The Boy Who Could Draw Tomorrow (4 page)

For the rest of the trip, she tried to make a list of everything she had in her bag. Credit cards—that was the tough part. Did she have a Saks card? How about Altman's?

Peggy was still running through all the New York department stores she sometimes shopped at when the plane started its descent for Pensacola.

***

But they didn't have to call anybody. An Eastern agent was at the gate when they trooped off the airplane into the terminal. He spotted the Coopers instants before Peggy's father did—and in the confusion and excitement and relief, it took minutes before Peggy noticed something that made her legs go weak. First the Eastern agent told them not to worry, that the cab driver in New York had turned in her pocketbook to the Eastern desk at LaGuardia and it would be there waiting for her, safe and sound, on their return trip. Peggy could have kissed the man, she felt such a wave of relief. But then she saw her father, taller than the Eastern agent by a full head and standing just behind the smaller man as if waiting his turn in line.

Val Potter had his arms out, and he was grinning from ear to ear. Sam recognized him immediately. The boy hurled himself against his grandfather's legs and flung his arms around his waist.

"Val!" Hal stepped around the Eastern agent and clasped his father-in-law's hand.

But Peggy stayed where she was. She had all she could do just to keep her knees from buckling and giving way.

Her father, who had the vision of a professional pilot, was wearing a baseball cap and, beneath the bill, a black patch covered one eye.

How good it was to see him, Peggy thought as she settled into the sane routine of her father's retirement. His wholesome normalcy was like a tonic after the frenetic pace of New York.

Val was thrilled to see them, and delighted by the chance to show off his latest whiz-bangs. One was a goofy contraption that puffed steam and flashed whirling lights and deposited five pennies into a slot over a spout that then dispensed a glass of cherry Kool-aid.

Sam couldn't get enough of it. He kept asking to go back out to the garage and try it again. But, over dinner that first night, Peggy scolded her dad for using up Florida's energy resources for no good reason but silliness.

Val Potter was delighted. "What do you mean, no good reason? You call a five-cent glass of Kool-aid no good reason?"

This reminded Sam, and he asked to be excused.

"Can I, Granddad? Can I go back out to the garage?"

Peggy scowled. "But, Sam, you haven't finished your milk, and you'll miss dessert."

"There's watermelon," Val Potter said, fixing his grandson with one smiling eye.

"I'll just be a second," Sam promised.

"More likely one hundred and thirty-two seconds," Val Potter said, "which is how long she takes to run a cycle." He laughed uproariously. "
No
good reason."

Peggy calculated whether she could ask what she wanted in that much time, and concluded she could. She wanted Sam out of the room when she raised the subject—and she was too tense about it to wait until the boy went to bed.

"All right," she said. "But when you come back, milk first. No watermelon until you finish every last drop."

They watched Sam skip through the kitchen to the garage door, his hand out to make contact with almost everything he passed.

"And don't put your sticky hands all over Granddad's nice, clean walls!" Peggy called after 
him, and then, turning to her father and pointing to her own eye, she lowered her voice.

"What happened, Pop?"

"Aw, hell, I didn't want to worry you two," Val Potter said.

"All right, but what happened?"

"Metal shaving. Should have had my goggles on. Didn't."

"You were horsing around in your workshop?" Hal said.

Val Potter nodded, then went back to eating. "It's nothing. Forget it."

"But how serious is it?" Hal persisted. "I mean, will you always wear that patch?"

"My dogfighting days are over," Val Potter laughed, pushing his plate away from him and smiling like a boy caught at something infamously off-bounds.

Peggy got up and put her arms around her father's neck. He hugged her and tried to get her to sit down again. "It's no big deal, kitten," he said gruffly. "Let's just skip the melodrama and get that watermelon on the table."

"In a minute," Peggy said, standing over her father and looking down at him with deep concern in her eyes. "Just tell me how long ago it happened."

"Why, just the other day. I figured there was no sense calling you about it, since you'd be here so 
soon anyway. Besides, it isn't important enough to deserve a long distance phone call."

It was a warm night and the house was hot anyway from the dinner cooking. But Peggy's thoughts fixated on Sam's notebook, and she was chilled to the marrow.

Val Potter stood staring at his daughter, totally nonplussed by the stricken look that had washed across her face. "I told you, Pegs, there's nothing to worry about."

***

It wasn't conclusive. But it was enough to start her thinking. Sam couldn't have known about the eye. Yet it could have been a wild coincidence, a boy on his way to visit his grandfather and he happens to have pirates on his mind.

Then she thought about the drawing of the moving van waiting at the curb to cart their belongings away. Was that a coincidence too? Yet what else could explain it? Nothing, she told herself sternly. Absolutely nothing. It wasn't like her to be this high-strung, and the sooner she got back to normal, the better.

But that night, when the house was quiet and she and Hal sat watching the late movie on TV, Peggy still hadn't been able to shake off her mood of unease. She wondered if she should say something, at least hint that she was worried. Perhaps Hal would think of some explanation that could 
put her fears to rest. Hal was clever that way. Maybe he'd unravel the whole thing in two seconds flat. But something told her that Hal would be just as mystified as she was. And then what? Everything would be worse—because that would get him to worrying too.

She decided she had to protect Hal from that. It would be rotten to burden him with something else when he had so much on his plate already—the mortgage, the monthly maintenance, the greater responsibilities and pressures that came along with his new job. It was a high stress affair, working in the music business, especially if you were connected to the public relations end of it. That really put Hal on the spot—if he lost his job now, they'd really be screwed. So she decided not to say anything, although she hated having secrets from Hal. In fact, wasn't this the first one?

The movie was awful—Aldo Ray in
The Naked and the Dead.
Besides, Peggy had seen it a thousand times, and she didn't like war movies to begin with, even if a shot was never fired.

She was sleepy, and what she really wanted was to go to bed. But she was afraid that as soon as her head hit the pillow, a vision of little boys sitting in precise rows would unfurl behind her eyelids. Like the boys in the picture, she too would face the pig-nosed woman who stood with her back to the blackboard as she coolly regarded the pupil who had collapsed across his desk.

She was being silly, wasn't she? Perhaps all Sam meant to suggest was that the boy was napping when he should have been paying attention to his lessons.

She felt Hal's hand moving up under her breast and then his other hand high on the inside of her leg. He was still for a moment, and then he stirred again. She had on one of her dad's old Navy robes, and Hal was parting it now and undoing the belt.

"Not here," Peggy whispered, kissing her husband's ear.

"Come on, then," he whispered back. He got to his feet and stood over her and started lifting her from the couch.

But Peggy resisted. "Don't you want to see the rest of this?"

Hal's voice was hoarse with desire when he answered. "I know what I want to see the rest of, and they're not showing it on TV."

She knew it was no time to try to talk. But she wanted to turn him off. There was too much to think about, and she was afraid to make love and then fall asleep and dream. Besides, there was a hard carnal edge to Hal's lovemaking lately that she just didn't find all that much of a turn-on. So, instead of letting him lift her, she pushed at his chest. "You could always go to that X-rated motel out by the airport. Didn't you notice it on the way in? Closed-circuit movies in every room?"

Even in the weak light, she could see the angry look that came over his face. It wasn't like Peggy to put him off. It wasn't like her to do it, let alone want to.

"I must be selling the wrong line of goods," he said, backing away slightly and standing back up to his full height.

"I'm sorry," Peggy said. "It's just—I don't know. Losing my bag and everything. I can't seem to settle down."

"That's okay, Pegs," he said, trying to mean it. He bent down, kissed her a quick peck on the forehead, and went off to the guest room, like Sam, making contact with the wall as he worked his way along the hall past the room where Val and Sam were sharing the bed.

***

Things were strained between Peggy and Hal the rest of the week. But the time went quickly. Val and Sam went fishing together almost every day. Peggy and Hal hung around the house. They sunbathed, took long naps, now and then talking together in a new and guarded way. Mainly they went over their new budget and mapped out the belt-tightening that would have to set in as soon as they got back to New York. Hal worked on a 
batch of releases. Peggy did sketches of some ideas she had for the store's late-autumn windows. And in no time at all, they were on their way home, having made Val promise he'd visit them in their new place come Christmas and that he'd also remember his safety goggles whenever he was inspired to fool around in the garage.

Peggy kept an eye on Sam's drawing now. At Val's he'd been too caught up with fishing to bother with his pad. But as soon as they were strapped into their seats, he got out his pad and went happily to work. Without letting on that she was doing it, Peggy made sure she got a look at everything he did. Halfway into the flight, she saw one that unnerved her completely. It showed one of the bridges that spans the East River between Queens and Manhattan—a reasonable rendering of the very bridge they would pass over on their way back into the city. In the first frame of the drawing, a large chunky car was crashing through the guard rail, heading for the river below. In the next frame, the car had hit the water, and a crowd had gathered near the broken railing to stare in horror at the vanishing car and its driver.

"Oh, Sam," Peggy almost cried. "Why on earth would you want to draw something so terrible?"

She hated herself for saying that—she would have her self freaked-out in no time at all if she 
didn't snap out of this thing about Sam's drawings—attaching such morbid and outlandish significance to it. But when she saw what he'd sketched in response to her outcry, she couldn't help but feel an inordinate sense of relief. In a third frame, Sam had shown the driver of the car being pulled to safety by what looked like a police rescue team in a motorboat. And when Sam turned to a fresh page and started to form the outline of an airplane, she reached out instinctively to put her hand in the middle of the sheet of paper to interrupt the motion of Sam's pen.

"Honey? Could I have a piece of paper to make some notes?"

She didn't give him a chance to offer another. Instead, she tore off the page he'd started to work on—and then, to distract him from going back to the same subject, she said it was time to visit the bathroom.

"Poke your daddy and tell him we have to get out."

Hal Cooper came awake angrily. "I don't like it," he growled as Peggy and Sam were making their way past him into the aisle.

"What, darling?"

"The way people are always making cracks about your dad and me having names that rhyme."

Peggy sent Sam on a few steps ahead and then turned back and touched her husband's arm, leaning down so that the other passengers would not hear. "Please, sweetie," she said, "please don't be angry with me. Everything will be back to normal before you know it." She hoped he would understand what she meant by
normal,
but the look Hal shot her before Peggy turned away to catch up with Sam was clear evidence that he hadn't.

She followed Sam down the aisle toward the back of the plane, aware that this was the first time in her married life when she and Hal weren't getting through to one another. Yet wasn't it her own fault? She was distracted. She was worried about Sam, about his drawing things as if his pad and pen could see around corners. But why didn't she share her concern with Hal? Was it just because she didn't want to burden him? Was she afraid he'd shrug it off and tell her she was crazy? Or was it something else that kept her silent?

Peggy went to claim her purse at the Eastern office while Hal and Sam waited at the carousel for their luggage to come around. Sam loved to help. He loved to be the first to spot a piece of their luggage as it bumped along the conveyor belt. In the taxi back to the city, Peggy went through her purse. It was all there, not a button missing. She breathed a sigh of relief and handed Hal the slip of paper on which she'd jotted down the name and address of the driver.

"I'll call him first thing in the morning," Hal said. "Let him know we're mailing him something. Twenty-five dollars okay?"

"No," Peggy said, "I'll do it. I was just wondering if you recognized the name now that you see it. I mean from that nameplate thing. You know, up there," and she pointed to the front seat to show what she was talking about.

But she could see that Hal didn't seem to understand. Or didn't want to.

"
You
know. Oh, forget it," she said, and took back the slip of paper.

He made an exasperated sound and turned to look out the window. "All I know is the guy had sad eyes and one of them strayed like. You know, it didn't track. And he said something about what a great family I had."

Peggy detected a faint note of irony in Hal's voice, and she was angry about it for Sam's sake. She couldn't understand Hal's unwillingness to patch things up. Maybe the strain of the new apartment, and all the debts that came with it, were beginning to tell on him. Why was he being so obstinate—and sarcastic?

She tried to make her voice soothing, and she hoped he would turn around and see that she was smiling. "I'll call and let him know something's on the way. After all, it's my job to thank the man."