Have Mercy (Have a Life #1) (15 page)

              Without the pickup’s engine belching and without Jonah’s talking, everything was quieter than I’d ever imagined quiet could be.  I grabbed Tim’s hand—he was used to this, right?—and  we walked to the barn. 

              “Everything you need’s in there,” Jonah shouted after us.  “See you bright and early.”

The unused barn where the students slept wasn’t very fancy: dirt floor with a carpet of straw.  Ten single cots with mosquito net hoods, stripped, with folded bedding on top.

              Tim and I bounced around on a couple of them before we decided they were all equally uncomfortable and finally pushed two together and lay down, not bothering to put on the sheets.  We put our hands under our heads and looked up at the red metal ceiling. 

              “Are you sure this is the place?” I asked Tim.

              Tim laughed.  “Captain Kirby was pretty specific.  Jonah Weil at Sunny Vale.”

              “I can’t believe Captain Kirby worships this guy.  Jeez, he’s weird.”

              “So’s Captain Kirby.” 

              We both started laughing and I realized we were hysterical with tiredness. 

              “Tim?”

              “Yeah?”

              “I’m glad you came.”

                He rolled over on his side.  “Me, too.”

              I rolled over to face him.  “Aren’t you going to get in trouble?  What’s your Dad going to do?  Won’t he try to find you?”

              “Nah.  One less mouth to feed.  That’s what he said when Mike left.  I don’t think he gave a damn.  We were starting to fight every time we talked, anyway.”  He pulled at a loose string on the mattress.  “I went to your house, Mercy.”

              “Yeah?”

              “Your grandmother left.”

              “Yeah?”

              “Yeah.”

              “Your mother is all over the news and blogs and stuff again.”

              I rolled onto my back.  “I know.”  She would be stuck in jail until her trial.  I wondered if they let her keep her cell phone.

              “Is anybody following me?” I asked.  “I mean, does anybody actually care that I’m gone?  What about school?”

              “Mr. Dow was pissed that you didn’t take the exam.  He cornered me after class to tell me you were jeopardizing your future.”

              Jeopardizing your future was like a theme song of guidance counselors and teachers.  They seemed oblivious to the fact that sometimes you had to address an immediate pain before you could think about your future.

              “I mean, I’m not like a missing person or anything, am I?” I asked, picturing myself on the side of a milk carton.

              “Nah, you’re just a runaway.  Captain Kirby knows I’m with you and said to tell you not to worry.  Even if your grandmother reported you missing she said your name just goes into a computer system, and if you don’t do something wrong it won’t come up.  She suggested we use fake names.  Just for now.”

              “Oh.”   

              I told myself, this is what I wanted.  I wanted to be on my own, writing songs.  I thought that once I wasn’t trying to live Jane’s version of cool that songs would come pouring out of me.  But I was scared.  And even though I hated her, I was scared for Jane.  I couldn’t imagine how she would manage without me. And what were they doing to her in jail?  I couldn’t let myself think about it.

              “Mrs. Kirby got fired from her job at Kulick’s,” Tim said.

              “What!”  I sat up.  “What a bitch.  Over some
finger nail
polish.  Jesus, so what’s Mrs. Kirby supposed to do?  Do people ever think of that?  What’s she supposed to do?”

              “Actually,” Tim said, “She’s living at your house.  House sitting, she said.  She answered the door when I went by.”

              “How did she….?”

              “Captain Kirby said you wouldn’t mind.  For safe keeping, she said.”

              I had 300 dollars from Kirby in my backpack.  I’d consider it a month’s security and rent and not try to figure out how she got into our house.  What did it matter anyway?  No one was living there, so why not?  But, boy, it certainly didn’t take long for your footprints to be erased.

              “So what are
we
going to do?” Tim asked.  “What’s our plan?”             

              “I have to find The Griffin,” I said, “I want to live with him.”  Was that too much to ask from the universe?  Was that too much to ask from
him
? 

              Our eyes had adjusted to the darkness.  I could make out individual stars in the sky through the holes in the barn and a kind of icy light was coming through the open barn doors and the chinks in the barn’s siding and roof. 

              Tim took his guitar out of its case and began to play around with chords.  Without an amp, an electric guitar has a tinny sound.  Tim hummed over it and the effect was like a kid fooling around on a toy piano. 

              “I’m working on a new song,” he said.  “On the way up here, it kept going through my head.”

              Of course, I thought, that’s what a real musician would do.  He would be working on a new song on a twelve mile bike ride.  He wouldn’t be worrying about things that go bump in the night, like me.

              “Show me the chords.”  I uncased my own guitar and plucked out the progression.

Tim’s tenor stretched over the notes:

The night is dark

But I can see

A path lit up                              

In front of me             

I sang, improvising:               

I’m lost and sad

I’m out of time

I’m scared to death

My light won’t shine

Tim and I fell asleep without taking our clothes off.  I was in the middle of a pleasant dream for a change.  I was on a stage, the lead singer in a spotlight, my band blacked out behind me.  I couldn’t see them but knew it was Tim and Captain Kirby, but when I opened my mouth to sing instead of it being me a rooster started crowing and his two-note song cued other creatures in his band to start screeching, moaning, yowling, and kicking, all of this coming from underneath my cot—the barn had a lower level below “the dorm.”  I dragged myself awake and turned on my phone.  It was 4:30 in the morning.  So much for the peaceful countryside.  As Jane would say, nature was way overrated.

              Tim was already gone.  I checked my messages.  Nothing from Jane or Granny O’Reilly.  Nothing from The Griffin.  I read the
Morning Clarion’s
account of how Jane had tracked down and stalked her innocent victim—“assaulted” him was how Rob’s mother put it—and how her bail had been revoked.

              I stuffed the phone into my backpack and groped my way toward the mill looking for Tim and hoping for coffee and almost tripped over a brown hen and her sisters who were pecking in the scrubby grass outside the barn.  A sliver of sun appeared, like the top of an orange.  Behind the house was a little building with opaque plastic windows that looked like a greenhouse.  Black hens and white hens stalked the grass around it.  I supposed that’s where they all lived when they weren’t enjoying the authentic free range lifestyle. 

                I knocked on a giant wooden door on the first floor of the mill then pushed it open.  To the left was a huge room with a hole dug in the ground—it looked like someone was building a swimming pool and ran out of money—a walk-in stainless freezer was humming on the right and in front of me was a narrow steep wooden stairway without a railing.  

              As soon as I opened the door at the top of the stairs, Bob Dylan’s tonsilly voice ambushed me, coming from every direction.  Four six-feet-tall speakers, one in each corner of a high ceilinged room criss-crossed with giant support beams, were blaring out the sound.  A cat was walking across a beam above my head that went into an open kitchen where Jonah and Tim were sitting at an island drinking coffee and smoking fat brown cigarettes.  Everything in the kitchen—the island counter which looked like a slab from a three hundred year old tree, the stools that could’ve been in Madame Curie’s lab, the wooden and enamel utensils—looked antiquey.  It was like I walked into a time machine and came out a hundred years ago.

              “Good morning, Darcy,” Jonah said. 

              “Hi,
Darcy
,” Tim added and I remembered that as of last night we had new names.

              “Since when do you smoke?” I asked, not knowing what to call him.

              “These are American Spirit cigarettes,” Jonah said.  “Pure tobacco, nothing else.  I’m initiating Karl in the Lenape Indian way.  Want to try one?”  

              Tim, I mean Karl, grinned at me.  “They aren’t half-bad.” 

              I shook my head.   “I need some formaldehyde to get me going.”

              Jonah took a blue enamel cup off a wall hook.  “Some coffee, Darcy?”

              “Thank you, yes.”  It was interesting having a new name.  I felt like I could act the way I wanted to act a lot of times but didn’t because people get used to you being one way and when you try on a new hat they ask you why you’re acting fake.  Yes, Darcy will take two sugars with her coffee,
brown
sugar if you please, and yes, if that’s stone ground oatmeal on the stove—or steel cut, or whatever authentic oatmeal is—I’ll have a bowl. 

              “It occurred to us last night that you might be hungry,” Jonah said.  “But when we came to get you, you were sound asleep.”

              “We had a long day,” I said. 

              “By the way,” Jonah said, “You snore.”

              “I do not!”  I felt myself turn red. 

              Tim was laughing.

              “I’m only kidding, Darcy,” Jonah said.  “I thought some humor would break the ice between us.  Karl told me you two are studying music in college.”

              Wow, we were in college already.

              “I knew you were musicians without him telling me.”

              “Really?  How?”

              “You were still holding your guitars in your sleep.”

              So much for destiny being written across your face. 

              Jonah went into the living room and shuffled through some LPs.  I followed him in and flipped through a stack until I came across,
Jump Naked
, from The Griffin’s Too Hot Handle tour with Aerosmith in the nineties.   

              “I
love
this song, don’t you?” I asked, dying to tell him I was related to the composer.  “How did you get it on vinyl?”

              “It’s bootleg,” Jonah said. “There’s an underworld of authenticity out there.  A good friend gave it to me and I promised I’d listen to it even though she knows I dislike metal.  Heavy is a hammer.  It’s not music.  As soon as I finish my book on Tube Sonamics I’m going to go through my album collection and purge every record I don’t absolutely love.  A person should do that with everything in their life.  Everything you own blares out who you are.  Why would anyone want things they don’t absolutely love defining their space?”

              It was one of those obvious statements that adults were always making as if they just heard a drum roll and God handed them the meaning of life written on a scroll, but I had to admit that there was a ring of truth to it.  I thought of poor Mr. Croslis in his coffin wearing that funny, too-small suit his father probably bought for him before he stopped growing, and about his big loud family and how they still defined him even though he was dead.  And worse, what Jonah was saying made me think about me.  About the Two Cool Society, which was mine only in name.  And about The Griffin.  I was his in name only too. Both of them defined me, but I had no say whatsoever about them.   

              “We have a busy day ahead of us,” Jonah said.  “You need to eat something.”

              “I’m not hungry.”                              

              He handed me a wire basket.  “Go get some eggs and I’ll make you an egg white omelet.  Guaranteed to put in you in a good mood.  Get a dozen.  Zina does her hair and skin with egg whites.  The coop is behind the mill.”

              “Yeah, I saw it.  Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked Tim.

              “Karl and I are right in the middle of a discussion about sound,” Jonah said.

              I waited for Tim to gallantly join me but he just waved.  I went out the kitchen door and down a flight of steps to the back yard.  An old metal glider behind the hen house was covered with light brown birds with weird combs.  I brushed two of them aside to make room for me—I felt dejected and hungry, my stomach was spazzing.  As soon as I sat down I heard the screeching that woke me up this morning.  A peacock with its tail fanned out in you-are-really-pissing-me-off mode was making a beeline for me.  Apparently, the brown birds were his harem.  

              “Okay! Okay!” I said and ran to the chicken coop.  The closest I had been to chickens before this morning was at Kentucky Fried.  But how hard could collecting eggs be?  You just scoop them out of the nests, right? 

              Different colored hens pecked at the ground in front of the coop.  When I stepped inside, I was confronted by a white rooster whose head came to above my waist.  He wouldn’t get out of my way and countered when I stepped left or right to get around him.

              “Come on,” I said.  I waved the basket at him and he puffed himself up and pecked my arm.

              I was definitely not in the mood for this.  I put the basket down, got up on my toes and flapped my arms and shouted “Stop It! Stop It!” until he backed down.

              The coop was a straw filled smelly room with shelves three high along the walls.  Hens sat in their nests on the shelves, facing out.  I approached the closest one and lifted her to one side to collect her egg.  She bit me.  “Ouch!” I said.  She followed me with her little yellow eyes, head bobbing.  I reached under her from the other side and she bit me again.  Maybe this was a particularly mean chicken.  I walked down the row a couple of hens and got bitten again.  On the bottom shelf were two blue eggs in an empty nest.  That’s probably how you did it.  You waited until they went outside to go to the bathroom.  I bent to pick them up and the rooster jumped on my back, taking vicious bites of my neck.  I screamed, shook him off, kicked hens that were swarming at my feet out of the way and ran back to the house with two blue eggs in my basket. 

              I showed Jonah where the hens bit me. “Your chickens are mean!” 

              “Why didn’t you wear the gloves?” he asked.

              The gloves? 

              “I only got two,” I said, sheepishly.

              “Don’t worry.  Zina is meaner than any chicken.”  He laughed.  “She’ll get them later.”

              Jonah cracked the eggs into a bowl.  “There’s nothing like free range eggs.  Wait till you taste this omelet.”

              Too Hot to Handle
was blaring from the living room.  I wondered who Jonah’s metal head friend was and I thought how The Griffin would laugh if he could see me.  Wait till I told him!

              “I love this group,” I said. 

              “Not crazy about The Griffin,” Jonah said.

              “Well, I think The Griffin is really hot.”  I knew I sounded like a punk girl but I had to say something.              \

              Jonah laughed.  “You don’t look like a metal head.  Personally, I think he’s a clown.”

              “A clown!” 

              “Prancing around in that stupid outfit. Jesus, how old is he?”

              “Old is Neil Young,” Tim said. 

              “He’s a perfect example of what I was talking about.  If you spend three quarters of your life in a silly clown suit, you’re a clown, aren’t you?”

              “He’s a
performer
,” Tim said. “I don’t like metal that much either”—surprise to me—“but  he’s one of the best at it and his bass player is as good as anyone in rock.”   

              “Perhaps,” Jonah said.  “We’ll talk more later.  Both of you finish your breakfast.  It’s past seven.  We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.” 

              I knew he didn’t mean to be insulting.  He thought I was eighteen-year old Darcy Somebody, but almost-sixteen-year-old Mercy O’Reilly could barely swallow a bite of egg.