XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation

by Brad Magnarella

The biker scooped up the four records he’d been trying to trade for and nodded toward the others. “I brought in eight of mine, now I’m taking four of yours. That’s fifty percent. That’s what your ad says. Faggot.”

  “First of all, we are called gays. And I should know because I’m it, honey, the real San Francisco treat.” Chad batted his eyelids. “Second, the ad states that the albums must be of tradable value. I’m almost embarrassed to have to tell you this in public, but Billy Joel and, lord save us, John Denver do not meet our standards of tradable. We don’t even carry them.”

  “Get bent,” the biker said, tucking the four records under his arm.

  “Hey, you come back here with those!” Chad scrambled around the counter as the biker made for the door.

  Tyler had seen enough. With an underhanded motion, he released the charge he’d been gathering. The biker shrieked as his hair gusted up, the records clattering to the floor. He stared at them, eyes bugging, lips dripping saliva, the charge fizzling around his cerebral cortex. Raising his face toward Tyler, the biker muttered something that sounded like glog gloop and then staggered outside.

  Chad looked after the biker a moment, then knelt and began gathering up the records. “I should have figured him for a lunatic. John Denver?” He shook his head.

  Tyler fought to keep his mouth straight.

  “So what are you doing here at two o’clock on a school day?” Chad stood with the records, his back straight as a ruler, and began filing the records into bins. He was wearing a Ramones concert T-shirt, the narrow sleeves rolled up. “Did your precious head become too crammed with knowledge?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Heh.” He put the last record away and dusted off his hands. “What are we in the market for?”

  “Any Dylan you’d recommend?”

  “Hmm.” Chad peered over his shoulder. “I applaud you for becoming seduced by the master, but you already have two of his most revolutionary works. I would take another six months with them, minimum, before adding to that collection.” Chad teepeed his fingers beneath his chin, then lifted his head. “I know!”

  He sidestepped to an adjacent bin, flipped his fingers through it, and drew an album forth. He sighed and pressed it to his chest before revealing the selection to Tyler. The album cover depicted a guy on the verge of smashing his guitar against a stage floor.

  “It’s not one I’d normally recommend to someone so young, but you’re hungry. You’re precocious. You can handle it.”

  Tyler leaned toward it. “The Clash,” he read. “London Calling.”

  “Now, it does deal a lot with the London scene, but it’s punk at its most genius, and the themes are universal. Consumerism, political apathy, nuclear disaster.” Chad grinned as he held out the album. “Try getting that in school.”

  Tyler took the album, the anticipation of discovering another world already kicking around inside him. He tucked the album beneath his arm and fished some crumpled bills from his pants pocket.

  “Uh-uh-uh-uh.” Chad held up his palms. “Take it home and give it a listen. If it slays, then you pay.”

  Tyler smiled and stuffed the bills back down. “Thanks.”

  “Anyway, I envy anyone who gets to listen to London Calling with virgin ears. In exchange, I expect full disclosure.” He widened his eyes. “Understood?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Tyler watched Chad sashay his way back to the counter. Upon first meeting Chad, he hadn’t been sure how to take him, with his funny turns of phrase and flamboyant gestures. But Chad seemed to get him. It was his knack for picking out the right albums at just the right times — albums that spoke to him when nothing else could. At the start of high school that August, when Tyler was questioning formal education and where it all led, Chad insisted on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Listening to the double album in his bedroom, Tyler was comforted to discover that such thoughts were shared by a group of musicians an entire continent away. And that’s what Tyler found in the music Chad picked out for him: a community, even if he couldn’t speak to its members. The music that played on the pop stations — synthesized sounds, repetitive lyrics — just sounded like noise to Tyler, clowns on springs. But this stuff… Tyler turned the album over in his hands.

  “I wonder.” Chad perused the records the biker had left behind. “What’s going on in a fifteen-year-old’s life that he needs a dose of the Clash?”

  “You know. The usual B.S.”

  “Let me guess. Your parents.”

  “Parent, singular,” Tyler said. “My dad took off when I was twelve. Left the house New Year’s Eve and never came home.”

  Chad hitched himself up onto a tall stool behind the counter. “And your mom remarried, and your stepdad’s an intolerant slug?” He sighed. “Been there, done that.”

  “No, for that to happen, my mom would have to leave the house first.”

  “Ouch. Crippling depression?”

  “Pretty much.” Tyler pretended to become interested in the colorful bills taped across the front of the counter advertising upcoming concerts. Thinking about his mother made him think he should be heading home.

  “Well, thanks again.” Tyler held up the album.

  “Anytime.” Chad fiddled with the stereo system for a couple of seconds before giving up and twisting back to Tyler. “Oh, and thanks for helping me with that Neanderthal. Those records were as good as goners.”

  Tyler froze with one hand on the door. “Huh?”

  Chad winked. Tyler pushed his way outside.

  * * *

  Tyler cut through the neighborhoods between University and Sixteenth Avenues, the Clash album tucked beneath his arm. The shadows of late day had set the air on edge, and the cold crept inside his denim. He pulled the final cigarette from his pack with his lips but couldn’t bring himself to light it, so pushed it back inside the pack and the pack into his breast pocket.

  Did I hear Chad right? What in the hell does he think I did?

  No answer came, only the cadence of his footfalls over asphalt and his gut telling him he needed to be more careful. Much more careful. Because if knowledge of his powers ever got out, he could be connected to What Happened. That’s how Tyler had come to think of it — not what he did, but What Happened — and What Happened had been pretty damn awful.

  Back home, Tyler edged past the truck that sat in the same place his father had parked it New Year’s Eve three years before, half on and half off the twin strips of cement, a crippled bush lying in its wake. The truck leaned like a drunkard on its graying tires. Fallen limbs and sodden pine needles filled the rusting bed. Tyler had offered several times to call and have the truck hauled away, maybe even get some money out of it, but his mother had always shaken her head.

  Tyler was surprised to find her inside at the kitchen table, not up in her bedroom.

  “Hey, Ma.”

  She raised her head and mumbled, “Hey, sugar,” the words nearly shapeless.

  He set the album beside the loaded sink and sauntered over. “What are you doing?”

  She was sitting back in one of the white plastic chairs, holding onto an empty glass on the table as if it was the only thing keeping her up. The rest of the table was a scatter of unopened mail, stacks of ad pages, and her medications, the brown plastic bottles half toppled like miniature bowling pins.

  “Huh?” Her head listed toward him, but her drooping eyes remained on the window looking out on the driveway. Cold seeped in around the panes. She was in shorts and a faded Buccaneers T-shirt. The bottoms of her calloused feet looked like gray ice against the dingy tiles.

  Tyler sighed and adjusted the thermostat until air huffed from the overhead vent. “Where’s your robe? You’re gonna freeze to death.”

  She laughed hoarsely.

  “Is it upstairs? I’ll get it.”

  “Naw, naw…” She shook her head, straw-like hair falling over her face. “I was about to go back up. I just came down for a…” She let go of the glass and lurch
ed to her feet.

  Tyler caught her around the waist, her ribs mushy beneath his grip. His mother draped an arm over his shoulder and let her head rest against his.

  “Can’t keep my eyes open,” she said with another laugh.

  “C’mon,” Tyler said. “Don’t stub your toes.” He steered them from the kitchen and up the brown carpeted steps.

  “Think he’ll be back?” Her voice rose with a girl’s hope.

  “Who?” he asked, already knowing.

  “Les. Lester. Your father.”

  “I don’t know, Ma.”

  They made their way down the wood-paneled hallway, where a few framed pictures still hung; family photos from when he and Creed were kids. In one photo, everyone was smiling rigidly except their father, who never smiled in photos. He stared out with coal-black eyes, his mustache and sideburns as thick as Berber carpet. One arm clenched their mother; the other gripped Tyler’s small shoulder.

  Tyler pushed open the bedroom door with a foot. The covers on his mother’s bed were already thrown back, and he set her down and helped her legs onto the bed. She rolled onto her side.

  “Thanks, sugar.” She pulled the covers to her ear with a clawed hand and shivered once.

  “It’ll warm up soon.” Tyler looked from the vent over the bed to the rest of the bedroom. With its solid brown walls and oiled furniture, it still looked more like their father’s room than their mother’s, which was how she seemed to like it. Tyler would sometimes hear the vacuum cleaner running late at night.

  “He was a son of a gun,” she said beneath the covers, “but he was, you know, trying to fix himself. He loved both of you.”

  Tyler’s gaze fell.

  “It’s why he moved us here. Why he signed the… signed the…”

  Tyler looked back to where her pouched eyelids were fluttering. “The lease,” he finished for her.

  She shook her head. “Contract.”

  “Contract?”

  “So you see, your father was trying.”

  “What contract, Mom?”

  But her eyelids remained closed, and soon thin snores droned from her nostrils. Hands in his pockets, Tyler paced to the window. He parted the diaphanous drapes with his shoulder and scanned a backyard that was mostly dirt and leaf fall. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been out there. Azalea bushes grew wild against the tall slats of the rear fence.

  I found a camera pointed at my house, he heard Scott saying. I’m betting there’s one on you guys’s, too.

  The drapes floated back over his view. He felt faint. He needed food. There was at least half a pack of franks in the fridge, he was pretty sure. He could boil a couple and eat them with canned beans. Then he’d listen to his new album. He looked down at where the bed covers swallowed his mother.

  Stepping from the room, he was careful to close the door all the way to trap the heat in.

  10

  The woods

  4:05 p.m.

  The oak tree Scott and Janis had crossed when they were eight sprawled like the fossilized remains of a prehistoric creature. The bark had long since shed off, and the seasons, along with various creatures, had conspired to hollow out the core. What remained was a knotted exoskeleton — if trees could be said to have exoskeletons — solid and bleaching.

  Scott peeked back to the entrance of the woods — still no one — and hoisted himself up, near where the roots stood from the earth like a gnarled hand. Years before, when the roots were still earth packed, he and Janis would prod the black dirt with sticks and then stare in wonder as beetles, centipedes (some large as snakes), and neon-colored salamanders spilled out and wriggled for fresh cover. Now, atop the same trunk, Scott strolled its barren length. The bog was gone, its mud sanded over. In the place of green reeds and elephant ears grew an expanse of dry, straw-like plants, some with cottony tufts on the ends.

  Scott suffered a twinge of disappointment that the fallen oak wasn’t as large as he remembered. He could already see the final limbs out ahead of him, and beyond the limbs, the cement wall of the levee.

  Scott patted his belt at the rear of his pants to make sure his card to Janis was still tucked inside, then he pulled her note from his jacket pocket. He pushed up his glasses and unfolded it.

  Meet me in the woods today at 4:00. Very important!

  He hadn’t even realized Janis had been the one to drop the folded square of paper in front of him until she removed her hat and her hair had tumbled down the back of her jacket, like a dream. She didn’t turn around. Instead, she walked into Blake’s arms and remained with her back to Scott through the rest of the evacuation, which ended up lasting the rest of the school day. Scott’s skewered heart had clung to her spoken words: I’ll explain later.

  He wondered what was up.

  “Don’t fall in.”

  Scott’s arms pinwheeled, his feet slapping and shuffling around until they caught up with the rest of him. He tottered once more, then straightened. Janis was standing at the end of the trunk where Scott had climbed up, her eyes pinched with what looked like concern. But then they relaxed and her lips leaned into a smile.

  “Oh!” Scott said, pushing her note to him back into his pocket. “You’re, ah, you’re here.”

  He heard Bud Body smack himself in the forehead.

  Janis glanced over her shoulder and then walked toward him, her expression turning serious again. Her hair fluttered over the shoulders of a charcoal-gray down jacket. Scott swallowed, not sure what to do with his face. When she reached him, he was startled by her gloved hand enfolding his fingers. She led him down a thick branch that dipped below the level of the trunk.

  “Here’s good,” she said, releasing his hand and rubbing his arm once. “Have a seat.”

  She lowered herself cross-legged opposite him. Scott followed her example, wincing as the card to her crinkled beneath his belt. When he craned his neck, he saw that they were hidden from the cul-de-sac and houses. He turned back to find Janis smiling up at him.

  “Hey,” she said hoarsely.

  God, I’ve missed you. So, so much. “Hey,” he said back, the slightest tremor in his throat. “How are you?”

  Her chestnut eyes fell, and she nodded in a vague way that told him that even if she said she was all right, that wouldn’t have been true. She stopped nodding and reached for his arm. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  Scott looked down, terrified he’d brought the card out without realizing and was now holding it open. But her fingers were only exploring the cast around his left hand. The tiny, tickling propagations of her touch reached his skin, filling his head with a dizzying warmth.

  “Oh, that. Someone wrapped my arm in plaster.” He shook his other fist in mock anger. “And just wait ’til I find out who. No, I, um…” There was no point in lying. “I got into a little altercation with Jesse and Creed.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “Over what?”

  “An old score. I think it’s settled now.”

  “Are you serious?” She held the underside of his cast as though it was something fragile. “They broke your arm?”

  The anger in her voice surprised Scott, and he felt a stammering guilt for having evoked it. “Well, um, the cast is more a precaution than anything.” Whatever that meant. “And your wound?”

  Janis drew her elbows to her sides, the shoulders of her jacket bulking around cheeks that had pinkened with cold. How can someone look more perfect? Scott thought. She clasped her hands together in the lap of her blue jeans, the remnants of her touch lingering inside his cast like a halo.

  “That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said.

  Scott pushed up his glasses. I’m here for you.

  Janis lowered her gaze. “The agent who questioned me in the hospital, Agent Steel, she came over last night. Put some more questions to me. She suspects…” Janis glanced around. “She suspects that there was someone else in the house besides me that morning. In fact, I think she
already knows. I’m so sorry for getting you involved in this, Scott. I should never have…”

  “No, no, it’s all right.” He considered taking her hands, but the moment slipped away. “It was my idea, anyway, remember?”

  “Did Agent Steel talk to you at school today?”

  He shook his head. “But even if she comes around, so what? I’ll just say I wasn’t there.”

  “They have your blood in evidence.”

  “My blood?” Understanding penetrated Scott’s mind like a stiletto. He looked at his palms, his left one casted, of course, but his right one pink and scaly where the last bits of scab had flaked away the week before. From the moment the culvert had ground them to pulp, his weeping palms had left a trail. “Even so,” he heard himself saying, “I’ve got one of the most common blood types, A positive. So, yeah, it throws me into a pool of suspects — right along with one third of the U.S. population.”

  “They have the talkie, too. The one Mr. Leonard smashed. I told Agent Steel it was already in their house.”

  “So I wipe mine and ditch it in a dumpster.”

  “But not at school.”

  “No, not at school.” His shock was yielding to the rational, problem-solving part of his brain. “I was thinking of behind a toy store or hobby shop. Where it would blend in.”

  Janis nodded, his reassurances appearing to relieve her. She pushed a strand of hair from her cheek, her eyes slanting away in thought. The stems rustled around them in the late day, and here and there a cotton tuft drifted past. Scott wet his lips and began reaching behind himself. I meant to give this to you before you left. It’s just, um, something to show how much you mean to me. No, he would scratch that last part. Better to keep it short: I meant to give this to you before you left, and then hand it to her. The card would speak for itself.

  “There’s something else,” Janis said.

  Scott tucked the card back against his shirt and pulled his jacket straight. “Yeah?”

  She scooted herself nearer until their knees were almost touching. Striations of soft green shone around her pupils, making him even crazier. But her smile was thin, little more than a creasing of lips.