Vessel

  Vessel

  Orson Scott Card

  Orson Scott Card

  Vessel

  PAULIE HARDLY KNEW HIS cousins before that first family reunion in the mountains of North Carolina, and within about three hours he didn't want to know them any better. Because his mom was the youngest and she had married late, almost all the cousins were a lot older than Paulie and he didn't hit it off very well with the two that were his age, Celie and Deckie.

  Celie, the girl cousin, only wanted to talk about her beautiful Arabians and how much fun she would have had if her mother had let her bring them up into the mountains, to which Paulie finally said, "It would have been a real hoot to watch you get knocked out of the saddle by a low branch," whereupon Celie gave him her best rich-girl freeze-out look and walked away. Paulie couldn't resist whinnying as she went.

  This happened within about fifteen minutes of Paulie's arrival at the mountain cabin that Aunt Rosie had borrowed from a rich guy in the Virginia Democratic Party organization who owed her about a thousand big favors, as she liked to brag. "Let's just say that his road construction business depended on some words whispered into the right ears."

  When she said that, Paulie was close enough to his parents to hear his father whisper to his mother, "I'll bet the left ears were lying on cheap motel pillows at the time." Mother jabbed him and Father grinned. Paulie didn't like the nastiness in Father's smile. It was the look that Grappaw always called "Mubbie's shit-eatin' smile." Grappaw was Father's father, and the only living soul who dared to call Father by that stupid baby nickname. In his mind, though, Paulie liked to think of Father that way. Mubbie Mubbie Mubbie.

  Late in the afternoon Uncle Howie and Aunt Sissie showed up, driving a BMW and laughing about how much it would cost to get rid of the scratches from the underbrush that crowded the dirt road to the cabin. They always laughed when they talked about how much things cost; Mubbie said that was because laughing made people think they didn't care. "But they're always talking about it, you can bet." It was true. They hadn't been five minutes out of the car before they were talking about how expensive their trip to Bermuda had been ha-ha-ha and how much it was costing to put little Deckie into the finest prep school in Atlanta ha-ha-ha and how the boat salesmen insisted on calling thirty-footers "yachts" so they could triple the price but you just have to grit your teeth and pay their thieves' toll ha-ha-ha like the three billy goats gruff ha-ha-ha.

  Then they went on about how their two older children were so busy at Harvard and some Wall Street firm that they just couldn't tear themselves away but they brought Deckie their little accident ha-ha-ha and they just bet that he and Paulie would be good friends.

  Deckie was suntanned to the edge of skin cancer, so Paulie's first words to him were, "What, are you trying to be black?"

  "I play tennis."

  "Under a sunlamp?"

  "I tan real dark." Deckie looked faintly bored, as though he had to answer these stupid questions all the time but he had been raised to be polite.

  "Deckie? What's that short for? Or are you named after the floor on a yacht?" Paulie thought he was joking, like old friends joke with each other, but Deckie seemed to take umbrage.

  "Deckie is short for Derek. My friends call me Deck."

  "Are you sure they aren't calling you duck?" Paulie laughed and then wished he hadn't. Deckie's eyes glazed over and he began looking toward the house. Paulie didn't want him to walk off the way Celie had. Deckie was two years older than Paulie, and it was the important two years. Puberty had put about a foot of height on him and he was lean and athletic and his moves were languid and Paulie wanted more than anything to be just like Deckie instead of being a medium-height medium-strong medium-smart freckled twelve-year-old nothing.

  So naturally he tried to cover up his stupid duck joke with an even lamer one. "Have you noticed how everybody in the family has a nickname that ends with ie?" Paulie said. "They might as well hyphenate that into the family name. You'd be Deck Ie-Bride, and Celie would be Ceel Ie-Caswell."

  Deckie smiled faintly. "And you'd be Paul Ie-Asshole."

  Paulie stood there blushing, flustered, until he finally realized that this was not a friendly joke, this was Deckie letting him know that he didn't exist. So Paulie turned and walked away from Deckie. Did Celie feel like this when she walked away from me? If she did then I'm a rotten shit to make somebody else feel like this. Why can't I just keep my mouth shut? Other people keep their mouths shut.

  Later he saw Deckie and Celie hanging around together, laughing until tears ran down Celie's face. He knew they were talking about him. Or if they weren't they might as well be. That was the kind of laughter that never included Paulie, not at school, not at home, not here at this stupid family reunion in this stupid forty-room mansion that some stupid rich person called a "cabin." Whenever people laughed in real friendship, close to each other, bound by affection or mutual respect or whatever it was, Paulie felt it like a knife in his heart. Not because he was particularly lonely. He liked being alone and other people made him nervous so it wasn't like he suffered. It hurt him because it was exactly the way people were with Mubbie. Nobody liked him and he still kept joking with them as if they were friends, even Mother, she didn't like him either, any idiot could see that, they were probably staying together for the sake of "the child," which was Paulie of course. Or rather Mother was staying for Paulie's sake, and Mubbie was staying for Mother's money, which was always useful for tiding him over between sales jobs, which Mubbie always joked his way into losing after having piled up an impressive record of lost sales and mishandled contracts. I'm just like him, Paulie thought. I joke like him, I make enemies like him, people sneer at me behind my back the way they do with him, only I'm not even studly enough to get a rich babe like Mom to bail me through all the screw-ups that lie ahead of me in life.

  If I could just learn to keep my mouth shut.

  He even tried it for the next couple of hours, being absolutely silent, saying nothing to anybody. But of course the moment he wanted to shut up, that was when all the aunts and uncles and the older cousins had to come up and pretend to care about him. No doubt Mother had noticed that Paulie was by himself and told them to go include Paulie. People did what Mother said, even her older brothers and sisters. She just had a way of making suggestions that people started following before they even had a chance to think about whether they wanted to. So when Paulie tried to get by with nods and smiles, he kept hearing, "Cat got your tongue?" and "You can't be that shy" and even "You got something you shouldn't in your mouth, boy?" to which Paulie thought of about five funny answers, one of which wasn't even obscene, but at least he managed not to say them out loud and completely scandalize everybody and make himself the humiliated goat of the whole reunion, with Mother apologizing to everybody and saying, "I can assure you he wasn't raised that way," so that everybody understood that he got his ugly way of talking from Mubbie's side of the family. Of course, Mother would no doubt end up saying that sometime before the week was over, but maybe Paulie would get through the first day without having to hear it.

  Dinner was bad. The dining room table was huge, but not big enough for everybody. Naturally, they had to have Nana, Mother's grandmother, at the table, even though she was so gaga that she had to be spoonfed some poisonously bland gruel and never seemed to understand anything going on around her. Why didn't they send her to the second table with the little children of some of the older cousins, nasty little brats with no manners at all and a way of whining that made Paulie want to insert silverware really far down their throats? But no, that was Paulie's place.

  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 kit
chen 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 ki
ssing 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."