Two in the Morning

Nobody said anything in the car.

Castellanos drove. Kimura sat beside him, with her radio in her lap. And in the back, in a row, the four of them: Frederick by the window with the creek drying on him, stiffening, grey, from his hair to his feet, and his trainers somewhere in Craig County that he would not see again; and Theo beside him, muddy to the knees, with the goldfish in its bag on his lap, held upright in both hands; and Felix and Marcus, who were not muddy at all, not anywhere, and who had been found first.

He had understood that at the car. Castellanos had not said it. Nobody had said it. But they had been at the car before him, Felix and Marcus, standing beside it in the car park under a light, clean, upright, very pale, and Felix had looked at him as he came across the gravel with Kimura in front and Castellanos behind, and had opened his mouth, and shut it, and opened it.

“We went to the carousel,” Felix had said. “Rule two. We lost you in the crowd and we went to the carousel and stood by the ticket booth. On the side by the generator. Where the light is.”

“I know,” Frederick had said.

“We waited. Like he said. We stood there and waited.” Felix had looked at Castellanos. “He came. In two minutes. Like he said.”

And Frederick had understood that Castellanos had come to the carousel in two minutes, exactly as he had promised, and found two of them standing by the generator in the light where they had been told to stand, and not the other two; and that that was the moment the forty minutes had begun.

The car went south out of Vinita in the dark, on the highway, at the speed limit. Nobody turned the radio on. In the headlights the road came at them grey and went under, and on either side the flat country went away black, with a light in it here and there, a long way apart.

At the county line the road went smooth.

Nobody said anything about that either.

---

They washed in the lake.

It was Castellanos’s idea, or his order; Frederick did not know which, and did not ask. At the farmhouse, at twenty to midnight, in the yard, by the car, under the oak, Castellanos had looked at him, and at Theo, grey from the knees down, and at the well, under its steel lid, and at the hose coiled on its hook on the side of the house; and had said, not the well, in a voice that did not need anything after it.

“The lake, sir,” said Castellanos. “It’s what it’s for.”

So they went down through the field in the dark, the four of them, past the fence, to the line of trees, and through them, to the water; and Castellanos came after them with a torch and stood on the bank at the top of the little beach of red mud and stones where the fields came down to the cove, and turned the torch off, and stood in the dark.

The lake was warm. It was black, and flat, and still, and warm as the creek had been, warmer, and it smelled of weed and of the day’s heat; and across it, on the far shore, the lights of the town, yellow, a few, doubled in the water, each one with its twin. He walked into it in his clothes. He walked in until it was at his waist, and then he lay back in it, and let it take him, and felt the creek come off him, the mud and the smoke and the forty minutes, slowly, in the dark, into the warm black water, and go away.

Theo was beside him. Theo had walked in holding the goldfish’s bag above his head, and was standing in the water up to his chest, holding it up still, in the dark.

“You can put it down,” said Felix, from the shallows. “It’s a fish. It’s in water. You’re in water. It’s fine.”

“It’s a pet,” said Theo, with dignity. “It’s not a lake fish. It’s a fair fish. It doesn’t know about lakes.” He held the bag higher. “I’m not having Earl meet a catfish.”

On the bank, in the dark, Castellanos did not say anything. Frederick could not see him. He could see only a shape against the trees, a darker darkness, standing, not moving, the whole time they were in the water; and once, when Marcus, swimming out a little way, went further than the others, the shape moved, one step, down the bank, and stopped, and Marcus came back.

---

The goldfish went into the mixing bowl.

It was the biggest bowl in Mrs Sixkiller’s kitchen, glass, the one Felix had learned pastry in at the start of the week, and Theo filled it with water from the jug in the refrigerator, because he said the water from the tap would have chlorine in it, and Kaylee had said chlorine was two parts in a million and he did not know what that did to a goldfish, and he was not going to find out; and he untied the knot in the bag with his teeth, very carefully, and let the fish out into the bowl.

It went round. Once, and then again. Then it stopped, in the middle of the bowl, small and orange, and hung there, with its fins moving, and looked at them through the glass.

They sat round the kitchen table in their wet clothes at a quarter past midnight with the box fan roaring and the moths on the screen and looked at it.

“Earl,” said Theo.

The goldfish went round.

“He likes it,” said Marcus.

“He’s a fish,” said Felix. “He doesn’t like anything. He’s just going round.” He looked at it. “He likes it.”

Frederick looked at the goldfish going round in Mrs Sixkiller’s mixing bowl, on the oilcloth, under the lamp, and then up at the refrigerator door, at the back of page fourteen of the Proposed Summer Programme, held up at its corner by the magnet shaped like the State, with the pink ticket hanging over the top of it. Four ticks, and the half that was not a half any more, which Theo had made into a whole on Friday night, carefully, with the short pencil, while Darlene’s twenty sat in the café’s till. Five.

And number six, in Marcus’s hand, written straight after his number five, before anybody could say anything, in the King’s sitting room, three weeks ago. Go out at night. To something with lights.

Nobody had ticked it.

Nobody said anything about that. They went up to bed.

---

He could not sleep.

He lay on top of the sheet in the hot room under the tin roof with his hair still wet from the lake and listened to Theo fall asleep in the other bed, all at once, the way Theo always did, as if a light had been turned out; and he lay and looked at the ceiling, and at the square of grey that was the window, and listened to the box fan at the top of the stairs, roaring; and every time he closed his eyes he saw Castellanos’s face in the doorway of the hog barn.

At two o’clock he got up.

He went down the stairs, the fourth and the seventh and the ninth, and through the kitchen, past the goldfish, which was not going round any more but hanging in the middle of the bowl in the dark, asleep, if fish slept; and past the refrigerator; and to the screen door, holding it so that it would not bang.

He stopped.

There was somebody on the porch.

---

Castellanos was sitting on the top step.

He never sat on the porch. In fourteen days, Frederick had never once seen him on it. He came to the bottom of the steps, and to the screen door, and stood outside the mesh and spoke through it, and went away; he did not come up, and he did not sit. He sat in the trailer, in the air conditioning, or in the car, or on a chair by the north wing door at the Palace that had been there for four years, a hard chair, the kind that stands in corridors; and he was sitting now on the top step of Mrs Sixkiller’s porch at two o’clock in the morning, in the dark, in a clean shirt and a pair of trousers that were not the trousers with the creases, with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging down between them, looking at the yard.

He did not turn round.

“Sir,” he said.

Frederick came out. He let the screen door close behind him, slowly, without a sound. He stood on the porch boards behind Castellanos in his bare feet, and did not know what to do; and then he sat down. On the top step. Not beside Castellanos; at the other end of it, by the post, a yard away, with his knees up and his arms round them.

They sat on the step together and looked at the yard.

It was dark. The oak, black. The trailer, by the barn, with its blind down and its light off, and the air conditioning humming. The barn. The windmill, still. And over all of it the stars, thick, from one side of the sky to the other, and across the middle of them, from the trees to the barn, faint, the pale band of the galaxy, edge on, the whole of it.

The whip-poor-will in the oak said its name, once, and stopped.

---

“At ten twenty-six,” said Castellanos, to the yard, “I was required to make a report.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Loss of contact. Ten minutes. That’s the rule. If the officers on the detail lose contact with the principal for ten minutes, without explanation, in a crowd, at night, the senior officer reports it to the duty officer at New Westminster, by radio, at once. And the duty officer reports it to the Commissioner, and to the Household, and the Household tells the Private Secretary, and the Private Secretary tells the Prime Minister.” He paused. “And the State constabulary is called. And the sheriff. And the Nation police. And a helicopter goes up from Tulsa.”

He looked at the yard.

“I didn’t make the report.”

The windmill by the barn turned, once, slowly, with its long creak, as some wind came across the yard that neither of them could feel; and stopped.

“Why not?” said Frederick.

Castellanos thought about it. He thought about it for a long time, the way Theo thought about things, honestly, as if nobody had asked him before.

“Because at ten twenty-six,” he said, “I had found the other two at the carousel, where they were supposed to be, and they told me you’d gone after a pig with Mr Hartigan. A pig. Towards the hog barn. And Sergeant Kimura had found the gate of the pen open and the twine chewed and the big doors open and a track through the grass to the fence. And I knew where you’d gone, and why, and I knew that you were with Mr Hartigan, and a girl from the 4-H, and a pig.” He paused. “And I thought about the helicopter.”

He did not say anything else for a while.

“It would have been over the fairgrounds by eleven,” said Castellanos. “With a light. Every road out of Vinita would have had a car on it by a quarter past. By midnight it would have been on the news in New Westminster, and on every news in the Realm by breakfast, that the King had been lost for an hour in the dark at a county fair in Oklahoma-Sequoyah. And the press would have been in Ketchum by tomorrow afternoon. Every paper in the Realm. On the gravel road. At the café. At the pool.” He looked at his hands. “And that would have been the end of it. Not of tonight. Of all of it. You’d have been on a plane by Tuesday, sir, and you’d never have been allowed a summer like this again. Not this year. Not ever. Not after that.”

Frederick sat on the step with his arms round his knees and could not say anything.

“So I didn’t make it,” said Castellanos. “I went down the bank with a torch instead, after Sergeant Kimura. And I looked for you in the creek. For half an hour. In the dark. And for every minute of that half hour, sir, I knew that if I was wrong, if you weren’t with Mr Hartigan and a pig, if it was something else, if it was anything else at all, then the helicopter would have been that many minutes late, because of me.” He stopped. “Because I wanted you to have your summer.”

---

The whip-poor-will said its name again, in the oak, three times.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“I’m sorry.”

Castellanos did not answer.

“I’m sorry,” said Frederick again. He did not know how to say it so that it was the right size. He had said sorry a great many times this summer, to Royce Pettit and Mrs Sixkiller and Kaylee and Ms Fenner and Mr Lowther, and every time it had been the right size, or near enough. This was not near enough. He did not know a word that was. “I didn’t think. I saw her go past and I saw Rae-Ann and I ran. I didn’t think about the rules. I didn’t think about you. I didn’t think about anything.” He looked at the yard. “I’ve never done that in my life. Not once. I’ve always thought. About everything. Everybody’s always made sure I’d thought.” He stopped. “And the first time I didn’t, it was you that had to.”

Castellanos was quiet for a long time.

“You ran after a pig,” he said at last.

“Yes.”

“For a girl you’ve met twice.”

“Yes.”

“In the dark. Into a creek. Without telling anybody.” Castellanos looked at the yard. “Because she’d been raising it since February.”

“Yes.”

Castellanos did not say anything to that. He sat on the step with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging down, and looked at the barn, and the windmill, and the trailer, and the stars; and Frederick, at the other end of the step, by the post, looking at the side of his face in the starlight, saw it do something, very slowly, that it did not do. He did not know what it was. He thought it might have been the thing Mr Baggett’s face did, and Earl’s.

“I’m going to make the report, sir,” said Castellanos. “In the morning. All of it. The pig, and the creek, and the forty minutes. And that I didn’t make it at ten twenty-six.” He paused. “Especially that.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“They’ll…” Frederick stopped. He did not know what they would do. He did not know what the Commissioner did to a sergeant who had not made a report. “Sergeant, please. Don’t. Nobody needs to know. It was all right. It was all right.”

“Sir,” said Castellanos, “that’s not yours.”

He said it quite gently. He said it the way Mrs Sixkiller had said you’ll want to wash that off, at the blue door, and the way Kaylee said do it again, the whole floor; as a thing that was simply so, and did not need arguing.

Frederick looked at him.

“It’s mine,” said Castellanos. “What I did tonight. That’s mine. I did it, and I’d do it again, and I’ll tell them that, and they can do what they like.” He looked at the yard. “You don’t get to take that off me, sir. Any more than I get to take the pig off you.”

Frederick did not say anything for a long time.

“All right,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

---

They sat on the step.

After a while Castellanos said, to the yard, in a different voice:

“Sergeant Kimura saw you.”

“When?”

“At the end. At the bend in the creek. Before she called it in.” He paused. “She’d got there first. She came down the bank above the bend, quiet, the way she does, and she saw the three of you in the light from Mr Hartigan’s telephone, coming in on the pig from three sides. The girl with the board, and Mr Hartigan with the fish.” Another pause. “And you. In the creek. In front of it. With your arms out.”

Frederick felt his face go hot in the dark.

“She didn’t call it in,” said Castellanos. “Not for a minute. She said she stood on the bank and watched. She said she had to see if it would work.” He looked at the barn. “She said the pig looked at you for a long time. And then it turned round and went up the bank, the way you wanted.”

“Rae-Ann told me to be big,” said Frederick. “She said I was the fence.”

“Sergeant Kimura said,” said Castellanos, “that you were the biggest thing in the creek.”

He stood up.

He stood up slowly, the way he did everything, with his hands on his knees, and stood on the top step, and looked down at Frederick by the post; and then he did something he had never done. He opened the screen door. He went into the kitchen. Frederick heard him in there, in the dark, by the refrigerator, and heard the drawer open, the kitchen drawer, and close.

Then he heard it. A small, short sound, on paper, on the refrigerator door. Like a match.

Castellanos came back out through the screen door, and let it close behind him without a sound, and stood on the porch with the short pencil from the drawer in his large hand, looking at it, as if he did not know how it had got there.

“Number six, sir,” he said.

He put the pencil in his shirt pocket. He went down the steps, one at a time, and across the yard, in the starlight, to the trailer, and went in, and shut the door; and the light did not come on.

Frederick sat on the top step by the post with his arms round his knees.

After a long time the whip-poor-will in the oak started again, and said its name, and said it, and said it, until he lost count.

---

His mother rang at nine on Sunday night, on the telephone that did nothing else.

He had known she would. He had known since the morning, since eight, when Castellanos had gone into the trailer with his radio and shut the door and been in there for an hour and a half, and come out, and gone to the car, and sat in it with the door open and his telephone, for another half an hour, and come back to the trailer, and said nothing to anybody all day. He had known she would know. He had spent the day in the lake, and on the porch, and asleep in the afternoon on the swing in the heat with the goldfish in its bowl on the boards beside him, knowing.

He took it on the porch, on the top step, in the dark.

“Fredde,” said his mother, in Swedish.

“Mamma.”

There was a pause on the line from Öland. It was four in the morning there. She had set an alarm.

“Was the gate mended?” said his mother.

He had not expected that. He sat on the step with the telephone at his ear and could not, for a moment, say anything at all.

“Yes,” he said.

“By you?”

“Yes. It was the keeper. The loop on the post, that the bolt goes into. It was bent down. Somebody had hit it, years ago. I bent it back.” He looked at his hands, in the dark. “With my hands. Not hard. You have to do it slowly.”

“And it holds?”

“It holds.”

“Good,” said his mother.

There was another pause. He heard her move, in the bed, at Solliden, in the dark, five thousand miles away across the Atlantic and the Baltic, and heard the sheets, and heard her breathe out.

“Sergeant Castellanos telephoned me,” she said. “At seven this morning, his time. Two o’clock in the afternoon, mine. Himself. He asked the Household for my number at Solliden and the Household gave it to him, which I did not know they would do, and he telephoned me, and he told me everything.” A pause. “The pig. And the creek. And the forty minutes. And the report that he did not make at twenty-six minutes past ten.” Another pause. “And then he told me why.”

He did not say anything.

“And then,” said his mother, “he offered me his resignation.”

Frederick sat very still on the step.

“I did not accept it,” said his mother.

He let out a breath that he had not known he was holding. It went on for a long time.

“I told him,” said his mother, “that he could not resign to me. That he did not work for me. That he worked for you, and for the Commissioner, and for the Realm, and that if he wished to resign he would have to ask one of them.” A pause. “And then I told him that if he did ask one of them, I would fly to Oklahoma myself, and stand in the farmhouse yard, and say so to his face, in front of the trailer.” A pause. “He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, yes, ma’am.” Another pause. “And then he said that you had been the biggest thing in the creek.”

He put his free hand over his eyes in the dark.

“Fredde,” said his mother. “Look at me. I know you can’t. Look at me anyway.”

He took his hand away. He looked at the yard, at the oak, at the trailer with its light on now, and its blind down.

“You frightened a man who is not frightened of anything,” said his mother. “You frightened him very badly, for forty minutes. You will remember that. You will not do it again, because you will not need to, because you have done it once and now you know what it is.” A pause. “And you ran into a creek in the dark after a pig because a girl you hardly knew had raised it since February. And you made yourself into a fence. And you mended her gate with your hands.” Another pause, and her voice changed, and had the smile in it, the one that changed the shape of her Swedish. “I don’t know which of those I am more proud of. I have been lying awake since two o’clock in the afternoon trying to decide.”

“Which?”

“I can’t,” said his mother. “That’s the trouble. That’s always been the trouble with you.” She laughed, very softly, at four in the morning, on Öland, in the dark. “Go to bed. Feed the fish. Pay Sergeant Castellanos for his shoes.”

“How do you know about the fish?”

“Sergeant Castellanos,” said his mother, “is very thorough.”