company. While Bill watched, Henry disassembled the sandwich, tearing crusts off the bread, breaking it into hunks, ripping the bologna into strips, folding the cheese into little squares, then working on each pile, meat, then cheese, then bread. Policing his meals was now their side occupation after Henry had fainted at school. Bill was less shocked by it than Emily, but he himself had been a very anxious, worried, neurotic kid. So he tried to be patient with the eating business, having grown up in a time when adults didn’t know what to do with a nervous boy.
Back then, you had the good sense to hide anything different about you, and to pretend to be unfazed by what happened to you, regardless. You just tried to have a place in things, even if your place was terrible, on the bench, last in the pecking order.
The explorer Lewis had written letters to his mom from the army, saying he loved it, that they had “mountains of beef and oceans of whiskey” and he felt able to share it with the “heartiest fellow in camp.” His mom probably cried when she read it, because it showed he was an oddball, with difficulty making friends, and so grateful just to belong. But soon he was in fights. He was offering to kill people at dawn, and being court-martialed (acquitted) for dueling, then getting transferred elsewhere.
Bill didn’t want Henry’s boyhood to be like that, broken on the bitter rock of experience, because those boys never grew up but just got older, and many didn’t even do that. They went to pieces before everyone’s eyes, on the five o’clock news.
Bill also wanted to know and be close to his son, but Henry always sat down about a foot farther away than seemed necessary.
“So what were you thinking about,” Henry asked, “when it happened?”
“What, are you my shrink now, Hen? Is that the sort of stuff your shrink asks you? Stuff like that?”
“I guess. Pretty much.”
He shifted the peas to see Henry better. “I guess just the usual things, to answer your question. Lewis and Clark. Lewis’s suicide.”
“Oh, uh-huh.” He nodded. “Why’d he do that?”
“He owed a fair sum of money. He couldn’t find a good woman. It ran in his family. You pretty much take your pick.”
“How much money?”
“Only about six hundred bucks. Which was not that much, even by their standards. So it’s a mystery.”
“Why didn’t Clark loan him the money?” Henry asked, chewing with great concentration. Bill had a suspicion he counted his chews, and swallowed when he got to a certain number.
“It wasn’t so much the amount. He’d written checks with the War Department’s checkbook, and they suddenly refused to pay, left him holding the bag.”
“Why?” He was cross-legged on the floor and now pulled one knee up into a single-lotus and went on working the sandwich.
“I dunno, Hen. He’d come home to a different world. Jefferson wasn’t president anymore. Maybe they wanted to shut down anyone from the romantic old world so as to usher in the tougher, harder modern world.”
“Typical,” Henry said.
Bill shrugged. “I think it all follows from something the Spanish called the primary right of conquest. Your rights derived from your ability to attain them, by whatever means at your disposal. The ends justified the means.”
He was talking from under his crown of peas. “Anyway, Lewis’s main job on the expedition was to keep a document of the trip, but he had trouble with it and stopped four times, once for eleven whole months.”
“What was wrong?” Henry asked. He was working on the milk now, a swallow at a time.
“He suffered from a tendency. Sensible depressions of the mind,” Bill said. “Say, would you reach me that other pillow, old buddy, old pal?”
“Sure.” Anything to lay off that milk a minute. It was very odd. As a kid, Bill had eaten whatever was put in front of him. His dad used to challenge him to eat seven hot dogs or nine pieces of chicken, and he always did it, and never puked after. He’d eat his food and his dad’s, too. But then, his dad had sort of eaten vicariously through Bill, because of his severe ulcers.
“How’d he do it?” Henry asked.
“Shot himself. Once in the head, then the chest. When that didn’t work, he cut himself, sort of head to foot, with a straight razor.”
“I couldn’t cut myself,” Henry said. “I might be able to hang myself, though.”
“Henry, old boy, I hope you never have to work it out,” Bill said.
His son made him feel interesting. He was the kind of kid who wouldn’t want you to think you were boring, who wanted the people he met to feel good about themselves. Bill even felt guilty sometimes, having a son and liking it, too, like it was something he didn’t deserve.
Similarly, Jefferson and Lewis had almost been father and son, working alone together a lot in the president’s house. Lewis even delivered Tom’s first state-of-the-union address to Congress. Lewis always showed great presence of mind when in physical danger, people said. Others said less flattering things: that he was bowlegged, stiff, graceless, and awkward, that he reminded you of Napoleon. And Lewis did, in fact, sign “Citizen” in some of his letters, after the French custom of the time.
“There are always the murder theories, of course,” he said. “He was slightly mixed up with a traitor named Aaron Burr and his daughter Theodosia. Lewis even predicted his own death to her, in a letter.”
“But you don’t think it was murder,” Henry said, nodding. Henry worried about him, Bill knew, and seemed to know when he was down and wondering about the point to things. Much as he tried, Bill had difficulty reciprocating. It was just hard for him to picture what Henry—a modern boy—thought about during a given day. Public school had not changed, was still filled with threat, profanity, violence, obscenity and in-your-face sexuality. But in his own schooldays, it’d never occurred to him to borrow a gun from home. Now, if you had trouble at school you just killed everyone, staged your own massacre. Nobody understood it, but this harmless-looking thing, a public school, was actually driving some people insane. In the privacy of their minds, some kids were made nuts by it. And adults had little control over it, that shadow-world called adolescence.
Henry was an inch from triumph over the glass of milk. The color was leaving his face as he worked.
“We have a reliable account from people at the inn, what he said, what he did, the order of events,” Lewis said. “He said he wanted to rob his enemies of the pleasure.”
The blood gradually came back to Henry’s face, but it was clearly taking all of his will to beat this thing. He carried his plate and glass away, and pretty soon Lewis heard him above his head, in the bathroom. He strained to hear if Henry was getting rid of the food, their other fear, but couldn’t hear a thing in that old plaster-walled house, soundproof as a vault. You could commit murder in any room.
Bill stayed on the couch, thinking. It was supposed to be this big secret. When Tom asked for the money from Congress, he lied and said they wanted to explore the Mississippi. He didn’t want the Spanish or British to guess the truth, that he was about to grab up the whole thing, sea to shining sea.
It was a suicide mission. When Tom gave his instructions to Lewis, he didn’t say “when you elude the dangers and reach the Pacific.” Oh, no. He said “should you elude the dangers, & etc., etc.” He wasn’t sure they’d even come back.
He must have fallen asleep. Emily’s voice suddenly woke him. “Lewis, what is this?” she asked. His eyes popped open. On the floor was a sizable, long shipping box. “Please don’t tell me that’s what I think it is.”
“It’s not. I swear.”
“Because it looks to me like the UPS man just left a gun at my house.”
In