by Robert Reed
Jack’s room was straight above the kitchen.
I hadn’t been inside his house, no, but everyone knew which was his room. I could see a cheap chest of drawers, each drawer painted some different loud color, every knob a different shape. There were old-fashioned books stacked on top of the chest, with tattered bindings and yellowed pages working free. They were given-away books, or cheap, and when I saw them I imagined Jack Wells sitting up late and reading. Is that what he did? I wondered. Were those books about snakes? Or what? It made me realize that I didn’t know Jack very well. Cody might be the one to know what he read, and when. She certainly knew plenty of stories about his brothers and folks—their drinking and drugging and the night-long parties and the run of small-time stealing that had started in the neighborhood the day the Wellses arrived. Jack was the only tailored brother. The other four brothers were quite a bit older, and each had seen prison time. At least Cody said so. I asked myself how Jack could live in such a house…how anyone could manage that kind of life. I hadn’t any clue. They were like a different species, those Wellses. They were like wrong-colored ants in a nest.
I put down the binoculars and started to daydream.
I imagined the five of us at the mansion. Dr. Florida met Jack Wells, and later, on the sly, I told the Father-to-the-World: “He’s got such a hard life, sir. But he’s not bad himself. Cody will tell you, sir. All of us will, except maybe Marshall.” I said, “Jack’s a good, smart kid. He is.”
“I know it,” said the imaginary Dr. Florida. “I can tell.”
“He’s smart and tough, sir.”
“Oh, he’s got talents. They show.” Then he smiled and rubbed my hair and said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll help your friend. Jack deserves a good boost, don’t you think?”
What could Dr. Florida do? I wondered. Buy liquid crystal books for Jack? Or give him his own personal? Or maybe, just maybe, he could get Jack out of the house entirely. I took a deep breath and vowed to bring the subject to Dr. Florida’s attention. I trusted him to know how to help. If anyone could know such a thing.
Time passed.
I got a little bit lost, staring out at nothing. Then a boy was shouting, his voice strange, and I blinked and heard another boy shouting, “Go! Go!” Someone was running on our bridge!
“It’s open,” called the first voice.
I blinked and gazed downwards. Boys were starting to climb the oak. They were older than me, and larger, and I didn’t know them. “Climb!” One was carrying a long crowbar, another had a battered old electric saw, and the lead boy was awfully close to our hatch. I’d left the hatch open. Open? I gasped and moved, and someone shouted, “I saw a little shit! Get the fuck up there! Go!”
I climbed into the maze, scooting face-first through the dark, turning passageways. The voices outside became muffled, almost peaceful, and my own breathing sounded huge. I was stupid for leaving the hatch open. I came around a corner and saw a hand reaching inside, fighting for a grip, and I panicked and slammed the hatch shut. Whomp! The hand vanished. I heard a wailing scream while I secured the lock, then I retreated to the first corner, breathing hard and trying to collect my senses, my poise.
The air turned stale after a minute.
I heard more voices and motion, and there came the sudden piercing whine of the saw. Its spinning blade bit into the hatch, sawdust and beams of sunlight playing over me. I retreated. The voices beyond sounded furious. Vengeful. The saw stopped and then started again, cutting again, and I locked the next hatches and worked upwards and thought there wasn’t any hope to stop them. Not by myself. I was scared and so sorry for the boy’s hand, and I thought that maybe an apology would help. If I was to say I was sorry? So when I reached the big room I secured the floor’s hatch and went to the window to speak, and someone saw me and chucked a ragged lump of concrete at my head.
It missed me by nothing.
“You fucking broke my hand, asshole! You hear me?”
Maybe I deserved to be hit, in payment, but all of them were throwing concrete. They had brought chunks of it in their pockets. I ducked and slipped under the game table, clinging to the binoculars and shivering with a bad case of nerves.
Five voices, plus the boy with the saw. I heard the cursing and the saw working and felt vibrations through the floorboards.
The concrete stopped flying. I heard grunts and old nails being jerked from wood, and I realized what they were doing. They were angry enough to dismantle our bridge. Bang and skeeek and the boards came up, faster and faster, and the saw was getting closer to me. It was cutting through layers of the maze, ignoring all of our intricate turns and twists.
No one was throwing at me. I rose and saw five boys dragging boards down onto the bottoms, making a heap in the green weeds. They were laughing. They were dancing. They saw me and said, “You fucking shit, we’re going to kill you! Hear? We’re going to murder you, you shit!”
Cody was standing on the bottoms.
She was with Beth and Marshall, the three of them near the slabs. For a terrible long moment I thought they didn’t see me. How couldn’t they see me? I was trapped and doomed, and Beth said, “There it goes! I see it!” with her voice close to singing. It was an opera voice, her words carrying over the whining saw and shouts. She was pointing at something. Or nothing. “Do you see it?” she sang. “Look, look!”
The strangers paused.
“Is it the dragon?” called Cody.
“I saw it!” sang Beth.
“The dragon!” Marshall screamed. “I see it too!”
My three friends ran toward the slabs. Cody sprinted and jumped and missed grabbing the fleeing dragon. The strangers watched her without speaking, curious now. Then one of them asked, “What is it?”
“The snow dragon?” said another.
“You think?” asked a third boy. He rubbed his sore hand. “What the hell? The shit’s not going anywhere. Let’s take a look!”
The floorboards trembled when the saw started to cut again. But the other boys were leaving. I watched my friends chase nothing up past the slabs, all of them pointing and shouting, and then the boys were in the woods too and no on else was in sight.
I waited, standing motionless, my breath galloping and my guts aching.
Beth and Marshall came from the north, Cody from the south, and Cody was first to reach the oak. I shouted to her about the boy in the maze. She told the others to hide, hide and wait, and she took an enormous leap and scampered up through the ruined hatch. The saw kept cutting. Then it quit and there was shouting, then shoving, and I heard the boy saying, “Fuck you! You’re not goddamn taking my saw! It’s my dad’s—!”
The shoving continued. The boy and Cody emerged from the maze, the boy dangling on the oak’s lowest branch. His face was sweaty and scared. Cody said, “Jump or climb,” and he tried to climb. Only there weren’t enough handholds with the bridge gone. He ended up leaping and tucking when he hit the bare slope, dust rising and his sweaty clothes turning muddy in an instant. Then he was up and running, his friends gone and him rushing onto the bottoms with his hands cupped around his mouth, his scared voice calling for John and Larry and Pete. “Jesus? Where are you?”
Beth and Marshall were hiding. I couldn’t see them.
Cody came into the big room. “What a mess, would you look?” She winked at me and dropped the saw on the game table. “A good thing you were here to slow them, Ryder,” and she opened a freezer and got ready. She picked a dozen hard white snowballs and told me to be alert. “We’re going to teach them,” she declared. And she winked again.
The boys came out of the woods after a while.
They stopped for a moment, watching Cody and me, and then they came toward us and I picked up a snowball. It was smooth and wonderfully round, Cody-made and pure ice. It felt heavy and bitterly cold in my hand. I stood beside Cody. She yelled at them, taunting them. “You jerks! There’s no dragon! You toad-gened dickless jerks!”
They began to charge us.
Cody threw the first snowball with a sidearm motion, putting so much force into it that she grunted—a hard, from-the-gut grunt—and the snowball spun downwards and struck the lead boy with a slap in the chest. He stumbled and picked himself up again and kept running. Cody let them come close. She waited for them to congregate beneath us, presenting easy targets, and she flung the snowballs down at their heads. They didn’t have much to throw at us; the concrete was too slow to hit Cody. I watched the joy in her face and how she turned to me, practically calm, and asked, “Can you get me more, Ryder?” and I handed her fresh snowballs from the freezer. “That’s the boy. Thanks.”
One boy climbed the oak’s trunk. His fingers jabbed into the bark itself, and Cody struck his face with a half-strength blow, striking him just above the right eye, and his hands went limp and he fell backwards to the bare slope, all of him limp. He looked like something boneless. Dust rose and the skin over his eyes was split open and bleeding. He was lying motionless, and I saw the vivid crimson color. One of his friends bent over him and said, “He’s dead,” and for an instant I didn’t just believe him, I was glad. For a tiny wicked sliver of a moment I was so glad that he had died, thinking of the fear he had caused me. I could have been the one dead on the ground, not him. And then the wounded boy stirred, moaning and lost under all the blood, and I saw how the heart had gone out of his friends. The other five gathered their tools, minus the saw, and they helped their fallen comrade to his feet. A couple of them remembered to shout at Cody. They called her, “Fella,” because they didn’t know better. “We’ll get you, fella!” But they were broken. It showed in their faces and in the stooping curl of their big bodies.
Beth and Marshall returned when it was safe.
Cody hammered extra handholds into the oak’s trunk, everyone coming into the big room. “I hope he’s all right,” said Beth. “That one—”
“He asked for it,” Marshall declared. “He deserved worse.”
Beth shook her head sadly.
“I wished I could have popped him too,” said Marshall. He pounded his fist into his hand, saying, “They make me mad.”
No one thought about me or Dr. Florida. They wanted to hear about the strangers trying to break into the treehouse. I was telling it when Jack arrived, and he sat with us and listened. Then I was finished and ready to tell about Dr. Florida. Only Cody stood and said, “I’ve got to start fixing this mess. Can you tell me later?”
Not really. I had something special to say—
“I wish I could have plugged those assholes,” said Marshall. He shook his hands and moved his feet and turned toward Jack. “It was great! You should have seen Cody pounding them—”
“Where were you? Hiding?” asked Jack.
“Cody told me to stay below,” he explained. “In case.”
Cody rolled her eyes. “Listen. I’m tired of you two—”
“In case you shit your pants,” said Jack.
“So where were you?” asked Marshall. “We could have used you for bait, you little shit—”
“All right!” Cody got between them and said, “Now shut up!” and glared at both of them. She hadn’t been half as furious with the attacking boys. “Listen. Ryder wants to tell us about Dr. Florida, and we’re going to sit on our tongues and listen. You understand? Do you?”
And so I started to tell it. I was a little angry with the way events had pushed my news aside, spoiling my timing. I told them how it felt to meet Dr. Florida in his home, to see his office and labs while he talked about his childhood and treehouse and the crazy ordinary things he did when he was like us, a kid. Then I told them what a good man he was, truly; and that’s when I got a stabbing feeling that maybe, just maybe, I didn’t deserve the honor of a return visit. I had believed that the boy was dead, and his death had made me happy. For a moment. I felt quite ashamed of myself. I wished I could take back that vindictive instant. What would happen if I made no mention of Dr. Florida’s invitation? Could I avoid it? And then I stopped talking, losing myself inside my tangled thoughts, and Beth touched me and said my name until I blinked and looked at their calm faces.
I ignored my doubts.
Everything was starting, after all. Dad was making the call and the big relentless ball was rolling.
I swallowed and blinked, saying, “And guess what?”
“What?” they wondered. “What is it?”
I told my news. We would go to the mansion together, all of us; and my friends straightened and turned wide-eyed, the notion too large to be swallowed neatly. I watched them shake their heads in disbelief, and then they gave quick shy smiles. Their faces were vacant. Their hands were open and limp. It occurred to me that they were now the ones who were lost, and this is how I must sometimes look to them; and I sat and waited patiently, feeling the breeze and smelling the green woods and the sun.
Six
Lillith came to my house and my folks walked me to the limousine. Mom never spoke. She stood with her arms crossed, and Dad spun jokes for Lillith and told me to enjoy myself. “I mean it!” Then we were leaving and they were waving at me, both of them, and Lillith told the limousine where to stop next. It was a cloudy day, rain coming. Marshall was waiting for us. He was wearing a suit and tie, and his mom beat him to the open door. “So good to meet you!” she announced. “Lillith? Is it Lillith?” Marshall’s dad was a quiet, empty-faced man who hung in the background. “Now take care, dear!” Marshall’s mom couldn’t have sounded nicer. “Remember your manners, and good-bye! Good-bye, Ryder! Good-bye!” She was waving and then his dad waved too. As soon as Marshall was sitting, and safe, he pulled off the tie and breathed like someone who’d been choked.
Jack and Cody came from Cody’s house. They were dressed in clean shirts and new jeans. Cody’s mother May walked from the backyard with a wad of weeds in one gloved hand. She was a pretty woman, and large, and it was strange how she resembled her daughter. May said something to Cody, her free hand hanging in the air between them. Tina must be gone, I thought. Tina was the small plain one who had answered the door years ago. Cody had inherited Tina’s plainness and May’s build, and I sat watching them. I was sitting beside Lillith and feeling ever so fine.
Jack climbed inside.
“You must be Jack,” said Lillith.
He was looking out the opposite windows. “Fuck,” he said.
I turned and saw two of Jack’s brothers standing on their porch. They were wearing nothing but shorts, and they were reaching inside the shorts and scratching themselves. I saw them digging and grinning without any shame or hesitation.
Color rose in Lillith’s face.
Cody arrived and we were moving, Jack saying, “Fucking jerks,” with a soft, fierce voice. We turned right and passed the almost-pond, and Lillith quit blushing, saying, “One more stop.” We turned right again and pulled up in front of Beth’s house. She was wearing a bright cream-colored dress and black shoes that shone despite the clouds. A window shade lifted while she walked toward us, then it dropped, and then we were moving again. The sky began to spit rain, and the rain became strong as we drove west. “It’s no morning to be outside,” said Lillith. Her eyes were red and tired. She asked if everyone was comfortable and would we like drinks, and then she repeated herself. “I wouldn’t want to be outside today. No thank you.”
Jack touched his shirt pocket.
I blinked and saw motion. There was a tiny snake in the pocket, squirming, and Jack noticed my stare and halfway smiled, as if to say, “Our secret, okay? Don’t tell.”
Lillith was silent, her eyes faraway and intense. She seemed lost in some rainy-day mood. For a little while I watched the rain too. The ground and trees and even the people took on a sodden, chilled appearance. I found myself shivering. Marshall started to talk about the dragon, saying, “It’s not weather for hunting it, no,” and then he asked Lillith, “What are we going to be doing, ma’am? I’m curious.”
Lillith blinked. “Do?” She blinked again. “We
ll, you’ll get a tour. Of course. Then I think you’ll end up in the surf room.” She shook her head and said, “I hope everyone can swim.”
Marshall said, “I don’t have a swimsuit.”
“We’ll find one.” Lillith didn’t seem herself. She bit her lower lip, then asked, “So. Have you been chasing the dragon?” She must not have heard Marshall talking to himself. “Any of you?”
“I’m too busy,” said Cody. “Our treehouse got torn to hell the other day, and I’m fixing it.” She pretended there was a hammer in her hand and a nail in the air. “Marshall’s our dragon man.”
“Are you?”
“And I’ll catch it too,” he declared. “I’ve got this system with live bait and nets. Everything’s figured.”
“Well,” said Lillith, “good luck to you.”
“Ryder helps me,” he persisted. “Don’t you, Ryder?”
A few times. But I didn’t like waiting in the dark with nothing fooled by the bait. I said nothing, nodding and giving a shrug, and I thought how a part of me didn’t want to catch the thing. It would be a lot happier in the woods hunting wild rats and birds, and whatever. That’s what I told myself.