shipshape, Soldier, Max had said when David was barely tall enough to reach Max’s knees.

David snapped out the light and sat in the near dark.

Was the thing he’d sensed coming all this time this thing? Not having to break through in track, but having to stand up to someone like stupid, dog-eyed Rick Buddy? And if he did, would he have put off all Rick Buddys, like his father had said he would?

Or was Rick Buddy just part of it?

Moonlight spilled through the window on Janie’s face.

But was life really all just climbing on top of each other, or knocking down Rick Buddys, as Max had told him it was? Because if that was true, when did you stop? And who could possess anything of real value then, if it only made you a target for those who’d try to take it away?

David smoked in the dark, all this melancholy in him.

His father had always criticized him for siding with the so-called underdogs, the losers. Cross-country, what a loser sport, son. Who cares? You don’t get the girls, you don’t get the respect.

But even in his chair, David felt that rush of motion, the trees falling back, and that beautiful moving into his stride, and passing John Pretorius, today, and then the others, and running side by side with Terry McGovern, he’d hit his stride, and he just knew, just knew he could have beaten him, goddammit! if he’d had another half mile. But he hadn’t bet on that length of hill, and he’d run stride for stride with McGovern, with more on tap, but McGovern, on the hill, had more lift, more strength, though only on the hill, and back on even ground he could have taken him if he’d just put back more pain, because that’s what it was, eating pain, pushing through pain, and staying focused, and pushing through that feeling that your lungs and heart would burst, if you could push through that burning, until you reached that clear, clean rush, and staying quiet, could use the ground under you, and like Coach said, take the fastest in front of you, and fucking run his goddamn back down, and when you can see the end, spend it all, every goddamn thing in you, and that’s where David saw he’d failed.

If he’d had time to look at the track before, if he’d have known that hill was there . . .

If he hadn’t missed the bus that morning, or had eaten breakfast, or if his mother, Rachel, hadn’t told him his father had called . . .

Fuck it, he said to himself. Stop making excuses.

If he stopped smoking . . .

He crushed the cigarette out in the ashtray, then bending over the bed, tucked the quilt around Janie’s face, and went off into the living room, where he covered himself with the afghan on the couch and slept.