The pregnant woman tried to convince the lady to take her seat again but this old black woman was not to be trifled with. She’d hear none of it and stabilized herself against the rocking of the train with one hand on the back of the seat and another on a vertical pole. She gripped the pole fiercely with a naughty smile on her face and refused to speak to the pregnant woman any further.
Junior felt a tug at long unused muscles in his face. Then he noticed the folks in the seats near the old woman pretending not to have seen the exchange and the almost-smile vanished. He looked away. The ginger leaned against the center pole now, one foot up on the crossbar of his bike as he dug through his messenger bag. Junior’s gaze drifted down to the bike’s fat white wall tires. Then down farther to the old gum, bits of Cheetos, and apple core at his own Surplus-booted feet.
His thoughts wandered, as they always did, to his mother. He’d followed her new life from a distance. At first he’d had to search for news from her high school, her college. He’d steal time on people’s computers even as he stole food from their kitchens while they slept. He tried to jump to bedroom closets in the town she grew up in but failed time and again. After college, she’d become easier to find as she dominated local political columns in her rapid rise. Her success depressed him and he hid from the world for months at a time, jumping from bedroom to bedroom, sleeping in a new closet every night. Today was the first time he’d seen the sun in four months.
Five months ago Kathryn Leo, his mother in another time, had been elected the youngest Councilperson in the city’s history. Every day she was in the news. Every day Junior saw evidence of the things he’d kept her from doing when he’d been her whole world. All he’d ever wanted was to work in the dirt. He wanted to nourish and grow food and flowers and make people happy. But he couldn’t get a job growing things because he had no social security number or ID and, oh yeah, most of the time nobody could see him. He couldn’t garden in his own backyard because, again, he didn’t exist. He couldn’t make people happy. He could only make them freeze in terror. He was worthless. He was a monster. Kathryn Leo was surrounded with friends and family and admirers. Junior Leo—the one she’d called her little man, her love, her life—he was all alone.
He jumped at a touch on his face. A tiny hand brushed the hair out of his eyes.
“Brudda man, you are not alone.”
Junior looked up. At first he looked through the girl. She tangled her little fist in his beard and his eyes focused. It was the girl with a spray of pigtails all over her head. She stood four and half feet tall, thin as him but with a round, happy face. Her skin was as dark as his was pale. His heart skipped a beat at the color of her eyes.
“Brudda man, you are not alone.”
He started to speak but found his throat was dry. He coughed, “You can’t see me.”
The little girl smiled. “I am not afraid of you.”
Junior looked away at the cyclist who’d seen him earlier. The ginger had a foot up on the bar of his bike, touching up the hand-sketched wingtip pattern on his Chucks with a Sharpie. Junior wondered that someone could care so much about how he looked to others. His mother always looked perfectly put together in the news clips. Not a hair out of place in the photos on her website. Junior hacked his hair short anytime it tickled his neck. He’d just shaved for the first time in years in the police station, not that he really could grow anything but patchy fuzz on his face. He didn’t own a stitch of clothing that hadn’t been worn by someone else. He couldn’t imagine how he must smell to the little girl. He had no reason to bathe when everyone around him was too frightened to notice.
The belt of loneliness tightened around his chest and he murmured, more to himself than to her. “Then you don’t know who I am.”
She stared at him in silence for more than a few moments and out of the corner of his eye he saw her nod sadly. “I know your fadda is the boogeyman and your mudda is a power gonna change the world.”
Junior turned to stare at her. He couldn’t keep away from the sight of blue eyes in such a deeply black face. He’d only seen that in one other person. The memory choked him. When he found his voice again, he said, “How do you know this?”
She tilted her head at him as if she were surprised he didn’t recognize her. Then she smiled sweetly. “I know who your fadda be,” she said. “I know who your mudda be. But you’re right, Junior. I don’t know what you be.” She searched his eyes. “Do you know what you be?”
His chin wavered and his eyes swam. He dropped his head again, unable to meet her eyes anymore. But she lifted his chin with her tiny hand tangled in his beard.
“I say it again. You listen this time.” She nodded encouragingly at him. “You are not alone.”
Still holding Junior’s chin, the girl turned and smiled up at the cyclist. The ginger was the only person on the whole train paying any attention to the conversation between a little girl and a homeless guy. He took his foot off the crossbar of his bike and smiled back. Then he slipped the Sharpie into a pocket of his messenger bag and dug inside. He pulled out a small orange and first raising a questioning eyebrow, tossed it to Junior.
Junior caught it. He mumbled, “I love oranges.”
The cyclist smiled. The little girl laughed. The train pulled into a station.
“Jane.” The old woman reached one hand out to the little girl as she made her way up the aisle.
Junior jolted at the name but the girl with five pigtails had turned away to take her old granny’s hand. The cyclist manhandled his bike out of the way as the two moved with a few others toward the door. Junior didn’t move. As everyone waited for the doors to slide open, the little girl caught the ginger’s eye. She looked pointedly over at the punk taking up three seats and back to the orange-gifter.
A little grin quirked her lips. “Thank you, man.”
Junior followed her gaze again as she giggled at the teen frantically searching the pockets of his black duster. The cyclist pulled a thick green wallet wrapped in duct tape from his back pocket. He offered it to the girl.
She shook her head at him. “You go do good with it, Brownie.”
Then the doors opened and she looked back at Junior, waggling her fingers goodbye. She and the old woman got off and Junior watched them walking down the platform as the train pulled away.
4
The Office
The businessman got up as they approached the next stop and the punk made to follow him. The cyclist disappeared for an instant in a trick of the light as the suit passed him. But then Junior blinked and the ginger was there, steadying his bike against the slowing of the train. He winked at Junior and turned to head out the door. On an impulse, Junior followed. The punk didn’t. He fell back against a post when he couldn’t get one foot to move. Somehow, his bootlaces had gotten trapped between the seats.
Junior let the waiting girl scout troop flow around him onto the train. He faced the train as the doors closed on the punk kid’s profanities. He kept his eyes down to avoid his reflection in the plastic windows but as the train started to pull away, Junior looked up. He caught the punk’s eye and forced the guy to see him. The profanities stopped.
He stood there until the train had disappeared down the track. He was a monster. The punk was rude, but he didn’t deserve terror in payment. He was a monster.
A glint of sunlight sparked on the wooden slats of the platform. It’d hit the copper gleam of a new penny. Junior bent to pick it up. He dropped it into a pocket of his satchel. Standing, he noticed that the crowd at the stairs had dissipated and remembered why he’d gotten off the train.
Junior had to hustle along the elevated platform to catch sight of the ginger at the bottom of the exit stairs. Junior made his way down as the guy waited to the side to let the small crowd flow through the turnstiles. When they’d cleared out, he lifted the thick bike over the turnstile and headed around the corner. Junior followed. When the guy got on the bicycle, Junior simply kept walking after him.
&nb
sp; The late morning sun glinting off the silver chrome made it easy to see the bicycle even several blocks away. Junior peeled the little orange as he walked. He ate it in sections, enjoying its sweetness and the smell of clean. Eventually the guy turned a corner, disappearing from view. Junior kept walking and eating. As he approached intersections, he looked down the street in the direction the cyclist had turned. At one intersection he found two old dimes and a nickel he had to pry up with his pocket knife. At Clark, he saw the bike locked to a light post three quarters of the way down the block. Junior licked the stickiness from his fingers as he walked to the bike. It was parked in front of a freestanding shop with a facade that matched the ginger’s ‘30s style. The ginger had woven a fabric-encased chain through both of the bike’s wheels, it’s frame, and around the fat lamp post. Nobody was stealing that bike.
Junior almost caught a glimpse of himself in the shaded window when he peered at the hand-carved wooden sign that read Brown’s Resale and Consignment. He went to the door. In that moment, he realized that while he didn’t know why he was following the guy it was still pretty creepy that he was following him.
He stopped and looked around at the lonely neighborhood. It felt like an old place. Most of the buildings were walkup apartments with a few businesses below like the resale shop. An older man dressed for the weather several weeks away came out of a hat shop and trotted down the sidewalk to the bar across from Brown’s Resale. The Italian restaurant a few doors down from the bar seemed dead but two people carried paper bags out of a taqueria and panaderia. They crossed the street and also entered the bar.
This was the farthest Junior had been from a bedroom closet in years. He could probably break into one of the apartment buildings and find a closet. Locks weren’t usually much of a problem for him. But where would he go? Back to hiding during the day and stealing at night? It wasn’t much of a life. For him, haunting a dive bar would be an improvement.
Junior crossed the street. The dingy building featured a blue door. A small, easily missed plaque beside the door read The Office. The dirty window to the right of the sign didn’t allow for much of a peek inside. Junior couldn’t see more than a jukebox with an old woman dancing beside it. He could just hear a hint of 80’s synth-pop.
He checked that he’d fastened all the buttons on the cop’s donated shirt and discovered he had, but in the wrong order. He fixed them, ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair, and adjusted the bag on his shoulder. Then he walked into The Office.
It was a fairly small room, dark despite the daylight coming weakly through the window. The jukebox stood against the wall just to the right of the door. The old dancing woman, looking more in need of a shower than himself, shimmied in the small space between the wall, the jukebox, and the bar. The corner stool closest to the door had what must be this woman’s puffy jacket draped over it and the counter in front of the stool was strewn with quarters.
A muscular bald guy stood behind the bar looking up at the bottles behind him while making notes on a clipboard. He glanced over at the dancing woman when she started spinning and caught sight of Junior standing by the door. A smile spread across the bartender’s indisputably handsome face.
With a rich Scottish accent, he said, “Toll’s optional but recommended.”
Junior looked around, confused. “What’s the toll?”
The bartender nodded at the quarters on the end of the bar. “A quarter. Beth collects.”
Junior dug through his bag to find his change pocket. He pulled out a quarter and set it on the bar top. Then he noticed the other quarters were forming a spiral and repositioned his coin at the trailing edge of the nautilus.
“Seb.” The bartender held a hand out.
Junior sensed he’d passed some sort of test. He stepped over and shook Seb’s surprisingly small hand, getting a second look at the barman. The gorgeous face and well-muscled chest and shoulders had distracted him from the fact that Seb stood a little shorter than the girl on the train. Junior peeked over the bar as he chose a stool. The floor behind the bar was raised.
“What can I get you, Scarecrow?”
Junior hadn’t thought that far. He’d only ever tried high-school party beer in his last life, his life with a mother. He had no idea what drinks cost but was pretty sure he had enough pennies alone to pay. People never bothered to pick up pennies. Even homeless beggars left pennies where they lay. But what beer to choose? He glanced at the tap handles. And saw the ginger.
The green-eyed cyclist was kneeling on a stool and leaning over the bar pulling his own beer. Seb followed Junior’s gaze.
“Regulars. That’s Orin getting his grubby fingerprints all over my tap. Amal is the tall dark drink a water who looks like he hasn’t shaved in three days. Lucio is the swarthy young fella dressed far too nicely for my pub who looks like he’s shaved very carefully every day since he was nine. They run the consignment shop across the street, Brown’s Resale. We’ve got glög. First day.”
Junior’s confusion must have shown. The gregarious Seb didn’t even pause.
“Glög’s a thing we do here in winter. Don’t normally have this good a crowd for lunch on Wednesday.” He indicated the bustling tables behind Junior where about nine people sat with sandwiches and steaming mugs. The couple from the panaderia were ignoring their food in favor of the glög while the hat shop guy used a hand to waft the steam to his nose.
Junior recalled a night a couple came home while he was raiding their kitchen. After they’d each spun once to catch the unfamiliar shadow in their kitchen, their heightened fear made Junior totally invisible and he stayed to watch them. They’d poured beers they definitely didn’t need and cut up orange slices to decorate the rim like their beer was a cocktail. They’d called it a wheat beer. Junior thought bartender would know what that was and was about to order a wheat beer since the taste of citrus was still fresh on his taste buds. But he was too slow.
Seb decided for him. “You’re new. I’ll get you a mug of glög. You can try it while you settle. Welcome to The Office.”
Seb walked away to an enormous pot steaming on a burner on the back counter of the bar. He grabbed a Chicago is for Lovers mug from a mismatched display and ladled the glög into it.
When he set it in front of Junior, he warned, “Let it cool a minute.”
Seb went back to his inventory. Junior took a whiff of the steam rolling off the mug. He blinked. The smell was potent with a strong orange odor. It was exactly what he wanted. He might get drunk just smelling it. No wonder the hat man was taking it slow.
The jukebox dancer, Beth, had a mug in her hand but she was focused on swaying to True by Spandau Ballet. The people at the tables who weren’t working seemed to consider this a great floor show, and even those typing furiously on their laptops looked over at the woman occasionally. It was hard to tear your eyes from her. She was as happy as he’d ever seen anyone. When the chorus came around, she broke out into full on dance moves and sang along.
Junior turned to watch his ginger friend. Orin and the other guys from Brown’s Resale bent close over their drinks. They were a mismatched trio. Amal could have been in his fifties or sixties while Lucio looked barely old enough to be in the bar. The kid’s brown skin fell dead in the middle of a color spectrum bookended by Amal’s disappears-in-shadows shade and Orin’s never-seen-the-sun pinkness.
Close as they were, Junior could easily hear every word of their discussion.
Orin slid a scrap of paper over to Amal. “We’ll just all keep an ear out for the vamp. Nothing else we can do. I got the lady’s address off the kid’s school ID. We can head up there after lunch.”
Amal slid the paper to Lucio. “You and Orin go. There’s an item missing from our shelves and I have to find it.”
Orin looked up. “You mean a wooden box?”
“Yes.” Amal froze, his finger still trapping the scrap of paper Lucio was trying to pick up.
“What box?” Lucio peeled Amal’s fingers up until the t
aller man got the hint and released the paper.
The ginger sipped his beer before he answered. “A woman came in yesterday looking for an antique jewelry chest her grandfather sold to us in ’72.”
“How’d she know so specifically?” Lucio tucked the scrap of paper with an address on it into an inner pocket of his vest.
Amal seemed tense. “It’s not a jewelry chest.”
Orin ignored him. “She had the receipt. Amal bought it from him for eighty-seven dollars. The lady said she found the receipt in her father’s belongings after he died. Wants the box back as a keepsake. It had belonged to her great-great-grandmother.”
“You didn’t sell it back, did you?” Amal set his still steaming glög on the bar.
“You’re the antiquities expert, Amal. I told her I’d have to get you to appraise it first. She’s coming back tomorrow. But, you know, there’s a padlock but no key. I couldn’t open the thing.”
“Don’t.”
Orin barreled over Amal’s interjection. “It seemed weird. So I took it with me to go check out the guy’s address. He lives over a bakery on the south side.”
“Lives?” Lucio finished his beer and tried to catch Seb’s eye for another. “Present tense?”
“Yep. The ‘father’ is alive and kicking. Everyone before him though, they’re all dead. Violent, tragic ends.” Orin swung his messenger bag around so it sat on his lap. “So my question, Amal, is why did you never tell us about it and what exactly is in this box?”
Orin pulled a package wrapped in blue cloth from the bag. As he set it on the bar Amal stood from his stool and backed away before grabbing for the package. Orin slammed a hand down on it. The well-dressed Lucio reached out and tore the blue cloth off under Orin’s hand.
Junior stood.
The box was the work of a master craftsman. Or two. It was carved out of oak to look like it had grown as a part of some tree. Junior couldn’t see the details in the carving but something made him want to look closer even as it repelled him. The edges of the box were protected with iron and it was locked shut with an exquisitely small padlock hung on circles of metal twisted and etched to look like branches. And Junior could feel it. The box felt like the closet he’d found one time with a kid locked in it. He felt terror and fierce anger in equal measure. He still hated himself for not doing something to help that kid. There was nothing he could have done, but the fact that he did nothing haunted him.
Junior (A Wyrdos Tale Book 3) Page 2