It was a brand-new day... and when I finally got around to breakfast, the first thing I did was lift the horoscope section from the paper... and drop it, unread, into the wastebasket.
No more snooping in drawers... and no more bad-luck horoscopes.
Surrogate
That spring I began following fourteen-year-old David Mallory home from school.
I always borrowed a car from one of the other lawyers in the firm, and I always wore a hat with the brim low over my face.
With all the talk of child molesters in the news, I knew what people would think if I ever got caught trailing him. To make things worse, his father, Stephen, was my racquetball partner three days a week. We lived on the same upwardly mobile street, attended the same upwardly mobile church, and drove the same kind of upwardly mobile car. Their family BMW was blue; ours was red.
Most days, David went straight home from school, a ten-block walk that skirted a shaggy wooded area where the neighborhood kids liked to play.
After a week of tailing him, I was about to give up. Then came the rainy day when he met the tall boy at the south end of the woods and handed him what appeared to be a white number ten business envelope.
I used my binoculars so I could get a better look at the other boy. He was blond, freckled and thin, though it was a sinewy thinness that suggested both strength and speed. He looked to be about fourteen but there was an anger and cunning in his face that you don’t often see in kids, not in our kind of neighborhood anyway.
He opened the envelope, peeked inside and gave David an angry shove. I couldn’t hear their words but I didn’t need to. The tall boy was disappointed by what he’d found inside and was obviously making this clear to David.
He lashed out and grabbed David by the jacket and hoisted him half a foot off the ground. He flung the envelope to the ground and then slapped David twice hard across the mouth.
Then he let David fall in a heap to the ground.
The only sounds were the light rain thrumming on my borrowed car and the faint irregular pulse of an engine badly in need of a tune-up. In the rain and the faint fog, the tall boy stood over fallen David, still cursing him.
He brought a leg up and kicked David in the stomach.
David went backwards, splayed face up on the winter brown grass.
The other boy bent over him, shaking the white envelope in David’s face.
The tall boy left abruptly, with no further words, with no warning of any sort. He turned and ran at a trot into the woods, and then vanished, seeming to be as much a creature of the forest as a fox.
David lay in the rain for a long time. I doubted he was badly hurt. Even the kick couldn’t have done all that much damage. But he was probably embarrassed and afraid, the way I’d always been at his age when bullies had taken their turn with me. Even with nobody around to witness your beating, you still felt humiliated.
Eventually, he struggled to his feet. He was soaked. He took a few tentative steps and then fell into his regular pace. He was all right.
He reached the sidewalk and then finished the rest of the walk home.
In the next three weeks, he met the blond boy three more times. Always on Wednesdays. All three times, David handed over a white number ten business envelope and the blond boy quickly peered inside. David had obviously done what the other boy had demanded. The boy accepted the envelope, said a few words I couldn’t hear of course, and then went back into the same dark woods he’d come from.
Who was he? Where did he live? What was in the envelopes David was giving him?
A week later, I got to the site where they met and hid myself in the woods, far to the right of the narrow dirt path the blond boy always used. I got there half an hour early.
He came up from the wide creek that wound through the center of the woods. He moved as usual at a trot, showing no signs of exertion at all. On a sunny spring day like this one, he wore only a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
He reached the mouth of the woods, stopped, and within a minute or so, David was there, looking nervous as usual, handing over the white envelope as if in appeasement to a dark god who might smite him dead at any moment.
As I hunched down behind the low-hanging branches of a jack pine, I saw an American Copper butterfly light on a green bush, and I felt a terrible and sudden melancholy, thinking of what had happened in the past and how my wife still woke up sobbing at night, and what surely lay before us in the days ahead. I wanted the peace and wisdom of the butterfly for my own, to know the succor of sunlight and release from my rage.
But all I could do was follow the boy back into the woods, into the shifting shadows and ripe spring scents in which squirrels and stray kittens and birds slept and romped and luxuriated.
The boy went back into his trot, indifferent to the branches slapping him on face and arms.
He came to a fork and went west, toward the wide muddy creek.
After a few more minutes, I lost him completely. I couldn’t even hear him disturb the undergrowth.
I was just inching my way to the clearing on the bank above the creek when he reappeared.
He climbed without pause to the very top of the railroad truss bridge that lay across the fast-moving creek. He scurried up to the top chord, which rose twenty feet above the tracks below, and stood there gaping at the countryside.
He was king-of-the-hill up there, taking a package of cigarettes from his jeans pocket and lighting up, looking over the world below with his customary sneer.
A train came soon enough, twenty-six swaying rattling boxcars pulled by an engine car running hard and fast and invincible.
This was the nightmare shared by every parent in our neighborhood — that one of our children (even though strictly forbidden to play anywhere near the bridge) would fall into the path of the pitiless engine and be killed instantly.
The train roared through.
The entire bridge swayed.
But the boy, still enjoying his cigarette, rode the top span of the bridge as if he were aboard a bucking bronc. He stood upright, swaying with the power beneath him, becoming one with its rhythm.
And then the train was gone, taking its furious sounds with it, till all you could hear in the silence after was the incomprehensible chitter and chatter of birds.
From my hiding place, I watched the boy a few more minutes, trying to make some sense of that sullen, angry face and insolent stance. But I could make no sense of him at all.
Soon after, I left.
Next afternoon, it rained again. I parked two blocks down from school.
When I saw David I honked my horn. Today I was in my own car, and without hat, so he recognized me right away.
He came over and opened the door.
“Hi, Mr. Rhodes.”
“Hi, David. Get in and I’ll give you a ride home.”
He looked confused for a moment. What was I doing parked along the street this way? he had to be wondering.
“Really, Mr. Rhodes, I can walk.”
“C’mon, David, get in. It’s going to start raining again anytime now.”
He still seemed apprehensive but he reluctantly got in and closed the door.
I pulled away from the curb, out into traffic.
“So how’ve you been, David?”
“Oh, you know, fine, I guess.”
“Your dad tells me you’re getting good grades.”
“Yeah, well, you know.” He half smiled, embarrassed.
“Makes me think about Jeff. You know, how he’d be doing in school these days.”
I looked over at David. I knew he’d get uncomfortable and start squirming. Which is just what he did.
“He’d be doing just great, Jeff would,” David said. “He really would,” David added, as if he needed to convince me of it.