The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) (5 page)

“Do you know Gina Rizetti?”

“I don’t.”

“Waitress at Hungry Paul’s?”

I shrugged and we were off.

“Doesn’t matter,” Kyle said as he struggled to find second gear. “She’s a girl who can get things. Lives in one of those dumps under the bridge. I gotta see if she’s got any fireworks that I can sell to these lacrosse players for their field party. Anyway, could take a few minutes, and I got a chain saw in the back of the van and some fresh cartons from the reservation, and the locks are broken and I don’t want some desperate tweeker snatching it all.”

“So I’m…?”

“Standing guard.”

*   *   *

My stint as a guard was an uneventful one. I sat in the van as Kyle went into a little blue house with a soggy sofa on the front porch and a rusty swing set and cracked plastic kiddie pool in the yard. Though the neighborhood was more ramshackle than I was accustomed to, it was a bright day and no one was walking around or acting the least bit menacing. I listened to voices on AM radio battle through the static and I waited.

After a few minutes, Kyle returned with a box that he tossed in the back as if it were a bag of laundry.

“You like Roman candles and bottle rockets?”

“I guess so.” I had heard of them, but such things were forbidden in my house.

“These jocks better like ’em, because that’s all they’re getting.” He turned the key and the phlegmy engine gave its all.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot, little man,” Kyle responded as we pulled into traffic.

“Do you trust all of your memories?”

Kyle faked a flinch. “Whoa. Getting all philosophical on me now?”

“Forget it.”

“It’s cool,” he said. “Truth is I’m lucky if I remember half the craziness that comes my way. And sometimes I remember things how I want to remember them, if you get what I’m saying.”

“Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “But if I can’t even trust myself, how am I supposed to know if I can trust a girl?”

I should have expected the laughter that followed, but it hurt anyway.

“Never mind,” I said.

“No, no.” Kyle coughed away his giggles. “It’s a fair question. Guess it depends on the girl. You got one who’s lying to you?”

“I don’t know. Seems like it. Either that or she’s crazy.”

“What’s her angle?”

“What do you mean?”

“What does she want?”

“She wants me to listen.”

“Don’t they all. Girl named Josie Pruitt used to tell me that she had this modeling contract with some big agency outta Paris. Couldn’t shut up about it. Believe me, she was pretty, but not Paris pretty. Down the line I find out there ain’t no contract, only a bunch of nudie shots taken by her cousin down in his basement. No surprise, really. So the best thing I can tell you about a chick who lies a lot is this: there’s probably some messed-up stuff going on in her life.”

It was as clear an explanation as one could expect. “I guess she might be having problems at home.”

Saying it out loud suddenly made me feel better about things. Logic began to break the code. For instance, the similarities between Fiona’s story and my dream were most likely coincidental, perhaps inspired by an image we both picked up from the same movie. And the rest of what she was saying? The missing months and the radiators and the Riverman and all of that nonsense? There was a reason for it too. Horrible things, taking place behind closed doors, can warp the mind. My dad was a social worker at the hospital in Sutton, and he was always telling us about people who came in with bruises or worse, and how they rarely admitted to how they got them. They made up stories instead, crazy, unbelievable stuff.
Coping mechanisms.
That was the term. So while he might not have used the exact same language, even my dad agreed with Kyle.

“A chick who’s having problems at home will give it up quicker than most,” Kyle explained. “But I warn you, little man. Might not be worth the hassle, especially if she’s got a whack-job for a father, or stepfather … or whatever.”

“Yeah.”

“Is she hot?”

“I don’t know.”

He laughed again. “Well, get that straightened out before you go sticking your tongue in her mouth.”

*   *   *

We didn’t make any other stops. Kyle told me he needed to “nap off a long night,” and he deposited me at the end of my driveway.

“Thanks,” I told him as I stepped down from the van.

“Anytime,” he said. “Just don’t go telling li’l brother we hung out, okay? He can be a jealous kid.”

“I know.”

“Bet you do.” Kyle chuckled to himself, shot me a salute, and pulled away.

Almost as soon as he was gone, I was on my bike, pedaling the short distance to Fiona’s house. I’m not proud to admit it, but I was searching for depravity, for squalor, for anything to confirm that Fiona had more than enough reasons to be dark and disturbed.

I had passed by her house countless times over the years, but it had been a while since I’d really looked at it. It was basically the same as I remembered it from the few times I visited when we were younger. The hedges that lined its south side could have used a trim, but they weren’t exactly overgrown. The paint was mostly unmarred, the mailbox relatively straight. Outward appearances can only tell you so much, though. I needed a closer look.

I was pretty sure Mrs. Carmine had a job and would be less active on a weekday morning, but I still kept an eye out for her as I hid my bike in a pile of fetid leaves. With the coast clear, I took my chance, jogging along the side of Fiona’s house, where I used my peripheral vision to peek in the windows. I’m not sure what I expected to see. Men dressed in ball gowns? Iron maidens and other medieval torture devices? Corpses hanging on hooks? Of course, what I saw was entirely normal. A bedroom, a bathroom, striped drapes.

I ended up in the backyard, which was equally unremarkable. There was a small garden with a wooden archway at one end and a sundial at the other. There was a deck with a glass table in the middle of it. There was a bird feeder from which a squirrel was trying to pry seeds.

As soon as I moved closer to the house, the squirrel hopped off the feeder and darted for a nearby tree. It wasn’t me that he’d heard. It was the back door opening.

“Nice as it’ll be in a long while, I think. Best we appreciate it.” The voice was a man’s, raspy, with a touch of Southern drawl.

My first instinct was to run, but when I saw a wheelbarrow tipped onto its side next door in the Andersons’ yard, I changed plans. I dropped to my belly and crawled like a soldier until I reached the wheelbarrow. Then I curled up behind it and looked back on the scene.

A man with brown shoulder-length hair and a tatty beard unfolded a lawn chair a few feet from the bird feeder. It was far too cold out for a T-shirt, but he wore one—black with a cartoon demon on the back and what looked like a list of cities. His right bicep was emblazoned with a tattoo of a skull encased in a helmet. Once the chair was in place, he returned to the house and escaped my line of sight.

“I got a blanket if you feel a chill,” I heard him say. When I saw him again, he was pushing a wheelchair across the yard.

An old woman sat in the chair, hunched over so much that it was a wonder she could hold her head up. But hold it up she did, at least for a few moments, long enough to spot the tree where the squirrel had found harbor.

“Can’t do much about them thieves,” the man said. “Add more seed. Birds won’t starve.” He guided the wheelchair over to the lawn chair and engaged the wheel locks with his foot.

The squirrel stole my attention for a moment. I watched as it made a spiral ascent up the tree and hid behind a cracked bulge in the bark. When my eyes returned to the man, I noticed that he was holding a small pillow—a red embroidered throw, the type you’d find on a couch or an armchair. His arms trembled slightly as he held the pillow in the air above the canvas of the wheelchair’s back.

The canvas came up as far as the bend in the old woman’s spine, and that bend was now the highest point on her body. She was curled like a cooked shrimp; her head had fallen and was almost touching her knees. If her posture were better, then her head might have been in line with the pillow. The man might have been pulling the pillow over her face. He might have been smothering her. As it was, he was miming a murder, going through the motions like a golfer taking practice swings.

Strange wasn’t the word for this moment. Bizarre. Because it didn’t stop there. The man then drew the pillow toward his own head. He pulled both sides until the fabric and stuffing took on the contours of his face. The old woman remained in her chair, not saying a thing, hardly moving, certainly not turning around to see what was going on behind her.

Somewhere in the distance, a woodpecker went to work on a tree, and the rattle startled the man. He yanked the pillow from his face and shook his head violently, as if trying to dislodge water from his ear. Then he slipped the pillow behind the old woman’s bent back, ran his hands through his mane, and let out a rumbling and exhausted breath. Finally, he sat down in the lawn chair.

And that’s where he stayed. Neither he nor the woman said anything or even moved much. They looked out past the yard into the grays and browns of the swamp.

I watched them for nearly thirty minutes, first waiting for something else to happen, and then falling into a gentle hypnosis, not exactly a feeling of comfort, but a surrender to the boring and meaningless.

“Lunch?” the man eventually asked.

The woman responded with a barely noticeable nod. They went inside.

F
RIDAY
, O
CTOBER
20

My trepidation transformed into compassion. What I had seen in Fiona’s backyard confused me. I still had no idea who the man and the old woman were, but there was something going on there, something peculiar, something potentially violent. It wasn’t illegal, so I couldn’t really tell the police. And since I didn’t want to admit to snooping, I wasn’t going to tell my parents either. Yet the image of the pillow smothering an invisible face—of the pillow smothering the man’s own face!—was not something to ignore. This was not the kind of person you wanted living in your house.

After a long, dreamless sleep, I went to school with a renewed sense of purpose. I would listen to Fiona, listen carefully to what she was
really
saying. Cries for help aren’t always cries. Sometimes they’re stories.

“Do you mind?” I asked, hovering over Fiona with my tray of French fries.

She looked up from her Oreos. “Sure. I mean, no. I don’t mind. Kendra and Fay-Renee are waiting on chicken nuggets, but they’ll be here in a jiff.”

“That’s fine,” I said as I sat. “I got a table with Mike and Trevor today, but I wanted to stop by and let you know I’m sorry about the other night.”

Fiona paused, as if searching the depths of her memory. “Oh,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Forgotten. Ancient history.”

“Are you busy this weekend?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Why don’t I go over to your house and we can talk about Aquaville?”

“You mean Aquavania?” Her eyes narrowed.

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think you should come over. Our house is a mess.”

From the little I’d seen through her windows, I might have said their house was the opposite, but I wasn’t going to challenge her. The goal was to be comforting, trustworthy. “That’s fine,” I said. “Anytime, though. Anytime you wanna talk about anything.”

Fiona surveyed the cafeteria to see if anyone was listening. “You don’t have a ton of friends, do you?”

It was true. I knew almost everyone in seventh grade, but when it came to friends, there were only a few guys I hung out with at school. Outside of school, there was only Charlie.

“I…”

“I don’t, either,” Fiona said. “I’m fine with that. Kendra and Fay-Renee are nice and all, but there are more important things, more important people.”

“You called me a weirdo the other day,” I said. “I’m not a weirdo, I’m a—”

“Alistair?”

“What?”

“It’s not about being a weirdo. I’m gonna be telling you secrets. It’s about keeping those secrets. No blabbing to Mike. Or Trevor. Certainly not to Charlie. People’s lives depend on it.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“Tomorrow morning, at that rock. Eight o’clock. You listen. You don’t run away. No matter what I say.”

I stood up and ran my finger across my chest in a big
X
. The timing was unfortunate. Kendra and Fay-Renee had stopped amid the round tables, only a few yards in front of me, and Fay-Renee was whispering to Kendra, who was pretending to gag herself. It didn’t bother me, though. Because I knew that Fiona would be telling me something that she may never have told anyone else.

I knew that, at least for this moment, I was important.

*   *   *

That evening, as I washed the dishes, I received another phone call from Charlie.

“You won’t believe what I found!” he squealed. “A box of fireworks in the back of Kyle’s van! Tomorrow morning we go out and catch some toads and we launch them into space on bottle rockets.”

“Sounds fun,” I lied. “But I can’t. I’m busy.”

“Some time later then?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

S
ATURDAY
, O
CTOBER
21

I arrived early, and Fiona was already sitting behind Frog Rock on a lawn chair. There was a chair set up for me as well.

I sat. “Morning.”

She looked me over. “Why the change of heart?”

“I…”

“Felt sorry for me?”

“No,” I said. “Needed to hear more.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re here.”

“I am. I forgot to bring the tape recorder, though.”

“And to wear the snazzy jacket,” she joked. “That’s fine. Like I said, I changed my mind. I don’t want you recording this. I want you memorizing it.”

“I can try to do that.”

“You better. Because I’m gonna talk your ears off.”

Talk she did. We were there for more than two hours, with Fiona telling a story so fantastic, so ridiculous, that I had trouble keeping a straight face. I did my best, though, and I let her get it out. I didn’t question the details. I tried to remember them. I didn’t call her a liar. I listened.