“For the City,” he explained.
I raised my eyebrows. “The city needs rabbit poop?”
“Cannonballs,” he corrected.
He wasn’t as boring as I expected. He said “watch out” to squirrels, got mad at litter, washed his cannonballs until they dissolved in a beached canoe full of water. I taught him to snap twigs back to mark the path home, to walk on the lichened parts of rocks that were less slippery. To break up the silence, for something to do, I started naming things off for him as we went. Trailing arbutus. Chickadees. When we came across some beer cans under a greenstone ledge, Paul pointed and I said “rust.” Sometimes Paul told me about his father’s research (“he counts baby stars”) and his mother’s job (“she corrects his words”) and the City he was building on the deck. It had roads of bark, walls of sticks and rocks, train tracks of flattened leaves.
“Who lives in the City?” I asked him once. I remembered children from a long time ago when the bunkhouse had been full of them. They did things like build cities for fairies. They made up tiny people who came out at night.
“Nobody lives there.” He looked frustrated by the question.
“Then why are you building it?”
He shrugged. “It’s just a city.”
“Just a city,” I repeated. I could respect that.
He took me for granted. When he climbed up a rock and couldn’t get down, he held open his arms—without saying a word—and I lifted him under the armpits. When he had to pee, which was often, he just said, “I gotta go,” and I steadied him as he pulled down his pants. The first time I saw his penis, I felt a wave of sympathy and disgust, the way I’d felt, once, when I’d come upon a clump of nude baby mice in the hollow of a log. Those mice had blue bulges for eyes, pink tails wound together in a big lump. “Yuck,” Paul said, when I helped him pull up his damp underwear and wipe his hands on a leaf. “Yuck,” I agreed. The next time, I pointed at a log and said, “Try to hit that.” Overhead each afternoon we could hear the Canada geese coming back. We could hear them giving directions, laboring through wind currents, setting down their Vs. When the sun had just about set, we turned around, Paul lagging, getting farther and farther behind, so as the day grew truly cold—miniature winter setting in, the way it does at night in April—I put the backpack on Paul, and Paul on me, and we headed back toward his house on the lake. His fingers made corkscrews in my hair and his breath heated one ear.
Once, as I was helping Paul slide off a boulder, we came upon a mallard nest so far from shore that the ducklings could do nothing but waddle in yellow, panicked circles to get away. Paul reached down to touch one. The brown mother winged a few feet back, then waited empty eyed for the disaster to play itself out. Her feathers gleamed with a faint hint of purple, unruffled and smooth as scales. She did nothing to intervene, and so neither did I, as Paul grabbed at one of the ducklings. He had good intentions: he was a gentle enough kid. At the last minute, though, he pulled his hand back as if spooked—as if he’d felt something horrible beneath all that fluffy down, something brittle and hard and unexpected.
“Oh!” he said.
“What?” I asked, newly impatient with him.
His squeamishness goaded me somehow, made me a little angry. I wanted him to take the duckling and do something heartless and boyish, so I’d have to remind him to be kind. I don’t know. I wanted to be the one to stop him when he discovered the fragile contraption of bones beneath that halo of down. I wanted to intervene on behalf of animals. It irritated me that he was so careful and afraid. We stood and watched as the duckling waddled off to its mother, and the troop reconvened in a huddle under a pine.
For a strange instant, I found myself longing to lift a rock and throw it at them. I wanted to show Paul something, maybe, make him scared of the right things.
Or another time, in early evening. As Paul and I were cresting the last hill, as I was squinting into the darkening woods to make out the path, a couple of deer lifted their heads at once and differentiated themselves from the trees.
We stared at them, and they at us, for a full thirty seconds without moving. They multiplied as we looked at them. There were three at first, then there were four, then there were five. They were the exact color of the bark and leaves—gray brown—but the skin around their eyes was red. I felt the breeze on their backs lift the braid from my chest and set it down over my shoulder. “They’re going to get us,” Paul whispered. He reached for my hand.
“They’re a herd,” I reminded him. “They’re afraid of us.”
Two more appeared. Paul shivered.