Skeleton Crew Read online

  Norton gave a tremendous yank on the starter cord.

  Whutwhut-whutwhutwhut-WHAT!WHAT!WHAT! ... WHAT! ... Whut.

  Almost had it there for a minute, fella.

  Another Herculean tug.

  Whutwhut-whut.

  "Cocksucker," Norton whispered fiercely, and bared his teeth at his fancy chainsaw.

  I went back around the house, feeling really good for the first time since I got up. My own saw started on the first tug, and I went to work.

  Around ten o'clock there was a tap on my shoulder. It was Billy with a can of beer in one hand and Steff's list in the other. I stuffed the list in the back pocket of my jeans and took the beer, which was not exactly frosty-cold but at least cool. I chugged almost half of it at once--rarely does a beer taste that good--and tipped the can in salute at Billy. "Thanks, champ."

  "Can I have some?"

  I let him have a swallow. He grimaced and handed the can back. I offed the rest and just caught myself as I started to crunch it up in the middle. The deposit law on bottles and cans has been in effect for over three years, but old ways die hard.

  "She wrote something across the bottom of the list, but I can't read her writing," Billy said.

  I took out the list again. "I can't get WOXO on the radio," Steff's note read. "Do you think the storm knocked them off the air?"

  WOXO is the local automated FM rock outlet. It broadcast from Norway, about twenty miles north, and was all that our old and feeble FM receiver would haul in.

  "Tell her probably," I said, after reading the question over to him. "Ask her if she can get Portland on the AM band."

  "Okay, Daddy, can I come when you go to town?"

  "Sure. You and Mommy both, if you want."

  "Okay." He ran back to the house with the empty can.

  I had worked my way up to the big tree. I made my first cut, sawed through, then turned the saw off for a few moments to let it cool down--the tree was really too big for it, but I thought it would be all right if I didn't rush it. I wondered if the dirt road leading up to Kansas Road was clear of falls, and just as I was wondering, an orange CMP truck lumbered past, probably on its way to the far end of our little road. So that was all right. The road was clear and the power guys would be here by noon to take care of the live lines.

  I cut a big chunk off the tree, dragged it to the side of the driveway, and tumbled it over the edge. It rolled down the slope and into the underbrush that had crept back since the long-ago day when my dad and his brothers--all of them artists, we have always been an artistic family, the Draytons--had cleared it away.

  I wiped sweat off my face with my arm and wished for another beer; one really only sets your mouth. I picked up the chainsaw and thought about WOXO being off the air. That was the direction that funny fogbank had come from. And it was the direction Shaymore (pronounced Shammore by the locals) lay in. Shaymore was where the Arrowhead Project was.

  That was old Bill Giosti's theory about the so-called Black Spring: the Arrowhead Project. In the western part of Shaymore, not far from where the town borders on Stoneham, there was a small government preserve surrounded with wire. There were sentries and closed-circuit television cameras and God knew what else. Or so I had heard; I'd never actually seen it, although the Old Shaymore Road runs along the eastern side of the government land for a mile or so.

  No one knew for sure where the name Arrowhead Project came from and no one could tell you for one hundred percent sure that that really was the name of the project--if there was a project. Bill Giosti said there was, but when you asked him how and where he came by his information, he got vague. His niece, he said, worked for the Continental Phone Company, and she had heard things. It got like that.

  "Atomic things," Bill said that day, leaning in the Scout's window and blowing a healthy draught of Pabst into my face.

  "That's what they're fooling around with up there. Shooting atoms into the air and all that."

  "Mr. Giosti, the air's full of atoms," Billy had said. "That's what Mrs. Neary says. Mrs. Neary says everything's full of atoms."

  Bill Giosti gave my son Bill a long, bloodshot glance that finally deflated him. "These are different atoms, son."

  "Oh, yeah," Billy muttered, giving in.

  Dick Muehler, our insurance agent, said the Arrowhead Project was an agricultural station the government was running, no more or less. "Bigger tomatoes with a longer growing season," Dick said sagely, and then went back to showing me how I could help my family most efficiently by dying young. Janine Lawless, our postlady, said it was a geological survey having something to do with shale oil. She knew for a fact, because her husband's brother worked for a man who had--

  Mrs. Carmody, now . . . she probably leaned more to Bill Giosti's view of the matter. Not just atoms, but different atoms.

  I cut two more chunks off the big tree and dropped them over the side before Billy came back with a fresh beer in one hand and a note from Steff in the other. If there's anything Big Bill likes to do more than run messages, I don't know what it could be.

  "Thanks," I said, taking them both.

  "Can I have a swallow?"

  "Just one. You took two last time. Can't have you running around drunk at ten in the morning."

  "Quarter past," he said, and smiled shyly over the top of the can. I smiled back--not that it was such a great joke, you know, but Billy makes them so rarely--and then read the note.

  "Got JBQ on the radio," Steffy had written. "Don't get drunk before you go to town. You can have one more, but that's it before lunch. Do you think you can get up our road okay?"

  I handed him the note back and took my beer. "Tell her the road's okay because a power truck just went by. They'll be working their way up here."

  "Okay."

  "Champ?"

  "What, Dad?"

  "Tell her everything's okay."

  He smiled again, maybe telling himself first. "Okay."

  He ran back and I watched him go, legs pumping, soles of his zori showing. I love him. It's his face and sometimes the way his eyes turn up to mine that make me feel as if things are really okay. It's a lie, of course--things are not okay and never have been--but my kid makes me believe the lie.

  I drank some beer, set the can down carefully on a rock, and got the chainsaw going again. About twenty minutes later I felt a light tap on my shoulder and turned, expecting to see Billy again. Instead it was Brent Norton. I turned off the chainsaw.

  He didn't look the way Norton usually looks. He looked hot and tired and unhappy and a little bewildered.

  "Hi, Brent," I said. Our last words had been hard ones, and I was a little unsure how to proceed. I had a funny feeling that he had been standing behind me for the last five minutes or so, clearing his throat decorously under the chainsaw's aggressive roar. I hadn't gotten a really good look at him this summer. He had lost weight, but it didn't look good. It should have, because he had been carrying around an extra twenty pounds, but it didn't. His wife had died the previous November. Cancer. Aggie Bibber told Steffy that. Aggie was our resident necrologist. Every neighborhood has one. From the casual way Norton had of ragging his wife and belittling her (doing it with the contemptuous ease of a veteran matador inserting banderillas in an old bull's lumbering body), I would have guessed he'd be glad to have her gone. If asked, I might even have speculated that he'd show up this summer with a girl twenty years younger than he was on his arm and a silly my-cock-has-died-and-gone-to-heaven grin on his face. But instead of the silly grin there was only a new batch of age lines, and the weight had come off in all the wrong places, leaving sags and folds and dewlaps that told their own story. For one passing moment I wanted only to lead Norton to a patch of sun and sit him beside one of the fallen trees with my can of beer in his hand, and do a charcoal sketch of him.

  "Hi, Dave," he said, after a long moment of awkward silence--a silence that was made even louder by the absence of the chainsaw's racket and roar. He stopped, then blurted:

&nb
sp; "That tree. That damn tree. I'm sorry. You were right."

  I shrugged.

  He said, "Another tree fell on my car."

  "I'm sorry to h--" I began, and then a horrid suspicion dawned. "It wasn't the T-Bird, was it?"

  "Yeah. It was."

  Norton had a 1960 Thunderbird in mint condition, only thirty thousand miles. It was a deep midnight blue inside and out. He drove it only summers, and then only rarely. He loved that Bird the way some men love electric trains or model ships or target-shooting pistols.

  "That's a bitch," I said, and meant it.

  He shook his head slowly. "I almost didn't bring it up. Almost brought the station wagon, you know. Then I said what the hell. I drove it up and a big old rotten pine fell on it. The roof of it's all bashed in. And I thought I'd cut it up ... the tree, I mean . . . but I can't get my chainsaw to fire up ... I paid two hundred dollars for that sucker . . . and ... and . . ."

  His throat began to emit little clicking sounds. His mouth worked as if he were toothless and chewing dates. For one helpless second I thought he was going to just stand there and bawl like a kid on a sandlot. Then he got himself under some halfway kind of control, shrugged, and turned away as if to look at the chunks of wood I had cut up.

  "Well, we can look at your saw," I said. "Your T-Bird insured?"

  "Yeah," he said, "like your boathouse."

  I saw what he meant, and remembered again what Steff had said about insurance.

  "Listen, Dave, I wondered if I could borrow your Saab and take a run up to town. I thought I'd get some bread and cold cuts and beer. A lot of beer."

  "Billy and I are going up in the Scout," I said. "Come with us if you want. That is, if you'll give me a hand dragging the rest of this tree off to one side."

  "Happy to."

  He grabbed one end but couldn't quite lift it up. I had to do most of the work. Between the two of us we were able to tumble it into the underbrush. Norton was puffing and panting, his cheeks nearly purple. After all the yanking he had done on that chainsaw starter pull, I was a little worried about his ticker.

  "Okay?" I asked, and he nodded, still breathing fast. "Come on back to the house, then. I can fix you up with a beer."

  "Thank you," he said. "How is Stephanie?" He was regaining some of the old smooth pomposity that I disliked.

  "Very well, thanks."

  "And your son?"

  "He's fine, too."

  "Glad to hear it."

  Steff came out, and a moment's surprise passed over her face when she saw who was with me. Norton smiled and his eyes crawled over her tight T-shirt. He hadn't changed that much after all.

  "Hello, Brent," she said cautiously. Billy poked his head out from under her arm.

  "Hello, Stephanie. Hi, Billy."

  "Brent's T-Bird took a pretty good rap in the storm," I told her. "Stove in the roof, he says."

  "Oh, no!"

  Norton told it again while he drank one of our beers. I was sipping a third, but I had no kind of buzz on; apparently I had sweat the beer out as rapidly as I drank it.

  "He's going to come to town with Billy and me."

  "Well, I won't expect you for a while. You may have to go to the Shop-and-Save in Norway."

  "Oh? Why?"

  "Well, if the power's off in Bridgton--"

  "Mom says all the cash registers and things run on electricity," Billy supplied.

  It was a good point.

  "Have you still got the list?"

  I patted my hip pocket.

  Her eyes shifted to Norton. "I'm very sorry about Carla, Brent. We all were."

  "Thank you," he said. "Thank you very much.'

  There was another moment of awkward silence which Billy broke. "Can we go now, Daddy?" He had changed to jeans and sneakers.

  "Yeah, I guess so. You ready, Brent?"

  "Give me another beer for the road and I will be."

  Steffy's brow creased. She had never approved of the one-for-the-road philosophy, or of men who drive with a can of Bud leaning against their crotches. I gave her a bare nod and she shrugged. I didn't want to reopen things with Norton now. She got him a beer.

  "Thanks," he said to Steffy, not really thanking her but only mouthing a word. It was the way you thank a waitress in a restaurant. He turned back to me. "Lead on, Macduff."

  "Be right with you," I said, and went into the living room.

  Norton followed, and exclaimed over the birch, but I wasn't interested in that or in the cost of replacing the window just then. I was looking at the lake through the sliding glass panel that gave on our deck. The breeze had freshened a little and the day had warmed up five degrees or so while I was cutting wood. I thought the odd mist we'd noticed earlier would surely have broken up, but it hadn't. It was closer, too. Halfway across the lake now.

  "I noticed that earlier," Norton said, pontificating. "Some kind of temperature inversion, that's my guess."

  I didn't like it. I felt very strongly that I had never seen a mist exactly like this one. Part of it was the unnerving straight edge of its leading front. Nothing in nature is that even; man is the inventor of straight edges. Part of it was that pure, dazzling whiteness, with no variation but also without the sparkle of moisture. It was only half a mile or so off now, and the contrast between it and the blues of the lake and sky was more striking than ever.

  "Come on, Dad!" Billy was tugging at my pants.

  We all went back to the kitchen. Brent Norton spared one final glance at the tree that had crashed into our living room.

  "Too bad it wasn't an apple tree, huh?" Billy remarked brightly. "That's what my mom said. Pretty funny, don't you think?"

  "Your mother's a real card, Billy," Norton said. He ruffled Billy's hair in a perfunctory way and his eyes went to the front of Steff's T-shirt again. No, he was not a man I was ever going to be able to really like.

  "Listen, why don't you come with us, Steff?" I asked. For no concrete reason I suddenly wanted her to come along.

  "No, I think I'll stay here and pull some weeds in the garden," she said. Her eyes shifted toward Norton and then back to me. "This morning it seems like I'm the only thing around here that doesn't run on electricity."

  Norton laughed too heartily.

  I was getting her message, but tried one more time. "You sure?"

  "Sure," she said firmly. "The old bend-and-stretch will do me good."

  "Well, don't get too much sun."

  "I'll put on my straw hat. We'll have sandwiches when you get back."

  "Good."

  She turned her face up to be kissed. "Be careful. There might be blowdowns on Kansas Road too, you know."

  "I'll be careful."

  "You be careful, too," she told Billy, and kissed his cheek.

  "Right, Mom." He banged out of the door and the screen cracked shut behind him.

  Norton and I walked out after him. "Why don't we go over to your place and cut the tree off your Bird?" I asked him. All of a sudden I could think of lots of reasons to delay leaving for town.

  "I don't even want to look at it until after lunch and a few more of these," Norton said, holding up his beer can. "The damage has been done, Dave old buddy."

  I didn't like him calling me buddy, either.

  We all got into the front seat of the Scout (in the far comer of the garage my scarred Fisher plow blade sat glimmering yellow, like the ghost of Christmas yet-to-come) and I backed out, crunching over a litter of storm-blown twigs. Steff was standing on the cement path which leads to the vegetable patch at the extreme west end of our property. She had a pair of clippers in one gloved hand and the weeding claw in the other. She had put on her old floppy sunhat, and it cast a band of shadow over her face. I tapped the horn twice, lightly, and she raised the hand holding the clippers in answer. We pulled out. I haven't seen my wife since then.

  We had to stop once on our way up to Kansas Road. Since the power truck had driven through, a pretty fair-sized pine had dropped across the road. Norton
and I got out and moved it enough so I could inch the Scout by, getting our hands all pitchy in the process. Billy wanted to help but I waved him back. I was afraid he might get poked in the eye. Old trees have always reminded me of the Ents in Tolkien's wonderful Rings saga, only Ents that have gone bad. Old trees want to hurt you. It doesn't matter if you're snow-shoeing, cross-country skiing, or just taking a walk in the woods. Old trees want to hurt you, and I think they'd kill you if they could.

  Kansas Road itself was clear, but in several places we saw more lines down. About a quarter-mile past the Vicki-Linn Campground there was a power pole lying full-length in the ditch, heavy wires snarled around its top like wild hair.

  "That was some storm," Norton said in his mellifluous, courtroom-trained voice; but he didn't seem to be pontificating now, only solemn.

  "Yeah, it was."

  "Look, Dad!"

  He was pointing at the remains of the Ellitches' barn. For twelve years it had been sagging tiredly in Tommy Ellitch's back field, up to its hips in sunflowers, goldenrod, and Lolly-come-see-me. Every fall I would think it could not last through another winter. And every spring it would still be there. But it wasn't anymore. All that remained was a splintered wreckage and a roof that had been mostly stripped of shingles. Its number had come up. And for some reason that echoed solemnly, even ominously, inside me. The storm had come and smashed it flat.

  Norton drained his beer, crushed the can in one hand, and dropped it indifferently to the floor of the Scout. Billy opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again--good boy. Norton came from New Jersey, where there was no bottle-and-can law; I guess he could be forgiven for squashing my nickel when I could barely remember not to do it myself.

  Billy started fooling with the radio, and I asked him to see if WOXO was back on the air. He dialed up to FM 92 and got nothing but a blank hum. He looked at me and shrugged. I thought for a moment. What other stations were on the far side of that peculiar fog front?

  "Try WBLM," I said.

  He dialed down to the other end, passing WJBQ-FM and WIGY-FM on the way. They were there, doing business as usual . . . but WBLM, Maine's premier progressive-rock station, was off the air.

  "Funny," I said.

  "What's that?" Norton asked.

  "Nothing. Just thinking out loud."