Once again, Buddy smiled in that easy way he had, like a summer sun coming up, and Tom felt his stomach clank and tangle. “C’mon, Dad, I only borrowed that stuff. I only planned to be gone for the weekend, me and Bilodeau, that kid from Concord. It was a weekend, the weather suddenly got warm, you probably don’t remember, but it did, and we were planning to chase some girls Bilodeau knew over on the coast near Kittery. But things just got screwed up, and before the weekend was over, we ended up going in different directions with different people. You know how it goes…” He showed Tom both his palms, as if to prove he wasn’t hiding anything.
“That was last April.” Tom knew his son was lying, and there was no damned sense trying to catch him out or somehow prove the boy was lying or get him to admit it, because he’d just go on lying, topping one lie with another, canceling one out with a new one, on and on, until you just gave up out of fatigue and boredom. He was one of those people who are always ready to go a step further than anyone else, and after a while you could see that about him, so you’d stop, and he’d be standing there just ahead of you, smiling back. It was almost as if he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.
“April?” the girl said. She lit a cigarette and looked at Buddy through the smoke. “So what’s been happening since April? This is June,” she observed, as if she had got a glimpse, from the conversation between the father and son, of what might be in store for her if she went ahead with her plans and hooked up for a while with this good-looking, smooth-talking, slender young man. It had probably started out as a whim, picking up and spending the weekend with a guy she’d seen hitchhiking in Maine. It would make a funny story she could tell on herself to her friends in Boston or Hartford or wherever she had originally been headed. But now things were starting to look a little off-center to her, not quite lined up, which is how it always was with Buddy, how it always had been. He was so damned good-looking, all white teeth and high cheekbones and quick-sloping narrow nose and deep blue eyes, the all-American boy, and he talked sweetly and in a strangely elaborate way, all in circles and curls that kept you listening, so that pretty soon you forgot what it was you were planning on doing and instead you plugged into his plans, but then someplace down along the line, things started to look a little bit off-center, as if a couple of basic pieces hadn’t been cut right. And you couldn’t tell which pieces were off, because the whole damned thing was off.
Buddy peered down at her as if he couldn’t quite place her. “What’s been happening since April?” he asked. “You really want to know?”
“No. Not really. It just seemed a funny thing, that’s all…”
“Funny. What’s funny?” Buddy asked. Tom watched the two carefully from the bar.
“Nothing,” the girl said. “Forget it.” She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them, her expression had changed, as if she had turned Buddy into a total stranger, as if she were seeing him for the first time all over again but this time with the knowledge of him that she had gained since morning, when she first saw him at the Portland exit with his thumb out and his duffle and suitcase on the road beside him.
“Forget funny?” Buddy said, smiling broadly. “Who can forget funny?” He turned away from the girl and faced his father and suddenly started talking to him. “Listen, Dad, that’s why I stopped down at the trailer before I came up here. To give your stuff back, I mean. Hey, I couldn’t do it way the hell up there in Maine among the trees and lakes, and then Donna here was nice enough to drive all this distance out of her way just to help me drop these things off at your place, before we resume our wanderings. Listen, Dad, since April I been way the hell out on a narrow neck of land in northern Maine, working on a lobster boat.” He had laid a hand on his father’s shoulder.
Tom didn’t believe a word the boy said. He had decided long ago, as policy, not to believe anything his son told him. And that, he told himself, was one of the reasons he kept his trailer locked now, for the first time in his entire life. You’re supposed to love your son and trust him and protect him, and while that would have been easy for Tom, it always had been, this new way of treating him was a burden, and he hated it. For years Tom had loved his son and trusted him and protected him, behaving precisely the way he knew the boy’s mother, his ex-wife Maggie, would not have behaved. Maggie would have let the boy down. Maggie wouldn’t have been home that night the state troopers brought him home all drunk and raving, and the boy would have ended up in jail. Maggie wouldn’t have known how to handle it when he got his head bashed in by that guy with the baseball bat in Florida. She would have let him rot in that charity ward in the Florida hospital before she’d have brought him home, set him up on the living room couch in front of the TV, and then every night for six months taught the boy how to talk again, until finally he could make those looping, charming sentences of his again, and people would sit back in their chairs and listen with light smiles on their faces to see such a clever, good-looking young man perform for them. Maggie never would have borne up under the weight of Buddy, Tom knew. The proof of her weakness, if he’d ever needed proof, he’d obtained the summer Buddy turned twelve, when he had taken the boy by Greyhound all the way to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit his mother, at her request, while he, the father, took a two-week holiday alone farther west, visiting Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studios and watching the surfers at Huntington Beach, the only time he had ever seen real live surfers. When the two weeks were up and Tom had called back at Phoenix for his son, things had changed, and he left the boy in Phoenix, at the boy’s request, presumably for good (at least that was Maggie’s and her husband’s intention and Buddy’s as well). Tom returned to New Hampshire, and didn’t hear anything from his son until September, when the boy showed up at the trailer. She had put him alone on a Boston-bound bus in Phoenix connecting to another bus to Concord, New Hampshire, and the boy, more travel-wise by then than he’d been in June, had hitchhiked the twenty-five remaining miles home. No, for Maggie it was the love and the trust and the protection that made the burden. For Tom, the burden was in withholding that love, trust and protection. That’s what he believed.
For it wasn’t simply Buddy’s stealing his father’s belongings that had turned the man against him, though of course that helped. And it wasn’t that the boy seemed incapable of telling the truth about anything (he would lie when there was nothing to be gained by it, he lied for the sheer pleasure of lying, or so it seemed, and if you asked him was it raining outside, he’d look out the window, see that it was raining and say no, not yet, and when you stepped out the door into the rain, you’d turn around and look at Buddy, and he’d say with great delight that it must have started raining that very second). And it wasn’t that the boy was reckless and troublesome, that he seemed incapable of avoiding the kind of person who happened at that moment to want to hurt someone, especially someone young and pretty and mouthy. Buddy would find himself in a bar, the Hawthorne House, say, next to a crossed-up truck driver or some hide-stacker from the tannery, and he would do everything he could think of to make himself look even younger, prettier and mouthier than he was, and of course he’d end up getting himself thrashed for it. And then somehow he’d get himself back to the trailerpark, and he’d drag himself to the door, swing open the door and fall into the living room, where his father would be sitting in front of the TV with a can of beer in his hand and the open newspaper on his lap.