The radio is a cathedral shaped Crosley Dual Ten hewn of birch or alder, with four wooden knobs and brass molding around the dial face, a Christmas gift last year. Every night after dinner, Gabe goes upstairs to his bedroom to listen for a while before he goes to bed. Usually he opts for drama programs over music, but tonight’s broadcast of The Green Hornet is a rerun, so he’s tuned it to a Cajun station out of Lafayette. He lies back on his bed and stares up at the ceiling, listening to a two-step duet of accordion and fiddle.
The cracks in his ceiling he knows by heart. In his mind they form a map, delineating the borders of territories that make up a world that he knows does not exist, but that he feels somehow should, so familiar has its geography become. One of these territories, directly above the foot of his bed, looks to Gabe like Massachusetts. His mother is from Massachusetts. Gabe has never been there, though he would like to go. Massachusetts makes him think of waves splashing against a rocky shoreline, of trees whose leaves turn impossible colors. Of stone walls and lakes that freeze, and hills and mountains, which fascinate him. Gabe can’t imagine actually standing on land that is not flat in all directions. This is one of the things his mother says she misses most about the north—living in a three-dimensional landscape. His father argued once that their landscape here was nothing if not three-dimensional, but his mother shook her head. “It’s flat,” she’d said. “It’s missing a crucial plane.” Gabe’s not sure what she meant.
He stares up at Massachusetts, fixing on the tip at the end. He wonders what it’s like to live on the very edge of the land. He thinks he’d feel exposed and unsettled, as if at any moment he might be swept away. Here they’ve got a safe cushion of solid ground extending around them for miles and miles. His mother calls it landlocked.
The dance of accordion and fiddle slows to silence. Gabe listens in the momentary quiet for household sounds—dishes being put away, footsteps, murmured conversation, but the house too is quiet. Outside, he can hear the distant lament of a siren, and he wonders what the emergency is, and whose, and where. Gabe frowns. The sound makes him ponder what they will do with Willie’s body after he has died, whether they will take it away in an ambulance or a hearse. When Jimmy Gibson was missing in the bayou last year and all those fathers were searching through the water for his body, there was an ambulance waiting at the bayou’s edge even though everyone knew the boy was dead. Gabe didn’t dare ask why.
Ambulance or hearse: in the end it doesn’t matter which takes Willie’s body away, yet somehow that detail seems important. The detail is important. All of it’s important. Gabe takes a breath and sits up, suddenly and definitely resolved. If his father won’t take him tonight, he’ll find another way.