by Bob Bannon
It was getting dark out and, now that his hair was wet, he was starting to notice the cold again too, so he put on the other sweater he had as well.
He pulled the furniture cover to the far side of the office, next to the bookshelf and the bathroom and made it into a little nest. When he sat down on it, he found it wasn’t the most comfortable thing, but it was better than lying on the floor.
Retrieving his sweater from the bathroom, he balled it up and put it at one end of the nest. It would have to do as a pillow. He lay down and tried it out. As he was lying there on the floor, he noticed the long, rectangular light on the ceiling. He hadn’t tried it out when he walked in.
He got up and went to the door of the office and found the light switch on the wall. When he flicked it, there was a buzz from above. The light flickered twice and then went on. He immediately turned it back off, in case anyone could notice it from outside.
He took the tablet and its cord out of his pack. He looked around the room for an electrical outlet. Fortunately, there was one on the nest’s side of the control panel. He plugged the tablet in and sat down. The tablet powered up. He wasn’t sure what he could do with it since it couldn’t connect to the internet, but it would probably make a good nightlight if he needed one.
Since he had nothing better to do, he searched the entire tablet, pushing each icon in turn.
He pushed the internet browser button. It took a moment to open, but then a block came up that read ‘no internet connection’, so he closed it.
He pushed the e-mail button and it opened to a ‘welcome’ screen and asked for the input of sign-in data. Jonah never had an e-mail account. He didn’t know anyone to send an e-mail to. His father had an e-mail account though. His dad let him use his information to sign up to an internet magazine about science. Not that Jonah cared about the educational properties of the site. He had seen a commercial that said the site included information about all sorts of animals. So his father signed him up and Jonah could sign in with his father’s e-mail address and a password. He wondered if his father’s e-mail password would be the same one he used for the science site. He would need an internet connection to find out.
There were samples of other things too. There was a sports app that he pushed. It came up and had pictures of different sports players in a variety of poses and action shots. As he put his finger on each one, the tablet brought up a box that said ‘please sign in’. Jonah made up sign-in names and passwords at random with each picture. Each came back with the response ‘no internet connection’. It was more or less the same for the weather app and the dictionary app.
Then he touched the icon marked ‘books’. The book app opened and he found that there were five icons for different books. He touched the first icon and, after a moment, the book opened to the first page. He wondered if his father had bought these books, but as he leafed through, he found that it was only the first fifteen pages of the book. He opened the others and found similar restraints. Fifteen pages of this one, twenty pages of another, only ten in a third. The icons were just small samples from the larger books. It didn’t matter though. At least it would give Jonah something to do.
Jonah stood up and reached into his pack looking for dinner. He decided on the can of corn. He grabbed the water bottle and his spoon and sat back down on his nest.
Jonah wasn’t much of a reader. His father had tried to encourage it, but Jonah much preferred television to books. There were the times when his dad would con him into reading, like the times that Jonah had seen something in town that he wanted – a baseball, or a sports jersey, or even a pair of shoes he’d seen in a commercial. His father would say he could have it, but the price was a two-page essay on a book of Jonah’s choosing. Suffice it to say, Jonah tried to keep his wants at a minimum.
While he ate, he began reading the first book sample, which looked to be some kind of spy thriller. This first chapter introduced a man who was on some sort of covert mission in France. Jonah wished the man would stop in a restaurant and ask what the difference was between French-cut green beans and the regular kind, but he didn’t retain a lot of the book. He just let the words kind of wash over him until he felt tired.
When he looked up again, he saw that there was just dim light in the room through the office windows coming from street lights outside and he was surrounded by the glow of the tablet. He put the tablet down and lay down on his sweater-pillow. He yawned and stretched, but then shivered. The night had become considerably colder than earlier in the day.
He stood up and put on his coat, then grabbed the other furniture cover and dragged it back to the nest. He bundled up in it and used the excess to further cushion underneath him. It actually felt better, but he found that each time he would finally get warm, the light of the tablet would go out and he would have to reach his hand out and touch the surface for it to glow back to life. He did this many times before he finally fell asleep.
IV
His nest turned out to work pretty well. He’d been there in the warehouse for a few days now and no one had ever shown up to check on the place.
In the mornings, a large truck would rumble down the street in front. It had to be really big for the commotion it caused. You could hear its metal frame squeak and moan as its large tires would roll through the potholes in the street. And you could hear the driver shift the gears followed by the loud puff of exhaust. The clock on the wall told Jonah this happened almost exactly at ten o’clock each morning.
Jonah would roll over on his sweater-pillow and try to go back to sleep after the truck rolled by and onto the next block, but he almost never could. So he would get up and go use the bathroom and then wash his face and run his hands through his unruly hair until it looked decent enough.
He went over to his pack, which he kept zipped tight and ready to go at a moment’s notice, and pulled out his last can of peaches and his water bottle. He only had one can of baked beans left. Now was the time to start thinking about what he was going to do about food. So, as he ate, he thought about his location and where he might find some.
He’d gone out exploring in the past few days. Each time he would put on a sweater and his coat and put all his other belongings in his pack. He had pulled a sturdy metal table to the window he had first used to climb into the building and it made his exit that much easier. Every day, he took his pack with him outside and then stuffed it in the small door under the stairs. He didn’t want it to be trapped inside if he came back to the building and found people working in it. He thought, if that happened, he could easily wait until they were gone and then rescue the pack and find someplace new. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He was actually beginning to feel safe in his nest. The one thing he never left without was the green gem. Instead of wearing it around his neck though, he always put it in the pocket of his jeans.
Jonah found that Main Street, where he had encountered most of the shops and restaurants, was almost a forty-minute walk from where he was. The mall his father took him to was just on the other side of that, about another ten or fifteen minutes. He would walk to Main Street and window shop from one end of the strip to the other, which seemed to be about six blocks. There were plenty of other shops on the surrounding blocks as well, so that killed a lot of time. He would stop and look in the windows of the restaurants and notice which ones were busier than others at lunch time.
The residential neighborhood was about a twenty-minute walk in the opposite direction of the Main Street, and on the other side of the freeway. He had walked over there too, crossing over the street overpass that acted as a bridge, and sometimes stopping to look down at the speeding cars. His father had never driven in that direction, so Jonah had no idea what to expect.
The houses there were all quite large and in different styles and colors. They had well-manicured, green lawns, not the tall golden colored grass at his house. There were cars of all sorts parked along the tree-lined street and in driveways. Some he knew were incredible and expensi
ve cars because he’d seen commercials for them. Sometimes he paused to look in the car windows.
He had walked five or six of those suburban blocks and had seen more than a few people coming and going, unpacking things from their cars or ushering kids into cars in a hurry to get somewhere. He had even walked by some people who were raking their lawns and clearing away the autumn leaves. No one seemed to notice him as he toured the neighborhood, which he thought was a good thing.
As he finished his can of peaches, he thought he would set off into the neighborhood again today. He still hadn’t made it all the way over to the mall, but he supposed that could wait. He thought it would give him something to look forward to, like the anticipation he felt for the trips with his father, which only happened every month or two.
So he stood up and pulled on his coat, made sure everything that belonged to him was stuffed in his pack, and left the office. As he came down the stairs, he leaned over the railing and called to the back corner, “Good morning, Grouchy!”
He had named his downstairs neighbor, the raccoon, after their third encounter. Jonah had come to the conclusion that Grouchy did not prefer noise of any sort. When Jonah had come clanking down the stairs on his second day, there was another flurry of activity in the corner, which startled Jonah, until he remembered the raccoon.
He walked over in the direction of the corner, remembering their agreement to leave each other be, but he wanted to make sure it was still the raccoon and not a person. The raccoon had run into the other corner, as it did when Jonah first encountered it. He did not look happy. So Jonah turned and left.
When Jonah had come back on the second day, the raccoon was sitting in its nest of litter. As Jonah passed by, it raised its head and bared its teeth. Jonah couldn’t tell if the thing was snarling or yawning, but didn’t want to find out. “Sorry, Grouchy,” he said, and kept right on walking.
This morning he didn’t wait to see what Grouchy’s reaction was going to be and headed straight for the window. He hopped up, pushed his pack onto the dumpster and climbed out. Jonah had become quite good at jumping up on the dumpster now to get back inside. His hands seemed to instinctively know where the crevice in the lid was now, so when they shot out, he almost always found it. His toes seemed to become accustomed to the balance as well. And no one had come to move the dumpster, probably because they knew it was empty.
He balanced on the rail and stepped down with his pack. Then walked down the stairs and put his pack in the secret door.
It was a crisp and cloudy day. It looked a little ominous out. He put his hood up and shoved his hands in his pockets.
Once in the neighborhood, he thought that even the trees looked sad in the cloudy weather. They seemed to droop more and looked like they had even less leaves than two days ago. His feet made a raspy, rustling noise as they moved through the leaves on the sidewalk. The weather, the sad trees, the dead leaves and the thought of being out of food weighed heavily.
Just then, he looked up to see a man in a suit rushing out of his house toward his car parked on the street. The man was shouting into his phone, which he was alternately holding and then cradling to his shoulder. The man kept shifting his briefcase from one hand to the other so he could dig in his pockets. When he got to the car, he threw his briefcase on the top of it, and patted himself down all over. He found his car keys in the pocket of his suit coat, but when he pulled them out, Jonah saw something else. A slight flash of green fell into the street. The man opened the door, threw his briefcase inside and took off. He never stopped his conversation.
Jonah walked over to where the car had been and looked down at the street. What he picked up was a crumpled five dollar bill.
Jonah was elated. Five dollars! He didn’t know what he could do with it, but he knew it meant food, at least for a day. He felt momentarily guilty. He looked up the street in the direction the car went. Then he wondered if he shouldn’t put the five dollars in the man’s mailbox or leave it up near the door to his house. But he decided five dollars probably meant much more to Jonah than it would to the man. So he put it in his coat pocket.
He immediately turned toward Main Street. He wondered what he could buy at the little gas station. He had walked through the small shop there and they had convenience items and bread and things. He didn’t think five dollars would go very far at the super market so he wouldn’t go there. Could he buy something that would last a couple days if he went to the gas station? He didn’t know.
His mind wandered as he walked. He couldn’t believe his luck. The thought of more food made his stomach start to rumble.
Then he had a thought. While window shopping and judging which restaurants seemed to do more business than others, he had come across a diner that had a sign in the window that read ‘Come in for Hot Chocolate!’ Hot chocolate sounded really good right now. It wouldn’t last him a few days though. But he decided he didn’t care about that anymore. The thought consumed him and his feet moved on automatic pilot.
He walked up to the window of the diner and saw the sign there, illuminated with Christmas lights that blinked on and off. The red neon sign above the door spelled out the name Red’s Diner, in smoother cursive writing. Jonah pushed open the door to a whoosh of warm air. The change in temperature stung his face a bit but was more than welcome. He hadn’t noticed how cold it had gotten. He looked around and found only a few people in the diner. Four people were sitting at the counter, so he went there and sat down.
A teenage girl in a waitress uniform had just placed some plates full of food in front of some two overweight men wearing thick flannel shirts. “Hey,” she said to Jonah as she walked over and leaned on the counter in front of him, “All by yourself today, huh?”
“No,” Was the only thing that came out of his mouth.
“No, huh?” She said with a smile.
“I mean,” Jonah stammered. “My dad is just at a meeting and told me to…” And he pointed in no particular direction out the window.
“Easy there.” She said with a wider grin. “I’m just teasing. What can I get you?”
Jonah pulled out the five dollars and put it on the counter. “How much is hot chocolate?”
“Oh, you’ve got plenty for that,” she said.
She turned, didn’t have to move but a step or two, and put a mug under a hot chocolate dispenser. She turned back and put it in front of him. Jonah relished the warm feeling of the cup in his hands.
The waitress took the five dollar bill to the register, rang it in and returned with two dollars and dropped that in front of him as well.
“Do you want marshmallows with that?” she said, once again, leaning on her elbows in front of him.
“Yes!” He said almost too eagerly. “I mean, sure,” he added trying not to be so excited.
She smiled and reached under the hot chocolate dispenser and brought out a bag of mini-marshmallows. “Say when,” she said and began dropping a handful in.
She had practically filled the cup. “Really?” She asked smiling.
“Okay, stop.” Jonah said with a blush and an awkward smile.
She laughed. “No problem. Looks good to me”.
A bell rang and Jonah instinctively looked toward the door. The last bell he heard had sent him into a panic. But this time, no one was coming through the door. The bell was a sound from the kitchen. The waitress, whose name was Jenna, according to her name tag, turned and picked up some plates of food and took them off to a table near the back.
Jonah raised the glass of hot chocolate and tasted it. It was amazing. It was warm and tasted great, but he found that the marshmallows had soaked up a lot of it. He put the cup down, not really wanting to take his cold hands off of it, and picked up a spoon. He mashed the marshmallows around in the cup and then spooned some into his mouth. Wow! That was even better.
Jenna returned and resumed her spot, putting her elbows on the counter and balancing her chin in her hands. She was very pretty. She had dark brown hair th
at was swept up into a ponytail and she had light brown eyes that really popped because of the eye makeup she was wearing. It seemed like she had really long eye lashes. She looked like she was probably seventeen or eighteen, only a few years older than himself, really, but she seemed older.
“So,” she said. “Do you want a piece of pie with that?”
Jonah looked at her, then down at his remaining money. “Is pie two dollars?” He asked. “That’s all I have left.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about how much pie is?” She said with a wide grin, but took his two dollars anyway. “Do you want apple or cherry? You can have a slice of the chocolate mousse, but that might put you on overload.”
Jonah was sick to death of fruit. He almost turned her down. “Can I have the chocolate one?” He asked with another blush.
“See,” she said walking toward the pie caddy. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”
She returned with an oversized portion of chocolate pie and put it in front of him, then retrieved a fork from under the counter.
Jonah attacked it. He couldn’t remember anything being so good. He looked up and found her looking at him again. “Didn’t get lunch today, huh? Your dad must have forgotten?” She said.
“No,” he sputtered again. “I just wasn’t hungry until just right now.” He blushed with the lie.
“I get that. Chocolate does the same thing for me.” And with the sound of the bell, she was gone again.
Later, he had polished off the pie, slowing himself down purposefully. He had decided to take small bites and then over-chewed them, even though what he really wanted to do was lick the plate clean. He thought that by playing this little game, he might pass himself off as a kid waiting for his father as opposed to the starving homeless kid he was. Jonah was now scooping the last melty marshmallows out of the cup. Jenna had let him eat in peace, but now she was back, leaning on the counter.
“You want another one?” she said.
Jonah stared dumbly at her. He was already more full than he had been all week, but could he really say no? Would she catch on to him if he said yes? “Um…” he said mulling it over. He looked at the clock and saw that he’d been there for an hour and a half already. “I don’t have any more money.”