by David Nickle
Dad sat slouched back a bit in the chair, as peaceful and quiet as ever, as the sirens grew louder, and Shelly marvelled: she still couldn’t imagine her Dad taking a gun and pointing it at a grocery store man, and saying he’d kill him if he didn’t give over some cash. Any more than she could imagine him breaking the window of a shiny red pickup truck that belonged to someone else, and taking it for himself.
Mom was wrong, so wrong: Dad wasn’t a bad man at all. In spite of what everyone thought about him. As Shelly continued up the stairs, she hoped the police who were running that siren could see the goodness in Dad too; she hoped they wouldn’t be too mad about everything that had happened tonight.
The basement, after all, was only so big.
Other People’s Kids
“The trouble with places like this,” said my sister Lenore, “is other people’s kids.”
Nick, Lenore’s third boyfriend ever and the coolest one yet, took a long sip of his coffee. “Other people’s kids?” he said mildly. “As opposed to your own?”
“I don’t have any kids right now, thank God.” Lenore sat down at the picnic table next to Nick. “But I had the worst time in the line. There were two little boys — must have been twins — who were playing this game of SCREAM, which is exactly what it sounds like. Their mom didn’t even notice.” She set down her cinnamon pretzel and jammed a straw into the top of her diet root beer. “On my way back, I saw a kid running around with his poopy diaper. I know it was a ‘he’ because he was holding the diaper over his head and yelling, ‘LOOKIT MY POOPY DIAPER!’”
“More SCREAM,” I said.
“With poop.” Nick smiled. He was so cool. “Kids are wacky,” he said.
Lenore shook her head. “Terrible. Look around! Other people’s kids are terrible!”
We looked around. The picnic common of Natch’s Highway Grill and Fun-Park was full of kids, other people’s kids, I guess, and yeah, they were all pretty terrible.
But why shouldn’t they be? Natch’s was located on the highway, exactly halfway between Carlingsburg and the Elbow Lakes tourist region, and today was exactly halfway through Labour Day Monday. So of course that meant that about a half of all the kids in Carlingsburg were on their way home from their family cottages. It was their last day of summer vacation, and each and every one of them knew that when they woke up in the morning they would be looking at just over three months before Christmas and their next scheduled good time. I myself had been facing this grim reality, along with the prospect of starting Grade Nine all but friendless in a high school whose main problem was too many cliques. So if these kids were a little hopped up on sugar and grouchy enough to fall down in the grass, kicking their legs in the air and screaming like the three-year-olds they were . . .
Hey, I could relate.
In fact, a couple of years ago I would have been one of those kids. We’d been stopping at Natch’s every summer since Lenore was a little kid and I was a baby. Dad used to joke that Oliver Natch’s old highway rest stop had grown up with me. When I was little, Natch’s was just a burger joint on the northbound side of the highway, nestled in a semi-circle of low rocky hills, and surrounded by a dark forest of big pine and cedar trees. I was too young to remember it like that, but one of our family pictures is of the four of us standing in front of the little restaurant — Dad with a big suntanned arm over Mom’s shoulder, Lenore holding me and giggling like an idiot while I grabbed her ear. I don’t know who took the picture — maybe Mr. Natch himself did it, because he probably spent more time there in those days.
These days, my Dad figured that Mr. Natch was too busy counting his money to spend much time at the Grill and Fun-Park. Over the years, he’d put in about fifty picnic tables, slapped up two separate dining buildings with their own washrooms, set up a lame amusement park with a little carousel and the CARLINGSBURG RAIL MUSEUM in an old train car. Sometime in the last ten years, he’d built a completely enclosed footbridge across four lanes of highway to a parking lot on the west side — so people coming south back to the city could stop at Natch’s too. Dad thought he must have bribed someone high up in the government to get permission to build the bridge across the highway like that. I didn’t know if he did or not but he certainly could afford to. The place was packed. It was so packed there were actually security guards, wearing blue shirts and carrying walkie-talkies and strange black wands, making sure nothing bad happened to Mr. Natch’s considerable investment.
“Okay,” said Nick. “I see what you mean.” He was looking at a table two over, where a four-year-old girl with pigtails had overturned her milkshake onto her brother’s french fries. Her dad, a big-bellied bald man in a Carlingsburg Panthers T-shirt, sipped at his own milkshake without seeming to notice. “If that were my kid, maybe I would want to strangle her.”
Lenore took a bite out of her pretzel. “Our kid,” she said, “would never do that.”
Lenore didn’t notice how Nick winced, but I sure did. Nick had been wincing a lot over the past two weeks he’d been at our cottage. He winced when she talked about how after graduation next year, the two of them would apply to the same college. He winced when she talked about how before college, the two of them could audition for spots on the Up With People tour and spend the whole summer criss-crossing the United States spreading cheerful songs and right-thinking values to those “less fortunate” than Lenore. And he particularly winced when she would go on and on and on about all the things they’d do together after college. I wasn’t surprised one bit when Nick offered to drive me back to the city along with Lenore, to give my parents some “alone time.” “Alone time” was something he and Lenore had altogether too much of over the past two weeks.
“Hey!” The boy across from us got up, one soggy vanilla-flavoured french fry in his hands. His sister stuck her tongue out at him. “You little rat!” he shouted.
“Don’t call your little sister names,” said their father as he sipped at his milkshake and looked off into the distance, and the little girl smiled. “Don’t call your little sister names,” she said in a sing-song voice that was designed to be irritating. Then she crossed her eyes and turned over to look at us.
“Fezkul,” she said.
I leaned forward, trying to figure out what she was trying to tell me. But she wasn’t trying to tell me anything. Someone answered from behind me:
“Good girl, Blair. You are a rocking kid.”
The voice sounded like a little boy — a little boy leaning right over my shoulder. I turned around, and for an instant, I saw him: a kid wearing low-slung jeans and a baseball cap, an oversized T-shirt and a big smile.
It was a smile with rows of saw-teeth. It made him look like a shark.
“Holy crap,” I said. But then I blinked, and he was gone. Or I’d dreamed it. Or he was just gone. I shook my head.
The little girl giggled and clapped: “Fezkul!” she said. Her dad set his cup down on the table and looked at his watch.
“We should get back on the road,” he said. “Your mother’ll have my neck.”
The girl stopped giggling and her face fell. “No!” she said. “Wanna go see Fezkul!”
She pointed across the picnic ground to the woods.
Her father made to protest, but she hollered back that “new daddy” would let her and just like that, he gave in.
“Weird kid,” said Nick.
My sister shook her head. “She’s not weird. She’s manipulative. Her poor dad’s probably just got them for the weekend, and she’s probably been holding that ‘new daddy’ line over his head the whole time.” She looked up into the clear blue sky overhead, as if asking God to back her up. “Divorce is so terrible. Let’s never get divorced, Nicky.”
“Um,” said Nick.
“What’s with Fezkul?” I said.
They both turned to look at me. “Who?” said Lenore, and Nick said, with a certain amount of relief in his voice: “Fezkul. That’s what she said. I couldn’t make it out. You got a good ear, bro
.”
“Fezkul,” said Lenore. “It’s probably some character off the Cartoon Network. Or out of one of your Dungeons and Dragons books.” Lenore was forever dissing my Dungeons and Dragons books. “Kids.”
“Sure.” I nodded like I agreed with her, but I didn’t buy it for a second. I couldn’t get the picture of that weird kid with the creepy smile out of my mind. That kid was no cartoon character.
“I got to go to the bathroom,” I said.
“All right,” said Lenore. “But don’t take too long. Tomorrow’s a school day.”
“Do what you got to do, bro,” said Nick as I got up and hurried off to the main building.
I didn’t have to do anything, at least not in the bathroom. But I did have to go. There was something about that kid Fezkul; something about his voice, those teeth. I figured it must have been an optical illusion, those rows of shark teeth, but still . . .
I was having what my dad called a curiosity attack. Ever since I was two, these attacks would come on with varying intensity and they would cause me to do all sorts of things which, looking back, seemed pretty stupid: climbing telephone poles; sticking my head through metal grating; one time, eating a bug. Dad told me that this curiosity disease would — how did he put it? — “Doom you to a life of journalism” (which is what he did before he quit the newspaper and went into web design) “if it doesn’t get you killed first.”
What can I say? It’s a sickness.
I started my search for Fezkul at the museum, and checked out the kids standing in line. There were only five of them, and twice as many parents. None of them looked like a Fezkul.
So I headed for one of the dining buildings. It was nice out, so there weren’t very many people inside, just a couple of clusters of senior citizens who looked at me nervously while they munched on Natchie Burgers. A teenager in a bright orange Natch uniform was busy mopping up an immense puddle of something in the middle of the floor. There were some old video games — which struck me as the kinds of things that might attract a kid like Fezkul — but no. I nodded at one old woman, who nodded back and looked away, and stepped around the puddle, and so it was that I left the dining hall. Rather than try the other one, I figured I’d head for the heart of Natch’s Highway Grill and Fun-Park — the place where it had all started: The grill house.
“Hey, Fezkul,” I said as I headed across the gravel to the old, glassed-in former donut shop where Mr. Natch worked his barbecue magic on squashed balls of ground beef and pepper. “Fezkul Fezkul Fezkul,” I whispered. “Fezkul.”
Now I remember some fairy tales where if you say the guy’s name five times, he shows up like magic. Rumplestiltskin comes to mind. Or the dude in that old Clive Barker movie, Candyman.
That is not exactly what happened when I said ‘Fezkul’ five times.
I was just about to step up to the door and worm my way inside, when I felt the hot, sweaty hand of authority on my shoulder.
“Where’s your parents, kid?”
I turned around and found myself looking into the glaring, stubble-covered face of — I glanced down at his nametag — Tom Wilkinson. His nametag was pinned on the left pocket of his blue security guard uniform. He did not look friendly, and he looked even less friendly when I answered: “I don’t have any.”
I know that’s not entirely true. I have two perfectly good parents and I love them to bits. But you have to understand: my parents weren’t here and I was with my sister and her boyfriend on the way back from the cottage to start school, and it was a lot easier to say I didn’t have any parents because that was partway true right at the moment and . . . and . . .
I panicked, all right? And it was a bad time to panic. I admit it.
Tom Wilkinson struck me as that kind of security guard who’d gotten into the business after giving a really good try at being a policeman and somehow not measuring up. Maybe he didn’t make the academy because he was too fat (which he was) or because he wasn’t bright enough (which from the look in his tiny squinty eyes suggested he might not have been) or because he was just too evil for police work and had flunked the evil detector test.
As he turned me around and held up the weird little wand that they all carried close to my face, I was pretty sure that the evil detector test was what had got him.
“You,” he said slowly, “are coming with me. Punk.”
I had to walk fast to keep up with Officer Tom as we made our way through the line and around the back of the grill house. There was an old, broken dumpster out back — the lid didn’t close properly, and the sides were kind of bent out. Beside it was a big metal door that said OFFICE on it, and I guessed correctly that that was where we were going. “Inside,” he said as he swung the door open.
“Look,” I said, “I was kidding about not having parents.”
We were not in an office, but a little hallway. Ahead was a pair of swinging doors that led to the grill — I could smell the seared meat and deep fryer from here. But there was another door, also marked OFFICE. This one was actually the top of a metal stairway that went down two flights. “Down,” said Officer Tom. I did as I was told, feeling terrible. At the bottom was another door, with OFFICE written on it. I was beginning to feel like the whole OFFICE thing was an elaborate joke. But this time, when we went through, there was an office. The room was walled in painted cinderblock, like a school hallway but without any lockers. In the middle was a lime green desk with a laptop computer plugged into a power bar big as a two-by-four. Seated behind it was a skinny man, who was sipping from a big bottle of water. He peered over it, first at me, then at Officer Tom.
“Yes?” he said.
“Mister Natch,” said Officer Tom, “this kid knows Fezkul.”
So this was Mister Oliver Natch. I thought back to when I was a kid — a real kid — to see if I remembered him. With his high forehead, curly blond hair and wide, expressionless eyes, you’d think I would have. But he didn’t register. Mr. Natch nodded quickly and set his water down by the computer. And he knew about Fezkul.
“Does he?” he said, then turned his gaze on me. “You’re one of Fezkul’s? You seem old.”
“I’m fourteen,” I said.
“Hmm. That is old.” He looked back at Officer Tom. “That is old, Wilkinson. Why are you wasting my time?”
Officer Tom’s mouth opened and closed, and he blinked. I thought that Natch might be doing something to Officer Tom’s airway, like Darth Vader did in that old Star Wars movie. He looked like the sort of guy who would do that.
“He-he was saying his name,” said Officer Tom. “A bunch of times. I thought — ”
“Yes.” Mr. Natch looked at him like he was stupid, which was a good way to look at Officer Tom. “You should be back on patrol,” said Natch. “You know what day it is.”
Officer Tom nodded. “You want me to find this kid’s parents?”
“Back,” said Natch, “on patrol. I’ll talk with the boy a moment.”
Officer Tom left, muttering under his breath: “Patrol. Like I ever see anything on patrol.” Although I never would have thought it, I was sad to see him go. Mr. Natch tapped quickly on his computer keyboard, squinted at the screen, and looked at me, hard.
“Fezkul,” he said finally, then said it again, more slowly. “What’s a boy like you, doing saying Fezkul on a fine Labour Day Monday like today?”
It was time to start telling the truth. “I heard a little girl say it,” I said. “And then I saw another kid.”
Natch nodded.
“Another kid. With sharp short teeth in his mouth and in his eye a mischievous glint? A glint that sometimes glows with inner hellfire?”
Something in Mr. Natch’s own eye told me that my telling-the-truth idea was not a good one to stick to.
“I dunno,” I said.
Mr. Natch looked very serious and he leaned forward. “I don’t think that’s true, now,” he said. “Do you? What did you say your name was?”
I don’t know why, but I thought then
about movies and books where you told someone your name and it turned out they were a wizard and they had power over you. So I said “Stan,” not Sam.
“Well, Stan,” said Mr. Natch. “Are you enjoying your day here? At the fun park?”
“We’re just stopped here for a bite,” I said.
“Hungry work,” agreed Mr. Natch, “driving south.”
I shrugged —
“And you saw Fezkul.”
— and shrugged.
Mr. Natch’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t buying it, I could tell. But I wasn’t ready to ’fess to anything either.
“Come around here, erm, Stan. I have something I want you to see.”
I went around the desk and looked at the computer screen. There were pictures on it — pictures that looked like they were from security cameras, maybe during a big riot. Except the rioters weren’t guys in bandannas; they were little kids. There was one where it looked like a dozen kids were crawling all over an SUV. One of them was bending its antenna at almost a right angle, and another one was standing on top of the cab, holding what looked like a torn-off side view mirror over her head like it was a bowling tournament trophy. There was another one where three kids were hefting one of the RAIL MUSEUM’s signal posts between them while a bunch of others watched on. Another showed five kids at a dumpster behind the grill house, lifting what looked like a barbecue propane tank into it. One of the kids had a long barbecue lighter and was flicking it.
“Well?” said Mr. Natch. “Recognize anybody?”
I shook my head.
“Those pictures,” said Mr. Natch, “are from one year ago today.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes. Wow.” He put his hand on my shoulder. It felt like a tree branch. “And it’s nothing, I fear, compared to what’s in store this year. Now, Stan. Look more closely.” And with that, he pushed me closer to the computer screen. “Recognize anybody?”
“I am not comfortable with you touching me, Mister Natch,” I said. This is what I had been told to say if anyone touched me in a way I didn’t like, and it had the effect I was looking for. Mr. Natch took his hand off my shoulder and apologized with a grunt.