Keepers

by Gary A Braunbeck

  The vehicle approached; large, dark, boxlike.

  It could only be something like a SWAT team.

  Good.

  The dogs looked at the vehicle, then calmly went back to their respective tasks of disassembling the driver and guarding me.

  Dusk was coming fast. There was maybe an hour of daylight remaining.

  Still, the vehicle shone its headlights directly into my eyes. I blinked, pulled back my head, and tried to turn away, only to find the face of the second mastiff batting its nose into mine to turn my head forward.

  There was the sound of a metal door sliding open. A figure stepped from inside the van. It was difficult to make out any features because of the headlights’ glare, but I could make out some if his shape.

  Not a police officer. Not unless the Cedar Hill Police Department was now issuing bowler hats as official head gear.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted something in a language like no other I’d heard before. It sounded like an amalgamation of languages; guttural clicks of Basque, monosyllabic tones of Mandarin, retroflex consonants of Gondi and Kurukh, even the musical complexities of Welsh.

  Over two decades, and now my World Language minor comes in useful.

  Whatever language he spoke, the dogs understood.

  They both stopped what they were doing and trotted over to the man with steps that were almost light and happy.

  “You need to go,” said the blurry figure behind the lights.

  “B-but … but they killed that man!” I said, pointing toward the body as if the other man didn’t have a clear view of it already.

  “Raw material is a bitch to get hold of these days, Gil. You’ll remember soon enough. Now, you’d best be on your way to get Carson.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the two mastiffs came lumbering out of the light, their red eyes glaring, their lips pulled back in full snarls.

  I staggered back to my feet, stumbling toward my car, not wanting to take my eyes away from the dogs.

  When my opened car door hit me in the ass, I twisted around and fell into the seat, slamming the door closed, putting the car in gear, and tearing away from there in a squeal of tires.

  I ran two stop signs and least one red light on my way toward Audubon’s Graveyard. How I didn’t get pulled over by the police, I’ll never know. I only know that I was so far beyond scared that it would have taken the light from scared a thousand years to reach me.

  I need to concentrate, to find something concrete, something real, something of the world I knew and understood to grab hold of and not let go, to ground me, to let me know that I wasn’t cracking up again.

  (Again? Did I hear the word “again”? Does that mean you’re finally going to let it come back to you, pal?)

  Ignoring you.

  I pressed a hand against my chest as if that would help slow the jackhammering of my heart, then slid it up to press against my screaming shoulder. Even through the jacket and shirt I could feel the old scar tissue beginning to swell, and suddenly I had it, the one thing I could latch onto, the one thing that might keep me in one piece until I’d found Carson and could start making sense out of all of this.

  The promise of seeing Beth again.

  Because if it hadn’t been for this old wound, I never would have met her …

  NINE

  Two months before my tenth birthday my aunt Amy, who was then eighteen, invited me to go along with her to visit one of her friends who was away at college. Aunt Amy usually took me out at least once every two weeks—a movie and pizza, then shopping at the seemingly endless supply of record stores in Columbus (usually near or on the Ohio State University campus). Even then, people twice my age were aware that when it came to contemporary music—be it rock, folk, progressive (“prog,” to those of us in the know), even crossover jazz like John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, this little geek from Cedar Hill was The Kid to Ask. Whenever Amy was going to have a party and wanted the music to be perfect, she’d come to me to help her record tapes. The deejays at Stereo Rock 92 had nothing on me when it came to instant recall of who played in what band and on what label and when.

  The excursion that day promised to be a good one; the new Steppenwolf album was just out and I’d been saving my allowance to buy it. No place in Cedar Hill carried it yet, but I knew I’d find it at the first record store I walked into in Columbus. Amy told me that she needed me to settle a bet with some of her friends about the last couple of Grand Funk Railroad albums, and if I’d come along with her and “put those know-it-alls in their place,” she’d buy the Steppenwolf album for me. (Amy made it a point to never tell me ahead of time what the “bet” was specifically about, because she knew I enjoyed being put on the spot when it came to rock trivia. I’d been the ace up her sleeve on at least five occasions, and not once had I failed her or been stumped by any of her friends. I liked that. I liked being good at something and briefly admired for it: “Hey, this kid’s good. Really good. Now get rid of him and let’s party.”)

  The drive from Cedar Hill took forever, it seemed (two hours in a car in kid-time is an eternity, remember?), but eventually we arrived at our destination. I knew something was wrong as soon as we started driving down a side road that led to the dorms.

  “Shit,” said Amy, banging a fist against the steering wheel. “They’ve got it blocked off.”

  We turned around and tried three other side roads but all of them were closed. Finally, Amy drove around one of the roadblocks and ended up on a really nice road lined with hills and trees. It would have been pretty if it weren’t for the smoke coming over the trees and all the shouting in the distance.

  Just as we were coming around a bend in the road Amy hit the brakes. Several yards ahead sat an ominous looking truck that I recognized as having something to do with the Army.

  Amy’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, Lord… .”

  I rolled down my window to see if I could get a better view of what was going on. I could hear a lot of people shouting somewhere on the other side of the hill. I could also hear something that sounded like the voice of a robot trying to be heard over the shouting. (I later found out it was a bullhorn being used by campus security.)

  A soldier walked around the side of the truck and pointed at our car. Amy grabbed my hand and said, “Stay here,” then climbed out to meet the soldier. I sat there looking at the smoke coming over the trees. I wasn’t so much nervous as I was impatient to know what was going on, so like every curious, annoying nine-year-old you’ve ever met, I looked to make sure Amy and the soldier weren’t watching me (they were arguing, rather loudly), opened the door of the car, and made my way toward the hill. I was almost to the top when I heard the robot voice shout something I couldn’t understand, and then something made the loudest crack! I’d ever heard and the crowd screamed.

  If you haven’t figured it out yet, my Aunt Amy had driven us to Kent State University. It was May 4, 1970, and we’d arrived just a few minutes before the National Guard opened fire on students gathered to protest the war in Vietnam. They were supposed to fire over the protestors’ heads, but some did not. All of this I discovered in the days and weeks to come; at the moment all Hell broke loose and invited Purgatory to join the party, I was flat on my face at the top of that hill. I looked up and saw a structure a few yards away and, figuring it would be safe, crawled toward it.

  There is a very famous photograph from the Kent State shootings. In it, a young female student is halfkneeling, half-squatting by the body of a student lying facedown on the sidewalk. Her arms are parted at her sides like a celebrant blessing the hosts at Mass; her long straight hair is caught in the wind and flowing to the right. She is in the middle of releasing a scream of anguish that to this day I still hear in my dreams.

  In the background, past the people running by in panic, past the lush hillside, through the wisps of dissipating tear gas, up in the corner, you will see a small gazebo. If you are a person who has the technology to do so, and if
you can get your hands on a copy of that photograph, then use your computer’s photo editing software to enlarge that corner section of the picture. Concentrate on the lower left-hand side of the gazebo, enlarge that a little, and you will see what looks like a small fuzzy animal trying to burrow its way through the gazebo’s latticework and hide underneath.

  That is the top of my head.

  A few seconds after that photograph was taken, I scrambled to my feet and ran back down to the car as fast as I’ve ever run in my life. When I got there, the National Guardsman who’d been arguing with my aunt was surrounded by half a dozen angry and panicked students. Two of them grabbed the guardsman while another attempted to yank his rifle from his grip. The gun was jerked up, down, and to the side. One. Two. Three.

  On two Amy whipped her head around and saw me standing by the car. She started to shout something at me and then three arrived and something exploded. I couldn’t see what because I was magically on my back staring up at the clouds and wondering why I couldn’t feel my left side.

  Here’s a piece of information you might want to file away under Things You Never Want to Find Out for Yourself: If fired in close enough proximity to a target—even an accidental one like an annoyingly curious nine-year-old boy who should have stayed in the stupid car—rubber bullets can cause almost as much damage as the real thing.

  The bullet passed cleanly through my left shoulder, missing bone but making a permanent impression on what tissue it met along the way.

  I remember everyone crowding around me. I remember the way Amy grabbed me and kissed me and got my blood all over her nice blouse. I remember the strength of the guardsman’s arms as he pushed everyone aside and lifted me up like he was some kind of superhero and ran toward the truck. Then I decided I was tired and closed my eyes.

  I was treated at the local hospital, then transferred by ambulance to Cedar Hill Memorial the next morning. I remember none of this because I was unconscious for nearly twenty hours after it happened.

  What I do remember is waking up in my hospital room to find Amy there with my mom, a nurse, and a couple of reporters. Amy was so glad to see me awake she broke down crying and tried to hug me, but the nurse said that wasn’t a good idea, so my aunt simply kissed my cheek and held my hand while my mom glared at her, and then at me. She didn’t have to speak; I knew what was going through her mind: Do you have any idea how angry your father is about all of this? Do you know how embarrassing this has been to us?

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to her.

  “Oh, hon,” said Amy, “oh god, what have you got to be sorry about? I should have left the minute I knew what was happening! This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.”

  I turned my head and looked at her. Why was she crying about me?

  I was something of a minor celebrity on the floor for a few days after that. I was the Kid Who’d Gotten Shot at Kent State. That’s how nurses and orderlies broke the ice with me: “Hey, aren’t you that kid who got shot at Kent State? Wow.”

  I knew I’d been hit in the shoulder, but what confused me was why I had this monster bandage running from the center of my chest down to my package. (My father was a WWII veteran, and in his house you never said “pee-pee” or “penis” or “dick”; no, when referring to that area, you called it your “package.”)

  It turned out that when I’d dropped, I’d slammed down on a large rock at the side of the road and ruptured my spleen. My parents had raised holy hell about having surgery performed in Kent and had insisted it be done at Cedar Hill. I was stabilized and moved, even though postponing the surgery could have killed me. To this day I try to convince myself it had nothing to do with the rates at CHM being nearly twenty-five percent cheaper; haven’t made it there yet, but stay tuned.

  Soon enough I became less of a conversation piece and just another patient and that was fine with me. Most days in the hospital I was kept comfortable, had plenty of help when I needed to get out of bed, regained my appetite, and had a few visitors; mostly Amy (who not only bought Steppenwolf 7 for me, but evidently every album in every record store between here and Michigan) and a couple of my teachers from school. Mom came to visit only once after that first day, and then didn’t say much or stay long. My father never visited or called. I guessed he was still mad at me.

  On those days when Aunt Amy didn’t come by, I could always count on Beth, who always seemed to appear just when I needed her, always decked out in her torn blue bathrobe with the words Grand Hotel, London stitched out in fading letters across the chest. She boasted that her mother had gotten it for her while in England on a theatrical tour, and the hotel management was more than happy to give such a renowned stage actress as Beth’s mother a tiny souvenir. (Even then I suspected that Beth might not be telling me the whole truth; I’d heard a couple of nurses talking about how she lived with her aunt, who was the only relative that could be found. If her mother was such a famous stage actress, then how hard could it be to find her? After all, she’d sent her that bathrobe from London, hadn’t she? Then I figured that maybe Beth was embarrassed because her mom and dad didn’t want her, so she made up things. I guessed that was okay. Sometimes the truth was boring, or made other people feel sorry for you and not know what to say, so they didn’t say anything and left you alone. I got the feeling Beth had been left alone a lot.)

  Beth had been admitted for an emergency appendectomy when her appendix burst and was in the room two doors down from mine. She’d come by my room in the early days of my stay when I was still the Big Curiosity, but unlike the rest of the patients on our floor, she kept coming back.

  Beth was sixteen years old, I was still nine (Ten in July I’d tell people any chance I got, as if knowing that would make me any less ridiculous in their eyes.); she wore love beads around her neck and told me she had a pair of hip-hugger bell-bottom jeans that she only wore in warm weather because she liked to wear her sandals with them—thank God the appendectomy scar was low enough that she could still wear halters and tube-tops.

  My wardrobe consisted mostly of mismatched plaid and paisley.

  Beth seemed to be popular at her school (she had a lot more visitors than I did, all of them girls who were her age; and she always brought them over to meet me, and they always said I was cute but I don’t think they really meant it). I was a big Zero at my school, what with the plaid, the paisley, and my thick, dark-framed glasses, not to mention my interest in books (Vonnegut), monster movies (Godzilla ruled, still does), and music that wasn’t on American Top Forty.

  Why someone Beth’s age seemed to like being around a kid like me, I don’t know. Maybe she cast me in the role of Little Brother She Never Had or something; all I know is that anytime I got sick, or fell down (I fell down a lot the first week or so after my surgery), or even felt lonely, Beth was there before any nurse or doctor, always helping me up, or brushing my hair back with her hand, or giving me a big but not too-tight hug. I liked that. My mom and dad weren’t big huggers. They loved me, I knew that (or told myself so, anyway), but ours was not a house big on physical displays of affection. So a Beth bear hug (the only kind she knew how to give) was always welcomed, even when it made me feel like a little baby.

  Then one day Beth overhead something between a nurse and one of the orderlies, something about the lab where all the animals were kept. Eavesdropping on adult conversations was something that Beth seemed to do automatically, and when she told me what she’d heard, something about the word “animals” piqued my interest.

  “They keep animals here? I thought this was a hospital just for people.”

  “I guess there’s like a whole floor of them over in one of the other buildings,” Beth said. “They try out new drugs and operations on them, to help humans.”

  “How do you get there?”

  “I heard the nurses saying that you have to go outside, across the street. But guess what?” She smiled at me, one of those delicious “I’ve-Got-A-Secret” smiles that become less enchanting the older you
get, then lowered her voice to a whisper: “There are tunnels! Can you believe it? Like those secret underground places in all the James Bond movies. Pretty groovy, huh?”

  Having been cooped up in this room and bed for most of the last ten days, I was all for it. “How do we get there?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’m working on it. Stay cool.”

  Beth worked on it, all right. One of the orderlies on our ward was the older brother of a girl Beth knew from school, and was easily talked into taking us there. (I remember that he and Beth had gone into one of the little rooms down the hall to talk about it and were in there an awfully long time.)

  The Sunday morning we took off on our little excursion was an incredibly warm one, even for mid-May in Ohio. All of the windows were open but they offered no relief. My gown clung to me as I slipped out of bed (with Beth’s help, of course) and put on my slippers and the light hospital robe.

  “I know the robe’s uncomfortable,” Beth said, “but I don’t want you catching a cold or anything worse—God, I’d just freak out if that happened. Just to be safe, here—put on your pajama bottoms. And don’t look at me like that, you.”

  The IV bottle was tricky, a big, heavy thing made of thick glass that clinked against the metal pole from which it hung. At least the pole was on wheels so I could pull it along behind me, but the clinking noise drove me nuts; Beth remedied that by stealing some medical tape from a supply cart and wrapping it around the bottle so that it was attached to the pole. Thankfully, the wheels didn’t squeak.

  Once I’d gotten myself out into the hallway, Beth, the orderly (whose name I never knew), and I headed for the elevators.

  “We gotta go down to one of the subbasements in order to get to the other elevators,” said the orderly, putting his hand in the middle of Beth’s back. “Hope you aren’t afraid of dim places.”

  “I’m not afraid of much,” replied Beth, pulling his hand away from her. “Except maybe having my time wasted.”