The Twelve-Fingered Boy (17 page)

We stick to the shore to practice. It's a risk. We're in danger of Quincrux sniffing our trail. But we need wide expanses of water to get it down. To get it right.

Jack can fly.

Today we nabbed over a half grand working Charleston's tourist district. I hired a driver, and he brought us here, to Folly Island, nonplussed by the fact that two kids had so much cash. He gave me his card.

There's low cloud cover and a brisk wind. The beach is empty, wind-torn, and lined with dark buildings.

Jack's in skintight scuba duds we bought at a dive shop and swim goggles that make him look buglike and alien. It's gotten cold now, and the shore is chilly. I'm bundled up ten ways to Sunday, but I look forward to getting back to the condo.

When we arrived at Folly Island, dusk was gathering and cleaning women and maintenance men were coming in and out of the beachside buildings. Plucking key codes from their heads was easy.

The condo's got a large collection of movies, most I haven't seen, and we brought a backpack full of dried pasta, soup, tuna, and jerky. It's the off-season, but if anyone shows I can get inside and make us invisible—at least for a little while. If there's more than one person … well … that might be tough.

“Ready?”

“Yeah. I'm ready.”

“Listen, it's not the takeoff that's the problem. It's the touchdown. Your last one was sloppy.”

That ticks off my Jack. He sets his shoulders at an angle, and I remember the Angry Kid statue. It seems my natural abrasiveness is what it takes to keep Jack unhappy enough to do his explodey trick on command. I'm fuel to the fire.

I pull up my knees and adjust my windbreaker.

“Remember, keep the anger pointing down. You got a raw deal. You got screwed. Get mad.”

“Shreve, this isn't good. For me. For us. I don't know if—”

“You remember the witch? You remember what she did to you?”

Jack spits. Might be from a salty mouth of seawater. Might be just good old unadulterated anger. And that's what we need.

The witch always does it. That memory is still as raw in him as an open wound.

“You're above her. She's down there. Look down. You see? Remember what it felt like?”

He nods. His hair drips with briny water. The surf rushes in and recedes, the ocean ripping and tearing at the shore. It's beautiful out here, beyond the dunes, on the edge of the world. Even with our messed-up lives, it's hard to stay angry enough for flight.

So I try to get in. He's still steel. But I'm like acid, and I try to sear my way in. To corrode.

No dice.

I assault him. I batter him. But he slips away. I can't do it; he's still impenetrable.

“Hold the anger. Let it burn slowly. Let it out slowly. Do it. Go.”

Jack runs at the surf, pumping his arms, building speed. He jumps, spasms, and then a perfect circle dimples the water below him. Jack rises ten, twenty feet into the air on a higher, faster trajectory.

“Again!”

He's pinwheeling his arms now, trying to keep upright.

“Now, Jack!”

He throws out his hands, palms down like his arms were wings, and he shoots upward. He rises out over the surf, over the waves, and into the blue of the Carolina night. Into the stars.

The higher he goes, the less effective his bursts. He's got nothing up there to push against except more air. I'm not stupid. I'm a troublemaker, but I used to listen in class. I know every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Jack must have paid attention in that class too.

He's moving faster and out of earshot, what with the roar of the surf, when he wobbles and starts to roll. He's lost his balance. His head and torso tilt forward on an axis, like he's falling. Which he is, really. It's a controlled fall Jack does. A controlled plummet.

But then he does something I've never seen him do before. He throws out his hand in front of him and gives what I can only call microbursts—like an astronaut on a spacewalk. And his body rights itself. He puts his hands back in the wing position and rises on another explosion.

He's sixty or seventy feet up. If he gets any more altitude, when he comes down he'll break something. At that height, even water starts to hurt.

Jack starts his turn.

This is the tricky part. He throws his hands out to the left—bam—and he's turned his trajectory some, not much. Jack will never be a skywriter. He gives another burst to his left and one underneath to gain more altitude, and now he's flying parallel to the shore.

He's windmilling again, whirling his arms and pumping his legs like a runner, trying to stay upright. He's hit the apex of his last burst and is coming down now. He's not coming down too fast, but fast enough to smack the water hard unless he can stop himself.

He gives a buoyant half burst, and then another, slowly decreasing his altitude. Then he waits until he's ten feet from the surface and gives one last microburst upward. He tucks in his chin, puts his arms out in front of him in a dive, and hits the water.

I snatch up the towel and run to the point on the beach nearest his landing.

Jack takes a few minutes to swim back to shore. He wouldn't be able to fly if he wasn't such a good swimmer, that's for sure.

He's grinning when he comes out of the water.

“Nine point three.” Our little joke. I score him on the landings.

“What? That's what you gave me, like, three weeks ago in Destin.”

“Yeah, well, you were an amateur then.”

I toss Jack the towel, and he dries off.

“Nine point five, at least.”

“You were wobbly. But you did stick the dive.”

We're both smiling now, amazed a human can fly. I don't know what genetics had to come together for this to happen, but it seems so improbable as to be magic. And maybe that's what it is. Maybe humans really have had magicians throughout history, and they were just kids with extra fingers and triple nipples and two dicks and abusive parents, surrounded by folks like Quincrux and the witch.

We turn to walk back up the beach.

“Race ya,” Jack yells, dashing forward, and he gives a pulse that launches him fifteen feet in the air. He lands squatting, his feet digging deep into the sand and his arms out. But he rises fast and keeps running.

If he goes explodey, there's no beating him in the hundred-yard dash.

I'm left alone to trudge back to the condo.

The old routines take hold. I'm used to cooking and cleaning and waiting on a younger brother. After hours of me bitching, cajoling, insulting, and assaulting Jack while he's doing the human rocket over the Atlantic, he's tired and needs to bring his core temp back to human levels. I'm happy to take care of things and let him warm up, wrapped in a blanket in front of the TV. It's been a long two months on the road, and most of the nights haven't been in digs as nice as this.

Tonight, Tuna Helper—Hamburger Helper's ugly sister—is on the menu. I've got some pickles to get some green on Jack's plate, but until we can settle somewhere, I don't see us hitting the local farmers market. We eat what we can tote in our trusty backpacks.

The condo is a glorified hotel room with a combination-lock door. Everything has its place, but nothing is personal. It's a snapshot of what a vacation must feel like, full of pastels and shells and tropical birds that have no business being within a thousand miles of South Carolina.

I might be a kid, but I'm not an idiot. The condo is pure fantasy.

I bring Jack a bowl of the noodles and tuna, and he sniffs at it, takes a bite, and puts it on the coffee table in front of us. Like Vig used to get after a long day of play, he's too tired to eat, but he'll be ravenous in the morning. Now he's watching the flickering lights of the TV, some stupid sitcom with impossibly pretty people; lights are on, but nobody's home for both Jack and the show. I could try and get in, to root around in his noggin, but I don't want to be that guy who takes advantage of you when you're down.

Friends don't do that. Brothers don't do that.

“Come on, bro. Let's get you into bed.” I drag Jack up by the arm and march him to the bedroom. He puts up no resistance.

The condo has three bedrooms—two masters and one bedroom for kids, with bunk beds—and this last room seems the most appropriate for us. I'm not going to take a master and put Jack in the other. What if the landlord or owner shows up? And I'm not going to sleep in the same bed as him.

Bunk beds make sense.

Jack falls into the bottom bed. I pull covers over him, and he turns on his side, fully asleep. I pad back to the TV room, eat the rest of his Tuna Helper, brush my teeth at the kitchen sink. I open the front door and check the fenced atrium where we found the maids and I took the code from their heads. I check the patio door that leads out to the scrub grass and sand and dunes and the sea beyond, which even now I can hear like a dull roar.

I lock the door as much as it can be locked and turn back to the bedroom. Climbing to the top bunk, I imagine being back in Casimir Pulaski. I imagine being back in my bunk, letting the cold air coming from the vent cover me like darkness, and I close my eyes.

Where is Vig now? Where is Coco?

I keep my eyelids closed, moving my eyes in their sockets like I am seeing Little Rock from a bird's-eye view. There is Casimir, locked in chain-link and razor wire in the eastern section near the river port. And then, away there, off to the west at the foot of the Ozarks, Holly Pines.

I'm picturing this in my mind, and I rise up and away. Now I'm really rising, and I can feel Jack's presence below me like a frozen man can feel the radiant heat of a fire even from a distance. Jack and I are connected by a thin, bright filament—like a piece of gum you've chewed and then held between your teeth while you stretch out a piece until just the slightest tendril connects the gob in your hand to the one in your mouth. That's how the filament connecting Jack to me feels—wispy and thin, but there— except it's a filament of fire. A connection of gold.

And then I see the other, fainter filaments spanning away from me off to the west. I'm suddenly reminded of when Marvin, that giant among prison guards, tased me and I entered him through the wires shocking me, my awareness becoming electric.

So I follow these golden threads of fire. Over dark landscapes and the swell of the unknowing, massive ocean, over cities and fields and woods, I follow this fine thread of flame like a firebird on a highway in the sky. All I can think of is Coco. Leaving without being able even to talk to her broke a part of me that I'll never be able to repair— not by words, not by deeds. Or maybe that part of me died bleeding out into the cab of Billy Cather's truck.

I follow the filament until I reach a core brightness, and then I'm suffused with memory. I see Coco, hair golden and laughing, in the piney woods—caught in a ray of light streaming through the canopy of trees. I'm caught in her kiss, and I feel myself dissolving.

I can feel her. I know her. I am her. She is me.

Vig.

I stretch out and race down another thread, keeping Vig held in my mind like a lifeline.

He's warmer, fierce and stubborn and unhappy. When I join him, he fights me and pushes me away. But I surround him, and finally his spirit sighs and allows me to enter it. My little dude, so far away and all around me.

He's hurt and alone, like all of us, and he doesn't know I'm there.

I rise, and now I can see the filaments stretching away from my body. Thousands of filaments, golden and uncountable, connecting me to everyone I've ever met and ever might meet. I feel an instant of mind-numbing fear, because this is real. This is real. Whatever Quincrux did to me, even inadvertently, has left me open to this. I'm a puppet suspended over a vast abyss, webbed in billions upon billions of fiery threads. I rise, and I can't tell whether the billions of threads piercing me lift me up or whether I'm pulling them. The mesh that connects me to everyone and connects everyone to me becomes so massive in my mind's eye that I think my consciousness might be snuffed out like a tiny candle. How can you bear knowing that we're all one tissue? How can you live with that knowledge, knowing what your fellow man can do?

I pull and tear to rip myself free, sending tremors out along the threads like a fly caught in a web.

I'm everything my mother said I was. Selfish. I'd give anything to be back with Coco and Vig. I don't want to do this anymore. I want to give this all up; I want to go home.

And then I feel the coldness.

I want to close my eyes to the cold, but that's impossible now because eyes are for those who remain incarcerado. I've gone out into the wild blue yonder; I've gone out into the beyond. And while the mesh of humanity keeps me tethered, I feel a great, seeping cold—a darkness growing along with my expanding perception.

And then I'm high above the plane of threads and points of light, as though I'm standing on the peak of a mountain. To the north is the darkness like a black hole. I look that way and see a spot devoid of light, bare of the fine mesh of life and love and happiness. I see nothing but darkness there.