Untouchable (27 page)

The Kid had his head cocked toward the open pickup window, listening. He’d continued his list of night sounds in his notebook.
Dog barking, woman yelling, back gate swinging open and shut.
Darby watched the curve of The Kid’s ear. It was her ear, Lucy’s; it was the same gentle slope. The Kid was growing to look more like her, had her ears and her eyes, her unruly thatch of straw-blond hair. Darby didn’t know where it would end, if it would end. Didn’t know if soon he would look over at The Kid and see more of her face than he could bear.

I want to go,
The Kid wrote.
I want to see the place where you grew up.

Darby looked back at the house, turned the radio up. A survivalist expert and a talk show host were debating the Tehachapi situation, what should or shouldn’t be done if it was discovered that children were in the compound.

“We’ll go,” Darby said. “Someday we’ll drive out and I’ll show you where I’m from.”

If you want to see a secret, meet at midnight at the bus stop outside the library. The city library, not the school library. You can’t tell anyone else what we’re doing. You’ll have to sneak out of your house without getting caught. Bring a flashlight. Write I WILL BE THERE on the back of this note if you want to come. If you don’t want to come, flush this note down the toilet. TELL NO ONE ELSE.

The Kid made two of these notes while the class was waiting in line for lunch, careful to make sure no one else saw. He folded the first note into the palm of his hand and then offered his hand to Matthew to shake. Matthew looked at him like he was crazy. They’d never shaken hands before. But The Kid kept thrusting out his hand until Matthew took it and felt the note hidden there. Matthew looked at the folded paper. The Kid gave him a secretive, under-the-eyebrows look, and Matthew pushed the note down into the front pocket of his pants.

The Kid knew that girls didn’t really shake hands, so for the second note he walked past Michelle and dropped the folded paper at the toe of her grungy sneaker.

“Kid, you dropped something,” she said, too loud, and a couple of the girls in line turned to look, their faces scrunching with disgust seeing Michelle and The Kid standing so close by.

The Kid pointed quickly at the note, looked away, tried to act like nothing was happening.

“Kid, you dropped something,” Michelle said again.

The Kid shook his head, kicked the note up onto Michelle’s sneaker, walked quickly to his place in line. When he looked back, Michelle was bending over, picking up the note, unfolding the paper, mouthing the words as she read.

The Kid laid out the plan at lunch. Michelle didn’t have a problem with the plan, but Matthew complained that there was no way he could get out of his house without his father knowing. The Kid told him he would have to find a way if he wanted to come. Matthew said that this was no problem for The Kid because The Kid’s dad wasn’t always around at night. The Kid told Matthew that he understood there were risks involved, but that what he was going to show them would be worth the risks.

Michelle pulled her note out of the pocket of her jeans, turned it over, wrote
I WILL BE THERE
on the back. Slid it across the table to The Kid. Matthew looked at his note. He couldn’t decide. He seemed even smaller than usual. He looked like he was going to cry with the weight of the decision.

“Stop being such a pussy,” Michelle said. “Stop being such a whiny bitch.”

“You don’t understand,” Matthew said.

“What don’t I understand? You’re either a whiny bitch or you’re not.”

Matthew grabbed The Kid’s pencil, scribbled
I WILL BE THERE
on the back of his note, pushed it across the table to The Kid. Sat back with his arms folded. He still looked like he was going to cry.

Then it’s settled,
The Kid wrote.
We’ll meet tonight.

The Kid took the fastest route home, even though it was a route he didn’t particularly like, the least safe of all his routes. He wanted to get home and start planning the midnight excursion. He’d need to go back into his dad’s toolbox and borrow a couple more masks and goggles for Matthew and Michelle. He might need to draw maps in case they got separated on the way to the burned house. There was a lot to do.

The real shortcut part of the route was a long, tight alleyway between two apartment buildings. The opening of the alleyway was on a side street past Sunset, and the other end dumped The Kid out just two blocks from home. It was like a galactic wormhole in an outer space comic: you went in the mouth, down the long stretch, and came out the other end at an impossible distance. The alleyway was only about two of The Kid’s shoulder widths wide, so once he entered he had to either continue forward or head back. There were no other options, there was nowhere else to go. This was why he didn’t really like that route. He knew that the alley was the perfect place for an ambush.

He stood in the entrance, looked all the way down its length to the daylight at the other end. That light was only two blocks from home. If he ran fast enough, if he was quick enough and lucky enough, he’d be there in no time at all.

He took a deep breath and sprinted into the alleyway, sneakers jumping, arms pumping, pushing as hard, running as fast as he could for that opening.

He wasn’t quick. He wasn’t lucky. They’d known somehow, or they’d guessed correctly. Halfway down the alleyway, Razz appeared at the opposite end, blocking the exit. The Kid stumbled to a halt, falling to one knee, a cold tingling in his fingers and toes. He turned back, desperate to see that the entrance was still clear. But there was something there, a familiar figure backlit by the falling sun. The figure moved in slowly, tall and lean, an exaggerated horror-movie stalk, its long arms out, fingers dragging across the red brick of the alley’s walls.

Brian made pig noises as he approached,
oink oink
sounds through his nose. He called “Here piggy, piggy,” in a low, soothing voice, a voice like The Kid’s dad had used with Steve Rogers, a voice used to trap an animal.

Razz walked in from the other end, laughing a little, a raspy hatchet sound.

“I keep seeing you around my girlfriend, piggy,” Brian said. “Why do you keep bothering my girlfriend?”

The Kid wished he had some of the courage he’d had back at school that day, when Arizona was a guest on his talk show, when he was making those jokes about Brian. The Kid wished he had the courage to open his notebook and write,
She’s Not Your Girlfriend,
or,
You might think she is, but she isn’t.
But The Kid’s courage had fled, had found a way up and out of the alley.

“She tells me you keep bothering her, you keep following her,” Brian said. “She said you smell like piss and shit. That you get so excited around her that you piss and shit yourself.”

Arizona wouldn’t say those things. The Kid knew she wouldn’t say those things, but there was nothing he could do about it. Brian saying them out loud made them as good as true.

“
Cochino,
” Razz growled. “Here, piggy, piggy.”

The Kid was breathing hard, sweating. There was no way out of the alleyway. No way past Razz, certainly no way past Brian. He looked around frantically for something he missed, something he wasn’t seeing, some way out, some way around, but there was nothing. He’d made an awful mistake, taking this route home.

“I don’t want you going near her,” Brian said. His tone was changing, getting deeper, rougher. He bit off the ends of his words. “I don’t want you talking to her, sitting next to her, touching her. I don’t want you infecting her, pig. Do you understand me?”

Brian was maybe ten feet away. The Kid looked at Brian, tried to nod, to give up, but his head wouldn’t move.

“I didn’t hear you,” Brian said.

The Kid tried to nod, but nothing worked, nothing moved. He imagined what a relief it would be to call out, to yell,
Help! Help!
What a relief it would be to let his voice loose.

Razz shoved The Kid in the back, hard. The Kid stumbled forward, stopping a few feet from Brian.

“I know you can talk,” Brian said. “I want to hear you say something. If I don’t hear you say something, I’m going to kill you.”

Razz shoved him again from behind. The Kid flew forward, crashing into Brian, and Brian pushed him back into Razz, and then Brian was upon him. The Kid started swinging, kicking, hitting Brian in the chest, in the arms, but this only made Brian stronger, only made him furious, tight-faced and red, and then Razz was pulling The Kid to the ground and Brian was on top of him, teenager-strength almost, dad-strength almost, pinning him down, holding The Kid’s wrists with his hands, trapping The Kid’s legs with his legs.

Brian rolled The Kid over, face first into the broken cement, a patch of dirt. The Kid couldn’t breathe, his nose and mouth pushed into the ground.

“Say something,” Razz said.

The Kid couldn’t breath. There was dirt in his mouth. He struggled, panicking. He couldn’t breathe, but Brian wouldn’t let him up. The Kid’s nose was mashed into the cement, felt like it was going to break.

“Say something and we’ll let you go,” Brian said.

He could say something. He could force out a sound, a noise, something close to a word. Maybe that was really all they wanted. Maybe they’d let him up and leave him alone, maybe they’d never attack him again, maybe the incidents would end, the meetings with Mr. Bromwell, maybe it would all be over if he said something, if he broke the Covenant.

“Do it,” Brian said, pushing The Kid’s face harder into the ground. “Say something or I’ll kill you.”

A sound, a noise, something close to a word, and maybe they’d let him up, let him go home. Who would know if he broke the Covenant? Who would hear in this stinking alleyway?

“Make him say something,” Razz said. His voice was getting fainter, drifting further away. The Kid couldn’t see anything but black. “Make him say something or he’ll die in the dirt.”

But The Kid thought of his mom, alone out there somewhere. He thought of breaking the Covenant and the awfulness of knowing that his mom would never come back, that he’d never hear her open the front door of the house. He felt how hopeless that would be, how unbearably sad, and he thought about his dad, sitting in the pickup at night, waiting for her to come back, thought about having to tell his dad that he had broken the Covenant and she wasn’t coming home.

“Do it,” Brian whispered into The Kid’s ear. A tribal chant. “Do it, do it, do it.”

The Kid shut his mouth, biting a thick mouthful of dirt, blocking the last possible passage of air. He thought of his mom coming through the front door, his mom returning, that sound he had waited for, and he knew this was still possible, knew he had preserved this chance, so he shut his mouth, clenched his jaw. He heard a voice far off, back off and away, Razz or Brian, someone saying something, and then he felt a final push into the dirt and the darkness overtook him completely.

The Kid and his dad were on the road. They were going from town to town in the pickup, days and days of road and then a town, days and days of road and then a town, moving slowly across the map of the country, west to east. In the towns they asked questions of people on the streets, people working in stores, asked if anyone had seen The Kid’s mom, if she’d passed this way. They had a picture that they showed around, a snapshot from a couple of years back of The Kid’s mom sitting at the kitchen table, eyes closed, chest inflated, just about to blow out the candles on her birthday cake. The Kid was standing beside her, hands clasped over his heart, smiling, watching his mom do something he thought only kids were supposed to do. His dad wasn’t in the picture because his dad was taking the picture. They showed it around everywhere they went, asking people to look at the woman blowing out the candles.
Take a good look. Are you sure you don’t recognize her? Take a good look. Don’t be so quick to say no.

At the beginning of the trip, The Kid’s dad had admitted that he’d lied to The Kid, that he’d lied to everybody. That The Kid’s mom hadn’t fallen in her classroom, hadn’t been carried by one of her students. He told The Kid that he was sorry. The Kid listened to his dad’s explanation, and then he wrote,
It’s OK, I understand
. The Kid did understand. The Kid thought that if he had a kid and something like this had happened, he probably would have done the same thing.

Every night, he and his dad parked on the outskirts of whatever town they’d been through and lay in the truck, under the stars, head to feet on the bench seat, and The Kid hosted his talk show, a series of special episodes,
It’s That Kid Across America!
His guests were people they’d met earlier in the day, people they’d asked for information about his mom, bus drivers, bank tellers, supermarket checkers. But on the show The Kid didn’t ask about his mom, he asked questions about his guests’ lives, where they’d grown up, what their interests were, if they had any special talents or hobbies. He wrote their answers in his notebook, what he imagined their answers would be.

His dad watched the show, drank beers, smiled at the jokes. It was hard to sleep in the truck. The Kid didn’t know how his dad had done it for so long out in the driveway. Maybe he hadn’t, maybe he’d just laid out there awake, thinking, sad that he’d had to lie to everybody, had to lie to The Kid, waiting for The Kid’s mom to come home.

They weren’t traveling in a straight line. A straight line would have been the fastest route between Los Angeles and wherever they were going, but The Kid’s dad didn’t want to leave any stone unturned, so they zig-zagged across the map, slowly, dipping down, dipping up, but always moving further away from home. It got colder as they drove. The days got shorter. At night, they began to roll up the pickup’s windows when they slept. When they woke in the morning, after dozing for an hour or two, they found frost on the windshield, little crystallized paw prints on the hood of the truck.