Say Goodbye for Now Page 6

  “Oh, there you are,” Pete said, though he’d actually spotted Justin some time earlier.

  “How’s that dog? Or whatever he is?”

  “He’ll be okay. His leg was broke but the lady doctor operated on it.” A silence fell, and Pete realized he’d said too much. “Oh,” he said quickly. “Just pretend I never said that, okay? I took him to a place, and he got an operation. I think he’ll be okay, but maybe not for a time. I broke my leg when I was younger and it was weeks before I felt much like walking on it. But in time I think he’ll get back on his feet just fine.”

  “Are you gonna keep him?”

  “I’m not sure,” Pete said, feeling his eyebrows scrunch down and his forehead wrinkle with the unpleasant weight of the subject.

  “You going out to see him now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  Justin’s face disappeared from the window.

  The two bowls of cereal Pete had eaten for breakfast suddenly refused to sit still in his belly. His face felt hot, and a cloud of what felt like certain doom formed over his head, pressing down on his morning. On his very being.

  He gently touched the worst of the welts on his buttocks, the one that had bled. He couldn’t imagine doing anything to get a whipping again until he was fully healed. But at the same time he knew he would not—could not—tell Justin not to walk with him. Or not to call out for a talk when he saw Pete come by his house. Or not to be Pete’s friend. It wasn’t Justin’s fault, and Pete was not in the habit of hurting feelings and breaking hearts, or even spirits. Never had been. Didn’t figure he ever would be.

  The next thing he knew, Justin was walking next to him down the sidewalk, eating what appeared to be a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Pete was paying close attention to that sandwich, because he was still hungry, and it looked and smelled good.

  Every step caused Pete’s undershorts to rub against his welts, but he resisted the urge to express his pain out loud.

  “Want half my peanut butter sandwich?” Justin asked, apparently seeing Pete eyeing it.

  “I’d love it, if you really think you could do without.”

  “It’s okay. It’s my second one.”

  Justin tore the sandwich in half carefully, using the tips of his fingers to break it along a fairly straight line.

  Pete took the half from him and scarfed it down in three bites.

  “Mmm,” he said. “That raspberry jam is good.”

  “I know, huh?” Justin replied.

  They walked in silence for a moment or two. Pete glanced over his shoulder to see if they were being observed.

  “You didn’t eat breakfast?” Justin asked.

  “No, I did. I ate twice as much as I usually do. But I didn’t hardly eat yesterday, except breakfast before the sun came up, and now I just can’t seem to get enough.”

  “Because of that dog?”

  “Right.”

  “What did the lady doctor say he was? Oh. Sorry. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. After you told me to forget it and all.”

  “It’s okay. I know you can’t really forget. It’s my own fault for saying it out loud. I wasn’t thinking and it just slipped out. I guess I meant . . . don’t say anything about it to anybody else.”

  “No,” Justin said, a bit solemnly. “I won’t.”

  “She thinks he’s a wolf-dog.”

  “Part of each?”

  “Right. And she says he knew people at some point in his life because he had some kind of claws removed. And because he’s fixed.”

  “How long did you stay with him?”

  “Till the sun went down.”

  “She didn’t give you anything to eat?”

  “No. And then when I got home, my dad’d thrown my dinner away. Fifteen minutes. That’s what he gives me after suppertime and after that it’s my own fault for being late.”

  “Wow. He’s strict.”

  “Plus I got a whipping.”

  “For what?”

  “Being gone so long,” Pete said, carefully withholding the second part of the whipping story.

  They walked in silence for a time. The sun was just getting a good fire going, and it gleamed out from between the leaves of the big trees that grew farther down the long blocks of their seemingly endless street. Justin glanced over at Pete. More or less at his lower half, Pete couldn’t help noticing.

  “I wondered why you were taking such little bitty steps,” he said.

  Pete never answered. He glanced over his shoulder again. Justin seemed to be watching Pete watch the street behind them. But when the smaller boy opened his mouth to speak, he took the conversation in a whole different direction.

  “Your dad sounds tough.”

  “Does he?”

  “Yeah. Really tough.”

  “Huh. I don’t think so. I think he’s just like anybody else’s dad.”

  “He’s not like my dad.”

  “You never get a whipping?”

  “Never. Well. Once he swatted me on the butt with his hand. But then he couldn’t stop apologizing for it.”

  “So what does he do if you make him mad? You know. Break the rules or something.”

  “Just sits me down and gives me a good talking-to. He doesn’t believe in hitting kids. He says if you hit kids then they just grow up to hit.”

  Pete stopped walking for a moment to consider that idea, deeply relieved because his undershorts were no longer rubbing his painful welts. It took Justin a moment to notice he’d stopped. When he did, he walked back to where Pete stood thinking.

  “I don’t think that’s altogether true,” Pete said. “Because I never hit anything or anybody, and I never will.” He paused a minute, chewing over his own thoughts. “Then again, my grampa strapped my dad when he was growing up. So I guess it’s not altogether false, either.”

  Pete looked up.

  A filthy white tow truck had pulled up level with them and slowed. Pete looked through the passenger window. His heart fell when he locked eyes with Boomer Leggett.

  “Aw, crap,” Pete said under his breath.

  “What’s wrong?” Justin asked.

  Boomer tipped his head forward and to the side the way he tended to do when stressing something important, usually without words. It made a section of his stringy blond hair fall over his eyes. He smiled that smile Pete had never liked. There was something mean about it. And when he smiled it, nothing good ever followed. Then he looked forward, through his windshield again, and gunned the engine, his tires squealing on the warm asphalt.

  “What’s wrong?” Justin asked again. Sounding as though he’d caught the fear like a cold.

  “Oh. Nothing, I guess. I just don’t like that man.”

  They began walking slowly along the sidewalk again.

  Pete briefly considered making an excuse regarding why he had to go on alone. But he couldn’t bring himself to hurt Justin’s feelings.

  And besides, the damage was already done.

  “Where’s your wagon?” Justin asked as they turned onto the lady doctor’s street.

  But Pete was a hundred miles away in his head, running over his fears like those white rats run on exercise wheels, and he hadn’t registered the fact that he’d led Justin too close to Dr. Lucy’s house.

  Instead his brain just pulled away from razor strops and his daddy and Boomer Leggett and chewed on the fact that it seemed like a strange question about the wagon. Because there would be no earthly reason for him to drag it along on this walk. Then his busy brain went on to note that he really didn’t know where the wagon had gone off to. He had lost track of it sometime deep into the previous day. Which seemed like weeks ago when he tried to mentally access it.

  Let’s see, he thought. The lady drove me home. And she didn’t bring it. So it must still be—

  Pete looked up to see the lady doctor’s house. They were only a few dozen steps away from her door. The house was set back from the street, and the windows
were blocked from a few angles by overgrown bushes and trees. But, as Pete’s luck would have it, the lady was not inside. She was standing in her front yard, grass and weeds up to her knees. On her right hand she wore a long and heavy leather glove. Like a work glove, but extending higher up on her arm.

  On the glove perched that beautiful golden eagle. The one she’d said had been shot.

  Pete stopped in his tracks, and looked over at Justin.

  “Right,” Justin said. “I know. I get it. I’m going. And I didn’t see a thing.”

  Then Justin hurried down the street, back the way they’d come. He swung around the corner at an efficient trot.

  Pete looked up to see the lady still staring at the bird perched on her gloved hand. She didn’t seem to have noticed either one of the boys.

  Pete breathed a sigh of relief.

  Chapter Five: Dr. Lucy

  It wasn’t so much that a movement caught her eye. Her eyes remained fixed on Angel—in case she never saw the bird again, which was likely—until something caught Angel’s eye.

  Then she looked over to see that boy approach her.

  She knew she shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d said he would come back in the morning. And, little though she knew of him, she knew he took his commitments seriously. To understate a case.

  “Morning, ma’am,” he said, looking as though he would tip his cap to her if he had one.

  She nodded, rather than speaking.

  “Mind if I go in and see Prince?”

  She aimed him in the direction of the house with a flip of her head.

  Pete walked a few steps, then stopped. Looked back at her.

  “What’re you doing out here with that pretty eagle?” he asked. “Do they need to get out in the fresh air sometimes?”

  “Angel needs to be out in the fresh air all the time. I’m letting her go.”

  He walked back to where she was standing, his eyes wide.

  “Is she fixed enough for that?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  Angel flapped her huge, patterned wings, leaving them spread for a moment as if for balance. As she did, Dr. Lucy could see the spot where the bullet had torn through her left wing.

  “Hey, wait,” Pete said. But then he didn’t tell her what she was waiting for.

  “Yes?”

  “You named that bird Angel.”

  “So?”

  “You said you should never name an animal unless you’re planning to keep it.”

  “Well, if it helps any to know,” she said, “I’m paying for it now.”

  “Not sure I follow, ma’am.”

  “It means I’m better at giving advice than taking it.”

  “Still don’t quite get it. But anyway, now I’m kind of torn. I want to go in and see Prince, but I also want to see you let that bird go. I don’t suppose you’d hold off? Just long enough for me to say a quick hello to Prince.”

  Dr. Lucy felt something small happen on her face, almost akin to a smile. It brought a wave of relief to be given a good excuse to keep the bird a few minutes longer, and to be able to pretend sentimentality played no role in the decision.

  “Sure,” she said.

  She expected him to run into the house. Instead he walked toward the door in tiny steps, as if his hips were too tightly attached and only partially mobile.

  She looked back at Angel.

  “Here comes your pep talk,” she said. “The world out there is no nicer a place than it was last time you were in it. So keep a low profile, okay? Never trust a man with a gun. Actually, never trust a man. Period. Stay away from power lines and don’t swoop too low over highways. It’s not that I would mind putting you back together again. It’s that once you fly away from here the chances of anybody bringing you back to me if something goes wrong are pretty much nonexistent. So just find yourself a decent mate and build a sturdy nest and pay good attention to the eggs. Because the world could use more eagles. More eagles and fewer people, though I’m not making that last part your problem. That would be nice, though, wouldn’t it? A world full of eagles who shoot at people regularly to keep their numbers down?”

  She looked into the clear, intense eyes of the bird, who looked up into the trees.

  “And . . . you know . . . ,” she said, her voice just at the edge of cracking, “. . . have a good life.”

  Pete’s voice startled her.

  “Does she understand all that?”

  “No,” Dr. Lucy said. “She doesn’t understand any of it. That was awfully fast. I thought you wanted to say hi to Prince.”

  “I didn’t want to miss seeing that bird go.”

  “I told you I’d wait.”

  “I didn’t want to keep you waiting too long, though. Prince seems better today.”

  “I think so, too. I gave him some solid food this morning and he ate it.”

  “He wagged his tail at me.”

  “Well, that’s not too surprising. He’s canine.”

  “I didn’t mean it was surprising, really. Just nice.”

  She smiled the tiniest bit. Maybe it hadn’t even been enough to show on her face at all. They stood in silence for a moment. She did not release the bird, and Pete did not ask why not.

  Though, actually, Angel was not tethered in any way. Her huge talons wrapped around and inside Dr. Lucy’s gloved fist, but if the bird had chosen to fly away, she would have.

  “I guess it’s time,” she said.

  “Seems sad,” Pete replied.

  “Sad or not, she’s a wild animal. And it’s time.”

  “Is it like Prince?”

  “Is what like Prince?”

  “What you said last night about letting him go. How if he wants to go, he will. And then later if he wants to come back, he can.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “Except an eagle isn’t half-wild. She’s one hundred percent wild. It’s all she knows.”

  Dr. Lucy opened her hand. And, as she did, she extended the gesture even farther. She lifted the hand and the bird, a kind of universal signal for a bird to take flight. A little help to start them on their way.

  Angel flapped her wings. For a moment, for two or three flaps, she gained little altitude. If any. It seemed as though she was testing that once-wounded wing, rather than just assuming it would perform.

  Then she put more effort behind the lift, and soared up onto the branch of a tree, nearly directly overhead.

  “She’s not leaving!” Pete nearly shouted in his excitement, craning his neck back and shielding his eyes from the sun.

  “Give her time.”

  “Maybe she wants to stay!”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Pete. Wild birds fly. It’s what makes their lives special.”

  “But maybe she just wants to fly around here.”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  They waited. They watched.

  When Dr. Lucy’s neck grew a bit stiff, she turned her gaze down to see that Pete had his first two fingers tightly crossed on both hands.

  She wondered if—through some type of superstition—the boy felt a bird who wanted to stay would be a good omen of a wolf-dog who wanted to stay.

  “Oh, damn,” Pete said suddenly.

  She looked up to see Angel soar away, gliding to a speck in the distance, then out of view.

  “Sorry I cussed,” Pete said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Aren’t you sad to see her go?”

  “I don’t like to talk about how I feel.”

  “Sorry,” Pete said.

  They turned and walked toward the house together.

  “What about the owl?” he asked. “Are you going to have to let him go pretty soon, too?”

  “No. He was too badly hurt for that. He can’t fly, and he never will again—at least not well—so he’ll always be with me.”

  “What about the horses?”

  “The horses are not wild. They’re domestic horses. Born and bred in captivity. They’ll stay.
”

  “Good. ’Cause I like those horses. Could I ever ride one of those guys, do you think?”

  “I don’t guarantee they wouldn’t buck you off.”

  “You wouldn’t need to. I’d be willing to take my chances. Not today, though. Definitely not today.”

  He lay on his belly on the hard linoleum of her examining room floor. Nearly nose to nose with the wolf-dog. She leaned on a counter and watched the boy. Wondering when, if ever, he planned to leave.

  “Give you a ride home?” she asked.

  He turned his head to her, and his face looked positively emotionally scorched. In fact, he looked as though he was just about to cry, or had been crying quietly. But there had to be more to his mood than what she’d just asked. This seemed to be a preexisting condition.

  “What’s wrong, Pete?”

  “Everything.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “I can’t go home.”

  “Why not?”

  “Yesterday I got whipped. Twice. My daddy never whipped me twice. Not before yesterday, I mean. I could try to say how it feels to get whipped on the places where you just got whipped a minute ago, but I swear there just aren’t the words, ma’am. Or if there are, I don’t know them. And now it hurts like the devil just to walk. I can’t even sit down. And if I go back there again, he’s going to whip me again. And I swear, ma’am, I just can’t take it.” On the words “take it,” his tears gained ground. He swiped at them violently with the back of his hand and turned his face away. “Not a third time.”

  “Would it help if I went back with you and asked him to take it easy?”

  “No, ma’am. Might make it worse. He doesn’t like to talk about family stuff outside the family and he doesn’t like people telling him what to do.”

  “You have to go home, though,” she said.

  She told herself she would have said the same had it not been her house, her privacy, he was invading. But, truthfully, she did indeed want him to go away now, ignoble though that might have been.

  “I just can’t bring myself to do it, ma’am.”

  “Well, you can’t stay here,” she said, and then immediately regretted it.

  “I understand, ma’am,” he said, pulling gingerly to his feet. “I’ll just be going.”