“Sure,” Lance said. “I could sure go for a funnel cake right now.”
He closed his bedroom door.
Lance awakened just after seven on Wednesday morning, and the moment he opened his eyes, he felt it. The feeling, the instinct, the verification. It was going to happen today.
They would come for him. He was certain.
The Hillston Sporting Authority was always closed on the day Centerfest was held. “No point,” Nick Silverthorne always said. “Half the people who come in off the street just want to use the bathroom, and the other half just want to get out of the sun for a bit. Nobody comes to buy anything. Might as well keep the doors locked and enjoy the day. I do love a good fried Twinkie.”
Lance hadn’t disagreed.
He dressed and found his mother in the kitchen, much like he did most mornings, and when she turned to look at him, he felt another wave of grief, an unexpected sadness.
Pamela handed him a mug of coffee. “Today?”
Lance nodded.
“But you don’t know what?”
Lance shook his head.
Pamela smiled. “Well, we won’t let that ruin the day, now will we?”
And that’s when Lance felt something different: a fresh, warm blanket of happiness and love. He looked at his mother and marveled at her resilience and optimism. Her faith in him—his abilities—was absolute. Her belief that he was walking a predetermined path was unwavering. Whatever happened today was supposed to happen, and it would not be Lance’s last challenge. That was the way she saw it, and nothing was going to change her mind.
Lance sat at the table. I’ll fight. I’ll give everything I have because I can’t let this woman down.
The hours ticked by slowly, and Lance spent most of them in his room, trying to shake the oddest of feelings, an annoying drip at the base of his brain that was telling him to take a good look around, because he’d never see this place again.
He’d prove the drip wrong. He’d prove it all wrong.
But when his mother told him she wanted to leave in a half hour’s time, Lance couldn’t help but feel like a death-row inmate who’d just been told he’d be taking his last walk very soon. No matter how hard he told himself otherwise.
I’ll be back here tonight, he told himself. Whatever happens, it’ll be okay.
But it never hurt to be prepared.
Before he left his bedroom and met his mother at the front door, he did two things.
One, he called Marcus Johnston—now the mayor—whose number he’d had memorized since he was ten years old, and told him to expect a call tonight, because Lance might need help. The mayor pressed for more, but Lance gave him nothing else. Because honestly, what he could he say?
And two, he grabbed his backpack from the floor by his closet, tossed in a few items, and slung it over his shoulder.
Then he met his mother in the living room, and they both headed out the door for the last time.
They walked together down their street, already able to hear the low murmur of noises coming from town. A cacophony of far-off voices. An indeterminable genre of music being played through powerful speakers.
The air was cool as the sun began to set behind the horizon. Breezy. Lance felt goose pimples along his arms and watched his mother pull the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands. She didn’t question his backpack. Didn’t say a word until they got closer to the actual event. They continued on, silently, and as Lance looked around at his surroundings, seeing houses and landmarks and trees he’d observed his entire life, the silence between him and his mother seemed to say it all. “This has been our life together,” it said. “And it’s been wonderful.”
But tonight, it might very well come to an end.
These heavy thoughts weighed Lance down as they walked. The burden he’d carried with him since he’d been born suddenly seemed to take on more heft than ever. Lance didn’t subscribe to any particular organized religion, but he’d read the Bible. As they walked and Lance contemplated the events which might be about to come, he thought about the story of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane the night of his capture. What must it have been like, knowing, waiting? Ripe with the knowledge that only you could perform what needed to be done, whatever that may be.
After Jesus, he thought of Aslan, the great lion in Narnia, who’d so willingly and confidently strolled through the White Witch’s mocking crowd, head held high as he arrived to sacrifice himself.
Am I that brave? Lance asked himself. Am I at all worthy of these gifts?
The voices and the music got suddenly louder and Lance came back from his thoughts and found that they were standing at the end of Church Street. The block or two of Church that was dedicated to Centerfest was full of people. They milled about from craft tent to craft tent, from booth to booth. Ahead, Lance could just make out a glimpse of Main Street, running perpendicular to Church. Main Street was the main artery of Hillston, and thus Centerfest. Plumes of smoke and steam rose over the roofs of the buildings, and his stomach, despite the situation, grumbled with hunger.
There was no way his mother could have heard his stomach, but as if on cue, she reached out and touched his arm, saying, “Before anything else, let’s get you that funnel cake.”
She smiled at him, and Lance was again hit with an overwhelming urge to convince her to leave with him for a while, to leave whatever was about to happen in Hillston for somebody else to deal with.
But of course, there was nobody else. And Pamela was already making her way through the crowd, headed for Main Street. Lance followed her, his head well above most of the other patrons out this evening, following the top of his mother’s head as she made her way forward. The air continued to grow cooler, almost rapidly, as the sun finally disappeared completely and the streetlights and shop lights became all that lit downtown Hillston. His mother spilled out onto Main Street, and Lance turned left to follow her toward the rows and rows of food vendors. Brightly painted food trucks with compressors and propane tanks hissing and growling on their rears, torso-sized menu boards plastered on the street side, advertising anything and everything you could ever hope for from a carnival environment. Lance watched a group of small children run by, all holding half-eaten and dripping snow cones, their mouths stained every color of the rainbow. He heard fryers frying and smelled grills grilling. He saw a man wearing a clown suit spinning cotton candy onto a paper stick for an elderly couple standing hand-in-hand, anxiously awaiting their treat with grins on their faces. Lance passed by people he knew, waved and nodded hello. A few looked as though they wanted to stop and talk, but Lance would not stop following his mother. He hated the possibility of appearing rude, but he wasn’t letting her out of his sight tonight. Not for anything.
Finally, Pamela stopped in front of one of the food trucks and got in line. Lance came up beside her, looking at the menu board. Aside from funnel cakes, this truck offered fried Oreos, fried Twinkies, fried pickles, fried ice cream, and, seemingly out of place, bottles of water.
“What are you going to have?” Lance asked.
His mother had been studying the board as well. “How do you fry ice cream? That seems inconceivable, don’t you think?”
“Cleary some sort of witchcraft, I suspect. Maybe we should go to another truck. I don’t want to turn into a toad or have my head shrink after eating whatever they give me.”
His mother made a show of thinking about what he’d said. “There’d be less laundry if you were a toad.”
Lance grinned. “And less, well, you know, me.”
She nodded. “There is that. I do enjoy having you around.”
Lance was about to make a witty retort, but found he couldn’t. There was a sudden lump in his throat that needed swallowing.
“I’ll just have a pinch or two of yours, if that’s all right,” Pamela said as they stepped up to order.
“Or course.”
Lance paid for the funnel cake and they walked further down Main Street, eating their
sweet and heading toward the First Bank & Trust parking lot. From the parking lot came a swirling glow of neon lighting mixed with the popping of air rifles and balloons, the clinking of plastic rings against glass bottles and the all-too-familiar echo of basketballs being bounced. The parking lot was home to the game booths.
“I’m finished,” Pamela said, brushing powdered sugar from her hands. “The rest is yours.”
Lance picked up what remained of the funnel cake, folded it in half, and demolished it in two bites.
His mother watched him. “I’d say I’m impressed—or disgusted—but by now I’m just used to it.”
Lance laughed and tossed the empty paper plate into a nearby trash can. “Come on, let’s go see if I can get one of these overinflated basketballs into one of these too-small hoops. I love seeing the disappointed faces of the workers when I win.”
“Lancelot Brody, that’s awful. I thought I raised you better than to revel in somebody else’s misfortune.”
“Mom, they’re ripping people off. You’re not meant to win. It’s basically rigged.”
Pamela considered this. “Really?”
Lance nodded.
“Okay, then, go win yourself a cheap stuffed Spongehead.”
“It’s SpongeBob.”
She waved him off. “Just go win.”
Lance did win. He paid two dollars to the man behind the counter at the basketball shoot and then bounced the ball a few times on the ground, getting a feel for it. He tossed it in the air twice, feeling its weight. As expected, it was way overinflated and probably would have landed on the bank’s roof if Lance had bounced it hard enough off the ground. Instead, Lance took two steps backward, positioning himself further away from the goal than most of the other participants, and then shot and swished two shots in a row. He didn’t even take off his backpack. He did indeed win a stuffed SpongeBob, which he quickly gave to a young boy who had been watching. The boy’s parents thanked Lance, and the game attendant gave Lance a sly smile that seemed to say “Congratulations, but now get out of here.”
Lance wished basketball was his only special talent. A normal talent that could take him places and that people understood. He’d never forget the confused voices that had come from the other end of phone calls with college coaches when Lance called to politely decline the scholarships they’d offered him. “So where did you decide to go?” they always asked. Lance wasn’t sure many of them believed him when he said he wasn’t planning on going to college. “I’m staying home,” he’d say. And then they’d usually hang up.
Lance and his mother stopped to watch a few of the other games but did not play. Lance knew what his mother was patiently waiting for, one of the biggest reasons she came out to Centerfest every year. The music.
Pamela Brody loved live music. She loved the energy from the bands, loved the pounding of the speakers, loved the crowds. She loved how people transformed in front of live music, how their problems and inhibitions seemed to melt when the right song came on and the tune and the beat and the melody carried them to a different place they usually kept locked away, deep down.
She loved to dance.
She’d stand by herself, or she’d join a crowd of other free spirits, and she’d sway and twirl and step along with the music. Her eyes would close sometimes, like a Southern Baptist churchgoer during their favorite hymn, and as Lance would watch her in her long skirts or woven sweaters, with her hair done in braids or sometimes just loose and falling halfway down her back, he would flash to the images he’d seen of Woodstock and smile. She would have fit right in.
He loved seeing her as happy as she was in those moments. Mostly because it made him forget about himself for a while. Lance wasn’t stupid. His gifts were a curse not only upon himself, but also his mother. She’d had to deal with things just as much as Lance had. Lance always longed for a normal life, and he couldn’t help but wonder—and feel guilty—about whether his mother desperately wished she’d been given a normal child. She’d never indicated such a thing, but then, Pamela Brody wasn’t the type of person who would.
He shook himself out of these thoughts and said, “Come on, let’s go find the band.”
Pamela watched a young girl of about three try to toss her red plastic rings atop the scattering of glass bottles at the ring toss tent, then followed Lance as he led the way out of the bank’s parking lot.
They didn’t have to search very hard to find the band, because the bandstand was set up in exactly the same place it’d been set up every year since Lance could remember—with the exception of that one time when Lance was about fifteen and some poor sap had mistakenly scheduled the Hillston Farmers Market parking lot to be repaved and lined a day before Centerfest. But tonight, as usual, Lance and his mother walked another two blocks down Main Street and then turned onto Bedford Avenue to be greeted by what seemed like a thousand people packed under the pavilion-like shelters that stretched north for roughly a quarter mile, perpendicular to the street. The city had set up folding chairs under the wooden structures for people to sit and enjoy the show, and while the majority of the seats looked to be filled, there was a massive mosh pit scene spilling out into the parking lot on the other side of the pavilions.
This was where people ended up who just wanted a quick taste of the music before moving on, or those who were young enough and full of enough energy to stand and enjoy the tunes. This was also where people danced. This was where Lance and his mother were headed, he knew.
At the far end of the Farmers Market parking lot, the stage was raised high, a good three or four feet above the heads of the patrons. Speakers as black as night and as loud as jet engines stood like sentinels on either side of the platform, pushing unhealthy volumes of sound out into the night air, permeating downtown Hillston. The band onstage was a local favorite, a young rock group whose sound resembled eighties megastars more than anything more modern, which was ironic since the lead guitarist and singer had graduated a year ahead of Lance. This kid—because he was, after all, a kid in Lance’s mind—who now stood onstage singing a Phil Collins cover, to the crowd’s delight, was the same kid who’d electrified Hillston High School basketball crowds with electric covers of the day’s most popular hip-hop offerings during pregame warmups. He was talented. Lance suspected his band would be playing in venues a lot larger than the Hillston Farmers Market very soon.
His mother took the lead and headed out onto the black asphalt of the parking lot, weaving between clusters of people who stood by, swaying along with the tune or nodding their heads to the beat. She found a small gap in the crowd, a hole that had appeared almost out of nowhere, as if it’d been waiting just for her. Lance followed, trailing just a few feet, and when Pamela stopped in the clearing, which was a little to the left of dead center of the crowd, Lance stopped behind her. She pulled up the sleeves of her sweater now, the crowd and all the walking causing her to grow warmer, and after a few seconds—that was all it really took—Lance could practically see his mother morph into that other person she became in front of the music.
Lance, who was six-six and as graceful as a gazelle on the basketball court, had all the rhythm of a garbage truck. Opting to join the head nodders, he stood back and smiled as he watched his mother get carried away into her special place. During the second song, Martin Hensinger—the local dentist and an avid reader who frequented the library—found his way to Pamela, and the two of them exchanged some small talk and laughed and half-performed a brief awkward dance together before Martin bade her farewell.
Lance had never seen his mother go on a single date his entire life, and again the guilt of her burden pummeled him. How different—how much better—would her life have been?
“Get away from me, creep! Get away!”
A young woman’s voice struck a chord in Lance’s mind, rattled in his head the way the bass from the speakers onstage were rattling his stomach. His vision blurred for a moment, as if he’d been struck. When it cleared, it was as if the music and
noises from the crowd had diminished, as if some great hand had turned down the master volume knob on the whole event.
“Help!”
The voice again, coming from his left. Lance turned his head and looked into the sea of people surrounding him. Most were facing the stage, taking in the music. A few leaned toward each other in half-screaming attempts at conversation. They clutched plastic cups of soda or cardboard cups of coffee and hot chocolate (Courtesy of Downtown Joe!). They bit into candy apples and funnel cakes and steak-and-cheese sandwiches. They all looked happy and relaxed. Nobody seemed distressed.
“Somebody help me! Please!”
Lance started in the direction of the voice, stretching up on his toes, occasionally jumping up as he pushed through the crowd, scanning the horizon over the flood of heads.
And then he saw her. Just a fleeting glimpse of a thin teenaged girl dressed in jeans and a Hillston High School hoodie, blond hair splayed out behind her as she struggled. Somebody was pulling her into the alley that ran between the rows of buildings on Main Street and Woodson Avenue. She swung her free arm in an off-balance attempt to attack her assailant, then struggled to turn and get in one last view of the crowd that was seemingly ignoring her cries for help. She opened her mouth, as if to expel one last scream, one last plea, but before she could make a sound, she was violently jerked into the blackness of the alley’s mouth.
Lance was moving again now, looking all around him, stunned that nobody had heard this girl cry out. Nobody else was heading toward where she’d been taken. They weren’t even looking that direction.
They can’t hear her, he thought. The music is too loud!
He ran.
But how come I can?
The answer was obvious.
Because of his gifts.
Because of his burden.
Lance Brody was meant to hear the screams because that was his life. He was a light in the darkness. An unassuming protector. Forever obligated, indebted to the world.
Because what was the alternative? Stand by idly and let the world burn? Let the evil win without batting an eye?
Lance Brody Omnibus Page 6
