The Man Without a Face (11 page)

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like my hand was a cockroach or something. Like, for Pete’s sake, I had made a pass at him. That’s what burned me up. Well—screw him! I’d take what I could from him, pass my exam, and then tell him to go to hell.

But fantasies of telling him to go shove didn’t help me to concentrate. I stuck it out till around twelve thirty. At that point, having taken in about zero, I split.

As I was pelting down the path I heard Richard’s hooves behind the long belt of pines on the other side of the cliff, coming at a fast clip. I didn’t want to meet McLeod, so I put on a burst of speed, vaulted over the gate, and high- tailed it to the bridge and across. Then I left the main road and went down the steep hill that gave onto the back of the village. Once there I felt safe. I strolled to the outdoor counter of the malt shop and treated myself to two hamburgers and a double malt which, having paid for, I could only eat half of. This morning was really a bomb!

From where I was standing I could see inside. A whole lot of Gloria’s gang were there, but I couldn’t see any of mine. So when I had eaten all I could, I decided to pay the cove a visit.

Running down the pier I jumped into one of the dinghies, untied it, and rowed past the point and north along the coast until I hit the cove. One of the reasons we had picked the cove was that from the seaward side it looked more or less like any other string of big rocks lining that part of the shore. But when you got right up to one end where there was a narrow opening, you could see the rocks were sort of a jetty running parallel with the shore, shielding a small beach in the elbow.

I turned in at the right place, rowed across the tiny cove, and tied the dinghy to a tree stump near the edge of the water. Then I ran around the curve, dodged around a big

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boulder, and there they all were—Pete Minton (Percy’s brother), Sam Leggett, Tommy Klein, Luke and Mike Warner, and Matt Henry. They were all stretched out except Pete, who was sitting with his back against a rock. Thin spirals of smoke rose from each. Then I smelled it: pot.

That was something I certainly hadn’t bargained for. There was always a lot of talk about getting some, but grass in these parts is about as easy to find as porno. But I couldn’t go back now.

“Behold the grind!” Pete said dreamily.

“How’s the studying going?” Mike asked.

“And how’s the guy without a face?” Tommy pitched in. “What’s his name, fellers?”

“McLeod,” they all chorused.

So they knew. “Okay.” I sat down and leaned against a tree. I was really shaken but didn’t want to show it. I wanted very much to know how they knew, but knew better than to ask. Pulling a grass blade from near one of the rocks I smoothed it between my thumbs and blew it a couple of times, making a thin screeching noise.

“Man, you must really want to get into that funky school,” Pete said.

“Haven’t you heard, he wants to be a flyboy,” Sam took a long drag on his joint. “Off we go, into the wild blue wonder ...” He broke off into a giggle.

“Shove it,” I said.

“So sorry, sir. Achtung! Sieg heil! Up yours!”

“I said shove it.”

“My, aren’t we sensitive? Who said you could come out here, anyway? You aren’t one of us any more.”

“Yeah? So who’s gonna make me move?”

They were so bombed I felt pretty safe saying that, although even if they weren’t I could take any of them on

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alone, even Pete, who’s heavier than I am. None of them is exactly what you’d call athletic.

There were no takers, but I knew I was on very dicey territory. Somehow, I didn’t know how, they knew what I was doing and they’d read me out of the club. I lay back and thought about it. It didn’t take a genius to arrive at the answer: Meg had meant well but they knew I wasn’t being forced to study. If this had been Mother’s or the school’s idea I would have been down here every afternoon griping about it. What’s more, it would have been the same time every day—the second school was out. That would have made it okay. I would have been just another victim of terrible parental and school pressure to achieve. It was doing it on my own that made me a leper. But they hadn’t told anybody, or Gloria would have heard it. Mother would have heard it. Meg would have heard it. And you can believe that by sundown I would have heard it. By the same logic Meg hadn’t known this morning, which now seemed a year ago. Or did she? She might have been going to tell me that when she left in a huff. That made me think of McLeod, whom I’d been carefully keeping out of my mind since I’d lammed out of his house. Bastard.

“How’d you know?” I asked Pete.

“Saw you go up a couple of times and followed you.”

“Fink.”

“You’re the fink. What’s the matter with school in New York?”

“Nothing. I just want out from home.”

There was silence. I waited for him to say something about Gloria and his brother, half wishing he would and half wishing he wouldn’t in case I would have to clonk him over the nose. But he didn’t. I also wanted to ask him if

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Percy knew about McLeod, just to reassure myself. But that would have been a major blunder.

“Have a drag,” Pete said, holding out his joint.

This is what I was afraid of. I’d gone along with the talk about finding pot because I didn’t think there was a prayer of getting any. At school I was always in training for something or other—baseball, football, basketball, hockey— which was an acceptable excuse if you were a jock. The one time I’d smoked it with some of my class in the locker room, I had gotten so stoned they were scared to let me go home. Not that the faculty cracked the whip—most of them smoked grass themselves. But any cop who saw me would know exactly what I’d been doing, and in the state I was in I’d probably tell him where and with whom. Actually, the whole thing scared me and I was glad to have the training excuse. I had a weird—but strong—feeling that pot was not for me, not because of the law or all the crap they hand out at school, tongue in cheek. And it didn’t have anything to do with what anybody else did. It was just like there was some steering gear in me that kept pointing away from it.

But now I wasn’t in training and Pete didn’t know what had happened at school and I was tired of being out instead of in. I said as casually as I could, “I get sick on that stuff.”

“Listen to the boy scout! You’re just too good for us, Chuck. Maybe you’d better run back to teacher.’”

“He’ll probably tell teacher, anyway, all about the nasty boys smoking grass.”

“I told you, shove it! Here—” I took the joint out of Pete’s hand. The mention of McLeod had done it. Gingerly,

so I wouldn’t show what an amateur I was, I took a drag,

t

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inhaling as little as I possibly could. Nothing happened. Then I took another.

“Here,” Pete said. “Have one of your own.”

In the beginning, it wasn’t like the last time in the locker room, probably because I went at it cautiously. I lay back against a boulder. After a drag or two I started feeling relaxed. Then I felt good, like absolutely everything was going to turn out all right. And if it didn’t, it still didn’t matter.

“How’d McLeod get the scar?’’ Pete said.

Since everything had slowed down, it took me a while to answer.

“In a car accident,” I said dreamily. McLeod had really shoved me back. The memory of that morning sliced through my pleasant fog, bringing with it a muffled jab of pain and anger, so I added, “He was drunk and he had a kid with him who was burned to death.”

“Wow! Hear that, you guys?”

The good feeling went. Something had gone wrong. I was afraid if I learned what it was everything would get worse, so I took another deep drag.

I can’t explain what happened after that. Afterwards I figured I just passed out. Went to sleep. Had a nightmare, whatever . . .

The sky and water seemed to swim together. Gulls were flying. After a while they seemed to be flying in formations and then I noticed they had jet engines and weren’t gulls after all—they were planes. Then came a great, wonderful, floating feeling, because I was in one of the planes and sometimes I was in the sky and sometimes I was floating in the water only it was all the same. I got happier and happier. Then I landed on the water, just like one of the gulls, and got out of the plane and splashed through to the

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shore to my father, who was standing there. I knew it was my father because the sun was blazing on his yellow hair. It was funny, though. I couldn’t see his face because the sun was shining in it and it was just a blur. I said to my mother as I walked towards the shore, “But you must have another picture of him somewhere. How am I ever to know what he looked like?” And she said, “But that’s why I threw the pictures away. I don’t want you to know what he looked like, because then you might get to look like him and then you would hate me the way he did.” Which is just the kind of thing you can expect from a female.

“But you were the one who hated him,” I said. “That’s why—”

I stopped because I suddenly realized I now could see Father’s face very well. It had a red scar on one side, but it was getting smaller and smaller. It was odd, though, about his hair. I could have sworn it was yellow. I could see now it was black and gray. All of a sudden it was McLeod, minus scar. He was smiling and holding out his hands. I gave a shout and started running towards him. And that’s where things went wrong, badly wrong. How, I don’t know, but the sky was almost black. McLeod’s face was as white as the stones and he was terribly angry. He was so angry I knew I would never be forgiven and that, anyway, I was going to die because I had forgotten about the undertow which was pulling me out and down, down into the water where I couldn’t breathe. ...

“Push his head down again,” Pete said.

“No,” I tried to say, as the water filled my mouth.

“Now you’ve drowned him.” That was Sam.

There was a stinging slap on my face, then another. Slowly I came to. The sky wasn’t black, it was its usual watery sun-and-blue effect.

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“Come on, Chuck! Wake up! Do you want to get us all in trouble? If your mother sees you and squeals, we’ll have the pigs all over this place.”

I was standing, fully clothed, hip-deep in the water. The others, naked, were standing around. Pete gave me another slap. “Wake up!”

I tried to launch a blow that would knock his head off, but all I did was lose my footing and I had to be held up. “I’m all right. Lemme go.”

“Man! you weren’t kidding, were you, when you said you got sick.”

I pushed him away and staggered to the shore. I had barely gotten up onto the stony beach when I really got sick. Maybe it was the pot, maybe the sea water I had swallowed. Whatever it was, I felt like I was bringing up my breakfast of day before last.

I was shivering and my forehead was clammy with sweat, but, after a minute, I managed to crawl back to the water, wash my face, and slosh some up on the beach to clean it up.

“You’d better stick to straightsville,” Pete said, putting on his pants. “You’re a walking menace.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You can go back in the rowboat,” he went on grudgingly. “One of us can row the dinghy back.”

“I can row it back myself.”

“Suit yourself. I don’t have to tell you that if you open your big mouth about this, we’ll total you.”

“Don’t worry,” I said sarcastically. “Your secret is safe with me.” I swallowed the bad taste in my mouth. “What I told you about McLeod. Keep that to yourself, too.” “Who’d I tell?” Pete said, getting into the boat.

I tried to convince myself that since McLeod was a creep

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he deserved anything I did to him. But I couldn’t make myself quit feeling lousy, like I had started something I couldn’t stop. Shakily I got into the dinghy and, keeping the other boat well in sight, rowed back around the point.

For the first time in that putrid day, fate seemed to be for me. There was no one in when I got back to the house.

I got out of my wet clothes, put on a dry pair of shorts and a sweater, laid the wet ones out on the garage roof outside my window where they could get the setting sun, and passed out on the bed.

The next morning early I sneaked down to get some milk and breakfast. I was starved. But even after I had eaten a couple of bowls of cereal and four pieces of toast with butter and honey and drunk two glasses of milk I didn’t feel the way I usually do—rarin’ to go. I felt like my head was stuffed with cotton and what I wanted to do was go back to bed. I also didn’t want to go up to McLeod’s. As a matter of fact, it was the last place I wanted to go. I didn’t know what to do.

I was sitting there, too zonked out even to move, when the door opened and Mother came in. What’s more, she looked wide awake. If I hadn’t been sitting down you could have knocked me over with one of Gloria’s false eyelashes. Mother had on a silky blue robe that looked as if it had been made in Hong Kong or somewhere, and her dark hair was piled on top of her head and tied with a matching blue ribbon. She looked pretty enough to eat. If she had but known it, I was sitting there like ice cream on a dish for her to have. Luckily, I guess, she didn’t know it.

“Where were you yesterday, Chuck?”

So that was the game. “With the gang.”

“What were you doing?”

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“What we always do. Swimming, shooting bull.” “Were you smoking marijuana?”

“No. Where would we get it around here?”

“Then why were you out like a light when we came in? Both Meg and I tried to get you up but you wouldn't stir. I’m worried about you, Chuck. Meg tells me you’ve found someplace to study. If that’s what you were really doing, then all I can say is what I’ve been saying all along. You’re studying too hard. You should be out with the others.”

I pulled myself together. “First you grill me about what was I doing with the others, then you tell me I should be with them more.” Against every inclination I stood up. “It doesn’t matter what I do. It’s wrong. Well, I’m going to pass that exam so I can go to St. Matthew’s next year. That’s why I’m studying.”