Since he had said his mother was sick, had heard his voice say the word, he had been self-compelled to face the idea instead of running and hiding from it; to try to consider steadily how sick she was, and what her sickness was.
That was hard. It meant comparing: as if she was not his mother, but any woman, anyone. Anyone sick.
In his last couple of high schools he had known fellows who went the hard-drug route, all the way. And in tenth grade, it was not a memory he wanted to dig up, the girl who used to copy his English assignments sometimes, he could not think of her name—she always made him feel guilty because she was so humble—Cheryl was her name, and one day the week before school was out she had locked herself in a stall in the girls’ room and tried to stuff herself down a toilet. He had heard the screaming and seen a girl in the hall laughing in a horrible whooping way, and then Cheryl carried out doubled up, with pinkish water dripping out of her hair, screaming in a high thin voice, and he and all the other kids standing watching, people running up the stairs to see. Nobody had known how to talk about it afterwards, nobody who had heard the screaming. That was the worst he had been close to so far, but working in groceries you saw a lot of people scolding the mushrooms, and crazies like the shoplifter who tried to bribe his way out or the guy who pulled a knife on Donna when she refused to cash his check without ID; and people doing things that might have a reason but looked pretty weird, such as buying forty-eight bottles of germkiller spray and a can of water chestnuts. What all these people had in common, as well as he could figure it out, was a kind of getting out of gear, out of synch. The engine made a noise but no power got to the wheels. They were stuck. They got nowhere. In the last seven years his mother had changed houses thirteen times and lived in five different states; and the oftener she moves, he thought, the more she doesn’t get anywhere.
All the same, even if she was like the mushroom people and the germ-spray people, she wasn’t as bad as the junkies or Cheryl. She was stuck but not sunk. The loan company, a huge outfit with offices all over the country, had let her transfer twice now, and still gave her raises. She complained a lot about the work, but never missed a day at it. And in this office she had made a friend finally, Durbina, and found a whole new interest, this previous-lives business, which she was getting very deep into. Was that crazy? Hugh had no inclination to judge it one way or the other. What she told him sounded pretty silly. They always seemed to remember being princesses or high priestesses in their previous lives; he wondered who had worked at the loan companies and the supermarkets in Ancient Egypt. But then, no doubt you tended to remember the high points. It was screwy, but no screwier than most things people got interested in: baseball scores, aluminum futures, antique medicine bottles, nuclear proliferation, Jesus, politics, health foods, playing the violin. People did very strange things. People were extremely strange. All of them. You couldn’t judge sickness by strangeness, or everybody would come out sick. Sick was when you drove the car in neutral. The place she couldn’t get away from was home, the more she left it the worse she was stuck; could not bear to be alone in the house, could not come home at night to an empty house, lived in terror of waking up at night with no one else there. And that had got worse. She was worse now than she had ever been—But I know that, he thought. What’s the good of knowing it? There’s nothing I can do. She hasn’t got anybody but me. You have to have somebody, even if neither of you can do anything. There isn’t anybody else.
He was waiting for Hugh at the corner across from school. “Let’s go watch the track events down at the college practice field,” he said, and Hugh, thirteen, wearing the green shirt he had got yesterday for his birthday, noticed the other kids noticing his dad, a big, fair man, tall and broad-chested, looking good in a jeans jacket gone white at the seams. He had the Ford truck there and they drove down to the college track and watched runners, broad jumpers, pole vaulters in the golden haze of the April afternoon. They talked about the last Olympics, about the techniques of pole vaulting. His dad punched his shoulder gently and said, “You know, Hughie, I have a lot of confidence in you. You know that? I can count on you. You’re steadier than a lot of grown men I know. You keep that way. Your mom’s got to have somebody to depend on. She can depend on you. It means a lot to me, knowing that.” Hugh could not kiss the large, gold-haired hand; the only way men were allowed to touch each other was by hitting. He could not even touch the frayed cuff of the jeans jacket. He sat silent in the sudden blissful sunlight of praise. Next day when he got home from school their neighbor Joanna was there, thin-lipped, in the kitchen; Hugh’s mother was lying down, under sedation; his father had gone off in the Ford truck leaving a note saying he had a job in Canada and thought this was a good time to make the break.
Hugh never saw the note, though Joanna had repeated a couple of phrases from it, such as “a good time to make the break,” and he knew his mother kept it among her papers and photographs in a file box.
He had got lousy grades the rest of that term, because his mother had kept him out of school by any means she had, usually by having a crying jag at breakfast. “I’ll come back, I’m just going to school. I’ll be back at three-thirty,” he would promise. She would cry and beg him to stay with her. When he did stay he did not know what to do with himself but read old comic books; he was afraid to go out and afraid to answer the telephone in case it was the school attendance officer calling; his mother never seemed to be glad to have him there. That summer they had moved for the first time, and she had got a job. Things were always better for a while at first in the new places.
Once she had started working she could cope with daytime all right, and he finished school without any problem. It was the night, the darkness, that she still couldn’t handle, being alone in the dark. So long as she knew he was there she was all right. Who else did she have to depend on?
And what else did he have but his dependability? Anything else he might have thought he was or was worth his father had pretty well devalued by leaving. People don’t leave necessary things, or valuable things. But though he understood well enough what Cheryl had felt like, like shit, that ought to be got rid of, he wasn’t going to do anything about it, as Cheryl had tried to do, because in one respect he was valuable, useful, even necessary: he could be there when his mother needed somebody to be there. He could take his father’s place. Sort of.
When he had to go out for track in spring in tenth grade, he broke his ankle pole vaulting the first day. He was never any good at sports. He got big and tall, but heavy, with soft muscles, soft skin.
“Hey, I’m going to get one of those cute red suits and start running up and down the street too,” Donna said. “Where’s your spare tire gone to, Buck?” He looked down at his belly self-consciously but saw that maybe it did look better than it used to. No wonder, since every morning before work he got in a long fast walk plus something like ten or twelve hours of hiking and swimming and not eating very much. Getting enough food into the evening land was a problem which he solved mainly by going hungry there.
His first explorations farther upstream had been tentative and short. He was afraid of getting lost. He bought a compass and then discovered he did not know how to use it. The needle flittered and veered at every step, and though it seemed most of the time to indicate that north was across the creek (if north was the blue end of the needle) he would need a bit more than that to get back to the gateway clearing if he got deep into the hills upstream. There were no stars or sun to take directions from. What did north mean, here? The trees grew close enough that walking could never be straight for very long, and he found no open viewpoint, no way to get an idea of the lay of the land. So he explored the paths and thickets, hollows, glades, side valleys, hillside springs, windings and turnings of the forest on both sides of the creek upstream from the willow place. He learned that piece of wilderness. He had a lot to learn. He knew nothing about wilderness, woodcraft, plants. Trees with cones were pines. Trees with drooping stringy branches were willows. He knew oaks, there had been a huge oak on the playground of one of his high schools, but none of the trees in this forest looked like it. He got a book on common trees and succeeded in identifying severaclass="underline" ash, maple, vine maple, alder, fir. Everything he saw and all that came under his hand interested and occupied him, here. He thought also about what he did not know and had not seen. How far did the wilderness, the forest, go on? Was there any end to it? He had gone several miles now along the creek and there was no change, no slightest track or sign of mankind. Even the birds and beasts were all but unseen; he followed the faint paths of the deer but never saw one, found sometimes an old bird’s nest fallen, but never, in the changeless time and season and the weather without change, heard an animal cry out, or a bird sing.