Say Goodbye for Now Page 7

  “Wait,” she said. “Where will you go?”

  “No idea, ma’am.”

  She sighed.

  “No. Don’t go yet. You can stay a little longer. I’ll fix us something to eat.”

  “How bad are those spots where he whipped you?” she asked him.

  She sat at her kitchen table. He stood. He had to raise his soup bowl to his face to spoon it up, because it apparently hurt him too much to bend over.

  “Pretty bad, ma’am,” he said.

  “Want me to have a look?”

  His eyes went wide. He dropped his spoon into his bowl with a clank.

  “At my . . . behind? Are you kidding? I’d be humiliated!”

  “But I’m a doctor.”

  “But you’re a lady!”

  “Okay. Fine. It was just a suggestion. Forget I ever brought it up.”

  In time he picked up his spoon again and they ate in silence.

  “Wait,” she said. “Why would he whip you a third time if you went home now? What have you done this time that’s so bad? You’ve only been here less than two hours.”

  At first he averted his eyes and said nothing.

  “I guess it’s your own business,” she said, “and none of mine.”

  “Last night he told me not to do something. But then today I went and did it. Anyway.”

  “But if you were so afraid of another whipping . . .”

  He shifted uncomfortably on his feet.

  “I guess you can’t really understand it, ma’am, unless you know what the thing was.”

  She waited. But they fell back into eating their food, and the silence took root and grew. And stayed.

  And he never told her what the thing was.

  “This is stupid,” Pete said. “I’m just going to go home.”

  He’d been lying on his belly in her examining room again, his face close to the wolf-dog’s through the wire mesh, offering his fingers, which Prince tentatively sniffed. As he spoke he began the clearly painful process of standing.

  Archimedes the owl had been making a lot of noise for as long as Dr. Lucy could remember. All morning. She’d been trying to pretend she didn’t know why.

  She wanted to argue with Pete about going home. She also wanted to move on with her day. Get back to the way it was before: with no overly conscientious kid hanging around, being so constantly . . . there.

  “I think you should call me if things get bad,” she said.

  He leveled her with a look she couldn’t quite interpret.

  “That’s mighty kind of you, ma’am.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “I didn’t mean to say you can’t be nice. Just that I didn’t think you cared.”

  Funny, she thought. I didn’t think I did, either. She never answered out loud.

  Archimedes continued to hoot and fuss.

  “My dad and I don’t have a phone, though. Is the thing.”

  She dug some loose change out of her skirt pocket and singled out a dime. Held it out in Pete’s direction. It was shiny and new looking.

  “Then go find a pay phone if things get bad.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. That’s very neighborly of you to do.” He accepted the coin and pressed it deep into the pocket of his shorts. “I don’t know your number, though.”

  “If I told it to you now, could you remember it?”

  “Probably not, ma’am. No.”

  “Well. I’m listed.”

  A long silence.

  Then Pete said, “I don’t know your name, ma’am.”

  “I didn’t tell you my name?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “It’s Lucille Armstrong. It’s listed under L. K. Armstrong.”

  “What’s the K for?”

  She rocked her head back a little and found his eyes, not attempting to hide her curiosity.

  “Why do you want to know my middle name?”

  “It’ll help me remember those letters you just said.”

  “There’s no other Armstrong listed with just initials. But anyway, the K is for Kay.”

  The boy looked confused. For a long, silent moment.

  “How can it be . . . ?”

  “Not the letter K. The name Kay. K-A-Y.”

  “Oh, right. Got it. Okay. Now I think I’ll remember.” He turned toward the door. Stopped. Turned back. Seemed to wrestle with a thought in his own head. “Thing is, I’m not going to take the whipping this time. I’m just going to say no.”

  “Didn’t know you had the option.”

  “Once upon a time, maybe not. But since he hurt his back in that accident at the plant . . . I honestly don’t expect he could catch me if I didn’t want to get caught. It’s risky, but . . . He tells me to take the strap down and bring it to him. This time I’m going to say no. It’ll make him mad as hell. Sorry. Heck. And I’ll pay for it once his back is feeling better. Except . . . I don’t know. I’m almost as big as he is now. But I’m not sure I think it’s a good idea to point that out. Maybe I’ll just tell him I’ll take the whipping, but not until I’m healed up from the last two. And—what’s wrong with that owl, ma’am? He sounds upset.”

  She reached for a cigarette. “He misses his next-door neighbor,” she said.

  “Oh. Right.”

  He’d obviously forgotten about Angel’s new status as a free bird. It obviously pained him to remember.

  She lit the cigarette and puffed at it.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well. If it gets real bad, you just might see me again. But I still think it’s time to buck up and face what’s ahead of me.”

  “Good luck,” she said, drawing deeply on the cigarette. And she meant it sincerely.

  He moved toward the door.

  “Take your wagon,” she called after him.

  “Oh. My wagon. Right. Where is it?”

  “On the front porch.”

  Silence. Pete didn’t respond. She couldn’t hear him moving toward the door. She looked down at the wolf-dog. Prince, as Pete was determined to call him. He held his head high, following the sounds in the living room with his vigilant upright ears. Except there were currently no sounds to follow.

  Pete stuck his head back into the room.

  “I have this friend,” he said.

  Then he stalled. As if this hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

  “Go on.”

  “He’s new. He just moved here. I’ve only known him since yesterday. But I only had one really good old friend and he was never very good. If you know what I mean.”

  A pause.

  “I think I do,” she said to fill it.

  “Anyway, my dad said I can’t see him.”

  “This new friend.”

  “Right.”

  “Why not?”

  “Different race.”

  “I see.”

  “But that didn’t feel right to me at all, ma’am. I mean . . . how am I supposed to say that to my friend? He didn’t do nothing wrong. Sorry. Anything wrong. So this morning he walked me part of the way here again.”

  “Maybe your dad will never know.”

  “Oh, I wish, ma’am. But he’ll know. We got seen. By the same guy who ratted me out in the first place.”

  Another long silence. This one she did not fill. The boy was clearly surrounded with the rottenness of others. Hardly surprising. The world was full of it. And she couldn’t fix that for him. She couldn’t even fix that for herself, and not for lack of trying.

  “Well,” he said, “wish me luck.”

  “I did, actually. But I will again if you like. Have you always had so much trouble with your dad?”

  Pete leaned his shoulder on the doorframe, and his gaze moved up and away. As though going for a trip in his head.

  “I been thinking about that lately,” he said. “And I swear he used to be a whole bunch easier to get along with.”

  “Before the accident?”

  “No, ma’am. It started earlier than that. It’s like I was
little, and he was this pretty good dad. Not perfect, but good enough. I was a little harder to handle back then, too. I did a lot of stuff wrong.”

  “That’s hard to imagine,” she said, laughing out a puff of smoke.

  “It’s true, though. But then I got bigger and he got madder and I kept getting more and more polite and trying to cooperate. You know? I figured if I was good enough he wouldn’t be so mad. But it just seems like the bigger I get the madder he gets. But I don’t suppose it’s got much to do with my size.”

  “It might,” she said.

  He screwed up his face in an outward mask of his own inability to understand.

  “That’s interesting,” he said, “and maybe you’ll explain it to me, but next time. Right now I’d best get this done.”

  With that, he disappeared from the doorway.

  “Pete,” she called after him.

  “Yes, ma’am?” he asked without reappearing.

  “I think you did the right thing.”

  “About my new friend, you mean?”

  “Yes. That.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. That’s what I thought, too. Nice to have somebody back me up on that.”

  This time she heard the front door close behind him.

  She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and walked out the back door. Into the blazing morning sun. The horses crowded near the fence, nickering to her, but she paid them no mind.

  She leaned on one post of their pasture fence and stared off into the woods on the other side. Scanned the trees one by one, hoping to see Angel hanging close by. Keeping an eye on the house, and her. Expressing some kind of loyalty or affection for the place.

  She never saw Angel.

  In time the sun became too much and she had to take herself back indoors.

  Chapter Six: Pete

  Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. One irritating note on each revolution of the wagon’s wheels.

  Pete continued to register the sound. Because he didn’t know how not to. He would have stopped listening if he could have. He found it almost unbearably irritating. Since he couldn’t, he just winced once on each squeak and continued to scan the sky.

  “I know you’re up there somewhere, Angel,” he said.

  But even as he said it, he knew “somewhere” could be twenty miles away or more. After all, it was a big sky.

  Pete caught the toe of his sneaker in a sidewalk crack and pitched forward, landing hard on the concrete on his chest and the heels of his hands.

  “Ow!” he bellowed, mostly from the jostling of his previous wounds.

  He lay facedown on the hot pavement for a moment, cursing quietly to himself.

  Then he heard the sound. What kind of sound, though, he couldn’t quite sort out. It definitely sounded human. But a human trying to communicate what? That was the question he couldn’t answer.

  He lay still a moment longer, waiting to hear it again.

  The second sound was much clearer. Much easier to identify. It was a sob. A wet, helpless sob.

  Pete pushed carefully to his feet.

  “Hello?” he called.

  Under a shade tree in a vacant lot, half obscured by tall weeds, hunched a small figure that looked a lot like Justin. Little dapples of sunlight that filtered between the leaves shone alarmingly on the bright red blood that covered his closely cropped scalp.

  Pete broke into a run in the weeds, in spite of his own pain.

  “Justin?”

  The figure raised his bloody head. And he was indeed Justin.

  “Justin, what happened?” Pete reached his new friend and dropped to his knees in the weeds. “Justin! Talk to me!”

  Justin raised his eyes to Pete, but there was none of the familiar sharpness or clarity there. Instead he gazed almost foggily at Pete’s face, as if recently jostled from sleep.

  Pete looked down to see Justin clutching his thick glasses in one hand. They were covered with blood and smashed beyond repair.

  “Pete?”

  Justin reached one bloody hand in Pete’s direction. He missed. His hand touched a spot half a foot left of Pete’s left shoulder.

  “We have to get you to a doctor,” Pete said. “Or the hospital.”

  Justin offered no response. He seemed to have drifted back into his sleep state again, despite his eyes remaining open wide. Too wide, Pete thought.

  “Come on. I’ll help you up.”

  But Justin had ceased responding now. It wasn’t a matter of helping. It was a matter of doing it for him.

  Pete hooked one arm under each of Justin’s armpits and pulled the smaller boy to his feet. Justin fell limply forward onto him, and Pete was aware of the blood. The fact that Justin’s blood was all over him. He changed nothing as a result of it, but he couldn’t help finding it alarming.

  Pete lifted straight up again, wrapping his arms around Justin’s waist. He was able to lift Justin’s feet a few inches off the ground.

  Pete carried him—in a desperate series of tiny steps—to his wagon.

  The only doctor in town was a good four miles away. The hospital was over the line into the neighboring county. But Pete figured he was less than two miles from the lady doctor’s house. She might be mad if he brought someone there. But he would do it anyway. He would have to do it, regardless.

  Some things were simply more important than others, and everybody with half a brain knew it.

  “Ma’am?” he screamed from the end of her road. Even though he knew he was too far away to be heard. “Ma’am?” he screamed, even louder.

  He looked around at Justin as he jogged. Pete was pulling the wagon right down the tarmac in the middle of the road, because there was no sidewalk out here in the sticks, and the dirt beside the road was too broken up and bumpy. Justin had loosed a muffled shout of pain on every bump, and that was something Pete simply could not abide. He’d have rolled the wagon over his own body to spare his friend that pain. That is, if such a thing had been possible.

  Justin slumped in the wagon with his back resting at the intersection of the two remaining wooden rails. His neck was purposely craned in the direction of their travel. His eyes looked more focused to Pete, and he seemed to be taking in the fact that they were headed for the lady doctor’s house, which filled Pete with a tremendous sense of relief.

  Justin had blood in one of his eyes. And he didn’t seem to notice. At least, he wasn’t trying to fix it.

  “Ma’am?” Pete screamed again.

  She hurried out onto her front porch.

  Just for a split second she was looking down at her apron. Apparently her hands had been wet when he’d screamed for her, and she was hurrying outside and drying them on her apron at the same time. She looked perturbed. As if he shouldn’t have bothered her again. As if she’d really counted on spending the rest of the day with no troublesome young boy to pester her.

  Then she looked up.

  “Holy mother of God,” she said. “What in hell happened to him?”

  “I’m not sure, ma’am,” he called, jogging up her bumpy walkway, towing the wagon. Trying to ignore his friend’s grunts of pain. “He was woozy and I couldn’t get him to tell me much.”

  She ran to meet them halfway.

  She bent over Justin in the wagon. Examined his broken scalp. Opened his eyes wide with gentle fingers and peered inside. She held up two fingers in front of Justin’s face.

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked him.

  “Two, ma’am,” Justin said, his voice frighteningly small.

  “Good.” Dr. Lucy straightened up and addressed Pete. “We need to get him to a hospital,” she said.

  “No hospital!” Justin said, his voice higher and stronger.

  “But you’re a doctor,” Pete said.

  “But I’m not a hospital.”

  “No hospital!” Justin piped again.

  Dr. Lucy leaned over him a second time. “Why would you not want to go to a hospital when you’re this badly hurt?” she asked him.

&
nbsp; Justin’s answer was small and hard to hear. Pete moved in closer, but by then he seemed to have missed it. Whatever it was.

  “How would a hospital make it worse?” Dr. Lucy asked Justin. “That doesn’t make sense. Hospitals make it better.”

  Another mumbled reply that didn’t make it all the way to Pete’s ears.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Dr. Lucy asked.

  Justin looked down at his lap and offered no reply.

  “Did the person who did this to you tell you not to go to the hospital?”

  At first, nothing. Then a movement of Justin’s head that might have been a nod, or his head might just have teetered slightly in his difficulty holding it up.

  “Or the police,” Justin said. A little stronger this time.

  Dr. Lucy stood up straight and sighed. For a time, nothing moved. It seemed like a long time to Pete but he knew in the back of his brain that it probably wasn’t. It was probably only seconds. But they were long seconds.

  “I don’t have permission to treat this boy,” she said, apparently to no one in particular.

  “Justin!” Pete said, still caught and twisted in his panic. “Tell her she has your permission!”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

  Another long second. She seemed calm in some ways. Troubled, but not excited. She seemed lost in her own brain. Pete could tell she wanted to help, that her impulse was to help. And yet she stood still another second or two.

  “This is a minor child,” she said. “And he’s not my child. I could get in a lot of trouble treating him without his parents’ permission. Especially if something goes wrong and it turns out I should have taken him to a hospital.”

  Another excruciating second. Or two.

  “His mother died,” Pete said.

  “Where’s his father?”

  “Working at the plant.”

  The doctor’s attention disappeared again, into her own head. Pete waited, thinking he might burst. As if everything he was feeling could not fit inside his skin another moment.

  “Bring him inside,” Dr. Lucy said.

  “Okay, here’s what I want you to do,” she said to Pete. “We’re going to scrub you up, and then I want you to come here and hold pressure on this scalp wound. Be gentle, so as not to hurt him. But firm enough to stop the bleeding.”