Safe Passage (28 page)

    
"Einstein was considered a space cadet," Percival said.

    
"I'll try to keep that in mind the next time they put you in detention." The high school had a system of demerits for crimes such as being unruly in the cafeteria or cutting classes. After a certain number of demerits, a student had to spend a day in the detention hall doing homework. Percival sat there with rough boys from the slums, boys who spent their school hours practicing for lives of petty theft and stints in the county jail.

    
"Einstein got into college, didn't he?"
Mag
said. She frowned. "The teachers aren't necessarily going to be more benevolent in college. I had a few
doozies
in my time." The little cigarette was getting smaller as they passed it back and forth. She held it between her thumb and forefinger; her hands looked very adroit. She thought she had seen a beautiful actress holding a joint just this way in an R-rated movie.

    
"Maybe I won't go to college, then," Percival said in a calm voice.

    
"That seems logical. First you quit the running team,
then
you quit school. That seems very logical." She said this without anger or concern; all of it seemed rather absurd to her now—she assumed this was an effect of the marijuana—and even Percival seemed amused.

    
"I mean, that's the way you think, isn't it?" she went on.

"You think, well, I'm not at that race today; it could have been awful but I passed it by, so now I'm out of the woods. There's this hard test coming up, but I won't take it; as long as I don't do it, I'm out of the woods. There's your mistake, Percival. You think you're out of the woods, but it's never true. Some new hard thing keeps coming up. Even disappearing into dope isn't something you can do forever. Life
is
the woods."

    
"That's very poetic, Mother. You're very poetic when you're stoned."

    
She was pleased with herself. "I am, aren't I?" Percival put out his hand and slapped hers the way he did when his friends said, "
Gimme
five." She didn't feel heavy and dizzy as she did when she drank liquor; she felt light,
floaty
, not at all bleak inside.

    
She began to feel hungry. "You want some chicken soup?" she said. Percival had remained picky about his food as he grew older, but he would always eat Campbell's chicken noodle soup when it was offered. He liked the appearance of the golden-yellow broth and uniform white noodles, which he believed were clean-looking.
Mag's
homemade chicken soup, by contrast, was sometimes polluted with gray (not pure white) bits of chicken, shards of celery and carrot, unidentifiable things.

    
"What I really want," Percival said, "is a banana split."

    
This sounded like a clever, even a wonderful, idea.
Mag
realized that all along she had been yearning for a banana split.

    
"I think we have some bananas," she said. Bananas usually lasted in the house longer than other fruits because the boys refused to take them in bag lunches to school. They looked too much like penises. But they didn't mind eating them secretly at home.

    
They went down to the kitchen and made banana splits. They put scoops of vanilla and chocolate ice cream on top of the bananas,
then
dribbled caramel and chocolate syrup on top of that. She had never before eaten such a large banana split. The ice cream tasted better than she remembered ice cream ever tasting.

    
"This is delicious," she kept saying. She wished she kept whipped cream and maraschino cherries in the house.

   
 
"It's always delicious when you're stoned," Percival said.

    
"When you're drunk," she told him, "you can't appreciate a banana split."

    
"Maybe we should introduce Dad to grass," Percival said, "since he can't drink."

    
"Oh, I don't think so."

 
   
They ate the banana splits and cleaned up the kitchen. She still felt mellow and a little
floaty
when the others came in and told them Gideon had won. Percival gave her such a look then: a half-amused, sad, I-told-you-so look. If you were absent from the race, there was no chance to win, and still you felt just as bad about losing. She did not know if
Percival's
look was of shame or resignation or acceptance. It was the only look you could give someone when a part of your life had passed and you had been absent.

    
Later, when she was not
floaty
anymore, she said to Percival, "I think marijuana's probably no worse a high than drinking alcohol, but I don't think you should use it any more than you would use alcohol—on the weekends or whatever. Not during the week. Not when you're supposed to be in school. Or racing, or whatever." She sounded stern and authoritarian, like one of his teachers.

    
"And, Percival—I speak from experience," she said.

    
He smiled a little then, the small mischievous smile she remembered from when he was a boy. She thought her lecture might have done some good. Then he said, "Pot is no longer the drug of choice, you know, Mother. People are more into coke."

    
Her expression dropped and Percival laughed—an open, genuine laugh. "Don't worry," he said. He patted her arm. She didn't know what to think at all.

    
After that he was more discreet. She checked his room occasionally for cigarette papers or packets of white powder, but she never found anything. Percival broke up with Jill and found another girl named Helen—girls came easy to him then—and sometimes cut classes to take her to his bedroom while she and Patrick were at work. His grades stayed mediocre, but he did well on the SATs and agreed for
Mag's
sake to apply to the community college for the following year. But the spring he was a senior, he refused to run track. He refused to go to his own graduation. Later he refused to study at the college any more than he had studied in high school. It was not that he was not capable. It was more that he was absent. Those last few years, he became an absentee in every respect. He was absent until he joined the Marines.

    
And she thought now: Let him not be in Egypt. Let him not be absent. Let him be present at this bombing, and survive it, and let that give him the strength to attend the other major events of his life.

    
The ten o'clock news was over. They would wait to hear it again at eleven. Alfred had not let Jason and Joshua fall asleep in the family room tonight; he had carried them upstairs to his old room. Everyone was quiet. Even Simon was not pacing the floor, but sitting motionless in a chair. His fingers lay still and silent. They all felt that they would hear something soon. It was a pulse, growing inside them, almost as if a bullet had been aimed at them but was coming in slow motion, letting them steel themselves before it hit.

    
Mag
was filled with a sense of bitter irony. Percival was just coming
into his own
. Finally becoming a man. It seemed to her that his rebellious stage had ended when he joined the Marines, though they had not understood it. At first they had all been stunned—that Percival, who had never followed anyone's rules but his own, should sign up for
that
, But it was different than she expected. He went to boot camp at Parris Island and to infantry training at Camp
Lejeune
in North Carolina. He went to a school where they taught him about those armored vehicles he drove, and then he was in his unit. When he called, he sounded calm and easy inside himself. Later, home on leave, he talked about explosives and demolition and warfare as if those were games he had always wished to play. He was no longer an absentee. Having endured whatever beginning Marines go
hrough
, he looked grown up, handsome, relaxed. Even his skinhead haircut suited him. Last summer, on his last leave before going to Beirut, Percival got up early most days to run with Gideon—slow daybreak runs through rising summer light. There was a peace between the two of them, and a peace inside Percival, and
Mag
had thought: He will finally be able to do something with himself now.
The ultimate irony.

    
The phone had all but stopped ringing. Its sudden jangling startled everyone. Simon leaped up.
Mag
stopped him by raising her hand. When she lifted the receiver, the first thing she heard was the long-distance static. It was Tim O'Neal.

    
"They've set up these phone lines and are bringing the units in one at a time to call home," he said. "I already called my mother, but they're letting me use it again because it's four-thirty in the morning here."

    
"You've heard something, then," she said.

    
"Not really." His voice sounded unsteady.

    
"What do you mean?"

    
"The unit I thought Percival was with…They came back a little while ago."

    
"I see."

    
"I mean—he wasn't with them."

    
"No."

    
Of course she had always known.

    
"But mainly…everything here's such a mess," he said. "There are a lot of guys I haven't seen." His voice was thin.

    
She felt perfectly hollow. It no longer mattered that Tim had alienated Percival from Gideon. All that seemed distant and petty. She was empty. Tim's death would not have made
Percival's
easier.

    
"There are a lot of line companies still out," he said. "He could still be out there."

    
"But you don't think so."

    
"I don't know." His voice cracked like the voice of a child—any troubled child, even her own. "I just don't know," he said again, and then the connection was broken.

CHAPTER 11

    
Izzy
was interested in the fact that his father's eyes did not seem to be affected by Tim O'Neal's call. It was very curious. This morning, he'd been convinced that stress played at least some part in his father's blind spell, after his eyes started to close while he was reading the paper. Studying the paper later,
Izzy
had seen how jarring the news stories were.

    
The death count was up to 161.

    
The crater left by the explosions was thirty feet deep by forty feet wide.

    
Gunnery Sergeant Herman Lange, one of the first to get to the site of the explosion from a nearby barracks, told reporters that bodies were lying all over. He could hear them screaming. They were saying, "Get us out. Don't leave us." The gunnery sergeant "just started digging, picking men out and taking them away on a jeep."

    
"It was total devastation," he reported. The area was peppered with personal items—a can of deodorant, a jack of hearts, a quarter.

    
Some bodies were thrown fifty yards.

    
That was this morning.

    
Later, after his father's eyes shut down, they said on television that a chaplain rescued from the rubble about noon on Sunday was the last person known to have been pulled from the explosion site alive. Rescue operations were continuing, but only dead bodies had been retrieved so far.

    
Hearing that, his father had taken more aspirin.
Izzy
assumed stress was causing at least the headaches. He remembered his own headaches when he'd killed the
Biolab
dogs. Then, though the situation hadn't improved, his father took a shower and came downstairs able to see again.
Izzy
reasoned that the shower had a powerful calming effect, which let his father overcome the psychological component of his illness.

    
But later he was not so sure. By midnight, more than an hour after Tim O'Neal's call, his father could not only still see, he had put the situation back in perspective for the entire family.

    
"Tim might be on the scene over there, but judging from what's been on television, he has even more limited view of it than we do here. You can tell from the film clips that he's right about everything being a mess. I'm sure there are more people he hasn't seen than he himself realizes, given the chaotic state over there and what he's been through. I would say, in terms of what we know and don't know, nothing's changed."

    
That seemed to
Izzy
a powerful statement for his father to be able to make, considering the circumstances. After that he was not sure, after all, that the blind spells were influenced by stress.

    
When the eleven o'clock news ended, his father had sent Simon to bed. Alfred and Cynthia decided to stay over, to camp out on the floor of Alfred's old bedroom, where Cynthia's boys were already asleep. Alfred went up to find blankets, but Cynthia stayed in the living room with his mother, which seemed odd, considering how his mother felt about her. Everyone else shared a final pot of tea around the kitchen table. Merle let the cat in, and his father picked it up, using it as a prop to make his final statement for the evening. "I'm turning in," he said, in such a tone that everyone else realized they were expected to do so, too.