Men in the Making (4 page)

Whether it was the look on Matty's face—something between a smile and a smirk—or whether my sudden bitterness rose from the fact that he was leaving me, from the sight of all his belongings boxed up and ready to move, something started sparking in my guts, a crackle of resentment for this game we'd been playing for years. I'd brought the lighter down as a gift, by damn, not a payment.

"This," I said, slipping it into my pocket, "this is mine."

Matty nodded and I knew that this too would have a price. If he remembered some pact between kids, he'd want to keep Nate's secret, hold on to a sacred bond with the brother he'd lost. That way, he'd have a memory of Nate that was his alone, and as much as I wanted that for Matty, or as much as I should have wanted it, the thought tripped a mine of jealousy in me. Dammit, I thought, I shouldn't have to pay for it. Shouldn't have to pay a red cent. He's
mine.
Nate's my son. "Where'd he hide them," I said, "the braces."

Matty turned back to his boxes. He was leaving me. He already had. "I don't remember," he said. "Somewhere."

 

The year Matty left his crutches at home, two weeks before Christmas, Anne and I had it out over the dogs and the dirt bike. She was peeling potatoes at the kitchen table, her hands working furiously, independently of her eyes, which were locked on mine, keeping me from the evening paper.

"Matty can't take care of a dog," I said. "Much less two. He's too young."

"But Nate's old enough for a motorbike? Christ, Tom. At least the dogs are free. Mrs. Burke says they're housetrained and gentle and good with kids. And Matty
needs
them. They'll get him out of the house more often. He's the palest seven-year-old I've ever seen."

"Get Matty the dogs," Nate said, walking in from the back hallway. He stood with a hand on the refrigerator door. "I'll help take care of them."

Anne gave him a little wink. "See there," she said, "Nate will help out," as if that settled it.

Here's a confession you don't hear too often: even parents have favorites, one child that pulls at our heart or bolsters our pride or simply reminds us the least of the things we despise in ourselves. For Anne, that child was Nate, and though she loved Matty, loved him as any mother loves a son, crippled or otherwise, it was Nate who found her eyes the heaviest and most often upon him. Perhaps because each time she saw Matty limp or pull off his prosthetic foot, it cracked her heart a little wider. Or maybe it had nothing to do with Matty. Perhaps her love for Nate was simply four years older, but I don't believe it. I never have. By the time Matty was five or six, if he had his socks and shoes off, he couldn't have limped around the room fast enough to catch up with Anne's averted eyes. Anne would protect him fiercely, from other kids, from the unkind word, even from Nate, but when it came time for the choice, I have to believe Nate would have won out. He had grown up right, and strong, and whole, the way Anne had known he would.

That night, after our argument in the kitchen, she joined me under the quilts, put her head on my chest and let out a moan I'd come to know. "Oh, yeah?" I said. "Somebody need a little roughhousing?"

Beneath the sheets, she cupped me and gave me a playful squeeze. "Now," she said, "you going to agree to the dogs or do I have to use force?"

Her hands were cold, and her hold on me sent an electric chill arcing through me from tailbone to temples. "We do the dogs," I said, "we've got to get the dirt bike, too. Nate heard everything we said, you can bet on that. The dogs, the bike, the whole shebang. That kid's sly, probably stuck up for Matty just to increase his own odds."

Anne loosened her grip a bit and turned her head, propping her chin up on my ribs while she thought it over. "Touché," she said, rolling onto me. "You've got a deal, mister."

 

Tonight at the wake, Lonnie's mother shook my hand, then stared me dead while I offered my condolences. She didn't say a word, and I was surprised and almost disappointed by her restraint, by her ability to keep the blame in check, to stay cool and quiet with all that grief sizzling away inside. The casket was polished and shining and closed, and while I stood against the back wall, wondering how soon I could leave without showing any disrespect, Big Red leaned next to me and exhaled hard, the gin heavy on his breath. He was wearing a suit, his tie in one of those enormous Windsor knots, but his trademark red beard was scraggly as always.

"Oh, man," he said. "You meet the mother yet?"

I nodded, and he shook his head, his eyes rolling drunk and loose in their sockets. "What gets me, Tom, is there's nothing in that box. Nothing left of him, you know? There can't be."

Later, I followed Red outside and stood under the front awning while he smoked a cigarette. He'd run out of matches, so I handed him the lighter I'd been carrying with me since I'd retrieved it from the attic. I'd polished it, replaced the flint and wick, and filled it with fuel.

Red flipped it open, lit his cigarette, and blew smoke from his nose. "Do me a favor?" he said.

"What's that?"

"Come up to the mill with me. I'm a little sauced to be running the debarker alone."

 

On Christmas morning, when we led the boys out to the barn, Anne teased them with the latch, saying it was stuck, letting them squirm awhile with excitement before swinging the doors open. Inside, the two dogs were curled up under Nate's new blue Honda CR80. They were full grown—half Lab, half golden—one with copper fur that seemed to shine even in the dim dawn light of the barn, the other a dull yellow thing with huge drooping eyes. Both were female, but Matty insisted on naming them Bo and Luke after his favorite TV characters.

"That's stupid," Nate told him, rolling his eyes. "Those are guy names."

"I know," Matty said, using Luke's long red tail like a whip to swat his brother. "But they like it. They're tomboys."

Within a month, Matty and the dogs were inseparable. They walked him to the bus stop in the morning, announced his return with a melody of mismatched howls in the afternoon, and slept huddled together at the foot of his bed each night. And as Nate became a better rider and began letting Matty ride behind him on the Honda, the dogs would trail them, running and barking all the way up to the forest's edge at the Petit Jean River. Weekends, I'd pay the boys with gas money for washing my truck. Inspecting their work, I'd squat down beside the rear fender wells and point out the missed spots that I pretended to see. "I don't know, boys," I'd say. "You may have to do this quarter panel all over again."

"Come on, Dad," they'd say. "You
promised.
"

I never let them off easy. I wanted to have those minutes with them before they rode off to the woods. Today, if I could have them back, I'd keep them there in that driveway, scrubbing that truck indefinitely. And though in time they would recognize the injustice, and call me on it, and surely come to hate me for it, still I would persist, but in those days, when to my mind lost time could be counted in hours or days, I had little to lose by letting them go. "All right," I'd say, handing them each a dollar. "Just be careful."

 

Late that winter the clouds stretched solid and low from horizon to horizon and the pine branches hanging over the highway sagged under the weight of their ice-laden bark. At the mill, the workers huddled around propane heaters, and the planers had to be honed daily to prevent them from biting jagged chunks out of the frozen logs the men pushed through the blades.

Just before the five o'clock shift change, Anne called. Her voice was quaking, panicked in a way that sent my blood to drumming in my ears. "The boys," she said. "They took the bike out, Tom. I told them not to, but I was working in the kitchen and I didn't hear them. Jesus, Tom, they've been gone for hours."

"What do you mean, hours?"

"
Hours,
Tom. God, I didn't want to bother you."

"Call the sheriff," I said. "The ranger station."

"I thought they'd come right back."

"Anne, just
call.
"

I remember concentrating on the road. Sheets of ice kept blowing from the trees and slapping against the windshield. In the dark of winter dusk, the night seemed to narrow in on me, and as I roared down the hills into the valley ahead it swallowed the light of my headlamps.

The police found them the next morning near the bank of the Petit Jean, and later, at the station, a bearded deputy with deep-set eyes slid the pictures from the accident report one by one across an unfinished pine desk. The Honda was on its side, bent and buried in the brush near where a washed-out trail met the water. Nate hadn't flown far. He was twisted under the towering oak that had stopped him cold, his head snapped forward under his chest, his arms barely distinguishable from the tangle of roots at the base of the trunk.

There were no pictures of Matty. They had found him first, followed the high-pitched whining of the dogs right to him. He'd flown farther than Nate, to the water's edge at a bend in the river. He'd shattered a kneecap and cracked two ribs in the fall, but it was the cold that would have killed him.

"Dipped into the digits last night," said the officer who met us at the hospital. "And him laid out like that on the frozen riverbank, it's a wonder, it surely is, but when we pulled those dogs off him he wasn't even shivering."

 

The town paper made the dogs out as heroes, but Anne couldn't look at them, wouldn't let them in the house anymore. The night after the funeral, I found her sitting alone in the barn. "How could they?" she said. "How could they save Matty and leave Nate for dead?"

"Honey, they just know. It's animal instinct. They can smell the difference."

"You don't know he was dead."

"Anne, the doctors said."

"You don't
know,
Tom," she said, her bloodshot eyes swimming deep in their sockets, looking for something to blame, and rather than sympathy, what I felt that night was rage. She didn't know either, couldn't know, and that's what was gnawing at her. She hadn't seen it coming, hadn't been able to hear it in the wind the way she could hear the next day's rain, but what frightened me most was my conviction that, in Anne's mind, the wrong boy had been taken from her. Something welled up in me, molten and slow. The dogs were whining, scratching at the back door, and our surviving son was alone in his bed upstairs.

"Dogs know, Anne. I don't, you're right, but dogs do. What did you want, huh? For them to let the crippled one die?"

Since she left, I've spent hours on the porch, subjecting myself to the cold, mulling that night over and wondering how I could have said what I did. And when I'm brave with whiskey and honest with myself, I begin to suspect the ugliest possible answer, that I deserved the stab of her stare and have earned, in that one fit of rage, these biting nights I've endured, even nights like tonight, when the blame in Lonnie's mother's eyes was as sharp and cold as Anne's had been. That it was me, not Anne, who wanted Nate back so badly. No matter the cost.

 

We kept Matty home from school for a week after the accident. At night, the dogs howled at the door, and Anne grew more and more remote, sinking so far into herself that I prayed she'd slam a door or throw something or beat me with her fists, anything so I could recognize her as the woman I'd taken as my wife.

Afternoons, I'd load Matty up in the truck and haul him up to the top of Magazine Mountain. A fire had crowned up there in the sixties, the regrowth was sparse and low to the ground, and we'd walk around up there, staring out at the waves of clouds that rolled out in all directions below us. His ribs were taped, his good leg now stiff and clumsy in its cast, but he never much complained. He'd hobble around in his old arm braces, which he preferred to the wooden crutches they'd given him at the hospital, and when he moved there was an unhurried calm about him. Weeks later, when the cast came off, he walked with his head up and his shoulders squared, confident and almost proud of the hitch in his step, and I realized then that, in a way, Matty had embraced his limp as a reminder, as a way of mourning.

Back home, more and more, Anne was coming undone. The dogs, now deprived of their warm and huddled sleep at the foot of Matty's bed, spent the nights scratching and sniffing at the back door, whining to be let in. It drove her crazy, Anne said. She couldn't sleep.

One morning, while Matty and I were eating breakfast before our ride to the mountain, she emerged from the bedroom. If you'd been there, you might have wondered just what had become of this woman. Her shoulders slumped forward, some invisible burden pressing hard on her, and her eyes were cast down and away, as if inspecting the baseboards for dust. "Mommy," Matty said, but Anne held up a hand. She'd woken me four times the night before, muttering and climbing from bed and pacing in and out of the bedroom, slapping her hands over her ears when the dogs launched a new vocal assault on the door. Now she poured a cup of coffee and stood facing the sink, and when, from out on the porch, the dogs bellowed, her body jolted, something electric pulsing through her, and her hands shook violently enough that coffee splashed over the rim of the cup and onto her hands.

"
Shut up,
" she screamed, stomping her way toward the utility room and the back door. "Enough. That's enough out there. Just shut up."

From my chair at the table, I heard the deadbolt snap back and the door swing open. "Anne," I said.

Matty's eyes were on me, his fork frozen above his plate, and the dogs were howling.

"
No,
" Anne said, "
stay.
" And then the door slammed shut, or nearly shut, and the house shook and there was that same hollow sound I'd heard all those years back at Uncle Weldon's slaughterhouse in Texas, that sledgehammer coming down, making contact, that calf dropping limp into the dust, and I kicked my chair back just as Anne started ranting.

"You're not allowed," she said. "You're not allowed inside. Oh, Jesus, you know that."

When I made it around to the door, Anne was standing there, her hands knotted up in her nightgown, her hair limp and dirty as the dog lying at her feet. It was Luke, her shiny red coat now dulled and tangled from all the days out of doors. She was still wedged between the heavy oak door and the doorjamb, her head dented in at the temples. "She was trying to get in," Anne said. "I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it, but she wouldn't stop."