Timéo

The boy did not come on Friday.

At half past six the dogs lifted their heads from under the trucks and listened to the track and put their heads down again, and at seven they did it again, and at half past seven Magali came out of the stables with a fork in her hand and stood in the yard looking at the empty track, and said, "Dentist," in a voice that meant she did not believe it, and went back in. By nine Gaëtan was up, which he never was, standing in the kitchen doorway in yesterday's shirt with his phone in his hand, ringing a number and listening to it ring and ringing it again. By ten he had rung the café in Vauvert where Timéo's mother worked, and the mother had said that Timéo had gone out on Thursday evening to meet a girl and had not come home, and that she supposed he had slept at a friend's, and that he was seventeen and she was not his jailer, and that if Gaëtan saw him he was to tell him that his dinner was in the bin.

By eleven nobody was pretending.

They found him at a quarter past twelve. Or rather, he found them. Fredo had gone out in the truck to drive the back roads towards Vauvert, slowly, looking in the ditches. Gaëtan had gone the other way in the pickup. Magali and Yassine had stayed at the mas because somebody had to, and were standing in the yard in the full white glare of noon with nothing to do and no way to stop doing it, when Yassine saw a figure on the track.

It was a long way off, at the far end where the track met the road, a dark shape wavering in the heat as if it were under water. It was walking. It was walking very slowly, the way a man walks at the end of a long march, or a very old man, or someone who is concentrating all their attention on not falling down. It was too small and too thin to be a man.

Magali saw it a second after he did. She did not say anything. She dropped the bucket she was holding and ran.

• • •

He had been left on the road.

That was what Timéo told them later, in pieces, the parts of it he could tell. Not in Vauvert. Not where they had taken him. On the road from Le Cailar, at the turning for the marsh, at the foot of the old wooden cross that stood there on its plinth with the faded plastic flowers at its base, the kind of cross that stood at every crossroads out here and that nobody looked at any more. They had pushed him out of the back of a car at dawn and driven away, and he had sat at the foot of the cross for a long time, he did not know how long, until he could stand. Then he had walked. It was six kilometres. He had walked it in the heat with no water and his right hand held against his chest in his left, and he had not stopped, he said, because he was afraid that if he sat down again he would not get up, and because he wanted to get home.

He said that. Home. Magali, kneeling beside him on the kitchen floor where he had sat down at last against the leg of the table, heard him say it and put her hand over her mouth and turned her face away.

His face was not too bad. That was the first thing Yassine noticed, kneeling on the other side of him with a bowl of water and a cloth, and the part of him that kept the notebook noticed it coldly and precisely and filed it: the face was not too bad because they had been careful with the face. One eye swollen and closing, a split at the corner of the lip, a bruise along the jaw going purple. The kind of face a boy could explain to his mother. I came off the scooter. I fell at the beach. A bull got me. The body was worse. He would not let them take his shirt off, but Yassine could see the way he held himself, folded round his own ribs, and the dark wet patches coming through the cotton at the side.

And the hand.

He held it against his chest the whole time, cradled in his left, the way you would hold a bird. When Magali tried to look at it he flinched so hard that he cracked his head against the table leg, and cried out, and then was ashamed of crying out, and set his jaw, and held it out to her himself, slowly, his own arm shaking.

Two fingers. The first and second, on the right hand. Bent at an angle that fingers do not bend at, the knuckles swollen up tight and shining and black.

His running hand. The one he would have worn the crochet on.

Magali looked at it for a long time. Then she looked up at Yassine across the boy's bent head, and the look on her face was one he would remember: not grief, not anger, not yet. Only a kind of terrible arithmetic. A woman adding something up and arriving at a number.

• • •

Gaëtan got there first, then Fredo. They had both been rung. Gaëtan came in at a run and stopped dead in the kitchen doorway and stood there looking at the boy on the floor, and his face did something Yassine had never seen a face do, it went blank and then white and then, very slowly, as if a hand were pressing down on it from inside, it went grey. He did not say anything. He did not go to Timéo. He stood in the doorway holding the frame with one hand as though the house were moving.

Timéo looked up at him and tried to grin. It came out crooked, the split lip pulling it sideways.

"I didn't say anything," he said. "Gaëtan. I didn't. They asked me things and I didn't say."

Gaëtan made a sound. It was not a word.

"What things?" said Yassine.

The boy's eyes came round to him, and something passed across them, quick, a flinch, gone before Yassine could read it. Then he looked down at his hand.

"Things," he said. "Stuff. About the horses. About when." He shook his head, carefully, as if it might come off. "I didn't say."

Fredo came in behind his son and pushed him gently out of the doorway and came into the kitchen and looked down at the boy on the floor. He looked for a long time. He looked at the face and at the way the boy was holding his ribs and at the hand. Then he got down on his knees on the stone floor, slowly, in stages, the way Manolo used to get up out of his plastic chair, and put one big hand on the top of the boy's head, on the black hair that was matted now with dust and dried sweat, and held it there.

"Pichot," he said. Provençal. Little one. "You walked from the cross?"

"Yes."

"Six kilometres. With that hand."

"Yes."

"Good," the old man said, and his voice cracked down the middle like dry wood, and he kept his hand on the boy's head and looked at nothing.

• • •

There was a phone.

They found it in the pocket of Timéo's jeans when they got him into the truck to take him to the hospital in Nîmes. He had not known it was there. A cheap black phone, like the one Gaëtan had been given behind the dunes, like the one in Yassine's own pocket, switched on, with a single message on its screen. Gaëtan read it standing in the yard with the boy already in the cab and Magali beside him and the engine running. Then he gave it to his father. Fredo read it. He did not give it to anyone else. But he did not turn the screen away either, and Yassine, standing at his shoulder, read it too.

That was fingers. Next is not fingers. The moon is in ten days. Answer.

Gaëtan was looking at Yassine. Across the yard, across his father's shoulder, across the phone in the old man's hand. Just for a moment. It was the look of a man in a burning house who has just seen, through the smoke, the only other person who knows where the fire started.

Then he looked away.

• • •

They told the hospital it was a bull.

Magali told them. She sat in the corridor of the emergency department at Nîmes on a plastic chair, very like the one under the plane tree, with Timéo's mother beside her, and told the doctor and the nurse and the mother, in a flat steady voice, that the boy had been in the near pen with the young emboulés, showing off, and one of them had got him against the rails, and that it had been his own fault and he knew it and he was sorry. Timéo, on a trolley, with his hand in a splint and his ribs strapped and his face going purple and yellow under the strip lights, said yes, a bull, his own fault, sorry. His mother, a small tired woman in a café apron who had come straight from work and still had a pencil behind her ear, looked at Magali for a long time, and then at her son, and said nothing at all, and Yassine understood that she did not believe a word of it, and that she had decided not to believe it, which out here, he was beginning to understand, was a different thing from not knowing.

They drove back in the dark. Nobody spoke.

• • •

Fredo called them into the kitchen at midnight.

The table had been cleared. The oilcloth with its faded lemons lay bare under the lamp. Fredo sat at the head of it, where he always sat, and Gaëtan sat on his right, in his own chair, the one Arnaud had sat in, and Magali sat on his left, and Yassine stood by the dresser, because nobody had told him where to sit, until the old man looked up at him and pointed with his chin at the chair at the far end, the one opposite his own, the one nobody used.

He sat.

"Ten days," Fredo said.

Nobody answered.

"They want an answer. Here is the answer." The old man put his hands flat on the oilcloth among the lemons. "We don't run. Not on the moon. Not after. Not ever again, for them. That's finished."

"Papa," Gaëtan said.

"Finished." Fredo did not look at him. "Nine years I carried for that man. Nine years I let him sit at this table. And he put Manolo in the ground and he broke that boy's hand, and he thinks I'll carry his poison across my land because he's frightened me." He shook his head slowly. "He hasn't frightened me. He's made me remember."

"Remember what?" Magali said.

"That this is our land." Fredo looked at his daughter. "Not his. Not the bank's. Not the Dutchman's. Ours. For nine generations. And nobody, nobody, comes onto it and does that to a child." He lifted one hand and let it fall on the table. "So. We don't run, and we don't go, and we don't hide. We watch. Every night from now until the moon, and after. Two at a time. Somebody on the step, somebody at the pens. The dogs loose. Nobody alone anywhere. Nobody goes to Vauvert, nobody goes to the beach with a girl from the bakery." His mouth moved. It was not a smile. "And if they come, we'll be here."

Gaëtan was staring at the table. He had not looked up since his father began. His hands were clasped together in front of him so tightly that the knuckles had gone white, and Yassine, at the far end of the table, could see the edge of the cheap black phone in the pocket of his shirt, the one from the dunes, the one with a single number in it.

"And if they come with guns?" Gaëtan said, very quietly.

Fredo looked at him for a long moment. Then he got up.

He went out of the kitchen and down the passage. They heard him in his room, the creak of a wardrobe door, the scrape of something heavy being pulled out from the back of it. When he came back he was carrying a long bundle wrapped in an old grey horse blanket, and he laid it on the table among the lemons and unwrapped it, slowly, fold by fold, the way Manolo had unwrapped the photographs of the dead.

It was a rifle. An old one. A bolt-action hunting rifle with a dark walnut stock worn pale where generations of hands had held it, and a long blued barrel gone brown in patches, and a smell of gun oil and mothballs and the inside of a wardrobe.

"My father's," Fredo said. "For the boar, in the winter. And for one or two other things, once, during the war." He did not say what things. "I said no guns on my land. That was for them. This is for us."

He picked it up. He held it for a moment in both hands, looking at it, an old man holding something older than himself. Then he turned, not to his son, not to his daughter, but down the length of the table to the far end, and held it out.

"You," he said.

Yassine looked at it.

"You've got steady hands," the old man said. "I saw you at the fête. I saw you at the checkpoint, Magali told me. You don't shake." He held it out a little further. "Gaëtan shakes. Magali would shoot the first thing that moved and it would be a dog. You don't shake. You take the step tonight. You and me."

There was a silence at the table. Magali was looking at him. Gaëtan had lifted his head at last and was looking at him too, and in his face was something Yassine could not bear to look at for long, something between gratitude and shame.

He knew what he should do. He knew it the way he knew the paragraph in the authorisation that said what he was permitted to do and what he was not, the paragraph he had read in the cold office on the fourth floor and signed his name beneath. He knew that an officer in an infiltration was covered for carrying drugs across a marsh at night, and was not covered for this, for an old man's rifle on a kitchen table at midnight, for the step and the dark and whatever came up the track. He knew exactly what Granier would say. He could hear him saying it.

He stood up. He went down the length of the table, past Magali, past Gaëtan, under the lamp, and stopped in front of the old man, and put out his hands.

His hands did what they had been trained to do. He did not tell them to. They took the rifle and turned it, and his right thumb went to the bolt and drew it back, smooth, and his eyes went to the empty chamber, and his thumb pushed the bolt home again and his finger lay along the outside of the trigger guard, not on the trigger, never on the trigger, all in the time it took to breathe once, the way they had taught him in a range in Montpellier twelve years ago and every year since.

He looked up. Magali was watching his hands. She had seen.

Fredo had seen too. Something moved in the old face, and was gone, and he only nodded, once, and said, "Good," and turned away to find the box of cartridges in the dresser drawer.

Yassine stood under the lamp in the kitchen of the mas with the rifle in his hands and did not put it down.