The Twelve-Fingered Boy (16 page)

When I got back my breath, I didn't know what to say. He'd just jumped thirty feet.

“Were you gonna leave me?” His voice was deceptively neutral. It didn't take a mind reader to know he was pissed.

“No. If you couldn't make it, I was gonna hop out.”

“You were just sitting there.”

“So? You made it didn't you? And how. You just jumped a freakin' mile.”

The grouchy look remained for a bit longer, and then he smiled. “I did, didn't I?”

“Holy smokes … did you? Like a damned rocket. What's your superhero name gonna be?”

“Shut up.”

“Mr. Explodey sounds good.”

“Shut up.”

“Maybe Jack the Frogman. No. Hopalong. Hopalong the jumping super-dude.”

Jack looked like he was going to get all pissy, but then he laughed. “How about we call you Mr. Mysterio the Jerkwad.”

“Nah.” I buffed my fingernails against my chest. “I'm the Cannonball.”

He looked puzzled.

“You know, because of my last name?”

“Huh. It doesn't fit, really. That's not what you do.”

We fell silent, swaying with the movement of the cargo car.

When the train finally stopped, we were in Mobile, in the great state of Alabama.

The scam works like this. Jack takes the item to the cashier. It's usually something small, like gum or candy or the cheapest thing he can find in the store.

I tag along behind.

When the cashier pops the register, I go in. Not all the way. Not possessing. Just enough where I can change things, fiddle with what the cashier sees, play defense. While he's looking at Jack, he's not seeing me. It's a trick. A sleight of mind.

I can make someone look right through me. It's hard, but … desperation has shown us how strong we really are.

The bill Jack offers looks like a C-note instead of the single it really is. I can make that adjustment behind their eyes.

Some cashiers balk. Some ask where Jack got so much money.

It's his birthday, of course. He's a well-loved son of wealthy parents. Or sometimes it's a gift from Granny. Sometimes it's all Dad had in his wallet, and Dad's just around the corner.

Afterward, there's ninety-eight dollars and change in our pockets.

We work the coast. Mobile. Pensacola. Destin. Charleston. Moving east. Moving north.

We never hit the same spot twice. Two or three in a day and we've got meals, clothes, and our next Amtrak or Greyhound ticket.

We're brothers. Any adult questions us, and Mom and Dad have just stepped away for a minute. Should we go get them for you?

If the do-gooders ask any more questions, I go in and get rid of them.

Gently. Always gently.

I don't use the trick on Jack. I don't peep his thoughts. But I've tried. And while my boy Jack is often physically motionless and silent, there's a roil of pain there, tumultuous and wild, that I can't penetrate. His thoughts are s mooth as silk and hard as steel, and I can't get in.

I don't think he knows I've tried peeking. I hope he doesn't.

Drugstores work the best. Acres of candy: Now and Laters and Twizzlers, Hershey's and Kit Kats and Mentos and Starbursts, Hubba Bubba and Wrigley's Spearmint—rank upon rank of sugar spun into multicolored toylike shapes. Unattended children are the norm—mothers and fathers distracted by their errand and duty—and something about a building with large amounts of drugs and people wearing what look like lab coats lends an air of safety and blinds them to the chief danger of leaving the kids by themselves. The pharmacy we're in, somewhere on the Alabama Gulf Coast, has high stamped-tin ceilings and a candy rack that goes on for miles under old-timey photographs of soda jerks and lines of servicemen drinking root-beer floats.

There are two brothers at the rack—real brothers— and as Jack and I approach, I can hear them talking softly.

“Lemme borrow some money,” the blond one says.

“Hell, naw,” the other, taller one, black-haired and wearing jeans, a New Orleans Saints T-shirt, and Chuck Ts, responds. “All I got is five dollars.”

“Gimme a buck, man,” the younger brother says, turning to face his sibling with a roll of Mentos in his hand. He's maybe twelve, the other fourteen. The tall brother has zits and wisps of hair sprouting all over his face. He looks like some Dr. Seuss version of puberty: oval head perched on a stalk of neck, thin ink-stroke beard hairs quivering in the air. The younger brother puts his head close and almost snarls, “Or I'll tell Dad about
you know what
.”

I didn't know what, and for a moment I want to peep them to see what the hell they're talking about. But the face of the younger brother when he said
you know what
stops me, because it's a hungry animal face, a starving dog's snarl, a wolf's avid snout. This family ain't like the ones they show in Hollywood. But mine isn't either, I guess.

Jack's nudges me and nods at the comic book rack. He browses the pulp while I watch the two brothers.

They're well dressed, wearing nice shoes and shirts and jeans with logos proudly displayed. Healthy and tanned, even though the year grows late—they radiate wealth and prosperity.

The older brother digs in his pocket and pulls out a five-dollar bill. “This is all I've got. Gimme what you want.”

The younger boy hands him the Mentos and then, as if he just thought of something else, he snatches a pack of Hubba Bubba off the rack and shoves it at his brother as well.

“That's more than a dollar!” Overmatched, elder bro takes the gum and stands, semi-defeated, and stares at the candy rack. Wolf-boy smiles, showing braces. He notices me.

His gaze takes me in very quickly, snapping from my face to my clothes to my shoes,
tick tick tick
. Wolf-boy sniffs.

I want to go in his head and see if he's rotten to the core, but I don't really want the stink of his soul on me for the rest of the day.

As much as I get into them, they get into me.

“Boys, it's time to go…”

Someone brushes past me, smelling of cologne.

“Oh, excuse me, son—” A tall man, dressed similarly to the boys, with a little figure on a horse swatting at something with a club on his left tit, moves past me holding a white prescription bag and stands by his two boys.

“You're not getting that right before dinner,” the father says, looking at what the older son holds in his gangly hands.

“I've got my own money,” Junior Seuss says, holding up his five-spot.

“Not the point, Brando. We're about to go to dinner…”

The father looks up and glances at me. He's dark-haired, too, like Junior, has a handsome, healthy face— lacking the wisps of hair and acne—like a piece of buttered toast. He looks at me, looks away. Looks back.

Suddenly I feel exposed, as if something in his glance is peeling away layers from me—not like Quincrux's mental assaults, not penetrating. Junior's glance was judgmental, dismissive. His father's isn't.

He watches me while Junior says, “Aww, Dad,” and replaces the candy on the rack. I can't tell what Dad's picking up from me, but his face goes through a series of expressions and settles on a somewhat sad one, like he's seen a lost puppy or something. Which I am most assuredly
not
.

I feel the same anger bubbling up that I always felt, at Booth, at the penguins and suits come to preach at Casimir on Sundays, at the touchy-feely self-help crap Red Wolf ladles out to the fish. I want to wipe that smile from the man's face. I want to tear down whatever illusions of family or normalcy he has and expose him to my world, like ripping a scab from a knee. Why should he have beloved children? Why should those ungrateful wastes of space have a loving father? Why should they get such blessings while the rest of us scrabble and scratch to survive?

Furious, I go at the sympathy behind his eyes, as if it's some invisible organ in him and I am a surgeon. I am a lance. An arrow. A bullet. I'm going to make him see, I'm going destroy him and that sad smile.

The impact, when it comes, makes me ring like a bell, like a cartoon dog struck between two garbage can lids, vibrating to my core. He's like a rock wall, a steel door. Impenetrable.

I feel like I've been shocked, like I've pissed on an electric fence. I can't move, and I wonder what my face looks like then. Shell-shocked? Stunned? Plain old retarded?

Then something more strange and peculiar happens. Even though he's walled off behind titanium blast doors, even though I'll never read him, I can feel something in his mind shift, like tectonic plates rubbing together. Like a dragon rumbling and uncurling in a cave. Something in him awakes.

Something in him, something
not him
becomes aware of me. Looks at me from behind his eyes. Something riding him.

I feel cold, despite the heat of the day. My hair stands on end.

He's noticed something's changed. And his sons notice who he's looking at and turn to face me as well.

“Something wrong, son?” the man says. Wolf-boy grins. “You okay? You don't look so good.”

I say nothing. Jack turns away from the comics to look at me, an alarmed expression on his face.

“Son? You okay?” The man takes two steps toward me and extends his hand as if to grasp my shoulder.

I blink and knock his approaching hand aside.

“Don't call me son. I'm not your son.”

He looks confused now. “Of course not…”

It's so easy to go behind Wolf-boy's eyes. He's like a glossy magazine, and just as deep.

I point at the youngest. “He stole the school literacy week donation jar and bought a video game that he told you he borrowed from a friend. He buried the jar in the backyard, by the doghouse. You can find it there.” I turn, moving my finger to point at the oldest. He's harder to get inside, maybe because he's older, or maybe because of the stricken look on his face like he knows what's coming. “And this one … this one…”

I see it all. The men's magazines under his mattress, the bottle of hand lotion. His slack-jawed and lascivious midnight masturbation sessions looking at men modeling skivvies.

I stop. No. I won't go that far. Now that I can, I don't want to destroy their life.

Family is like a fuse and bomb. Ultimately, even the best of them will blow.

The father starts and turns to look at his youngest. Wolf-boy says, “He's lying! I didn't!”

Junior Seuss looks like he's about to cry, and he's brought up his hands in a defensive gesture. But it's the anger coloring the father's face that makes me turn and run from the store, sobbing.

Jack finds me two blocks away, holding my head in my hands.

“What happened back there?”

I stay quiet, and he sits down next to me.

Eventually I say, “Sometimes it's all too much.”

“What?”

“Everything. The world. Us. Me.”

He nods as if he understands, puts his six-fingered hand on mine.

I guess he does.