The Romantic (27 page)

In the schoolyard Abel and I go on acting as if we don’t know each other, though I never let him out of my sight. He stays by the fence and is generally ignored, except when he catches the attention of Jerry Kochonowski, he of the square head, blond brush cut and walleye. Last year Jerry would yell,“Hey, Kraut! How many Jews did your Nazi father kill?” Now it’s,“Hey, Nazi! Killed any Jews lately?” or,“Show us your swastika!” His friends seem tired of this game but none of them speaks up. Jerry is a bully from a family of bullies, older brothers in and out of jail, a father who hits him with a board.

“Bashes me right across the noggin,” he brags, unwittingly offering an explanation for how he came to have that eye.

Nobody, probably least of all Jerry, expects Abel to answer the taunts. I don’t say anything either, hard as that is. It would only make things worse, a girl of my lowly status coming to his defence, although what keeps me quiet is not wanting Maureen Hellier to know that he matters to me. Of all people, she’s the one who tells Jerry to leave him alone, and she’s so sure of herself, so impervious to ridicule, that Jerry will occasionally back down. When he doesn’t, she reports him to the teacher on yard duty. She and her girlfriends then troop over to Abel—there’s no escaping
them—and start going on about how awful Jerry is and how adopted children are just like other children and they bet Abel’s real parents are Canadian but even if they aren’t, that’s okay, lots of people have German relatives. “Rudeness is why there are wars,” Maureen invariably announces. Later, when Abel and I meet, I try to get him to admit that she’s a stupid know-it-all. He pretends to be suddenly interested in some insect or leaf. If we’re in his kitchen he goes into the living room and starts playing the piano.

I slide onto the bench next to him. The Angel of Love is there, too, leaking light along the keys. Usually he plays something by Bach, who is his favourite composer, and mine now, as well. I like how crisp and mysterious the music sounds; it reminds me of the ravine, lying under the pine trees and the sun coming down in splinters through the needles.

I can’t believe that anyone could play better than he does, but I never tell him because then he’ll make me listen to a record of the same piece and try to get me to hear the difference. It isn’t the flattery he minds, it’s the laxity of perception, the inaccuracy. When I call a frog a toad, or a damselfly a dragonfly, he is just as anxious to straighten me out. When I spot Jerry across the ravine and say,“There’s fathead!” he still corrects me, but indirectly; he says,“Blond boy at four o’clock,” as if this neutral way of putting it were only a confirmation.

With the shorter days and colder weather and with the snow already deep by mid-November, we see less and less of Jerry, or of anyone, in the ravine. We ourselves still go down after school, although not as often. Abel prefers what he
calls night prowls, and once, maybe twice a week I sneak out to join him, provided no bad weather has been forecast. It isn’t easy. I’ve got to smuggle my snowsuit, hat, scarf, mitts and boots into my bedroom, stay awake until midnight and then climb out the window without alerting my father.

In the summer when we did this, there were crickets chirping, maybe someone’s dog barking. In the winter, there is no sound that doesn’t come from us. The unavoidable whistling my leggings make as I walk shears through a world in suspended animation. We keep our flashlights off until we’re in the ravine, and then we start searching for animal tracks. Along ridges and down by the river, we sometimes come upon the neat, straight tracks of a red fox. The same tracks, sloppy and meandering, mean it’s a dog. Prints like little human feet mean skunk. We look for abandoned birds’ nests and visit the ones we found before. In the spirea bushes there’s a sparrow’s nest threaded with blue fishing line and with what we think is the red string you tear off a Band-Aid wrapper. Nearby, dangling from a branch and threatening to fall but always still there, is an oriole’s nest in the shape of a Dutch boy’s shoe.

At around two o’clock we start heading back. More often than not, as we enter the subdivision, we hear his mother calling.

“Where does she think you go to?” I asked the first time we heard her.

He said he didn’t know.

“Doesn’t she say, ‘Where were you?’”

“She’s just glad to find me. I always let her find me.”

“And she’s not mad?”

“She’d probably be out for a walk anyway. She’s an insomniac.”

“What’s that?”

“A person who can’t sleep.”

“But doesn’t she worry that
you’re
not getting enough sleep?”

“I’m an insomniac, too.”

Under my window he makes a step of his linked hands and I climb up onto the ledge. He waits until I’m inside, then sets off in the direction his mother is calling. I always feel a little desolate then. He never looks more unconquerable or more completely himself than he does from the back, at night, walking away.

By early June it seems that Abel has made it through another school year in one piece. He doesn’t act relieved, however; he doesn’t talk about the near brush with death. He talks about the success of his strategy, as if Jerry Kochonowski were only an element in a successful experiment.

“I completely ignored him,” he says. “I played dead. When you play dead, it dulls a predator’s killer instinct.”

Or sharpens it.

One day I have a dentist appointment after school and so I don’t make it to the ravine until four-thirty. Abel said he’d be in the sumach grove but he’s not there. I use the crow call, the loudest and most urgent in our repertoire. No answer. I run around cawing. I go to the cave, back to the grove, down to the river. I climb up to the ledge and look inside my old fort. I keep on climbing to the top. From here
I can see the river and the sludge factory. Men are beginning to leave for the day. Maybe Al knows something. Al, the manager, who gave us a bag of green mints once and had such a wrinkled, mischievous face that I could no longer think of him as a spy. I start hurrying down. I am at the ledge when I spot a boy racing across the Camp Wanawingo clearing. Not Abel, a blond boy.

Jerry Kochonowski. By himself.

I stumble the rest of the way down. I run screaming,“Abel!” It doesn’t matter who hears. My legs feel like tree stumps. The bridge is too far away. I run straight into the water, which is only knee deep at this point but so putrid I’ve never stuck a finger in it before.

He appears from behind a bush. His shirt is off and he’s holding it above his right eye. “It’s okay,” he says, coming to the bank. “I’m okay.”

“What happened?” I slog out of the water. “What did he do?”

“Threw a piece of brick.”

“Let me see.”

He takes away the shirt, and there’s a saw-toothed gash.

I cover my mouth with my hands.

“It’s starting to coagulate,” he says.

I don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad. “Come on,” I say,“let’s go to the factory before they close. They might have bandages or something.”

“I don’t need bandages. I just need to keep applying pressure.”

“We’d better go home and call a doctor.”

“I’ve got to sit down.” He drops onto the sand.

I drop beside him. “I saw him running away. I knew he’d hurt you. I—” My voice catches.

“It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“But what happened?”

“I was looking for that bullfrog we saw yesterday. I heard rustling in the bushes over there and thought it was you—”

“I wouldn’t rustle,” I say desperately.

“I went over to see and it was Jerry crouched down, trying to hide, so I thought I’d better get away fast and I started to run but he yelled ‘Help!’ so I ran back and he threw the brick and took off.”

“That stupid fathead. I hate him. I hate him. We have to call the police.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s all over now.” He takes the shirt from his face. “How does it look?”

“Awful. Oh, your shirt’s all bloody.” I am wearing a pale blue cotton jacket over my blouse and I pull it off and give it to him.

“Are you sure? The blood might not come out.”

“Then I’ll burn it.”

He folds the jacket into a square. “Don’t cry, okay?”

“Didn’t you hear me calling?”

“I blacked out.”

“Blacked out?” I jump to my feet. “I’m going to the factory right now!”

“No.” He reaches for my hand and draws me down. My hand in his silences me. He says,“Before you came I was
doing mental exercises. Counting backwards from a hundred by intervals of seven. I’m pretty sure I don’t have brain damage. Do I sound normal?”

“He tried to kill you.”

“We’re not going to tell anyone, okay?”

“What about your parents?”

“I’ll say I tripped and fell on a rock. A jagged rock.”

“You’re going to let him get away with it?”

“He won’t do it again.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Promise you won’t tell anyone.”

Sobs punch at my throat. His expression is confusingly sympathetic, as if I were the bleeding one. When I can speak I say,“Only if he leaves you alone from now on.”

“Don’t worry.”

He lies back. So do I. He turns his head toward me, keeping the jacket in place with his elbow. We are still holding hands. He says,“You’d better wash your feet and legs when you get home. You’d better wash your shoes, too.”

“I will.”

“Don’t cry.”

“What if I cry because I love you?”

He blinks. But he doesn’t look away. He’s thinking, considering the question. “Do you?”

I kiss him on the mouth. He shuts his eyes. I kiss him harder. He lets go of my hand and brings that arm around me and we roll to face each other. We push at each other’s lips and bodies. I can’t get near enough to the feeling this produces. When we stop, the coat has fallen from his forehead. The gash, which I’d almost forgotten about, gives me a start.

“Is it still bleeding?” he asks.

“A little. It’s swelling.”

He repositions the coat. “I might need stitches after all.”

“We’d better go, then.”

“In a minute.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Not too much.”

He is staring at me. His face seems years younger. I say, ‘You love me, too.”

He nods.

‘You love me very, very much.”

He nods.

We kiss all the time. We will be collecting stones, picking wild strawberries, and a look will pass between us, as if we’ve both just heard a strange noise, and wherever we happen to be, we’ll start searching for a private place. We don’t speak; there are no preliminaries. As soon as we lie down, we’re kissing.

We have progressed to opening our mouths. We touch tongues, suck on each other’s bottom lips. I have a rough idea about sexual intercourse but I can’t imagine doing anything more sexual than this. When it’s over, before we stand up, I might tell him I love him and he’ll say,“Okay.” So then I’ll say,“You love me,” and he’ll redden and say, ‘Yes.” We never talk about the kissing.

Or about the scar. He refuses to. It is a sideways Z, which I suspect secretly pleases him, as it could be the mark of Zorro. Nine stitches were required. We stuck to our lie, but his father seemed to know that if there was a rock, it was thrown.
He said, ‘You didn’t break the fall with your hands?” and Abel slid his hands into his pockets and shook his head.

“Where exactly was this rock?” Mr. Richter asked then.

Again Abel hesitated, so I said,“Where they’re building the new house, on Spruce Court,” and Mr. Richter looked at me, a stern and unconvinced but not unkindly look. Mrs. Richter, who would have walked by that house many times and seen the piles of excavated stones, cried,“Abel, what if Louise had fallen into the pit?”

“Louise is careful,” Abel murmured.

“Louise is good,” Mrs. Richter cried, hugging me,“to let you ruin her jacket.”

I am not careful. I am not good. I am vengeful is what I am.

I have thought, since Abel died, that by always being furious on his behalf I allowed him to take the high road. Or else I gave him no other choice. In my company, he would never admit that somebody was even exasperating let alone obnoxious or mean. But then why should he, when I could be counted on to say the worst? Unlike him, I required an accounting. I understood perfectly the eye-for-an-eye argument. The turn-the-other-cheek argument struck me as wrong in an almost physical sense, a threat to natural order and balance.

I find it maddening, then, when I see Jerry in the ravine, unpunished and unafraid, fishing off the bridge or setting campfires he never properly puts out, which means we have to pour water on them later. These days he is usually by himself, his gang having mysteriously dropped away, and I say to Abel, why don’t we capture him and tie him up in the
cave? Make him swallow ground glass? Shove twigs under his fingernails? In the ravine, Abel and I no longer bother putting any distance between ourselves, but when I start going on like this, he tries to move out of listening range. Or he tries to make a deal. “Let’s set a deadline,” he’ll say. “In one week you never talk about Jerry ever again.”

“Or what?” I’ll say.

“Or you pass the deadline.” As if this were dire, and “deadline” itself has a forbidding enough ring that I am temporarily silenced.

And then a real, comprehensible deadline comes along. He tells me that on July twenty-first he and his parents are going to Vancouver for three weeks to visit Mr. Richter’s brother, Uncle Helmut, who’s trying to get them to move out there.

“Are
you going to move out there?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Maybe.”

So there it is: a line, like death to me.

On the morning that they leave, it rains. I help Mrs. Carver prepare a stew by chopping carrots and celery into the pill-size pieces she requires. After that, I watch a movie on television about a composer who dies young, bleeding all over his piano in the last scene. I cry silently as the composer’s girlfriend, George, cries. By the time the movie is over, the rain has stopped. I decide I may as well head down to the ravine.

I go into the cave and just sit, my mind empty of thought. Behind me, where the bats sleep, is a steady ticking sound. Water dripping. Deadlines passing. Eventually I move out onto the ledge and consider getting Abel’s gardening gloves and cutting back more nettles to enlarge our lookout post.