The Obsidian Blade

by Pete Hautman

  Kosh came back up the path. Tucker handed him the note. Kosh read it, then held it out between his thumb and forefinger as if it were a dead mouse.

  “That’s it?”

  “He left it on my pillow.”

  “Huh. Not even a God-bless-you.” He released the letter and watched it fall to the ground.

  “My dad doesn’t believe in God.”

  Kosh raised an eyebrow. “Since when?”

  “I don’t know. A year, I guess.”

  Kosh laughed, shaking his head and slapping his dusty, greasy thigh to show Tucker how much he was enjoying the joke, whatever it was. Tucker felt himself getting angry.

  “Do you know where they went?” Tucker asked.

  Kosh stopped laughing but continued to shake his head. “They could be on the North Pole for all I know.”

  Tucker felt himself getting angrier. “I don’t know why he’d want you to take care of me anyway. He doesn’t even like you.”

  Kosh shrugged. “I never liked him much either, kid. But blood’s blood. All I know is Adrian called and told me I’d be babysitting you for a while.”

  “I’m fourteen. I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “Not saying you do. But here we are. Big brother has spoken.” He gave Tucker a searching look. “So, Emily’s not doing so good?”

  “She sees ghosts.” Tucker was instantly sorry he’d spoken, as if saying bad things about his mother would make it more true.

  Kosh’s lips tightened. “I don’t know how she kept her marbles long as she did. Fifteen years with Adrian would drive anybody nuts.”

  “She’s not nuts,” Tucker said, louder than he meant to. “She’s sick. The doctor said she has something like autism. He called it RAD. But Dad says the doctors don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  Kosh nodded somberly. “Yeah, Adrian told me they could do nothing for her. He said he was going to try something else. Probably took her to some faith healer or witch doctor or something.” He gave Tucker another long look, then put his hands on his hips and turned toward the house. “Guess we better get busy shutting this place down.”

  “What?”

  “Turn off the water, shut off the electricity —”

  “Wait — how come?”

  “We can’t just leave it, kid.”

  “Leave? Who’s leaving?”

  “You and me, kid. You’re coming to live with me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.” Tucker ran up the porch steps and into the house.

  “If you think I’m staying here in Hopeless, you’re crazier than your old man,” Kosh said.

  Tucker slammed the door and locked it, his heart hammering. He could hear Kosh just outside, muttering curses. Maybe he would give up and go away. But then what? He could go to live with the Krauses. Or maybe just stay at home and hope that his parents’ absence would go unnoticed. He could make up a story, tell everybody that they had gone to visit a sick relative, and wouldn’t be back for a few weeks. That would buy him some time. Or he could live in the abandoned Hopewell House, like the Phantom of the Opera. He had sneaked into the abandoned hotel once with Tom and Will. Some of the rooms still had beds, dusty but serviceable. When one room got dirty, he could simply move down the hall. Tom and Will would bring him food, and what they couldn’t get for him he would steal.

  He was wondering how he would stay warm come winter when Kosh banged on the door.

  “Open up, kid. I know you can hear me.”

  Tucker imagined Kosh smashing his fist right through the wood panel.

  “C’mon, kid, I just want to talk.”

  “My name isn’t kid,” Tucker yelled at the door.

  “Okay, then. Tuck. Open the door, Tuck.”

  “It’s Tucker.” Only his father called him Tuck.

  “Tucker, then. Would you please open the door so we can discuss this?”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “Okay, okay! I won’t make you go if you don’t want to.”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “You don’t. But I am.” In a softer tone, he said, “Look, I just rode two hours to get here. You could at least offer me something to drink.”

  If Kosh wanted to, he could probably knock the door right off its hinges, Tucker thought. His parents wouldn’t like that. He unlocked the door, opened it, and backed away. Kosh stepped inside.

  “Thanks.” He walked past Tucker into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator. “No brewskis?”

  “My parents don’t drink,” said Tucker.

  “Look at all this food. What are we going to do with it?”

  “Eat it,” Tucker said.

  “Oh, right. I forgot. You aren’t leaving.” He found a bottle of apple juice, sat down at the kitchen table, and drained it in one long swallow. “You know what’ll happen if you stay here, don’t you?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah, but for how long?” Kosh said. “Let me tell you what’ll happen. You’ll be fine for a few days. Eating whatever you want, staying out half the night with your friends, raising all sorts of hell, trashing the place. Maybe you got some cash, and you can stretch it out a few weeks. Maybe you even take the old man’s car for a spin, maybe roll it over in a ditch, bust your schnoz on the steering wheel.” Kosh put a finger to the side of his misshapen nose. “Or maybe some other stuff happens. Either way, sooner or later some nosy neighbor will come poking around and find out you been living the high life all on your lonesome. Next thing you know you’re stuck in a foster home with the Do-Good family. Or more likely, they send you to a state school. You ever been in a state school?”

  Tucker shook his head.

  “It’s like being in prison, kid. Turn you into a criminal if you aren’t one already. Assuming you survive.”

  Tucker felt disconnected from reality, as if Kosh were nothing but a hologram of a real person. But what he was describing sounded all too real.

  “You’re in a vise, Tucker. I feel for you, I really do. Fact is, you just don’t have a whole lot of options. We got a common agenda here. You don’t want nothing to do with me, and I sure as hell want nothing to do with you. I barely survived the last time we met.”

  “But . . . we’ve never met.”

  “Maybe not.” Kosh narrowed his eyes. “You just look awful familiar. Sometimes I think crazy runs in the family. You aren’t crazy, are you?”

  “No. I have a plan.” Tucker thought about his scheme to become the Phantom of Hopewell House. But even as he thought it, the idea unraveled. People would notice lights at night, they would hear him moving around, and he would be caught in no time. And he didn’t have much money, not even enough to buy a bus ticket out of town.

  “You’re a smart kid — I can tell. But life’s got a way of taking the best plan and whacking you upside the head with it. Look at me. I was planning to paint the south side of my barn today. Then I get a call from my dear brother and next thing I know, I’m sitting in a kitchen in Hopeless, Minnesota, drinking apple juice instead of beer and talking to a twelve-year-old kid —”

  “I’m fourteen,” Tucker said.

  Kosh grinned, and suddenly he looked like a completely different person. “Well, I’m thirty-two, and what do I know? Look, you come stay at my place, you’ll do fine. You get your own room. And when your folks come back, they’ll know right where to find you.”

  The more Kosh talked, the less scary he became. Tucker even started to imagine himself on the back of that monster Harley.

  “Would you teach me to ride?”

  Kosh tipped his head. “I got a little Honda dirt bike might fit you.”

  Tucker thought for a few seconds. “People are going to wonder where we went.”

  “Adrian took care of that,” Kosh said. “Said he let enough people know so they won’t think I kidnapped you.”

  “What about all my stuff?”

  “There’s not much room in my saddlebags,” Kosh said. “How much stuf
f are we talking?”

  “We could take my dad’s car. Load the food from the fridge and all my clothes and stuff.”

  “What about my bike?”

  “You could put the bike on the trailer.” Tucker pointed at the utility trailer parked alongside the garage.

  Kosh thought for a moment, then sighed. “Okay, kid, we’ll do it your way.”

  “It’s Tucker.”

  Kosh rolled his eyes. “Tucker.”

  KOSH’S HARLEY FILLED MOST OF THE TRAILER, BUT there was room for Tucker’s bicycle, the perishable food, a couple of suitcases, and a few other items: his chess and checkers set, an old microscope that sort of worked, a poster showing the New York City skyline, his old metal fire truck, his snowboard —

  “Why are you bringing that?” Kosh asked.

  “It’s mine,” said Tucker.

  “It won’t snow for another six months. You’ll probably be home before school starts. Your folks won’t be gone forever.”

  Tucker’s insides went hollow as he looked at the snowboard, the only gift he had received on that last sad, lonely Christmas. The stunted spruce tree he and his dad had decorated was now rotting in the brush pile behind the garage. Was it true that his parents would be back before the end of summer? He was not so sure.

  Kosh said, “Look, anything we leave behind, you absolutely got to have it, we can come back. My place is only a couple hours away. Okay?”

  What Kosh said made sense, but that didn’t make it any easier. If he could, Tucker would have strapped the entire house to the top of the car.

  “Let’s lock and load and hit the road,” Kosh said.

  Tucker put the snowboard back in the garage. He was trudging toward the car when he noticed the aluminum extension ladder leaning against the back of the house. It wasn’t like his dad to leave things out, so why was the ladder there? He thought back to the day his dad had disappeared off the roof.

  “You coming or not?” Kosh said.

  “Just a minute.” Tucker ran to the ladder and started to climb.

  “Hey, where you going?” Kosh yelled.

  Tucker ignored him. He stepped from the ladder onto the steep roof. Only the grip of his sneaker soles on the rough asphalt shingles kept him from sliding off. He quickly reached the peak, grabbed on to the chimney, and looked around. He could see the repair his father had made last year. The replacement shingles were a slightly different color from the originals. He looked up the road, but no one was in sight. In the distance he could see the Hopewell water tower, the roof of Hopewell House, and the radio tower.

  “Tucker, come on down.” Kosh had climbed to the top of the ladder.

  There was something very strange about that roof. It was where his father had disappeared the first time and where Tucker had seen one of the ghosts. He scanned the horizon, looking from downtown Hopewell to the Reillys’ silos on the far side of the pond. The water was choppy. A light breeze ruffled his hair. He turned his head and looked east, toward the woods. Tucker blinked and rubbed his eyes. The trees seemed to waver. It didn’t change anything. Something just off the end of the roof was blurring a section of horizon. “There’s something up here,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Kid . . . come on!”

  Tucker got down on his hands and knees and crawled along the ridge toward the edge. If he didn’t look at it directly, he could make out a perfectly round distortion of the air — a gauzy cloud had been compressed into the shape of a four-foot-diameter disk — but the closer he got, the harder it was to see. He heard a faint humming sound, like a swarm of tiny insects. He smelled something like burning oil, and he felt a tugging sensation, as if the disk were sucking at the fabric of his shirt. He was reaching out his hand when something grabbed his belt and yanked him back.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Kosh shouted in his ear.

  “Do you see that?” Tucker pointed, but there was nothing to point at. The disk was gone. He could no longer hear the faint hum; the air was perfectly clear.

  “See what?”

  “There was something there,” Tucker said.

  “Yeah, well, if there was, it’s gone. Now come on. You almost fell off the roof. I don’t want you breaking your scrawny neck on my watch.”

  Neither Tucker nor Kosh talked as they followed the county road out of town toward I-90. The trees and buildings and signs became less familiar with each passing mile. Kosh turned onto the freeway and brought the Chevrolet up to seventy miles per hour as Tucker stared numbly out through the windshield. He felt as if he was living in a dream, as if he might wake up and the entire last year would go away. Maybe he was crazy. Seeing ghosts. The thing on the roof. His dad disappearing. Lahlia, with her strange ways and even stranger stories.

  After a few more miles, Kosh spoke.

  “You thought you saw something up on the roof, huh?”

  Tucker turned his head slowly to regard the man behind the wheel.

  “I did see something.”

  “Not saying you didn’t.”

  “I could smell it. And hear it.”

  Kosh drove for a while without replying. Finally, he spoke.

  “Life really sucks sometimes.”

  Tucker laughed. “Yeah, right. And then you die.”

  “That’s right, kid.”

  “Tucker.”

  “Yeah. Tucker,” Kosh said with a smile.

  KOSH FEYE LIVED ON AN OLD FARMSTEAD NORTH OF La Crosse, Wisconsin, in a black barn.

  “You live in a barn?” Tucker said.

  “House burned down ten years ago,” Kosh said, pointing to a collapsed, charred foundation with ragweed and nettles growing up through the rubble.

  “You painted your barn black?”

  “I like black.” Kosh lifted one of Tucker’s boxes from the trunk.

  “What’s that?” Tucker pointed at the top of the barn, where the dark profile of a motorcyclist stood on a short post.

  “Weather vane,” said Kosh. “He always rides against the wind. Made it myself. Come on, I’ll show you your room.”

  The bottom level of the barn was a sprawling garage/workshop/junkyard containing several motorcycles, an ATV, two tractors, a snowmobile, and a school bus with no wheels.

  “You got everything,” Tucker said. “Except a car.”

  “Don’t like cars,” said Kosh. “Anyway, we got Adrian’s Chevy now.” A long worktable was covered with engine parts. More machine parts and tools were stacked on metal shelves and hanging from hooks on the walls. They threaded their way through the shop to a black iron spiral staircase. Tucker followed Kosh up the steps through the ceiling.

  The second floor was a different world: a single open space the length of the barn, with polished wooden floors and a bank of picture windows looking out over a forested valley. An enormous stone fireplace dominated one end of the room. At the other end was a kitchen area with a wall of stainless-steel appliances. A black leather sofa and chair were positioned in front of the fireplace; a wooden trestle table and chairs divided the kitchen from the rest of the room. The center of the space, an area about fifty feet long, was open and empty.

  “You could have a bowling alley here,” Tucker said.

  “I don’t bowl.”

  “You got a computer?” Tucker asked.

  “Nope.”

  “My dad never wanted one either.”

  “Probably the only thing me and your old man got in common,” said Kosh.

  “TV?”

  “Sorry,” Kosh said, not sounding in the least bit sorry.

  Tucker walked to the windows and looked out over the valley.

  “Nice view,” he said.

  “This way,” said Kosh.

  The spiral staircase continued up through the second-floor ceiling. The third floor was unfinished. It had the musty, sour smell of old wood, new wood, and gypsum dust. One end was full of stacked two-by-fours, drywall, and plywood. Barn swallows sailed in and out the open windows at the peaks. Bits of rotting str
aw were scattered across a rough wooden floor. The other end of the space was framed in with two-by-fours and sheets of drywall.

  “Under construction,” Kosh said. “Your room’s over here.”

  Tucker followed him through an open doorway into the maze of studs and unfinished walls. Kosh led him down a short hallway to a corner room that was nearly finished. A futon mattress lay on the carpeted floor, along with a small chest of drawers, a desk, a chair, and a crookneck reading lamp. A large window looked out over the valley.

  Kosh dropped the suitcases on the floor. “No AC, but you got plenty of ventilation.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “Wherever I happen to be when I get tired. Cot in the workshop, sofa, wherever. I don’t sleep much.”

  “I’m not taking over your bedroom, am I?”

  Kosh snorted. “I’m not that nice of a guy.”

  Except for the frequent sputters and roars from gasoline engines, life in the black barn was peaceful . . . and a little boring. Tucker could do what he wanted, as long as he cleaned up his own messes.

  For the first few days, Tucker explored Kosh’s property and the surrounding woods and tried to avoid thinking about his parents or about Hopewell. But every time he stopped moving, his thoughts turned to home, to life as it had been, long ago, before everything changed. His father standing in his pulpit at church, preaching with God’s light in his eyes. His mother in the garden, her red hair tied back, a hoe in her hands, smiling and joking with him. He wondered if he would ever see them that way again — or see them again at all.

  It was too hard to think about. Even his more recent memories — Tom and Will, the rope swing, Lahlia — left him feeling hollow and lost. Especially Lahlia, who kept popping into his thoughts: holding the gray kitten, looking down at him when he’d fallen from the rope swing. Lahlia as she had appeared that day with his father, wide eyed and mute in her tattered silver shift and blue plastic booties, staring at him with those dark eyes.