by Owen King
“Wesley,” he said, “shut up.”
“Calm down?”
Wesley ignored them both. “Deep breaths.” To demonstrate, he closed his eyes, inhaled for a two-second count, and then exhaled. Wesley opened his eyes and nodded at her. “See? You feel better now, don’t you?”
“That’s it. I’ve had enough of your patronizing, you fat prick.” Mina ripped open the side pocket of the duffel bag, tore out a can of pepper spray, and was at the couch in two steps, smashing the fire button.
The spray caught Wesley directly in the right eye. “Ahh! Stop! Stop!” He paddled his hands through the air in front of his face and flopped over the arm of the couch and onto the floor, shrouded in the blanket of recycled carpet fragments.
Sam turned one way and then another, searching for somewhere to set down the sewing machine. There was nowhere.
While Wesley rolled around in the tangle of the blanket, Mina climbed onto the couch and leaned over the armrest, the can still raised to firing position. “Are you okay?”
“I thought we were friends.” Wesley had his palms jammed into his eye sockets, rubbing, and his voice came out muffled and teary.
She shot him with another jet. “I almost sprained my ankle on your stupid hammock.”
“Mina! Stop!” Sam had given up trying to find a place for the sewing machine. He stood in the entryway, feeling at once impotent and transfixed. “That’s enough!”
Wesley howled again, kicked against the floor with his heels, and propelled himself backward into the bottom box of a four-tall stack of boxes. The stack tumbled over onto the incapacitated man’s body with a sound like bricks hitting fresh earth. When the quake stopped, the sight of the bare feet sticking out from under the jumble of packaging reminded Sam, inescapably, of another pair of feet, infamous in their ruby slippers, protruding from beneath a crumpled farmhouse.
Mina lowered the pepper spray and glared at her brother. “I just wish that he would clean. This is ridiculous! You know very well I would be a way better roommate.” She put the canister in her pocket and glanced back at Wesley—the only part of him that was visible, his feet. “I am your friend,” Mina said.
■ ■ ■
They had reached the front of the building before Sam managed to regain the wherewithal to ask Mina if she thought Wesley was okay. He was still toting her sewing machine.
“Depends on what was in those boxes.” She spoke over her shoulder and kicked out the door.
“Jesus Christ, Mina, why did you do that?” He followed her out into the building’s open-air courtyard, a small T-shaped area of cracked slate set back from the sidewalk and crowded by a rusted green Dumpster. It was already hot, overcast, the morning light filtered and gray.
The vagrant stepped toward them. What Sam noticed about him immediately was the brightness of his eyes; they were nested in the mass of his copper-colored beard like a pair of shiny green bird’s eggs.
“Hi?” The vagrant’s voice was throaty. In one hand, he had a long knife, blade pointed up. He blinked at them.
“Hi,” said Mina. She went at him, calmly pulling the canister out of her pocket as she moved, and when she was an arm’s length away, she blasted him in his bird’s-egg eyes.
The man yelped and stumbled backward, tripping over a loose slate. There was a thud as his head struck the paving.
Sprawled on the slates, the vagrant lifted an arm and waved the blade around as if trying to swat flies.
“Drop the knife,” said Mina.
The weapon clattered from the man’s hand, and Mina hopped aside to avoid its spinning, whisking slide. It clanged against the base of the Dumpster and lay on the slate.
On some level Sam was pondering the knife’s action—the vagrant’s intention—even as the impulse to defend his sister carried him the short distance from the door to the prone man. The same impulse lifted Sam’s foot and dropped it on the man’s crotch. As his shoe drove downward, he felt a soft squelching beneath his heel. “That’s my sister!” Sam’s cry echoed in the morning courtyard, bouncing off the walls, the Dumpster, climbing up the wide shaft between buildings.
The vagrant momentarily sat up, spluttered, vomited orange gruel into his lap, and collapsed back onto his side. He sobbed and made hurt-animal noises.
“Sam?”
He turned to his sister. “I thought he threw it at you.”
Mina shook her head. “You’re my hero.” She dropped the pepper spray back in her pocket and bent to pick up the sword. “Let’s go.”
Sam took a blind backward step. The vagrant’s left hand popped under his sneaker sole. The man expressed a sound like a whoopee cushion.
“Sorry, sorry,” Sam said, and jumped off. He looked down at the spitting, weeping little man with grit and vomit in his beard and snot spurting from his nose, lying on the ground in a puddle of filthy overcoat. Rocking on his heels, Sam held his sister’s sewing machine and felt insane.
The vagrant’s writhing came to an abrupt crescendo: he jerked, gagged, spat, and went still. His chest rose and fell in a shallow rhythm.
Sam gathered himself with a deep breath. “Sorry,” he said again, a whisper this time—and he was, too, terribly, wretchedly sorry. But there was no time to think of strangers; his family was calling. Sam turned and chased after his sister.
Brooks Hartwig, Jr., opened his eyes. He rocked his head to look one way, then rocked it to see the other way. They were gone. Except for the crew, he was alone.
He stared into the awful sky. It still wasn’t over. It still wasn’t dead. He knew because they were filming. “Just do what you do,” said the Director. “Ignore us. We’re not even here.”
“I hate you,” Brooks tried to whisper. He wondered if maybe his hand was on fire, but he refused to look.
He was going to have to be very strong and very brave to kill it once and for all, to finally kill the beast. If he was ever going to get these fucking cameras out of his face, someone was going to have to die.
REEL CHANGE
(1991)
1.
Monday’s headline was this: Booth, without consulting anyone, had offered to appear at Sam’s homeroom for that Friday’s Career Day Presentation. Mrs. Quartermain had accepted.
“That should be interesting,” Allie said.
Sam didn’t care for that—“interesting.” He was increasingly attuned to the way adults used vagaries to obscure dangerous truths. His mother, for instance, referred to her marriage to Booth as “liberated,” which Sam recognized as a sneaky way of acknowledging his father’s long absences. It was as though they were a little less married than other married parents and, by extension, that their family was somehow looser than other families, not as official. He didn’t want other people to think that they were different, although he knew they were.
“Interesting how?” asked Sam.
“I don’t know—entertaining.”
“There’s nothing interesting about being entertained.”
“Says you,” said Allie.
Mother and son were wandering the Huguenot graveyard that sat on the hill a few hundred yards from their house. It was their custom on the afternoons that his mother had off, where they went to discuss the events of the day—what had happened to Sam at school, what had happened to Allie at work, etc.
It was early spring, clear and brisk. The lichen-speckled stones lay scattered and tilted at a dozen different angles. The dead refugees they walked on top of had all ceased to breathe over two hundred years ago.
Sam let his hand trail along the arched top of a stone, scraping the spots of pale green growth with his fingers. Their steps raised milky brown puddles in the grass.
A lean, auburn-haired woman in her late thirties, Allie tended to carry herself very straight and to hold her arms crossed over the chest, like the commander of something. There was a remote quality about his mother that Sam held in great esteem. She listened. She never yelled. She didn’t tend to fool around.
Which w
asn’t to say that his mother was especially severe or grindingly serious in the way that some parents could be—the fathers who barked directions from the bleachers at Little League games; the mothers who, just before the music began at an assembly, couldn’t resist running up to pat down an errant hair or smooth a tie. Rather, because of her calmness, she was the polar opposite of those types.
The café had been robbed once. Sam had been there at a café table, drawing. The bell over the door jangled, and he glanced up to see a man in a shiny teal Dolphins jacket run at the counter, snatch the tip jar, tuck it in his elbow, spin, and dash out, rejangling the bell. The thief vanished beyond the windowed doors, never to be seen again. The whole incident was over in less than twenty seconds.
Allie said, “Hey!” but didn’t make a move around the counter.
The bell was still tinkling when his mother cast a look at Sam at his table, where he was holding a magenta crayon over the paper, perplexed rather than frightened. Allie crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. “Kiddo, I don’t suppose you’d mind drawing up a label for the new tip jar, would you?” she asked, and Sam giggled and went right to work.
A grown-up didn’t perform; a grown-up reacted. His mother was a grown-up. If Allie told him that a thing was, it was; if she told him it wasn’t, it wasn’t; if she promised that he would feel better tomorrow, he could not doubt her.
Sam had never possessed that kind of conviction in his father, and he certainly didn’t now. That winter’s episode, the trip to the museum, lingered on the boy’s mind. He replayed the events—the odd woman and her questions, how she used baby talk at first and then at the end became so serious and sad-seeming, the panties on the floor, Booth’s twisting of Sam’s words on the train—and could make no sense of the offense he had committed, and he was baffled and humiliated once more. Allie couldn’t have comprehended any of that, and even if the boy felt he could explain it to her, his father had sworn him to secrecy and gave no hint of releasing the oath.
When Booth was about to depart on his latest trip to California, he had swept Sam up in a bear hug and swung him around. “If you’re going to look at me as though I’ve murdered someone, Samuel, the least you could do is reveal the name of my victim!” As it was happening, Sam laughed in self-defense. That night, when his father was gone, he spent a long time in his bedroom with his face buried in a pillow, breathing fabric, and wishing he was tired enough to sleep so he didn’t have to go down to dinner and pretend to his mother that everything was normal.
Now all Sam could manage was “Regular people aren’t prepared for Booth.”
Allie said she didn’t believe there were any regular people. “It’s going to be fine. Your father understands that this is important. He’ll be on his best behavior.”
“You don’t know him like I know him.”
“That may be so.” She gave the boy a chuck behind the ear. “I guess you’ll just have to tough it out and hope for the best.”
They walked some more. Allie said that Tom was coming back that week to finish fixing the ceiling at the café, thank the heavens. Sam asked her if she’d mind adding a few girl touches—curlicues, sparkly glue, whatever came to mind—to a poster he was making for his social studies project on the Trail of Tears. She agreed to take a look.
“You don’t think he’ll do the leper story, do you?” Booth loved to tell people that Sam, as a newborn, resembled a little leper.
“No. I’m sure he won’t.” Allie touched Sam’s back, and he shrugged her hand off.
A black-and-white cat was crouched out in the middle of the road. Allie yelled at it to move. The cat stared at her the way cats stare at people. “You’ll get smushed,” she said, and threw a handful of gravel in its direction. The animal hissed and trotted off, disappeared into some bushes. “You’re welcome,” she called after it, “you stubborn idiot. No one gets smushed on my watch.”
At the marker for Henry James Elting, 1833–1845, Beloved Son and Brother, Sam took out two Nukies from his pocket and arrayed them on the stone top side by side. The first of these red creatures had two regular arms, plus a crooked little baby arm that ended in a claw, and droopy antennae. The other had a tail, bulging fists that looked like they could smash rock, a jaw shaped like a shovel blade, and a ragged bucket hat jammed down on its head. Both figures stood hunched and frowning, a not uncommon expression among the jinxed species.
His mother looked on while Sam made a camera with his fingers and zoomed it in and out. “Your men are so depressing, kiddo.”
“They’ve had hard lives,” he said.
“Do you know how much I love you?” his mother asked.
“Sure.”
He inched to the left, gathering a few jumbled stones into the background of the frame of his finger camera. Sam instinctively sensed that the depth this added to the picture was valuable, that it spoke to how forbidding the landscape was for those few poor descendants of the human race who had lurched up from the toxic sludge of the twenty-second century.
“Do you know how much your father loves you?” Allie asked.
“Yeah.”
“Because the thing about your father is that he’s not like other fathers. He’s not like other husbands, either. And that can be difficult. We’ve talked about how difficult that can be, haven’t we? But what’s different about your father is also what’s good about him. I mean, you have to ask yourself, you know, what other fathers can order takeout with Animal’s voice? Right? I know you love it when Booth does that. Your dad is funny. What other fathers can juggle?
“And lots of men laugh at themselves, but not many like it when women laugh at them. Your father just loves it when people laugh, doesn’t he? I hope someday you understand how exceptional that is. What other fathers talk about books or have been to other countries or—” She did this occasionally, started talking to Sam about his father but ended up talking to herself, a goofy grin spreading across her face the way it never did unless the subject was Booth. It was the one time when he thought his mother seemed less than adult.
Sam meticulously tweaked the lens of his imaginary scope, widening and sharpening. When he was satisfied, he cleared his throat. “Quiet on the set!” (This was what Booth said right before he pressed the button on the camera timer and hurried around to stand beside them for family portraits.)
“Oh, sorry,” said Allie. She zipped her lips and flung away an invisible key.
Sam operated his invisible camera by turning an invisible crank, adding a faint, helicopter-like whirring noise to make it more realistic.
Allie stood aside in polite silence. A cold wind picked up. The Nukies trembled.
“Cut,” Sam said eventually.
“What was the scene about?” she asked.
“Ill tidings,” said Sam. He scooped up his toys. “They sense that something bad is about to happen.”
“Kiddo,” said Allie. “Ill tidings? Wait a sec. Didn’t they already live through the apocalypse? How much worse can it get?”
■ ■ ■
At home, his mother set a pot of water on the stove for tea and asked Sam to watch it while she was in the bathroom. A minute later, the phone rang.
“Hello?” Sam asked through a mouthful of American cheese.
There was a sniff, a small exhalation.
Sam gulped down the cheese. “Hello?” he asked again.
“Sammy? Is your daddy there? I’d like—”
Sam hung up.
Allie came back from the bathroom. “Who was that?”
He shook his head—no idea—and took another bite.
2.
Among his fifth-grade peers, Sam believed that he placed squarely in the middle ground; he was not an athlete or a math whiz or a musical prodigy; he was not poor or handicapped or a malcontent; he had no enemies but no close friends, either; except for a Perfect Attendance certificate for the spring semester of third grade, he had avoided any kind of distinction whatsoever, and that was how Sam liked it. He pref
erred to be outside of things. Attention not only made him anxious, it interrupted his vantage, making him focus on how other people were reacting to him as opposed to letting him focus on how other people interacted. (Girls were of particular interest to Sam. Since at least the beginning of second grade, he had been turning a single multi-faceted question over in his mind: “Girls: what the heck?”)
It was evident, too, that the wrong kind of attention—the kind of attention that his father, so large and so different from anyone else, could all too easily draw—could ruin a kid. Sam had seen it.
There was poor Erica Wembley, who had blithely lain out bare-chested at the public swimming pool. Three years on from the blunder and people still called her Cheese Nips and threw Cheese Nips at her head when the teacher’s back was turned.
Ethan Evans had let slip that he had two mothers; Mark Goolsby admitted that his father was in jail for writing bad checks. They were Lesbo Kid and the Convict’s Son, respectively. There were others: the one who was caught stealing; the one who cried on the field trip to the apple orchard because he thought he’d lost his Buffalo Bills duffel bag; the new guy who took off his clothes after gym and actually showered in the shower in the locker room for the first time in known history.
It wasn’t the cruel nicknames attending these personal catastrophes that scared Sam the most—although the thought of being branded as something like Cheese Nips was lamentable—but the way they transformed someone. You felt sorry for Erica Wembley. You studied her profile, the way she held herself, as if there were a wall pressing against her back. When someone said, “Yo! Cheese Nips!,” it was almost possible to see the words hit her and bounce off onto the floor. But the abuse might not even be the worse of it. Sam could imagine bunching up his shoulders and dropping his head, pushing through. What would be truly awful would be the sympathy of bystanders like Sam himself, because no one who witnessed your perseverance would admire you. No matter how tall you walked, you’d only seem more pitiable. To be Booth’s son was confusing enough on its own terms. To be revealed as Booth’s son in the eyes of everyone else felt like an execution.