Safe Passage (27 page)

    
Back in the house, Cynthia said, laughing, "Percival
said
all you really cared about was being black. Until now I didn't believe it."

    
Simon was thinking how
Pooter
and Boozer would help Marcellus shine the car. He remembered helping Percival, watching the metal begin to glow.

    
Cynthia winked at him. He knew he must look silly, a longhaired white boy looking at a car with three short-haired blacks. But he didn't care.

    
Then the phone rang, and the knot came back into his throat. It was probably Hope, calling to say she'd talked to Mr. Forsythe about a moment of silent prayer. But it was only one of the neighbors, calling to find out if there was any news.

    
After that, every time the phone rang, Simon answered, even after he finally talked to Hope. If it was the neighbors, he gave the phone to his father. If it was a radio or TV station or a newspaper, Merle or Darren talked. As people started getting off of work, more neighbors began dropping by. Alfred became the one who answered the door. Cynthia stayed in the kitchen, accepting the food everyone brought. She offered each one coffee or tea and something to eat.
Izzy
and Gideon sat in the family room talking to the guests. Simon supposed Gideon stayed seated partly because he was having so much trouble moving around. But still, it was comforting knowing everyone had a particular job. Everybody, that is, but his mother. She stayed in the living room. The stereo was lower now, but she didn't turn it off. She put on record after record, craning her neck toward the speakers. Cynthia and Alfred got supper out, but his mother wouldn't come in to eat.

    
"Should I bring her a tray?" Cynthia asked.

    
"No, let her listen to her music, if that helps her," his father said.

    
His father was letting her get away with a lot more than he would have let Simon get away with, that was for sure. Why did she think she had a right to turn his alarm clock off and deliver his papers? Why did she get to act like a spoiled brat when no one else could? They cleared the table and washed the dishes, but his mother was still sitting there when the ten o'clock news came on.

    
Mag
could not listen to music anymore. It wasn't doing her any good. She wandered into the family room to see the news. A woman was being interviewed—the wife of a Marine.

    
"We called headquarters, but they told us their lists are just tentative. They really don't know…" The woman's voice cracked. "We really don't even know how to feel."

    
Mag
was annoyed by that. She herself knew exactly how to feel. Twice, Alfred had called the Marine Corps hotline to check on the tentative lists of survivors and had been given the same runaround, and she had felt helpless and furious at the same time. Then Tim O'Neal's name had appeared on the list and
Percival's
hadn't, and that had infuriated her, too.

    
"It was his life," the woman on TV said.

    
"His life,"
Mag
repeated out loud.

    
"What?" Patrick asked.

    
"Nothing."

    
The interview was over. A tape came on, of a reporter talking to one of the officers in Beirut. Identifying the dead was "a tedious process," the officer said. "It's made even more difficult by the fact that some of the bodies were badly crushed." She saw Percival crushed, Patrick blind, Simon earless, forever and ever. "And because the personnel records were blown up," the officer was saying, "we're just now getting a handle on which men are away on leave in Egypt."

    
"It's possible he went to Egypt," Gideon said, with a thread of hope in his voice.

    
Gideon looked worse than anyone else in the room.
Mag
remembered all that had transpired between him and his brother. But she thought: No, let Percival not be in Egypt. Let him not be dead—God, not that—but let him not be absent. Let him be right there, at the airport in Lebanon, and let him have survived. For Percival, worse than not winning, sometimes, was not being there at all.

    
The night before the cross-country championship his senior year, Percival did not come home. It was not the first time. He sometimes stayed at Tim O'Neal's house, and several times he had been with his girlfriend, Jill. Girlfriends had been a by-product of the belated dark beauty Percival had finally developed, leaving him almost as handsome as
Izzy
without
Izzy's
mournfulness.
Mag
even drew comfort from the idea of Percival in womanly arms. It was better than being out on the streets with Tim—speeding, wrecking cars, taking drugs.
Mag
found Jill's belt in
Percival's
room and hoped the girl wasn't pregnant, but she never resented her the way she had Tim, or worried about
Percival's
staying away with Jill. Maybe she simply had no energy to fight about it. A difficult child could drain you; you always had to be on guard. What surprised her was his staying out that particular night. He had never stayed out all night before a race.

    
Percival didn't win much anymore, although he did well in comparison to everyone but Gideon. And sometimes he surprised them. Patrick said he was inconsistent because he didn't train properly, and he blamed Jill for interfering with
Percival's
workouts. This struck
Mag
as unfair because Patrick had never blamed
Tim
for interfering and because Percival had worked out irregularly for years. Even so, Percival was not doing badly. Along with his sudden belated beauty had come muscles, a man's body,
surprising
strength. Patrick did not discuss this, but he believed Percival had half a chance to beat Gideon in the championships. It never occurred to anyone that he would miss the meet.

    
Mag
made pancakes that morning as she always did before a race. Gideon and the twins stuffed themselves with carbohydrates because they believed it would help them run; Simon and Patrick ate because it was a long drive to Howard County and a long time before lunch. Everyone kept watching the door, waiting for Percival to come through it. He still hadn't arrived when the dishes were cleared, when Gideon and the twins had to leave for the bus that would take the high school team to the race.

    
"Where the hell is he? Call Jill's house," Gideon said.

    
"No," said Patrick. "He didn't forget what day it is." His voice was low and flat, detached.

    
"What if something happened to him?"

    
"Nothing happened to him. This is the same as cutting class."

    
For a year, ever since Gideon beat Percival at Brunswick, Patrick had been saying to Percival, "At the top levels, it's ninety-nine percent want-to."
Mag
believed he encouraged Percival not because he loved Gideon less, but because he had been training Percival longer. Because he had made the
RipOffs
for Percival so he would not spend his winters inside. Because time was running out on Percival, who would graduate in the spring, while Gideon had another year of high school.

    
But that day of the state championships, Patrick said, "The hell with Percival then. We can't wait for him forever."

    
Mag
thought: We could wait. Then
a calmness
descended inside her. It seemed to her that, after all, Patrick had been waiting for Percival for too long. All the years of training he had devoted to him, the bits of running lore, the
RipOffs
—all were part of Patrick's plan to make Percival tough and strong. But Percival understood them only as a test he could never pass. And all the time, it seemed, he had been following some separate agenda which none of them understood. So on the day of that state championship, Patrick gave up on Percival, let him go. Patrick got into the car with Simon and drove to Howard County to watch his other sons.

    
Mag
had planned to go with them. She'd planned with perfect assurance to watch either Percival or Gideon win the championship. She would watch her son pull in front of the others late in the race—
Percival's
dark hair or Gideon's blond curls blown back by the wind as he passed the others. She would bask in fall sunshine and watch one of her boys triumphant, golden; she would ride on that tide of joy.

    
Then a little nub of worry swelled inside her, larger than her anticipation of joy, and though she knew Gideon would win, she stayed behind to wait for Percival.

    
He came home, finally, in the middle of the afternoon. He saw their station wagon was missing from the driveway and must have assumed they had all gone to the race, even
Mag
. In his room, thinking he was unwatched, he emptied change and a pack of rubbers and a little plastic bag full of marijuana onto his bed.

    
"I think I've spent the last five years of my life,"
Mag
said to him from the hallway, in a low voice which nevertheless made him startle and turn around, "telling you guys what I think of smoking dope."

    
Dark eyes are not usually cold, usually opaque, but
Percival's
were then. "How can you be so self-righteous about marijuana if you've never even smoked it?" he asked calmly.

    
"I can deduct from your behavior what it must be doing to your brain for you to miss the bus to Howard County."

    
"I wasn't going to win."

    
"You never know."

    
"Another area, he said, "
in
which you speak from wide experience."

    
"All right, light me up," she said.

    
"Huh?"

    
"Light me up, I said. Light me up a cigarette. A joint. Whatever you call it. If you're not going to listen to me unless I speak from experience, then far be it for me not to seek out experience. Later maybe I'll run a mile or two."

    
"Mother, I hate to say this, but I think you've lost it," Percival said.

    
"Not at all. I see that you respect only hands-on knowledge of an issue. Come on, roll one of those things. Go on."

    
He smiled then, at her anger, and got some white cigarette paper out of one of his drawers and began to roll a joint. "I know you won't really smoke," he said.

    
But she did. They sat on
Percival's
unmade bed, backs against the wall, looking out onto the floor—a sea of running shoes, jock straps, textbooks, a radio they called a box, the detritus of teenaged boys—and beyond that into late-fall sunshine, a slanting, amber light. At first she felt awkward—at being in the room and not in the process of cleaning it, as much as at smoking the joint. Percival instructed her how to inhale, to hold the smoke in as long as possible—even how to pass the cigarette back and forth without dropping it on the bed. After a time she no longer felt so awkward.

    
He turned the box on; she knew music was supposed to sound different when you were stoned—she remembered the Beatles and the
wavery
sound of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"—but if the station Percival played sounded different than it normally did, or more
wavery
, she wasn't sure, being unaccustomed to hard rock. If anything, the sound annoyed her less. "That song isn't so bad," she said.

    
"See? I told you."

    
"I'm not making a final evaluation until I'm sober again," she said.

    
"Oh, no. I wouldn't expect you to."

    
He was no longer angry with her. His real anger, she saw now, was not with her but with himself, for missing the race. But he had chosen not to go. And now no one was angry.

     
"Are you passing all your courses?" she asked him. "I hope so, because I know you're cutting a lot of school."

     
"I always pass everything," he said.

    
She supposed that was true. It was just that his grades were so unpredictable.
Izzy
had gotten As in everything, and Alfred had done almost as well, but while Percival consistently made As in math, he could easily come home with Cs and Ds in everything else. It all depended on whether or not he liked his teacher. This had been going on since middle school, and each year
Mag
expected it to stop, believing that Percival would reach a point where he would be less affected by personality than by subject matter. But so far it hadn't happened. She was perennially disappointed—
stunned
might be a better word—when she saw his grades.

    
"I'm always surprised that a space cadet like you is good in math," she heard herself say. Normally they didn't talk about his
airheadedness
or his school work except on report-card days, but it seemed all right while they were smoking the sweet thin cigarette; it seemed as if their discussion was outside of them and couldn't do any harm.