THREE

I didn’t really know where I was going. I just wanted to get away from school. I took the school road and then swung onto a side road where there wouldn’t be much traffic. I was feeling sort of numb, and trying not to think about Helen. Instead, I thought about the pollution in the Timber River.

If they were dumping stuff in the river, it had to be coming out of a pipe somewhere along the river-bank. All I had to do was walk along the riverbank until I found it, then get a camera from somewhere and take some pictures of the pollution coming out. I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do with the pictures. I figured there had to be some sort of state agency in Albany that was responsible for pollution. Or maybe the police. Or maybe I would just give the pictures to the Timber Falls Journal and let them run a big story about it. Then I could send the story to the agency in Albany or whatever it was.

In fact, that seemed like the best idea. They were bound to take the whole thing more seriously if they saw a story about it in the paper than if some kid just sent in some pictures. That was the way to do it: Get the story in the paper first. Of course, I didn’t have a camera, and neither did Mom and Dad. We’d never had one, as far as I could remember. In the ads on television families always have cameras and take pictures of their trips and vacations and kids‟ birthday parties and all that. We didn’t go on any trips to take pictures of. Sometimes Dad went off for a few days or a week. He always said it was for a job out of state, but he never said where it was, or what it was, and we never knew for sure. But the rest of us never went on trips, so we couldn’t have had pictures of them even if we’d had a camera.

We had birthdays, though. I mean, we didn’t have real birthday parties with other kids coming over and balloons and hats and stuff. On our birthdays Mom would buy us a present—a toy or a doll or something when we were little, a sweater or a jacket when we were bigger. She would make something special for dinner that we liked—hamburgers and french fries or something—and she’d buy a cake and ice cream, and we’d blow out the candles and all that. But we never took any pictures of our birthdays, or Christmas or anything else. About the only pictures of myself I’d ever seen were one of Mom holding me when I was a baby, and another one that Helen and I took in a photograph machine once when we all went over to Watertown to see Mom when she was in a hospital for tests.

So getting hold of a camera was going to be a problem, but I figured I could solve it some way. I’d think about it for a while and see what came to me.

No matter how I tried to change the subject in my head, I couldn’t help thinking about Helen. I didn’t think she had gone home. If she came home early, Mom would want to know why, and Helen sure wouldn’t want to tell her. I figured she would hang out someplace until three-thirty when we usually got home. I felt sorry for her. Going back to school the next day and facing everybody was going to be hard for her.

The truth was that it was Helen’s own fault. I knew that. If she hadn’t let those guys come around, none of it would have happened. But I guess she wanted so much to have some guys come to see her, she couldn’t stop herself.

Still, I felt bad for her. What had happened to her wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, and if Dad had only got a real job and a real house, maybe things would have been different. But there wasn’t any use thinking about that. It wasn’t Dad’s way. He was his own man, he always said. He wasn’t going to spend his life taking orders from the middle class. The whole thing confused me a lot. It wasn’t fair for Helen; but why should Dad have to get a real job just for Helen?

I wondered what time it was. I couldn’t go home either, not until three. But I had to go someplace where no cop was likely to come along and ask me why I wasn’t in school. I would have to get away from town. And suddenly, just like that, I decided I would go out to the carpet factory just to have a look around.

I didn’t know much about the place. I’d gone out there two or three times with Dad when he had something to deliver and needed help unloading. It was a big one-story cement block building with a corrugated iron roof. It had been there a long time—forty years maybe. Behind it there was a blacktop parking lot, which ran down to the Timber River. That was about all I knew about it.

I could get from the school road to the carpet factory without going through town. So I headed on out, going as quick as I could. In a little while I came to the road that ran along the Timber River out to the carpet factory. It was pretty out there. The river was boiling along with the spring rush, and the mountains stood all around me. Sometimes the road swung in close to the river so that it was not more than fifty feet from the bank; other times it swung away from it, so there was maybe a quarter of a mile of woods between the river and the road, and I couldn’t see the river at all, or hear it boiling along either. It was only a couple of miles out to the factory, and after a while I began to get close.

Here the road was a good way from the river, with the woods in between. I kept on going, and pretty soon I came to an eight-foot-high steel mesh fence running along beside the road. I stopped and in a minute I realized that the fence turned the corner there and ran off down through the woods toward the river. I knelt down pretending to tie my shoe and took a look to see if anybody was around. A car was coming up the road. It slowed down when it came to me, but then it went by. I waited until it was out of sight, and then I slipped into the woods and worked my way along the steel mesh fence down to the river. I stopped on the riverbank and looked through the fence. It turned the corner again here and ran along the riverbank upstream in the direction of the carpet factory. It was pretty clear that the mesh fence must go all around the factory. I looked up at the top of the fence. There was barbed wire along the top. I could come back here with a pair of Dad’s wire cutters and get through that easily enough, but I had a hunch that it would set off an alarm if you cut the barbed wire.

I turned back and looked at the river. Here, this close to the factory, the water had a kind of greenish tint to it, and the little spots of foam on the surface didn’t look to me like ordinary whitecaps. I decided to take a look at the factory itself. I went back to the road and began walking along again. In a couple of minutes the woods ended, and there was the factory, about fifty yards back from the road, with a little lawn and some bushes out front, and behind it, as much as I could see from my angle, the parking lot and the loading docks. There were maybe a hundred cars in the parking lot.

The steel mesh fence went right along the whole thing and disappeared into more woods on the other side. It would go all the way around, I figured. There was a big steel mesh gate in the middle of the fence, where the factory road went in. The whole place was pretty well guarded, and I wondered why. I figured there was always the risk of thieves.

Anyway, it was going to be pretty impossible to get in there and prowl around looking for the pollution pipe. How was I going to find it? Then it came to me that if I crossed the river, and went along on the opposite bank, I would see it. I didn’t know how big a pipe you needed for something like that, but, I figured, from the amount of pollution that was in the water, it couldn’t be some little piece of one-inch pipe. It would be a twelve-inch pipe or something. It wouldn’t be hard to spot something that big sticking out of the riverbank.

I looked up at the sun, and judged that it must be getting on toward three, so I started for home, feeling a whole lot better. It felt good to be working on something interesting like this. It was sort of scary, too: but what was the danger? It wasn’t going to be much of a problem going along the opposite river-bank trying to spot that pipe, I figured.

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. She had a dress on, like she was going somewhere. “Where have you been, Harry? I’ve been so scared. My heart’s been pounding so, I thought I’d have an attack.”

I began to feel scared myself. “What’s the matter? I’ve been at school.”

“No, you haven’t,” she said. “They called from school. They said that you and Helen ran off after lunch. I’ve been so worried.”

“Ran off?” I didn’t know what to say.

“That’s what they said. Where’s Helen?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t worried about Mom so much as Dad. Mom wasn’t much for punishing us. Dad always told her that she had to bear down on us harder. But Dad would hit you if he got mad enough. Suddenly I saw a way out. “I don’t know where Helen went. I was looking for her.”

“Harry, they said Helen was upset.”

I didn’t know what to say, but I had to tell her something. “She was crying in school,” I said.

“Crying? What was she crying for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She was just crying.”

“She didn’t say where she was going?”

“She didn’t say anything. I went looking for her, but I couldn’t find her. I figured she came home.”

“Where did you look?”

“Just around town,” I said.

She took a sip of her coffee. “I’m so worried,” she said.

“I have to bury the garbage before Dad gets home,” I said.

I went outside, picked up the garbage can from behind the house, and toted it past the barn up into the woods. About a hundred feet in, there was a pit I’d dug for the garbage. We would dump the garbage in and cover it over with some dirt so that the animals wouldn’t get into it. About every three months I would have to cover over the garbage pit with the dirt that was left, and dig a new one. The pit was pretty full. I was going to have to dig a new one pretty soon. I hate that: it was hard work and took a morning.

I dumped the garbage into the pit and shoveled dirt over it. I wondered where Helen was. I’d figured she’d come on home after three-thirty, but she wasn’t home yet. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t think she’d go to visit those two girls who liked her, because she’d have to tell them what she was crying about. Where else would she go? If it had been me, I’d have gone off into the woods someplace to take my mind off it, but Helen wasn’t much for going into the woods. Where could she be?

I wished Dad would come home with the truck so we could go out looking for her. Mom ought to be doing something. She didn’t have a car, but she could be trying to find out where Dad was, to tell him. Or she could be phoning around to people to see if anyone had seen her. Or she could call the police. Do something, instead of just sitting there drinking coffee and worrying. That was the trouble with Mom: There didn’t seem to be much to her.

I finished up the garbage and carried the can back to the house. Helen still wasn’t home. I hosed the garbage can out so it wouldn’t stink. Then I went up to my room so as to be where Mom couldn’t start asking me questions. All my schoolbooks were still in my locker at school where I’d put them at lunchtime, but I was supposed to be writing a report on the ecology of the Adirondacks, which I knew a lot about anyway. So I started on it.

But I couldn’t concentrate. The longer the day went on, the more I worried about Helen. Why wasn’t she coming home? It began to grow dark, and still she didn’t come. She always came home by supper time. There wasn’t much else for her to do. I told myself that she was just messing around somewhere, and tried to concentrate on my report. Then I heard Dad’s truck drive in and stop. The door slammed.

Maybe Helen had got a ride home with Dad. I jumped up and ran to the window. It was just Dad. He took his toolbox out of the back of the truck and carried it up to the barn. Then he came back down to the house and went in. I jumped up and went downstairs. Mom was still sitting at the beat-up blue kitchen table drinking coffee. Dad was standing in the middle of the kitchen. He said, “What do you mean she’s run off?”

“They called from the school. She was crying and ran out of school. Harry went looking for her, but he couldn’t find her.”

“Crying?” Dad said. “What was she crying about?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said. She looked like she was about to cry herself.

Dad looked at me. “What’s this all about, Harry?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she was pretty upset about something.”

Mom started crying. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, Frank.”

Dad sat there for a minute, frowning and thinking. Then he said, “It probably wasn’t anything. Nerves or something. Let’s eat.”

Mom tried to stop crying, and wiped her eyes with a tissue.

“No, Frank, something’s wrong. It isn’t like her. I just know something’s wrong.”

“You’re making a big thing out of nothing. She probably had some trouble with her boyfriend. It’ll all blow over. Let’s eat.” He sat down at the table.

Mom stood up and faced him. “Frank—”

“Stop worrying. She’s probably made it up with the guy already, and she’s fooling around with him and forgot the time. She’s sixteen. She isn’t a baby. So what if she’s ten minutes late.”

“Please, Frank, please.”

He sighed. “All right,” he said. “All right. Come on, Harry, let’s go find her.”

We weren’t going to find her. By now I knew that she’d run away. Where, I didn’t know. But I knew that she wasn’t around Timber Falls anymore. I didn’t say anything; I just got my jacket, and we went out into the truck. Dad started the engine. “Where does she usually hang out?”

“Mostly everybody goes to Teddy’s Pizza Parlor,” I said. Helen went there sometimes, I knew, but she usually didn’t have enough money, not unless she could borrow some. We drove into town and stopped at Teddy’s, which was between the hardware store and the liquor store. “See if she’s in there,” Dad said.

I didn’t want to because everybody in there would know who I was looking for. But I couldn’t argue with Dad, so I got out of the truck and went into Teddy’s. Charlie Fritz was there, sitting at a booth fooling around with a couple of guys. He looked at me, but he didn’t say anything. I turned around, went out, and got back into the truck. “She isn’t there,” I said.

“Where else is she likely to be?” he said. “Who’s her boyfriend? Maybe she’s over at his house.”

“She doesn’t have—She isn’t going with anyone right now,” I said.

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend?” he said. “A girl that pretty doesn’t have a boyfriend? What about her girlfriends?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” I said, “She doesn’t have too many friends.”

‘That can’t be right, Harry,” he said. “She must have friends. She’s pretty and smart, she ought to have lots of friends.”

“She doesn’t have too many friends,” I said.

“I don’t understand that,” he said. “I just don’t understand it.”

He didn’t know anything about Helen. He didn’t know anything about who she was, or what she did, or what her life was like. What could I say to him? How could I explain to him that the whole time Helen was in elementary school she stank? How could I explain to him that everybody we knew thought we were trash?

We drove around town for a while, looking into the stores that were still open, and then we drove home. Dad didn’t say very much but just looked straight ahead all the way home.