The River King (7 page)

This year there were three freshmen in the attic: David Linden, whose great-grandfather had been governor of the Commonwealth, Nathaniel Gibb from Ohio, the winner of a tristate science fair, and Gus, mistake of mistakes, whose presence testified to the fact that although an individual's statistics might look fine on paper, in the flesh they could spell disaster. As for Gus, he had come to Haddan with no appreciation for the human race and no expectations of his fellow man. He was fully ready to confront contempt; he'd been beleaguered and insulted often enough to have learned to ignore anything with a heartbeat.

Still, every once in a while he made an exception, as he did with Carlin Leander. He appreciated everything about Carlin and lived for the hour when they left their books and sneaked off to the graveyard. Not even the crow nesting in the elm tree could dissuade him from his mission, for when he was beside Carlin, Gus acquired a strange optimism; in the light of her radiance the rest of the world began to shine. For a brief time, bad faith and human weakness could be forgotten or, at the very least, temporarily ignored. When it came time to go back to their rooms, Gus followed on the path, holding on to each moment, trying his best to stretch out time. Standing in the shadows of the rose arbor in order to watch Carlin climb back up the fire escape at St. Anne's, his heart ached. He could tell he was going to be devastated, and yet he was already powerless. Carlin always turned and waved before she stepped through her window and Gus Pierce always waved back, like a common fool, an idiot of a boy who would have done anything to please her.

From the day he'd arrived in the attic, unpacking at breakneck speed, if that's what anyone could call tossing belongings haphazardly into a pile in the closet, Gus had known his arrival at Haddan was a mistake. One afternoon, Harry McKenna had knocked on his door to announce there was to be a house meeting that evening, coolly suggesting that Gus had better be there on time. Gus, who didn't appreciate the superior tone of the older boy any more than he was inspired to take orders, instantly resolved to dodge what was bound to be a boring evening, one he'd just as soon avoid.

Instead, he had met Carlin in the cemetery and together they watched Orion rise into the eastern sky, high above a line of poplars and maples. It was a beautiful night, and poor Gus sensed something that felt like hope rise within him, not that the euphoria had lasted long. Gus hadn't understood that what he'd been offered by Harry McKenna was not an invitation, but a mandate. This he realized only upon his return to his room. He'd gotten through the front door of Chalk House unnoticed, nearly two hours past curfew, and had safely made his way up the stairs, but as soon as he reached the attic he knew something was amiss. The door to his room was ajar, and even if he hadn't remembered closing it when he left, the house was much too quiet, even for such a late hour. Someone wanted to ensure that he learn his lesson son and the lesson was extremely simple: Certain invitations best not be ignored.

In his room, bedding and clothes had been heaped together, then urinated upon. Lightbulbs had been removed from his lamp to be broken and sprinkled on his window ledge, where the glass glittered prettily, like a handful of diamonds displayed on the peeling wood sash. Gus stretched himself out on his mattress with a bitter taste rising in his throat and lit a cigarette in spite of the no-smoking ordinance, and watched the smoke spiral upward, toward the cracks in the ceiling. In his experience, this was what happened; an individual paid dearly for all that was sweet. Spend the evening with a beautiful girl, walk through the woods on a cool, pleasant night, lie peacefully on another man's grave to watch the three brilliant stars of Orion, and soon enough a message would arrive to remind you of what you were up against.

Gus rolled onto his stomach and stubbed his cigarette out on the floor beneath his bed. Red sparks rose up in a stream that made his eyes tear, but he didn't care; fire was the least of his problems. He was so thin that his bones pressed into the springs of his mattress. Although he was tired, he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep, not tonight and probably not on any other night. If someone were to weigh the beauty of moonlight against the depth of human cruelty, which would win? Moonlight could not be held in the palm of one's hand, but cruelty could cut deep. Who could begin to describe the color of moonlight once it had been replaced by the clear light of day? Who could say it had even existed, if it had ever been anything more than a dream?

After Gus had swept up the broken glass and washed his laundry in the bathtub, he went to check himself into the infirmary. His headache and nausea were real, as was his elevated temperature. Frankly, there weren't many at Haddan who missed him. His teachers were relieved by his absence; he was a difficult student, disruptive and challenging one moment, bored and withdrawn the next. Carlin was the only one who worried about him, and she looked for him in vain, searching the cemetery and the dining hall. When she finally tracked him down, the school nurse, Dorothy Jackson, informed her there were no visiting hours at the infirmary. And so, Carlin did not see Gus for eight days, not until he was up in his own bed, his coat wrapped around him like a blanket. In the dim light he stared at the ceiling. He had just punched a hole through the old horsehair plaster, the act of someone with no recourse other than shortsighted destruction. There were bits of plaster dusting the floor and the mattress. When she found him, Carlin threw herself down beside him on the bed to examine the results of his anger. It was possible to view the clouds through the hole in the eaves; a square of blue sky peeked at them from between the rotted shingles.

“You're insane,” Carlin told Gus.

But in fact, his actions had just cause. Upon his return, he'd stumbled over the gift his brothers had left for him while he'd been in the infirmary. A bloody rabbit's foot, so fresh it was warm to the touch, had been deposited on his desk. Gus had picked it up gingerly, wrapped it in tissue, and placed this dreadful talisman into the garbage. And that was how he'd become a desperate individual, a boy who punched holes through plaster, brought low by injustice and shame.

“Did you think I was normal?” he asked Carlin. During his stay at the infirmary, he hadn't once changed his clothes. His T-shirt was filthy and his hair was uncombed. He'd often locked himself in the infirmary bathroom, where he smoked so many cigarettes there was still a film of nicotine on his skin and the whites of his eyes had a yellow cast.

“I didn't mean insane in a negative way,” Carlin recanted.

“I see.” Gus's mouth curled into a smile despite his despair. Carlin could do that to him, cheer him even in the depths of his misery. “You meant insane in a positive way.”

Carlin propped her feet up against the wall, her long body stretched out against Gus's even longer one. She held her hand up to the sunshine streaming in through the ceiling, completely unaware that her complexion had turned golden in the light.

“What will you do when it snows?” she asked.

Gus turned his head to the wall. Impossible, impossible; he was about to cry.

Carlin leaned up on one elbow to study him. She gave off the scent of chlorine and jasmine soap. “Did I say something wrong?”

Gus shook his head; there was a catch in his throat and the sound he emitted resembled the call of that dreadful crow in the cemetery; a wail so dispirited and broken it could barely begin to rise. Carlin lay flat on the bed, the beat of her heart quickening as she waited for him to stop crying.

“I'll be gone by the time it snows,” Gus said.

“No you won't be. Don't be ridiculous, you big baby.” Carlin wrapped her arms around him and rocked him back and forth, then tickled him, knowing it would make him laugh. “What would I do without you?”

This was exactly why Carlin had never wanted to be close to anyone. When she was younger, she'd never even asked for a dog, and was temperamentally unfit to own a pet. It was so easy to be drawn in, to care and to comfort; before you knew it, you'd find yourself responsible for some defenseless creature.

“Was somebody mean to you?” Carlin threw herself on top of Gus. “Tell me everything and I'll make them pay I'll defend you.”

Gus rolled over to hide his face. There was a limit to how much humiliation even he could take.

Carlin sat up, her back shoved against the wall, her shoulder blades in the shape of an angel's wings. “I'm right. Somebody is being mean to you.”

Down in the cellar, where tadpoles hatched in the trickle of groundwater that always seeped through the concrete no matter how often repairs were made, I larry McKenna and Robbie Shaw had drawn two orange crates close to the air vent. Both boys were good-looking, fair and rawboned, but Harry McKenna possessed a truly extraordinary face. His straw-colored hair had been clipped close to his skull, a style that showed off his outstanding features. Girls swooned when they saw him, and it was said that no one could deny him once he turned on the charm. Sitting in the basement of Chalk House, however, he was not at all pleased, and his irritation showed. His beautiful mouth was twisted into a scowl and he snapped his fingers repeatedly, as if that simple action could erase what he heard through the vent, a flattened piece of metal that ran from the rear of the closets in the attic rooms down to this cellar. Through the vent it was possible to hear nearly every word that was said up above. Even whispers resonated through the tube; a cough or a kiss could be caught and sliced apart for purposes of examination or entertainment. The older Chalk boys always listened in on the new residents, and for this practice they made no apologies. How better to know exactly who was to be relied upon and who needed to be taught a lesson still?

Pierce was proving himself to be a washout at this very moment, pouring out his heart to some girl, bellyaching like a loser. Harry and Robbie had been eavesdropping for quite some time, hunched over until Harry's long legs were riddled with cramps. Now he stood to stretch his back. Usually, he liked the benefits of his height, both with girls and on the playing field. He liked any advantage he could get and this was to be the year of his advantage. He was the senior in charge of Chalk House, and as such retained the honor of residing in what was once Dr. Howe's office, before the new administration building was built. The room's focal point was its handsome oak fireplace; tiny serrations had been carved into the side of the mantel, marks that were said to represent every woman Dr. Howe had slept with, and if the fireplace notches were to be believed, there had been quite a crowd.

Harry appreciated Dr. Howe's room, just as he valued all his many privileges. He was a boy who was grateful and greedy in equal measure. Certainly, he wasn't about to have some nitwit like August Pierce come in and ruin things. It was a cruel, cold world, wasn't it? A universe spinning through the dark, without any pledges or guarantees. A person had to take what he wanted or be left behind, flattened by circumstance. Nowhere was this more true than in the gentle Massachusetts countryside, where the weather continually proved that most circumstances couldn't be controlled. Chalk boys were certainly well aware of the wreckage that could be made of a life, an unfortunate observation made in the very first year, for these were the boys who had suffered the worst loss in the flood so many years ago. In the mayhem of the rising waters, the grades of every boy from Chalk House had evaporated from the dean's marking book. It was a thoughtful fellow from Cambridge who discovered this calamity while mop-ping up the dean's waterlogged office, and he ran back to tell the others what he had learned before any teachers found out.

All of their hard-earned As in biology, their B's in Latin and Greek were gone, the letters washed away in blue pools of ink that had stained the floorboards a terrible cobalt that refused to come clean no matter how often the mop was applied. The Chalk boys wondered if the river had singled them out for torment. Why had this happened to them rather than the others? Why should their lives and careers be sacrificed? In the face of this disaster, a suggestion was proposed, a possibility voiced so humbly no one was ever quite sure whose idea it had been.
Twist fate,
that was the notion, one that was taken up immediately, by each and every boy. Turn calamity into compensation. Take what has been denied you.

It was a spring night, the thirteenth of May, when the boys at Chalk House changed their grades. The peepers were calling in a rush of damp music from every flooded corner of the campus; the moon floated above the library in a soot-black sky. The boys let themselves into the dean's office, where they substituted their names for those of the students from Otto House and Sharpe Hall, claiming grades they hadn't earned. The task was easily done, an elementary act of delinquency handily accomplished with a pick from the locksmith and some India ink, a simple bit of conjuring, but one so effective they decided to call themselves magicians, even though they had no true skills but one.

At the close of the term, the boys from the other houses who had once been assured an acceptance to Harvard or Yale roamed the campus, as despondent as they were confused. These students wondered what had happened to all their hours of study, for their grades had disappeared entirely, and from that day forward the term fair play was erased from their vocabularies. For those boys at Chalk who had thrown their lot in with the Magicians' Club, all that was demanded was full loyalty. If any among them did not have the temperament for cheating, no time was wasted. The others dragged boys who might be the least bit unreliable out to the meadow where the rabbits made their homes and they beat such individuals senseless. In protecting themselves and their brothers, the boys learned an important lesson about unity. Rules bound people close, true enough, but breaking rules bound them closer still.