by T. J. Klune
A buzzing noise starts in my ears. “Did they say who they were?”
Rosie shakes her head. “I tried to get names, but they ignored me. I thought at first that maybe they were police or something, but the more I think about it, the less I’m sure.”
FBI? I think, remembering Corwin’s card in my pocket, and his earlier visit. With all that’s gone on lately, he’s been the furthest thing from my mind. Maybe he sent someone else to follow up here in town. I tell Rosie this, but she’s shaking her head again even before I finish.
“I don’t think that’s it, Benji. They weren’t asking about Big Eddie or Griggs.” She glances over her shoulder again out onto the street. It’s empty. She turns back to me. “They were asking about Cal.”
I can’t prevent the shock on my face. “Cal?”
She nods. “They called him Calliel. They described him perfectly, asking if anyone in the diner had seen him. I had a few of my regulars in there. The doc, Julie from the mayor’s office. Worley had come down off the mountain for a cup of coffee and a burger like he does every week.”
I’m horrified. “They all know him,” I whisper.
She snorts. “We do, yes. But you should know us better than that, Benji. They let me talk, and I didn’t say a thing. I told them I hadn’t seen the person they described. I asked them who they were and what they wanted, but they just said they were trying to find their old friend Calliel. They looked around the diner like they thought I was hiding the big guy somewhere. Then they left and started walking down Poplar Street, store to store. I got the doc and Worley to start calling the businesses to warn them, and I took the back alley from the diner down to here.”
Her loyalty is almost enough to cause me to crumble. “Rosie… I—”
She heads me off. “Oh, no. Don’t you even do that, now. You know we take care of our own here. Big Eddie always did right by us, by me, and you’ve done the same since you’ve stepped up in his place. And I don’t think I’ve seen you as happy in that whole time as you’ve been in the last two weeks.” I start to sputter, but she glares at me and I subside. “Do you trust that man?”
I don’t hesitate. “Yes.” The answer surprises even me.
“Then that’s good enough for me. I liked him the moment I saw him. I don’t need to know what he did, if he even did anything. I don’t know where he is right now, and for some reason I’ve got a feeling you don’t, either. But if you speak to him, you tell him old Rosie’s asking about him and that he’d better get his ass back here before I hunt him down.”
“I miss him,” I admit. “I don’t know….” I allow myself to trail off.
Rosie hears the bitter notes in my words. She reaches over the counter and grabs my hand. “He’ll be back,” she says, her gaze softening. “You should see the way his eyes light up when he’s talking about you. It’s always ‘Benji this’ or ‘Benji that’.” She grins at me. “Remember when you guys came in for dinner a few days ago?”
I nod. It had been the day before the gunman. The day before I called him to my bed.
“When you weren’t looking, he’d steal these little glances at you, out of the corner of his eye. I don’t think he knew anyone saw him, but we all did. Everyone except you. And that look? Oh, Benji. That look was everything.”
My heart hurts. My bones ache. “I—“
The bell rings overhead. The door opens.
Two men walk in, unfamiliar to me. The room immediately goes cold. Both are wearing matching black suits, white dress shirts, and skinny black ties. They are big men, almost the size of Cal. Both have cropped dark hair, and for a moment I think that they might be twins, but one has darker skin, almost bronzed, while the other is a pale white. The darker-skinned man appears younger than his counterpart, who has lines around his eyes and mouth. Their eyes are the same, though, and I can see why Rosie had said they were like Cal. Their eyes are like black pools of oil, almost without any white around them. They look like Cal’s eyes, but even from here, they seem darker. Older. Emptier. The strangers cause my stomach to twist.
The younger man, in the lead, looks around the store, jerking his head erratically, like a bird. He stares at the ceiling for a moment, narrowing his eyes. I follow his line of sight, seeing scratch marks against the ceiling tiles overhead. It takes me a moment to place them, only because I can’t imagine what could cause those marks ten feet overhead. Then it hits me and my blood runs cold.
Cal’s wings, wrapped around me, protecting me from gunfire.
I drop my gaze to find the pale-skinned man staring at me. “Help you?” I say, my voice somehow even.
He ignores me, averting his eyes to Rosie. “From the diner,” he says, his voice oddly flat. There’s no accent to it, no lilt to his words. Each word down to the very letter sounds exactly the same. Even in Oregon there’s a specific cadence to the speech. This voice sounds like it comes from nowhere.
Rosie grins cheerfully. “Came to say hello to my friend!” she says, her voice booming. For an old broad, she’s got some balls, that’s for sure. “Why am I not surprised to see you boys again. Say, I didn’t catch your names earlier.”
“We didn’t give them,” the darker man says, his voice just as strange. “What happened there?” He points to the ceiling with the scratch marks.
I glance up just for a moment, pretending to study what he’s showing me. “Don’t rightly know,” I finally say, slowly. “Can’t say I spend much time looking at the ceiling.”
Rosie frowns as she looks up. “Probably the electrician,” she says. “These old buildings are wired like you wouldn’t believe. Looks like tool marks to me.”
I shrugged. “Could be right.”
“Big Eddie,” the older one says, and I squeeze my hand into a fist. “That’s the name out there on the sign. Big Eddie.”
“Sorry, gentlemen. If you want to speak to my father, you’ll have to communicate with the dead. He’s bones in the ground.”
They glance at each other, and for a moment, I swear I see their eyes twitch back and forth rapidly. I blink, but it’s over and I can’t be positive it happened. They both turn back to me.
“You’re Benjamin Green,” the older man says. “Benji.”
I raise my hands. “You got me there. How’d you know that?” Sweat trickles down the back of my neck into my shirt.
“We’re looking for a… man,” he says, ignoring my question. I hear the hesitation on the last word and know they’re flat-out lying. They know what he is. They know who he is. “Goes by the name Calliel. Big. Red hair. Beard is red. Like fire. Like so much fire. Has he been here?”
I shake my head. “Guy like that’d stick out around here. Can’t say I’ve seen him. And a name like Calliel? Sounds Hispanic… or Greek.”
“It’s not Hispanic,” the dark man says.
“It’s not Greek,” the light man says.
I cock my head. “Could have fooled me.”
The dark man jerks his head again, and it almost looks like he’s seizing, the cords in his neck tightening. “Feathers,” he says as his head stops moving. “Have you seen any… feathers?”
Carefully, I push my backpack farther under the counter with my foot. “Like bird feathers?”
“There’s all kinds of feathers around here,” Rosie snaps, though even she sounds somewhat confused. “We live in a forest. Birds live in trees. There’s bound to be feathers all over the ground.”
The light man shakes his head once, from side to side. It’s not fluid, but staccato, as if the joints in his neck are partially frozen. “This is not… a bird feather. It’s big. It’s bigger. It’s—”
“Blue,” his counterpart finishes. “Everything about it is blue.”
“No blue feathers, no green feathers, no feathers the size of a house,” I say. “Fellas, I haven’t seen your man, and if you aren’t going to tell me your names and if you aren’t going to buy something, I suggest you say sayonara and walk through the door.”
They narrow
their black eyes at the same time. I meet their gazes coolly, even though I’ve curled my hands into fists behind the counter and I’m digging my nails into my palms hard enough to draw blood. They glance at each other again, and this time I’m sure I see the strange eye twitch, and I wonder if they’re communicating. I wonder if they’re from On High. I wonder if they’re angels.
But they’re making my skin crawl, and all I want is for them to leave. I clear my throat and their eyes stop twitching. They look at me again. “I hope,” the dark man says, “that you are telling us the truth, Benjamin Green. About Calliel. About feathers.” He curls his lip, the closest thing to a human expression I’d seen since they’d walked in. It’s a monstrous thing. “And scratches.”
They turn as one and walk out of the station and continue out of sight down Poplar Street.
Rosie lets out a breath she’s been holding. She turns to look at me. “Benji, what the hell is going on?”
“These are some strange days,” I mutter, unsure of what else to say.
The Strange Men (which is how they were referred to throughout the town, like
you could hear the capitalization of each word) apparently stopped intruding on people after leaving the store. The doc and Worley were able to contact enough people to spread the word to others, and nobody answered any questions from the Strange Men. I consider the people they would have spoken to, knowing some are less skilled as actors than others. I worry that the Strange Men will run into Griggs or any of his deputies, but by the grace of God (a phrase that I can’t use anymore without basking in irony) they never come into contact. Griggs and the Strange Men are people I do not want meeting.
So members of the town rally behind us, and I wait for a snake in the grass to show his face and hiss little secrets, but it doesn’t happen. After leaving the station, the Strange Men disappear.
By five that afternoon, the phone lines began to buzz with more whispers that fan the gossip wildfire. Most are rational, or so I’m told. Most just wonder what Cal has done to attract the attention of the Strange Men. Most believe Cal to be some dashing bank robber, or an international jewel thief. Okay, most don’t actually believe that; that theory comes directly to me from one Matilda Bajko, a kooky old bat who sighs when she says Cal’s name as she explains breathlessly in my ear over the phone about how she believes he’s on the run from Interpol. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I don’t think Cal even knows what Interpol is. Let alone how to steal anything.
But there are those who whisper different things. A strange light in the sky? they say. A meteor no one had seen? they conspire. Men in black suits coming out of nowhere and leaving just as mysteriously? Why, it’s obvious! How could they have not seen it before! Aliens have landed in Roseland! But why are they asking about Cal? This stumped the conspirators until Gerald Roche, a retired banker and admitted sci-fi enthusiast, decided Cal had seen something he wasn’t supposed to see and was on the run and the government was trying to hunt him down.
Regardless, everyone agrees, it’s exciting. It’s mysterious. It feels like secrets and if there is one thing a small town always has, it’s secrets.
Strange days, indeed.
I resist the urge to drive straight home after I close the shop to see if Cal is there
waiting for me. Ever since the Strange Men left the store, my phone has been ringing off the hook. It isn’t until dusk that Mom starts calling me, but I let it go to voice mail, which I ignore. Her questions are going to be harder to dodge. I know she’s going to be waiting up for me no matter how late I drive in, but there’s something gnawing at the edge of my brain, something that has been there ever since this morning when Nina mentioned my father by name.
I need to see him, to be near him even if he’s just mostly bones.
So instead of continuing straight toward home, and instead of turning right to mile marker seventy-seven and the river beyond, I turn left, heading toward a lost hill that never was. Autopilot takes over, like I’m being directed to this place by something that I can no longer find the strength to believe in.
It is here, now, that I fall back to my darkest hour.
this is the hour we collide
It rained the day my father died. The kind of rain that starts early, and the
clouds are so heavy you know the cloud cover is going to stick around all day. The kind of day you wake up only to want to pull the covers over your head and sink back into sleep.
The alarm went off early, predawn light entering the room. I looked out the window and saw through the rain that my dad’s truck was already gone. I was surprised at that. It seemed too early for him to go meet up with his friends already, but since I didn’t know what they were doing in Eugene, I guess I didn’t give it much thought. He would be back, he’d told me, at some point that afternoon.
I opened the store that morning, knowing it would be quiet unless the rain let up. That was okay with me—I still had history and algebra to catch up on. I started the coffee machine. I put the pastries in the display cases. I turned on the lights.
And it continued to rain.
Abe came in and shot the breeze with me for an hour. He showed me how to find the value of X when I only knew Y. He drank a cup of coffee and then headed out. The rain hurt his joints, he said. The cold too. Such an oddly cold day for May. He was going to go home and use a heating pad on his knees. I smiled and waved to him as he left.
Rosie brought me soup around eleven. Chicken noodle, freshly made. She smiled and then made the mad dash back to the diner.
Around one, I heard the wail of sirens in the far-off distance.
It was two when a deputy’s car pulled into the station. It sat outside in one of the three parking spaces for a moment. I could see the deputy moving around inside. Dominguez, I think it was, talking into the CB. Eventually, he backed out, his lights started to spin, and he took off.
It was raining harder at three that afternoon, like a wall of water.
Then it was four. And then 4:17 happened. I will remember that exact time for the rest of my life. It was 4:17 when my mom pulled into the station. The lights from her SUV filled the store. They switched off, and for a moment the afterimage danced along my vision. Then my eyes cleared, and I saw my mother through the rain, still sitting in the SUV. I couldn’t make out her face clearly through the rain sluicing down the windshield. I sat there and waited. Maybe she’s on the phone, I thought. She’d gotten a hands-free headset she seemed to be in love with. I couldn’t see clearly to know if her lips were moving or not. So I waited.
And waited. Five minutes. Then ten. I became worried at 4:27. At 4:29, the car door opened slowly. As if it wasn’t raining. As if it was a beautiful day and she had all the time in the world. As if nothing else mattered.
Her foot came out first and touched the pavement of the parking lot. She let it rest there for a moment, and I saw her press down on it, as if testing her leg to make sure it could hold her. Her other foot came down. She reached up to grab the top of the door and used it to pull herself up. I thought she was sick. I thought she was drunk. I thought I should go to her. I needed to help her. She was my mother and she was obviously not well. Something was wrong.
But I couldn’t move. Something stopped me. I don’t know what it was, but try as I might, I could not move.
She took another tentative step forward, and then closed the door behind her. Her head was bowed, her blonde hair hanging wet around her face, almost like a veil. She took another step and almost stumbled, her right leg seeming to buckle. She caught herself on the side of the car before she fell.
And still I could not move. Still it rained.
The florescent lights buzzed overhead. One began to flicker, snapping on and off rapidly. The tips of my fingers tingled at my sides. My head ached. My heart was sore. It hurt because I was watching my mother falter in the rain and I could do nothing to stop it. As she took another step toward me, I was sure something awful was coming. She took another
step.
I could lock the door, I thought. I could beat her there and lock the door. Keep her out of here. Keep her from bringing in the rain and the clouds. I’m dry here. I’m warm. Sure, the light above looks like it’s dying, and the buzzing noise is driving me insane, but I’m dry in here. I’m safe. She’s my mother. I love her. I love her completely, but she’s going to bring the rain inside.
She reached the door, and for one moment, one single heartbeat, her eyes met mine and I took a step back. The skin around her eyes was swollen, her cheeks puffy. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot in vibrant red lines. Her lips trembled. I saw all of this in one second. A second, really. Just one moment for me to see it all.
She opened the door.
The bell rang overhead.
A blast of air, wet and moist and smelling like deep earth, rolled over me like a wave.
“Benji,” she said, her voice raw and cracked.
“Mom? What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. Took in a great gasping breath.
Impossible, I heard my father whisper in my head. Improbable.
I couldn’t move. “What?” I said. “What? Oh, no. What? Oh, please just tell me what.”
Her eyes welled. “He’s…. Oh, my God.”
Choke your hands up on the bat, son. It’s the only way to get a good swing in. Not that high, a little lower. There you go. All right. Incoming, you ready?
Pain in my stomach, sharp and burning. I wrapped my arms around myself, clutching as I bent over and gagged. A low moan escaped me. “Ah,” I said. “Ah. Ah.”
“He’s gone, Benji.”
Heard another one today, Benji. It’s bad. You ready? Did you hear about the guy that went to a zoo that had no animals except for a dog? It was a Shiatzu!
“Oh my God, Big Eddie is gone,” my mother said.
Hand me the 5/8wrench, Benji. We’ll see if we can get this son of a bitch started. Motherfucker ain’t gonna get away from us, no sir. This bastard is ours.