by Bob Bannon
Logan struggled to get away for a moment and the devil slammed him into the pole. When Logan’s head connected, there was a resounding gong from the hollow pole. “Say it!” The devil demanded.
“I want to be a good boy,” Logan muttered. It was hard for Eric or Mason and Tyler to hear what he’d said.
“Louder!” the devil demanded again. Logan complied by yelling it. The three boys heard it that time.
“Good boy,” the devil said, and mussed Logan’s hair.
There was the zipping sound again and the devil turned and bent over, putting his hands on his knees in front of the two boys sitting on the ground so he could look in their eyes. “Don’t we all just want to be good boys, morons?” The devil asked.
The boys looked at each other, unsure if they were supposed to answer or just sit there quietly.
“Sure we do!” The devil announced throwing his arms out to his sides like he was trying to convince a whole audience of people.
Logan, again, tried to make a break for it. The tail whipped out and wrapped around his neck. Logan struggled with it as the tail led him over in front of Eric.
“Anything you want to add, E-man? I could start another rousing chorus of ‘Logan’s a Loser’. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, morons?” He asked the two boys, who just looked at each other once again.
Eric, who had always wanted Logan Oswald to be publicly humiliated in the worst possible ways for almost three years now, could only just stand and look at the kid now. Logan looked scared, as they all did, but there was something new, something defeated. He wondered if this was the look Logan wanted to see on other kids’ faces that he bullied. Was this what Eric looked like to Logan?
Whatever the case, and however badly Eric had wished for something to happen to Logan, this was too weird. Too mean. Too much.
Eric shook his head and looked down at the ground.
“You sure, E-Man? You got nothin’? Alrighty.” And with that, the tail picked Logan up and slammed him down on the ground on his rear.
Just then, Mr. Jackson, the guidance counselor and Principal Sawyer came bursting out of the doors of the West wing headed straight in their direction. Principal Sawyer was struggling to get his left arm in his winter coat. They had probably seen the action from inside and were hurrying over to see what it was about.
“Well, boys, gotta go,” the devil said. “And Logan,” he added. Logan turned his head in the devil’s direction. “Don’t make me come back, man. You won’t like it.”
There was another Zzzzip and the devil was gone. It was just the two boys sitting on the ground, Eric next to the wall, and Logan on the grass in front of him. Eric instinctively reached out a hand to help Logan off the ground, and Logan accepted it.
The rest of the afternoon, the boys didn’t attend classes. Parents were called in, as well as the police. Interviews were conducted with the four boys together, and then separately. When suspicious questions were raised as to what the four boys were doing, since Eric didn’t really run with Logan’s crowd, Logan had answered that he was on his way to his locker with Mason and Tyler. Mason and Tyler concurred. Eric said he was just on his way to lunch.
All of them avoided the beginning of the story as much as possible, making it sound like they had all ended up in a bad spot by coincidence. The general theme of the story was that some guy in a devil costume bullied Logan while the other three were too scared to do much of anything. It was generally understood by the authorities and the parents that whoever the guy was probably intervened on Eric’s behalf.
XV
Jonah’s left eye burned with a pain that shot straight into his mid-brain. He pushed the heel of his hand into his left eye and opened his right. He was lying on his back and was staring at the all-too-familiar ceiling of the warehouse office. He was in his nest.
He sat straight up and looked around. He had no memory of coming back to the warehouse. The last thing he remembered was being doubled over in pain in the alley. He wasn’t sure how he would have gotten back here. He looked at the clock on the wall. It was one o’clock. He had lost almost four hours.
He stood up and began to pace the room, trying to put the pieces together while rubbing his eye. The pain was subsiding, but he still didn’t try to open it. He saw that the tablet was on the control panel, which didn’t make sense either, since, when he had left, it had been in his coat, which was still zipped. He checked his pockets and made sure he still had the money in one pocket and felt for the green gem under his sweater.
He went into the bathroom and took a long drink of water from the tap. His water bottle was safely in his backpack, and the backpack wasn’t in the office, so that must mean it was still locked behind the little door outside.
When he finally came up for air, he looked into the bathroom mirror. He slowly moved his hand away from his face and then slowly opened his eye. When he did, he saw for an instant that the iris of his left eye was black, not blue. It startled him to the point that he fell backwards against the bathroom wall. He blinked his eyes rapidly and rubbed them. When he looked in the mirror again, his eyes were blue and brown, just as they had always been. He looked in the mirror more closely at his blue eye, the left one, and squeezed it shut, then opened it again. The pain was now down to a dull throb and his eye was fine. He chalked up seeing the black eye as some hallucination brought on by the pain.
When he walked back into the office, his very first thought was that he should check the mini-recorder under the control panel. He almost did, he moved in that direction, but then he looked at the clock again. He only had twenty minutes to make the next bus or the entire trip would be off for the day.
He had to make a go of it. He had no choice. He grabbed the tablet, ran down the stairs and went outside. He only made one quick stop to make sure the backpack was still inside the little door, which it was.
Jonah ran quickly toward the bus stop on Main Street. When he was about halfway there, he cursed under his breath. He should have picked up the stupid recorder and brought it with him. He could have listened to it on the bus.
He made it to the bus stop with three minutes to spare. There were several people waiting and there was no place to sit, so he stood next to the bench and waited.
As he looked around Main Street, he noticed a sign in the mini mart that was just behind the bus stop. It said: All-Day Bus Pass $7.00. He jammed his hand into his pocket. He felt the ten dollars in bills and change. If he tried for an all-day pass, he might save three dollars. He looked up the street and saw that the bus was still not coming, so he decided to chance it.
He went inside the mini-mart and asked the gray-haired man behind the counter what the all-day bus pass was all about. He learned that for seven dollars, he could use the pass anywhere along the line until three P.M. the following day. He asked if that included transfers and the man assured him that it did. The man said that each time he got on the bus, all he needed to do was show the pass instead of paying. Jonah purchased the pass and the man slid a small orange card through a card reader and then handed it to him.
He made it outside just as the bus was pulling up to the stop. Instead of getting in line behind the people who stood up from the bench, he moved around to the front of the bus, just to make sure it was the bus he wanted. In yellow lettering, a digital readout over the front window of the bus announced the destination for the bus was indeed Masonville. He waited for everyone else to board and then followed them up the three steps.
A chubby woman with blue eyes and blonde hair sat behind the wheel. She smiled at each customer as they paid. When it was Jonah’s turn, he was unsure exactly what to do, so he just held the pass out in front of him as though he were going to hand it to the woman.
“Well hello,” she said in a cheery voice.
“Hi,” was what Jonah managed and extended his arm further towards her.
“Just tap that here, darlin’,” she said, tapping her hand on an electronic box.
He did, a
nd the light on the top of the box went from red to green.
“There you go,” she said. “Welcome aboard.” And she gave him a little wave toward the back of the bus to move him along so others behind him could get on.
Jonah saw that there were three seats on either side of the front of the bus that faced each other and then each subsequent row had two seats that faced forward. He sat down in the second seat and waited for the bus to move. He was staring out the window at the activities around Main Street when his attention was drawn to a small old woman who had some trouble getting up the three stairs to the bus. The driver even stood up and helped her.
After the old woman had paid her fare, she began walking extremely slowly looking for a seat. Jonah stood up and offered her his seat. She thanked him and tapped him on the shoulder and then she sat down.
Jonah looked for another seat and ended up in a row that was about halfway back, and no one was sitting in the other seat, so he had two to himself. As the bus began to move, he opened the tablet and began to scan the local news. Before long, he was fast asleep, lulled by the movement of the bus.
The entire trip was uneventful, if not extremely boring. He jumped off the bus in Masonville just in time to catch the transfer to Clapton.
Once he arrived at the Jefferson Street stop, he couldn’t help but notice that Clapton was a lot different than Kensville. Where Kensville was made up of mostly old buildings, Clapton had a mixture of the old and the new, and there were also houses or apartment buildings just about everywhere he looked. When he looked up the hill, which seemed to be the center of town, you could see the college campus with its big stone buildings. The rest of the town seemed to spread out from that point. He was sure that the road he was walking was curved. He noticed that the streets most of the businesses were on ran in circular streets out from the campus and residential roads went out like spokes from a wheel.
When he opened the tablet and checked the map app, he found that he was four blocks north of where he needed to be, and six blocks east. It seemed to him that if he walked in a diagonal, it would be the faster route, but looking at the surrounding buildings, he doubted there was going to be an easy way to do that. He kept the map out and noted his progress as he walked through the small college town.
The population here seemed to be a much younger crowd. There were people he could obviously identify as students who walked with backpacks or passed by on bicycles. The bicycle traffic in this town was definitely heavier than in Kensville. As he walked, he almost started to count how many coffee stores he passed, and every one of them had lines inside, but he lost track because he had to concentrate on making sure he was following the map correctly.
He finally reached North Clapton Boulevard. It was just after five-thirty. According to the map, he needed to take another left and cross Lennox Street about a block down and that would cross him over to South Clapton Boulevard.
The houses on North Clapton Boulevard didn’t make much sense to him, they were built in a variety of different styles - some were brick, some were clapboard. Some were three stories, some were single-story. It looked like people who moved in just added on to the house that was there in whatever way they saw fit.
The corner of Lennox Avenue was extremely busy. Jonah immediately recognized that Lennox must be the main street here in Clapton. The traffic surged this way and that and Jonah noticed that there were two very large apartment buildings on opposing corners here. The first floor of each building housed restaurants and coffee bars and the one across the street even had a gym. There was a car wash to his right, and across the street from that was a large pizza restaurant that looked to be doing heavy business from all the cars in the parking lot.
Jonah waited for the light to change and then ran across the street. As he passed by the windows of the gym, he noticed they were tinted so you couldn’t see inside. He wondered if you could see out from the other side.
As he walked he checked his reflection in the tint. He stopped and ran his fingers through his hair, and then he looked close up at his teeth to see if they were okay. He even checked his breath. Suddenly, there was a bang from the other side of the window that scared him enough that he jumped back a few feet. That answered that question. Jonah blushed and walked away.
He walked three more blocks until he came upon the address listed for A. Stapleton. The house was red brick and was two-stories with a white-painted porch and a small yard. The windows were trimmed in white paint and the front door was white as well. A chain-link fence wrapped around the front yard and there was a small brown dog on a chain that was barking in a high-pitched yap at something in the tree it was chained to.
Jonah stopped. This was it. This is where all the answers would be. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
He walked past the house, trying to search its windows. When he got to the end of the block, he turned around and walked back past the house again. He didn’t know what he was going to do if anyone looked out and saw him, but he repeated the pattern twice more.
As he came back that second time, a white SUV turned into the driveway next to the house. It happened so fast that Jonah didn’t see who was in the car. He stopped and looked at it from across the street. For a moment, nothing happened. Even though the car had stopped, no one got out. Then, from the passenger-side, a pretty teenage black girl got out.
She looked directly at Jonah and walked toward the street. She wore a pink coat and blue jeans and tan boots. She looked up and down the street to make sure no traffic was coming and then crossed directly to him, giving him a big smile. She hugged him.
She was a few years older than him for sure, probably in college, and she was about a foot taller, which made the hug even more awkward than the fact that he had never seen her before.
As they were locked in the embrace, Jonah stammered, “Um, do you know me?”
She let him go and then slipped her arm around his, leading him down the street. “No,” she said. “Never seen you. But Grams does. She says there are people looking for you. She doesn’t want you here. But she said it means something if you came here, so I’m going to take you somewhere she can meet you.”
“What? There are people looking for me?” He asked. “Who?”
“Listen,” she said, still walking him down the block arm-in-arm looking like old friends. “I don’t know anything about it. She gave me twenty bucks and asked me to do her a favor. She looked kind of scared, and my Grams never looks scared. Besides, twenty bucks is twenty bucks.”
Jonah looked back over his shoulder. An older black woman with gray hair wrapped in a tight bun on the back of her head had gotten out of the driver’s side of the car. She wore a long, dark blue coat and a yellow dress underneath. She closed the car door, went into the chain-link fence gate and released the dog from his chain, all without looking in their direction. She went into the house and the dog followed. He thought he saw her look at him from the open door, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Well, wait!” He suddenly demanded, shaking his arm free. “Where are we going? When can I talk to her?”
“Listen, I don’t have to do this, you know,” she said with a hint of anger. “I’ll go back and tell her you didn’t even want to talk to her.”
“And I’ll go sit on your front lawn until she does talk to me,” Jonah retorted.
“Okay, let’s just back up a step,” the girl said, putting up her hands to calm the situation down. “There’s a park just around the corner. It has a playground and a picnic area. She said that not too many people will be there when it’s this cold. She said she could meet you there in about a half hour. By the picnic table in the back, near the trees. I’m just delivering the message. Do you want me to show you where it is, or don’t you?”
“Okay,” Jonah said quietly. “Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just that it took me a lot to get here and I don’t even know if she can help me.”
She started walking again and he followed.
�
�So where do you live?” She asked.
“Kensville,” he said.
“Kensville?” She said with surprise. “You really did come along way. How do you know my Grams? I don’t think she’s ever talked about anyone in Kensville.”
“I think she knew my dad,” Jonah said quietly, not sure he wanted to give her too much information.
“Oh, really?” She asked as they turned the corner. “What does your dad do?”
“I think he worked for an aeronautics laboratory,” Jonah said, quieter still.
“Oh, the I.A.L.? She said with immediate recognition. “My Grams worked at the I.A.L., up in Seattle; up until about five years ago, when she retired and moved down here.”
Jonah stopped. “That’s it then,” he said. That’s the connection, he thought. She must know something then.
“Did your dad bring you here to meet her? Where’s he at?”
“He’s dead,” Jonah said.
“Oh. I’m so sorry,” she said, embarrassed. “I didn’t know.” She got flustered and looked around. “Listen, the park is just over there. The picnic table she’s talking about is all the way at the back next to a couple of trees. Um, I gotta go. Sorry again.” After pointing him in the right direction, she turned and left.
He watched her walk around the corner and then he turned toward the park. He guessed he did drop that like a bombshell. He felt bad for saying it so abruptly.
The park was lined with a short iron fence but had no gate. The grass was green, but crunched under his feet with frozen dew. It wasn’t large. It looked like the town had decided it wanted to keep a little green around, so they had reserved this spot. A cement path wound its way toward the back and he followed it. He passed a swing-set, a slide, and a monkey bars placed together and surrounded by sand. It looked like a lonely, abandoned place at the moment. He could see picnic tables dotted here and there next to short, skinny trees that had lost their leaves some time ago. Finally, the path wound to the other side of the park.