“I’ll get Dr. Burgoyne, he’s just up the hail.” She hur-ried out.
Brian’s dad gave David a strained smile. There was sweat trickling down his cheeks and standing out on his forehead in a galaxy of fine dots. His eyes were red, and to David he looked like he had already lost weight. David didn’t think such a thing was possible, but that was how he had looked. Mr. Ross now had one arm around his wife’s waist and his other hand clamped on her shoulder.
“You have to go now, David,” Mr. Ross said. He was trying not to pant, and panting a little anyway. “We’re… we’re not doing so good.”
But I didn’t say goodbye to him, David wanted to say, and then realized it wasn’t sweat trickling down Mr. Ross’s cheeks but tears. That got him moving. It wasn’t until he got to the door and turned back and saw Mr. and Mrs. Ross had blurred into a whole crowd of parents that he realized he was shortly going to be crying himself.
“May I come back, Mr. Ross.” he asked in a cracked, shivery voice he barely recognized. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
Mrs. Ross had stopped struggling now. Mr. Ross’s hands had ended up locked together just below her breasts, and her head was bent so her hair hung in her face. The way they looked made David think of the World Federation Wrestling matches he and Bri had also some-times watched, and how sometimes one guy would hug another guy like that. Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, David thought for no good reason at all.
Mr. Ross was shaking his head. “I don’t think so, Dayey.”
“But—”
“No, I don’t think so. You see, the doctors say there’s no chance at all for Brian to… t—to-to His face began to change as David had never seen an adult’s face change—it seemed to be tearing itself apart from the inside. It was only later, out in the Bear Street Woods, that he got a handle on it… sort of. He’d been seeing what happened when someone who hadn’t cried in a long time—years, maybe—finally couldn’t hold back any longer. This was what it was like when the dam burst.
“Oh, my boy!” Mr. Ross screamed. “Oh, my boy!” He let go of his wife and fell back against the wall between the two red vinyl chairs. He stood there for a moment, kind of leaning, then folded at the knees. He slid down the wall until he was sitting, hands held out toward the bed, cheeks wet, snot hanging from his nostrils, hair sticking up in the back, shirttail out, pants pulled up so you could see the tops of his socks. He sat there like that and wailed.
His wife knelt by him and took him in her arms as best she could, and that was when the doctor came in with the nurse right behind him, and when David slipped out, crying hard but trying not to sob. They were in a hospital, after all, and some people were trying to get well.
His father was as pale as his mother had been when she told him about Brian, and when he took David’s hand, his skin was much colder than Brian’s had been.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” his father said as they waited for the world’s slowest elevator. David had an idea it was all he could think of to say. On the ride home, Ralph Carver started to speak twice, then stopped. He turned on the radio, found an oldies station, then turned it down to ask David if he wanted an ice-cream soda, or anything.
David shook his head, and his father turned the music up again, louder than ever.
When they got home, David told his father he thought he’d shoot some baskets in the driveway. His father said that was fine, then hurried inside. As David stood behind the crack in the hottop that he used as a foul line, he heard his parents in the kitchen, their voices drifting out of the open window over the sink. She wanted to know what had happened, how David had taken it. “Well, there was a scene,’ his father said, as though Brian’s coma and approaching death were part of some play.
David tuned out. That sense of otherness had come on him again, that feeling of being small, a part instead of a whole, someone else’s business. He suddenly felt very strongly that he wanted to go down to the Bear Street Woods, down to the little clearing. A path—narrow, but you could ride bikes along it if you went single-file—led into this clearing. It was here, up in the Viet Cong Lookout, that the boys had tried one of Debbie Ross’s cigarettes the year before and found it awful, here that they had looked through their first copy of Penthouse (Brian had seen it lying on top of the Dumpster behind the E-Z Stop 24 down the hill from his house), here that they had hung their feet down and had their long conversations and dreamed their dreams… mostly about how they were going to be the kings of West Wentworth Middle School when they were ninth-graders. It was here, in the clearing you got to by way of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that the boys had most enjoyed their friendship, and it was here that David suddenly felt he had to go.
He had bounced the ball, with which he and Brian had played about a billion games of Horse, one final time, bent his knees, and shot. Swish—nothing but net. When the ball returned to him, he tossed it into the grass. His folks were still in the kitchen, their voices still droning out the open window, but David didn’t even think about poking his head in and telling them where he was going They might have forbidden him.
Taking his bike never occurred to him. He walked, head down, the bright blue EXCUSED EARLY pass still sticking out of his shirt pocket, although school was over for the day by then. The big yellow buses were rolling their homeward routes; yelling flocks of little kids pounded past, waving their papers and lunchboxes. David took no notice. His mind was elsewhere. Later, Reverend Martin would tell him about “the still, small voice” of God, and David would feel a tug of recognition, but it hadn seemed like a voice then, or a thought, or even an intui tion. The idea his mind kept returning to was how, when you were thirsty, your whole body cried for water, and how you would eventually lie down and drink from a mudpuddle, if that was all you could get.
He came to Bear Street, then to the Ho Chi Minh Trail He walked slowly do—’n it, his head still lowered, so that he looked like a scholar with his mind on some immense problem. The Ho Chi Minh hadn’t been his and Brian s exclusive property, lots of kids ordinarily used it on their way to and from school, but no one had been on it that warm fall afternoon; it seemed to have been cleared espe cially for him. Halfway to the clearing he spotted a 3 Musketeers candybar wrapper and picked it up. It was the only kind of candybar Brian would eat—he called them 3 Muskies—and David had no doubt that Brian had dropped this one beside the path a day or two before the accident. Not that Brian was ordinarily a litterbug sort of guy; he’d stuff the wrapper in his pocket, under ordinary circumstances. But—But maybe something made him drop it. Something that—
knew i’d come along after that car hit him and threw him and broke his head on the bricks, something that knew I’d find it and remember him.
He told himself that was crazy, absolutely nutzoid, but maybe the nuttiest thing of all was that he didn’t really think it was. Perhaps it would sound nutty if spoken aloud, but inside his head, it seemed perfectly logical.
With no thought of what he was doing, David stuck the red-and-silver wrapper into his mouth and sucked the little bits of sweet chocolate off the inside. He did this with his eyes closed and fresh tears squeezing out from under the lids. When the chocolate was all gone and there was nothing left but the taste of wet paper, he spat the wrapper out and went on his way.
At the east edge of the clearing was an oak with two thick branches spreading out in a V about twenty feet up. The boys hadn’t quite dared to go whole hog and build a treehouse in this beckoning fork—someone might notice and make them tear it down again—but they had brought boards, hammers, and nails down here one summer day a year ago and made a platform that still remained. David and Brian knew that the high school kids sometimes used it (they had found cigarette butts and beer-cans on the weather-darkened old boards from time to time, and once a pair of pantyhose), but never until after dark, it seemed, and the idea of big kids using something they had made was actually sort of flattering. Also, the first handholds you had to grab in order to make the climb were high enough to discourage the little kids.