The Buffalo Soldier (7 page)

Alfred saw Tim Acker walking down the sidewalk adjacent to the front of the elementary school as his bus was pulling into the parking lot, his red hair an almost neon beacon at fifty or sixty yards.

In the past Alfred had always walked to school, and after two and a half months he still wasn't used to the bus. The fact that he was at least two years older than everybody else on the route didn't help, but he also found the notion of a schedule confining and the idea of the bus itself a constant reminder that he lived in the middle of nowhere. He was jealous of Tim and Schuyler and Joe Langford because they lived in the village and could walk to and from school--the way he had when he'd lived in Burlington.

Tim was alone today, which meant the boy might wait for him when he got off the bus. When Tim was with other kids, Alfred had noticed, the whole group usually went pounding on ahead together, and Alfred wouldn't catch up with them until they all met in the coatroom just inside their classroom.

Hey, Tim said to him, once the small horde of first-, second-, and third-graders had raced off the bus, squealing today about cartoon stickers and gummy fruit snacks. Alfred could see the shape of the other boy's in-line skates pressing against the inside of his nylon backpack.

Hey.

Can you stick around after school today? Tim asked. My mom says she could drive you home.

They started up the cement steps, the crisp November air on their backs. The rain had come and gone in the night and the sun was up now. It was going to be unnaturally warm by mid-morning.

Alfred tried to think if there was any reason why he couldn't stay after school with Tim, and he couldn't come up with one. At some point he'd need to phone the animal shelter and make sure it was okay with Laura--or, at the very least, leave a message on the answering machine at the house. Then, when Laura returned, she'd listen to it and figure out where he was.

I'll have to call Laura, he said, still unsure whether that meant at the Humane Society or their home. As soon as he'd spoken, however, he figured it would be easier for everyone if he just left a message at the house. He'd probably get Laura's voice mail at work, anyway.

Terry got a deer yet? Tim asked.

Hadn't as of last night. And he's coming home today.

My dad hasn't got one yet, either. But my brother did. A button buck. Sixty-eight pounds.

Cool, Alfred murmured, guessing that sixty-eight pounds must be pretty good if Tim was boasting about his brother's kill. He wondered what a button buck was.

When they reached the classroom, they saw Schuyler Jackman and Joe Langford by the classroom aquarium, and without taking off his jacket Tim went to join them. Alfred started to follow, but he had the sense that he shouldn't. Once before he'd accompanied Tim to the group when they'd arrived at the classroom together, and it had been awkward. The other boys lived within blocks of each other in the small village, and had known each other practically since the day they'd been born. The only reason Tim didn't walk to school with them every day was because it was slightly quicker for him to cut across the athletic field and the playground from where he lived. Usually when Alfred saw him alone, it meant that he was running a few minutes late.

Alfred took off his blue-jeans jacket and draped it over a hook, and hung up his backpack beside it. Then he unzipped the top compartment and reached inside for his loose-leaf notebook. He noticed that he had inadvertently allowed the notebook to mash the visor on the cavalry cap the Heberts had given him, and a part of him wished that he had worn it to school today--if only so the bill wouldn't have been crushed. When he was filling his backpack earlier that morning, however, he decided at the last minute not to wear it. Kids might ask him who the buffalo soldiers were, and he'd have to tell them the little he knew--which meant driving home the point, one more time, that he was black and they weren't.

By the aquarium the three boys started to laugh at something Schuyler had said, and though Alfred didn't believe it had anything to do with him--at least that's what he assumed--the laughter hurt him if only because he wasn't a part of it.

HE KNEW HE was the only black kid in the fifth grade, and he was almost as positive that he was the only black kid in the school. Certainly he'd never seen any others. In the entire village he'd never seen any other black people, children or grown-ups.

The school had a single class for each grade, and during an assembly one morning he heard the principal say there were 119 students in the school, including the morning kindergarten class. The assembly was held in the gym because the school didn't have an auditorium, and so the kids sat on the polished wood floor under the basketball hoops.

One time when he was standing in the lunch line at the cafeteria with Tim, a first-grader who rode his little bus had asked him why his skin was so dark. The inquiry wasn't meant to be hurtful, but it had made him self-conscious: He was embarrassed because the question was asked in front of Tim and slightly angry because he knew nobody would ever think to ask this six-year-old boy why his hair was so blond.

Burlington, of course, had had a couple of black kids, as well as a black teacher. Burlington had even had Chinese kids and Japanese kids and kids whose parents had come from Vietnam.

Briefly he wondered how his friend Tien was doing, and what she was up to right that second. He guessed she, too, was in school, but you could never be sure with Tien. He wondered where she was living.

Alfred knew a little history, just enough to sense that no one here discriminated against him because he was black. No one called him names, no one wanted him to have less of anything. No one expected him to use a different water fountain. It wasn't like those pictures from the South they'd looked at in Ms. Huntoon's class when he was in the third grade in Burlington.

But he also felt as if the people here, teachers, too, were always staring at him when he was on the playground or in the lunchroom, and that may have been because he was black--although it may also have been because he was a foster child. A person just dropped into a school filled with kids who'd been together since the very first day of kindergarten.

Either way, some of the kids still kept a certain distance, even now when he was involved in one of their games. He was part of the group that was playing Capture the Flag during recess. Immediately after lunch the teachers had herded everyone outside because it was so warm for November and the sun was out. Schuyler Jackman had made sure that Alfred was on his team, which had made him feel better than if he'd wound up as a spectator with his back to the brick wall of the building--something that had happened twice before. But he still found that he could reach the opposing team's flag almost at will, as if the other kids didn't want to tag him. His team had won both games so far, because with a minimal amount of darting and ducking he had raced through the defense and grabbed the red art smock that was serving as their flag.

He couldn't figure out whether they were being nice to him, or whether it was something else entirely. No one, he could not help but notice, had clapped him on the back or asked for a high five when he'd crossed back onto Schuyler's team's side with the smock--not even Tim. That had certainly been a part of the victory celebration in the games he had witnessed from the sideline. In his case, however, both times there had been a few small cheers and a few kids had pumped their fists into the air, but then he had simply been expected to hand the jersey back to the losers so they could begin a new game.

Certainly Peter Wolcott should have held up his palm and offered some skin. Both times Peter had been the teammate nearest him when he'd returned, victorious, with the opposing team's flag. Instead Peter had ignored him.

He wondered what would happen if he just gave them back the jersey and walked back inside the building to his classroom. A teacher would probably stop him--probably his own teacher, Ms. Logan--but there was no way one of the kids would make the effort. He felt himself growing angry, but he couldn't stop himself and he didn't care. Would it have been so hard for Peter or Schuyler or anyone to ask him for five? For Tim? Of course it wouldn't.

It wasn't his fault that his mother had gone AWOL on him when she had another child, and that no one seemed to know who his dad was.

And so after racing around Liam Freeland and a pair of girls who were offering next to no defense of the flag, he swiped the red smock from their goal, sprinted back to his side of the field, and then thwacked the cloth hard against Peter Wolcott's fat back. The boy yelled, more in surprise than in pain, and when he turned Alfred thwacked him again. This one got him on the side of his head, and would probably redden that pale, pale ear in a matter of seconds. Alfred apologized--he knew how much an ear could hurt--and was about to say something more because he really hadn't meant to nail the kid there, but he saw one of the teachers walking purposefully across the playground field toward him and he realized there wasn't a thing more he could say at this point that would do him a bit of good.

"I informed Sergeant Rowe of the order I'd received that henceforth the company would be kept fifteen yards from the white soldiers during inspection and would no longer march in review. He replied that they could live with inferior mounts (though not happily) and would continue to wait patiently for adequate Spencer carbines, but argued respectfully that they could not be separated during inspection and excluded from their place in review. It was clear he was prepared for disciplinary action, and was surprised when none was forthcoming and I agreed to speak on the troopers' behalf."

CAPTAIN ANDREW HITCHENS,

TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

REPORT TO THE POST ADJUTANT,

AUGUST 18, 1869

*

Terry

He didn't go back into the woods in the morning, but decided to leave the camp at first light and go home. Not straight home. He planned to stop at the barracks first and grab a shower. He would tell Melissa, their dispatcher, and any troopers who happened to be there that he still reeked of the woods and didn't want to smell too earthy when he walked in the door of his house and was greeted by Laura.

Still, he doubted Laura would smell anything on him, even if he didn't go by the barracks. After all, he'd showered at Phoebe's friend's trailer.

There had been something a little pathetic about the arrangement. Phoebe hadn't wanted to bring him back to her father's house, and so they had gone to some woman friend's trailer instead. Phoebe had made a phone call from the bar in Newport where they'd gone from her store, and the friend had left a key under a flat rock by the front steps and then gone someplace else for a couple of hours. He had a feeling the friend was going to drive into Newport herself, perhaps to hang out in this very bar.

Nevertheless, he took pride in the simple fact that he had managed to seduce this attractive woman who clearly, at first, had not wanted to get involved with a married man. Moreover, the sex had been good, even if it had been on a twin bed in a room likely to induce claustrophobia in anyone who hadn't once worked in a submarine. He hadn't been with a woman other than his wife since he started dating Laura years earlier, and the novelty of another woman's smell alone had been appealing in ways he hadn't expected. And Phoebe's body was so very different from Laura's, even though the two women were probably about the same size.

He wondered what it was that he'd done or said that had pushed her over the edge, and changed her mind about him. Getting her to the bar had been easy: He figured she simply expected she would lead him on a bit, tease him. Make sure he understood exactly what it was that he wasn't going to get. And for at least their first fifteen minutes at the bar, she really did little more than abuse him. She made fun of his small mustache, and how closely the regulations demanded he trim it. She teased him about the gray in his temples, and told him that she'd never had a drink before with a man so old who wasn't a friend of her mom and dad's.

I would wager that I am less than a decade older than you are, he'd said defensively, and then added, and you are young and beautiful.

At some point, however, the fact that he was a father came up. They never discussed Laura, but he did mention he had a foster boy living under his roof and they did talk about the girls. Everything changed when he told her they'd died. Suddenly his interest in her seemed to grow less sordid in her mind, and it became almost explicable. It wasn't that tragedy justified adultery. But it did make certain needs more comprehensible.

Still, Terry was absolutely positive that he had not told her the girls were gone because he thought he could use it, he was quite sure of that. Indeed, he had almost left after telling her what had occurred. (How many words had he needed? A dozen? A dozen and a half? You couldn't use more, because if you did, he knew, you started to cry.)

He was less sure, however, why he had then gone on to mention that the anniversary of his children's death was the day after tomorrow. Wednesday, in fact. He hadn't needed to add that little tidbit. But he had. He had looked into the beer foam that ringed the inside edge of his mug after speaking, because he knew he couldn't meet Phoebe's eyes.

Later that night when he was lacing his boots and the two of them were preparing to leave the trailer in their separate vehicles, Phoebe asked him if he ever got to Montpelier.

Sometimes Barre, he answered, referring to the city five miles south of Montpelier. Two or three times there have been changes of venue and I've had to testify in the courthouse in Barre.

You do that a lot?

Testify? Yes and no. Sometimes when I'm an arresting officer I have to testify. But the truth is, the better the affidavit, the less likely I'll wind up in court. Whether it's a speeding ticket or a B and E, you want it to be pretty darn cut and dried. And usually I'm not in Washington County, anyway. I'm in Addison. But you know what? Our headquarters are just north of Montpelier in Waterbury. I actually get there every once in a while.

She nodded and looked at the cowboy boot in her hand as if she didn't recognize it.

Why do you ask? he said.

She was wearing a pair of heavy wool tights, and it seemed to take a great effort to slip her foot--even though it had seemed so small and petite to him no more than an hour ago--into the boot.

Well, she said finally, I was going to suggest you drop by when you're in the area. But I'm not altogether sure that would be a good idea.

Probably not, he agreed. But the moment he'd said it he wondered if his ready assent might have hurt her feelings. He'd never done anything like this before--and he vowed that he never would again--but maybe there was an etiquette here he didn't fully understand. Maybe he was supposed to pretend this was more than it was, try to elevate it into something less tawdry than a roll in a twin bed in some stranger's trailer. And so he waved his arm at the two of them and then at the narrow room with the fake wood paneling in which they were getting dressed and said, You know something, Phoebe? This whole evening wasn't a good idea. But I'm glad we did it.

Oh, I am, too, she said. Really. I am, too. But don't do it. Don't come see me when I move back to Montpelier.

He considered asking her why she was so firm in her resolution, but he was pretty sure it was simply the fact that he was married. Still, when he thought back on their conversation and her admission only a moment ago that she had almost suggested he drop by when he was in the county someday, he realized there might be something more: He was a state trooper. Someone who was supposed to be righteous and upstanding, someone who was supposed to uphold the law. Someone who was actually a bit of a hero once in a while.

Perhaps when he had mentioned the idea of testifying in Barre, he had reminded her of what he did for a living.

IN THE SHOWER in the barracks he started to cry. This time he didn't make a sound, it wasn't like those afternoons in his cruiser, and he stared straight up into the cascading water with his eyes shut tight so the tears would roll down his body and disappear down the drain with the water.

The girls--the word alone could unhinge him sometimes, the plural especially, because of the seraphic memories it conjured--had been named after their grandmothers.

HE WAS ALREADY nearing the massive blue silos at one edge of the Cousinos' dairy farm when he decided to turn around. He drove back along the two-lane road linking Cornish with Durham until he reached the Durham town commons, and then he parked in one of the diagonal spaces in front of the gazebo. There was sun today, lots of it, more than there had been in almost a week, and the side walls of the gazebo--repainted that summer for the first time in at least a decade and a half--looked whiter than milk and too shiny for wood.

He went first to the florist, because he knew what he wanted to get Laura. He asked the woman who worked there to prepare for him the most colorful bouquet of cut flowers she could manage.

Make it cheerful, please, he said to Carol. Very cheerful.

I think we can arrange that, Carol said, and she went to the refrigerator with the tall glass doors. Larkspur, she murmured, more to herself than to him. I love purple flowers. And some yellow lilies. Laura likes yellow, yes?

Yes.

And, let's see...iris. Blue irises.

What are those? he asked, pointing at a collection of flowers in a gray bucket on the bottom shelf.

Oh, good choice. Gerbera daisies. Some hot pinks would be nice.

And roses, too, he said. A couple red roses.

Red means love, she said, and she added four sweetheart roses to the assemblage of flowers she was preparing.

After he had paid for the flowers, he put them in the passenger seat of his pickup and went to the big drugstore next to the supermarket. It was the closest thing the town had to a variety store, and he thought he might be able to find something there for the boy.

HE GOT HOME before lunch--hours before Laura would return from the animal shelter and Alfred would return from school. If he wanted, he knew, he could shower yet again. Three showers, he figured, and not even a bloodhound would be able to detect a trace of Phoebe Danvers on his skin. But a third shower seemed more than a little paranoid, even if the cats seemed more interested in him than usual, and so he didn't bother to bathe yet again.

He considered placing the wrapped flowers in the refrigerator, but Laura wouldn't be back until somewhere around two-thirty. That meant they'd have to sit there for three solid hours. And so although he'd only put flowers in a vase a handful of times in his entire life, he did now. The arrangement wasn't pretty--somehow the irises and the lilies kept hiding the daisies, and the roses kept sagging to the side--but at least this way the flowers would be alive when Laura got home, and she would know how to fix them.

He'd bought Alfred a football kicking tee and a magazine about the NASCAR circuit. He didn't know if the kid liked auto racing, but it was clear the boy was interested in his cruiser, and the glossy pictures of the race cars were pretty hot.

And Alfred did enjoy football. It was, as far as Terry could tell, one of the few obvious things they had in common. The boy didn't like shooting baskets with him, but they'd tossed a football together three or four times that autumn and watched a couple of Patriot games on TV.

He grew a little annoyed at Alfred when he listened to the answering machine in the den. The kid had simply left a message announcing that he was going to stay in town after school and play with that Acker kid. The child's mother would drive him home. The part that irritated Terry was the fact that Alfred had left the message on the machine here, instead of calling Laura at the shelter. Now she'd be racing home as usual to greet the boy when he got off the school bus, when maybe she would have done something else if she'd known she didn't have to come straight home.

Sometimes the boy just didn't think. The girls would never have shown so little common sense.

The girls. He found it interesting that since they had died he always viewed them as a pair, as if they had lacked individual personalities or were incomplete when they were apart. In reality, when they were alive they had done many things separately, and Laura hadn't dressed them alike since they were toddlers. They wouldn't have stood for it.

The truth was they had very different interests, and you could see it in the "Try-It" badges that had monopolized so much of their lives during their last years. Both children had been Brownies and then Girl Scouts, and it would have been so much easier if they'd ever been interested in getting the same badges at the same time. But of course that hadn't happened. Megan had been obsessed with the ones that seemed to demand hours outdoors, while Hillary always focused on those badges that involved cooking and clothing and manners.

And yet it had been Hillary who was the jock. She was the one who'd played youth soccer and T-ball and Little League. Not Megan. No interest in sports at all. She liked to be outside all right, but it was always so she could look for birds' nests and mole holes. Fairy houses, when she'd been younger. There had been a period when he and Laura hadn't dared move a stone or a twig in their yard, because it might have had totemic importance for one of Megan's secret, make-believe sprites.

He liked to hike--along with hunting and pickup basketball one night a week, it was about the closest thing he had to a hobby--and the summer before the girls died, the family had gone on some nice, long hikes together. Hillary had seemed to enjoy them because of the effort the walks demanded, while Megan had derived her pleasure from the wonders--real and imagined--that she would insist lived beneath every leaf.

About twenty to three, he poured himself a glass of apple cider. The cider was pungent and thick, and reminded him of the day that autumn when he and Laura had taken Alfred to the orchard. The boy had never been to one before, despite living almost his entire life in Vermont. It had been a perfectly fine day until it was time to leave, and the boy refused. Just wouldn't budge. Then, when they thought he'd finally agreed to return with them to the car, he disappeared the moment they'd turned their backs. One moment he'd been a dozen steps behind them, and the next he was gone. It had taken them twenty minutes to find him, and Laura had grown so frightened that she started to cry. The orchard bordered Lake Champlain, and the kid had wandered all the way down to the shore, where he was looking at the boats and throwing rotten apples as far as he could into the lake.

He said he missed the water. Said he used to hang out by the waterfront sometimes when he lived in Burlington.

Just after Terry had poured the glass of cider, Laura pulled into the driveway. He heard the car and went to the front steps to greet her. As she emerged from her little gray Taurus, a massive wave of guilt rushed over him: Here she was, the woman he'd fallen in love with and married. Here by the carriage barn they used as their garage was his wife. Her hair was held in place by the thinnest of headbands, and it was blowing in all directions as she walked up the bluestone toward the front door. He saw wisps of animal fur on one of the sleeves of her jacket, fluff from the white coat of some very big dog.

She smiled and waved, and pulled the strap of the wicker tote bag she used as a purse up over her shoulder. She was, he decided, as fragile as she was beautiful, and she must never, ever know what he had done the night before. Never. And so in case he was wrong about Phoebe Danvers--in case the scent of her perfume or her skin or that woman friend's trailer had indeed come home with him, despite two showers in half a day's time--he took the glass of apple cider he was holding and spilled it down the front of his red-check flannel shirt.