The Runaway

by Jo Barney

  Then Peter brought a new girl to the camp—Peter, tall and wiry, a soft-spoken man-boy about whom Starkey had doubts from the beginning. When told of his initiation task, also a ritual, Peter dared to ask why he and Jimmy needed to carry weapons on a midnight mission.

  “Loyalty to our family,” Starkey answered, touching the knife at his side with his fingertips. “Your job is to find someone who needs beating up. You’ll use our bat.” Peter was not unfamiliar with violence. Starkey had seen the scars on Peter’s back, still angry red, carved there by someone the boy would not talk about even in the most intimate evening sharing times. Peter hesitated, picked up the bat, nodded to Jimmy, and headed out of camp down the hill. They returned with a bloody weapon and this hooligan girl who calls herself Smiley.

  Smiley has lived up to her name. Firesides begin with Starkey’s sermons and end with Smiley’s laughter, until the night Peter lands in the fire, after being disciplined for his inattention to the lesson. The circle breaks apart. Some move to help Peter get up; others turn, look toward their bedrolls. Starkey calls everyone back to the fire. “You need to know why I’m so tough on you,” he says, and then he tells them about his tough early years. Some of his family can relate to his stories, have had grandpas and cousins, even mothers, with Grandpa Jack’s proclivities. They hesitantly tell their stories, too, and the shared secrets calm the circle. Despite Starkey’s original annoyance at the change of atmosphere as they gather each evening, the family seems stronger than it has ever been. The bat isn’t used for several weeks.

  Gradually, though, Starkey becomes uneasy. One night, watching Peter and Smiley sit in the center of a noisy cluster of kids, he senses a subtle shift of leadership. He realizes he needs to put down the coup developing in front of his very eyes.

  In the past he has given the family members loyalty tasks: graffiti messages, stealing specific items from grocery shelves, roughing up midnight campers under the bridge, but this situation calls for something more.

  “I believe,” he begins, the flames of the fire lighting the ten sets of eyes in front of him. “I believe that we are getting soft, losing our raison d’être, losing the glue,” he goes on to explain, “that has held us together over past months. We need a challenge, a task that will bring us to a new level of understanding as to what this family is all about.”

  He pauses, focuses his gaze on the boy and girl holding hands at one side of the circle. “Two of you will be required to help rid the community of its living detritus. Useless debris,” he explains. “Perhaps the homeless turd who sprawls in an alcoholic swoon across a sidewalk in midday. The schizo who refuses to take his meds, screaming at the teeter-totter that is attacking him. The meth-scarred ho lying on the park bench, her children not even memories.”

  Starkey can tell by their stillness that he’s gotten their attention. “It is time for our family to be a force in the community, not a complacent nodule.” He isn’t sure about that last word, but he does know what he is going to say next. “Two of you will be chosen to bring back the finger of a person without whom society will be better off.”

  He stands up, picks up the bat and the knife, waves them toward his family, and slips through the flaps of the tent pleased with himself. If he is ever grateful for anything about Grandpa Jack, it is the pile of words the old man stuffed into him that surfaces at moments like this.

  When he wakes up the next morning, he sees that Smiley’s place next to Peter is empty, her duffel gone. Peter is kneeling, stuffing his sleeping bag into his backpack.

  “I’m going, too,” he says. “You can’t stop me.” He stands up, and when Starkey steps toward him, Peter swings a fist, catches an earringed ear with a hard-knuckled blow. That’s when Starkey picks up the bat and uses it on the boy until he crumples, the family watching, a couple boys yelling “Stop!” but not intervening.

  “This is what happens to a traitor,” Starkey says, breathing hard, taking the knife out of its holder. He was too soft on this kid from the beginning. Should have eliminated him one way or another a long time ago. Now all he can do is show the others that Peter, and, in turn, they, will not get away with disloyalty to the family.

  It is over in minutes. Peter is wrapped in a ground cloth, his pockets emptied, a wallet searched for money, as Starkey has instructed. The silent kids crouch near the fire or bury themselves in their sleeping bags. No one leaves the camp all day. That night he and a trembling Mouse, who asks, “Are you sure?” until Starkey tells him to shut up, deliver Peter’s body to a pile of leaves near the park.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ellie

  September 2009

  I wake up the next day to doors opening and closing, hallway speculations, people in uniforms pushing aside plantings and shoving aside garbage cans under my window. The park is cleared of fall leaf droppings, the beds neater than they’ve ever been in my memory. All along the forest boundary, machines roar through and cut back the branches and blackberry canes overhanging the narrow road, rakes poke here and there, their tines tracking neat patterns that will last until the next rain. The third murder hasn’t made the newspapers, although the gossip in the hallway gnaws on its possible details.

  “Some crazy person out there. They don’t want to get us stirred up,” my old-man dinner partner, Mr. Levitz, surmises as we stand in our slippers on the front steps. “We’d be marching on city hall if we knew for sure.”

  Sure, I think. The only thing that has gotten this neighborhood of tired, sick old people marching was last year when someone said that our new president would try to kill us all off. The march itself almost killed off a couple of us. You can go only so far with a walker. Then someone mentioned that we’d all die sooner or later, and until then Medicare seemed to be working, so why worry? It was a relief to be able to go out of the building without someone grabbing your sleeve and trying to slip a flyer in your pocket.

  By now most of us are back into our routines, waiting for the lunchtime volunteers with their Styrofoam boxes, complaining about the heat in the radiators, the slippery leaves on the sidewalks.

  Except I’m not. The last few nights, sometime around three in the morning, I’ve woken up and gone over all the details. Not of the murders. Of my life. Conversations slink in, fill my mind with words and sick feelings, then evaporate, leaving behind eyes that won’t close and pains in my stomach. I turn over, try to get back to sleep, and instead move on to the next scene, not in time, but following some winding trail of guilt: the morning I raise a fist as I stomp out of the room, screaming, “Why did I ever have you?” to a cringing three-year-old.

  And later, when I try one more time to be loved, I get “I never loved you, ever,” instead. The man laughs and shakes his head as he throws the suitcase filled with his clothes over his shoulder. He stops at the doorway. His face goes mean as he turns to me. “Especially not now. Look at you, drunk, as usual.”

  “Look at you, you pervert,” I yell back as he disappears into the stairwell. I feel good, freed up for a second, no more worries about always having to please someone else. Then I hear Danny bawling in the next room.

  The other times. The night I notice and don’t care about the dirty fingernails of the guy I am picking up at Murphy’s, focusing only on the bills in the wallet held by those fingers. The day I wake up to Danny pushing my head against a vomit-crusted pillow. He is crying, and as he hands me a damp washcloth, he says, “I thought you were dead.” He is about nine, quiet and bringing home bad report cards.

  “We’re alone, just the two of us,” I excuse him to his teacher. “It’s hard on both of us.” The teacher looks at me, wrinkles her nose at my whiskey breath, and answers, “I can see that. Maybe the school counselor, Ms. Williams, can help,” meaning the both of us, but I never call the woman. I can do it myself, I am sure.

  * * *

  I really did believe I could do it myself, back then when I swam through a river of bourbon each day. My midnight mind scuttles over the drunken scenes barely
slowing down, there are so many of them. Danny moves in and out of those years, cooking beans and wieners sometimes, disappearing for days, coming back to yell at me and me at him. I threaten to kick him out one day if he doesn’t go to school. I’m sick and tired of the school calling me at work; I’ll lose my job, I say, and he laughs at me.

  But the worst times, the last times, the ones that make my mind freeze shut, begin the night I grab his jacket, pull out the baggie holding the white crystals, know he is either dealing or using, probably both. I screech at him, spilling out all the anger the bourbon has churned up and kept splashing inside me for ten years, how I hated the man who walked out on us, how Danny is just like him—lazy, stupid, going to jail, how I have to work in a pit of a laundry in order to feed him and how he…In my almost sleep, the words still pour out, hot behind my eyelids, and they are so full of poison I have to sit up and turn on the light to stop them.

  But when I lie back down, Danny’s face reappears. We are fighting at the door of our apartment. Now he is the poisonous one. He has heard me call the police, report him as a possible accomplice to a robbery I’ve just read about in the newspaper. “How could you? I’m your son. What kind of fucking mother narcs on her son?” His face is wet with tears, and he wipes his eyes with his palm.

  Then I see the fist coming my way. It lands on my shoulder. I hit back, brushing his chin. His next jab sends me to the floor. A Nike comes at me. I feel a shot of pain in my ribs. I hear Danny say, not yelling, leaning down over me so close his words feel hot on my cheek, “Fuck you, Mom. Someday I’ll pay you back for this goddamn life. You just wait.” He slams the door of his room. I can hear drawers being pulled out, him cussing.

  When I push myself upright, my ribs hurt like hell and I am angry, and all I can think of is to call 911. I might need a doctor. I make my way toward the door and the phone down the hall, but someone is knocking. I let a policeman in and lean against the doorframe, barely able to talk. When he hears the officer’s voice, Danny, stone-faced and dry-eyed, comes into the living room. He just shakes his head as I tell about his hitting me, about this son who needs to be taken in hand, straightened out. “Juvie, maybe,” I say, “before he decides to really kill me.”

  Danny lets himself be patted down, and the cop doesn’t come up with anything, but he opens his notepad, looks around the apartment, and I realize later, probably takes in the bottle on the table, the glass beside it, the smell of neglect and dirty dishes in the sink, the smell, in fact, of me. He writes it all down, asks about the robbery I called about.

  I look at Danny. His pale face, stiff with hate, makes me say I’ve made a mistake about the call; I was mad at my son, and I admit that’s what started this whole thing.

  The policeman looks at both of us, decides we’re through going at each other, says I should call if we have any more problems. He hands me his card and leaves. A minute later Danny picks up his suitcase and follows the uniform out the door, and, except for one call from my son and instructions years later about graffiti removal, I don’t hear from either one of them again.

  Until this week. Sergeant Matt Trommald drops in during the day, and my son, Danny, visits me every night.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Jeff

  September 2009

  After the Peter incident, Mouse, who usually lives up to his name, shows signs of not being willing to pick up the ceremonial bat, the use of which comes into play more often as family members slack off on duties.

  Then Lila comes back to camp talking about seeing Smiley sitting with an old guy with a gray beard on a bench and her going with him. Starkey recognizes an opportunity to reinforce his demand for loyalty and to initiate two of the new members, Bebop and Jasper, into the ways of the family. “No one helps a traitor to this family,” he explains, the two boys nodding open-mouthed. They’ve been told about Peter.

  That night, Starkey hikes down into the park with them. They find the old gray-bearded guy on a bench, drinking a beer, singing, and after the boys use the bat, Starkey finishes the job with the knife. Then he hands the bloody knife to Jasper and points to the limp right hand at their feet. In a minute or two, a bloody finger is tucked in Bebop’s fanny bag. When they hear footsteps nearby, they slip away into the forest.

  A day or two later, Starkey reads that the old guy was able to crawl away to his cave somewhere to die. Not a problem, since he wasn’t talking when he was found.

  It is strange, he thinks, reviewing recent events as he lounges in the camp chair beside a dwindling morning fire. Some of the family members are very willing to accept the family’s need for order. Jasper and Bebop, for instance. They carried out their chore without complaining.

  However, others—like that mama’s boy Sampson who’d joined the family last week—thought they could get around the rules, trying, as Sampson did yesterday, to sneak a call home. Peter, of course, was the worst offender, attacking his father, bringing violence to the family circle. Some kids are just born weak or bad, Starkey thinks. Nothing a parent can do to change them.

  Now that he understands the rules of fatherhood, he is confident that this particular family, despite a few disruptions, in this liberal town, in this receptive forest with its paths to the nearby city Dumpsters and sympathetic pedestrians with change in their pockets, this family is going to be the best one yet.

  He does have to do something about Smiley, of course. She is the only one to run away and not be disciplined. That is a concern.

  The sun feels good on his face. He turns toward it, takes off his sunglasses, and shuts his eyes. He has never felt so relaxed, unencumbered with doubt. He gives his crotch a squeeze, decides he’ll nap instead, while the sun is still warm.

  Moments later, he hears rustling on the path. Sitting up, he sees a tall man in dreads and a beard wandering around the edge of the camp. “I’m real hungry,” he mumbles when he notices Starkey. “Any extra food? I’ve been traveling for a couple of days.”

  The two men look at each other, Starkey in his kerchief and whiskers, the other with his matted hair and beard and muddy jeans, and after an astonished moment, they grab at each other and hold on.

  “Call me Starkey,” Jeff tells Danny once they sit down over a couple cans of beer. “Remember that book we read when we were about nine?” Danny doesn’t. “Pirates. I needed to change a few things about myself, including my name.”

  “You look good,” Danny says. He brushes at his stained thighs. “I should clean up.”

  “Later. Let’s catch up. Why did you come back?”

  Over the next hour, Starkey learns that months before, Danny left the woman he once thought loved him. He ended up on the street, so depressed he wondered if he’d be able to lift his feet to find his next meal. He slept on benches in the park and under the freeways where the police, under the new Green River Council Clean Parks Initiative, hassled the camps until it was hard to get a night’s sleep anywhere.

  Starkey opens another can of beer. “I’ve been there,” he says. “Fuckin’ police. It’s better here in McLaughlin.”

  Danny shrugs. “After getting beat up a couple of times by kids looking for drugs, I decided to head back to this town. I haven’t a clue whether my mother is still here.” He swallows the last of his beer. “And I don’t care.”

  Jeff knows Danny must be remembering their last fight, the apartment, Fred, the easy money. Skipping the part about Fred and his wife, he brags a little about joining the army, getting trained in journalism, which turned out to be a dead end, his decision to help homeless kids up north. Now he is working down here in the trees he and Danny ran to that first time. “Social work. I’m good with kids,” he says, feeling how right on these words are. “They respect me. Especially kids who need a father figure. You’ll be surprised.”

  “You’ve always been someone people looked up to, gathered around.” Smiling his familiar smile, Danny adds, “Remember our times smoking shit in that first apartment up there? You could have led those kids
right off a pier, they liked you so much.” He shakes his head. “I guess I just didn’t want to get led, especially by someone I was jealous of, even though I needed a father bad.”

  Starkey breathes in the unspoken apology, knows he can tell the rest of it, about the family he’s built here. “Discipline. The infrastructure of strong families. And the rule enforcer, the father, always. Not the mother, as you well know.” He pauses, allows himself a sigh. It is good talking to someone who understands. “In this project, of course, I’ve had a few kids who wouldn’t follow our rules. For the benefit of the others, they learned what happens when they disobey. Most of the family is doing well, though. You’ll see when they get back. I’m proud of what we have here.”

  It probably isn’t the time yet to talk about the idea of the expensive house for the expensive kids. Not really Danny’s kind of business, but who knows? They open two more cans of beer, hold them up, and toast the moment, as they did a long time ago under the freeway, and Starkey feels something click, as if a broken connection has been repaired, a warm hum flowing between them once again.

  “Here’s to the new you, a pirate named Starkey.” Danny’s grin seems to mean that he feels it, too.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Matt

  September 2009

  It is 2:00 PM when Matt returns to his desk from lunch. He looks over his emails, and among the numerous interoffice memos, he notices a fax from a Lieutenant Small, GRPD, entitled “Urgent.”

  The lieutenant, an officer in the Green River police department, informs him that an operative, an undercover agent, code name Seattle, is moving into the McLaughlin area. After learning of murders in Green River very similar to three reported in McLaughlin—homeless kids, same kind of MO—they have sent him down to find out what he can about a man who in Green River was known as Jeff, the name the kids in his camp in the woods above the city called him.