Free No Signature by William Bell

the fire, and besides, it would keep the bugs away.
    I was sitting across the flames from him in a lawn chair, struggling to read in the waning light. He was on his third beer. He had peeled the bark off a thick stick and was carving grooves and shapes into it with his pocket knife. The little fire popped and crackled every once in a while—because he was burning hemlock, he told me.
    “Mind if I ask you somethin?” he asked, tossing the stick into the fire and folding up his knife.
    I looked up from
Shogun
, but held it open. “Yeah?”
    “What’s eatin’ you, anyway?”
    “What do you mean?”
    He stuffed the knife into his hip pocket. “You know what I mean.”
    “No, I don’t.” I looked down at the page.
    “That. Just like that.”
    I looked up again. His mouth was set in a firm line. He drained his beer and dropped the can beside his chair. He pulled his pipe out of the pocket of his bush shirt, and pointed the stem at me.
    “Im tryin’ to talk to you and you look at your book. That’s good manners, is it?”
    “Sorry,” I said. I closed the book and stared atthe flames. They were orange-yellow-red, but blue where they separated themselves from the whitened ash of the wood. I waited.
    “What’s the problem that you can’t at least be polite? I mean, okay, we haven’t seen each other for a long time. I know it hasn’t been easy for you. But I’ve waited a couple of days. You’re not just shy, you’re rude.”
    Rude
. That was the kind of word my elementary school teachers used.
    “Can’t you talk to me?” he went on. “I was hopin’ we could be … I don’t know … friends.”
    Yeah, right, I thought. You turn up from out of nowhere and all of a sudden we’re pals.
    “Well?” he said, his voice edged with anger now.
    “Well what? What do you want me to say? This wasn’t my idea, this trip. I didn’t even want to come,” I said.
    “Why did you then?”
    “Mom made me.”
    He got up out of the lawn chair and got another beer out of the fridge. Great, I thought, maybe he’ll leave me alone. I opened my book. No such luck.
    “She made you?” he asked as he sat down. “You’re a little old for that, aren’t you? What do you mean she
made
you?”
    “She can get pretty stubborn sometimes.”
    “That’s for sure,” he said, “she sure can.”
    That made me mad, but I kept my mouth shut.
    He puffed away for a few moments. “Look,” he tried again, “why can’t we make this a nice trip? Have some fun. Get to know each other.”
    “If you wanted to get to know me maybe youshouldn’t have taken off when I was a kid.”
    Even in the fading light I could see his face redden. He looked away, as if there was something in the trees that suddenly caught his attention, and stayed like that awhile. Then he nodded. When he started talking again his voice shook, and he kept his eyes on the darkened trees.
    “I guess this was a bad idea, this trip. I … maybe I didn’t think it through good enough. You’re right.” He turned and faced me. “It was a bad idea. Tomorrow we’ll get to the Soo. There’s someplace I want to take you, if it’s okay with you. It won’t take long. Then I’ll get you a bus ticket to Thunder Bay.”
    He stood up and walked slowly, as if he was carrying something heavy, to the back of the van. I heard the rear door open and then slam shut. When he came back to the fire there was a bottle of whiskey in his hand.
    The old man stopped beside me. I looked up at him, but he kept his face averted. His voice was quiet and trembled even more than before.
    “Just for the record, Steve, there’s somethin’ you ought to know. I suffered too.”
    Slowly, holding the bottle by the neck, he walked into the trees, along the path that led to the pond.
    I closed my book and looked into the fire. In
Shogun
, somebody, one of the Japanese, explained to Blackthorne how the Japanese handled their problems. He said that they put the problem “in a box” in their