The Boy Who Couldn't Fly Straight (The Broom Closet Stories)

by Jeff Jacobson

  They were looking at him the way police officers look at someone about to jump from a building. Or the way zookeepers approach a cornered tiger.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry to have to do this, son, but…” said the man standing to Beverly’s right. He was black-skinned, and very tall. He wore a fitted shirt unbuttoned down to his sternum, and Charlie could see small black curls of hair on his chest.

  The man clenched both hands into fists. They made a cupping sound. For a moment, the air seemed to be sucked from the hallway.

  A sharp pain cracked through Charlie’s skull, and then all the lights went out.

  Chapter 50

  The next few days were a blur. Charlie slept a lot. There was always someone in his bedroom when he woke up, either standing over the bed and looking down at him or sitting in a nearby chair. At first he wasn’t sure why, but he was too tired to ask. Eventually Jeremy, his bedroom guard of the hour, told him that it was to keep him safe and the house in check. When he explained to Charlie what had happened to the vases, the dishes, the couch, and the magazines, Charlie couldn’t believe it.

  “But I didn’t really do all that stuff, did I?”

  “Yep, you sure did. You’ve got a mighty curveball,” said Jeremy, as if he admired what Charlie had done.

  “But I didn’t mean to do that. Why did I do that?”

  “You were upset about Mr. Wang, Charlie. All of that emotion boiled out of you. It’s normal to have craziness like that happen. That’s why we have folks watching over you. It was our fault that we didn’t have somebody in your room when you woke up and heard the news.

  “He’s going to be okay, by the way. He’s out of danger. Looks like he had bypass surgery, and is now in stable condition.”

  Charlie breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t know the principal very well, but really appreciated the time he took to help Charlie get oriented at Puget Academy.

  His thoughts wandered back to being popped, and what damage he had caused to Randall and Beverly’s home.

  “But I can’t control it. How will I ever…?”

  “You will, you will. You’re forgetting everything you’ve been told - that it dies down after several days, or a week at the most. That once it dies down, it’s almost like you haven’t been popped. Well, that’s not exactly true. It’s more like…”

  Jeremy paused, stroking his beard with his hand.

  “It’s more like you can see and feel things differently, but you can’t do anything about it. Not right away. You have to learn how.

  “Believe me, there’ll come a point in your studies when you’ll long for it to be as easy and chaotic as it is for you right now. I remember getting so frustrated when I first started learning! One minute, I made stuff happen all around me, and the next minute, I couldn’t even light a stupid candle!”

  “But was it out of control for you too in the beginning?”

  “Yeah. Most definitely. It is for everybody, Charlie. I ended up blowing the engine on my dad’s Volkswagen GTI, and I somehow managed to singe all the hair off of my little sister’s head.”

  “You what?!” Charlie exclaimed, rolling over on his side, resting his head on his hands and staring at Jeremy in disbelief.

  “Yeah, it’s true. She was so mad at me for the longest time. It didn’t matter how much my parents tried to explain to her that I didn’t mean to. She got over it when she was popped, though. She completely dissolved the old tree house in our backyard, the one she’d loved since she was a kid.”

  Charlie tried to understand. It was like new witches were ticking time bombs, and you never knew when they were going to detonate, or how big the explosion would be.

  “Am I still, uh, in danger? Or, I mean, am I still making things happen?”

  “It’s died down a lot. Can you hear all that crazy stuff outside?”

  He listened. He couldn’t hear, or feel, a thing.

  “No, not at all.”

  “That’ll come and go. About two hours ago all the pens on your desk shot across the room and stuck in the wall over there.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Then one of them pulled out and started writing on a piece of paper on your desk.”

  Jeremy stood up and showed him the page.

  “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, which is the stupidest sentence in the English language,” it said, in perfect cursive penmanship.

  “I wrote that?”

  “Well, technically the pen did. But, okay, yeah, you wrote it.”

  “That’s embarrassing. And it’s not even my own handwriting.”

  “What’s so bad about that? My friend made his dad’s dirty movie collection project on the kitchen wall one morning while the family was eating breakfast. His mom didn’t know about the secret stash. Ooh, there was fighting in that house for a while after.”

  Charlie had been listening in dismay to Jeremy’s stories, worried about all the things he might do. But this last example struck him funny. He tried to hide his smile.

  “Dude, you can totally laugh. It’s hilarious!” Jeremy said.

  They started to giggle, and then Charlie fell back on his bed and laughed until tears came out of his eyes. Jeremy laughed hard too, until Charlie slapped his hand down on his sheets and the comforter rose up off the bed and threw itself over Jeremy, knocking him off his chair.

  Jeremy jumped up. He looked like he was trying on a ghost costume for Halloween. His hands moved around under the comforter until it floated off of him and settled back on the bed.

  “Sorry! Jeez, I…”

  This set them both off on another riot of laughter. Charlie made sure not to slap the bed again.

  After they were able to calm down, Charlie thought about his dream again.

  “I should have known it was going to be Principal Wang. I could have helped him.”

  “Charlie,” Jeremy chided, still breathing heavily and wiping his eyes, “there’s nothing you could have done. It sucks to have dreamt what you did, but you gotta give yourself a break on this one. Beverly investigated it, by the way, because she knew you would worry. It was a completely natural heart attack. You didn’t cause it. And neither did any other witch. Your only involvement was that you picked up a hint of something in a dream. You can’t blame yourself for something out of your control. If you do, you’ll go nuts.”

  Charlie nodded, relaxing a little bit. He felt awful about Principal Wang, but started to believe that there really hadn’t been anything he could have done.

  Later that night he told Beverly that he wanted to call Diego. He was worried that his friend would wonder why he hadn’t called him back. They decided it was a good idea, but she insisted on standing near him, “just in case.” He was beginning to understand what “just in case” meant.

  “Tell him you got really sick in California. The flu. That’s one we use a lot when kids have to miss school after getting popped.”

  So he did. The call went through to Diego’s voicemail. He explained that he wouldn’t be back from California for a few more days, that he was sorry he’d had to hang up the phone so fast the other day, that he’d gotten a nasty bug while down there and couldn’t talk much.

  Charlie listened to his message once before sending it. He was surprised to hear how weak and tired his voice sounded, like he really was sick. He hoped Diego would buy it.

  On the Thursday after being popped, with nothing else having broken, exploded, or caught on fire for a good twelve hours, Beverly declared that the danger was over.

  “You may still feel strange, honey, but it’s back under control. We can declare emergency threat level yellow.”

  Randall came home later that afternoon. He’d flown for a few days, then purposefully stayed away, sleeping in a hotel downtown, until things died down.

  A warm weather front had moved in. He and his uncle sat in the backyard on the lawn furniture, enjoying the summer-like weather and the view of the Sound.

&n
bsp; “I tell you, Charlie, I can’t imagine what it’s like. All that weird stuff happening around you, and how you sense it all? Beverly has tried to explain it to me, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.”

  Charlie nodded. It wasn’t like anything he could have imagined either. He was glad he had stopped breaking things. But his sense, or feeling, of everything around him had come back. It wasn’t as overpowering as before. He could control it better, by tuning in to one thing and blocking out something else. But it was still there. He could hear an argument taking place inside a house more than four blocks away.

  “Cammie, I’m tired of you complaining all the time. ‘You don’t love me enough, you don’t show me how much you care, you don’t…” he heard a man’s voice saying, fatigue and anger lacing every word.

  “Do you think it’s fun for me to wait around for your scraps?” a woman’s voice yelled back. Embarrassed, Charlie shook his head, hoping Randall wouldn’t ask him what he’d just heard.

  “Um, see that tree over there?” Charlie said, pointing to the maple at the far corner of the yard. “See how it’s mostly green?”

  “Yeah,” said his uncle.

  “Well, I can sort of, like, feel the green evaporating. If I focus in on one leaf, there’s this feeling, you know? That the green is leaving, and that it’s going to get a little crinkly and dry. I know, of course, that it’ll turn colors soon. Everybody knows that. But I can feel the pull of the green and the, uh, the push of it getting older. The tree is tired, and wants to rest. It wants to stop having to feed all of the leaves for a while. But the leaf keeps holding on to the branch, like it doesn’t want to lose the green. Something like that.”

  “You can feel that?”

  “Yeah, if I pay attention to it. It’s way better than a few days ago, when everything was loud. I thought I was going crazy.”

  Charlie softened his gaze a moment. “There’s a red Saab parked across the street from us. There are envelopes from a…from a King County credit union shoved on the floor in the backseat. There’s a water bottle in the front that says, “Yoga for Life” on it. And in the glove compartment, there’s an owner’s manual, and a, let’s see, a small plastic bag of something.”

  “Uh oh. Is it something illegal?”

  “I can’t quite see it yet. Oh, no, it’s little candies wrapped in yellow paper.”

  “Okay, now you’re just showing off.”

  “No, I’m not, I swear.”

  “I’m teasing you, nephew. But really,” he said, shaking his head, “how amazing. I don’t think Beverly can do all that. I mean, not as fast as you’re doing it.”

  “No. She said she can’t. She really has to focus. And she said that in a little while I won’t be able to do it either. Fine with me.

  “I mean, you should feel it. Or hear it. I don’t even know what to call it. But this grass back here,” Charlie said, indicating the lawn stretching out in front of them. “It’s sort of singing or something.”

  Randall raised one eyebrow. “Singing?”

  “Well, not really singing. Humming. Making kind of a green noise. I know that sounds weird, but…”

  He paused, trying to find the words. “It’s alive. And I can feel it. You know how you can feel the warmth on someone’s skin if they are standing close to you, and you know it’s because blood is beating through their veins? I can kind of feel the, the uh, the blood beating through those blades of grass, or the life, or whatever,” he paused, frustrated with how hard it was to explain it.

  He reached down and touched the lawn. A warm sensation filled his hand, spreading up his arms and across his face. It almost felt like he was going to become the grass. He looked at his arm, half expecting the skin to have turned a soft green color. He was relieved to see that it looked normal.

  “So you can feel this whole yard, and each blade of grass? Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Boy, I tell ya,” Randall said, shaking his head. Then he added, “I assume asking you to mow the lawn is out of the question?”

  Chapter 51

  Todd Laramie sat at a bus stop in downtown Seattle, waiting for the Number Forty Nine to take him home. Industrial music in his headphones drowned out all sound around him. He didn’t hear the man in the tailored jacket and pants sit down next to him.

  “Hey Catman,” the man said to the high school junior, who, oblivious, kept looking for his bus.

  The man tapped him on the shoulder. Todd jumped, seeing the stranger for the first time. He pulled off his earphones.

  “I said, ‘Hey Catman.’” The man stared at him. His dark hair swept back from his forehead, and black stubble peppered his jawline and cheeks. The man’s shirt was unbuttoned at the chest.

  “Whu-? What did you say? Why did you call me that?”

  “Because, my man,” the stranger said, his striking face moving closer to him, “I know that you know that I know what I’m talking about. The cats, brother. Dig it? You, the cats, your vision, all of it.” The man stood up and began to moonwalk in front of the bus stop bench. He ended it with a spin.

  “H-o-w did you k-n-now?” Todd asked, not caring that he stammered.

  “Want some help with it? I know about you and your cat vision. It’s freakazoidinally radical, and I can tell you about it. If you want,” he said, spreading his arms in front of him the way a vendor does when displaying his wares.

  “What? Yes, please. What do you know? Please, can you help me? I feel like I’m going crazy!” The boy removed the headset from around his neck and turned off his music with a shaking hand.

  “Crazy is as crazy does, my main man.”

  “I, uh, it started a couple months ago. My buddies and I were watching the Mariners game, and suddenly, I could see myself, see us, sitting there, like I was across the room, looking at us through the eyes of my family’s cat. We’d had some beers, and they said I was just drunk.”

  “Anything traumatic,” asked the man, stretching out the word and wiggling his eyebrows, “happen to you recently?”

  “Like what?”

  “Death of a parent? Violent crime? Major body injury?” The man ticked off the points with his hands.

  “No, no, nothing like that. I just…oh wait! I fell and hit my head pretty hard on the bench at basketball camp. Had to go home.”

  “Yep. That’ll do it,” winked the man, cocking his pointer finger at Todd and squeezing his thumb like the trigger of a pistol. “You started seeing things in black and white? No color?”

  “Yes! And I started smelling things, and everything felt, I don’t know, different.”

  “That’s the network, my man.”

  “What network?” Todd whispered.

  “The network. Wanna know some more?”

  “Yes. Please. Please help me. I don’t know what to do. I keep listening to this loud music to drown everything out. I don’t even like industrial rock!”

  “Lay me some skin and follow me,” said the man.

  Todd didn’t care that this white man, who looked like he came straight out of an Italian menswear ad, was trying to sound like a funky homeboy. He was desperate for answers. So he gave the man a high five and followed him down the street.

  They walked next to a chain-link fence, then turned into a municipal parking lot. The man approached a bright red Ferrari. The alarm system beeped as both the driver and passenger doors opened with a soft whoosh.

  “Climb in, brother,” the man said to him.

  The scent of new leather, mingled with something wet-smelling, like moldy wood, rose from the interior as Todd slid into the passenger seat.

  “But how did you know?” he asked the man, who turned to face him.

  “What you’ve been hearing is the cat network, my friend.”

  “The what?”

  “The cat network. All over town. The cats stay sharp. Report in. Keep an eye on things and share the news, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not really. I mean, I just see things
through their eyes. And my hearing…it’s so sharp. Lately, I sort of, I sort of feel what they’re feeling. Why is this happening? Do you know?” He put his right hand on the dash and leaned toward the man, who smelled like aftershave.

  “Sure do. You’re leaking. And pretty soon you’ll just be one of those echoes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know. And buddy, I could give a flying frick,” the man said. He reached over, closed both of his hands around Todd’s throat and began choking him. Todd recoiled, and tried to pull the man’s hands off him. But they were too strong. His legs beat and jerked, trapped beneath the low dashboard.

  “Hey baby, yeah, feel the love, just feel it,” the man whispered, moving his face close to Todd’s as the boy’s eyes bulged.

  The boy hit and slapped at the man, who, barely blinking an eye, leaned in even closer and bit down on Todd’s lower lip, drawing blood. Todd gagged and shook, trying to scream, trying to pull away. Eventually he stopped moving, his head dropping forward on his neck, arms slack at his sides, unconscious.

  “You, my friend, are a lousy kisser,” Tony said as he licked the blood from his mouth and turned the key in the ignition. Rap music blared inside the Ferrari as the engine roared to life. Tony stepped on the gas pedal. The car lurched out of the parking lot and skidded onto the street.

  “You cat me cat, everybody we cat,” he shouted along with the song.

  Chapter 52

  Charlie didn’t go to school that Friday. He still didn’t feel back on his feet, and Beverly suggested he take the extra day to see if things calmed down.

  “Besides, you’ll have the weekend to get back to normal again. Well, your new normal, that is.”

  Charlie helped around the house for a while, carrying things to the basement with Randall.

  “You ever see her workroom?” his uncle asked as they passed by a closed door near the garage.

  “No.” The house was so big that there were still parts of it he didn’t know.

  “Have her take you in there sometime. It’s a bit of a surprise.”