The Grays Read online

“And just because I’m watching 2001 does not mean that I’m sad.”

  What could she say to the misery in that voice? “Conner, a genius does not an actor make.”

  “Mother, could you consider dropping that label? You say that all the time and it does not help.”

  “That you’re not a good actor?”

  “Okay, let’s do this. Would you care to come out on the deck with me?”

  “On the deck? It’s twenty-six degrees.”

  But he’d already gotten to his feet and slid open the door. He gestured to her, and she saw the anger in it. She went out with him.

  The air was sharp with smoke, the western sky deep orange beyond the black skeletons of the winter trees. One would have thought that a winter silence would prevail, but instead she heard the shrill voices of preteen boys.

  When she looked down toward the Warners’ house, she saw streaks of light racing around in the backyard.

  “You’re not invited?”

  He went back in the house, sat down, and jammed the button on the remote. The bone sailed into the sky, the “Blue Danube” started.

  Paulie and Conner had been friends effectively from birth—Conner’s birth, that is. Paulie was a year and a half older.

  “Conner, what happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something happened.”

  “Mom, I’ve asked for space.”

  “Honey, look, you’ve got one place you can go. Here. Two people who are one hundred percent on your team, me and Dad. And I want to know why you aren’t at that party.” And why, moreover, was it unfolding outside where Conner could watch from a distance? That was real hard, that was.

  Conner was ten months younger than the youngest child in his class at Bell Attached, the school that served the children of Bell College’s professional community. He was nowhere near puberty, in a class where half the boys were shaving at least occasionally.

  “Conner, would it make you feel better if I told you that puberty turns boys into monsters?”

  “Thank you for that little dose of sexism, Mother. Girls have trouble with puberty, too.”

  “But boys really do.”

  She could hardly believe that Maggie and Harley would allow Paulie to leave Conner out like this. “What’s really wrong?”

  “All right. Fine.” He got up, crossed the room, and went downstairs.

  She heard him shut the door to the basement that Dan had finished for him when he was five. It was boy heaven down there, with an X-Box and a TV/DVD combo and a hulking but powerful Dell computer, plus his dinosaur collection, all of them painted with the utmost realism, and his train set, HO-grade, which had lighted houses, streetlights lining the streets, and lighted trains. He would play trains in the dark down there by the hour, muttering to himself in the voices of a hundred train men and townsfolk, all of whom he had invented, all of whose lives evolved and changed over the years. Katelyn thought of the train set as a sort of ongoing novel, and that her boy was a word genius as much as he was a math genius.

  The care he lavished on everything he modeled came from his ability to concentrate. Even when he’d been little, he hadn’t been clumsy. When he was eight, she’d discovered while cleaning up one day that the tiny human figures in his train set all had different-colored eyes, they had been that carefully finished.

  She had loved him so, then, looking down at a tiny suited figure with a tie so small that you had to look under a magnifying glass to see the design he’d painted on it. And then you would hear him deep in the night talking to himself, and you would realize that he was reciting a book he’d read, maybe even years ago, all from memory, just to enjoy it again.

  Conner and Dan had celebrated the completion of the room by putting a plaque on the door: THE CONNER ZONE.

  She and her husband had celebrated in quite a different way, later that night. This was your garden-variety tract house, as isolated as it and its three neighbors were, and the walls were tract-house thin. They did not feel that this extremely sensitive child needed to overhear the sounds of sex in the next room. And on that night, at last, they had been able to use their bed the way a bed was meant to be used, instead of being as still as possible, wincing at every squeak, and keeping their cries to a whisper.

  “Dan,” she said, walking into the kitchen where he had begun trimming ribs, “there’s something kind of ugly going on. Paulie’s having a party and Conner’s not invited.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They’re actually outside playing with flashlights, which I kind of have the feeling is on purpose.”

  “Kids are cruel.”

  “Listen, incidentally, I had an e-mail from Marcie Cotton about you.”

  “Oh?”

  “They’ve reached the point of asking general-faculty opinion.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I gave you a great report.”

  “What a relief.”

  “Come on, what else would I do?”

  “Tell the truth like everybody else. I’m dull as dishwater in the classroom.”

  “No, you’re actually interesting. It’s physiological psychology that’s dull. In the hands of most profs, it causes birds to die in the trees outside their classrooms. At least yours just fly off.”

  “Dull is dull. I should’ve used puppets or worn costumes.”

  “I would have preferred almost any other referee, frankly.”

  “Yeah, you and me both. But I can handle her . . . maybe.”

  “Not too much.”

  Dan went to her, embraced her. “You’re my girl.”

  There came a sound from below—a crash.

  “He just kicked the wall,” Katelyn said. “Like father, like son.”

  “Maybe a mano a mano would be good.”

  One of the most precious things about this Dan Callaghan whom her heart had whispered to her to marry was that he was a genuinely good father—not an easy thing to be for a boy as challenging as their son. But Conner’s brilliance and demanding personality also made him fascinating, and she thought that the rewards for loving their boy were substantial. “Maybe a mano a mano would be very good,” she said.

  As he went downstairs, he noticed that the Conner Zone sign had been removed from the door, leaving some areas of peeled paint that would have to be repaired. But not right now. He started to open the door, thought better of it, and knocked.

  A moment of silence was followed by a grudging, “Okay.”

  The room was dark and the trains were running. Conner loomed over the board like some kind of leering godlet, an image that Dan found oddly creepy. In fact, he found Conner, in general, oddly creepy—a great kid, he was crazy about him . . . but there was something sort of fundamentally creepy about somebody who was probably smarter than Shakespeare, and certainly smarter than you—way smarter.

  “Hey there, I see you’ve abolished the Conner Zone.”

  “It’s stupid.”

  A streetcar, wonderfully modeled, shot around on the tracks, racing through intersections, wheeling out into the forest and then returning to the town, passing Andy’s Garage and Sill’s Millinery and Carter’s Groceries, racing along as crossing guards whipped up and down and the figures inside sat as still as if frozen in terror.

  “Isn’t it going a little fast?”

  “I’m exceeding the speed limit and maybe they’re all going to die.”

  “It hurts, buddy. It’s meant to. Only, we need to get in front of it. Figure out what we’re doing wrong and not do that anymore. That way, we don’t lose our friends.”

  Conner turned the transformer up a notch and the streetcar shot off the tracks, tumbled through the woods, and crashed to the floor. The roof broke off and half the figures came out. Conner leaped around the table, grabbed the remains of the car, and smashed it to pieces against the tiles.

  “Hey. Hey! You’re killing the floor, here.” Dan went down to him, but he was up again and off across the room.

  “I’ve gotta get rid of
this whole kid setup,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m an asshole, Dan. I’m a little boy. In fact, I’m the little boy.”

  Dan went over to the bed where Conner had thrown himself. “Conner, your mom and I both felt you needed to skip grades. You were bored silly in third grade. You could do all the problems, you could read all the books.”

  “I can still do all the problems and read all the books. Only the difference now is, I’m the class freak, Dan. The freak!”

  “You’re not a freak. You just happen to be somewhat smarter than most people.”

  “You know who I really relate to? I really relate to Junior Hamner. Do you know who that is?”

  Dan thought that the Hamners had a little boy with Down syndrome. “He’s that mentally disabled child, isn’t he?”

  “Exactly. Another freak. We should be joined at the hip.”

  “Except that your mind—who knows what it might do one day? And Junior Hamner’s always gonna be eleven years old.”

  “Actually, he’s four. Mental age.”

  “Okay, let’s get down to it. What, exactly, happened to cause you to get ditched?”

  “I told you, I’m a little boy. Little boys aren’t allowed.”

  Dan had, to be honest, been one of the bullies. He’d had a childhood full of nightmares, so many and so intense that he now speculated that he might have been an abuse victim. He’d often been taken night fishing by an old man who lived down the block. Most of the time, his uncle Frank had been with them, and Frank was to this day as straight an arrow as had ever been carved, but there had been times when he and Mr. Ehmer had been out there alone all night, and he wondered what had transpired then.

  He remembered strange violence. Screaming. Being swarmed by flies. And maybe those were screen memories for things Mr. Ehmer had done, that should not have been done.

  Dan had been angry and big, so he used to push the little kids around—whip their butts, take their money, you name it. So he could understand the ugly frustrations of Paulie Warner and the other boys as well as he could his own boy’s hurt. He put his arm around Conner’s shoulders, gave him a friendly squeeze. “This was not like this a week ago. Two days ago.”

  “Let me tell you what they’ve done. They have created a club called the Connerbusters. Clever name, do you get it? Everybody in the seventh grade is supposed to be a Connerbuster except me, of course—” He stopped, his voice cracking.

  Dan looked over to see the young face twisted in pain. Agony.

  “I’m sorry, Dan, here I go being a little boy.”

  “Look, I was a class bully. I would’ve been a Connerbuster. For sure. But I cried, too. And you can be sure that Paulie Warner and the rest of them are just as vulnerable. You’re a little behind them physically, Conner, but mentally, you’re on another planet. In another universe.”

  “Aye, and there’s the rub. So listen, my friend, and you shall hear, of the careful humiliation of Conner the queer.”

  “You’re not gay?”

  “I have no idea, I’m prepubescent. And incidentally, without hurting her, you have got to tell Mom to stop bragging about me to the other mothers.”

  Now, that was a stunner. Katelyn was hardly your braggart mama. “That doesn’t sound like her, somehow.”

  “She refers to me as a ‘genius.’ ‘My son is a genius,’ she says. And do you know that Mrs. Warner resents this? And Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Fisk and probably every other faculty wife with a kid at B.A. Because they all want geniuses, Dan. This is a college! These are college people! And I really am a genius and they resent me. So you give a kid ammo like that—the parents can’t stand some classmate with an unfortunate disability like mine—and that poor cripple is fair game.”

  Dan could certainly see, from Conner’s standpoint, why he might view his intelligence as a deformity. It was ugly, though, to see him driven to feel that way about a gift so rare.

  The thing about Katelyn was, if you were going to love her and you were going to be her husband, you were going to have to accept that Conner was the center of the universe for her. He was, indeed, a professor’s dream child and she was, indeed, a professor. “She’s always bragged, Conner.”

  “She’s really messing me up.”

  At that moment, flashlights began appearing in their yard, swarming over from the Warners’. There were also voices making low howling sounds. “Great,” Conner muttered as he turned out his bedside light.

  For a few more seconds, Dan hoped that this was something nice, but when he heard them calling Conner’s name, he knew that it was more cruelty, and he, perhaps unfortunately, got mad. He headed for the glass door that opened out onto the underdeck and the yard.

  “Dan, please just go upstairs.”

  “Conner, those kids don’t have any business in this yard.”

  “Dan, please!”

  Dan opened the door. Behind him, Conner pulled his bedspread over his head. Then Dan heard cracking sounds. He realized that somebody was hitting the aboveground pool with what sounded like a board or even a hammer.

  “All right, that’s enough,” he shouted as he strode up to the shape that was hacking away at the pool. It was a kid he didn’t recognize, but when the boy saw him, he tried to run. Dan got him by the collar of his jacket.

  The kid swung and managed to land a crooked blow on Dan’s thigh. And the rest of them didn’t run. He heard Paulie Warner say in an almost bored voice, “Let ’im go, Dan.”

  Dan carried him across to the fence and dumped him over. “Get out of here, all of you.” He grabbed Paulie as he was leaving. “You oughta be ashamed of yourself.”

  Paulie snorted—laughter. Only a miracle from above prevented Dan from smacking him. Instead, he brushed past him and strode across the Warners’ driveway. “Get off my property,” Paulie shouted from behind him.

  He hammered on the front door. A couple of seconds later, Maggie opened it. He was so furious that for a moment he was at a loss for words, and the two of them just stared at each other. Finally, he spoke. “Keep those vandals out of my yard, Maggie, or I’m calling the cops.”

  “Dan?”

  “Paulie had his gang out there busting up our pool, damnit! It’s not on, Maggie. If I have to, I’ll see you guys in family court. Paulie might not like Conner anymore. That’s his privilege. But when he starts vandalizing our stuff—that I am not going to allow.”

  She turned around, called into the house, “Paulie?” Then, “Paulie!”

  He came, not looking afraid in the least, Dan noted. He was growing up, Paulie Warner was. The peach fuzz was getting dark, the eyes getting hard.

  “Did you bust up their pool?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, you did—or your friend did. I think they have a little gang, Maggie. What’s your little gang called, Paulie?”

  “I don’t have a gang.”

  Maggie shoved his shoulder. “Where’s Conner, Paulie?”

  “He couldn’t come.”

  “They cut him out and the gang is called the Connerbusters, and they invaded our yard with the intention of vandalizing us, and I’m not gonna stand for it, Maggie.”

  “Okay! Hey!” Maggie called into the house. Boys began to appear, just young enough to be a bit wide-eyed with worry. “Party’s over, fellas. Call your parents and tell ’em to pick you up. You can wait on the front porch, I don’t want you in here anymore. I’ve already had a shelf busted in my fridge—”

  “That was an accident, Mom!”

  “—and now the neighbors are complaining and I’ve had it. You go up to your room, young man.”

  Paulie started to speak, but she cuffed him in the back of the head. “Learn how to choose your friends, dummy,” she said.

  He went upstairs, his face red, fighting tears.

  As Dan left, the other boys filtered out behind him. They crowded together on the front porch, blowing on their hands and waiting for their rides. He walked across the yards, feeling the cold now through his cotton chinos and h
is light sweater. The kids sure were growing up, and it was sad. Last July, he supposed, had been the high summer of Conner’s childhood. He remembered those days of his own life. He’d been like some kind of water creature, like all the kids who lived along the lakes of Madison.

  He went over to the pool. The moon was rising, and in its light he could see that the little creep had done a fair job on the fiberglass.

  As he was walking back to the house, something caught his eye—a flash, he thought, coming from somewhere to the west, in the direction of the town. An explosion? There was no following rumble, so he supposed not. Nothing ever happened around here, anyway . . . except for kid trouble. Kids were a problem in any college town. Bored, affluent, smart, faculty brats were a notorious irritant on every campus he’d ever worked.

  He went in and gently explained to Conner what had happened. “Son, there will be no fallout from this. You’ll see, Monday morning in school it’ll be as if none of it ever happened.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  “Count on it. They went a step too far, that’s all. They’re testing, trying to figure out who they want to be—and they’re not like you, they’re much simpler, to be honest. So even though they’re older, in many ways they’re less mature.”

  “Dan, do you think you could find out about the Wilton public schools for me, since I really can’t return to B.A? I think the, uh, middle school—what’s it called, Colonel Saunders Memorial or something—has a rather good reputation in shop. And, of course, the football team is the stuff of local legend. Who knows, maybe I can try out for back end.”

  Dan saw that there was nothing to be gained by arguing with him. He’d go up and report to Katelyn.

  As he left, Conner said, “Promise me, Dan. Call Wilton.”

  “I’ll call them first thing Monday.”

  “And that boot camp in Lockridge. I could commute, actually, on the Louisville bus. I wouldn’t have to live in the barracks or anything.”

  “Yeah, that’s a possibility, too.” Dan turned to leave and, to his surprise, saw a boy standing just beyond the deck. His shape was clearly visible in the moonlight. He was not one of the gangling creeps from Paulie’s party. This kid looked even smaller than Conner. Which was very strange, because Conner himself was the youngest child on Oak Road, not counting six-month-old Jillie Jeffers.