The sun shone through the trees and made leaf shadows on the pavement. Buck and his uncle kept to the side of the road and shifted over even farther when a car went by.
“How’d you meet him?” Buck asked.
“Remember that big windstorm we had last September? I was coming back from the gas station and I see the screen door on this house flopping back and forth. And here’s this crippled man holding a hammer in one hand, the other on the screen, trying to set it straight. So I stopped.”
Uncle Mel reached up to push some branches out of their way. “Can’t say he was glad to see me. In fact, I wasn’t sure he saw me at all, ’cause when I asked if I could help, he didn’t even look my way. But a hinge had lost its pin, so I found it, wrestled the screen in place, then let him hammer the pin back in….”
“D…did he thank you?”
“Nope. I’d been studying the way his legs shook, and the spotty way he’d shaved that morning. I put out my hand and said, ‘I’m Mel Turner. Live with the Andersons down the road there.’ And all he did was give me a nod and hobble back into the house.”
Buck waited until a pickup without a muffler roared by. Then he said, “I wouldn’t have ever g…g…gone back.”
“I sort of felt the same way. But when I walked out to the road again, I saw how the flap on his mailbox had been blown open too, and the box was full. Stuff had been there a week, maybe. So I pulled out all the mail, walked it back to the house, and set it between the screen and the door. One envelope read Jacob Wall, so at least I had his name.”
The small square house was coming into view now. Like many of the other houses along the road, it was dwarfed by the land on which it sat. Folks along here were said to be land-rich and house-poor, Buck had heard.
When he and his uncle turned up the gravel drive, an old Volvo crookedly parked at the head of it, Mel said, “So…I just started dropping by couple times a week, walking the mail up to the house. And one day I knocked and said, ‘Jacob, it’s Mel. You got a pliers and screwdriver handy, I could fix the flap on your mailbox.’ And after that—maybe because I was asking his help, wanting to borrow his tools—he thawed a little.”
“Like you were friends?”
“Naw. Never that. But when I’d ask if he needed anything, he’d let me pick up something from the store, mail a letter, fix a leak. The Bealls say he comes into town ’bout once a month, but driving’s a chore for him. I never learned much more about him than I’m telling you now. But every Friday he hands me a five-dollar bill. Told me I couldn’t come back if I didn’t take it, and he doesn’t want any thank-yous. Strange, though. The inside of the house doesn’t fit with the outside, and he doesn’t quite fit with either one.”
Buck wondered if Jacob heard the gravel crunching underfoot as they approached the house—if he’d been watching from a window, maybe. It seemed a long time before the door opened, though. Then he found himself staring up into two fading blue eyes, half hidden by bushy white eyebrows that matched the thick thatch of hair reaching down under his collar. Jacob’s face had so many wrinkles it looked like a shriveled apple.
“Afternoon, Jacob. Brought the lightbulbs you needed. This is my nephew, Buck. He’s going to give me a hand. Buck, this is Mr. Wall.”
“Hi,” said Buck, and waited.
In response the man stared at him two seconds longer, then shakily turned himself around and wordlessly set off for the kitchen.
Buck looked up at his uncle, but Mel only shrugged and followed Jacob through the house.
•••
It was more like an antique store than a house. So much furniture that in places Buck had to turn sideways to get through. Two large leather couches, when the living room was only suited for one. Two leather armchairs, three end tables, and bookcases that not only lined the walls but covered one window as well. Only a few of the framed pictures had actually been hung, the others propped against a buffet.
Uncle Mel stepped up on a low stool, removing a glass globe on the ceiling and handing it to Buck. And Buck had never felt so unwelcome. He could see himself reflected in the tall framed mirror leaning against the wall, looking as stiff and awkward as he felt. He could sense the glare of Jacob’s deep-set eyes boring into his back. When he glanced at the old man once, it made him so uncomfortable, he had to look away.
“Here’s the thing,” Mel said, when he stepped down again and they moved toward the bedroom to replace a bulb there. “Since I’ve got a few longer hauls coming up, I’d like you to let Buck come in my place when I’m not here. He’ll pick up the mail, run errands….Any repairs you got, I’ll do when I get back.”
Jacob’s face didn’t change, and he said nothing.
“He’s a good worker,” Mel continued, positioning the stool at the foot of the large bed, the headboard shaped like a scroll, and climbing up a couple of steps. “Won’t touch anything he shouldn’t. He’s got a bike, so he could ride to the store for you.” He looked at Buck. “Where’s that wire basket you can hook on a bike if Jacob needs a few things from Bealls’?”
Buck fought that old, familiar tightening of his jaws that clamped them together, locking the words in. “I th…th…think it’s in the c…c…c…cellar,” he struggled to say, and wasn’t all that surprised when Jacob turned himself around, stared at Buck a moment or two, then turned his back on them both and limped out of the room.
Buck let out his breath. He did not want to work for this man, and obviously, the man didn’t want him to.
After the lightbulbs were replaced and Mel had tied up the trash and deposited it outside, and after Buck had emptied a mousetrap under the sink and scrubbed out the shower stall, he followed his uncle to the front door.
“Buck will be by in a few days, then,” Mel said. “He’s as handy with a mop as a lawn mower, so if you need any housekeeping done here inside, you just tell him. Take care, Jacob.”
Jacob gave an almost imperceptible nod and closed the door behind them.
Buck didn’t say anything until they were almost to the road. Then, “Wow. How old d…do you think he is? I figure ninety.”
“Naw,” said Mel, “He’s weathered, that’s all. Weathered and worn.”
“What kind of house did he have b…before? Had to be b…bigger than what he has now.”
“Appears that way.”
“Looked like he c…could chew me up and s…spit me out. Where’d he c…come from?”
“I don’t know and I don’t ask,” said Mel. “Think you can handle this now?”
“He doesn’t want me there.”
“Wants you or not, he needs help.”
When Buck made no reply, Mel glanced over. “Not afraid of him, are you?”
“No,” Buck said. But he sure didn’t like him.
He hated the bus ride to school without David. Some of the boys in eighth, and a few in seventh, used to joke about the two of them—David, with his shaggy hair and stocky frame; Buck, the smallest in the class.
“Here come the sheepdog and his Chihuahua,” someone would say.
Now that Buck rode alone, the hassling became more specific. Whenever he could, Buck sat with a boy, any boy. Failing that, he took an empty seat near the front. But usually one of the girls had snagged it and saved it for Katie, and then Buck settled for whatever he could find.
This morning, with two weeks of school yet to go, the only seat the girls hadn’t preempted was second from the back, directly in front of Pete Ketterman and his buddies. And no one made jokes about them. Pete Ketterman, Ethan Holt, Isaac Lewis, and Rob Moss were the It guys, and all but Rob were in eighth grade.
“Pete and his ducks,” David used to say. “You ever notice how they follow him around? Pete says ‘jump’ and they say ‘how high?’ ”
“Ducks can jump?” Buck had said, and David elbowed him in the ribs. Buck knew what he meant, though: Pete called the shots and the others fell in line.
Buck slid into the empty seat, his Nationals cap partially obscuring hi
s eyes. Already one of the boys had his knees digging into the back of Buck’s seat. The bulge receded, then came back again with a hard whump. Outwardly Buck didn’t react, but he took a long, silent breath and let it out again. It was a seventeen-minute ride to school, and the pranks had only begun.
“H…h…hi, B…B…Buck. H…h…how y…y…you d…d…doin’?” Pete said to a chorus of snickers.
Not even half authentic, Buck was thinking.
One of the girls in the seat across from him pivoted and glared in Pete’s direction, but that made it all the worse somehow. Buck could feel the heat rising in his neck. He turned his face toward the window.
Trees were so close to the road that all he could see was a blur of green, broken open now and then by a patch of sunlight, then closing again. JESUS SAVES AND HEALS, read a sign. Occasionally branches scraped against the roof of the bus, adding to the chatter of the riders.
“C…cat g…got…y…your t…tongue?” came Isaac’s voice this time.
Then Pete’s: “He can’t help it.” His voice rose higher and higher with each word until it sounded like a three-year-old’s. “He’s so short his words get stuck in his windpipe.” All the guys laughed, even a couple of boys sitting a few rows ahead.
Rob asked if they remembered the teacher back in sixth grade who lost his voice for a week and had to signal with his hands. And finally, the conversation turned to teachers in general.
Buck relaxed a little. Sometimes, if he ignored them long enough, they’d quit. The bus had reached an open stretch, and beyond the field, Buck saw a few dogwoods still in bloom. The hills in the distance were every shade of green he could imagine, with a few dots of white or yellow.
Still, Buck liked the colors of fall best. He and David used to climb to the top of Buzzard’s Roost in October and look down at the valley—watch the reds and yellows lighten or darken when a cloud cast a shadow. He could almost see David sitting beside him on a rock—the heavy clump of dark hair hanging down over one eye, matching the brown of his pupils—his large chin like a paperweight at the bottom of his face. And the grin—always the grin—because they had a good time when they were hanging out, tramping around the countryside.
The seat-poking behind Buck had stopped, but so had the conversation, and that was a bad sign. And then he felt it—the soft scritch-scritch of something crawling up the side of his neck.
He reached up to flick it off, but nothing was there. Moments later, scritch-scritch on the other side, just behind his ear. His hand shot back but, once again, nothing. He brushed off his shoulder to get rid of whatever insect it might be. But when the scratching came again, this time accompanied by a guffaw, Buck was quick enough to grasp the end of a ruler and push it away.
“Kn…knock it off,” he said, half turning.
“What? Okay,” said Isaac, and the ruler lifted the Nationals cap off Buck’s head and sent it flying.
“You guys cut it out back there!” ordered the driver, and Buck could see his small eyes glaring at them in the rearview mirror.
“Sorry. Don’t have any scissors,” Isaac murmured, and again the boys laughed.
The cap had landed between some girls three rows up, and one of them passed it row by row back to Buck, sympathy in her eyes. Pity was the worst, and Buck could feel the heat in his face and neck again.
You’ve got to stand up for yourself, Buck, his dad had said when Buck was in fourth grade and complained of bullies. “Give as good as you get.”
“And a punch in the mouth now and then might show ’em you mean business,” Uncle Mel had added.
Except that neither Dad nor Mel had ever stuttered, as far as Buck knew. He was strong despite his size and he could punch pretty well, but the first time he’d tried it, he was kept in over lunch period for a week, emptying wastebaskets for all the teachers, and had missed out on soccer.
“Just because someone says something that upsets you doesn’t mean you can split his lip,” the principal had said.
It had helped to have a buddy. In that same fourth grade, David had been watching from the swings when two boys penned Buck against a wall, their arms making a cage around him. With a small audience looking on, they accused him of stuttering so he wouldn’t have to read aloud in class.
For Buck, never being called on was almost as embarrassing as stuttering his way through it.
“Oh, p…please, M…Mrs. Sellers, I c…can’t read it b…because I s…stutter,” one of the boys was saying, his nose five inches from Buck’s face.
Some of the other kids had laughed.
And suddenly David Weinstein was there, grabbing hold of both boys by their shirts and throwing them to the ground. The little crowd had scattered, and the astonished boys picked themselves up, muttering accusations. But they backed off, and from then on, Buck knew he had a friend.
•••
The bus pulled into the circular drive at East Bend Middle, and the large boys behind Buck crowded into the aisles, not giving him a second glance this time. Pete was in the lead, his thick short hair standing straight up in a style all its own, and when he grinned at the girls, he displayed the slight gap between his two front teeth.
If David had still been there, he and Buck would have sat together and talked all the way to school. David could discuss almost anything at all because he read everything from Scientific American to horror comics, like the one about the giant amoeba that oozed into a town, leaving a DNA marker on everyone it touched, turning them into amoebas too.
Last fall when the class was assigned to write essays on imaginary science experiments, Buck had written about living in a pressure-controlled community at the bottom of the ocean, while David wrote about being frozen in a cryonics lab, having his head removed and attached to a muscle-builder’s body. The class loved it.
And then, of course, David’s mom got a job transfer and they had to move.
But Buck had a story going of his own that only David had ever seen—a comic strip, actually—and he was thinking about a new adventure for Pukeman as he put a couple of books in his locker. Taking out the one he’d need for first period, he walked down the noisy hallway to homeroom. Someone was having a birthday because a bunch of balloons were tied to a locker door handle.
“Hey, Buck-a-roo!” one of the guys from civics class said in passing. Buck raised one hand in greeting and went on, reminding himself that not everyone was a jerk. But that guy lived on the other side of the county, practically—not a couple miles away, as David had.
The morning announcements on the PA system began with the Pledge of Allegiance. Buck stood with everyone else and, like everyone else, recited it flawlessly, without the trace of a stammer. “…with liberty and justice for all.” That was what he couldn’t understand. No one else could either.
Then, when they sat down again, and the principal talked about test results for May, Buck turned to a sheaf of well-fingered papers at the back of his three-ring binder. The Life of Pukeman, the ink-smudged title read, and beneath that, two rows of comic strips spanned the page so far, with others in the preceding pages.
The first strip, “Pukeman Rides His Motorcycle,” showed a ferocious guy with thick short hair that stood straight up, bent over the handlebars of his cycle. His wide mouth, showing the gap between the two front teeth was bellowing, “I want the whole world to worship me.” In the second frame, the wind whipped at his jacket and he continued “…I want the whole, whole…”
And in the final frame, his motorcycle is falling into an open manhole in the street, and a small mouse in the bottom right corner with bug eyes, holding a manhole cover, says, “You got it, Pukeman,” and grins.
The student council president was announcing the last meeting of the semester, and Buck smiled to himself, remembering when he’d drawn the first Pukeman strip.
“Make his eyebrows slant down in the middle,” David had said. “And his mouth’s gotta be sort of open, so when he falls into the hole you can see his teeth flying all over
the place.”
They had worked on the strip in study hall, handing it back and forth, each adding little touches until they were satisfied—the helmet and leather jacket, the gap-toothed grin…
There was a “Pukeman Goes Skiing” and “Pukeman Plays Football” on some of the other pages.
Over the PA system, the coach was reminding the basketball team to turn in their uniforms before the last day of school, and as Buck started a new strip called “Pukeman Likes Heavy Metal,” the cheerleaders ended the morning announcements with a rousing cheer for East Bend Middle School.
“Have a great day,” the principal said, “and make it count.”
The microphone clicked off, then clicked on again and the school secretary’s voice came through the speakers: “Excuse me, students,” she said over the ringing of the first bell, “but would Buck Anderson come down to the front office, please?”
“What’d you do now, Buck?” a girl teased good-naturedly as she passed his seat.
Buck gathered up his stuff and started for the door.
What now?
Buck weaved in and out of the swarms of students in the hallway. Had someone seen him at the old Wilmer place on Saturday and reported it to the school? Who would know? And who would care?
Two eighth-grade girls made way for him as he mindlessly plowed between them. “Well, excuse me!” one of them said.
“Sorry,” Buck murmured, and went on.
He opened the glass doors to the office and stepped inside. The red-haired secretary looked up. Her earrings were little ceramic cats in the pounce position, and they jiggled each time she moved her head.
“Hi, Buck,” she said. “Would you believe that a speech therapist is finally going to see you?”
He stared at her, at the way her arched eyebrows, drawn with pencil, extended up onto her forehead. He’d been on the waiting list since September of last year—Mom had seen to that. “There’s only t…two more weeks to g…go,” he said.
“I know. She has three other schools besides this one, and she’s doing the best she can.” The secretary nodded toward the row of chairs along one wall. “Want to take a seat? She’ll be with you shortly.”