Darkness Under the Sun (2 page)

“They call me names. Sometimes they push and shove and trip me. They laugh.”

“That would be other kids,” Mr. Blackwood said.

“Mostly, I guess.”

“Listen, a lot of cruel kids grow out of their cruelty. A few don’t. You can’t let the few decide what your life will be like.”

Only Howie’s mother had ever talked to him like this, and for some reason the same words didn’t mean as much coming from her as they did when they came from Mr. Blackwood.

“Why haven’t I ever seen you before?” Howie asked.

“I only came to town last night. Just sort of blew here on the breeze, you might say. Found the basement window that isn’t locked. Camped out downstairs on the ground floor near the back door. I’ll be leaving maybe tomorrow night.”

“What’re you here for?”

“For a place to be,” said Mr. Blackwood. “It’s a place between two other places, that’s all. I never stay long anywhere.”

“What do you do? For work. What’s your work?”

“I drift. It’s my job and my pleasure. Always moving on, seeing what I can of the world.”

Surprised, Howie said, “You get paid to drift?”

“It pays. I get everything I want.” Mr. Blackwood licked his lips, as if he’d just thought of something sweet. “What about you—have you lived here all your life?”

“Except when I went away for surgery at the burn center.”

“You live nearby?”

“Two blocks east on Wyatt Street. Are you a hobo?”

“Some people think so. But I’m something else. You have any sisters? Brothers or sisters?”

“Just Corrine.”

“Is she older than you?”

“A lot, yeah. She’s sixteen.”

“That’s a nice age for a girl,” Mr. Blackwood said.

“Is it? Why is it nicer than any other age?”

Mr. Blackwood closed his eyes and rocked his head from side to side. “Young enough to be still tender, but old enough to be ready for the world. What’s your mom’s name?”

“Nora. She’s really old. She’s thirty-five. What else are you, since you’re not a hobo?”

“I know all the hobo ways and tricks. But what I am most of all is a dreamer.” He opened his eyes. “What about your dad?”

After a silence, Howie said, “I don’t have a dad anymore.”

“I’m sorry, boy. If he died, that is.”

“He didn’t die,” Howie said.

Mr. Blackwood seemed genuinely interested. “But he doesn’t live with you. So was it divorce then?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s still your dad, though.”

“No.”

“You still see him, don’t you?”

“I can’t. I wouldn’t.”

Mr. Blackwood was silent. Then: “How long ago was this divorce?”

“When I was five.”

“The year you were burned.”

Wanting to get away from all that kind of talk, Howie said, “What’s a dreamer do?”

“Right now I’m dreaming of doing something special. But I don’t have all the details dreamed out just yet. When I do, I’ll tell you all about it. No dad all these years—that’s tough. Maybe your mom has a boyfriend lives with her, he could be a kind of dad.”

“No. She doesn’t. It’s just the three of us.”

As he stared down at the street, Howie was aware that Mr. Blackwood watched him with interest. “You’re the man of the house.”

“I guess so. How do you drift everywhere? You have a car?”

“Sometimes I get a car and drive. Or I hitch a ride in an empty railroad boxcar. I even take a bus from time to time.”

“Don’t people stare at you on a bus?”

“I sit right up front so they can get a good look.”

“I wouldn’t like them gawking at me.”

“If they gawk too much, I give them a spooky stare, and that cures them of it.”

“I wish I had a spooky stare,” Howie said.

“You see, it’s just like I told you—there’s nothing scary about you, Howie Dugley.”

“Do you always sleep in empty old buildings like this?”

“Not always. Sometimes in whatever vehicle I’m driving. Now and then under a bridge or in a field with my sleeping bag. Sometimes in homeless shelters, and sometimes in a house I like.”

“You have a house somewhere?”

“I have houses all over, any place I like,” said Mr. Blackwood.

“Then you’re not poor?”

“Not me. I’ve got everything I could ever want. I do what I want. I do anything I want.” From one of the many pockets in his khaki pants, he fished a thick roll of folding money. “Does this town have a
respectable take-out joint that makes great sandwiches?”

“There’s a place or two.”

Peeling a twenty and a ten from the roll, holding them out toward Howie, Mr. Blackwood said, “Why don’t you go buy us lunch? Two sandwiches for me, one for you, some Cokes. Don’t bother with the cellar window. Go out by the back door. It won’t lock behind if you set the latch lever straight up.”

The hand was so big that it could have covered Howie’s entire face, heel under his chin and fingertips past his hairline, thumb hooked in one ear, the little finger in the other. Even the little finger was large and, like all the others, had a freakishly big pad at the end, bigger than a soup spoon, almost like the sucker pads on the toes of a toad.

That hand looked so strong, maybe it could tear off your face and wad it up like Kleenex. If Mr. Blackwood wanted to hurt Howie, however, he would have done it already. Another thing to think about was that if Mr. Blackwood changed his mind about drifting, if he decided to stay here because he made friends in town, he would be a great friend to have. Bigger kids, no matter how big they were, no matter how mean, wouldn’t lie in wait for Howie and knock him around anymore, wouldn’t pull down his pants and laugh at him, wouldn’t call him Scarface or the Eight-Fingered Freak or the Claw, if they knew that he was a friend of Mr. Blackwood’s.

“I don’t usually go in places like restaurants unless my mom makes me go with her, and I never go alone.”

Still offering the money, Mr. Blackwood said, “Then it’ll be good for you to do it. You’ll see how they’ll take your money as quick as anyone’s, they’ll give you what you want like they would any customer. And if someone stares at you—just smile back at them. You don’t have a Frankenstein smile like me, but a nice smile will work as well, maybe better. You’ll see.”

Howie approached Mr. Blackwood and took the thirty bucks.

Dark muddy-red stains marred the bills. “They’re spendable,” Mr. Blackwood assured him. “Let them think you’re buying sandwiches for your mom. If they know we’re up here, they’ll chase us off before we have our lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s a lot of money—thirty bucks. But I trust you to do the right thing, Howie. There can’t be friendship without trust.”

Whether in the sunlight or in the occasional cloud shadow, Mr. Blackwood appeared so strange that he didn’t seem entirely real. But his eyes—so coal-black you couldn’t see any difference between the iris and the pupil—his
eyes
were as real as anything in the world, and they drilled right through you, seemed to look into your mind and read your thoughts.

Mr. Blackwood winked. “If they have any tasty-looking cookies, get a couple of those, too.”

2

HOWIE RETURNED WITH PAPER PLATES, PAPER cups, paper napkins, four cold cans of Coke, and a Ziploc bag full of ice in addition to thick sandwiches, big dill pickles, a bag of potato chips, and a package of chocolate-chip cookies. He also had twenty-three dollars in change from the thirty bucks. The sandwiches were roast beef and Swiss cheese on egg bread, with mayonnaise on one slice and mustard on the other, lettuce, and tomatoes.

As they sat on the tiled roof with their backs to the parapet, with the potato chips and cookies between them to be shared, Mr. Blackwood said, “These are really good sandwiches. That is some fine sandwich shop. What’s it called? Howie’s Sandwiches?”

“How’d you know?”

“The sandwiches didn’t give you away. They’re of the finest professional quality. It was the Ziploc bag of ice, too thoughtful a touch for any commercial sandwich shop. And twenty-three dollars change. You can’t buy all this for seven dollars or twice seven, for that matter.”

“Now that you know, I guess you’ll want your seven bucks back.”

“No, no, you’ve earned it. This is a bargain. You did so well, I’m of a mind to make you take at least another ten. What did your mother say, you packing up a picnic like this?”

“Mom’s at work all day. She works hard. She wants me to be with a sitter. But I don’t want a sitter, and she can’t afford one. And anyway, I know how useless a sitter can be.”

“Corrine? That was your sister’s name, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. She has a summer job over at the Dairy Queen. She’s gone all day, too. Nobody saw me making lunch.”

“The chips are good,” Mr. Blackwood said.

“Sour-cream-and-onion flavor.”

“It’s like having the dip built right into the chip.”

“I like Cheetos, too.”

“Who doesn’t like Cheetos?”

“But we didn’t have any,” Howie said.

“These are perfect with beef sandwiches.”

For a while, neither spoke. The chips were salty, the Cokes were cold and sweet, and the sun pouring down on the roof was warm but not too hot. Howie was surprised by how comfortable silence was between them. He didn’t feel the need to think of things to say or the need to be careful of what
not
to say. Ron Bleeker, Howie’s nastiest and most persistent tormentor among the kids in town, taunted him with a lot of names, including Butt-Ugly Dugley, and said that he was the president for life of the Butt-Ugly Club. Mr. Blackwood had probably been
called butt-ugly more times than he could count. So you could say that a meeting of the Butt-Ugly Club was now in session—and it was a cool event, up here on the roof, above everyone, with good eats and good company, and nobody better than anyone else just because of the way he looked.

Eventually Mr. Blackwood said, “When I was a kid, my father told me never to talk to anyone, and when I did, he always caned me.”

“What’s caned?”

“He beat me with a bamboo cane.”

“Just for talking to people?”

“It was really because I was so ugly and he was ashamed of me.”

“That’s not fair,” Howie said, and for the first time, he felt sorry for Mr. Blackwood, who until this moment had seemed to be still a little scary—though Howie couldn’t say why—but who was mostly someone to envy because he was so big and strong and sure of himself.

“When your father does something mean,” Mr. Blackwood said, “you think it must be partly your fault, you disappointed him somehow.”

“Is that what you thought?”

“The first few times he caned me, yeah. But then, no. I saw he was just a bad man. If I was the most obedient boy in the world—and the handsomest—he would have beaten me for some other reason.”

A large black bird circled over the roof twice, then landed on the northwest corner of the parapet, where it stood solemnly.

“That’s not just a crow,” said Mr. Blackwood. “That’s my raven.”

Howie was impressed. “You have a raven for a pet?”

“Not a pet. He’s my guardian. He always stays nearby. He gave me something once … showed me the night, its secrets. But that’s a long story. I’ll tell you some other time. These pickles are good. They have snap.”

“They’re crisp,” Howie said.

“That’s right. That’s the exact word. Crisp.”

The bird didn’t appear to have been drawn by their food. It remained at the distant corner of the building, preening its feathers with its busy beak.

When they finished eating and were packing up the debris, Mr. Blackwood said, “Was it that your dad didn’t want your mother to have custody of you?”

Howie was rendered speechless by the insight that the question revealed.

Into the boy’s silence, Mr. Blackwood said, “If he couldn’t have his son, nobody could have you. That’s pure jealousy, and it’s a sin. There’s envy in it, too. And pride and murderous hatred. Nothing you did or could have done would have changed what happened. My father and your father, with the cane and the fire, they were the same—except yours worse than mine. I assume there was a court order, he couldn’t come near you. So how did he get hold of you?”

After a while, Howie decided he would be better off sharing than holding it inside. “He took me from a babysitter’s house while Mom was working.”

“Took you where?”

“He said an amusement park. But it was this motel. He waited till I fell asleep.”

“Was it gasoline?”

“I woke up.” Howie drew a deep breath, then another. “Couldn’t breathe.” The memory of the gasoline was suffocating. He found it almost as hard to breathe now as then. He said, “Because of the fumes. Gasoline fumes.”

Mr. Blackwood was patient, as though somehow he knew that Howie had never talked about the burning with anyone, not even with his mother.

Watching the raven as it tucked its head under its wing and seemed to sleep in the sun, Howie finally said, “And then the match. Later he told people … he said he meant to burn himself, too. Him and me together. But then he couldn’t do it to himself.”

“He never meant to,” Mr. Blackwood said. “Don’t you ever believe for a minute that he meant to.”

“I don’t. He lies. He’s a liar.” Funny—how it could be true and still hurt to say his father was a liar.

“You saved your vision with your hand, pressed it tight against your left eye as the fire leaped up. You lost fingers, but otherwise, you’d be blind in one eye.”

“All the gas … it was on my left side.”

“You’re a smart boy and brave, to think so fast, keep your self-control in spite of the pain.”

“I’m not brave. I was scared bad. Sometimes I still am. When I think … he’ll get out one day.”

“I’ll bet all I own, he dies in prison, one way or another.”

Howie didn’t want to wish his father dead, but he took some heart from what Mr. Blackwood said, especially since he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

“The motel guy … he hears me. He comes fast. I’m burning. He has this extinguisher. My dad tries to stop him. He knocks my dad down. The stuff from the extinguisher—it smells cold. He saved me. I passed out. I woke up blind. But it was just wet pads on my eyes. Mom holding my good hand. The hospital, see. No pain at first. So I thought,
It’s over
. But it was only just the beginning. It was the beginning of … of everything.”