Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

“You could have,” I said.

Joe’s face darkened. “I could have done a lot of things.” He crushed out his cigarette and waved for the waitress. “Come on.”

We paid the bill and left. Outside the rain had yielded to an easy snow; already an inch had fallen, clinging fast to every surface, like cake frosting. In the windshield of a Karman Gia parked at the curb somebody had written, in letters carved by a thick, gloved finger: “Make love, not exams.” We did not head back to the apartment but instead walked south, searching for the river. A maze of dormitories and classroom buildings, their courtyards sealed by iron gates, and then we emerged on Memorial Drive, a busy four-lane road separating the campus from the Charles. Cars thrummed by, their hoods and fenders washed by the damp, pushing cones of snowy light; across the river, a ribbon of darkness uncoiling through the city, the Prudential Building stood over all like a great, glowing monolith. My feet were soaked, the snow was falling all around. A feeling almost beyond words: I was suddenly touched by a vivid reality, as if I were seeing everything, the world itself, for the first time. There was nothing for me in Maine; I didn’t even have to go back. Just by saying so, I could leave my bubble of waiting and disappear into these streets, join this bright, pulsing world of people and buildings and cars. I could find a job, rent a small apartment. I felt as if I were standing at the edge of a great river of life, an endless current of possibilities as to who I might become. All that remained was for me to step into it.

We returned to the apartment and undressed for bed. The room was freezing; the third night, something had gone wrong with the heating, but of course we were in no position to complain. Whom would we call? How would we even explain who we were? We were anonymous, unseen, we barely even existed. Something as simple as a functioning radiator was beyond our reach. We piled our coats on top of the blankets and got into bed. In the dark I turned to Joe.

“I want to come with you.”

“On a dragger? Luce, it’s winter.”

“Of course not. I could just take the bus like a normal person.”

He sighed into the frigid air. “We’ve been through this,” he said. “I wish we could be together, but we have to be patient. You wouldn’t like it up there, Luce. I’m broke, I live in a filthy dump with six other guys. We’ve got mice, it smells to high heaven, nobody ever flushes the goddamned john. It makes this place look like the Taj Mahal. I’m not even working legally. What kind of life is that?”

“You said it yourself. There’s going to have to be some kind of pardon.”

“Fine, maybe so, but what if there isn’t? You want to spend your life as a fugitive? And what if they deport me? Then where would you be?”

“I’d be with you,” I said. “That’s the important thing.” But in his voice I felt him slipping away.

“Not if I’m in jail.”

We took a bus the next afternoon to Portland, slept the night in a motel near the water; at five the next morning, still in darkness, I walked him to the dock, where his boat was berthed. A wedge of white steel, eighty feet long: on the side was her name, the Jenny-Smith, dripping with rust. The last gear was being hauled aboard: great coils of rope, huge orange barrels, blocks of ice the size of kitchen stoves. They would work the Jordan Basin for ten days, straddling the Hague Line, then let Joe off at Grand Manan, the southernmost island of the Canadian Maritimes. From there he could take a ferry to Blacks Harbour and hitch the rest of the way to LeMaitre.

A man in a bright yellow slicker stood by the gangway, holding a clipboard.

“You Crosby?” He spoke through the cigarette perched in the corner of his mouth.

“That’s right.”

He made a snorting sound. “Thought we were going to have to leave without you.” He looked me over, like a man in a bar. “She coming?”

“No.”

With thick, dirty fingers he plucked the cigarette from his lips and flicked the ash away. “Too bad.”

The first one showed up in the fall of ’67: a pale, skinny kid, traveling alone, carrying nothing but a bedroll and a canvas rucksack. We were just closing down for the season. He arrived on foot, hiking in from the county road at night, and slept on the porch. I found him that morning in the kitchen; my father was cooking him breakfast.

“This is David,” my father announced. “Your cousin.”

“I didn’t know I had a cousin David.”

“He’s new.”

We nodded warily to one another. He had a phony little mustache-a kid’s mustache. My father served him eggs from a cast iron skillet, rinsed the dirty pan in the sink, and wiped his hands on a dish towel. “You, in the office,” he said to me.

It was no surprise what he told me. By this time my father was well-known, a kind of public riddle, at least in our town: the war hero who had become an antiwar activist, the man who had given half the visible world to fight Hitler but would not, in his words, “see one American son die to line the pockets of the plutocrats and fatten the résumés of the Joint Chiefs.” The vagaries of the Communist threat, and the way it had been used to ratchet up the war, repelled him. “These talking heads. I knew who I was fighting,” he used to say, “and he knew me. Kids in pajamas, running through some jungle. I have no quarrel with them, and neither do you. You shoot somebody, you better have a reason to hate him. The fact that he doesn’t drink Coca-Cola or drive an Oldsmobile doesn’t cut it.”

David stayed a day; he seemed nervous, spoke little, and spent most of his time on the porch, reading a well-thumbed paperback. I asked him what it was, and he showed me: On the Road. We exchanged no other words. The next morning, my father left with him in the truck before I was awake, returning six hours later, the fenders spattered with mud: long enough, I figured, to reach an unregulated stretch of border on the logging roads that ran north from the highway. I never saw him again, nor learned what became of him, even when, a little over a year later, I followed the same path.

There were other cousin Davids: boys and young men traveling alone, dirty and long-haired, some couples, even a family or two, seeing their son off as if they were sending him to summer camp. A few were deserters, wanted men; others had simply seen what was coming. The logging roads gave them safe passage. At the other end lay jobs, a place to live, friends waiting.

I despised them all. It wasn’t that I supported the war; I didn’t understand the war. In many ways it was as remote from me as my father’s was, separated from my quiet, compact world not by time but by so many thousands of miles it was beyond imagining. Kids in pajamas, fighting other kids who should have been in pajamas.

It wasn’t long after this that we also got our first visit from the sheriff, Darryl Tanner. I think up until the moment I saw his cruiser coming down the drive I’d somehow never construed what my father was doing as actually illegal. Tanner and I had a little history: my sophomore year in high school, a bunch of us had gotten ourselves arrested on Halloween night for blowing up mailboxes with little quarter-sticks of dynamite. There was beer in the truck, too-not a lot, we’d mostly drunk it by then-but Tanner had made a big show of booking us, fingerprints and all, and waiting till morning to release us to our parents. The charges were dropped, none of us was even close to being of age, but we were all suspended from school for a week.

I was chopping wood by the shed when Tanner’s cruiser rolled up. I instantly felt nervous, though I wasn’t sure why-it was simply the effect he had on me. For a minute he sat in his car, writing something on a pad. At last he got out and looked over at me.