THE LAST BOY

by ROBERT H. LIEBERMAN

  “Yes,” Danny nodded.“I had some raisins.”

  Molly shook her head.

  “Oh, so you wouldn’t want some nice hot pancakes with maple syrup and melted butter, would you?”

  “I’m not that hungry, really.”

  After Molly left, Rosie fixed him some pancakes. “They call these silver dollars, because—”

  “I know,” he said, watching the butter melt in puddles that dripped down the edges of the stack.

  “Go on,” she coaxed.

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “Just give it a taste, okay? Aunt Rosie went to all this trouble and…” She poured syrup on top. “This is real stuff, right from the maple trees. None of this supermarket junk. Uncle Ed has this friend in Candor who's got this big farm with sugar maples.” Rosie kept up a steady patter all the while shoveling food into his mouth. “It's good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Aunt Rosie,” he said sweetly.

  “Oh, Pumpkin,” she cooed and kissed the back of his head, “I don’t want you being sad like this.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I know you liked the old man. It's terrible what happened. But, well, people don’t live forever anyhow. We’re here on earth for, well, like a visit, wearing our body suits. And then we just take them off and go somewhere else that's nice, too. Maybe nicer.”

  He gazed up and looked at her intently.

  “You want to play with the babies?” she suggested when he got up from the table and went to the window to look out. A pair of deer were standing in the backyard staring at him.“Will you look at that!” said Rosie. “Deer in the middle of the city. Boy those guys aren’t afraid of anything these days.” A buck with a full rack leaped into the yard.“Look at him!” she exclaimed.“Isn’t he beautiful?”

  Danny pressed his face against the glass, and Rosie noted how the buck stepped boldly closer.

  Later, he went into the nursery and held the babies while Rosie did the laundry and tried to straighten up the house. When Rosie went to check on him, Danny was talking to the babies.

  “…and why couldn’t people just leave him alone?” she overheard him say. “But I don’t care what they say. I know he's not dead. He couldn’t be dead. He promised me he wouldn’t die until I was ready.”

  “I don’t want you to panic,” said Rosie when she got Molly at the office just before lunch,“but—”

  “But what?” Molly held her breath.

  “But I can’t find Danny.”

  “Oh, God!” she gasped.“No!”

  “I’ve looked everywhere around the block, but I can’t go very far with the twins. And Ed's working somewhere up on—”

  “I’ll be right over,” said Molly, grabbing her keys. She brushed right past Larry who was headed her way.

  “Hey, what's up?” he called after her, but she was already out the door.

  She found Rosie standing on her porch, crying and tearing at her clothes.

  “I don’t know how he got out,”Rosie kept wailing.“First day he's here and then he disappears into thin air. And I was watching him like a hawk—you’ve gotta believe me! He had just helped me put the twins to sleep. I was making lunch and I looked around…and…and he was just gone!” She broke into sobs again.

  Molly tried calling Tripoli at his home, but he didn’t pick up. His cell phone was off, too. She tried the station, but in her panic forgot he was on leave. She called his house again. She let it keep ringing as Rosie stood behind her rattling on and on.

  Finally, after a dozen or more rings, he picked up.

  “Trip. You’ve got to help me.”

  The day in town was torrid again. As Tripoli pulled up on Rosie's block, Molly ran to his car, her face flushed and streaked with sweat.

  “Oh, Trip!” she sighed, leaning in the window.

  The air rushing in from the streets was so oppressive he felt like he was in the tropics. “Let's try not to panic on this one,” he said.

  Molly noticed that he had a growth of stubble on his face— which was unusual for a fastidious guy like Tripoli. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and his forehead glistened with perspiration. “Look, I’m going to cruise around. You work the neighborhood. Whoever finds Danny first, calls the other. All right?” Through the open window, he handed Molly his cell phone.

  “I’m sorry to have to drag you in again like this…”

  “No problem,” he said,“Better than sitting home and brooding. You can leave a message for me with IPD. They’ll call me. I’ll keep my radio on. I just don’t want to call out all the troops yet, okay?”

  It wasn’t quite okay, but Molly had no choice.

  “Stay calm. I got a hunch where to look.”As she turned to hurry off, he peeled away from the sidewalk, took a right, and went east on Green Street. Running a series of red lights, he took a sharp left on Aurora and headed up the incline.

  Tripoli spent a good ten minutes snaking around lower South Hill, checking backyards and alleys. Then, finally, he spotted Danny cutting up Hudson Street. Except for his sneakers, the boy didn’t have a stitch of clothes on. And, sure enough, he was headed south.

  Tripoli pulled up alongside the naked boy and threw the door open.“Come on, hop in,” he said.

  Danny, ignoring him, continued moving. Tripoli switched on his lights and kept pace with him, letting the car slowly creep ahead, signaling a van behind him to pass.

  “Well, where do you think you’re going?” he called out the window.

  “I’m not talking to you,” Danny said, pouting.

  “Okay, don’t talk to me. Your mother just called me. She was worried. Wanted me to find you. She wanted to know where you’re going?”

  “I’m going to see the hut.” The breeze was carrying the car's exhaust in his direction and Danny reacted with a grimace of pain.

  “Yeah, I figured so. Come on, give me a break and get in. You’re making your mother sick with worry. Is that what you want?”

  Danny stopped.

  “Come on, please, we all feel bad enough as it is.”Tripoli opened the door again and finally Danny climbed in. He sat on the front seat beside Tripoli, staring straight ahead.

  “So, where are your clothes?”

  “I don’t know.” Frowning, he turned to the side window.“I forget. It was hot so I took them off.”

  “Well, you can’t go around like that.”

  “Why not?”

  Tripoli chuckled. He didn’t have a good answer. It was so hot and sticky he wished he were naked himself. He drove down the hill and stopped at the first phone booth.

  “Hey, you can relax,” he said to Molly when she answered his cell phone. She was all the way up North Cayuga Street near Fall Creek. “I’ve got your little escapee.” He looked over at Danny and smiled. Danny glared at him.

  Tripoli cut across town and toward the high school. Molly had gone there, figuring that maybe the heat had gotten to Danny and he had headed for the cool waters of Fall Creek. Except for a pair of teenagers wading in the stream, the place was deserted.

  As they pulled up, Molly stood waiting in the shade of a tree, her hands on her hips. Scattered at her feet lay branches broken by the storm. She was livid as she slid into the front seat, shoving Danny closer to Tripoli.

  “What the hell happened to his clothes?’

  “Beats me,” said Tripoli with a shrug.

  Danny peered at her sheepishly. This time it was clear she was in no mood for forgiveness. “You can’t keep doing this to me!” she exploded, grabbing Danny by the arm and shaking him.“You’ll get me fired. Don’t you understand? And then what will we do?”

  “Go easy,” said Tripoli.

  “Easy nothing!” she snapped.

  Molly's teeth were clenched, her features hard, and Danny looked at her, puzzled, frightened, as if she were a stranger. Tripoli had never seen her angry like this, certainly not at her boy.

  “Why don’t you let me take him for the rest of the day,” he suggested.

/>   Molly looked at him, then turned back to Danny.“Be my guest. He's all yours. I’m getting so tired of all this.”

  As Tripoli drove down Cayuga Street toward her office, she stared mutely out the windshield. He could feel her wrath slowly beginning to subside.

  “I’m sorry I got upset like that,” she muttered later without looking at either of them.

  “We understand, don’t we?”Tripoli glanced over at Danny who looked small and still cowed by her fury.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said and turned to Danny. He looked up at her, his eyes welling with innocence.“Oh God,”she uttered with a sigh, and finally embraced him.“What am I going to do with you?”

  Tripoli found Danny's clothes on a bench on the east side of the Commons. He tossed the clothes to Danny in the front seat, then headed out of town, crossing the bridge spanning the inlet.

  “There's a little something I want to show you,” he said as the boy dressed.

  “Is it a long drive in this machine?” He turned his underpants inside out and put them on, one leg at a time.“I don’t like being in cars, you know.”

  “Not very long. Just chill out and enjoy the view.”The radio in his car was clamoring about the pursuit of a suspect on foot, three cops boxing in a man who had just swiped some steaks from the supermarket. He turned it off, and the space in the car suddenly became more habitable. Daniel was certainly right about one thing, he thought, and that was silence.

  “How much longer?” Danny kept asking as they cut onto Route 327. There were cows grazing out in fields, and when Danny saw them, he became less fidgety.

  As they started to climb Tripoli's rock-strewn driveway, Danny suddenly spotted the animals and his face broke into a big smile.

  “You got them!” Danny shouted and clapped his hands. He had the door open before Tripoli had come to a complete stop.

  “Rescued them,”Tripoli chuckled.

  “I was scared that those policemen had…”

  The animals all eagerly turned their heads to watch as Danny raced toward the barn. He squirmed through a tiny gap in the enclosure, ran straight up to the old billy who stood as if waiting for him. Wrapping his arms around the goat's neck, Danny kissed him right on the nose. Then he ran around and greeted every one of the sheep and goats, calling them by strange names. They seemed to recognize him as well. His sudden happiness was such a relief, so infectious, that Tripoli had to laugh.

  Next Tripoli gave Danny a quick tour of the grounds, then took him inside to make him a sandwich. All he had on hand was a package of bologna, peanut butter, and a little moldy jelly left at the bottom of a jar. The choice was obvious. He made the boy a peanut butter sandwich and took the bologna for himself after slathering the bread with mayonnaise. Then he popped open a beer. When he couldn’t find any milk for the boy, he made up some juice from a can of concentrate.

  Danny took his sandwich and explored the house, checking out all the rooms, upstairs and down.

  “This is better here,” he said, coming back into the kitchen.

  Tripoli took a swig of his beer. “Better than what?”

  “My mother never lets me eat and walk around. I have to always sit at the table. She says I make crumbs.”

  “Well,” said Tripoli surveying the balls of dust that had accumulated in the corners,“in this house we firmly believe in feeding the mice.”

  Danny looked at him. He wasn’t sure if Tripoli was kidding or not. When Tripoli finally winked, he smiled.“I like mice, too.”

  “Well, of course. We’re all God's creatures,” said Tripoli. At first he said it as a joke, but when he thought about it, it rang true. Why not let the mice partake? “And they want to live like everybody else.”

  Danny looked at him askance.

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “Yeah, I know,”Tripoli said finally,“a promise is supposed to be a promise.”

  Danny just continued to stare at him.

  “Nobody meant to hurt him. Really. Least of all me.”

  Danny stood there with the last bite of his sandwich in his hand.

  “Go on, finish up your food and we’ll go out.”

  In town, the heat was searing, the air was perfectly still, and the fumes from the cars and factories hung in a thick haze in the valley. In the magazine offices, the air conditioners in the windows were laboring full blast.

  “What was that all about?” asked Larry as Molly sat under the vent of her air conditioner trying to dry out.

  “Nothing. Just an old friend who had a problem.”

  “Oh,” said Larry, who hardly look convinced. “You mean a Danny problem.”

  “Larry, you’ve got to understand.”

  “What I understand is that half the people in this town have lost their ever-loving minds. This mumbo jumbo with the Hermit and the boy creating storms, healing people and the—”

  “I never said anything like that.”

  “But everybody else is saying it. And you need to put a stop to it before it gets out of control. No, it's already out of control and it's fucking up our office.”

  And with that he turned on his heels and left before she could try to explain.

  “It's the heat,” said Ben, after Larry stormed off. “It's making everybody a little crazy. Larry’ll get over it. He’ll be back in five minutes saying he's sorry. You’ll see.”

  He wasn’t back in five minutes, or even ten, but there was a pale man in a blue suit who was sitting in the reception area waiting to see her. He would not tell Tasha who he was, only that he was from a government agency in Washington.

  “Sorry to take up your time,” he said, opening a briefcase and taking out a notebook. He wore a pencil-thin mustache, and his dark hair was buzzed in a military-like brush cut.

  “What government agency?” she asked.

  “Well, I work for a number of agencies. I’m on loan you might say,” he answered vaguely.“I just need to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “Is this about my taxes?” she asked, and he laughed, not sure if Molly was joking.

  “I’ve been asked to follow up on some reports we’ve been getting about your boy.”

  Molly felt her stomach knot up.“Reports?”

  “Nothing to worry about. The newspapers have been filled with all this stuff about your boy being able to sense the weather, predict—”

  “Listen,” said Molly, cutting him short. “There's been a lot of nonsense floating around.”

  “Well, we assumed that. But, you know, we have to follow this thing up. There are stranger things in life. We’ve got porpoises that can defuse mines and bees that carry messages. So you just never really know.”

  Molly had no idea what he was talking about, and didn’t care. All she knew was that this man and whoever he represented was a threat to Danny. “Danny's just a regular, happy little boy. No extrasensory perception. He doesn’t heal by laying on of hands. He can’t read minds. He doesn’t—”

  “Well, that's what we figured,” he said amiably, closing his pad. “Just had to follow it up. Anyway, it was a good excuse to fly out of Washington. The heat there's been a real killer. Between the pollution and the temperatures, people have been dropping in the streets like flies. During the day the streets are like a ghost town. You should be glad you’re living up in a nice, cool place like this.”

  Out in Newfield it was frying, too, but there was a breeze wafting across the tops of the high hills creating a sun-drenched afternoon that was still tolerable. Danny helped Tripoli carry buckets of fresh water to the animals and watched as they greedily drank. Kept busy around the animals, Danny appeared to be distracted from his grief—and his anger at Tripoli.

  Tripoli found an old wooden-handled scythe in the barn, honed the blade to a razor finish, and then, with Danny trailing behind, waded out into the high meadow to a point where the grass was still dense and lush.

  As they left the animals, Tripoli could feel the boy's mood steadily sinking again. S
ilently, he watched as Danny sauntered off, finding a cool spot under a nearby tree and plopping down in the shade. Sitting with his back propped up against the trunk, he stared glumly out at the rolling hills.

  Ignoring him, Tripoli set to work and, grasping the wooden handle of the scythe, he drew the blade in a long arc, slicing neatly through the succulent growth. It fell in a neat fan-like line. Then he took another pass. And yet another. As he worked, each stroke became more fluid and Tripoli quickly developed an easy, elegant rhythm. Soon the air was filled with the smell of freshly cut pasturage. This was the quiet way that people used to work, he thought as he left in his wake a long path of flattened stalks. This was how it was done before the advent of riding mowers and weed whackers. How quiet it must have been before we had cars and planes. He glanced over at Danny who was lying under the tree, his chin cradled morosely in his hands. What could he do to get the boy to forgive him?

  Peeling off his shirt, Tripoli set back to work. The heat of the sun soaking into his pale skin seemed to infuse him with energy and warm his soul. He had actually forgotten how good it could feel to do simple but honest labor, to be outdoors instead of cruising in mindless circles through city streets. He had almost forgotten Danny, when he heard a shout from the boy. Tripoli turned to see him leaping to his feet and making a strange, chirping noise. Danny was staring into the line of woods and then flapping his arms as though he were a bird. Tripoli watched, startled, as Danny threw himself against the tree and hugged it.

  He hurried over to where the boy stood.“What's up?” he asked.

  Danny's face was glowing. Tripoli scanned the field, then the edge of the neighboring woods, but could see nothing unusual.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, nothing special.” His eyes were now suddenly bright and untroubled, and there was a broad grin on his face.

  “In that case, how's about your giving this old man a hand?”

  “Sure,” said Danny, and happily bounced along at Tripoli's side back to the work site.

  They spent the next hour gathering grass and carrying it back to the barn. Danny, his arms laden, didn’t walk, but seemed to prance, bounding across the meadow with the gait of an animal.