THE COFFEE WAS cold and tasted like mud, but Lewis drank it anyway. He had made the decision to take a little run, and needed to stay awake.
“I'm going.”
Toby twisted his head around, but Lewis noticed his eyes did not leave the television screen. “Alright.”
“I'll be gone for a while.”
“Uh-huh.”
Then Lewis felt a twinge of shame, said, “I'll be out by myself.”
“Okay, Dad. See you later.”
Lewis grabbed the keys from the hook and quietly closed the door to the house. He stood on the bottom step of the back stoop and glanced at the woods. For a moment, he almost walked over, found the old path, thinking he'd find Melvin at the end of it. Lost and in trouble. But he chastised himself for more foolishness. So many nights he had tried and failed to find his son. Like trying to pinpoint a shadow in the darkness. Not a single trace until, early morning, the boy's body reassembled in the kitchen, limbs and trunk moving sluggishly, his eyes low and tired and hiding something. Lewis tried not to focus on the flurry of break-ins. Nothing ever stolen, just items shifted, touched. There had been a lull in the reports lately, but it still gnawed at him. He had never been able to catch the culprit. Catch, he was certain, Melvin. Lewis gripped the flaking handrail, stared at the woods again. Listened for some sound of fear, but there was only a gentle whistling. Just the wind riding out through the trees. He went to his car, hauled the door closed. There was only so much he could do, he told himself. As a father. As a constable. Only so much.
No questions were asked when Lewis stopped in and borrowed Terry Verge's prize Mustang. As he drove up onto the highway, he told himself he would just wander for a few miles, enjoy the rumble of an eager engine. His weight against the leather seat when he pressed hard on the gas. The stars in a clear fall sky. But Lewis knew where he was going. As he always did.
THE LIGHT OF his mother faded out, but Melvin still heard her words. Go. You'll find your truth in the barn. He turned around, located the heavy wooden doors of a barn, one set opening onto another set, opening onto another set. After a single forever had passed, he stepped into the damp structure, pigs in a circle, heads bowed with reverence, and in the center was a manger. A bed of straw. Melvin squinted, saw that his brother was sleeping. Toby, fully formed, naked, fetal position, in a pouch of clear fluid, and waiting patiently to be born. Tiny fingers reaching out, testing the membrane. Beholding Toby, Melvin felt clean and good inside, and he knew that his brother was like the trees. Full of rings. Timeless and chubby with purpose and purity. Melvin wanted to touch him, protect him, but there was someone else standing above them. In the loft. Curtain separating the two.
“Open,” Melvin thought, and the curtain spread. Folding sheets of newspaper. Crinkling. A hooded man stood on the platform, arms out like Jesus trapped in the stained glass at the back of the church, sweat marks underneath his armpits moving outwards, coating him. A layering of deep-fried grease. Wind blowing back his hood, and the man was revealed. Skinny, in navy overalls, faded knees. Smirking, smacking a rubber chicken against his thigh. Smacking, smacking. In a rhythm that made Melvin's body jerk. And smells suddenly flapped though the air, car exhaust and unwashed bodies, sour breath and cheap pine tree freshener. He had it, Melvin knew. So obvious. This man had Melvin's sense of smell.
As Melvin's blood began to rush about through highway tunnels, flattened disks tumbling over each other, bending, squeezing, trying to flee, he witnessed the chicken turning into a peachy colored gun, and the man aimed the flaccid barrel directly at the manger. At Toby's neonatal head. Melvin could see Toby's eyes open wide, Toby's hair like a million arms, soft and waving in the fluid. Melvin rushed forward, elephant legs, rolls of loose gray leather weighing him down. Hands now blocks of sand, ready to crush the man's narrow skull, but the tide pushed Melvin backwards, backwards, washed him towards shore. Hands dissolving, settling to the bottom of the stream, watery fingers working to knit him back inside himself. Rolling out of the water, Melvin knew he was on the side of the stream, hidden underneath a heavy book. Godly hand tearing away sheet after sheet. Weight becoming lighter. Gradually, he became aware of reinhabiting his stiff body, felt his face resting in the cold muck that oozed up between the trampled blades of sharp grass.
For a while he lay there silently, had no desire to move while the rest of him arrived from beyond. Then, just before sunrise, he felt a spirit move over him, touch down. Announcing that someone was watching him. Would take care of him, if he held onto the truths that he learned. If he believed everything that was revealed to him. A baby still lived inside Toby. Threatened. Melvin could stop searching, stop sneaking in through opened windows and unlocked doors. The thief had been revealed. And someday soon, Melvin was certain, he would kill Garrett Glass. Kill him dead.
NEAR THE TOP of a spruce tree, an owl gripped a branch with its white claws, then locked her rolling eyes on the child. Since the boy had stumbled down the short path to the stream, he had not moved, had not blinked. He lay there, head twisted to the side, body curled, one bent wing dipping into the steam. Every time he opened his mouth, the owl twitched her ear tufts, waited for a gentle hoo. But no sound emerged. And she loosened one foot, tightened, then leaned, loosened the other, tightened. The sight of this fledgling made her uneasy. Somewhere deep inside the hollow of her flight feathers she understood he was motherless, pushed too soon from his nest. Broken and lost.
A mouse quivered in the shadow of a shrub, then darted across the deadly gap of open space. Reaching the boy, it pressed its body to his hardened jeans, skittered up towards the pocket of his jacket. Nose under the flap, the mouse began to tear away strips of a hand-written note, working, working with its long yellowed teeth. Bunching the damp shreds inside inflated cheeks.
With inbred patience, the owl watched, waited, and when the moment was exactly right, she dropped from her perch, cut soundlessly through the air, diving downwards, wings extended, beak wide open. Swooped over the hapless child, and in one snap removed the tiny violator. Swallowed it whole.
THE FIRST FEW times he'd come, Lewis had been filled with anger. Tempted to take a brick and at three in the morning smash out the front windows. Destroy the one possession she somehow managed to love. Love so much more than him and his boys. But now, the anger had faded, and only a dry sadness remained. Making him suck spit from the crevices of his mouth and swallow over and over again.
Lewis arrived in the city and parked across the street. As he always did, he watched Wilda in the faint glow, dusting and rearranging. Padding among the items. Pausing to lean her head against a worn bookshelf. That night, as Lewis spied, she came to the entrance, stood there, hands touching the glass. Lewis hunched down, worried she might spot him. The humiliation of such an encounter would gut him. But soon, she turned and touched the wall. The store went black, and she dissolved into the shadows. He waited several hours more, until all the drunkards had passed without disruption, then cringed as the car growled into life, and he made the journey home.
Over the years, he had watched her hair grow and her style change from skirts to trousers, and the displays in her front window shift only slightly from what was there to more of the same. Not once was she out, and not once did she have company. And as much as Lewis's insides wanted him to step right up to her and ask why, his hand not once touched the handle, opened the door. His foot never met the ground of that thieving city.
IN THE EARLY morning, Toby couldn't find his note anywhere. He checked every pocket of his jacket, ran his hands down the sleeves. Had he stuffed it into Melvin's jacket pocket instead? Same style, color, only three sizes larger. Toby dropped to his knees, checked the floor of the closet, a jumble of shoes and gravel and dust balls. Nothing. His first love note had vanished, and his face went instantly red, even though he knew Melvin wouldn't rib him. Wouldn't joke. Still, when he glanced at the pen and paper, he didn't have the stomach to compose another.
He went outside, followed the rising sun until he came across a stretch of dandelions, growing in a protected area near the side of a large rock. The flowers curled outwards, just waking up, and he plucked them one at a time, wiped the sticky milk from the stems on his jeans. He walked towards their meeting place, and smelled the intense odor of spruce, as though the warmth of morning was releasing what the night cold had consumed. By the time they met at the boulder, the flowers were closed once again and limp in his fist. He hid them behind his back, but his fist wouldn't open. Wouldn't let them drop into a shadow. And he cringed as he watched his hand move out around his side, and hold them up to her.
She stuck her nose in the handful of flaccid weeds, leaned her head onto his shoulder. He thought to tell her about the note, but decided against it. When she looked up at him and smiled, a dusting of yellow powder on her nose, he realized he didn't need to write anything. She already knew.
“TOAD!”
Bubble at the bottom of a thick dark drink. Knocked free, floating upwards.
“Toad! Wake up.”
“Ah-huh.”
Breeching the surface.
“Something happened.”
“What?”
“I need to tell you something.”
One eye open, Toby turned towards his brother, rigid and shaking in the bed.
“What? You had a dream?”
“No, no. I knows something.”
“You knows what?”
“Someone is coming for you. Coming to get you. And I knows there's no way out from it, and these ones trying to help you can't do nothing for you. They couldn't stop no one. And I was just there and I was waiting in the dark for someone wanting to hurt you, and I couldn't look everywhere at once, and I had to turn my head, and even though I got us into a corner, I still couldn't see everywhere I needed to see, and I couldn't even breathe, like someone was stomping on my chest, and I knew it was only a matter of time before someone showed up to kill you. Take your life away. Leave you in the black. And I decided then and there I'd rather put a gun in my mouth before I sees someone do that to you.”
Silence.
“You fucking fall asleep on me?”
Eyes wide open at the sound of Melvin's queer trembling voice. “No.”
“Someone's coming for you.”
“No, they idn't. Was just a dream, Mellie.”
“'Twas fucking real, man. Scared the shit right out of me.”
Flapped the covers.
“It was just a dream, I said. I wouldn't lie to you.”
“Yeah. Not like everyone else.”
“No one lies.”
“They do, Toad. They all do. Someone's coming to get you.
Maybe me, too. But I don't care about me. You got to be safe, Toad. Safe.”
“I got no one coming for me, Mellie. I swears.”
“You do. You do.” Starting to whimper. “I knows, Toad.”
“Did you take something?”
“What do that mean?”
“I means did you swallow something that might, you know, give you funny dreams or something?”
“It idn't dinner, Toad. You don't get it. Don't you hear the rumbling?”
“What rumbling?”
“Like a piece of junk car. Idling.”
“There's no car, Mellie.”
“Listen!”
“Okay, okay.” He didn't understand, and the sound of his brother's mewing frightened Toby beyond anything he'd ever known. He would fight to the death for his brother, but how could he fight something he couldn't see? Couldn't hear?
“Someone's coming. Things is gonna change soon. Soon. And I can't see everywhere. I got blind spots.”
“Is your head hurting? Should I get Dad?”
“No, fuck, no.”
Melvin lay ramrod straight, and his skinny body shook in the bed.
“You sleep, Mellie.”
“Can't.”
“Yes, you can. You don't be scared, Mellie. Sleep and I'll watch for a while. I'm a good watcher. I won't barely blink.”
After a while, Melvin turned on his side, brought his knees up towards his chest, and Toby lay next to him, curled his body around his brother's, trying to hold what was left together. He felt the sharp points of Melvin's spine through the damp T-shirt, wished he knew how to pad them. Lids pressed back, Toby kept his promise as best he could. Stayed awake. His owl eyes trying to find some light in the darkness.
A ROLL OF pure white shag. Garrett's final payment. He'd lost his job at Clarey's Paints and Carpets after working reliably for six years. Most people would guess he was fired, or maybe he simply didn't perform well enough as a salesperson. But nothing could be further from the truth. Garrett quit. Plain and simple. He told Mr. Clarey that he would never set foot in his store again.
What started innocently enough turned into something vile. Eventually, Garrett understood, it was bound to. During those years of work, Garrett and Mr. Clarey rarely conversed, and when they did, Mr. Clarey never met Garrett's eyes. Instead, the man gazed at Garrett's throat, at his Adam's apple. And Garrett was aware of this look of appetite in his eyes, as though the three cans of wieners hadn't quite filled him up. Garrett didn't trust Mr. Clarey. Not in the least. A man who often pressed his nose into a roll of underpad, inhaling deeply.
Mr. Clarey had called Garrett into his office at closing that day, and when Garrett slipped in through the door, Mr. Clarey asked him to close it.
“Close it?”
“Yes, my son. This is a business meeting, idn't it? These things got to happen behind closed doors.” And, eyes fixed on Garrett's swallowing throat, Mr. Clarey winked. Winked.
“Oh. Oh, okay.” Garrett was nervous that he'd been found out. Perhaps Mr. Clarey had discovered the box containing his supply of carpet cutters was nearly empty. Garrett had stolen over a dozen of them, hated to not have one in his pocket, in his hand. The clicking blade had become a source of comfort.