Untouchable (9 page)

Sometimes his dad left for work before the pager even buzzed, and this was how The Kid knew that his dad did have a kind of superpower, an intuition that he was needed somewhere in the city, a sense that someone out there needed help.

His dad got postcards sometimes. The Kid saw them when he brought in the mail. He’d gotten used to opening the mail that wasn’t addressed to him in the month after his mom had gone. So many cards had come from teachers at his mom’s school, parents of her students, old friends from back when she was a kid. His dad didn’t open them so The Kid opened them all, and that was how he knew that his dad got postcards from different people all over the city that said,
Thank you
, or,
God bless you
, or,
You did the impossible for us
. These cards were from people his dad had helped, the people he went to when his pager buzzed in the night.

The Kid drifted, dozing, half hearing things, sirens and car horns, engines gunning down the street, the rhythmic beating of police helicopters passing overhead, and then something would bring him back, a bus backfiring, a dog barking, some loud, sharp noise, and he would wake in a panic, afraid he’d missed it, the other sound he was waiting for.

He didn’t believe his dad, the story his dad had told him that day, about his mom falling over in front of her class. The Kid had never heard of a mom just dying like that. He had heard of dads dying, even knew a couple of kids in school whose dads had died. They’d been hurt at work or shot or killed in a car crash. This was the way some dads died. But moms didn’t die that way, as far as he knew. What moms did sometimes was leave. They got sick of kids and dads and they walked out the door and left. This had happened to Little Rey Lugo. His mom had left a couple of times. Once she was gone for over a month. The other kids in school said that she had another family, another husband and kids way out west by the beach. They said that when she got sick of Rey and his dad she went to live with her other family. The kids said that her other family was probably rich and lived in a bigger house.

This is what The Kid thought had happened with his mom. Something similar. Maybe she didn’t have another family, another husband and son, maybe she didn’t have a big house by the beach, but she had left, she’d gone to school that day and hadn’t come back.

He’d heard his mom and dad arguing sometimes, whispering in the night down in their old bedroom or out in the living room when The Kid was supposed to be asleep. He’d heard his mom crying sometimes after an argument, and even sometimes when The Kid’s dad wasn’t there. Just standing in the kitchen in the afternoon while The Kid ate his after-school snack, talking to The Kid one minute and then quiet the next. The Kid would look over and see her crying. He’d look over while they were watching the talk show tape in the morning sometimes and see her crying then, too, just watching TV and crying silently. When he asked her what was wrong, she said that she didn’t know, that she just felt bad. She said that she didn’t know what was wrong.

The Kid suspected what was wrong. She was disgusted by The Kid, the fact that The Kid smelled bad, that he had B.O. and bad breath. She was embarrassed by The Kid, the things people said about him, all of The Kid’s problems at school. That’s why she’d left. He had made her sick and sad. That’s why his dad lied about what had happened. To protect The Kid’s feelings.

She was out there, somewhere. Sad, maybe alone, maybe crying. The Kid kept an eye out for her whenever he went anywhere. This is why he paid such close attention when he was walking around the neighborhood. When he came home from school, he looked for her in the windows of the house. He walked through the front door hoping she’d be standing there in the kitchen, smiling at him, opening her arms. She’d see how clean he was now, how long he brushed his teeth for, how long he swished the mouthwash, how hard he scrubbed in the shower, how much deodorant he used. His dad would come in from the pickup and apologize for the fights they’d had. She’d see how much they missed her and decide to stay home, decide that she was happy here, that this was where she belonged.

The Kid’s dad slept out in the pickup instead of in the old bedroom. One night, not long after his mom had left, The Kid heard something outside and went to his window and saw his dad down in the pickup, listening to the radio. It happened every night after that. His dad usually left one of the truck windows open for a while, until the night got too cold, and on nights when The Kid had his bedroom window open he could hear the radio from down in the truck. His dad listened to talk shows, people talking about sports or the news or taking calls with listeners’ questions about health problems or real estate. The Kid didn’t know what his dad’s interest was in any of this stuff, but that’s what he listened to. Sometimes The Kid would stand at his window, looking down on his dad in the glow from the streetlight, watching his dad sitting, watching his dad lying across the front seat. He wasn’t sure how much sleep his dad got. Some mornings The Kid woke up and went outside to find the windows of the truck rolled up, foggy with his dad’s breath, the radio still playing. The Kid would knock on the pickup’s window so his dad would wake up and start the day.

The Kid knew why his dad was sleeping out there, though his dad never told him. The Kid just knew. It was the same reason that The Kid tried to stay awake all night. His dad was waiting for The Kid’s mom, too. His dad was keeping watch, just like The Kid.

For weeks after she was gone The Kid would come home from school and find flowers and cards waiting on the front porch. The Kid felt bad that people had spent money on those things, wondered how mad those people would be if they found out it was all a lie. His dad never brought the flowers and cards inside. They just kind of piled up and then one day they were all gone. He didn’t know what his dad had done with them. Maybe his dad was ashamed, too, ashamed of lying to save The Kid’s feelings and then all those people went to all that trouble to send flowers and cards.

Every week for a while, Amanda had come by with dinner in Tupperware containers for The Kid and his dad. Chicken and cheese enchiladas, green corn tamales. The Kid felt bad about this, too, but the dinner was always good, better than the drive-thrus they went to, so he didn’t feel too bad. Amanda had been friends with his mom back before he was born, back even before his mom and dad had met. She brought the dinners for a while, and then she stopped. The Kid didn’t know why. At one point she just stopped and then they didn’t see Amanda at all anymore.

The flowers and cards hadn’t come for a long time, but his dad still got the postcards. Whenever The Kid felt angry that his dad hadn’t been able to stop his mom from leaving, he read the postcards waiting on the porch, thought of all the other people his dad had helped.

The only person The Kid had told about his suspicion was Matthew, about a week or so after his mom had gone. He couldn’t hold the secret anymore. It was too much for him. He was afraid he was going to blurt it out in school and get his dad in trouble. He felt like it was going to burst through his chest, like it was going to jump up out of his mouth into the quiet of the classroom. After school one day, up in Matthew’s bedroom, he told Matthew the story his dad had told him, and then he told Matthew why he thought it was a lie. Matthew agreed that this was a definite possibility. Matthew could picture The Kid’s mom leaving like Rey Lugo’s mom had left. This wasn’t unheard of. Matthew promised not to tell anyone else the truth. He swore on a Bible, which The Kid knew meant Matthew was serious.

Matthew told him what he could do to bring his mom back. He could make a Covenant. A Covenant was when you made a deal with God. How it worked was you gave something up, something that was important to you, something that was hard to go without. You sacrificed something and stuck to it, and what you asked God for in return would come true. Matthew said that this happened all the time. It usually happened with little things, stupid things, lost homework or lost pets, but it could happen with big things, too. Lost mothers. But this would mean a bigger sacrifice. Matthew said that if The Kid wanted this big thing, if he wanted his mom to come back from wherever she was, then he’d have to sacrifice something that would be very hard to live without.

The Kid thought for a while, and then he decided. He wouldn’t talk. He knew that if he sacrificed talking, he would never grow up to be a real talk show host, that he’d never broadcast
It’s That Kid!
on actual TV. It would always only be a made-up show. He thought about what it would be like to never talk for the rest of his life. He tried to picture himself as an adult, at his dad’s age, walking around not talking. It was a scary thought, but he would do it if it meant that his mom would come back.

The Kid didn’t know much about God. He’d never gone to church except on Christmas Eve with his mom a few times. All he knew about God was what he’d seen on TV and heard from Matthew. He hoped that this didn’t matter to God, hoped that God would accept The Kid’s sacrifice even though The Kid didn’t know too much about him.

He’d knelt on the hard wood floor of Matthew’s bedroom and followed the instructions Matthew gave. He closed his eyes, clasped his hands, repeated after his friend. The words of the Covenant. When Matthew stopped talking, The Kid was supposed to tell God what he promised to give up. Matthew stopped talking and there was a hole in the room, a pause, and then The Kid said the words, offered his sacrifice, and when he was done talking he closed his mouth and didn’t talk again.

It had gotten easier after a while, after his dad bought him the first notebook, after he’d learned to write fast, learned to think quick. He still even hosted the talk show, although it wasn’t quite as good, wasn’t quite the same. He knew this. But nothing was really quite the same.

The Kid had kept his end of the deal for a year now. Matthew said to be patient, but The Kid didn’t know how long he would have to wait, or if something else was required for the Covenant, if there was something else he needed to do.

He lay in bed and listened in the night, waited for the sound of his dad’s pager, for the other sound. He heard sirens instead, fire trucks from far away, getting closer. He went to his window, looked through the bars. He saw his dad out on the sidewalk, looking down at the manhole cover. There was a flickering orange glow a few neighborhoods over, on the other side of Sunset Boulevard. Something on fire. The Kid could even smell it, burning wood, deep and dusky. He watched the glow, listened to the sirens getting closer. He watched until the glow went away, until the fire was put out, until he could barely stay awake any longer, fading at the window, fighting it but fading, and then it felt like he was being carried, someone in the room, maybe, a shadow of a person, it felt like he was flying, back into bed somehow and mad at himself for being so weak, unable to stop from falling asleep before he could hear the sound of his dad’s pager or the other sound, the one he was really waiting for, the sound of the front door opening and his mom coming home.

T
he Kid stood outside Mr. Bromwell’s office, on time for his appointment but waiting, listing to the murmur of Mr. Bromwell’s voice on the other side of the door, talking on the phone. He had all his stuff in a brown paper supermarket bag, his notebook and pencils and schoolbooks. The bag was only temporary, was only to make do until he and his dad could go shopping for a new backpack.

“Hey, Kid.”

The Kid turned and there was Michelle Mustache, coming slowly down the hall, what looked like cherry fruit juice staining her upper lip, making her nickname seem even truer than usual.

“You waiting for the shrink?” she said.

The Kid nodded.

“What do you talk about in there?”

The Kid shrugged. He didn’t feel like getting into a whole conversation.

“Did you see the fire last night?” she said.

The Kid shook his head.

“I did. It was a white house right down the street. I went out and watched it burn, watched the firemen shooting water. The news trucks were there. That woman from Channel Two was there, standing at the corner talking on TV. I saw the whole thing. I watched it in real life and then I watched it on TV. Then this morning I saw the house on the way to school. Completely burned. It looks like a tooth with a cavity. No one lived. The person who was in the house died in the fire.”

The Kid took his notebook out of the grocery bag.

How do you know that?

Michelle coughed loudly, didn’t cover her mouth, letting the cough fly out into the hallway. It looked to The Kid like she didn’t feel the need to answer his question. She had been there, The Kid hadn’t. She knew what she knew.

“Are you and Matthew still making that comic book?”

The Kid nodded.

“It’s been a long time since the last one came out. How long’s it been?”

A couple of months.

“Why’s it taking so long?”

The Kid shrugged, didn’t bother writing the obvious answer:
What’s the point?

“I thought it was pretty good,” Michelle said. “Not as good as a real comic, but it was pretty good to read sometimes.”

Michelle smelled bad, even from that distance. Like fruit that was too ripe. Michelle had B.O. and bad breath, but the other kids rarely made fun of her for it. She was too big, too wild, too mean.

“I go in and see Dr. Bromwell, too,” she said. “Twice a week. Tuesday and Thursdays, right after lunch. I bet you didn’t know that.”

The Kid knew that. He’d gone down to Mr. Bromwell’s office on those days to call his dad and found the door closed, heard Michelle’s deep voice on the other side.

“We talk about my real dad,” Michelle said. “He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minneapolis and St. Paul, those are the twin cities. He moved out there a few years ago because he hates my mom. He took a bus out there, I think. He didn’t take the car, because my mom’s still got it. My mom’s boyfriend takes it to go buy beer. I tell Dr. Bromwell about how when I save up enough money I’m going to take a bus to Minneapolis to live with my real dad.”

He’s not a doctor
.

“Who?”

Mr. Bromwell. He’s just a Mr.

“He’s a doctor. He’s like the nurse, except he’s even higher up than the nurse. He’s got diplomas on the wall.”

I think he’s just a Mr.

“If he isn’t a doctor, then why the fuck do we go talk to him, Kid? Why the fuck would they send us here?”

Michelle’s face went red, redder than her fruit juice mustache. She got angry so fast. The Kid closed his notebook. He didn’t want to make her any angrier.

“Whatever, Kid,” Michelle said. “He is who he is. You don’t have to tell me what you talk about in there. I don’t really give a fuck.”

She shoved off past him, swaying down the hallway, walking with that bad-guy shoulder roll. The Kid wondered if she had a hall pass. Thought that the answer was probably no.

Rhonda Sizemore was the prettiest girl in sixth grade, maybe even the whole school. She had clear blue eyes and long blond hair and nice clothes, fancy clothes. The kids who were her friends were like celebrities and the kids who weren’t her friends wanted really badly to be her friends.

The Kid was not one of her friends. No way, no how. She looked at The Kid like he was something she’d stepped in, like he was something stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

Rhonda had drawn a picture of The Kid sitting in a garbage can with squiggly fume-lines flying out from his tongue and under his arms. In the picture, he was holding his notebook open to a page that said,
I Stink
. Rhonda had given the picture to the girl who sat in front of her and that girl had passed it to the girl in front of her and so on. The drawing went around the room during Independent Reading Time, while Miss Ramirez graded quiz papers at her desk.

The Kid saw the drawing because it was passed down his row, and when it reached his desk there was really no way to pass it around him. The kid in front just passed it back to The Kid. When The Kid had the drawing in his hands he wanted to tear it up, but Razz grabbed the back of The Kid’s seat and shook his desk and whispered
Come on, come on
, until The Kid passed it over his shoulder.

There was a new girl in class. The Kid hadn’t even noticed her. She must have arrived while he was in Mr. Bromwell’s office. When Independent Reading Time was over, Miss Ramirez called her up in front of the dry-erase board and introduced her to everyone. The Kid didn’t hear her name. He was watching the drawing make its sneaky way around the room.

The new girl was small and pale and incredibly skinny. She wore a plastic barrette in her blond hair, a little blue flower. She said she had moved to Los Angeles from Arizona. She said her father was in the military. The class began introducing itself, one kid at a time, and after each kid the new girl said,
Hello
, and then that kid’s name.

The Kid knew where Arizona was, but he’d never been there, and he wondered if everyone in Arizona looked like her, sun-kissed and slight.

“Hello, Rhonda Sizemore,” the new girl said.

The Kid wished he’d held onto the drawing. He didn’t want the new girl to see it. He thought that this was someone who didn’t know anything about him, who didn’t know how disgusting he was. He thought that if he could get a hold of the drawing again, he could maybe keep her from seeing it and thinking those things about him.

“Hello, Matthew Crump,” the new girl said.

Arizona, The Kid thought. That should be the new girl’s name. He thought of the desert, bright white sun, clean sand stretching to each horizon. Images from a cowboy comic he’d once read. A new place, it seemed like. No buildings, no people. A place where nobody knew anything about anybody.

The drawing was making another circuit, moving from desk to desk every time Miss Ramirez looked at Arizona instead of the rest of the class. When it reached The Kid he grabbed onto it, folded it once, twice, three times into a small, tight rectangle. Razz shook the back of The Kid’s seat again, Come on, Come on, and when The Kid didn’t pass it back he heard other kids whispering too, Come on, Come one, Razz whispering the loudest, an undisguised threat in his voice.

It was The Kid’s turn to say his name, so Miss Ramirez said,
Whitley Darby
, to keep things moving along, to avoid the awkward delay of The Kid writing in his notebook and holding it up for the new girl to see. The other kids laughed, but The Kid was grateful that she’d saved him the embarrassment of explaining the notebook to a new person.

The Kid’s desk was really shaking now, Razz trying to jar The Kid loose so he’d drop the drawing. The Kid didn’t want the new girl to see the drawing, but he couldn’t think of a place he could hide it. The shaking got worse,
Come on, Come on
, and when he felt the kicks starting, the kicks trying to knock over his chair, he folded the paper again,
Come on, Come on
, making it as small as he could and then he popped the drawing into his mouth, chewing fast. The kids around him erupted in angry yells, drawing a stern look from Miss Ramirez. Razz giving him a final hard kick. The Kid swallowed.

“Hello, Whitley Darby,” the new girl said.

The Kid took different routes home from school, alternate routes, attempts to confuse the enemy, to get home without incident. He had four of these routes, one for each of the first four days of the week. He followed them in sequence. On Fridays, he went back to the Monday route, which meant that the next week he would start with the previous Tuesday’s route, and so on. He kept track of all of it in his notebook. It was a complex safety system. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes he turned a corner and there they were, Razz and Brian Bromwell, waiting for him.

Sometimes The Kid came up with different routes when an incident had occurred, or when there was something he wanted to see. Then he would take another way home,
circuitous
, his mom’s word, meaning a route that went way out of its way to get him home. This was one of those days. He made a new route through the neighborhood where the fire had been. He wanted to see what all the commotion had been about, the sirens and the glow in the sky. He wanted to see if Michelle’s story was true, wanted to see what was left of the house after the fire.

At the traffic signal at the top of the hill he took a left and doubled back, away from Sunset, the opposite way from the way home, down the hill along the cinderblock wall at the backside of the strip mall. High up on the wall were signs for the donut shop, the nail salon, and then the main store,
Gift 2000
, where they sold a little of everything, school supplies and cleaning supplies and boxes of cereal with brands The Kid had never heard of. Everything in the store was supposed to cost 97 cents. The store used to be called
97¢ Gift
, but they’d recently changed the name and hung new signs on the outside of the building in anticipation of the new year. The Kid thought that was just as well, because
97¢ Gift
was misleading. After tax, everything in the store actually cost $1.04.

It was hot again, bright afternoon sun in his eyes. A rickety van rumbled by, what Michelle Mustache called a roach coach. There were placards on the side of the van with a menu in Spanish, pictures of tacos, burritos, tostadas, hand-drawn logos for soft drinks and juices. The vans stopped at construction sites at break times, and workers lined up to buy breakfast and lunch from the back. Michelle said that she bought food from roach coaches all the time. She said that the tostadas were really good, you just had to be careful that you knew what you were biting into.

There was a large cardboard box on the sidewalk halfway down the hill, the box for some sort of major appliance, a stove or a giant-screen TV. Two dirty, shoeless feet were sticking out. The Kid almost stopped to check if the person was okay, but then he heard snoring from inside the box, so he moved quickly away.

Every few seconds he checked back over his shoulder, half-expecting Brian to be gaining ground at a full sprint, impossible to outrun, to get away from. He scanned the street ahead of him, the corners of houses and apartment buildings, ready to change direction and run like heck if need be. When he saw something that he wanted to write down in his notebook, he stepped off the sidewalk and crouched down between cars in a driveway to hide while he was most vulnerable, while his eyes were on the page.

He walked down the final slope onto the street where he figured the fire had taken place. He wasn’t exactly sure what he had expected, but this wasn’t it. No fire trucks, no police cars, no dead bodies, no smoking craters. The street looked the same as it had ever looked, small houses in ramshackle rows stretching out to the base of the next hill, cars and trucks parked at the curbs, dogs sleeping on porches. Like nothing had ever happened. It didn’t seem likely that he’d gone down the wrong street. He had a very keen sense of direction. He continued along, looking for any evidence of what had happened the night before.

He smelled it before he saw it. Charred wood and stale smoke, like the morning after a barbeque. It was a small house near the end of the street, wedged in tight between two larger houses. One level, maybe a few tiny rooms. There was a cement porch in front and two thin strips of concrete running through the dirt at the side of the house to function as a driveway. The Kid couldn’t remember ever noticing the house before, couldn’t remember what it had looked like before this.

The house was burned to a crisp. The two front windows were nothing more than ragged black holes, the wood frames blown out around the edges. Whole sections of the low roof had collapsed, and long fingers of black sear-stain shot out of the holes and down the front and sides of the house. The walls and roof were soaked from the fire hoses, the wood still wet even in the afternoon heat. It looked like a piece of soggy charcoal in the shape of a house. The Kid held his nose. The closer he got, the more powerful the smell was.

He didn’t know if there had ever been grass in the small patch of front yard or if the grass had burned up or what. It was just dirt now, rutted with tire tracks and boot-prints, slithery snake trails from fire hoses. There was a big plastic garbage bin overturned in the front yard, melted almost perfectly in half. The front door of the house was missing, maybe burned down or kicked in by the firefighters, but there was a heavy steel security door still in place, closed tight. It looked ridiculous with the blown-out windows and the holes in the roof. Who would want to break into the house now? The Kid thought of somebody closing the security door when they left, a policeman or fireman, which he guessed made sense. What did you do when you were the last person to leave somebody’s house, even if it had burned down? You closed the door behind you.