Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (2 page)

She was only planning to vacuum.

Now this.

She reached around behind her and turned off the Electrolux.
For a moment she just knelt there staring at the rifle in the heavy summer silence.

A slim black barrel lurking in the shadows.

A
secret
, she thought.

Yet another.

She reached inside and grasped the cool metal. Drew it out into the light.

The rifle was an old bolt-action .22. Her brother had owned one very much like it when he was fifteen—took it down to the VFW target range on Saturdays for a while. Then he discovered girls.

Danny was only ten
.

Where in God’s name had he got it?

Richard wouldn’t have bought it for him. Not even her ex-husband was fool enough to think for one minute that she’d allow a weapon in the house. No, it had to be . . .

. . .
her father’s
.

Which meant that Danny had also stolen it.

They’d visited his farm the weekend before last. She was struck again by how empty the house seemed now that her mother was gone and had sat in the kitchen with her father drinking cup after cup of black coffee, knowing how starved for conversation he was now. So that Danny was on his own most of the day. Through the big bay window she saw him go into the barn where her father kept his two remaining horses. A little later noticed him walking through the field of long dry grass toward the woods and stream beyond. And then she’d forgotten all about him until what must have been over an hour had passed and he came slamming in through the screen door with a big box turtle in his hand, Danny all excited until she told him to put it back by the stream where he’d found it, that they weren’t taking a turtle all the way back to Connecticut with them and that was that.

Her father kept his newer guns behind glass on a rack in the living room.

The older ones, the ones he never used anymore, were stacked in the workshop of the cellar.

She examined the stock. It was scratched and pitted. Her sinuses were giving her hell this summer and she could barely smell a thing but she sniffed it anyway. It smelled of earth and mold. It was her father’s, all right. She sniffed again, the scent of old gun oil on her hands. Probably he hadn’t used it in years.

It would be months before her father noticed it was missing. If then.

She threw the bolt. Inside a brass shell casing gleamed.

She felt a sudden mix of shock and fury.

My God.

He’d
loaded
the Goddamn thing.

Her father would never have left it loaded. That meant that Danny had searched around the basement for shells as well. And found some.
How many more did he have? Where were they?

She resisted the urge to go tearing through his drawers, rummaging through his closet.

That could wait.

What she needed to do now was find him and confront him. One more confrontation. More and more as he got older.

She wondered how he’d explain
this
away.

It was not going to be like stealing Milky Ways from the Pathmark Store.

It was not going to be like the fire he and Billy Berendt had set, yet denied they’d set, in the field behind the Catholic Church last year.

He couldn’t say that he’d meant to pay for the candy bars but didn’t because he got to looking at the comic books and forgot they were in his pocket. He couldn’t claim that the two eyewitnesses—kids from the rougher part of town who’d seen Billy and Danny go into the field and then come out running and laughing just before smoke appeared on the horizon—had it in for him.

The rifle was concrete. The bullet even more so.

They did not lend themselves to easy explanation.

It was not going to be like the jackknife from Nowhere or the brand-new Sega Genesis computer game from Nowhere or the Bic cigarette lighters that kept cropping up which he’d always
found on the street
. What a lucky kid.

She was angry. She was scared.

Angry and scared enough so that her hands were shaking as she removed the shell from the breech and put it in her jeans pocket. She felt a by-now all-too-familiar access of what could only be called grief, a feeling that even though her son was only ten she’d already lost him somehow, as though there were something in him she could no longer touch or speak to and for which mourning was easily as justifiable and as appropriate as her father’s grief over the loss of her mother.

She knew it was important to push that feeling aside. To let the anger flow freely instead. She needed the anger. Otherwise too much love and loss, too much sympathy and—
let’s face it
—too much plain old-fashioned self-pity would only weaken her.

Tough love
, she thought. That’s what’s left.

She’d tried the shrinks. Tried the counselors. She’d tried to understand him.

Taking things away from him, privileges—the computer, TV, the movies—was the only thing that seemed to work anymore.

Well, they’re all going out the window today
. Everything.

She slid the black bolt of the rifle back into position and marched on out of the room. She knew where to find him.

At the clubhouse.

The grass in her back yard tickled her ankles. It was time to cut the lawn again. Humidity made the stock of the rifle feel sticky in her hand. She slid between the two pine trees in back of the lawn out onto the well-worn path into the woods.

The path belonged to the boys. Billy Berendt, Danny, Charlie Haas and the others. She never came back this way. Hardly ever. Only when she was calling him for supper and he was late and didn’t answer. Even then she rarely had to venture this far. The path was only two feet wide at most through thick, waist-high brush, dry brown grass and briars as tall as she was. A path the width of a boy’s body—not the width of hers. She was glad of the jeans—already studded with burrs—and unhappy with the short-sleeve blouse. A thorn bush scored two thin lines of blood along her upper arm. She used the barrel of the rifle to part another. She heard the stream rushing over its rocky bed through a line of trees to her left. The path split ahead of her. She took it to the right, away from the stream.

All these woods would one day be developed, bulldozed into oblivion. But in the three years they’d lived here that hadn’t happened yet—and Danny was getting to the age where soon it wouldn’t matter. In the meantime the woods and stream were part of the reason she’d wanted the place for him.

Nature, she believed, was a teacher. She’d grown up on a farm and thought that most of what she knew about life she’d glimpsed there first and then had come to understand more fully later. Birth, death, sex, the renewal of the land, its fragility and its power, the chaos inside the order, the changes in people that came with the change of seasons. The implacability of the natural world and how important it was simply to accept that.

She wanted all this for Danny.

What she’d had. And what now sustained her.

She knew that many women would have been bitter about a broken marriage that they hadn’t chosen to end. But she wasn’t. Not really. Unhappy, yes, of course—but there had never really been any bitterness. Love, she thought, was a contract you signed knowing that someday the signatures might fade. Richard had fallen out of love with her and gotten involved with someone else. A simple
change of seasons. Hard as winter, but bearable and somehow even understandable. It was no longer necessary to the scheme of things that people mate for life. Reality was what it was and couldn’t be changed by her own distress in the face of it. She thought Richard’s choice of second partners was one he someday might live to regret. But that was his affair. She’d let him go.

And she might have been bitter about Danny too. Instead she simply kept plugging away. Though the boy was far from easy. He’d
never
been easy. But since the breakup four years ago he always seemed, if not actually in trouble, always on the verge of it. Sliding grades. Clowning, fighting in class. Bad language around the girls at school. Once he’d been caught throwing stones at Charlie Haas on the playground. And of course there were the stealing and brushfire incidents.

Beyond paying child-support his father was no help at all. Richard thought it was all typical boy behavior. It would pass, he said. She’d never been a boy and it was possible he was right.

But Richard didn’t have to live with him.

Didn’t have to endure the tantrums when he didn’t get his way or the hostile silences.

She felt exhausted by him sometimes.

What more could a kid get into?

He could get into firearms, obviously.

At age ten.

Great. Just great.

She wondered how he’d smuggled it home in the first place and then remembered the blanket she kept in back of the station wagon. He could have hidden a box of dynamite back there and she’d never have known it.

Very cute, Danny. Very sneaky. Very neat.

Her arms felt sticky with sweat, itchy from the pollen and dust in the air and the warm brush of leaves. She could barely breathe for all the damn pollen.

But she was nearly there now.

She could see its location in the distance to the right of the path, up a hill through a tall thin stand of birch.

His clubhouse. His personal sanctuary.

Aside from the occasional visit from Billy Berendt, inviolate to the world.

Until today.

Once, perhaps a hundred years ago, there had been a house here but it had long since burned to the ground—leaving only the root cellar—and whoever the owners were they’d never rebuilt it. He’d taken her up to look at it, all excited, shortly after they moved in and he first discovered it. At that time it was nothing but a hole in the ground five feet by eight feet wide and four feet deep, overgrown with weeds. But he’d cleared the weeds to expose the fieldstone walls and raw earth floor within and, with her permission, begged a pair of old double doors from her father’s barn, and he and Richard had spent one uncommonly ambitious afternoon painting the two doors green and sinking hinges into the walls and then attaching the doors so that they covered the hole and could be secured together by a combination padlock from the outside and a simple hook and eye from the inside.

Total privacy.

He called it his clubhouse.

His private little gathering of one.

She had always thought it was kind of sad. Possibly not even good for him.

But Danny had always been a loner. She guessed that was his nature. He always seemed to tolerate the other neighborhood boys more than he actually befriended them—though for some reason they all seemed to like him well enough and were eager to get him out to play even though they were excluded from the clubhouse and were probably jealous that Danny’d discovered it first. For some reason that didn’t seem to matter. Maybe the place imparted status of some kind. She didn’t know.
Boys
, she thought.

All she knew was that he spent a lot of time here. More than she’d have liked.

She’d bought him a battery-powered lantern. Not much light got in through the doors, he said. A step-ladder for going up and down. Toys and books and games would disappear and then reappear in his room as well as mason jars from the kitchen and hammers and boxes of nails from the toolbox so she knew he was bringing them out here and then returning them according to some private agenda.

She never pried.

But now she was going to have to take all this away from him too for a while.

She leaned on the rifle, catching her breath before starting in on the remaining trek up the slope of the hill. She heard bees buzzing in the grass beside her.

Her sinuses were killing her.

Warm wind ruffled her hair. She steeled herself for what was to come and headed on.

The doors had weathered considerably since last she’d seen them. They could seriously use another paint job. She saw that the combination lock was gone. That meant he had it with him. He was inside.

“Danny.”

No answer. She listened. No movement either.

“Danny. I know you’re in there.”

She reached down for the door handles and rattled the doors.

“Come out of here. Now.”

She was starting to get seriously angry again.
Good
, she thought. You damn well
should
be angry.

“I said now. Did you hear me?”

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“What?”

“I said you’re not supposed to be here. You never come out here.”

“Well that’s too bad because I’m here now. Do I have to kick these doors apart or what?”

She heard a click and the rattle of glass and then steps on the ladder. She heard him unfasten the hook and the door creak open.

He slid through the doors, out of the dark below, and let the doors fall shut behind him. There was something furtive about him. Something she didn’t like. He knelt and took the padlock out of his pocket.