All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook (22 page)

Z
oey's mom agrees to go. “We need to gas up anyway,” she says. Then she sighs. “And if there is a Bosco, or Mr. Bosco, there, Perry can . . . I don't know . . . test his memory, I guess.”

“Yes! Yes! Ow . . .” Zoey grabs her face and says, “I think the novocaine stuff is wearing off. Oh . . . Mom . . . I think I had too much custard.”

“Then you need to sit tight and rest,” her mom says firmly. “The prescription will be at the pharmacy. We'll pick it up before we go home.” She pulls the SUV up to the pump.

“Perry, you have to tell me if he says anything important,” Zoey says, and she manages to tag me in the arm as I unbuckle.

Zoey's mom and I hop out together. “Perry,” she says. She's tilting her head at me in a sorry sort of way. “You know
this might not amount to much, right?”

I nod. I know what she means.

“I don't want you to be disappointed.”

“I'll be fine,” I say. “And I'll be quick.”

“I'm on empty,” she says, grabbing the nozzle from the pump. “But we also have to get Zoey home.” She gives me a nod and a smile. I slip away.

Inside, I smell oil and rubber, and maybe cat litter. I call out. “Hello?”

“Yes, sir!” A man with a thick brown beard and a cap rolls out of a tiny side room on an office chair. I can tell he's gotten a good push off something—maybe from the cluttered metal desk inside. It looks like he makes nests out of papers. Behind him, the office walls are covered with hubcaps and keys on string tags, rusty license plates and loops of wires.

“Are you Mr. Bosco?” I ask.

“You found me,” he said. “What can I do for you?” He glances out toward the gas pump, probably wondering if something is wrong.

“Well, we're filling up,” I say. “But I have a question. A waitress at Toni's Corner said you might remember an accident that happened at this intersection. It was a long time ago.”

“Hmm . . . okay . . . so try me,” he says. “Tell me what you know.”

“It was twelve years ago.”

“Twelve. That's about the time I took the place over from my pop.”

“It was August. Nighttime. There was a hailstorm,” I say, and I watch his eyebrows rise.

“We get those,” he says. “Car? Truck? Big? Little?”

“Car.” I think hard. “Three people inside. Two older and one would have been a young—”

“Oh . . .” He breathes and squints like he might be seeing into the past. “There was a girl . . .”

I nod, but I wonder if he's guessing or playing fortune-teller with me.

“Hmm . . .” Bosco pops out of his chair and hauls open a rickety drawer in an old file cabinet. A great fat cat is startled to her feet on top of the cabinet, and she in turn startles me. She balances while Bosco tugs and the cabinet sways. “I probably don't have the towing record anymore . . . but . . .”

I lean left then right trying to see around him. He is shuffling through bunches of cloudy plastic zip-top bags. They look like they have trash in them—curls and wads of paper, and I can't tell what else. He mumbles something. I think he says, “. . . the watch bag . . .” He reaches way back—the drawer swallows his arm—and he pulls several bags out. He drops them on the office desk and pokes through them. “I'm thinking . . . this one,” he says. He taps it with his finger.

I'm thinking that I wasn't really looking for bags of trash—and Zoey's mom will not want me to bring one into
the tidy VanLeer SUV. I can't even take one just to be polite. Maybe Zoey's mom was right; maybe this is disappointing.

“I remember them for different reasons,” Mr. Bosco says. “This one, because of the girl. She was wrapped in a blanket when I pulled the truck up.”

He has my attention now. Mom said the police gave her a blanket.

“She was all alone, ankle-deep in hailstones and staring off almost like she was expecting to see something come out of the roadside fields.” He waves a hand through the air. “I thought she might have lost a dog that jumped out and ran off after the crash. But this girl wasn't calling out.” He ducks his head. Then looks up at me again. “I remember reading later . . .”

“Someone died.” I say it for him.

“Yeah. Tough,” he says. He scratches his bearded jaw. “I hope it wasn't somebody close to you. You're very young,” he says, as if he has just noticed that.

“I wasn't even around,” I say. The cat jumps down from the file cabinet and tiptoes over the mess on the desk. It hops to the floor and slinks out of the office. I hear it meow somewhere near the entrance. “Mr. Bosco . . . I don't understand about the bags of garbage,” I say. I can't stop eyeing the one he has picked out for me.

“Oh, not garbage,” he says. “Well, that's debatable, I suppose.” He reaches and pops the bag open for me with a snap. He looks inside and gives the contents a shake and a rattle.
He dumps it out. I see receipts and gum wrappers, a ChapStick and a few coins. But something heavy slid out too. I heard it hit the desk. “My job is to clean up the scene after the police are done,” he says. “Big stuff. Small stuff. I save everything in case the police ask for it. But nine times out of ten, they don't.”

“Really?”

“If there's no investigation, no lawsuits or legal stuff, they don't take the time. Then I'm supposed to call the car owners to come get it, and I do. But I've seen a lot of wrecks go right to scrap. Sweet old cars somebody once loved.” He grins slightly. “I sweep them out before they go, but like I say, most of the time nobody comes for, as you say, the garbage.” The cat lets out an impatient yowl. Bosco says, “Anyway, kiddo, I'm ninety-eight percent sure that this is what I've got from the night you're asking about. It's yours if you want it.”

“You can just give it to me?”

“I'm supposed to throw it out after four years,” he says. “But as you can see, I'm not much for getting rid of things.” He steps out of the office to tend to the cat.

I should hurry. The gas tank of the SUV is probably full, and Zoey is hurting. I give the pile on the table a stir with one finger. I catch something—a strap. It's bright orange and bendy. I pull on it and uncover that one heavy thing that slid out of the bag. It's a sports watch with a face like a dashboard but it's smashed—and I want it. It's just that it doesn't feel like it belongs to me. A picture! I need my camera! But
my backpack is in the SUV.

“Sure. He's inside,” I hear Bosco say.

Then I hear Zoey's mom. “Hey, Perry? You ready?”

“Yep!” I close my hand over the watch and tuck it up into the cuff of my fleece.

A
t the VanLeer supper table, Zoey feels better again. She's had her medicine. She eats oatmeal and tells about our trip. “. . . and my tooth was the least of it, Tom. This was sad but amazing,” Zoey says. “We were actually
at
the intersection where Perry's mom had that accident, and it turns out that—”

“What? Where did you go?”

“We went to the oral surgeon.” Zoey's mom pushes those words out. “We
think
we had lunch at the intersection where it happened. It seems like maybe it was the place.”

Wow
, I think. She's still not sure. Even after I told them in the car, “Bosco remembers.” That's what I said, and I showed her bright eyes from the backseat. Then again, she never saw the photos from Mom's file like I did. She doesn't know about the watch. I'm keeping that to myself—I'm dying for a better look at it. So far, I haven't dared. I haven't even
taken off my fleece jacket. I'm sitting right here at the VanLeer table with the watch still tucked up inside my sleeve. I try not to look down at my wrist.

“Perry talked to the tow truck driver,” Zoey says.

“He wasn't a witness to the crash,” I say. “But afterward he saw a girl wrapped in a blanket staring at the night. That's how my mom told the story to me.”

Mr. VanLeer seems squirmy. He looks at his wife and shakes his head. She is silent. I push my food with my fork. I'm not that hungry after our late lunch.

Then Zoey says, “You can't get mad at Mom, Tom. Nobody can plan a coincidence.”

Boy, do I love that. Zoey Samuels is right.

After dinner, the VanLeer adults excuse us from cleanup. They ask us to go ahead to our rooms, please. On the way down the hall, Zoey whispers to me. “I bet they take it to the street,” she says, which means the adults are going to argue. About me. At least they will be busy.

Inside the closet, I kneel beside the warden's suitcase and switch on the reading lamp. I slide the watch out of my sleeve and turn it over in my fingers. There's a white starburst crack in the glass that makes it hard to see the face. I see three circles under there. Must be for different functions. The clip on the watch is broken. The orange band is still bright after all these years. On the inside of the band someone has written with black pen.

For Flip, my timekeeper for all time. Love, J.C.

My heart stops beating. J.C.
has
to be Jessica Cook. Who is Flip? And what is this message about a timekeeper? Of all the voices in this world I hear Mr. Krensky telling me that Mom had to be protecting someone.

I whisper in the closet. “Who is Flip?”

J
essica Cook looked down into the common from the Upper East Lounge. Halsey Barrows stood with a duffel strung across his body. He was dressed in street clothes—no chambray. A few more minutes and he'd be gated out—gone. She'd had to distance herself from him these last couple of days—no other way to bear the impending separation. Perhaps he felt the same; he'd been moving around her rather than to her. Even now, she kept back from the railing just in case he'd look up and deepen the crack in her heart.

She saw the small assembly: Big Ed as his support person, one foreman, and the temp. So often Perry had joined these small sendoffs. This was going to crush him. Halsey had been one of their special ones. She watched the taxi pull up in the circle. She saw Halsey hand Big Ed two . . .
envelopes
. . . she was fairly sure.

At the end of the work day, Big Ed put both of them into
her hands. One was addressed to Jessie, one to Perry. The supper line was forming, and the common was too busy for the delicate business of letter opening. So she hiked up the stairs, took a chance, and tried the door to Perry's old bedroom at the end of the Upper East Lounge. To her surprise it was unlocked. Inside, she sat on his stripped-bare bed and gently worked her thumb along the triangular flap of the envelope addressed to her. She slid the folded paper out, and when she opened it, several bills fell onto her lap. She felt herself blush as she packed them deep into her palm with her fingers. Then she read:

Jessie, I tried and tried to write you something that would tell you all the things I want you to know. I failed again and again. Sorry. But you're quick, and you've got a read on this whole world like nobody I've ever known—and isn't that ironic given the long years you've spent on the inside? (I hope you're smiling.) Point is, I think you know what's in my tongue-tied heart. Stay strong. Do it for you; do it for Perry. I'm leaving my gate money for you and your boy. I don't need it. I've got an honest gig—pretty far from here—but it pays well.

Love, Halsey

Jessica dumped herself onto her side. She pulled her knees up and curled around them. She wept convulsively.
When she could, she took her salt-burned face down to a late supper, where Eggy-Mon put up a serving for her. He cooed softly, “I saved you a biscuit—crumb and flake, and a bowl of split pea—the best I make. Birds fly high and birds fly low. When birds fly out, we watch them go . . .”

He came around the counter, took Jessica's tray, and walked her to the table where Gina, Callie DiCoco, and Sashonna Lewis sat. From inside his apron pocket Eggy-Mon produced a napkin full of oatmeal raisin cookies, which were met with squeals of approval. When the women broke the cookies, the smell of cinnamon filled the air, and Jessica leaned toward the warm shoulders of her friends.

O
n Friday at school, I dodge a few questions about missing the Coming to Butler County projects. It's pretty likely that Brian Morris has filled people in. I don't care. I have something bigger on my mind—a job for the library volunteers.

Before we get into the Bucking Blue Bookmobile, Zoey helps me slip messages into magazines—again. I'm going to need the rezzes to keep six for me on Saturday like never before. I'm waiting until then to ask Mom about the watch. Friday afternoon is never enough time, and for this, we've got to be alone.

“So why do you need them to keep six on Saturday?” Zoey asks. I think about the watch with the orange band. I have it stowed in the interior pocket of the warden's suitcase in the VanLeer closet.

I tell Zoey half the truth. “I need to talk to my mom about the coincidental lunch at the infamously dangerous intersection,” I say. “Your stepdad isn't cool with what happened. So . . .”

“Oh! Right! And you have the picture to show her!” Zoey's thinking of the History Wall at Toni's Corner. I'm thinking of pictures I took of the watch because it seems more important. “You need Tom out of your way,” she says. “And if I see your mom today, I won't mention any of it,” she says. Zoey Samuels is the best friend in the world.

At Blue River, Mrs. Buckmueller settles in her chair. Zoey and I empty the bins. As we stack the periodicals, I am so focused on the notes inside it about knocks me over when I feel a tap on my shoulder.

“Mom! You're so early today.”

“I asked for permission,” she says. “I wanted more than a few minutes with you.” She gives me a tired smile, and I wonder what's up. When she excuses us to a far corner in the common, I am sure she has bad news.

She holds out an envelope. I take it between my finger and thumb. It feels warm from being inside her pocket. “From Halsey,” she whispers, and instantly I know that he is gone.
Released.

“Should I open it here?” My voice is small.

“Up to you,” she says.

I peel the envelope open.

Dear Perry,

Blue River is gating me out today. I'm glad about that. But it means I'm going to miss saying good-bye to you, and we're going to have to take a rain check on that game of one-on-one. I wanted to give you my story, so here it is:

I am a pro player. No joke.

Once, I had everything in place for a crazy-good life, but I messed it all up. Not proud of that. But that's my story. That's how I ended up at Blue River trying to figure out how to rise up again. I'm on the comeback trail. I'm suspended from playing in the US for a while longer. So I'm off to train with a team in Germany. I hope to see you again one day. In fact, I'm counting on it.

Until then, you keep listening to your mom. She knows it all. Thanks for being around, Perry. Thanks for raising me up.

Fraternal love,

Halsey

“Well, we knew he was getting out,” I say. My throat is a little sandy. “Good for Mr. Halsey.” I blink but I won't cry because a good thing has happened—same thing we want for Mom. “We'll see him again,” I say.

“I hope so,” says Mom.

“I know we will,” I tell her. “He promised me a game.”