“Oh, I don’t know.”
“I know. I was young once myself. What do you want?”
Bran the Man looked him over but only for a second. The stranger was here and he was willing. He would do. “Just a six-pack,” he said. “Whatever’s cheap.”
“You got it.” The bearded stranger tapped the top of the car again and strode across the gravel parking spaces next to the store’s dock. He was tall, Bran realized, and he wore faded jeans with thready patches worn in places. His t-shirt was black and without sleeves, and although his arms were thin, the muscles looked chiseled and powerful. He reached for the door with his left hand, then turned and grinned back at Brandon. Bran could see a dark tattoo on the right bicep, a name or a word, but before he could make it out the stranger pulled open the door to the liquor store and disappeared inside.
Minutes later, he stepped back out of the store with something in a paper bag and walked back to the Accord with long strides. Bran the Man noticed something folded in his other hand, what looked like a magazine of sorts. The stranger sat the sack on the ground, stooped, and leaned his elbow against the door, grinning inside the window.
“Miller’s on sale for four-ninety-nine,” he said. “I’ll cover the tax, so five’ll call it even.”
Bran dug into his back pocket for his wallet. “You sure? I’ve got change for tax in the ashtray.”
“I’m sure. Five’ll do.”
Bran flipped open his wallet and peered out the window. “Didn’t get anything for yourself?”
“Nah. I don’t drink. I bought this.” He held up the folded magazine with his other hand. Bran could make out the Ford Truck logo from an ad printed on the back of the periodical.
“So why did you buy that beer for me if you didn’t want any yourself?”
The stranger shrugged, and one of his pointed shoulders stretched the fabric of the t-shirt. “I was just out taking a walk and saw a brother in need.”
Bran pulled out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the stranger. The stranger’s arm was leaning on the jamb of the window—his right arm as the stranger was turned to the front of the car—and Bran noticed the tattoo for the first time. It was a single name, four letters, etched in a rough attempt at dripping, melting font: JACK.
“Jack,” Bran the Man repeated. “That you?”
“At your service.”
The stranger, Jack, picked up the bag of beer and passed it into Brandon’s car. He made no attempt to be careful or covert about it. Bran snatched the bag quickly, tucking it down on the floorboards on the passenger side. When he sat back up, Jack was still there, leaning into his window, and showed no signs of leaving anytime soon.
“Well,” Bran said. “Thanks.”
“I know you?” Jack asked.
“No, sir,” Bran the Man replied. “I don’t think so.”
“No, I know you,” Jack insisted. “You’re that quarterback out at the high school. What was it they called you? The Beast of something or other.”
Bran the Man grinned. He had thought the community had forgotten. “Beast With Three Backs,” he said. “BTB, baby.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Man, I loved watching you guys play last fall.”
“Thanks again,” Bran the Man said.
“Shoch, right? Brandon Shoch.”
“Yes.”
“And those other two guys, Catella, Segerstrom. They were pretty good too. But you, man …” Jack shook his head and chuckled. “You were a field general out there.”
“Thanks, man,” Bran the Man said. “I appreciate it.”
“So, Brandon,” Jack began, “what’s up next?”
“Uh, next?”
“You know, where are you going with your life now that you’ve graduated?”
Bran the Man shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Might play football out at K-South, but no one’s offered me a scholarship or anything.”
“I don’t mean that, Bran,” Jack said, shortening Brandon’s name the way everyone did in high school. “College, man, it’s just purgatory.”
“Purgatory?”
“You know what that is, Bran?”
Bran the Man shook his head. “Something like hell.”
“It’s the place between this life and the next,” Jack said. “You die, right? And purgatory is where you go to be purified for heaven. You’re kind of stuck in the middle there. Catholics, man, they’re great storytellers.”
“Yeah,” said Bran the Man.
“That’s what college is, Bran,” Jack continued. “It’s a purgatory … a manhood purgatory. The boys back here in high school think you’re now a man. But the men out here in the real world think you’re still a boy. Turns out you’re neither. Purgatory.”
Bran the Man nodded, considering this.
“So you need to be a man right now, Bran,” said Jack. “You need to get your ass out there and do manly things.”
Bran the Man looked at him, at those icy shark’s eyes and that abundant beard-framed smile. He wondered for some reason how old Jack was. Too old to be fresh out of one of the high schools at a neighboring town. He was older, maybe 30, 40, probably some dead-end loser working at the local foundry. Still, there was something about him that Bran the Man liked.
“What kind of manly things?” Bran the Man asked.
At this, Jack offered the magazine and unfolded it to reveal the cover. It was an image of a large rubber raft, oval-shaped but angled on one end, its inflatable tube as big around as a large barrel. It was wide enough to accommodate what looked like six individuals, dressed in bright orange life-jackets and waggling paddles in multiple directions, and the rest of the picture was a splash of gray-and-white foamy water. The title of the magazine was WHITE FURY, and in the lower left-hand corner of the cover were printed the words: CASCADE CRAZY! SHOOTING THE DESCHUTES.
“Deschutes,” Bran said. “What’s that?”
“It’s a river,” said Jack. “In the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. I try to raft there at least twice a year. Matter of fact, I’m heading up to Maupin next week.”
“Where’s Maupin?”
“Little town in Oregon, right on the Deschutes,” Jack explained. “Meeting some buddies up there to shoot the rapids.”
“Sounds cool.”
“Ever whitewater raft before, Bran?”
Bran shook his head. “No place to raft around here.”
You ought to hit the Deschutes with us. Bring your friends too.”
“Seriously?” Bran the Man asked. “Head out to Oregon with you?”
“Not with me,” Jack admitted. “I’ve got some traveling to do, so I won’t be at Deschutes until … let’s see …” He scratched his beard, and his lips puckered, drawing the wooly mustache down to cover the upper half of his mouth. “First Monday in August, that’d be a week from now. You could leave next weekend and drive it, probably go all night and be there before me.”
“Yeah,” Bran the Man said. “That would be cool.”
“Come on out to Maupin. Bring your buddies too, those two guys you used to play football with. You guys can hook up with me and my friends, and we’ll show you how to run the rapids.” Jack nodded as if it was already decided, and when he finished he thrust a hand into the window of the car. “Sound like a deal?”
Bran the Man looked at the hand and then at the wooly face of the stranger who had been kind to him. The eyes were still two black holes, no color or life within, but it did not matter, not at that moment. He gripped Jack’s hand and offered it a firm shake.
“Deal,” he said.
“All right, my man.” They broke the handshake, and Jack patted him on the shoulder. “Monday next, then. And you will bring your friends, right?” His voice dipped into a shallow darkness, making this sound like a command. “Dusty and Marty?”
Bran the Man grinned, never pausing for a moment to consider how Jack knew so much.. “Sure, I’ll talk ‘em into it,” he said. “Our last hurrah before we go off to college.”
“I’ll be looking for all three of you, Bran.”
“Where will I find you?”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Jack said, pushing himself back up to his feet. “I’m real, real easy to find.”
Boy In the Closet/Cat In the Bag
The wallpaper was as Sarah remembered it, a repeating pattern in various shades of piss-yellow that looked to her young eyes like a cross between a fleur-de-lis and a bouquet of paramecium. She had learned both of these obscure terms in school, paramecium because her favorite class was Science with Mr. Hall, and fleur-de-lis because a boy she kind of liked wore a t-shirt with a New Orleans Saints helmet embossed on it, and Sarah had asked Mrs. Jackson, her English teacher, what that symbol on the helmet was called. At one point, she had tried to cover the wallpaper’s ugly recurring pattern with posters of Peter Frampton and Sylvester Stallone, but Big Buddy had ripped them down, claiming that they would damage the walls and he would get less back on his security deposit.
Sarah whiplashed awake, bolting upright in the short twin bed with bad springs and looked around. “No,” she whispered. No … not here …”
They had moved into the house on South Tacoma Way when she was 11 years old, when Big Buddy claimed that Little Buddy had wanted a room of his own. That turned out to be a lie; every night after Sarah went to sleep, Little Buddy was there within minutes, crawling in between the sheets to sleep with her. Later, when Big Buddy would come for her, he would chuckle a little at the loveliness of his son, carry the sleeping boy back to his own bedroom, and then stamp back down the hall in his filthy boots to play the game. Sarah would hear him coming, scuffing the boots and staggering into the wall of the hallway after the requisite number of beers, and then he would be there, in the doorway like something out of the late night Creature Feature, framed in the heavy shadows cast by the single 40-watt bulb Sarah left on in the closet.
“Hey, little girl,” he would groan. “Let’s play.”
Sarah snapped her head to the doorway, and he was there, Big Buddy in his muddy boots, his old work coveralls reeking from the stench of a thousand cigarettes. There it was, then. This was what was real. She was back in the house on South Tacoma Way, a place that she had come to think of as the Nightmare House, and here was Big Buddy, hovering in her doorway and ready for the awful game. The last few weeks of being on the road, crouching in C-store bathrooms, dashing in terror through the woods, and at last taking comfort in a mysterious boy named Tom … all of it had been a dream. She had not escaped. There was no hope out there, waiting in the woods to save her. This was the real, the awful, her dark and terrible castle lorded by a giant called Big Buddy.
“You awake, little girl?” Big Buddy growled. “Let’s play.”
Something twitched in the corner of Sarah’s eye, a shadow cast across the wall that wasn’t there before. She knew every shadow of this room, from the shape her hanging clothes made against the south wall by the bulb of her closet to the silhouettes of the trees at various stages of foliage from the street lamp out her window. But this was a new shadow now, mingled in with the shape of her clothes, something wavering and lurching from deep within her coffin-sized closet.
From the doorway of the room, Big Buddy took a step inside. He leaned against the open door, thudding it hard against the north wall. Sarah jumped at the noise and imagined the doorknob pocking the awful wallpaper, those twisted vomit-gold bouquets that in the right light looked like laughing faces. That’s going to leave a mark, she thought. That won’t be good for your security deposit.
The shadow on the south wall grew larger, and Sarah could see the thing now, whatever it was, slapping about in her closet. It did not make a sound; there was no jangling of coat hangers, no whish of her hanging clothes as whatever it was tried to claw its way to the surface of her world. It was as if she was watching a silent movie of it all, Big Buddy coming from the hallway, some new monster coming from her closet, two horrors for the price of one.
“What you looking at?” Big Buddy muttered. “I’m right over here, girl, come on.”
With a crash, the thing in the closet made its final push and tumbled out onto the floor of the room. It writhed and thrashed on the faded shag carpet crushed down from years of foot traffic. In the light from that single bulb, Sarah saw that it was not a monster at all but a long-legged boy with fly-away hair. He did not stay down long but pushed himself up on his hands as if doing push-ups. His legs thrashed, but the soles of his sneakers found purchase, and he sprang to his feet, wobbling a bit like a sapling in the wind. At once, he spun about, turning his back to Sarah and facing Big Buddy.
“Come get some then!” he barked. Despite his thin and utterly breakable body, there was might in that voice, something awful that suggested a reserve of power hidden even from himself. “By God, you can come and get some!”
A dry chuckle began to wriggle its way from Big Buddy’s chest, pouring out of his mouth as if he were vomiting a bucket of dung beetles. With one swift move, he cocked his arm back and drove it palm-first into the boy’s chest. The boy staggered backward, falling over the corner of the bed and landing hard on the mashed carpet.
“I’ll give you a fight,” the boy groaned. “I’ll give you such a fight because I’ve got nothing left to lose …”
* * * *
The bus lurched to shift gears, and Sarah awoke. She was sweating, and the sweat made her skin cold, and she gripped the seat in front of her and tucked her head, sucking deep breaths to steady herself.
“Humph!”
She looked down at the floor in front of the empty seat next to her. Thank God the bus wasn’t to capacity this time of night; she was able to find two seats near the back. There on the floor sat the gray plastic cat carrier Tom had purchased at the 24-hour K-Mart for $20, and peering out from the metal grating in front was Tom, or at least Tom as he was at this moment. She had left the reading light on, and in its dim illumination she could see the cat’s ginger fur bristle on his head.
“I'm okay,” she said. “Just the dream again.”
“Humph!”
“Yeah, okay. Give me a minute?”
She leaned out in the aisle and looked up to the front of the bus. All the reading lights were off save one towards the front, and everything was very still. No one seemed restless or looking to come back Sarah’s way to use the bathroom. Beyond the rows of seats, she could see the open highway rolling before them in the glow of the bus’s headlamps.
Not much farther, she thought. Tom said we’d be there when the sun came up.
“Humph!”
“Okay, okay. It’s all clear. Give me a minute.”
She stood carefully, reached up on the netted shelf above her head, and pulled down Tom’s pack, which they both now shared. She allowed another quick glance to the front of the bus and then felt around for one of the thin fleece blankets that the bus line supplied. When she fell back into her seat, she glanced down at Tom the cat, who was watching her and waiting. It had been his idea that he travel in this form. He had been able to beg and borrow a little cash, but even then it was not a lot, and the cost of a bus ticket for a single girl with a cat was much less than a ticket for two people. It made sense, but this part of the plan made her a little uncomfortable.
She reached down to the cat cage and twisted the tiny bolt, opening the door of the cage. She pulled it open, allowing the cat to escape, but he waited patiently, shaking his caramel head and yawning.
Sarah reached into the pack, pulled out Tom’s jeans, a pair of his underwear, and a long-sleeve pullover. She sat these carefully on the seat beside her.
“There,” she said. “There are your clothes.”
She then unfolded the blanket. With great care, she draped the blanket over the cat carrier, over Tom’s wide orange face, letting the upper edge fall on the seat next to her. She looked forward again, checking the inactivity of the other bus passengers, and then leaned down to the blanket.
“Okay, Tom,” sh
e whispered. “You can come out.”
She saw a bump in the blanket, pressing up as the cat poked his head out of his cage, and then it began … the noise in her ear, tiny buzz like a gnat, then growing to the low hum of power lines, the tingle on her skin like a thousand bolts of lightening, each the size of pin point. The current poured into her out of nothingness, through her and across her, and in the seat next to her the fleece blanket sparked and popped with static electricity, a miniature fireworks show. Sarah stared, fascinated as the flickering blanket rose, the bump underneath growing more tumescent, the sparks seeming to wriggle into the fibers of the fleece like glowing ants. She had seen this display once before, in the woods just behind the bus stop back on the strip, only that time the sparks were going the other way, buzzing through the trees like fireflies.
At last, the sparks across the fleece began to dissipate, and when the last one skittered into the fabric with a hiss the lump under the blanket was now quite large. Sarah watched as Tom’s pale freckled hand felt its way onto the seat, examined the folded clothes there, and settled on the long-sleeve pullover. The hand sucked it back under the blanket like a frog’s tongue. More shuffling, and then Tom’s head appeared. He blinked up at Sarah and smiled.
“Hello,” he said.
“You okay?” Sarah asked.
“Fine, always fine.” He slid himself up onto the seat, keeping the blanket around his waist. He now wore the pullover, and as they spoke he worked to get the rest of his clothes on under the blanket. “Any idea where we are?”
“I’ve been asleep.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t have a watch.”
Tom grunted and continued to struggle under the blanket. At last, he was near complete, and Sarah heard the sound of his zipper being tugged in place. He grinned at her and pulled off the blanket, now fully clothed but for his shoes. He nodded his assurance, then looked out into the sky, studying the stars. “What’s the day?” he muttered.
“Saturday,” she told him. “First weekend in August.”
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