73

DAVID DID NOT SEE BUDDY, THOUGH, THE WEEK FOLLOWING, the second week of May. At the field house, or at his meets. Or even at school. And not seeing him around, he worried he was waiting just out of sight. At the water fountain when he got a drink in the hallway at Morningside. Or in the parking lot when he walked to his wreck of a car, a tan Buick Skylark. On the path around Lake Cornelia when David ran, now, perhaps faster than he’d ever run, or ever would again.

Heart ticking like a racing engine, and his legs pulling hard.

By the trees, willows, and enormous elms and oaks, and by the lake itself, by bulrushes, and cattails greening and swaying in the spring breezes, and by lilac now burst into purple resurrection and the air thick with it, sweet, lovely lilac, and he felt his legs, sinewy, carrying him up the steep hill, and he sprinted then, uphill, and into the now-green yard.

But even then, the moment was marred by thoughts of Buddy. He was out there.

One night, after a late run, David waited until Rachel and Janie were asleep, then went into the garage. He brought with him a baton and a roll of cloth athletic tape he’d taken from practice. There was a large vise on a tool bench, and he lay the baton and tape alongside the vise, and rummaged through the boxes of old plumbing under the bench. Max had been a thumb-fingered do-ityourselfer, but he’d also been one never to throw things away. In the boxes were old sinks, rusted traps, and here, what David had been looking for, lengths of inch-and-three-quarter lead waterpipe. He found one that was long enough, nearly two feet, and setting the baton over it, marked it, and then, thinking again, rummaged through the box of old plumbing supplies until he found two lead end caps, both nearly the thickness of the cloth tape wrapped at either ends of the baton. This would make for more work, but David was good with his hands, and he went through Max’s tools, and was suddenly stricken with grief, recalling Max, how he’d laughed with them at the lake that evening. It surprised him like that, nearly blinded him, his eyes glassy, but then he had it, Max’s tape and threading tools—Max had had all the tools you needed, and, in typical Max fashion, had used them, maybe, once.

David measured the depth of the threads in the caps, then measured the length of pipe against the baton again, and marked the shaft a second time.

He clamped the lead pipe in the vise, and using a hack saw, he cut the pipe to the length of the baton, minus the end caps. He fixed the threader to the right side and lay in the threads, then did the same opposite.

He screwed the caps on and measured the length of what he had against the baton.

Same.

The baton was silver, the lead pipe dark gray, and David fixed that, with a can of silver paint. Set the pipe upright on one of the end caps and sprayed it, until it looked to be aluminum. He went outside while it dried, and lit a cigarette, there nothing boyish in him now, and his mind made up.

If Buddy came after him, in the field house, he would kill him.

No kid stuff. No warning.

He’d promised to injure David, and publicly, and David wouldn’t have it.

He sat there on the stoop in the dark, a hundred voices in his head, telling him, Don’t do this, go to Doctor Parker, he’d listen, or tell Coach, tell Rachel, but there was something in him that refused to do any of it, any of this telling anyone anything, even in that word some awful humiliation, telling, and he would not be bent to it, or anything else. It was between him and Buddy, he thought, sitting calmly.

He had failed up north because he’d been surprised, and unprepared.

Not this time.

He went back into the garage, the paint fumes all the more noxious for drying off the pipe. But the paint was glossy now, hard. He opened the windows, and a shaft of moonlight fell on the bench.

He removed the stripe of green tape from the baton and wrapped it around the lead pipe, wrapped the ends in the white athletic tape.

He lifted the new baton, four and a half pounds of lead. He swung it. The caps were a good idea after all. There was heft in the baton.

Now he was ready.

The following morning, he left the house with the baton in his book bag. At the field house that afternoon, he had the baton in his track bag.

When they took a break, and Simonson and Pretorius were at the east end of the field house, David hid the lead pipe baton behind the water fountain, opposite, in a broken cinderblock full of crumpled candy wrappers.

When he left the field house, no one noticed his bag hung lightly on his shoulder, or that there was a hardness in his eyes.

Or was it just determination?

On Thursday of that week, after dinner, and watching some inane show on television, the three of them laughing, and after Janie was in bed and sleeping, Rachel asked David to come out, sit on the steps as they used to do. It was a cool evening, and along with the scent of lilac, now there was also rose, and crab apple. They’d blossomed up and down the road in from Sixty-sixth, the roses in well-tended gardens, and the crab apples heavy with blossoms, enormous pink or white trees just in from the street, but like phantom shapes in the dark, and the breeze blew the scent by the house, and neither David nor Rachel spoke.

David got out his pack of cigarettes.

“I thought you cut that out,” Rachel said.

“I did.”

There was a contradictoriness to his behavior at times, and Rachel thought not to mention it. So when he offered her a cigarette, she took it.

They smoked there, all they’d lived between them buoyed up in the dark, with the smoke, and, just sitting, there really wasn’t anything to say. And when he got to thinking about Max, and remembered an evening like this, when they’d played catch on the lawn, he told Rachel about the meet.

Rachel told him Coach had already called about it. David was a minor, after all, she said, and chuckled, this in itself a joke.

“I think it’s wonderful,” she told him.

She’d wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t pin all his hopes on this track meet the following afternoon, or the athletic scholarship to the university in town he might win at it. That there would be other meets, other opportunities. That, maybe, he shouldn’t cut his last year at Morningside, that he could make things easier on himself. She’d wanted to tell him that, if he could just . . . wait, the money would come, and they’d be able to afford one of those schools he’d wanted to attend, out east, but it was all wishful thinking with Max gone, and it was too late for her to do what she’d wanted to do, and because she’d let what David feared happen to her, her life thrown off, because she, herself, had helped put Max through school, had held things off, she was not going to do it with David.

Especially not given what they’d been through.

Which made her feel, in the dark, as if she were in some strange dream, her life, so unlike what she’d imagined for herself, the girl in drama class, meeting the doctor-to-be taking the class for distribution, and so awkward, but sure of himself anyway, this thumb-fingered boy she’d taken on.

And here she was. Max gone, and her own son leaving, already. Max had left home early, too.

But David was nothing like Max. This boy-man beside her. Oh, the things she wanted to say to him, her hands crossed over her knees, the cigarette smoke curling up in the dark and gone. Everything gone, but this, her children, really. And David, her first.

All she loved in him, just the way he was, so much the very things Max had so disliked in him—that David could seem impossible, once he made his mind up, which was like Max, only David knew people. Like he’d known Janie, when they’d brought her home.

At a glance even. Understood them.

Max had always called him willful. But Rachel had known it from the first as something else. And other people saw it, too— David had not been popular, or silly, and he’d come home hurt, one day, because someone told him he had an “old face, like someone from a long time ago.” Not boyish, or cute.

And he stared at people, or, really, into them. Didn’t turn away.

Exactly unlike Max.

All this she thought in a second, in the graceful lift of her hand, and the tap of the cigarette, the ash falling, and she wished for her son some happiness, but she knew his life would have other satisfactions, perhaps very difficult ones.

And in the darkness, and knowing, maybe, this would be the last time they would sit on the stoop like this, she did what she knew she should.

She said only this: “I’ll be there tomorrow with Janie to cheer you on.” And she allowed herself this one small thing.

She rumpled his hair and he smiled, not pulling away, not shrugging her off as he’d done for some time, though he didn’t say the words she wanted to hear.

He said, “Thanks,” and nodded. And crushing out her cigarette, she went inside.