The Searcher(80)

Trey nods. They eat without talking for a while. Outside the window, twilight is setting in and the cloud has started to break up, leaving patches of sky a luminous lavender-blue, edged by the lacy black silhouette of the tree line. Somewhere far away, a fox barks sharply.

“You could live up the mountains,” Trey says. He has clearly been thinking this over. “If you got good at it. Never come down again.”

“You can’t shoot jeans,” Cal points out. “Or sneakers. Unless you want to sew your clothes out of hides, you’d have to come down sometimes.”

“Once a year. Stock up.”

“You could, I guess,” Cal says. “I’d get lonesome, though. I like having someone to talk to, now and again.”

The kid, scraping his plate, throws him a glance that says they differ widely on this. “Nah,” he says.

Cal gets up to fix Trey a second helping. From the stove he says, “You wanna bring one of your friends with us, next time we go hunting?”

The last thing he wants is more random kids hanging around his house, but he feels pretty safe; he just wants to confirm a suspicion he has. Sure enough, Trey stares at him like he just suggested inviting a buffalo to dinner, and shakes his head.

“Your call,” Cal says. “You got friends, though, right?”

“Huh?”

“Friends. Buddies. Compa?eros. People you hang out with.”

“I did have. I’ll get back with them sometime.”

Cal puts Trey’s plate in front of him and goes back to his own dinner. “What happened?”

“They’re not allowed hang around with me any more. They don’t care, but; they would anyway. I just . . .” He twitches one shoulder, sawing at a chunk of rabbit. “Not now.”

An edge of tension has slid back into his body. Cal says, “How come they’re not allowed to hang out with you?”

“We did some stuff together,” Trey explains through a mouthful, “like we robbed a coupla bottles of cider and got drunk. Stuff like that. There was the four of us in it—the cider wasn’t my idea, even. But their parents reckoned it was all my fault ’cause I’m the bad one.”

“You don’t seem like a bad kid to me,” Cal says, even though Trey doesn’t seem particularly upset about it. “Who says you are?”

Trey shrugs. “Everyone.”

“Like who?”

“Noreen. Teachers.”

“What’d you do that’s so bad?”

Trey twists one corner of his mouth, implying a surfeit of examples. Cal says, “Pick one.”

“Teacher was giving me hassle today. For not paying attention. I told her I don’t give a shite.”

“Well, that’s not bad,” Cal says. “It’s unmannerly, and you shouldn’ta done it. But it’s not a question of morals.”

The kid is giving him that look again. “That’s not manners. Manners is like chew with your mouth closed.”

“Nah. That’s just etiquette.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Etiquette is the stuff you gotta do just ’cause that’s how everyone does it. Like holding your fork in your left hand, or saying ‘Bless you’ if someone sneezes. Manners is treating people with respect.”

“I don’t always,” Trey says.

“Well, there you go,” Cal says. “Maybe it’s your manners that need work. You could do with keeping your mouth shut when you chew, too.”

Trey ignores that. “Then what’s a question of morals, so?”

Cal finds himself uncomfortable with this conversation. It brings back things that put a bad taste in his mouth. Over the last few years it’s been brought home to him that the boundaries between morals, manners and etiquette, which have always seemed crystal-clear to him, may not look the same to everyone else. He hears talk about the immorality of young people nowadays, but it seems to him that Alyssa and Ben and their friends spend plenty of their time concentrating on right and wrong. The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as Cal can see, have to do with what words you should and shouldn’t use for people, based on what problems they have, what race they are, or who they like to sleep with. While Cal agrees that you should call people whatever they prefer to be called, he considers this to be a question of basic manners, not of morals. This outraged Ben enough that he stormed out of Cal and Donna’s house in the middle of Thanksgiving dessert, with Alyssa in tears running after him, and it took him an hour to cool down enough to come back in.

In Cal’s view, morals involve something more than terminology. Ben damn near lost his mind over the importance of using the proper terms for people in wheelchairs, and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that, but he didn’t mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair, and Cal would bet a year’s pension that the little twerp would have brought it up if he had. And on top of that, the right terms change every few years, so that someone who thinks like Ben has to be always listening for other people to tell him what’s moral and immoral now. It seems to Cal that this isn’t how a man, or a woman either, goes about having a sense of right and wrong.

He tried putting it down to him getting middle-aged and grumpy about young people these days, but then the department went the same way. They brought in a mandatory sensitivity training session—which was fine by Cal, given the way some of the guys treated, for example, witnesses from bad hoods and rape victims, except the session turned out to be all about what words they were and weren’t allowed to use; nothing about what they were doing, underneath all the words, and how they could do it better. Everyone was always talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.