Tweaked (13 page)

“Gordie!” It's Detective Keppler. He is pacing in front of the telephone booth shouting into a radio when he sees me. “Keep back!”

I ignore him. If they can't get him, I will. I turn the corner. There is a short field behind the mall, stretching to the back of a gas station and a body shop. Chase must have already crossed the field. I can see the cops on foot checking between and inside the cars parked behind the body shop. Just south of the gas station is a medical building. I cross the field and run down the alley between the medical building and the gas station, emerging on to the street in front of them. Traffic is heavy. Pedestrians stand at the intersection, waiting for the lights to change. I scan up and down the sidewalk.
There is no sign of Chase and no way to know which way he has gone.

I stand there a moment longer before turning around. I walk back through the alley, my heart thumping, my anger a hard lump in my throat. I kick a garbage can, the sound of metal hitting concrete echoes in my ear. I pull myself up on a giant Dumpster behind the medical building, push back the heavy lid and peer inside. Nothing but garbage. I let the lid slam shut.

“Gordie?”

I slump back against the Dumpster at the sound of Detective Keppler's voice.

“I can't take it anymore,” I tell him, letting the backpack slide off my shoulder. “He's ruined my life. He's ruined my parents' lives.” I am so close to blubbering. I take in a deep breath, keeping my eyes fixed on the graffiti on the concrete wall.

The detective puts his hand on my shoulder. “Look, we'll get him. It didn't happen this time, but we will. Things will get better once we do.”

I turn away. “Well, they sure as hell can't get any worse. He's taken everything. He's ruined everything. I don't know how they can get better. They'll never be the way they were.” My voice is hoarse.

Detective Keppler doesn't say anything right away. How many times has he dealt with guys like Chase, watched the families disintegrate before his eyes?

“The important thing is that he doesn't get to you. Only you can prevent that. Don't let him drag you down along with everything else.”

I don't answer.

“Do you hear me, Gordie? You've made it this far.”

I nod.

With one hand, he squeezes my shoulder. “Keep your head up. Go to school. Go to the movies and hang out with your friends. Kiss your girlfriend—and if you don't have one, get one. Keep on living your life; it's your best defense. Leave this to us. I promise we'll make things change.”

I shoulder my backpack again, nod at Detective Keppler and head back to the bus stop to go to school. I arrive just in time for second block.

“Where were you?” Jack shouts down the nearly empty hallway. He stands next to the doorway to math class while I pull books from my locker. I walk down to meet him.

“I slept in.” We enter math class together. “I missed the bus.”

Throughout the day, I keep replaying what has happened in my mind. Considering his disadvantages, it's astounding that a messed-up, scramble-brained guy like Chase continues to elude everyone. On the other hand, I guess it isn't. We continue to count on him to act like a rational human being when he is
anything but. Standing before my locker at three fifteen, I try to remember what books I need for homework. I begin to wonder why I have even bothered to come to school at all. I can't recall a thing that was said in class all day.

By the time I arrive home Mom and Dad are not talking to one another. Still, it is as tense as if I'm listening to them scream at one another over the sound of a train. Mom has spent the afternoon driving around looking for Chase, with no luck. Not long after I get home from school, she takes off again.

“She blames me,” Dad tells me. He stands at the kitchen counter, spreading mustard on a piece of bread. He slaps it over the rest of his sandwich. “And the police. She says that if we'd only left her alone she would have been able to talk Chase into turning himself in.”

“No, she wouldn't,” I say.

Dad sits at the table and takes a bite of his sandwich. He chews gingerly before crossing the kitchen and letting it slide from the plate into the garbage can. He's become so thin. I suspect that sandwich was probably the only thing he's attempted to eat all day.

“You and I know that.”

“What's going to happen now?” Taking the plate from Dad's hand, I open the dishwasher. The stench of decaying tuna and cheese makes me take a step back. There aren't many dishes, but the few that are in there
have been sitting on the rack for days. I add soap and turn the dishwasher on.

Dad shakes his head. “I really don't know. But I'll tell you this, the next time the police have him within their grasp they won't be nearly so kind.”

Dad moves downstairs into my territory. He begins using Chase's room to store his stuff, but he sleeps in the rec room. It's strange sharing a space with my father. It's like one of us got caught in a game of Red Rover and we're suddenly on the same side. He and Mom have stopped talking, or at least they say nothing more to each other than what needs to be said. She occupies the upstairs, and Dad and me are down.

Mom acts like we're traitors. She'd had it all under control, she tells Aunt Gail. She would have talked Chase into turning himself in if she'd only had a few more days. She can no longer trust either of us, not now that we've joined forces with the police. Despite Aunt Gail trying to tell her that there are no sides, that we all want only what's best for her and Chase, she remains unconvinced.

Aunt Gail spends more and more time at our house, talking to Mom, trying to get her out of bed and doing something while also acting as a referee. She cleans and cooks. Now and again she makes a comment that
leads me to believe that she has no idea how things got to the point they have. She reminds me of myself when Chase first got into drugs, when he first started lying and stealing, and my disbelief that anyone could be so careless toward the people who were trying to help him. Aunt Gail has a lot to learn about crankheads like Chase.

The police drop by to talk to Dad more often, sometimes more than once a day. I don't think they have much trust in Mom. The real estate agent has also brought a few prospective buyers through the house. It's no surprise to me that she hasn't received any offers. For one thing, the damage Chase caused during his break-in is still not repaired. But more importantly, to an outsider, the atmosphere in the house must feel as cold and indifferent as a chain-link fence.

Every day I take the bus to the secondhand shop to visit my guitar. On my third visit it's no longer in the window. My heart misses a couple of beats. But once I am inside and find it hanging with others along the wall, I breathe a sigh of relief.

The clerk looks up from his crossword puzzle. “Are you ready to buy?”

“Not unless the price has come way down.”

“A couple of hundred perhaps. Say, twelve hundred.”

I shake my head. “I can't do it.” I am about to leave, but I have a thought. “I'm just curious, how much did you give my brother for it?”

He eyes me suspiciously. “Your brother didn't sell it to me.”

“Maybe you just don't remember.” I speak as calmly as my emotions will allow. “You must make a lot of deals in a day. He's skinny, his hair is brown, and he has sores all over his face. He looks pretty much like every other drug addict. He stole it. He punched a hole in my closet where I kept it locked up.”

The clerk silently considers his puzzle. He then repeats what he'd told me the first time I came in. “I told you, I bought it from a woman.”

But he hasn't said it fast enough or in a way that is at all convincing. I know now, for certain, that he bought it from Chase.

“Okay, how much was it worth to her?”

“She got a fair price.” He slides the pencil behind an ear. “What makes you so sure it's yours, anyway?”

“I bought it. I played it for six months. I recognize my own guitar.” I leave the store.

The following day the price drops another hundred dollars. And the day after that, the last day of school, one hundred more. It has also been moved to the back of the store where it looks like old stock.

Jack, Steve and Bobby are keen on practicing more now that school is out. At least for them it's out. I start summer school on Monday. It runs every morning until the end of July, which at least allows me to work
in the afternoons and save some money. The battle of the bands is the first weekend in August.

The three of them have played a few times since Chase took off with my guitar. They've been using an electronic keyboard to replace me, hoping a miracle will happen before August and I'll find a new bass. Jack complains after every practice.

“It sucks,” he tells me. “We'd have a dirtier sound if we brought my little sister in to replace you.”

I try to brace myself for the announcement that they have found a new bass player and I'm out of The Pogos. It has to come; they won't qualify to play in the battle of the bands without live musicians.

Saturday morning, Jack asks me to come over and listen to what they've been working on. When I arrive, Steve and Bobby are already there, playing pool in the basement. Their equipment fills the adjoining space. Steve takes a last shot while Jack tells me he's worked out most of the riffs to the Foo Fighters tune we'd been learning to play.

“We want you to listen. But first we want to show you something.” He sets down his guitar. He's acting a little strange, goofy somehow.

“All right, what?”

Jack pulls a guitar case out from under the old plaid couch. He lays it on top of the cushions, which are tattered from his cats sharpening their claws.
The case has also seen better days. It's beat-up and one latch is broken.

“What's this?”

“Open it.” Steve and Bobby have racked their pool cues and are standing next to us, waiting.

I open it. Inside is a bottom line, Indonesian-made bass. It's sure nothing compared to my P-bass but it's in decent condition. I lift it from the case.

“Okay, we know it's sort of a piece of crap. But it's what we could afford when we threw our money together. It'll do for a while, at least to practice.”

Jack doesn't need to apologize. Instead of getting someone to replace me, they'd gone and done this. I can't believe it. I play a few notes. “It's great. With a new set of strings it will be even better. I don't know what else to say but thanks.”

We have a fantastic practice, driving through one song after another and not breaking until one in the morning. It's like when we'd first started to play as a band and actually made it through a whole song. We choose the three songs we will play in the first round of the battle of the bands.

Walking home, carrying my new beat-up case, it feels good to be a Pogo again.

In the awful days following Chase's escape, Dad sleepwalks through life. He gets up in the morning and goes to work. He spends the evenings in his study, marking papers or, more often than not, just staring at the wall. He says little to me, but I've noticed that I do seem to be his little bridge to sanity, even though I hardly feel all that sane myself. I say this because if he sees me pass down the hallway, he'll sit up at his desk like he's just woken up. “How are our groceries?” he'll ask, or, “Did the paper come today?”

I know he really doesn't care if the paper has come or not. He hasn't looked at it in weeks. No, I think he asks about these ordinary things just to assure himself that the normal world is still turning outside our closed and chaotic one. Or it could be that his thoughts while pondering the wall have spun wildly out of control and he needs something to grab on to, to steady himself.

As for me, I try to spend as little time as I can at home. I have thought a lot about what Detective Keppler told me about not letting Chase suck me in too. If I have to be a jerk and ignore what's going on around me, I've decided that's what I'm going to do. On the other hand, it's fairly easy, because nothing's happened. Chase has gone underground.

It takes a good deal of pressure off Dad just having Aunt Gail around. Mom still cries most of the time. The rest of her time is absorbed in trying to come up with
a plan to help Chase. Although her ideas are more like ridiculous schemes than rational plans. For example, she figures if she could only find Chase, she could get him into a clinic in some other country. Aunt Gail listens, then tries to reason with her—something Dad and I gave up on some time ago.

With summer school every day I don't see much of Jade outside of work. Her mother is in a special clinic for a couple of weeks. She's being assessed for some kind of new treatment, so Jade is spending a lot of time with Holly. It's good for her and she seems more relaxed without the strain of caring for her mom. Still, she is looking forward to her mother coming home, because her aunt, who lives in Seattle, has arranged a sitter for Holly and homecare for her mom. Jade and her friend, Laura, can then visit Seattle for a week. I sure am going to miss her, but for her sake, I know a change of scenery will be good.

Sitting in summer school class with Jason Dodds and Brian Zimmerman feels like I'm part of some moronic reality show. I do my best to ignore them. I keep my head down and my mouth shut. I've also got into the routine of doing my homework in the library before I go to work. If I stick to this system, I should be able to make it through July.

I'm not so sure that Mr. Saik will make it, though. In the first few days, I see him quietly count to ten every
time Dodds shouts out some idiotic remark. But it's hot, the sound of little kids playing in the wading pool in the park next to the school grounds drifts through the open window, and every day at 10:00 o'clock he has to compete with the ice-cream truck blaring some jolly tune. Even he gazes outside now and again, no doubt wishing he were somewhere else. After a few days, he loses patience with Dodds and begins barking back at him the instant he opens his mouth.