anything else to do. The story struck him as foolish now, although once he’d loved it. When his mother called him for supper, he walked very firmly into the kitchen. He was going to refuse, absolutely, to eat in the bedroom with Cody any more. But his mother had already set two places at the kitchen table. She sat across from him while he ate, not eating much herself. Luke shoveled in various cold foods and refused to meet her eyes. The fact was that she was stupid. He didn’t know when he’d seen such a weak and stupid woman.
After supper he went back to his room and listened to a radio show where people called up a tired-sounding host and offered their opinions. They discussed drunken drivers and battered wives. It grew dark, but Luke didn’t turn on the light. His mother tapped hesitantly on his door, paused, and left.
Then he must have fallen asleep. When he woke it was darker than ever, and his neck was stiff, and a woman on the radio was saying, “Now, I’m not denying I signed the papers but that was only his fast talk, only him talking me into it. ‘Just put your John Doe right here,’ he tells me …”
“I assume you mean John Hancock,” the host said wearily.
“Whatever,” said the woman.
Then beneath these voices, murmuring through the wall, came Cody’s grumble and Ruth’s pale answers. Luke covered his head with his pillow.
He tried to recall his Uncle Ezra. It was several years since they’d met. And even that was such a brief visit, his father taking them away in a huff before they’d got well settled. Finding Ezra was something like hunting through that footlocker; he had to burrow past a dozen other memories, and more came trailing up along with what he was after. He smelled the burned toast in his grandma’s kitchen and remembered Ezra’s bedroom, which had once been Ezra’s and Cody’s together, where boyhood treasures (a football-shaped bookend, a peeling hockey stick) had sat in their places so long that to Ezra, they were invisible. Anything that caught Luke’s attention, Ezra had seemed surprised to see. “Oh! Would you like to have that?” he would ask, and when Luke politely declined, not wanting to seem greedy, Ezra said, “Please. I can’t think what it’s still doing here.” His room had been large — a sort of dormitory arrangement, occupying the whole third floor — but its stuffy smell of used sheets and twice-worn clothes had made it seem smaller. There was a lock inside the bathroom door downstairs, Luke recalled, that looked exactly like a little silver cashew; and the bathroom itself was tall and echoing, ancient, cold floored, with a porcelain knob in the tub reading WASTE.
He tried to picture his cousins — Aunt Jenny’s children — but only came up with another room: his cousin Becky’s ruffled bedroom, with its throng of shabby stuffed animals densely encircling her bed. How could she sleep? he had wondered. But she told him she had no trouble sleeping at all; and whenever she went away to spend the night, she said, she took the whole menagerie in a giant canvas suitcase and set it out first thing around the new bed, even before unpacking her pajamas; and most of her friends did the same. It was Luke’s first inkling that girls were different. He was mystified and charmed, and he treated her protectively for the rest of that short visit — though she was a year older than he and half a head taller.
If Ezra were really his father, Luke thought, then Luke could live in Baltimore where houses were dark and deep and secretive. Relatives would surround him — a loving grandma, funny Aunt Jenny, those rafts of cousins. Ezra would let him help out in his restaurant. He would talk about food and how people need to be fed with care; Luke could hear his ambling way of speaking. Yes, now he had it: the memory homed in. Ezra wore a flannel shirt of soft blue plaid, washed into oblivion. His hair was yellow … why! It was Luke’s kind of yellow, all streaky and layered. And his eyes were Luke’s kind of gray, a full shade lighter than Cody’s, and his skin had that same golden cast that caused it to blend into his hair almost without demarcation.
Luke let himself believe in some unimaginable moment between Ruth and Ezra, fourteen years ago. He skipped across it quickly to the time when Ezra would arrive to claim him. “You’re old enough to be told now, son …”
Knitting this scene in the dark, doubling back to correct a false note or racing forward to a good part, Luke forgot himself and took the pillow off his head. Instantly, he heard Cody’s voice behind the wall. “Everything I’ve ever wanted, Ezra got it. Anything in life I wanted. Even things I thought I had won, Ezra won in the end. And he didn’t even seem to be trying; that’s the hell of it.”
“You won the damn
Cody said nothing.
The next morning, Cody seemed unusually quiet. Ruth took him into the doctor’s to get his walking cast — a moment they’d been waiting for, but Cody didn’t act interested now. Luke had to go along to serve as a crutch. He flinched when Cody first laid his heavy arm cast across his shoulders; he felt there was some danger hovering. But Cody was a dead weight, grunting as he walked, evidently thinking about other matters. He heaved himself into the car and stared bleakly ahead of him. In the doctor’s waiting room, while Luke and his mother read magazines, Cody just sat empty faced. And after he got his walking cast, he hobbled back to the car unassisted, ignoring Luke’s offer of help. He fell into bed as soon as they reached home and lay gazing at the ceiling. “Cody, honey? Remember the doctor said to give that leg some exercise,” Ruth told him.
He didn’t answer.
Luke went out to the yard and kicked at the grass a while as if he were hunting for something. Next door, a cluster of toddlers in their wading pool stared at him. He wanted to shout, “Turn away! Stop looking at me; you have no business.” But instead it was he who turned, wandering out of the yard and down the street. More wading pools; more round-eyed, judging stares. A Welsh corgi, squat and dignified, bustled down the sidewalk, followed by a lady in a flowing caftan. “Toulouse! Toulouse!” she called. The heat was throbbing; it almost breathed. Luke’s face became filmed with sweat and his T-shirt stuck to his back. He kept wiping his upper lip. He passed rows of colonial houses similar to his, each with some object featured like a museum piece in the living-room window: a bulbous lamp, a china horse, a vase of stiff-necked marigolds. (And what did his own window have? He couldn’t recall. He wanted to say a weeping fig tree, but that was from an apartment they’d rented, three or four towns back.) Sprinklers spun lazily. It was a satisfaction to stop, from time to time, and watch a lawn soak up the spangled water drops.
Now here came some busy lady with her baby in a stroller, small children all around her. He crossed the street to avoid them, took a right turn, and arrived on Willow Bough Avenue with its whizzing traffic, discount drugstores, real estate offices and billboards and service stations. He waited at an intersection, pondering where to go next. One of the things about moving so often was, he never really knew where he was. He believed his sense of direction had been blunted. He couldn’t understand how some people seemed to carry a kind of detailed, internal map of the town they lived in.
A Trailways bus zipped past him reading BALTIMORE. Imagine hailing it. (Could you hail a Trailways bus?) Imagine boarding it — assuming he had the money, which he didn’t — and riding off to Baltimore, arriving at Ezra’s restaurant and strolling in. “Here I am.” “
No RIDERS, a label on the window read. None of this was happening. Slowly, like someone being pushed from behind, Luke climbed into the cab. It was filled with loud music and a leathery, sweaty, masculine smell that made him feel instantly comfortable. He slammed the door and settled back. The driver — a knife-faced man, unshaven — squinted up at the traffic light and asked, “Whereabouts you headed, son?”
Luke said, “Baltimore, Maryland.”
“Folks know you’re going?”
“Sure,” said Luke.
The driver shot him a glance.
“Why, my folks …
“Oh, then.”
The truck started up again. They rumbled past the shopping mall where Luke’s mother went for groceries. A green sign swung overhead, listing points north. “Well,” said the driver, adjusting his mirror, “I tell you: I can carry you as far as Richmond. That’s where I have to veer west.”
“Okay,” said Luke.
Even Richmond, after all, was farther than he’d ever meant to go.
On the radio, Billy Swan was singing “I Can Help.” The driver hummed along in a creaky voice that never
