Sons from Afar (16 page)

He didn't kid himself about the way it bothered him, either, even if there was nothing he could do about it. But after all these years, he had to admit it was starting to get through to him.

Adults liked him all right, there was that. Anyway, the doctors did, and so did their nurse. It wasn't just teachers who liked him. Kids acted as if they were the only people in the world, but they weren't. They weren't even an important part of the world, although they acted as if they were the reason the whole world had been made. It was pretty unrealistic thinking, James thought. He wished he could show everybody how stupid they were. Because they were, always trying to make someone feel bad because he wasn't just like them, or even just ignoring him because he wasn't someone like them.

*   *   *

Gram took James into the town dock so he could get to school by seven thirty for the Annapolis trip. It was a warm, moist morning, with clouds hanging over the flat water. Everything was gray—the clouds a smoky gray, the bay a stony gray. “Call me when you get back, if you miss the school bus,” Gram said. “You have money for a phone call?” she asked.

James had five dollars in his pocket and other things on his mind. “Yes, sure,” he said.

Gram didn't even cut the motor on the boat, because she was in a hurry to get back. James stood on the dock, looking down at her, waiting, in case there was anything else she wanted to say. She looked up at him, from the rocking boat. “Enjoy yourself,” she said. “Whatever it is you're up to.”

Before he could deny anything, she had pushed off and was heading out into the harbor. He wondered what she guessed, and why she suspected anything. But she had gone, and the red boat was hobbling along across the choppy water, so he couldn't ask her. He didn't want to know, anyway. He didn't know that he expected to find anything in particular in Annapolis, but he planned to go to the Hall of Records and see what there was there under Verricker. He might find his father's family. He walked up along the broad main street to the school. He'd be more than on time, he knew, so he took his solitary time. Stores were deserted, their fronts like sleeping faces. He might find one of those sisters, somewhere, in business somewhere, and she might know where her brother was. James didn't know whether he actually wanted to meet his father, whom he couldn't even imagine. He wondered what it would be like to see him, from a distance, or even talk to him, without James giving away who he was. He wondered what kind of a man Francis Verricker was, what kind of a father he would have made.

Toby Butz was among the group gathered at the front of the school, waiting for the bus to arrive. The U.S. history teachers were the chaperones for this trip, only three of them for the sixty kids who would fill the bus. That was good, James thought, good that Toby, someone he knew, was going, and also good that U.S. history was a junior course, so none of the teachers knew who he was. He wasn't the kind of kid they would know was there, or not there. James went to stand beside Toby.

“James,” Toby said, hesitant.

“I didn't know you were going.”

“Anything's better than a day here.”

That surprised James. He always felt safe, in classes at least. He stared at Toby, looking at the eyes magnified by the thick glasses. He thought, Toby had always felt the same way he did about school; he wondered, what had changed Toby's mind. “You really don't like school,” he said.

“I hate it. You can't think about anything.”

“If we have to have partners, let's be partners,” James suggested.

“If you want to,” Toby said. He said it as if he weren't sure he wanted to. James wondered if Toby felt as strange about him as he did about Toby. It was hard with people you used to be good friends with, best friends, and then just weren't—especially if they turned out to be dorks.

They sat together on the bus, but there wouldn't be partners, because this was, as the teachers told them, a high school trip and they were certainly old enough to behave sensibly. If they knew what was good for them.

James looked out the window, because Toby had told him to take the window seat. He tried to figure out how much to tell Toby about his plan to ditch out on the group. Getting away shouldn't be hard; it was not being noticed that was the risky part. He was getting pretty adept, he thought, about sneaking around. He'd given Andy Walker the notes for a report on “The Myth of Sisyphus”; good notes too, so good that James was sorry not to get to make the report himself. He'd just handed them over at the start of French the previous morning, just said “I don't know if you'd be interested in this,” and passed the papers over. Andy had looked at them and said, “Can I borrow them? I haven't got time now.” In case anyone was listening. All Andy would have to do was work out the development of the ideas,
and then translate what James had written into French. That was so close to cheating, James thought, uncomfortable and not because of the way the bus bounced under him, so close that it probably wasn't any different. Well, he thought to himself, turning away from the gray and brown landscape, he was his father's son in more than just the smartness. Besides, it only really mattered if you were caught. If you weren't caught, then it was as if you hadn't cheated. The whole thing depended on what people thought. There had even been times when cheating was admired. It was all relative, anyway, everything was relative, especially morality, and besides, there wasn't anything James could do about it now.

He turned to Toby, more to distract himself than to talk. “How are things?”

Toby shrugged.

“Do you still think extraterrestrial life-forms are a possibility?”

Toby didn't want to answer, James could see that. But he couldn't stop himself from talking about his favorite subject. And he was knowledgeable, James thought, listening, as the road rolled on and the towns rolled by, Princess Anne and Cambridge, as the miles rolled by and they crossed over the short humped drawbridge to Kent Island. Traffic got thicker around them, and the voices in the bus grew louder. They rumbled up the long bridge that headed west over the bay. James looked down at the trail of a tanker in the gray wrinkled water, then up to where the low mass of the western shore came toward them.

James was going to have to trust Toby. There wasn't anything else for it. If he didn't tell the kid, then he'd . . . have to stay with the group all day, pretending to himself that he'd tried to get to the Hall of Records but circumstances had overwhelmed him, while all the time he'd know he'd been too chicken to take a shot at really doing it. But if he did tell Toby, then he'd have to try.

He kind of hated to interrupt Toby, in the middle of an explanation of the possibilities of life on Venus. “Not humanoid, of course,” Toby was saying, earnest and engrossed. “The chemical composition, the environmental differences, it wouldn't be anything like human, but—”

“Listen,” James interrupted. “I have a favor to ask. A big one. I want to finish talking about this on the way back, but—”

“I guess I've been doing all the talking,” Toby said. He smiled, then hid it behind his hand. “I always talk too much, if anyone listens.” He smiled again, as if smiling was a nervous habit. His smile looked like an apology.

“You are a bit obsessive,” James told him. “But listen—I have to get away from this group.”

“Why?”

James shook his head. He wasn't going to answer.

“For how long?” Toby asked.

“As long as I can. It's nothing dangerous or anything.”

“Nothing dangerous? Annapolis is a city, James, you could get—anything could happen. Do you expect to just wander around in it? And not know where you're going or anything? Aren't you afraid?”

“No.” Not of anything Toby had mentioned, James wasn't. “Will you cover for me, if you need to? Or tell them where I am if they find out?”

“But I don't know where you'll be.”

“Just tell them I'll be back to get on the bus at two. That's if they miss me, which I strongly doubt they will.”

“Do you know how much trouble you could get into?”

James didn't want to worry about that. He just . . . hoped they'd never notice him, like they'd never noticed him so far. “That's okay,” he said.

Toby envied him, James could see that, and admired him.
Toby's reaction made James feel like a pirate, like an adventurer, like someone the rules couldn't hold in. Like his father. Toby was all wrong about him, James knew, but it still felt good.

At the front of the statehouse, where the legislature met, they all clambered off the bus. A guide, dressed up like a colonial woman in long skirts and a little white cloth cap, was waiting for them there. First everybody had to listen, looking up at the brick building on top of a green hill, while she told them how to behave and what the legislature was going to be discussing. Then she led the group up the shallow steps, to begin the first part of the tour.

It was easy to hang back, to hold the big doors open for other people and then just not step inside. It was hard not to just grin and wink at Toby, looking back over his shoulder at James from inside the building.

When the last student had gone through, James let the door close and stepped back, against the brick building. His heart was thudding. He didn't know if it was fear or excitement. He waited for whatever it was to die down so he could think. He half expected one of the teachers to come back out through the doors, to yell at him to come along quickly, right now.

That didn't happen.

James went back down the steps, feeling as good as if the sun was shining right down all over him. It was a sort of adventure, his own adventure.

The statehouse had been built at the top of a low rounded hill. Green lawns spread down all around it, forming a circle around which cars drove slowly, a big necklace of cars around the legislature's green hill. James walked all the way around the circle once, then went into a store to ask directions. The store he picked had men's suits in the windows, and naval uniforms. It had a round clock hung out from over its door. Ten ten, the clock
read. James entered the store and moved through a room crowded with shirts piled up in glass cases and ties hung on racks, with trousers and shorts stacked up on tables. He asked one of the men behind the counter, “Can you tell me how to find the Hall of Records?”

The man was wearing a suit and a knitted tie. His shirt was crisply white and his face looked freshly shaved. He looked like he should be buying these clothes instead of selling them. He pulled a small folded map from under the counter, to show James where he was, and where the Hall of Records was. It was just around the corner, James saw, trying to memorize the map.

“You'd better keep this,” the man said.

“Thank you, I can use it,” James said. “Thanks a lot,” he repeated, because things were going so smoothly he wanted to share some of that feeling with the stranger who had been so helpful.

He left the store and turned down the narrow street, in the direction he had been told. The street was lined with little shops on both sides, bookstores, a window where tin soldiers lined up in regiments facing off against one another, antique stores, a window filled with wicker baskets of more shapes and sizes than James would have guessed possible. At the stoplight, he turned left and the stores disappeared, leaving tall square houses, with an occasional shorter one, many built of brick, many shingled, only one with any kind of front lawn to it. At the end of the street lay the broad green lawn of the college. The Hall of Records was at one corner of the front campus, the salesman had told him that.

James walked slowly along, enjoying the heavy moist air and the way the low gray clouds made colors look deeper. He liked the uneven bricks under his feet, liked the way the roots of trees had broken up through them. He liked the neatly painted
doorways. He liked occasional glimpses into small gardens hidden behind houses. He liked being there, on his own. He liked being away from his usual life, his usual self.

He crossed the street and entered the campus of the college. Two tall rows of trees marched up the main sidewalk, one on each side, leading to a perfectly symmetrical brick building, situated on top of a rise of land. At the center of its slanting roof was a cupola, in which a bell hung. As James entered the campus, the bell started to ring, swinging back and forth, its notes swinging back and forth out over the campus. He knew it wasn't ringing because he had come there, but he felt—looking up between the two lines of trees at the gold cupola glowing under smoky clouds, at the dark bell swinging right, swinging left—he felt he was going to find out something. He knew that today was his day, somehow.

Because he knew he was going to discover what he wanted to, that his luck was running, James wanted to move into it slowly. Instead of turning across the grass to the little corner building he knew was the Hall of Records, he went on up toward the bell, looking around him. He didn't know what they were, dormitories, classroom buildings, whatever. He walked up the broad brick sidewalks, approaching. A number of students, young women and young men, ran down into and up from the cellar of the building he approached. Most of them looked a little ragged, but some of them didn't. Older men and women, in jackets and ties, in dresses and suits, were probably the teachers. Professors, they'd be. James walked up the sidewalk and then turned down another brick path that led toward the Hall of Records. He listened to snatches of conversation, the voices flowing on away as he went down the hill. He entered the Hall of Records through painted wooden doors. To find—almost as if these were magical doors—what he was looking for.

He was back out in five minutes. The receptionist had been nice, but they couldn't help him, they didn't have records of that sort; he didn't have the library skills to make use of the records they did have. She was awfully sorry, but much as she'd like to, she couldn't help him. No, she said, she didn't see any need to ask anyone else. No, he couldn't stay and just look around; these were irreplaceable historical records, they were strict about letting people wander around. No, she said, no.