“Where goin, Daddy?” Gage asked companionably, giving his father his hand.
“Going over in Mrs. Vinton’s field,” he said. “Gonna go fly a kite, my man.”
“Kiiiyte?” Gage asked doubtfully.
“You’ll like it,” Louis said. “Wait a minute, kiddo.”
They were in the garage now. Louis found his keyring, unlocked the little storage closet, and turned on the light. He rummaged through the closet and found the Vulture, still in its store bag with the sales slip stapled to it. He had bought it in the depths of mid-February, when his soul had cried out for some hope.
“Lat?” Gage asked. This was Gage-ese for “Whatever in the world might you have there, Father?”
“It’s the kite,” Louis said and pulled it out of the bag. Gage watched, interested, as Louis unfurled the Vulture, which spread its wings over perhaps five feet of tough plastic. Its bulgy, bloodshot
eyes stared out at them from its small head atop its scrawny, pinkly naked neck.
“Birt!” Gage yelled. “Birt, Daddy! Got a birt!”
“Yeah, it’s a bird,” Louis agreed, slipping the sticks into the pockets at the back of the kite and rummaging again for the five hundred feet of kite twine that he had bought the same day. He looked back over his shoulder and repeated to Gage: “You’re gonna like it, big guy.”
Gage liked it.
They took the kite over into Mrs. Vinton’s field and Louis got it up into the blowy late-March sky first shot, although he had not flown a kite since he was . . . what? Twelve? Nineteen years ago? God, that was horrible.
Mrs. Vinton was a woman of almost Jud’s age but immeasurably more frail. She lived in a brick house at the head of her field, but now she came out only rarely. Behind the house, the field ended and the woods began—the woods that led first to the Pet Sematary and then to the Micmac burying ground beyond it.
“Kite’s flyne, Daddy!” Gage screamed.
“Yeah, look at it go!” Louis bellowed back, laughing and excited.
He payed out kite twine so fast that the string grew hot and branded thin fire across his palm. “Look at that Vulture, Gage!
She’s goin to beat shit!”
“Beat-shit!” Gage cried and laughed, high and joyously. The sun sailed out from behind a fat gray spring cloud, and the temperature seemed to go up five degrees almost at once. They stood in the bright, unreliable warmth of March straining to be April in the high dead grass of Mrs. Vinton’s field; above them the Vulture soared up toward the blue, higher, its plastic wings spread taut against that steady current of air, still higher, and as he had done as a child,
Louis felt himself going up to it, going into it, staring down as the world took on its actual shape, the one cartographers must see in their dreams; Mrs. Vinton’s field, as white and still as cobwebs following the retreat of the snow, not just a field now but a large parallelogram bounded by rock walls on two of its sides, and then the road at the bottom, a straight black seam, and the river valley—
the Vulture saw it all with its soaring, bloodshot eyes. It saw the river like a cool gray band of steel, chunks of ice still floating in it; on the other side it saw Hampden, Newburgh, Winterport, with a ship at dock; perhaps it saw the St. Regis Mill at Bucksport below its steaming fume of cloud, or even land’s end itself, where the Atlantic pounded the naked rock.
“Look at her go, Gage!” Louis yelled, laughing.
Gage was leaning so far back he was in danger of toppling over. A huge grin covered his face. He was waving to the kite.
Louis got some slack and told Gage to hold out one of his hands.
Gage did, not even looking around. He couldn’t take his eyes from the kite, which swung and danced in the wind and raced its shadow back and forth across the field.
Louis wound kite string twice around Gage’s hand and now he did look down, comically amazed at the strong tug and pull.
“What!” he said.
“You’re flying it,” Louis said. “You got the hammer, my man. It’s your kite.”
“Gage flyne it?” Cage said, as if asking not his father but himself for confirmation. He pulled the string experimentally; the kite nodded in the windy sky. Gage pulled the string harder; the kite swooped. Louis and his son laughed together. Gage reached out his free hand, groping, and Louis took it in his own. They
stood together that way in the middle of Mrs. Vinton’s field, looking up at the Vulture.
It was a moment with his son that Louis never forgot. As he had gone up and into the kite as a child himself, he now found himself going into Gage, his son. He felt himself shrink until he was within Gage’s tiny house, looking out of the windows that were his eyes—looking out at a world that was so huge and bright, a world where Mrs. Vinton’s field was nearly as big as the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the kite soared miles above him, the string drumming in his fist like a live thing as the wind blew around him, tumbling his hair.
“Kite flyne!” Gage cried out to his father, and Louis put his arm around Cage’s shoulders and kissed the boy’s cheek, in which the wind had bloomed a wild rose.
“1 love you, Gage,” he said—it was between the two of them, and that was all right.
And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. “Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!”
They were still flying the kite when Rachel and Ellie came home.
He and Gage had gotten it so high that they had nearly run out the string, and the face of the Vulture had been lost; it was only a small black silhouette in the sky.
Louis was glad to see the two of them, and be roared with laughter when Ellie dropped the string momentarily and chased it through the grass, catching it just before the tumbling, unraveling core tube gave up the last of its twine. But having them around also changed things a little, and he was not terribly sorry to go in when, twenty minutes later, Rachel said she believed Gage had had enough of the wind. She was afraid he would get a chill, So the kite was pulled back in, fighting for the sky at every turn of the twine, at last surrendering. Louis tucked it, black wings, buggy
bloodshot eyes, and all, under his arm and imprisoned it in the storage closet again. That night Gage ate an enormous supper of hot dogs and beans, and while Rachel was dressing him in his Dr.
Dentons for bed, Louis took Ellie aside and had a heart-to-heart talk with her about leaving her marbles around. Under other circumstances, he might have ended up shouting at her because Ellie could turn quite haughty—insulting, even—when accused of some mistake. It was only her way of dealing with criticism, but that did not keep it from infuriating Louis when she laid it on too thick or when he was particularly tired. But this night the kite flying had left him in a fine mood, and Ellie was inclined to be reasonable. She agreed to be more careful and then went downstairs to watch TV until 8:30, a Saturday indulgence she treasured. Okay, that’s out of the way, and it might even do some good, Louis thought, not knowing that marbles were really not the problem, and chills were really not the problem, that a large Orinco truck was going to be the problem, that the road was going to be the problem. . . as Jud Crandall had warned them it might be on that first day of August.
He went upstairs that night about fifteen minutes after Cage had been put to bed. He found his son quiet but still awake, drinking the last of a bottle of milk and looking contemplatively up at the ceiling.
Louis took one of Gage’s feet in one hand and raised it up. He kissed it, lowered it. “Goodnight, Gage,” he said.
“Kite flyne, Daddy,” Gage said.
“It really did fly, didn’t it?” Louis said, and for no reason at all he felt tears behind his eyes. “Right up to the sky, my man.”
“Kite flyne,” Cage said. “Up to the kye.”
He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, and slept. Just like that.
Louis was stepping into the hail when he glanced back and saw yellowy-green, disembodied eyes staring out at him from Gage’s closet. The closet door was open . . . just a crack. His heart took a lurch into his throat, and his mouth pulled back and down in a grimace.
He opened the closet door, thinking