Tom Finder

by Martine Leavitt

  – Act 1, scene 2

  What? Am I to feed on stones?

  – Act 1, scene 3

  “Hey, Tom Finder. Sleeping rough again, eh?”

  Samuel Wolflegs was sitting beside him. He was the first thing Tom saw when he opened his eyes. “Did you find my boy, Daniel?”

  “No,” Tom said. He clutched the blanket around himself, rolled over, and closed his eyes.

  “Don’t feel bad. He is a wolf, wild on the streets, lone, a little dangerous. You found a blanket, though. Good.”

  Tom had had enough sleep to see how finding the blanket could have been a coincidence. He kept his eyes closed. As for the pen, technically he hadn’t found it, since he’d had it all along.

  “Up with the sun, boy. Don’t lose the rhythms of the earth. That’s the first step to letting the street have you. You don’t want her to have you. She’s a bad mother, or worse.”

  “I’m tired. Go away.”

  “Bet you’re hungry.”

  Tom rolled back and looked at Wolflegs.

  “Got an egg salad sandwich here if you’re awake.”

  Tom sat up. “Okay, I’m awake.”

  Wolflegs held out the wrapped sandwich. Tom’s hands shook as he unwrapped it. He was so thirsty that he didn’t think there was any spit left in him, but some came. He ate the whole thing in six bites.

  “You’re here early,” Tom said with his mouth full. “Don’t you go home at night?”

  “My son did not sleep in a bed last night, so I do not,” Wolflegs said.

  Tom’s throat was so dry that he swallowed with difficulty. “I’m gonna drink that river now,” he said.

  Wolflegs shook his head. “That’s white man’s water. You haven’t had anything to drink?”

  “There’s no fountains anywhere.”

  “Some of the buildings have washrooms open to the public. They have fountains for the tourists.”

  “Where do the tourists go?”

  “Come. I’ll show you.”

  Tom folded his blanket over a branch. He was afraid to walk in the Core with someone as tall as Samuel Wolflegs, with someone who had long black and silver braids, with someone who for sure would be seen. But his thirst was greater than his fear.

  He needn’t have feared.

  “They don’t see you either,” Tom said as they walked.

  “They don’t want to,” Wolflegs said. “Chicken skins, all of them.”

  “I think they are pretty. They look good—I mean, they look like they would be good.”

  Wolflegs grunted. “Money can make you look moral.”

  Tom wondered what he meant. “How long have you been looking for Daniel?” He needed to talk to take his mind off his thirst, though his speech sounded sticky.

  “Since last winter,” Wolflegs said. “He’s left before, when we fought. But this time demons got him.”

  “Demons?”

  “Bad medicine. Demons. They say drugs made him crazy, but it was his demons made him take the drugs. It was demons made him take more and more. Some say he’s dead. He’s not dead. If he was dead, I would have seen his ghost.”

  “There’s no such thing as demons.”

  Wolflegs looked at him. “That’s what Daniel said. He didn’t know about demons, about bad magic, and so he wouldn’t use the good magic I had to give him.”

  “Good magic, eh?” Tom said. He tried to smile, but his cheeks didn’t work. He tried again. Nothing. He guessed he’d forgotten how to smile, too. “You mean magic like the power I have to be a Finder?” He would have laughed if his cheeks had worked and his throat wasn’t as dry as the sidewalk.

  “Yes, like that,” Samuel said.

  Tom said nothing. His legs were stiff and his tongue coated, and he was walking beside a medicine man who believed in magic, and if gravity had a thumb he was sure it was pressing down on him right now.

  “You should find your way home,” Wolflegs said almost gently. “I am wrong to keep you here, looking for Daniel.”

  Tom almost said, “Don’t worry, I’m not looking for Daniel,” but something stopped him. He didn’t know many things about himself, but he knew he was “nice.” The candy had said so, and now it was written down in his notebook. Nice was pretty vague. How good did you have to be to be nice? Did you just have to not say mean things? Or did you have to find people’s kids for them?

  “Where is home for you, Tom?” Samuel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “But when I see it, I guess I’ll know.”

  Wolflegs looked at him. For a while he didn’t say anything. Then, “You forget everything?”

  Tom nodded.

  “You forgot on purpose.”

  Tom shook his head once.

  “How’d you forget?”

  “I forget.” He might have smiled, but the corner of his lips could hardly defy this kind of gravity.

  Wolflegs turned Tom to the right and pointed. “The Calgary Tower. There are fountains in here for the tourists. And I’ve got money to take you to the top. Come on.”

  At the fountain Tom slurped and guzzled until his stomach rounded out, then he drank a little more.

  Wolflegs led Tom into the elevator. “My son grew up in a box, in a square house with square rooms, and in the day he went to a square box school. No wonder he came here, to this place, where everything is boxes, only big. The god of boxed things lives here.” He grunted. “Boxes are good for coffins.”

  On their way up in the elevator, Wolflegs droned on, and Tom only half-listened to him talking about stars and what they looked like when he was a child, so many stars that there was no space between them. Tom was sure he could feel the lower gravity as they went higher and higher. It felt good.

  “Worst part of being on the streets is boredom,” Wolflegs said. “No school, no chores, no job. Feels good at first, then it gets boring. Drugs fill in the boredom, but they make you more bored, and soon you’re so bored that you want to die and so boring that nobody cares if you do. Stay close to the earth, Tom Finder. Sleep near the river; learn from it. Sit near trees, on green grass. Be like a weed that pushes up through the pavement and cracks the sidewalk.”

  Tom’s stomach sloshed and gurgled as the elevator came to a stop. The elevator doors opened.

  Wolflegs kept talking, but Tom didn’t hear him at all anymore. The whole city lay like a map below him. It was still, as if no people lived in it. If you looked closely you could see cars moving, but they moved slowly and silently.

  Tom walked from window to window, pressing his face against them, examining the neighborhoods and landmarks to see if he remembered anything. Nothing was familiar. It was when Tom looked almost straight down that he saw something he was looking for.

  It was a billboard. On it was a strange birdlike creature, and the words, THE MAGIC FLUTE, SEPTEMBER 12–15. It made him feel a little sick to his stomach to look at it, or maybe he was afraid of heights since the Forgetting. Maybe before, too. There was no way to know. That opera, though, had something to do with home, with who he was. Maybe his mom worked there in ticket sales or something. His parents probably weren’t rich. They probably lived in an ordinary house and had two ordinary cars and worked at ordinary jobs. Maybe his dad was a welder, or a science teacher. His mom probably coached swimming in her spare time. She must have been the one who taught him to swim. They probably missed him like Samuel missed his son, Daniel.

  Maybe he’d rent a billboard like that to let his parents know where he was.

  “I might have found a way to find my parents,” Tom said. He noticed an electronic sign across the street that said JUNE 27.

  Wolflegs didn’t answer. He was looking too, trying to see the almost invisible people below. “Your power is given to help others. You will only be a Finder if you look for my Daniel.” His fingertips and nose were touching the viewing glass. There was a wolf in his eye.

  “Do you see him?”

  “No,” Wolflegs said. He stepped back from the glass, and his
eyes lost their animal gleam.

  They waited for the elevator in silence. On the way down Wolflegs didn’t look at him. The tears were streaming down his face again. They filled the acne scars on his stony face and streamed onto his black and gray braids. Tom wished he could remember who would be looking for him, maybe crying for him like this. Finding Daniel would be a fair trade for finding home.

  “I’ll find Daniel,” Tom said.

  Wolflegs looked at Tom with his lone-wolf eyes, yellow, searching, wolfy eyes. “I gave you the gift. I named it in you. You must use it to find Daniel first. You won’t find home until you find Daniel.”

  The elevator stopped and they got out. Tom had another long drink at the fountain.

  “I’ll be at the river,” Wolflegs said before he strode away.

  Tom looked for money for the pay phone. He found a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and four pennies under bus benches. He called Bill’s Billboards. He found out that to rent a billboard for four weeks cost $2,700. It also cost $4 per square foot for producing a design. That made a total of $5,388. Tom put the nickel and four pennies in his pocket. Now he only needed $5,387.91.

  The next day Tom found food in a dumpster behind a bakery: day-old rye bread and a squashed cream puff. Later that morning he found an unlocked washroom at a Fas Gas where he washed himself, and still later he found a Sally Ann drop-off, where he found a clean pair of socks. For lunch he found a box of brown, bruised bananas behind a Safeway. He ate three and saved a few for later.

  Wherever he went he looked for Daniel Wolflegs. He saw no wolves, no warriors.

  He didn’t mind looking. When his parents found him, they’d take him out of the Core’s orbit. Looking for Daniel meant he was on his way home, headed that way, only on foot: slower than a car, but faster than a house. One day he’d get to where the skyscrapers ended, and then a little farther, and then he’d know who he was.

  He rode the trains and buses, looking for Daniel. He was not invisible to Train Cop. As soon as he saw him, Tom got off and ran. Sometimes he just sat in the stations. They were one of the best places to find stuff.

  Tom wondered at times if the things he found were some sort of communication between him and the skyscraping workers, the beautiful mannequins come alive. It was as if they were saying to him, “Here, boy, have some gum. Here, boy, have a toonie and a pair of sunglasses. Here, boy, noticed your hair’s messy; have a comb. No teeth missing, just a few bent ones. Here, boy, have a packet of licorice, a People magazine, a bologna sandwich, a broken skateboard, a can of pop with only a few sips gone.”

  Tom used the first toonie he found to buy a toothbrush. After that he made a deal with a guy named Tuba at the Greyhound bus station. Tom got the slightly bent locker in exchange for cleaning out the lockers once a week. He was proud of himself for striking the deal and figured maybe his dad was a businessman and he took after him. He didn’t like carrying everything he found. It increased his mass, made it easier for gravity to find him. Besides, he’d discovered that the richer you were, the less you carried. The poor had shopping carts, and the rich had thin briefcases, the thinner the richer.

  Tom discovered a place that would pay him for discarded pop bottles and cans. He saved all his money in his locker. He only needed $5,364 more. He tried never to spend money on food.

  One morning, as he was going through the bakery garbage, he noticed someone looking at him. When you were invisible, you could feel eyes on you.

  A man wearing white pants and a dirty apron was standing at the back door. “Get out of my garbage,” he said.

  “Why?” Tom asked.

  “Because I’ll call the cops if you don’t.”

  “Have you got plans for this garbage?”

  The man turned around to go back into the store. Tom grabbed two handfuls of muffins and ran.

  After that the baker mashed everything together before he threw it out. Tom learned to like the taste of pumpkin pie on his sausage roll, and not to mind his bread smeared with lemon tart like it was jam.

  One day he went into Future Shop, to see if they had bottles and cans, and also to see what they sold there. As soon as he walked in, he knew that something from home was here, something that was true about him. Then he knew it was television. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all tuned to the same channel. He counted them. One hundred and thirty-eight.

  He remembered the closing credits of this show. The closing credits of “McCullough Avenue.” He had them memorized. He remembered the characters in it—the names of each family member. There was Judith and Raymond McCullough and their three children. He knew the show’s song off by heart. He remembered that Raymond, the father, was funny. You could never be too sad or mad with a dad like that. You’d spend your whole life just cracking up. He loved Judith the mom. He wanted to kiss the screen just looking at her. She was an advertising executive, but she never seemed to go to work. She took her kids to swimming lessons and sat with them while they practiced piano and had long talks with them over homemade cookies. The oldest McCullough kid, Trevor, was funny like his dad. He made his kid sister feel smart, and he was a good friend to Beaner next door. Trevor McCullough was nice.

  News.

  Tom watched, hoping someone had reported a lost boy.

  There was no lost boy reported, but he came again the next day. He came every day to watch the news and hoped that “McCullough Avenue” would be on.

  Sometimes he listened to music while he was there.

  “Got any Mozart?” Tom asked the clerk one day after he’d spent time staring at the notes in his notebook.

  “Sorry. All out,” the clerk said, focusing his eyes on a grease stain on Tom’s shirt.

  A few days later, after he had found a clean shirt at the Sally Ann drop-off bin, Tom asked again. “Got any Mozart?”

  This time the clerk looked in his eyes. Tom’s throat closed. “You’re hanging around here too much,” the clerk said.

  Tom stayed away from the Future Shop for a while, until one day he woke up and knew he couldn’t stay away any longer. He was sure that if he listened to Mozart, he’d remember something that would remind him of home.

  On the way he stopped before the MAGIC FLUTE billboard. Someone had pinned a handwritten sign to it: Find God. Tom wondered if he had believed in God before the Forgetting. He wondered if God were playing some sort of cosmic hide-and-seek, which didn’t seem fair since God could make Himself invisible if He wanted. If a guy was a Finder, though, that would make the game easier. If he were an invisible Finder, that would definitely even up the game a little. Samuel was so sure he was a Finder that sometimes Tom believed him. After a long day of searching and not finding Daniel or home, he knew it couldn’t be true. Still, there was the pen, and the blanket, and the food.

  The Future Shop was closed, and while he was waiting for the store to open Tom noticed the church next door had its door propped.

  He figured that was likely a good place to look for God.

  Tom peeked in. Before his eyes could adjust to the dark, he heard a man say, “Come in.”

  Tom stepped in. Tom could make out a man in a black robe and white collar, a priest, probably. He could remember priests. The priest’s hair was a tall pile of black curls on top of his head, as if his hair were trying to get to heaven first. He could see Tom. He glanced at him, smiled, and looked again. Tom’s stomach didn’t seem to mind this man seeing him.

  “I’m just waiting for Future Shop to open,” Tom said.

  “Ah.” The man’s voice was old, but his face was young. “Sit, then.”

  “I like to catch the morning news on one of the TVs,” Tom said. “I like to stay current.”

  “You don’t have a TV in your house?”

  “Don’t have a house,” Tom said.

  The priest pressed his fingertips together and nodded thoughtfully. He didn’t stare at Tom, but he didn’t make Tom invisible either.

  “Are you Catholic?” the priest asked.


  “I forget,” Tom said. “I think so.” He thought maybe his family was Catholic, or maybe Buddhist.

  “One doesn’t forget if one is Catholic,” the priest said. “But we serve all God’s children here. Rich or poor, it is all the same to God.”

  “You must have found Him, then.”

  “Who?”

  “God.”

  “Oh.” The man nodded, and so did his hair. He smiled. “It is not finding Him that is difficult, it is following Him that takes a lifetime. Are you hungry? I have some cookies in the office—”

  “Do you talk to Him?” Tom asked.

  The priest was silent for a time. “I do,” he said finally.

  “Maybe you could tell Him about me,” Tom said. “Just in case He’s forgotten.”

  “God does not forget His children.”

  Tom thought about the woman he had seen this morning sleeping on a park bench and wearing red high heels. She had such small feet.

  “Well, just in case,” Tom said. “Have you ever run into a boy named Daniel Wolflegs?”

  “Daniel. Good name.” He thought for a moment. “Tall?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. He dug the school photo out of his pocket and showed the priest.

  “Yes. I haven’t seen him in a while, though. First time I met him, some kids were egging the church. He chased them off. I saw him eating the eggs they left. Raw. I talked to him for a while, learned his name, but when I suggested he go home, he bolted.”

  “Next time you see him, tell him Tom is looking for him. A nice guy. I’m always around.” Tom began to leave, then turned and added, “And next time you’re talking to God, maybe you could tell Him that if rich or poor’s all the same to Him, I’d rather be rich.”

  “I’ll do that,” the priest said. “I believe, however, you should approach him about it yourself.”

  “Yeah. Well, Future Shop is open,” he said, and he left.

  A new clerk gave Tom a Mozart CD. “It’s The Magic Flute,” the clerk said.

  “Hey, thanks,” Tom said brightly because of nice.

  He put the headphones on.

  He listened.