The Unwanted (3 page)

“That woulda been another homer if the bat hadn’t busted,” Jeff observed as he caught up. “How come you always hit those to me? You know I can’t catch ’em.”

Eric’s grin came back, and his blue eyes sparkled with quick good humor. “You don’t care if you catch ’em or not. If
I hit ’em to you, I know I’m gonna get a base, and I know you’re not gonna worry about it.”

Jeff shrugged his indifference, but his eyes clouded slightly. “Your dad saw what happened,” he said quietly. “You gonna get in trouble?”

“I always do, don’t I?” Eric replied. He tried to make his voice sound as if his father’s wrath didn’t mean any more to him than a missed fly ball meant to Jeff. Except that Jeff had been his best friend almost as long as he could remember, and Jeff always seemed to know what was going on in his head, no matter what he said out loud. Now, he proved it once again.

“Wanta cut the council meeting? If we did, we could get the trig assignment out of the way before you’ve gotta be home. Or we could cut the trig, too, and go down to the beach,” he added hopefully.

Eric thought about it, then shook his head as he pulled open the heavy locker-room door and stepped inside. “Can’t. If I don’t get an A on the test next week, I won’t get an A in the course. And you know what that means.”

Jeff rolled his eyes. “How would I know? And you don’t either, since you’ve never gotten anything
but
A’s. Besides, your dad won’t kill you, will he?”

“I don’t—” Eric began, but was immediately cut off by the coach yelling at him from the equipment cage next to the showers.

“That’s two bats this week, Cavanaugh! One more and you start paying for them! Got that?”

“I didn’t mean—”

Simms’s voice grew louder, and his words seemed to echo the lecture Eric heard from his father so often: “I don’t care about what you meant. All I care about is what you do!”

Eric felt a sudden surge of anger flood up through his body, and struggled against it. Getting mad would only make things worse. What the hell was the big deal about a broken bat anyway? Except it wasn’t just the bat—it was everything. And it had been that way as long as he could remember. No matter what he did, it never seemed to be good enough—not for his father, not for his teachers, not for anyone. Always they seemed to think he wasn’t trying hard
enough, that he ought to do better. But he was already doing the best he could. What more did they want?

Once again Jeff Maynard seemed to read his mind. “Forget it,” he heard his best friend say so softly that he knew no one else could hear. “If you say anything else, he’ll tell your dad you mouthed off and make you run laps. Then you’ll miss the meeting and flunk the test too! ’Course,” Jeff couldn’t resist adding, “it might be fun to watch Mr. Perfect fall on his face just once!” Then, as Eric swung around to punch him on the arm, Jeff darted off and disappeared around the corner toward his locker.

Eric glanced at the big clock on the wall, and realized he only had ten minutes to get to the council meeting. He began stripping off his stained jersey, shoving it into his book bag for his mother to wash that night.

He would mend it himself.

It was five-thirty when Eric finally left Memorial High and started home. The streets of False Harbor were nearly empty, since the summer season wouldn’t start for another six weeks and most of the small fishing fleet was out to sea. The summer shops along Bay Street were still boarded up, and the town wore the strangely deserted look it took on every winter after the summer people were gone and the seasonal shopkeepers had closed their stores, heading south to bask in the sun and sell the same merchandise to the Florida vacationers that they sold on Cape Cod all summer. Though the town had an oddly forlorn appearance, the off-season was still Eric’s favorite time of year. It was only then that he could go off by himself sometimes, hiking across the dunes and combing the beach, alone with the pounding sea and the stormy winter skies.

Then there was the marsh, flooded at high tide, that had given the town its name by making the harbor appear much larger and more easily accessible than it actually was. In the summer the dredged channel, which provided the only opening to the deeper harbor inland of the marsh, was choked with pleasure boats, and when the air took on the stillness of August, the acrid exhaust of their engines hung over the reeds like a poisonous haze. But in winter, with a northern
wind howling, the marsh held a special magic for Eric, and he would sit for hours, his back to the village while gulls screamed and wheeled overhead. Once or twice he’d talked Jeff Maynard into exploring the marsh with him, but Jeff had only shivered in the cold for a few minutes, then suggested that they go bowling at the little six-lane alley on Providence Street, where at least it was warm. But that was all right with Eric—he didn’t have the opportunity to go to the marsh very often, and when he did, he preferred to be alone.

Today there was no time for a hike out to the marsh, but as Eric strode along Bay Street, his book bag slung over his right shoulder, he considered stopping at the wharf. A gull had built the first nest of the season on one of the pilings, and Eric had already checked it twice for eggs. So far there were none. Still, you could never tell.

When he reached Wharf Street and glanced up at the clock that stood atop an iron tower at the entrance to the marina, he changed his mind. If he wasn’t home by six, there would be hell to pay. So he turned left, starting toward the old common two blocks away.

It was only there, in the center of the town, that False Harbor began to look lived-in again, for it was in the long central strip—four blocks wide and eighteen long—stretching from the marsh at the western end of town to the rolling expanse of dunes that marked the far eastern boundary, that the year-round population lived. The residents of False Harbor had left both Cape Drive and Bay Street to the summer people. Indeed, once you left Bay Street there wasn’t much to set False Harbor apart from any other small New England village. It was built around a rectangular common that hadn’t seen a sheep grazing in more than a century, and the owners of the buildings facing the common had resisted the temptation to turn the village center into anything that might be called
quaint
by the tourist guides.

Yet quaint was exactly what it was, for many of the buildings were more than two centuries old. Once they had been private homes, but most had long since been converted into stores, remodeled by former owners in the days when Victorian architecture had been modern. The brick town hall still dominated the acre facing Commonwealth Avenue, which
was bounded on the east by the common and on the west by High Street. Next to it stood the stone Carnegie library, which had replaced the town stables in the early twentieth century.

Eric turned away from the town hall as he emerged from Wharf Street, cutting diagonally to the point where Commonwealth picked up again after having been broken for a block by the square. Then, changing his mind, he veered south again, toward Ocean Street and the old Congregational Church which occupied its own acre between the common and Cambridge Street.

The church had always been Eric’s favorite building in False Harbor, though if anyone had asked him why, he would not have been able to say. A tall, narrow structure, its severe white clapboard side walls were broken at regular intervals by stained-glass windows which had only replaced the original flashing two hundred years after the church had been built and a hundred fifty years after the last of its puritan founders had been put to rest in the adjoining graveyard. Its steeply pitched slate roof was surmounted by a tall steeple in which the original bell still hung, though it was rung now only on Sundays and holidays. Eric paused again in front of the church, wondering if he dared take enough time to slip inside and watch the ancient clock in the vestibule strike six. Just as he’d made up his mind to risk it, a horn sounded. He turned to see his father’s white truck idling at the curb. From the driver’s seat Ed Cavanaugh was waving impatiently.

Eric felt his stomach begin to knot up with a familiar tension as he hurried across the lawn and slid into the truck next to his father.

“Got time to waste hanging out in there?” Ed Cavanaugh growled as he shoved the truck into gear, then let out the clutch.

Eric said nothing. He looked straight ahead. He could feel his father’s eyes boring into him.

“Seems to me you could be spending your time a little more productively than standing around watching an old clock strike,” Ed Cavanaugh went on. His voice was dangerously soft, a certain sign to Eric that his father was angry.

“I wasn’t going to be there more than a couple of minutes—” he began, but got no further.

“Unless you want to end up in the gutter, I don’t think you’ve got a couple of minutes to waste,” the elder Cavanaugh replied. He glanced at the road as he turned into Cambridge Street, then shifted his attention back to his son. “And you can damn well look at me when I talk to you,” he added.

Eric felt the knot in his stomach tighten, but he was determined not to let his expression betray his fear. Obediently he turned to face his father.

“You think I’m too hard on you, don’t you?” Ed Cavanaugh asked, his voice edged with an acid whine. He was breathing harder now, and the heavy reek of whiskey on his breath made Eric shrink back slightly. When the boy made no reply, Ed shook his head. “Well, I’m not. All I want’s for you to do your best. And you can’t do that by dawdling your afternoons away.”

Like you can dawdle yours away in a bar?
Eric thought, but didn’t dare voice the thought. “I was on my way home, and I just decided to stop at the church for a minute,” he ventured. “That’s all.”

“Should have been home studying,” Ed groused. “And it seems to me you and I better spend a couple hours on the diamond after supper. At sixteen you should be able to hold a bat right.”

“It was an accident,” Eric groaned. He’d hoped that if nothing else, at least the drinks his father had consumed had made him forget about that afternoon’s baseball practice. “I know how to hold a bat. You taught me yourself, didn’t you?”

Ed Cavanaugh’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, and his jaw tightened. “You getting fresh with your old man, Eric?”

“But you did teach me,” Eric insisted. “And I’m not getting fresh. You didn’t see the rest of the practice, did you? I hit a home run, and I pitched three strikeouts in a row. How come you couldn’t have seen that?”

“It wouldn’t matter if I had,” Cavanaugh replied. “Home runs and strikeouts are what I expect of you. What I don’t expect are broken bats and pop flies that any idiot except Jeff Maynard could catch. And I don’t expect sass either!”

“Jeff’s not an idiot,” Eric protested. “He just doesn’t care
as much about baseball as you do. If he’d wanted to catch that fly, he could have.”

“If he could have, he should have,” Ed said tersely. He swung the truck right into Alder Street and halfway down the block pulled it up in front of the shabby two-story clapboard house he’d bought when he and Laura arrived in False Harbor the year Eric had been born. Back then he’d only thought of the house as something temporary, a place for them to live while he built up a fleet of commercial fishing boats. But the business hadn’t worked out at all. Ed Cavanaugh’s “fleet” still consisted of nothing more than the same fifty-foot trawler he’d started with seventeen years before. He’d long since given up any hope of moving into one of the larger houses in the west end of the village. Besides, he told himself whenever he still bothered to think about it, it wasn’t really his fault the fishing hadn’t panned out, any more than it was his fault that the house, like the boat, had gotten more and more run down over the years. But where the boat only needed a coat of paint, the house needed a new roof as well, and the garden that had once run neatly along the front of the house was overrun with weeds.

Of course, if he’d had a wife who gave him at least a little bit of support, it all would have been different. The house would look great and the business would be booming. Well, it didn’t matter anymore. In fact nothing mattered much anymore.

He glanced over at Eric once more, and found a point of focus for the anger that was suddenly threatening to boil over inside him.

Eric, he decided, wasn’t much better than Laura. Everything came too easy for the boy, and the rotten kid didn’t appreciate it. Besides, the little know-it-all wasn’t quite the hot shit he thought he was.

Oh, Eric was smart—Ed knew the kid was a lot smarter than Laura, if not himself, and he was almost as well coordinated as he himself had been at the same age. Almost, but not quite.

Nobody—but nobody—had been as good an athlete as Big Ed Cavanaugh. And if things had just turned out different—if he’d just gotten even one decent break—he’d
have played in the big leagues. But, of course, he’d never gotten a decent break.

Eric, on the other hand, always seemed to get the breaks. And all it had done for him, as far as Ed was concerned, was to make him cocky.

That meant he had a duty to take the kid down a peg or two.

And he knew how to do it too. Just keep pushing at the kid. Never let him think he was doing enough.

Swinging himself down from the cab of his truck, Ed glanced around the yard, looking for some extra chores to add to Eric’s list of weekend duties. Then he glanced at the house next door, and the rage he was feeling toward his son shifted again.

How come, he wondered, the Winslows’ house always looked so much better than his own? But, of course, he knew the answer: Keith Winslow—who wasn’t any better than anyone else, except he always got all the breaks—had somehow managed to snag himself a decent wife. And that made all the difference in the world. If
he’d
been married to Rosemary Winslow, things would be different for
him
too. Not only did she keep the house looking good, but she made a decent living as well.

And that let Keith spend his time lounging around on a boat that never did any real fishing at all. Just took a bunch of rich people from Boston and New York out for sport every now and then.