Gargoyles Read Free Page A

the subject of his father, his mother wouldn’t speak of him except in the vaguest generalities — he was unstable, he was too serious, he was very thin. It was this suspicious lack of detail plus a certain stricken look in her eye that told him his mother possibly wasn’t sure who his father was. So Tyler stopped asking. In fact, not asking is exactly how his father would have handled it. Sometimes, when Tyler is this angry at his mother, like now, he imagines this is how his father felt about her too and is why he didn’t stay.
    The forest is dense and the sunset’s light is more dark than dappled. The road is narrow and not ditched and the trees are close — if he walks like an arms-out Jesus, Jesus with a beer can in each hand, Tyler can almost touch leaves on either side. He likes the idea, the threat, of a predator. A predator keeps you alert. The lack of man-eating predators in England is partly what’s wrong with the overall character of the English, a favourite author of his wrote. Getting attacked is less likely than getting hit by lightning, but truly there are bears and cougars here, perhaps twenty feet away, watching him walk. As far as cougars go, he knows not to make quick or skittery movements. In other words, don’t act like prey. In the same way that, sleeping in a new bedroom in another artsy oldhouse they’ve rented, he sometimes dreads yet wants to see a ghost, he now half-wills a mountain lion to make itself known to him. He would love to see its calm face.
    Tyler reaches another logging road and turns left, which is uphill and not the way they had come. He wants to see what lies beyond. He walks and walks. He thinks of nothing he’s left behind him. For a while, he visualizes himself very tall, which changes the road’s gravel to huge boulders, and he is a Tree Ent, his strides huge and ungainly, his style of walking not just mind over matter but wisdom over matter. As another beer can empties, he places it upright in full view at the side of the road.
    He hasn’t cried and he won’t. He knows he’s really all she has in her life. He has just realized that she truly doesn’t know what will hurt him. That’s how naive and trusting she is — she thinks he is that mature, that above it all. That’s how stupid she is — she thinks he is that smart.
    He’s a few miles from Kim’s ass-tickling road when he turns another corner and there, with a driveway of sorts leading to it, is a log cabin. The cabin’s roof is so thick with moss that at first Tyler sees it as thatch, the quaintly rounded English kind. Behind the house a shed of equal size looks ready to collapse in on itself. The wood of both buildings is unpainted, perhaps never-painted. There is no car. No lights are on. Tyler sees no electric wires leading to the house, then remembers he has been walking for miles without seeing power poles at all.
    Tyler looks around him, sees only trees and hears only the wind in trees higher up the slope. No cars passed him all evening. He really is very alone here. He is in no danger whatsoever so there is no reason to be afraid of anything at all. He has had five cans of beer. He doesn’t bother to walk quietly ashe approaches the cabin. Why should he? He walks up, cups his hands over his eyes, leans against the glass to look.
    On open shelves sit colourful rows of canned goods, and boxes of herbal tea and tins of this and that. A good, or at least big, stereo system sits in the corner. He sees electric light fixtures. Maybe there’s a generator in the shed. Tyler wonders if there’s indoor plumbing. He will look in other windows. Passing the door he puts his hand on the knob and it turns. Why not? His father would look around too. He is one step inside when he hears . . . The black pickup is new and quiet enough to have been muffled by wind in the treetops and by Tyler’s criminal excitement. It rolls up and