“Your mother meant to come but at the last minute she didn’t feel up to it. We agreed it probably wouldn’t do your morale any good to see her in one of her… uh…”
“Probably,” Daniel agreed.
“And it probably wouldn’t be that good for her morale, either. Though, I must say, this place—” pointing at the trees with his pipestem “—is a bit, uh, nicer than I was expecting.”
Daniel nodded.
“Are you hungry? We brought a picnic.”
“Me? I’m always hungry.” Which was truer than he would have cared to be known.
While they spread out the food on the table, another car arrived with other visitors. Having them as an audience made it easier. There was a roast chicken, which Daniel got the better part of, and a bowl of potato salad with what seemed a pound of bacon crumbled in it. Abraham apologized for there being only a quart of milk for everyone to drink. The beer he’d brought had been confiscated at the checkpoint on the highway.
While he ate, his father explained all that was being done to have Daniel released. A lot of people, apparently, were incensed about his being sent to Spirit Lake, but they were none of them the right people. A petition had been sent to Mayor MacLean, who returned it saying the whole thing was out of his hands. His father showed him a typed list of the names on the petition. A lot of them had been customers on his route, others he recognized as his father’s patients, but the surprising thing was how many of them he’d never heard of. He had become a cause.
For all that it was the food that registered. Daniel had got so used to the process food at Spirit Lake he’d forgotten what an enormous difference there could be between that and the real thing. After the chicken and potato salad, Abraham unwrapped a carrot cake. It was the closest Daniel came to breaking down during the whole visit.
When the food was gone Daniel became conscious of the usual obscuring awkwardness rising up again between him and his father. He sat there staring at the weathered boards of the table, trying to think of what to say, but when he did come up with something it never precipitated a real conversation. The excitement at the other picnic table, where they were talking Spanish, seemed a reproach to their own lengthening silences.
Cecelia, who had already been carsick on the ride to Spirit Lake, rescued them by tossing up her lunch. After her dress had been sponged clean, Daniel played hide-and-seek with the twins. They had finally got the idea that there wasn’t just a single hiding place to hide in, but a whole world. Twice Aurelia went beyond the fieldstone posts marking the perimeter to find a place to hide, and each time it was like a knife right through his stomach. Theoretically you weren’t supposed to be able to feel the lozenge, but no one who’d ever been implanted believed that.
Eventually it was time for them to go. Since he hadn’t found a way to lead round to it by degrees, Daniel was forced to come right out with the subject of McDonald’s. He waited till the twins were strapped into their seatbelts, and then asked his father for a word in private.
“It’s about the food here,” he began when they were by themselves.
As he’d feared, his father became indignant when he’d explained about the rations being deliberately less than the minimum for subsistence. He started going on about the petition again.
Daniel managed to be urgent without being swept along: “It’s no use complaining, Dad. People have tried and it doesn’t do any good. It’s the policy. What you can do is pay what they call the supplement. Then they bring in extra food from McDonald’s. It doesn’t make such a big difference now, ’cause most of the farmers, when we go out and work for them, usually scrape up something extra for us. But later on, in winter, it can be nasty. That’s what they say.”
“Of course, Daniel, we’ll do all we possibly can. But you certainly will be home before winter. As soon as school starts again they’ll have to put you on probation.”
“Right. But meanwhile I need whatever you can let me have. The supplement costs thirty-five dollars a week, which is a lot to pay for a Big Mac and french fries, but what can I say? They’ve got us over a barrel.”
“My God, Daniel, it’s not the money — it’s the idea of what they’re doing here. It’s extortion! I can’t believe—”
“Please, Dad — whatever you do, don’t complain.”
“Not till you’re out of here, certainly. Who do I pay?”
“Ask for Sergeant Di Franco when they stop you at the checkpoint on the way back. He’ll tell you an address to send the money to. I’ll pay it all back, I promise.”
Abraham took his appointment book out of the breast pocket of his suit and wrote down the name. His hand was shaking. “Di Franco,” he repeated. “That reminds me. I think that was the fellow who made me leave your book with him. Your old friend Mrs. Boismortier has been by the house several times, asking after you, and the last time she brought a present for me to bring you. A book. You may get it eventually, once they’ve made sure it’s not subversive.”
“I don’t know. They don’t let many books through. Just bibles and like that. But tell her thank you for me anyhow.”
The last formalities went off without a hitch, and the Hertz drove away into the brightness of the inaccessible world outside. Daniel stayed in the visiting area, rocking gently in one of the swings until the whistle blew, summoning him to the six o’clock roll-call. He kept thinking of the mixing bowl that the potato salad had come in. Something about its shape or its color seemed to sum up everything he’d ever loved. And lost forever.
Forever, fortunately, isn’t a notion that can do you lasting harm at the flexible age of fourteen. True enough, there was something Daniel had lost forever by coming here to Spirit Lake. Call it faith in the system — the faith that had allowed him to write his third prize essay way back when — or maybe just an ability to look the other way while the losers were being trounced by the winners in the fixed game of life. But whatever you call it, it was something he’d have had to lose eventually anyhow. This was just a rougher form of farewell — a kick in the stomach rather than a wave of the hand.
It didn’t even take a night’s sleep with its standard nightmare to put Daniel into a fitter frame of mind. By lights-out he was already looking at the little horrors and afflictions of his prison in the perspective of practical sanity, the perspective by which one’s immediate surroundings, whatever they are, are seen simply as what is.
He had played a game of chess with his friend Bob Lundgren, not an especially good game but no worse than usual. Then he had wormed his way into a conversation between Barbara Steiner and some of the other older prisoners on the subject of politics. Their talk was in its own way as much over his head as Bob James’ chess, at least as far as his being able to contribute to it. They made hash of his most basic assumptions, but it was delicious hash, and Barbara Steiner, who was the clearest-headed and sharpest-tongued of the lot of them, seemed to know the effect she was having on Daniel and to enjoy leading him from one unspeakable heresy to the next. Daniel didn’t consider whether he actually agreed with any of this. He was just caught up in the excitement of being a spectator to it, the way he enjoyed watching a fight or listening to a story. It was a sport and he was its fan.
But it was the music that had the largest (if least understandable) effect on him. Night after night there was music. Not music such as he’d ever conceived of before; not music that could be named, the way, when it was your turn to ask for your favorite song in Mrs. Boismortier’s class you could ask for “Santa Lucia” or “Old Black Joe” and the class would sing it and it would be there, recognizably the same, fixed always in that certain shape. Here there were tunes usually, yes, but they were always shifting round, disintegrating into mere raw rows of notes that still somehow managed to be music. The way they did it was beyond him, and at times the why of it as well. Especially, it seemed, when the three prisoners who were generally accounted the best musicians got together to play. Then, though he might be swept off his feet at the start, inevitably their music would move off somwhere he couldn’t follow. It was like being a three-year-old and trying to pay attention to grown-up talk. But there seemed to be this difference between the language of words. It didn’t seem possible, in the language of music, to lie.