• • •
Hours later, just after I finally fell asleep, I woke to catch the smell of Marlboros stinking up my space.
I hoisted myself up on my elbows. Ziggy was sitting at my desk, legs loosely crossed.
“It’s happening again.”
After the shock of seeing him in my bedroom wore off, I remembered I was mad at him. “Where the hell did you disappear to yesterday afternoon?”
“I’m here to help you fight the Marr, son. I have no power over stupidity.”
He was talking about the jumpy police kid with the gun.
It was a crap answer, and to make it worse he flicked ash onto my carpet.
“Do you mind? Some of us have to live here.”
He took another drag. “You need to focus on the real problem.”
“Which is what?” I said. “’Cause I’m losing count of what I’m supposed to be worrying about.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “There’s Terrence, who got shot in the chest. There’s every teenage girl in the city. Oh yeah, and then there’s Evan, who keeps popping pills and gets skinnier each day. Have I left anything out?”
He leaned forward and steepled his fingers. His crooked teeth glowed so much I thought they might have a half-life. “There’s a pattern, old boy. You can feel it, can’t you? You just haven’t put it together yet. Terrence was close. That’s why he went down. He tried to tell you.”
I lay back. “Listen, man. I’m tired. I spent half the day up to my elbows in gore. Can’t you please let me sleep? I promise I’ll think when I get up.”
I turned my head to the wall and folded the pillow over my ears. I didn’t know how he got in and out of places, but I was hoping that if I ignored him he’d disappear. Glimmer off somewhere else.
He didn’t. I knew he didn’t because the smoke got closer to my head.
“You can’t escape me. The more you try to shake me off, the more I’ll be with you.”
The burn was quick and unexpected. A cigarette stubbed out on my right hand, in the valley between my thumb and forefinger.
I screamed. Ziggy leaned in closer and whispered, “It shouldn’t have to be this way, Noah. Use your ears. Use your eyes. Find a way to understand things other than through pain.”
Of course Mom and Cilla came running, but as soon as they flicked on the lights, Ziggy was gone.
“MY GOD, NOAH! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO YOURSELF?”
Mom had my hand in hers. There was a smoking crater in the valley between my thumb and forefinger.
“Smoking. In bed. Fell asleep.”
Cilla came running back in with a bag of frozen peas for my burning hand and tucked me in bed. My sheets were midnight blue with glow-in-the-dark constellations on the pillowcases. So as soon as Mom and Cilla flipped off my bedroom light, I felt like I was lying in a field of stars. My room was cold but peaceful. If it wasn’t for my throbbing hand, it would’ve been easy to float away into the stratosphere.
There was another reason I couldn’t get to sleep right away. Mom and Cilla left the door cracked, probably to keep an eye on me. So I heard them shushing each other in the hall and saw silhouettes of fingers pressed to lips. They might as well have yelled, “WE WANT TO TALK ABOUT YOU AND IT ISN’T GOING TO BE GOOD!”
So of course I had to listen.
Good thing I was an expert at playing possum, another skill I’d learned from living with Dad. I could always tell by the lurch and creep of his shadow, the way it reached and coiled like smoke, when he was coming for someone—anyone—to leave his permanent mark on.
On those nights there was nothing to do but play dead.
Nope. Nothing here. Just a pile of sleeping kid under covers the color of the midnight sky.
That skill served me now. Mom and Cilla thought I was asleep after only a minute.
Mom said, “Let me get this straight, honey. You think he’s deliberately hurting himself?”
“You saw the burn, Mom. That was more than just random ash. Someone ground it out on his hand. Hard. And he was the only one in the room.”
“Couldn’t someone else have done it? Maybe he’s hiding Sonia in there somewhere. He’s always been a sucker for her. Goddamn. I knew we should’ve pressed charges after what she did to his nose.”
I heard Cilla huff. She loved knowing more than other people. “Sonia’s over, Mom.”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, please. She scarred him for life. Noah may be clueless but he’s not stupid.”
“Have you seen his personal finance grades? He can be very stupid.”
“Well, yeah, I suppose so,” Cilla said. “But not about Sonia. Not anymore. Earlier tonight, when I cut his hair, he said he was interested in someone new.”
Silence. I could practically hear Mom chewing her lip, like she did when she couldn’t make something add up.
“So that’s it, then. He did this to himself. Why? Is he really that desperate for attention?”
“I don’t understand it either,” Cilla said. “This band thing has made him a little loopy. It’s almost like he won’t let himself be happy. Like something’s dragging him back.”
Mom swore in a way she would never have dared when Dad was alive.
“. . . asshole still screwing with us after all these years. I knew I should’ve gotten Noah into therapy. Or medicated him. But he seemed fine.”
“He had Evan.”
Mom sighed. “No kidding. I don’t know what Noah would do without him.”
And that was the problem. I didn’t either.
A week went by and March turned to April. Didn’t make much difference in the weather. Either it was rainy and gray, like in Gresham, or rainy and gray and stinking of hops, like in Portland. The whole sprawl seemed depressing and industrial—a city of old bridges and warehouses and unused train tracks that led into brick walls.
The PfefferFest was in two weeks, but we still hadn’t heard from the Pfeffer brothers about who was in the lineup. There were teaser posters all around town, though: PfefferFest. Who Will It Be? With a dotted outline of a random head and shoulders. Drove us nuts. Crock tugged hard on clumps of his hair. Not only did not knowing not jive with his control freak nature, he was getting interrogated daily from us.
“Honestly, how soon until we find out?” Evan said one afternoon in my Gremlin on the way to the Maxi Pad. He was riding shotgun, as usual, and Crock was in back. People stared at Ev’s rainbow dreads at every stoplight. It was like driving a motorized fishbowl.
“I don’t know,” Crock told him. “Look, the fact that we haven’t heard is good news. A bunch of bands have already gotten flushed. We’re probably in the top thirty.”
“Out of how many?”
Crock fake-coughed. “One hundred seventy-two,” he said.
Ev sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus, that’s a lot,” he said.
Crock said, “I don’t know how word got out, but it did. There were even bands from Austin, Texas. Everyone wants a big break.”
“I had no idea the odds were that bad,” Ev said. “This changes everything.”
“Like what?” I said. “What does it change?”
Ev looked out the window, flipped off the latest carful of people who were staring at his hair, and said, “It makes a difference in how I can keep getting away. I told Dad we were rehearsing for the PfefferFest.”
“Is that it?” I said. “You’re worried about excuses? Take it easy, then. If this falls through, Crock’ll get us another gig. Right, Crock?”
“No prob,” Crock said. “We’ll find something sooner or later.”
Evan slouched in his seat. “Sooner would be better,” he said.
In that dead calm of the next week, Crock kept a chore chart taped to the door in the Maxi Pad with everyone’s name and their work rotation. To get us off his back when we weren’t practicing, he said. Dinner. Store. Dishes. Terrence.
Terrence the Homeless Knife-Wielding Vet had survived the operation to remove the bulle
t and fix the internal damage. But his rehab was a bitch. The doctors thought he might’ve had a small stroke at some point. All we knew was that, because of either the stroke or a lot of Thorazine, the guy was a drooling idiot. One of us visited him at Emanuel Hospital every afternoon, but after he got all the tubes out, not a lot changed. Someone kept the TV on in his room all the time, but he didn’t watch it. Instead, he spent hours staring at the giant mutant rhododendron outside his window.
I liked pulling the Terrence shift and often swapped Maxi Pad chores so I could spend more time with him. I found it restful talking to a guy who didn’t talk back. I told him everything. I told him about my dad and what it had been like cleaning his head off the basement wall. I told him about Ziggy and the Marr. I told him how worried I was about Evan.
Each time, I brought Terrence’s knife with me. Each time, I looked for a way to give it back to him. Each time, I decided it was a bad idea. Until one afternoon, when the door to the hall was closed and I was strumming tunes on my acoustic guitar. I told him I thought the Marr might also have something to do with the Disappearing Girls.
“I just don’t understand, Terrence,” I said. Strum strum strum. “There’s got to be a pattern. I know it. Willy’s working on it, but I don’t think whoever’s taking these girls will slip up again anytime soon. He’s too good.” I paused to tune up. “I still think it has something to do with the PfefferBrau Haus.”
I put the pick in my mouth and tightened up my G string. Then I looked up. Terrence was staring at me, his eyes completely focused. There was no drool.
I put the guitar down and held the straw for his cranberry juice up to his mouth. He swatted it away.
“I believe you have something of mine,” he said, as though he had never been sedated or on antipsychotics. I didn’t know how he pulled it off, but he was even better at playing possum than I was.
He slipped a hand from under his blankets and beckoned for it. He even snapped his fingers. Gimme.
I reached into my jacket pocket but stopped. “Are you sure this is the right place to give it to you? Shouldn’t you be discharged first?”
“Son, they ain’t never gonna discharge me. As soon as I look better, they’re shuffling me off to the psych ward. I heard them.”
And now I had a decision. Was Terrence harmless? Or wasn’t he? “If I give this to you, do you promise not to use it on any doctors or nurses? Or police guys or nuns?”
He snapped his fingers again. “You let me worry about that. You’ve got enough to worry about already.”
I didn’t kid myself. I knew what I was doing. I knew I’d smuggled a concealed weapon into a crowded hospital. I knew Terrence hadn’t given me any guarantees. But I handed it over anyway, and his hand, now clean and white and flopping around like a cod, snatched it from me and slid it under his mattress.
I tried to guess how I’d feel if I found out later some orderly had had his throat cut because Terrence went on a rampage.
But I doubted he would. Even as he hid the knife, I had a feeling that the worst that would happen would be what actually did—that he’d bust out of the hospital, and the only casualties would be the window frame and the hundred-year-old rhododendron on the ground two stories below.
When I came back to the Maxi Pad that afternoon, I knew at once that everyone else was worried about something, and that it wasn’t Terrence.
Ziggy was sitting on the open windowsill, flicking ash on the sidewalk below. He had a mean-dad look in his eyes, as if to say: I warned you.
Sonia, Crock, and Evan were clustered around Jojo’s TV set. Sonia was sitting on the alpaca carpet, her long legs stretched in front of her. Crock was leaning forward on the sofa, his fingers steepled, like he was part of an important meeting. Ev was sitting next to him. His bass was in his hands but he wasn’t playing.
“’S goin’ on?” I said, dumping my guitar case by the door.
Sonia shushed me and went back to watching.
I came closer to see what they were so interested in. It wasn’t MTV, or reruns of Gilligan’s Island.
No. They were watching the news. The news. Reporters in trench coats with perfect hair, standing on blustery Portland streets.
It didn’t take me long to figure out what that meant.
Terrence had been right. Pfeffer had done it again.
• • •
Her name was Tracy del Campo. She was a junior at Madison High School. Her parents were from El Salvador, but Tracy was born in Portland. According to interviews with her hollow-eyed parents, Tracy wanted to be a social worker, to help people like them—the kind with heavy accents—get used to how things worked in the United States.
Tracy had been coming home from her internship at a legal aid office on Fremont Street. She was last seen at a TriMet bus stop on the corner of Fremont and Thirty-ninth. Nobody saw her get on the bus. Nobody saw her get into a car with some psycho either. She just . . . disappeared.
By now there had been so many missing girls, the police pounced right away, and so did the media. The whole city wanted her back now.
So reporters interviewed her family. They interviewed her classmates. They interviewed the police. Everyone kept repeating her name. Tracy. Tracy. Tracy. The message was: We did not raise this child to be a victim. Let her go, whoever you are, you sick freak.
They kept showing pictures of her: in a prom dress leaning into a date who was shorter than she was, holding a gaudy debate trophy, looking to the side in front of some splattered blue photography-studio backdrop. Her black hair looked like it had been cut with blunt gardening shears, and she had a skinny rattail of a braid snaking down her back.
Wait, a rattail?
“She looks like . . .”
Ev bounded up from the sofa before I could say any more, grabbed my arm, and pulled me out of the apartment and onto the landing.
He hissed at me: “Jesus Christ, Noah! Sonia’s already freaked enough. Do you want to freak her out more?” He did a back-check into the Maxi Pad to see if anyone was watching us.
The last time we’d talked about the girls on the Disappearing Wall at Denny’s, he’d told me there was no pattern, that I’d go nuts trying to find one.
“Ha!” I said. “Ha ha ha! So I’m not crazy. You see it too!”
Evan wrinkled his nose at me like I smelled like Terrence sitting in a dumpster on a hot summer day. He was disgusted. “Believe it or not, Noah, not everything’s about you.”
Then I noticed his eye. It was half closed, like something was pressing on it.
“Ev, do you need your headache meds?”
He huffed. “Go help Jaime in the store.”
He went back into the Maxi Pad and slammed the door behind him. The frosted glass rattled but held firm.
Jojo was gone when I came in the store, and Jaime had a line of customers ten deep.
We didn’t have time to talk to each other until we closed. The loudspeakers were off; Jaime was counting out the till, and I was wiping down the front case with Windex and a paper towel.
I realized I hadn’t talked to Jaime since Terrence got shot. When we weren’t rehearsing, Crock kept our chore rotations pretty far apart and his closer to hers. We’d all seen him try to flirt with her, but she seemed too tired to do anything about it. At least before Evan smacked Crock upside the head and reminded him the Old Girls were off-limits, no exceptions.
Now I noticed the bags under Jaime’s eyes, and remembered the sound of a gunshot, and crouching on the sidewalk, and then Jaime, her bloody arms like satin gloves. It almost didn’t matter that Terrence was recovering. You never forget seeing up close what a bullet can do when it tears through human flesh.
“You did good the other day. With Terrence,” I said. “If it hadn’t been for you, he might not’ve pulled through.”
She wouldn’t look at me. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you.” Her eyes flicked up to mine, then back to the piles of dimes and quarters. “My parents don’t want me han
ging out here anymore. They let me come today to say good-bye to Jojo. Starting tomorrow I have to stay home and study after school.”
Crap. As Idiot Willy would say, it was that woman again.
“You mean they don’t want you hanging out with us,” I said. She kept re-counting change—because she screwed up the count each time, or she didn’t want to look up. “Or is it just me?” She closed her eyes. She didn’t say anything. “They think I’m trouble.”
“‘Troubled’ was the word they used. Trouble with a ‘d.’”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”
“They’re wrong,” she said softly, almost as if she hadn’t said anything at all. “They don’t hear you, Noah. They don’t know the work you’ve been doing. Even if they did hear it, they wouldn’t understand.”
She was so upset I just meant to hug her, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, I lifted her chin so she’d look up at me and I brushed her lips with mine. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll find a way.”
And I kissed her again.
She’d said her parents hadn’t heard us play. She’d said that even if they had, they wouldn’t appreciate what we were trying to do.
In that still moment I heard the sizzle of the neon sign outside where the second J in JOJO’S RECORDS kept shorting out. I heard Sonia banging the crap out of the floor tom upstairs and felt sorry for Castaneda the goldfish. I heard the scratching of a record on a turntable where we’d forgotten to take the needle off.
I heard the softest brushing of wings over our heads.
I don’t know how we know the things we do. Maybe, like Jojo thinks, there is a higher plane of existence that you can reach by feeding pot to a goldfish. Or maybe, like Terrence, you can smell danger and protect yourself and the city you love with a hunting blade and a tinfoil hat.
Or maybe, if you’re like me, you have to suss it out bit by bit, note by note, until you understand that you’ve made art and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.
Because that was how that moment between Jaime and me felt. Something that only the two of us could hear and feel.
I loved how, in that moment, everything else fell away. Even as I was kissing her, I knew that moments like this didn’t come often, so I memorized each beat of it.
The Rise and Fall of the Gallivanters Page 13
