THE AIR OVER ROUTE 44 fuses his perceptions, muggy and bright. The shoulder is narrow; traffic passes close. He turns east, breaking into a desperate jog. It can’t be more than five miles to his mother’s house.
But he runs lumpishly today, unable to locate his stride, eyes hugging the gravel-strewn ground in front of him: an athlete in civilian clothes, his shoes heavy and flat.
It would seem a simple thing on the surface—that a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime, his or someone else’s. That he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note. That he might love his parents helplessly, in spite of who they are; just as, if he’s ever to find his place in the world, someday he must accept himself helplessly, in spite of who he has become.
He slows, then stops, a painful stitch digging into his side. He bends over. Not in shape, after all. No kind of “prospect.” Just another washout without a life plan.
He remembers stabbing a freshly sharpened pencil into the hand of a boy at school. It was Eddie Tibbet, his friend. They were ten. There was no logical reason for the attack, no apparent motive.
It is still fresh to him: the look of disbelief on Eddie’s face, his high, startled cry of pain. The teacher grabbing him by the wrist, dragging him off to the principal’s office.
To separate him from the others, she said: so he could not hurt anyone else.
A fuel truck lumbers by at close range, trailing gasoline vapor. Painted on the back of the stubby silver tank, for some reason, is a palm tree, brown coconuts nesting in green fronds.
He thinks of California.
And then, heading west in the opposite lane, he sees a second vehicle, a converted pickup, its flatbed vertically sectioned by large panes of clear glass—a roving window in search of a house. And for the instant it’s even with his position he is granted, as if by some higher power, insight through its crystalline lenses to the other side.
He snaps this mental picture, not knowing what it means.
Then the truck is past, and all views everywhere revert to the obscure.
The tips of his father’s brown lace-ups are badly scuffed from his mad dash along the roadside: the man’s been out running, too, chasing his son. Pale dust coats his pantlegs to the shins, and dark islands of sweat stain the armpits of his white button-down.
“I still know some people around here—” His father bends over—hands on his knees—to catch a wheezing breath, then slowly straightens again. “Come on … I can find you half a dozen lawyers better than that pompous asshole.”
“Forget it.”
“Sam, listen to me—”
“No.”
“Dammit, we need to do everything we can here.”
“ ‘We’?”
His father looks away. Sam repeats the question, his anger growing, as a yard away a minivan passes them in a rush of dust and fumes.
His father breathes out. A public service, in essence: trying to expel something potentially harmful to them both.
“You don’t want to go where I went. Never. You don’t want any part of that.”
“Doesn’t look like it killed you.” Out of bounds now, Sam lets it fly. It almost feels good. His father stares at him, takes a step closer.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. It’ll ruin your life. Rot you from the inside out.”
“Too late,” he says softly.
(He is five again, and across the room his parents are killing each other.)
“Listen to me—”
He turns to get away. But a hand shoots out, grabs him high up on his left biceps. Strong blunt fingers that know what damage is dig into the soft tissue between muscle, sending a knifelike pain shooting up his shoulder and down his arm.
Before he can stop himself, his fist flies out: he punches his father in the face.
They both see it at the same moment: his father’s fist cocked in the stunned air, about to deliver the return blow.
And then his father, running.