Hunter's Moon (29 page)

CJ’s mother looked worse. The first time he visited, she was wearing a bathrobe and no makeup, and was deep into a bottle. And yet today, in a pair of flowery pants and a white top—both pressed—and without a hint of anything on her breath, CJ thought she looked worse.

It was something in her eyes—the way they flitted about the room, never resting on anything for too long. She was nervous, almost manic. And while she looked outwardly better than she had the day before Sal’s funeral, one does not trade mental solidity for physical form and come out even.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Mom?” he asked for the third time.

“I’m fine,” Dorothy answered. “Why do you keep asking?”

He didn’t answer the question, and Dorothy didn’t follow it up. She ran a hand over Thoreau’s coat. The petting seemed to calm her, and Thor couldn’t get enough of it, so it was a win for both of them.

“So how is it that you’re still in town and this is only the second time I’ve seen you?” she asked.

CJ did feel a bit guilty about that, especially as it was her call that had brought him out here today. He’d begged off from helping Dennis at the house so he could do this, and he felt like a bad son because he would have rather been hanging sheetrock.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been here, Mom. I’m working two jobs.”

“And playing poker, going to Albany, and having dinner at the house,” Dorothy said.

“For someone who supposedly never leaves home, you’re pretty well-informed,” CJ said, snapping more than he wanted to. Even Thor, eyes half-closed in canine contentment, seemed to give him a frown.

Whatever was going on with his mother, one of the effects was that she didn’t seem inclined to stay on topic for long.

“While you’re here,” she said, “can you help me move a table down from the attic?”

Grateful for something to do besides sit in the parlor, CJ said, “Sure, Mom.” He stood and headed for the hallway, to the pull-down stairs that would take him up to the attic.

“I didn’t mean you had to do it right now,” Dorothy called from the parlor.

“It’s okay, Mom.”

When he slid the latch aside and pulled the stairs down, a musty smell came with them. That couldn’t be good, CJ thought, knowing that the smell meant some moisture.

His work boots clumped on the wooden staircase as his hand instinctively went for the string that hung at the top of the stairs.

When he pulled on it, a single, swinging sixty-watt bulb went on, yet it didn’t do much to dispel the shadows from the corners of the room.

But what the light did show was enough to coax a single word from CJ.

“Wow,” he said.

Dorothy, who stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up at her son, said, “Wow, what?”

“I’d forgotten all of this stuff was up here.”

Except for a few items, the attic was a photograph of the way it had looked when he’d last been up here. The only differences involved the far right corner of the room, where several items— his father’s, by the looks of them—had been haphazardly tossed into a pile.

Seeing them made CJ aware that he’d gained access to a place his father had been trying to get to for years.

“The table’s the small one to your right. I’ll help you carry it down.”

She started coming up the stairs behind him, and he moved deeper into the attic, until his eye caught something familiar against the wall to his left. It was a chest, blue in color, like what a magician might use for an escape trick, although not quite that large. CJ crossed to it and knelt down, his hand feeling for and finding the latch.

Before he’d left for Vanderbilt, he’d cleaned his room out. His father had threatened to turn it into an office the second CJ walked out the door, and CJ decided he would rather move all his possessions himself rather than risk what his father would have done with them. The entire left corner of the attic, and halfway down the left wall, housed the contents of CJ’s room, and he hadn’t seen any of it since the day be walked out the door in 1993.

The first thing he saw was his baseball glove—the one he’d used in high school and that he hadn’t taken to college. He’d spent that summer working in a new glove, tossing it against the wall, stomping on it, rubber-banding a ball in its pocket—all the abuse a ball player had to inflict to make his glove ready for the game, to make it feel like an extension of his hand.

He set it aside and reached for something else in the chest, remembering that he’d packed some of his more important possessions there. It told him something about how the seasons of life shuffle, or reset, priorities that he’d forgotten about, all of these things within just a month of leaving New York. His hand came up with a faded envelope that bore a Vanderbilt letterhead: his scholarship offer. He put that aside too, and when he shifted his weight, when the single overhead bulb cast more of its light on the contents of the battered case, he saw his senior yearbook.

Dorothy had gained the top of the stairs and stood over him, but she didn’t say anything as he pulled the yearbook out and started to flip through its pages. It didn’t take him long to find his own picture. He laughed when he saw it, and then grimaced when he studied the shirt he was wearing. With a headshake he moved past it, glancing at the odd picture here, the random message there, people who’d scribbled memories and goodbyes on the pages. He didn’t know where any of them were now.

He was about to put the yearbook back in the chest when he reached the pages between which he’d stuck his team photo. The glossy print had attached itself to one of the book’s pages and it made a slight tearing sound as he pulled it free. He couldn’t believe how thin he was in the picture. Probably all of 150 pounds. He started to put the picture back, to end this trip down memory lane and help his mom with the table, when he spotted the neat handwriting beneath a girl’s picture that had been hidden behind the baseball photo.

For a long while he studied Julie’s picture—until a shifting of body weight behind him reminded him that his mother was there. Before he closed the book, though, he read what Julie had written all those years ago. Then he closed the book, placed it back in the chest, and shut the lid.

“Where’s that table?” he asked, perhaps a bit too gruffly.

“Right there,” Dorothy said, and there was a particular tone in her voice that made CJ look at her. And right then she didn’t look like the agitated creature he’d spoken with downstairs. She looked like his mother, with perhaps a dash of melancholy. With a small smile she took him by the arm and led him across the attic.

She was right, it was a small table. It was the end table that used to sit by the couch, by the arm near the piano. It was light enough that he could carry it down by himself. But before he did that, he had to remove what looked like a few old black-and-white photos from its surface. He scooped them up and flipped through them. There were only three, and two of them were shots of himself, Graham, and Maryann when CJ was maybe four, taken by a fence at the house on Lyndale—a fence that a storm had taken a few years later.

The third picture was of a man who appeared to be about the age George would have been around the time the other pictures were taken, but it wasn’t his father.

“Who’s this?” he asked, holding the picture up so his mom could see it.

“Just a friend of your father’s,” Dorothy answered. “I forget his name.”

After a last look, and a feeling that he remembered the man in the picture from somewhere, he shrugged and looked for a place to deposit them. He settled on his mother, whose outstretched hand took them and slipped them into her pants pocket.

As he’d been standing here, he’d noticed the musty smell was much stronger.

“Do you have a leak up here?” he asked Dorothy.

“Not that I know of.”

CJ left the table where it was and started walking along the wall, skirting his mother’s sewing machine and a cardboard box filled with old clothes. The farther he went this way—in the direction of the living room—the fainter the smell was. So he headed back the other way, toward the part of the attic that shared an outer wall with his old bedroom. The smell was stronger in this direction, in the corner where Dorothy had piled George’s things.

He admired the temerity of his mom to hold on to the old man’s things like this, but it wasn’t lost on him that what he’d just experienced, the time he’d spent going through his own things, was all his father wanted.

Looking up at the roof, he began searching for signs of water damage. He was almost to the corner when he found it—a water stain spreading out above a beam. The sun was out today, but CJ knew that when it rained, water would drip onto the beam and pool until it began to spill over the sides. By the size of the water stain, and the damage the moisture had done to the beam, it had been leaking for a long time.

The smell was almost overpowering where he stood. He lowered his gaze, seeing that the leak was directly over the hostage possessions of his father. Because it was so dark, he couldn’t see past George’s golf clubs and a trio of boxes filled with only Dorothy knew what. He bent down and picked up the golf clubs, standing them up against a stationary bike. Then he inserted himself between the exercise equipment and the stack of boxes.

He was effectively blind, so he reached into his coat pocket for his keys, for the penlight attached to the key ring. He directed the narrow beam over the real estate at his feet, and what he saw produced what might have been the first curse he’d ever uttered in front of his mother.

“What’s the matter?” Dorothy asked him.

When CJ turned toward her, he saw that she hadn’t moved away from the steps.

“Well, a whole box of George’s clothes are destroyed,” CJ said. “And you may want to get a mold expert in here, because I sure can’t tell you if this stuff is toxic or not.”

From across the room, Dorothy nodded, a gesture that conveyed she knew there was more coming—that what her son had told her didn’t match the profanity.

CJ shook his head and released a deep sigh.

“The Winchester’s ruined,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head again. “Man, is he going to be mad.”

Chapter 22

The Tragically Hip made their music as CJ sat at the card table that served as the apartment’s eating area. The green fabric of the table was ripped, and the chair CJ sat in wobbled whenever he shifted his weight, but for tonight it was the perfect setup.

He was one of those writers who subscribed to the school of thought that there were two atmospheres that facilitated writing. The first was that environment which the writer created for himself—the familiar chair, the right kind of pen, a cup of Sumatran coffee, black. By arranging these things the right way, the writer could coax the words out, get the story on paper with a minimum of fuss. The other atmosphere was the one in which it didn’t matter if all the writer had in his possession were a roll of paper towels and a red crayon; it didn’t matter if the chair was wobbly, or if the room was too cold, or if the Hip CD stuttered at the same spot on Track 9 for thirty-seven seconds. Still, the words came pouring out onto the page, unstoppable and yet often messy.

That was where CJ was tonight, although he did have the luxury of a good pen. He’d popped the CD in, grabbed a cup of Maxwell House, and sat down with a notebook and started to write. And when he wrote the first letter, it was like throwing a switch. The words started to come with reckless abandon, for as he wrote a sentence he could scarcely remember the one that came before, didn’t know the one that would follow. The sentences disappeared behind him as if he were viewing an incredibly long, straight fence that sank into a dot in the distance, and when he turned the other way, the way he was heading, he saw pieces of a fence that hadn’t yet been built.

All he knew was that he was a cistern filled with words and that he had to get them out, and the faster he wrote the quicker he emptied. And he had to reach empty.

When he was like this, he barely had room for thoughts of anything beyond feverishly transcribing the story. But tonight, in the midst of it, it hit him that he hadn’t felt this way even once when writing
The Buffalo Hunter
. And while the article was progressing nicely, no amount of nonfiction could work the magic either.

Under the table, Thor snored in time with the music, and it was all just noise to CJ. Even so, a page later he found he’d written a dog into the story. It was like transcribing jazz. Writing prose like jazz, he wondered if he ought to write a book about that.

He was writing about Eddie, although he didn’t call him that. And his father was in there too. Beyond these, a darker character lurked. Formless for now, but not void. Graham would work his way into the story in his time.

In the living room, the song changed.

Julie turned out the light. Ben had preceded her to bed by a good hour but she hadn’t been tired. Even now, she wasn’t sure she would fall asleep, but she had to try or else she’d be a zombie trying to see Ben off to work and Jack and Sophie to school.

She exited the living room and started down the hallway, but when she reached Jack’s door she opened it a crack and peered inside. He was a lump under the blankets and from somewhere inside came the sound of light snoring. Knowing how he slept, confident she wouldn’t wake him, she gave in to the impulse to open the door and go in. For a teenage boy, Jack kept his room pretty neat, although she knew some of that came from the discipline Coach Carter instilled in the kids. Before football, she’d have tripped over a half dozen items before making it a few feet into his room.