Everything Breaks (11 page)

Bud had to be inside. There was nowhere else he could be.

I grabbed my pack from the floor of the car. The keys were still hanging from the ignition switch and I pocketed them. I took off at a fast lope toward the house. My legs protested in the most extreme way at first, but just like yesterday, the pain became a slight bit easier to deal with when I'd hit my stride and it pulsed in time with my pace.

“Bud!” I called when I figured I was near enough for him to hear above the wind. “Bud, you in there? Bud! Wake up and get out here, we gotta get
home
!”

“Tell me the honest truth, Tucker Graysten. Do I look good with blue hair or is it too harsh for my delicate features? Do you think I should go with, say, raspberry?”

I stopped in my tracks, every nerve in my body gone taut with dread. Sometimes you believe what you want to believe, and I'd believed she was gone, that she'd reached her destination or left the car to get another ride or take a bus or hoof it or something.

But no such luck. I turned in the direction of her voice. She was over to my left maybe twenty feet, sitting on the ground with only her fluorescent hair, heart-shaped face, and skinny white neck visible above the wheat. I doubt I'd have seen her at all if she hadn't called out to me. But then I realized she
hadn't
called out, and that's why my skin was suddenly crawling. Her words had been a frustrated, mumbled gripe about her hair like girls are always making when they want you to tell them they look really good just the way they are.

So why
had
I heard her above the banshee howl of the wind?

I took some skulking strides in her direction, leaving myself plenty of escape room in case she tried to play some weird mind game with me like she had in the car last night. She was sitting in a circle of flattened wheat, a tiny version of Steve's English crop circle. She was rummaging wildly through that overstuffed pack of hers, and as I watched, she eased out a mirror the size of a dinner plate and began frowning at herself in it, pulling up handfuls of her hair for her own inspection and wrinkling her nose at her reflection.

I turned quietly back toward the house, hoping she was so absorbed with her crazy appearance that she'd forgotten all about me. Maybe I even tiptoed, lame as that sounds. I remember I harbored a slight, idiotic hope that now she'd just wander away and be gone by the time I woke Bud and got him into the car.

“What're we doing here anyhow, Tucker Graysten?” she grumbled to my back.

An overwhelming sense of doom shot through me like a virus. I reminded myself that
she'd
been the one at the wheel last night, not me. But her stupid question had somehow given me the weird feeling that I
did
know more than I knew that I knew.

I forced myself to turn and face her. “I have no clue what
you're
doing here,” I called. “I mean, I don't know why
you
were sitting in the middle of the road last night. But Bud and I were headed back to Oklahoma after a Chiefs game when you got in the car. Janet, my stepmother, Bud's daughter, probably called the police when we didn't make it home last night. I wouldn't be surprised to see the cops pull up at any time.”

Let
her
be the jittery one for a change. Hitchhiking on the interstate
was
illegal.

But she just smirked. “That's not what I meant and you know it, Tucker Graysten.”

That's not what I meant and you know it.
How could she expect me to even
know
what I knew? I couldn't get anything straight when everything she said was so crazy.

The wind suddenly snatched her by her spiky hair and pulled her to the side so roughly she had to dig in hard with the heels of her cowboy boots to keep from being blown away. She was so small, bird-boned, and she looked very childlike with her white, knobby knees. I'd have to say she was pretty, but in a sharp-edged, willful way.

“What's so funny?” she yelled, glowering at me as she struggled to regain her balance.

I didn't think I'd laughed, and even if I had, it was just a nervous reaction. The last time I'd
authentically
laughed was when Steve and Zero and Trey and I were driving from Speed Mart to the zinc mine fields with the Mustang's top down and the October moon rising and no clue in the world of what was about to happen.

The memory was like a stomach punch. “Nothing's funny,” I barely managed to get out. My guts had suddenly clenched into a raw knot, and there she sat staring with wide-eyed interest at me like I was some science experiment she was conducting. Yes, conducting—I would have sworn that sickening memory had been a little gift from her, just like the nightmare dream in the car last night had been.

I ordered myself to get a grip. The canvas smell of her pack had triggered that dream, not her personally. I noticed that gob of grape gum still stuck like a fungus behind her left ear. It was more than I could handle, and I doubled over and retched.

“Poor baby, maybe you're dying?” She giggled and shrugged, then began fishing ruthlessly through the pockets of her motorcycle jacket, chewing her bottom lip in concentration. She finally came up with half a crushed cigarette and held it between two bitten-to-the-quick purple fingernails as she fished with her other hand, probably for a match, all the while bracing herself against the wind with her heels dug in deep.

I took Trey's green lighter from my pocket and threw it across to her. “I'm going up to that house to wake Bud,” I muttered, but I didn't move to do that.

She snatched the lighter from the air, looking surprised. “You'd part with this?”

I'd meant to lend it to her again like I had last night in the car. I wanted it back, of course I did, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to say so.

She grinned that jack-o'-lantern grin of hers that was too wide for her small, sharp face. “You want it back,” she accused. “I'll tell you what. Let's play a game! I'll trade you something for it.”

I shook my head. “I've only got Bud's keys, and you're
not
getting those.”

She held the lighter out in front of her. “Nine,” she announced. She clicked it one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times.
Fwoom!
—on the ninth, it lit.

I was surprised the lighter had fired in this wind, let alone on her count. The way she could predict its flare was eerily like what I had tried to do after Trey had seemed so sarcastic in my hoop house dream. But I was getting used to her cheap tricks and outrageous predictions. And even if she
could
somehow manipulate the information in my dreams and memories, that also could have some gimmick to it, like when those TV psychics appear to know everything about people's love lives, their dead dogs, et cetera.

Still, there was something more intense I had trouble explaining to myself. It was the sense of danger I felt when she got quiet, like right then, smoking. It was as if something big was silently rolling toward me and I couldn't run from its invisible path.

“I'm going up to wake Bud,” I repeated, and again, I didn't move a muscle. This time, though, it felt more like I
couldn't
move.

“You
can't
go inside that house until we play our
game,
Tucker!” She pushed her bottom lip into a pout. “You have to
give
me something in exchange for this lighter!”

Her skin was as pale as her cigarette smoke. She seemed made from the dawn mist that was suddenly rising from the wheat, making everything clammy and cold.

“I told you,” I repeated, “you're
not
getting Bud's keys.”

“You don't even
have
Bud's keys, I've got them,” she mentioned as she crushed her cigarette butt with her heel. “You
have
got something else, though. In the back right pocket of your jeans? Give me
that
and I'll give you the lighter.”

I suddenly felt a small circle of heat in the pocket she'd mentioned. It was that obolus thing Mrs. Beetlebaum had given me. I'd forgotten all about it.

My throat went dry. “You
couldn't
have Bud's keys.” I thrust cold fingers deep into the pocket where I'd dumped them not fifteen minutes before. Empty.

“Tucker?
Yoo-
hoo!” she sang out. “Oh,
Tuck-
er.”

She had Bud's key ring around her left index finger and was casually twirling it while she frowned into her big mirror again. “Tell me the truth. Blue? Or raspberry.”

“Give me back those keys.” I wanted the heat of my righteous anger to burn through the layer of fear that coated my throat, but that wasn't working. The fear was thickening instead, becoming suffocating so my voice was a squawk. “Bud
gave
those keys to
me.
”

Without those keys we could be here forever. She'd probably seen the outline of the obolus in my pocket, thought it was a half dollar or even a silver dollar or something, and now lusted after the cigs she thought it would help her buy. I was tempted to hold up the coin and tell her I'd trade her, but not for the Bic, for the keys. Then I remembered how Mrs. Beetlebaum had gone on and on, warning me not to take it from my pocket. That must mean it was valuable, old as it was, and it wasn't mine to lose. Mrs. B. had just lent it to me for some teachery reason I hadn't gotten straight.

I wanted
so much
to taunt the vain and crazy hitchhiker right then, to ask her why she didn't just use her flimsy amateur magic to
take
what was in my back pocket, like she'd taken the keys. Didn't the rules of this criminal game of hers allow you to steal more than one thing from an innocent bystander at a time?

I didn't do that, though. You don't poke a stick at a scorpion.

“Just like you say,” she suddenly admitted with a sigh, “Bud gave these keys to you, right after the funeral. Uh, funerals. But you gave them back to him, remember? That is, you left them behind when you sneaked out of the house at the crack of dawn the next morning. That was a good call, though, leaving them behind like that. You're right, you shouldn't be driving, Tucker Graysten. You almost ran over me last night, remember? Talk about white-knuckle, last-second braking! Yeeow! And you have no idea how awful you look.”

She tossed the keys into her pack, then sailed her mirror like a Frisbee across to me. I tried to sidestep and let it sail on by, but from some childhood instinct my hand reached and caught it. I let it dangle from my fingers, though, unused and unwelcome.

“Take a good look,” she said, and her voice suddenly seemed much lower, the voice not of a flighty young girl but of . . . something else, something not to be disobeyed.

XI

I
WATCHED MY HAND
hold up the mirror. Three deep cuts from the vents of Trey's locker ran clear across my forehead, and blood from those was matted in my hair and crusted on the stubbly skin of my unshaven face. My eyebrows were singed to a frizz in places. My eyelashes were mostly gone, and the lids beneath where they'd grown were now angry red. Purple hollows had set in under my cheekbones, my lips were cracked, and my eyes were shot with red and had a strange, haunted look about them.

Someone I didn't even know had crawled in and taken up residence in me.

“And beneath those jeans your
legs
are an absolute
mess,
” she pointed out, rolling her eyes. “As recently as a hundred years ago people routinely died of blood poisoning from open wounds like that. Antibiotics are wonderful things, Tucker Graysten. Get a
clue
!”

“How did you . . . how
could
you . . .” Even Bud didn't know how bad my legs were.

She took the time to chew off a ragged bit of thumbnail, then gave a sigh of disgust with herself as she shook her hand in the air. “How'd I know about the legs? I
read
you, that's how. Last night, right before I got in your car? I know your whole story, Tucker. Trey picking you up at the curb last Saturday afternoon like he'd done probably a thousand times before, the borrowed ID, your first two beers and then the one Zero gave you, bailing out of the Mustang, puking in the ditch, sliding down the bluff, and everything that's happened to you since, at school and at home and at the funeral. I even know you were the careful one among those friends of yours, the guy who took care of everybody else, the cook and the lookout and the person who kept track of Trey's lost stuff, but I
still
don't know what we're
doing
here, which means you're hiding some detail, Tucker. Some sliver of truth is too far embedded in your soul for you to reach it.”

I took some deep breaths and tried to concentrate on the pain in my legs so I could block her insanity. Maybe Bud had told her a bunch of that stuff she knew. Or maybe I'd talked in my sleep. Who cared how she'd got her information? She was just plain nuts, and the important thing was for us to get far away from her.

“I'm going up to that house to wake Bud,” I said for the third time. My teeth were chattering so hard I tasted blood. “We're not going your way. You should go back to the main road and try for another ride.”

I started toward the house again, but after a couple of steps, my legs just locked.

I whirled to face her and found I could move just fine, but only in her direction.

“What . . . are you
doing
to me?”

She gave me a puzzled look. “I'm not
doing
anything to you, Tucker Graysten. I just need you to tell me why we're here. You called me last night, and I have to admit I came in a hurry because I could smell money on you, which is sooo rare these days. I mean, they aren't making those coins hundreds of years ago, and since there are so few of them around now it's absolutely thrilling when I get paid. Usually I have to get by on, well, nothing, no payment at all, which is one of the many ways my boss is cutting corners these days. Trust me, I'd love to just grab that coin, throw you into the car, and get back behind the wheel to take you where your infected legs and your weirdness the past few days
and
your horrible driving last night tell me you want to go.

But there's something missing from your story, some little poison detail. I always want my pickups to be able to state in clear terms their own reasons for calling me, especially when they're only seventeen. It's not that you won't tell
me
why you called, it's that you won't tell
you.
”

Her voice was coming from far away, echoing in my head.

“I . . . I
didn't
call you . . .” I pushed out. “You just . . .
appeared
there on the exit ramp when Bud and I were on our way back to Oklahoma from—”

“There oughta be one of those iron water pumps around here someplace,” she murmured. She got to her feet and began squinting toward the house. “Yes! There it is, over on that old well curb by the kitchen garden.”

“And whuh . . . what do you mean
embedded
?”

She whipped around quick as a snake and fastened me with her eyes, which suddenly were awful. Had her pupils become spirals, like the dog's? Could you buy contact lenses that did that?

“Embedded, Tucker,” she whispered. “Buried so deep that recalling that little detail will be like pulling a knife from your heart. You'll bleed, maybe even to death. But whether you know it or not, you
called
me and then you picked me up, so find that piece of the story you've embedded in your soul, pull it out, let it bleed, and whatever happens, happens. I mean, I'm
here
now, so you're wasting my valuable time until you do that.”

I stumbled backward, desperate to get away from her. “I . . . didn't pick you up. Bud . . . Bud was the one who picked you up. I wanted to leave you.”

“You
both
picked me up.” She yawned and stretched, then scratched her hair into lopsided tufts. “If anybody knows himself, it's Bud. So if you're not ready to know
your
self, then
I'm
getting started coloring this hair.”

She threw Trey's lighter into her pack, then eased a hot pink squeeze bottle out of it. She turned to trek toward the old iron water pump that was framed like a hook-necked animal against the distant sky.

The wheat seemed to open a path for her. I rubbed my eyes, and when I looked at her again, she'd stopped and turned back toward me with her hand on her hip.

“I almost forgot,” she called. “If you're bound and determined to see Bud, I gotta call Cherry Berry. Bud is at the point where . . . well, let's just say he's being guarded.”

She tucked the bottle under her arm, put her two pinkie fingers between her lips, and produced the sort of piercing whistle I'm pretty sure can break glass.

A shadow suddenly darkened the grain. I looked to the sky but was too sun-dazzled to see anything except a huge shape up there, probably some winged predator, maybe a giant eagle or a clot of three or four buzzards.

Then the shadow grew sharper and darker and the black dog dropped out of the sky and into the wheat not four feet in front of me! He sat up on his haunches, staring at me with all three tongues lolling in big doggy smiles.

I opened my mouth, then stood there speechless, looking from the dog to the weird hitchhiker and back. “So this is—this is
your
dog?” I finally managed to stammer.

The girl started shaking that big pink bottle, looking peeved at the delay.

“Nah, we're just co-workers. He's got a tiny bit of seniority on me.”

The dog turned one head toward her and set up a little whimper-whine. She rolled her eyes, then drew the lighter from her pack and looked at it wistfully.

“Cherry Berry says I have to give this back. He likes you. That's why he brought you Trey's green lighter in the first place.”

She threw it to me, and I caught and pocketed it. “He dug it up across the street from my house,” I muttered quietly, rubbing my forehead. Had I told her it had been Trey's?

She snorted. “Don't make me laugh. CB brought Trey's lighter from a
lot
farther away than that. He probably thought it might help solve this little
problem
of yours.”

Without waiting for my response, which would have been utter confusion, she turned and headed toward the pump again. The wheat slammed like an iron gate behind her.

The dog meanwhile sat quivering in every muscle, then bounded right up into the air.

I watched him swoop up the hill, do a flyby of the house, then circle twice around the roof. He finally did a four-point clumsy landing on the porch, where he regained his balance and stood facing, facing, facing me, eagerly waiting for me to join him.

I swallowed hard and finally resumed my own hike up the hill, breathing deep, which I hoped was a way to keep panic from getting the best of you.

I still thought, or I guess I mean I
hoped,
the weird girl was simply insane.

But something about seeing that flying dog with his gangly legs hanging so loose and his big floppy ears tossing in the wind had made me admit to myself that when I reached that big black dog that reminded me a little of Ringo, I wouldn't be joining a him.

I would be joining an
it.

By the time I reached the porch steps, the dog was chasing its tail in close circles like dogs do when they're especially eager to get going. I made doggy small talk, said it was a good dog and so forth, and when I was balanced on the rickety floor of the porch itself, I even went down in a crouch at the dog's level to show I was its friend.

I stopped short of reaching out to scratch its ears, though. I wouldn't say I was squeamish, not exactly. Just off-balance, like I was around the girl. In fact, I had the sudden thought that I wouldn't have wanted to touch
her
either.

“Is Bud inside?” I asked the dog, and in answer it turned all three heads toward the front door, which was banging in the wind. I caught it and held it still and open a few inches and the dog slid through and disappeared into the gloom inside the house.

I followed but stopped just over the threshold to adjust my eyes to the sad and murky shadows of what must have once been the kitchen of the place. Wooden cupboards sagged against the walls, so shrouded with cobwebs they looked like mummies. Shards of broken glassware studded the floor—the handle of a cup, half a flowered plate. I made out a rusted pump bolted to the edge of a large sink, its white porcelain fuzzed with mold. A mouse skittered from the spout of an overturned teapot.

I took a breath and called, “Hey, Bud, you awake? We gotta hit the road!”

I waited, my heart galloping. If he didn't answer,
then
what?

But from above me, Bud finally grumbled back, “Keep yer shirt on, will ya?”

I felt boneless with relief as I hustled in the direction of his voice, dodging the glass and fallen boards that littered the floor of the kitchen and the room beyond, which was empty except for a bedraggled staircase against the far wall. I
needed
Bud like you need the feel of solid ground beneath your feet after you've spent too long on a roller coaster.

I reached the foot of the treacherous old stairway and called up, “Bud? Hey, there's a bacon and cheese sandwich with your name on it waiting at some fast-food place down the road! Let's get a move on!”

“Yeah, yeah,” he answered. “Come on up, why doncha.”

Meanwhile the dog materialized on the landing at the top of the stairs and sat patiently looking down at me with six shining eyes. I pushed fallen ceiling plaster out of the way and slowly climbed, avoiding the ragged holes where the stairs had rotted through. When I finally reached the landing, the dog skittered down the hall and came to a sliding stop outside one of three closed doors that must have been upstairs bedrooms.

And then it, the dog, evaporated into nothingness.

I walked cautiously to the door where it had been and knocked.

“Bud? You . . . in there?”

No answer, so I turned the knob and pushed it open a bit. “Hey, Bud?”

He was sitting on a straight chair, looking out the window with his back to me.

I let out my breath in a whoosh that left me light-headed. “Hey, come on, Bud, let's get going! I'm starving, aren't you?”

He didn't turn. In fact, he didn't move at all. “Come over here, will you, son?” he said. “I got something I need to show you right quick.”

His voice was so . . . I don't know, tired? Well, of
course
he was tired and so was I. I walked up behind him and bent to look over his shoulder. “What is it, Bud?”

He pointed. “Can you see that small hill yonder a ways, the one with trees?”

I squinted, trying to see what he was talking about. The glass was just too grimy, so I straightened and looked through a place near the top of the window where the glass had gone missing. Beyond the ocean of wheat I saw a series of bumps along the far horizon.

One of the bumps seemed fringed. “I
think
I see the hill with trees.”

He nodded. “Our burying place is under those elms. My grandparents, my parents, my little sis. She died of polio while I was in Korea. My Mary is out there as well. My sweet Mary, gone now for ten years.”

I said nothing, just thought about how Bud's voice was so
distant.
He sounded like he was in a different room, reading out loud or talking in his sleep.

The wind blew the wheat. Some crows flew by in a tight formation. The scene outside was so peaceful, but it somehow had an edge, a dark border.

“This was your house, then, Bud?” I finally asked. “And we're in . . . Nebraska?”

He nodded. “Lived here with my folks and then for years with my Mary before we had our Janet and moved on to give her more advantages in a bigger place.”

I took a step back and looked around the room. There was an old set of iron springs that must once have been part of a bed. Wallpaper hung like loose skin from the walls, too puckered and water-stained for you to tell what color or pattern it might have once been. Wasps' nests were thick in the corners of the ceiling and littered the floor.

“Go along now, boy,” Bud said, still without turning. “I'll join you directly.”

“I'll just hang out here until you're ready to go, Bud.”

“Go on along,” he insisted. His voice had a crackle to it when he said that, like a radio transmission sent from far away. I wanted him to face me and to at least explain how we came to be at his old place. But he just kept staring out that filthy window. “Tell her I won't be but a few more minutes,” he added weakly.