Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

“Your father around, Joey?”

“Inside,” I said.

“He alone?”

“I guess. Why wouldn’t he be?”

“No reason.” Tanner hitched up his pants. It was a surprisingly warm day for mid-October, and he was sweating in the heat. “Just wouldn’t want to drop in unannounced and see something I didn’t want to. This is more of a social call.”

I picked up the axe again and tried to look busy. “Well, he’s inside, like I said.”

My father met him on the porch, and the two men disappeared into the lodge. I tried to continue my chores, but couldn’t; I crept around to the back of the house, under the office window. Sure enough, they were talking inside.

“Don’t know a thing about it, Darryl,” my father was saying. His voice was curt. “You can just go on back where you came from.”

“Joe, Joe.” I could practically see Tanner shaking his head in that disapproving way of his, fingering the brim of his hat. “What you don’t seem to get here is I’m doing you a favor. People are talking, Joe. Making some pretty serious accusations, saying you might not be such a loyal American. Course I told them that’s nonsense, you being a veteran and all.”

“People can say what they like, Darryl. Last I checked, no law says I can’t speak my mind.”

“And of course, you being a lawyer, you’d know all about the law. I said that too. A lawyer and a war hero. What was it, Harvard, Joe? An Ivy League war hero, no less. Last guy you’d think would be, say, harboring draft evaders out here in the woods. Last guy in the world.”

“Go on and have a look for yourself. There’s no one here.”

“That’s what Joey tells me, and I’m happy to hear it. That’s what I’m telling you, Joe. I don’t want to look. But you keep on with what you’re doing, the day will come I sure as hell will have to. And not just me. Real guys, army guys, from the stockade down in Portland. These people aren’t your friends, Joe.”

“I see. But you are?”

“For now.” I heard the scrape of Tanner’s chair as he rose to go. “Anyway, that’s what I drove out here to say. I hope I don’t have to come back. It’s really up to you. I’ll let myself out.”

I scrambled back to the woodshed in time to see Tanner stepping off the porch. I put up a log to split and took my time tapping the wedge, then lifted my eyes as if I’d only just noticed him standing there.

“You find him okay?”

Tanner nodded. For a moment we just looked at each other. I wondered if he somehow knew I’d been listening.

“There wouldn’t be anything you want to tell me, would there, Joey?”

“About what?”

Tanner sighed and shook his head. I didn’t like him one bit, but I also understood that no one had made him come out here like he had. He was giving my father fair warning.

“Christ, the two of you. You’re a regular chip off the old block, you know that, Joey? Do your pop a favor and tell him to take my advice. No more visitors. Comprende?”

“People come, people go, Darryl. It’s none of my business.”

Darryl opened the door of the cruiser. The conversation seemed over, but then he paused a second, as if he’d only just remembered something.

“You get your draft notice yet, Joey?”

“Leave him out of it, Darryl.” We both turned to see my father standing on the porch with his arms crossed over his chest. “You have no business with him.” He wagged a finger down the drive. “Go on now.”

Tanner smiled, spinning his hat in his hands. “I’m all done here anyway. Think I made my point.” He opened his door and turned one last time to me. “And Joey?”

“Yeah?”

He winked. “Happy Halloween.”

I was twenty-one that fall, classified 1-A. The following May I received orders from my draft board to report to Bangor for my physical exam-a letter, blandly impersonal, like a tax form. I went secretly, telling my father only that I would be gone for the day. From the Federal Building on Harlow Street a schoolbus carted us, about thirty men, to the army processing station, a frigid hangar at the National Guard base at the airport. For six hours we pranced around in the cold, wearing only our underwear, cupping our privates as we stood in line after line. A barrage of questions: Did I wear glasses? (No.) Had I ever been charged or convicted of a felony? (Not technically, unless you counted the mailboxes.) Received psychiatric care? (No again, though living with my father, I probably could stand some.)

Tanner’s threats notwithstanding, the simple truth was this: I wanted to fight. I didn’t care who, or what for. If I’d had a broken leg I would have danced a fox-trot to make them send me anyway. In my heart I knew it, had known it since the day my mother died and I looked up from the Rawlings’ floor to see my father standing over me; I was nothing, a being without courage. All my life I had lived his war. I wanted a war of my own.

I received my induction notice in early October. A virtually identical letter: for a moment I thought some mistake had been made and I was being asked to report for a physical a second time, one of those army screwups my father always carped about. But then I read more closely. Back to Bangor, two days after Christmas. Bring my social security card. Settle my affairs. And, at the bottom, a single sentence: “Failure to report to the place and hour of the day named in this order subjects the violator to fine and imprisonment.”

I showed my father the letter that night at dinner. He read it slowly, the one good eye squinting. His glass eye was nothing unusual to me-I had never known him otherwise-but still there were times when its misdirected, jewellike gaze seemed aimed right at me.

When he was done he placed the letter aside. “You passed your physical?”

“Last May.”

He regarded me a moment, but said nothing about my deception. Probably he had already guessed it. Then: “What are you going to do?”

I had imagined this moment so many times my answer was ready. “I’m going to do my duty,” I said.

“Is that a fact. Tell me what that is, you’re so sure of yourself.”

“To fight. Like you did.”

“I see.” He nodded. “Let me ask you this. What if we were Germans, and it was 1939. Your boss Hitler has just invaded Poland and told you to come along and join the fun. Would you fight then?”

“We’re not Germans. It’s not the same.”

“That’s where you may be wrong. You better hope you’re not.”

“I’m not wrong.”

“Tanner have anything to do with this?”

I wanted to laugh. “Tanner’s an asshole.”

“What are you fighting for?”

I thought a moment. There was only one answer. “Myself.”

I expected him to argue: all these strangers, shuttling through the camp, riding the rails of some underground of which my father was a part. Tanner’s warning was no joke. By this time everyone in town knew what my father was doing, or else suspected. There were people who wouldn’t have pushed my father out of the way of a logging truck, who would have watched him choke or drown. He’d given everything away, or nearly: his reputation, his name, most of his friends. And yet, when I told him what I intended to do, to fight the war he loathed, the war that seemed to undo the very meaning of his own sacrifice, he had no words. For a moment we sat without speaking, the only sound in the room the rhythm of our own synchronized breathing. I had never been more aware of his presence, the sheer, unassailable fact of him, his mysterious existence. We had lived alone, just the two of us, for thirteen years. Rarely did I speak of my mother, and never to him. Once a year, each June on her birthday, we would put on our suits and take the pickup to the cemetery; but even on those mornings, the silence was like a cold blade between us. We did not say we missed her, or that we loved her; he did not tell me, your mother would be proud of you, I’m sorry she’s not still here, to watch you grow up. We always brought flowers-irises, her favorite. After we had placed them on the ground by her headstone, we would stand a moment longer, and then my father would place his hand on my shoulder and, in his smoke-coarsened voice, say, “Well. It’s nice here. A pretty spot. I’m glad to see they take good care of it. We’d better get going.” I understand now that what I wanted most was simply to know him, and to do that, I had to be like him. But not back then; I might have said I hated him.