from The New Yorker
AT THE Home I’d get up early, when the Sisters were still asleep, and head to the ancient Chinese man's store. The ancient Chinese man was a brown, knotted, shriveled man who looked like a chunk of ginger-root and ran one of those tiny stores that sell grapefruits, wine, and toilet paper, and no one can ever figure out how they survive. But he survived, he figured it out. His ancient Chinese wife was a little twig of a woman who sat in a chair and never said a word. He spoke only enough English to conduct business, to say hello and good-bye, to make change, although every morning, when I came for my grapefruit, I tried to teach him some useful vocabulary.
I came out of the gray drizzle through the glass door with the old Fish-back Appliance Repair sign still stenciled on it, a copper cowbell clanging above me, and the store was cold, the lights weren’t even on. I went to the bin and picked through the grapefruits and found one that wasn’t bad, a yellow ball, soft and square from sitting too long in the box, and then I went to the counter. The Chinese man wasn’t there. His tiny branchlike wife was sitting in her chair, all bent up. I searched my pockets for show, knowing all along that I’d be a little short. I came up with twenty-seven cents, half a paper clip, a pen cap, and a ball of blue lint. I put the money in her hand and she stared at it. By the lonesome sound my nickels and pennies made when she sorted them into their slots I also knew that the till was empty.
I looked behind her through the beaded curtain to the small apartment behind the shop. Next to the kitchen sink was an apple with a bite out of it, the bite turned brown like an old laugh.
I held my grapefruit, tossed it up in the air, caught it.
Where is he? I asked.
She was chewing on a slice of ginger and offered me a piece, which I accepted. In the morning, they chewed ginger instead of drinking coffee.
Husband? I said.
She blinked and spat on the floor.
Meiyou xiwang, she said. Meiyou xiwang.
She folded her hands, tangling the tiny brown roots together. Meiyou xiwang, she said, touching her heart, and sending her hands flying apart. Her singsong voice beat an echo against the bare walls. Her hands flapped like a bat. I shook my head. Meiyou xiwang, she insisted. Huh? I said, but I knew we could go on forever not making any sense. She hugged herself, like she was cold. I didn’t know what to say. She’d traveled all this way, she’d left China and crossed the ocean and come to Bremerton and opened a little store and put grapefruit in the bins and Mogen David on the shelves, but she’d gone too far, because now she couldn’t tell anybody what was happening to her anymore.
I had two projects at the Home. I was reading the encyclopedia, working through the whole circle of learning available to man, as the introduction said. I’d started with Ignatius Loyola, because I’m named after him, and the Inquisition, and this led me right into the topic of torture.
My other project involved learning Latin so I could be an altar boy. I got the idea one morning at Sacred Heart while I was staring at the cold altar and the Cross and winking at the nailed-up Christ to see if he’d wink back. Our priest said that he didn’t go for the vernacular because it was vulgar. If you were God Eternal, he said, would you want to listen to such yowling? He said that everything in the Church was a sign for something else, and a priest was a man who knew all the signs, but an altar boy knew a few of them, too. I looked around the sanctuary. With the snowy marble slab of altar, the gilt dome of the tabernacle and its tiny doors, the chalices and cruets, the fresh-cut flowers, the sparkling candlelight, the sanctuary was like a foreign country, and if I knew the language I could go there.
Several times I read the Missal as far as the Minor Elevation, the part of the Mass just after you pray for the dead. Per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen. World without end. Amen. But I was trying to learn Latin with phonetics—the Missal was Latin on one side, English on the other—and, needless to say, my comprehension was zero, and I was always finding myself back at the beginning, starting over. Per omnia saecula saeculorum, amen!
Most of our schoolwork focused on how to get into Heaven. Sister Eulalia, the catechism nun, taught us about sin and the opportunities for salvation. She was a short, wide old woman with thick glasses and blue eyes that drifted behind them like tropical fish. She kept calling Jesus the Holy Victim and the Word Made Flesh and the Unspotted Sacrifice. She said that sacrifice didn’t mean to kill but to make holy. We are made in the image of God's great mystery but through our ignorance and despair our vision is clouded. Salvation, she told us, is our presence in a bright light where we at last become the perfect image and reflection of our Creator.
We saw a slide show on the scapular. A boy was riding by a gas station on his bicycle. A man was pumping gas and a family was waiting in a car. Then the gas station was blowing up and the boy was flying through the air. Everybody died but the boy, who was wearing his scapular. Sister Eulalia passed around blank order forms and said to fill them out and bring $2.50 if you thought it was prudent to have a scapular for yourself. I’d spent all my money on grapefruits, though.
At night, in bed, I practiced my prayers. We had to memorize so many at the Home: Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, Act of Faith, of Hope, of Love, of Contrition. Praying either put me to sleep or made me think of girls. Once, I passed a girl a note during class and Sister Josephine, the discipline nun, intercepted it and said someone my age doesn’t know the least thing about love and shouldn’t use that word the way I did. That kind of love is special, she said. It's a rare gift from God, it's the consummation of a union, and it's certainly nothing for children. Sister Josephine called it The Marriage Act. It's embarrassing for me to admit, but she made me cry, she was yelling so much. I never sent another note. Still, I attached a vague feeling of hope to different girls, a feeling of, I don’t know, of whatever, that came out, some nights, when I said prayers.
We had to learn the prayers because we prayed for everything: we prayed for food, we prayed for sleep, we prayed for new basketballs. Three times a day, Sister Catherine, the food nun, took us to the church cafeteria for our meals. Volunteer ladies served us—they were all old and kind and had science-fiction hair, clouds of blue gas, burning white-hot rocket fuel, explosions of atomic frizz. I loved the endless stacks of white bread and the cold slabs of butter. When the nuns said I was underfoot, I went downstairs and studied the encyclopedias or read Latin or went outside and shot buses with my pump gun. Buses passed the Home every twenty-six minutes. I built up my arm pitching rocks at a tree until a circle of pulpy white wood was exposed in the bark. One afternoon I planted a sunflower in a milk carton.
I longed to go somewhere but there wasn’t anywhere good that I knew of. Then one day I found the public-school yard.
What’re you doing here, you stupid shit? asked one kid, a pudgy boy with skin like a baby.
He and some other boys pushed around me in a circle.
The pudge said, Who are you?
When I didn’t answer, he said, You’re one of those orphan bastards, right?
The boys crowded in closer and I was afraid to speak. People could tell you were from the Home by your haircut. We were all shaved up like the Dalai Lama.
Finally, I smiled and mumbled, If you say so.
What? the pudge said. I didn’t hear you.
The circle of boys cinched like a knot. Their looming heads were way up in the sky.
Yeah, I said.
After that I sat below the monkey bars and chewed a butter sandwich and watched pudge-boy and his gang over by the water fountain with some girls and I knew I was going to have to kick his ass sooner or later. Everything else was new and strange but this seemed predictable and something I could rely on.
That spring the pudge had the nerve to try out for baseball. He wore brand-new cleats and threw like a fem and his mitt, also brand-new, very orange and stiff, wouldn’t close. He might as well have been standing in right field with a piece of toast. He dropped everything. The second day of practice, we had an intrasquad game and I nailed him three times. I just chose places on his fat body and threw the ball at them. Eventually, pudge-boy was afraid to stand in the batters box. The coach thought I had a control problem but I didn’t. My control was perfect.
I whiffed nine guys and made the team and the pudge was cut. He walked away, crying. I ran down the hill and jumped on his back. I hit him in the face and the neck and beat on his ear over and over. You hear that? I shouted. You hear that, you fat fucker? Now that I had him alone I was insane. The pudge rolled away on the grass, holding his ear. Blood was coming out. He was bawling, and I hawked a gob of spit right into his black, wailing mouth and said, You bastard.
That night, I was asleep with the encyclopedia pitched like a tent over my nose when Sister Celestine, the head nun, came in.
Why weren’t you at dinner?
I could hear the polished rocks of Sister Celestine's rosary rattling as she worried them between her fingers.
She pulled the encyclopedia off my head.
Won’t you talk? Sister said.
She tucked a dry, stray shaft of hair back beneath her habit. Maybe you’d feel more comfortable making a confession?
I picked at the fuzzballs on my blanket.
I just got off the phone with that boy's mother, she said.
She touched a cut on my lip and took a deep breath. She said you called him a name. Do you know what that name means?
I shook my head.
She took off her scapular and put it around my neck. Two small pieces of brown wool hung on a cord, one in back, the other in front.
I rubbed the wool between my finger and thumb.
It's not magic, she said.
No?
More like a sign, she said, that helps guide people—she paused—like us. When you pray to it you never say Amen, because the prayer is continuous. It doesn’t have an end. Before I received my calling, she said, I used to be a lot like you. I felt trapped. It was like I lived in a dark little corner of my own mind. She sighed. Ignatius, do you know what the opposite of love is?
Hate, I said.
Despair, Sister said. Despair is the opposite of love.
When the pudge came to the yard, he was obviously beat up and everybody wanted to know what happened. Before I could say anything, he came charging across the lot and said, Truce, truce. We shook hands and sat under the monkey bars, which had become my private territory.
I thought Catholics were pansies, he said.
Ignatius Loyola was a warrior, I said.
That's a weird name, the pudge said. My name's Donny
Ignatius, I told him.
I’m sorry I called you a bastard, Donny said. He peeled a strip of red rubber off his tennis shoe and stretched and snapped it in the air. Then he put it in his mouth and chewed on it.
You should meet my dad, he said.
My dad used to race pigeons, I said. He had about a hundred of them.
Donny looked impressed. How do you race pigeons? he asked.
You just drive out to the country and let them go—they always find their way back to the coop. You can use pigeons to send messages.
My dad ate a pigeon once, Donny said. In France.
Donny told me about the Eurekan Territory, which was something he’d made up on summer vacation. The Eurekan Territory came from Eureka, California, where he had relatives he didn’t like. All they did was drink greyhounds, he said, and talk about people you didn’t know. They were always slapping their knees and saying Gosh, isn’t that funny? when nothing was funny.
Donny wasn’t a Catholic but I let him wear my scapular, which he kept on calling a spatula.
You should come over to our house, Donny said. It's big. My dad rakes it in.
I said, You want to go see my dad?
Donny looked at me. Where? he said.
What do you mean, where?
Isn’t he dead?
Follow me, I said.
St. Jude's Hospital was a huge old brick building. A hurricane fence caged in a patio that was scattered with benches and garbage cans. We walked around the fence, plucking the cold wires with our fingers.
My dad was sitting on a bench with a loaf of bread and an orange. He wore a paper nightgown with snaps in the back. His eyes were like blown fuses, and dry white yuck made a crust around his mouth. Wind ruffled his hair. It was too cold to be outside in a paper outfit.
Don’t you want a sweater? I said.
I climbed up the chain-link fence.
This is my friend Donny, I said. Donny, this is my dad, Tony Banner.
Dad was barefoot on one foot and wore a foam-rubber slipper on the other. He grabbed the fence and the links shivered. He looked out west, toward the Olympic Mountains, and we looked, too. It was getting dark.
Hey, Dad?
What?
He dropped a piece of bread through the fence, and a couple of cooing pigeons bobbed along the gutter and fought each other for it. They were ugly pigeons, dirty like a sidewalk. They were right under me and Donny s feet. I kicked one in the head. It fell over, and beat the dirt with its wings.
I’m learning quite a lot of prayers at school, I said.
That got him to laugh. The cuts on his hands were healing. That last week at our house he emptied all the soup cans in the garage and kept the rusty nails in his pockets. One morning for breakfast he served me a bowl of nails with milk and then squeezed a fistful of them in his hand until blood came out. He kept saying with his voice very loud and fast, I got the nails, I got the nails right here, boy—where's my cross, eh? Now he was gentle. He pushed bread through the fence until the loaf was gone and the pigeons flew away, except the one I’d kicked.
I gotta go home and eat, Donny said to me.
Donny s gotta go home and eat, I told my dad, translating for him. I’ve got to go eat, too.
I turned around once, real quick, and he was gripping the fence, looking off nowhere, then Donny and I crawled through a hole in the hedge.
Donny's dad asked us, Who wants to get the hell out of here? Who wants to go hiking in the Olympics? I’d spent most of my summer at Donny s house, so I knew his parents. Mrs. Cheetam was a beautiful woman with silver-and-gold hair. Mr. Cheetam was a traveling salesman and wasn’t home much, but it was true, he raked it in. They bought Donny everything. Donny told me he had a sister who died of leukemia. He played me a cassette of her last farewell. Near the end of the tape she said, Donny? I love you, remember that. I want you to know that wherever I am, and wherever you are, I’ll be watching. I’ll be with you always. I love you. Do you hear me? Donny?
When she said that—I love you. Do you hear me? Donny?—I got a lonely sort of chill.
We’re now leaving the Eurekan Territory! Donny said as we drove away, and I said, That's right. Good-bye, Eurekan Territory!
Mr. Cheetam listened to different tapes from a big collection he kept in a suitcase. They were old radio shows, and one I liked was called The Shadow: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Mr. Cheetam and Donny knew all the words and talked right along with the tapes. The Shadow knows, they said, ha ha ha!
Later Donny woke up and asked, Where are we? Mr. Cheetam said, You see that river there, Donny? That's the Quinault River, and we’re going to hike up along what's called the High Divide, and when we get to the top we’ll be at the source of that river. You’ll be able to skip right over it, he said, so remember how big it is now. Donny asked, What if we see the Sasquatch? I said we’d be famous, if we captured it. Or took a picture, Donny said. But I don’t want to see it, he added. We parked at the ranger station and signed in. It was silent and we could hear our feet crunching the gravel. We cinched up our pack straps and looked at each other. This is it, Mr. Cheetam said. He looked up the trail. This is where we separate the men from the boys.
After about an hour, we cut off the main path and headed toward the river. This is where I buried my dad, Mr. Cheetam explained. I always visit once a year. Right beside the river was a tree, hanging over the water and shadowing everything. Initials were carved in the tree on the side facing the river. B.C. is Billy Cheetam, Donny said. That's my grandpa. Is he under the tree? I asked. No, no, Mr. Cheetam laughed. He was cremated and I scattered his ashes in the river. But this is the spot, he said. The river was deep and wide at that point. Mr. Cheetam asked if he and Donny could be alone to think and remember and I hiked back out to the main trail. I sat against a fallen log until Donny came back. He talks to him, Donny said. What's he say? I asked, but Donny didn’t know.
Our first camp was disappointing because we could hear Boy Scouts hooting and farting around, a troop of about sixty in green uniforms with red or yellow hankies around their necks. It was like the army, with pup tents everywhere. Mr. Cheetam said not to worry, higher up there wouldn’t be any Scouts.
We found wood and lit a campfire and made dinner—beef Stroganoff— and I sopped up all the gravy with my fingers. We washed the pots and pans with pebbles and sand in the river. Mr. Cheetam drank whiskey from a silver flask, wiping his lips and saying, Aaahhh, this is living!
The Boy Scouts sounded off with taps. Donny and I shared a smoke-wood stogie—a kind of gray stick you could smoke—and when it was quiet Mr. Cheetam cupped his hands around his mouth and moaned, Who stole my Golden Arm? Whooooo stoooole myyyy Goool-den Aaaarm? You could hear his voice echoing in the forest. Whoo stoooole my Gooolden Aaarm? You did! Mr. Cheetam shouted, grabbing Donny. We crawled into our tents and I started laughing and Donny got hysterical, too. Mr. Cheetam had a different tent and told us to shut up.
Donny whispered how he hated the Japs and never wanted to be captured by them—they knew how to make you talk. I told him about the Inquisition and all the tortures they’d invented for getting confessions.
They had this one thing called the press, I said. If you were accused of a crime and didn’t make a plea, the King ordered you to lie down. Then he piled rocks on you until you confessed the truth or got crushed.
How big were the rocks? Donny asked.
I don’t know.
What if you had thirty—what if you had a hundred—no, wait, what if you had a thousand rocks on you and then you decided to tell the truth?
You could, I said. But if you said you didn’t do anything, the King didn’t want to hear that, and he’d just go ahead with another rock, until you admitted you did do it.
Donny hesitated, and I thought I understood.
I know, I said. I know.
At the next camp, only two people were around, a man and a woman, who were sitting naked on a rock in the river when we first arrived, but kept to themselves afterward. Donny and Mr. Cheetam fished for a while but quit after Donny's hook got caught in the trees too many times. Mr. Cheetam said, Don’t worry about it, Donny. It's no good down here. Higher up the water's colder and we’ll catch tons of rainbows, maybe some Dolly Varden.
We ate a great meal of dehydrated chicken tetrazzini and pilot biscuits and chocolate for dessert. Donny and I shared more smokewood. Now and then we added sticks to the fire and the light breathed out and made a circle around us. I love getting away from it all, Mr. Cheetam said.
He tipped back his flask and in the bright curved silver I could see the fire flaming up.
Once upon a time, Mr. Cheetam said, there was a boy and girl who were very much in love.
Where was this? Donny asked.
Oh, Mr. Cheetam said, it doesn’t matter, does it? Love's the same everywhere you go, so let's just make up a place.
How about the Eurekan Territory? I said.
O.K., Mr. Cheetam said. The Eurekan Territory, that's where they were in love. It was a small place, and everybody knew everybody else, so eventually people figured out this boy and girl had a thing going. You know what a thing is, right?
Donny said he did.
Good for you, Mr. Cheetam said. Well, this thing was frowned on by everyone. People took different sides, against the boy, or against the girl, everybody blaming everybody else. But the boy and girl were madly in love and you can’t stop love, not when it's the real thing.
He went to his pack and pulled out a big bottle and refilled his flask. When he came back he said, You know what that's like, to have a real thing?
Donny said, Yeah, I know.
I mean really real, Mr. Cheetam said.
How real? I said.
Mr. Cheetam ignored me. To hell with what anybody thinks, these kids, these lovers, said. So one night the boy meets the girl on the edge of town and they drive up a dark winding road to a lover's leap. They can see everything from up there, but they’re not looking. No sirree, Bob. The boy and the girl sit in the car, spooning, as we used to call it back in the day— making out, and listening to love songs on the radio, until one of the songs is interrupted by a special bulletin. A prisoner has escaped!
Does the prisoner have hooks instead of hands? I asked.
Yeah, Mr. Cheetam said, that's the guy.
How’d you know? Donny asked.
I knew because the story wasn’t true. The girl hears something outside, and the boy says, Oh, baby, baby, don’t worry, we’re way up here above everything, we’re safe. The boy tries to get at the girl, and the girl keeps hearing something outside. Eventually it's no fun, and they go home. When the boy opens the door for the girl to drop her out he finds a hook clawing and banging at the door handle, just clinging there, ripped right off the prisoner's arm.
Mr. Cheetam didn’t scare me, but Donny was scared.
We were quiet for a minute, and then I told them about when my dad was driving in his car. The other car came out of nowhere, I said. And my dad was hanging half out the door. His foot was stuck under the clutch and his head was banging on the road. He was dragged about two hundred feet. He was in the hospital for a month. My mom died.
No one said anything, so I added, That's a true life story.
You don’t think mine was? Mr. Cheetam asked. He looked at me strangely and winked.
Well, I said, yeah, I do. I know it is. I heard about those lovers before.
Mr. Cheetam stood up, stretched, and fell down. Donny and I looked at each other, then we got in our sleeping bags.
Your dad sure enjoys whiskey, I said.
In the middle of the night, Donny said, Hey, you hear that?
Come off it, I said.
I swear I heard something.
There's nothing out there, I said, but Donny went over to sleep in his dad's tent anyway.
We reached a sign that pointed different ways: the High Divide and the Low Divide. We took the high, up and up. There were fewer trees, and we climbed on loose rock called scree, and the air was thinner. Donny had an ugly blister on his heel and complained, and Mr. Cheetam got impatient with him. Just pull yourself up and get going, he said. Don’t fall behind.
Finally we crossed a field full of pink and yellow wildflowers, and at the far end, where the path ended, was a lake. The surface was perfectly clear and placid and we could see ourselves.
Here we are, Mr. Cheetam said.
Skinny-dipping, Donny said.
First things first, girls, Mr. Cheetam said, so we hopped to, setting up camp and scrounging enough wood for the night.
Donny and I stripped naked and jumped off the cliffs. No one else was around but when we swam and shouted and splashed our voices bounced back and forth off the rocks. Ricochet, we yelled. We dove and dove. Then we lay on a hot flat rock. I noticed that Donny had hair on his balls and he probably noticed so did I. You want to smoke a stogerooni? Donny asked. Nah, later, I said. We were stretched out and quiet: blue sky, yellow sun, white mountain—everything was perfect but Donny got antsy doing nothing for so long and took another dip. He came up fast and said, A fish! I saw a fish! And he got his fishing pole and caught a rainbow, like pulling a prayer from the water.
Good work, Donny, Mr. Cheetam said.
The fish wasn’t all the way dead yet and Mr. Cheetam had to slap its head against a rock. Blood came out the eyes. The knife blade sank into the skin with a ripping sound. What do we do with the guts? I asked. Toss ’em in the lake, Mr. Cheetam said. We don’t want any animals coming into camp. Bears? Donny said. It's not impossible, Mr. Cheetam said, but not likely, either. Maybe the Sasquatch, Donny said. Mr. Cheetam said to shut up about that damned Sasquatch. It's time you grow up, he said, shaking Donny's arm. Jesus, Donny said, rubbing himself.
Mr. Cheetam wrapped the fillets in foil and set them on the fire. It was soft out now, not dark but not light, either. Our shadows were weak around the fire, and Mt. Olympus was tinged pink and purple, and the wind died down.
Hey, I said, what about the Quinault?
Yeah, the Quinault! Donny said. You said I’d get to walk across it.
Oh crap, what was I thinking? Mr. Cheetam asked himself. You already did and I forgot, God damn it!
We ran back through the darkening wildflowers. We found a little stream about a foot wide and three inches deep that you would never think was a river but it was. There's your mighty Quinault, Donny, Mr. Cheetam said. Donny asked if we built a dam would the river dry up below and Mr. Cheetam laughed, saying, No, I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. We bent down and drank and splashed our faces in the water. We listened to the little river, trickling in a whisper. It was almost like nothing.
The fish was all burned to hell when we got back to camp. Donny was upset and kept whining. I’m sorry, Mr. Cheetam said, but things happen. What can I say? Then he offered, Tomorrow? You want to stay another day? Donny looked at me, then said, Stay! Stay! O.K., Mr. Cheetam said, I think we’ve got everything we need—plenty of provisions—and we’ll catch some more fish.
After dinner, Mr. Cheetam drew out his flask again. His face was like my dad's had been in the last days, rough and black. One night toward the end I’d found him, my dad, in our broom closet. He had all his Bob Dylan records out and was writing new lyrics on them with a nail. Other things happened that I prefer to keep to myself. All week his loud voice was like the echo of thoughts he’d had a long time ago. Then one morning at the very end I heard him calling me in the rain. He was on top of our house in boxer shorts, yelling. Our neighbor tried to drive him off the roof by throwing a pot of geraniums at him. My dad started ripping apart the chimney and pitching bricks down on me and everybody else on the front lawn. We had to call the authorities. For a while he thought he was Jesus in a hospital called St. Judas, but it was really St. Jude's and my dad, of course, wasn’t Jesus. The same people who took him to the hospital brought me to the Home. I hadn’t eaten in three days.
Nearby we saw field mice hopping around, and Mr. Cheetam said that we’d better keep our packs inside the tents tonight. He hooked his arm around Donny s neck and said, How’d you like to go to California?
Not Eureka, Donny said.
No, Mr. Cheetam said, L.A.
Donny said he didn’t know anything about L.A. Mr. Cheetam fussed with the fire, arranging the coals. When that goes out that's it until morning, he said. He tipped back the flask. Then he capped it and said, That's it for that, too. He stretched and groaned and walked out where the firelight failed. I heard him whistling in the dark.
Son? Mr. Cheetam said.
What? Donny asked.
Come on over here a minute, Mr. Cheetam said.
They were in the shadows. I heard Donny say, What does Mom think?
That's the thing, Mr. Cheetam said. Your mother would stay.
I don’t know, Donny said. How long would we be gone?
Donald, Mr. Cheetam said, don’t be stupid. We’re divorcing, your mom and I. You see, we won’t come back—we’ll live in a brand-new house there.
Donny begged, But why?
Donald, come on. You see how things are.
The two of them were quiet and staring ahead, like their next thoughts might fall out of the sky.
What can I say? Mr. Cheetam said.
Nothing, Donny said.
I love you, Donald. You know that.
I crawled inside our tent. A little while later, Donny got in his bag, buried down inside. He was crying and choking. I whispered, Donny, hey, hey, Donny? Donny? I think I hear something out there. Do you hear it? Let's go look! I hugged my arm around him and he started jerking in his bag and sat up and cried to me, Here's your stupid spatula! Then he crossed over into Mr. Cheetam's tent but kept crying and begging even louder for no divorce.
Look, I heard Mr. Cheetam say, after your sister died—His voice fell apart. That's too easy, he said. I’ve met someone else. He was quiet a minute. That's the truth.
I thought the crying would go on forever, but eventually Donny must have fallen asleep.
I turned over and over in my sleeping bag, and then I put on Sister Celestine's scapular and grabbed the flashlight and crawled out of the tent. The fire made a hiss and I kicked the last few embers around in the bed of ash. Mr. Cheetam snorted in his sleep and I heard Donny say, Dad? And Mr. Cheetam say, What? but there was nothing after that, even though I stood outside their tent a long time, listening.
I aimed my flashlight ahead to the flat rock rim of the lake and followed the narrow beam up there. I sat, dangling my feet, and snapped off the light. I think I was feeling sorry for myself. Suddenly it felt like we’d been gone for ages. Was it Sunday? I gathered up ten rocks for a rosary, to count my prayers. I rattled them in my hands and started the Our Father but my voice was weird. I shook the rocks in my fist like dice. I threw one in the lake, and a little while later I heard the splash. Circles opened out where the stone had vanished. I thought of saying something in Latin but couldn’t recall a single word, except amen. I yelled out, A-men! and heard back, Hey-men, hey-men, hey-men, smaller and smaller.
I stretched out on the rock. Sister Celestine's scapular was old, the wool worn soft from handling. Once, at the Home, I had climbed the stairs, six flights up from my room in the basement, to see where she lived. We weren’t supposed to go up there. I saw why. Hosiery hung from the water pipes. Candy wrappers were crumpled on the floor. A black habit lay like an empty sack beside the bed. The bed was unmade, and I could see the hollow where Sister Celestine slept. A pale-green blanket and a thin yellow top sheet had been twisted into a tight braid and kicked off the end of the mattress. The only decoration was a black wooden crucifix, nailed on the wall above the bed like a permanent shadow.
I was still lying there when Donny and Mr. Cheetam came running up the rock in their undies. Hey, what's going on? they asked. They said they’d heard me shouting and were afraid I’d got lost or seen something.
Maybe the Sasquatch, Donny said.
God damn it, Donald, there is no such thing, Mr. Cheetam said. That's just a myth.
Oh yeah, Donny said. How do you know?
Don’t worry, I said. It was nothing.
You sure? Donny said.
It was nothing, I said. I’m sure.
A wind was blowing and it was a little cold on that rock. Nobody knew what to say.
See out there? Above Mt. Olympus? That green star? Mr. Cheetam said, pointing. We all looked—a vague white shadow, a green light. It's not really a star. That's a planet—that's Venus, Mr. Cheetam said. The goddess of love.
That's just a myth, Donny said, looking at his father. Bastard.
I didn’t hear you, Mr. Cheetam said. What did you say?
Nothing, Donny said.
Nothing? It didn’t sound like nothing to me.
I pitched another rock in the lake, way out there, as far as possible. We all listened. Across the water a circle spread out, wider and wider. Then, shaking with cold, Donny folded his arms around himself and yelled out, Hey, and we heard back, Hey, hey, hey, and then I yelled out, Hey, and even Mr. Cheetam joined in, and we kept hearing back, Hey, hey, hey, like there were millions of us everywhere.