(2007) Chasing Fireflies - A Novel of Discovery (5 page)

"What's your name?"

He pulled the pencil from behind his ear, drew a question mark, then circled it.

Seconds passed. I tried again. "Until the age of six, folks called me something different every time they shuffled me from one home to the next. I didn't know what my birth certificate said until Unc here showed it to me."

He shot a glance at Unc's boots.

"You ever seen yours?"

He shook his head.

"What do people call you?"

He turned to a clean page and wrote in block letters: SNOOT.

I studied the page. "They call you anything else?"

From the moment we had walked in, his left leg had been bouncing like Pinocchio tied to an invisible tether held by a puppeteer above the ceiling.

"What if you could pick any name ... and you knew folks would call you by it ... what would you pick?"

The hand stopped, Pinocchio's tap dance quit abruptly, and the kid's head slowly turned toward my feet. After nearly a minute, he turned back to center, and the puppeteer tightened the slack.

For the first time, I noticed that most of the pages in the notebook were covered in sketches. "Will you show me your notebook?"

He turned to the first page and held it open on his lap. I put my hands behind me so he'd know I wouldn't take it, and leaned in. The realism was stunning yet, based on what I had seen walking in, so was the speed with which he sketched. He flipped the pages while Unc looked over my shoulder.

We saw a rundown trailer on blocks with a fat, collared cat sunning itself on top and a German shepherd burrowed in the dirt below with two, undoubtedly pink, flamingos thrown off to one side. One of the heads had been chewed off. One high-top basketball shoe, the laces untied with a hole above the big toe, sat at an angle before the front door. Beer cans and Jim Beam bottles riddled the grass around the front door. A clothesline hung off to one side. Men's underwear, a woman's thong, a few pairs of jeans, and one pair of kid's faded jeans hung from it. A tall live oak rose up from behind the trailer and towered above it. A fifty-gallon barrel cut in half and resting on its end sat front and center, flames rising above the rim. A bag of charcoal had been tossed aside and lay crumpled nearby. On the door hung the number 27. All the windows were open, and a huge floor fan had been lodged in the bedroom window on the end.

I tried to find his eyes, but he lowered them further. "Can I turn the page?"

He nodded, and I slowly turned the page-again putting my hand behind me.

The second page contained a close-up sketch of what looked like a massive and muscled right hand, covered in grease and calluses, wrapped around a pair of pliers and squeezing like a vise. The pliers were pressed against what looked like the back of someone's arm or shoulder blade, and pinched inside the nose of the pliers was a fold of skin, maybe an inch long and half an inch in width. The next picture, or frame, showed the hand and pliers just after they had ripped the skin off the arm.

I compared the kid to his pictures. First his arms, then shoulders and back. His skin was a war-torn canvas. Including the one beneath the gauze, I counted sixteen scars. Each one was about as long as the nose on a pair of pliers.

The kid's head had been buzzed short, and entire random patches of hair were missing. They'd been pulled out. His shoulders, bony and narrow, fell off like waterfalls at the edges. His fingernails had been bitten down to the quick, and his feet were that kind of dirty that no single bath would clean.

Unc studied the pictures, the kid, and then me. His lips were sort of wrapped around the left side of his mouth, and his front teeth were chewing on the inside of his right cheek. Every few seconds, he'd spit out what looked like a dead piece of skin.

I knelt next to the kid, trying to level my eyes to his. Without touching, I pointed to his arms. "Who did this to you?"

The speed of the hand on the tether was tapping double-time and now controlled both his left leg and right hand. His head moved from Unc's feet to mine and then back to center. Finally, he shut the notebook and crossed his arms.

I sat on the floor in front of the kid and pointed. "What's his name?"

Now his head began bobbing along with his leg.

"Can you draw it?"

The hand slowed, the bouncing stopped, and a few seconds later he quit moving altogether.

I tapped the notebook. "Show me."

He pulled the pencil from behind his ear, opened the book, and in a matter of three minutes sketched a man from the waist up. Dark hair, mustache, sleeves rolled up, big biceps, beer belly, shirt untucked and unbuttoned, a cigarette dangling from his lips, tattoo of some creature with a snake's head on his right bicep and a naked woman wrapped in a much larger snake on his left forearm, long sideburns, and a name patch ironed on his chest. It read Bo.

I pointed at the name. "Bo did this?"

The kid didn't respond, letting the picture speak for him.

"Does Bo have a last name?"

Still no response.

"Is Bo your dad?"

The kid picked up his pencil, turned the notebook, and pressing hard on the paper wrote No.

"Did your mom live there too?"

He used the tip of his pencil to point to the word.

I pointed to the Impala on the first page. "Did your mom live in that car?"

He pointed again.

Unc reached slowly across, flipped the page to the sketch of the train intersecting the Impala and pointed to the woman behind the steering wheel. He spoke slowly. "Was that your mom?"

The kid looked back and forth between our feet five or six times like windshield wipers set on intermittent. Finally he circled the word.

I sat back, rubbed my chin, and scratched my head. Too many things weren't adding up. Without thinking, I patted the kid on the knee-which made him flinch. "You like pizza?"

The kid looked around the room, behind him, then began bobbing forward and back. He eyed the man in the suit on the other side of the door and wrote slowly in the notebook YEs.

"Pepperoni?"

He pointed.

"Extra cheese?"

He circled it twice.

"Be right back."

I dialed Nate's Pizza-my late-night writer's addiction. While the phone rang it struck me that, in all of our conversation, the kid had never uttered a word, and I had yet to see the color of his eyes. I told Nate what I needed, and he promised me fifteen minutes, which meant thirty. Then I dialed Red, who flipped open his cell phone on the fifth ring.

"You at the hospital?"

"You want to tell me what's going on here?"

"That's your job. The paper has decided it is in that kid's best interests-"

"You mean `the paper's."'

"Right ... to discover that kid's identity, where he's from, and what sick mutant of a human has been beating the hell out of him."

I hung up, slid the phone into my pocket, and stood in the hall considering. I needed to talk with anyone who had contact with this kid: paramedics, firemen, nurses, his doctor. I pulled a small black notebook out of my back pocket and began making notes.

Just then a doctor, maybe thirty, appeared at the door and began reading the chart. I tapped him on the shoulder and extended my hand. "Chase Walker. I'm with the paper."

He nodded and sidestepped away from the door, causing his stethoscope to sway like dreadlocks.

"Yes ... Paul Johnson. I've read your stuff. You do good work. The drug story on the shrimp boats was fascinating."

Two years ago, I began researching a rumor that the shrimp boats located out of Brunswick were being used to run ecstasy from Miami to Myrtle Beach. Because money follows drugs, it wasn't hard to uncover. I took some late-night video, showed it to the police. They staged a sting, and Red printed my story on the front page.

"Thanks for coming." Dr. Johnson looked up and down the hall, eyeing the nurses, techs, and other doctors working there. "We thought it might help to get some media coverage. Find out who this kid is."

"What happens from here?"

"Well, as soon as I clear him, the state will come pick him up and assign him to either a boys' home or foster home. We don't have too many registered foster parents in Glynn County, and from what the DA and CFS tell me, those we do have are either top-heavy or not interested in taking in a ... a kid like that."

The doctor turned, and Unc stuck out his hand.

"I'm Willee McFarland." He pointed at me. "I'm with him."

The doctor shook his hand and continued. "I think he likes the ice cream, and he really seems to like the quiet and ... the guy with the gun guarding the door. If he's asked to see that gun once, he's asked to see it fifteen times. Well-he points, mostly." He turned to me. "Have you gotten him to say anything?"

"No. You?"

"He won't talk."

Unc piped in, "Won't ... or can't?"

The doctor nodded in agreement. "You picked up on that?"

`Just because a chicken has wings doesn't mean it can fly."

The doctor looked confused. I tried to help him out. "Appearances can be deceptive."

He nodded in agreement and flipped the chart open. "Yesterday we took some pictures, and as best we can figure he suffered some tracheal trauma somewhere in the past. Damaged his voice box. It might work, might not. I don't have much experience with kids like him, but I've read in the journals where kids with a history of abuse-especially his kind-suffer permanent memory loss-and sometimes stop talking."

I flipped open my black book and probed. "What do you mean?"

"It's a defense mechanism. Their minds block it out-sort of like an intelligent hard drive in which the most horrific files have been deleted in an automatic response to protect the whole drive."

"So, he can draw like Michelangelo, but might not know his own name?"

"Exactly."

"And his voice?"

"Another mechanism. Not speaking brings less attention to themselves, meaning they are noticed less and, they hope, beaten less. They're usually told to shut up whenever they do speak. Add to that the physical damage to the voice box, and you've got a kid that for all practical purposes is mute."

"You think he'll ever speak again?"

The doctor shook his head. "Don't know. In time, if his vocal cords and voice box can repair themselves, but the rest is up to him. But that's jumping the gun. I'm no psychologist, but in order for that to happen he's got to understand there are people in this world who want to hear him. Thus far, that's not his experience, so we're rowing against the current."

"That explains his notebook."

He nodded and closed the chart. "Remarkable. I've never seen anything like it. He's got the speed of a cartoonist and the talent of Norman Rockwell."

Unc nodded. "How old do you think he is?"

Doctor Johnson squinted one eye and tilted his head. "Maybe nine. Not ten. He's still prepubescent."

We small-talked a few minutes, and I noted everything I could remember and wrote down questions to research later. About that time, I started smelling pizza.

I paid the delivery boy, and then the three of us took the pizza into the kid's room, where Unc served four plates. I was three bites into my slice before the kid lifted his to his mouth. He smelled it, studied the edges, and then looked at the door and the man wearing the suit. The guard sat half in the doorway in a folding chair, reading a Clive Cussler paperback. The kid slid off his chair, and I noticed how skinny he was. Every one of his ribs showed, and his hips looked hollow. Walking slowly and humpbacked like an old lady, he carried his plate to the door and offered it to the guard.

The guard-four, maybe five, times larger than the boy-looked at the top of the boy's head, then at the pizza. He held out a platesized hand. "No, thanks. I'm trying to quit."

As if bolted to a lazy Susan, the kid turned, paused, then turned back again and slid the plate below the open book and onto the man's lap.

The guard sat back, set down his book, and said, "Well ... if you insist. Thank you."

Unc served the kid another piece, and he began to eat. He chewed slowly, swallowed as if it required effort, and looked at the box. Over the next forty-five minutes he ate four pieces and drank three small cartons of milk. When he'd polished off the last of his milk, he turned his head toward my plate and the two uneaten pieces of crust.

"You can have it." I tilted the plate toward him. "I'm done."

When I was working on the shrimp boat story, I got to know a mangy dog that used to show up not long after the boat guys had clocked out and gone home. After three months of baiting him with dog biscuits, he still would not let me pet him. He only came close enough to smell whether or not I had food. And if I did, he'd wait until I set it down and walked off. He had no collar, his hair was matted and tangled with cockleburs, and he lived beneath a warehouse porch three blocks away. One day I made the mistake of picking up my tripod to reposition my camera. It was a few days before I saw him again. Looking at the kid, I was reminded of that dog.

I set the plate down, and the kid slowly took the crust, pulling it back to his plate only after he'd looked over his shoulder. He ate and l jotted notes-those that only I could read and would make no sense whatsoever to anyone else. Based on what I saw, his skin-and-bones presentation was not a function of small appetite. The kid was a vacuum cleaner.

I set my card on top of the notebook. "You need anything, you have somebody call me. Okay?"

He slipped the card inside the accordion pocket in the rear of his notebook, but made no other movement. For all I knew, he had a hundred others just like it in the same place. His cooperation at the moment did not suggest compliance in the future.

As we walked out, I heard his pajamas sliding along the floor behind us. He stood behind Unc and tugged on his back pocket. Eyelevel with Unc, the kid opened his notebook, tore out a page, and handed it up without looking at him.

Uncle Willee studied the picture for several minutes while his front teeth chewed on the inside of his right cheek. Finally, he took off his baseball cap and set it gently on the boy's head. It teeter-tottered from the center, hung well out over his ears, and dwarfed his face. Unused to receiving gifts, he looked confused. Unc read the kid's posture and then gently reached over the top, adjusting the Velcro to fit his head. "There, how's that?"