Early Autumn

CHAPTER 16

The next morning I woke Paul up at seven.

“Why do I have to get up?” he said. “There’s no school.”

“We got a lot to do,” I said.

“I don’t want to get up.”

“Well, you have to. I’m going to make breakfast. Anything special you want?”

“I don’t want any.”

“Okay,” I said. “But there’s nothing to eat till lunch.”

He stared at me, squinting, and not entirely awake.

I went out to the kitchen and mixed up some batter for corn bread. While the bread was baking and the coffee perking, I took a shower and dressed, took the corn bread out, and went into Paul’s room. He had gone back to sleep. I shook him awake.

“Come on, kid,” I said. “I know you don’t want to, but you have to. You’ll get used to the schedule. Eventually you’ll even like it.”

Paul pushed his head deeper into the sleeping bag and shook his head.

“Yeah,” I said. “You gotta. Once you’re up and showered you’ll feel fine. Don’t make me get tough.”

“What’ll you do if I don’t,” Paul muttered into the sleeping bag.

“Pull you out,” I said. “Hold you under the shower. Dry you, dress you, Et cetera.”

“I won’t get up,” he said.

I pulled him out, undressed him, and held him under the shower. It took about a half an hour. It’s not easy to control someone, even a kid, if you don’t want to hurt them. I shampooed his hair and held him under to rinse, then I pulled him out and handed him a towel.

“You want me to dress you?” I said.

He shook his head, and wrapped the towel around himself, and went to his room. I went to the kitchen and put out the corn bread and strawberry jam and a bowl of assorted fruit. While I waited for him I ate an orange and a banana. I poured a cup of coffee. I sipped a little of it. I had not warned him against going back to bed. Somehow I’d had a sense that would be insulting. I wanted him to come out on his own. If he didn’t I had lost some ground. I sipped some more coffee. The corn bread was cooling. I looked at his bedroom door. I didn’t like cool corn bread.

The bedroom door opened and he came out. He had on jeans that had obviously been shortened and then let down again, his worn Top-Siders, and a green polo shirt with a penguin on the left breast.

“You want coffee or milk?” I said.

“Coffee.”

I poured some. “What do you take in it?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never had it before.”

“May as well start with cream and sugar,” I said. “Calories aren’t your problem.”

“You think I’m skinny?”

“Yes. There’s corn bread, jam, fruit, and coffee. Help yourself.”

“I don’t want anything.”

I said, “Okay,” and started on the corn bread. Paul sipped at the coffee. He didn’t look like he liked it. After breakfast I cleaned up the dishes and said to Paul, “You got any sneakers?”

“No.”

“Okay, first thing we’ll do is go over to North Conway and buy you some.”

“I don’t need any,” he said.

“Yes, you do,” I said. “We’ll pick up a newspaper too.”

“How you know they sell them over there?”

“North Conway? They probably got more flashy running shoes than aspirin,” I said. “We’ll find some.”

On the ride to North Conway Paul said, “How come you made me get up like that?”

“Two reasons,” I said. “One, you need some structure in your life, some scheduling, to give you a sense of order. Two, I was going to have to do it sometime. I figured I might as well get it over with.”

“You wouldn’t have to do it if you let me sleep.”

“It would’ve been something. You’d push me until you found out how far I’d go. You have to test me, so you can trust me.”

“What are you, a child psychologist?”

“No. Susan told me that.”

“Well, she’s crazy.”

“I know you don’t know any better, but that’s against the rules.”

“What?”

“Speaking badly of another person’s beloved, you know? I don’t want you to speak ill of her.” We were in Fryeburg Center.

“Sorry.”

“Okay.”

We were quiet as we drove through the small open town with its pleasant buildings. It was maybe fifteen minutes to North Conway. We bought Paul a pair of Nike LDVs just like mine except size 7, and a pair of sweat pants.

“You got a jock?” I said.

Paul looked embarrassed. He shook his head. We bought one of them and two pairs of white sweat socks. I paid and we drove back to Fryeburg. It was ten when we got to the cabin. I handed him his bag of stuff.

“Go put this stuff on and we’ll have a run,” I said.

“A run?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t run,” he said.

“You can learn,” I said.

“I don’t want to.”

“I know, but we’ll take it easy. We won’t go far. We’ll run a little, walk a little. Do a little more each day. You’ll feel good.”

“You going to make me?” Paul said.

“Yes.”

He went very slowly into the cabin. I went in with him. He went into his room. I went into mine. In about twenty minutes he came out with the new jogging shoes looking ridiculously yellow and the new sweat pants slightly too big for his thin legs, and his scrawny upper body pale and shivery-looking in the spring sun. I was dressed the same, but my stuff wasn’t new.

“We’ll stretch,” I said. “Bend your knees until you can touch the ground with both hands easily. Like this. Good. Now without taking your hands from the ground, try to straighten your knees. Don’t strain, just steady pressure. We’ll hold it thirty seconds.”

“What’s that for?” he said.

“Loosen up the lower back and the hamstring muscles in the back of your thighs. Now squat, like this, let your butt hang down toward the ground and hold that for thirty seconds. It does somewhat the same thing.”

I showed him how to stretch the calf muscles and loosen up the quadriceps. He did everything very awkwardly and tentatively as if he wanted to prove he couldn’t. I didn’t comment on that. I was figuring out how to run with a gun. I normally didn’t. But I wasn’t normally looking after anyone but me when I ran.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re ready for a short slow run. Wait till I get something in the house.” I went in and got my gun. It was a short Smith & Wesson.38.I took it from its holster, checked the load, and went out carrying it in my hand.

“You going to run with that?” Paul said.

“Best I could think of,” I said. “I’ll just carry it in my hand.” I held it by the cylinder and trigger guard, not by the handle. It was not conspicuous.

“You afraid they’ll find us?”

“No, but no harm to be safe. When you can, it’s better to deal with possibilities than likelihoods.”

“Huh?”

“Come on, well jog. Ill explain while we run.”

We started at a slow pace. Paul looked as if he might never have run before. His movements seemed unsynchronized, and he took each step as if he had to think about it first.

“Say when you need to walk,” I said. “There’s no hurry.”

He nodded.

I said, “When you’re thinking about something important, like if your father might try to kidnap you again, it’s better to think of what the best thing would be to do if he tried, rather than trying to decide how likely he was to try. You can’t decide if he’ll try, that’s up to him. You decide what to do if he does. That’s up to you. Understand?”

He nodded. Already I could see he was too winded to talk.

“A way of living better is to make the decisions you need to make based on what you can control. When you can.”

We were jogging up a dirt road that led from the cabin to a larger dirt road. It was maybe half a mile long. On either side there were dogberry bushes and small birch and maple saplings under the tall white pines and maples that hovered above us. There were raspberry bushes too, just starting to bud. It was cool under the dappling of the trees, but not cold.

“We’ll hang a right here,” I said, “and head along this road a ways. No need to push. Stop when you feel the need and we’ll walk a ways.” He nodded again. The road was larger now. It circled the lake, side roads spoking off to cabins every hundred yards. The names of the cabin owners were painted on hokey rustic signs and nailed to a tree at the head of each side road. We had gone maybe a mile when Paul stopped running. He bent over holding his side.

“Stitch?”

He nodded.

“Don’t bend forward,” I said. “Bend backward. As far back as you can. It’ll stretch it out”

He did what I told him. I hadn’t thought he would. An old logging road ran up to our left. We turned up it. Paul walking with his back arched.

“How far did we run?”

“About a mile,” I said. “Damn good for the first time out”

“How far can you run?”

“Ten, fifteen miles, I don’t know for sure.”

Walking on a felled log, we crossed a small ravine where the spring melt was still surging down toward the lake. In a month it would be dry and dusty in there.

“Let’s head back,” I said. “Maybe when we get back to the road you can run a little more.”

Paul didn’t say anything. A redheaded woodpecker rattled against a tree beside us. When we got back to the road I moved into a slow jog again. Paul walked a few more feet and then he cranked into a jerky slow run behind me. We went maybe half a mile to the side road leading to our cabin. I stopped the jog and began to walk, Paul stopped running the moment I did.

When we were back to the cabin, I said, “Put on a sweat shirt or a light jacket or something. Then we’ll set up some equipment.”

I put on a blue sweat shirt with the sleeves cut off. Paul put on a gray long-sleeved sweat shirt with a New England Patriots emblem on the front. The sleeves were too long.

We brought out the weight bench, the heavy bag, the speed bag and its strike board, and the tool chest. Paul carried one end of the tool chest and one end of the weight bench.

“We’ll hang the heavy bag off this tree branch,” I said. “And we’ll fasten the speed bag to the trunk.”

Paul nodded.

“And we’ll put the weight bench here under the tree out of the way of the heavy bag. If it rains we’ll toss a tarp over it.”

Paul nodded.

“And when we get it set up, I’ll show you how to use it”

Paul nodded again. I didn’t know if I was making progress or not I seemed to have broken his spirit.

“How’s that sound, kid?” I said.

He shrugged. Maybe I hadn’t broken his spirit