Jewelweed (62 page)

“What's he coming for?”

“I've applied for a small-business loan. We need more room.”

“Well, thanks for talking to me. And could you please not tell him I was here?”

“Sure,” replied Jacob.

B
uck and Amy left early the following morning for the North Woods, leaving some confusion about who was in charge. Dart and the nurse argued about whether Kevin should ride along when she drove Ivan to August's. The nurse said he couldn't go, but Dart brought him anyway, after his blood pressure, pulse, and temperature were recorded in the notebook.

When they pulled up by the log house, August came outside. He told Dart how good it was to see her again and thanked her for bringing Ivan. She walked past him dismissively and went inside.

August hurried over to Kevin and Ivan and started waving his hands excidedly as he talked. He said that the day before, he and Blake had gone over to Blake's father's place to mow the yard and do some other chores. While taking a break for a glass of water inside the house, Blake played back the messages left on his father's answering machine. Most of them were from tired women with nervous voices trying to sell stuff. Blake erased them one by one. But the last message was from the trucking company. The male voice said Blake's father was to take a load to a town called Wormwood, in Iowa. All the other drivers were busy; it needed to be done right away, and he was supposed to call back as soon as possible.

After hearing the message, August said Blake had paced around the kitchen and living room. Then he'd called the trucking company and told them his father, Nate, would take the job. The trucking company told Blake that someone would bring the loaded trailer over the following evening and drop it off. All the papers were signed and ready. The brown wrapping paper and plastic cling were to be delivered to the packing plant in Wormwood by eleven o'clock at night.

Then August asked Blake how his father was supposed to get the message from his answering machine if he wasn't there to listen to it. Blake showed him. “Just dial the number,” he told August, handing him his father's phone. August dialed Nate's number and when the answering machine picked up Blake told him to punch in the number two, followed by seven. “You have one message,” the machine said. Then Blake told him to punch the number five. When he did that the machine played back the message from the trucking company, and August could hear it through the phone. “See,” Blake told him. “When Dad calls home, he'll get the machine to play back the message. That way he'll know.”

“Everybody knows how answering machines work,” said Kevin. “What's the big deal?”

“I'm trying to tell you something important,” said August. “I don't think Blake's father is ever going to hear that message. I think Blake is going to take that load to Iowa himself, and if he gets caught he'll be in serious trouble, because that's a violation of the conditions of his release.”

“Why can't he leave the state?” asked Kevin.

August and Ivan tried to think of a reason.

“Well, each state is different,” said Ivan.

“Ivan's right,” added August. “And some things that are against the law in one state are legal in other states, like buying fireworks.”

“Other states probably have the death penalty for carrying drugs,” added Ivan.

“The death penalty?” scoffed Kevin.

“He's already served his time for that,” said August.

“Sure,” Ivan said, “but that might not mean anything in other states. They might just be waiting for him to come into their territory so they can electrocute him.”

“Surely not,” said Kevin, but Ivan could tell that neither he nor August was sure.

“I'm going with him,” said Ivan.

“How are you going to do that?” scoffed Kevin.

“I don't know how, but like I've told both of you, I think Blake Bookchester is my dad, and I'll find a way to go with him. He might need me.”

“That's crazy,” said August.

“You don't even know for sure that he is your dad,” said Kevin.

“I'm pretty sure.”

“Did you ask your mom again?” asked August.

“Mother and I aren't getting along too good right now, and anyway she has always said that my father is dead.”

“And you don't believe her?”

“I just think she needs to tell me that for some reason.”

“So you can't ask her again?”

“Not right now, but if we could get inside Blake's house and look around, I'm sure there's something that would tell.”

“You might be right,” replied August. He was quiet for a while, and then he added, “We can do that tonight if you want. After Blake leaves to drive his father's truck down to Iowa, it would be easy to get into his house. It's only a mile, or less, out of Words. We can ride over on our bicycles. I have one for you to ride.”

“Are you two completely nuts?” asked Kevin. “You can't break into someone's house.”

“Yes we can,” said Ivan. “I'll bet he doesn't even lock it.”

“That doesn't make any difference. There could be other ex-cons staying there, hiding from the law. There could be two or three of them, with knives, guns, and sexually transmitted diseases.”

“You're just imagining things,” said Ivan.

“Maybe, but a lot of the things I imagine end up being real.”

“My dad would know if there were other people living with Blake,” said August.

“Sure, but he might not tell
you
,” said Kevin. “Listen, I've got a really bad feeling about this.”

“Maybe he's right,” said August to Ivan.

Then Dart came out of the house and walked toward them, frowning.

“I'm not kidding,” said Kevin. “Stay away from there, promise me.”

“I can't do that,” said Ivan. “Some things are important enough to take risks.”

“No,” said Kevin, but by then Dart was there and she drove away with him in the front seat, leaving Ivan and his suitcase standing next to August.

The two boys watched the Bronco leave, then went inside the house
and told Winnie they wanted to camp out overnight by the hermit's hut. She had a thick book with fine print in her hand, and she looked up over the tops of her reading glasses and said that was way too far away. It was fine to camp out, she said, but it had to be close by. August said they wanted to see the hermit again, and look for the Wild Boy, but she just repeated that it was way too far away, making it clear this time that it was useless to argue.

The boys put up the tent in the woods beyond her garden. After supper, they made a fire and let it burn down and unrolled their sleeping bags inside the tent. Then August said they were running out of time. They started playing back the tape on which they had recorded their conversation for the last couple of hours, so when August's parents walked out to check they'd hear their voices inside the tent.

August's bikes were in the garage next to the house, and they got them without being seen. It was hot and the ride took longer than August had planned for, but they got to the road in front of Blake's farmhouse just before dark. Ivan looked through the binoculars August had brought. He could see the motorcycle parked in front of the house.

“Maybe you were wrong,” said Ivan. “Maybe he isn't taking the load to Iowa.”

“Maybe,” replied August.

They waited a few minutes on the other side of the road, crouched down in the ditch. After a little while Blake came out of the house, got on his bike, and came down the driveway toward them. They got down lower and he turned the corner and raced off without having seen them.

They looked for a place to hide the bikes in the farmyard, then leaned them against the far side of the house.

“Maybe he locked it,” said Ivan, looking in one of the windows.

“We'll find out,” said August. “Let's try the back door first.”

“I'm a little surprised you're doing this,” Ivan said to August as they walked back around.

“Me too,” he said. “But this was July Montgomery's old house, and I asked myself what he would have done if his best friend—who was my dad at that time—wanted to find out who his dad was. And when I asked myself that I just knew that we should do this.”

They tried the back door and it opened right away.

“I'll go in first,” said Ivan, stepping inside.

Almost immediately, he wished he hadn't come. It was dark in there, and something horrible was hanging in the air in the middle of the room.

“That's Blake's bag,” explained August, snapping on his flashlight. “He uses it to exercise. It's a punching bag.”

They went on to explore the rest of the room, and then the kitchen it opened into. Six bulging garbage bags were stacked up against the wall, and bits of old wallpaper and chunks of plaster on the floor led the boys to assume that Blake had been cleaning up the place. They checked the drawers and cupboards as well, then looked through the other room downstairs. The book written by Flo's husband was on a chair next to the window.

Upstairs were two relatively empty rooms. The room Blake slept in had a single bed and two bureaus. There were more books scattered around, along with some motorcycle magazines, empty soda cans, wrenches, and screwdrivers.

“You'd better look at this,” said August, looking down into the top drawer of one of the bureaus.

Inside were several pictures of Ivan's mother when she was younger. In one of the pictures she and Blake were laughing, their faces close together and their eyes watching each other.

Ivan had seen only a few pictures of his mother before he was born, and none of them looked like these. He couldn't stop looking at them, even when August said he saw something outside. “Nate's semi is coming down the drive,” he said, “turn your flashlight off. We've got to get out of here.”

Ivan just stood there, looking at the picture of Blake and his mother. It was cracked and dirty around the edges, as if it had been picked up and held too many times. Still, it was the key to the empty places inside him. He studied how his mother and Blake looked at each other, the way their eyes cocked sideways, and then the way they were laughing. It seemed like a real laugh, but Ivan couldn't imagine what kind of laugh it was. What could ever happen that would be laughed about like that? And the more he studied the picture, the more puzzled he was by this image of his mother. She looked so young and so wild, as if she had just stepped into the world and wasn't sure what she was doing there. Ivan simply didn't recognize this earlier version of her, and the effect was unsettling.

“Ivan, come on!” yelled August again. “Turn your light off. He'll see it.”

Ivan turned off the flashlight and they felt their way out of the room, along the hall, and down the stairs. Then they heard beeping, and when they looked out the kitchen window, they saw the back end of the trailer approaching. They hurried into the back room, heading for the door.

Outside, they crept around the side of the house to where their bikes were. Then they looked around the corner.

Blake unbolted the trailer and swung the doors open. Then he went into the house. He came out a minute later carrying several garbage bags. He threw them into the back, then returned for more.

Ivan took the picture out of his pocket and shone the flashlight on it again.

“Turn it off,” said August.

Blake came out with two more bags, tossed them into the trailer, and went back inside.

“I'm going with him,” Ivan said to August.

“What?”

“If he gets into trouble in another state, he might need me.”

Ivan could hear Blake rustling around the kitchen. He ran to the open trailer, climbed onto the bumper, crawled between the garbage bags, and scrambled down the narrow aisle between the crates, all the way to the front of the trailer.

Blake came out again with more garbage bags, tossed them in, and closed one of the double doors. Then he went back inside, and when he did August climbed up just as Ivan had, crawled back through the trailer, and crouched down beside Ivan.

“I'm coming too,” he said.

Then Blake came out, closed the second door against the first, and bolted them tightly in place.

It was pitch black inside the trailer.

The boys heard the cab door open and close, and then a couple of minutes later the engine started up, the sound vibrating through the trailer. They felt the trailer lurch ahead. August shined his flashlight on his watch.

For the first few minutes there was a lot of stopping and starting, running through a couple quick gears, bumping around, and corners.
They couldn't tell where, but Blake stopped outside Grange. He opened the back doors and began carrying the garbage bags across the road and throwing them into an open dumpster.