Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (28 page)

“I can find you wherever you go,” he’d said.
“I’ll be back when he is walking.” She believed him.

The money he paid her with—it came in brown
envelopes stuffed under the door—was generous and arrived
mysteriously after she was asleep. But it had to be given to a bank
first thing in the morning because by midnight it turned into
leaves or ashes or bits of colored paper. So he’d warned her, and
she knew that to be true because once she’d kept an envelope a
second night, first checking that it was full of the promised
money. When she opened the envelope the next morning, it was filled
with red and gold autumn leaves instead. And so she’d nothing for
almost a month and had to go back to tricking to keep the baby and
herself alive.

Predictably, Red Cap had beaten her when he
returned. Somehow he’d known what she’d done without having to
ask.

“It’s written on your stupid cow face,” he
told her and flung another envelope at her. He never asked about
the child.

After that, she went early to the bank, the
baby bound up tightly to her breast so that he didn’t smell
anything but her and the milk, just as Red Cap had demanded. Of
course, every few months she had to change banks, but since Red Cap
continued his generosity that made it only a small burden.

Of course she grew to love the child who
looked nothing like either one of them but had a dark feral beauty
and a brilliant smile. He seemed content being in the little
apartment, entranced by the television Red Cap’s money had
purchased, and absolutely stunned by the music he heard there. She
bought him a little pipe that he tootled on incessantly, and soon
was able to mimic bird songs, and so she named him Robin after her
favorite bird. His father refused to use that name, continuing to
call him Dog Boy, which she hated.

One time she shorted herself on food and
bought Robin a small tape CD player along with a variety of CDs:
Battlefield Band, Janis Ian, Steeleye Span, the Silly Sisters—all
favorites of hers. None of this new stuff. Except for Amanda Palmer
and the Dixie Chicks. He begged then for a fiddle, and she went on
short rations for several months till she had enough to buy it for
him, a quarter-size fiddle that he taught himself to play.

And she talked to the child constantly. Well,
she had to, didn’t she? There was no one else to talk to except
when they went quickly to the bank or to the local bodega at the
end of the road. She kept herself busy during the day with the
boy—playing with him, singing to him, washing his clothes, teaching
him numbers, nursery rhymes, dreaming of escape.

But Red Cap came back as she knew he would.
As he’d warned he would.

He put a stupid strap around the boy’s
shoulders and chest. Then off they went, her little boy trotting
along in that new, funny, rolling sailor walk behind him and Red
Cap yanking on the leash as if Robin had been a dog and not a human
boy.

***

Of course Robin was a disappointment to his
father. So he worked harder at trying to please him. He learned the
smells of the city as if they were his ABCs. Graduating from milk
and mother to finger foods and distinguishing ginko from maple.
Learned the difference between sandals, shoes, and sneakers. Then
the differences between Nikes, Pumas, Reeboks; between
Birkinstocks, Kurt Giegers, and Crocs; between Doc Martin’s, Jimmy
Choos, Manolo Blahnik, Mephisto, and Birkenstocks. Though it would
be years before he had names for the shoes, just the smells.

By the time he was four, he was able to
follow a woman down a street an hour after she’d walked by without
ever seeing her, simply by the smell of her Jimmy Choos and the
waft of perfume.

By the time he was six, he could track two
men at the same time, and when they parted, he could find one, mark
that territory with his own personal scent (a piece of chewing gum,
a wipe of his hand over his hair which was now long and shaggy as a
dog’s, or even by peeing around the spot if no one was watching).
Then he’d go back to the place of parting, and track the
second.

The praise he got from his father was little
enough.

It felt enormous.

***

“It’s time,” Red Cap told the boy on his
tenth birthday.

Dog Boy knew what he meant without having to
be told. He was well-trained. He was old enough. He’d long been off
the leash. This day he would be in at a kill.
A blooding
,
his father called it. He couldn’t wait.

His father handed him a small child’s cap. It
was a school cap, blue with an insignia, a red pine tree and the
numbers 1907. He sniffed it. He would know that scent anywhere.

They walked to a small park, a kind of grove.
It was filled with lovely smells that made Dog Boy shiver with
delight. The sharp, new growing things, both white-rooted and
green. Little mealy-smelling worms. The deep musk of the old oak’s
serpentine roots that lay halfway above ground.

There were many sneaker smells, too, mostly
the rubbery scent that made his nose itch. But there was a familiar
odor, faint but clear enough for him to follow.

He lifted his right hand and pointed at a
place where the path forked. Eager to be off, he was stopped by his
father’s rough grasp on his shirt collar.

“Now is when we must take care,” Red Cap told
him. “Be subtle. Act like everyday humankind. An ordinary father
and his ordinary son on an outing. Not a hunter and his dog.”
Though there was nothing ordinary about the pair.

Dog Boy nodded, he could scarcely contain his
excitement. His father had spoken quietly, not in his usual sharp
trainer’s voice, nor in his dangerous growl. Dog Boy liked this
new, quiet, unexpected sound. It soothed him. It calmed him
down.

“Steady, steady now, show me the way.” Red
Cap took his son’s hand. This was so unusual, Dog Boy almost
stopped to say something, then thought better of it and went
on.

They walked along, almost companionably, and
any onlooker would have no reason to think they were not a happy
pair out for a Sunday stroll. When they reached the fork, the smell
drew Dog Boy to the left. And then another left. And because his
father still had hold of his hand, he was drawn along as well. They
came into a small, hidden, grassy place where dark trees bent
nearly double.

A boy, younger than Dog Boy, was standing,
his back to them. By the way he stood, Dog Boy knew he’d come into
this out-of-the-way place to pee.

“Let him finish,” whispered his father. “We
have time.” As an afterthought, almost as if laughing at the child,
he added, “Though he does not.”

Dog Boy wondered:
Time for what?
But
deep inside he knew, had always known, had tried to keep himself
from knowing. For him, it was the seeking, the finding that
mattered. But not for his father. Never for his father. He
shuddered.

They moved closer to the boy who, turning,
looked a bit alarmed, then relieved, then frightened, then
terrified.

Then silent.

Dog Boy couldn’t stop staring. There was
blood everywhere. The sharp iron tang got up his nose as if it had
painted itself there. He wondered if he would ever smell anything
else.

Watching his father dip the red cap in the
boy’s blood, he tried to weep. He tried to turn away. He could do
neither.

***

They walked in silence back to the house. A
tall black boy his age ran by, his legs scissoring. A smaller kid,
maybe a brother, cried after him, “Chim, Chim, wait for me.”

The bigger boy stopped, turned, caught the
little one up in his arms, swung him onto his shoulders. “Hold
tight!” he said. “Don’t want you to fall.” Then off he trotted, the
little one’s legs wrapped around his arms, his small hands in his
brother’s afro. Their gales of laughter floated back to Dog Boy who
shrugged himself further into his own shoulders, as if he might
disappear there. Had he ever laughed that way? Maybe with his
mother, once or twice, certainly never with his father. He pictured
himself swinging a small child up on his shoulders, the weight of
the child, the laughter. He imagined trotting along the park path,
the wind blowing the scent of lilac and azalea, the smell sweet,
not cloying. Both child and laughter were light in his reverie.

At that moment, Dog Boy had forgotten what
his father looked like dipping his cap in the slaughtered boy’s
blood. How his face had changed into some sort of. . . creature.
An orc, maybe. Or a troll,
he’d thought at the time, pulling
monsters from his reading. A smiling monster. But in the wake of
the two laughing boys, he couldn’t retain the horror of the child’s
blood. The memory of Chim and his brother—Dog Boy was suddenly sure
it was a brother—that memory was even stronger than the memory of
the dead child. He couldn’t think why.

***

Once home, the image of the murdered boy
returned to him, as well as the smell of it so he went immediately
into the bathroom where he washed his face and hands obsessively
for what seemed like hours though in fact it was just ten minutes.
Then he took out the NettiPot his father made him use whenever they
were about to go out on a practice run. The warm water through his
nose and nasal passages flushed away the lingering blood scent and
the last of the memory of the dead boy. He would remember the day
as the one where he saw the black boys and their joy with one
another.

When he joined his father in the living room,
Red Cap was standing awkwardly, staring at the sofa where Dog Boy’s
mother sprawled. Neither one of them was moving.

Something in the room was strange. It smelled
off. Muted. Cold.

Dog Boy ran over to the sofa and looked down
at his mother’s face. All the lines in it had been oddly smoothed
out. She looked almost happy. She smelled. . . For a moment he had
no name for it. And then he had it.

Peaceful.

Then realizing what that meant, he threw
himself across her body and began to weep.

When the weeping was over and he had no more
tears to cry, he picked her up in his arms as if she were a child,
and the bottle of pills she’d been clutching in one hand shook
loose.

He turned to look up at his father, to ask
him what had happened. Why it had happened.

Red Cap was smiling. It was—Dog Boy
thought—the same smile he’d stretched across his mouth when sopping
up the murdered child’s blood.

“Now I can take you to the Greenwood,” Red
Cap said. “Nothing holds you here any more.”

Dog Boy opened his mouth. For a minute no
sound came out. Finally, as if it was a truth that needed telling,
he said quietly, “
She
holds me here.”

“
She
is dead,” Red Cap said as if the
boy hadn’t the sense to realize it on his own. “And not even blood
for the dipping.”

That was when Dog Boy first understood how
much he hated his father. How much he hated being his father’s dog.
He set his mother’s body down on the couch again, carefully, as if
afraid he might bring her back from her final escape. Taking the
small crocheted quilt that hung on the sofa’s arm, he covered her
with it. She looked tiny, small, and—suddenly—safe.

“I’m staying.”

“You cannot.”

Dog Boy made his hands into fists. More tears
began to roll down his face. He expected to be beaten. It would not
be the first time. Probably not the last. He was prepared for
it.

What he was not prepared for, though, was his
father reaching into a pocket and taking out the leash which Dog
Boy hadn’t seen in years. Quickly Red Cap bound him as easily and
as tightly as he’d ever done when Dog Boy had been a child.

For the first time Dog Boy could actually
feel the leash’s power. Perhaps he felt it because he didn’t want
to go where it willed him, where his father willed him. Always
before he’d been eager to go outside, to smell the city scents, to
do what his father would have him do. When he’d been little, he
thought that the leash was only to keep him safe. He’d been proud
the day he was old enough to go outside with Red Cap leashless. He
believed he and his father had forged a team; two hunters, leaning
on one another. He had the nose, his father kept him safe.
Equals.
He’d reveled in that.

But now he understood the truth. The leash
was not just a piece of leather to keep him getting lost, to keep
him out of harm’s way. There was something else about it. Something
that glimmered on the inside. Something fierce. Something old that
he was powerless to resist.

Red Cap pulled on the leash and it drew Dog
Boy relentlessly toward the door.

“I want my fiddle and pipe.” His voice was
high, but not pleading. He would not make his mother’s mistake.
Pleading just gave his father some kind of strange pleasure.

“You’ll not need it where we’re going.”

“Where is that?”

“Under the Hill.”

For a moment he thought his father meant
underground
. It was something he’d watched on a TV show: a
family on the run from the mafia had to go underground to escape
certain death. His father had killed someone, maybe the child of a
mafia chieftain, maybe the child of a policeman. Or the FBI.

Underground.
They’d be on the run.
Together.

But then he remembered the smile, the dipped
hat, the blood, the obvious pleasure that his father had taken in
the stalking, the killing of an innocent child. And he remembered
something else. His father—for all that he was a bloodthirsty,
vicious murderer—never lied. They were going
Under the Hill,
whatever that meant.

Looking back at his mother’s body on the sofa
wrapped in the red and green coverlet, at the silver pipe on the
table, at the fiddle in its case resting against the wall, Dog Boy
told himself:
Some day I will kill him for this.
Once more
the murdered boy was all but forgotten. By this he meant his
mother’s suicide.