Scott was sitting on the railing at the far end of the dock. His white T-shirt glowed slightly in the light from the waning moon. The dock itself sagged in several places and had a stretch of missing railing. Baedecker remembered the new-wood smell of it when he had stood there talking to his own father seventeen years before.
'Hello,' said Baedecker.
'Hi.' Scott's voice was no longer sullen, only distant. 'Let's forget that blowup, okay?'
'Okay.'
Baedecker leaned against the railing and the two looked out at the lake for several minutes. Somewhere an outboard motor growled, the sound coming flat and pure across the still water, but no running lights showed. Baedecker could see lightning bugs flickering on the far shore like the flash of small arms fire.
'I visited your granddad here once not long before he died,' said Baedecker. 'The lake was smaller then.'
'Yeah?' There was little interest in Scott's voice. He had been born eight years after Baedecker's father had died and rarely showed any curiosity about him or his grandmother. Scott's other grandparents were both alive and well in a Florida retirement community and had happily spoiled the boy since birth.
'Tomorrow I thought we'd clear out the last of the old furniture in the morning and take the afternoon off. Want to go fishing?'
'Not especially,' said Scott.
Baedecker nodded, trying not to give in to his sudden flush of anger. 'All right,' he said. 'We'll work on the driveway in the afternoon.' Scott shrugged and said, 'Are you and Mom going to get divorced?' Baedecker looked at his ten-year-old son. 'No,' he said. 'What on earth gave you that idea?'
'You don't like each other,' said Scott, still assertive but with a slight quaver in his voice.
'That's not true,' said Baedecker. 'Your mother and I love each other very much. Why are you saying these things, Scott?' The boy shrugged again, the same one-shouldered little motion Baedecker had seen too many times when Scott had been hurt by a friend or had failed at some simple task. 'I don't know,' he said.
'You know why you said it,' Baedecker said. 'Tell me what you're talking about.' Scott looked away and flipped the hair out of his eyes with a snap of his head. His voice was high but not yet a whine. 'You're never home.'
'My job made me travel, you know that,' said Baedecker. 'That's going to change now.'
'Yeah, sure,' said Scott. 'But that's not it anyway. Mom's never happy, and you don't even notice. She hates Houston, she hates the Agency, she hates your friends, and she hates my friends. She doesn't like anything but her god-damn clubs.'
'Watch what you're saying, Scott.'
'It's true.'
'Watch how you say it anyway.' Scott snapped his head away and silently stared out at the lake. Baedecker took a deep breath and tried to focus on the August evening. The smell of water and fish and oil on the water reminded him of his own summers of childhood. He closed his eyes and remembered the time after the war when he was about thirteen and he and his father had gone up to Big Pine Lake in Minnesota for three weeks of hunting and fishing. Baedecker had been shooting at cans with the .22 on his Savage over-and-under, but when it came time to clean the weapon, he realized that he had left his cleaning rod at home. His father had only shaken his head in that unexpressed disappointment that was more painful than a slap to the young Baedecker, but then his father put down the fishing tackle he was working with, tied a small lead sinker to a string, dropped it through the barrel of his son's .22, and tied a cloth to the string. Baedecker was ready to clean the rifle by himself, but his father kept the other end of the string and the two had pulled the rag through, back and forth, speaking softly about nothing important. They had continued long after the barrel was clean. Baedecker remembered it alclass="underline" his father's red-and-tan plaid shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the mole on his father's sun-browned left arm, the soap and tobacco smell of him, the pitch of his voice — and he remembered more than that — he remembered the sad, insistent awareness of everything he was feeling at the moment, his inability, even then, simply to experience it. Even while cleaning the rifle in near-perfect contentment, he had been aware of that contentment, aware that someday his father would be dead and he would remember everything about the moment, even his own awareness.
'You know what I hate?' said Scott and his voice was calm. 'What do you hate?' asked Baedecker.
The boy pointed. 'I hate the fucking moon.'
'The moon?' said Baedecker. 'Why?'
Scott turned so that he was straddling the railing. He flipped the hair out of his eyes. 'When I was in first grade? I told the class during sharing time that you'd been put on the primary crew for the mission? Miss Taryton, she said that was great, but there was this kid named Michael Bizmuth? He was a shit, nobody'd play with him or anything. He came up to me during recess and said, ‘Hey, your Dad's gonna die up there and they're gonna bury him and you're gonna have to look at it your whole life.' So I hit him in the mouth and got in trouble and Mom wouldn't let me watch TV for two weeks. But every night for a year before you went, I'd get down on my knees and pray an hour. An hour each night. My knees'd hurt but I'd stay the whole hour.'
'You never told me this, Scott,' said Baedecker. He wanted to say something else but could think of nothing.
Scott did not seem to be listening. He pushed the hair out of his eyes and frowned in concentration. 'Sometimes I prayed that you wouldn't go, and sometimes I prayed that you wouldn't die up there ' Scott paused and looked right at his father. 'But most of the time, you know what I prayed? I prayed that when you did die there, they'd bring you back and bury you in Houston or Washington, D.C., or somewhere so I wouldn't have to look up at night and see your grave hanging up there for the rest of my life.'
'Do you ever think about suicide, Richard?' asked Dave.
It was Sunday morning. They had risen early, eaten a large breakfast, and were taking a pickup truck borrowed from Kink into the hills above Lonerock to cut firewood.
'No,' said Baedecker. 'At least not much.'
'I do,' said Dave. 'Not my own, of course, but about the concept.'
'What's there to think about?' said Baedecker.
Dave slowed the pickup to ford a small stream. The road up Sunshine Canyon had gone from gravel to dirt to ruts to a vague, two-pronged path between the trees. 'A lot of things to think about,' said Dave. 'Why, when, where, and — maybe most important — how.'
'I don't see why it would matter too much about the how,' said Baedecker.
'But it does!' cried Dave. 'One of my few heroes is J. Seltzer Sherman. You've heard of him . . .'
'No.'
'Sure you have. Sherman was a proctologist in Buffalo, New York, who got deeply depressed about his life in 1965. Said he couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel any more. Flew out to Arizona, bought a telephone pole, sharpened it on one end, took it by mule down into the Grand Canyon. Surely you remember that.'
'No.'
'It was in all the papers. It took him ten hours going down. He buried that pole sharp end up, spent fourteen hours coming back up the trail, took aim, and jumped off the south rim.'
'And?' said Baedecker.
'Missed it by that much,' said Dave, showing half an inch of space between finger and thumb.
'I suppose it's still there as a challenge,' said Baedecker.
'Exactly,' said Dave. 'Although old J. Seltzer himself says that he might try it again someday.'