Gemini Summer Read online

  She went out after him, in her slippers and dress, in her hillbilly clothes, shouting at him, “Don’t walk away! Tarnation!”

  They shouted back and forth, up and down, from the hill of mud to the bottom of the pit. The Old Man was standing among his reinforcing bars, tearing the plastic sheets from the rusting, poking-up ends of metal. He looked like a tiger in a tiger trap.

  “Do you think you can hide him down in that hole?” she shouted. “Do you think you can put him in a box and seal him off from the world? He’s going to grow up, you know, Charlie. He’s going to do what he wants.”

  “He’s too young to know what he wants,” the Old Man shouted back.

  “Don’t you dare try to spoil his dreams,” she said.

  He was wrestling with the plastic, pulling long shreds through the metal spikes. When he had it all free, he tried to hurl it from the pit in a huge ball. But it only rolled back down on top of him.

  “Charlie,” she said.

  “I’m not going to spoil his dreams,” he said. “I just want him to grow up and have a chance to live them. Is that so bad?”

  He grabbed one end of the plastic and climbed from the pit, dragging it all behind him. He climbed right past Flo, over the top, and down the other side. The plastic rippled and snaked behind him.

  “‘Give up the stars, Beau.’ Is that what you’ll tell him?” she asked. “‘Keep your feet on the ground and your head in the dirt.’” She glared at him as he came back. “What about the trip to the Cape? I suppose you’ll tell him to forget it now.”

  He grimaced at that—the Cape—as if they were all talking like astronauts now. “No, that’s more important than ever,” he said. “I want him to see the rockets and all, and ache to get into space. Then I’ll tell him that he doesn’t have to join the air force to do it. There’ll be scientists in space by the time he’s ready, and plumbers and doctors, if there’s still a world to launch them from. And if there’s not, well, the four of us will be here in the shelter, waiting it out. I’m covering all the bases, Flo.”

  “You don’t have to tell him anything,” she said. “Charlie, please. Just let him grow up on his own. Let him find out those things himself. I wish you’d fill in that hole and let him grow up.”

  twenty-five

  Toward the end of March it started to rain, and the rain kept up for weeks. The Old Man’s mountain eroded into gulleys and crags. Brown glaciers flowed from the top, creeping toward the pit. Mrs. River hoped the whole thing would collapse into itself, hiding forever the terrible future that hole represented.

  She had told the boys not to play there but knew they did. For Danny especially, it was irresistible, the mud perfect for shaping into river canyons and underground streams. He’d leveled out a lake near the summit and directed its runoff in every direction. The mountain was riddled with his bits of pipe, waterways, and spidery bridges.

  He spent hours building elaborate castles that clung to the cliffs, then knocked them down with mud bombs. Beau would join him for that, the pair of them yelling as their bombs burst and the castles crumbled.

  In the middle of April the Old Man got angry about it. Mrs. River heard him drive up in the truck and, looking out, saw him staring into the hole. Then he waded through the mud and came in, and he threw down his cap and said, “For crying out loud, can’t you keep an eye on those boys?”

  “Well, hello to you, too,” she said.

  “I can’t keep up with them,” he said. “I spend every night just shoveling out the dirt they’ve pushed in during the day. You can’t pour concrete onto dirt, Flo. I’ll never get finished at this rate.”

  “Tell them yourself to stay away,” she said, rather coldly.

  “I’ve told them until I’m blue in the face,” said Old Man River. “I’m not here to watch them, but you are. Is it too much to ask that you keep them out of the dirt? Is that too much for you, Flo?”

  He marched off to change his septic-pumping coveralls for his mud-digging coveralls. As he passed her again he said, “Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. There I am, breaking my back for you and the boys, and what do I get? Nothing.”

  He slammed the door behind him and went angrily into his hole, and after that she didn’t bother much with the boys. If they wanted to fill in the pit with their mud bombs and castles, that was fine with her.

  In the last week of April she was in the basement when she heard them at the game. She was writing away in her notebook, scribbling quickly. She was on Chapter 83 and her heroine, Cherry O’Day, was about to slap the daylights out of a meddlesome Yankee.

  She tried to ignore the shouts of the boys. But Danny’s voice came piercing through the walls, and she heard him yell, “Fire one! Fire two!”

  Mrs. River trudged up the stairs and looked out the window. Beau was firing the little rockets from his Christmas toy, and Danny was the target. He was dashing across the mountain, and both of them were laughing. She tapped on the window and caught their attention, then shook her finger and mouthed, “You be careful.”

  Back she went to the basement. She read what she’d written, and started midsentence…. damned Yankee!” screamed Cherry O’Day. Her bosom was heaving. Flo’s pencil scratched over the paper.

  From outside, through the walls and through the floor, came Danny’s voice again, now angry. “Get out of here! Buzz off, will you!”

  She imagined that Beau had finally hit him with one of the little rockets. So she got up and turned on the washing machine. Its rush of water hid the sounds, and she filled the page and turned to the next. Cherry O’Day was a redheaded polecat.

  She wrote and wrote, seeing it all in her mind, the carpet bagger holding up his arms as Cherry flew at him with her bodice ripped open. She didn’t hear the whirls and thumps of the washing machine, or the rattle of her chair; she didn’t hear anything but the slap-slap-slap of Cherry’s hands, and Cherry’s voice shouting out, “You vahmint! You Yankee!” She saw Cherry wild-eyed, her clothes flapping like flags, her buttoned boots kicking.

  Then it all faded away.

  Danny was screaming.

  twenty-six

  Mrs. River took the stairs three at a time, flying up from the basement, out through the house.

  She saw Danny standing on the mountain, bashing his own cheeks with his fists. “Beau!” he cried. “Beau!”

  She ran up toward him, shouting his name, but he didn’t seem to hear. Her feet sank into the mud, and one of her slippers came away, and then the other one. Twice she fell and caught herself, until her hands were black to the wrists and her fingers were like sausages of mud. “Danny!” she shrieked as she raced up the mountain. “Danny, what’s wrong?”

  He fell to his knees, still hitting himself. He kept shouting, but nothing she could understand.

  As she came up beside him and looked, she spotted Beau at the bottom of the pit, Beau lying all crooked on the concrete, lying in the rain and the mud. Her first thought was that the puddle of water was the color of peach blossoms. Then she saw that Beau had fallen onto one of the reinforcing bars, and that it had pierced right through his chest.

  “Get up!” she shouted at him. “Get up right now and don’t try to frighten me.”

  But Beau did not get up. He didn’t move. His eyes were partly open, his fingers curled nearly into fists. There was a rip in his shirt, and blood was seeping from his mouth.

  Mrs. River dropped to her knees. She grabbed Danny. She pulled him against her, and she felt him go all loose, like a bit of old rope. Then she screamed and screamed and screamed, until someone came to help her.

  It was Mrs. Elliot from up the street. She came running in her old-lady shoes, her spectacles swinging on the string round her neck. She tried to climb the mountain but couldn’t. All covered in mud, she stood at the bottom and shouted up, “What’s happened, Flo? What on earth has happened?”

  When a car came by, she ran and flagged it down—Creepy Colvig in his station wagon. He swerved right past the old woman
before he stopped. Then his brake lights flashed red, and Mrs. Elliot screamed at him, “You get out of that car! You come here and help!”

  He scaled the mountain. He took one look in the pit, then led Mrs. River and Danny down to the road.

  twenty-seven

  An ambulance came, its lights flashing, its siren whooping through the Hollow. Men in blue jackets went into the pit, and they fussed over Beau, but didn’t bring him out. They put a blanket right over him, right over his face, until only his fingers were poking out.

  The police came next. They came in two cars, the lights going round and round on their roofs, and the policemen looked in the pit but didn’t bother going down. They took out black notebooks and skinny little pens. They talked to Danny and Mrs. River. They asked Danny, “Can you tell us what happened, son?”

  Danny said he couldn’t remember what happened. A policeman said, “You’re not in trouble, son. No one’s going to get angry with you.”

  Then Danny said he did remember. He said, “Dopey was here. Dopey came and pushed him.”

  “That’s the Colvig boy,” said Mrs. River. She was holding Danny. “They live up the street.”

  The police went to the Colvig house, then came back and talked to Danny again. They said Mr. Colvig had told them his son hadn’t left the house that morning. “Were you just playing?” asked one of the policemen. “Is that it? Were you just playing, and your brother had an accident?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Danny. “I think it was Dopey.”

  The Old Man arrived half an hour later, roaring down the hill in the big truck, another police car in front of him with its siren blaring.

  Everyone who lived in Hog’s Hollow had gathered outside the gray house, and they all shuffled aside as Old Man River pulled up in the truck. A policeman got them to move away, and they retreated to the other side of the street.

  The Old Man came out of the truck looking like a figure made of chalk. His boots slipped in the mud as he hurried to Flo, who stood with Danny at the foot of the steps. He hugged them both at once, and then he shook and trembled, and looked up at the sky with his face all wet with tears.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “It was that pit,” she said. “It was that goddamned hole of yours.”

  twenty-eight

  For two hours Beau lay at the bottom of the pit, in the rain and the mud. Men in business suits took pictures of him, their flashbulbs popping out blasts of white light. Then the ambulance people zipped him into a black bag and carried him out.

  The men in their suits asked all the same questions that the police had asked. They stayed all that day and came back the next, and the next after that. They knocked at every door along the winding street, and they plodded up and down through the pit until their black shoes were just blobs of thick mud. They talked to the Colvigs and talked to the Rivers. Again and again, they asked Danny what happened.

  Danny stuck to his story. “We were playing,” he said. “Then Dopey came, and I don’t remember after that.” Whenever he tried to remember, it was like looking through a fog. Sometimes it was like looking into blackness, and he could never be sure what he really remembered and what he thought he remembered. “I think it was Dopey who pushed him,” he said.

  Creepy Colvig also came to the old gray house. Danny heard him shouting and, looking out, saw three men in suits holding him back. Creepy was like a big, raging bear, bellowing at them as he thrashed out with his arms. He was like a big bear trying to get into the house, and Danny—terrified that he would break loose from the men—hid trembling under the kitchen table.

  That evening, the men in suits sat in Danny’s living room. As the Old Man and Mrs. River watched, one of the men had his last talk with Danny. “Look,” he said, “it’s all up to you, son. If you say the Colvig boy pushed your brother, he’ll be put away. Maybe for a long time. Now, are you sure that’s what you want to happen, Danny? Are you absolutely sure about this?”

  Danny started crying. He thought of Creepy shouting on the lawn, and saw him twice as big and twice as mean as ever, towering over the men in their suits. He imagined that if he said yes right now and Dopey was put away, Creepy would come back and kill him. He was sure of it. Creepy would find him one day in the Hollow, or come one night to his bedroom, and kill him for what he had said.

  “Well, son?” asked the man. He was sitting on the sofa beside Danny, his arm on its back. His fingers, very lightly, touched Danny’s shoulder. “It’s all up to you. You’re the only one who was there.”

  Through his tears, Danny looked at Flo and said, “Oh, Mom!”

  The Old Man leapt up. “This has got to stop!” he shouted. “It’s got to stop right now. My boy’s dead; he’s gone. Don’t you think it’s punishment enough for the other one?”

  In a calm and quiet voice, the man in the suit answered. “It’s one more question, sir. Just one last question.” He turned again to Danny. “Did the Colvig boy push your brother?”

  Danny slowly shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t remember what happened.”

  The men in the suits went away then, and didn’t come back. It was decided that the cause of Beau’s death was “undetermined.”

  In the Hollow, people thought that Danny was paying dearly for a terrible accident. Mrs. Elliot put her pale hand on top of Flo’s and said, “I’m so sorry. Poor Danny must feel terrible.”

  Danny was there, and he didn’t argue. He wasn’t sure himself what had really happened anymore; it hardly felt real. He knew that Beau was dead, but he couldn’t stop thinking that someone would come along at any moment and tell him that it hadn’t happened at all, or shake him from a nightmare.

  It felt that way through the funeral service, and the burial, and the horrible afternoon when people came to the house and ate sandwiches and smoked cigarettes and told him what a brave little boy he was.

  His father made a phone call, and a yellow machine arrived. It pushed all the dirt into the pit, then trundled and clanked back and forth on its Caterpillar tracks. It smoothed the lawn to its old flatness, leaving the dirt pressed into long lines of little brown cakes.

  Danny found no pleasure in watching the machine. He found no pleasure in anything.

  It was terrible to lie in his bed at night and not have Beau there beside him. But it was worse to wake in the mornings and see that Beau’s bed hadn’t been touched, and to see the model rockets hanging from the ceiling, and Beau’s schoolbooks on the chair, where Beau had put them down on his last Friday. It was terrible to sit at the breakfast table, and terrible to watch TV.

  It was terrible to go back to school, and to have all the children look at him, all the teachers touch him. No one called him Polluto or Stinky River, but he almost wished they would. He took the big bridge there and back, trekking across the heights. More scared than ever that Dopey would find him, he never went along the trails.

  There was not a moment he didn’t think of Beau. Even asleep, he had Beau in his mind, and saw him in all sorts of dreams. He would dream that the front door opened, and there would be Beau. Or he would dream that he was outside, playing in the creek, and suddenly he would look up and see Beau walking down the path. Beau would smile and wave and call out, “Hey, Danny! I’m okay; look, I’m okay.” And sometimes Beau would seem just fine, and sometimes he would have an iron bar sticking out of his chest, but he wouldn’t know it was there.

  The house was so quiet that Danny could hardly stand it. He could sit in the living room with his parents and hear the cat clock in the kitchen shifting its eyes back and forth. They spent hours sitting there, with no one saying a word, his mother just sighing and sighing, the Old Man gazing at his hands. But, bad as that was, it was worse when his parents fought. Anything could set them off, and then they stood and screamed at each other, shouting about silly things like books put in the wrong places, or footprints on the floor. The one thing they never shouted about was Beau, but Danny had a feeling that it
was all about Beau. He thought his parents blamed each other for what had happened, and blamed themselves as well. They never came right out and blamed Danny, but they barely talked to him.

  On Sundays they went to the place where Beau was buried. They drove in Mrs. River’s Pontiac, though the Old Man did the driving. Mrs. River took a bunch of flowers, and the Old Man took scissors so that he could cut the clumps of grass around the stone. He would snip and snip, then get up and wander away.

  On the third Sunday, Danny took a rocket from Beau’s Rocket Base USA and buried it in the dirt. He poked a hole with his finger, then wedged the rocket into the grass. He could feel its nose cone sticking out. He wondered if Beau could see it.

  That day, on the way home, his parents talked to him for the first time about what had happened. The Old Man started it. “Look, Danny boy,” he said, “we’re not blaming you.” And Danny knew then that they were. “We’re not blaming you at all,” said the Old Man. “We just want to know what went on that day.”

  “Can you tell us?” asked his mother. “We just want to know what happened.”

  “I’ve told you,” said Danny. “I was playing with Beau.” It made him nearly dizzy to peer back through the fog and the blackness. “We were playing rockets,” he said, “and Beau was trying to shoot me. Then Dopey came from nowhere.”

  The Old Man and Mrs. River turned their heads and frowned at each other, then turned away again.

  “Danny, I didn’t see the Colvig boy,” said Mrs. River, facing straight ahead.

  “Then he musta come after you looked,” said Danny. “I think he wanted one of the rockets; that’s why he came. But I wouldn’t give it to him. He tried to push me in the pit. It was nearly me that fell in the pit.”

  “I don’t remember that boy ever coming to play with you,” said Mrs. River.