by Rob J. Quinn
Before their mom had even closed the door, Scott lounged on Red’s bed with the decorative 1980 Philadelphia Eagles plastic football from his shelf. He heard the slurping sound of Red’s straw as he tried to get the last drops of orange juice in the glass.
“So?” Scott said.
Red wiped his mouth with a napkin his mom had put on the tray, and swiveled the chair halfway around to his brother. And farted.
“Nice,” Scott said.
Red simply shrugged. “Needed that,” he joked, leaning back with his eyes closed.
“Dude?”
“What?” he said, eyes still closed.
“You’re really not gonna say anything?”
He knew what his brother was getting at. Or at least he thought he did. But he really didn’t know what to say. “I’m tired,” he said, yawning. “You know what happened more than I do. Did we win?”
Scott rolled his eyes. “Seriously? That’s your question? No, we didn’t win. The game was called. Dude, you obliterated the booth and a tree. I mean, it was like they just shattered.”
“You’re mad?” he asked, beginning to get annoyed himself.
“No. I’m just saying . . .”
“I was scared to death,” Red said. “It was coming right toward us. Then I saw Pete had no chance to get out. I saw the kid in the booth and whoever was with him running down the stairs. I just reacted.”
“Dude, I’m not questioning why you did it,” Scott said. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. People think a tornado did it. Yesterday we were screwing around with a football. Now . . .”
The words just hung there. Red knew he was right. The whole thing was insane. “I know,” he said. “Last night it practically exploded from me. I’d been using it all afternoon. At the game. In gym class.”
“Gym class?”
“I told you about the freshman who’s been kicking everybody’s ass every week,” he said. Red shrugged. “I just felt like shutting him down for once.”
“What’re you doing that for?” Scott said.
“Yeah, I got it, I probably shouldn’t have,” Red shot back, having felt bad enough about it on his own. “It was a one-time thing. Besides, you had no problem with it when I was helping you win a bet.”
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t do it at all anymore,” Scott said.
Red wasn’t surprised by the suggestion. In fact, he realized he’d been moving toward the same conclusion. But hearing it out loud made something else even more clear. “I like it,” he said softly. “It’s a feeling, a sense of control, I never thought I’d have.” Red searched for the words. “Whatever this is, it’s power. It’s strength. It’s everything. I mean, I never really thought about being cured. I didn’t even care about going to that doctor.”
“I know.”
“It was just reality,” Red said. “It sucks, and you deal with it, and you hate it sometimes. But most of the time the CP’s just there. But this . . . I don’t even know what this is. It’s not curing the cerebral palsy. I don’t even know if it’s helping my CP at all.” He paused. “But, whatever it is, it’s pretty awesome.”
“But if doing it made you pass out this time . . .”
“I know. I get it,” he said. “But I don’t think I could ever go back to . . . Back to being whatever I was. Back to being just some disabled kid in school.”
“You said yourself you were doing it a lot in gym. Then at the game. Maybe it wasn’t that one huge push that knocked you out. Maybe if you do it too much . . .” Scott didn’t want to say the words he was thinking. “Who knows what could happen?”
It might kill me. Red knew that’s what his brother was thinking. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. He looked at Scott. “But the more I think about what I can do, the more I want it.”
Tim came in through the back door to find his wife putting the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. He took off his gloves and began washing his hands.
“What happened to my help with the leaves?” he asked.
“Upstairs talking to the patient,” Mary said.
“Red’s finally awake?”
“Yep,” Mary said. “I just brought him some breakfast.”
“Why? He couldn’t come down?” Tim asked, concerned.
Mary shook her head. “No, he could,” she said. “I think he’ll be fine. I just want him to take it very easy this weekend. We’re going to the specialist on Monday for another treatment, and he’ll check him out.”
Tim dried his hands on the towel hanging over the oven door handle. “How do you think that’s going?” he asked. “I can’t really say I’ve noticed any improvement.”
“If the injections help him stay where he is as he gets older, I’d be happy,” she said in her typical way of taking every possible positive from anything having to do with her son’s cerebral palsy.
Not wanting to press the issue, Tim switched gears. “I just saw Rick out back,” he said, referring to their next-door neighbor. “He was saying somebody damaged the back of the firehouse and flattened a tire on one of guys’ cars. You hear anything about that?”
“No. You mean graffiti?”
“He said it looks like somebody took a sledgehammer to the wall,” Tim said. “And the tire wasn’t slit. He said it was smashed in—like they used the same thing on the tire that they used on the wall. The boys didn’t say anything about it?”
Mary shook her head. “They were too busy trying to hide a Nerf football they apparently destroyed. I found it when I accidentally knocked over the trash can full of balls when I was doing laundry down there.”
Tim shrugged. “Nerfs don’t last forever.”
“Well,” she said, finally closing the dishwasher and turning it on, “this one wasn’t just tattered. In fact, it looked a lot newer than some of the others except for the fact that it was torn almost in half.”
Tim briefly raised his eyebrows. “They didn’t damage a brick wall or a tire with a Nerf football, but there’s something they’re not telling us. I didn’t like that whole story with the fight in school the other day either. Where’s that ball?”
Reading his mind as he started to move across the room, she gently put her hands on his chest. “It’s right where I found it,” Mary said. “And that’s where it stays for now. C’mon, I don’t want Red all upset over some stupid prank somebody else probably pulled.”
Tim hugged his wife and kissed her. “Fine,” he said, giving in. He wasn’t sure how the dots connected anyway. But he was pretty sure they did. He was even more sure Mary knew they did, too, and even if the boys weren’t directly involved, she probably already had an idea of just how they connected. “For now.”
Chapter 13
Red nestled back under the covers after using the bathroom. Cool fall breezes occasionally made the window shade balloon until relenting after a few moments, allowing the shade to fall back into place with a gentle tap against the windowsill. Following orders to take it easy hadn’t been much of a challenge for him. Laying around in sweats watching college football all day was intertwined with several naps.
The only problem with the plan was that when he actually went to bed for the night less than twelve hours after he’d gotten up, he wasn’t exactly in need of another eight hours of sleep. His dad had only turned off the TV in his parents’ room a few minutes before his trip to the bathroom, and Scott still had almost an hour before his one o’clock curfew.
Thoughts of waiting to see if his brother was up for a late-night game of Madden football on Sega were interrupted when he heard a girl say, “Stop it,” somewhere in the back of the houses. There wasn’t any real strain in her voice, but it had been more than a request. It wasn’t unusual for some of the underage-but-out-of-high-school crowd to hang in the field behind Mr. Taylor’s house on Saturday night. As long as they didn’t talk too loudly, and kept their boom boxes low enough, which was quickly becoming less of a problem since only a few guys still had them, no one seemed to care. Mr. Taylor generally didn’t run the
m off as long as they stayed back by the woods.
Another, somewhat more annoyed “Stop,” with an extra syllable in the middle to add emphasis, reached the window. Curiosity got the better of Red. Keeping his sheets around him, he got on his knees and slipped under the window shade to see what he could. Recognizing the girl’s voice, he knew King Street’s Charles and Di, as his mom called them, were having a spat.
Billy was a little more than five years out of high school and still spent most of his time around the latest crop of high school graduates who hadn’t gone away to college. He had already washed out three times at trying to pass the training to be a fireman, but still volunteered in the hopes of latching on. Red had heard that he was working as a janitor at the Springfield country club, which was just the latest in a string of jobs everyone knew he’d eventually be fired from.
His blond hair had been almost as long as Jennifer’s before she cut it a couple summers ago. She was taking classes at community college, and rumor had it she was doing pretty well, while waitressing at Carrabba’s in the mall. She was always sweet to Red whenever the family had dinner there, and even though he knew it was mostly from a pat-the-disabled-on-the-head mentality, he liked her well enough because she always took his order without asking his mom what he wanted. Nonetheless, he couldn’t disagree with his mom when, like most of the neighborhood women, she ended conversations about Jennifer with some form of the suggestion that “she’d be so much better off without that boyfriend.”
Jennifer seemed to be in agreement. Her exchange with Billy was becoming more animated. Red couldn’t make out every word, but she was clearly agitated. They were loud enough now that he could tell they were sitting either against the opposite side of Mr. Taylor’s boat or behind it.
“I said, knock it off,” he heard Jennifer say loud and clear.
Red thought he heard Billy mumble something that sounded like, “C’mon, baby.”
The smack of a hand against someone’s skin cut through the relative quiet. Red’s grip tightened on the sheets he held around his shoulders. He didn’t know if Jennifer had done the slapping or if Billy had hit her.
“What the fuck is your problem?” Billy growled, any thoughts of being discreet suddenly forgotten.
“I’m not in the mood, Billy,” Jennifer yelled back as she stood up from behind the side of the boat.
Red saw a second figure stand up in the moonlight and grab her arm. He could feel the wave stir even as he tried to calm himself with a deep breath. As Billy tried to pull her back to the boat, she leaned in and cracked him right across the face with her free hand. Jennifer turned to walk toward the field. Mr. Taylor’s back patio light came on as Billy grabbed her by the arm again. Red knew he could help Jennifer. He could push Billy away any time he wanted. But he hesitated, wondering if his brother was right. Maybe I really shouldn’t do it anymore, he thought.
Jennifer was able to shake her arm free and take several steps away from Billy. “I’ll call the cops if you don’t leave me the hell alone,” she said.
Billy started after her as Mr. Taylor’s screen door opened with its familiar whine of the springs. “You kids knock it off,” he hollered, stepping outside in a tank top and boxers with his mostly gray hair, which was usually greased back, seemingly swaying in every direction with each movement.
“Uhmff,” Red groaned even in the rising heat of the moment. Didn’t need to see that, he thought.
“Yeah, I got it. Everything’s under control,” Billy said in a dismissive tone. Jennifer had stopped in her tracks.
“You kids get the hell away from my boat,” Mr. Taylor said in the screechy voice the neighborhood kids heard on rare occasions when he chewed out one of them for doing something in his yard that he didn’t like. “And you leave that girl alone. She don’t want no part of you right now.”
“Don’t worry about it, old man,” Billy barked.
Jennifer took a few steps toward him. “Billy, let’s go,” she said, her tone softening toward him.
“Don’t worry about it, eh?” Mr. Taylor said.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Billy said sharply. “Nobody’s messing with your damn boat.”
“I’m gonna make sure of that,” Mr. Taylor said, walking back into his house.
Red looked back at his bedroom door, half hoping, half expecting to see the hallway light leaking in from the bottom. He found only darkness. Not even a sound to suggest his parents were stirring.
Jennifer let out a quick scream. Red’s head snapped back to see her fighting off Billy. He had to do something. He tried pushing the wave at Billy, but found himself ducking away from the window when it rattled so much he feared for a second it was going to shatter.
“Damn,” Red whispered, looking up at the window after it stopped shaking. Relieved not to see any damage, he pushed the window further up out of his line of sight. Well, Mom, here’s what happened . . ., he imagined himself saying, while thanking God he wasn’t actually going to have to explain how his window got blown out. It also occurred to him that he didn’t feel light-headed after pushing the wave.
Billy had a firm grip on Jennifer’s arm when Red looked out the window again. This time Red tried to push the wave just enough to knock Billy down, as if he were blowing out candles on a cake with one quick burst, half afraid the window screen might be pushed out. The screen didn’t shake at all. No dizziness either, he thought. Red had managed to knock Billy to the ground, but he’d pulled Jennifer down with him. Red searched for something to push at Billy to hold him down. Mr. Taylor’s patio chairs. A small table. Neither would work. Jennifer kicked at Billy as she tried to get back to her feet to run. Red looked back at his bedroom door, his heart racing. Still no sign of his parents. He considered yelling for them, but something told him it was already too late for them to do anything. Looking outside again he saw the couple had only moved a few more feet beyond the boat. He knew he could push Billy through the woods if he wanted, but something was still making him hold back. What if I pushed too hard? He remembered the falling tree from the night before. He had pushed so hard he shattered the tree and the broadcast booth. I might kill him, Red thought.
It finally hit him. The boat! It seemed extreme but he knew Mr. Taylor could reemerge any second, and if rumors were true that the old man kept a shotgun just inside his basement doorway, Red would be doing Billy a favor as much as anyone.
Without hesitation he tried to push the boat, causing it to wobble, but he instinctively backed off as the wave was ripping through the hedges his father constantly trimmed. He heard Jennifer scream, “Get off!” She was still kicking at Billy as they struggled on the ground.
Red tried again to move the boat, which was anchored by the trailer that attached to Mr. Taylor’s truck. He pushed the wave over the hedges. But the boat simply began to tip over as Red could only hit the far side of it with the wave. Stopping to let it settle back on its resting place, he noticed the ropes tying the cover down over the boat. One more mental check assured him he wasn’t feeling any light-headedness from pushing the wave.
“Let go of me,” Jennifer screamed. Billy was stretched out, still grabbing her ankle as she kicked at him with the other foot.
Tipping the boat again, Red ripped the cover off, pushing the wave under it until the ropes on each side gave way. Free from its ties, the cover hung in the air for a second until Red slammed it into Billy with the wave.
Startled, Billy wrestled with what he initially assumed was Mr. Taylor. His flailing arms made it easier for Red to keep pushing the cover around him, giving Jennifer the chance to escape. This time she didn’t look back, but Red knew the cover wouldn’t hold Billy very long.
He looked back at the boat and pushed against its far edge again. Without the cover it was easy to push the boat just enough to make it flip, trailer and all. Once it was far enough away from the fence, Red pushed it in the air to where Billy was just getting free of the cover. Red drove the nose of the boat into the ground before
he eased the rest of the craft down over Billy like a slowly shutting trapdoor.
