Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  For one, I started to notice just how much school sucked. I hadn’t really spoken to Fang and the boys since that last time at Delaney’s. I was still pissed at them for spilling to the media, but mostly I didn’t want to brush up against anyone who’d been within earshot of the story I’d told in the basement that night. Fang did attempt to make contact, and for a while there he tried to get in my way at my locker after school, looking all pathetic and confused, asking me if I was okay. I had nothing to say to that. I had nothing to say to him. Eventually he got the hint and stopped showing up.

  Having no friends except for the dead one following me around wasn’t great, but still, there were other, braver kids who wanted to be my pals. They’d come up to me at my locker or corner me in class and at first they’d act really nice, like we were old friends and they gave a shit about how I was doing, but even on high doses of meds I could smell their desire for answers dripping off them like busybody BO, could see them lining up their real questions just like Baldy had that day at Hank’s. So, how’d you do it? If you knew it was going to happen, why didn’t you do something? That’s what I don’t get …

  Things weren’t much better outside of Jefferson, although I had found a friend in Jesus, or one of his spokespeople, anyway. Pastor Ted was a persistent bastard, and like some revved-up game show host, he kept calling, trying to get me to come on down. He claimed he was concerned, and it wasn’t only him: God was concerned. They were both there for me, they could help, they’d seen cases like mine before. Ted didn’t really worry me; he seemed harmless enough with his promises of salvation and spiritual gifts and everlasting life and whatnot.

  On the home front, my parents and I weren’t exactly hitting it off either. I’d been spending most of my time in my room, and I knew they were worried—that much was obvious—and it wasn’t because they thought I was surfing the Net for porn or injecting shit into my veins or getting blisters from jacking off, all the usual things parents buzz about outside their teenagers’ closed doors. Their worry was cord-around-the-neck bigger than that—but seriously, parents freaking about teens, it’s kind of part of the deal. I couldn’t help them out, was pretty sure they couldn’t do squat for me, so I avoided them as much as possible, fell into monosyllabic communication mode whenever we did come face to face.

  Of course, my mother wasn’t having it. She kept chipping away, trying to crack me open. Coming up to my room, throwing the door wide like she was totally welcome, settling onto the bed. Wanting to talk. About what had happened. About how I was. Upset she had no answers for me, nothing that might make it make sense. All she had to offer was Mexican Mick. Yeah, she yapped about him a lot, and it was always the same old crap. How she thought I should talk to him. How when Mick was little and the phone …

  One day I just shut her down. Forget the Trazon. Forget the hazy, lazy buzz. I was instantly angry. “Yeah, I know about Mick,” I snapped. I’d been at my desk, eavesdropping on my old friends’ moronic instant messaging session, but I got to my feet pretty quick. Because it’s easier to freak, easier to flap your arms and raise your voice and charge around a room, when you’re standing up. My mother was leaning against the wall just inside the door. Arms folded across her chest, mouth knotted up, she watched me go to it. I think I was only about two inches from her face when I told her I was sick of her implying that what had happened to me had anything to do with some nothing, psychic call-display talent her loser brother had twenty years ago. To pretend that it did, to make it seem like Mick and I had something in common, felt like a fucking insult. What happened with Stan and me wasn’t anything, anything like the freaking phone thing with Mick, okay? OKAY?

  “So, what was it like, then, Luke?” she asked, countering my red-hot rant with a cool white calm.

  I could only shake my head. As if, as if, I could explain that. To her. To anyone. I sat down on the bed, spent from the outburst, knocked out by one question.

  “I know you don’t think much of my brother. I know you think he’s a coward who left when he shouldn’t have. But can I tell you something, Luke? Mick was an amazing boy. He was the kindest, most sensitive kid. There was really something special about him. I adored my brother, and yeah, he’s let me down, and yeah, he’s had his share of troubles as an adult, but I still love him. And can I tell you something else you don’t know about him?”

  I didn’t bother giving my consent and she didn’t bother waiting for it.

  “Mick did leave me on my own when I was seventeen. But he didn’t leave three days after our dad died. He left three days before.” She paused, knowing the critical change in information, the after time-warping into before, would grab my attention.

  “When my mom died”—she did a couple quick loops with her hand, rolling past the cancer part of the story—“my father went kind of crazy. Right away he made us get rid of all her things, everything. And a month after she died, he sold our house, and a month after that, we packed up what was left and we moved. Mick and I hadn’t even seen the new place, we just climbed into the cab of the moving truck and drove across town. But when we got there, Mick wouldn’t go inside. There was a big scene on the lawn, my father and my brother were screaming at each other, and Mick just kept saying there was no way he could go into that house, there was no way any of us could go into that house. My father kept telling him not to be silly, to grow up, but nothing he said would change his mind. Eventually Mick just walked away. He didn’t even take a suitcase. He was sixteen years old, and he walked away with nothing.” She took a long drag of air, turned it into a big windy sigh. “Three days later, my father was up on the roof, fixing the aerial so he could watch some football game on TV, and he fell off. And he died.”

  When my mom sat down on the bed beside me, the mattress shifted, but I didn’t. I was rigid. I was a statue, staring blind out a window held together with packing tape.

  “I don’t know why I never told you this before. I’ve never even talked about it with Mick. Or your dad. Not really. I guess I thought I was protecting him somehow—from inquiry, or guilt, or implied responsibility—I don’t know. It always just seemed easier to say Mick left after Dad died. But now …” She put her hand on my stony shoulder. Without even moving, I blasted her with coldness, gave her the old back-to-the-face blow-off, until finally she pulled her hand away.

  I didn’t see her get up. I didn’t see her put the scrap of paper, the one that had been stuck on our fridge since the day Stan died, the one with my uncle’s phone number on it, onto my desk. And I didn’t hear her say she loved me, she’d do anything for me, her life circled around mine. No, I definitely didn’t hear any of that.

  MIDDLE OF NOVEMBER, November 15, the first day it hadn’t warmed up at all. I was heading home after school, underdressed in the latest fall fashions—Converse kicks, T-shirt, jeans with a ripped-out ass, unbuttoned Levi’s jacket with the standard-issue black hoodie underneath. There was frost on the ground and the pavement was slick in all the shadowy places. I hunched into the bitter wind whipping across Erie to scream up the Stokum streets, but as soon as I picked up any speed, my wheels would sideslip on me and my forehead was icing up. After a couple cold blocks, I called an end to my boarding season and started to walk. I was semi-frozen by the time I turned onto Clive Avenue. Still, I slowed up in front of the Bernoffskis’ to take in just how shitty the place looked.

  The house was all shut up, curtains pulled tight, letters and papers hanging from the black metal mailbox. The once-perfect grass was brown and the parts that weren’t buried under piles of rotting leaves were about six inches long. I was thinking about how Mr. Only-on-Tuesdays would flip if he could see the old homestead now, and about the John Deere in the garage— probably untouched since my dad and Mr. Connelly had wrestled it inside and closed the door. I didn’t even notice the station wagon parked across the street from my place. I was halfway up my front walk when I heard a car door open and someone calling my name.

  “Luke? Luke Hunter?”


  I turned to watch a lady stumbling out of an old Volvo wagon, clutching something pink to her chest. She rushed toward me, looking off balance and sort of battered with her dark hair limp and stringy as if she’d forgotten what a shower was for and her coat hanging open despite the nipple-erectus weather. She looked sort of familiar, but I was pretty sure we’d never met. I yanked the cuffs of my sweatshirt down as far as they would go, picked up my board and turtled into the collar of my jacket as the lady hurried across the street.

  She stopped at the end of my walk, introduced herself in a nervous voice. “I’m Mrs. Jordan. Astelle’s mother.” She shifted in front of me, holding what I could now see was an Old Navy sweatshirt in her tight hands, waiting for me to clue in, but nothing registered. “The mother of the missing girl.”

  That registered, big-time, like a well-delivered kick in the nuts. Just to be sure, she pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket and forced it into my hand. I didn’t even look at it. I knew what it was.

  “I saw you on the television. I’m awfully sorry about your friend. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t, if I didn’t think you could help.” She held the sweatshirt out and shook it a little. Behind the light pink cloth, her face was rigid and gray. “It’s Astelle’s.” Her voice was barely there.

  I took a step back. My teeth were chattering.

  “It’s Astelle’s,” she said again, her voice rising as a blast of frigid air whipped up the street. The flyer snapped against my leg.

  I took another step back.

  “No one’s been able to help, it’s been forty-five days now, I thought you might …” She shook the sweatshirt at me. It fell open, trembling between us like some faded bullfighter’s cape. “Please. Take it. Please.”

  She was crying now, wringing the sweatshirt in her hands, begging me to touch it, just take it, please, please, maybe I’d feel something, maybe I’d know … I turned and I ran. I don’t really remember how I got my keys out of my bag or what happened to my skateboard or how I got inside. I do remember my heart hammering against the stiff wood as I leaned against the front door and stared out the little rectangular windows at the top.

  Mrs. Jordan pressed the sweatshirt to her face and held it there for a long time, her body shaking into it, shaking like her coat. In the heat of my front hall, with my teeth clattering together, I watched the lady and her coat flapping out there in the cold wind. Finally she dropped her arms and folded the shirt into a neat package. On upturned palms, she carried it back to the Volvo and drove away.

  I only saw Mrs. Jordan that once. Nonetheless, I think she deserves an honorable mention for her intense, best-supporting cameo in the Luke Hunter: Death Prophet saga, although I came off as a bit of a wimp in that particular episode. Too cowardly to touch a sweatshirt. Too pathetic to deal with a desperate mother. Offscreen, I’d tried to be braver. I crumpled the Missing poster up, tossed it into the garbage can in my room, cranked the music, tried to get angry with System of a Down. But it didn’t work. I finally had to pick the goddamn thing out of the garbage. The paper was wintery cold, despite all the hot details. Only sixteen years old. A mere five feet three inches tall. A feathery 110 pounds. Heaps of brown curls. Big brown eyes. Sexy lace-up jeans. A Fantasy tight shirt. Shit, I barely glanced at the neatly written address, phone number and plea for help on the back. I folded Astelle up, reduced her to a thick square and tucked her in my wallet, so she could ride around in my back pocket like some cursed charm.

  Besides Astelle, there was another girl giving me a bit of trouble, but trouble of a different flavor. She was alive and sizzling and could usually be found in the library, where I was still spending most of my lunch hours. And to be honest, those lunch hours had started to feel less like hiding out and more like waiting—for Faith to show up and claim a seat. Preferably close enough for viewing yet far enough for comfort.

  To keep Ms. Banks happy, I’d given up my spot on the floor at the end of row H through J for a back table off to one side, and was reading all her latest picks for troubled teens. This one day, it was sometime near the end of November because the Peppers concert was only, like, a week away, and I was half wondering what to do with the extra ticket and half reading Cannery Row, which was nice and short and pretty good, too, when I felt someone watching me. And I looked up.

  Faith’s emerald eyes were upon me, but I don’t think it was me she was seeing. She was sitting, perfect and still. Her hair was pulled away from her face, which was this incredible golden brown—mulatto, Eurasian, Hispanic, some exotic foreign blend. It took a couple seconds for her to realize I was watching her, and I know this sounds completely lame, but in those few seconds I could see right into her. And God, it was sweet—beauty and sadness and mournful grace lit the fucking library, man. I couldn’t look away. Then she blinked and focused and there I was, gawking, looking like the creep I was. I dropped my eyes fast, pretended to read, but I could feel her getting up, could feel her coming closer. The gorgeous girl on the bike. What I dreamed. The broken girl in the church. What I dreaded. I clutched my book in my hands like some fat kid clinging to the last Krispy Kreme in town.

  A pair of black, shiny Doc Martens topped by dark jeans appeared beside my table.

  “Hey,” she said. Her voice was low for a girl’s, but soft.

  I managed to look up. She was even more delicious up close. My mom would have made note of her good posture and lack of makeup, but my eyes wandered to her shirt. It was one of ours, and Stan and I had been right—the XS did wrap nicely around this particular Jefferson girl’s tits, which were small but nice, although I was sort of disgusted with myself for even noticing.

  “Hey.” Now it was me sitting perfectly still, it was Faith seeing right into me. I held on, maintaining eye contact, bruising my book, threatening my heart.

  “I miss him,” she said.

  I looked away.

  “I miss him.” She said it again before she turned and headed for the door.

  I could see the empty spot beside her where Stan should have been as I watched her go. Still. I watched her go.

  AND THAT NIGHT, the night after Faith, the funniest fucking thing happened. I was alone in my room, right, just listening to tunes, mellow shit mostly—Limp Bizkit’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” Pearl Jam’s “Better Man.” Some old stuff that came to me through my parents. R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon.” Elvis Costello’s plea not to be misunderstood. The entire Nirvana Unplugged CD. Turns out it wasn’t a good idea. Even with the Trazon—one too many or one too few, I’m not really sure—the songs made me soft. Which was stupid, because I knew I had to stay hard, I knew I had no other way to do this. This being life, mine in particular. Still, that night, I didn’t, couldn’t, turn off the music.

  And all of a sudden, there I am thinking about this old dude, dying. Bits of feeling and knowledge and song mixing together to become a flashing picture, a low-res MPEG video flickering on the gray screen in my head. It wasn’t particularly outstanding—just an old man dying an old man’s death—but afterwards I dropped to the floor. I mean, really dropped. Death fantasy or death flash— either way, the old guy completely felled me. And once down, there was no getting up. Once down, I lay there with the music going and my cheek pressing into the carpet and stared at the dust beneath my bed. I could find no way to stop or to discuss or to figure anything out. Shit, at that moment, I couldn’t even see a way off the floor. I dragged air into my lungs. I expelled it. I stared at the dust. In the dangerous stillness of my own room, it took everything I had just to do that.

  I lay there all night.

  Like that.

  And in the morning, I got up and went to school. Because that’s what every teenager in America has to do, pretty much every day, September through June. No matter what. No matter how. And if the kid happens to be of the male variety? You’ve gotta know there’s no one waiting at the front door to hear his tale of woe. Even if he had a willing listener? Or, say, a blank page right there in front of him? Real words wouldn’
t come. He’d tell you everything was cool. He’d tell you it was just an old man dying an old man’s death.

  NINE

  Another night, a Friday night, end of November, the beginning of yet one more dull weekend at home. I was so bored, so blasted from hanging alone in my room, I risked heading downstairs after dinner to cozy up with the folks. They seemed pleased to have me join them for the last of the six o’clock news, which proved to be interesting viewing.

  Lance Winters was all over our living room that night. I’d been wondering about him. He’d disappeared from my life a month or so back, but before that, surfer boy had been making a real effort to be there for me, after school, once, even twice a week. He’d acted like he had no hard feelings about the Super Soaker incident, was all smiles when he fell in beside me, promising to turn me into the biggest thing to ever hit town. He’d tell me how good, how profitable, it would be for me to share my story with the country, because it would be the country. Man, just the license plate thing was priceless! The exposure could change my life, and his too, could get us both out of Stokum, because he agreed with me, this place sucked, ha ha ha. But the window was closing, let’s face it, we were going to be blown out of the water by the boys in Iraq if we didn’t act fast.

  Seemed he’d been right. Because there he was, plastered across the screen, spewing about his upcoming series on the local guys who were headed to the Gulf. He showed a couple highlights from the interviews (eight guys and their families, one per night). Judging from the clips, it seemed like everyone was pretty confident the war, if it happened, would go well. The boys were ready, were proud to be able to help out the U.S. of A. and whatnot, although the chubby girlfriends and mothers admitted they’d be pining for their men. I couldn’t really get into it, even when they showed a clip of Dwight Slater’s older brother Dwayne (full interview Tuesday). He’d enlisted after graduating from Jefferson last year, was only a couple years older than me, so I probably should have cared, but seriously, I just couldn’t get past Lance.