Silence for a beat. “Okay,” I said.
He opened his eyes. “I mean it. He was at our house one night over Christmas break our senior year, and Mother had to run to the store. My father was at the office, as usual. Abby was upstairs writing a letter or something. Wat decided to watch The Searchers on cable while waiting for Mother to come home and have dinner. He just sat there on the couch, watching John Wayne, and I went to the hall closet and found a pistol my father had always kept there, tucked under an old blanket on the top shelf. It was a .45, big ugly thing. I’d never fired it before, but I walked quietly down the hall to the den where Wat was watching the movie, his back to me, and I pushed the safety off and pointed it at his head.” He paused and then exhaled heavily. “Didn’t do it. Couldn’t.”
“Why not?” I murmured.
“Abby,” he said simply. “I didn’t want to shoot him and have her see him that way, see me with the gun in my hand. It was a near thing. I pushed the safety back on and put the pistol back into the closet and went outside and threw up behind the garage. There’s got to be something wrong when the only reason you don’t shoot your uncle to death is because you’re worried how your sister will react. Later, of course, I was horrified at the idea. I almost went to pieces. I didn’t come back to school until later, remember?”
With a shudder, I did remember. “Yeah, your mom said you were sick—flu, I think.”
“On the verge of a nervous breakdown, more like it. And then spring break . . .” Fritz grimaced.
“What?”
“My father found pictures on Wat’s computer. He was doing a security sweep to pave the way for some government contracts or something, every NorthPoint computer account got the once-over, and his IT guys flagged something buried in Wat’s hard drive. A file with hundreds of pictures. All porn. All boys.”
“Jesus.”
“Wat was at our house that night when Father came home. I’d never seen my father so angry. He told Wat he needed to talk with him, and Wat raised his eyebrows and went into Father’s office and closed the door. I stood outside Father’s office and listened to him shouting at Wat, asking how he could download porn of all things, accusing him of setting the company up for ruin. I couldn’t hear what Wat said, but suddenly he opened the door, trying to leave, and I nearly fell into the room. Father looked livid, just white with anger, but Wat stared at me as if I were a ghost. Then Father looked from him to me.”
I said, “He knew?”
Fritz shrugged. “It was all over our faces. I was scared—terrified, even—but at some level I was relieved. We could deal with it, get it out in the open.” He said these last words with such bitterness that I nearly rocked back on my heels.
“What happened?” I said.
Fritz clenched his jaw as if afraid to speak. “He buried it,” he said. “My father buried it. Had Wat’s laptop wiped clean and fired the IT guy who had called him. Made up something about the guy selling NorthPoint secrets to the Koreans or something, I don’t know.”
“The Chinese,” I said hoarsely. I saw in my mind’s eye Wat Davenport in his townhome, sitting in front of the fire, his laughter brief and harsh. It sounds like a bad movie, doesn’t it? Wat had said. Chinese spies!
Fritz frowned. “Yeah, maybe it was the Chinese. Anyway, he fired the guy to keep my uncle from getting in trouble. And he wouldn’t even talk to me the rest of vacation. He just . . . looked at me, like I was offensive.” Fritz’s voice wavered slightly before hardening again. “Then he sent me back to Blackburne. That was when I knew I had to leave. My own father didn’t want to know what had happened to me, or how I felt, or anything. He just wanted me gone because he thought it would hurt his fucking company.” He stabbed a finger toward his trailer. “And now I’m a father, and I have a son, and I swear to God I won’t ever abandon him the way my own father just . . . left me. He left me.” His voice dropped, though his tone was no less harsh and insistent. “He left me. When I needed him, he wanted me gone. I just obliged him. I got as much cash together as I could and planned to take off after spring break.”
I heard myself ask, in a small voice, “How did you do that? I mean, you didn’t ‘take off ’—you disappeared. You walked off the edge of the fucking earth.”
Fritz looked weary now, resigned, as if he revisited his history every day. Which, I realized with a shock, he probably did. “I stole a bicycle,” he said. “Earlier that year. One of the older faculty kids left it out in a field near his house, and one day during cross country practice, I ran by and saw it and realized that was how I could get away from my family. I pretended my laces were untied and let my teammates run past. Then I went and got the bike and rode it into a stand of trees about a quarter mile away. I felt bad for the kid who owned the bike, but I just saw it as something I needed. The night before I left, during study hall, I ran back to that stand of trees and found it still lying there, a little rust on it but nothing terrible. I think I told you I was studying in the library.” He shrugged in apology. “The next night I went back and got on the bike and just rode down the Hill and down the driveway out past the lions. Made it to Staunton in an hour and bought a bus ticket to West Virginia, and then kept going west.” He made a halfhearted gesture at the trailer. “Ended up out here, eventually. Finally got to be a cowboy, I guess. Dodging a bull’s not much different than dodging tackles. George is training me.”
“I thought,” I started to say, and then had to clear my throat. “I always thought you left because—we had that argument. About college and . . . how I lied to you.” My voice sounded pitiful in my own ears. Your uncle molested you and you almost killed him, and when your father found out, he covered it up and then you ran away, but the important thing is that I need to apologize.
Fritz gave me a strange look. Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a worn leather wallet, from which he extracted a much-folded piece of paper. He held the paper out to me, and I took it from his hand and unfolded it. It was a letter from UVA addressed to Francis McHugh Davenport. “Dear Fritz,” it began. “Congratulations! You have been accepted . . .” I looked up from the letter and stared at Fritz, who gave another small, lopsided grin.
“Got that the day I left,” he said.