Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

Milo thought about it. “I don’t know. Wanted to see if I could, I guess.”

The boy’s face was blank. At the periphery now, a group of other boys had appeared, milling in the background.

“It take you a long time?”

“Couple of months,” said Milo. “How’d you hear about it?”

“Mr. F told me you wanted to hand it over.”

“How’s that?”

The boy, who was so skinny his shirt bagged over his belt, whispered something.

Milo leaned in closer. “What?” he said.

“I said, what you think I got here?” The boy reached above his head to pull the light cord. Milo looked up at where he was reaching.

When the hall turned over, he remembered noticing that there was no light cord at all, only the rows of pine boards on the ceiling, punctuated by rusting nail heads. After that, there were only the blows.

—

THE SCHOOL NURSE shaved his temple. When she pulled away the pad of gauze, it dripped blood onto the tray. “That’s mine ?” Milo said.

He hadn’t seen a mirror.

“Nasty little punks,” she answered. “What’d you do to deserve this?”

“I really don’t know. I made something.”

“Like what?”

Milo shrugged. “A chain.”

“You hit one of them with it?”

He eked out a laugh.

She looked at him, her manner easing. “Well,” she said, taking his elbow, “they did a number on you, anyway.”

She wiped his wounds with iodine. He tried not to show her how much it burned. Then she lifted his shirt and examined his ribs. The boy who’d done it had lifted Milo’s shirt, too, had yanked the tails up over his head, then tripped him backward, so that when the punching started he was on the floor inside a sack, his arms pinned in beside him. He winced as the nurse eased the collar up over his head. Before moving to his back, she brought him a mirror. Up and down his spine were clumps of bright red rectangles.

“Steel-toed,” she said.

—

“WHY WAS HE asking about a chain?” said his mother, turning from the sink of dishes.

“I guess they wanted it.” He shrugged. “It was something I made.”

At this point, they asked him to show it to them. He went out to the woods, and when he returned, they both admired it in their reserved way, which meant that his mother regarded it for a long moment with a smile on her lips, and his father picked it up and inspected several of the links. His father had had a drink that night, too, which he rarely did.

The chain lay on the table now. Milo gazed at it as his mother went back to her washing. He could resurrect every link in his mind, the change in color at each turn of grain.

With a clank, his father set down his glass. He went to the closet, and when he came back to the table he was putting on his hunting coat. “People punch up, ” he said. “They punch the ones who are better than them. Nobody likes a kid who does something well. That’s what happened.”

This was a compliment. Milo was aware of it.

In the mirror above the mantel now, he regarded his own face. From the work of the nurse, his hair was ragged across the brow, and on one temple was a gauze bandage that was weeping a dark stain. His neck was crisscrossed with scabs that in the low light looked like caterpillars crawling on his skin. He couldn’t keep his eyes off them.

He was a different person. He could sense it. When the kicks had started, he’d thrashed away from them and tried to kick back, but then, when they’d moved from his spine to his skull, he’d just curled up and let himself surrender. That’s when he’d felt himself rising. The thing was, there had been pleasure in it.

This was something he could never tell anyone.

“Next time,” his father was saying, “you hit ’em. Before they get the jump. That’s how you do it. You hit ’em with whatever you have in your hand.”

“You do no such thing, Milo.” His mother held a soapy plate in her hands. “He has a better way of dealing with his problems.”

“The bridge of the nose is good. Butt ’em with your forehead right there, between the eyes.”

“He has—”

“You hit ’em with a bat, Milo. You kick ’em in the nuts. You smash a book into their face — you do whatever the hell you have to. You move fast. Do you hear? You show ’em what you’re made of, or they follow you around the rest of your life. That’s the deal. Do you understand?”

“Henry,” said his mother, “what you’re telling him—”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Milo.

His father stood, nearly toppling his chair. Then, coming around the table, he leaned down to whisper in Milo’s ear.

“What was that?” said his mother.

“I was talking to my son.”

“Well, what did you say to him?”

At the threshold, he said, “If I’d wanted you to hear, I would have said it loud enough.”

The door rattled on its hinges.

When the sound of his footsteps was gone, his mother sat down beside him. She finished the drink that was on the table, then reached over and laid her hand on his arm. After a moment, she withdrew it and returned to the sink. The faucet sprayed noisily, and the pots and pans rattled against the basin.

“Well,” she said after a time, “what did he say?”

“I don’t know,” Milo answered. “I didn’t hear.”

—

SOONER THAN HE would have imagined, though, his wounds had healed. He was different now, he knew, but he also knew that he probably didn’t appear any different to the other kids at school. People paid no more or less attention to him than they had before. Not long after the incident, Vene had stopped him in the cafeteria with a couple of friends and offered to help him find the attackers; but Milo had put him off, saying he didn’t remember what they looked like and that all the Polish kids were pretty much the same, anyway. There were hundreds of them at Near Isle.

The truth, though, was that he’d learned something. As he’d felt himself giving in to the blows, he’d understood that he was entirely alone in the world. He lived in it alone, and at that moment, alone, he might actually depart it.

The truth was that this had comforted him. That’s what he’d learned.

Vene didn’t mention the incident again, and before long, even Milo had stopped thinking about it. His life renarrowed. Every morning, he walked down the long hill to the bus, and every afternoon he returned, climbing the slope toward the dark house, dropping his books in the kitchen and heading out again into the woods. At night in his room, before climbing into bed, he did a few minutes of homework.

Strangely, though, he would never have said that he was lonely.

Whenever his mother had a free moment, she was reading a novel — and, of course, his father was a teacher — but Milo, unlike many such solitary souls, wasn’t a particularly good student. He enjoyed the books he chose for himself, but he found the ones assigned to him a chore, like sickling the tall grass that grew up between the house and the garage or sweeping the floor of his father’s shed. He had passing grades in social studies, citizenship, shop, and history. Once in an art course he’d been told by a teacher that he possessed talent; but the subject held no interest for him. As a courtesy to his father, he made good grades in science, but that was the extent of it. Math bored him.

—

HE HAD, OF course, heard what his father had said to him. What he’d whispered in his ear was “Welcome to the world.”

ONE SATURDAY IN June, his mother banged the garbage-can lid at dinnertime, but when he came in from the woods he found his parents sitting in the Plymouth. His father beckoned him into the backseat. As soon as he got in, they drove away. His father was dressed in a flannel shirt and a fedora. When they stopped, they were in downtown Cheboygan. The Andrets rarely came here. His father paid to park at the pier, even though it would have cost nothing to park a block away. Already this was strange. So was the fedora. The day was warm. Along the boardwalk, a bicycle cab was bumping across the planks and a cotton-candy salesman was spinning cones. The sun was low already, and where the dark lake was disturbed by watercraft it winked with painful brightness, as though the moving vessels were sprinkling glass behind them. Today was his parents’ anniversary, he discovered. He could see that there had been some kind of disagreement, though. His mother fidgeted with a picnic basket.