“Good,” Nat said. “You’ve come to post my bail.”
“No,” Nathan said. “I’ll come see you every visiting day. But I won’t put up bond for you. Because I know you’ll run away. You’re going to stay in here until your trial, and then you’ll go into the juvenile detention system and pay for what you did. I want you to tell me exactly what happened. I want to know how you could bring yourself to steal my shotgun and fire it at a perfectly innocent stranger.”
Nat’s eyes registered genuine alarm. “I didn’t shoot anybody! Is that what they’re saying? Then they’re lying! Because I never shot anybody!”
“The man at the desk said the weapon was discharged. And that the gas-station owner was injured.”
“Will you at least let me tell you what happened?”
“Fine,” Nathan said. He crossed his arms against his chest. Leaned back, feeling the hard plastic of the chair press into his back. “Tell me.”
“I’m just trying to get him to open the cash register. I’m holding the shotgun on him. And he reaches down to open the drawer. And then what does he do but pull a little pistol out of the drawer and fire it at me. I mean, who does that? Pulls a gun on a guy who’s holding a loaded shotgun right in your face?”
“So you would have me believe it was all his fault? For trying to defend his business?”
“I didn’t say that. Anyway, I threw myself out of the way. You know. So I wouldn’t get shot. And I fell down. And the gun just sort of … went off.”
“So you did shoot him. Whether you meant to or not.”
“No! I didn’t! I didn’t hit him. I hit the cash register. And a piece of exploding cash register hit him in the cheek. I know that’s what happened because I was still there when the cop helped him pull it out. He sort of sat on me until the cops came.”
A long silence. During which, at least, the boy had the wherewithal to appear humiliated.
“And if the round had hit him?”
“But it didn’t.”
“If it had?”
“It was only birdshot.”
“Do you know what birdshot can do, fired at close range? Right into someone’s face? You could have killed that man. And it’s really only by luck that you didn’t. That the morning wasn’t a complete and utter irreversible disaster is really not to your credit at all.”
Another long, embarrassed silence.
“I know,” Nat said. “I’ve thought about it.”
“Well, you’ll have time to think about it a lot more. You’re probably here until you turn eighteen. Because I meant what I said about the bail. You are the one who did this, so you will have to be the one to pay.”
The boy said nothing for a long time. Then he said, “You’re right about one thing. I would have run out on the bail.”
“Why did you do this?” Nathan asked. “Are you trying to get my attention?”
The boy shrugged. “Everyone else does bad things. Why shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t. Lots of people don’t.”
The boy sighed and brushed hair back out of his eyes. “I believed you,” he said. “I believed that as long as you were alive you’d never wash your hands of me. Never stop trying to civilize me. I was trying to get far away.”
“I see.”
“Wash your hands of me now?”
“No,” Nathan said.
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Nathan had been home for several hours. He had fed Maggie and the pup in their run. Heated up a TV dinner for himself, hamburger patty with mashed potatoes. Eaten it in front of the news.
Then he brought Maggie and the nameless pup into the living room with him.
It wasn’t until he turned off the TV and looked at the clock — noting that it was nearly eight o’clock — that he remembered.
He tried to look up Eleanor’s number in the phone book, but it wasn’t listed.
It took him several minutes, but he found her phone number in his old client records, in a banker’s box in the garage.
When he got back inside, the pup was in the process of urinating against the corner of Nathan’s couch.
Uttering mild, barely offensive curses, he first threw the pup back into the run, where the dog whimpered and yapped. Then he headed back to the garage for carpet and upholstery cleaner. But he stopped, knowing the phone call was more urgent. Which, considering Nathan’s penchant for sanitation, made it unusually urgent.
She answered on the second ring.
“Oh, Eleanor,” he said. “I am so sorry. In fact, I’m more than sorry. I’m downright ashamed.”
In the intervening silence, he could hear the puppy’s heated complaints.
“I probably shouldn’t have asked you,” she said.
“Eleanor. I’ve been a widower for three years. You’ve been a widow for fifteen. There is nothing the slightest bit inappropriate about you asking me to dinner.”
“But when you didn’t show up, I thought—”
“Well, you thought wrong,” he said. And told her, in about the three- or four-minute version, of the addition and then the subtraction of the boy he found in the woods. “Have you ever had a day like that?” he asked. “When something happens that’s so huge it just erases everything that came before it?”
Silence on the line, during which Nathan believed she really was considering his question.
Then she said, “I suppose the day Arthur had his heart attack was a day like that.”
A vivid memory reared into Nathan’s consciousness. Opening Flora’s door at eleven A.M. to see why she wasn’t awake yet. He firmly pushed the image back down again.
“I’m sorry for what you must have thought,” he said. “And I’m sorry because your dinner must have been ruined. And I don’t suppose I’d blame you if you didn’t think I was worth the second chance. But maybe I could take a rain check …”
At least this time he wouldn’t have to worry that leaving Nat alone would amount to trouble. Because all the trouble in the world had already come to stay.
1 October 1975
He Still Doesn’t Really Know You
Several days later, on the boy’s birthday, Nathan came to visit.
In fact, he had been to visit every day since Nat’s incarceration. But on this day he made more of a production of the visit. He tried to make it special without being sad, as special occasions in tragic circumstances tend to be.
He brought a birthday cupcake — a whole cake seemed excessive under the circumstances — half a roast duck in foil in a paper grocery sack, a photograph of the still-unnamed pup, and a small wrapped gift.
He stepped through the front door of the county facility, silently mourning how familiar the place had become.
“Ah. You,” Officer Frawley said as Nathan signed in.
Nathan could still see his own name prominent on the sign-in sheet among yesterday’s visitors. There were only two, save himself.
“Yes,” Nathan said. “Me.”
It was a veiled criticism of the kind of useless prattle Nathan despised. Any type of small talk was abhorrent to him. But the officer had no way of knowing that, so it had not been a rude comment, or at least could not have been perceived as such. In fact, Nathan assumed that to Frawley it sounded quite a normal thing to say.
“Any progress on the return of my shotgun?” Nathan asked. As he did each time he signed in.
“No, but it’ll happen eventually. The wheels of evidence grind real slow. What’s that in the wrapping paper? Not likely I can let you in with that. Unless you’re willing to unwrap it. I pretty much have to visually inspect anything you bring inside. Are you willing to unwrap it?”
“I guess I can if I absolutely have to. But it’s his birthday. I hate to ruin the surprise. I suppose I could wrap it again when you’re done looking. If you have some tape I can borrow.”
“Hmm. Sorry. No tape. We use staples on everything. Let me take a closer look at that, then.”
Nathan handed it over.
It was small, light and soft. It was not in a box of any sort. Nathan hoped it would be obvious, just by feel, that it had no real potential to be dangerous.
“This is OK. I can make an exception for this. Couldn’t possibly hurt anyone, whatever it is. So, the little miscreant has a birthday today.”
“His name is Nat.”
The officer looked up at Nathan. Gauging. Measuring. It was clear from Nathan’s voice that the man had over-stepped a line. His interest seemed to be in learning how far.
“Right,” he said. “My mistake.”
“Anyone can make a mistake,” Nathan said. Aware that much of his fate rested in the hands of prison employees for several years at least.
“No one else visits every day,” the officer said. “Why is that?”
“I couldn’t speak for anyone else.”
“Actually, I guess I meant, why are you so different?”
“I’m not sure I can speak to that, either,” Nathan said. “I am the way I am. We all are the way we are and I’m not sure any of us really knows why.”
“I guess you got a point there,” Frawley said.
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