Saturday at 6:00am, black dark out as rotten teeth, and Teddy, age thirteen, should’ve been asleep. Instead, he was kneeling on the bathroom floor. He’d drunk a few beers last night, hanging with Matt Sutphin down by the train tracks, right where the old dog was dead. The rotting head lay between ties, and the Sutphin boy, laughing, had picked it up by the remaining ear and tossed it his way. The shock of it was still with him. The dog had been dead a month at least, and crows had had at it, the blazing sun of Indian summer, but dead dog or not, this was the place where anyone who wanted to drink and not get caught by parents or police came. Eyes closed, Teddy could see it all—the tracks, the ties, the dog in two, Matt Sutphin reaching into a bag and saying, “Here you go, champ, just one more, and here’s a church key, too,” and Teddy taking that key, punching a hole on each side, and tipping it up—
“Boy,” his father, James, called to him. “You done in there, yet?”
“Just about. Be out soon.”
And then Teddy vomited as quietly as he could, aiming for porcelain, dodging that dog head, the smell as it tumbled past, bits slopping off as he sidestepped, his stomach spasming. Was it three beers he’d had? Four. It was four at least. Pabst. Falstaff. Maybe both, Matt mixing it up inside that sopping wet bag he’d brought along in the dark.
“I’ll be in the car,” James said, and Teddy said he’d be right there. James had turned Teddy’s bedroom light on at 5:30am. “You’re coming with me today,” he’d said, and Teddy knew what that meant, and why—he’d dragged in only five hours before, and James had called out and asked where had he been all night? He couldn’t remember his answer, just that he had fallen into bed. Wobbly, he stood. Washed his face. In the bedroom he pulled on his pants and found a sweater, glanced at the homework undone on his desk, pulled on socks, shoes. Put a hand over his mouth and breathed—which sent him back to the bathroom for a good scrubbing, looking at bloodshot eyes as he brushed away, mad dog foaming and flecks flicking the mirror, taking his washcloth to it, wishing his mother had not left them. Little brother Zach got stuck staying at their grandparents’; Teddy, old enough to stay home by himself, had just got drafted to make the trip.
He walked out to the curb and James, at the wheel of his ’58 Ford, looked up at him and grinned. His reflection shimmered into view, face doughy and hair making oblique shapes. He found his cap in a jacket pocket, screwed it on tight. Crawled into the back seat mumbling please just let me sleep, his hand touching something soft, a pillow and blanket, right there. Arranging himself, he did not thank his father for his foresight as the car moved away from the curb. What he did do was dream—crazy things, bright colors, strange objects. He dreamed for a hundred miles: he and eight boys running bases in the snow. A preacher shouting things from a pulpit in a bank lobby. One about his mother in danger somehow, hunters in their yard, which made him jerk awake.
“You okay, boy,” James said from the front.
“Fine,” Teddy mumbled. He was trying to catch his breath.
“You were calling for your mother.”
Teddy tried but he could not remember the dream. He fell back asleep and by noon they were deep into Kentucky. His father had stopped once for gas; the second stop was for lunch. “Come on, boy,” James said, and Teddy dragged behind him up grimy stairs through a grimy door to a grimy booth. He ordered a fried egg sandwich and a shake. Chips. His father, wearing that public face he wore for school, ordered meatloaf and mashed potatoes. White bread, black coffee. “Get a side of corn on there, too,” James said, and when the girl asked if he wanted sliced or creamed, he said, “The former.” “Sliced?” She was guessing, and James smiled and said yes. She smiled and took their order back to the kitchen.
“Pretty girl.”
Teddy didn’t feel good enough to notice how pretty the girl was, just that she wore the same checkered apron with a knot cinched at the waist that girls wore back at the diner in Tippleton. If he were back home, he could have slept till eleven, eaten a bowl of cereal with raisins, and be dug in on his homework. “Did you really need me on this trip?” he asked, staring at the place mat.
“Look at me when you’re talking, son.”
He looked, hoping he didn’t look as half drunk as he felt.
“No,” James said. “But I didn’t want to leave you back home.”
“Why not?”
“Because you spend too much time running with that Sutphin boy. They’re about to send him away, you know. If reform school doesn’t get him, a military academy will.”
“His parents can’t afford that.”
“I know.”
That was James for you, tuned in to the various doings of parents with their wayward brood. Being a civics teacher did that. Teddy didn’t necessarily like Matt Sutphin, but he was different: the one to swing out on a vine over the edge of the mountain when they were deep in the woods, a bunch of them. Teddy had too much sense for that. Matt Sutphin was also the one to hop a sled in winter and carom down a long, steep hillside and not wipe out. He stole bases in Little League like a pinch runner in the pros, and he whipped Teddy’s ass repeatedly at one-on-one basketball—on wood, asphalt, or dirt. Teddy’d come home with a long face many times after Matt Sutphin contests, and James would be the one to see his son drag in. “Don’t worry, son,” he’d said a dozen times. “You’ll catch up, some boys mature faster.” Teddy was waiting for that—the catching up part.
James looked out the window of the diner; said, “Not a bad day out there.”
What Teddy saw was sunlight fissuring off farm trucks, a shoddy job of asphalting beneath their tires, and a two-lane that needed fresh paint. He took a bite of his sandwich. His appetite was trying to return—the food settling his stomach somewhat—but he couldn’t drink but half that shake. He asked the girl his father liked so much for ginger ale; smiling, she brought him a small glass.
“Quite a mix you got going there,” James said.
“Home cooking would be my preference,” Teddy said, and James winced.
Teddy was the first one home from school the day his mother left, and he read the note that began, “Dear James, I am leaving town with Walter and don’t plan to come back anytime soon.” A private detective his father knew tracked her down to East Tennessee, Walter’s summer home. Walter Gates taught college biology in Charleston, an hour from Tippleton, but he had taken the fall semester off to investigate the migratory patterns of North American birds. Teddy didn’t know the names of more than half a dozen birds, the ones you saw all the time, but what bugged him was that Walter had been a friend to them all, the whole family, and now he’d taken his mother away from his father, and that just seemed terribly wrong.
“They should kill him,” Matt Sutphin had said.
“‘They’ who?”
“People,” he’d said, and when Teddy pressed him to say which people, Matt Sutphin punched him in the stomach and doubled him over. Teddy didn’t speak to him for days, but then Matt said he had a bag of beer, and that was Friday after school, which was just yesterday, Teddy realized as he stepped back inside the car to head farther south. The waitress waved to them through the big glass window in the front, and James smiled and waved and told Teddy he should try to date a girl like that one day. Teddy got a good look this time; she looked something like his ma: long dark hair, thin limbs, lean face, high cheekbones.
“Buckle up,” James said, and Teddy did but he made sure the belt wasn’t too tight because lunch was doing strange things inside his gut. His father was the only dad in Tippleton who had opted for seatbelts when he bought the Ford. The other fathers called them a ploy, Detroit trying to make a few bucks. They didn’t read the reports that showed how many lives they saved, but his father had, and he’d talked it over with his mother, who had agreed it was better to have wrinkled clothes and feel a little bit confined any time you rode. “You miss her?” James asked, driving down the two-lane to the ramp that merged onto the interstate. Teddy did miss her, but it was not without qualification. “Mostly,” he said, and James laughed. I-75, as it turned out, ran for only another fifteen miles. There was just no more road, and the exit they had to take put them right back on the poorly painted two-lane, not nearly as nice and not nearly as straight.
“Check that map, son.”
Teddy pulled it out of the glove and looked.
“You see where we are?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it show?”
“Dashed line. Dashed another hundred miles at least.”
“Well, then, settle in, boy.”
He tried. Curve after curve, and James turned on the radio, twisting the knob till he found a signal out of Lexington. A Lesley Gore song finished up, followed by a Beach Boys. Teddy didn’t care for either one; they just made his head hurt. His father turned the radio off and said, “I do not need teenage love songs accompanying me all through east Kentucky down into the state of Tennessee.”
October sunlight flickered into their car through the tall straight trees beside the road. He had to reach for his father’s sunglasses from the glove box, and James put them on, and Teddy noticed how handsome his father was, maybe for the first time. People often told Teddy how good-looking James was, but he never really saw it before. His father had not shaved and the stubble was dark against his salt and pepper hair. He had a noble profile, a strong jaw. How could his mother leave a man who looked like that?
“Tell me something,” James said.
“What?”
“Just what do you and that Sutphin boy do all the time?”
“Nothing,” Teddy said. His father was trying to get at something.
“Where do you go?”
“We just walk around and talk.”
“What do you talk about?”
“I don’t know. Girls. Teachers.”
“Do you ever talk about me?”
“No. Why would we?”
“A man’s wife leaves him, people talk. They want to know why.”
Teddy knew that that was the case. He’d talked about it with Matt Sutphin, so his father had figured it right.
“Do people ever tell you I’m queer?” he asked, and Teddy didn’t know what to say to that. No, no one ever had, but why was he even asking? So he didn’t say anything, and they drove another twenty miles and slipped over the border into Tennessee. The highway rose way up, through winding mountains taller than the ones back home. The trees were much farther ahead here, leaves having fallen across the road, and birds flew from the tops of them over the highway and back. Quite a number zipped back and forth just above the road, about the level of the headlights, and one thunked against the car, and his father pulled the Ford over to the berm of the road and wrenched a blackbird out of the grill by the wing and tossed it into the woods. “I hate that,” he said when he got back inside. “That was a red-winged blackbird. Might be my favorite bird.” Teddy thought about it. He never thought to have a favorite bird, but the dead bird reminded him of the dead dog head, and his stomach started to churn. Maybe it was the ginger ale he’d had, but he could taste egg and had to suddenly roll down his window. “Let it out, boy,” James said. He did just that, and then some. His father had to stop in the first town they came to, at a gas station which had a water hose rolled up on a big wheel on the side of the building, and Teddy peed and looked at the rubber machine labeled “For Gentlemen Only.” He thought he might buy one but figured it would only make an outline against his pants when he sat in the car, and James would not hesitate to ask what in the world it was he had there in his breeches. Lord, God: Why had his father asked if anyone told him he was queer? He could not get that out of his head, and he had to work hard at not pairing it up with the fact that his mother had left.
At 3:00pm they reached a town called Javin that had a road that cut east, up over a tall mountain. “She’s up there,” his father said. They took a left at the stoplight and headed up the hill. Near the top was a dirt road, and his father pulled over and took a small map from his shirt pocket—a handmade thing, drawn and signed by the detective he had hired. “This is it,” he said. They drove down the dirt road two miles, a slow road with lots of small potholes, some with just a trace of water. Maybe half the leaves were gone from the trees, mostly oak, but some beech trees and a few willows, too. Lots of pine poking up farther down the steep mountain. Finally they came to two houses, a long ranch house to the left, where his father was looking, and a two-story home to the right, where a girl sat in a swing on the front porch rocking gently and staring at them. She was maybe sixteen and she had blond hair and wore short sleeves and jeans. It was seventy-five degrees and the porch got the afternoon sun, which was striking her long legs. His father pulled into the driveway of the ranch house, and now the girl was behind him and he couldn’t see her. What he could see was the house of Walter Gates, the family friend who had taken his mother from his father.
“That’s his house?”
“Yes, it is.”
Teddy took a hard look at it. It was okay if you liked long and flat, but the roof was missing tiles here and there. Leaves were hanging out of the gutter. The wood that limned the house needed painting. The screen door had been kicked out at the bottom.
“She’s inside.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been married to her fifteen years. I know.”
The logic of it escaped Teddy. “Tell her to come home,” he said.
“You wait here,” James said, and he got out and walked up to the door and knocked.
From where he sat, Teddy couldn’t see who opened the door. But his father said some things and then, without looking his way, stepped inside and the door closed. He sat there a long time and nothing happened. He could see no one moving inside, and all he had a view of was the living room, an arm of a chair or sofa being about the only thing he could make out. A table lamp was on. His window was down, and all he could hear was wind and birds calling to one another. Robins skittered over the lawn. A maple leaf blew inside the Ford and slapped his face. Then another. That’s when he got out and stretched and tried to get a look at that girl. He worked it casual, looking from the side, but then he tried a full-on and she was looking right at him.
“You want a Coke?” she called to him.
“What kind?”
“We got Pepsi,” she said. “Some grape, maybe an orange.”
“Could I have that orange?” Teddy said.
The girl said she’d see if there was any still, and she disappeared inside. His stomach felt okay now. A minute later the girl came back out and walked across the gravel road to him with an orange soda. She had a Pepsi for herself. He said, “Hi, I’m Teddy,” and she told him her name was Eunice and asked Teddy where he was from, and when he told her, she said, “Then that woman who’s been here the past couple of weeks must be your mother, because she’s from Tippleton, too.”
Teddy didn’t say anything. He took a long drink of the orange soda. “This is delicious,” he said, and Eunice looked at him and smiled.
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” he lied.
“You’re twelve if you’re a day,” she said.
“Thirteen,” he said, and she nodded.
“How about you?”
“Fourteen.”
Teddy was surprised.
“Do you know Mr. Gates?”
“Down here every summer. Ornithologist. That was your father who went inside?”
He nodded.
“I imagine they’re having quite a conversation.”
“I guess so,” he said.
They moved around and sat on the hood of the car, with their feet resting on the chrome bumper. He’d seen teenagers do this at the ice cream place in summer, but he’d never had the chance to do it himself. He took another swig of that soda.
“I wish you all lived here instead of Mr. Gates,” she said.
“Why?”
“Well, you seem nice. And your dad looked like a real nice man. And your mom’s okay, though I can’t see him and your mother being married. Yet, here you are, and all. So, there’s that. But I don’t like the way Mr. Gates looks at me.”
Teddy knew what she meant. There was a gym coach at his school who got in trouble for looking at girls wrong, that’s what people said. The girls were eleven, twelve, and thirteen years of age, and people said it was deplorable, and that’s when “deplorable” entered his vocabulary. He told Matt Sutphin his behavior was deplorable when he flung that dog’s head at him.
Then the door to Walter Gates’s house opened and James walked out of it, pulling the door closed and looking more than a little distraught. When he saw Teddy and Eunice, he tried to brighten up.
“Well, hello, young lady,” he said.
“I’m Eunice,” she said. “I live across the road. I’m Dr. Albright’s daughter.”
“I see.”
Eunice held out her hand to his father, and the two of them shook and smiled. Girls back home never did such a thing, and his father talked to her like she was grown up—about her father and what he did, about living up here on top of a mountain, how was it? And Teddy could gauge by his father’s talking to Eunice politely and the fact that his mother had not appeared that she was not coming back home with them.
“Dad, was she in there? Did you talk?”
“She was, son. Go on inside. She wants to talk to you.”
Teddy looked at the house, the front door.
“Where is she?”
“Kitchen table. Step inside and then turn to the right. You’ll see her.”
He handed Eunice his bottle. “Thank you so much,” he said.
She smiled. He wished he were older so he’d know what to do—shake her hand, hug her, give her a wink, who knew? Then he walked up to the door and stepped inside Walter Gates’s house. As good a friend as Mr. Gates had been to the family, there had never been any kind of invitation to this place down through the years—not that Teddy knew about anyway. There was a smell when he stepped inside, an old smell. Damp maybe. There were bird books all over the coffee table, and in the corner Teddy could see a big work desk, elevated, with a barstool in front of it. The table was stacked with books, and it looked like a diploma was hanging on the wall alongside a row of paintings of birds.
“Teddy?”
His mother was calling him, and he walked inside to the kitchen table, thinking Mr. Gates would be there, too, but he wasn’t. It was just his mom who sat there. Her hair style was different—short, stubby even, a blunt cut. “I took scissors to it,” she said, seeing what he saw. “I just got tired of it draping down across my shoulders.” She wore a plain blouse and a light blue sweater. She was drinking a cup of coffee. “I’m trying to wake up,” she said. “It was a late night last night. Too much alcohol. You know I drink, right?”
He knew. When he was six he found a bottle of vodka on the pantry shelf behind the pancake syrup and vinegar bottle. He’d check there from time to time, and a bottle was always there, nearly full sometimes, nearly empty others.
“Yes, I know.”
“Have a seat.”
“Where’s Mr. Gates?”
“Out in the woods somewhere with a pair of binoculars.”
“How often’s that happen?”
“Daily. You want something to eat?”
“Huh uh.”
“Drink?”
“Just had an orange soda.”
“I saw. She’s a nice girl. Too old for you, though.”
“I know that,” he said.
“No need to get testy,” she said. She looked out the window, toward where the Ford was parked. “Your father is a very good man. You know that, right?”
“Sure.”
“He’s been a good father to you and your brother.”
Teddy agreed.
“It’s just, I needed a little break.”
“Do you love Mr. Gates more than you love Dad?”
“Walter Gates?” She laughed. “He’s just a friend,” she said. “We used to date when I was in high school.”
Teddy tried to rearrange it in his mind. He couldn’t quite do it. “Where do you sleep?”
“Guest room.”
“Show me.”
She smiled and took him back into the living room, where he’d stood, and then she turned and took him down the hallway to the very end. “That’s his room,” she said, and Teddy saw. The bed was unmade, dirty clothes on the floor. Drawers half open. A mess.
“Does he ever clean?”
“Huh uh. Come on.” She went down the hall to the other end. They passed a bathroom, to which she pointed and said, “Help yourself, if you need.” Then they stood looking in at her neatly made bed. The tidy chest of drawers. A vanity with her make-up and perfume. A writing desk, where her purse lay. She had a set of stationary at the center of the desk, unopened.
“Is that to write me?”
“To write you or anyone.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“I told you. I needed time away.”
“Do you still love Dad?”
“In a way.”
“Does he love you?”
“In his way, yes.”
Teddy didn’t know what to say.
“You’ll understand it someday.”
He wanted to tell her what his father had told him earlier, about being queer, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“I’m sober today,” she said. “First day in a long time. I figured it was about the time your father would make his way down here. I didn’t know he’d bring you, but I’m glad to see you, even if you do look a little bit hungover.”
Shame knotted through him, even though he knew that wasn’t what she intended.
“Don’t feel bad, honey. It runs in the family. But don’t let it get you. Be careful. And watch who you run with.”
When she said that, Teddy knew they’d talked about him.
“Your father wants to head back. You should get on out there.”
“I just …”
“What?”
“It’s good to see you.”
She hugged him. Then she walked him to the door. On the end table lay a short note in his father’s script: “Walter, take care of her. James.” “I’ll write,” she said. “Write me back?”
He said he would. The door closed behind him, and he saw his father sitting on the Ford’s hood. The girl was gone. “Sent her home,” he said. “You talk?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. Let’s get back.”
They got in the car and backed out of the long driveway. Teddy scanned the windows for his mother, but the late afternoon sunlight was such that they showed only a reflection of the yard, right down to the Ford backing away from the house with a middle-aged man and his son sitting stone-faced in the front seat. For the first time he felt bad that he had gotten drunk the evening before with Matt Sutphin, and at the very end of the long driveway, his father turned the wheel and just drove. “Buckle up, son,” James said. They saw an orange-jacketed Walter Gates stepping out of the woods at the end of the long property. He looked in their direction, paused, and started to wave, but they kept their eyes on the road like he wasn’t even there.
