The Parallel Apartments (28 page)

…
man named Brady…

The tire disappeared. At virtually the same instant there was a loud
op,
and vulcanized shrapnel spread through the summer afternoon.

Murphy ran back through the alley in an aural vacuum. The world was bright, bright like a dentist's anglepoise, even under the dotting shade of the trees arched over the alley. Squinting bright. Headache bright. And silent.

He could barely breathe, but at the same time, he could breathe far more deeply than he ever had—as though his windpipe had dilated but his lungs had shrunk to dirty pink kitchen sponges, dried and slate-like from disuse.

He realized he still had his magnifying glass in his hand.

It was whole, uncracked. He kept running.

When he finally got home, he was alone—Granny wasn't back from tutoring yet. Murphy stood in the kitchen, closed his eyes, respired in his strange new way, and tapped on his skull with the magnifying glass, hoping his hearing would return.

The fake black-forest clock over the kitchen table chimed. He opened his eyes. He looked down.

His entire front, from V-neck to Hush Puppies, was soaked in blood.

He screamed. It came out hoarse, broken, frothy, like the howl of a rabid whippet. He searched for the source of the blood. He peeled off his shirt, kicked off his shoes and socks, tore down his shorts and underwear, and scanned himself. No cuts, tears, avulsions, holes; nothing missing. It was as if he were sweating blood. He looked at himself in the polished, convex
flank of the four-slice toaster. There was something odd about his neck. He ran to the bathroom.

A nozzle, greasy and black, two inches long, stuck out of his windpipe. From the end of it, spit-thinned blood dripped; from the root of it, rich red channels pooled in his collarbone, spilled over, and fanned out down his chest.

He pulled out the tracheotomy tube.

And he fainted.

He spent four days in the hospital. Who cares; he had gotten away with blowing up Travis's precious tire. Supposedly Travis thought his tire had burst in the sun. It
had
been the hottest part of the hottest day. Obviously, he'd never noticed the splashed blood trailing through the gravel in his side yard and down the alleyway back to Murphy's house.

The official press was that Murphy had fallen on a slot-head screwdriver, which seemed to satisfy everyone except for a tall, skinny nurse named May who would come into his room, pinch his big toe really hard, and point at the ceiling.

“Ssss. Ss. Sss,” she would say. “You didn't fall on no screwdriver.” Then she'd wiggle all his valves and slap his bag of saline solution. “And let me add that you too old to wet the bed, young man.”

Murphy hadn't wet his bed since Travis flung him off the merry-go-round. Murphy had regarded the side effect as freak luck, like when some people get struck by lightning and all of a sudden they can memorize a quarter million digits of pi or read minds.

But now he'd wet the bed every night since he'd been in the hospital.

Five weeks later, on another abnormally hot day, Murphy, with a new timbre to his voice that made him sound like Paul Lynde yodeling underwater, reported for the first day of third grade.

“Murphy Lee?” said Mrs. Santangelica. “Is that you?”

“Mmm.”

“You sound different.”

“Mmm.”

“What happened?”

The attention of the other forty or so freshly advanced third-graders had turned to Murphy and Mrs. Santangelica.

“Mmnmnow.”

The classroom sang with grade-school chuckling.

“Aren't you hot with that shirt buttoned all up?”

“Mnmo.”

“Do you have the croup? Maybe you'd like to see the nurse? I'll excuse you.”

Murphy said, “There's no excuse for me,” but it came out sounding like an experimental dulcimer melody. His classmates abandoned chuckling for giggling.

“Blowhole,” said Renée Tuttle, who was sitting directly behind Murphy.

Murphy had had Renée as a classmate last year. Over the summer, she had grown from a tiny, delicate, clover-like being, always overlooked, forgotten, ignored, in danger of being trod upon, to a
girl
—taller than anyone in the class, razor-chinned, strapped with long muscles.

“What'd you say, Renée?” said Mrs. Santangelica.

“I don't know, nothing.”

“Be sweet.”

Murphy'd heard that Renée's dad was a karate expert, and forged combat knives out of industrial hacksaw blades. He played high-stakes poker, smoked contraband cigars, and drove a yellow Porsche covered in STP and Pennzoil stickers that could go Mach 1. He played bass in a band and could drink a whole case of tallboys. He had night-vision goggles and a medieval crossbow. He once put a tapir in a headlock, and another time caught a baby that had fallen out of a helicopter.

Renée huffed and put her feet up on the back of Murphy's chair. She bounced her feet as fast as a drumroll until recess.

On the playground, Murphy went behind the jungle gym to explore a giant old pile of dirt that had sprung a copse of weeds over the summer. He climbed to the top and looked down. Dandelions, ragweed, hay, crabgrass. Nothing especially flammable; most of them, he knew from experience, would hardly smolder. And the hill's non-weeds were just as disappointing: broken glass, mashed cans, shreds of rotted rubber. Except for a confused or possibly insane locust pacing back and forth at the foot of the hill, there weren't even any bugs to vaporize.

Murphy euthanized the locust and sat down at the summit of his dirt hill.

He watched his classmates. They were the same kids as last year, doing the same things. They fired the same Nerf balls at each other, fought over the same Frisbees, sat morosely in the shade of the brick wall of the gym, stalked, screeched, snuck, hid, and spun like pulsars until their fuel of sugar was spent and they collapsed in flares of powdered dirt, where they would wait for a recess monitor to drag them away. All the same. Except now they were a little older and a little bigger, less frantic but more potent, less cruel but more cunning. Coarser. At home with premeditation.

Murphy got out his magnifying glass. He began to peel off a callus he'd recently developed on his thumb from sweeping Granny's walk every day.

The callus came off. He accidentally dropped it in the dirt.

“Shit,” he said.
Chisth.

“Watcha doing, blowhole?”

Murphy spun around. Renée.

“Mnupn.”

“What's that? Magnifying glass? Give it.”

Renée took his glass away, pushed him aside, and then immediately and expertly focused the sun on the cuff of her jeans. A tiny smolder only.

“Sucks,” said Renée, giving Murphy back his magnifying glass. “My dad has an oxyacetylene torch. Fifty hundred thousand degrees. Hotter than the planet Mercury. Get rid of that dumb magnifier and get a torch. Bye, blowhole.”

Renée shoe-skied down the dirt hill and ran off toward the slides.

Murphy searched for the callus with his glass. Desperate, he burned off a knot in his shoelace.

The bell rang.

Murphy began following Renée home after school.

He'd stay a block or so behind her, and when she turned the corner at the unfinished house, the one he'd burned Count Chocula into, he'd stop, watch her until she disappeared, then sit on the curb and flick lighted matches into the street until it was time to go home and watch
The Brady Bunch.

Though it felt like he was abandoning tradition, he had retired his magnifying glass and switched to the sulfur match. Though likely not as
much fun as an oxyacetylene torch, matches were efficient and immediately satisfying. They were also copiously available—Granny had accumulated hundreds of boxes and books of matches that she stored in a big aluminum suitcase of the sort secret agents use to carry dismantled sniper rifles. What's more, during the summer she had switched to a gold Zippo lighter one of her math tutees had given her. So, for most practical matters, Murphy now had his own metal valise of power.

“A nice smell, flint and lighter fluid,” Granny had said, flipping open her new Zippo and snorting at the wick. “Smell, Murphy.”

Granny leaned far over her legal pad of proofs to wave the lighter under his nose.

Nice, Murphy had thought, but nothing compared to the sweet, almost alcoholic top note of an oxidizing gelatin-phosporous-head match.

“Delicious, right?” said Granny.

Murphy nodded instead of speaking.

“Murphy, bed. Go.”

Because he'd started wetting the bed again, Granny taught him how to use the washer and dryer.

“Don't forget to empty the lint trap. See? Just get a fingernail under the lint layer to get it going, then roll it off the screen. Feels pretty good to do. Lint rolling.”

“Ymf.”

“If you forget, the lint can catch fire. You heard me, Murphy?”

“Yp.”

He wondered if laundering was his purpose.

Murphy squeezed the box of matches in his pocket that he'd selected that morning before school—a fat cuboid made of scabbard and paper that read in faded cursive
THE SPODEE MOTOR LODGE WITH SWIM-POOL
—and waited for the bell that would signal the last instant of school and the first of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Mrs. Santangelica seemed to be waiting impatiently, too—she unfolded and folded and emptied and filled and tested and retested her professional
Swingline stapler, until finally the bell rang.

Renée jumped up and was out the door first. Murphy waited ninety seconds and then followed her out into yet another ridiculously hot day.

As always, at the corner where the unfinished house was, Renée turned and was gone. This time, though, he wouldn't see her for five days, until school on Monday.

On the sidewalk across the street a bored-looking mourning dove pecked at an empty Skoal can.

Murphy had taught himself to shoot a flaming match twenty, sometimes thirty feet by first pushing the match head against the strike-paper with his fingertip, aiming, then flicking his finger. He got out his matchbox, calculated vectors, and let one go.

It landed well short of the dove, who paid it no attention.

Murphy turned to go home.

“Hi, blowhole,” said Renée.

“Agh.”

“Is your voice box ever gonna heal?”

Panic forced dots of sweat out of Murphy's wrists and forehead.

“Agh.”

“I doubled around that skeleton house,” she said, pointing at the half-finished construction project. “I wanted to ask you why you follow me every day. Do you like me?”

“Agh.”

“Come over, and I'll ask my daddy to light his torch.”

Renée lived in a big duplex, each half of which had later been halved, forming a fourplex; the Tuttles were domiciled in the second unit from the left.

“Where,” said Murphy, carefully testing the word before he finished the question, “is your daddy's Porsche?”

“Your voice sounds a little better,” said Renée, as she sorted through the half dozen keys she kept on a leather bootlace necklace. “Porsche is getting the double exhausts chromed. Come on in.”

Mr. Tuttle, a large, down-comforter-soft man begrown with a mossy gray beard, was asleep in a fully articulated Barcalounger in front of a TV. He was shoe- and sockless, wearing a three-piece suit whose tie had been shed and had come to rest in a bowl of popcorn on the floor next to a four-tier
pyramid of empty Busch cans.

“Daddy.”

Mr. Tuttle opened one eye.

“Home?” came a voice from within his beard.

“Thanksgiving. Out early today. This is Murphy Lee, from school. Will you melt something with your torch for him?”

Mr. Tuttle looked from Renée to Murphy to Renée to the TV to Renée.

“Tired. Busy. Job hunting.”

“Just a nickel?”

“Ballgame on.”

“A fork?”

Mr. Tuttle shut his eye.

“C'mon, Blow. Let's go to your house.”

On the way to Murphy's, they stopped at 7-Eleven to get cold drinks.

“Why do you like that stuff?” said Renée as Murphy picked a Pepsi out of the cooler. “Dr Peppers're better.”

“They taste the same. Don't they?”

“God. No, they don't. Dr Pepper won the taste test on TV, so there's proof. Beat Coke
and
Pepsi.”

Murphy considered this. Murphy considered his new friend. He considered fire, Granny, his new voice, his new friend's gender, her fresh superiority. He liked being Blowhole. Renée Tuttle didn't call anyone else by a cool nickname. He put his Pepsi back and chose a Dr Pepper.

“We should get something for your momma.”