Darkness Under the Sun

with her, he could be a kind of dad.”

“No. She doesn’t. It’s just the three of us.”

As he stared down at the street, Howie was aware that Mr. Blackwood watched him with interest. “You’re the man of the house.”

“I guess so. How do you drift everywhere? You have a car?”

“Sometimes I get a car and drive. Or I hitch a ride in an empty railroad boxcar. I even take a bus from time to time.”

“Don’t people stare at you on a bus?”

“I sit right up front so they can get a good look.”

“I wouldn’t like them gawking at me.”

“If they gawk too much, I give them a spooky stare, and that cures them of it.”

“I wish I had a spooky stare,” Howie said.

“You see, it’s just like I told you — there’s nothing scary about you, Howie Dugley.”

“Do you always sleep in empty old buildings like this?”

“Not always. Sometimes in whatever vehicle I’m driving. Now and then under a bridge or in a field with my sleeping bag. Sometimes in homeless shelters, and sometimes in a house I like.”

“You have a house somewhere?”

“I have houses all over, any place I like,” said Mr. Blackwood.

“Then you’re not poor?”

“Not me. I’ve got everything I could ever want. I do what I want. I do anything I want.” From one of the many pockets in his khaki pants, he fished a thick roll of folding money. “Does this town have a respectable take-out joint that makes great sandwiches?”

“There’s a place or two.”

Peeling a twenty and a ten from the roll, holding them out toward Howie, Mr. Blackwood said, “Why don’t you go buy us lunch? Two sandwiches for me, one for you, some Cokes. Don’t bother with the cellar window. Go out by the back door. It won’t lock behind if you set the latch lever straight up.”

The hand was so big that it could have covered Howie’s entire face, heel under his chin and fingertips past his hairline, thumb hooked in one ear, the little finger in the other. Even the little finger was large and, like all the others, had a freakishly big pad at the end, bigger than a soup spoon, almost like the sucker pads on the toes of a toad.

That hand looked so strong, maybe it could tear off your face and wad it up like Kleenex. If Mr. Blackwood wanted to hurt Howie, however, he would have done it already. Another thing to think about was that if Mr. Blackwood changed his mind about drifting, if he decided to stay here because he made friends in town, he would be a great friend to have. Bigger kids, no matter how big they were, no matter how mean, wouldn’t lie in wait for Howie and knock him around anymore, wouldn’t pull down his pants and laugh at him, wouldn’t call him Scarface or the Eight-Fingered Freak or the Claw, if they knew that he was a friend of Mr. Blackwood’s.

“I don’t usually go in places like restaurants unless my mom makes me go with her, and I never go alone.”

Still offering the money, Mr. Blackwood said, “Then it’ll be good for you to do it. You’ll see how they’ll take your money as quick as anyone’s, they’ll give you what you want like they would any customer. And if someone stares at you — just smile back at them. You don’t have a Frankenstein smile like me, but a nice smile will work as well, maybe better. You’ll see.”

Howie approached Mr. Blackwood and took the thirty bucks.

Dark muddy-red stains marred the bills. “They’re spendable,” Mr. Blackwood assured him. “Let them think you’re buying sandwiches for your mom. If they know we’re up here, they’ll chase us off before we have our lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s a lot of money — thirty bucks. But I trust you to do the right thing, Howie. There can’t be friendship without trust.”

Whether in the sunlight or in the occasional cloud shadow, Mr. Blackwood appeared so strange that he didn’t seem entirely real. But his eyes — so coal-black you couldn’t see any difference between the iris and the pupil — his eyes were as real as anything in the world, and they drilled right through you, seemed to look into your mind and read your thoughts.

Mr. Blackwood winked. “If they have any tasty-looking cookies, get a couple of those, too.”

2

Howie returned with paper plates, paper cups, paper napkins, four cold cans of Coke, and a Ziploc bag full of ice in addition to thick sandwiches, big dill pickles, a bag of potato chips, and a package of chocolate-chip cookies. He also had twenty-three dollars in change from the thirty bucks. The sandwiches were roast beef and Swiss cheese on egg bread, with mayonnaise on one slice and mustard on the other, lettuce, and tomatoes.

As they sat on the tiled roof with their backs to the parapet, with the potato chips and cookies between them to be shared, Mr. Blackwood said, “These are really good sandwiches. That is some fine sandwich shop. What’s it called? Howie’s Sandwiches?”

“How’d you know?”

“The sandwiches didn’t give you away. They’re of the finest professional quality. It was the Ziploc bag of ice, too thoughtful a touch for any commercial sandwich shop. And twenty-three dollars change. You can’t buy all this for seven dollars or twice seven, for that matter.”

“Now that you know, I guess you’ll want your seven bucks back.”

“No, no, you’ve earned it. This is a bargain. You did so well, I’m of a mind to make you take at least another ten. What did your mother say, you packing up a picnic like this?”

“Mom’s at work all day. She works hard. She wants me to be with a sitter. But I don’t want a sitter, and she can’t afford one. And anyway, I know how useless a sitter can be.”

“Corrine? That was your sister’s name, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. She has a summer job over at the Dairy Queen. She’s gone all day, too. Nobody saw me making lunch.”

“The chips are good,” Mr. Blackwood said.

“Sour-cream-and-onion flavor.”

“It’s like having the dip built right into the chip.”

“I like Cheetos, too.”

“Who doesn’t like Cheetos?”

“But we didn’t have any,” Howie said.

“These are perfect with beef sandwiches.”

For a while, neither spoke. The chips were salty, the Cokes were cold and sweet, and the sun pouring down on the roof was warm but not too hot. Howie was surprised by how comfortable silence was between them. He didn’t feel the need to think of things to say or the need to be careful of what not to say. Ron Bleeker, Howie’s nastiest and most persistent tormentor among the kids in town, taunted him with a lot of names, including Butt-Ugly Dugley, and said that he was the president for life of the Butt-Ugly Club. Mr. Blackwood had probably been called butt-ugly more times than he could count. So you could say that a meeting of the Butt- Ugly Club was now in session — and it was a cool event, up here on the roof, above everyone, with good eats and good company, and nobody better than anyone else just because of the way he looked.

Eventually Mr. Blackwood said, “When I was a kid, my father told me never to talk to anyone, and when I did, he always caned me.”

“What’s caned?”

“He beat me with a bamboo cane.”

“Just for talking to people?”

“It was really because I was so ugly and he was ashamed of me.”