Chapter Ten
So talk I did, for what seemed like a year. Justin listened without saying much, except to ask me a question or prod me to go on when I stopped for breath. He didn’t grill me or act like he didn’t believe me; he just sat there real quiet and took it in. It was hard to tell what he thought about it all.
I told him about the Ceremony and how I was supposed to kill something on the night of the next full moon to finish becoming a loup-garou. I told him why I didn’t want to be one, and how Mama and Daddy meant to make me do it anyway whether I liked it or not. I told him about riding on the septic tank truck and the lady who bought my bus ticket in Fort Smith, and I told him how I found him on the Internet and how I lived in the dog house in Sulphur Springs and raked yards. I finally told him how I walked to his house from Cumby and got there Tuesday night. I didn’t hide the fact that I’d been staying there waiting for him to come home, either. I figured if I wanted to live with the man, I better not start things off by lying to him.
Finally I wrapped it up, maybe an hour or so after we first came inside, and Justin put his face in his hands and didn’t ask me anything else.
“Aw, man,” he finally said, mostly to himself. That was all he said for a long time, but he finally looked at me.
“Well I’m not gonna turn you out on the street, Zach. But what do you want me to do? You know your mama’s gonna come lookin’ for you, don’t you?” he said.
Now if I had to be totally honest, I’d have to admit I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. Finding Justin and convincing him to let me stay with him was as far as I’d ever planned. When he pointed it out to me, I saw he was probably right. But whether he was or not, I couldn’t let it go at that.
“I don’t know what she might do. But I can’t go back there, Justin, I just can’t. You know what will happen to me if I do,” I pleaded. He didn’t look happy.
“Yeah, I know,” he said, looking down at the table. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, and the silence dragged out till it started to get uncomfortable. At least it did for me; I guess Justin was too wrapped up in his own thoughts to notice.
“Your mama and me used to be pretty close, you know,” he commented after a long time.
It didn’t exactly have much to do with anything I had just told him, and I wondered why he said it. I have a bad habit sometimes of talking too much, but that night I managed to zip my lips and let Justin talk. It sounded like he might tell me some things I had wanted to know for a long time, if I had the sense to shut up and be quiet.
“We talked about everything, always did stuff together. Then she met your dad and got off into all that business he was in. You know what I mean,” he said. I nodded without saying anything. I knew exactly what he meant.
“She was different then. Wasn’t interested in anything else anymore. Wouldn’t go to church, wouldn’t do anything with her old friends anymore. She told me all about what was goin’ on, let me watch her tear the throat out of a deer the next full moon. She wanted me to join up and do it with them too, even though I wasn’t much older than you back then. She told me it was the most awesome feeling she ever had and I’d never be sorry I did it. But I never would go along. Didn’t think it was right, and I told her so. Made her mad at me after awhile. We fought about it all the time. She started fighting with Paw and Gran, too, wouldn’t listen to anything they told her anymore. They thought she was on drugs. I almost wish she had been,” he said.
All this was news to me, but I resisted the urge to ask questions. I kept quiet as a mouse.
“Finally she and your dad pulled up stakes and said they was gettin’ married and movin’ away. They never said where. After that I never heard hide nor hair else till you showed up on my pond today,” he told me. He sounded sad.
“You never tried to find her?” I ventured to ask.
“No, she made it clear she was done with me and all the rest of us. Like to have killed Paw and Gran, cause they raised us both you know. Paw never did get over it. I think he died partly from grief, a couple years after Jenna went off and disappeared. I lived here with Gran till she passed away this past summer, except when I was workin’ in the oil fields. She woulda been proud to meet you, Zach. I wish she could have,” he went on.
I wasn’t sure what to say to that either.
“I’m sorry,” I finally told him.
“Aw, you couldn’t help it, bubba. Don’t worry about it. But we have to think what to do with you, though. I’m not set up too good right now for takin’ care of a kid. I’m gone all week, and I was fixin’ to sell this place and move closer to work. You’d have to be in school and all that, and sooner or later they’d find you if they looked. I’m not that hard to find,” he told me.
I had my own opinion about how hard Justin was to find, but I didn’t think it was a good time to mention that.
“They don’t know I was lookin’ for you, and I never said anything to them,” I pointed out. He still looked doubtful, and I was desperate to change his mind. I knew if I couldn’t convince him now, I’d never be able to do it later.
“You could go ahead and sell this place and we could move to wherever your work is. I don’t mind that. And I’m old enough to take care of myself,” I promised.
“What about school, though?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I could tell them I was in home school or something up till now. They wouldn’t know any better. You could tell them I’m your nephew who just came to live with you. People do that kind of stuff all the time. I’m sure it would be okay,” I said.
I tried to sound as confident and sure of myself as I possibly could, cause I knew if I sounded like I had any doubts, then Justin would end up having at least ten times as many. He thought about it for what seemed like a long time, and then he took a deep breath, like he’d made up his mind.
“Well, we’ve still got a little while before it matters much. You can probably miss this last week or so before Christmas, and then you won’t have to be back in school until after New Year’s. Maybe we can figure somethin’ out by then,” he finally said.
“So I can stay?” I asked him hopefully, hardly daring to believe it. He finally smiled then, for the first time since I met him.
“Yeah, Zach, you can stay,” he told me. A surge of relief washed over me and I didn’t mind at all letting him see how happy I was to hear that. I jumped up and threw my arms around the dude and gave him a bear hug.
“Whoa, bubba, slow down,” he laughed, “We still got a lot of things to figure out.”
I knew that was true, but right then I didn’t care. I was too happy to have a home again after all that time.
We talked for a long time that day, about a bunch of different things. I really liked him a lot. He was funny and pretty smart too. He was a geobiologist for an oil company, whatever that was. I never did quite understand what it was he did. I just knew he had to travel a lot to drilling sites and that kept him away from home except on the weekends, mostly. That was why he’d been gone all week.
After a while, the winter daylight started fading away and Justin noticed it.
“Come on, boy, if you’re gonna stay with me awhile then you need some stuff. You can’t go around in holey shirts and wore-out jeans,” he told me, getting up from the table and heading for the door. I got up and followed him.
We went outside and jumped in his truck, and he drove to the Wal-Mart in Commerce. I remembered walking that road just four days ago, and it’s amazing how much faster you can get somewhere when you drive, isn’t it?
We went inside and he bought me some new clothes and a toothbrush and a Texas Rangers baseball cap and some new tennis shoes. He got me a prepaid cell phone so I could call him if I needed to, and he gave me thirty bucks to spend however I wanted.
It had been quite a while since I had that much spending money for whatever I wanted. I bought myself a George Strait CD and saved the rest for later. You never knew when you might need some e
xtra cash. I’d learned that lesson real well.
After that, he took me down the street to the Lone Star Pizza Works by the football stadium. We ordered an extra large sausage and pepperoni pizza with double cheese, which is my favorite. When the food got there, he asked a blessing before we ate. I’d seen people do that before, of course, but not in quite a while.
Justin smiled and laughed a lot and seemed like he’d changed his mind and decided to be glad I was around. He made me feel like he was glad, anyway, and that was something I wasn’t used to and hadn’t expected. I would have been satisfied if he’d just agreed to let me stay with him. He didn’t have to do all this extra stuff he was doing, and I loved him for it.
There are times when I look back and think how strange it was that he won me over so fast like that. Maybe it had something to do with me being alone and far from home, but it wasn’t only that. I didn’t know what it was about him that I loved so much, not back then, but I do now. It was goodness. He walked close with God and he really lived it. You don’t find too many like that. It took me a long time to learn what it was that made him so different, cause until I met Justin I never saw it before. At the time, I just knew he was the best uncle I ever had.
Well, he was the only uncle I ever had, to be honest, but you know what I mean. Mama didn’t have any other brothers or sisters, as far as I knew, and I didn’t know anything at all about Daddy’s family, except Nana Maralyn. Like I said before, nobody in my family ever talked about their relatives if they weren’t monsters. I thought Daddy was an only child, but I wasn’t totally sure.
“Yeah, your dad was from Sulphur Springs, just down the road a piece. That’s really all I know about him. Only met him a couple times. He never mentioned any family except his mama, and you already knew about her,” Justin told me when I asked him, shrugging his shoulders.
That wasn’t really a whole lot more than I already knew, but I decided it wasn’t so important to know right now. I could always find out more later.
After we finished our pizza, Justin took me to a movie rental place and got some games for the Xbox, and then we drove back home. He played some games with me and beat me at baseball, but that was no surprise. He’d had a lot more time to play the game than I had. If it had been a real baseball game outside then I would have beat the tar out of him. I’m the best pitcher on my team.
But he beat me fair and square on the Xbox, so I tackled him and knocked him down on the floor and we rolled around and wrestled until he pinned me down by the couch and I had to give up.
I hadn’t done anything like that in years. Daddy used to wrestle with me when I was little, but not in a long time. Maybe it was because Justin was younger and still enjoyed stuff like that, or maybe he just liked me better. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that, cause you can love somebody without really liking them very much. You have to have something in common to be able to like a person.
I think maybe me and my dad had that problem, cause we didn’t care about the same things. So I guess he probably maybe loved me, but he didn’t much like me as a person. You can always tell.
It was different with Justin though. He laughed at stuff I thought was funny, and talked about things I thought were interesting, and enjoyed stuff I liked myself. He was so much like me. I’d only met him half a day ago, and I could tell that already.
There are times when God gives you things that are so good you never would have dared to ask for them or even dream they were possible. Justin was like that. I don’t think I ever told him so, but I hope he knows it.
We spent that whole weekend at the house, mostly, just talking and doing things, and we drove around Wolfe City a little bit. I got to see where he and Mama went to high school and I got to visit the cemetery where my grandparents were buried. They died in a car wreck when Justin was only a baby, so he and Mama had to live with their grandparents till they grew up.
I learned lots of things like that which I never knew before. I filed it all away in my mind to think about later, when there was more time.
Every night Justin called his girlfriend Eileen in Magnolia and they talked for at least an hour or two. She was the girl in the pictures with the long brown hair who liked to stick out her tongue at him. He told her about me and some of the reasons why I was there, and it didn’t seem to faze her any. I talked to her for a minute myself just cause she wanted to say hi to me. She sounded like a nice person, the best I could tell.
Sunday morning Justin took me to church with him, and I was afraid I wouldn’t like that at first. I almost said I didn’t want to go. But I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I bit my tongue and went. I expected it to be dull and boring, but it really wasn’t. When we got there he sent me to the youth group and said he’d pick me up later.
I had more fun than I thought I would. They had a band and we mostly sang songs that were easy to learn. Then we studied something from the Bible, but I have to confess I don’t remember what it was. Something about Christmas, no doubt, but I forget exactly what. We played some games and finally we had a potluck dinner of chicken spaghetti and garlic bread with grape Kool-Aid and peanut butter cookies. I decided if church was like that every Sunday then I might not mind going after all.
Going to church wasn’t the only thing I had to get used to, living with Justin. People always have their own personal habits and ways of doing things, and he was no exception. He ate whole wheat bread and he liked to crunch ice cubes with his teeth while he watched movies and he had a bad habit of liking to get up at the crack of dawn every day.
That one was especially hard for me to get used to, because when he got up the first thing he always did was go in the bathroom and shave.
That by itself might have been okay, except he always sang while he did it, and that woke me up every time. He also sang in the shower, and in the truck, and sometimes just around the house while he worked on things. He was just happy I guess, but it wasn’t something I had ever seen somebody do so much. He sang anything from country love songs to old hymns to Camptown Races and Oh Susannah. You just never could tell what might pop into his head. There were times when I wanted to laugh at him for it, and late Sunday afternoon I finally did, when he was singing Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer at the top of his lungs. I swear I couldn’t help it, I just busted out laughing.
He stopped singing and gave me an innocent look.
“What is it?” he asked, like he didn’t already know.
“Aw, just you singin’ all the time,” I finally managed to gasp.”
“What, you don’t like my singin’?” he asked, pretending he was all hurt and brokenhearted.
“Yeah, you’re just silly cause you do it all the time, that’s all,” I told him. He didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by that, and he ruffled my hair and jumped onto the couch.
“Come here, bubba, we need to talk about some things,” he told me. He was taking up most of the couch himself because he was lying down sprawled out like a warm breakfast, but I sat on the end of it by his feet. He sat up to give me more room.
“You know I have to go to work tomorrow, right?” he told me.
“Yeah, I know that. I’ll be okay,” I said. I wasn’t really looking forward to another week at the house by myself, but I was okay with it. I’d find something to amuse myself.
“Well, I been thinkin’ about that, Zach, and I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to stay here all week by yourself,” he said.
“Where else would I go?” I asked, not really liking the way the conversation was going. I guess deep down I was afraid he’d changed his mind and decided I couldn’t stay with him anymore. Was this just a long winded way of breaking the bad news to me gently?
As it turned out I was worrying for nothing. He wasn’t thinking anything like that at all.
“I think I’ll take you to work with me this week, and maybe that way you can help me look for a new place. You kinda caught me by surprise, Zach. I was gonna move, but
not this soon. Now we have to move things up a little bit,” he said, rubbing his stubbly goatee.
I didn’t know much of anything about Texas or where he needed to work or anything like that, so I didn’t think I had much advice to give. I didn’t feel like I had a right to demand anything from him, anyway.
“Aw, I’d be happy with anything you could find, Justin,” I told him.
“Yeah, I’m sure you would, bubba, but all the same I’m sure there are things you like and things you don’t,” he said.
That was true, and since he was the one who asked I felt better about telling him some of what I really wished for.
“Well, can it be somewhere in the country, sorta like this?” I asked. He smiled again.
“Yeah, we can probably manage that part without too much trouble, Zach,” he told me.
“What about somewhere with hills, and rivers to swim in, and a place where I can go horse riding?” I asked him, encouraged by the way he was so easygoing about it. I was mostly thinking about Tennessee when I said that, and I guess he knew it.
“We. . . ll, maybe,” he said, “We’ll have to see what we can find.”
He didn’t seem too sure about that part, so I left it at that. I was sure he’d do the best he could, and I knew I ought to be thankful for whatever I got. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the mountains and the wild hickory trees, and the sound of whitewater falling over rocks. They say there’s no place like home, and I guess that’s true. I missed it more than I ever thought I would.
I let my mind drift away for a minute, thinking about all the things I’d left behind. The mountains and the whitewater, Jonathan, going target practicing in the quarry, my bike, my family, school. . . where should I even start? If I made a list of things, I could probably go on and on till the cows came home and still leave out a bunch. How could I ever even begin to replace it all?
The answer to that one was easy, of course. There wasn’t any way. You can never have the same thing twice, and it’s hopeless to try. It never works like that, and all you end up doing is breaking your heart against a solid rock. That’s why when you lose things you have to let them go instead of trying to get them back again. You can’t do it, and you only hurt yourself worse if you keep on. Never cry for the moon.
I’m not sure who told me that or where I learned it, but even back then I already knew it was the truth. The sooner I stopped thinking about the past and started focusing on making a new life for myself, the happier and better off I’d be.