Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  It’s been months since the TV show where everything went wrong. Mom talks about all his sad pictures like they’re no big deal. She hardly cries (at least in front of him). She looks through what he’s drawn today, and then says, “Why don’t you draw me something from when you’re, say, twelve years old?”

  He tries to remember all the way to twelve. He’s sitting in a building. It’s summertime, the medal heavy and slick against his chest. He’s taken to secretly wearing it under his clothes, like Superman’s outfit. Frankie’s there in the building, looking tall and skinny and tough. One of his favorite Frankies. Buddy draws another rectangle and Mom says, “That’s not another grave, is it?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s a pinball machine,” he says. “Frankie’s really good at pinball. Plays it all day.”

  “Oh,” his mother says. “That’s nice.” She’s not crazy about the idea, he can tell, but she has no idea how good Frankie’s going to be. “And you’re there, too?”

  “I just watch,” he says. He draws himself next to the pinball machine, and draws a circle where the medal would be.

  “Does Dad know about that?” she asks. “That you two are hanging out in a pinball parlor?”

  He shrugs. He sees what he sees. He can’t read minds.

  She takes one of the blank sheets of paper and starts writing on it.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “I just wrote down, ‘When Frankie is sixteen, he gets really good at pinball.’ ”

  “Oh.”

  “I like to know what you’ll all be doing,” she says.

  “After you’re dead,” he says.

  “It’s like a future diary,” she says. “You draw, and I write down words, but it’s the same thing.”

  “It doesn’t make you sad?”

  She thinks about this. “Sometimes.” He likes that she doesn’t lie to him. “But other times, I’m just happy that you all grow up together, that you take care of one another.”

  He doesn’t like to think about Mom not being there, in the future. But he’s known ever since The Mike Douglas Show that she’d be leaving them. Just like he knows that Irene is going to have a baby, and the baby’s going to be a teenager named Matthias, and someday he and Matthias will put brown tile on the front step.

  Suddenly he’s dizzy. His body is little and big at the same time. His arm by the window is cold, but he can feel the sun on his back, feel the sweat running down his sides.

  “Buddy?” Mom asks. “Buddy, look at me.” She comes over to his side of the table and crouches down. She turns his face in her hands. “Stay with me, kiddo.”

  Yes. There she is. Mom’s here. Alive. Alive.

  She runs a hand across his damp hair. “You’re sweating,” she says.

  He pushes a palm against an eye. He nods.

  “Tell me what this is, Buddy,” she says, and points to the drawing of himself.

  “It’s a medal. I used to wear it all the time, then.”

  “What medal is that?”

  “The one you’re about to show me,” he says.

  Her eyes go wide. Talking about her death didn’t make her cry, but this does. Then she smiles, a brilliant, uncontained smile, and says, “Oh, that medal.”

  She leads him upstairs to her room, and opens a drawer. “This was given to me a while ago, but soon it will belong to you.” It’s wrapped in a scarf that she never wears because it’s too fancy, too colorful. Teddy’s taste, not hers. She peels back the cloth, and the gold is as bright as her smile.

  “You have a wonderful gift,” Mom says. “I know it’s hard sometimes. I know you get worried. But I know you’ll always do the right thing, because you have a good and noble heart.” She waits until he looks her in the eye, and then she touches her forehead to his. “Listen to me,” she whispers. “It’s all going to work out.”

  Irene pulls up with the windows down, and he can hear her singing along with the radio. Even after she turns off the car she keeps singing: “Ba-a-a-nd, on the run. Doot-do-do-do-doo.” Buddy loves to hear her. She sings all the time when she’s a girl of nine and ten, and hardly at all when she’s older. But in the early weeks of August 1995, right before the end, she turns into Maria von Trapp. She sings every time she takes a shower. She hums while she’s cooking dinner. And when she’s not saying anything at all, she seems to be swaying to music he can’t hear.

  She sees the newly tiled front step, finished now except for the cleanup, and instead of yelling at him or asking him what the hell he’s wasting his time on, she just shakes her head. “Buddy, that’s indoor tile.”

  Matty says, “So?”

  “So it’s going to be slick as hell in the winter.”

  “It’s not slippery,” Matty says. “Try it.”

  “Wait till it rains,” she says.

  “Just try it.”

  Irene abandons her complaints. She steps up with mock seriousness, compliments Buddy and Matty on their handiwork, and goes inside, still humming Paul McCartney.

  Matty’s looking at him. “It’s weird, right?” the boy says. “How good a mood she’s in.”

  Buddy shrugs. It’s time to sponge up the dust and excess grout. And he has more work to do before sunset: mail to deliver, people to talk to, a meal to make. What is he forgetting? Not the cold. He remembers the winter. No, now: Dad driving home, asking what’s for supper. The color of his mother’s scarf. No. Matty leaving for the gas station to buy milk. And what else? Frankie showing up, looking for Matty. The feel of the medal in his small hand.

  “Uncle Buddy?” Matty says. “You okay?”

  Buddy holds on to that voice. Fourteen-year-old Matty. They’ve just finished tiling the front step.

  “Did I make you mad?” Matty asks.

  He shakes his head. “We need milk.”

  “Milk?”

  “For supper.” Buddy walks toward the house. “There’s money on the kitchen counter.”

  “But—”

  Buddy raises a hand. He’s already said more than he’s comfortable with. Words are dangerous. He goes upstairs, and stays there even after he’s done with his shower, so that he’s safely out of the way when Frankie barrels into the house, looking for Matty. But the boy is gone, so he instead declaims to Teddy in his too-loud voice that he’s selling the hell out of UltraLife products. Going through the numbers, talking about the percentages he’s making on each sale. He wouldn’t try that bullshit with Irene. But she’s out of the way, too. As usual, she’s in the basement, in front of the computer, online again.

  Which leaves only Teddy to absorb the lies. Poor Teddy. And poor Frankie, who’s embarrassed because he asked Teddy for a loan last week, and was turned down. Of course he was. Frankie wouldn’t say why he needed the money. Now he has to make sure everyone in earshot knows he didn’t need the money anyway—he’s got big plans, a surefire way to come out on top. Buddy thinks of the day in the casino, the chips stacked in front of his brother, just like he promised, and the roulette ball listening to him the way the pinball used to. Wasn’t it enough that he gave Frankie that hour of bliss? True, only an hour, but that’s more than most people get. Buddy only got forty-five minutes.

  He’s twenty-three years old when he leaves his brother alone on the Alton Belle, walks the half mile to the Days Inn, and sees her, the girl of his dreams. In fact, he’s dreamed of her for years.

  She’s sitting on a bar stool, turned slightly away from the bar, her tanned bare legs crossed at the knee. One hand lazily twirls the swizzle stick in her drink. And oh, those hot pink nails, the same color as her lipstick. The long blonde hair (a wig, but it doesn’t matter, not to him) cast into another shade of pink by the neon light of the Budweiser sign. His heart beats a tattoo, sending him to her. Pushing him across the room.

  The bar is almost empty. The hotel, though only a few blocks from the Alton Belle dock, can offer none of the attractions of a casino, and this early in the night no one’s ready to drown their sorrows. Yet she’s th
ere, waiting. Almost as if she had a vision of this meeting.

  He’s ready. One pocket is stuffed with cash, a fraction of Frankie’s winnings at the roulette table. (Frankie is still on the riverboat, enjoying himself—for now. Buddy already regrets what’s going to happen, even though he’s powerless to stop it from happening.) The other pocket contains a hotel key card. His mouth radiates cinnamon freshness thanks to the three Altoids he chewed on his walk over from the riverboat.

  He sits down, one stool away from her. The bartender is nowhere in sight, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He reaches blindly into his pocket and puts a bill on the bar. Sees with surprise that it’s a hundred.

  The woman says, “Good day at the Belle? Or haven’t got there yet?”

  He smiles. She’s thin and tanned and maybe thirty years old. Her eyes are rimmed by black eyeliner.

  “I got lucky,” he said.

  “Or maybe it was your turn to get something nice,” she says.

  This is what he’s been telling himself: Wasn’t it his turn? Yet his own words rang hollow. Everything he knows about the whirlpool of past and future tells him that the universe does not owe you anything, and even if it did, it would never pay up. He never convinced himself he was owed this moment, but hearing the words come from someone this beautiful makes him want to believe. It was his turn, tonight, and not Frankie’s. Oh God. Poor Frankie doesn’t know what’s about to happen to him.

  “Don’t look so worried,” she says. “Come sit a little closer.”

  How can he not obey? He shifts onto the next stool.

  “Tell me your name,” she says. He likes the huskiness in her voice.

  “Buddy.”

  “Cerise,” she says. She puts a hand over his—and leaves it there. He can feel his heart in his throat. She smiles. “You don’t have to be nervous, honey. You’re over twenty-one, right?”

  He nods, unsure where to look. She’s wearing a tight, spangly tank top with spaghetti straps and a black pleather miniskirt that barely reaches the tops of her thighs. He has a future memory of her underwear—a lime-green thong. He really needs to stop thinking of that lime-green thong.

  She glances down at his lap. “Oh, you poor man,” she says. “I think you need the full treatment.”

  He reaches into his pocket again and she says, “Not here. You have five hundred dollars?”

  “And I have a room here,” he says. “Upstairs.” A clarification that’s probably unnecessary. He doubts they have guest rooms in the basement.

  “Then what are we waiting for?” She downs the rest of her drink, then nods at the bill resting on the bar. “A twenty will cover my tab, hon.”

  He takes out the wad of cash, thumbs through it. Finally he finds a twenty-dollar bill.

  Cerise chuckles, leans in close. “You probably don’t want to flash your whole roll like that. This ain’t East St. Louis, but still.”

  “You’re right,” he says. She doesn’t know that he’s going to give it all to her, in forty-five minutes.

  They take the elevator up. She asks for the room number, and he tells her: “Three twenty-one.” She leads him there without glancing at the navigation signs, and as they get closer, he’s thinking of the room number like a countdown: three…two…

  He lets her inside. She glances at the open closet, peeks into the open bathroom, and says, “You travel light.”

  He doesn’t understand this comment at first, then thinks, Right. No luggage.

  She puts her string purse on the dresser next to the TV. When she turns to him, she’s surprised. “Honey, you’re shaking.” Then she understands. He can see it in her face. She steps to him, and touches his cheek. “You have nothing to worry about,” she says softly.

  But it’s what she says next that makes him fall in love with her. The words ring like chimes backward and forward through all the Buddys, across the years: sitting beside a cold window on a winter afternoon; arguing with his brother in high summer; lying on the grass on the last day of the world.

  She smiles and says, “It’s all going to work out.”

  Buddy crouches beside his bed. From underneath he pulls out a metal lockbox closed with a padlock. He dials the combination and slips off the lock. Inside are several white envelopes bound with a red rubber band looped two times around. Once, there were so many envelopes the rubber band could barely go around them. (Though he’d started out with a different rubber band. Then it got old and snapped, and he had to find one that was exactly the same color and thickness.)

  All of the envelopes are addressed to Teddy, except one blue one that has Matty’s name on it. That one Buddy isn’t supposed to deliver until later. He takes the topmost Teddy envelope, and makes sure it has today’s date. Only one more letter to his father is left. His mission for Mom is almost over. He carefully puts the lock back in place and hides the box again.

  With the envelope hidden in his shirt, he sneaks downstairs, trying to stay out of sight of the kitchen door, where Frankie is still yammering away at Teddy. Buddy slips out the front door.

  As he remembers, a van is parked just down the street. A silver one, that will return here on September 4.

  He puts the envelope in the mailbox and closes it with a silent sigh. One more secret duty nearing its completion.

  Speaking of duty, he thinks, and turns toward the van. The man behind the wheel, a gray-haired black man, watches him approach from behind sunglasses. He probably thinks the glasses are sufficient disguise. After all, they have only met once before, at Maureen’s funeral, when Buddy was six years old. Buddy raises a friendly hand, as if greeting a stranger, and then walks up to the driver’s-side window. He makes a twirling motion, and the driver rolls down the window. There’s a passenger in a rear seat of the van, but Buddy doesn’t see his face. He won’t, until September 4.

  The driver says, “Yes?”

  Buddy does have an exact, clear memory of this moment, so it’s a relief to not have to worry about what to say. “Have you seen a teenage boy walk by here?”

  The driver does not quite glance behind him, at the man in the backseat. Then he shakes his head.

  Buddy says, “I sent my nephew, Matty, to the gas station for milk, and he should be home by now. It’s only four blocks from here, and I was getting nervous.”

  The driver says, “We haven’t seen him.”

  “Okay,” Buddy says. “Thanks anyway.” He turns and walks back toward the house. He’s feeling proud of himself, because not only did he deliver the letter, but he got through the conversation with the van driver perfectly, with all the words in the right order.

  Behind him, the van starts up. It makes a three-point turn, and drives away.

  “It’s all going to work out,” the World’s Most Powerful Psychic says to himself. He just has to keep doing his job—until it’s no longer his job.

  11

  Matty

  It took Matty one day to become a criminal, three weeks to become a psionic superspy, and a short walk to the gas station to make him give up astral travel forever.

  His life as a criminal began the day he borrowed the fifty dollars from Frankie. Matty carried the money in his fist as he slowly made his way down the basement stairs to Malice’s room, softly calling her name. Each step revealed a bit more of the basement. Malice lived in a pigsty. Clothes were not just scattered over the floor, they covered it, a foot-high mulch of flannel, denim, and T-shirt. There wasn’t much furniture—a bed, a bookcase, a green armchair, a milk crate that functioned as a bedside table, an old TV—but every flat surface was a Jenga of dirty Tupperware, food boxes, CDs, and cups. So, so many cups.

  Finally he reached the bottom of the stairs. She sat on the rollaway bed, facing away from him, headphones on, a notebook balanced on her knees.

  “Malice?” he called.

  She pulled the headphones down and twisted to face him. “What the fuck?” Her arm knocked into a pile of books, atop which rested a plate with a half-eaten sandwi
ch. The plate tipped and fell facedown into a pile of clothes. Malice made no move to pick it up. “What are you doing here?”

  “Sorry! I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I just—wow.” He lifted the sandwich by two fingers, instantly regretting it. This was no recent meal. “I just never knew girls could be such slobs.”

  She climbed out of the bed. “You can leave now.” She was wearing a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt that said NO EMPATHY.

  “I will.” He set the sandwich and plate back atop the stack of books. “I wanted to ask you a favor.”

  “You can’t come out with me again.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to—that’s not—” He shook his head. “That wasn’t my fault.”

  “You have zero tolerance, dude. It was like you were on acid. You were totally zoned, and then you started yelling.”

  “It wasn’t my fault!” he said. But of course he hadn’t been able to explain what had happened to him while he was high. And up until he came to with everyone looking at him, it had been one of the best nights of his life.

  “So,” Malice said. “You get scared straight?”

  “Not exactly. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  He looked around for a place to sit, but even the armchair was covered in crap.

  “You’re not staying,” Malice said. “What’s the favor?”

  “I want to buy more pot.”

  She laughed. A bit harshly, he thought.

  “From you,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “No way.”

  “I really need it,” he said.

  “You need it? Okay, now I’m really not giving you any. You’re thirteen.”

  “Fourteen.”

  “I’m not getting my stepcousin addicted to pot. Plus, I don’t think you’re cut out for it, man. I mean—” She stuck out her arms and shimmied, bug-eyed. “Gaddiga-gaddiga-gaddiga.”

  “I did not look like that.”

  “Dude, it was much worse.”

  He opened his fist, revealed the wad of cash. “Here.”

  She eyed the bills, but didn’t touch them. “Where’d you get forty bucks?”