The World Made Straight (15 page)

“Miss you at school,” Shank said. “I got no one to sit with in detention.” Shank waved his hand at the other guys. “These boys ain't outlaws like we used to be. You remember when Slick Abernathy called us that in his office, said we'd end up in prison if we didn't change?”

Irritable as he felt, Travis still had to smile.

“We did raise some hell, didn't we? I bet Slick won't ever forget me.”

“No way,” Shank said. A souped-up Mustang drove by, the driver revving his engine as he passed. A couple of the guys cheered when the driver flattened the accelerator pedal, left two wavy smears of rubber in his wake.

“I reckon you really are a outlaw now,” Shank said, “what with you and Leonard in cahoots. We're liable to see your ugly mug in the post office before long. I figure to turn you in and get a big reward.”

“Maybe it's already up there,” Wesley said. “That's how come he's got those shades on.”

“Come on, son,” Shank said, “tell us some stories of the
cutthroats and desperadoes you've been riding herd on, what kind of big dope deals you got going down.”

He liked Shank calling him an outlaw, liked the respectful way the other boys looked at him as they waited for him to tell what it was like to live with a drug pusher and bootlegger. Travis thought about saying he and Leonard were like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, partners in crime and good buddies. Fast as his mind was working he could've come up with all sorts of bullshit. Instead he just gave a little smile, like there was stuff going on but he wasn't saying.

“So what you got stashed in that truck?” Wesley asked. “I wouldn't mind getting high.”

“Nothing but fishing equipment.”

“Not even a nickel bag?” Shank asked.

“No.”

“Maybe you ain't quite the outlaw we were thinking,” Shank said.

“I don't give a damn what you think,” Travis said. Shank's words were like gnats swarming around his head. He wondered if you were supposed to take just one of the pills.

For a few moments they watched the vehicles pass before them.

“Leonard been practicing to defend his title?” asked a younger boy nicknamed June Bug.

“He shoots a few cans every once in a while,” Travis said, glad to have the subject changed. “Good as he is he don't need much practice.”

“I don't know why those other fellows even try,” Shank said. “They might as well hand Leonard their entry fee when
they show up. Not even shoot so they don't waste their bullets.”

A Dodge filled with girls passed. The windows were down and the girls waved and shouted. Shank lifted his arm in a beckoning wave, but they kept going.

“That girl driving,” Shank said. “I saw her tubing in the river last summer and she didn't have enough clothes on to wad a shotgun.”

“If I had been there I'd of asked her to go skinny-dipping,” June Bug said.

“I bet that's what you'd have done,” Shank said, rolling his eyes.

“June Bug, even if she'd got naked you wouldn't have known what to do next,” Wesley said. “You'd have froze up like a deer caught in headlights.”

“That ain't so,” Shank said. “June Bug would have got in the water and told her he hoped she didn't mind that he'd kept his clothes on.”

While the other boys were laughing Travis slid off the hood. He acted like he was going to piss, but once behind the building he just walked around the back lot, kicking empty motor-oil cans, throwing a few rocks. Doing something for a few minutes besides sitting and listening to a bunch of stupid talk. Travis paused and placed his hand on his chest, was surprised he could not feel a wild battering against his ribs. He was worried about his heart, afraid it could only take so much before exploding. Shank met him on the way back, motioned for Travis to sit with him beside the gas pumps so they could talk alone.

“So Lori giving you what you need?”

Travis stared at the black smears the Mustang had made. He wished it was his truck that had made those marks and he was now someplace else. But where? He seemed to have run out of places he could go. Some of the other guys shouted as the girls in the Dodge drove back by.

“I bet you hadn't even rubbed her titties yet,” Shank added.

“I'm getting what I want,” Travis lied.

Shank grinned at him.

“In your dreams maybe. Boy, the rate you're going you'll be laid up in the old folks' home before she puts out.”

“I've got to go,” Travis said, standing up.

“I'm just trying to help you out,” Shank said. “Anyway, little as you come around these days I'd think you'd want to stay awhile and visit.” Shank no longer smiled. “If you ain't careful I may get to thinking you don't have time for your best buddy anymore.”

Travis wanted to tell Shank it wasn't that way at all. But he was afraid to say a single word, because once he started he didn't think he'd be able to stop. He'd tell Shank how hard living away from home could be, how scared he was sometimes because it was like there'd been a net beneath him that was now gone. He'd probably start bawling like a baby before he got through. Besides, for all the talking he'd already done today little good had come of it. He thought how much better the day would have been without words, catching the trout, laying with Lori in the meadow, even sitting on a truck hood with his friends. All those were good, until Lori and Shank opened their mouths and ruined them. Even Dena. It was her words
that had brought him to the back bedroom. Words seemed to ruin everything.

Travis got in his truck and cranked the engine.
What can be spoken is already dead in the heart.
That was something Leonard had said last week, quoting some philosopher. At the time he'd had no notion of what that philosopher was getting at, but now those words went barb deep.

The sun had finally begun to nestle into the folds of the mountains. He was only supposed to have gained an hour but this day seemed like forever. A flock of redbirds flew across a cornfield, bright against the gloaming. The birds compressed and expanded, lifted a few feet higher and compressed again as if trying to mirror his own racing heart. Travis rolled down the window, hoping the brisk air would make his body feel something beside the pills.

The road began a long climb that ended where Harbin Road intersected with Highway 25. He could go home. It was as easy as making a left turn. That's what his mother wanted, said as much during her weekly shopping trips, trips Travis knew she arranged to coincide with his work schedule. They always talked a few minutes, about his sister and her husband, his grandmother's health, even his studying for a GED, which had done a lot to change his mother's mind about him living with Leonard. Almost every time he saw her, her eyes teared up and she told him she wished he'd come back home. She told him his room was just as he left it. Travis had clothes and a bed there. His fishing equipment and rifle were in the truck. He wouldn't even have to go back to Leonard's trailer.

But not once had she brought a single word from his father.
It was like the old man refused to acknowledge that Travis existed anymore, the same as when he'd driven by the grocery store's parking lot. Travis remembered all the work they'd done together in the fields, his father never noticing how straight he made his rows or how good Travis was at spotting cutworms and hornworms, just noticing things done wrong like stepping on a plant or leaving a hoe in a furrow. Then the work inside the barn come harvest time, Travis hanging thirty-pound sticks of tobacco while balancing on a crossbeam no wider than a railroad tie. That was the hardest work of all, not just hanging the plants but the resin sticking to you like tar, flecks of tobacco burning your eyes. Dangerous work, because it was easy enough to slip off a beam and end up in a wheelchair like William Revis. Travis had done good work up there in the rafters. Others had said so, men who'd spent time on those crossbeams. But it was the same as in the fields, his daddy only noticing what didn't suit him—Travis taking a break when he could hardly raise his arms anymore, or a plant with barn burn because it had been hung too close to another.

Travis figured a couple of beers might help mellow him out, so at the next crossroads he turned right and drove until he came to Dink's. The bootlegger met him at the door, took what money Travis had with him and brought back three beers.

“I figured five dollars would get me a six-pack,” Travis said.

“You figured wrong,” Dink said. “That price is just for my regulars, and you ain't been around in months.”

Once on the main road Travis drove north before turning onto an old skid trail lined with second-growth hardwoods. He
parked and pulled the tab on one of the cans, poured its contents down his throat like vital medicine. He drank the second almost as fast. Soon the alcohol began taking the edge off the pills, or maybe the pills were wearing off now on their own. Whichever, he no longer felt as agitated. He opened the last beer and watched darkness seal up the last gaps in the branches. When the can was empty he did not leave. Dena wouldn't miss just three pills, he was sure of that, but if he went back now Leonard would realize he was buzzed, might look closer and notice how dilated his pupils were. Nothing good could come of that. He'd wait another hour or two.

Travis leaned back farther in the seat and closed his eyes. Think about something good, he told himself, and settled his mind on the fish he'd caught, not the big rainbow but the speckled trout. Large enough to eat but Travis was glad he'd let it go. He thought of the orange pectoral fins spread open like small bright fans as the trout hid under the bank, safe from otters and kingfishers, anything else that might snatch it from the water. The speckled trout would be sore-mouthed and wary from the hook, but soon enough it would move out from the undercut and feed again on a crawfish or nymph, maybe a grasshopper that survived first frost. Then as winter came on it would feed less, stay near the pool's bottom where the water wasn't as cold. The water a still, dark place becoming darker and even more still as a caul of ice settled over the pool, shutting the trout off from the rest of the world. A dark, silent place, Travis knew, and the trout down there, its metabolism slowed, as close to hibernation as a fish could get. Dogs
dreamed. He'd seen them make soft woofs and kick their back legs, eyes closed as they chased a rabbit or coon through the dark woods of their sleep. Travis imagined the speckled trout under the ice, rising in its dreams to sip bright-yellow mayflies from the surface, dreaming of spring as it waited out winter.

That morning when his principal, Dennis Anderson, and the sheriff's deputy came to the classroom door, Leonard believed something terrible had happened to Emily. He was so exhausted and depressed that his mind could summon forth no other reason. A month had passed since the separation. Each afternoon he drove across town to a run-down apartment complex that rented by the week. His landlord was a laconic Cambodian immigrant who demanded payment in cash, the neighbors grizzled drunks whose lives Leonard suspected were fast-forwards of his own. Sleep came only if he drank enough to spiral into darkness, and he always woke an hour or two before daylight. What dreams he had were garish and violent, more like fevered hallucinations.

When the principal motioned him to come into the hallway, Leonard had been unable to move from behind his desk. An image from the worst of his nightmares—Emily prostrate in a
hospital bed, a sinister array of tubes embedded in her flesh—seized his mind with the certainty of prophecy.

Dennis Anderson motioned again, spoke his name aloud as students shifted in their seats and began whispering. Finally the sheriff's deputy came into the classroom and took him by the arm. As the deputy led him out, Leonard looked at his class and saw curiosity and concern. Except for Robert Tidwell, one of the students he'd given a zero to for cheating. Robert slouched in his seat, legs sprawled before him, smirking.

“They found marijuana in your car,” the principal said.

“So nothing is wrong with Emily?” Leonard asked.

“No,” Anderson replied. “This is about you.”

“I have to handcuff him,” the deputy said.

“I know,” the principal replied, “but let's wait until we're outside.”

For a few moments all he felt was relief, even as they walked to the patrol car. The officer recited Leonard's rights, then removed handcuffs from his belt and motioned for him to hold his hands out. The steel made an audible click as it secured his wrists.

“I'll let Kera know what's happened as soon as the class period ends,” Anderson said. “Do you want her to come to the station now?”

“No. Tell her to come after school and not to bring Emily.”

The deputy took his arm and opened the rear door.

“Watch your head,” he said, and guided Leonard into the backseat. Leonard looked up at Anderson.

“Robert Tidwell did this. He's getting me back for giving him a zero.”

“How can you know that?”

“The way he was acting in class just now.”

“I'll check into it,” the principal said. “But that's not much to go on.”

As they pulled out of the lot, Leonard watched Anderson walk rapidly toward the school's main entrance. He wondered if the principal would confront Tidwell directly or wait until the boy's father had been informed.

After they searched and fingerprinted him, took his belt, and confiscated the contents of his pockets, the deputy led Leonard to a vacant holding cell, its one piece of furniture a sagging urine-soaked cot. On the wall outside, a clock's hands moved beneath wire mesh, even time imprisoned here. It was fourth period, his European history class. If he were at school, he'd be talking about the French Revolution. Trying to sound coherent, make it to the last bell so he could go back to the apartment and drink. Leonard lay down on the cot and closed his eyes and did not open them again until he heard footsteps approaching his cell. Following the deputy were his principal and Dr. Trevor, superintendent of the DeKalb County schools.