“Her eyes are closed,” he said.
“Exactly.”
Mick laid it facedown on the seat and wrote FAITH across the back.
26
* * *
The thief.
IT WAS a beautiful day with a bright breeze and high, thin clouds, and Mick was feeling frisky for some reason after he dropped off the Man With No Hands. He didn’t want to go straight home and dive into Saturday chores, and he had some mad money in his wallet that he’d rat-holed from side jobs here and there. He stopped off at the camera store in the mall on the way home. The long lens he wanted was still out of his price range, so he settled for a couple filters.
When he finally got home around noon the house was deserted. Layne had left a note saying she was taking the kids shopping for new bathing suits. Oddly, the back door was unlocked. Layne never went off without locking all the doors. Then Mick noticed a couple of drawers hanging open and flour all over the kitchen counter, the Tupperware flour bin sitting on the counter open.
He started looking around, then, and noticed other things out of the ordinary. The door to the hall closet was open and some of the coats had been thrown in the floor. The walk-in closet in his bedroom had been ransacked, clothes strewn all over the place. Even the hamper against the back wall, the one with Layne’s stuff in it, had been dumped out and left overturned.
Somebody had been in the house. Then he saw that Layne’s jewelry box on the dresser had been cleaned out. In the kids’ rooms he found the remains of broken piggy banks on the floor. The stereo was still in its place, and his guns remained untouched. Whoever had broken into the house apparently wanted only jewelry and cash. Mick called the police.
Of all the cops in the world they could have sent, Officer Bowers showed up—he of the red hair and sunglasses. The jerk who tagged Mick for littering last fall. Mick was in the kitchen talking to him when Layne showed up. Coming home and finding a police car in her driveway, she barged in all breathless and hysterical. Officer Bowers was probably forty-five years old, and he’d been a policeman more than half that time. He was leaning against the kitchen counter with a toothpick in his mouth, smiling, unperturbed.
“What did they get?” she asked, clutching the kids up under her and staring around wild-eyed, like she thought the burglar might still be in the house.
“The biggest thing was your jewelry,” Mick said. “And the kids’ piggy-bank money.” His jaw tightened and his nostrils flared. This was his turf, and he’d been invaded. He would have strangled somebody if he’d known where to start, but he didn’t. In the end, he remembered that it was his job to calm Layne down.
“Did you have a lot of expensive jewelry?” Bowers asked.
“Not really,” she said. “There were a couple of opal rings my mother left me, and a pair of diamond stud earrings.”
“Have you noticed anybody hanging around watching the house lately?” The cop swiped a finger through the flour mess on the counter.
“No, not that I recall,” Mick said.
“There’s that kid on the motorcycle,” Layne said. “He’s been riding through the woods around here the last couple days.”
Mick had forgotten about him. “Just some teenager on a dirt bike,” he said. “Probably from one of the subdivisions a mile or two up the road.”
Bowers nodded, picked up his hat and made a move toward the door. “Okay. I’ll take care of it. Odds are you won’t get any of your stuff back, but I’ll go lean on him. I can guarantee he won’t come back here.”
He knew. Bowers had already figured out who did it. It was obvious he had a history with this kid. Mick wanted a name. He wanted a piece of biker boy.
“You know who it is, don’t you?” he said.
“Oh yeah, I knew right away. This isn’t my first trip around the block. I keep tabs on all the aspiring young criminals around here. This particular one likes to circle the house at a distance first and look for cars. If all the cars are gone, he’ll come up and ring the doorbell. If anybody comes to the door he’ll just ask to borrow some gas for his bike. But if nobody’s home he’ll jimmy the back door and make a quick grab for cash and jewelry—whatever he can stick in his pockets. He knows enough not to take guns. I don’t know why, but he always looks in the flour bin—probably where his mother hides her stash.”
“I want a name,” Mick said. He didn’t try to hide his intentions. He felt sure he could persuade the little delinquent to give them back their stuff—and maybe some of his own.
“Not a chance,” Bowers laughed. “I told you I’ll take care of it. Make a complete list and report it to your insurance company. And, ma’am, I’ll try to get your jewelry back, but don’t count on it. He’s a tough kid.”
Toad had gone into the living room and squatted down in front of the open cabinet where the DVDs were stored when they weren’t scattered all over the floor.
“There’s a couple movies missing,” she said.
“Superheroes?” Bowers asked.
Toad nodded. “Batman and Daredevil.”
Bowers nodded. “That’s him.” He was watching Mick pretty closely and noticed him flexing his fists. “And Mister Brannigan, you’d best let this go. I don’t want to have to lock you up for assault, you hear?”
* * *
“I feel so violated,” Layne said after the cop left. “What if we’d been home?”
“He wouldn’t have done it if we’d been home,” Mick said. He had calmed down a little by then.
Layne stopped pacing for a second and asked, “Where were you, anyway? I tried calling you but you didn’t answer your cell phone.”
“I turned it off. I’m sorry. I would have been home earlier but I went by the camera store. How much do you think was in their piggy banks?” he asked.
“About fifty dollars apiece, mostly in two-dollar bills. Birthday money from their grandparents. What are we going to do, Mick?”
She was distraught, and he could understand it. Her home had been invaded by a stranger and she felt helpless, defenseless. Mick’s family’s safety was his first priority, and even though biker boy hadn’t taken anything of his it felt like he’d lost more than anyone else. He was his family’s last line of defense and he had let them down.
He was spitting mad, but at least he had sense enough to see how shaken Layne was. Even the kids picked up on it. Dylan shadowed him. He didn’t say anything, but there was fear in his eyes; he kept wringing his hands and asking Mick to pick him up. Toad followed her mother around asking a million questions.
“You really think it was the boy on the bike? Why didn’t he take the other Batman movie? Do you have a piggy bank, Mom?”
There was one question Toad asked more than once. Several times she took a breath and asked her mother in a hushed tone, “Do you think he’ll come back?”
Ben was being really quiet, a disturbing sign. He swept up the broken pieces of his piggy bank, laid them out on the dining room table, and sat there turning chunks around and fitting them together like a puzzle, thinking about glue. It would never work—the thing was too badly shattered.
Layne finally called everybody together in the dining room. She knelt down where she could look the kids in the eye and talk straight to them.
“This is exactly why you don’t put your confidence in stuff. It all goes away sooner or later, one way or another,” she said. “There’s moths and rust and bad people who break in your house while you’re not at home, and stuff just goes away. You can’t trust stuff.”
Dylan clung to his dad, buried his face in Mick’s neck.
“We need to do something,” Toad said.
“Like what?” Mick asked. He had some ideas himself, but most of them involved yet another crime.
“We could walk around,” Ben said.
“Walk around?” Mick asked. They were already walking around—like scared rabbits.
“When Cameron’s TV and stuff got stole they walked around the house. Seven times.”
“Let’s do it!�
� Layne said. She knew right away it was what they needed. Mick sensed it, too.
They all went out into the yard and took each other’s hands.
“We have to pray,” Ben said. So while they walked, they asked God to protect them and make their house safe again. Even Mick said some words. He wasn’t sure if the words went anyplace, but he said them anyway. Dylan, in his own odd way, even prayed for the burglar. He asked God to give biker boy “some stuff of his own so he won’t come and take ours anymore.”
It seemed like such a simple thing but it had a calming effect, even on Mick. Somehow, it took away the rage. In the end he thought maybe the Man With No Hands was right. Maybe rituals really did have a way of making people feel safe and secure.
* * *
The kids were out of school for the summer, so as soon as the bank opened on Monday morning Mick loaded all three of them into the truck and drove up there. On the way he explained to them that it might take a while for the justice system to make biker boy give them back their money, so he was going to replace it and let them pay him back later.
He sat Dylan up on the counter and made the teller give each of them their piggy-bank money in the same denominations that were stolen. She got a huge kick out of the story. She went all over the bank rounding up two-dollar bills and telling people about it. By the time they left, the kids could have had a job there if they’d wanted
27
* * *
When frogs and crawfish fly.
SUMMER. The real test.
When the kids went out to play Andy couldn’t stand being locked in the backyard with the rest of the livestock, even though it was three acres. His mission in life was to find a way to get out—when he wasn’t chasing the goat or working alongside the chickens to unearth the foundation of the house so rain could drain in under it.
He loved to get into Hap’s pond. He wouldn’t swim in the pool because he was afraid of the steep sides, but he’d tunnel out of the yard, run through a quarter-mile of woods and climb Hap’s pasture fence to get to the stinking, swampy muck hole Hap called a pond. Andy thought it was heaven. He’d escape, and after a while he’d come prancing home, black on the bottom and yellow on top, proud as a two-tone Buick and smelling like a swamp. It was then that he particularly liked to find an open door into the house.
The only thing he couldn’t do was get back inside the fence, where they kept his food and water. Mick provided dog food strictly for appearances; he didn’t think Andy ever actually ate any of it. He foraged. He’d eat absolutely anything except dog food. Mick knew this because Andy was very careful to vomit only on the sidewalk around the pool—never in the woods. He’d go off and eat somebody’s weed-whacker, a basketball and maybe a whisk broom, and then, when goat fare disagreed with him, he’d come home and ralph on the concrete by the pool where the kids could squat next to it, poke it with sticks and speculate about what it used to be:
“Looks like part of a pencil, a couple Legos, a Hefty bag and some yellow junk . . . squash, maybe?”
“Oooh, no! Yuck! Even Andy wouldn’t eat squash.”
What he didn’t eat he destroyed, and left the remains scattered in the grass or the flower bed—doormats, carwashing utensils, toys, tools, other people’s newspapers, shoes, begonias. He also liked to invite his friends over for a good romp and wrestle, always in the nice, soft, damp flower beds in front of the house. And he was a world-class digger. Mick came home from the store one hot day to see a black nose poking out of a Volkswagen-sized hole up against the house in the front flower bed.
In hot weather Andy would belly down on the pool steps to cool off. He wouldn’t get all the way in, he’d just lay down on the top step. On the rare occasions that Mick managed to plug all the holes and keep him in the backyard for a day or two, the kids would leave the pool gate open and Andy would spend all day traipsing back and forth between his red-dirt digs under the deck and the pool steps. He’d get good and muddy, then leave a trail to the pool and a bushel of red mud on the steps. He could also destroy as many as nine flotation devices, three inflatable balls and seven plastic squirt guns in a single afternoon when he had access to the pool. Once in a while a lizard would scurry under the fence and Andy would hunker down with those big webbed feet and broad shoulders, hiking dirt and gravel into the pool at the rate of about fifteen pounds a minute. If nobody was around when the gate got left open, the goat would add his trail of raisins and the chickens would leave their mark.
Of course, with three kids “working” full time, there was no chance of keeping things put away where the dog couldn’t get them, and no hope of keeping gates and doors closed. There were seven gates and doors that had to be controlled. On one side there were three kids, six chickens, a goat and a diabolically intelligent dog. On the other side was a tired old ironworker.
Mick was losing, and getting tired.
But he had to admit the pool was worth it, for the kids. He put in an hour or so every day keeping it clean and keeping up the chemicals, but the kids loved it. Since they didn’t have to be in daycare all summer long and there were no other kids in the neighborhood for them to play with, they practically lived in the pool. Ben and Toad swam like otters, and before long all three of them were brown as crowder peas.
But Dylan couldn’t swim, or at least he claimed he couldn’t, so Mick worked with him. Every day, while Ben and Toad were playing games in the deep end and showing off on the diving board shouting “Watch me!” every five seconds, Mick was in the shallow end holding Dylan up so he could beat the water into submission. Layne worried constantly about Dylan and the pool. She insisted on keeping the rope across the shallow end, and she told Dylan if he ever crossed that rope he would surely die. Anytime Mick went to the deep end Dylan would just stand there on his side of the rope and whine until he came back. More than once it occurred to Mick that his own father would have just chunked him in the deep end and gone in the house. But Mick was not his old man.
He took Dylan to the therapist once a week, where she did all the weird exercises with the big ball and the weighted blanket and such, none of which really accomplished a whole lot as far as he could tell. Dylan still wore his pink fuzzy earmuffs half the time and he still couldn’t pronounce a G, but she did say his hand-eye coordination was a little better. She always seemed a little disappointed, and every week she made a point of encouraging him to do a more consistent job with Dylan’s home-therapy regimen. Mick was doing the best he could, but he wasn’t much of a mother. The truth was, Dylan didn’t like his therapy exercises; he hated them almost as much as Mick did. He’d much rather spend time playing in what he called his “net”—a makeshift swing Hap and Mick had made from an old hammock and hung from a white oak out in the woods—or rolling around in a short section of drainpipe they found out behind Hap’s workshop. With everything else Mick had to do he was just too busy to remember Dylan’s therapy every day, but they were always together. After the near disaster in Hap’s pond, he never let Dylan out of his sight. Dylan had become Mick’s number one sidekick, and he tried to emulate every move his dad made. He was getting pretty good at swinging a hammer, but Mick felt sure that was not the sort of thing a therapist would want to hear.
* * *
One afternoon in late June they walked down to Honeysuckle Creek—Mick and his kids and Andy. There was a wide place in the creek where it crossed under the road about a mile from the house, and the current had scooped out a little shallow pond in a bend. The kids loved to go down there and get filthy. Andy liked it, too. There was nothing he liked better than going for a swim in muddy water.
Ben made a spear out of a reed and spent the afternoon trying to harpoon bream with it. He had no chance, but he had fun trying. Dylan made a handgun out of a dead pine limb—to a boy, everything was a potential weapon—and Toad threw rocks. Andy got into the shallows down below the pond and started chasing crawfish. He’d paw at a rock until a crawfish darted out so he could chase it, then he’d splash through
ankle-deep water with his nose tracking back and forth just above the surface until he caught up and pounced. He’d stick his whole head down in the water and come up with a crawfish in his teeth, but he must have gotten pinched once because he wouldn’t keep it long. He’d fling it twenty feet in the air and then splash over to wherever it landed and start the chase all over again. Mick would have given anything for a close-up shot of the look on that crawfish’s face.
He was sitting on the edge of the old wooden bridge laughing at Andy when Aubrey’s BMW pulled off the road and stopped. Mick hadn’t seen him in a few weeks, since giving him the titles for the pictures. Aubrey had called once to tell him he had submitted the six photos to the museum for the show, but Mick had almost forgotten about it. He figured Ben could spear a boxcar load of bream before he got a photo picked by a panel of judges—professional photographers and museum curators. It was all just Aubrey’s wishful thinking. When Aubrey got out of the car he didn’t look happy, so Mick figured he must have gotten the word. He came over and sat down beside him on the bridge, letting his legs dangle.
“I got a call from a friend of mine at Arts Clayton this afternoon,” Aubrey said.
“So, did they pick one of my pictures for the show?”
“No.” Now Aubrey smiled. “They picked three.”
“Get outta here.”
“No, seriously. You’ll be getting a letter from them in a day or two—that’s the normal routine. I only got a phone call because the curator is a personal friend.”
“Which three?”
“Let’s see ... I know he mentioned the one of Toad flying through the air. I think the other two were the closeup of Ben watching his kite and the silhouette of Dylan with the old man under the bridge.”
“Wow. That’s amazing. I never in a million years . . . Three?”
Summer of Light Page 20
