Brood

by Chase Novak

  “Be good, guys,” Dennis says, heading for the door. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Oh, and if anyone needs to use the facilities, they’re right over there, second door to the right. Try not to look in the tub!”

  Chapter 18

  Rodolfo is beset with worries. So many worries! He cannot organize his mind and figure out which of his worries is most pressing, which worry to worry about first, which is second, third, which can safely be put aside for some future time. The worries are like huge waves that come from all directions, and his mind is a little ship constructed out of Popsicle sticks, out of paper, out of dreams.

  He is not stupid. No one who oversees a band of outcasts, finding actual indoor shelter for some, reminding the others of their responsibility toward one another; who keeps the peace among boys and girls who nearly 100 percent of health-care, educational, social work, and psychiatric professionals would deem incorrigible and unreachable, untreatable and undeserving of a minute’s freedom; who is basically president of a nation of outcasts, with some disappearing and some reproducing (and what is being reproduced is not really a reproduction in the strictest sense but a furtherance, another rung up or down the evolutionary ladder); who runs an underground enterprise with an ever-increasing cash flow, who oversees the quality of the product they sell and who, unlike many CEOs whose pictures are snapped at celebrity balls or on their yachts bobbing sunnily off some Greek isle, never allows greed and the pursuit of profit to get in the way of quality control or any other good business practice—no, no sixteen-year-old boy with Rodolfo’s cares and responsibilities can be called stupid.

  He is merely overwhelmed.

  The disappearance of Polly has destabilized his household.

  The defection of Alice has destabilized him.

  Central Park, 8:00 p.m. The summer sky is blue and purple on the east side. To the west, however, the light still lingers, smoky pastels and a sinking red sun—it looks like a blanket hanging in some tourist shop in Arizona. Every once in a while, one of the windows in the big Fifth Avenue apartments will flash red as the sun reflects way across the park to the east side. One by one, the trees dissolve into the darkness.

  The police are still maintaining the fiction that the two cops were mauled by a pack of wild dogs, and there are signs posted on the trees, yellow plastic with black lettering, warning people: Park Closed—Wild Dogs—Danger. Yellow tape and sawhorses block the roads going in and out of the park, east and west, north and south, around and around: all blocked, forbidden; what a laugh it is for the wild children. The dogs who once pranced through the park with their proud owners can now only look longingly at the deserted acres of hill and dale while they are leash-walked along the park’s periphery. They whimper, they strain; the squirrels look down on them from the sycamores, oaks, and maples, safe at last from constant harassment by these well-fed beasts when they, the bushy rodents, are only trying to do their job. But the dog owners know that dogs do not make good decisions. Word is that the police will shoot to kill any dog they see in Central Park—border terriers, borzois, dogs in booties, dogs with rhinestone collars; none will be spared. What’s next? Rodolfo and his kind wonder. Open season on cats? Peregrine falcons? The police are lying and Rodolfo knows why, they all know, all the crews, every last one of them. The powers that run the town don’t want to say that two of New York’s Finest succumbed to a pack of teenagers. They don’t want to say that some of the wealthier citizens of the greatest city on earth shot themselves up with a mix of ingredients that jump-started their reproductive engines and that in quite a few of the cases things took an unexpected turn. (Talk about dogs making bad decisions; couples longing to be pregnant can make some doozies as well.) They don’t want to say that each and every one of the wild children living in the park and in a few other of the city’s nooks and crannies—some of them not quite children anymore, a few even with children of their own—are there because they were not safe at home. Not safe! That’s putting it mildly. At home, under the roofs of their loving parents, they would have perished. And the cops will definitely not say (Rodolfo is not certain if they even know) that in that pack of outcast children is Dylan Morris, who, if anyone bothered to ask him (the other wild children don’t have to make inquiries; they know), would burn the ears off the average listener with tales of his life at Gracie Mansion, the city’s official home for its mayors. In that mansion, where his parents managed to create an aura of privacy where other mayors and their families had submitted to the public nature of the place, with its security guards and CCTV and aides at all hours and always a repair or a renovation under way, here in these rooms, he learned to dread the hour growing later, dread the inevitable moment when his parents’ desire reached critical mass, and they started in on each other, acknowledging his existence only inasmuch as they hollered, Leave us alone for a while. They were intermittently aware of Dylan’s presence but never of his proximity. If he was in the next room hearing every grunt, hearing the squish and thump of their hideous union, they seemed none the wiser. He compulsively wandered into his mother’s bath, as if in a trance, and saw the evidence of her desperate depilatory efforts—the heaps of Lady Schick razors, the pots of bleach, the strips of waxing adhesive with her dark hair clinging to the amber gum, like insects infesting the rinds of a melon—but if she was in any way aware that he witnessed what she had to do to make herself presentable, if she had of any knowledge of his invasion of her most tragic privacy, she gave no indication. There was a lack of consistency, not unheard-of in most households, but here it was more costly. He would be hurried out of the room if his parents felt a quarrel coming on or if they wanted to show their affection for each other by wrestling on the floor. But somehow, it did not occur to them that little Dylan ought to be protected from watching them eat—the less said about this, the better: The man is the mayor of New York City, and the woman is the city’s First Lady.

  But Dylan did not join Rodolfo and the feral boys and girls because he was repelled by his parents. He ran because he was frightened. He ran because he feared for his life. Like so many of the others who quickly became his friends, his new family, the human levee that protected him from the rising waters of oblivion, Dylan ran because he overheard his parents, Mommy, Daddy, his havens in a heartless world, heard them agonizing over how terrible they felt about wanting to devour him. We’ve all heard parents kvelling over their offspring, saying, You’re so cute, I could eat you up. Well, Mayor and Mrs. Morris meant it. They were not dealing in metaphor or hyperbole. This was not a figure of speech. And Dylan knew it. And most of his new friends knew it about their parents too.

  Rodolfo has slipped into the park undetected by anyone, even around the perimeter, all along the wall separating Central Park West (and its apartment buildings with a thousand eyes) from the park itself. Wherever he goes, he looks for that Watertight truck. He has already figured out what he will do when he finally finds it—he will follow it and discover where it takes the kids it collects. He will run behind it at an easy lope. Upright all the way.

  He will find them. He will save them. How? Here, he’s not so sure. But it can be done.

  It may be time to arm the troops. Rodolfo has secreted quite a bit of money away. Real money, a serious sum. Some of it right here in Central Park. Several months organizing Zoom sales around the city—it gives a boy access to other illegal activities. Oh, the things he knows. Where the brothels are, the loft on Watt Street where rich men and women watch kickboxers from Southeast Asia fight to the death—though Rodolfo has also heard complaints, bitter complaints, that the deaths are faked. He knows who sells passports and for how much. He knows who will buy a kidney, a chunk of liver, the promise of a heart. And he knows where he can buy weapons: automatic rifles, handguns. There is even a Zoom customer, a skinny little guy with a long waxed mustache like two question marks, who can hook Rodolfo up with a flamethrower, not new, but still functional.

  He walks through the park, from shadow to shadow.
All of a sudden—it is like an abrupt shift in the weather, when the wind changes and the temperature plunges ten degrees—he is beset with the most terrible sense of loneliness. The darkness, the caution, the underlying sense of fear: It reminds him of home. Home! He is now the head of a vast, mad, endangered family—Boy-Boy, Dee-Dee, Little Man, on and on—but every now and then comes the taste of the purest, most unendurable longing for his old house, his old room, the sights from his bedroom window, the smell of the carpets, the urgent sound of the telephone in the hall, its echoing ring, and even for his parents, who were so mad, and so dangerous. He forgives them. He realizes that they were as screwed as he was, realizes that they could not help themselves, they were blitzed, they were blotto, they were as gone as gone can be, they were the original Zoom heads before there was Zoom. He can still recall their touch, the way they petted him, coddled him. His father used to put him right on top of his head, walk around like that, with little Rodolfo balanced there, hanging on to Daddy’s ears. How do you like my new hat? Sometimes it was just too much. Get away, get away, Rodolfo would squeal, a little two-year-old touch-me-not. Oh, he wishes he could have a shot at those paternal caresses now. Before biochemistry had its ruthless way with his parents, before nature, dormant for a while after the injections, came roaring back. Back then, in that gauzy, barely remembered paradise called before.

  Rodolfo stops, startled. His cheeks are wet. He did not realize it straight off—he’s crying! He thinks he should slap some sense into himself. But then he thinks better of it. Just let it out. Don’t keep it bottled up. Lighten the load. Where’s the harm?

  But there is most certainly harm, because what he lets out is not just a little sniffle of sadness. This is no common cold of teenage angst. This is a raging malaria of grief. This is a sadness that twists the guts and weakens the knees. He sees a bench and realizes that, whatever the risks, he must sit.

  It is not only that he is sitting on a bench, which is a dicey enough thing to do in this locked-down park where cops and who knows who else are on the lookout for lawless boys whose description Rodolfo fits to a proverbial T, but, to make matters worse, he is sitting on a bench right next to a streetlamp. He sits there, dramatically lit, as if this were a play and a stage set, and for this scene of sadness and regret, Rodolfo is lit like an actor.

  He is leaning forward. His elbows are on his knees, his hands are molded to his face as he weeps into them. His tears follow the pathways of the lines in his palms. It has been nearly six years since he saw his mother and father. He refuses now to call them his family. That would be too much. It’s hard enough: Mom, Dad. But family means something different now, something that has taken the place of his former life on Seventy-Seventh Street. Family is on Riverside Drive. Family is in this very park, or Washington Square, or Carl Schurz Park. Family is selling Zoom down in Gramercy. Riding the elevator with a backpack full of the red. So no, he does not, will not, cannot think of them as family, or even say the word. But he does manage those two old words, Mom, Dad. And they take him by surprise. It’s an ambush, a self-ambush. And it’s really too much for him. He is wired to run, to hide, to take, to lead, but not for this: He is not wired to feel. He is not wired to grieve. Mom. Dad.

  He misses them. There. The thing is thought. The admission is blinding. It is like staring into a house on fire. Me’s turning into little bitch, he thinks, punishingly. But the cold water of it does nothing—except maybe make him feel a little bit worse. Yet what does he miss—what can he miss? These two, old to be parents in the first place, soon beset by one medical complaint after the other. First loving, yes, but then so stern, and finally so deadly. Yet there it is: He misses his father’s reedy voice, the gap between his front teeth, the way he cleaned his eyeglasses on his necktie until one day he didn’t need glasses anymore, and there was no reason to wear a tie…

  Wait.

  Rodolfo sits up straight, holds his breath. He has heard…something. A twig snap? Maybe…

  He looks up and realizes he is directly in the glow of the streetlamp; he is at the end of the yellow cone of light like a note coming out of the bell of a trumpet. He rises up on his hands like a gymnast, then flips backward off the bench, into the humid grass and a measure of darkness. He backs up, looking left, right.

  He sees nothing. But he is certain someone is near.

  He sniffs the air. He smells human skin, the perfumed stink of an adult. Smoke too. Detergent. Leather. Oil. Oh yes, yes. Someone is near. More than one person. More than two.

  If he were fully human, Rodolfo might spend another moment or two standing there, cocking his head left and right, trying to figure out just what he is hearing, trying to make a reasonable evaluation before deciding what, if anything, he ought to do next. But he’s not fully human. He is evolution’s next step—or evolution’s sidestep, at least. A menagerie of DNA courses through him, with several species waging a constant struggle with one another for dominance. His last thought before he runs—and it’s not really a thought at all, it’s just a sudden knowing—horses.

  He’s off! A lesser creature would not make it ten steps in this murk. A lesser creature would be tripped up in a tangle of vines, blocked by boulders, stymied by chain-link fences, lost and even panicked in the park’s elegant undulations. But Rodolfo is not only swift, he is graceful, guided by the invisible cartography of a creature’s deepest sense of the world, and even those parts of the park he doesn’t know from experience he knows by instinct; the map is in there, and always was.

  He is heading vaguely south, vaguely east.

  He hears a man’s voice, a thick voice, a heavy, bellyish bellow. “Tallyho!” The call goes up, and suddenly Central Park is horribly alive with lights—lights propped up on the roofs of squad cars, enormous klieg lights on tripods as if to illuminate a theater before a world premiere. The darkness of the park turns bright silver. The privacy of night is stripped away—it is like tearing the clothes off a helpless person.

  Rodolfo runs. Cops on foot, cops in cars, cops on BMX bikes, and cops on horseback chase after him—all that is lacking is the bugler in a red cutaway coat and the hounds. Instead of crops, they carry clubs. He hears their engines. Hears the frantic clop of hooves. How many are there? He cannot say. But there must be at least twenty in the field, all in hot pursuit, plus a couple of hilltoppers watching from a distance, keeping track of the hunters and their quarry.

  He keeps away from the ribbons of roadway, rendering the squad cars useless. He resists climbing any of the trees that go whizzing past him as he runs. In a tree, he will be trapped. In a tree, he will be killed.

  The ground behind him shakes as the cops on horseback draw closer.

  “Tallyho, tallyho!” an enormous cop on a very small bicycle shouts.

  “Halt,” shouts another.

  One particularly fit young officer is making the chase on foot. He runs with his arms at his side, and his hands, hanging limply, paddle back and forth. Has he learned something new about the physics of foot speed? He is coming at Rodolfo at a vertical. His path will intersect with Rodolfo’s in ten more paces. Beyond that, the corridors of brightness created by the lights the police brought begin fading, dimming—if he can only get to the darkness, his chances of survival will increase.

  “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” the speeding young officer says as he bears down on his quarry. His piston gait is tireless, robotic.

  Rodolfo can feel the heat of the horses like sunlight on his back. It is difficult to put space between himself and his pursuers because he will not, must not, run in a straight line. He must weave, he must cut a path as unpredictable as possible. He does not fool himself into believing that the cops want to take him alive. He does not comfort himself with the sweet story that they would never snuff out the life of a minor.

  Their own blood has been spilled. There is nothing they will not do.

  Rodolfo is on the Great Lawn now. The ground is soft. It is far too open. He might as well be running on the mo
on.

  He thinks about going on all fours, but there are two or three seconds in the transition from biped to quadra-, and right now he cannot afford them. He is running as fast as he has ever run, and now it is clear that he must run faster.

  The young cop on foot makes his move, and Rodolfo powers himself forward toward the lawn’s border.

  “Aaaar,” the cop grunts as he prepares to tackle Rodolfo.

  The tires of the squad cars behind him are digging up long black and green curls of lawn. The sirens let out little whoops—there is something strangled, almost involuntary in the sound, which makes it somehow all the more nerve-racking. Rodolfo leaps over the benches on the lawn’s border, and the young cop slams into the wooden slats.

  Rodolfo’s leap has taken him six feet over the benches and when he lands, he staggers for a second, almost falls.

  Now he has the moment and the momentum to go on all fours. The bag of Skittles he was carrying in his front pocket falls out; the hard little candies bounce and disappear.

  Rodolfo tries not to think. Thinking is not what nature wants, not at a time like this. But he cannot stop himself. He wonders what they will do to him if they catch him. If he were a fox, the hounds in their frenzy might tear him to shreds, but here the hounds are the hunters. He knew this day would come. The man in the white truck is picking them off one by one. And now here come the cops—two of their own are gone and they want justice. No, they want revenge. Of this Rodolfo is certain: He will be beaten, he will be hurt, humiliated. His dread of capture and punishment is so acute, he can almost feel the blows raining down on him, smell the breath of the hunters, see their smiles of swinish satisfaction…