Читать книгу Down in the River - Ryan Blacketter - Страница 4

Levi’s Café stood in a city block of pines—just that one, small lighted building in the center of the grove. As Lyle went into the trees, the café windows were yellow stains that in the wind and rain seemed to darken and then flicker on. Instead of going in, he lingered under his umbrella. The motorcycle club gathered here each evening at five. But Lyle had offended one of the boys, Devon, who was tall and drove a Triumph and liked heavy wool sweaters—girls favored him—and he supposed they would not invite him to join now, despite his new clothing.

In a dim window, familiar boys and girls crowded a booth. Their faces glowed in the light of a short lamppost right outside. Raindrops on the window pocked their skin with tiny shadows, so they all looked spotted with some attractive disease. Devon and Martin took turns speaking, as if they competed for the girls’ laughter. Devon was skinny in a muscled way, in a too-small T-shirt, his black hair greased like an Italian boy’s, and Martin was chubby and white-haired and balding, hostile and brilliant, old-seeming because he was albino. When Martin spoke, the girls didn’t laugh. He kept a flask-sized bottle hidden under the table, and he sipped from it. The high school had placed Lyle with them because he had taken honors classes back in the mountains, where comprehending Riders of the Purple Sage indicated high promise.

Lyle bounced a fist on his thigh, shame gnawing at him. In class earlier, they had discussed a story of a man who freezes in the snow. Devon said his little sister vanished in the snow on Mount Hood years earlier. She had worn all white that day. Lyle giggled in his chair when he heard this, and fell into a laughing fit. He couldn’t stop it, even when the girls turned and made disturbed expressions at him. A little girl trotting invisibly into the snow made a funny picture in his mind.

He touched a tree in the rain and let go of a small groan, unsure what had tickled him about a little girl dying in such an awful way. Maybe he could explain that it was a misunderstanding.

A far train horn shrieked a high note of panic. Then came the ding ding of a warning gate. The air sang with the freight passing, and he heard it occasionally under the rain. When the headlights of a turning car swept the grove, trees staggering in light and shadow, he went toward the café door, hesitated, then ducked back into the trees. He didn’t want to be laughed at. In class he sensed that people were amused that he’d changed his appearance overnight. He had gone to the Salvation Army and bought a new jacket made of green wool, tapered at the waist, a line of red cloth on each shoulder—some foreign army’s uniform. It fit him well. He got razors and some old-fashioned hair grease at a drug store. His sparse, dirty-looking beard was gone, and his hair was greased back. Although he’d tossed out his denim jacket, he still wore his camouflage boots. He should have eased into it, wearing the jacket a while before changing his hair. Eugene, Oregon, was a big city, and there were plenty of kids, but he wanted these friends, with their rain-smelling wool, bright conversation, and intelligent meanness.

He was getting ready to take off when Devon and Martin and one of the girls, Monique, came out to smoke under the narrow porch roof. Motorcycles were parked along the concrete walk in front of the café—a couple of dirt bikes, a few Vespas, and the two-seated Triumph with saddlebags.

Martin stood on the walk in the rain, sipping from his little bottle. The whiteness of his face made the circles under his eyes very dark. His hair was so thin and white it seemed to have washed away in the rain. Under his trench coat he wore a white shirt and blue tie. His black satchel rested against his back, and the strap crossed his chest like a sash.

“I have no interest in what you two do together,” Martin said.

“I still want to be close,” Monique said. She was pretty despite the short black hair, the round glasses, and the frumpy clothes.

“Did you hear what I just told you? Zero interest. None.”

Lyle stepped out of the trees. “Hey, Devon!” His voice was too loud. He was nervous and breathing in jags. “I wanted to let you know I wasn’t laughing at your sister—I was remembering a funny show on TV.”

Devon squinted at Lyle’s boots.

“What are you even doing here?” Martin said to Devon. “I never invited you to my club. Monique’s a member, but you’re not.”

“I’ve been a part of it since the first day,” said Devon. “You can’t just suddenly … I think I’ll come and go as I please. It’s my dad’s café.”

Martin said to Lyle, “That wasn’t the first time he’s mentioned his sister—in class today. He tells the story so girls will feel sorry for him.”

Lyle made a somber face, to show he wasn’t laughing at Devon. Devon wobbled his head and pulled his arm behind his neck, folding it strangely flat along his shoulder in a double-jointed contortion. “Want a drag?” he asked Monique. The hand of the contorted arm held a cigarette. She dragged from it and laughed at the performance.

“What’s a better choice,” Devon asked her, “Cirque du Soleil or the Berlin Circus?”

“As long as you do something,” Martin said, “instead of talking about it all the time.”

“All you talked about last month was shooting out all the lights in town with your BB pistol.” Devon snickered, unfolding his arm from behind his neck. “I didn’t think you’d do it, and you didn’t. I think that was your oh-so-eccentric thing. Your oh-so-interesting and disturbed thing.”

“I have every intention of shooting out the lights.”

“What are you trying to prove by standing in the rain?” Monique said. “You’ll get sick.”

Martin drew a pistol from his coat pocket and fired. Devon pulled air between his teeth and shook the pain from his hand.

“Martin, Jesus!” Monique said.

“Oh please,” said Martin. “It’s only a mild sting. There’s no blood.”

Her eyes on Martin, she turned her head slowly to one side. “You scare me sometimes, but Devon doesn’t—he doesn’t scare me.”

As Martin opened his mouth to laugh, a noise like a weak cough came out. He slipped the pistol into his coat pocket and sipped.

A white-bearded man appeared in the café door window. It must have been Levi. He stepped outside in a white shirt and black tie, a white apron around his waist, and slapped a hand on the wooden railing. He stepped down, confiscated the half-full bottle, and returned to the overhang.

“You’re eighty-sixed, Martin,” the man said. “There are rules. No alcohol for minors is one of them. You’re out for good. This is too many times now. Out. Off the property. Son, were you drinking too?”

“No,” Devon said. “Nobody else had anything.”

“You can’t kick me out,” Martin said. “This is my club.”

“You’re out for good this time,” Levi said. “I won’t tell your mother, but you can’t come back. Sorry.”

The man went inside. Through a window, Lyle watched him go behind the counter to take an old woman’s payment. Levi bowed to her slightly, as if thanking her for her patience. A small chalkboard on the wall behind him read, “Matzo Ball Soup.”

Martin looked like he might cry. Devon grinned.

“You’ll be all right, Martin,” said Monique. “I know you’re not always like this. You must be having a bad time. Are we still friends?”

Martin breathed a shaky, “No.” He knocked on a café window and motioned for people to leave. A few kids in wool coats and jackets came outside and straddled their bikes. At the end of the line of scooters and motorcycles, Martin started his black-shielded red scooter. His engine hacked as if it had no muffler. As Devon awakened his Triumph, the sound obliterated the noise of the other motors, and Monique slung herself onto the seat behind him. Most of the kids wore small white or black helmets that showed their faces.

Lyle swept his eyes across the Triumph’s chrome and leather. “Where’d you get this?” he said. Devon turned away, revving the engine as Martin coasted into the grass, passing the others, and took up the lead position. “It’s his dad’s. It’s not even his.”

“Why don’t you and Lyle do something tonight?” Devon said. “Go hunting or something. I think the rest of us want to start having a good time. We’re going to my house,” he threw over his shoulder.

“We’re going to my place—it’s my club,” Martin said.

“You really should wear your helmet,” Monique told him.

Devon nudged his tire forward, to signal Martin to get moving. Two younger girls with long hair and glossy lips came out to the porch. One of the girls called to Monique, “Are you going to the concert? I just talked to Mom. She said I could go if you’re going.”

“No. Leave me alone. I have no interest in hanging out with you.”

“Then you have to call Mom. She said to call if you’re not going. She said—”

“Rosa! Go alone. I’m sure you can manage.”

“But Mom said!”

Martin and the rest of them rode along the walk, pine trees jerking upward in the headlights. Martin swerved onto Shepherd’s Boulevard, then turned again and passed by on the road in front of the café. Lyle watched the riders moving in the trees, Martin leading the pack. Then all at once, he slowed. Each of the bikes overtook him. His engine was failing in rattles and gasps. Lyle saw him stop on the café side of the one-way, partway down the block. When the engine died, he brushed water off his face and cursed, jumped on the kick-starter, and wound the engine to a scream before letting it settle. He bowed his head for a moment. Then he bounced his scooter up the curb and steered wildly through the trees. He stopped in the shadows near the café.

“Rosa,” Martin called. “Devon has several STDs. He’s trying to give them to your sister. Will you tell her? I say this because I care about her.”

“She wouldn’t listen. She hates me.”

“But tell her, okay?”

“You should tell her.”

“Several people have told me he has herpes. I hope you can talk to her in time.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Rosa. “Last night he brought her home at like three in the morning. She’s probably already caught it off him, and I bet she gave him something back.”

“Just tell her. Maybe you don’t care if your sister’s life gets ruined, but I do. Tell her that. Tell her I care a lot.”

Martin sped out of the grove, toward the flock of bikes that had left him. When he was out of sight, the glow of his taillight drifted in the trees, as if it had stained the air behind him.

“Martin cares. He’s a very caring individual.” Rosa laughed.

She wore a close-fitting turtleneck and skirt, gray tights, and a green plastic raincoat with a hood liner printed in hearts. She had big eyes and a lot of black hair, and she was small, with good hips. He liked her scent, like a torn-open orange misting in the air.

Rosa introduced her friend as Shanta, who said her name was Shantatara. Shanta had dark eyeliner, a checkered skirt, and no curves that Lyle could see.

“I don’t see why you don’t stick with Shanta,” Rosa said. “It’s a fine name.”

Shanta asked him what it was like being in the club. He rested his foot on a step. He liked feeling older, an eleventh grader. “It’s not always great, I’ll tell you that much. Where do you live?” he asked Rosa.

“Top of Chambers.”

“I live at the bottom of Chambers, way on the other end of Shepherd’s. It’s a temporary place till we find a house to buy.”

He asked if he could call her sometime.

“Give me a pencil,” Rosa told her friend, sounding urgent, and Shanta gave her a candy cane pen. Rosa moved the tip of the pen on the inside of a bubble gum wrapper.

“The ink won’t stick,” Rosa said. “Do you have something?”

He stood with them under the porch roof and opened his wallet. Slipped into a card holder was a picture of his sister, Lila, two years earlier, at fourteen. He hesitated to let her write on the photo, but it was the only thing he had. Rosa’s brow tensed at the photograph.

“It’s my sister,” he said, and Rosa smiled. He held the picture facedown on his wallet while she wrote her name and number on the back. He placed the photo back in the card holder, with the name Rosa showing.

He told her he would call her the next day. He left the trees and walked Shepherd’s Boulevard three blocks to a bus stop shelter. When the bus picked him up, the ceiling lights came on and it surged ahead as he walked to the back, casting a rectangle of light across a brick building. In the reflection in the bus windows he looked like a seated soldier on a train. When the bus darkened again, the stark image vanished, leaving his dim ghost. He took out the photo and read the number, then flipped it to see his sister. Lila’s hair was curled and she wore a pink sweater. Her tightened left eye gave a look of mischief to her smile. Again the ceiling lights flared when a passenger stepped on. He leaned into the photo: Rosa had pressed the pen too hard. The lines gave the appearance of a worm looping in her right cheek and forehead beneath the skin. He dragged his fingernails down one side of his head and returned the photo to his wallet.

After Lila had stopped her own breath in the river two months earlier, in the mountains, an elder at River Baptist Church told his big brother, Craig, that she had sullied the congregation, by choosing her time, by departing unsaved. It was too much dirt for good people to sift. The kids of churchgoers said Lila was a whore, a witch, and a vandal. She did like to blow things up, but nothing big—mail boxes, air conditioners, exhaust pipes. A lot of kids in Marshal played with pipe bombs. The elder said the family could return to the church later, in a year or two, when time and prayer had washed them through. He assured Craig that the congregation loved them. He suffered every time they had to cut a family off the vine. That evening, Craig announced to Lyle that Lila’s name would go unspoken. “She brought hell into our home, as a test for us,” he said. “Now God wants us to move on.”

The bus stopped across the boulevard from Lyle’s apartment, and he got out. An exposed bulb near the roof of the building showed the orange letters Knights in Arms. Gutters were broken at the joints, and a curtain of rainwater poured through a shopping cart in the stairwell entrance. He and his brother and mom had moved to Eugene into this second-floor apartment a couple of weeks before. He didn’t mind the building. It was better than living in the woods.

Inside at the table, where they had been waiting for him, his mom set down two oven dishes of baked deviled eggs. Craig sat nodding at the food, smiling at her when she got glasses for milk. He’d bought the smoked glass table a week earlier at Walmart. After shopping for groceries, Lyle and Craig had separated to look for her. Lyle found her in the garden department sliding her hand across the glass table, wet-eyed over its beauty, whispering as if to the birds etched into the top of it, frozen in flight.

In her teddy bear nightgown she carried a glass of milk full to the rim. Craig accepted it with two hands, sipping. She didn’t used to take short steps and speak quietly. Before the girl’s passing, she wore western shirts and moved with a mountain swagger. For newcomers she exaggerated her country accent. Barb Rettew. Born here and raised up ranch-style, fourth generation—who the hell are you?

The kitchen air hung thick with the smell of eggs. The three of them joined hands, Craig squinting shut his eyes. When he spoke the words table, and bread, and family, a strange whimper slipped from his throat. It scalded Lyle that his brother was choked up, when it was he who forbade mention of Lila’s name. Lyle leaked air through his teeth, knowing it sounded nasty, and laughed. Craig raised his prayer voice but otherwise ignored him.

The back of his mom’s chair touched the sliding glass door that led to the deck. When rain tapped the glass, she swerved anxious eyes over her shoulder. From her countertop radio a gospel song issued. Her face hardened while she ate. She whispered a few unintelligible complaints before her eyes rested on Lyle.

“You wearing that Halloween costume tomorrow, too?” she asked him. “You look like you’re trying out for the devil contest.”

“There’s no devil contest.”

“There certainly is.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about it.”

Before him on the table a rosy-cheeked porcelain dairymaid offered a basket of toothpicks. He turned his last egg facedown onto its yellow and stuck toothpicks along the white center like a spine.

“Half the people in this town look like devils,” his mom said. She lifted her glass shakily and put it down without drinking any. For a moment she made a crying face, but there were no tears. Craig cut her egg with her fork, stabbed a piece of it, and she took the bite. His feeding seemed to calm her.

“Good people everywhere,” Craig said. “Even some of these hippies are nice folks, once you have a conversation with them.”

She brightened. “Listen to me complaining. I’m sorry.”

“You’re fine. You’re doing great. Isn’t she, Lyle?”

“Sure.”

“They gave her two more shifts at work. Isn’t that nice?”

Lyle nodded.

“Well, say so. Come on, participate in the conversation here. Isn’t it nice?”

“Yeah, it’s nice, Mom. Good job.”

Craig worked in quality control at a vegetable processing plant—after casting resumes all over the Northwest. He got their mom a job, too. Her first day was tomorrow.

“We’ll like the mountains all the more for being gone a year,” Craig said. “Save up some money, keep busy … we’ll get back there.”

She stroked her glass tenderly. When Craig saw that his brother had gotten no milk he poured him a glass.

“I don’t see why we came here,” Lyle said, “if we didn’t plan to stay. I sort of like Eugene.”

“That’s enough talk, buddy. Finish your eggs.”

“Had four already.”

“Eat the last one, and drink your milk.” He snapped his fingers. “Don’t make faces. Lift that glass. Drink it up.”

“What else about home, honey?” she said.

Craig soothed her with plans they had gone over before. He would build a house on the Salmon River near White Bird Hill, where her great-grandfather had homesteaded, down canyon from Marshal but close enough to attend River Baptist, once they were accepted back into the fold. The brothers would each grab hold of a church gal and have a mess of Rettews.

Lyle’s milk went down wrong and he spluttered. His brother poured himself another glass and took his chair. He had a few glasses a day and thought everybody should. At fifteen, Lila had quit milk to spite him. “Fuck milk,” she had said quietly at the table once, in front of their mom. Rattled after hearing the F-word, Craig tried to force the milk into her, most of it spilling down her faded Christian Rock Rules T-shirt. Half of Craig and Lila’s fights had begun with milk.

Lyle was coughing hard now. His hacking rang on the walls.

“Boy can’t even drink his milk,” his mom said.

When his chest settled, he touched a finger to the spine of his egg, tapping the sharp toothpick points as he spoke.

“There’s some people who don’t like milk,” he said. “You have to make them drink it. It’s funny, everybody likes ice cream, but how come some people don’t like milk?”

She drew her hand into a tight fist over her mouth.

“That’s plenty out of you,” Craig told him.

“What did I say?”

“Keep quiet. What’s got into you?”

“I won’t ever mention ice cream again. Tricky subject around here.”

“You done fussing?” Craig pulled his tired eyes off of him.

Their mom unfolded her paper napkin and covered the uneaten food on her plate. On the radio a choir was singing. When the music ended, she brushed roughly at her lap as if the voices had settled there. Lyle hadn’t wanted to cause trouble, but they were so touchy about what a person could say.

Craig set their plates in the sink and found her sedatives in the cupboard, she took the pill with her milk, and he got his brother’s pills and offered him one. Lyle didn’t cup his hand to receive it, so Craig placed it on the table so that it rested in one of the birds’ heads in the glass.

“I only take one pill anymore,” Lyle said. “Took it this morning.”

“Now you’re taking two.”

“No, just one now. I didn’t say anything wrong.”

Craig showed him two fingers in the air.

“Dad never would have taken any medication,” Lyle said.

“Maybe he should have.”

“I’ll take it if I can see one of the photo albums.”

“Nope. Told you already.”

“Can I see some pictures of Dad?”

His brother didn’t speak, but Lyle figured he knew what the answer would be. Most of the photographs of his dad had Lila in them, so they were off limits too. But his brother and mom had never wanted to talk about his dad, either. Maybe anyone dead was off limits.

“I can’t see any pictures, then,” Lyle said. “Not one.”

“Quit talking, and take your pill.”

“I didn’t say her name.”

Craig’s mouth twitched. “I said I heard all the talk I want to hear. Take the pill, right now.”

Lyle tucked the pill beneath the spiny egg on his plate. His brother flipped the egg over, with the pill stuck in its yolk—a sick, downward-looking eye—removed the plate, and dropped the pill on the cloth placemat printed in tiny runaway stagecoaches.

Lyle set the pill on his tongue and sipped milk. In the living room, he fell back on the couch, spat the pill into his hand, and dropped it between two cushions. Then he worked the remote through the channels. After watching part of a show where people competed by eating bananas, he turned to a special about high school cheerleading squads. A girl fell from a pyramid of cheerleaders and two of them caught her before she hit the floor. Another falling girl was caught. It was only beautiful kids who people mourned. When one of them died the way his sister did, everyone came out with tears and good words. In fact, they kept talking for weeks and wouldn’t shut up. It was okay to talk about the pretty ones—it was even a pleasure. Everybody wanted a piece of a death like that.

The teapot made a banshee noise. Craig and his mom rattled spoons in their cups of instant coffee. They were talking low-voiced beneath the gospel music and TV. Lyle heard snatches of their conversation. He heard her say, “Pray that boy doesn’t go crazy on us next,” and, “He ain’t a bad one clear through. He has his merit points.”

His eyes pinched when she said he wasn’t bad. When she was soft, he loved her in a way he couldn’t at other times. But her softness angered him, too, because he disliked it that he cared. For a moment he wanted to tell her that he wished he could do what she wanted him to. Back when he was in youth group, in the mountains—before he “set Jesus on the shelf,” as she put it—she had been warm toward him, and he had been part of things.

That night he left the apartment after his brother and mom went to bed. His night legs were coming into him, and he had a fierce need to run. The air smelled of wet dirt, as if the ground nearby had been freshly turned. Flying rain stung his face. He loped along the tracks downtown, holding his folded, sharp-pointed umbrella in one hand. The tracks rose onto an embankment, and he walked on the ties, between window ledges close enough to leap onto. In one building, a man made rows of bread dough on a table, tattoos of red ropes looping his arms, a stiff cone of beard. The man sang with the stereo, and Lyle heard the edges of his furious song. A few minutes later, in a phone booth outside of the A&W, he searched his pockets for change, then turned over his sister’s photograph, smelled the peppermint ink from the candy cane pen, and dialed the number.

The woman who picked up wanted to know who this was and what he wanted. When he heard himself breathing into the phone, he moved the mouthpiece to his chin, wanting to explain that he was one of the good kids—from the mountains, raised Christian. A Mexican mother would like hearing that.

She asked again who he was and he told her his name.

“Liar?” she said. “This is Liar?”

He corrected her, and she pronounced his name as if the word was hard to get her mouth around: “Li-ar,” she said.

“No. Lyle. Lyle.”

Rosa got on the phone. “Can you come out?” he said.

“It’s too late,” she whispered. “Usually my parents are asleep by now, but they’re letting my little sister stay up and watch this stupid movie. Can you meet me tomorrow night? I have ballet in the afternoon, but we could meet at Levi’s at ten, if that’s not too late. Good. My parents usually go to sleep at nine thirty.”

“You’re up on Chambers? What’s your last name?”

“Larios,” she said. “What’s your number?”

He gave it to her and asked what grade she was in. “Ninth,” she said—two years younger, but she seemed his age. When he hung up he found the name in the phone book, matching the number with the address, 87 Skyline.

He walked the two miles of boulevard from downtown and tramped up Chambers. The streetlights tapered in the distance above, where the road met sky. As he crested the hill, he unbuttoned his jacket for the wind to cool him and turned onto Skyline. Houses rested on stilts. He glimpsed the city in the spaces between them.

At Rosa’s house, he stepped along a raised walkway to the back deck. The city spread shimmering below him. In the first window he saw Rosa, cross-legged on her bed in a bathrobe, reading a book in her lap. When she turned to lift a mug from the night table, her robe, tied at the waist, pulled against her body. As she read she made expressions of frustration and disgust. Stuffed animals lay at her headboard. A poster of black-haired men hung on the wall above. The Cure. He had never heard of them. She reached the book to the floor—a man on the cover fitted a ring onto a woman’s finger—and turned off the light; he ducked and leaned against the wall for a moment.

He crept along the railing and saw the family in the living room. He crouched down. City lights quaked like outlying fires in the sliding glass window. They probably couldn’t see him past their own reflections. A five-year-old girl jumped on a small trampoline. Mr. Larios lay sleeping on the couch in a tie and glasses, frowning, his arms pressed to his chest as if he were holding onto something tightly in his dream. His wife, a bulky woman with a large brown face, sat on the carpet before a stack of files. The little girl spoke words Lyle couldn’t hear. Mrs. Larios tapped a finger to her lips to shush the girl. When the girl spoke again, Mr. Larios opened his eyes. “Why can’t you shut her up!” he yelled. He sat up and bowed his head into his hands, then smoothed his hair. From the coffee table he lifted a glass, gold liquid in the bottom of it, and drank. Mrs. Larios spoke to him, looking apologetic. He drained his glass and went into the kitchen.

When the little girl screamed, Mrs. Larios got up, saw where her daughter was pointing, and shrieked at Lyle. He rushed off the slippery deck, nearly falling twice, and ran to the road. A little girl’s bike with training wheels lay on the sidewalk. He swung himself onto the pink seat and pushed forward. When the woman burst out of her front door shouting, “Go look in your own weendow!” he peddled faster, his knees jerking awkwardly. He glided onto the steep main road and raced down the hill. The city lights through the trees shook with his kicking heart.

By the time the ground flattened, his head was ringing numb with cold, his inner ears aching. He was worried they might have called the police, and stopped a half block before the boulevard, where a chain-link fence looked over the slough by his apartment building. He heaved the bike into the air and it crashed into the water. He touched the railing. A handlebar and its sparkling red tassel reached above the surface. He giggled. The mood was starting in him. He had been spitting out the lithium for days. The deadening stuff was leaking out of him. Anytime that he or his sister got keyed up or excited about anything, his mom and brother called it a mental “event.” But he would let it happen this time. Anyway, he could handle it. The mood came and went throughout the day. All that most people noticed was that he was in a sharp, giddy state.

He jogged to the apartment and went in. It was chilly. It always smelled vaguely of beets and carrots, especially now with the dinner smells settled. His brother’s rubber boots stood at one end of the couch. Lyle placed them on the deck. Facing the slough below, the boots seemed to belong to some invisible man, standing there musing.

In his bedroom he removed three of his sister’s pipe bombs from under his mattress, and the thin roll of duct tape she used. He placed the pipes in the inside pocket of his jacket, where they fit snugly—the three of them somehow humorous, like joke cigars—the duct tape going into one of the jacket’s large waist pockets.

His mom yelled from her bedroom across the hall, and he walked over to check on her. She lay on her side, with her head bent toward her raised knees, mumbling. “Mom, are you asleep?” he whispered. “Mom.” Two night-lights burned. On the bedside table, the windowsill, and the small bookcase, glass angels were arranged in vigilant flocks. They flickered in the blue light, seeming to stir, as if alerted to his presence.

He went back to his room and hung his jacket in the closet, then waited unsleeping through the hours. As the wild mood rose in him, the need for rest would lessen even more in the coming days. All he wanted was to get through the school day and find his way back to the night.

The next afternoon he hurried home along the boulevard, weaving through traffic in the rain a couple of times, tracking cars over his shoulder, veering one way and the other, forcing them to brake and observe him. He skipped to the sidewalk and slowed to a walk in front of the new brick library. An enormous window gleamed back winter trees, a dark sky, and kids who stood in circles, many of them yelling, screaming, laughing. They were a few years younger than he was. He passed between them and stood on the corner watching, to see what they were about.

Some of them had seen him running in the street, holding up traffic. A green-haired boy, smaller than the rest, dashed into the road. The kid screamed at passing cars. When a car stopped, he paced in front of the bumper, gripping his head, hoarsening his voice. Then a girl with piercings in her face shot into the street and strained her voice to its limit. Soon all of the kids swarmed into traffic, bellowing at the dim, melting figures behind the rain-slashed car windows. Cars were backing up to the previous block.

As spinning lights flashed on the wet road—a police car had nosed into traffic—the kids fled on foot, skateboards, and bikes, and traffic continued. The cop drove away, pursuing none of them, as if used to the mayhem of children.

Lyle crossed to the next block, where a scooter slowed beside him. It was Martin. “Let’s go over there where it’s dry.” He pointed to the stucco building across the street, and they crossed and went under the carport shelter where Martin sat on his idling scooter, the motor hacking, exhaust gassing the air around him. The sign in the window of the building advertised a book and game store. Martin shook the rain off his baseball cap. Although Lyle was soaked through, he felt warm after running. He was glad he’d left the apartment in just a T-shirt that morning because he’d forgotten his umbrella too, and his army jacket would have gotten wet.

“Those kids are nuts,” Lyle said.

“They’re a sad bunch. Some of them are meth freaks.”

“That cop didn’t even do anything.”

“Sometimes they bust them, but mostly they just scatter them. Any single one of them could die, right now, and nobody would care. Some of those girls are barely out of seventh grade and already they’ve had fifteen guys or more. No kidding. Their mothers should be in jail. Permissive hippy women are the top killers of the Northwest. Forget serial killers.”

A shiver took Martin and his elbow jerked. He examined his arms as though waiting to see his body’s next involuntary movement. Although he was tense with something, he looked pleased, awake. Some of the roughness of the previous day had gone out of him.

“Do you have any interest in getting terribly hazy and gone?” Martin said.

Lyle was unsure what the question was.

“Tonight,” said Martin.

It was Friday. “Sure.”

“I just stole a bottle of Schnapps.” He brought out a Hostess cherry pie. “You can have some if you come out later.”

“You steal booze? Ever been caught?”

“No. But Devon has, on his first try. A few of us steal booze from the Sleeping Man—he runs the Superette, by Levi’s. An old lady saw him take it. She followed him to the café and told his dad.” He snatched a bite and chewed. “Devon’s changing his name to Devonian. Did you hear about that? Idiot.”

Lyle had mulled over Devon’s rudeness at Levi’s—after he’d apologized for laughing at his sister, after he tried to make friends. It surprised him that Martin turned out to be the friendly one.

Martin examined the teeth marks on his pie. “Devon’s birthday is next week. When I was upset last night, I was planning a little party for him and his dad. A surprise party. You know, like, how about I ruin your life? How about I twist your cerebral cortex a hundred and eighty degrees? But I see it differently now. All I want to do is right a wrong.”

“What are you planning?”

“Something entirely moral. Unlike Levi, I actually care about real morals, not about following rules. But I’m not going to talk about it till it’s dead, or threaten to do it. This time I’m going to do it, very calm, very cool. Ever been to the graveyard past the university, up on that hill? There’s a big problem up there right now.” He bowed his head. “I’m not talking about it—I forgot.”

Lyle was chilly. He needed to get running again. “I’d like to hear about it later.”

Martin threw the half-eaten pie skittering in its package across the road. His scooter was dying, and he revved it. “Ever feel like going just all-out wild?”

Lyle grinned.

“I’m not kidding, I mean full force Napoleonic,” Martin said. “Just for the hell of it. Let’s meet at the square with all the statues, at seven thirty. Two blocks down from here.”

A troll figurine was mounted on Martin’s headlamp, its tiny arms raised and its rubber beard “blowing” over its shoulder. The troll was spray-painted white, although specks of its original black showed through.