Silent Boy (11 page)

‘Stew,’ I said. ‘Stew and salad and bread.’

‘Is that all?’

‘That’s all.’

‘Why don’t you ever keep any good stuff around?’

‘Like what?’ I asked.

‘Like ice cream or Cokes or something?’

‘Because that’s not what I make my suppers out of.’

‘Oh well,’ she said good-naturedly. ‘If that’s what we gotta have, then that’s what we gotta have, huh?’

I nodded.

I gave her the lettuce to wash and the carrots to slice.
Touché
she shouted to herself and stabbed the knife into the air at unseen dangers. I took it and the carrots and let her shake the dressing instead.

And then as I was putting the stew into bowls, Charity came bounding over and leaned across my arm to see what was happening.

‘Tor?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can I spend the night with you?’

‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a school night.’

‘So? What difference does that make? I’ll still go to school.’

‘You need to go home and get a bath and –’

‘Why?’ she interrupted, looking down at herself. ‘Am I dirty? Don’t you got a bathtub here?’

‘That’s not the point. It’s a school night. You ought to be home in bed and then be able to get up and put on school clothes and get there before the bell rings. It would be too hard from clear over here. We’re practically across town. And I have to leave for work a lot earlier than you have to go to school.’

‘It wouldn’t be so hard. I could do it. I could wear these here clothes. They ain’t dirty. I could get up real, real early. Okay? Can I? Please?’

I shook my head and handed her a bowl of stew. ‘No, not on a school night, Charity. Maybe some weekend. But not on a school night. End of conversation.’

Carefully she carried her bowl over to the table. Setting it down, she climbed up onto the chair. ‘You gonna have a man over here tonight, is that how come I can’t?’

I looked at her. ‘No, Charity. That isn’t how come you can’t. I told you how come you can’t.’

She had already started shoveling her food in, so she just shrugged. ‘Well, that’s all right. I understand. That’s when my mom works too. Every night but Mondays.’

The next morning dawned dark and gray, and when I drove to Garson Gayer at 9:30, the streetlights were still blazing.

Kevin had arrived in the room ahead of me. When I came, he was standing at the window looking out. It was the first time I had ever seen him just standing without being in the process of getting somewhere, unless of course I counted the day before, outside the staff room. He appeared to have momentarily put down the burden of fear.

He did not turn when I entered but continued to stare out of the window. The day was so gray, a bitter November day that spoke only of winter and made the icy darkness ahead of us seem millennia long. It was not snowing. It was doing nothing outside at all. It was silent, motionless and cold, like death.

I came up behind Kevin, put my box down on the radiator below the window and did not speak. I had to admit feeling a little afraid of him, standing there. The other day was not long enough past. I was still sore, and he had demonstrated his strength so well. This wasn’t like it had been with the little children. I was a physically strong person myself and even with the older children, with the boys ten or eleven or twelve, I could easily subdue them when I had to, no matter how out of control they might have been. I had always had the confidence to act without much regard to physical danger because I was tall and in good condition and strong and I knew it. But things were different with Kevin. He wasn’t a child. He was a man. I found it scary to know all I had to rely on were my wits. They didn’t always feel so sharp.

Kevin still did not turn from the window, and something about him made me unwilling to break the silence. I too looked out the window. The small courtyard was without life.

Kevin stood quietly, his shoulders back, his hands interlocked behind his back. The side of his face was still swollen, turning bluish green at the jawline where the bruise appeared deepest. As I watched him, I could see that he had not necessarily put his fear aside but rather some other thing had superceded it. He seemed suddenly very old to me, a thing Kevin had never seemed before. And he seemed weary.

‘I wish I could see more,’ he said at last.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Beyond this window. This isn’t a very good window. It doesn’t let you see anything except where you are. I already know where I am. I wish I could see more.’

Then the silence again.

The silence grew very long. I was uncomfortable with it, I think only because I feared to break it. Kevin was clearly somewhere else, and I did not know if I should call him back or not. This was a different Kevin; he had changed from the boy under the table. I did not know him.

He turned slightly, glanced at me. ‘They pay you, don’t they?’

‘Who?’ I asked. ‘For what?’

‘To come here.’

I nodded.

‘You come here and do this with me because someone pays you to.’

‘It’s my job, if that’s what you mean.’

Silence.

‘You knew that,’ I said. ‘You knew all along.’

He shrugged, a half shrug really, just one shoulder. It lent an air of indifference to the gesture.

‘What’s eating you, Kev?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I can hardly believe that.’

Another shrug. Then the silence. He was a master at silence. It protected him as effectively as chain mail. But I wasn’t bad at the game myself. I too said nothing and we stood together, staring out into the heavy grayness. The minutes passed.

‘I thought,’ he said softly, ‘that maybe you came because you wanted to.’

‘I do.’

‘But not because you got money for it.’

‘That’s secondary. I do come because I want to. I wouldn’t come, if I didn’t. Nobody can pay me enough to go where I don’t want to go. So the money’s not the issue.’

He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m used to it.’ He looked over at me. ‘They told you I got no family, didn’t they? They told you that I just got brought here and left and I’ve never seen them since.’

‘No, they didn’t exactly tell me.’

‘I guess I was just thinking,’ he said, ‘that it would have been nice to have at least one person in the world who didn’t have to be paid to like me.’

T
he days grew eerie. It was mid-November. Usually this was a time for pale white skies and large, floating snowflakes, when winter came upon us tenderly and beguiled us. But not this year. The temperature dropped to just above freezing. The clouds hung low and dark, making it necessary to leave the lights on all day. However, they gave up no rain. As the days strung out lifelessly, one behind the other with no change, a fog began rising up from the land. It cloaked the deathly pallor of the days in a soft, white shroud. It was what they would have called
Mabinogi
days in Wales, days for spirits to come alive and for ancient things no longer in the present world.

Kevin seemed to take on the same secret nature as the weather. He never recovered from the blowup over the rocket poster. Whatever had happened then had been complete. Kevin changed.

Kevin’s behavior remained especially enigmatic over a period of about ten days. He talked to me little; he did very few of the old things which had given him pleasure. No more crosswords or activity books or games with small toy cars. He grew up very suddenly in those ten days, and the aura of youngness which had clung to him vanished. Instead he was restless, spending most days before the window or pacing up and down the length of the small white room. The most mysterious change of all, in my opinion, was that his fear seemed to have fallen away from him, shed like a reptile’s old skin. His chart indicated that he was still fearful on the ward and in the schoolroom and still protected himself with tables and chairs, but when he came to me, he put his fear away. He now walked into the room, he sat in chairs, on the table, on the radiator below the window. His shoulders were held back and he seemed an altogether different person than he had before. But the fearlessness had been replaced with a different sort of burden, a kind of weariness about him, which made him seem very old yet without vulnerability. Perhaps it was a type of depression. I didn’t know. But it emanated from him, this heavy, heartless tiredness.

I did not understand what was happening to him. I made no pretense to. I only came, wary and watchful. I was no longer afraid of him, as I had been the first couple of days after the explosion. But because I had so few concrete clues as to what was happening to him, I remained vigilant. It was a vaguely anxious period for me, the way it is when one awaits a tornado after the watch has been sounded, although at the same time, it was intriguing.

‘I drew you something,’ Kevin said to me when I arrived. As on other days, he had come into the room ahead of me. He was at the window, perched on the radiator, but as I entered, he came to the table. He walked. Like a man, he walked, with big, powerful strides. No more crouching or cowering. Pulling out a chair, he sat down. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘See what I drew for you.’

He had a piece of brown paper, a sack that had been cut open as carefully as possible to expose the maximum amount of unwrinkled space.

‘It isn’t very good,’ he said. ‘They don’t let us have pencils on our own here, so this one I had to steal from the schoolroom when I was having lessons. It was easy. They don’t watch me under the table. But see, it’s just a grubby little thing. And I had to use a crayon for the red. If I had colored pencils, I could have done it better. But I don’t. I’m sorry it isn’t so good.’

It was good enough. In fact, it was hideously good. On this piece of opened sack was an expertly executed drawing of a man lying on a road. He had been disemboweled, the curvy, squirmy coils of his intestines strewn across the tarmac. A bird – a crow, I think – sat upon the protruding bone of one leg and pulled forth a long, sinewy bit of meat from the body cavity. Blood had spilled everywhere, puddling in the road, trickling through blades of grass. On one side I could even see the red footprints of some vermin which had trailed through the blood and off the side of the paper.

It was a horrible picture, shocking in its photographic accuracy and demonic in its incredible attention to detail. That Kevin’s obvious talent was unsuspected made the entire thing more sinister.

‘It could have been better,’ Kevin said quietly. ‘If I’d had real pencils.’

‘It’s very good as it is. I hadn’t realized you drew so well.’

‘I draw
very
well,’ he replied and the note of confidence in his voice was menacing, the way it is when one knows precisely the power of one’s abilities.

‘I can see that.’

He was studying me carefully, hoping to see, I think, if the contents of the picture shocked or sickened me. It had, more by virtue of its unexpected excellence than anything else, but one could hardly ignore what the picture was about either. It was the detail that unsettled me the most, especially those bloody rat footprints. However, I did the best I could to show no reaction at all. That seemed best.

When I looked over, Kevin smiled. It was the same, easy grin he’s always given me, a slightly foolish expression that made him look retarded, although I knew full well by now he wasn’t.

‘That’s what I’m going to do to him,’ he said. ‘I want to see his stupid body split open and maggots eating his guts.’

‘Oh,’ I said and realized I didn’t even know who it was that should suffer this fate. I asked.

‘My stepfather, of course.’ His forehead wrinkled, as if he expected that I should have known that fact, as if he thought he had told me and was now disappointed that I’d forgotten. But he hadn’t told me.

Again he scrutinized my face very, very carefully, looking me fully in the eyes without turning away. I wasn’t sure this time what he was searching for. Perhaps I had unsettled him by not knowing who the picture was about and he was assessing my value. Perhaps he was simply trying to figure out how much he could reveal to me, how relaxed he could become. I was unable to tell. But he stared at me for the longest time, his eyes slightly squinted behind the thick glasses. I felt probed to my soul.

At last he turned away, looking down at the drawing again. ‘This is what I’m going to do to him. Only it won’t be just a drawing someday.’

The next day the drawing was back. He had folded it up in a little square and stuffed it down his T-shirt. With no one bothering him about bathing or changing his clothes, it had been undetected. I’d checked the charts before I went down to the small white room. There was no mention of a picture, so no one else must have seen it because that wasn’t the sort of thing which would have failed to make an impression on the staff. It would have been charted. But it wasn’t, so I knew the drawing was our little secret.

When I came into the room, Kevin had the drawing with him. He sat at the table and carefully flattened out the wrinkles. As I sat down next to him, Kevin examined the picture at length. With one finger he traced over particular parts, over the exposed internal organs, over the blood puddling beside the corpse. Then he turned away and stared out the window. Minutes seemed to pass and all he did was stare out at the murky, misty stillness in the courtyard.