Exley (18 page)

A: You can't.

Q: I can't what?

A: You can't help people. You can't help A.

Q: Of course I can. (
Pause.
.) Why can't I?

A: Because the only thing that'll help her for sure is if I come home alive and stay home. It doesn't take a doctor to know
that
.

 

 

O
ak Street was on the north side of the river. In his book, Exley called it “the less fashionable side of Watertown.” I'd been through there a bunch of times with my parents, in the car, on the way to or from something. It looked like the side of Watertown I lived in, except the houses were a little smaller and in a little worse shape and there seemed to be a Rite Aid or a Stewart's on every corner whereas on my side of town there was a Rite Aid or a Stewart's on every
other
corner. That's what Mother always said: “Why does Watertown have to have a Rite Aid or a Stewart's on every other corner? It's depressing.”

Anyway, I crossed the Black River on Factory Street, then took an immediate right onto Water Street, past abandoned factories and shingled shacks that seemed to be sliding down the hill into the river. Then I took a left, away from the river and onto Oak Street. Within five minutes after the last factory, I seemed to be in the middle of the country. It didn't feel like Watertown at all anymore.

I followed Oak Street up a hill. It was a paved road at first, and then it was a dirt road, and then it was a dirt path with high weeds in the middle and tire tracks on either side. There were tires everywhere in the even higher weeds on either side of the tire tracks, but no cars. It was like the tires had made the tracks all by themselves. I had followed the tracks a little farther when I heard a dog barking, then some squawking, then more barking. A minute or so later the path ended. At the end of it was a house. The house looked like it had been built by many different people using many different kinds of wood. The roof was a piece of thin, rusty metal. It hung way over the side of the house and drooped a little. There
was a tiny pipe sticking out of the roof, and smoke was puffing out of it. Off to the left of the house were four cars in the weeds. Two of them were up on cinder blocks and two weren't. None of them had tires. So that's where the cars had gone. Although I still didn't know how they'd gotten there without their tires.

There was more barking and squawking around the other side of the house. I followed the sounds until I saw a man with a shotgun. I know there are different kinds of shotguns, but I don't know what they are, and I didn't know what kind this one was. I'd never seen anyone hold one before. But I wasn't scared, mostly because it looked like it was broken. The man was holding it by the handle. The handle was parallel to the ground. But there was a mouth-shaped crack between the handle and the rest of the gun, which was pointed directly at the ground. The gun wasn't scary, broken like that. The man wasn't scary, either. He was wearing blue khaki work clothes, and work boots that were untied, with the tongues outside the pant cuffs. He was old and skinny and looked sick. I mean, he looked like he was going to be sick. He spat in the dirt in front of him. It was a big glob of spit and didn't dissolve when it hit the dirt. Then I saw why he might be sick. In front of him, between the house and us, was a big dirt patch. There were two chickens pecking at it. There was one dog looking at the two chickens. There was another dog a few feet away. It was slowly eating something. I guessed it was a chicken, because I could see at least six dead and bloody chickens scattered nearby. The dog ate the last bit of whatever he was eating, seemed to almost throw it up, then swallowed it.

Just then the man noticed me. He smiled, and I could see that he had a couple of teeth left and that they were gray. I smiled back, and then he stopped smiling. He looked inside the shotgun, where it was broken, and then fixed it with one flick of his wrist. He kept one hand on the handle, the other under the barrel, put the whole thing up near his chin, and then pointed it at me.
Then
I got scared. I was so scared I didn't have time to decide whether to start calling this man Exley in my head, or to wait until he proved he was Exley before calling him that. I put my hands up and shouted, “V. sent me! A guy named V. sent me!”

When the guy heard that, he lowered his gun a little, so that it was
pointed at my feet and not at my face. “Why didn't V. come himself?” he wanted to know.

“V. didn't say.” I was about to volunteer to go back to the Crystal and ask V. why he didn't come himself when the guy nodded, spat, and said, “Pussy.” I didn't think he was talking to me, but even if he was, I wasn't exactly in a position to be offended. He then flipped the gun around and pointed it, grip first, in my direction. I knew what he wanted me to do: he wanted me to take the gun. I didn't even stop to think about whether I should do it. Because this was the kind of situation in which you did what was asked of you. Because if I didn't want to do what was asked of me, I shouldn't have put myself in the situation in the first place. Because if I didn't do what this guy wanted me to do, I wouldn't find out if he was Exley or not. Anyway, I took the gun. It was the first time I'd ever held a gun that wasn't a BB gun. This gun was heavier than that gun, and smelled of oil and old smoke. Not woodsmoke, but the smoke from a bottle rocket or a firecracker. Now that I had the gun, though, I wasn't sure what the man wanted me to do with it, exactly. The man must have sensed this, because he pointed at the dog nearest me and said, “I guess shoot him first.”

I didn't say anything back, because I was afraid the man would hear how scared I was. I held the gun like the man had held the gun a second earlier, then turned to face the dog that had just finished eating the chickens. I curled my finger around the trigger, then paused.
I can't do this
, I said to myself.
Sure, you can
, I said back.
Think of it as a test. You're good at tests
. I stood there for a few seconds more, looking at the dog over the top of the gun, until the gun started to shake a little, then a lot.
No, I won't do it
, I said.
But what about your dad?
I said back.
I thought you'd do anything for your dad
.

“For Christ's sake, go ahead,” the man said, and I thought,
Exley!
and then pulled the trigger and shot the dog that had just finished eating. It was so loud at first and then wouldn't stop being loud: it was like the noise was doing laps around my ears, and I wanted to put my hands over my ears, except they were holding the gun. The dog coughed out a weak, wet bark and flopped on his side in the dirt. The other dog yelped and sprinted off, away from the house and the chickens. The two live chickens squawked and ran into each other and made noises like they were about
to get into a fight, but then didn't. They started pecking the dirt again. I handed the man the gun, and the man broke it, and something that looked like red plastic but must have been a bullet fell out of it, and then the man put another bullet in and fixed it again. We didn't talk. I don't think I could have said anything if I wanted to. I was too busy listening to the sound of the gunshot in my ears. It was an echo somewhere deep down where you weren't supposed to stick the Q-tip. I wondered what had hit the dog if the red plastic bullet was still in the gun after I'd fired it. I wondered what kind of guns my dad had fired in Iraq and whether it had hurt his ears the way me firing the gun had hurt mine. I wondered if my dad had been shot, and if that was why he was in the VA hospital in the first place, and if him being shot was more painful for him than me shooting the dog was for the dog. And then I wondered how my dad would feel about me shooting the dog if he'd been shot, too, and I almost started to cry. But I didn't want Exley to think I was soft. So I made myself go hard inside and thought that there was no reason I should feel bad for the dog because I'd seen him eat the chicken.

“Poor King,” Exley finally said.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “But you wanted me to shoot King, didn't you?”

“That's not King,” the guy said. “That's Petey.” He rocked back and forth on his heels and held his stomach with both hands and looked at the dog, who seemed to be a German shepherd mixed with a smaller kind of dog. Petey was bleeding a little bit from the mouth, but his eyes were still open and he was still breathing.

“Why'd you say ‘Poor King,' then?” I asked.

“Because King heard what happened to Petey and he knows it's gonna happen to him, too.” Sure enough, I could hear a dog whimpering somewhere on the other side of the house. “V. thinks I don't feed the dogs, but I do try,” Exley said. “I do try to feed them.”

“What do you feed them?”

“That depends on what I'm eating.”

“What are you eating?”

“I can't eat nothing because of my stomach.” Exley looked sheepish when he said that. I had the feeling that Exley's stomach was something he and V. had talked about. King yelped suddenly and loudly, and the
man said, “It hurts my stomach to hear him cry like that.” Then he started coughing. It was a weird cough; it rose and broke, like a wave, and then started over again. I'd never heard a cough like it before. Exley was shaking, and his hands were covering his face, and that's when I realized he was crying, not coughing. That made me mad because I tried so hard not to cry myself, and also because I was starting to figure out that V. was Exley's son. Exley had twin sons in his book, and so V. could have been one of them. Except if V. were Exley's son, he would know whether his father was Exley. Unless Exley had kept his identity secret from V., and I couldn't come up with a reason why he'd do that. But I could come up with a reason why V. said he might be Exley: so he wouldn't have to come out here and shoot his dad's dogs for him. Any way you looked at it, it meant that this man wasn't Exley and that I'd shot Petey for no good reason. I hadn't done a very good job of that, either: Petey was still alive, lying in his own blood and making small whimpering noises. The whole thing just made me incredibly mad. So mad that I took the gun out of the man's hands, walked over to where Petey was, and shot him again. Petey bounced about an inch off the ground, and when he'd landed he wasn't breathing anymore. The chickens didn't squawk this time; they just kept on pecking. Meanwhile, the noise from the second gunshot was chasing the noise of the first gunshot around and around in my ears. When I finally cleared my ears a little, I could hear King howling from behind the house. Meanwhile, the man was still crying, except louder, and this made me even madder than I was before. “‘Listen, you son of a bitch,'” I said. “‘Life isn't all a goddamn football game! You won't always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss.'”

“It hurts my stomach to hear you talk like that,” the man said. He sniffled a couple of times, hugged himself, and then looked at me with big eyes, like he'd just recognized me. “Jesus,” he said, “you sounded just like Exley.”

“You know Exley!” I said.

“I haven't seen that crazy bastard in years,” he said. “I thought he was dead, for some reason.”

“No!” I said, and the man nodded.

“You're right,” he said. “Guys like him who should die end up living
forever. He's probably out in Alex Bay. That's where he was living last I heard.”

“Alex Bay,” I repeated. Alex Bay was Alexandria Bay. I'd been to a beach there with my parents once. It wasn't far from Watertown, but it was too far for me to walk or ride my bike. I'd have to figure out how to get there. But now that the man had said this, it made perfect sense. After all, my dad had told me I wouldn't find Exley in Watertown. At the time, I thought this was just one of those vague things adults say to remind you that you're a kid who doesn't know what adults know. But it seemed now it was one of those specific things adults say to remind you that you're a kid who doesn't know what adults know. “Thanks a lot,” I said to the man.

The man didn't say,
You're welcome
. He reached his hand out and I handed him the gun, except I handed it to him barrel first. “Jesus, not like that,” he said, and I apologized and turned it around and handed it to him that way. He flicked open the shotgun, dumped out a bullet, put another one in. “If you can't find Exley in Alex Bay,” he said, “then you might want to ask this guy V. drinks with down at the Crystal. He's a crazy bastard, just like Exley. And while you're down at the Crystal, tell V. his father said he was a pussy.” Then he fixed his gun and went to find King, the other dog.

 

 

Y
ou might want to know how I got to teach my dad's Great American Writers class at the community college in the first place. I got the idea on the twentieth of March, 200–, the day my dad left to go to Iraq. I'd come home from school. It was the last day, like I told Dr. Pahnee. Like I told Dr. Pahnee, Mother was in the driveway, crying. But my dad wasn't in his car yet. He was standing in the driveway with her. I guess I misremembered that part. And I wasn't hiding behind the bushes. I must have gotten that wrong, too. I was just walking down the sidewalk. As I turned into the driveway, I could hear my dad say, “Poor K.” At first I thought my dad was saying the Spanish word for “because.” I'd just learned that word in my Spanish 1 class. Except my dad didn't know any Spanish. That's when I realized what he was saying, and I also realized, since I knew my dad liked to refer to some people by their first initial, because Exley did, that K. was probably the first letter of someone's first name, and not the name itself. But I didn't know who K. was, and I didn't know why my dad said “Poor K.” like he did: like he wasn't
really
sorry for K., whoever K. was.