Although Bradley was sure he could, he folded his hands on his blank legal pad and said, "Why don't you tell me anyway?"
6
I declined the part of Harold Hill and dropped out of Drama Club. I had lost my taste for acting. During my final year at Pitt, I concentrated on my business classes, especially accounting, and Carla Winston. The year I graduated, we were married. My father was my best man. He died three years later.
One of the mines he was responsible for was in the town of Louisa. That's a little south of Ironville, where he still lived with Nona McCarthy--Mama Nonie--as his "housekeeper." The mine was called Fair Deep. One day there was a rockfall in its second parlor, which was about two hundred feet down. Not serious, everyone got out fine, but my father went down with a couple of company guys from the front office to look at the damage and try to figure out how long it would take to get things up and running again. He never came out. None of them did.
That boy keeps calling, Nonie said later. She had always been a pretty woman, but in the year after my father died, she bloomed out in wrinkles and dewlaps. Her walk turned into a shuffle, and she hunched her shoulders whenever anyone came into the room, as if she expected to be struck. It wasn't my father's death that did it to her; it was the bad little kid.
He keeps calling. He calls me a nigger bitch, but I don't mind that. I been called worse. That kind of thing rolls right off my back. What doesn't is him saying it happened because of the present I gave your father. Those boots. That can't be true, can it, Georgie? It had to've been something else. He had to've been wearing his felts. He never would have forgotten his felts after a mine accident, even one that didn't seem serious.
I agreed, but I could see the doubt eating into her like acid.
The boots were Trailman Specials. She gave them to him for his birthday not two months before the explosion in Fair Deep. They must have set her back at least three hundred dollars, but they were worth every penny. Knee high, leather as supple as silk, but tough. They were the kind of boots a man could wear all his life and then pass on to his son. Hobnail boots, you understand, and nails like that can strike sparks on the right surface, just like flint on steel.
My dad never would have worn nailboots into a mine where there might be methane or firedamp, and don't tell me he could have just forgot, not when he and those other two were toting respirators on their hips and wearing oxygen bottles on their backs. Even if he had been wearing the Specials, Mama Nonie was right--he would also have been wearing felts over them. She didn't need me to tell her; she knew how careful he was. But even the craziest idea can work its way into your mind if you're lonely and grief-stricken and someone keeps harping on it. It can wriggle in there like a bloodworm, and lay its eggs, and pretty soon your whole brain is squirming with maggots.
I told her to change her phone number, and she did, but the kid got the new one and kept calling, telling her my father had forgotten what he had on his feet and one of those hobnails struck a spark, and there went the old ballgame.
Never would have happened if you hadn't given him those boots, you stupid black bitch. That's the kind of thing he said, and probably worse that she wouldn't tell me.
Finally she had the phone taken out altogether. I told her she had to have a phone, living by herself like she did, but she wouldn't hear of it. She said, Sometimes he calls in the middle of the night, Georgie. You don't know how it is, lying awake and listening to the telephone ring and knowing it's that child. What kind of parents he has to let him do such things I can't imagine.
Unplug it at night, I said.
She said, I did. But sometimes it rings anyway.
I told her that was just her imagination. And I tried to believe it, but I never did, Mr. Bradley. If that bad kid could get hold of Marlee's Steve Austin lunchbox, and know how badly Vicky messed up her tryout, and about the Trailman Specials--if he could stay young, year after year--then sure, he could make a phone ring even if it was unplugged. Bible says the devil was set free to roam the earth, that God's hand would not stay him. I don't know if that bad little kid was the devil, but I know he was a devil.
Nor do I know if an ambulance call could have saved Mama Nonie. All I know is that when she had her heart attack, she couldn't call for one because the phone was gone. She died alone, in her kitchen. A neighbor lady found her the next day.
Carla and I went to the funeral, and after Nonie was laid to rest, we spent the night in the house she and my father had shared. I woke up from a bad dream just before daybreak and couldn't get back to sleep. When I heard the newspaper flop on the porch, I went to get it and saw the flag was up on the mailbox. I walked down to the street in my robe and slippers and opened it. Inside there was a beanie with a plastic propeller on top. I fished it out and it was hot, like the person who'd just taken it off was burning up with fever. Touching it made me feel contaminated, but I turned it over and looked inside. It was greasy with some sort of hair oil, the old-fashioned stuff hardly anyone uses anymore. There were a few orangey hairs sticking in it. There was also a note, printed the way a kid might do it--the letters all crooked and slanting downhill. The note said, KEEP IT, I HAVE ANOTHER ONE.
I took the goddam thing inside--tweezed between my thumb and index finger, that was as much as I wanted to touch it--and stuck it in the kitchen woodstove. I put a match to it and it went up all at once: ka-floomp. The flames were greenish. When Carla came down half an hour later, she sniffed and said, What's that awful smell? It's like low tide!
I told her it was most likely the septic tank out back, full up and needing to be pumped, but I knew better. That was the stink of methane, probably the last thing my father smelled before something sparked and blew him and those two others to kingdom come.
By then I had a job with an accounting firm--one of the biggest independents in the Midwest--and I worked my way up the ladder pretty quickly. I find that if you come in early, leave late, and keep your eye on the ball in between, that just about has to happen. Carla and I wanted kids, and we could afford them, but it didn't happen; she got her visit from the cardinal every month, just as regular as clockwork. We went to see an OB in Topeka, and he did all the usual tests. He said we were fine, and it was too early to talk about fertility treatments. He told us to go home, relax, and enjoy our sex life.
So that's what we did, and eleven months later, my wife's visits from the cardinal stopped. She had been raised Catholic, and stopped going to church when she was in college, but when she knew for sure she was pregnant, she started going again and dragged me with her. We went to St. Andrew's. I didn't mind. If she wanted to give God the credit for the bun in her oven, that was okay with me.
She was in her sixth month when the miscarriage happened. Because of the accident that wasn't really an accident. The baby lived for a few hours, then died. It was a girl. Because she needed a name, we named her Helen, after Carla's grandmother.
The accident happened after church. When mass was over, we were going to have a nice lunch downtown, then go home, where I'd watch the football game. Carla would put her feet up and rest and enjoy being pregnant. She did enjoy it, Mr. Bradley. Every day of it, even early on when she was sick in the mornings.
I saw the bad little kid as soon as we came out. Same baggy shorts, same sweater, same little round boy-tits and poochy belly. The beanie I found in the mailbox was blue, and the one he was wearing when we came out of the church was green, but it had the same kind of plastic propeller. I'd grown from a little boy to a man with the first threads of gray in his hair, but that bad little kid was still six years old. Seven at most.
He was standing back a little way. There was another kid in front of him. An ordinary kid, the kind who would grow up. He looked stunned and afraid. He had something in his hand. It looked like the ball on the end of the Bolo Bouncer Mama Nonie gave me all those years ago.
Go on, the bad little kid said. Unless you want me to take back that five bucks I gave you.
I don't want to, t
he ordinary kid said. I done changed my mind.
Carla didn't see any of this. She was standing at the top of the steps and talking to Father Patrick, telling him she'd enjoyed his homily, it had given her so much to think about. Those steps were granite, and they were steep.
I went to take her arm, I think, but maybe not. Maybe I was just frozen, the way I was when Vicky and I saw that kid after her lousy tryout for The Music Man. Before I could unfreeze, or say anything, the bad little kid stepped forward. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and whipped out a cigarette lighter. As soon as he flicked it and I saw the spark, I knew what had happened that day in the Fair Deep mine, and it had nothing to do with the hobnails on my father's boots. Something started to fizz and spark on top of the red ball the ordinary kid was holding. He threw it just to get rid of it, and the bad little kid laughed. Except it was really a deep, snotty chuckle--hgurr-hgurr-hgurr, like that.
It struck the side of the steps, below the iron railing, and bounced back just before it went off with an ear-splitting bang and a flash of yellow light. That wasn't a firecracker or even a cherry bomb. That was an M-80. It startled Carla the way Carla herself must have startled Vicky that day in the box room at Fudgy Acres. I grabbed for her, but she was holding one of Father Patrick's hands in both of hers, and all I did was brush her elbow. They fell down the steps together. He broke his right arm and left leg. Carla broke an ankle and got a concussion. And she lost the baby. She lost Helen.
The kid who actually threw the M-80 walked into the police station the next day with his mother and owned up. He was devastated, of course, and said what kids always say and mostly mean after something goes wrong: it was an accident, he hadn't meant to hurt anyone. He said he wouldn't have thrown it at all, except the other boy lit the fuse and he was scared he'd lose his fingers. No, he said, he'd never seen the other kid before. No, he didn't know his name. Then he gave the policeman the five dollars the bad little kid had given him.
Carla didn't want to have much to do with me in the bedroom after that, and she stopped going to church. I kept on, though, and got involved with Conquest. You know what that is, Mr. Bradley, not because you're a Catholic, but because this is where you came in. I didn't bother with the religion part, they had Father Patrick for that, but I was happy to coach the baseball and touch football teams. I was always there for the cookouts and the campouts; I got a D code on my driver's license so I could take the boys to swim meets, amusement park fun days, and teen retreats in the church bus. And I always carried a gun. The .45 I bought at Wise Pawn and Loan--you know, the prosecution's Exhibit A. I carried that gun for five years, either in the glove compartment of my car, or in the toolbox of the Conquest bus. When I was coaching, I carried it in my gym bag.
Carla came to dislike my work with Conquest, because it took up so much of my free time. When Father Patrick asked for volunteers, I was always the first one to raise my hand. I'd have to say she was jealous. You're almost never home on weekends anymore, she said. I'm starting to wonder if you might be a little queer for those boys.
Probably I did seem a little queer, because I made a habit of picking out special boys and giving them extra attention. Making friends with them, helping them out. It wasn't hard. A lot of them came from low-income homes. Usually the single parent in those homes was a mom who had to work one minimum-wage job or even two or three to keep food on the table. If there was a car, she'd need it, so I'd be happy to pick my current special boy up for the Thursday-night Conquest meetings and bring him home again after. If I couldn't do that, I'd give the boys bus tokens. Never money, though--I found out early that giving those kids money was a bad idea.
I had some successes along the way. One kid--I think he had maybe two pairs of pants and three shirts to his name when I met him--was a math prodigy. I got him a scholarship at a private school and now he's a freshman at Kansas State, riding a full boat. A couple of others were dabbling in drugs, and I got at least one of them out of that. I think. You can never tell for sure. Another ran away after an argument with his mom and called me from Omaha a month later, right around the time his mother was deciding he was either dead or gone for good. I went and got him.
Working with those Conquest boys gave me a chance to do more good than I ever did filing tax returns and setting up tax-dodge corporations in Delaware. But that wasn't why I was doing it, only a side effect. Sometimes, Mr. Bradley, I'd take one of my special boys fishing out to Dixon Creek, or to the big river, on the lower city bridge. I was fishing, too, but not for trout or carp. For a long time I didn't feel a single nibble on my line. Then along came Ronald Gibson.
Ronnie was fifteen but looked younger. He was blind in one eye, so he couldn't play baseball or football, but he was a whiz at chess and all the other board games the boys played on rainy days. No one bullied him; he was sort of the group mascot. His father walked out on the family when he was nine or so, and he was starved for male attention. Pretty soon he was coming to me with all his problems. The main one, of course, was that bad eye. It was a congenital defect called a keratoconus--a misshapen cornea. A doctor told his mother it could be fixed with a corneal transplant, but it would be expensive, and his moms couldn't afford anything like that.
I went to Father Patrick, and between us we ran half a dozen fundraisers called Fresh Sight for Ronnie. We even got on TV--the local news on Channel 4. There was one shot of Ronnie and me walking in Barnum Park with my arm around his thin shoulders. Carla sniffed when she saw it. If you aren't queer for them, she said, people will say you are when they see that.
I didn't care what people said, because not long after that news report, I got the first tug on my line. Right in the middle of my head. It was the bad little kid. I'd finally caught his attention. I could feel him.
Ronnie had the surgery. He didn't get all the sight back in his bad eye, but he got most of it. For the first year afterward, he was supposed to wear special glasses that got dark in bright sunshine, but he didn't mind that; he said they made him look sort of cool.
Not too long after the operation, he and his mother came to see me one afternoon after school in the little Conquest office in the basement of St. Andrew's. She said, If there's ever anything we can do to pay you back, Mr. Hallas, all you have to do is ask.
I told them that wasn't necessary, it had been my pleasure. Then I pretended to get an idea.
There might be something, I said. Just a little thing.
What is it, Mr. H? Ronnie asked.
I said, One day last month I parked behind the church, and was halfway down the stairs when I remembered I hadn't locked up my car. I went back and saw a kid inside it, rummaging around. I shouted at him and he was out like a shot with my little change box, the one I keep in the glove compartment for tolls. I chased him, but he was too fast for me.
All I want, I told Ronnie and his moms, is to find him and talk to him. Tell him what I tell all you boys--stealing's the wrong start in life.
Ronnie asked me what he looked like.
Short and kind of pudgy, I said. Bright orange hair, a real carrottop. When I saw him, he was wearing gray shorts and a green sweater with stripes the same color as his hair.
Mrs. Gibson said, Oh my goodness. Was he wearing a little hat with a propeller on top?
Why, yes, I said, keeping my voice nice and steady. Now that you mention it, I believe he was.
I've seen him across the street, she said. I thought he moved into one of the projects over there.
What about you, Ronnie? I asked.
Nope, he said. Never seen him.
Well, if you do, don't say anything to him. Just come and get me. Will you do that?
He said he would, and I was satisfied. Because I knew the bad kid was back, and I knew I'd be around when he made his move. He'd want me to be around, because that was the whole point. I was the one he wanted to hurt. All the others--Marlee, Vicky, my father, Mama Nonie--were just collateral damage.
A week went past, then two. I was b
eginning to think the kid had sensed what I was planning. Then one day--the day, Mr. Bradley--one of the boys ran into the playground behind the church, where I was helping a bunch of them set up the volleyball net.
A kid knocked Ronnie down and stoled his glasses! this boy shouted. Then he ran off into the park! Ronnie's chasing him!
I didn't wait, just grabbed up my gym bag--I took it everywhere with me during the years when I had special boys--and ran through the gate into Barnum Park. I knew it wasn't the bad little kid who stole Ronnie's glasses; that wasn't his style. The glasses stealer would be as ordinary as the M-80 thrower, and just as sorry after whatever the bad little kid was planning played out. If I let it play out.
Ronnie wasn't an athletic boy, and he couldn't run fast. The glasses-stealing boy must have seen that, because he pulled up short on the far side of the park, waving them over his head and shouting, Come and get em, Ray Charles! Come and get em, Stevie Wonder!
I could hear the traffic on Barnum Boulevard, and knew exactly what that bad boy was planning. He thought what worked once would work again. It was a pair of special glare-reducing glasses instead of a Steve Austin lunchbox, but the basic idea was the same. Later the kid who took Ronnie's glasses would cry and say he didn't know what was going to happen, he thought it was just a joke, or a tease, or maybe payback for Ronnie pushing the pudgy little carrottop down on the sidewalk.
I could easily have caught up with Ronnie, but at first I didn't. He was my lure, you see, and the last thing I wanted was to reel him in too soon. When Ronnie got close, the boy doing the bad little kid's dirty work darted through the stone arch between the park and Barnum Boulevard, still waving Ronnie's glasses over his head. Ronnie ran after him and I came third. I jogged as I unzipped my gym bag, but once I had the revolver in my hand, I dropped the bag and went into overdrive.
Stay back! I shouted at Ronnie as I ran past him. Don't you go one step further!