فصل چهلم

FORTY

But none of those things happened.

All of them – the droning Orinco truck, the fingers that just touched the back of Gage’s jumper and then slid off, Rachel preparing to go to the viewing in her housecoat, Ellie carrying Gage’s picture and putting his chair next to her bed, Steve Masterton’s tears, the fight with Irwin Goldman, Jud Crandall’s terrible story of Timmy Baterman – all of them existed only in Louis Creed’s mind during the few seconds that passed while he raced his laughing son to the road. Behind him, Rachel screamed again – Gage, come back, don’t RUN! – but Louis did not waste his breath. It was going to be close, very close, and yes, one of those things really happened: from somewhere up the road he could hear the drone of the oncoming truck and somewhere inside a memory circuit opened and he could hear Jud Crandall speaking to Rachel on that very first day in Ludlow: You want to watch ‘em around the road, Missus Creed. It’s a bad road for kids and pets.

Now Gage was running down the gentle slope of lawn that merged with the soft shoulder of Route 15, his husky little legs pumping, and by all the rights of the world he should have fallen over sprawling but he just kept going and now the sound of the truck was very loud indeed, it was that low, snoring sound that Louis sometimes heard from his bed as he floated just beyond the rim of sleep. Then it seemed a comforting sound, but now it terrified him.

Oh my dear God, oh my dear Jesus, let me catch him, don’t let him get into the road!

Louis put on a final burst of speed and leaped, throwing himself out straight and parallel to the ground like a football player about to make a tackle; he could see his shadow tracking along on the grass below him in the lowest periphery of his vision and he thought of the kite, the Vulture, printing its shadow all the way across Mrs Vinton’s field, and just as Gage’s forward motion carried him into the road, Louis’s fingers brushed the back of his jacket … and then snagged it.

He yanked Gage backward and landed on the ground at the same instant, crashing his face into the rough gravel of the shoulder, giving himself a bloody nose. His balls signalled a much more serious flash of pain – Ohhh, if I’d’a known I was gonna be playing football, I woulda worn my jock – but both the pain in his nose and the driving agony in his testes was lost in the swelling relief of hearing Gage’s wail of pain and outrage as his bottom landed on the shoulder and he fell over backwards on to the edge of the lawn, thumping his head. A moment later his wails were drowned by the roar of the passing truck and the almost regal blat of its airhorn.

Louis managed to get up in spite of the lead ball sitting in his lower stomach, and cradled his son in his arms. A moment later Rachel joined them, also weeping, crying out to Gage, ‘Never run in the road, Gage! Never, never, never! The road is bad! Bad!’ And Gage was so astonished at this tearful lecture that he left off crying and goggled up at his mother, astonished.

‘Louis, your nose is bleeding,’ she said, and then hugged him so suddenly and strongly that for a moment he could barely breathe.

‘That isn’t the worst of it,’ he said. ‘I think I’m sterile, Rachel. Oh boy, the pain.’

And she laughed so hysterically that for a few moments he was frightened for her, and the thought crossed his mind: If Gage really had been killed, I believe it would have driven her crazy.

But Gage was not killed, all of that had only been a hellishly detailed moment of imagination as Louis outraced his son’s death across a green lawn on a sunshiny May afternoon.

Gage went to grammar school, and at the age of seven he began going to camp, where he showed a wonderful and surprising aptitude for swimming. He also gave his parents a rather glum surprise by proving himself able to handle a month’s separation with no noticeable psychic trauma. By the time he was ten, he was spending the entire summer away at Camp Agawam in Raymond, and at eleven he won two blue ribbons and a red at the Four Camps Swimathon that ended the summer’s activities. He grew tall, and yet through it all he was the same Gage, sweet and rather surprised at the things the world held out … and for Gage, the fruit was somehow never bitter or rotten.

He was an honors student in high school and a member of the swim-team at John Baptist, the parochial school he had insisted on attending because of its swimming facilities. Rachel was upset, Louis not particularly surprised when, at seventeen, Gage announced his intention to convert to Catholicism. Rachel believed that all of it was because of the girl Gage was going out with; she saw marriage in his immediate future (‘if that little slut with the St Christopher’s medal isn’t balling him, I’ll eat your shorts, Louis,’ she said), the wreckage of his college plans and his Olympic hopes, and nine or ten little Catholics running around by the time Gage was forty. By then he would be (according to Rachel, anyway) a cigar-smoking truck-driver with a beer belly, Our-Fathering and Hail-Marying his way into oblivion.

Louis suspected his son’s motives were rather more pure, and although Gage converted (and on the day he actually did the deed, Louis sent an unabashedly nasty postcard to Irwin Goldman; it read, Perhaps you’ll have a Jesuit grandson yet. Your goy son-in-law, Louis), he did not marry the rather nice (and decidedly un-slutty) girl he had dated through most of his senior year.

He went on to Johns Hopkins, made the Olympic swimming team, and on one long, dazzling, and incredibly proud afternoon sixteen years after Louis had raced an Orinco truck for his son’s life, he and Rachel – who had now gone almost entirely gray, although she covered it with a rinse – watched their son win a gold medal for the USA. When the NBC cameras moved in for a close-up of him, standing with his dripping, seal-sleek head back, his eyes open and calm and fixed on the flag as the National Anthem played, the ribbon around his neck and the gold lying against the smooth skin of his chest, Louis wept. He and Rachel both wept.

‘I guess this caps everything,’ he said huskily, and turned to embrace his wife. But she was looking at him with dawning horror, her face seeming to age before his eyes as if whipped by days and months and years of evil time; the sound of the National Anthem faded and when Louis looked back at the TV he saw a different boy there, a black boy with a head of tight curls in which gems of water still gleamed.

This caps everything.

His cap.

His cap is …

… oh dear God, his cap is full of blood.

Louis woke up in the cold dead light of a rainy seven o’clock, clutching his pillow in his arms. His head thumped monstrously with his heartbeat; the ache swelled and faded, swelled and faded. He burped acid that tasted like old beer, and his stomach heaved miserably. He had been weeping; the pillow was wet with his tears, as if he had somehow stumbled in and then out of one of those hokey country-and-western laments in his sleep. Even in the dream, he thought, some part of him had known the truth, and had cried for it.

He got up and stumbled to the bathroom, heart racing threadily in his chest, consciousness itself fragmented by the fierceness of his hangover. He reached the toilet bowl barely in time, and threw up a glut of last night’s beer.

He knelt on the floor, eyes closed, until he felt capable of actually making it to his feet. He groped for the handle and flushed the john. Then he went to the mirror to see how badly bloodshot his eyes were, but the glass had been covered with a square of sheeting. Then he recalled. Drawing almost randomly on a past she professed to barely remember, Rachel had covered all the mirrors in the house, and took off her shoes before entering through the door.

No Olympic swimming team, Louis thought dully as he walked back to his bed and sat down on it. The sour taste of beer coated his mouth and throat, and he swore to himself (not for the first time, or the last) that he would never touch that poison again. No Olympic swimming team, no 3.0 in college, no little Catholic girlfriend or conversion, no Camp Agawam, no nothing. His sneakers had been torn off, his jumper turned inside out, his sweet little boy’s body, so tough and sturdy, nearly dismembered. His cap had been full of blood.

Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all.