The River King (11 page)

“Maybe we should trade places,” Sean suggested to Gus one day. It was late afternoon and Sean had his eye on a table of girls from the Haddan School, none of whom would have given him the time of day, despite his good looks. His job in the drugstore spelled instant invisibility to girls like these. “You go to the public high school and come here to wash dishes, and I'll sit in your classes and stare at all the pretty girls.”

Gus's hands were shaking from his high level of caffeine and nicotine consumption. Since his arrival at Haddan, he had lost ten pounds from his already scrawny frame.

“Trust me,” he assured Sean Byers. “I'd get the better part of the deal. The Haddan School would do you in. You'd be jumping out a window in no time. You'd be begging for mercy.”

“Why should I trust you?” Sean laughed. He was a boy who always needed proof, particularly when it came to issues of faith. He had lived the sort of life that had soon revealed that any man who asks for undying loyalty is the man most likely to get you killed.

Gus decided to take Sean's challenge and prove his worthiness. He had ordered one of the hot rolls that had just come out of the oven, exactly what he needed for his next trick. “Give me your watch,” he demanded, and although Sean wasn't so quick to hand it over, he was interested. Sean had been through a lot, yet in some ways he was an innocent, which made him the perfect mark.

“Don't you want to find out if you can trust me?” Gus asked. The watch had been a gift from Sean's mother on the day he left for Haddan. It was the one thing of any worth that he owned, but he unhooked the band and deposited the watch on the counter. Gus made the prerequisite movements to distract his reluctant audience, and before Sean could tell what had been done, the watch was gone. Even the Haddan School girls had begun to pay attention.

“I'll bet he swallowed it,” one of the girls declared.

“If you put an ear to his belly button you can probably hear him ticking,” another girl added.

Gus ignored them and concentrated on his trick. “Do you think I lost your watch?” he goaded Sean. “Maybe I stole it. Maybe you made a big mistake trusting me.”

Sean was now as interested in the manner of the watch's reappearance as he was in the watch itself. All his life he'd thought he knew the score.
Get the other guy before he gets you; live fast and
fierce. But now he realized he'd never thought of any other possibilities. Maybe the world was not as simple as he'd always believed. He placed both hands on the cool countertop and he didn't care which customer called for a check or who demanded a coffee-to-go. His attention was riveted. “Come on,” he said to Gus. “Make your move.”

Gus took a knife from the counter and cut open the roll on his plate. There, amidst the dough, lay the watch, steaming hot.

“Man.” Sean was impressed. “You're amazing. How'd you do that?”

But Gus merely shrugged and went to pick up a prescription Pete had filled for him. Gus wasn't about to tell Sean the details of the trick. You had to be careful what you divulged, but now and then even the most wary had to take the leap and put his trust in someone. Like so many before him, the person Gus had chosen to confide in was Pete.

“What about my other problem?” he asked the pharmacist as he signed the insurance form for his medication. It was the thirteenth of the month and Gus had been hoping Pete might help with his problem at Chalk House.

“I'm working on it,” Pete assured him. “I've got a few ideas. You know if you went to school instead of sitting here all day you'd show the other fellows how smart you are, and you'd win out. That's what I've been telling Sean.”

“Have you been telling him about the tooth fairy, too? About truth and justice and how the meek shall inherit the earth?”

Gus was already convinced that the meek were not about to inherit anything in Haddan, which is why he packed a bag that evening and went down to the train station. He had no intention of participating in the barbarous rituals of the Magicians' Club. At the hour when Nathaniel Gibb was unwrapping a bloody rabbit's foot from the cotton handkerchief his grandmother had given him at Christmas, Gus was keeping an eye out for the eight-fifteen into Boston. It was a chilly evening, with frost soon to come. Waiting for the train, Gus thought about his father and the high hopes the elder Pierce still had. He thought about how many hours it took to get to New York, and how many times he'd transferred to new schools, and what a disappointment he must be. And then, before he could stop himself, he thought about Carlin Leander's silver hair and the way she smelled like soap and swimming pools. At a little before eight a police car drove by, and one of the cops leaned his head out the window to ask Gus what he was waiting for. Gus hadn't the slightest idea, and so he took his suitcase and walked back to the school, the long way, through the village. He went past Lois Jeremy's perennial garden, with its mums the size of pie plates; past Selena's, where Nikki Humphrey was closing up for the night. At last, he turned onto the path that would lead him past the weeping beeches Annie Howe had planted long ago. He did so grudgingly, returning to the place he feared most, his own room, for on this dark, blue night when the weather was about to turn, August Pierce had nowhere else to go.

* * *

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, MAUREEN Brown noticed a patch of bloodied grass in the far meadow. Intent upon searching for specimens for her biology lab, most especially the shy leopard frog, she went farther, making her way past birches and pines, at last inching along beneath thistles and thorns to the place where she found the carcass of a rabbit with one foot cut off. It was the time of year when the leaves on the wild blueberry bushes had become flame red and woody stalks of goldenrod could be found everywhere, in the fields and gardens and lanes. Deeply shaken, Maureen took to her bed after her dreadful discovery. She had to be carried up to her room on the third floor of St. Anne's, and afterward she refused to return to classes until she was allowed to drop biology Although it was halfway through the term, Maureen was allowed to enroll in Photography 1, bringing with her a hurt expression and absolutely no talent. Due to the circumstances, however, Betsy hadn't the heart to turn her down. Eric couldn't understand her pity.

“Imagine finding something like that,” Betsy said to Eric as they walked down to the pharmacy for a late breakfast on Sunday morning. “What a shock.”

“It was only a rabbit,” Eric told her. “When you think about it, they have rabbit on the menu over at the inn. They boil them and saute them every afternoon and no one says boo, but find one in the woods and it's a huge event.”

“You're probably right,” Betsy said, even though she was far from convinced.

“Of course I'm right,” he assured her. “The death of a rabbit, however sad, is hardly a federal case.”

In the past few weeks, Eric and Betsy had been so overwhelmed by their duties they'd hardly seen each other. In all honesty, they both had been too busy for intimacy and it didn't seem possible to find any privacy at the school. If they were in Eric's rooms, there was always the fear that a student might knock at the door and interrupt. The few times they'd managed to get the least bit romantic, they'd been awkward with each other, like strangers who'd gone too far on a blind date. Perhaps their estrangement was unavoidable; what little energy they had was given over to students, such as Maureen, whose traumatic experience in the woods had taken up most of Betsy's week.

“Did it ever occur to you,” Eric said now, “that girl of yours might be a spoiled brat?”

For a man with a doctorate in ancient history to be embroiled in the social lives of adolescents who couldn't handle the slightest mishap on their own was ridiculous, Betsy had to agree. Oh, how Eric wished he were teaching at a university, where students took care of their own petty problems and the quest for knowledge was the issue at hand. This year the most bothersome member of Eric's class was that boy August Pierce, who was clearly no student. Gus had been hanging around Eric's door for several days, obviously wanting something. At last Eric asked if there was a problem, knowing full well that with students such as Gus, there was always a problem, and that most of these difficulties were best left alone.

When Gus skipped the meeting on the thirteenth of October, there'd been quite a price to pay. When they got hold of him, they dragged him into the lounge and locked the door. Harry McKenna had held a lit cigarette to his arm, a brand to remind him that rules were rules. For days afterward, Gus couldn't get the odor of his own singed flesh out of his head; he felt as though he were still on fire, even now, beneath his sweater, beneath his coat. He had been shoring up the courage to speak to a houseparent for days. “Could I come in for a minute?” he asked Mr. Herman. “Can I talk to you privately?”

Of course the answer was no. Inviting students into one's home bred both familiarity and contempt, not at all in keeping with Haddan's code of etiquette. Gus Pierce, therefore, had been forced to trot alongside as Eric hurried to the library. The boy coughed and sputtered and began to spin some far-fetched story about his mistreatment. He hated to come to Eric like a tattletale on a playground, and Eric had no choice but to listen as the details spilled out. The sunlight was weak, yet Eric had felt a line of sweat on his forehead. No one on the faculty liked talk such as this; it was anti-Haddan, the sort of inflammatory nonsense that fueled lawsuits and ruined careers.

In point of fact, the kid claiming to be victimized was over six feet tall, not exactly the size and shape of a victim. When Gus pulled up his shirt Eric did note bruises on his back and ribs and a fresh burn Gus claimed had been recently inflicted, but what did any of this prove? Soccer could easily be the cause of such injuries, as could a wild game of football. More likely, such wounds were self-inflicted, the actions of a student whom many at school had already judged to be unstable. August Pierce was failing several of his classes; only last week there'd been a meeting wherein his teachers and the dean had discussed his wretched performance in class. Frankly, the odds were not in his favor, and several of his teachers did not believe Gus would survive the semester.

“Maybe you need to take responsibility for your own actions,” Eric said. “If someone's bothering you, stand up for yourself, man.”

Eric could tell the boy wasn't listening.

“I'm trying to help you here, Gus,” Eric said.

“Great.” The boy nodded. “Thanks a million.”

Watching Gus lurch away, Eric felt satisfied that his responsibility toward the boy had been met. Certainly, he did not wish to take up Gus's case, even if the other fellows were giving him a hard time. In all probability, he deserved whatever bitter ration was dished out to him. He was annoying and exasperating. What had he expected? That his roommates would admire him, that they'd be delighted to have him among them? Eric knew a hierarchy existed at Chalk House, exactly as it had when he himself was in high school, and again when he'd joined a fraternity at college. Well, boys would be boys, wasn't that the saying? Some were bound to be evil and others bound to be good and the rest would fall somewhere in between, bending one way or another given certain circumstances or friends who led the way.

Pressure, too, was bound to affect people differently. Dave Linden, for instance, never complained about cleaning the seniors rooms or cheating on their behalf, but he'd begun to stutter. Nathaniel Gibb, on the other hand, found himself suffering from nightmares; one night, he'd awakened to find himself standing at his window, facing the darkened quad below, as if someone with his promise might actually consider leaping from the ledge. Gus's method of dealing with the Chalk boys' offensive was to offer passive resistance. Whether they burned him or berated him, he thought only of empty space, how it went on forever and ever, how every human being was nothing more than a speck of dust. He was not in the least surprised to find that Eric Herman wouldn't help him; rather, he was ashamed of himself to have looked for help in the first place.

And so he let himself be beaten without a struggle; frankly, he did not believe a struggle would succeed. He began to avoid the Haddan campus even more than he had before, spending nearly all his time in town, going so far as to unroll a sleeping bag for the night in the alley behind the pharmacy and the Lucky Day Florist. Sean Byers often met him there in the evenings, for the boys had formed an alliance based on their mutual disdain for their surroundings. They smoked marijuana in the alleyway, breathing in the rank stench of the Dumpster along with the sweet aroma of hemp. Gus was so relieved to be away from Chalk House he didn't even mind the rats that lived in the alley, silent shadowy creatures that searched the garbage for scraps. From this vantage point, he could see Orion rise out of the east at midnight, making everything in town deliriously bright. The great square of Pegasus hung in the sky, a lantern above him as he huddled in the alley. Whenever Gus smoked pot beneath that awe-some horizon, he felt shimmery and free, but this was only an illusion, and he knew it. He had grown convinced that his only method of escape was to perfect the trick no one had ever managed before. If he tried, it might be possible to succeed where Annie Howe had failed and at last turn the roses red.

* * *

 

IT WAS CUSTOMARY FOR THOSE WHO LIVED IN the big white houses to place lighted jack-o'-lanterns on their front porches on Halloween night as an invitation to children who might otherwise not be allowed past the front gate. The youngest trick-or-treaters set out in the late afternoon, dressed as pirates and princesses, demanding sweets at one house before rushing on through piles of crumbly leaves to the next. The stores in town had bins of free candy inside their doorways, and Selena's was known to give out free mocha lattes. At the inn, complimentary pumpkin pie was served at dinner, and over at the Millstone, those customers who dressed in plastic masks and clown noses to celebrate the holiday were always the ones who drank so much they needed to be escorted home at the end of the evening.