Citrus County

by John Brandon

  After detention the next day, Toby headed for the track-and-field tryouts. A bunch of other kids were going too. This was the kind of thing kids did. Toby walked past the faculty parking lot, the garbage bins. He rounded the trailers. There was Shelby Register, sitting on a bench at the little playground, reading a newspaper. The middle school had once been an elementary school, so it still had this kiddie playground and low water fountains you almost had to get on your knees to drink from.

  Toby took a moment to watch Shelby. She wasn’t as transparent as the other kids at Toby’s school. He sort of hated her because everything was easy for her, but somehow she felt like an ally. She had misery in her and she didn’t give it away. She kept it and believed in it. She was like Toby; she was fine with whatever people thought she might be, fine with being underestimated. She was pretty without looking like all the other pretty girls. She wasn’t ashamed of being smart.

  A toddler with red hair was on the swing, kicking her feet and tucking them. Toby walked up beside Shelby and for a moment she didn’t notice him. He wasn’t sure why he was stopping, wasn’t sure what he wanted to happen. Shelby had crisp tan shorts on instead of her old army pants. Her legs were ghastly white. She had wisps of hair falling over her ears. Shelby thought she was better than everyone else, and maybe she was right. She wasn’t better than Toby, though, because Toby wasn’t playing the same game.

  She lowered her paper. “You can sit if you want.”

  Toby’s face was to the sun. The sky was still, empty except for one immovable cloud that looked like a boulder. Toby stepped in front of the bench and lowered himself onto it.

  “They’re going to eliminate pennies.” Shelby folded the paper and tucked it under her leg.

  “How?” Toby said.

  “Just pennies, for now.”

  “So no more of those little trays: leave a penny, take a penny.”

  “Those will go to museums.”

  Toby grunted. He looked at the little girl on the swing.

  “That’s my sister,” Shelby said. “We live through there. You can almost see our house.”

  Toby looked at Shelby, then back at her sister.

  “How was detention?”

  “Same as always,” Toby said. “I won.”

  Shelby’s sister was swinging higher and higher, getting the chains parallel to the ground. This didn’t seem to make Shelby nervous.

  “Do you watch Comedy Central?” she asked.

  “I don’t have cable.”

  “Is your uncle a hippie?”

  “How do you know I live with my uncle?”

  “Everyone knows that.”

  Toby squinted. The sun seemed aimed at him. “His income is up and down,” he said.

  “They had this guy doing this stellar bit about Hot Pockets.”

  “I eat those,” Toby said.

  An active old couple peddled by on mountain bikes. They waved to Toby and Shelby, who watched them until they rounded a thicket.

  “What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Kaley.”

  Kaley held a big toy watch. She wasn’t wearing shoes.

  “Are you going to be late to tryouts?” Shelby said.

  “I’ll make the team. Nobody else wants to pole vault. It’s not even supposed to be a middle school sport.”

  “Then why is it?”

  “The superintendent. He instated it after he married this lady from Finland.” Toby couldn’t keep his eyes off Kaley. Her hair was glinting like a fishing lure.

  “He did it for love,” Shelby said. “He made pole vault a sport for love.”

  The cloud wasn’t like a boulder anymore. It was like a scoop of something. It slid in front of the sun and Toby could see. There was nothing to look at but Shelby and her sister, her sister’s filthy feet.

  “Would you recommend that island with all the monkeys on it?” Shelby said. “I have to find outings for my family. What’s left of it.”

  “What island with monkeys on it?”

  Shelby tipped her chin. “Down by Homosassa Springs. Monkey Island?”

  “I don’t go on outings.”

  “You’ve never even heard of it?”

  “Not till now.”

  “Well, it’s there. They filmed a Tarzan movie and left the monkeys.”

  Toby shrugged. He didn’t care about movies or monkeys. He watched Shelby adjust herself on the bench, then push the newspaper farther under her.

  “If you ever want to kiss me,” she said, “not that you currently want to or anything, I would be okay with that.”

  Toby felt panic wash through him. He tried to nod.

  “I wasn’t telling you to kiss me. In fact, don’t. It would be too weird now. I said that for future reference is all. Just so you know.”

  Toby stood up from the bench, finding his balance. “Future reference,” he said. He stumbled getting back to the sidewalk.

  Toby caught the last forty-five minutes of the tryout. It was the first day, so the group had not been broken into events. Toby joined the herd and jogged laps. He did push-ups. He drank from the coolers. He kept seeing Shelby’s sister swinging easily up toward the clouds and then losing steam and zipping back toward the mulch, her feet and her hair.

  Toby saw himself moving around the field as if from above, as if from a sleepy hot-air balloon. He saw the big girls that threw the shot and the discus. They had bulky upper bodies and lean legs. They wore sweatshirts and shorts and toted a half-gallon of water in each hand. Toby saw Vince giving out Gatorade gum. He saw Coach Scolle, his head of slick curls and his whistle and his distasteful glare. Coach Scolle knew Toby didn’t belong at his tryout. Toby felt his lungs burning. Something had occurred. Toby had decided on something. He saw the bare pines jabbing the sky in the distance. He felt the cool, incurious ground when he collapsed on his back after the laps.

  That evening Toby skipped dinner and went to the bunker. He listened to his breathing and to busy drones that seemed to come from beyond the bunker walls but that also could have been coming from his mind. For a while, a tint of light came in from above, through a small vent, but once the sun set Toby couldn’t see anything. He had candles but he didn’t light one. And so he couldn’t see the big railroad ties that stood in each corner for support. He couldn’t see the spider webs or the pale roots that hung limply from the earthen walls. There was nothing down here but what you brought. Toby thought about the way some of the other kids had looked at him when he showed up for the track tryout. He thought about his hunger, which he could ignore until it went away. He thought about Shelby Register and her little sister, and about their dad who probably patted their heads all the time and watched them sleep and gave them five dollars for each good report card grade.

  When Toby was in the bunker, he never knew how much time was passing. He heard voices sometimes, nothing he could understand. He heard whimpering. He heard static. It was all in his imagination. It took hours in the bunker for him to clear away all the chatter from school—blabbing teachers and gossiping classmates and orders from coaches and stupid announcements over the PA.

  His back was stiff when he stood up from the folding chair. His sweat had dried on him. He wanted to know who else had been down in this bunker and who had built it. Toby had been meant to find it. Toby wasn’t another hard-luck case. He wasn’t another marauding punk. He’d been acting like one, thus far, but he was destined for higher evil and he could feel that destiny close at hand. He was more terrible inside than every juvenile delinquent in the whole county put together.

  Mr. Hibma managed to stretch the genealogy presentations into a three-day affair, giving him a break from lecturing and from compiling trivia fodder. There were only a few kids left who hadn’t dispensed the uneventful lives of their recent ancestors. Mr. Hibma was seated low behind his desk, studying the basketball binders. He’d have to rename these plays. Instead of yelling out Ivy League schools, his point guard would bark mixed drinks and famous assassins. Mr. Hibma foun
d a rulebook in one of the binders, and a list of basketball terms. Pick and roll he knew. Backdoor cut. What the hell was a match-up zone?

  Mr. Hibma looked up and called on Shelby. She never volunteered for anything because she didn’t want to be a kiss-ass, but she was always prepared. She got up and spoke about her mother’s family. Her great-grandparents had owned a cane shop, back in Belgium. Their daughter, Shelby’s grandmother, had come to visit the States, fallen in love with a history teacher, and never returned to Europe. She and the history teacher had hosted a series of foster children before finally conceiving Shelby’s mother. One of the foster children had become famous in art circles, a woman named Janet Stubblefield who had dropped out of high school to become a hippie. She became expert at constructing mobiles out of old boots, and against her will she developed a following. People from all over began making art out of shoes. The whole business put Aunt Janet off. She moved to rural Tennessee and became a hermit and died in middle age. She had told everyone to stay away, that it was important to her to die alone.

  Shelby dropped her note cards in the trash and sat down, light applause playing about the room. She hadn’t mentioned her mother. She’d chosen her mother’s side, but she’d cut the history short. A kid could really get sick of having a dead parent, Mr. Hibma imagined. These kids were all sad or crazy, and most of them had reason to be.

  Mr. Hibma asked for the next presenter and a girl named Irene, who’d worn a sweater set and heavy makeup, got up and said some things and retook her seat. Toby was next, the only one who hadn’t gone. He’d chosen his father’s family, the family whose name he bore: McNurse. They’d moved from Ireland to Canada at the turn of the century, a well-off family who’d chosen to immigrate to Canada instead of the United States because it was harder to get into Canada. Most of them had died in the forties in an accident. An avalanche.

  Mr. Hibma was sure Toby was lying. Toby was testing Mr. Hibma, seeing if he would call him on his fake history, but there was also a chance Toby didn’t know a thing about his father’s family. Toby may never have met the man. Or maybe Toby’s history was nothing anyone would want to know. Maybe making a history up was the wisest option. Well, Mr. Hibma would give Toby an A+.

  “My father was a snake researcher who drove a big Cadillac,” Toby said. “He met my mother while driving across the country. He only slept with her because he’d promised himself he’d sleep with a woman every night of his road trip, and she was the only woman not spoken for in Farmington, New Mexico.”

  Toby sat and Mr. Hibma replaced him in front of the class. He told the kids to give themselves a hand, then to line up and receive a poster.

  “I’ve got Mermaids,” he said. “Fletch II. Except you, Thomas.”

  Thomas, a kid with a widow’s peak whose parents farmed fancy tomatoes, gaped at Mr. Hibma.

  “In your notes you had pages printed from the internet. I could see the site info at the top and bottom. You’ll be getting a C. Everyone else gets an A-. Toby, you get an A+. Best presentation of the year.”

  Alone in the classroom, Mr. Hibma returned to his binders. He wondered if they would take the job away from him if the team performed dismally enough. He wondered if he could be stripped of his whistle for encouraging dirty play. He wondered if he was expected to hug the girls, if he was supposed to give pre-game talks in the girls’ locker room. He hoped they were all ugly; that would make things easier. He flipped the last page of the last binder, which detailed something UNLV used to run called the amoebae defense. He found a single folded sheet tucked in the binder’s pocket. The paper was stiff. In red ink were the words twin towers, and a game plan that called for the other team’s good player to be triple-teamed while the two remaining defenders stayed under the basket, one on each block, to rebound the misses of the other team’s bad players. Hyenas and Twin Towers required two enormous girls who didn’t mind being the girls who stood under the basket. Mr. Hibma wondered if the previous coach had ever implemented this strategy. There were two girls at the school who fit the bill, the girls who’d failed, who threw the shot and the discus. Mr. Hibma liked the idea of a game plan. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had one, for anything.

  Toby chose Friday. He wasn’t shying away or questioning himself. Friday evening was the correct evening and now it was here and Toby found that he was up to it. This didn’t surprise him. In fact, he left Uncle Neal’s way too early and had to wander circles around the woods. He put his supplies down and sat near a clotted creek and watched tadpoles dart about. He picked up a handful of dead leaves and smelled them; he didn’t know why. Clouds were gathering tentatively. Toby picked some berries off a bush and ate them and they were dry as sand.

  He made his way to the railroad tracks and progressed one tie at a time. The tracks went to places Toby would never see. They went past herds of thin, dusty cows who must’ve believed they were the last of their kind. The tracks wound past landfills swarmed with thousands of vultures. The tracks cut through miles and miles of peaceful palmetto beds. They skirted a subdivision full of gleeful young couples, came together with other tracks, found the shadows of the old factory buildings where stray dogs crossed back and forth. The tracks veered off when they neared the bay and the long bridge where every other week someone jumped off and hoped to die on impact with the water, hoped not to be alive long enough to have to worry about drowning. The tracks went on forever, under eerie lightning unaccompanied by thunder.

  As night fell, Toby sat himself down in a copse of struggling cypress trees near the Register house, the dark form of the school looming. Toby hoped it was going to rain. A good rainfall would wash away tracks and obscure scents. It would dampen the spirits of the searchers. The shoes Toby had on were three sizes too big—gray Velcro sneakers that all the stores carried. He was wearing four pairs of socks. He carried a rucksack with air holes poked in it and a roll of duct tape, with notches cut into one edge at even lengths. He had a side view of the house; he could see the front porch, where father and older sister and kid sister were having a grand and cozy old time, and he could monitor the bedrooms, which were in the back of the house. He knew he had to stay open to the prospect that a chance to take Kaley might not shape up. He couldn’t force it. He had to keep in mind that the house might have an alarm, or motion lights, or a dog.

  It was Register family board game night. It was an adorable little scene and it could have included Toby. He could’ve been sitting in that fourth chair. Shelby had invited him. She’d matched his stride on the way to lunch and wrapped her thin fingers around his arm and told him that if he came over and hung out and played a few games, then her dad would let them stay up and watch cable. “Cable,” she’d said, ribbing him. “It’ll be a whole new world for you.” She’d told Toby they might be able to take a walk and be alone. Then she’d tossed her hair and shuffled off in her boots, leaving Toby to stand there rubbing his biceps like a little kid who’d just gotten a flu shot, like Shelby’s fingerprints had been burned into his tender flesh, like he had no idea who Shelby really was. Toby had felt angry, toyed with. Shelby had been so sure of herself. She’d walked right up to him. Nobody walked up to Toby. It was absurd, the thought of Toby included in this kind of scene, playing board games and giggling, chumming around with someone’s dad. He’d done the right thing, telling Shelby he couldn’t make it. He had his own porch. He had his own plans. He didn’t want to hear anyone’s life story or receive any advice. That’s what dads did, as far as Toby could tell; they told old stories and dished out advice.

  Toby watched the Registers play cards with an oversized deck. They played a game which required them to make sketches, then a game with a plastic bubble that popped the dice. The father was working on a pitcher of something yellow, and kept threading his fingers behind his head like a businessman reviewing robust profits. Shelby was running things. She’d bring out a box and set everything up, instruct Kaley and let her win, place everything back in the box, stand and hike up her army pants, then
go in for another game. Toby wished Shelby had never moved to his county. He was too thirsty to spit. He’d filled a thermos with soda but had left it sitting on the kitchen counter. Toby could see his uncle discovering the thermos, taking it out to his rocking chair, and sipping it for hours. Being thirsty was no big deal. Toby could handle thirst. He could handle the nighttime noises of the woods, the spider that had dropped on the back of his neck and had him feeling crawly all over. He removed his shoes and tapped the sand out of them, then put them back on as snug as he could, tugging the Velcro strips. He reached into the rucksack and put his hand on the tape.

  The father loosed a yawn. He spoke to Shelby and she took Kaley inside. In a moment, the nearest bedroom lit up. The father, in his seat on the porch, picked up the pitcher and drained the last of the yellow beverage. Maybe he’d stay out awhile, leave the girls sleeping inside. Toby didn’t even know if Shelby and Kaley shared a room. His lungs felt made of glass, fogged. He flexed his knees. This was it. Toby felt strange, like he had at the track tryout. He was watching himself from above.

  The light in the bedroom died, and after a time Shelby came out onto the porch and handed her father a beer. Kaley was in there, in that dark bedroom. She was in there alone. Toby folded his rucksack under his arm. His courage had flagged and roared back and flagged and now it was back again. He did not feel alone. He felt egged on by something greater. It wasn’t Kaley’s fault, and it wasn’t even Toby’s. He would be different now; he would be new. He would possess a secret that put him above his uncle and his teachers and Coach Scolle and all the convenience store clerks and all the nameless punks of Citrus County who thought knocking over mailboxes and stealing cigarettes would save them.