Chapter FOUR
The sign was hung on the side of an office attached to a house.
CALEB LANCASTER
Family Counseling
Please Come In
It wasn’t really an office as much as it was a room stuck on the corner of a two-car garage. It had probably been a workshop, Brian thought. He stopped at the door. This cop retired and is making money on the side by counseling boys in his old workshop. Great. Just great. He’ll tell me to get good grades, don’t fight, don’t do drugs, obey my parents— and the police—and send me on my way. After getting a check from Mom, which is really a check from the money I’ve saved, since Mom doesn’t have any money. Great.
He had talked to a counselor briefly the first year after he’d come back but there hadn’t really been anything wrong then. He hadn’t started to miss the woods as much as he would later—and football players hadn’t attacked him yet either, he thought, looking at the sign.
For a moment he played with the idea of turning and leaving. This was so stupid. There was nothing wrong with him. He had come back at somebody who was attacking him. He had come back a little hard, maybe, but just the same . . .
His hand turned the knob without his really meaning it to and the door opened.
‘‘Hello. You must be Brian.’’
Brian stopped just inside the door and his eyes moved and in two seconds he had taken in everything in the room. Plain white walls, some cheap pictures of woods and mountains that didn’t seem to match the rest of the space, a framed document of some kind. The desk was gray-green metal. There was one chair facing the front of the desk—an old iron office chair. Along one wall was a gray-green metal bookcase filled with books so heavy the shelves sagged. The floor was clean gray concrete.
It was maybe the ugliest room he had ever seen.
Behind the desk sat what Brian could only think of as a wall of a man. He wasn’t fat, just enormous and richly black, with a smile that grew wider as he stood and held out his hand. Brian almost moved back. This man had to be nearly seven feet tall. He literally almost filled the room.
‘‘I’m Caleb.’’
Brian took his hand and felt himself being moved toward the chair across from Caleb.
‘‘Take a seat, any seat.’’ He laughed. ‘‘As long as it’s this one.’’
Brian sat, waited.
‘‘They tell me you’re the boy who lived in the woods. The one who was all over television a couple of years ago.’’
Brian nodded.
‘‘Is that right?’’
Brian nodded again and realized with a start that Caleb was blind. ‘‘Yes . . .’’
Caleb laughed, deep and booming. ‘‘You were nodding.’’
‘‘Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t know . . .’’
‘‘Don’t be sorry. It’s flattering that you took so long to see it.’’
‘‘Did it happen when you were a cop?’’
Another laugh. ‘‘Not really. I got a headache one day, a really fierce one while I was working, and three days later I was blind.’’
‘‘Just like that?’’
‘‘Just like that. The doctors had some fancy names for what happened but I like to keep things simple. I had a headache. I went blind. That’s it. But we’re not supposed to talk about me. We’re supposed to talk about why you beat the hell out of that football player.’’
Brian leaned back.
‘‘If you want to.’’
Brian took a breath.
‘‘Or we could talk about something else.’’
‘‘I didn’t beat the hell out of him.’’
‘‘They took him to the hospital . . .’’
‘‘He attacked me.’’
‘‘Over a girl,’’ Caleb said.
‘‘No. Or maybe. I don’t know. He just slammed out the door and hit me.’’
‘‘And you hit him back.’’
Brian nodded, then remembered. ‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Tell me about the woods.’’
‘‘Pardon?’’
‘‘The woods. Tell me about them. I’m a city boy and don’t know anything about woods. What are they like?’’
‘‘I . . .’’ Brian shrugged. ‘‘They’re all right.’’
‘‘All right? That’s all? After all you did that’s all you can say? I heard you had to eat bugs and almost died. What was it like—really like?’’
Brian paused, remembering. A blade of grass that moved, the way a rabbit turned its head just before an arrow hit it, a flash of color when a fish rolled in the water.
‘‘I don’t think you would understand. Nobody who hasn’t been there can really know . . .’’
Caleb nodded and was silent. Then he spoke softly. ‘‘Tell me one thing then.’’
‘‘What do you mean?’’
‘‘Tell me one thing, one part of it that I can see in my mind and understand. You can do that, can’t you?’’
Brian shrugged. ‘‘I guess so. Which part do you want to know about?’’
‘‘You pick it.’’
Brian thought for nearly a full minute. Moose attacks, wild wind, good kills, near misses, food—lord, food when he was starving—and the fierce joy that came when a hunt worked. All of it was there, every little and big thing that had happened to him in a summer and a winter, and in the end, he decided to tell Caleb about a sunset.
There had been many sunsets and they were all beautiful; every one had had different light, different sounds, and he remembered them all the way somebody who watches a wonderful movie can remember every bit of the movie.
The one he described for Caleb was in the winter. It had been a still, unbelievably cold day when trees exploded and the sky was so brilliantly clear that when he looked into the blue it didn’t seem to have a limit, didn’t seem to end. It was late afternoon and he had eaten hot food inside his shelter and gone outside to get wood in for the night. The sun was below the tree line but there was still light and the sky was rapidly turning a deep cobalt blue and Brian could see a single bright star—or was it a planet? Venus, perhaps, near where the sun had disappeared.
Suddenly—and it was so quick he almost missed it—a spear of golden light shot from the sun and seemed to pierce the star. Like an arrow of gold light, one brilliant shaft there and gone, and while he watched, transfixed, another shaft came and then another. Three times. Three light-arrows from the sun shot through the star.
It made him believe, made him know, that there was something bigger than he was, something bigger than everybody, bigger than all. He thought it must mean something, had to mean something, but he could not think what. Three arrows of light. Three-Arrow. Maybe a name, maybe a direction. Later, after he came back and was trying to understand all that had happened, he read that early Inuits in the North saw the northern lights and believed them to be the souls of dead children dancing. Brian knew it was really the ionosphere ionizing but he still wanted it to be the souls of dead children playing, wanted it to mean more, and it was the same with this sunset.
It was so beautiful it took his breath and he stood, his arms full of wood, staring at the sky until the sun, the star and the light were gone, wanting it all to mean more.
He tried to tell Caleb everything about the sunset every color, every shade, the small sounds of the ice crack-singing on the lake, the hiss of the cold sky, the rustle of powder snow settling.
Told it all and when he was done he looked across the desk and saw that Caleb was crying.