Chapter 12 Samson
The bus station is completely different at this time of day.
It’s strange being here with Mom. I look around at all the safe zones I’ve identified—relatively sheltered positions behind walls and advertisement screens, friendly stores where I can waste ten minutes, places I can hide—and they all seem so unnecessary.
We stop in at the library and Mom explains to an older lady what happened on the canal. I watch from a distance as she mentions the sheriff. The lady pats her on her hand and nods and glances over to me. I stare down at my shoes.
“We’ll stop by at the school office so I can explain your absence.”
I stiffen. “No.”
“Sammy, it’ll just take a minute. I have to tell them.”
“Call them. Please, I can’t… go in there.”
She looks me up and down. And then she calls from the pay phone by the laundromat.
Nobody else is looking over their shoulder like I am. Walking through downtown like a fighter in enemy territory, a battle-scarred infantryman trying to anticipate the next ambush. We pass by Frankie’s liquor store and the Community Bank and head up the broad stone steps into the town museum.
This is her way of shielding me. She has brought me here twice before: both times when Dad was too harsh, making her sad, scaring both of us.
Mom thinks this free admission museum is somewhere I feel safe.
She is right, I do. But it’s not the dusty artifacts or the faded printouts of dates and biographies I like; it is being with her in a quiet place.
Dad not interfering. No risk of Johnno, Eyebrow, Hammer Adams, or Gunner ruining everything.
It is almost like we’re not in the same town anymore.
We spend time at an exhibit explaining the history of the canal, how it used to connect to the rivers.
Aerial photographs. Some testimony by a farmer about how we’re in the geographical middle of the country, not considered east or west, north or south.
He says how we’re not truly accepted as delta people, or as mountain people, or as bayou people.
We’re forgotten about. He says with the rivers and our central location we should be thriving.
And then he finishes by saying how even though it’s a rough town that has seen better days we’re all still proud to come from here.
Only nobody remembers why. Amen to that.
I look at cross-section diagrams of some hill in England, and a narrow tunnel where boatmen of yore would detach their heavy horses from their canal barges, boats that look like ours, and propel cargo through a tunnel using nothing but their own leg power.
There are black-and-white photographs of men lying with their backs on the coal pushing their boots off the curved brick roof.
When I look at the pictures I imagine Mr. Turner’s final moments.
I hope he didn’t suffer in the water. I don’t like the thought of him fighting to breathe, freezing cold, trying to scramble up to the slippery bank, failing to pull himself free.
I saw pond weed around his ankles.
“You OK, Sammy?”
I look up at her and nod.
“You want to leave? Take a walk and talk about it?”
I tell her I want to stay.
We spend another half hour moving slowly from one glass case to the next. A Shawnee arrowhead found on a nearby ranch. A scale model of the church near the courthouse. There are no other visitors.
“Fresh air?” she asks.
We step outside and the town is misty. I like the way the old stone steps have been worn away over the years. Softened. The wind gusts. There are women holding on to their own hair, protecting it I guess, and a man walks past us eating a hamburger.
We turn the corner and I stop in my tracks. They are thirty yards away. Johnno and Ballbag. What are they doing outside of school? Whatever they like, it seems. They don’t care about the rules. Ballbag’s tie is loose, the knot down by his heart.
“They your friends, Sam?”
The boys laugh and point from the other side of the street.
“Clown shoes,” yells Ballbag.
“Pennywise,” says Johnno. “Pennywise loser.”
“Is that a joke?” asks Mom, frowning. “What does Pennywise mean, Sammy?”
I feel my cheeks burn. I make myself as small as possible and continue with her down the road toward the diner.
“Samson? Were those boys your friends?”
“I don’t know.”
The windows of the diner are all steamed up. The room smells of leather and coffee. There are numerous occupied tables. I count twelve. Everything is hushed and slow. We sit down in the corner as far away as possible from everybody else.
“Hot chocolate and a donut.” She takes off her coat. “That’ll make us feel better, won’t it? Whipped cream?”
“Yes, Mom.”
My cheeks are hot. I wish I could fold in on myself. Disappear.
The drinks arrive in tall mugs with long spoons. She has a white chocolate donut and I have a jelly one.
She leans in. “I’m so sorry, Sammy. About your friend, Mr. Turner. It’s a hard thing to get your head around.”
I nod.
“Do you want to talk about it yet?”
I shake my head and I’m thankful for the steam on the window glass. They won’t be able to see us if they walk past. They won’t be able to find me.
The short-order cook burns himself.
He curses.
“He was very fond of you, Sammy.” She pats my knee. “He used to tell me how much you kept him going. Your visits, looking after little Amber, and the talks you had. He mentioned to me that you told him all about your classes, about the plates moving on the earth’s crust, and about the planets.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Mom. If that’s OK.”
“Of course.”
She finishes her donut and dabs her lips on a paper napkin.
“But he did used to say you kept him going. You and your checkers games.”
I smile. “It was chess, actually. He was better than me at the start, far better. But that changed a few months back. I started getting stalemates. And then one day I beat him. Trapped his king in the corner. I thought he’d be upset about it, but he gave me a dollar bill.”
“He’s in a better place now, Sam. He lived a good, long life. He’s in a kinder place.”
I watch raindrops make their way down the windowpanes and I want to tell her everything about school, cry it all out, every last detail, about the boys, about when they soaked my clothes in the shower drain and whipped me red raw with towels, and I want to tell her about them hiding my bag at recess and filling it with sand that time and when they put glue in my hair and I had to cut it off.
It could only be a kinder place than here.
A far kinder place.
I tell her nothing.
It wouldn’t help.
“Drink up, Sam. Butcher’s shop, and then we’ll be off home to see your father.”
She buys lamb chops because they are my favorite.
Then she buys me a Milky Way from the newsstand.
She knows I like Milky Ways. I have liked them since I was small.
Smooth, but also chewy. Perfect, really.
I place the bar in my pocket and we chat as we walk back the long way to the bus station, behind the crematorium.
A crane stands stationary over the horizon like a giant insect.
It hasn’t moved for months. The whole town’s like that.
I want to share the dreams I have sometimes about Jim Hendricks but how could I ever do that to her?
“What happens next with your book?”
“Probably nothing. It’ll fizzle out, but I enjoyed writing it. Took me away from this place for a while.”
We pause and she looks around at the warehouses and tire shops, at the old community college and the Dollar General.
“If it becomes a real book one day we can maybe go away.”
She looks at me and smiles warmly.
“You mean like a vacation, Sam? I’m not sure your father would be interested.”
I look over at the distant hill. At what might be over the other side.
“Just the two of us, then. It’s your book. You should decide, really.”
She strokes my cheek. Her eyes look tired. “We’ll see.”
We turn a corner and traipse toward the bus station. The temperature drops. We’re heading directly into the wind and it cuts between us.
“Mr. Turner was looking out for us.”
“Say what, Sammy? Speak up, I can’t hear you in this wind.”
“I said he was watching out for us. Mr. Turner was. That’s why he came back to his boat.”
Her eyes are watering from the gusts.
“You think?”
“He was far too old to be on that boat,” I say, my eyes stinging.
“What?”
“He was too old, Mom. He was keeping an eye on us both. That’s why his boat was so close to ours, you know.”
“He was a nice old fella.”
“He was the only one looking out for us,” I say again, quietly, as much to myself as to her. “He was the last one.”