(2007) Chasing Fireflies - A Novel of Discovery (41 page)

Because of the restraining order, Mandy had asked the court to allow her to accompany me to the bank. She and my shadow met me downstairs. He was wearing flip-flops, cutoffs, and one of Tommye's Georgia Bulldogs T-shirts.

I squatted down and said, "Nice shirt."

He smiled and jumped up on my back. While I piggybacked the kid, Mandy escorted us to the bank, where an expressionless manager met us, assisted by one of the police who'd arrested me. Without a "Hello" or a "Would you like a cup of coffee," he led us through the lobby and into a private sitting room adjacent to the bank's high-tech vault.

I showed him the number, he retrieved the box, we turned our keys, and he walked out, closing the door behind him. I lifted the lid, pulled out a stack of papers, and laid them on the desk. They were old and yellowed, but they smelled of Tommye's perfume, which told me she'd been here. Most of the sheets were deposit receipts from 1979 and 1980. One set came from a wholesale brokerage house in New Orleans, and others from an offshore bank in the Bahamas. The dollar amounts were staggering. I picked up the first, reading and rereading it several times. About the third time, the numbers added up and the truth sank in.

"Holy sh-" I looked at Sketch. "I mean, smokes!"

Mandy leaned in and we stared, shoulder to shoulder.

Tommye had arranged the receipts according to date, so I spread them across the desk and tried to make sense of the bigger picture. It didn't take either one of us very long.

Mandy's eyes grew wide, and her jaw dropped. "And to think this has been sitting under his nose the entire time. This could ruin him. How'd she get it?"

If there ever was such a thing as a paper trail, we were looking at it.

"No telling. Tommye could get into anywhere." I looked at the puzzle pieces in front of me and, in my mind, began writing the story I'd been wanting to write for most of my life.

At the back of the stack I found two pictures. The first was a picture of Tommye taken in high school. She stood between Unc and me, her arms around our shoulders. It was the Tommye I wanted to remember. She must've known this.

The second picture was one that Lorna had taken on the front porch just after Sketch ate his birthday cake. Dad and I stood on either side, while Sketch sat in Tommye's arms wearing an icing mustache. Her hair was thin, eyes dark and sunk deep into their sockets, and pain had wrinkled her forehead. I studied the picture and noticed something I'd not seen that night. Printed in small black letters across the bottom of her T-shirt were the words AMERICAN PIE. A yellow sticky note was attached to the back of the picture. On it she'd written, The three men I admire most ... they caught the last train for the coast....

I could hear her voice, see her sly smile and the look behind her eyes. I held the picture while the edges grew cloudy and my insides began to ache.

Mandy put her hand on mine. Quiet comfort that felt no need to speak.

Sketch looked at the picture and then at me. He'd been practicing, but we were still a long way off. His face grew red as his mouth tried to remember how to form the words. The whisper was broken and raspy. "Y-o-u m-i-s-s h-e-r?"

"Yeah ... I do."

He held the picture, tried to speak, but then just smiled and tapped himself on the chest.

I make a living with words, but sometimes words can't say what needs saying. Sketch taught me that. I slid the picture into my shirt pocket and then shoved all the papers back in the box, locking it and hanging the keys around my neck. "Might as well let him keep it safe for us. Leastways 'til we can get the FBI down here."

Mandy nodded, pushed the box away, and sat back. "Ironic, don't you think?"

"Yeah . . . but sometimes the thing you need the most is right there under your nose."

We walked out of the vault, Sketch's hand in mine, the sound of our flip-flops echoing off the shiny steel walls. We stood on the sidewalk, where a September breeze met us after it had stirred on some foreign continent, swept across the sea, and filtered through the marsh, carrying with it the smell of home and moments worth remembering.

JOHN DOE #117 ADOPTED

John Doe #117 was given a permanent home this week, as he was adopted by William and Lorna McFarland of Brunswick. The State of Georgia, along with the help of an independent investigator, determined that John Doe #117 was a foundling-abandoned since birth. Parental rights were terminated five years ago in Atlanta and, in an effort to place the child in a permanent home, the child was named Stuart Smoak.

Two years ago he was adopted by Sonya Beckers, a Certified Nursing Assistant at Cedar Lakes Assisted Living Facility. Shortly thereafter, Sonya and Stuart disappeared. The two reappeared three months ago when Ms. Beckers dropped Stuart off at a railroad crossing south of Thalmann on Highway 99 just before her car was struck by a southbound freight train. Authorities did not speculate if the death was a suicide, as no note was found. Stuart was placed in Brunswick Boys' Home, then transferred to the McFarlands' home until a permanent living situation could be arranged.

Last week Mr. and Mrs. McFarland filed a petition with the courts to permanently adopt the child. Yesterday, in a private ceremony before the judge, the couple officially adopted John Doe #117. At the child's request, he changed his name to Tommye Chase McFarland. When asked what he wanted to be called, he scratched his head and said, "T.C."

When asked why he would adopt at the age of fifty-five, William McFarland said, "Every boy is born with a hole in his belly. If his dad don't fill it, it festers and becomes an aching black hole-one that he'll spend his waking hours trying to fill. Mostly with things that do him more harm than good.

"Lord knows I'm not as young as I once was, and I've made my fair share of mistakes, but . . . well, I ain't that old, and if I got to put a square peg in a round hole, well . . . That boy might not have been born of my loins, but he's been born of my heart. And I reckon that's good enough."

Mr. and Mrs. McFarland first became foster parents some twenty years ago when they accepted the placement of then seven-year-old Chase Walker. When asked why he chose to adopt Stuart, but hadn't adopted Chase more than twenty years ago, Mr. McFarland smiled, shook his head, and asked, "Why would I adopt my own son?"

I ince I met him at the hospital, my new little brother had 1known six names: "the kid," Snoot, Sketch, Buddy, Stuart, and finally, T.C. The first five seemed like impostors, or stand-ins until the real thing could be located. But when we finally started calling him T.C., well, the name was like an old shirt. It draped across his shoulders, hung loose around his neck, and the sleeves weren't too long. Besides, he seemed to like it. The more difficult transition occurred when I tried to insert "Dad" where "Unc" had once been. Problem was, when I tried to do so, I found they both meant the same thing.

T.C. and I watched from the porch steps as William "Liam" McFarland stepped out of Sally and walked beneath the pecan trees to the mailbox. His boots were muddy, shirt stained with salt and manure, and his hat was tipped back, shading the falling sun off his neck. He reached the end of the drive, flipped open the door, pulled out the mail, and pitched the junk into the trash can. He flipped through the bills, slid them into his shirt pocket, and meandered back toward us.

He climbed the steps, patted T.C. on the head, knocked my Braves cap on the floor, and sat between us, letting out a deep breath. "Phew, my dogs is tired." He tilted his hat back, leaned on his elbows, and stared out across the pasture. After a few minutes, he reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a small slip of paper.

It was a picture yellowed and wrinkled from time. It looked like it was taken somewhere in the seventies. A small boy sat on a man's shoulders. The boy was smiling, pulling on the man's right ear. The man had sideburns, one leg in a cast, and was leaning on a single wooden crutch. The other hand supported the boy's foot, but also kept him from falling backward.

I held up the picture and studied it. The boy wore a pair of cutoff jeans, cowboy boots, no shirt, and a summer tan. The man was a mixture of faded denim, snap cuffs, and a smile that spoke of contentedness.

In the distant background, I saw a brick building with a dark shingled roof and clock tower. It stood at the end of a long drive lined with trees. I extended the picture at arm's length and compared it to the driveway that spread out before me.

I flipped it over. On the back it read Liam and Me, 1979.

Unc slid a dirty finger underneath his nose and wiped his hand on his jeans. He spoke out across the porch steps. "That's us just a few days after you got caught on the tracks and took fifteen years out of my life ... which I couldn't spare."

T.C. laughed, pushing out a hoarse whisper.

Dad calculated. "That's about six months before the storm hit, and we found we weren't in Kansas anymore."

"You kept it all this time?"

"Sometimes ... when I reached my bottom and felt lower than a snake's butt in a wagon rut ..."

T.C. smiled. I just shook my head.

"And needed to remind myself that I wasn't some hallucinating lunatic, I'd pull it out and imprint the image one more time onto the backs of my eyelids." He sucked through his teeth and twirled the brow of his hat through his hands. "That picture got me through a lot of bad times."

"What's with the cast?"

He rubbed his leg. "Trains ain't gentle. And they ain't quick to slow down neither."

"The train actually hit you?"

"Well, of course it hit me. How you think I got you off that track? I jumped off the platform thinking I was Superman, tried to drag you off with me, and when I did, the front of that thing nearly tore my leg off. Spun us both through the air like a helicopter."

I studied the pictures in my head. "I have no memory of that."

"Probably just as well. It wasn't too pretty."

"The leg ever bother you?"

"Not really, but I can predict the rain or a coming cold snap better than that fellow on Channel 11."

I stared again at the picture. "What's the building?"

"Oh, that ..." He laughed. "That was the train depot that used to sit at the end of our driveway."

"Right down there?"

"Yup. Once your mom heard about your little escape-which, by the way, was the third time I'd found you down there-she contacted the city, said it was some sort of rat-infested hazard, and petitioned to have it torn down. So ... no more depot."

"That explains a lot."

He smelled of manure, sweat, and honesty.

"You got any more secrets?"

He raised his eyebrows, the laughter rising up from his belly. "That's probably enough for one lifetime."

There it was again. Laughter for pain.

T.C.'s hands were blazing across his sketchpad, and the puppeteer was warming up for a tap dance. We leaned in and studied his sketch. From a track-level perspective, his picture depicted a train that had come and gone and was now fading off into the distance-a black trail of smoke dissipating in its wake.

Dad put his hand on T.C.'s neck and patted his shoulders gently. T.C. shut his book, slid his pencil over his ear, and rested his head across the tops of his arms. If manhood is passed down, if it is a mantle cut from the cloth of one and draped across another, it is not done so using titles or accolades. Not hardly. It occurs there-in that spout now resting neck-high-pouring down the spine and into the belly in a language that has never been transcribed, but that every boy on the planet understands and has always understood.

I tucked T.C. into bed and promised him we'd go fishing tomorrow. He whispered, "It's dark in here." I clicked on the closet light and pulled the door behind me.

Because Vicky was sitting on blocks in the barn and weeks away from drivable, Dad let me drive Sally. Darkness blanketed the pasture, stars lit the atmosphere, and the first hint of a gentle and nearly-cool easterly breeze swept across my face. Headlights off, I idled down the drive, stopping in front of the mailbox. I cut the engine, folded the letter, stuck it in the box, and raised the red metal flag.

I lifted my nose, smelled the marsh, and closed my eyes. I heard the distant sound of booted footsteps jumping off hollow porch boards. When I opened my eyes, I saw a man wearing pants and no shirt running figure eights through the pasture, waving his arms in the air. With every swipe, he'd pull down a star, place it in the jar, and then run wildly in search of another. Trailing not far behind him came a giggling, skinny boy, the moonlight bouncing off his glasses.

I shook my head and slipped through the fence, where we spent the next hour filling up that mason jar-and the kid who would carry it.

Oh, yeah, the letter read:

Dear Dad,

I was looking the wrong way.

Your son,

Liam

It was the first time I'd ever written my name.

was eight. Maybe nine. Still in that magical age where hope and sweat dripped from the same pores. My neighborhood was filled with rough and tumble boys. If we were not throwing a football, or hitting a baseball, then we were riding our bicycles, terrorizing the neighborhood. Everybody had a dirt bike. Everybody but me. My bike, if you can call it that, was a hand-me-down, via my sister, and about two sizes too small. It was yellow, had a banana seat, and little white plastic tassels hanging from the grips which, all total, made me the laughingstock of the neighborhood. Further, the crank arms were so short and it was geared so low, that I had to pedal twice for every one of my friends' revolutions. Riding around the neighborhood, my legs looked like a spinning blur of tennis shoe over tube sock.