Blackbird House (20 page)

The son, Dean, could often be seen on a tire swing that had been rigged up with some rope that hung from the old pear tree in the front yard.
 
You could see him from the road when you drove past: a shock of blond hair, long legs, a splash of movement on the other side of the lilac hedge.
 
One year he seemed to have a dog, but the father probably couldn’t abide the shedding and whining, and by the following summer, the dog was gone.
 
Dean was an odd kid, and as he got older, he grew odder still.
 
He spooked people.
 
Some local boys would be fishing down at Halfway Pond, and they’d suddenly spy him, sitting all alone in the grass.
 
He was spotted down at the bay at dusk as the fishermen came in to dock at the wharf all by himself again, throwing stones, skimming them over the flat surface of the water as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.

When the boy was fourteen, Billy Griffon was called in to turn the old summer kitchen into a garden shed, or at least that’s what the husband had said.
 
It wasn’t often that a person had the chance to settle old scores, so Billy had agreed to come have a look.
 
But when Billy arrived, Meg Stanley explained that she wanted the shed redone as a place for the boy.
 
Billy Griffon took his time; he figured he’d charge the Stanleys double as reparation for the cost to his pride and his wallet all those years back when he was fired.
 
It wasn’t a small job, as a matter of fact.
 
They wanted a built-in bunk bed, new windows and insulation, roofing, a desk with bookshelves.
 
Meg Stanley came out and watched as Billy took the measurements.
 
Billy was in no mood for nonsense; his wife, Lorri, had recently left him and moved down to Florida, and the price he was totaling up in his head for this renovation just kept getting higher.
 
It was getting so that he might be able to go down to Florida for the month of January himself if he played this right.

“He doesn’t like to be with us,” Meg Stanley said of her boy.

She said it out of the blue, for no reason, and Billy Griffon wouldn’t have been any more surprised if the mice in the field had suddenly addressed him.

“Boys that age,” Billy Griffon blurted.
 
Well, he had to say something, didn’t he?
 
The way she was standing there.
 
The look on her face.
 
He couldn’t just ignore it.
 
There was an echo in the shed, and his voice sounded strange.
 
Sheep had been kept here in the past, and there was the bitter scent of animals and hay.
 
“They’re all idiots.”

“I thought he’d be happier out here.
 
You can smell the sea.

Meg had her arms crossed over her chest, and she looked so vulnerable standing there that Billy Griffon had the urge to put down his measuring tape and kiss her right on the mouth.
 
Instead, he kept on with his figuring, and he drank the cool glass of lemonade Meg Stanley brought him, and the next day he sent her an estimate that was high, but not outrageous.

Straightaway, people in town told Billy he was a fool for taking the job.
 
He knew they were right, but what did it matter?
 
He’d been a fool before.
 
Many times, indeed.
 
He’d had no idea that Lorri was thinking of leaving him until she sprung her whole plan on him.
 
All the same, it was a year when people were tightening their belts, when carpenters such as himself were begging for jobs, so that answered that.
 
Meg Stanley approved his plans and the price, and when the husband, who seemed to know enough to keep his distance, sent a check for a third of the cost, Billy Griffon started bringing over lumber and supplies.
 
Luckily, he wouldn’t have much to do with the family, wouldn’t even start the project until they’d moved back to the city.
 
But on the day of his delivery he saw the boy out in the woods with a bow and arrow.
 
Or at least that’s what he thought he saw.
 
He blinked and the boy was gone.
 
Billy Griffon felt a chill go across him.
 
The field to the left of the house was thick with blossoming sweet peas, and there was a droning sound in the air, bees and mosquitoes and those big horseflies that just won’t leave a person alone.
 
Behind the shed there were scrub pines, so it was impossible to spy the little pond at the rear of the property If this had been Billy Griffon’s place, he would have chopped down those pines, and the tangles of winterberry as well, and had a fine view from the house all the way to the pond.
 
But this wasn’t his house and it wasn’t his business and he probably hadn’t even seen the boy anyway.

Billy started working the second week in September.
 
It was hot and beautiful and quiet, except for the call of the blackbirds.
 
The pear tree out front was covered in new fruit, and the air smelled sweet. One afternoon, while Billy was re roofing the summer kitchen, the scent of tar overtook the sugary odor; all the same, he looked over at the yard.
 
He saw that the pears had begun to turn color and that they were red.

He kept thinking about those pears as he worked, and his mouth was

watering.
 
Usually, he was an honest man, but that afternoon he took

two pears and let them ripen on the windowsill of his kitchen. Then

Billy got it into his head that if he ate one something terrible would

happen, and so he just watched the pears turn from red to scarlet to a

blue-tinged crimson, then he threw them away

At the Decoy Tavern people were saying Billy Griffon had been hypnotized, or maybe he had just found some of the killer marijuana that was said to grow wild in the fields on the Stanleys’ property, planted years ago and all but forgotten.
 
Whatever the reason, he couldn’t seem to stay away.
 
True enough, he was taking his time with the bunk bed and the bookshelves, using good red oak; he was varnishing the floor by hand and rebuilding the joists so sturdily that a storm would have to be a hell-raiser if it aimed to knock down the shed. When he finished, there was trouble, just as everyone had predicted. Louis Stanley came down to inspect the completed project in December, and soon after, his lawyer fired off a note to Billy Griffon stating that he had taken advantage of the Stanleys by using overpriced materials in a run-down shed.
 
He’d over built and overcharged. Therefore, Louis Stanley would only submit the second payment due, but not the third.

At the tavern no one looked up when Billy came in, which was exactly what had happened when Lorri left for Florida.
 
Folks felt sorry for him in the way people always did for a well-meaning fool.
 
Stop for a coyote on the side of the road, and expect to be bitten.
 
Do it a second time, and expect to be pitied as well.
 
Billy didn’t mind, and he didn’t bother to inform anyone that Stanley’s wife had sent him the check for the remainder of what he was owed.
 
That fact he kept to himself, even if he did look like a fool.

When people saw Billy’s truck parked in the driveway of the Stanley house over the winter, they figured he was dismantling the shed, taking back all that good red oak to use somewhere else.
 
They thought he was probably doing a lit tie damage, and no one blamed him for seeking some retribution.
 
But that wasn’t it at all.
 
He was watching the way the wind moved through the scrub pine.
 
He was telling himself that feeling a chill doesn’t make anything so, and stealing a red pear from an old tree couldn’t cause misfortune any more than whistling through a blade of grass could call the eels out from the mud, creatures buried so deep you’d never know anything was there.

Billy Griffon stayed away after that.
 
He’d gotten his money; he’d done his job.
 
He forced himself not to park in the driveway The next summer, he went up to Maine, to work on a huge job with some buddies.
 
It was a mansion, really.
 
His contribution was to fashion bird’s-eye maple bookcases in the library, floor to ceiling.
 
It was the kind of work he loved, but he took no pleasure from the job.
 
When he got home to the Cape, he drove past the Stanleys’ place, but the family had already moved back to Boston.
 
Billy wondered if the boy had slept in the shed.
 
If he’d smelled the sea at night; if he’d sat at the red-oak desk, if he’d been happier.
 
He wondered if Meg Stanley had brought her boy cold lemonade, if she’d sat on the step and watched fireflies rise out of the field, if she’d thought about how much care had gone into everything he’d done.

The next summer, Dean Stanley was sixteen.
 
He’d gotten his junior license, and he drove through town like a maniac, on a blue Honda motorcycle that echoed like a chain saw.
 
Local women said they’d never let their sons drive around on such a deathtrap.
 
All the same, they could tell, Dean wasn’t one to listen or obey.
 
He took risks, anyone could see that, racing into turns too quickly on the sandy back roads, careening through the rain without benefit of a slicker or a helmet.
 
Everyone in town agreed, he’d wind up in trouble if he kept on this way.
 
People wanted to dislike him, because of the father, but it was hard to dismiss Dean.
 
He wasn’t in the least like his father; he was completely himself.
 
One day, walking home after work, Ivy Crosby from the post office saw the boy cradling a dead rabbit in the road.
 
The poor creature had been run over by a Jackson’s Fuel truck, a situation that probably happened fairly often.
 
It was a trivial accident, but the boy was holding on to the rabbit and crying, real out-loud sobbing, in a way most people didn’t wail even for their loved ones.
 
It was hard for Ivy to get over seeing that poor boy like that, down on his knees, with that motorbike of his tossed onto the dirt shoulder of the road.
 
Another time, Mickey Maguire over at the general store sold the boy a winning Lotto ticket.
 
It was nothing much, three aces in a row, which added up to twenty dollars; nothing to get excited about.
 
But the boy, Dean, had leapt over the counter and scared the hell out of Mickey with a huge bear hug.

“What the hell was he thinking?”
 
Mickey Maguire said to folks down at the tavern.
 
Why, Mickey’s own children, Cody and Siggy, knew enough not to hug the old man, not when they were growing up and certainly not now.
 
Mickey liked his personal space, especially in dealing with summer people.
 
“What would he have done if he’d won fifty bucks?”

The next summer, the boy was seventeen; he’d crashed the motorbike in the city during the spring, and so he was walking again.
 
He walked in the rain and late at night.
 
You’d be on your way home from the drive-in or from supper with friends and there he’d be, moon-eyed, rambling, when everyone knew he had nowhere to go.
 
No friends, no acquaintances, no suppers, no fund-raisers.
 
Nothing.
 
People were more afraid of running into him on the road than they were of hitting a deer head-on.
 
Dean Stanley was a good-looking kid, lanky and lean, almost a man, but when you pulled up beside him as he went on his way, there was something off-putting in his expression.
 
It was as though he was looking at something no one else saw.
 
As though he was staring straight into the fire.

Louis Stanley didn’t come down to their summer house much, perhaps a weekend or two, nothing more.
 
The wife, Meg, still shopped at the fish store and went to the post office, but she seemed in a hurry, and appeared just as happy to have people treat her as though she were a stranger.
 
When anyone said hello to her, she seemed to take a step back.
 
Billy Griffon had seen her several times in town, and she didn’t seem to recognize him.
 
Billy had gotten a puppy a black-Lab mix from the pound, and he tended to take the dog for walks in the woods near the Stanleys’ place.
 
One afternoon he all-out trespassed; he let the puppy splash around in the pond.
 
But then he’d seen the woman, crying in the back yard, and he’d taken off running, the dog at his heels.
 
Billy Griffon felt as if he’d stumbled into a bramble patch; as though there were nettles in his skin.
 
He was feeling that something inevitable was about to happen.
 
He was aware of how little he knew of this world, though he’d been in it for forty-five years.
 
The dog was barking, and when Billy looked up he saw a big white bird in an old oak tree.
 
He blinked, and then all he saw was a cloud.

It was a hot summer, hotter than usual, and things turned brown.
 
Local people wished for fall, for leaves turning color and cool air sweeping in from Canada.
 
When folks met at the ponds in the evenings they talked about the coming school year, and the way gardens were failing, and they also talked about the Stanley boy.
 
The police had been called in to the house one night, and Cody Maguire, who worked with the sheriff and who’d never arrested anyone in his life, had found himself in the position of having to talk Dean out of the shed, where he’d barricaded himself.
 
The kid had torn the bookshelves off the wall, and ripped out the built-in bunk as well, and piled it all against the door, vowing to defend himself with a butcher knife.