“I was a hobby drinker,” Tom said, “not a professional.” But he left the beer alone.
The afternoon droned on. It was a sunny, warm day and Tom opened the front and back doors to let a breeze sweep through the house. The air smelled of hot, tarry pine.
Archer kicked back and put his Reeboks on the kitchen table. “You went to Sea View Elementary. Then the high school over on Jackson, I guess, just like everybody else. Shit-awful schools, both of them,” and then they were off on a round of skewed nostalgia—what Barbara had once called “the hideous past, relived at leisure.” It turned out that the trouble Archer had gotten into in high school had been more serious and more personal than preadolescent rock throwing. He had waged a war of attrition against his high school principal and his father—two staunch disciplinarians who happened to be poker buddies. Archer had spent plenty of nights listening to them vent their hatred of children over pretzels and a well-shuffled pack of Bicycle playing cards. His father was an appliance repairman who hated kids, Archer explained, out of some fundamental quirk of personality; the principal, Mr. Mayhew, had professional reasons and was deemed to be an expert on the matter. Jackson Archer, belt-whipping his only son, liked to explain that Mr. Mayhew did this for a living and could probably do a better job of it. In fact Mr. Mayhew confined himself to the use of a ruler on the back of the hand, which was painful without incurring the kind of visible injuries that brought mothers howling down to the school—maybe this was what made him an expert. Archer had a theory that they took out their poker losses on him; he learned to avoid whoever had lost money on Sunday night.
“Didn’t stop you from getting in trouble,” Tom observed.
“Didn’t stop me from drinking, smoking, and riding in fast cars. Nope. But I never figured they really wanted to stop me. They were having too much fun.”
“Does this story have a punch line?”
“When I was sixteen I drove my father’s Pontiac into a tree. Totaled it. I wasn’t hurt, but I was driving without a license. They sent me to a so-called military school upstate, with the happy consent of the Juvenile Court. What it was, of course, was a concentration camp for adolescent psychotics.”
“What did you do there?”
Archer ceased smiling. “I ate shit, like every other inmate. These institutions live up to their rep, Tom. They can turn a sullen, rebellious teenager into a sullen, submissive one—like that. I ate shit for a couple of semesters and came back when my dad died. My mother said, ‘I couldn’t leave you in that place.’ I thanked her politely, and when she marched me past the casket—in full parade dress, for Christ’s sake—I looked down and said, ‘Screw you and your poker game and your cardiac arrest too.’”
The silence rang out in the kitchen for a few awkward moments. Tom said, “You never forgave him?”
“He was a lonely, hostile man who never forgave me for being born and complicating his fife. Maybe I’ll be more generous than that. One of these days.” He took a long pull from his beer. “So how about you? Another casualty of childhood?”
“I had a reasonably happy childhood. Nobody sent me to military school, anyway.”
“That’s not the only way to suffer.”
“I can’t say I did suffer. Not substantially. Dad wouldn’t have stood for it.”
“Ah—wait a minute. Winter? Doctor Winter? Used to have a practice over on Poplar Street?”
1 hat s us.
“Shit, I knew Doc Winter! I went there with a ruptured appendix when I was ten years old. My father said, ‘The kid’s complaining about a bellyache.’ Of course, I had a raging fever, my abdomen was hard as a rock, I was convulsing from the pain. Your dad took a look at me and phoned the hospital for an ambulance. When he put down the phone he turned to my old man and said, ‘You nearly killed your child by waiting this long. If there was a license for fatherhood, I would have yours revoked.’ Sick as I was, I remembered that. It felt good. My God, Doc Winter’s son! But didn’t he—?”
“Both my parents died in a car accident,” Tom said. “It was about twelve years ago. A log truck sides wiped them coming around a turn on the coast highway.”
“You were how old?”
“Just finishing high school.”
“Tough situation,” Archer said.
“I lived. The insurance paid for my engineering degree. Much good it’s doing me. But, you know, it was kind of ironic. I always figured Dad got into medicine because he believed the world was a bad, dangerous place. He had a real sense of human vulnerability—the basic fragility of a human body. He once told me the human body was a sack of skin containing the vital organs and something even more fragile, which was life.”
“Maybe not a good attitude to grow up with,” Archer said.
“But he was right. I understood that when the police showed up at the door, the night the truck accordioned his car. There’s no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad’s voice: This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.’ Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can’t stop that by marching.”
“Isn’t that a little like giving up?”
“I think it’s called acceptance.”
Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees. “Very bleak attitude, Tom.”
“Experience bears it out.”
Around six, when the sun began to slant through the window over the sink and the kitchen bloomed with summer heat, they moved into the cooler dimness of the living room. Tom phoned Deluxe Pizza in Belltower and was assessed a five dollar delivery charge, “ ’Cause we don’t ordinarily come out that far.” The order arrived an hour later—pepperoni pizza with anchovies, room temperature. After he paid the delivery driver Tom opened the curtains onto a view of the back yard, shadows lengthening among the pines. His appetite had vanished. He ate a little and took his plate to the kitchen. Coming back he negotiated around the video camera looming on its tripod like an alien sentinel. “They won’t stand for it,” he said again.
Archer looked up from his intense involvement with the pizza. “Yeah, you said that before. Who’s they?”
“I don’t know.” Tom shrugged. “But don’t you get a sense of it—a sort of intelligence at work?”
“I didn’t think we’d admitted that much. Maybe you just have exceptionally tidy roaches.”
“I’m beginning to think otherwise.”
“For any particular reason?”
The dreams, Tom thought. The dreams, the holes in the foundation of the house … and a feeling, an intuition. “No, no particular reason.”
“What you’ve described,” Archer said, “sounds less like intelligence than it does like a machine. The kind of idiot machine that keeps running when the owner’s on vacation.”
“Its owner being who? The guy who lived here—Ben Collier?”
“Maybe. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to find out anything about him. Totally anonymous. Joan Fricker at the grocery store up at the highway must have seen him more than anybody else, and I doubt she could give you a good description. He never participated in public affairs, never held office, never wrote letters to the editor—never said more than hello, as far as anybody can remember. The only person with a special memory of Ben Collier is Jered Smith, who delivered his mail.”