The Translator Read Online Free PDF Page B

play alone. He ran, preferring distance and endurance events; swam; wrestled too, strong and smart enough to win but maybe too generous or not competitive enough to win often.
    Golf. The summer after he graduated from high school they lived in an odd tall house on the edge of a golf course, a house like a summer cabin, paneled in varnished plywood. He’d get up early that summer and take a stained canvas bag of six or eight clubs he’d bought at a church sale and walk out onto the course when the grass was wet and the air still; play five or six holes until the shape of the course brought him back near his own lawn again, and quit.
    He took Kit with him if she got up quickly when she heard him wake and dress. She walked out with him into the checkered shade and the sounds of birds awaking, out along those mysterious shorn rides bordered with placid trees and undergrowth, the rough. He let her try to hit the ball, stood behind her to model her stance and swing, flinging her arms like a puppet’s. Now and then she lofted a ball sweetly into the day. Once she watched it float (with mysterious solemn slowness, hooking badly) right between a rising goldfinch crossing one way and a monarch butterfly sailing another, as though they played in Eden.
    Eden: Falin said that we are entranced with Eden because it is at once changeless and fleeting. It was on the golf course that Ben told her he was planning to join the army.
    “I can’t tell Mom and Dad yet,” he told her. “So I’m practicing on you.”
    They sat on a little bench between holes. She would remember the little herm that stuck up there by them, brushed metal, a dirty white towel hung around it: the ball washer.
    “I thought you were going to college. To Thomas Aquinas.”
    “I thought I wanted to. But. I want to do this.” He grinned at her.
    “That’s good, though, see. That’s what they’re going to say.”
    30

j o h n c r o w l e y
    He was turning a drab little flower in his fingers. Six months before he had driven home on a great black motorcycle and then told his parents it was his, he had bought it with his own money, earned at the jobs he was always able to get. He found it easier to explain and account for what he had done than to tell them what he planned to do. They were lucky that what he had gone and done so often made good sense, or at least wasn’t dangerous or wrong.
    “A soldier,” Kit said. “Mom and Dad’ll kill you.”
    “Soldiers,” he said, “don’t get killed by their parents. That’s not the idea.”
    “Oh jeez. Ben. But.”
    He began to explain, as much to himself as to them or to her. He had an obligation to his country, if he didn’t do it now it would be hanging over him till it was done. College wasn’t cheap, and if he got all the way through his army training, not only would he have completed a lot of work that would count toward a degree—language, for instance—he would be eligible for good scholarships and loans. The GI Bill. He talked carefully, building a small watertight house around himself, putting each brick in place with care. Dad had been in the army, after all, hadn’t he; this was a time when everybody ought to be willing to defend this country, everybody knew the dangers. If you joined up you served longer, yes, but you got top choice of programs and locations.
    Every brick he put in place shut him off further from Kit.
    She almost never thought about the future, it seemed brazen or dangerous, the very thing that the gods got you for doing. Ben though: he loved planning and believed in it. So he was probably right about the army, that it would be a good deal for him, and work out well. But why didn’t he see that it would leave her without him, with no future that she could envision, no way to get ready?
    “They’ll miss you so much. Mom will miss you so much.”
    “Oh,” Ben said. “I think they’re ready. They say I eat too much.”
    “You do. But they love that. They love you.”

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