B.J. and the Bear, sometimes Cops and Moonshiners (his dad and mom had taken him to see White Lightning and White Line Fever on a double bill at the Norway Drive-In and Tad had been very impressed), sometimes a game he had made up himself. That one was called Ten-Truck Wipe-Out.
But the game he played most often—and the one he was playing now—had no name. It consisted of digging the trucks and the “men” out of his two playchests and lining the trucks up one by one in diagonal parallels. the men inside, as if they were all slant-parked on a street that only Tad could see. Then he would run them to the other side of the room one by one, very slowly, and line them up on that side bumper-to-bumper. Sometimes he would repeat this cycle ten or fifteen times, for an hour or more, without tiring.
Both Vic and Donna had been struck by this game. It was a little disturbing to watch Tad set up this constantly repeating, almost ritualistic pattern. They had both asked him on occasion what the attraction was, but Tad did not have the vocabulary to explain. Dukes of Hazzard, Cops and Moonshiners, and Ten-Truck Wipe-Out were simple crash-and-bash games. The no-name game was quiet, peaceful, tranquil, ordered. If his vocabulary had been big enough, he might have told his parents it was his way of saying Om and thereby opening the doors to contemplation and reflection.
Now as he played it, he was thinking something was wrong.
His eyes went automatically—unconsciously—to the door of his closet, but the problem wasn’t there. The door was firmly latched, and since the Monster Words, it never came open. No, the something wrong was something else.
He didn’t know exactly what it was, and wasn’t sure he even wanted to know. But, like Brett Camber, he was already adept at reading the currents of the parental river upon which he floated. Just lately he had gotten the feeling that there were black eddies, sandbars, maybe deadfalls hidden just below the surface. There could be rapids. A waterfall. Anything.
Things weren’t right between his mother and father.
It was in the way they looked at each other. The way they talked to each other. It was on their faces and behind their faces. In their thoughts.
He finished changing a slant-parked row of trucks on one side of the room to bumper-to-bumper traffic on the other side and got up and went to the window. His knees hurt a little because he had been playing the no-name game for quite a while. Down below in the back yard his mother was hanging out clothes. Half an hour earlier she had tried to call the man who could fix the Pinto, but the man wasn’t home. She waited a long time for someone to say hello and then slammed the phone down, mad. And his mom hardly ever got mad at little things like that.
As he watched, she finished hanging the last two sheets. She looked at them . . . and her shoulders kind of sagged. She went to stand by the apple tree beyond the double clothesline, and Tad knew from her posture—her legs spread, her head down, her shoulders in slight motion—that she was crying. He watched her for a little while and then crept back to his trucks. There was a hollow place in the pit of his stomach. He missed his father already, missed him badly, but this was worse.
He ran the trucks slowly back across the room, one by one, returning them to their slant-parked row. He paused once when the screen door slammed. He thought she would call to him, but she didn’t. There was the sound of her steps crossing the kitchen, then the creak of her special chair in the living room as she sat down. But the TV didn’t go on. He thought of her just sitting down there, just . . . sitting . . . and dismissed the thought quickly from his mind.
He finished the row of trucks. There was Greedo, his best, sitting in the cab of the dozer, looking blankly out of his round black eyes at the door of Tad’s closet His eyes were wide, as if he had seen something there, something so scary it had shocked his eyes wide, something really gooshy, something horrible, something that was coming—
Tad glanced nervously at the closet door. It was firmly latched.