five hundred acres, much of it in the bottom-right corner of the county, and on the southeast end, a half a mile from the dirt road, if you knew where to look, was an old log hunting cabin centered along with a few trees in a field a few acres across, just a little bump on the land. Bare furnishings inside, dirt floor, no water or electricity. Heated by a woodstove. But when had they moved in? And by what arrangement?
His father and the woman called Alice were talking about how cold it was.
“Freeze my dad-blame can off,” his father said.
“Mm hmm,” she said.
“You ever seen the like?”
“No, sir.”
“Not even in Chicago?”
She didn’t answer, and when the silence became awkward, his father turned the radio up and they listened to the weatherman saying it was cold. It was going to stay cold. Leave your tap water running tonight so your pipes wouldn’t freeze.
Larry stole a look at the boy beside him and then pretended to read his book. He was terrified of black kids. The fall after the summer he turned eleven he had entered the seventh grade. Recent redistricting of county schools had removed him from the public school in Fulsom and forced him to go to the Chabot school, where 80 percent of the student population (and a lot of the teachers and the vice principal) were black, mostly kids of the men who worked in the mill or cut trees or drove log trucks. Everything Larry couldn’t do-spike a volleyball, throw a football or catch one, field a grounder, fire a dodgeball-these black boys could. Did. They manipulated balls as if by magic, basketballs swishing impossibly, baseballs swiped out of the air, fierceeyed boys hurling and curving through their lives as smoothly as boomerangs. None read, though, or understood Larry’s love for books. Now he glanced over and saw Silas’s lips tense and his eyes moving across Larry’s page.
“What grade you in?” Larry asked.
Silas looked at his mother.
“Tell him,” she said.
“Eighth,” he said.
“Me, too.”
In Fulsom his father dropped the boys off at school, Alice climbing out and then Silas, Larry aware how unusual, inappropriate, it was for black people to be getting out of a white man’s truck. As he slid across the seat Larry glanced back at his father, who faced the road. Silas had disappeared-probably as aware as Larry of the oddity of their situation-and Larry stepped past the woman called Alice, seeing for the first time, as she smiled at him, how lovely she was.
“Good-bye,” she said.
“Bye,” he mumbled and walked off with his books. He glanced back, once, and saw his father saying something, the woman shaking her head.
At lunch in the cafeteria he looked for Silas among the black boys who occupied the two center tables but didn’t see him. He had to be careful because if they caught him looking they’d beat him up later. As usual, he sat with his tray and milk a few feet down from a group of white boys. Once in a while they’d invite him over. Not today.
His mother picked him up that afternoon, as usual, and, as usual, quizzed him about his day. She seemed surprised about their morning passengers. She asked where they’d been standing.
“They didn’t have coats,” he said. “They were freezing.”
“Where do they live?” she asked.
He sensed he’d said too much already, though, and said he didn’t know. For the rest of the ride, his mother was quiet.
WHEREVER ALICE AND Silas lived, they were there the next morning, same place, same time. His father pulled the truck over and the smell of woodsmoke blew into the cab with the icy wind and soon they all rode silently side by side. Larry opened
Wednesday and Thursday passed, each day the colored people waiting, his mother picking him up in the afternoon and quizzing him on the morning trip. Did the woman seem friendly to his father? How did his father act? Was he stiff, the way he could be, was, most of the time? Or was he-
“Why do you care?” Larry asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Well? Momma?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m just curious about your day.”
“I think,” he said, worried he’d hurt her, “they live in that old place down in the southeast acreage.”
“Do they,” his mother said.
At supper that night he could tell something was wrong. She’d told Larry to feed the chickens when he’d already done it and his father had to be reminded to say the blessing. Now neither of his parents spoke as they sat around their dining table and passed squash and meat loaf. And just before she rose to gather their dishes, his mother announced that she would drive Larry to school the following day, in her car.
His father glanced at Larry. “How come, Ina?”
“Oh,” she said. “In the morning that gas man’s coming and I can’t talk to him. You’ve got to tell him to come every week, every week, and make sure he understands. Besides-” She took the dishes to the sink and returned to the table. “I’ve got some things to return at Bedsole’s.”
His father nodded, then looked at Larry before pushing back from the table and bending into the refrigerator for a Budweiser and opening it on the way to his chair to watch the news.
“Carl?” His mother set a pie plate down, a little hard.
“Enjoyed it,” he called back.
As Larry dried the plates his mother handed him, he understood that he had betrayed a trust between himself and his father, and the next morning, in his mother’s Buick, she turned at the bend in the road where Alice and Silas waited, shivering, holding on to each other. As his mother slowed, Larry saw Silas push away from Alice, just as he would have done. Her drawn face pretty despite how the cold made her lips tiny, her skin the color of coffee the way women drank it, her hair in a scarf but her eyes large and frightened.
“Honey,” said Larry’s mother, “roll your window down, please.”
Without looking away from the woman, Larry turned his window crank.
“Hello, Alice,” his mother called as the glass descended.
“Miss Ina,” Alice said. She stood very straight. Silas had stepped back, turned his face away.
Larry’s mother reached over the seat behind them and withdrew a paper grocery bag. From it she took two heavy winter coats, old ones from their hall closet, one of hers for Alice and one of Larry’s for Silas. “These should fit,” she said, funneling them out the window, Larry’s hands poking at the coats, warm from the car’s heater, from the heat of their closet before that and before that the heat of their bodies, now going out to the bare black fingers in the cold.
Alice held her coat, didn’t even put it on. For a moment Silas glared at both Larry and his mother. Then he stepped back.
“You’ve never minded,” Larry’s mother said to Alice, looking hard at her, “using other people’s things.”
Then she pressed the accelerator and left them holding their coats in Larry’s side mirror.
In a moment his mother touched his knee. “Larry.”
He looked at her. “Ma’am?”
“Roll up your window,” she said. “It’s freezing.”
THEY WERE NEVER there again, Silas and his mother. And now Larry and his father, who’d had little to say before, rode the miles of dirt road and two-lane blacktop without a word, just the radio’s agricultural report and the heater blowing on their feet.
He understood that Carl liked most everyone except him. From an early bout of stuttering, through a sickly, asthmatic childhood, through hay fever and allergies, frequent bloody noses and a nervous stomach, glasses he kept breaking, he’d inched into the shambling, stoop-shouldered pudginess of the dead uncles on his mother’s side, uncles reduced to the frames of their boxed photographs now, whom Carl wouldn’t have on the walls. One uncle, Colin, had visited when Larry was five or six years old. At supper the first night Uncle Colin had announced he was a vegetarian. Seeing his father gape, Larry assumed that word, whatever it meant, meant something awful. “Not
