“I understand,” Chad said. “You don’t have to worry about me.” He brushed his hand through his hair. “I’ll tell her I have a serious girlfriend.”
“Good,” I said. “Because, don’t tell her I told you this, but—” I hesitated a moment, not certain I should continue. I said, “She hasn’t even had a first boyfriend yet. She’d be mortified if she knew I told you that, but it’s something you should know. It’s because we live out here in, as Amy says, Nowheresville. Still, she thinks she knows things, but she doesn’t know anything yet.”
“Like I said,” Chad touched his heart, as if swearing an oath. “You have nothing to worry about from me.”
I put my hand on his arm, as if to say thanks, and then turned to leave.
“Long as we’re talking,” he continued. “You know about my family, right?”
“I know what I read about your father in the newspapers.”
Chad closed his eyes for an instant, as if gathering the resolve to explain and pushing down frustration, like a celebrity who’s just been asked the same dumb question for the millionth time. “He’s not my father,” he said. “He’s my mother’s husband. We have a simple relationship. I hate him and he hales me.”
I looked at him in a way that I thought might prompt him to explain, but his eyes had gone steely, as if he had just said all he had to say on the subject. I pushed a little. “Doesn’t that worry you?” I asked. “Having someone like that hate you?”
“My mother would never let him do anything. I’m not worried.”
“Well,” I said, meaning to dismiss the subject, “maybe time will make you closer.”
“I doubt it,” he said. “He had my father killed.”
“He had—” I started to echo him stupidly, the amazement in my voice momentarily turning me into the boy.
“You can see the problem.”
“I guess so,” I said. “Like Hamlet.” I had no idea how to continue.
“I have nothing to do with Jimmy and he has nothing to do with me. So you don’t have anything to worry about on that score either. I just want to be a college student with a summer job, you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do,” and I touched his arm. I said, “I’ll send Amy for you for lunch,” hoping my tone let him know that the subject of his family was done with as far as I was concerned. On the way back to the house, I turned it over in my mind. I was curious, of course, but I wasn’t about to ask. In a way, it made me feel protective. Amy never understood that about me, my protectiveness. Linda, her mother, hadn’t either. There’s a reason for it. I was raised poor, in a bad part of Brooklyn. My father was a mean drunk, my sister was raped when she was sixteen, and when I was not much older I was robbed and beaten half to death by two guys wearing sweatshirts with hoods pulled to tiny openings around their eyes. They beat me just because they wanted to — no special reason.
After the attack, I spent months in the hospital, my heart full of murder. Nights, I’d have dreams in which beatings my father delivered merged with the street beating. Days, I’d fall into long, bloody reveries of violence so awful it frightened me — half daydreams, half trances in which I’d inflict every manner of nightmare on the men who beat me. For a while I thought I was losing my mind. I came back slowly. I didn’t lose my mind and I didn’t withdraw from the world. I just moved to a more secluded part of it. My father’s boss owned a horse farm up in the mountains, and I went to work for him when I got out of the hospital. I’ve worked around horses and on farms ever since. I became careful, protective.
Amy couldn’t appreciate these things, but I thought maybe Chad could, having been through some himself — and after working with him only a few weeks, it was clear that I was right. He rapidly turned into a combination ally and mediator in my frequent, though usually minor, conflicts with Amy. Whatever he told Amy, she seemed to hear clearly. I suspected his working without a shirt, sweat glistening over the muscles of his chest and stomach, had something to do with the explanations always being so convincing.
In any event, things ran a lot more smoothly with Chad on the farm. Amy seemed happier with him around, even if he did — as he had told her — have a serious girlfriend. She took to going to bed early most nights and sleeping late in the mornings, and in general appeared to be more relaxed and comfortable than she had been in years. She was looking forward to the fall, when she’d start her senior year in high school. Chad turned out to be excellent help, working all day, finishing up the jobs I’d given him, and often going on to other things that needed doing. Evenings he spent in his cabin, hardly ever going into town. The only problem I had with him involved the phone bill, which was exorbitant. When I took it to him, he explained he was calling a girlfriend and buddies from home and college and agreed to pay the extra charges. When I pointed out that if he didn’t cut back on the calls, he’d wind up sending a good portion of his summer earnings to Ma Bell, he nodded, hut not resentfully, the way Amy would have nodded. By midsummer, I was already worrying about his leaving and thinking of ways I might entice him back next year.
Ollie stopped by the farm more frequently with Chad here, which I also considered a benefit. Ollie was probably less than ten years older than me, but he always treated me in a fatherly way. He was a stocky, blond-haired, blue-eyed Swede with a fondness for poker and his stout, churchgoing wife. He supposedly had some dubious connections at the track — I had heard this implied by other trainers and farmers — but I never heard a word about it from him, and I never saw him do anything the least bit unseemly. Asking me to hire Jimmy Smoke’s son for a summer job was the only thing in twelve years that had given me the least cause for worry — and that was going fine. Then, on a morning in the first week of August, when I was at his stables picking up hay, he invited Amy and me to his house for dinner.
I backed my truck into the stable and lowered the tailgate, while he opened the stall door and dragged out four bales of special high-grade hay he had been holding for me. He tossed a bale onto the truck. “Hey, Paul,” he said. “The wife’s making something special tonight. Why don’t you and Amy come out and join us?”
I didn’t answer right away. I pulled a bale of hay from the stack, threw it onto the truck, and went back for another, which I slid onto the tailgate. Ollie had never invited me to dinner before. Ollie never invited anyone to dinner. I said, as if he didn’t know it, “We’ve never been to your house for dinner. Actually, we’ve never been to your house at all.”
“This will be the first time then, won’t it?” he said, tossing a bale of hay at me, playfully too hard.
I was knocked back a couple of steps before regaining my balance. “Okay,” I said. I didn’t see how we could refuse. “What should we wear?”
“Dress nice,” he said. “My wife’ll bring out the good china. We’ll do the whole deal for you.” He winked at me and closed the stall door. “Be there by seven. Don’t be late.” He turned and hurried to the other end of the stable, where he had an office.
At my truck, I pulled a ball of twine from under the front seat and took my time tying down the hay, which didn’t need to be tied down at all. The pit of my stomach stirred the way it does when something doesn’t seem right. I was tempted to follow Ollie into his office and ask him what was going on, why all of a sudden the invitation to dinner. By the time the hay was tied down, I had decided to let things play out as they would. I got back into the cab of the truck and instead of heading out the front entrance I did a three-point turn and started down the dirt road that crossed the stables and went through the farm and wound around to a back entrance, which was closer to town, where I planned on stopping at the supermarket. In the rearview mirror I saw Ollie come out of his office. He watched me drive away, looking annoyed. I usually asked him if it was all right to drive across the farm — but he had walked away and I couldn’t imagine why it wouldn’t be Okay. I couldn’t imagine — until I passed the bunkhouse where he sometimes put up extra help.