He knew it was Harry tapping at the Looner Module’s door, imagined his aged friend jabbing away with his aluminium cane as if the camper was a sleeping elephant or dinosaur, and felt Harry’s impatience through the fibreglass shell of his waking world. “Come on, Buddy!” Harry urged. “Guy’s got to have someone to walk with. Now Mister Beasley’s gone, I’ll have to put up with you.”
“Keep your shirt on,” Buddy scolded, wondering where the phrase came from and when he’d last used it. “I’ll be out in a minute.” He laced up his boots, jammed on his cap, and stumbled out the door, then down the steps. “Sure you wouldn’t rather come in for a coffee?” he offered.
“Naw. Wanna keep things as normal as I can.” Hooking his cane on the walker’s handle, he trundled off toward Kin Beach without a backward glance. “Got something we need to talk about.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Something I’ve been meaning to bring up for a while.” Then he clamped his jaw shut and focused on guiding his walker across Esplanade Street and onto the uneven pavement of the Kin Beach parking lot. “How’s Andrea?” he asked suddenly, as if the query had been jarred out of him.
Buddy hesitated. “Upset,” he said. “She feels awful, Harry.” They rattled on in silence for a while, letting the sadness of the moment settle. “She’s put Avatar down,” Buddy said at last.
Harry pushed on, grimly making for the park entrance and the dew-damp grass, which would impede his progress even more. “It was an accident. She’s a responsible dog owner.”
“You’re a helluva guy, Harry,” Buddy said, aware he was speaking someone else’s dialect, a jargon even older than his father’s, perhaps echoing his grandfather Hollis’s speech. “But I think she made the right decision. Accidents happen, eh?”
“Tell her I’m sorry,” Harry said. “Tell her I really mean it. She’s a good neighbour and friend. I don’t want to see her hanging her head around me cuz of what happened. Got it?”
“Yeah. I’ll let her know.”
They left tracks on the lawn between the park gate and Harry’s favourite bench. For a minute or two, they sat side by side in silence. “Do you have any secrets, Bud?” Harry said at last. “I don’t mean little ones, misdemeanours people would laugh at if you ever told ‘em. I mean secrets that work on your innards like rust?”
“Tell me one,” he prodded after a while.
Then, when Buddy still hadn’t answered, “Come on, man. I’m pushing a hundred. I’ll be in the grave before I get a chance to share your dark confession, and no one would believe me even if I did spill the beans.”
Buddy sighed, troubled by the old man’s insistence.
Why is he making this weird demand? he wondered, wrestling with the notion of a ‘confession’. Then—inexplicably—he let his doubts fall away. Trust, he realized. He’s earned my trust.
“I was a little boy,” he began. “Perhaps four years old, not even in school yet. I was playing alone in the common area of the apartment block where we lived, waiting for my friends to show up. This guy came along, pushing a bike. I can still see him: scruffy, gaunt, shifty… If I met someone like him today, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could spit. But I was a kid and sort of froze. Even then, I thought there was something wrong with him. The bike, it was a girl’s, with balloon tires and a rat trap on the back. I didn’t put two and two together then, but now I’m sure it was stolen. Everything was wrong about the guy, but he had this power… He mesmerized me with that look of his.
“Remember Charlie Manson? That’s the kind of look.”
Describing him stirred up an image of the vagrant. Buddy’s innards coiled, the thing inside him writhing to get out. “He told me this cockamamie story about a place we should go. I didn’t believe him; it was obviously bullshit. But I let him take me, just the same. He put me on that rat trap and cycled off.” Buddy blushed. “I was terrified. So afraid, I couldn’t even muster the gumption to cry out or run.
“I still can’t figure that out? Why I let him infect me with my share of the blame for letting him do what he was about to do. I was so ashamed. So complicit. Such a weak, snivelling coward… just like he wanted.
“Once that’s happened to you, even as a kid, there’s no getting back to who you were. I can’t say if he made a coward of me or just showed me up for what I was by nature. Pathetic!
“Start thinking that way about yourself, and even your courageous acts become tainted, like you’re faking it and should be ashamed of the lie you’re living, the bravado you’re inventing to conceal your chicken heart.”
Buddy rested, letting his innards settle, then went on, matter of factly.
“He took me to a cemetery, not far from home, did what he wanted, then left me there alone, too damaged to even cry. In shock, really. My parents were desperate. They called the cops. It took them a couple of hours to find me. I told them I’d wandered off exploring and got lost.
“You never told anyone what really happened,” Harry nudged.
“No!” Buddy recoiled. “And the funny thing is, I don’t think they really wanted to know. All they needed was a four-year-old’s story to explain the facts, and everyone could move on from there.”
Buddy stopped for a moment, getting his bearings.
“It’s impossible to make yourself forget something like that. It does sink out of memory for stretches, but always re-floats to the surface like a bloated, rotting corpse, the stench infecting you all over again.”
They sat for a while, apart, watching the gentle lap of the waves. Then Harry coughed. “You’re no coward, Buddy. I can tell you that,” he said.
Then, after a moment’s pause, “And you never told anyone?”
“Until now, no.”
“Jeez, I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“From the day I set eyes on you, when Bernice invited you to stay with us like some kind of stray dog she’d called in off the street, I knew there was a reason for you coming into our lives.”
“Woof! You sure didn’t act that way.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Harry acknowledged. “But it wasn’t just the GOM syndrome you were seeing there. It was fear.”
“GOM syndrome?”
“Grumpy Old Man. It’s what Bernie calls me when no one’s around.”
They laughed.
“Fear?” Buddy asked.
“Of what you might dig up, a reporter, snooping around our house.”
“Is this about Mural #36 and Arthur?”
Harry nodded. “You and Bernie have been looking all over for Art and Gypsy… in all the wrong places. So I’m gonna set you straight. Then I’m gonna ask a big favour…”
“What’s that?” Buddy prompted after a few seconds.
“I want you to go find them—Gypsy and his best friend, that is.”
“Find them? Where?”
“On the Hermit’s Trail, Bud. Inside that mural.”
“But…”
“Just listen! Okay?” Harry cut Buddy off. “Then gimme your answer.”
Next: Stone by Stone – Part 1