Sixteen

Royce Pettit brought the glass on Friday evening, in the back of his pickup, two panes, cut to size, wrapped in newspaper, with a tub of putty and a knife; and he put them in himself, in the two west windows, standing on a stepladder in the yard in the last of the light, with his half-sunburnt face very close to the frames, and would not take any money for it.

“It’s for the clock,” he said, and drove away.

Cecil Rowe and Deputy Tidwell did the windmill on Saturday morning. They came at seven, separately, without telling each other, and found each other in the yard, and looked at each other; and Deputy Tidwell, who was in his brown uniform shirt and his wide hat and had come on his day off, said Mr Rowe, and Cecil Rowe said Lonnie, and that was all either of them said for two hours. They climbed the windmill, one after the other, the old man first, in his cut-off canvas trousers and nothing else, and the young deputy after him, very pink, very careful, with a bag of tools over his shoulder; and they sat at the top of it, forty feet up, on the little platform under the blades, and bent the blades back. By hand. With a length of pipe for leverage. Slowly. One after another, all of them, until they were straight; and came down, and stood in the yard and looked up at it; and some wind that nobody could feel came across the yard, and the windmill turned, once, with its long creak, and stopped.

“Huh,” said Cecil Rowe.

“Yes, sir,” said Deputy Tidwell.

Earl sawed up the oak limb on Saturday afternoon, with a chainsaw that he brought in the back of his own car, because the van was the county’s and he did not use it for anything that was not the county’s; and stacked the wood by the barn, in a pile, neatly, the way the boards from the henhouse had been stacked. He did not look at the four of them, on the porch, any more than he looked at anybody. He did not ask any questions. He said Loretta’s oak once, sadly, looking at the stump of the torn limb high up on the trunk, and then well, it’ll grow, and went home.

“They were all in her fourth grade,” said Felix, watching him go. “Earl and Mr Rowe and the deputy. Every one of them. Different years.” He looked at the windmill. “She just rang them.”

“She didn’t ring Mr Rowe,” said Theo. “Mr Rowe just came.”

---

He went to Vinita on Saturday morning for the camera, while Theo was asleep.

Castellanos drove him. He had asked on Friday night, at the trailer, which was level again now, jacked up and set down two feet west of where the storm had left it by Castellanos and Deputy Tidwell on Thursday evening, with its blind back on its roller; and Castellanos had opened the door and listened and said yes, sir, which he had not said at the trailer door all summer; and at half past seven on Saturday they went, in the cold, the two of them, with Kimura staying at the farmhouse in the yard with her binoculars, looking at the oak.

Royce Pettit was behind the glass counter with a mug of coffee. His face was the same colour all over, now; he had been fishing facing the other way.

“Camera,” said Frederick.

“What kind?”

“A real one. With film. That you can’t see till it’s printed.” He thought. “For a friend who won a blue ribbon with one that he borrowed.”

Royce Pettit looked at him for a long time over the coffee. Then he put the mug down on the glass, on top of the watches, and went to a shelf at the back, behind the guitars, and came back with a camera in his hands.

It was black and silver, heavy, square, with a lens that stood out in front of it like a nose and a leather strap, worn, and a leather case that went round it and did up with a press stud. It was not new. It was not anything like new. The silver had gone soft and grey at the corners where hands had held it, and there was a dent in the top, by the winding lever, as if it had been dropped once, a long time ago, onto something hard, and kept working.

“Nineteen seventy-eight,” said Royce Pettit. “Came in with an estate at Afton. Fella was a photographer for the paper in Miami. Not that Miami. Our Miami. Up the road.” He turned it over in his big hands. “Took every high school football game in Ottawa County for thirty years with this. Every one. His daughter said.” He held it out. “Works. I put a film through it in June. Every one came out.”

Frederick took it.

It was heavier than it looked. It was the weight of something that had been made to last, by people who expected it to; and it fitted his hands, both of them, the right one in its bandage and the left one under the lens, as if it had been waiting for hands.

“How much?”

“Fifty-five,” said Royce Pettit.

Frederick took out the brown wallet. He unzipped it. In the little window for the photograph, the library card, HANOVER, F., and behind it the pink ticket and the yellow card; and in the long pocket for notes, the rest of the second envelope from Bonnie Tackett and all of the third, which had come on Friday, HANOVER - WK 3, with Thurs: closed for treatment, paid, B.T. written on the slip in her quick round marker. He took out fifty-five pounds and counted it into Royce Pettit’s hand. Twenty. Forty. Fifty. Fifty-five.

Royce Pettit counted it again. He put it in the till. Then he reached under the counter, and came up with three small yellow boxes, and put them on the glass beside the camera.

“Film,” he said. “Three rolls. Thirty-six on each.”

“How much?”

“Nothing,” said Royce Pettit. “It’s for the clock.”

“You’ve already done the clock. You did the windows for the clock.”

Royce Pettit looked at him over the counter with his face that was the same colour all over.

“Son,” he said, “that clock is going to be for a long time.”

---

Theo was sixteen at seven o’clock on Sunday morning, and Marcus told the whole of Craig County.

He did it from the porch. He had got up at half past six without anybody hearing him, which was not possible on Mrs Sixkiller’s stairs, and taken the trombone out of its case, and gone out onto the porch, and stood at the top of the steps in his pyjamas facing the yard and the barn and the trailer and the windmill and the whole of the morning; and at seven o’clock exactly, by the watch on his wrist, he put the trombone up and played Happy Birthday.

He played it loud. He played it louder than Frederick had known a trombone could be played, the long brass notes going out across the yard and off the side of the barn and over the fields and down through the trees to the lake and across the water to the town, all the way, he thought, to the café, and the post office, and the blue door. He played it twice. The second time, he did a slide on the last you that went down a whole octave and came back up, and held it, and shook it, and the windmill by the barn, which nobody could feel any wind for, turned, once.

The door of the trailer opened.

Castellanos stood in it, in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, with his hair flat on one side, and looked at Marcus on the porch with the trombone. He looked at him for a long time.

Then he looked at his watch.

“Seven o’clock,” said Castellanos, across the yard. He considered it. “On the dot.”

He went back in and shut the door.

Upstairs, in the hot room under the tin roof, Theo had sat up in bed with his hair standing on end and his raw arm in its bandage held up in front of him as though to ward something off; and was looking at Frederick, in the other bed, who had been awake since six and had been lying on his back waiting for exactly this, with an expression of the most profound and wondering betrayal.

“You knew,” said Theo.

“Happy birthday,” said Frederick.

---

The pie had sixteen candles in it.

Felix had made it on Saturday at the blue door, and carried it back two miles in the dark with a cloth over it, and hidden it in the bottom of the refrigerator behind the ham, where Theo would never look because Theo did not look at ham; and he brought it out now and put it on the kitchen table in front of Theo’s chair and lit the candles, all sixteen, with the matches from the cellar, one after another, carefully, with the box fan off so that they would not go out.

Peach. Golden. The slits in the top in the shape of a leaf, and the edge pinched like the edge of a coin.

“Blow,” said Felix.

Theo looked at the pie for a long time, with the sixteen small flames going in a ring on top of it, very still in the hot still kitchen.

“It’s not breakfast,” he said.

“It’s your birthday,” said Felix. “Everything’s breakfast.”

Theo blew. He got fifteen. The sixteenth stayed lit, small and stubborn, at the edge, by the leaf; and he looked at it, and Marcus said that’s a year of bad luck, and Felix said that’s not a thing, and Marcus said it is in Oakland; and Theo leaned forward and blew it out, very gently, as if it were a moth.

---

His parents rang at eight.

They rang Mrs Sixkiller’s telephone on the wall, with the long curly cord, from New Westminster, from the flat, from the room that was kitchen and sitting room at once with the window looking four floors down onto the yard of the bus depot, at nine o’clock their time; and Theo took the call standing by the refrigerator with his forehead against the door of it, under the list, with the cord wound round his hand, and talked to them in Wisconsindeutsch.

Frederick could follow most of it. He had learned enough at the Hartigans’ table, in four years, at the end of the forty-odd suppers; enough to hear Alles Gute and sechzehn and Mama and nein, mir geht’s gut, and to hear Theo’s voice go up and down the way it never went in English, younger, and softer, the voice he used at home; and to hear, once, Theo laugh, and then not laugh, and say ja, and then ja, and then nothing, for a long time, with his forehead against the refrigerator door, while somebody in New Westminster said something to him that took a long time.

Then he said Kate?, and his voice changed.

Frederick looked at the table.

“No,” said Theo, in English, suddenly. “No, you can’t. Kate. Kate. It’s mine. It’s half mine. I bought half of it. With my…” He listened. “That’s not… it’s not about the tape, Kate, it’s about the…” He listened. His face went through several things. “On the third?” He listened. “Well, I won’t be there, will I, so you can just…” He stopped. He listened for a long time. “Fine,” said Theo. “Fine. Take it.” A pause. “And the lamp.” A pause. “And happy birthday to me, thank you very much.”

He hung up.

He stood with his forehead against the refrigerator for a moment longer. Then he turned round.

“She’s taking the lizard,” he said.

Nobody asked what the lizard was. Frederick knew. It was a poster, a large one, of a green lizard on a rock, that had been taped to the partition in the Hartigans’ second bedroom since 2026, on Theo’s side, and that Kate said was hers because she had chosen it and Theo said was half his because he had paid for half of it, four pounds fifty, out of his birthday money; and that they had been arguing about for three years, through the partition, at midnight.

“On the third,” said Theo. “She’s moving into the residence at the college on the third. The day before school. Dad’s driving her over in the van.” He looked at the list on the refrigerator door. “I won’t even be there.”

He sat down at the table, in front of the pie, with fifteen holes in it and one burnt candle still standing by the leaf.

“I’ll have the whole room,” he said. He did not sound pleased. He sounded like somebody who had been told something he had known for a long time and had not believed. “No partition. No Kate. No lizard. The whole room to myself.” He looked at the pie. “It’s going to be terrible.”

“I know,” said Frederick.

“You don’t know. You’ve always had a whole room. You’ve had about forty.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “That’s how I know.”

Theo looked at him across the table for a long moment. Then he picked up a fork and ate a piece of his birthday pie straight out of the dish, without cutting it, from the edge, by the leaf, at a quarter past eight in the morning; and passed the fork to Felix.

---

He gave him the camera at nine, on the porch.

He had wrapped it in a page of the Vinita paper, the one with the commissioner on the front of it, standing on the Big Cabin Creek bridge in a suit, in the heat, in front of the sign that said CLOSED SINCE 2017 THANKS A LOT, saying something with his mouth open and an expression of the deepest despair; and tied it with orange baler twine from the barn, because there was nothing else, and it was right.

Theo unwrapped it on the swing.

He took off the baler twine, and folded it, and put it in his pocket. He took off the paper, and looked at the commissioner, and laughed. And then he looked at what was inside, in his lap, on the swing: the camera, black and silver, heavy, in its worn leather case, with the strap, and the dent on the top by the winding lever; and the three small yellow boxes of film beside it.

He did not say anything.

He took the camera out of the case. He held it in his hands. He turned it over, slowly, and looked at it, the way he had looked at the eleven pounds in their envelope with the crest, in June; the way he had looked at the goldfish in its bag in the lights of the booth; the way he had looked at the blue ribbon on the wall at Vinita, with his name under it. He put it to his eye. He looked through it at the yard, at the oak with its torn limb, and the windmill, straight again, and the trailer, level again; and turned the lens, slowly, the way he had seen Mrs Sixkiller’s turn, so that the yard came into focus and went out and came in.

“It came in with an estate,” said Frederick. “From Afton. A man who photographed every high school football game in Ottawa County for thirty years with it. Mr Pettit says it works. He put a film through it in June.” He paused. “It’s from 1978.”

Theo lowered the camera. He looked at Frederick, on the porch boards, by the post.

“How much?”

“Fifty-five.”

“Out of your…”

“Out of my wages. Week two and week three.” Frederick looked at the camera in Theo’s hands. “Mr Pettit gave the film. For the clock.”

Theo looked down at the camera for a long time.

“It’s not for having,” said Frederick. “Like the eleven pounds. It’s not for having.” He looked at the yard. “It’s for using.”

“I know,” said Theo.

He did not say anything else. He did not need to. He put the camera’s strap over his head, so that it hung against his chest, heavy, the way the goldfish had hung in its bag, the way Felix had held the pie, the way Frederick had held the clock; and sat on the swing with his hand on it.

Then he opened one of the yellow boxes, and took out the film, and loaded it, slowly, with his tongue between his teeth, following the little diagram inside the back, the way Mrs Sixkiller had shown him with hers; and closed the back with a click; and wound it on, once, twice, three times, with the lever by the dent; and raised it; and pointed it at Frederick, on the porch boards, by the post, in the morning light.

“Don’t,” said Frederick.

“It’s my birthday,” said Theo, and the camera clicked.

---

Mrs Sixkiller taught him to drive at eleven.

She did it on the gravel road, on the private part of it, the quarter of a mile from the paved road to the farmhouse that belonged to the farm and not to the county, which she said was the only place in the State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah where a boy of sixteen with no licence could legally be put behind the wheel of a motor car, and she had checked, and she had rung Officer Hummingbird to check, and Officer Hummingbird had rung Deputy Tidwell to check, and they had both arrived at the same answer at the same time.

It was her car. The blue one. Old, very clean.

She sat in the passenger seat with her hat on and her hands folded in her lap, and Theo sat in the driver’s seat with his hands on the wheel at ten to two, the way Kimura held it, and his camera on its strap round his neck, which he would not take off; and Frederick and Marcus and Felix stood at the side of the gravel road in the sun by the mailbox and watched, and Castellanos stood a little way off with his arms folded, and Kimura was somewhere, looking at a tree.

“Clutch,” said Mrs Sixkiller.

Theo found the clutch.

“Gear.”

Theo found the gear. The car made a noise like a dog being stepped on.

“Again,” said Mrs Sixkiller, without any change in her voice at all. “Gently. You don’t fight it. You persuade it.”

“Like pastry,” said Felix, from the side of the road.

Mrs Sixkiller did not turn her head.

“Exactly like pastry,” she said.

Theo persuaded it. The car moved. It moved forward along the gravel road, slowly, very slowly, at about the speed of a walking man, and then faster, a little, at the speed of a man on a blue bicycle; and Theo sat bolt upright behind the wheel with his hands at ten to two and his camera on his chest and his face white with concentration, and the stones crunched under the tyres, and the dust came up behind, pale, and hung; and beside him, in the passenger seat, with her hands folded in her lap, Mrs Sixkiller looked straight ahead through the windscreen and said, at intervals, in the voice in which she had taught forty-one years of the fourth grade and the eighth, mirror, and slower, and that’s a hen, Theo, they’re not on the road, but you look anyway.

They went to the bottom of the gravel, to the paved road, and stopped, very carefully, a yard from the edge of it, exactly.

Then Mrs Sixkiller said now back, and Theo turned the car round, in eleven movements, in the width of the gravel road, with the stones flying, while Mrs Sixkiller sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and did not say anything at all for the whole of it.

“That,” whispered Felix, at the side of the road, “is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen. Worse than the turtle.”

They came back up the gravel road to the farmhouse at nine miles an hour. Theo stopped the car by the oak. He turned the key. He sat behind the wheel with his hands still at ten to two and did not move.

Mrs Sixkiller looked at him.

“Well,” she said. “You didn’t kill anybody.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Or a hen.”

“No, ma’am.”

Mrs Sixkiller opened her door. Then she stopped, with one foot on the gravel, and looked back at him, at the boy in the driver’s seat of her car with a camera round his neck and his face still white; and the corner of her mouth did the small thing it did, and went on doing it.

“Happy birthday, Theo,” she said.

---

They came at seven, for the party.

Nobody had organised it. Frederick did not think anybody had organised it. But at seven o’clock, as the sun went down behind the trees and the heat came off the yard, the cars started coming up the gravel road, one after another, in their own dust: Darlene’s, a big old station wagon with a cake in a box on the passenger seat; Bonnie Tackett’s pickup, with Bonnie in it and Kaylee and Tucker in the back, Tucker standing up holding on to the cab with his goggles on, for no reason; Royce Pettit’s pickup, empty, with Royce in it in a clean shirt; Earl’s car, not the van, with Earl in it and Mrs Ledbetter beside him in the passenger seat in her lilac dress and her enormous thick glasses, holding her handbag on her knees; and Cecil Rowe, last, on foot, up the gravel road out of the trees from the direction of the cove, with a cool box in one hand and nothing on his top half at all.

They sat on the porch, and the steps, and the swing, and on kitchen chairs that Felix and Marcus carried out, and on the grass at the bottom of the steps; and Cecil Rowe fried catfish in Mrs Sixkiller’s iron pan on a gas ring that he had brought in the cool box; and Darlene’s cake was chocolate, three layers, with THEO 16 on it in white icing, which Darlene said she had put on with a piping bag and her own two hands at five o’clock that morning before the café opened, and which said THEO in very large letters and 16 in very small ones because she had run out of room.

Kaylee gave Theo a whistle.

It was a lifeguard’s whistle, orange, plastic, on a lanyard, like hers. She held it out to him across the porch without any expression at all.

“Spare one,” she said. “Don’t use it at my pool.”

Theo looked at the whistle. He looked at Kaylee.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t thank me,” said Kaylee. “It’s a whistle.” She sat down on the top step, beside Frederick, by the post, and looked at the yard, and did not look at either of them. “You blow it when somebody’s doing something stupid,” she said. “That’s all it’s for. Somebody’s always doing something stupid.” A pause. “You’ll need it.”

Tucker gave Theo a can of orange.

Earl gave Theo a ride card.

---

It was a yellow card, small, with RURAL TRANSIT - ONE RIDE printed on it in blue, the same as the one in the little window of Frederick’s wallet, except that there was no hole punched in it; and on the back of it, in pencil, in capitals, in the hand that wrote Hanover plus three on the clipboard, it said GOOD FOR ONE RIDE ANYWHERE IN CRAIG OR MAYES. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. EARL.

“It’s not allowed,” said Earl, handing it over, gravely. “I’m not allowed to give them out. They’re the county’s.” He looked at the card in Theo’s hand. “But it’s your birthday, and you’ve been on my van six times, and you never once didn’t say thank you.” He considered. “So I’ll pay for it. Out of my own pocket. One fifty. It’s legal if I pay for it.”

Theo looked at the card. He looked at Earl.

“Thank you,” he said.

“There,” said Earl, with satisfaction. “Seven.”

He sat down on a kitchen chair at the bottom of the porch steps with a plate of Cecil Rowe’s catfish on his knee, next to Mrs Ledbetter, and ate it; and after a while, with his mouth full, he looked up the steps at Frederick, on the top step, by the post, beside Kaylee.

“Hanover,” said Earl.

“Earl.”

“You hear about the bridge?”

Frederick did not say anything for a moment.

“Which bridge?”

“Big Cabin,” said Earl. “On 4510. The one that’s been out since 2017.” He shook his head, slowly, in wonder. “They’ve got a crew on it. Since Wednesday. Since before the storm. Three trucks and a crane and twelve men, working, in this heat, on a Sunday, I saw them this morning on the way to church. Commissioner was out there on Tuesday in a suit, standing on it, saying it’d be open by Christmas.” He put a piece of catfish in his mouth. “Never seen anything like it. In my life. Forty years I’ve been driving round that bridge. Forty years they’ve been saying it.” He chewed. “And now there’s a crane.”

On the bottom step, Theo had stopped eating his cake.

“Why now?” said Frederick.

Earl thought about it. He thought about it the way he thought about everything, slowly, honestly, as if nobody had ever asked him before, looking at the yard.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I’ve been thinking about it all week. Bud asked me on the dialysis run. Mrs Ledbetter asked me.” He looked at Mrs Ledbetter, beside him, who was looking at the catfish on her plate through her enormous glasses with extraordinary concentration. “There was a fella on the van on Tuesday. Big fair fella, from out of state, with a cap. Got on at Vinita and rode to Cove Point. I told him about the train.” He considered. “Maybe somebody told somebody.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was just time.”

He ate the rest of his catfish.

“Anyhow,” said Earl. “Christmas. I’ll be able to do Big Cabin straight through. Ten minutes off the dialysis run. Each way.” He looked at the yard with deep content. “Bud’ll be pleased. Ten minutes is a long time when you’re on the machine.”

Beside Earl, Mrs Ledbetter had put both her hands over her face.

On the top step, beside Frederick, Kaylee did not say anything at all. She looked at the yard. She looked at it for a long time. And then, without turning her head, she put her hand on his arm, the right one, on the bandage, very lightly, for about one second, and took it away.

---

His mother rang at nine, on the telephone that did nothing else; and she did not ask for him.

“Is it Theo’s birthday?” she said, in Swedish, at four in the morning, on Öland, in the dark. “Is he there?”

“Yes. He’s on the swing. Everybody’s here.”

“Give him the telephone, Fredde.”

He gave Theo the telephone. Theo took it on the swing, with his camera round his neck and Kaylee’s whistle round it too, on top, orange, and Earl’s ride card in his shirt pocket, and the cake on a plate on his knee with THEO on it in enormous letters; and held it to his ear, and said hello?, uncertainly, in English.

And then his face changed.

Frederick could hear it. Everybody on the porch could hear it, faintly, out of the telephone, across the five thousand miles and the Atlantic and the Baltic, at four o’clock in the morning: a woman’s voice, low and warm and slightly thick with sleep, singing, in Swedish, slowly, the whole of it, every verse, the song they sang at Solliden for birthdays, which Theo had heard twice, in the summers of 2026 and 2027, at the long table on the lawn with the lighthouse at the end of the point, and had pretended he did not know, and knew.

Ja, må han leva. Ja, må han leva. Ja, må han leva uti hundrade år.

Theo sat on the swing and held the telephone and listened to the Queen of Sweden sing to him at four in the morning, and did not move, and did not say anything, and his face did nothing at all, the way it had done nothing in front of the photograph of the screen door with the blue ribbon under it, the way it had done nothing at the screen door with the camera, waiting.

When she had finished there was a silence on the porch.

“Tack,” said Theo, into the telephone, very carefully, in Swedish, the one word.

He gave the telephone back.

---

At midnight, on the porch, in the row, under the eave, with the four of them on their backs on the boards and the party gone and the cars gone down the gravel road one after another in their dust and the whip-poor-will in the oak, which had come back on Friday, saying its name; Theo, beside Frederick, with his camera on his chest, said, into the dark:

“Freddie.”

“What?”

“We’re the same now.”

Frederick lay on the boards and looked up at the edge of the stars past the eave.

“Sixteen,” he said.

“Sixteen,” said Theo. He was quiet for a while. “Since May you’ve been sixteen and I haven’t. Three months and seventeen days. Every year. It’s terrible. You get to be everything first.” A pause. “And now we’re the same. Till May.”

“Till May.”

Theo was quiet again.

“I can drive,” he said. “Nearly. On a private road. At nine miles an hour.”

“I know. I saw.”

“I’ve got a camera. And a whistle. And a ride card. And a can of orange.” He considered. “And Kate’s got the lizard.”

“Yes.”

“Best birthday,” said Theo, into the dark, quite seriously, as if he had thought about it all day and come to a conclusion. “Of my life.”

He was asleep a minute later. All at once, the way he always was. With his hand flung out across the boards towards the post, so that his fingers were a few inches from Frederick’s head, and his other hand on the camera on his chest, holding it.

Frederick lay awake for a while. He looked at the edge of the stars, and the galaxy going across them, faint, edge on; and listened to the whip-poor-will; and thought about a crane on a bridge at Big Cabin, and twelve men working on a Sunday in the heat, and ten minutes off the dialysis run, each way, which was a long time when you were on the machine.

He thought: I did that.

He thought: no. Ms Fenner did. And the Prime Minister. And the commissioner, in a suit. And a photographer who was nineteen. And Earl, who told everybody about the train.

He thought that it did not matter who had done it. He thought that the bridge would be open by Christmas, and Earl would drive straight through, and Bud would be home ten minutes sooner, and nobody would ever know why, and that this was right. That was all a signature was for.

He slept.