“Hunks,” he said, breakfast-tablese for Thanks, and went on eating and staring.
“When did you go out?” She sat down across the Formica table from him with her cup of coffee.
“About five.”
“You jogged all that time, two hours?”
“I don’t know. Sat around some.”
“You shouldn’t overdo any kind of exercise in the beginning. Start slow and build it up. Two hours, that’s too much to begin with. You could do things to your heart. Like when people shovel snow in the winter the first time it snows and hundreds of them drop dead in the driveway every year. You have to start slow.”
“All in the same driveway?” Hugh murmured, with a vague look of awakening.
“Where did you run, anyhow? Just around and around? It must look funny.”
“Oh, sort of around. Lot of empty streets.” He stood up. “I’m going to make my bed and stuff,” he said. He yawned hugely. “Not used to getting up so early.” He looked down at his mother. She was so small and thin, so tense and fierce, he wished he could pat her shoulder or kiss her hair, but she hated to be touched, and he always did it wrong anyhow.
“You haven’t touched your coffee.”
He looked down at the full mug; obediently drank it off in a couple of long gulps; and mooched off towards his room. “Have a good day,” he said.
He would not have gone back but for the taste of the water. That water he must drink; no other quenched his thirst. Otherwise, he told himself, he would have stayed away, because there was something crazy going on. His watch would not run there. Either he was crazy or there was something unexplainable going on, some kind of monkeying with time, the kind of thing his mother and her occultist friend were interested in and he was not interested in and had no use for. Ordinary things were weird enough without getting messed up any farther, and life didn’t need any more complications than it had already. But the fact was, the one place where his life did not seem complicated was the place by the creek, and he had to go back there to be quiet and think and be alone; to drink the water, to swim in the water.
On his third visit there he decided to wade. He took off his shoes. The creek looked pretty shallow. He stepped into a deep bit and got wet to mid-thigh; splashed ashore, took off jeans, shirt, shorts, returned naked to the cold, noisy water. At its deepest it came no higher than his ribs, but there was one place where he could swim a few strokes. He went under, the strong currents pushing him, his hair floating loose around his face in the strange dark clarity of the underwater. He swam, scraped his knees on hidden rocks, set his hands and feet down on soft unseen surfaces, fought the shouting white water between boulders where the current raced. He came out of the water like a buffalo charging, shaking and stamping with cold and energy, and rubbed himself dry with his shirt. After that he always swam when he went there.
Since he came to the creek place only early in the morning, he kept thinking that he could not spend the night there, as he had imagined doing. And indeed he could not spend the night there, because it was never night there. It was never any different. It did not change. It was late evening. Sometimes he thought it was a little darker, or a little lighter, than last time; but he was never sure. He had never seen the star near the top of the high tree straight on, but was certain it was there in the same place each time. But his watch did not run, there. Time did not go. It was like an island, time running to either side of it like the water of a river, like the tides past a rock in the sand. You could go there and stay and you would come out to the moment you left. Or almost. When he felt he had been there an hour or longer, his watch seemed to show a few minutes had passed, when he returned to the sunlight. Maybe it did not stop, maybe it ran very slowly there, time was different there, entering the glade you entered a different time, a slower time. That was nonsense, not worth thinking about.
The fourth or fifth time he spent a long while at the creek place, swimming, making and sitting by a fire; by early afternoon, working at Sam’s, he was groggy, half asleep. If he did stay and sleep at the creek place, he wouldn’t have to stay awake twenty hours on end. He would live two lives. In fact he would live two lives in the space of one, twice as long in the same amount of time. He was arranging celery in the showcase when this occurred to him. He laughed, and found his hands shaking. A customer looking over the vegetables, a bony old man, glared at the mushrooms at $2.24 and said, “Crazy people taking psychologic drugs, ought to be taught a lesson.” Hugh did not know whether the old man was talking about him or the mushrooms or something else altogether.
He took his lunch hour to go to the cut-rate sporting-goods store in the shopping center across the freeway. Most of his week’s wages went for a bedroll, a stock of camping victuals, a good two-bladed jack-knife, and an irresistibly compact steel cooking kit. He turned back on the way to the cash register and added a cheap Army-surplus backpack. As he stuffed the food packets into the backpack he realized that he could not take it home. His mother was not going out tonight. She would be there when he came in. What’s all that, Hugh, what have you got a backpack for, a sleeping bag, but if you get one worth getting at all they cost a lot of money, just when do you think you’re going to use all this expensive stuff. He had been a fool to buy it all, to buy any of it. What did he think he was doing? He lugged it all through the heat back to Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart, left it locked in the freezer in the back storeroom, and went to the manager to ask permission to leave work an hour early.
“What for?” the sour man said, crouching in his office that was littered with empty cardboard cans of loganberry yogurt, and smelled of old yogurt and cigars.
“My mother’s sick,” Hugh said.
As he said the words he turned white and sweat started out on his face.
The manager stared at him, perhaps intimidated, perhaps indifferent. After a long staring pause he said, “O.K.,” and turned his back.
Hugh left the manager’s office feeling the floor and walls skip and sway. The world went white and small like the white of an egg, the white of an eye. He was sick. She was sick, yes, she was sick, and needed help.
I do help her. My God, what can I do that I’m not doing? I don’t go anywhere, I don’t know anybody, I’m not going to school, I work close to home where she knows where I am, I’m home every night, I’m with her on weekends, everything she asks—what can I do that I don’t do?
His self-accusation was, he knew, unjust, and it did not matter if it was just or unjust: it was judgment; he could not escape it. His bowels felt loose and he was still a little dizzy. He got through his work clumsily, making stupid errors over and over at the register. It was Friday, a heavy afternoon. He could not close his checkline till ten after five, and then only by getting Donna to take his place. “You sick, honey?” she asked him, as he gave her the register key. He did not dare repeat the lie lest it eat the truth again. “I don’t know,” he said.
“You take care now, Buck.”
“I will.”
He made for the back of the store, clumsy and blundering among the crowded aisles. He got his bedroll and backpack from the coldroom and set off through the streets, eastward not westward, towards the paint factory, the waste fields, the gateway. He had to get there. It would be all right when he got there. It was his place. He was all right there.
The fields were furnace hot. Soaked with sweat and his mouth dry as plaster, Hugh struggled on into the woods, left heat and bright day behind him as the path went downwards and he crossed the threshold of the dusk. He set down his load and went as always straight to the stream bank, knelt, and drank. He stripped off his sweaty clothes and walked out into the water. His breath caught in a ha! of painful ecstasy at the cold of it, the push and force and curl of the current, the grainy skin of rocks under his soles and against his palms. He slipped into the deep pool, dived under, let the water take him, the water in him, he in the water, one dark joy. All else forgotten.