Deckie and Celie were assigned to that table, too, but they ducked off into the kitchen to eat there, and bad as it was with the brats, Paulie knew it would be worse in the kitchen where he hadn’t been invited. So he had to sit there and try to listen over the noise of the brats as Uncle Howie at the other table bragged about Deckie’s tennis playing and how he could turn pro if he wanted, but of course he was going to Harvard and he’d simply use his tennis to terrorize his employees when he was running some company. “His employees won’t have to try to lose in order to suck up to Deckie,” Uncle Howie said. “They’ll have to be such damn good tennis players that they can give him a good game: And that means his best executives will all be in top physical shape, which keeps the health costs down.”

  “Till one of them drops dead of a heart attack on the tennis court and the widow sues Deckie for making him play.”

  The whole table fell silent except for one person, who was laughing uproariously because after all, he made the joke. Mubbie, naturally. Paulie wanted to die.

  After the dead silence, punctuated only by the laughter of one social corpse, Mother turned the conversation back to the achievements of the other children. It was a cruel thing for her to do, since naturally the others asked her about what Paulie was doing, and naturally she answered with offhand good humor, “Oh, you know, he gets along well enough. No psychiatrists’ bills yet, and no bail money, so we’re content.” The others laughed at this, except Paulie. He wondered if maybe some of the older cousins had been to shrinks or had to be bailed out of jail, so that maybe Mom’s little joke had a barb to it just like Father’s did, only she knew how to do it subtly, so that even the victims had to laugh. But most likely nobody in this scrupulously correct family had ever been in a position where either a shrink or a bail bondsman was required.

  Paulie ate as quickly as possible and excused himself and went to the room that had Deckie’s stuff in it too, piled on the other twin bed, but mercifully Deckie himself was off somewhere else being perfect and Paulie had some peace. His mother made him bring some books so when he was off by himself she could tell the others he was reading, and Paulie was smart enough to have packed books he already read at school so that when the adults asked him what he was reading he could tell them what the story was about, as if they cared. But the truth was that Paulie didn’t like to read, it all seemed pretty thin to him, he could think up better stuff just lying around with his eyes closed.

  They must have thought he was asleep, must have peered in the door and decided he was dead to the world, or they probably wouldn’t have held their little confab out in the hall, Mother and her brothers and sister. The subject was Nana. “She’s already got all her money in a trust that we administer,” Mother was saying, “and she can afford a round-the-clock nurse, so what’s the problem?”

  But the others had all kinds of other arguments’, which in Paulie’s mind all boiled down to one: Nana was an embarrassment and as long as she remained in the Bride mansion in Richmond their family could never return to their rightful place among the finest families of Virginia. Paulie wanted to speak up and ask them why they didn’t just put her in a bag, weight it down with rocks, and drop it into the James River, but he didn’t. He just listened as every one of Nana’s grandchildren except Mother made it plain that they had less filial affection than the average housecat. And even Mother, Paulie suspected, was opposing them because whoever ended up in that mansion would be established for all time as the leading branch of the family, and Mother couldn’t stomach that, even though by marrying Mubbie she had removed herself from all possibility of occupying that position herself. At home she talked all the time about how her brothers and sisters put on airs as if they were all real Brides but the spunk was gone from the family after Mother and Father died when they went out sailing on the Chesapeake and got caught in the fringes of a spent hurricane. “Nana is the only remnant left of the old vigor,” she would say.

  “Drooling and grunting like a baboon,” Father would always answer, then laugh as Mother ignored him.

  “She still understands what’s going on around her,” Mother would say. “You can see it in her eyes. She can’t talk or eat because Parkinson’s has her, but it’s not Alzheimer’s, she’s sharp as a tack and I have no doubt that if she could write or speak, she’d wipe my brothers and sisters right out of the will. And since she can’t do that, she does the only thing she can do. She refrains from dying. I admire her for that.”

  “I refrain from dying every day,” Mubbie would say, every time as if he hoped it would be funny if he just got to the right number of repetitions.

  “But you never admire me for that.” At which Mother always changed the subject.

  The conversation in the hall went the rounds until finally Aunt Rosie said, “Oh, never mind. Weedie’s never going to bend”—Weedie was Mother, who preferred the nickname to Winifred—“and Nana can’t live forever so we’ll just go on.”

  They went away and Paulie wondered how Nana would feel if she could hear the way they talked about her. Didn’t it ever occur to any of them that maybe she would be just as happy to be rid of them as they would be to be rid of her? Paulie tried to imagine what it would be like, to be trapped in a body that wouldn’t do anything, to have to have somebody wipe your butt whenever you relieved yourself, to have to have somebody feed you every bite you ate, and know that they hated you for not being dead, or at least wished with some impatience that you’d just get on with it.

  And then, drowning in self-pity, Paulie wondered whether it was really different from his own life. If Nana died, at least it would make a difference to somebody. They’d get a house. Somebody would move. People would have more money. But if I died, who’d notice? Hell, I probably wouldn’t even notice. Not till it was time to eat and I couldn’t pick up a fork.

  It was dark by now but there was a full moon and anyway the parking lot around the so-called cabin was flooded with light, especially the tennis courts where the thwang, thunk, thwang, thunk, thwang of a ball being hit and bouncing off the court and getting hit again rang out in the night’s stillness. Paulie got up from his bed where maybe he had fallen asleep for a while and maybe not. He walked through the upstairs hall and quietly down the stairs. Adults were gathered in the living room and the kitchen, talking and sometimes laughing, but nobody noticed him as he went outside.

  He expected to see Deckie and Celie playing tennis, but it was Uncle Howie and Aunt Sissie, Deckie’s parents, playing with intense grimaces on their faces as if this were the final battle in a lifelong war. They both dripped with sweat even though the night air here in the Great Smokies was fairly cool.

  So where were Deckie and Celie? Not that it mattered. Not that they’d welcome Paulie’s company if he found them. Not that he could even be sure they were together. He knew Deckie was out somewhere because his stuff was still piled on his bed. And the sounds of tennis had made Paulie assume he was playing with Celie. But for all he knew, Celie was in bed with the little girl cousins in the big attic dormitory. Still, he looked for them because at some level he knew they would be together, and for some perverse reason he always had to push and push until he forced people to tell him outright that they didn’t want him around. The school counselor had told him this about himself, but hadn’t told him how to stop doing it. In fact, Paulie was half-convinced that the counselor had only told him that as an oblique way of letting him know that he, too, didn’t want Paulie around anymore.

  There wasn’t a sound coming from the pool, though the lights were on there, so Paulie didn’t bother going in. He just walked the path around the chainlink fence that kept woodland animals from coming to drown in the chlorinated water. It wasn’t till Celie giggled that Paulie realized they were in there after all, not swimming but sitting on the edge at the shallow end, their feet in the water, resting on the steps going into the water. Paulie stood and watched them, knowing that he was invisible to them, knowing he would be invisible even if he were standing right in front of them, even if he were walking on the damned water.

  Then he realized that Celie was only wearing the bottom part of her two-piece swimming suit. Paulie’s first thought was, How stupid, she’s only eleven, she’s got nothing to show anyway. Then he saw that Deckie had his hand inside the bottom of her swimsuit and he was kissing her shoulder or sucking on it or something, and that’s why Celie was laughing and saying, “Stop it, that tickles,” and then Paulie understood that Deckie liked it that she didn’t have any breasts yet and he knew just what Deckie was and in that moment relief swept over Paulie like a great cleansing wave because he knew now that despite Deckie’s beautiful tan and beautiful body and charmed life, Deckie was the sick one and Paulie didn’t want to be like him after all.

  Only then did it occur to him that even though Celie was laughing, what Deckie was doing to her was wrong and for Paulie to stand there feeling relieved of all things was completely selfish and evil of him and he had to do something, he had to put a stop to it, then and there, if he was any kind of decent person at all, and if he didn’t then he was just as bad as Deckie because he was standing there watching, wasn’t he? And letting it happen.

  “Stop it,” he said. His voice was a croak and between the crickets and the breeze in the leaves and the thwang, thunk of the tennis match, they didn’t hear him.

  “Get your hands off her, you asshole!” Paulie yelled.

  This time they heard him. Celie shrieked and pulled away from Deckie, looking frantically for the top of her swimsuit, which was floating about ten feet out. She splashed down the steps into the pool, reaching for it, as Deckie stood up, looking for Paulie in the darkness outside the chainlink fence. Their eyes met. Deckie walked around the pool toward him.

  “I wasn’t doing anything, you queer,” said Deckie. “And what were you doing watching, anyway, you queer?”

  The words struck home. Paulie answered not a word. They were face to face now, through the chain link.

  “Nobody will believe you,” said Deckie. “And Celie will never admit it happened. She wanted it, you know. She’s the one that took off her top.”

  “Shut up,” said Paulie.

  “If you tell anybody, I’ll just look disgusted and tell them that you and I quarreled and you warned me you’d do something to get me in trouble. They’ll believe me. They know you’re a weasel. A sneaking weasel queer.”

  “You can call me whatever you like,” said Paulie. “But you and I both know what you are. And someday you’ll mess with somebody’s little girl and they won’t just call the cops so your family lawyers can get you off, they’ll come after you with a gun and blow the suntan right off your face.”

  Paulie said all that, but not until Deckie was on the other side of the pool, walking into the poolhouse. By then Celie had her top back on and was climbing out of the water. She didn’t even turn to look at him. Paulie had saved her, but maybe she didn’t want to be saved. And even if she did, he knew that she’d never speak to him again as long as he lived. He’d seen the wrong thing, he’d done the wrong thing, even when he was trying to do the right thing.

  He didn’t want to go to bed, not with Deckie lying there in the next bed. He thought of taking a swim himself, but the thought of getting in the water they had been using made him feel polluted. He walked away into the brush.

  It got dark immediately under the trees, but not so dark he couldn’t see the ground. And soon he found a path that led down to the stream, which made that curious rushing, plinking sound like some kind of random musical instrument that was both string and wind. The water was icy cold when he put his bare feet into it. Cold and pure and numbing and he kept walking upstream.

  The trees broke open over the stream and moonlight poured down from almost straight overhead. The water had carved its way under some of the trees lining the banks. None had fallen, but many of them cantilevered perilously over the water, their roots reaching out like some ancient scaffolding, waiting for somebody to come in and finish building the riverbank. In the spring runoff or during a storm, all the gaps under the trees would be invisible, but it was the end of a dryish summer and there wasn’t that much water, so the banks were exposed right down to the base. If I just lay down under one of these trees, when it rained again the water would rise and lift me up into the roots like a fish up to an octopus’s mouth, and the roots would hold me like an octopus’s arms and I could just lie there and sleep while it sucked the life out of me, sucked it right out and left me dry, and then I’d dissolve in the water and float down the river and end up in some reservoir and get filtered out of the drinking water and end up getting treated with a bunch of sewage or maybe in a toxic waste dump which pretty much describes my life right now so it wouldn’t make much difference, would it?

  The bank was higher on the left side now, and it was rocky, not clay. The stone was bone dry and shone ghostly white in the moonlight, except for one place, under a low outcropping, where the rock was glistening wet. When Paulie got closer he could see that there was water flowing thinly over the face of the rock. But how could that be, since all the rock above the overhang was dry? Only when he stooped down did he realize that there wasn’t just shadow under that outcropping of stone, there was a cave, and the water flowed out of it. When the stream was high, the cave entrance must be completely under water; and the rest of the time it would be invisible unless you were right down under the overhang, looking up. Yet it was large enough for a person to slither in.

  A person or an animal. A bear? Not hibernation season. A skunk? A porcupine? Maybe. So what? Paulie imagined coming home with spines in his face or smelling like a skunk and all he could think was: They’d have to take me away from here. To the doctor to get the spines out or back home to get the smell of me away from the others. They’d have to ride with him in the car all the way down the mountain, smelling him the whole way.

  He ducked low, almost getting his face into the water, and soaking his shorts and the front of his T-shirt. He was right, you could get into the cave, and it was easier than it looked at first, the cave was bigger inside than it seemed from the size of the opening. The spring inside it had been eating away at the rock for a long time. And if there was an animal in here, it kept quiet. Didn’t move, didn’t smell. It was dark, and after a while when Paulie’s eyes got used to the darkness it was still pitch black and he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, so he felt his way inward, inward. Maybe animals didn’t use this cave because the entrance was underwater so much. Bats couldn’t use it, that was for sure. And it would be a lousy place to hibernate since there was no getting out during the spring flood.

  The water from the spring made a pool inside the cave, not a deep one, but pure and cold. The cleanest water Paulie would ever find in his life, he knew that. He dipped his hand into the water, lifted it to his mouth, drank. It tasted sweet and clear. It tasted like cold winter light. He crawled farther into the cave, looking for a place where he could lie down and dream and remember the taste of this water straight from the stone heart of the earth.

  His hand brushed against something that wasn’t rock, and it moved.

  Paulie knelt there, hardly daring to breathe. No sound. No alarm. No movement of any kind. And he could see, just a little bit, just faint dark grays against the black of the background, and there wasn’t any motion, none at all. He reached out and touched it again, and it moved again, and then tipped over and thudded softly and now when he handled it he realized it was a shoe, or not really a shoe but a moccasin, the leather dry and brittle, so it broke a little under his hand. Something clattered out of the moccasin when he lifted it up and when he cast around to find whatever it was, he realized it was a lot of things, small hard things, bones from somebody’s feet. There was a dead body here. Someone had crawled into this cave and died.

  And then suddenly in the darkness he could see, only he wasn’t seeing anything that actually lay there. He was seeing an Indian, a youngish man, broad cheekbones, nearly naked, unarmed, fleeing from men on horseback, men on foot, running up the stream after him, calling and shouting and now and then discharging a musket. One of the musket balls took him, right in the back, right into a lung. Paulie almost felt it, piercing him, throwing him forward. After that he could hardly breathe, his lung was filling up, he was weak, he couldn’t run anymore, but there was the cave here, and the water was low, and he had strength enough to climb up under the overhang, taking care not to brush against it and leave a stain of blood from his back. He would lie here and hide until the white men went on and he could come back out and go find his father, go find a medicine man who could do something about the blood in his lungs, only the white men didn’t go away, they kept searching for him, he could hear them outside, and then he realized it didn’t matter anyway because he was never going to leave this cave. If he coughed, he’d give himself away and they’d drag him out and torture him and kill him. If he didn’t cough, he’d drown. He drowned.

  Paulie felt the moment of death, not as pain, but as a flash of light that entered his body through his fingertips and filled him for a moment. Then it receded, fled into some dark place inside him and lurked there. A death hidden inside him, the death of a Cherokee who wasn’t going to leave his home, wasn’t going to go west to some unknown country just because Andrew Jackson said they had to go. He held inside him the death of a proud man who wasn’t going to leave his mountains, ever. A man who had, in a way, won his battle.