Deet was the first one to be picked up on the west side run, so the bus was empty when he got on, except for Mindy, the bus driver.
Mindy had been driving that route since Deet was in kindergarten. She was a heavy, unpleasant woman in her forties or so who had one of those jutting bulldog jaws and a down-turned mouth, but she always grunted a greeting of sorts when he got on, more than she did for the other kids. He always sat in the front seat, behind her. It wasn’t that he wanted her conversation, he wanted to avoid the rest of the kids, who’d sprawl over the seats and yell all the way to the school. Deet jammed his fists in his pockets and burrowed his chin into the collar of his parka. The bus hadn’t warmed up yet.
Nelly’s stop was next. He lived in a trailer in the middle of his dad’s junkyard. There was a big homemade sign propped up in front of the trailer: NELSON’S BOUTIQUE. Nelly’s mom had done that. She thought it was pretty funny.
Wrecked cars were strewn everywhere, behind a sagging fence, which was supposed to screen the cars from the road but didn’t. Deet had been looking at that junkyard all his life, but he never saw it without a sort of mental shudder. If he’d had to live there he was sure he would have slit his own throat by now.
His own yard was bad enough. Dad had an old car in the back, a junker he was going to fix up and sell when he got around to it, and other stuff was scattered by the front porch: nylon-strap lawn chairs, wooden boxes, P. J.’s tricycle without a front wheel—almost buried in snow now, piles of lumber, and a stack of pallets, which Dad collected anywhere he could, on the theory that they’d be very useful someday.
When Deet went off to kindergarten, his mom used to ask him to bring kids home to play. Deet never wanted to bring anyone home from school, partly because there wasn’t anybody in kindergarten he wanted to spend any more time with and partly because his house embarrassed him, even when he was in kindergarten. It didn’t look anything like the houses in his Jan and Jerry reading books.
The house started out being an ordinary log cabin, which Dad had built the first summer he and Mom were married. That summer they’d all lived in the backyard in a tiny camper, one of those shells that fit on the back of a pickup, until the cabin was finished. The camper was still there, behind the house, in the willows.
After the girls were born, Dad had thrown up a frame addition on the side of the cabin that kind of spoiled the look of the cabin, and besides, he’d never gotten around to painting the addition. Deet was glad you couldn’t see their house from the road where the bus stopped.
The bus stopped for Nelly, who was waiting by his driveway, on time for a change, shifting from foot to foot to stay warm. His arms were stiff at his sides, fists sucked up in his sleeves, just like a little kid. He threw himself down in the seat next to Deet, spikes of his hair standing on end in spite of the junk he’d smeared on it to make it lie down, his nylon GI surplus parka crackling from the cold. He threw a look of despair at Deet.
“Did you get your math done?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” Nelly squeaked. He was right in the middle of a voice change. “You always get your math finished.”
“We’re not having math today, remember? We’re having that assembly. So I saved it until tonight.”
Nelly rolled his eyes with relief. “Man, I forgot about that. Saved again.”
Deet and Nelly had been in the same class since kindergarten, and Nelly always seemed to be hustling to keep up, treading water. It was because he wasn’t organized, Deet thought. His notebooks were a scramble of papers, never clipped into the binder, falling out, and even his shirts weren’t buttoned the right way, but started off on the wrong button.
Deet and Nelly were the only ones who lived off the main road. The rest of the kids who rode the bus lived in the fancy houses along the ridge, where everyone had a view of the valley and the mountains in the distance. Each house was better than the last one, and each yard was like a picture in a magazine. None of the kids who lived in those houses had their shirts buttoned wrong.
Deet’s locker at school was right next to his homeroom. He usually put his stuff in his locker, took his homework to Mr. Hodges’s room, and then took his library book to read until first period. He hoped no one would talk to him. He didn’t like to talk. Small talk, people said. Making small talk. How are you? How’s it going? What’s up? There was nothing sensible to be said to those questions. Nonquestions.
His mom kept on urging him to make friends, but Dad said Deet was a loner, that’s all there was to it. Deet didn’t know if he was a loner or not. It was just that there were no other kids who were interested in the things he was interested in.
And he wasn’t interested in what they were interested in. He just didn’t get what sports were all about. Chasing a ball seemed silly enough, but even sillier was the way people took games so seriously.
Most of the new movies seemed to have car crashes or some idiotic guy, some action hero, and the new music bewildered him. He liked tunes you could hum, actually. He liked old stuff. Old movies, old music, like the big bands he heard on the radio once in a while. And books.
When he went to the library, there was no telling what he’d come home with. Last week he’d gotten a book on weaving, of all things, one on ancient armor, and two books by John Steinbeck, whom he’d just discovered in Mr. Hodges’s class. (The book on weaving he got because he’d read in National Geographic that the Vikings had made their sails of wool, and the threads that went one way were made with the undercoat of a special sheep and the threads that went the other way were made with the top coat. So he wondered what other interesting things there might be to learn about weaving.)
The thing about books was that someone, somewhere, had written them, and so people somewhere must be reading them. Even the ones he took from the library had due dates stamped in the back, which showed that someone in town was reading them. So why did he never meet anyone who read things like that, or talked about them, or wrote them? And why didn’t anyone ever talk the way they did in books?
Deet was just different, that’s all. He’d always been different from everyone he knew, and he guessed he always would be. The thing was not to let people know how different he was if he could help it. The best way to do that was to keep his mouth shut.
Deet was frowning over his book when Nelly took the seat next to him in the back row of homeroom. Nelly tipped his chair back on its back legs so it leaned against the wall, clasped his hands behind his head, and watched while the front rows filled up with their classmates. Nelly didn’t hang out with anyone any more than Deet did, but he was always very interested in what everyone else did and pointed out this and that to Deet, who never paid any attention.
Nelly suddenly tipped his chair forward to rest on four legs and looked urgently at Deet.
“Would you take the second bus and help me with those equations? I just can’t get it, no matter what.”
Deet started to nod an okay, but then he remembered.
“Jeez, I’m sorry, Nelly, but I got to go over to my Grandpa’s right after school.”
Nelly mimed desperation, banging his head on his desk. Deet had to laugh.
“Why don’t you call me tonight, Nell, and I’ll talk you through it, okay?” Nelly looked dubious about the efficiency of this method, but he agreed.
Deet had been helping Nelly for years, and not just Nelly. Teachers often asked Deet to help someone out, someone who’d been absent, or someone who was floundering. He supposed it was because his notes were always neat and complete, because he didn’t think he was any good at explaining stuff. He didn’t think he had the patience to teach anybody anything.
Sometimes it seemed to Deet that he was surrounded by people who couldn’t organize or plan, and sooner or later they always managed to catch him up in their mess.
At sixth period Mr. Hodges handed back their quotations notebooks. He’d written comments on all of Deet’s pages, and at the bottom of the last one he’d written: “Your writing shows logical and coherent thought, which gives me hope for the future of humanity!” Deet pinched his lips together so that his face wouldn’t show how pleased he was.
On the bus ride to Grandpa’s house he tilted his book toward the streetlights so he could mark all the quotations he wanted to write about for the next week’s homework. He found one he liked right away.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
—GEORGE ORWELL
Did Grandpa and Grandma have the faces they deserved? What other kinds of faces could they have? Grandma’s face was soft and doughy. It just didn’t have anything in it at all. Maybe that’s how Grandma was. Not up to much. Grandpa was the opposite. His face was rock hard, and there weren’t many wrinkles, no smile lines around his eyes or mouth because he didn’t smile, or even frown.
Deet was very careful at his grandfather’s house, trying to avoid Grandpa’s sarcasm (“Born in a barn?”) when you didn’t shut the door fast enough, or Grandma’s picky complaints (“Don’t sit in that chair with those dirty pants!”).
He swept the snow off his feet outside the front door, stepped inside the porch and removed his boots, set them neatly in the corner, and knocked on the door. Here everything was organized and precisely planned the way he always wanted things to be at home, but there was something wrong with it. There was something cold and gray about organization at his grandparents’ house.
His grandmother came to the door, looking fake surprised—“Look who’s here, Grandpa!”—though she certainly knew he was coming because she’d called his mom to ask that he be sent over after school.
She was thick and stocky, with short gray hair like all the grandmas in the world seemed to have. He’d seen pictures of her when she was young, and she didn’t look anything like she did now. Maybe getting fat erased all your own features and made you look like everyone else. Grandpa didn’t have a bit of fat on him, so he looked a lot the way he did in his old pictures. But Grandma had lost all her distinguishing features. They’d been blurred and erased, and now she was a sort of generic grandma.
She sat back down at the kitchen table where her sewing basket was and picked up the pair of Grandpa’s black work pants she’d been patching.
“How was school today, Deet?” she asked as she always did.
“Fine, Grandma,” he answered as he always did.
Inside the house everything was neat and clean and quiet. They never had the radio on, and Grandpa wouldn’t allow a television in the house. Hard to imagine Dad as a little boy in this silent house. Maybe people become the way they are because they want to be the opposite of their parents, like he wanted to be all organized and efficient. Maybe Dad had wanted to be happy-go-lucky instead of being wrapped too tight like Grandma and Grandpa.
Their house had its own smell, which Deet could never identify. Dad said it was sourdough in a crock on top of the cabinets, which Grandma used nearly every morning for hotcakes. Maybe it was, but there was something else that smelled like meanness.
Maybe it was the smell of dead animals. The bearskin nailed against the living room wall, moose horns nailed over the porch door.
There were three guns hanging on the wall, a .22, a .30-06, and a .357. Grandpa’d go hunting every fall for a moose, and shoot forty or fifty spruce hens as well, which Grandma plucked and put in the freezer. He prided himself on providing the meat.
That was one of the big problems between Grandpa and Dad. Dad wouldn’t hunt. He hated killing things. When he turned eighteen he left the mining camp and went to mechanic school. And he wouldn’t go hunting with his father anymore. Dad let Deet make up his own mind about hunting, but Deet had shaken his head no when Grandpa wanted to take him out for spruce hens the first time. He didn’t want to kill things either. “You’re making an old woman out of this boy,” Grandpa snarled at Dad, “just like you.”
The stove gleamed and a shining teakettle sat in its place on the back burner. On the wall by the stove was a framed picture of hands, just hands, no face, no arms, just hands, praying. Deet had always disliked that picture. It gave him the creeps.
What was the point of praying, anyway? If this god was all-powerful, all-knowing, he knew about someone’s troubles already, didn’t he? Once Deet had asked Grandpa about this. Grandpa’s eyes had snapped blue sparks. “You know,” he said, “you can go to hell for asking questions like that just as sure as you can from stealing.” Well, if he was a good god, he wouldn’t have to be asked to do a good thing for someone, would he? He’d just do it. Mom said the good thing about Deet was that he’d do stuff without being asked. She said it was twice as good to have a favor if you didn’t have to ask for it. Shouldn’t this god be like that? Should he have to be begged?
Like those prayer things organized for someone in the hospital. “We all prayed for you to get well.” Like god kept a tally. Okay. Three hundred and seventy-five prayers. I guess I can heal him now. Or what about, Only two hundred prayers. Not enough. Let him die.
Deet didn’t believe in god at all, because everything people said about god was so silly. Illogical. Another way he was different from everyone he knew.
The curtains hung stiffly at the window, and the braided rug sat where it always sat, precisely in front of the rocker.
His grandfather sat in the rocker as he usually sat, and he gave Deet a critical look before he folded the newspaper and stood up. The look, Deet was sure, indicated that he thought Deet should have been there earlier.
“I just got off the bus,” he said in answer to that look. His grandfather grunted.
Even though he wasn’t really Deet’s grandfather, he never seemed to make any distinction between Deet and the girls. He always treated Deet the same as the girls, but it was not as if there was a lot of enthusiasm over any of them.
Grandma kept pictures on the bookcase in the dark living room: Dad at eight or nine, looking no different from his grown-up self; pictures of the girls as babies; a picture of Mom and Dad and Deet before the girls were born. There was a picture from the mine, the year they had such a big clean-up, Grandpa posing proudly with the gold pan full of nuggets and gold dust.
Grandpa’s parents had brought him from Finland when he was just a baby. Deet had read that the Finns had been invaded by hordes from Mongolia, and that was why some Finns had slanted eyes and broad cheekbones. Grandpa certainly would have approved of Genghis Khan, who was not an old woman.
“Have something to eat first, if you want, and then I want you to help me with the propane bottles.” Those bottles were hundred pounders, and Grandpa had handled them all by himself for as long as Deet had been around. Now he was asking Deet for help. Deet looked quickly into Grandpa’s face, but it was stony, no answers there.
“I’m not hungry,” said Deet. He put his boots back on and went out with Grandpa to carry the five bottles into the woodshed.