Going Where It's Dark (19 page)

“Been noticing that you pretty regularly get on your bike and go somewhere once your folks are out of the house,” he said to Buck. “Today I just decided to follow you over here, and seeing as how you don't appear to be doing any work at the moment, I want to know what the heck this is all about.”

Buck turned and looked at Jacob, and the older man said, “I think it's time you told them, Buck.”

Mel took a few steps farther into the room. “Told me what?”

“He's helping me with my sssssstuttering,” Buck said. “He's a speech ddddoctor.”

“Pathologist. I was a speech pathologist in the military, Mel, and I offered to help Buck over the summer. I really saw no reason to keep it secret, but Buck seems to feel otherwise.”

Mel sat down on the arm of the couch. “Well, for the lu'va'mike, why, Buck?”

“I just…” Buck shrugged. “Everybody wwwould always be asking, was I getting better and what did it c…cccost, and…”

Mel sat speechless for a few moments, then lifted his palms in the air. “I don't get it. What do we owe you, Jacob?”

Jacob shook his head. “No charge, Mel. I'm just doing this as a friend.”

“Well…that's really great, but…” Mel turned to his nephew. “How do
you
feel about it, Buck?
Is
it helping?”

“I guess I feel bbbbbetter about…about me.”

For a long moment Mel studied his nephew. “So…you still don't want your folks to know…?”

“Not really,” Buck said. “Later.”

Mel nodded and thought some more. Then he slapped his leg and stood up. “Well, I've got no quarrel with that. Sorry I barged in like this, Jacob. Hope you understand.”

“Indeed I do,” Jacob said.

Buck rode his bike occasionally out to the old Wilmer place just to make sure no one was surveying the land, that it wasn't for sale. And it wasn't. Stood there as abandoned and forgotten as many of the trees on the place. Buck worried it might not be until late fall, when the vegetables were all harvested and the farm markets closed, that he'd have a chance to sneak away to the Hole again, but that was too far off. There wasn't a day he wasn't thinking about it—the new passage he'd take the next time he was down there; the arrows he'd leave on the walls, what he might find….

He finally decided he would ask Joel to order the headlamp for him. If Joel wouldn't order it, no one would. He approached his brother one evening when Joel was on the back porch clipping his nails over a wastebasket. Buck sat down on the glider beside him.

“What's up?” Joel asked.

“You have a ccccccredit card, don't you?”

“Yeah, why?”

Buck handed him six fives and ten one-dollar bills. “Bbbbbig favor,” he said.

“What's this for?”

“I wwwwwant you to b…buy something online for me.”

“Must be pretty darn secret, you coming to me.”

“Sorta. I know for sure DDDDDad and M…Mom wouldn't get it for me.”

“What the heck is it?”

“A headlamp. T…to wear in the dddddark.” He showed him the picture he'd printed out on Joel's computer.

Joel pulled away from him a little and looked him over.

Before he could ask any more, Buck said quickly, “So I d…don't have to hold a flashlight…you know…rrrrrriding my bike at night.”

“Wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy a light for your bike?”

“Yeah, but…if it was on my head, I cccccccould use it other t…times too.”

Joel shrugged. “Well, I don't see why Dad or Mom would care.”

Buck nudged his brother's arm. “D…do they understand why you wwwwant to join the navy?”

This time Joel grinned. “Okay. Right. I'll send for it. It'll come addressed to me, but you can open it when it gets here.”

Later that night, however, when Buck was working on another Pukeman comic strip in his room, Joel stopped in the doorway.

“Hey, Buck. I started to place that order for you, and that model's discontinued. You want to choose another one?”

Buck spent the next fifteen minutes in Joel's room, looking at other headlamps on the computer, and finally chose a less expensive model. With the money he saved, maybe he'd get some really good knee pads later on, with Velcro fasteners.

He sat on the edge of Joel's bed as Joel typed in the new model number.

“Okay,” Joel said finally, when
Order received
came on the screen. “They say it's on back order, but that we should receive it in ten days to two weeks. Okay?”

No, but Buck was learning patience. He would have liked it to come tomorrow. He would have liked it to come tomorrow with everyone out of the house, Katie included—nobody to see him ride off with his backpack and everything he could possibly need in the Hole. And he would like tomorrow to be one of those incredible days where things went exactly the way they should.

“T
omorrow” was not that kind of day. In fact, it rained for the next two days. Both mornings Buck woke not to a blazing August sun, but to a gray sky, with air so heavy with moisture he could almost drink it. He was sweating before he even got out of bed. Finally, like it happened every year when summer was almost over, Gramps consented to turning on the air conditioner and leaving it on for the rest of the month.

“Never needed it when I was a boy, and you can't tell me the weather's changed all that much,” he'd say.

They humored him because it was, after all, his house, his land, and when you came right down to it, they were his tenants, even though they were family.

Buck had been spending more time with Nat, not only because his parents might think he was off with Nat the next time he disappeared for a day, but because he really liked him. Not as much as David, maybe, but for different reasons. David made him laugh. Nat kept him guessing about what he'd come up with next.

Now, with the water high after the rains were over, the boys decided to hike beside the swollen river that ran through the forest behind the sawmill and disappeared again into the mountain. They left their bikes in a thicket and teetered along the bank, trying not to fall in. Nat carried a sturdy stick for balance and used it to poke and prod at debris trapped among tree roots or washed up between the rocks.

As Buck watched him jam the long stick into the ground between himself and the water, and use it as a vaulting pole to leap across a crevice in the bank, he looked for a stick of his own. When he found one, Nat took out a pocketknife and carved one end of it smooth for a handle. Buck was impressed.

“You always ccccccarry that in a pocket?” he asked.

Nat rubbed his thumb over the handle and whittled a bit more. “Just stuff that's useful. That and my cell phone.”

“Yeah?” Buck pulled out his own cell phone and flipped it open so Nat could see it.
No service,
it read, and they both laughed. Not surprising, here in the forest.

They continued tramping, Nat in the lead, one or the other stopping now and then to prod a toad or flip over a rock or study a branch with berries.

“You g…going to tttttry for a job at the carnival?” Buck asked him, wiping one arm across his forehead.

“I'd like to,” Nat said over his shoulder, “but I'm helping my cousin finish his basement. We've got it mostly done except for the walls.”

Buck plodded along, following the blue jeans in front of him. “Yeah? When d…do you think he'll ggggggget it done?”

“I dunno. Needs more plywood, then some paneling. Depends when he gets enough money.”

For just a moment, Buck's foot hovered above the ground before he slowly put it down. He didn't want to think what he was thinking. Didn't even want to imagine that he and Nat could be having this much fun, and then…he might find out….Not that Nat was in on it. He was trying to figure a way to phrase his next question without sounding suspicious. And perhaps, because they went so long in silence, Nat finally broke it with, as always, a question Buck didn't expect: “Have you always stuttered?”

“Ummm, yeah. I guess.”

“Do you care when people ask about it?”

Did he?
It happened so seldom he wasn't sure. Generally, people just looked away.
Talk
about it, Jacob had ordered.

“Naw. Nnnnot really.”

“ 'Cause I don't care if you do,” Nat continued. “Stutter, I mean. I just…sometimes…when you're trying to say a word, and I know what it is, I want to help you along.” He was still talking with his back to Buck, but he slowed a little.

“Huh-uh.”

Nat glanced over his shoulder. “No?”

“Wait and mmmake me s…say it.”

“Really?” Nat started to grin. “But that could take all day.”

Buck grinned too. “So…tough,” he said, and poked Nat with his stick. For a minute or two, they had a mock sword fight with first one stick, then the other breaking in half, and they had to look for others.

Buck wasn't offended by what Nat had said. In fact, it felt good to talk about it, even that little bit. There was so much more he could tell him. What he was really thinking about, though, was Nat's cousin and his basement and the plywood he didn't have. He didn't want to suspect, but he did.

Buck recognized the handwriting even before he turned the card over.

Standing at Jacob's mailbox, he saw the postcard on top of the little pile of bills and circulars, and the blue ink and the large J and W of Jacob's name gave it away.

Dad,
it read, in big letters.
Please! Jim and I are so sorry, but we're hurting too. Johnny misses his grandpa. Please let us try to make this up to you in any way we can….

Buck stopped reading because he was almost up the driveway to the house, and he shouldn't have been reading it in the first place. Only ten days ago, Jacob had handed him another unopened envelope, which he'd marked
Return to Sender
and had asked Buck to put it in the mailbox for him.

When the door opened, Buck thrust the mail into Jacob's hand as he went inside, and if Jacob saw the postcard, he gave no sign.

“New assignment,” he said as they took their usual places in the living room. “Homework. Every day, you are to go up to somebody—anyone but family—and start a conversation. Someone on the street, someone at Bealls'. Even if it's just to say, ‘What do you think about the weather?' ”

“Ssssssome days the only p…people I see is family,” Buck told him.

“Then you make a phone call you wouldn't have made before. But I want to know about each one—how it went. And don't make something up or I'll work you twice as hard.”

Buck believed him.

When the session was over, Buck did his usual chores for Jacob. This time he changed the sheets, put one set in the washing machine, took out the trash, and washed the dishes in the sink.

“Anything else?” he asked when he'd finished.

“That's about it,” Jacob said, and then, as Buck headed toward the door, he handed him the postcard, and Buck couldn't help but see that in red marker, Jacob had printed
REFUSED
over the handwriting. “Drop this in the box for me,” he said, and turned away.

When Buck got home, he pulled out a container of potato salad from the fridge and dug around some more until he found the coleslaw. Then a bagel from off the counter.

He'd just sat down to eat his lunch when Katie came into the kitchen, a puzzled look on her face. She was holding something in one hand, but he couldn't tell what it was.

She sat down across from him. “Buck,” she said. “If I asked you a question, would you tell me the truth?”

He wasn't sure he could promise that. “I'll try,” he said.

Her green eyes on him all the while, Katie unfolded her fingers and gave him the slip of paper in her hand.

Mom and Dad, if I don't come back, call David. He'll know where I am.

“What does this mean?” she asked.