by Giles Blunt
The Tunkles were waiting on the front porch. Melanie Prine gave them a cheery wave as they drove up, five scarlet fingernails flashing in the sun. They were nice enough, and their house was a nice-enough house. Owen could see that it was a comfortable place, a house where people could live with each other, but it was not his house. He did not live here. He did not know anyone here.
The family had an older daughter of sixteen, a blonde girl who said hi and then vanished, and a still older son who was away at college. Melanie Prine abandoned Owen there for the afternoon, leaving the Tunkles to try to interest him in farm life. He was shown to his room, a nice-enough room to be sure, but not his. Just as the bathroom was not his bathroom, the kitchen not his kitchen, the basement not his basement, the front yard with its single stunted maple not his yard. It was as if everyone was playing a game: Let’s pretend this is normal. Let’s pretend we know each other. Let’s pretend we care.
With each minute that ticked by, Owen was exiled deeper into an inner Siberia. The worst moments were when Mr. Tunkle, a bony little man whose skin looked parched and stiff as if he’d been salted and left to dry in the sun, took him by the hand (a hand rough as a plank) to show him the pigs, the chickens, the fields, the cows. Owen had never seen anything so dreary.
Norwalk is not a big city, but it is not a small town and it is most definitely not the country. To Owen, farms were something you drove by to get somewhere interesting-a river, an aquarium, a museum, a campground, an airport. You didn’t stop at farms. The sunlight beat down on the place in a way he had never experienced in shady Norwalk. The chickens were repulsive, the cows somnolent, the pigs appalling. Owen was not afraid of manual labour; he had enjoyed helping his father fix things around the house, and he earned pocket money shovelling snow and raking leaves. But the idea that he would be expected to spend time with these creatures made his heart shrivel.
He would be required to change schools, the nearest neighbour was a mile away, and he would probably never see his friends again.
“Well, what did you think of the Tunkles?” Melanie Prine asked when they were on the way back to the receiving home. Her fingernails had dimmed to carmine in the late afternoon light.
Owen couldn’t answer.
“They’re nice, don’t you think?”
“They’re okay.”
“And isn’t that farmhouse incredible?”
“I don’t want to live there.”
“So much to do out here, don’t you think?”
“I don’t want to live there.”
“Open space everywhere. Lots of fresh air. Did you see they’ve even got a swimming hole?”
“I don’t want to live there.”
Five of the ten red fingernails lifted off from the steering wheel and travelled toward him as Miss Prine tried to comfort him with a touch on his shoulder. It was the briefest feathery touch, but it burst something inside Owen’s chest and he convulsed with tears.
“No one expects you to like it right away, Owen.”
“I don’t want to live there,” he said again, all but choking on each word.
“You’re not used to the country, I know. But a farm is an ideal place to grow up. So much to do. And it’s fun looking after the animals, don’t you think?”
“I want to live in my own home,” he said miserably. “Why can’t I just stay at home?”
“Owen, your parents aren’t there anymore. There’s no one to look after you.”
“But you said there’s money, right? Insurance money? Why can’t we pay a babysitter and I’ll just stay in my house? I don’t have to have new parents. I don’t want new parents. Would you want new parents?”
“No, Owen, I wouldn’t. Nobody wants to lose their parents. You’ve been very unlucky. But we have to find you another family to live with, and the Tunkles are good parents and they have room.”
“But I don’t want to live there.”
Owen was sent to the Tunkles the following day. He spent a painful weekend supposedly adapting to the routines of the farm, and when Monday rolled around he took the bus to his new school and sat silently throughout his classes. He made no effort to acknowledge his new classmates, and when his teacher called on him, he had nothing to say, he had heard nothing. He was focused strictly on the final bell, waiting hour after hour, minute after minute, for it to ring. When finally it did ring, he went nowhere near the bus stop. He walked into town and back to his old neighbourhood.
He had never seen his house with all the curtains closed. It sat blind and mute on the corner where it had always been. No car in the drive, of course, but then there never was when he got home from school. He still had his key, and let himself in.
It was a little stuffy, a little dusty, but it smelled the same. It smelled of his house, the way no other house would ever smell. And nothing had changed. All the furniture was there. The coats were still hanging in the vestibule-his mother’s, his father’s, his own-above a chaotic jumble of footwear. The merest objects filled him not just with pain, but with awe: his father’s enormous running shoes, the wellingtons his mother wore in the garden. He went and sat on the couch in the living room, facing the television. His reflection on the dim screen, thin and distorted, looked back at him.
He had never seen the house so dark, not during the day. He fell sideways into the cushions and cried, but it didn’t help. After a while he went to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Snapple from the fridge. All the same food was there. Nothing had been done yet, by whoever had come in to close the curtains. The electricity was on, and the water.
The message light was blinking by the phone, but he didn’t want to see who had called.
His plan was this: He would live in this house by himself. He would continue going to school as if nothing had happened. If he could get that insurance money, he would hire someone to cook and clean and look after the house while he was at school. He pictured a fat, cheerful woman who would bake lots of pies. Miss Prine would be impressed; she would see that he could get along without a mother and father.
But for now he had to keep quiet. He couldn’t open the curtains, and he was afraid even to turn on lights. The cops would burst in, thinking there was a burglary in progress. He brought a jar of peanut butter and some crackers into the living room and ate in front of the TV. For dessert he had a granola bar.
His parents had not brought him up to be religious, but he found, looking around at the empty chairs where his parents used to sit, with their books still open beside them, that he was thinking about God. What possible reason could God have to snatch his parents from this house, this town, this planet, and leave him behind? He would have to be a mean God. How would He explain it to his parents, wherever they might be now, who surely must be missing him too?
He woke up when the lights came on sometime later. Miss Prine stood over him, along with a policeman and an older man in a sober grey suit. He had an English accent just like his parents, and he looked a lot like the pictures of his grandfather.
“Owen?” Miss Prine said softly. “I think I have some good news for you. This is your great-uncle, Uncle Max.”
This jocular, highly verbal and theatrical tonnage of humanity managed to wade his way through the swamp of child welfare regulations, and to win over the support of Miss Prine in particular. It turned out he was the brother of Owen’s paternal grandfather, whom this strange apparition referred to as “Tommy.” He had a battered satchel full of family photographs that he showed Owen and Miss Prine during their first, supervised office visit. Many of them were the same images his parents had kept in musty old albums, but there were others he had never seen before: Max and Tommy as young men in cricket whites, Max and his father as a boy on a Brighton pier, Max in the crowd at Owen’s parents’ wedding in London. He told Owen a couple of amusing stories involving his father as a boy-the time he got stuck in the mulberry tree, the time he blew up his train set using his chemistry set, the time he ran away from home and asked to live with Uncle
Max.
“Bit of a sticky situation, that one,” he said. “Tommy was quite miffed that I’d taken the boy in. But what could I do? He was on my front porch with a little suitcase. Anyway, it was only for a weekend. Tommy and I had a rather bitter falling-out eventually-not over that. This was much later. Real estate deal went bad and we ended up losing pots of money. Anyway, that’s why me and this handsome young lad have never met. Didn’t even realize I had family in the country until I read the terrible news.”
The DCF checked Max’s background. He had been the first of the family to move to the States, settling into Manhattan years previously, where he ran a thriving theatrical supply business with a specialty in wigs. Since there were two countries involved, the paperwork took a considerable amount of time.
A bargain was worked out whereby Owen would stay with the Tunkles while he got to know Max better through more visits. Max drove up regularly from New York. At first they were supervised by Miss Prine-lunches at coffee shops and the like. But then Max was allowed to take Owen on day trips to the city: the Central Park zoo, the boat pond, the Museum of Natural History, the Staten Island Ferry.
When Miss Prine saw how well he and the boy got along, she became Max’s champion at the agency and in court. Eventually Owen was placed with him as a temporary ward, taking up residence in the extra bedroom of his Stuyvesant Town apartment. The initial adjustment period was rocky but brief, and soon the boy began to thrive. He got used to Max and Manhattan both, and he loved the long trips Max took him on, which, as far as he knew to this day, were crime free.
After two years Max asked him if he would like to make their arrangement permanent. “You and me against the world, lad. Taking on all comers. Thick and thin. You don’t have to call me Dad, you can call me Max, Uncle Max, Sir Max, Lord High Max, whatever variation strikes your fancy, what say you, sir?”
Owen replied with an unhesitating and resounding yes.
So here they are years later in Sir Slots-a-Lot Kitchen in Las Vegas, Nevada, Owen trying to explain that he isn’t ungrateful, he just wants something different for his life than robbing dinner parties. Something his mother and father would have been proud of.
“Ten years old, both parents dead-tragic, heartbreaking, positively Dickensian. You were headed for a series of foster homes, maybe a group home, maybe a locked facility, who knows? You’d’ve probably got molested and beaten and crushed and ruined and ended up a serial killer or next thing to, drooling away your final years on death row.”
“Well, look at me now,” Owen said, stirring the melted puddle of his sundae. “I’m a criminal.”
“Tush, boy.” Max leaned across the table and gave his best stage whisper. “You are a gentle criminal, a saintly criminal, a Saint Francis of the highway. You lead a completely non-violent existence. You harm no one, just as I taught you. Your life is good, I engineered it for you, and now you repay me by deciding to take up the sorry occupation that tore me up and spat me out.” Max sat back. The banquette wobbled ominously.
“Max, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. You gave me a home-sort of.”
“Sort of! I know not sort of! I put a roof over your head, made sure you got a good education, taught you right from wrong. No, no, let’s have no sort-ofs. Why can’t you study something useful? Locksmithing. Martial arts. Computer security.”
“Max, you loved acting. You still love acting.”
“The skill, not the profession. If you try to do it for a living, it will break your heart. I don’t want to see that happen.”
Owen spoke softly. “I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, or wondering where the next job is going to come from. And anyway, Max, I think it’s time for you to retire.”
Max shoved his dish forward and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin.
“I know you don’t want to hear it,” Owen went on, “but this line of work, it isn’t for old-older guys. You’re getting tired, you’re forgetting things. Yesterday you forgot where you were, for Pete’s sake. Sooner or later you’re going to make some horrible mistake, and I don’t want to see you go back to jail. I don’t want to go to jail either.”
“Pah. Seven years of hell, that was, seven years of hell. I will never go back inside. Never, never, never, never, never.” Max gripped Owen’s forearm as if he were taking his blood pressure. “Who are you to tell me my powers are in decline? Where are these glaring lapses, these colossal blunders? You’re only trying to justify running off to Juilliard so you can become a waiter, a cab driver.”
“Max, you’re not listening to me. It’s not just you’re getting too old. This life is getting to you. You’re not sleeping anymore.”
“I sleep like a baby.”
“You’re forgetting things, you’re having nightmares, half the time you’re not even all there. You’re a threat to your own safety.”
“Rubbish.”
“Max, please don’t be hurt. It’s just that I-”
Owen was saved from further speech by the arrival of a man wearing baggy shorts and a blinding Hawaiian shirt, carrying a mug of beer in both hands as if it were some kind of isotope.
“Max, you old mofo,” the man said. “You have room at your table for a respectable working stiff?”
“Yes, and even for you,” Max said, patting the seat beside him. “Owen, allow me to introduce Charlie Zigler, known to all and sundry as Zig. Old acquaintance from Oxford.” Oxford was Max’s word for prison, in this case a certain locked institution in Ossining, New York.
Zig put down his beer glass to shake hands. He was a compact, nervy man who blinked a lot. It gave him a look that was both curious and startled, a raccoon rudely awakened.
“Who’s the kid?”
“I don’t even know this boy,” Max said. “Never seen him before in my life. He just came up and asked me for money.”
Owen introduced himself. “I’m his nephew.”
“Uh-oh,” Zig said with a wink. “You must have bruised your old uncle’s ego somehow. How you keeping, Max?”
“Couldn’t be better. And you? Last time I saw you, you had grandiose plans to usurp William H. Gates, third of that name, in the pantheon of computer gods.”
“Exactly right,” Zig said, blinking. “Took a ‘puter repair course at a community college. Paid for itself after two weeks. Ask me anything.”
“How do I replace the PRAM battery in my PowerBook?” Owen said.
“No idea,” Zig said, and let fly with a laugh that sent pressure waves slamming into Owen’s eardrums.
“Don’t even talk to him,” Max said to Zig. “You’ll give him the illusion he’s human.”
“Poor old Max. Say, you still pulling those lame-ass dinnertime gigs, or did you finally retire?”
“Suddenly the whole world is breathless for my resignation. I suppose you want me to carve my own coffin and lie down in it too, you hideous dwarf.”
“Maybe you should move into an honest trade like myself.”
“I’m a travelling salesman-a friend to the bald, the gay, the theatrical. What could be more honest? Anyway, what do you care what I do, where I live, or whether I retire?”
“There’s some badass dudes out there, my friend. I wouldn’t want to see the Subtractors get hold of you.”
“The Subtractors,” Owen said. “I always thought they were a myth.”
“They exist,” Zig said. “And believe me, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of those guys.”
“Urban legend,” Max said. “No such creature.”
“Legend, huh?” Zig drank down half his beer. With each gulp his Adam’s apple bounced higher and higher up his gullet as if it might ring a bell and win a prize. “Lemme tell you about this urban legend, kid.” His face loomed forward across the table, blinking and foam-flecked. “The Subtractors is a group of individuals, a secret organization, call them. No one knows who they are, only what they do. And what they do is not pleasant. They prey upon thieves, see? They hea
r about a tasty job going down, they get their hands on one of the likely crew, and they, I don’t know how else to put it, they subtract parts of his body until he reveals where the score is tucked away. Bolt cutters are their tool of choice, although they have been known to use straight razors, exacto knives, whatever’s handy.”
“That’s sick,” Owen said.
“Scares hell out of me.” Zig jerked his head toward Max. “Gramps never mentioned them to you?”
“Naturally not. I keep rumour, superstition and falsehood off the curriculum.”
“The Subtractors exist, kid. And if Pa Clampett here was a decent father figure, he would have warned you about them.”
“Sounds like something out of a Tarantino movie,” Owen said.
“Doesn’t it?” Max said. “The distinct tang of fiction.”
“You don’t believe me?” Zig said to Owen.
Owen shrugged.
Blinking ferociously, Zig opened the buttons of his shirt, top to bottom, eyes fixed on Owen, a smirk on his face. He pulled open his shirt.
“Whoa,” Owen said, and looked away.
Zig turned to Max, displaying his chest like a stripper.
“Hmm,” Max said. “And they didn’t return them when they were finished?”
“That’s all you got to say?” Zig said. “Urban legend? No such animal? If that’s the case, where the fuck are my nipples?”
“Do I need to remind you,” Max said, gesturing at Sir Slots-a-Lot’s shining armour, the maces and lances, “that we are in a restaurant?”
“Just don’t tell me the Subtractors don’t exist,” Zig said, buttoning up. “Happened three years ago. Me and a couple of colleagues got into the customs house in San Francisco. Had a tip on some icons that were being held there. Next thing I know …”
“Your tits were in the wringer.”
“Razor, actually.”
Owen was still having trouble catching his breath. “Did you tell them where the stuff was?”
“Course I did. What do you think I am? Superman?”
“I would have told them after the first one,” Max said. “In fact, I would have told them before the first one. I would have handed them a map and a key.”
