If nothing else, people saw her now. She would have been fine after the bonfire and exploding can, but somebody had seen her when she’d needed to be seen, and now she ran like she knew she wasn’t invisible.
It’s not all the time that you get to do right by someone and actually see the result.
Right when it looked like she was going to dash in front of the tiny archers, she hooked around them. As she closed in on us, I waved to the Buddy she’d escaped from, who gave an exasperated wave back.
“Hi, Lump!” Matty said as the running child came to a dramatic and skidding stop in front of us.
“Hi. I need to keep borrowing this,” she said, mostly ignoring Matty and holding up the marker I’d lent her. “For the posters. I promise I’ll keep it safe.”
“Can I see one?” I asked.
She held out a bright yellow flyer from the multicolored stack. It had a pixelated stock picture of a baby deer glued under the word “LOST.”
“I couldn’t fill out the description part because I haven’t seen the deer yet so I need your help. With the diss-ting-wishing features and all,” she said, enunciating the word carefully to keep it from tumbling apart.
“I think you got it down pretty well,” I said. “This picture looks just like him,” I said, not quite lying. The picture looked like the deer because it was a picture of a baby deer. What made this lost deer different, though, was that somebody was trying to find it.
“Exactly like? Or just mostly like?”
“Baby deer all look pretty similar. Their genetics are pre—”
“We don’t want the wrong deer. We don’t want to steal a baby deer from the wild.”
“That’s a good point. But I think these’ll work.”
“Here,” Lump said to Michael and Matty, holding a couple of flyers out to them.
“Guys!” Faisal yelled to us, waving his free hand while the other one cradled the football in the nook of his arm. A small army of children was huffing in his wake, some still running after him with streaming flags at their waists, but most dejected or bent over and out of breath. “Guys! I’m about to win foot—” One of the smaller kids had decided to play from the sideline, silently jetting around in front of him and diving at him head-on as he stared over at us. He let out a hrrk! noise when the small bony bundle of destruction hit him in the solar plexus, sending the football bouncing away.
If it were regulation football, the players would have returned to a planned formation where they would strategize their next play. But this was the jungle. International waters. Prison rules. The ones still running to catch up caught up, hurling themselves through the air, bellowing warrior-cries as they did. The ones who’d stopped, too tired to chase on, snapped back to battle mode and went screaming toward the downed Faisal.
“Guys!” we heard, muffled. “Help! This isn’t football anymore—”
The kids piled onto him.
“Should we help him?” Matty asked, leaning over to see better, popping a handful of trail mix into her mouth.
“Nah, he’s got it under control,” Michael said with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. We heard a yelp as one of the children stood tall, yelling and holding up a triumphant handful of hair. “Oh. Yeah, no, we should help him.”
I blew the whistle again and started to go with Michael and Matty to help Faisal, but Lump grabbed my sleeve. “Can you help me pass these out? They said I need an adult. We have to go to the barn where it happened.”
She looked at me and shook the stack of papers a little, like, “Okay, come on,” and somewhere Test was off wearing creepy shorts and somewhere Charlie simply wasn’t, and it was just me.
“Look,” I said. “Right now, I’ve gotta do this football thing.”
I was the one who’d told her about the deer—if anybody else had brought her to get her ear bandaged up that first night, she would have never found about the missing animal. At the same time, there was still that stupid, assholish prerecorded message running through my head telling me to mind my own business and keep my head down and get through the week and maybe I could put everything behind me.
“Can he help me put up flyers?” she yelled over to Matty, who turned and shrugged and said, “Sure!” before immediately turning back to the kids mauling Faisal.
I breathed out through my nose.
I caught Matty’s attention and tossed her the whistle and stopwatch.
Michael pulled two kids off of the pile while Matty hunched in front of the kid who’d tried to scalp Faisal. The kid held out the handful of hair to her but she shook her head and kept talking to him.
There was an honest impulse to use the Lord of the Flies death match in front of me to my own advantage and leave Lump to find someone else to help her. But then a burst of cold, pre-winter wind weaved its way through the field and it made me think of the seasons changing, which made me think of the line from the Blue Oyster Cult song about how seasons don’t fear the reaper, and I knew that this was it: this was Lump Detail. Fuck the rest.
“How many posters did you make?”
“Almost a hundred.”
“And you want to put them all up?”
“How else are we supposed to find the deer?” She handed me a small slip of paper like I really wasn’t grasping how simple this was.
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
“Good. This is my phone number in case we need to split up and you run out of flyers and need more. What’s yours?”
EIGHTEEN: THE NUMEROUS HEINOUS CRIMES OF CECIL BENSON THE EIGHTH
WE’RE IN SEVENTH GRADE and we’re in the Chicago History Museum for a field trip about industrialization, which is a topic neither one of us can even remotely pretend to give the faintest shit about. Our class is big enough and the museum is hectic enough that we take the first opportunity that presents itself to slip away and explore on our own.
That first opportunity, it turns out, is down a mock turn-of-the-twentieth-century street, complete with a cobblestone road, gas lamps, and old-fashioned pickup trucks loaded up with wooden barrels.
We’re just looking for any kind of way to split off from our school group, but when we realize we’re in a gangster exhibit called “Booze and Bullets” that comes with a content warning, Charlie goes, “Fuck yes, we’re going learn about whiskey and machine guns.”
We walk down the road, passing glassed-in displays of crime-scene photos and artifacts.
I’m checking out one about Dillinger, his stark, blown-up mug shot staring out at the steady trickle of passersby. There’s a picture of his death mask, as well as a handkerchief that was dipped in his blood after he was shot down behind the Biograph Theater. “We should go check out the theater where they shot Dillinger, dude,” I say, reading an old news clipping. Charlie doesn’t answer, even though I’m aware of him in my peripheral vision. “Hey, you hear me?”
But Charlie’s looking at a murderer’s exhibit. I walk up behind him and see a huge picture of a man named Cecil Benson the Eighth being led out of his house by two expressionless cops. Benson’s in a white T-shirt with suspenders hanging in loops at his side, and there are spots of blood on his face and clothes. He’s a mess, but I know Charlie’s looking at the feet in the background, sticking out of the doorway, the body mostly in the house. The articles list Benson’s crimes, murder included.
The picture we’re looking at was taken the night he killed his cousin.
He starts when he sees me, then says, “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” without much tone or emotion. So we do, and we don’t talk about Cecil Benson the Eighth or any of his heinous crimes, but nobody outside of Charlie’s other half would have heard the waver in his voice when we left, or noticed how much eye contact he didn’t make the rest of the day.
NINETEEN: ANTHONY THE ASSHOLE
AFTER STOPPING AT THE MAIN OFFICE for tape and staplers, we set off.
“Because animals need our help!” Lump said. She had very enthusiastically already passed out ten or so flyer
s to the group at the archery range. “Especially baby animals. Did you know that when I was in second grade we had a cat named Helicopter that Mom and Dad thought ran away? This was before Grandma moved in because Dad got sick. Dad has ghost hair because he has mesothelioma.”15
Behind us the archery group were making stupid goddamn faces and pointing to the posters in their hands.
“But so anyway, the cat, Helicopter, that Mom and Dad thought ran away, didn’t actually run away. He only ran away to the front yard and tried to hide under the hood of the truck because it was warm there and it was winter outside so it was cold everywhere else. Here,” she said, handing me some more flyers. “We should ask the people on the rock-climbing wall to put some flyers up top, or maybe have them make them into paper airplanes and throw them down to everybody.”
“We can put some up in the mess hall,” I said. “Lots of people, lots of eyes. Maximum exposure,” I said, trying to shift gears as fast as her.
“Good idea. We also still need to go to the barn. Anyway, so Mom told me to go warm up the truck so that she could drive me to school and we didn’t know that Helicopter had crawled up around the engine.”
“I can’t see this ending too great for Helicopter.”
Her tone never really changed from fast-paced conversational. There weren’t many ways this could turn out well for Helicopter the cat, and when I looked at her to see if she was tensing up for the inevitably grisly outcome, I saw someone who might as well be recapping a mildly interesting movie. Something as fucked up as watching your family deal with mesothelioma probably has that effect on you. I should know: the punch lines for half the jokes at any of my family gatherings, at least growing up, involved little kids getting shot.
“And I turned the car on but it sounded funny so I pressed the gas pedal all the way down even though Mom said never play with any of the pedals or buttons but I did and then Helicopter sort of blew up on the windshield.”
“Je-sus.” As a responsible Buddy, I tried not to smile at her delivery of the story but it sounded like every joke I grew up on. Jokes like, “Take out the trash or I’ll finish what your cousin started,” and “I knew he should have bought a bigger gun.”
Jokes that we all thought were legitimately funny too.
“I don’t warm up the truck anymore.” The way she said it, she knew it was fucked up and terrible but you could tell she thought it was a funny story too. At least a faraway kind of funny. That “a lot of the other parts of my life are destabilizing bullshit so I’m going to laugh at cats that explode” kind of funny.
“I don’t blame you,” I said.
“Not unless I bang on the truck first with a hockey stick, but Mom says that gives her pre-mat-sure wrinkles which doesn’t make any sense because old age gives you wrinkles and she’s forty-three.”
And I couldn’t not laugh; I laughed my real laugh.
We headed for the mess hall and handed flyers out to the stragglers we passed. I taped a LOST flyer under the word “Nakwatuk.” Test was inside, standing in front of a wheeled-in whiteboard, lecturing a group of older campers that I didn’t know. Kids from one of the other buses.
“Maybe we should come back later,” I said to Lump.
“Why?”
“Because Tes—” I cleared my throat. “Mister Test is in there talking to the older kids.” It seemed like the right thing to say to make her to think I was a responsible and capable adult.
“That’s perfect!” she said and flung the door open, like she wanted to show me how to be a responsible and capable child.
Test stopped mid-sentence, his hands still up, and the group of nine or ten kids all turned and looked at us at the same time.
“I need everyone’s attention! I have an announcement!”
Test gave me a look that said, “Seriously?” before softening and looking at Lump. “Allison, you can make your announcement when I’m finished. I have the floor right now.”
Lump’s face went deep red. “Don’t call me that.”
“I’m sorry?” he said, placing his loose fists on his hips and trying to look as parentally intimidating as possible.
“I said, please don’t call me that.” Some of the fire went out of her voice when she tried to match Test’s authority. Still, the words came out made of iron, even if they came out quiet.
Test nodded and asked the group in a sweeping, semi-rhetorical voice, “Where were we?”
“You okay?” I whispered to Lump.
“I don’t like it when other people call me Allison.”
Before I could say anything else, and before Lump could tell me who calls her Allison, Test went on. “Right: you’re walking in the woods. Right. So. You come to a split in the trail and standing between the two paths is an old man. He greets you and says that you have two choices.” Which was obvious because it was a two-pronged fork, and wrong because there are always other choices. “Choice one.” He drew one large red arrow veering left and one veering right, and pointed to the left arrow with his marker.
“He definitely needed the giant dry-erase board for this,” I said to Lump. Some of the red faded from her cheeks.
“You go left and you will be given one billion dollars. With a B.” The students looked back and forth between each other. A small grin slunk across his face and you could tell he was thinking, Got these boys eating out the palm of my hand. After a very dramatic two-second pause, he said, flippantly, “Or you go right and you get…” He fished a dingy penny out of his back pocket and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. After everyone saw the coin, he tossed it to the nearest fourth-or-fifth-grader. “But: if you choose the penny, your money will double every day for a month. A penny the first day, two pennies the second, four pennies the third day, eight on the fourth, and so on.” He shrugged like, “That’s it; pretty lame, I know.” He looked his audience over. “The tension at the crossroads is palatable as the old man looks you in the eye and waits for your answer. What do you do?”
I leaned down to Lump. “Tension’s not palatable; it’s palpable.” I considered telling her that, despite his best efforts and sly intentions, a billion dollars was without a doubt the correct choice here, but settled on the abridged, “Also, choose billion.” Her color returned to normal.
“Who says go left?” he asked. All of the hands went up.
“C’mon. Let’s go put up some flyers. We’ll come back when they’re done.”
We made our way around the hall, dropping flyers where people would see them. On the sneeze guard over the empty salad bar; taped to the microphone stand on the stage; on the fire exits.
“What about through here?” she said, standing in front of a large wooden door marked “Staff Only.” She twisted the knob but the door didn’t move.
“If it’s staff only,” I said, taping a flyer to the window, “it’s probably…” In my peripheral vision I saw a Lump-blur run shoulder-first into the door, rattling it on its hinges with a sound loud enough to echo through the hall. “Holy shit, Lump.”
I saw Test looking at me from his makeshift stage through the porthole window on the connecting door. I tried to convey that things were still okay in here by flashing a smile and giving him two thumbs-up.
She was backing up and getting ready to batter the door down. “Lump, stop,” I said. The red started creeping back into her cheeks. It wasn’t much, but it was there. I took a breath, clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, checked to see that Test had returned to talking to the kids, thought, Fuck it, and said, “Hang on.”
I handed her the flyers and tried the door. It was locked, but just barely. I took my wallet out and found a rewards card to a place called Bonnie’s Café; I pushed the card between the door frame and the latch bolt and forced the door open.
“Yes!” she said, pumping both of her fists, still holding the papers. We couldn’t see anything past the door but that didn’t stop her from heading straight for it. I grabbed the back of her coat, said “Hang on,” agai
n, and felt around for a light switch.
The switch was high up on the wall, hidden in the cool, dry darkness. I flipped it on and we were looking at ten steep stairs leading to a maintenance tunnel.
“Can we?” she said, her eyes wide.
I jogged down the steps, looked down the tunnel, and came back up.
“Nobody’s going to see them if we put them down there,” I said.
“They might!” She looked at me until she scrunched her face up. “Fine. Can I look though?”
When I didn’t answer right away she shoved the flyers into my hands and sprinted down the steps. “It’s creepy down here!” she said without looking back at me.
And it was. The tunnel ran for maybe forty or fifty yards and was supposed to be lit by bare yellow bulbs every ten feet, except all of them but two had burned out: one bulb at the bottom of the stairs and one at the end of the tunnel. Under the last bulb there was a mess of tables, folding chairs, and decommissioned camp equipment.
I could hear Test and the campers wrapping up. “Lump. Go time!”
She ran up the stairs two at a time and we headed back toward Test, Lump moving somewhere between a power walk and a jog.
The whiteboard had a section of tallies under the left arrow and then what was supposed to be a mind-blowing equation under the right, except you could tell he’d realized his mistake during the presentation and had tried for a more creative math angle. He saw us approaching and asked the students to hang on a minute.
“Hi. Okay. Thanks. I have an announcement.” She studied their faces and waited for a response.
“What’s your announcement, Lump?” Test said. She didn’t tense up when he called her Lump.
“There is a deer missing. She’s just a baby and she escaped yesterday. I looked it up on the Internet … before, at home, because we’re not allowed to be on the Internet here … and the nightly average temp-er-rature has been in the record lows.”
“It’s just a deer,” one of the kids said. He was, inevitably, the Bryce of whatever cabin he belonged to.
Unstoppable Moses Page 10
