Exley (26 page)

My dad smiled at me. It was the first time he'd smiled at me since he'd lied about taking me to the zoo. “Why don't we just stay until halftime,” he said.

I was about to say that would be fine when the old lady, the one who was sitting by herself at the table, came wobbling over to the bar. Her juice glass was empty, although I'm guessing from the way she was wobbling that it hadn't been filled with juice. She was wearing a dress that had once been nice but was now frayed and filthy; it looked like something she'd worn to church fifty years ago. The lady put her glass on the bar next to me. She smelled like wine and Band-Aids and old perfume. I turned my head to say hello and saw she had this angry look on her face. It was the same look Mrs. C. always had on her face right before she told me to use my mine-duh.

“That boy is too young to be in a place like this,” she told my dad.

This wasn't a question, which was maybe why my dad didn't answer. He put one hand on my head and ruffled my hair and held his beer can
with his other hand and then drank from it with his mouth, and then he looked up at the Giants game on TV. This seemed to make the lady even madder. “You should be ashamed of yourself, bringing a boy his age into a place like this,” she said. “Don't you feel ashamed?”

Later, when we got home, Mother looked up from her work and asked my dad, “How was the zoo?”

“It wasn't so bad,” he said.

She nodded like that was the answer she expected of him. Then she turned to me. It was like she was sniffing me with her eyes. She asked, “How about you, Miller?” But I knew what Mother was really asking. She was asking, “Your dad has turned me into a ______, Miller; the question is, what are you going to turn me into?”

“The zoo was fun,” I said. “I liked the animals.”

“Oh, Miller,” she said. She looked away from me and back toward her work; her shoulders slumped like she'd just been beaten at something, which was exactly what my dad had looked like after the lady in the bar asked if he didn't feel ashamed. He'd drained his beer and placed it gently on the bar, then took his hand off my head and reached into his pocket for his keys. I could hear the sad little muted jingling of the keys as he pulled them out. My dad wasn't looking at me or her or the TV or anything. I glanced up at the TV, hoping there was something good going on there with the Giants that would cheer my dad up. But the other team was jumping around and the Giants players were standing there staring at the ground, shoulders slumped, looking defeated, just like my dad, just like Mother did later on when I told her I liked the animals in the zoo.

“Lady, of course I feel ashamed,” my dad finally said to the lady in the bar. “If I didn't feel ashamed, then I might not feel anything at all.”

 

 

I
needed to go to Alexandria Bay to find Exley, and in order to do that, I'd have to skip school. And everyone knows the best way to skip school is to report first thing in the morning to homeroom, so that when you don't show up to classes after that, they think—if you've been an otherwise good kid who has not already proved he's a class skipper—that you're getting sick in the bathroom, or you're in the nurse's office, or you're lost or something.

But something funny happened when I went to school the next morning. Dr. Pahnee was waiting for me, right in front of the stairs that led from the sidewalk to the school's main entrance. He was wearing the same clothes—faded blue jeans and a blue corduroy shirt and his clunky work shoes—that he'd worn the day before; they didn't look dirty, but they did look a little ragged. Dr. Pahnee looked a little ragged, too: he had big bags under his eyes, and his beard wasn't trimmed and was headed up north on his cheeks, toward his baggy eyes. And he was smoking! A cigarette! I wouldn't have thought he was the kind of guy who smoked. But now that he was smoking, he did look like that kind of guy. I guess you don't know what kind of guy you are until you start acting like one. Smoking was against school rules, of course, but the kids going into school didn't seem to notice. They didn't seem to notice Dr. Pahnee at all. It was like he stood there every morning. They just walked around him, like he was a teacher or a pole. But still, he made me nervous, the way he was standing there, staring at me in an angry way.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Do you know the real French word for ‘penis'?” he asked.

I didn't know the real French word for “penis,” and I didn't know why he was asking me if I did, either. Something weird was going on, and I
didn't know what it was, and that made me feel a little panicky, which was maybe why I blurted out: “I thought I saw someone in my living room last night.”

“You did?” he said. Dr. Pahnee was still staring at me, but the stare was a little less angry and a little more something else. “Who was it?”

“I thought it was my dad, at first,” I said. “But then I thought it was someone else.”

“Someone else,” Dr. Pahnee said.

“It was probably nobody,” I said.

“I think you're probably right,” Dr. Pahnee said. I waited for him to say something more about the French word for “penis,” but he didn't. A big gust of wind hit him in the face, blowing his hair straight up. He looked like a rooster. The wind also put out his cigarette. He flicked it off to the side with his thumb and index finger and it happened to hit Harold, who was walking by, right in the pant leg.

“Hey!” Harold said. But then he looked at Dr. Pahnee and touched the spot on his lip where the second-to-last guy who wasn't Exley had hit him.
This is a different guy
, I almost told Harold when I realized that this morning Dr. Pahnee
did
look a little like that guy, and he looked a little like Exley, too. Harold scurried away from us and into the school, and a second later I could hear the bell ring. It was the bell that rang a minute before the other bell rang. I could never remember whether the second bell meant that you were late, or if it meant that you were right on time. In any case, I'd never been later than the first bell. I could see Harold's face through the window in one of the doors. His eyes were telling me,
Hurry
.

“What are you doing here?” I asked again.

“I want you to see something,” Dr. Pahnee said.

“What?”

But Dr. Pahnee didn't say. He lit another cigarette and then started staring at me again. Meanwhile, Harold was pleading with me through the window, and not just with his eyes, either.
Come on
! I couldn't hear him say this, but I could read his lips.

But I didn't come on. Because I knew what there was to learn from school and from Harold. And I'd thought I knew what there was to learn
from Dr. Pahnee. But Dr. Pahnee seemed different today, and who knew what he could teach me. He turned and started walking down Washington Street, and I followed.

WE WALKED PAST
the VA hospital, and by the time we got to the YMCA, I could hear a band. I could hear trumpets that sounded like sad kazoos. I could hear the rat-a-tat-tatting of drums.

“What's that?” I said.

“Music,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But what is it? Where are we
going
?”

Just then I started to hear crowd noise in front of us, and from behind us, motor sounds. I looked around and saw three buses headed our way. The buses were gray, but other than that, they looked like normal school buses. Inside them were soldiers. They were unlike any bus riders I'd ever seen: not one of them waved to us, or pushed his face against the glass and then leaned back to admire the greasy face print, or puffed out his cheeks, or stuck out his tongue, or stuck up his middle finger, or yelled something you couldn't quite hear but knew was dirty. These bus riders weren't like that at all. They just sat there, staring straight ahead, as the buses brought them to the Public Square. When we got there ourselves, they were already filing out of the bus and onto metal risers. There was a big crowd in front of us. They weren't sitting on risers. They were standing on the grass, in front of and in back of and around the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Some people were holding American flags, but none of them were holding signs and none of them were chanting or singing or anything. I could tell from the backs of their heads that they were either old people (I could see a bunch of bald noggins and blue hairs with the curler marks still visible) or young women. There were a couple of young kids probably still in diapers on a couple of the young women's shoulders. In front of them there was a band, seated so that I could hear them but couldn't see them. In front of the band was a podium with a microphone sticking out of it. On the left side of the podium was a table with an American flag tablecloth over it. The table was thin and the flag tablecloth hung way down over the edge. There were soldiers wearing dress uniforms and holding rifles between the band and the podium and
table. They hadn't moved. The band had been playing this entire time. But suddenly the trumpets stopped. The drums were given a few extra sharp raps, and then they stopped, too. A man walked across the stage and then stood behind the podium. He was wearing a minister's collar. I looked at the table and flag tablecloth again and realized that it wasn't a table and it wasn't a tablecloth and there was a dead soldier under the flag and in the coffin. Then I wanted to go back to school. But Dr. Pahnee was standing behind me. He had his hands on my shoulders and wouldn't let me move.

The minister cleared his throat. He thanked us for coming, which seemed weird. Then he said we were here to lay to rest Captain R. The minister said Captain R. had made the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of our country and that he was at peace and with God now. I heard a little cry coming from way up near the coffin. It sounded like a bird crying. The minister tried not to look at where the crying was coming from. He seemed to be looking at something over our shoulders. I turned and looked. The only thing he could be looking at was a building in the shape of a triangle. There was yellow hazard tape around it, because pieces of the building had fallen off and onto the sidewalk. But they'd been falling off for a while now. It was nothing new. I turned back to the minister.

“Please be assured,” the minister said, “that your son, your husband, your father, your brother, your friend, has the thanks of the president and of the entire grateful nation.”

He looked to his right. One of the soldiers wearing dress uniforms put the rifle on his back, then bent over to pick up something. I couldn't see what it was. I got on my tiptoes but still couldn't see. Dr. Pahnee took his hands off my shoulders and put them under my armpits and lifted me. From up there, I could see the soldier was holding a folded American flag. He walked over to the front row and bent over again and then I couldn't see him, even with Dr. Pahnee picking me up. Then the soldier straightened up. He didn't have the flag anymore. He walked back to his place, and the band started playing. Then it was over. But Dr. Pahnee didn't put me down. Not even when the crowd started to leave. I could see a kid my age way at the front. He was dressed in clothes like the clothes I wore
when I got my picture taken at Sears. He was sitting in a folding chair, and I could see him looking down at the flag. I could see his mother—I guess that's who it was—sitting down and talking to a group of people. I guess they were telling her they were sorry. She was nodding. She kept reaching with her right hand to stroke the back of the boy's neck and he kept shaking her hand off by rotating his head and shoulders the way you do when your neck is sore. I looked away from them and toward the soldiers. Not the ones wearing dress uniforms and holding rifles, but the ones who'd come on the bus. I watched them climb down the bleachers and file back into the buses. Most of them were men. Most of them were young. A bunch of them were black, or at least darker than I was. A few of them were old. Maybe my dad's age. None of them looked scared, or happy, or sad, or angry, or determined, or anything. They just looked like guys who knew they had to get back on the bus.

“Run, you fucking dummies,” I said, because that's what Exley would have said, what my father would have said, too, before he decided to become one of the dummies. I glanced back and down at Dr. Pahnee to see if he heard me swearing, because I knew he didn't like it when kids swore. But he didn't seem to have heard; he was looking off to the right, past the health food store. I looked where Dr. Pahnee was looking, and saw Mother standing there! She wasn't looking at us; she was looking in the direction of the stage, where the woman and the boy were sitting. But still, I didn't want her to see me there and not in school. “Put me down,” I whispered. Dr. Pahnee did, and I sort of crouched behind him and hid. From where I was hiding, I watched him watch her, then watch where she was watching, then watch her again. This went on for some time, long after I heard the soldiers' buses drive away. Finally, Dr. Pahnee said, “You can get up now.” I got up and saw that Mother was gone, and that the Square was mostly empty except for some guys folding and stacking the chairs. “Cha think she was doing here?” he asked me.

“‘Cha'?” I said. Because he didn't sound like Dr. Pahnee at all. He sounded like my dad, if he sounded like anyone, who sounded like Exley if
he
sounded like anyone. “‘Cha'?” I said again, and then started laughing. But Dr. Pahnee didn't seem to think it was funny. He just looked at
me the way I'd seen people look at Harold: like he was really going to enjoy punching me in the face. So I stopped laughing and said, “She was probably just here for work.”

“Probably,” he said.

“Do you think she saw us?” I asked. Dr. Pahnee shook his head, reached into his pants pocket, took out a pack of Pall Malls, took a cigarette out of the pack, lit the cigarette, and smoked it. He still didn't seem like himself, and this weirded me out, and so I asked him, “Do you think I should tell Mother we saw her here?”