Had it rained recently? Was it ruined?
There are a lot of things about that painting that other people probably wouldn’t understand. Like why I drew a purple dragon over the city. It’s simple, really: because even though there were no purple dragons there, there were great warriors, so I figured why not give them a dragon to deal with? People usually think I’m pretty dumb until I stop and explain things to them. Then, they usually think I’m pretty smart. And also, people never know a masterpiece when they see one – I overheard Dad say this once as he stroked Mom’s leg in the dark.
I stood up, slipped my shoes on, then hummed a patriotic song I didn’t know the words to and began marching valiantly toward the woods.
Already, it was late fall and the leaves formed a nice cushion on the ground. Probably, I didn’t have to wear shoes at all. Everything was brown and burned-smelling and crackled as I walked.
There, in the woods, I saw the last person I expected to see. Actually, I hadn’t expected to see anyone because the booby trap hadn’t been tripped, but there she was, dumb as ever, Jessica Meyers. She was just leaning against the wall we’d constructed from sticks.
I froze like a polar bear.
Where were our weapons? Where were our goddamn weapons?
I hid behind a few trees, watching the top half of her body squirm as she peered down at the ground, eyes wide and mouth open. I couldn’t see the rest of her – just that floating t-shirt – and then, a moment later there was Albert, rising like a prince, growing from the ground.
Something suspiciously sexual was going on; I could sense it.
“A-ha!” I said, revealing myself. “You!”
Jessica bent down, tugged up her shorts, then returned to standing.
“Why the heck are her pants down?” I cried to Albert. “Someone could get rabies for crying out loud!”
“Jackson?” Albert whispered. He was scared of me. Real scared. I stomped my feet the way Dad did when the raccoons knocked over the trash cans.
“Git! Git outta here! Scat! Move on!”
“Jackson, hold up . . .”
“You’re . . . you’re putting glasses on a pig, Albert!” I stuttered, pointing to her. Jessica covered her face with her hands.
“Let’s see those glasses, pig,” I said, clawing at her arms. “Go ahead, show ’em off, piggie!”
She ran behind Albert like he’d protect her – her heroic, fake Eskimo.
“And you,” I said, pointing a finger at him like a curse. Snot ran down my face, and I tried to suck it in. “Mr. . . . Mr. ‘I-think-va-ginas-are-weird-and-boring.’ If they’re so weird and boring, then what were you two doing back here? Making some kind of weird and boring hot sex?”
I stamped again, snapping, growling – like maybe I was the one with the rabies.
I waited for him to explain everything and make us friends again, but he didn’t.
My chest throbbed, and I really wanted to kick things and break things and throw spears.
Where were all the goddamn spears?
I buckled, caught myself against a tree branch.
“Well?” I asked at last.
“Well what?”
“You tell me, soldier!”
“We were just . . .” Jessica began.
I stuffed my fingers in my ears and began humming until she shut her big, fat pig lips and ran out of the woods. Her butt looked as big as the moon. Bigger even.
Then, it was just me and the Eskimo all over again.
“Well?” I repeated. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I don’t know, Jackson,” he shrugged. “I guess . . . this is what we’re supposed to be doing now.”
I rolled my eyes until I could practically see my brain.
“Says who? Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower?”
He didn’t answer.
Far off, the rumble of a car going elsewhere. The sound of my sniffling.
Maybe, I considered as we stood there, we could just wait here forever. Until we grew beards and got arthritis and all our limbs peeled away. Maybe this fort could be like our new home, and those ants from school – the ones that survived, anyhow – they could move in with us. Maybe the dragon from “Mesopotamia” could even pull guard duty to make sure no idiotic girls or Nazis ever tried to breach our barrier.
I wanted to tell him all of these things, about how good we could have it if we wanted.
Instead, I just whispered, “Albert, I think you have the loosest lips of anyone.”
He nodded, said he understood, that he wouldn’t return to our fort any longer.
I saluted him with one hand and gave him the middle finger with the other. I figured I owed him that much.
He turned to leave but stopped. I thought maybe the idiot’s shoestring had come untied but it hadn’t. Not by a long shot.
“Go away,” I ordered. “That is, unless you want a spear in your heart.”
Still, he just moved closer.
“So what? Are you going to murder me like some common polar bear?” I asked.
He shook his head no, offered me the V of his hands, waited for me to enter.
Robotics
I made this robot. Everyone was making them. Mine was a vacuum cleaner with a rubber jack-o-lantern mask taped to the handle. His name was Z-Bot2131F, but I just called him Brady, after my dead brother. Brady, my brother, had come out cold, and then we buried him in Lindenwood Cemetery, and then, directly following, we cried. Just a few weeks later, we started going to church more and more. Then, I taped the mask to the handle.
Everyone in the neighborhood thought Brady was pretty great, and sometimes I’d wheel him around the sidewalks, and kids like Joseph Ames and Ryan Curl would come trickling from their houses to ask questions about how he worked and how I’d built him.
“Does he understand English?” Ryan asked, and I said, “Oh yeah, and a little Spanish, too.”
“Well, what does he do?” asked Joseph, and I said, “Two things. Watch.”
I wheeled my robot inside Joseph’s house, and I plugged him into the wall. Then, I pretended to check invisible dials and cranks. I made some beeping sounds with my mouth and acted nervous, like he might explode or something if he wasn’t properly handled. “Get back!” I cried, and I stood back myself to add to the suspense.
Joseph’s cat – a tabby named Mushu – began brushing up against the side of my robot, and that’s when I pressed down hard on the switch. Brady burst to life – something my brother had never done – and as the light flashed on the front panel, Mushu took off up the stairs, hissing. I grinned, guided Brady along the floor some, and we all listened to the chortle and cough of that robot hard at work. That jack-o’-lantern mask was always loose. It fell off sometimes when the tape got warm or damp or collected too many Mushu hairs. After a few minutes of my demonstration, I killed the switch, and I ran my hand over the top of the handle.
“Yup. So far I’ve trained him to do two things,” I reviewed. “He scares cats and he vacuums carpets.” Neither of them thought this impressive, so I told them that he could scare dogs, too, at least small, cowardly ones. They shrugged and began talking basketball.
“Well how about this,” I tried, waving my arms to get their attention. “I’ll let you guys spend the night and we’ll order pizzas, and I’ll help you build robots like mine.” This, they agreed, sounded pretty good, especially the pizza, and I said great, then it was settled.
When Brady and I stepped inside the house, Mom rose from the table, asking where I had been, and why I had the vacuum, and how dare I vanish without telling her.
“Mom,” I said. “Who vanished? We just went for a walk.”
“And it didn’t cross your mind to inform me?” I shook my head no. It hadn’t. I slapped the top of the vacuum like maybe it could be his fault instead. She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples and said, “Come on, Dylan, you have to try harder for me now, okay?” I said okay. “Because the last thing I need is f
or you to disappear like that.” I nodded. She opened her eyes and winced at the lights. “Maybe you and Z-bot should go to your room for awhile and think about things.”
I said fine, even though I didn’t know what “things” I was supposed to be thinking about.
“But you have to order pizza,” I called before closing the door. “Cuz Ryan and Joe are spending the night tonight.” Mom laughed, said no they weren’t, not in this house. When I asked why not, she slipped the workout tape into the mouth of the VCR and spread her mat on the floor.
“It’s a school night, remember?”
I groaned, but I didn’t get angry.
We could blame Mom for a lot of things, but we couldn’t blame her for Thursday.
Snug between sheets, Brady and I slept together, alongside a few stuffed animals – tigers and bears and a dolphin. The vacuum was cold, so I buried it in plush, and if I tried hard enough, I almost couldn’t feel a thing.
Some nights, when I couldn’t sleep, I made up dreams. I pretended to sleep and then I pretended to wake, and then I pretended to see that vacuum come alive. Sometimes Brady’s human voice would come from the inside of the vacuum bag. It would say things like, “Help! It’s me! It’s your baby brother! I’ve been right here all along!” Sometimes, there wouldn’t be any sounds at all, just a punching from inside, a tiny fist jabbing for the zipper. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but I mentioned it to Mom, that Brady, the baby, had been waking me up at night.
“Waking you up how?”
“I don’t know. Scratching from the inside of the vacuum bag and stuff.”
Mom grabbed my hand and dragged me to tell my father.
“It’s official. You’re crazy,” Dad said to Mom, then glanced at me. “And you, too. You’re crazy for making her crazy.” I returned to my room while they continued to talk.
“Can’t we all just move on already?” he called a few minutes later, but since I’d just plugged Brady in, I pretended not to hear a thing.
One night, Ryan Curl came over and set to work building a robot from a skateboard and a broken telephone. Meanwhile, I made a few modifications to Brady. First, I slipped one of baby Brady’s miniature shirts around the vacuum handle and straightened it to match up with the mask. Next, I unknotted the cord, then set to work polishing the wheels with a rag and water.
Ryan’s robot was pretty bad – it was certainly no Brady – and when he caught me staring at the curling wires on the skateboard deck, he said, “It may not look like much, but it can think like a human.”
“Think like a human how?”
“Watch,” he said, tapping a few numbers on the remainder of the phone base before shoving the skateboard across the living room with his foot.
“I programmed him to do that,” he explained, proud. I rolled my eyes and told him mine could think like a human, too, and to prove it, plugged Brady in and listened to him whir.
Mom walked into the room to tell us to knock it off, but then she glimpsed baby Brady’s shirt on robot Brady’s body, and she didn’t yell one bit. She wore sweatpants because she was always wearing sweatpants then, and then she turned him off, pointed to Brady, whispered, “Dylan, how could you?”
“But . . . Brady said to,” I whimpered. “In a dream.” Mom slammed the vacuum to the floor before tripping over Ryan’s robot and scattering the numbered keys. Ryan watched everything from his place on the floor, and when Mom left, I leaned over to him, cupped my hand to his ear:
“My robot makes people cry. Can yours?”
Missing Mary
You’ve heard this one before.
A sophomore at the local high school struggles through the periodic table.
The symbols aren’t the problem. She understands that B is for boron and C is for carbon, she even knows the trickier ones. What she doesn’t know are their atomic weights or how to find them, what the teacher means when he says valence. On her teacher’s recommendation, she seeks out a tutor who we’ll call Tim, though that’s not his real name, but it’s good enough and you get the picture. And we’ll call her Mary because this, too, will help put a face on things.
After Tuesday’s final bell, Mary catches Tim beside his locker, introduces herself, and he stares at her for a while before saying something like, “Yeah, I know who you are.”
Mary smiles, which is what she always does when she wants things.
“Valence,” she admits. “And atomic weights.”
He nods and picks at his nails, but he’s a teenager – don’t read too much into this.
“So?” she tries. “Can you help?”
Tim – who’s maybe a little strange but no more so than any other tenth grader – agrees he probably can.
“Meet me at the library at 8:00?” he asks.
He’ll be at a table near the back.
Fast-forward a few hours, and Tim has just finished pork chops with his family. His father reads the paper while he chews, but this won’t prove a critical detail. Tim excuses himself upstairs to wet his hair. This, too, won’t prove critical. Nor will what the family dog is doing (rummaging through the neighbor’s trash).
It’s never quite clear what Mary is doing during this time, as Tim finishes his dinner, as the dog gnaws on a corncob next door. She had soccer practice until 5:30 – we know this much – but there are discrepancies after that. Most teammates swear she waved goodbye and started home, though one refutes the claim.
She was going to see her boyfriend. You know she had a boyfriend, right?
Meanwhile, Mary’s mother and father are watching their youngest daughter’s dress rehearsal for The Wind in the Willows (Mary’s sister plays Stoat #2), and while her mother left a note – Leftovers in the fridge, sweetie – it’s unclear if Mary ever entered the house to read it.
The library closes at 9:00, and at 8:15, when she still has not arrived, Tim begins wondering why he asked her to meet him so late. An hour, let alone forty-five minutes, was hardly enough time to cover anything. The alkalines if they were lucky, though they wouldn’t stand a chance with noble gases.
He sits at the back table and examines his notes, though the truth is, he rarely needs them. Chemistry has always come naturally to Tim, though it’s mostly a thankless gift.
It is a fine library with an excess of hardcover books, subscriptions to major newspapers, enough microfilm to blanket the town in its past.
Though perhaps this doesn’t matter.
What matters is that Tim waits for her until the librarian begins tapping the face of her watch. She doesn’t have to clear her throat.
He nods, gathers his things, slips past the empty chair beside him.
You know how things go from here.
Her parents call the police, the obligatory squad car arrives, and a pair of bulging-bellied officers extricate themselves from the bucket seats of their cruiser and flip open their pocket-sized pads. Except maybe one of them isn’t all that fat. Maybe the other makes up for his fatness.
“Okeedokee, so when was the last time you saw the little lady?”
“You recall how she was dressed?”
“And how might you describe her mental state?”
Mary’s mother fumbles through all of these while Mary’s father feigns distraction with the thermostat, turning the wheel and watching the needle follow. He sets it at a comfortable seventy-four, appreciating this power between his fingers.
Mary’s little sister – who performed admirably as Stoat #2 throughout her dress rehearsal – is unsure how to interpret all these strangers in her house. She hides in the kitchen with chocolate milk, rehearsing her line in her head.
Half an hour later, when Mary’s father discovers Mary’s little sister there, he plops her atop his knee, assuring her that everything will be just fine.
Mary is most likely just out with friends, he explains, reciting his own line. The obvious answer is most often the right one.
And then it’s morning. Mary’s mother has not slept and her father
has managed only an hour or two. No one attempts breakfast, though what concerns Mary’s sister is that she’s given permission to stay home from school.
She thinks:
Somebody must be sick.
She thinks:
But there is no understudy for Stoat #2!
The officers have multiplied. They are in every stairwell and closet, each of them gripping a Styrofoam cup in one hand and a bear claw in the other. One of the officers offers a bear claw to the father. He declines.
“You know, we get these calls all the time,” an officer says between bites. “Nine times out of ten they’re just out blowing off steam.”
Mary’s father nods because it is easy and his head remembers how.
He wonders:
What kind of steam?
Two policemen walk into a high school.
The first one says, “We’ll need to have a look inside her locker.”
And the second one says, “Yes, indeedy we will.”
Inside it: books, a dried flower, a mirror.
One officer gets it in his head to examine the flower, as if implicating it. It’s a purple flower, its petals brittle, though the officer is uncertain in placing its time of death.
And then, a breakthrough:
“You know, she was having trouble with valence,” admits Mary’s science teacher upon questioning. “I think his name was . . .”
They pull Tim from Spanish class in the middle of conjugating jugar.
“Heard you and the girl were study partners?” “No,” he tells them. “We were supposed to meet at the library but didn’t.”
No, he wouldn’t consider them close friends.
No, he hardly knew her.
“Then why did she approach you?” they ask. “You of all people.”
He shrugs, reminds them it’s not a crime to be good at chemistry.
“You two fool around, Timmy?” an officer asks.
He says no; that was the chemistry he wasn’t good at.
Sightings Page 13
