The Twelve-Fingered Boy

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Some cashiers balk. Some ask where Jack got so much money.

  It’s his birthday, of course. He’s a well-loved son of wealthy parents. Or sometimes it’s a gift from Granny. Sometimes it’s all Dad had in his wallet, and Dad’s just around the corner.

  Afterward, there’s ninety-eight dollars and change in our pockets.

  We work the coast. Mobile. Pensacola. Destin. Charleston. Moving east. Moving north.

  We never hit the same spot twice. Two or three in a day and we’ve got meals, clothes, and our next Amtrak or Greyhound ticket.

  We’re brothers. Any adult questions us, and Mom and Dad have just stepped away for a minute. Should we go get them for you?

  If the do-gooders ask any more questions, I go in and get rid of them.

  Gently. Always gently.

  I don’t use the trick on Jack. I don’t peep his thoughts. But I’ve tried. And while my boy Jack is often physically motionless and silent, there’s a roil of pain there, tumultuous and wild, that I can’t penetrate. His thoughts are s mooth as silk and hard as steel, and I can’t get in.

  I don’t think he knows I’ve tried peeking. I hope he doesn’t.

  Drugstores work the best. Acres of candy: Now and Laters and Twizzlers, Hershey’s and Kit Kats and Mentos and Starbursts, Hubba Bubba and Wrigley’s Spearmint—rank upon rank of sugar spun into multicolored toylike shapes. Unattended children are the norm—mothers and fathers distracted by their errand and duty—and something about a building with large amounts of drugs and people wearing what look like lab coats lends an air of safety and blinds them to the chief danger of leaving the kids by themselves. The pharmacy we’re in, somewhere on the Alabama Gulf Coast, has high stamped-tin ceilings and a candy rack that goes on for miles under old-timey photographs of soda jerks and lines of servicemen drinking root-beer floats.

  There are two brothers at the rack—real brothers— and as Jack and I approach, I can hear them talking softly.

  “Lemme borrow some money,” the blond one says.

  “Hell, naw,” the other, taller one, black-haired and wearing jeans, a New Orleans Saints T-shirt, and Chuck Ts, responds. “All I got is five dollars.”

  “Gimme a buck, man,” the younger brother says, turning to face his sibling with a roll of Mentos in his hand. He’s maybe twelve, the other fourteen. The tall brother has zits and wisps of hair sprouting all over his face. He looks like some Dr. Seuss version of puberty: oval head perched on a stalk of neck, thin ink-stroke beard hairs quivering in the air. The younger brother puts his head close and almost snarls, “Or I’ll tell Dad about you know what.”

  I didn’t know what, and for a moment I want to peep them to see what the hell they’re talking about. But the face of the younger brother when he said you know what stops me, because it’s a hungry animal face, a starving dog’s snarl, a wolf’s avid snout. This family ain’t like the ones they show in Hollywood. But mine isn’t either, I guess.

  Jack’s nudges me and nods at the comic book rack. He browses the pulp while I watch the two brothers.

  They’re well dressed, wearing nice shoes and shirts and jeans with logos proudly displayed. Healthy and tanned, even though the year grows late—they radiate wealth and prosperity.

  The older brother digs in his pocket and pulls out a five-dollar bill. “This is all I’ve got. Gimme what you want.”

  The younger boy hands him the Mentos and then, as if he just thought of something else, he snatches a pack of Hubba Bubba off the rack and shoves it at his brother as well.

  “That’s more than a dollar!” Overmatched, elder bro takes the gum and stands, semi-defeated, and stares at the candy rack. Wolf-boy smiles, showing braces. He notices me.

  His gaze takes me in very quickly, snapping from my face to my clothes to my shoes, tick tick tick. Wolf-boy sniffs.

  I want to go in his head and see if he’s rotten to the core, but I don’t really want the stink of his soul on me for the rest of the day.

  As much as I get into them, they get into me.

  “Boys, it’s time to go…”

  Someone brushes past me, smelling of cologne.

  “Oh, excuse me, son—” A tall man, dressed similarly to the boys, with a little figure on a horse swatting at something with a club on his left tit, moves past me holding a white prescription bag and stands by his two boys.

  “You’re not getting that right before dinner,” the father says, looking at what the older son holds in his gangly hands.

  “I’ve got my own money,” Junior Seuss says, holding up his five-spot.

  “Not the point, Brando. We’re about to go to dinner…”

  The father looks up and glances at me. He’s dark-haired, too, like Junior, has a handsome, healthy face— lacking the wisps of hair and acne—like a piece of buttered toast. He looks at me, looks away. Looks back.

  Suddenly I feel exposed, as if something in his glance is peeling away layers from me—not like Quincrux’s mental assaults, not penetrating. Junior’s glance was judgmental, dismissive. His father’s isn’t.

  He watches me while Junior says, “Aww, Dad,” and replaces the candy on the rack. I can’t tell what Dad’s picking up from me, but his face goes through a series of expressions and settles on a somewhat sad one, like he’s seen a lost puppy or something. Which I am most assuredly not.

  I feel the same anger bubbling up that I always felt, at Booth, at the penguins and suits come to preach at Casimir on Sundays, at the touchy-feely self-help crap Red Wolf ladles out to the fish. I want to wipe that smile from the man’s face. I want to tear down whatever illusions of family or normalcy he has and expose him to my world, like ripping a scab from a knee. Why should he have beloved children? Why should those ungrateful wastes of space have a loving father? Why should they get such blessings while the rest of us scrabble and scratch to survive?

  Furious, I go at the sympathy behind his eyes, as if it’s some invisible organ in him and I am a surgeon. I am a lance. An arrow. A bullet. I’m going to make him see, I’m going destroy him and that sad smile.

  The impact, when it comes, makes me ring like a bell, like a cartoon dog struck between two garbage can lids, vibrating to my core. He’s like a rock wall, a steel door. Impenetrable.

  I feel like I’ve been shocked, like I’ve pissed on an electric fence. I can’t move, and I wonder what my face looks like then. Shell-shocked? Stunned? Plain old retarded?

  Then something more strange and peculiar happens. Even though he’s walled off behind titanium blast doors, even though I’ll never read him, I can feel something in his mind shift, like tectonic plates rubbing together. Like a dragon rumbling and uncurling in a cave. Something in him awakes.

  Something in him, something not him becomes aware of me. Looks at me from behind his eyes. Something riding him.

  I feel cold, despite the heat of the day. My hair stands on end.

  He’s noticed something’s changed. And his sons notice who he’s looking at and turn to face me as well.

  “Something wrong, son?” the man says. Wolf-boy grins. “You okay? You don’t look so good.”

  I say nothing. Jack turns away from the comics to look at me, an alarmed expression on his face.

  “Son? You okay?” The man takes two steps toward me and extends his hand as if to grasp my shoulder.

  I blink and knock his approaching hand aside.

  “Don’t call me son. I’m not your son.”

  He looks confused now. “Of course not…”

  It’s so easy to go behind Wolf-boy’s eyes. He’s like a glossy magazine, and just as deep.

  I point at the youngest. “He stole the school literacy week donation jar and bought a video game that he told you he borrowed from a friend. He buried the jar in the backyard, by the doghouse. You can find it there.” I turn, moving my finger to point at the oldest. He’s harder to get inside, maybe because he’s older, or maybe because of the stricken look on his face like he knows what’s coming. “And this one …
this one…”

  I see it all. The men’s magazines under his mattress, the bottle of hand lotion. His slack-jawed and lascivious midnight masturbation sessions looking at men modeling skivvies.

  I stop. No. I won’t go that far. Now that I can, I don’t want to destroy their life.

  Family is like a fuse and bomb. Ultimately, even the best of them will blow.

  The father starts and turns to look at his youngest. Wolf-boy says, “He’s lying! I didn’t!”

  Junior Seuss looks like he’s about to cry, and he’s brought up his hands in a defensive gesture. But it’s the anger coloring the father’s face that makes me turn and run from the store, sobbing.

  Jack finds me two blocks away, holding my head in my hands.

  “What happened back there?”

  I stay quiet, and he sits down next to me.

  Eventually I say, “Sometimes it’s all too much.”

  “What?”

  “Everything. The world. Us. Me.”

  He nods as if he understands, puts his six-fingered hand on mine.

  I guess he does.

  We stick to the shore to practice. It’s a risk. We’re in danger of Quincrux sniffing our trail. But we need wide expanses of water to get it down. To get it right.

  Jack can fly.

  Today we nabbed over a half grand working Charleston’s tourist district. I hired a driver, and he brought us here, to Folly Island, nonplussed by the fact that two kids had so much cash. He gave me his card.

  There’s low cloud cover and a brisk wind. The beach is empty, wind-torn, and lined with dark buildings.

  Jack’s in skintight scuba duds we bought at a dive shop and swim goggles that make him look buglike and alien. It’s gotten cold now, and the shore is chilly. I’m bundled up ten ways to Sunday, but I look forward to getting back to the condo.

  When we arrived at Folly Island, dusk was gathering and cleaning women and maintenance men were coming in and out of the beachside buildings. Plucking key codes from their heads was easy.

  The condo’s got a large collection of movies, most I haven’t seen, and we brought a backpack full of dried pasta, soup, tuna, and jerky. It’s the off-season, but if anyone shows I can get inside and make us invisible—at least for a little while. If there’s more than one person … well … that might be tough.

  “Ready?”

  “Yeah. I’m ready.”

  “Listen, it’s not the takeoff that’s the problem. It’s the touchdown. Your last one was sloppy.”

  That ticks off my Jack. He sets his shoulders at an angle, and I remember the Angry Kid statue. It seems my natural abrasiveness is what it takes to keep Jack unhappy enough to do his explodey trick on command. I’m fuel to the fire.

  I pull up my knees and adjust my windbreaker.

  “Remember, keep the anger pointing down. You got a raw deal. You got screwed. Get mad.”

  “Shreve, this isn’t good. For me. For us. I don’t know if—”

  “You remember the witch? You remember what she did to you?”

  Jack spits. Might be from a salty mouth of seawater. Might be just good old unadulterated anger. And that’s what we need.

  The witch always does it. That memory is still as raw in him as an open wound.

  “You’re above her. She’s down there. Look down. You see? Remember what it felt like?”

  He nods. His hair drips with briny water. The surf rushes in and recedes, the ocean ripping and tearing at the shore. It’s beautiful out here, beyond the dunes, on the edge of the world. Even with our messed-up lives, it’s hard to stay angry enough for flight.

  So I try to get in. He’s still steel. But I’m like acid, and I try to sear my way in. To corrode.

  No dice.

  I assault him. I batter him. But he slips away. I can’t do it; he’s still impenetrable.

  “Hold the anger. Let it burn slowly. Let it out slowly. Do it. Go.”

  Jack runs at the surf, pumping his arms, building speed. He jumps, spasms, and then a perfect circle dimples the water below him. Jack rises ten, twenty feet into the air on a higher, faster trajectory.

  “Again!”

  He’s pinwheeling his arms now, trying to keep upright.

  “Now, Jack!”

  He throws out his hands, palms down like his arms were wings, and he shoots upward. He rises out over the surf, over the waves, and into the blue of the Carolina night. Into the stars.

  The higher he goes, the less effective his bursts. He’s got nothing up there to push against except more air. I’m not stupid. I’m a troublemaker, but I used to listen in class. I know every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

  Jack must have paid attention in that class too.

  He’s moving faster and out of earshot, what with the roar of the surf, when he wobbles and starts to roll. He’s lost his balance. His head and torso tilt forward on an axis, like he’s falling. Which he is, really. It’s a controlled fall Jack does. A controlled plummet.

  But then he does something I’ve never seen him do before. He throws out his hand in front of him and gives what I can only call microbursts—like an astronaut on a spacewalk. And his body rights itself. He puts his hands back in the wing position and rises on another explosion.

  He’s sixty or seventy feet up. If he gets any more altitude, when he comes down he’ll break something. At that height, even water starts to hurt.

  Jack starts his turn.

  This is the tricky part. He throws his hands out to the left—bam—and he’s turned his trajectory some, not much. Jack will never be a skywriter. He gives another burst to his left and one underneath to gain more altitude, and now he’s flying parallel to the shore.

  He’s windmilling again, whirling his arms and pumping his legs like a runner, trying to stay upright. He’s hit the apex of his last burst and is coming down now. He’s not coming down too fast, but fast enough to smack the water hard unless he can stop himself.

  He gives a buoyant half burst, and then another, slowly decreasing his altitude. Then he waits until he’s ten feet from the surface and gives one last microburst upward. He tucks in his chin, puts his arms out in front of him in a dive, and hits the water.

  I snatch up the towel and run to the point on the beach nearest his landing.

  Jack takes a few minutes to swim back to shore. He wouldn’t be able to fly if he wasn’t such a good swimmer, that’s for sure.

  He’s grinning when he comes out of the water.

  “Nine point three.” Our little joke. I score him on the landings.

  “What? That’s what you gave me, like, three weeks ago in Destin.”

  “Yeah, well, you were an amateur then.”

  I toss Jack the towel, and he dries off.

  “Nine point five, at least.”

  “You were wobbly. But you did stick the dive.”

  We’re both smiling now, amazed a human can fly. I don’t know what genetics had to come together for this to happen, but it seems so improbable as to be magic. And maybe that’s what it is. Maybe humans really have had magicians throughout history, and they were just kids with extra fingers and triple nipples and two dicks and abusive parents, surrounded by folks like Quincrux and the witch.

  We turn to walk back up the beach.

  “Race ya,” Jack yells, dashing forward, and he gives a pulse that launches him fifteen feet in the air. He lands squatting, his feet digging deep into the sand and his arms out. But he rises fast and keeps running.

  If he goes explodey, there’s no beating him in the hundred-yard dash.

  I’m left alone to trudge back to the condo.

  The old routines take hold. I’m used to cooking and cleaning and waiting on a younger brother. After hours of me bitching, cajoling, insulting, and assaulting Jack while he’s doing the human rocket over the Atlantic, he’s tired and needs to bring his core temp back to human levels. I’m happy to take care of things and let him warm up, wrapped in a blanket in front of the TV. It’s been a lo
ng two months on the road, and most of the nights haven’t been in digs as nice as this.

  Tonight, Tuna Helper—Hamburger Helper’s ugly sister—is on the menu. I’ve got some pickles to get some green on Jack’s plate, but until we can settle somewhere, I don’t see us hitting the local farmers market. We eat what we can tote in our trusty backpacks.

  The condo is a glorified hotel room with a combination-lock door. Everything has its place, but nothing is personal. It’s a snapshot of what a vacation must feel like, full of pastels and shells and tropical birds that have no business being within a thousand miles of South Carolina.

  I might be a kid, but I’m not an idiot. The condo is pure fantasy.

  I bring Jack a bowl of the noodles and tuna, and he sniffs at it, takes a bite, and puts it on the coffee table in front of us. Like Vig used to get after a long day of play, he’s too tired to eat, but he’ll be ravenous in the morning. Now he’s watching the flickering lights of the TV, some stupid sitcom with impossibly pretty people; lights are on, but nobody’s home for both Jack and the show. I could try and get in, to root around in his noggin, but I don’t want to be that guy who takes advantage of you when you’re down.

  Friends don’t do that. Brothers don’t do that.

  “Come on, bro. Let’s get you into bed.” I drag Jack up by the arm and march him to the bedroom. He puts up no resistance.

  The condo has three bedrooms—two masters and one bedroom for kids, with bunk beds—and this last room seems the most appropriate for us. I’m not going to take a master and put Jack in the other. What if the landlord or owner shows up? And I’m not going to sleep in the same bed as him.

  Bunk beds make sense.

  Jack falls into the bottom bed. I pull covers over him, and he turns on his side, fully asleep. I pad back to the TV room, eat the rest of his Tuna Helper, brush my teeth at the kitchen sink. I open the front door and check the fenced atrium where we found the maids and I took the code from their heads. I check the patio door that leads out to the scrub grass and sand and dunes and the sea beyond, which even now I can hear like a dull roar.

  I lock the door as much as it can be locked and turn back to the bedroom. Climbing to the top bunk, I imagine being back in Casimir Pulaski. I imagine being back in my bunk, letting the cold air coming from the vent cover me like darkness, and I close my eyes.