Читать книгу Buried Treasure - Jack B. Downs - Страница 11

4 / Superman’s Rocket

Seasons changed, but James’s life was still. In the place where his mother used to live, James had draped a dark shroud. Not a lifeless, droopy thing, but a breathing, expectant shadow. It pulsed with anger and hurt, and he stoked it like a furnace. For James, the world was forever tilted since that April morning.

“My bike fell over. My bike fell over. Let me go. My bike fell over.” He chanted in a cadence to distract his father, who already was traveling to a different place on a ride without controls that was picking up speed.

Mrs. Somers had been only too glad to let his dad use her phone. She’d set James down on her porch glider, trying to calm him. He remembered not breathing, and the hiccoughing terror, and snot pouring down his chin. James hadn’t understood what was wrong. But he sensed his father fleeing after the baby, and the screeching was his own voice. It lasted until his air was gone, then a viscous sucking. Dying. First his mother, waving goodbye, smiling, to live at bus. Then David. How did he climb from the buggy? And his father, eyes empty, licking the lips in a hollowed face. The sound of the sirens, piercing between his cries. His father stumbling off the porch and back across the street to stand beside the carriage.

His father seemed to shred like Superman’s rocket from Krypton. Pieces of his dad flaming up in his own wake, ripping away. Two police cars arrived together. The first pulled up alongside his father, the second nosed to the bumper of the first. Four police heaved out of the cars, stepping slowly toward his dad, glancing down the empty street.

“You Mr. Paxton?” That’s how it started. Before his father stopped answering questions, he was a broken and much older man, a pebble that finally dropped, spent and gray, to the surface of the earth. Superman blasted to tiny bits.

His mother never looked at him again, not directly, not after David left. He understood David had been taken. Then he was furious at David for getting lost when James was naughty. David’s leaving made his mother leave, and then his father. James wanted to go where they’d gone, but he couldn’t find the way. Nana wanted to make him hers, and that would’ve been all right. But his father wanted it too, and James simply couldn’t bear it. He’d refused to leave his father, even when his father left him.

Then there was another baby, and he was not alone. But he wanted his mother to come back, and his father to come back, so they would not be mad at him anymore. He waited, and he tended the anger and hurt that kept him from being ripped apart too.