Unstoppable Moses

by Author Tyler James Smith

  The news frenzy has died down, especially in Chicago, but every now and again there’s a blip about us on the news.

  And of course, it happens today while I’m trying to buy a coffee and a banana. For a few seconds, my face is on the screen and the lady standing in line right behind me makes a tsk noise and I reflexively look back at her.

  And I think:

  You idiot, don’t look back at her!

  And: Now she’s going to recognize you, asshole.

  The lady—an anonymous, middle-aged woman with short hair and a big coat—sees the screen, then looks at me and says, “See, more kids need to be like you. Nice shoes, a tie, not like the—pardon my language—shit we see on TV.”

  She doesn’t recognize me; she just sees a nicely dressed young person trying to buy a reasonably healthy snack.

  I say, “Guess my parents just raised me right,” and give her the most disgustingly sweet smile in the world.

  I think: You goddamn machine. I think: Charlie wouldn’t have pretended. Must be nice knowing you can blend in. I think: That’s not how people with beating hearts respond.

  After I pay and step outside, I give my lunch to the homeless person on the corner. I feel like I’m about to throw up, I hate myself so much.

  SIX: THE IMPOSTER IN THE WILD

  A WALL OF RANK SHIT-STINK wafted over my group as we rounded the barn’s corner. Group three, it turned out, got to help set up the petting farm.

  A hundred or so yards away, Aviator Hat Girl was staring at her feet as one of the angry kids from the back of the bus said something and pointed at her head. Hatchet-Haired Kid looked like he was trying to moderate, and to persuade Angry Kid to apologize.

  My job was mostly just clearing out the pen area of leaves and old manure left un-pitchforked and un-shoveled by the last group of campers and Buddies, while a couple of the other Buddies worked on repairing a fence that had blown over in a storm. I was busy pitchforking at a pile of frosty leaves and frozen turds when I heard someone walking up behind me.

  I turned around and saw the third Buddy from the bus—the banker-looking one whose name I still didn’t know. He had that “I should approach this person I’ve never met and talk to them” look about him. And like all the other ones I’d spent the last year dealing with, there was a moment of fake surprise and literal finger-pointing with the nodding head before he started talking. “You’re familiar. You look familiar from something.”

  He had a garden rake, and I imagined him saying something like, “I’ve been raking my mind, but now I remember your face: you hate Jesus,” and then taking a swing at me with the rake, which I would dodge by roll-diving out of the way, and then we’d pitchfork–rake fight for a while before one of us died violently: me with a metal rake sticking out of my head, or the other Buddy with a pitchfork through his chest.

  “Just one of those faces, I guess,” I said, bunching up my shoulders, trying to ignore that familiar sting in the back of my gut. I went back to poking around at the frozen farm shit. The guy waited a beat and then tried again.

  “No, I swear—from TV? Right? Something on TV?”

  “Must be somebody else,” I said, as pleasantly as possible. I leaned on the pitchfork like a casual farmer, but the tool was tactically positioned just right for me to go flying into farm combat if necessary. We would fly off the goddamn rails into a mortal farm battle because he and his friends were missing the fucking point just like everyone had missed the fucking point. The same way everyone who’d recognized me for the last ten months, young and old, all had something to say: some advice or prayer or warning, some piece of wisdom, to give to me, the poor lost idiot.

  Or worse, he’d be like all of the other kids at my school. The ones who side-eyed me when I walked by, the ones who would pull out their phones and start texting the person sitting right next to them when I took my seat in class. Even down to the way that Mr. Stone—the sweetheart of a janitor at our school who gave every passing student a high five when they saw him in the mornings—pretended like I didn’t exist.

  All the kids I used to know and be friends with.

  The ones I felt like I’d let down, because why else would they all have stopped talking to me?

  The Buddy tried again with, “You sure? There was a thing. On TV.”

  I took a slow breath. “Look, man, it’s not me.” I just wanted to be left alone, to not have to pretend; and, after ten months, it had seemed like I’d actually have an opportunity to do just that. But instead this teenager, with his salt-of-the-earth farmboy–banker face, just couldn’t leave it be.

  “All right,” he said, nodding. “All right, hang on.”

  I couldn’t tell if he actually meant I should hang on or if it was just a filler statement as he walked away. He was headed toward the barn and, just as he walked inside, he pulled his phone out. The idea of him meaning “hang on” rhetorically didn’t seem half as likely as him coming out of the barn with a torch, leading an entire mob of people with rakes.

  Either way, I put my back to the barn and went back to shoveling until I heard his footsteps five minutes later.

  “Listen,” I said, spinning around. “I don’t fucki—”

  He was holding two baby teacup pigs, one in each hand. The pigs just hung there, draped over his hands with their legs pointed at the ground, which for them might as well have been a mile down. He waggled one of the pigs at me.

  “Let me try again. Here, have a pig.7 You’re Moses, right? Moses something?”

  Powerless in the face of the tiny, pink, muddy animal, I scooped it into my hands. It snorted at my thumbs.

  “I … yeah.” I held out my hand and he shuffled the pig around, resting it on his left forearm so we could shake.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Michael.” He pointed at the pig in my hand with the pig in his hand, and said, “And that is Kevin Bacon. I named him like three minutes ago.”

  I didn’t want to let the Kevin Bacon joke make me smile. “What about that one?”

  “Hamibal Lecter. It was either Hamibal Lecter or Magnum P.I.G. but he bit me, so I stuck with Hamibal. I would have brought Jurassic Pork, but he was too big to carry. So hey, full disclosure: I don’t recognize you. But my girlfriend does.” My brain insisted that this was where the big rake showdown would ensue, because sometimes my brain is an asshole. Kevin Bacon kept squirming around in the nook of my arm and trying to nuzzle his face into my coat; Kevin Bacon would most definitely lose the pig battle with Hamibal Lecter and the pig overlord, Jurassic Pork. “She thought she recognized you on the bus earlier and she wanted me to find out if it was you. Something about national … chemistry … or something.”

  From his point of view, it had to have looked like I’d simply powered down for a second, because I had absolutely no goddamn idea what he was talking about and I just had to stare at him to try to make sense of it.

  Then my brain powered back up from Idiot Mode and it fell into place.

  When I was in eleventh grade—while we were still planning on how to get a drum set to the roof of a bowling alley—I had competed in the US National Chemistry Olympiad and won gold. I had caught their attention with a paper I’d written for AP Chem about a theoretical solvent that could break down any organic matter a thousand times faster than hydrochloric acid. The actual Olympiad was a five-hour laboratory practical and a five-hour written theoretical exam, with the award ceremony televised to dozens upon dozens of viewers worldwide.

  Neither one of us expected me to start laughing. Being recognized for anything except alleged arson felt dumb and out of place, like hearing pop music on the radio at the police station an hour after your cousin has been shot in the brain. Dumb enough and out-of-place enough that you can’t not laugh.

  “Yeah, that’s me. It was the Chemistry Olympiad.”

  “Oh,” he said, trying really hard to sound enthusiastic about competitive junior science. “Well, hey. We wanted to know if you’d be interested in hanging out with us some nig
ht. There isn’t a lot to do around here, but there’s a town a couple miles away. You kind of have to trespass. And hop some fences. But there’s some cool stuff to do in town,” he said, and shrugged.

  “Um,” I said. “Maybe.” The laughter had died out by then and left this uncomfortable, exposed raw spot.

  “Fantastic.” He ignored my ambiguity, opting to focus on the small pig in his hand while the Buddies around us worked in their small factions, picking away at bits of animal refuse to make the petting farm safe and habitable for everyone else. We stood in silence for a moment before he said, “So I kind of I have to go deal with this pig situation.”

  The tiny pink animal was desperately wiggling around, trying to mash its poorly designed face into Michael’s palm, while mine was snoring, apparently asleep with its eyes open.

  “I meant to ask about that.”

  “I stole them. Or, well, borrowed them. Without explicit permission. There’s a whole litter of them just kind of bumming around in the barn, so I snagged a couple. Figured they needed some acclimating anyway. Plus, come on: baby teacup pigs.”

  I handed Kevin Bacon back to him. I had more questions, but it’s tricky asking someone if they’re quite sure they don’t recognize you from a nationally televised courtroom shit storm.

  “We’re meeting up tonight. Just come out to the rope wall. You’ll have to sneak out of your cabin, but it’s pretty easy to appoint one of the kids as Cabin Guardian or Cabin Defender. They love that kind of thing. Just come over when the kids head to the bonfire.” When I looked confused, he said, “They’re having the big welcome bonfire thing tonight and the Buddies pretty much get a night off on our own for icebreakers and team games in the den. Won’t be hard to get out for a while.”

  I nodded. “Also: rope wall?” It felt like the kind of semi-illegal, endearingly stupid thing that Charlie would have suggested.

  “Yeah, that…” He gestured toward the trees. “Okay. You can’t see it from here. There’s a big fenced-in rope wall. The kind you see in movies about army basic training. But we made keys to the padlock a couple years back so we can climb it whenever we damn well please.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do we climb it?”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t need to think about his answer. “Because it’s there.”

  I blinked, and in the millionth of a second where my eyes were closing it wasn’t Michael standing in front of me but Charlie. Because climbing something for the sake of climbing it was the kind of thing Charlie would have proposed. Michael made like he was about to say something but noise broke from the barn behind us and he spun, hiding the pigs behind his back in a fluid whirl of tiny oinks and squeals. Somebody was yelling to “get the gate” right as three young deer came charging out, all bounding in the same general direction: straight for the broken fence. Test came blasting out behind them, bent at the waist with his arms straight out. He managed to grab one of the deer by its back hooves as he went crashing down.

  The other two kept going—legs kicking and pumping in a fevered cloud of panic toward wild freedom. One of the Buddies jumped in front of the miniature stampede with his hands and feet out in proper goalie formation. The fawn in front decided that the best way out was through, and went straight into the kid’s gut. That Buddy went down with the air rushing loudly out of his lungs, the deer clasped firmly in his hands.

  But not the other one.

  The last deer was already a thousand miles outside of anybody’s reach. It bounced away through the dry and yellowing grass, dipping up and down, just a hint of ears and white dots on a small brown body. Mr. Test bumbled his way back up and, having passed the first fawn back to a sorry-looking Buddy, came storming over to us.

  “Oh! What a coincidence!” he said, barking the words at Michael. “You do this? Hm? Somehow? You leave that gate open? What do you have behind your back?”

  “What—”

  “Behind your back making teacup-pig noises. What’s back there? Is it teacup pigs?”

  “He picked them up when the deer ran out,” I said.

  I was thrown headfirst onto his shit list.8

  “I’m sorry, did I ask you, Mr. Hill?” He knew who I was too, and not because of chemistry competitions. “You’re already on thin ice, buster. You think I don’t know all about you?”

  I looked over at Michael like, “Buster?” while Test stared me down.

  “Wow. I am out of the loop with this chemistry thing,” Michael radioed in from another world.

  “You screw the pooch once—even once—and I’ll have your ass. You see this ground?” He pointed at my feet. “Thin ice. This thin.” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together and, to his credit, it was a very thin space indeed.

  “Mr. Test?” somebody called from the group of Buddies, who were still wrestling with the fawn, thwarting its adorable attempts to skitter past them.

  “Both of you,” he said, pointing at each of us, one hand apiece. He took a couple steps backward before turning and jogging pastily over to the Buddies, who definitely didn’t know what to do with jumpy, tiny farm animals. “And put those pigs back, Bachman. Now,” he called to Michael over his shoulder.

  We watched him usher the kids away and grab onto the deer.

  My face said, “Well. That guy’s a dick,” and the Charlie part of me wanted to call out after him that he could go fuck himself.

  Michael looked from Test to me and said, “Test isn’t so bad. I mean, he’s kind of shitty almost all of the time. And clearly, the shorts thing is an issue. Plus—and this is new—he wants people to call him Coach.” When I didn’t say anything right away he added, “Last year he tried to give out Halloween candy and he only brought Mary Janes and pennies.”

  I cracked and said, “His mustache freaks me out.”

  “I’ve heard him say ‘co-winkee-dink.’” He glanced over at me out of the corner of his eyes and I could tell he was gauging how funny I thought he was being.

  Without thinking, I sucked air in through my teeth, hamming it up right along with him, and immediately thought that I was an asshole for doing it, since who the fuck was I to be making friends right now.

  “But: he is who he is. Seems to have a hard-on for you already, which I wouldn’t take too seriously. You should have seen him a bunch of years ago when Faisal shot him with an arrow.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “The John-Denver-shirt guy on the bus?”

  “Yeah,” he said, laughing.

  “Shot him? With an arrow?”

  “I mean, ‘shot him’ is kind of harsh. It was back when we were campers here in fifth grade and the arrow went a little … wayward … when the wind caught it and sent it grazing off a hay bale into the general exact vicinity of Test’s hauntingly sculpted calf. Delicately. Barely broke the skin. But Test flipped out for a while and made Faisal write an essay about camp safety and archery range etiquette.”

  “That had to have either been the best or the worst essay ever written.”

  “Oh, it was definitely amazing. You ever read a camp safety essay with the phrase ‘barbaric arrow-related violence’ worked seamlessly in?”

  I had not.

  SEVEN: OF BRUISES …

  IT’S ONLY BEEN A few days since the bowling alley, and only a few minutes after a Christmas dinner where nobody seemed to have anything to say.

  I’m sprawled on my ass, propped up on one arm, wondering what it was that hit me so goddamn hard—blindsided me hard enough that I don’t remember falling, just standing in the rec room one minute talking to Charlie’s brother, Jordan, and then staring up at him the next.

  I remembered Jordan’s face going hard—steeling himself, and making sure nobody was watching.

  I’m trying to clear my eyes and I know that the faraway throb of dull, screaming pain in my jaw is only going to get closer and closer. I can’t think straight and the impact has me confused and for a fraction of a second I think I see Charlie standing in the corner, watching.r />
  And then the fuzzy sensation of dreams shifting to reality as my head starts to clear, and Charlie disappears as Jordan leans over and says, “He was my brother, you motherfucker,” and hits me again. He has a mean smile on his face but there are tears in his eyes. “You were always getting into dangerous shit with him, you fuck.”

  Then he puts his hands on my throat. Jordan’s a freshman in college—he’s a year older than us, he used to help us collect rocks. He had a bike with pegs and knew how to get illegal fireworks and when he squeezes down on my throat, my head starts to swim.

  And I look over to the corner where I swear Charlie had been standing, but he’s still completely and utterly gone and I can’t even bring myself to try to pry Jordan’s hands off my windpipe.

  My vision is getting red and fuzzy and the only thing I can think of while my cousin is choking me is, What song would we have picked for this shit?

  Because there’s no music playing.

  Nobody bothered to put on Christmas music.

  There’s no one in the room with us. Just me and Jordan and the ghost of Charlie Baltimore. He’s crying and his hands tighten, then relax, then tighten, like he can’t decide whether or not this family can take another lifeless body.

  And I think, “All Apologies” by Nirvana.

  Jordan’s hands go slack and he slumps off of me, crying hard and ugly like a little kid, and I want to cry like him but there’s still nothing. I swear to all of the gods that we burned that I really am all apologies.

  But I also can’t figure out if some important part of me burned up in that fire, or worse, if I never had that important part in the first place.

  When I come upstairs, everybody is sitting in the living room talking quietly. It’s a quiet that goes silent when I walk in, which is something that I haven’t gotten used to yet. I have my hoodie on so that nobody can see my neck, and Jordan is nowhere to be seen.

  God fucking bless us, every one.