IGMS Issue 22 (14 page)

And Jake had been different. He had spoken to Henry. Not reluctantly and sullenly, but openly, even happily. He hadn't made any sense, which was worrying, but it
had
still been a welcome change. Maybe, Henry thought fleetingly, just maybe it would happen again. Part of him hoped it didn't. After all, nice or not, it
had
been extremely strange and unsettling. But another part of him hoped very much that it would, even if it meant he was crazy. The world had been better back then, back in the Clyde, Ohio, of his youth. Not only because things had been simpler and less frustrating, but because of . . .

Adam.

Henry stopped and leaned in the doorway of his tiny kitchen. He hadn't thought of Adam Blankenship in decades. How could that be possible? Adam had been his best friend back in those days. They'd walked to school together, shared each other's paper routes, traded Star Wars cards, had endless sleepovers, drawn countless crayon doodles on torn up paper bags on Adam's back porch. Adam had been the best friend that Henry had ever had. By comparison, every other person he'd ever known -- even Steph -- had been a mere acquaintance. How could he possibly have forgotten about Adam?

Adam was the only person who had ever called him Hank.

Jake had called him Hank last night. More than once, in fact.

Henry thought about this, frowning and staring unseeingly into the depths of his kitchen. It still didn't make any sense. If anything, it was even more worrying. And still, he hoped it would all happen again.

He forced himself to wait until seven-thirty. Then, he stepped out of his front door, turned right, and walked resolutely toward Beech Avenue.

The street sign on the corner of Alpine and Beech had not changed by the time Henry, Jake and Sig got to it, but nearly everything else had. The backs of the buildings along the right side of the road were closer, crowding right up to the gravel. Narrow windows were propped open with old rulers and bricks, emitting the sounds of small town Ohio summer: Indians baseball on CKLW, the sizzle and clank of the grill in Camie's Diner, the squeak of barstools on the wooden floor of the Clyde Piper.

Henry walked along this with Jake at his side. Jake was kicking a Coors can down the road. Neither of them were holding Sig's leash, and with a glance, Henry understood why. Sig had changed as well. The German Shepherd had become smaller and whiter, with brown and black dabs on his back and neck. He'd become Willy, Adam Blankenship's mongrel pup. He sniffed at the Dumpster behind the Clyde Piper, circling it methodically.

"Did you get a tongue lashing last night when you got home?" Jake asked, stopping at the corner and fishing a cigarette from his pocket.

"Nah," Henry answered without thinking. "My Old Man was still down here at the Piper with his work buddies."

He remembered. His father had never been an alcoholic, but he did spend almost all of his evenings down at the Piper, watching the Indians or the Browns, depending on the season. He'd never get stupid drunk, but he would come home late most nights, and sleep more often than not on the downstairs sofa. He'd expect Henry to be home in his bed, having fed and bathed himself. His mom had died years earlier and Henry barely remembered her.

"He making you go to that stupid camp again this year?" Jake asked, lighting the cigarette with an Ohio Blue Tip match.

Henry sighed. He remembered that as well. Camp Covenant Pines was a religious camp near Lake Erie. Lots of hikes to the chapel each night for sermons about how they were all going to hell if they listened to rock music or danced or went to see movies in the theater. There were no girls at Covenant Pines, and no arts and crafts, either. There was sports by day, God by night, and no sneaking out for pranks or midnight shenanigans once the lights went out, because the camp counselors prowled the cabins with flashlights, on the lookout for just such behavior.

"I have to go in a couple weeks," Henry heard himself say. "I'll be gone seven days. Better than last year, at least."

"What a freakin' gyp," Jake declared. "Maybe you could hitch-hike your way back home and stay at my place instead. I could hide you out in the attic over the garage!"

Henry grinned at the prospect. "What about when camp's over and the bus shows up back here without me on it?"

Jake's eyes widened with inspiration. "You could just come wandering out of the woods over by the park and tell everybody you loved camping so much that you bushwhacked your way home! Busses are for wussies!"

Henry liked the idea, but he knew neither of them really meant it. At ten years old, the grown-ups ran everything. Such brazen free will was a pleasant myth.

He sighed. "The Old Man says going to camp builds character."

"He thinks everything that's stupid builds character," Jake said, taking a pull on the cigarette and offering it to Henry.

Henry didn't take it. He simply looked at the other boy's face, studying him. He hadn't talked this freely, this easily, with anyone in decades. There was simply no adult replacement for the simple, sweet friendships forged in youth. A shudder of loss shook Henry to his heels.

"I've missed you," he said. The words were almost like a prayer.

The other boy blinked at him. When he did, the world of Clyde, Ohio wavered, rippled silently like something seen through a rainy window. Jake, Henry's son, stood before him, his brow furrowed slightly.

"I'm right here," he said, a shade of confusion in his voice.

Henry nodded speechlessly. He had interrupted the magic somehow. Jake was with him, but he wasn't experiencing the same things Henry was. For him, maybe the magic didn't exist at all.

But then Henry reached forward. As he did, the world solidified again, settling back into place like a disturbed curtain. He took the stub of cigarette from the other boy's hand, raised it, and drew a deep drag. The smoke stung his eyes and curled into his nose.

"Come on," Jake said with Adam's voice, turning away. "Let's go over to Mason's place and see if he'll show us his brother's Hustlers again."

"Nah," Henry answered, allowing himself to fall into the moment, "they're gross. Mason's brother is a sicko. Just being in his bedroom makes me feel like I need a twelve-hour bath."

Jake laughed happily in agreement as he took the cigarette back from Henry. They walked on down the alley. Willy the mutt followed.

Henry noticed, with no real surprise, that Jake was as tall as he was now. Or more accurately, he, Henry, was as short as Jake. Of course he was. In the Ohio of this time he was only ten years old himself. He could barely remember that he'd ever been anything else.

But he was remembering a lot of other stuff. Stuff he had long since buried. His father, for instance. Earl Spalding had not been a happy man. He had rarely physically hurt Henry, apart from the typical spankings, but he had verbally lashed out at him, trying to make him into the man a guy like Earl thought he should be. The Old Man didn't understand his own son, this odd boy who liked to draw and write stories and who had no interest in sports like normal red-blooded American kids. As a result, he belittled young Henry. He threw away his drawings. He forced him to try out for his school's football and baseball teams. And when Henry failed to make first string, the Old Man would take him out onto the field and force him to run drills, to catch and hit, to practice endlessly during long, hot weekends.

Worst of all, Henry's father didn't like Adam Blankenship, not one bit. Adam's parents were soft, he declared, allowing their boy to grow up soft as well. A good father trained his boy right, to work hard, to put away childish things. Adam brought out the absolute worst in Henry's father, thus the boys never went to Henry's house, even when the Old Man was at work. Besides, Adam's place was nicer. There were books there, and plenty of crayons and markers, and cut up paper bags to draw on. Adam's dad was a bookkeeper at the same factory that Henry's dad worked at, but the two could not have been more different.

And Adam's mother was nice. She was pretty, and wore perfume, and made them peanut butter and honey sandwiches sometimes while they drew Star Wars characters on the back porch. Henry secretly had a crush on her.

"Let's go back to your place," Henry said, dragging the last toke from the cigarette and dropping it to the alley. "Let's see if there's anything good on TV."

Jake, who was also somehow Adam, shrugged and nodded. They turned and cut through an open gate, crossing a neighbor's back yard. Willy ran ahead. It was getting dark and the crickets stitched a musical cacophony in the purple air.

From somewhere beyond the houses, a car horn honked. It was a brief blat in the cooling evening air, but the sound of it made Henry look up suddenly. His heart pounded. The other boy walked on as Henry stopped.

Something was wrong. It wasn't just that this was all crazy, that Henry couldn't possibly be here, in this place and this time, couldn't possibly be ten years old again. It wasn't even that Jake, his son, and Adam Blankenship, his childhood best friend, had somehow fused fleetingly into the same person.

It was in the sound of that car horn. Or not that car horn, specifically, but another one in his memory -- a longer one, much closer, and accompanied by the noise of squealing tires, the acrid stench of burning rubber, the sound of a dull, final thump.

As an adult, Henry had simply refused to ever think about it. Now, in this magical representation of his youth, the memory struck him with perfect, sudden clarity. But here, of course, it
wasn't
a memory. It was a
premonition
. It hadn't happened yet. But it would very soon, as inevitably as day follows night.

Because in the world of Buena Vista, 2010 -- in the world of grown-up, divorced, angry Henry Spalding--Adam Blankenship was dead. He had been dead for a long, long time. Henry remembered watching it. He remembered seeing the car swerve as Adam ran out into the street, chasing Willy. He remembered the way the car's headlights painted Adam's legs in the twilight, illuminating them as if the road were a stage. And he remembered that awful thump, the twist of Adam's body, the sound of the breaking bone, the crack of his head on the pavement. He'd stood there and watched his best friend die. It had happened in an instant.

He wished he could forget it, but he couldn't. Not here, and not now. In the mysterious Clyde, Ohio, of his youth, that memory -- that premonition -- was perfectly fresh. It was as fresh as the apple pie down at Camie's Diner.

Heat lightning flickered against the dome of the evening sky. Henry stood still in the late day heat and shuddered.

He slept in very late the next day. It was unusual. As a guy who'd worked in a factory for the last ten years, getting up at five in the morning had become as unavoidable as bowel movements. His head ached on the pillow. Feeling like he weighed a hundred pounds more than he had last night, he shoved himself upright and stumped to the bathroom, one hand pressed to his forehead.

There had been nightmares, but he could barely remember them. What he could remember was going to bed very late, but not getting to sleep for a long time. He'd been thinking too hard. Henry wasn't used to thinking so hard, so intensely, but suddenly his brain seemed like something he couldn't control. Memories were flooding back, breaking loose in his mind like luggage in a storm-tossed ship, banging around and damaging things. It was all wrapped up in Adam Blankenship, the squeal of tires, and the thump of his young body. It was in the smell of the Goodyear radials that had screeched long black lines on the pavement of Main Street, as if drawing arrows toward the bloody dead boy.

The driver had been a guy named Prentiss. He was a teacher at the high school, fussy in his horn-rimmed glasses and white short-sleeved shirt, stretched over a gut so round and hard that it looked like a medicine ball. He had leaped from the car, a Plymouth Cutlass, and dashed toward Adam while Henry had watched, transfixed and still as a statue, soaking in every tiny detail. He remembered the way Prentiss' shirt rode up his back as he bent over Adam's body, remembered the dull smacking sound as the man patted the dead boy's cheek, calling, "Oh God! Oh God! Are you all right!? Come on, kid! You okay?" all while the Cutlass grinned down at them, its bumper sparkling meanly in the streetlights.