The Man Without a Face (10 page)

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He was standing, hands on the back of his chair. “Is it true that I what?”

One thing I had learned: If you start something like the *wrong question with McLeod you finish it you don’t just in the middle and leave by the nearest exit—not if you -anted to come back. I felt sick but I went on. “That you make your living writing porno under a pseudo-whatever- it-is?”

There was a second’s pause. That’s done it, I thought. Then he started to laugh and went right on as he picked up 2ie dishes and put them in the sink.

I was so relieved I felt weak.

“Is that the current story?”

“Yes. It’s all those packages and what look like checks from publishers.”

“You mean our dedicated postmistress has been corrupted?”

I grinned. “No. At least I don’t think so. But the word’s around.” I told him about the mass pilgrimage to the bookstores and he laughed even harder. At that moment he was warm and funny and almost young.

He finished washing the two dishes, glasses, and the cup and saucer. I dried them and put them away.

“It’s not porno,” he said finally. “It would be a lot more lucrative if it were.”

“Novels?” Somehow he didn’t seem the novel type, at least not the kind that Meg’s father, the publisher, or The Hairball left lying around the house.

“Yes. In a sense. A mixture of science fiction and mythology.”

“Under your name?”

“No. Terence Blake.”

I whistled. “Wow!” The Terence Blake books hadn't

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yet caught on like Tolkien but they were really good. “That’s great! I mean—your books are super!” I was impressed. What a pity I couldn’t tell everybody, although the minute I thought of that I knew I didn’t want to.

He smiled. “Sweet words to any author. Which ones have you read?”

I told him. “There’re two earlier ones I haven’t read. Somebody stole them from the school library and the bookstores say they’re out of print. But they’re coming out in paperback in the fall so I’ll get ’em then.”

“I have them. You can borrow them.”

As we went towards the living room I said, “Why Terence Blake?”

“Terence was my father’s name and Blake my mother’s maiden name.”

“But why a pseudonym? I mean—I’d be pretty proud if I’d written them.”

“But when I wrote the first I had no idea how it would go.

Somehow I knew that wasn’t the real reason, but I also knew I’d better not press it. He had that remote note in his voice. We went over to the bookshelves. He pulled down two books and handed them to me.

“Are they your only copies?” I asked.

“That’s all right. I trust you.”

I felt pretty good when he said that. But I shook my head.

“No. If anybody saw them they’d last about five minutes. Every kid on the beach would want them, and then they’d want to know how I’d got hold of them.” Reluctantly, but feeling heroic, I handed them back. “When they come out in paper I’ll send them to you to autograph. Would you? I mean autograph them?”

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Of course.”

He said it so abruptly I wondered if I had put my foot in n\ mouth again. “You don’t mind?”

He was putting the books back on the shelf, but he turned tad looked at me. “No, Charles. I don’t mind.”

I remember that summer partly as pictures that spring into my mind, knife-sharp, partly as fragments of conversation.

Once he asked me, “What do you want most? Quickly —don’t think.”

“To be free.”

“Free from what?”

“From being crowded. To do what I want.”

“Fair enough. Just don’t expect to be free from the consequences of what you do, while you’re doing what you want.”

At the time I was disappointed in McLeod. It sounded like some typical adult double-talk.

Another time, I was copying down the poem he read me, “High Flight,” so I could put it in a notebook along with the other stuff about flying that I had been keeping off and on since I was about seven. I asked him if he believed in God.

“Of course.” He said it almost impatiently.

I waited for him to ask what I thought, but he didn’t. Then he saw my face and laughed. “What were you expecting? That I would proselytize you?”

I grinned, feeling foolish. His ability to read me was unnerving. “Well, The Hairball always said that was the trouble with True Believers—they had to spread the word.”

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“In a sense, he’s right. But in your case it’s time you reached out for what you want—instead of waiting for people to come after you.’’

“How do you mean?’’

“About ninety percent of your time seems to have been spent resisting things and people, so that it’s now an emotional habit. It’s time you reached out on your own.’’

“I came here.’’

“Yes. Did you ever stop to think—if your mother or one of your numerous stepfathers had said, ‘Charles, we’ve arranged for you to have coaching this summer. You’ll be coached for three hours five days a week and then you’ll spend an equal amount of time studying while your friends are down on the beach or out in boats, and as your reward you’ll get into a school that you don’t much want to go to but is the lesser of two evils,’ how do you think you would have felt?’’

He had a point. “Lousy.’’

Looked at that way six hours of studying and being coached sounded like the worst nightmare of sweat labor. I must be out of my mind. But the truth of the matter was that I was enjoying myself which, since I wasn’t any shakes as a student even now, meant I was enjoying McLeod. He wasn’t like anybody I had ever known. I finished copying the poem and read it over. According to the footnote the author, Magee, died at nineteen —killed during the Battle of Britain—in I94I which, as far as I was concerned, was practically back in the American Revolution. But I started doing some calculations. What I was really trying to find out was whether McLeod had gotten burned as a pilot. The idea appealed to me. Anybody who was, say, nineteen in I94I would be—I did some figuring on the edge of my paper—about fifty now. Possible. I looked up at McLeod,

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*»r>o was rearranging some books on a shelf. The good side : * his face was turned toward me so that I could see only i swatch of the bum coming around his chin. There was a ioc of gray in his hair. On the other hand, some people got gray at thirty.

What are you trying to figure out?” he asked, without turning.

Caught short I blurted out, ”I was wondering how old

You are.”

“The easiest method is to ask. Forty-seven.”

Some more figuring. But not even McLeod was fighting :he Battle of Britain at sixteen. But he could have been an American air force pilot at the very end of the war. My heart started to beat faster. “Were you in the Air Corps during World War II?”

“No.”

“You weren’t in the war?”

“Yes. Infantry. A foot-slogging private soldier.”

“Is that where you—” Asking about his age and asking about a bum that disfigured half his face was not exactly the same thing.

“Where I—?”

I wished I hadn’t started. But I was still stinging from his comment about my tendency to run. “Where—where you got burned.”

He was looking at me but his face didn’t flicker. For the first time I wondered what it could be like for him. “I shouldn’t have asked that,” I mumbled.

“Most people do, sooner or later.” He put another book on the shelf from a pile on the floor. “I got burned in a car accident.” He paused and then added deliberately, “I was too drunk to know what I was doing, slid on some ice, and went over the side of the road down a ravine.”

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I was stunned. It sure knocked my picture of the wounded war hero to fragments. “I’m sorry,” I said, not sure whether I was sorry he had lost his face or I had lost the war hero.

He was watching me. “So am I. Not just because of this”—he gestured to the burned half of his face—“but because there was a boy with me, a boy about your age. He was burned to death.”

A bee had somehow got in the room and was buzzing around. In the silence that followed it sounded like a 747.

Then McLeod said, “It’s late, Charles. You’d better go.’’

The day after, I woke up before dawn, thinking about what McLeod had said. The queer part was that I expected to feel disgusted and disillusioned, and I didn’t. I felt sorry. I felt sorry for the boy who was killed, but I felt more sorry for McLeod. It didn’t make much sense because the boy was dead, but I was sure McLeod had been dragging around the guilt ever since, and that it had a lot to do with the way he lived and why he had never had his face fixed the way Mother and everyone in the summer community said he could—and should.

“What a lousy deal,” I said to Moxie, who was lying under the sheet next to me. My voice must have waked him, because I felt suddenly the deep vibration against my ribs that meant he was purring. In a few seconds the noise followed, sounding like a bad case of bronchitis.

A while later Meg came into my room. Since I had a lot to think about I wasn’t too pleased to see her.

“How is the Great Man?” she said, wiggling her backside against the footboard and crowding my feet.

“Okay.” I didn’t want to talk about McLeod.

“You’re getting very protective about him.”

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What’s to talk about?”

All right. Keep your hair on. But people are beginning to ask what you’re doing all the time and where you are.”

“And what do you tell them?” I tell the kids you’re being forced to study with some caching type on the mainland. And whenever Mother says Where’s Chuck?’ which she does sometimes in the afternoons—she’s resigned to your studying in the mornings— I say wherever your gang is at the moment, except when they’re right there, then I make up something else. But one of these days she won’t ask me, she’ll ask Pete or Sam or Tom, and then the fat will be in the fire.”

“And Gloria? What’s with her?”

“She’s still got a clutch on Peerless Percy. But Sue Robinson’s coming here from camp next week.”

“Yuch!” I struggled up and sat leaning against the headboard. “That’s bad news.” It was. Sue is Gloria’s only real competition: Red hair, green eyes, and if her figure isn’t quite as nymphy as our Gloria’s, her personality is several light-years better.

“And,” Meg went on, as though winding up for a real knockout blow, “she was the one Peerless Percy was in love with all last summer.”

Things did not look good. But somehow I didn’t care. It all seemed remote and unimportant. My mind slid back to what McLeod had told me.

“You don’t seem interested,” Meg said.

“Sure I’m interested, Meg. But I’ve got other things to think about. Besides, I’m tired. I haven’t slept much. I’d like to catch another hour’s shut-eye before I have to get up. After all,” I finished virtuously, “you may be having a vacation. I have to work.”

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“All right.” Meg was mad and I knew it.

“Don’t be miffed, Megsy.”

She turned. “You’re different, Chuck. You’ve changed.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“I don’t know,” Meg said slowly. “I can’t say what I mean. But you’re different. And I don’t like it.”

“Meg!”

But she was out of the room, and I was fairly sure she was crying. Well, I thought, getting back under the sheet, I’d make it up to her somehow. I knew she was kind of lonely because there weren’t too many of her age group up here this year. Our summer community is very age-oriented. The grown-ups

I comforted myself with this thought (Meg’s forebodings had upset me more than I wanted to admit) and went to sleep thinking about McLeod, knowing there was something I had to say and hoping that when the moment came I’d say it properly.

He was remote and full of trick and trap questions later that morning, really grilling me as to what I had learned, not just lately, but right from the beginning. By the time the three hours were over I felt limp. He must have seen this because he brought some milk and cookies into the library immediately.

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“You’d better go out and run for half an hour after you've eaten. I’d lend you Richard if he weren’t so neurotic.” “How is he?” I asked, downing cookies at a great speed. “All right.”

“Look,” I burst out. I was determined to have my say. “About what you told me yesterday. About the accident—” I kept my eyes on the table where I was nervously turning the cookie dish around and around. “What I want to say is—well, it was a lousy thing to happen to you, and it probably wasn’t your fault.”

“You’re wrong. It most definitely was.”

“All right. So it was. What I mean is—” I wanted so badly to tell him how I felt, but I couldn’t find the words. Then a strange thing happened. Without my volition, my hand reached towards his arm and I grasped it.

He didn’t move or say anything. The good half of his face was as white as paper. Then he jerked my hand off and walked out.

CHAPTER 7

I was sore as a boil. Worse—I felt like a fool.

So. He thought I ought to reach out! What a hypocrite! Here I had been thinking he was something special in grownups, and he turned out to be like all the rest: say one thing, do another.

I was so mad I found it hard to concentrate. Even so, I couldn’t get over the feeling there was a funny side to it. If this coaching had been Mother’s—or the school’s—idea, what an opportunity to walk out and say screw ’em. But it was mine, so I had to stay even though McLeod had acted