The Boy In The Black Eyeliner
“I put a chair under the knob on the inside and went out the window,” Evan said quietly, from the rug. “I’m sorry about the screen. I bent it.”
Nobody answered him.
Doug had both hands flat on the table on either side of his plate. He was staring at the phone the way you stare at a gauge that is reading something it should not.
I had seen that screen. I had seen it bent in February and thought the wind did it.
The third clip was the one he had come about.
February 21. 2:19 a.m. Nine degrees.
That was fifteen days before the Sunday I am telling you about.
The mailbox went by with nobody near it. The car kept going. You heard the boy let out a breath, like he had been holding it for the whole last mile, like he held it every night he drove past our place.
Then, a half mile on, the bridge.
It is not much of a bridge. Two lanes of concrete over the Middle River with a steel rail on each side, maybe waist high. Doug crosses it eight times a day. I have never once thought about it.
Pop was standing in the middle of it. In the pajamas. No coat at all this time.
He had both hands on the rail and he was leaning out over it, looking down.
On the recording the boy said one word, and it was a prayer, not a curse. He said, “Jesus.”
He did not slam on the brakes. I noticed that. He rolled up slow and stopped well back, and he left his headlights on low, and he got out and shut his door soft.
You could barely hear him over the wind.
“Evening, sir. It’s the driver.”
Pop did not turn around. “Ice looks good,” he said.
“Does it?”
“My brother and I used to skate right under here. All the way down to the Hanson place and back. You could go two miles and never lift your blades.”
“That sounds like something.” The boy was walking toward him now, a little at a time, coming up along the rail and not from behind. “You know what, though, I’d want to check that ice in the daylight first. I heard it’s been thin this year.”
“Thin?”
“That’s what they said at the truck stop. A fella put his foot through up by Pammel.”
Pop leaned out a little farther to look. My whole body went forward in my kitchen chair as if I could catch him from there, fifteen days late.
“I wouldn’t want my brother going through,” he said.
“No, sir. Me neither. Why don’t we tell him in the morning?”
It was the longest quiet I have ever sat through.
Then Pop took one hand off the rail, and the boy was right there under it.
He got him in the car. He got the heat up. And this time Pop did not talk about the farm. He sat there, and after a minute you heard an old man crying, quietly, the way men of that age do it, like they are trying to keep it from waking somebody.
“I don’t know how I got out here,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
“I was in my bed.”
“I know. You’re okay now. I’ve got you.”
“I’m slipping, son. I’m slipping bad.”