Brood

by Chase Novak

  They head north past the reservoir, which tonight is full of sleeping ducks whose feathery frames bob up and down as they doze in the gently rippling water. With the approach of the three kids, a sense of alarm suddenly sweeps through the flock—there is first a rumble of nervous quacks, and then, like a crash of cymbals, the ducks explode into flight, racing over the threshold of moonlight into the dark palace of night.

  “They hate us,” Alice whispers.

  “Who?” asks Dylan, who springs from his handstand back onto his feet.

  “The ducks,” says Alice. “When I was young we used to come here and feed them. The thing they liked best was Wheat Thins. They really liked them.”

  “Oh, me’s memorying eating mad Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. ’Member them?”

  “Cheddar-flavored,” Polly says over her shoulder.

  “Oh!” cries Dylan. “Me’s want. From the yum to the tum to the gimme some more.” He lifts his arms, and now the red glow extends from his fingertips to his palms to his wrists.

  “Hands down, Dyl,” Polly says, leading them away from the reservoir and into a thicket of trees.

  They move in silence. Their steps are light, graceful, almost soundless. A park police cruiser goes by, its emergency light slowly revolving. It’s not going anywhere in particular. It’s just showing its colors.

  At one point, Polly says to Alice, “So what do you think of Rodolfo? You think he likes you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess.” Alice knows she must be careful around Polly, but she is not certain what being careful entails—should she tell the truth or refuse to talk? What does Polly want from her?

  “You guess you like him?”

  “I mean him liking me,” says Alice. “I mean, it’s not a big deal or anything. We’re friends.”

  “How can you be friends? You’ve been away for a really insanely long time.”

  “I don’t know. We just are.”

  Polly’s laugh is not a real laugh—it’s more a quick, toxic exhale.

  “So what about you?” Polly asks. “You like him?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” says Alice, but with very little pleading in her voice. She says it as a statement of fact.

  “Girl,” Polly says. She puts her hand on her hip and juts it out. “I think you like him. You should just say.” She tosses her head and then mutters, “Bitch,” under her breath but certainly loud enough for Alice to hear it.

  “Hey, guys! Guys! Me’s here!” Dylan shouts as they reach 110th Street and he sees two members of his old pack. His hands are flashing and he is hopping up and down with excitement. His cohorts are pretending to fence, using skateboards as their swords. From a distance, it’s difficult to determine their gender. They both have long hair, rising up in a frizzy nimbus on one, tied back in a ponytail on the other.

  With a grateful glance over his shoulder, Dylan runs quickly toward his friends, pulsating with light.

  “Yo, yo, yo, yo,” calls out the one with the frizzy hair. He drops his skateboard to the ground and opens his arms wide.

  Others emerge, as if from nowhere. There are ten altogether. Polly notices they are all wearing dark green T-shirts, as if they are a team, or a gang. Rodolfo stresses that it is not a good idea for packs living together to wear matching clothes. You want to be able to disperse quickly, blend in. As much as possible. But, really, no one on Riverside expects the 110th Street crew to last. They take too many chances; they’re too exposed. They’ve already lost two members to whoever is snatching the wild kids—and they don’t even seem to know when someone goes missing, or maybe they don’t care. They never look for the missing ones—they don’t even mention it to anyone. When everyone meets at the Diana Ross, there’s simply one or two less in the pack. Sooner or later, they’ll all be gone; at least, that’s what Rodolfo says, and Polly is inclined to agree with him.

  “Let’s go,” Polly says.

  Alice yawns, rubs her eye with the heel of her hand. A wave of hunger goes through her, sharp and urgent, but she has become expert in ignoring hunger pangs. When her body calls for food, she knows how to tell her body to shut up. And shut down.

  They start back, but after a minute or so Polly stops, raises her hand. She looks worried, a little scared.

  Alice tilts her head, knits her brow, as if to say, What is it?

  Polly is looking intently at a cluster of bushes between the benches and the boundary wall. She takes a step toward them, stops, listens, and after a few moments, she shrugs and indicates with a wave that they might as well continue on their way home.

  “Can you read?” Polly asks. Without talking it over, they are taking the sidewalk heading south, as if they were just two normal kids out for a very late stroll in Central Park.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t have to say it like that.”

  “I’m just saying yes.”

  “A lot of us can’t, you know,” Polly says.

  “I know. I guess it’s not such a big deal.”

  “How about your brother?”

  “He can read. We both can read. We go to school.”

  “But do you? Do you ever just, you know, start reading, just to do it? Not in school. Just for fun?”

  Alice shrugs. She cannot say two words to Polly without feeling she has said the wrong thing or is about to and that she might even be letting herself be lured into a trap.

  Polly slings her arm around Alice’s shoulder. Her eyes widen. “Wow, you’re really bony.”

  Alice wishes she could move away from Polly but worries that it would make everything worse. All she wants right now is to get back to the apartment, go to sleep. She knows that Polly is mad that Alice has shared Rodolfo’s bed, and she knows that Polly thinks something sexy happened, which it did not. If it will make matters easier, Alice will gladly sleep on a sofa, or find where Adam is and sleep there, or sleep on the floor. She doesn’t care.

  “We have to put some meat on those bones, girl,” Polly says. Her fingers creep down Alice’s back and grab hold of her shoulder blade. “Is this what Rodolfo likes? Skin and bones?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Alice answers.

  “You don’t?” Polly is silent for a moment. When she speaks again, her tone has changed. It is no longer teasing and sharp, but soft and confiding. “We’re a lot alike, you know, you and me.”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess? You do a lot of guessing.”

  “I’m pretty tired.”

  “We’re not as messed up as a lot of them,” Polly says. “We’ve got some of whatever that shit is our parents took, but not as much. Some of them are really bad. Some of them are like our parents, or worse.”

  “My mother says we didn’t ask for this,” Alice says.

  “Your mother? I heard your mother killed herself.”

  “I’m adopted now. She’s actually my aunt.”

  “You shouldn’t call her your mother. It’s disrespectful.”

  “I guess.”

  “I guess,” Polly says simultaneously in a simpering voice, followed by openly cruel laughter.

  They walk in silence for a full minute. The spires of the San Remo float into view.

  Suddenly, Polly stops. She turns to face Alice.

  “You need to go home to your new mommy,” she says.

  Alice returns Polly’s stare. She waits for that familiar feeling of cringing and wanting to hide, what she has always felt when threatened or upset. But this time, for some reason, it doesn’t come. She feels nothing. No. Not nothing. She feels calm. She feels ready.

  “And you need to keep away from Rodolfo,” Polly adds.

  “I don’t have to,” Alice says. Her voice is small, but it is steady.

  “Oh yes, you do, you little bitch,” Polly says. Her breaths are rapid, and her face is flushed. She is trying to look as angry and as threatening as possible, but in fact, she looks frantic. She
waits for Alice to back down, to start stuttering and promising and I-guessing and basically falling to pieces, but Alice looks calm. Has the little bitch gone crazy? wonders Polly.

  In a moment of inspiration, she slaps Alice across the face. Not as hard as she could, but hard, definitely hard.

  Alice is stunned. Her eyelids flutter. She steps back and places inquiring fingers on the spot where Polly’s blow landed.

  Polly interprets this as weakness and strikes again, this time planning to hit even harder and settle this once and for all. But Alice has quick reflexes and catches Polly by the wrist before the blow lands.

  The little bony shrimp’s grip is amazingly strong. Polly’s hand is like a fox in a trap, crippled by pain, shit out of luck.

  “Let me go,” Polly demands.

  “You were hitting,” Alice says. Something is happening to her eyes. The brown of them is darkening, deepening. The pupils grow larger. She radiates a terrifying indifference. People who don’t know any better talk about an animal being vicious when all the animal is is hungry. An animal cannot hate, any more than it can really love; at least, not love in the way humans want the word to mean. An animal won’t burn a CD with seductive songs on it, and it won’t lie to make you jealous. That story that gets told about the dog waiting for his owner patiently at the door years after the owner has fallen on the field of battle is either a myth or a story about a broken dog. Animals don’t exact revenge, nor do they experience pleasure from the suffering of other creatures. What an animal can mostly do is want, and eat, and protect. An animal is designed to survive.

  And yet, as Polly looks into Alice’s eyes and feels the stubborn steely grip of Alice’s fingers around her wrist, she does feel fear, a great, dizzying geyser of fear. She tries to yank free, and, failing that, she strikes out at Alice with her other hand. “Let me go, you little bitch, let me go,” she shrieks furiously.

  Alice feels a power spreading through her. It begins in her stomach and travels down to her legs and up to her throat, her hands, her face, and her scalp. Her mouth hangs open; her blood feels like warm honey. Phrases from childhood occur to her, and she repeats them now. “You need to learn some manners. What were you, raised in a barn?” Except when she heard these words, they were accompanied by a frown, a slow shake of the head. However, when she says these words, they are accompanied by a physical fury that is sudden and absolute. It is as if she is being electrocuted by her own emerging nature.

  “All right,” Polly says, as if anything were up to her anymore, “we better get going. We can talk later.”

  “Leave me alone,” Alice manages to say.

  “Yeah, right,” Polly says, unable to concede more than that.

  “Don’t ever hit me again,” Alice says. The muscles in her neck are painfully tight. She strokes them with an open hand, lifting her chin, grimacing.

  “Then keep away from Rodolfo!” Polly says, her own courage and energy suddenly resurfacing.

  Alice cannot think of what to say next, so she growls, moving still closer to Polly, baring her teeth.

  “Freak,” says Polly. “You’re the worst.” Yet she takes a step away. They are off the paved walk now; she feels the scratch of a shrub of some sort on her back.

  Who is this girl? Who is this new Alice who lowers her head, stretches her lips so even more of her teeth can show, and who charges at Polly now? Once, in Cold Spring, she accidentally stepped on a little toad, camouflaged and practically invisible in the leaf litter on the front porch. The poor thing popped beneath the weight of her foot, and when she jumped back in horror and looked down, it was dying, its tiny front feet pressed together as if in prayer, a look of disgust and resignation on its little face. That night she wept in her bed, mourning the life she had accidentally taken, promising herself that one day when she was grown and on her own and had money and freedom, she would buy a ranch or a farm or a mountain somewhere and make a sanctuary for animals of all kinds. Was that girl—so tender, so humane, so human—still within her? Or has she been swallowed whole—like a little fish consumed by a big fish—by the self she has so abruptly become?

  A self that grabs Polly by the shoulders and twists her left and twists her right and twists her left again—with such force that Polly wonders if the top half of her is going to be torn from the bottom half. “Stop it,” she shrieks as her feet lose their purchase on the ground and she falls first to her knees and then flat on her back. She is exposed. Her stomach, with its treasure trove of guts, her throat, and the thin, utterly vulnerable coating of skin that shields the major arteries.

  She makes a quick calculation of her chances and decides her best hope for survival is to beg.

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry.”

  Looking at Alice’s face, Polly is not at all certain Alice heard or understood what Polly said. Or if she cared.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Polly says, her voice rising.

  As if to try it out, curious, tentative, Alice scratches Polly’s right cheek. She steps back, peers down, waiting to see the effect of what she has done. Three red lanes of welts rise on Polly’s face, a superhighway carrying pain from the corner of her eye to her upper lip.

  Using her other hand, Alice strikes again, gouging the left cheek. Polly screams in pain. She knows now that adopting a posture of surrender will not save her. The animal courtesy of sparing the vanquished will not apply in this situation. Alice is not enough of an animal, or she is the wrong kind of animal. Whatever. Polly scrambles up, staggering backward as she regains her footing, whirling her arms to get her balance.

  It takes Alice a moment to realize that Polly is going to get away. She is already running before Alice starts to chase after her. Polly is fast. She is a beautiful runner. Her long legs. Her long braid. Her arms hanging limply at her sides.

  Alice is fast too. But not as fast as Polly. She runs hunched forward, her arms extended, her fingers pointing down. It briefly crosses her consciousness—like a shooting star, only half seen—that she might do better if she dropped to all fours and ran like that.

  They reach the part of the park where they first entered. Alice does not want Polly to get back to the apartment before she does, though she is not sure why. She wants to catch Polly, and she is not sure why that is either. She wants to hurt her, and again she is not sure why. But she does. She does. She wants to hurt her. She really does.

  And then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the desire to hurt Polly disappears, leaving no more trace of itself than a burst soap bubble. Alice slows down, letting the distance between herself and Polly lengthen.

  Polly senses she is no longer being chased. She allows herself to look back over her shoulder, and sure enough, there is Alice, immobile in a yellow pool of lamplight. Polly stops, turns completely. Why has Alice stopped? Oh, well, no time to think about that now. She turns again to resume her journey back to the apartment on Riverside and finds she is face-to-face with a man in a black T-shirt, a grown-up with a pale face, dead eyes, a short greasy nose.

  “Time for your see-ya juice,” he says. Hot-dog-onion-and-coffee breath. He reaches for her. He is quick. He knows what he is doing. She feels a sharp pinch between her shoulder blades. She steels herself, prepared for hideous pain. But she feels nothing. Well…a little something. But not too bad. Oh… a little more. Trouble thinking. Her brain like a radio with the dial stuck between stations.

  “Polly!” Alice shouts.

  The man picks up Polly and slings her over his shoulder as if she weighed no more than a jacket. With a few quick, efficient steps, he is out of the park.

  Alice is running as fast as she can, but she is too late. A van is waiting for him, the engine coughing, a plume of black smoke wagging its way out of the tailpipe. The man opens the back of the van, tosses Polly in. Alice now is just a few steps away, but the van speeds off. She chases after it, but it’s hopeless. There is a dripping faucet painted on the side of the van. The windows in back have been painted black.

 
Chapter 16

  It’s 4:30 in the morning, the very quietest time in the park. The wind is almost nonexistent; the squirrels and the birds are two hours from running their rounds; the homeless human foragers have gathered up every can and bottle from the trash bins, the lawns, and the bushes and wheeled them away in creaking shopping carts. The troublemaking humans have already made their trouble. The spooning lovers have put a fork in it. The night-shift cops are comatose, and the day-shift hard-asses have yet to punch in. It is the ideal time to converge the packs and have a general meeting, but even if it weren’t the ideal time, Rodolfo would have had to send out the word, because what had been, up till now, an ongoing crisis has become a flat-out emergency.

  “You’s listen now, me’s quick,” Rodolfo says from his perch on top of the slide at the Diana Ross Playground. His opening words are repeated by those closest to him, and then are repeated again and again as his message spreads out like ripples on a pond.

  “Three hours,” he says, and then points over his shoulder to indicate the past. “Polly.” He stops, collects himself. It hurts to say her name. He knew it would—but not this much. “The snatcher. Ours Alice”—he points to her, in the front of the pack—“her sees it. One man.” He holds up a finger. “One truck. White. Words on the side.” He looks questioningly down at Alice.

  “Watertight,” she says.

  “Watertight,” Rodolfo repeats, and waits until the word makes its journey to those standing farthest away.

  “We’s finding the man. We’s finding the truck. We’s getting us brothers and us sisters back to freedom.” He waits for the message to be transmitted through the network of feral boys and girls.

  “We’s not asking for this,” Rodolfo proclaims, placing his hand, with its long shapely fingers, over his heart. “We’s never asking to be born, we’s not asking, no, to be the way us is.” He lets this travel back, waits for it to sink in. “But we’s proud. We’s not bad. We’s not broken. We’s not worse. We’s better!”