Tom Finder

by Martine Leavitt

The first strains were familiar, beautiful . . . but . . .

  He tore off the headphones.

  Gravity.

  When he saw the clerk staring at him, he realized that he was gasping like he’d just run a mile. Tom could feel that morning’s distressed green apples in his stomach creeping back up into his mouth. He ran out of Future Shop and threw up into an open waste bin in the parking lot.

  He needed to hide. Gravity was looking at him, concentrating all its efforts on him. He went around to the back of the church and crawled under the skirt of a large pine tree. He lay there breathing deeply for a long time, and then he fell asleep.

  The priest found him in the morning. He bent down on his knees, looked under the tree, and got up again. A little while later he was back. He rolled two bagels to Tom, rolled them like tires toward him. Tom ate them before he came out. When he did, the priest was watching for him.

  “Can I use the bathroom?” Tom asked.

  The priest showed him the way.

  “Shower,” he said, and he handed Tom a towel.

  Showers, Tom decided, were one of the great inventions of mankind. In the shower, he knew that it wasn’t Mozart’s fault. He knew Mozart had won the hide-and-seek with God. He could tell that just by listening to his music for a minute. But there was gravity in it, serious gravity that squeezed out all your stomach contents. He thought he’d heard that music before, knew it in fact. Just those few bars made him see himself, dirty; made him smell himself. This was crazy, sleeping in a park like this. Why didn’t he just go to the police and find his parents? Why didn’t he do something, anything?

  The priest invited him to sit in the chapel alone while he went about his work. Tom said, “Thank you.” He still didn’t feel very good. He remembered the feeling of gravity in the music. This is what gravity could do to you if it decided to pick on you: it made you too heavy to get up and look for a job; it made your heart so heavy inside that you could feel it beating where your stomach should be, and how could you care about anything with your heart half-eaten-up like that? It made breathing take all your energy. Sitting up deserved applause; making yourself clean deserved a hero’s medal.

  Tom was suddenly angry. He wasn’t going to let it. He was going to look up; he was going to look it in the eyeball, gravity’s heavy, round, slimy eyeball.

  He opened his book.

  Something had happened to Tom, but that was the first thing he forgot. Too bad, because Tom, he was a nice guy.

  He wrote in the margin beside this entry: Something bad, something to do with Mozart.

  He puzzled over this for a moment. He wasn’t sure if he was writing fiction or not. It had to be true, or it wasn’t anything. Beside Tom found food, he wrote Tom is a garbage eater. In the margin beside Tom lives on Prince’s Island, he wrote Tom evacuated in a public place.

  He could write 2 + 2 = 5 if he wanted, he knew that, but if he did, nothing would ever make any sense. You only had to listen to a minute of Mozart to realize you had to figure things out. He just didn’t know what was true. He didn’t remember what was true.

  Later in the afternoon, the priest sat down near Tom. He held out two new twenty-dollar bills.

  Tom hesitated.

  “We are all beggars before God,” the priest said, placing the money on the pew beside Tom.

  Tom looked at his notebook. “I’m looking for a job. I’m saving to rent a billboard.”

  The priest said nothing for a moment. His hair shook a little.

  He folded his hands as if they were just sitting together being quiet on purpose.

  “I asked about Daniel Wolflegs for you,” the priest said.

  “You did?”

  “Only one person I spoke with had seen him recently. He saw him . . .” He cleared his throat. “He saw him at a house where illegal substances can be purchased.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know the address. This person called it . . . ‘The Eye.’ That’s all. The Eye.”

  Tom knew right away where it was. It was an old house with a huge eye painted on the side of it. Suddenly, he felt good. He felt clean, full of bagels, rich, and like he was going to find Daniel, and then home, and soon this would all be over.

  “I guess you don’t believe in magic,” Tom said.

  “What kind of magic?”

  “A medicine man said I was a Finder.”

  The priest nodded. “Did you find anything?”

  “A pen,” Tom said.

  The priest rubbed his beard and then folded his hands again.

  “A magic pen,” Tom said. “And a blanket and a bakery dumpster . . .”

  The priest considered his folded hands.

  “Seems like whatever I write comes true,” Tom said.

  The priest nodded, and after a time said, “This I do know: Words have the power to create and destroy, to wound and to heal. God created the world with words. One of His titles, in fact, is ‘The Word’.” He clasped and unclasped his hands. “Unfortunately, sometimes I am so busy with words that I forget that they cannot be eaten. Tom, will you let us help you? If you don’t have a place to go, there are people who can help you.”

  “I’m sure I have a home. My parents just haven’t found me yet,” Tom said. “They might be rich so I can pay you back the money.”

  “No. Please.” He stood up and put his hand on Tom’s head. “I love you, my boy. Go to the police. Surely they will help you find your parents.”

  Tom said, I love you, too, but not out loud. Something inside him said it, something in the vicinity of his wishbone.

  So, Tom thought, that’s where You are.

  Tom left to find The Eye. On the way he stopped and wrote in his book, Tom found God.

  Tom had seen the house before in his wanderings, and he easily found it again. As he came closer he could see that the pupil of the eye was a black bird or a pterodactyl or something. Tom stood on the sidewalk and took a deep breath.

  P–T–E–R–O–D–A–C–T–Y–L.

  He smiled and marched to the door. Someone was playing drums inside. He knocked. A man with hair down to his waist answered the door.

  “I was told I might find Daniel Wolflegs here,” Tom said to him.

  The man turned away and shouted, “There’s a kid with a backpack here, looking for Daniel.”

  Tom didn’t hear the answer over the drums, but the man turned back to him and said, “Not here.”

  “Do you know where—”

  “Sorry.”

  Tom put his left hand up to the door frame just as the man shut it. Slam. Tom could hear little bones snap. The door bounced open.

  Tom knew a trick.

  He separated his mind from his body.

  His hand had just been murdered, but that had nothing to do with him. With his brain he wondered how he had learned to do that, while the whole time his hand was screaming.

  The man with the long hair stared at Tom as if he were the living dead. He was afraid of Tom. Tom decided this was a power almost as good as fighting.

  “I need to know if Daniel is really here or not,” Tom said. His voice hardly shook. “I have to talk to him.” Don’t move the hand, he told himself. Don’t move the hand. It had turned a grayish color and was oozing blood.

  The man shook the hair from his face. His mouth was open, and his eyes were open wide. Tom wanted to cradle his hand in his chest, but he didn’t.

  “No. He’s really not here. And I’m going to close this door now, whether your hand is in the way or not.”

  Tom barely got his hand out of the way before the door slammed again.

  Tom walked away, holding his hand upright against his chest.

  The throbbing in his hand beat in time with his heart. He was all one piece now, his hand and his heart. His whole body hurt. He licked his hand as he walked. It cooled it.

  It was getting dark, but he knew these streets like the back of his hand now, and they were both broken.

  Chapter 4

  I
chattered—and that was bad.

  – Act 2, scene 29

  On the way back to the island, Tom sauntered back and forth in front of the police headquarters. For the first while he hoped someone would come running out, saying they had just got his picture and his parents were searching frantically for him and what was wrong with his poor hand. When that didn’t happen, he hoped he’d get the guts to go in. Finally, he gave up, told himself he’d go in on a hungry day when there wasn’t anything in his stomach to throw up.

  As usual, Tom saw Samuel Wolflegs on the bench by the river.

  He was getting used to the routine. “What did you find today, Tom Finder?” Samuel said to him as he came closer. “Never mind. Looks like you found a fight.”

  “Sort of,” Tom said.

  Samuel led him to the river and got him to put his hand in the water. It felt good. In a few minutes Samuel looked at it, made Tom move his wrist, his fingers.

  “Hospital,” Samuel said.

  “No,” Tom said.

  Samuel didn’t argue. “Not much they can do with hands anyway.” He pulled an enormous handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped Tom’s hand up snugly. “So, what did you find today, Tom Finder?”

  “Food” and “money” had been good enough the first few times he’d been asked to report. After that they had not been acceptable answers. Samuel Wolflegs liked to hear answers that told him Tom was looking, really looking. He would look at him with a wolf in his eyes which made the hair stand straight up on Tom’s forearms and made Tom remember that this man knew where he slept. He had grown so thin that Tom didn’t think he could hurt him much, but his wolf’s eye had grown hungrier. His beautiful beaded jacket hung loose on him.

  “I found that if you look in their eyes, people have signs just like streets,” Tom said.

  For a moment the wolf looked as if it would prefer to eat pizza rather than boy.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Well, most people have ‘yield’ signs in their eyes: You may sit here as long as you don’t sit too long. Security guards have yield signs. The priest at the cathedral on Seventh has a ‘one way’ sign. The train cops and the police have ‘stop’ signs: you can’t sit here, you can’t eat here. Then there’s the do-gooders. Nice people, bring you tea and sandwiches, but their eyes have signs saying ‘no exit.’ And then there’s some people who have ‘danger’ signs . . .”

  Samuel nodded. “You are a Finder,” he said, almost as if to comfort himself. “You know those danger signs, Tom, but watch out for those with ‘dead end’ eyes, too. They seem like friends at first, but you meet them at night in the dark. You cannot see that they only want to rob you, and not just of money.”

  Tom looked for the peach Samuel often had for him.

  “What else did you find today, Tom?”

  Maybe it wouldn’t be a peach—maybe a cheese sandwich, or a chocolate bar. “God,” Tom said. “I found God.”

  “Too easy,” Wolflegs said. “What about my boy, Daniel?”

  Tom shook his head. He’d heard so much about Daniel that he was beginning to miss him, too. He sighed.

  “He has a scar on his chin, don’t forget,” Samuel said. “When you’re looking . . . he has lots of scars. Didn’t think he’d live to be the age of twelve, that boy.” He chuckled. “He never walked—only ran. He never walked around things, he climbed over them. He has scars from climbing fences, trees, falling off bikes, horses, skateboards. Once when he was seven he found a bullet—decided to see what would happen if he hit it with a rock. He’s got a hole in his shin from that one.” Samuel shook his head and laughed a little, and then his mouth bent down and he pressed his thumbs into his eyes.

  “Sorry,” Tom said, because of nice.

  “Being a Finder doesn’t mean you find everything right away,” Wolflegs said gently.

  “Who did he hang with?” Tom asked. “Do you know the name of any of his friends?”

  “Pepsi,” Wolflegs said. “I remember Pepsi. I don’t know his real name.”

  So Tom looked for Pepsi, who was much easier to find.

  Tom found a tiny green park in the Core. When street people walked by, he asked them about a kid named Pepsi. You could tell the street people. They acted like the street was the place where they could sleep and eat and make out and cry and laugh as loud as they wanted.

  Tom liked this park. It was just the size of a house lot between two skyscrapers, green, and carefully landscaped. There was a cement waterfall, flowers, a few bushes, a bench, and one enormous tree, which looked small, dwarfed between the towers on either side of the park.

  Today, on the bench was a silver-haired man in a suit and tie and a black all-weather coat. His briefcase was the thinnest. He was sitting with his head tipped back to the sun, his eyes closed, his hands clasped behind his neck. From the saggy look of the old guy’s face, Tom figured he must have fought and lost a few battles with gravity in his life.

  Tom stared. He’d never seen a downtown worker sit on a bench, just doing nothing, just letting the sunshine fall on his face. The downtown workers usually didn’t stop except at red lights, and sometimes not even then.

  The man felt Tom’s stare and opened his eyes. Tom wanted to ask, “Are you my dad?” Instead he said, “Are you rich?”

  The man straightened his head. “You don’t look much like a mugger,” he said.

  Tom shifted his backpack. “I’m not.”

  The man looked at Tom a long moment, closed his eyes, and raised his face to the sun again. “Yes. I suppose by some standards one could say I was rich.”

  “How’d you make your money? Don’t say hard work, because you’re just sitting.”

  The man chuckled. “You may have a point there. I made my money in the stock market. Company shares.”

  “The company shared?”

  “Well, I had to have a little capital.”

  “What’s capital?”

  “Money.”

  Tom nodded. “Got me some capital in a locker at the Greyhound station.”

  “Well, son, my advice to you is to invest. By the time you’re my age, you’ll be a wealthy man.”

  “I can’t wait that long,” Tom said. “Have you got any more advice?”

  The man shaded his eyes and looked at Tom. “Do what you love. If you love it, you’ll do it well. If you do it well, the world will reward you. What do you love to do?”

  “I like to write things.” Tom glanced up at the sky, as if gravity were there waiting to pounce.

  The man nodded. “That’s along my line of work. I’m in newspapers.” He handed Tom a card.

  “Yeah? Maybe if I wrote something down, you’d pay me money for it.”

  The man eased back in the bench and raised his face to the sun. “That what you’re doing it for? Money?”

  “No. Maybe.”

  The man laughed shortly. “See, I could retire. I could have retired ten years ago. I don’t because of words.”

  He opened one eye to see if Tom was listening. He was.

  “I read a great book once,” the old man said. “It was better than money. I realized having a word was more than having a buck.”

  Tom nodded slowly.

  “Think of a word,” the man said.

  “Gravity,” said Tom.

  The old man pointed a long finger at him.

  “Now there’s a word. Gravity was here before there were words. But did we know that? Not until we named it did we really start to learn about it. Now, think of the word antigravity.”

  Tom shook his head. His neck and jaw creaked. “No such thing.”

  “No? But just because there’s a word for it, every year millions in dollars and big brains go into looking for it. By gum, they’ll find it, too.”

  Tom thought about antigravity. It was like mooning the universe to even say it.

  “If I wrote something, would you tell me if the world would reward me for it?” Tom asked.

  “You can find me here early mornin
gs. Got osteoporosis—a woman’s disease. I don’t tell anybody but you. I need my vitamin D.”

  “My name’s Tom.”

  The man peered at him with an eye that could assess. “You’re not in school?”

  “I don’t have a school.”

  “Ah. You have a home?”

  “No. At least, temporarily no.” T–E–M–P–O–R–A–R–I–L–Y.

  “What’s it like living on the streets?” the man asked.

  Tom was going to explain that he wasn’t living on the streets, he was living on an island, but the man spoke again.

  “Why don’t you write it down for me, what it’s like to be living here on the streets, how you got there—”

  “I’m not really—”

  “I’d pay for that,” the man said. “Good money for that. If you can write, of course.” The man stood, picked up his thin briefcase. “Back to work.” He nodded curtly to Tom and left.

  He wasn’t a street kid. He was an island kid. He was between addresses, a temporarily lost soul.

  Tom walked past the cement waterfall and noticed that people had thrown change into it as if it were a wishing well. He determined to come back later that night and collect the change.

  When it got dark, Tom returned to the park. It had been a hot day, so he bathed in the waterfall and the pool below it before he collected the change. He sat under a tree to count it. The tree rustled without wind.

  “You stealin’ wishes, man,” a voice said above him.

  Tom jumped to his feet.

  It sounded as if it were coming from the sky, and for a moment Tom wondered if God was speaking to him. He looked up. He could see a small platform lodged in the crotch of the branches, and leaning out from the platform was a black head.

  “Who is it?”

  “Don’t believe you, man. You stealin’ people’s wishes they made. Might have to fight you for that.”

  “They wished a kid could have his wish today,” Tom said. “I’m just making sure their wish comes true.”

  “Well, I got twelve dollars worth of wishes in there, and I jus’ as poor as you.” Tom thought a minute. He dropped the coins back into the water.

  The black head flashed two rows of the whitest teeth Tom had ever seen, and then Tom recognized the face. “Hey, you’re the one who helped me get away from the Train Cop.”