CHAPTER FIVE

In the morning Phillip waited on the corner, his tools in a grain bag and the log at his feet. Wind sneaked through every seam of his clothing, and the world around him went light and dark and light again, as giant clouds sailed majestically before the rising sun. He and Carrie used to turn cartwheels while they waited for the bus at the end of the long farm driveway. Phillip hadn’t felt like doing that in a long time.

Carrie was coming home for the weekend; that was the one thing his mother told him over breakfast, after she asked what he wanted in his sandwich.

The car came. Greg, beside his father, looked out on Phillip in lofty boredom. Kris was in the back, reading. She glanced up with a hard-eyed, don’t-care look. Normally Phillip would have wilted and turned away. This morning he felt brave and strong and flashed her a cheeky grin. He watched her eyes widen and her face flush and saw her eyes falter down to her book. An unexpectedly sad feeling pierced Phillip’s excitement.

I don’t really know you, he thought. And you certainly don’t know me.

Did anyone ever know anyone else? He avoided wondering about his parents and Carrie, but then there was no one left to consider. No one but Thea, and of course he didn’t know her.

On the other hand, it was pleasant to think that he didn’t know Greg and didn’t need to. Count your blessings, Johnson!

The log shed beetles and dark, crumbly bark on the orange carpet. The teacher, troubled and dubious, made Phillip spread newspaper underneath.

He split the log first with wedges, popping it open neatly. It had a nice straight grain. No one had ever seen the heart of this tree trunk before; no one had touched this fresh, bright wood. His father pointed that out once. People always said it about a gemstone newly pried out of the earth, but it was as true of a piece of wood, his father said.

He split the log in quarters with his ax, mainly for the pleasure of it, and split one of the quarters into kindling, mainly for the grade. Kindling he had plenty of.

“See you on the bus,” he said later, passing Kris on the way out of class.

Her eyes were sharp on him. “History,” she contradicted.

He didn’t answer. Everything was tumbled into his grain bag now: jacket and tools, wood, books, and lunch.

The sun was shining through the big front doors. Meeting Mr. Pilewski, the attendance officer, in the hall, Phillip looked him straight in the eye, smiled, and went out unhindered.

He took what he wanted, put the bag in the trunk of Kris’s father’s car, which had been left unlocked for him, and stood there with the lid up, looking around. A couple of people were walking across the parking lot. Phillip put his jacket on and looked busy in the trunk. When he turned again, they were gone, the glass in the big front doors just shivering shut behind them. It was completely quiet now. He was the only person left. He picked up his ax and hatchet and started up the bluff.

When he reached the gray house, Phillip stood on the road for several minutes, looking. The exquisite loneliness of the place brought an ache to his throat. Perhaps he should walk on. It was a house that perhaps should be chance-met by wanderers, not returned to by a person with an ax and his lunch, and matches in an old baby-food jar.

But that feeling left him. The brook began to sound busy, and his eye drifted to the dead tree limbs he’d seen earlier. Time for work.

After the first few strokes the feel of using an ax came back to him—how the weight of the head and the length of the handle, and gravity, do the work for you. How effortless it seems when you do it right, until suddenly you find yourself tired. How your thoughts go away, your feelings go away, and you stand in physical clarity, your body and the ax and the log. Mindless labor. He had been missing it.

He chopped and carried wood indoors until he was more tired than he’d been in months, and starving. Then he sat on a rock by the brook and ate his meat loaf sandwich. It tasted wonderful, washed down with cold brook water. He felt perfectly blank. Nothing to hide. Nothing to prove. His only needs were biological and already satisfied. He just saw things, didn’t even name them to himself.

At last, though, a tiny worm of worry invaded the airy blankness. As soon as he perceived it, Phillip knew how good it was to be blank. Too late. He had to look at his watch, and yes, it was time to go.

People were getting on the buses when he came to the top of the bluff. Despite his good intentions, he was late.

He dropped down the steep hill without holding back. Slap! His sneakers hit pavement, and he was sprinting across the parking lot, dodging between cars. Shouts sounded in his ears: people noticing him as they went to their cars to drive home. The shouts were wordless; the wind in his ears blew the words away.

As he angled behind his own bus, he heard the door close, the engine start to make a let’s-get-moving sound. One of Phillip’s knees buckled, but he lurched forward and banged the door with the flat of his hand. The driver glanced his way, casually pushed the handle to let the door open. Not his disaster if some boy missed the bus. Not his business to ask why the boy was late. Panting, weak-kneed but serene, Phillip slowly mounted the steps, made his way down the aisle, and dropped into the seat beside Kris.

Her eyes raked his face. If you were feeling vulnerable, that look of hers could almost seem to scratch you. Today Phillip felt unscratchable, as if his face were made of hardened steel. He leaned back against the seat, feeling cheerful, while his pumping heart ran down a little and his breathing slowly relaxed.

“I’ve got a pear,” Kris said finally, touching her crumpled lunch bag. “If you’re hungry.”

“Not really,” Phillip said, and almost smiled at her alert look. He imagined a sharp yellow pencil making a note in her squared, rapid script: Not hungry Friday. “Want to split it?”

The mental pencil paused. She met his eyes, and then took the pear out of her bag and handed it to him.

NO EATING ON THE BUS, said a sign up over the driver’s head. The sign also prohibited swearing, smoking, and being in the aisle when the bus was in motion.

The pear was ripe and very good.

It took the clinic to bring him down: seven greyhounds that had blown their last chance in the Thursday Night Trifecta; Mrs. Farley’s cat, whose pale, depleted blood could no longer carry oxygen, wailing for breath after his fluid shot; Dr. Franklin swearing at the sound, while tears trickled into his beard, later drawing Mrs. Farley gently aside to try to persuade her, still later flinging out of the clinic in a rage.… Soon the gray house was so far away that it might as well not exist. As Phillip knelt and wrapped his arms around a doomed greyhound, waiting for Dr. Rossi to kill it, he was surprised at the soreness in his shoulders and for a few seconds could not think where it came from.

“I hate to do this to you, Phillip,” said Dr. Rossi when all the dogs were dead, “but I can’t bear to deal with Hugh again. Will you bring me the kittens?”

Phillip turned, openmouthed. But … he thought. But … I’m a high school kid. I’m … I’m not … make him!

Feeling as if he were walking underwater, he got a clean litter box and put the kittens in it. Phillip tried not to look at them, but the feel of their round, sturdy rib cages was imprinted on his hands. He put the litter box on the table before Dr. Rossi and stood there herding the kittens back inside it as she filled her syringe.

She turned now. Her large, compassionate eyes crossed his face, paused, came back again. “Phillip?”

He looked away, and his eyes had to fall on the kittens.

“I’m sorry, Phillip. I shouldn’t … quite often I forget how young you are.” She touched his shoulder gently. “Go on. I can manage by myself.”

Phillip shook his head. She couldn’t manage—hold a squirming kitten and find a vein—and her compassion was misplaced. He would go on living.

He picked up the first kitten. The other two immediately scrambled out of the box and prowled to the edge of the table, with amazed expressions. The one in his hands squirmed, furious at being restrained.

Dr. Rossi approached with her needle. How sad she looked, like a lady in an old painting. Phillip pressed the kitten flat on the table. It let out a little, complaining mew, and he thought how he would like to lay his head on Dr. Rossi’s shoulder and cry. She would let him—and that’s what Dr. Franklin wanted, too, but she wouldn’t let Dr. Franklin.…

He let the kitten up.

“Phillip?” Dr. Rossi looked at him again. Her large eyes were almond-shaped, with heavy lids and artful makeup. He loved to have her look at him.

“I’ll take them,” he said, watching her eyes. They looked puzzled—maybe a little annoyed?

“Why?” she asked.

Why? thought Phillip. He looked at the kittens, cautiously reviewing their options at the rim of the precipice. Unthinkable, to sink a needle into them and stop all their motion and discovery. But it was always unthinkable, and it continued.

He looked back into Dr. Rossi’s eyes, wishing to say something, to see himself mirrored there. But he had nothing to say that would be bold enough to show up, only the sensation of a round, sturdy body in his hands, a confused feeling in his heart, and a secret resource.

He began putting the kittens back into the litter box. “Can I leave them here until office hours tomorrow?”

Dr. Rossi was frowning. “I don’t like this, Phillip. We’ve been here before, and you can’t keep on doing it.”

Again he had no answer. He could only look at her mutely, thinking how beautiful her eyes were and hoping she couldn’t read his thoughts, spreading his hands wide to keep the kittens down in the pan. Trying not to think ahead.

She shook her head in frustration. “Oh! You’re as bad as Hugh, in your way! Put them back in the cage!”