Skipping School
FOR WILLY—
SUPERVISOR, BEST FRIEND
CHAPTER ONE
It was time for the captains to choose their teams: the soccer field, gym class, ten o’clock in the morning. The sun had not yet peered over the rim of the bowl of land that surrounded the Union High School, and the grass was white with frost.
Phillip waited while the best players were snapped up around him. People were encouraging their teeth to chatter or blowing out their breath in big white clouds. Goose bumps chased across Phillip’s arms. His legs took on a purple cast, and his windpipe burned from the laps he’d run. The cold was the first thing that had made him feel alive all morning.
“Johnson,” said a voice: Kris’s hotshot brother Greg. He moved over to that group, putting on a yellow vest.
“You’re left fullback,” Greg told him, in a neutral voice, refusing to acknowledge even in tone that Phillip was his sister’s friend and someone he saw fairly often in his own home.
Phillip jogged slowly back to position. At his old school he’d usually played fullback, too.…
It was a mistake to recall that. In the blank seconds before the game began, he could not squeeze back the memories: hot midwestern autumn games, his friend Rob the goalie behind him, corn rustling in the field nearby, and after school, five hundred hogs to feed … his father’s cough. The auction.
The whistle ripped away the memories. The other team had plenty of hotshots, too. When they got the ball through, Phillip stopped it, with his thighs, with his back. Once he bounced it off his head. When he couldn’t touch the ball, he blocked, unflinchingly. And he ignored the praise bestowed on him by Greg: “Good boy, Phil!” “Nice save!” The man was a politician. In the halls he and Phillip passed without a word, and Phillip didn’t see why he should speak now.
The yellow vests won. Phillip limped from the field, bearing a red ball mark, a grass-stained graze, a few bruises. Into the locker room, into the hot, hot shower beating the cold and ache out of his bones.
“Okay, everybody out!” The coach glanced into the shower. “Johnson!”
Phillip turned off the shower, dried and slowly dressed himself. The bell rang. People left, people came in, and he wondered if he could stay, put on his shorts, go out and play another game.…
“Johnson! Out!”
He picked up his books and went out the locker-room door. Straight ahead of him, down a long orange-carpeted hall, the sun shone through the double glass front doors.
Dust motes filtered down through the sunbeams. Outside, across acres of green lawn and playing fields, wind shook and loosened the autumn leaves. The maples were bare now. Only the beeches and the sad-colored oaks were left. The sky was brilliant above them.
People who left early, to go to jobs or home to babies, went out the doors. Mr. Pilewski, the attendance monitor, watched with half an eye as he talked to the janitor.
A stream of sweet air stirred in the stagnant hallway, drawing Phillip irresistibly. The door was just closing behind the last person. He caught it and went through. A gust of wind blew on his wet hair, as if he’d just dunked his head in ice water.
He walked purposefully toward the far side of the parking lot. No one called after him. He was so new that few students knew his name. He had never caused trouble before.
Reaching the last line of cars, he turned and looked back. People were driving away with a lot of tire-squealing and bad-muffler noises. A small teacherlike figure opened the big door and looked out. Slowly a few people sitting on the benches got up and went inside. Then there was no one in sight.
Phillip turned and scrambled up the bank into the trees, gained the top of the ridge, and went over the other side.
The woods were laced with trails used by the cross-country runners. During the first eight weeks of gym his class had run over these trails, and this gave Phillip a useful knowledge now. Easily and swiftly he followed the worn paths, and after a few minutes came out on a dirt road.
Here the gym class turned left, reentered the woods a hundred yards downhill, and returned by artificially winding routes to the school. Phillip turned right and walked briskly uphill, feeling steadily more matter-of-fact and cheerful.
It was ironic, he thought—or disgusting, or ridiculous, some such word—that he, a farm boy who now lived in a suburban-looking development at the edge of town, should be bused out into the country to the Union High School. Here was everything he longed for: the silent woods, the road less and less used as he walked along it, until grass started growing up between the tracks, and, over the next hill, a farm.
It occupied a whole valley, vast by New England standards, the autumn grass yellow-green in the marshy, hummocked pastures. The earth of the cornfields was rich and black, combed with rows of pale gold stubble. Here and there along the rusty fence lines an extra post, rotted at the bottom, seemed to float on the wire purely for decoration. Phillip could smell cow manure and silage, a combination like overripe cheddar.
As he watched, a tractor left the barnyard, pulling a full manure spreader. It headed out to the cornfield, and soon the manure was flying up behind. Big Holstein cows ambled out the barn door, with a heavy, footsore gait. They stood looking glumly at their watery pasture. Someone walked across the yard toward the house, followed by a collie dog.
The cold wind blew tears into Phillip’s eyes. He looked a moment more at the long red barn, the yellow house with the frost-nipped geraniums in the window boxes. Then he turned away. He couldn’t go down there. He was a truant, an outlaw.
He turned uphill, trying not to be disappointed at the emptiness and quiet of the woods.
After a few minutes he began to notice sounds: jays; a far-off crow; the silly bark of the collie; chickadees; chipmunks.
A brook.
It was below the road, and he walked down to it. A foot wide and three inches deep, it gushed merrily over miniature rapids. Phillip put in his hand and drew it out ice cold. He scooped a palmful of water to his mouth. It tasted sweet and clean.
He climbed back up to the road and continued walking. He really wondered, now, just what the hell he was doing.
But the road led upward, and he followed, quoting to himself from Tolkien:
The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far away the Road has gone.…
This road went on around a corner, and there was a house.
CHAPTER TWO
A small gray-shingled house with flaking white trim, it was set off the road near the brook. Black locust trees ringed it, their huge trunks dark and deeply fissured, the bare branches straggling wild across the sky. Before the stone doorstep the grass grew rank, and there was patch of sand. The rags of a very old towel hung on a limp clothesline.
The house was so gray, so quiet and abandoned, that Phillip at first thought nothing of it. He stopped and looked, but then he very nearly walked on. Only as he took the first step did he remember his dream. Last night? Last week?…
A black night, wild and rainy. Someone riding hard up a dangerous road, full of enemies, coming to a house by a brook. He knocks, and someone answers the door. Watching from outside, behind the rider, in the rain, Phillip sees that the person coming to the door with a candle is himself. A message is passed. They both look up the stormy black road, full of enemies and defeat.
Is the rider taken in? Or does the man with the candle dress himself and go forth? Phillip could not remember, but he felt the blackness around him and the rain on his skin, saw the lightning, saw the house, the stone doorstep, the grass and patch of sand … real sand, dream sand, slightly separated as when you cross your eyes.…
He squeezed his eyes shut, but when he opened them, the house was still there. Perhaps it was not quite the same. Perhaps the dream house had been smaller, perhaps the brook not quite so near. He had seen it only in the dark, after all.
He went down through the grass, skirting the patch of sand, mounted the doorstep, and knocked.
He could tell immediately that the house was empty, and that was a relief. He had not believed that the door would be opened, that he would face himself standing there holding a candle. But now the chill on his skin was just the chill of early November and no jacket. The house was empty, and when he pushed down the thumb latch, the door opened.
He looked into a dusty room, with plaster, leaves, and dry raccoon dung on the floor. A huge stone fireplace faced him, square in front of the door. To the left he could see another doorway, another room.
He stepped gingerly across the floor. One or two places felt soft, but nothing actually gave way. There were rustling sounds: mice beneath the floorboards and the leaf piles in the corners. Spider webs hung in dusty tatters from the ceiling. No spiders in sight; their brief seasonal lives were already finished. Future spiders hung in soft brown egg cases in the webs.
The back room was in even worse shape. The floor sloped sharply downhill. Some of the boards were broken, the holes filled with leaves that had blown through the door, which hung open on one hinge.
It had been the kitchen. A filthy soapstone sink stood against the back wall, and at one end of it a hand pump was mounted. An unpainted square of floor showed where the gas range had stood, and there was another for the refrigerator. But there was nothing left except the sinkful of leaves, rustling apprehensively as Phillip approached.
He tried to move cautiously, but the slope of the floor hurried him, and his foot broke through a rotten board. A musty, decaying smell arose, most unpleasantly.
From the back door he looked out on the brook.
It flowed not ten feet from the doorstep, more slowly here, for the ground flattened and a few large rocks formed a dam. The water was so clear that Phillip could see the softly rounded green stones on the bottom. Near the brook was an aluminum kettle. When he walked down to look, he saw that the bottom was rusted out.
He drank again, and something like happiness shot painfully through his chest as his lips touched the water. He shoved his face under the surface. The water gushed through the roots of his hair, cold and fresh. He wanted to breathe it, almost couldn’t stop himself, had to come up and gulp the cold clear air instead.
“Wow!” He shook his head, and the drips flew.
Sitting back on his heels, he looked around the hollow. Its dreariness suited him so exactly—the snaggling black branches; the tall brown grasses and the seed-pods rattling in the wind—that he was filled with exultance. This place was meant for him, and he had found it.
Urgently, now, something was pushing him—something to be done! The need buzzed along the insides of his arms and the backs of his legs. But what?
His eye fell on a branch, blown into the corner of the step. Good kindling: He broke it into fireplace lengths over his leg. The yard was littered with sticks of all sizes, and he began to gather them.
The thin ones he could break to a useful length, but the good pieces that would sustain a fire, he could only pile. To accomplish anything more, he needed a chain saw—or better, given his secret presence here, an ax. After many trips he had a large pile of what was essentially kindling.
It didn’t matter. He had no matches, and he wasn’t going to embarrass himself by squatting on the hearth, rubbing two dry sticks together. But he felt good, looking at his pile of limb wood.
Still, it was a pitiful harvest by the old standard. He remembered the drive across the cold cornfields from the woodlot, truck full of logs, his ears droning from a day of chain saw noise. Afternoons at the hydraulic splitter, afternoons stacking till the shed was full, and then stacking next year’s wood outdoors on pallets.
Come to think of it, the wood meant for this winter must still be out there. He wished he could get it.…
But the new people had probably stacked it in the shed to burn. Probably the pallets were already full of wood for next winter. It never ended. He remembered his dismay when he had first realized this. All the autumns of his life had stretched before him, blasted with the roar of chain saws, gritty with sawdust and wood dirt.
No more. Now they lived in a house that took care of itself. Its vinyl clapboards never needed painting, and heat ran automatically through the baseboard heaters. It had wall-to-wall carpet and picture windows that looked out at other picture windows, other vinyl siding.
This is better, he thought, looking around the bare, dirty room, with the big pile of kindling and the wind blowing through.
But for now he had to leave.
When he came over the bluff, the buses waited empty in the schoolyard.
Phillip came down the slope in a low, swift scramble, landing on his knees in front of somebody’s car, straightened, and walked innocently and forthrightly across the parking lot. No one was in sight.
Very faintly, now, he heard the bell ringing. As he approached, people began pouring out the doors. He joined, unnoticed, and boarded his own bus.
It was Kris who brought him back to earth. Kris, the first and the only friend he’d made here. He hadn’t given her a thought all day, but she’d obviously thought about him.
“Where were you?” She sounded both anxious and angry, and her glittering blue eyes seemed to pierce him through.
Phillip could only gape. He hadn’t wasted a moment in thinking up a story. He couldn’t begin to think of one now.
Kris frowned at him. Her pale brows were nearly invisible, but he could see the swirl of muscle. “Were you sick? Were you in the nurse’s office?”
That would be a possible story, Phillip realized. But too late: He was already shaking his head in a nerveless way. Kris flushed, and looked down at the books on her lap. They’d only known each other for three months. That was too soon for accountability, but it was definitely soon enough for discomfort.
Suddenly Phillip noticed the crumpled lunch bag on the seat between them.
“Do you have food left?”
“My apple.”
“Can I have it? I missed lunch.”
Kris looked him over: no books, no homework, no jacket. She nodded.
Phillip tore the apple out of the bag and struck his teeth into it. The white flesh melted before his hunger like spring snow. About as filling, too.
Nibbling daintily around the hard seedcases, he glanced across to see Kris watching him. Older, he thought instantly. It was the question that he’d been answering ever since he first met her: Is she older than me, or younger? They were in the same class, but that didn’t mean much.
“What happened in English?” he asked, trying to retrieve a sense of normality. Then he wished he’d said something different, or else kept his mouth shut.
Kris’s voice was smooth and cool. “More speeches. We learned how to do a manicure.…”
“Sorry I missed that!” said Phillip brazenly. Kris didn’t give him the satisfaction of so much as a glance.
“Then Lester McCoy taught us how to run a trap line, and Angela Vasco painted a masterpiece before our very eyes.” Slight pause. “Have you written your speech yet?” She knew he hadn’t—Phillip could tell from her voice.
He shook his head. Not only had he not written it; he didn’t even have a topic. “Something you know how to do,” the teacher had said. “Something you think other people would find interesting, and something of reasonable size to bring to class.” The teacher was young and bright-eyed and optimistic. Phillip felt older than she was sometimes. Kris was definitely older.
Kris glanced sidelong at him. She was a student of animal behavior, and Phillip felt as if he’d suddenly turned into a laboratory rat, one that persisted in running the maze backward. All her powers of observation were trained on him. “You’re next on the list,” she said in a cool, experimental tone. “For tomorrow morning.”
Something you know how to do, thought Phillip desperately. Reasonable size. Nothing he knew how to do was a reasonable size: driving a combine, chopping corn, running a wood splitter.… Wood! Ax!
“I’ll do a wood splitting demonstration,” he said to Kris, with what he could not help but feel was superb casualness. “Do you think your father would drive me in tomorrow?” Kris’s father was a much-dreaded biology teacher here at the high school.
“I’ll tell him,” said Kris. She gave him another assessing once-over, not as impressed as Phillip had hoped, settled deeper into the corner of the seat, and opened a book. She hardly ever did that on the bus, and Phillip knew exactly how to take it.
CHAPTER THREE
The bus let him out at the veterinarian’s clinic where he worked. Phillip got off with a sense of relief and stood for a moment watching as the bus lumbered away up the busy commercial strip. Kris wasn’t a waver, but she especially didn’t wave today. Phillip tried to shrug off a feeling of apprehension as he let himself through the side-door into the office.
Dr. Rossi sat at her desk, small, elegant, and poised, balancing her pencil on its tip and looking up at Dr. Franklin. He was shouting.
“Of course I can take one! Hell—I can take ’em all! I’ve only got seven cats and three dogs, and who needs to get married and start a family? Mother Teresa didn’t, and look at her!”
Phillip looked more closely, and saw that what he’d taken for a black doctor’s bag in Dr. Franklin’s hand was actually a small cat carrier. The open end was toward Phillip, and he had only to bend slightly at the knees to see inside.
One of the kittens. Of course.
“Hugh …” said Dr. Rossi, sounding tentative but compelled. “Hugh, you’re tearing yourself to pieces over this.”
“I’d like to tear something to pieces! My God … the miracle of birth! Can you believe it? That’s what the silly bitch actually said to me when she brought them in. ‘I wanted the kids to see the miracle of birth.’ And then she’s ready to flush the little bastards down the toilet!”
“Yes, Hugh, reprehensible. But—if I could just advise you—you’ll be dealing with this for the next thirty years. You can’t afford to get so personally involved—”
“I’m not sure I can afford the thirty years! My God … the greyhounds are bad enough. But at least they get some life! They get a few years before they’re used up and thrown away. But—”
Dr. Rossi’s sad eyes strayed past him. “Oh. Hello, Phillip.”
“Hi,” said Phillip. “Cages?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Rossi.
Phillip was the peon here, the one who did the dirtiest jobs, physically and morally: from cleaning litter boxes to restraining animals for killing, from sweeping and mopping to stoking the incinerator with trash and sometimes bodies. On good days he loved his job, days when no greyhounds from the local racetrack had to be killed simply because they weren’t fast enough; when there were no abandonments; when the tragedies were simple, natural, sometimes fixable. Phillip was interested in fixable tragedies.
The dog cages were empty today. No greyhounds.
But the cat cages were full. He got the garbage pail and started to empty litter boxes. In the office Dr. Franklin spoke again, more quietly.
“Madeline. Couldn’t you …”
“No,” said Dr. Rossi gently. “I can’t keep them past tomorrow. There’s always another litter coming, and you know I can’t keep them all.”
“But what are we doing to ourselves? Can we just keep killing all these animals? It’s not even to end suffering! It’s just throwing them away! Can we keep on doing this for thirty years and not turn into monsters?”
Dr. Rossi’s voice dropped to a murmur.
“I know he’s in the next room! He’s not a child! He’s got the same questions I do!”
“Well, for God’s sake don’t ask me!” cried Dr. Rossi. “I don’t know!”
“But you go ahead and do it anyway?”
“Yes, Hugh, yes! And so do you, and so does Phillip! And I go home and cry about it—but you won’t make me cry here and now! I’ve got work to do!” Phillip heard the chair scrape back, and a moment later the door to the waiting room banged shut.
Dr. Franklin came through the back room, cat carrier in hand. His beard was on his chest, his gray eyes wide and thoughtful. He glanced down the row of cat cages and saw Phillip. After a moment’s pause he set the carrier down and went to the last cage, where the litter of kittens had been living for two weeks now. There were three left: little tigers, fat and healthy. Dr. Franklin took them out and managed to cuddle all three against his bearded face.
“Any chance you can take one of these guys, Phil?”
“No,” said Phillip. “I—things are situated so I can’t.”
“That’s right,” said Dr. Franklin. “I remember—you saved a greyhound once, didn’t you, and you gave it away.”
“Yeah.” That was Diana, and he’d given her to Kris.
Dr. Franklin shook his head, an unwise move which waggled his beard enticingly. The kittens’ eyes brightened, and they pounced, heedless of their precarious positions almost six feet in the air.
“Ow!” Dr. Franklin tried to retract his chin. The beard wiggled. Pounce!
“Oh, shit,” Dr. Franklin said suddenly. He dumped the kittens back in their cage and turned away from them. “Bye, Phil.” The door banged shut behind him.
“Phillip?” Dr. Rossi looked through the doorway behind him. “Can you help me with a dog?”
“Just a second. I have to fill the litter boxes.”
“Hurry. The life you save will probably be mine!”
The patient was a large, woolly Airedale with a wound on its hip. Phillip’s job was to hold the dog’s front end after Dr. Rossi had tied its jaws shut with an old nylon, a fancy black stocking with pearly glitters and a seam up the back. Above it the dog’s eyes were sullenly narrow. A growl vibrated in its chest throughout the examination.
“He hates you,” Phillip said.
“And he’s getting to know my scent awfully well,” said Dr. Rossi. “I should have thought to use someone else’s stocking.”
“I can think of a few people,” said his owner, laughing. “I’ll bring you a supply next time!”
Finished with the dog, Phillip returned to the silent room. The laughter, a black, spangled stocking with a seam up the back, the round-limbed bounce and violence of the Airedale were gay and colorful in his head. The blank room with its cream-colored cement walls and big bank of cages seemed to swallow all that. He measured out the cat food, and its dry rattle in the dishes, the can opener, were the only sounds.
But as the heavy scent of cat food rose from the opened cans, cries came from the last cage. A short, fat kitten paw reached out through the grid and groped around blindly. Phillip found himself laughing.
Other cats rose and stroked themselves against the bars, inviting some courtesy in return, or if too sick, if dying, looked at him from sunken eyes as they crouched in the backs of the cages. Phillip’s laughter turned sharp-edged in his throat. But he reached in and touched each sick cat, and two responded with purrs and surprised looks of pleasure. “Yeah, it’s still good,” he said to the last one, as the bony gray head butted up into his palm. “It’s still good.”
He was careful to go back and wash his hands before touching the kittens.
They were frantic for the food, squalling, tumbling over one another, climbing the bars, and reaching out greedily, claws spread wide. Phillip sailed the dish over their heads into the back corner of the cage, and after a few seconds of frantic glancing about, everyone found it.
“Hungry, aren’t they?” said Dr. Rossi, passing behind him. She was bringing Mrs. Farley to see her cat.
This was the gray cat that had purred at Phillip. He had feline leukemia, and after months of flickering up and down, his life-force had abruptly waned. He had been at the clinic for a week, living on injections. Mrs. Farley visited every day.
She brought the frail creature out now and stood holding him, with tears running down her face. The cat seemed uninterested, uncomfortable. He looked toward his empty, featureless cage, as if he wished to return to it.
“I recommend putting him down,” said Dr. Rossi, bravely looking into the woman’s face.