CHAPTER
16

MONDAY IT ALL went sour. At breakfast not one of his family seemed like any sort of blessing. Sky dribbled milk down his chin disgustingly, and Mom didn’t seem to notice. Gib read the newspaper. He’d jogged to the bottom of the road for it in the loudest of his shirts and the shorts where the dye job divided exactly between the cheeks. Chad remembered making that pair. It had been a joke. He’d never expected anyone to wear them, let alone his father.

Julia was Julia. That was all it took.

This time last week he’d been heading down to his job. Done with that already, like a toy broken by Christmas afternoon.

He lingered at the table when the rest of them left, trying to do the newspaper crossword puzzle. None of the clues made sense. Mom came to put on the teakettle. “Hadn’t you better get going, Chad?”

He shrugged and waited, determined to make her ask and have it out in the open.

“Chad? Is something wrong?”

That wasn’t the question he wanted to answer. He shrugged again, but she didn’t go on, and he finally said, “I’m not going.”

“Why not?”

“I just decided not to.”

“Decided not to? Chad, it’s a job! You can’t just decide not to show up!”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Because he’s counting on you!” The kettle boiled. Mom switched it off and poured her cup of tea. “Did something happen down there that I should know about?”

Chad shook his head. It was a little hard to say, even to himself, what had happened. “Door,” he wrote into an open four-letter slot, ruining the crossword.

“Then what are you going to do?” Mom asked. “Don’t keep shrugging. I can’t stand it!”

Chad couldn’t help shrugging again. It was all he had in him to do.

“Chad, you can’t just mope around for the next month! You aren’t playing baseball; you have to do something!”

Chad’s shoulders started to shrug again, all on their own. Mom’s hand clapped onto his neck. Her fingernails touched him, not digging, but almost digging. “Don’t!”

Then she snatched her hand away. “Oh my God, look at me!” She turned to the stove. He heard a little splash. “Ow! Ow!”

That was something, anyway.

The sunbeam slanted deeper into the empty kitchen.

“Want to play the ambush game?”

Chad bent over the ruined crossword. Sky circled him and hauled at his arms. “Play with me! Play with me! Please, please, please!”

“Chad, play with him!” Gib barked from the computer table in the corner.

“You can’t make people play!” Chad muttered, under cover of “prettypretty prettyplease!”

Gib looked up. “Wanna bet?”

For Gib he seemed dangerous, though thin and not very muscled, and with his long, meek ponytail hanging down his back. Something hard in Chad, something alarmingly independent of his normal self, considered. Could Gib make him?

His shoulders twitched in a shrug. He followed Sky out onto the deck, to the broken-legged plastic horses and the one-armed cowboy.

Sky sat down with the toys, in a tangle of deck furniture all on its sides, and picked up the blond horse. “We have to be really quiet,” he said in a piercing whisper. “Here comes the bad guy riding down the canyon—”

“I don’t see a bad guy!”

Sky looked at him as if he were an idiot. “ Pretend! Now you have to make the good guy ride.” He pushed the handicapped cowboy into Chad’s hands. “He wants to catch the bad guy and make him tell where the money’s hid. Ride, ride, ride.” Sky made a whispery sound that was supposed to be whistling.

Chad jumped the cowboy over the fallen chair back. He kicked the cowboy’s legs against Sky’s horse and, accidentally, against Sky’s brown, soft hand.

“Ow!”

Chad kept kicking with the cowboy, knocking the horse over. “Blam-blam—killed him and his horse! Game’s over.”

“No! That’s not—”

“Game’s over!” Chad got up and vanished around the corner, hearing Sky’s roar behind him and his father’s angry voice.

He headed up the road. Halfway he met Jeep and Helen driving down. So no one was at the farm.

No one was in the barn either, and he went inside it.

It was dark in there, after the bright outdoors. The scent of new hay pressed down, heavy and sweet. A year ago he and Jeep had spent an hour, on a morning just like this, checking the bales to see if any were overheating. Packed this close, hay that was a little too green could generate an awesome heat—enough to set the barn afire.

The bales were strewn askew on top, and loose flakes of hay lay on the barn floor. Jeep must have checked by himself this year.

Jeep’s tools leaned against the wall. Here was the anvil; here were the chains; here was the gambrel-stick by which the butchered pig and steer were hung, year after year, splayed open to cool in the November air. Harnesses and horse collars gathered dust, and deep in one corner, dustiest of all, was Jeep’s red goat cart. When Jeep was twelve and had moved in with a family that was kind as well as hardworking, he’d been given this cart. It was the ambition of his life at that time to own a goat and drive it.

He’d had to move on. Chad never knew why. The tales had come according to what the two of them were working on at the moment, so he’d never pieced together Jeep’s growing up to make a full, real story. Somehow from that farm, Jeep had gone on to others, then to driving for a small trucking company at the age of fifteen, and then into the army, the war in Korea, and back here to marry Helen. After he bought this farm, he visited the kind family. The goat cart was still there, and someone remembered that it had been given to Jeep.

All it would take was a bale falling off the high stack, arcing inexplicably toward that corner.…

He couldn’t quite do it. Not quite.

He went outside, to the pigpen. The pig got up when it saw him and came over with a friendly oink. It was pinkish white, with twinkling little eyes behind stubby lashes.

“You’re meat!” Chad told it. “Dead meat! You’ve only got till fall. Don’t you know that?”

The pig gave a rich grunt and pushed its flat nose at him. He picked a broad dandelion leaf. The pig smacked it down.

It glanced up at him again and then along the fence, communicating with its eyes the way Shep used to. There, between two posts, lay Jeep’s flat stick for scratching pigs’ backs, weathered silver-gray, the edges rubbed smooth against generations of bristles.

Chad felt his heart swell and heat. Without thinking, he opened the latch and pushed the gate back.

The pig squeezed through the opening. Its head was down now. It didn’t have anything more to say to Chad, or he to it. He went out into the woods and spent a long time throwing sticks in above the waterfall and watching them be swept downstream.