by Dan Dillard
*****
Little more than a month passed before Danny and I went into Matt's yard again. Matt and I had nodded our hellos and goodbyes on the bus and in passing during school, but we didn’t share any classes that year. We didn’t have much to say to each other either, I think for fear we might bring it up.
John had started back drinking, and each day when it was time for him to come home from work, we made sure we were gone for one reason or another. Mom fought with him again. She had found renewed strength somewhere in Robin’s death and was using it to shield us, but I could see things were headed back down that old worn path. She would crawl back inside of herself eventually, only it would be darker than it was before, her world had one less light in it. I was glad of one thing: Robin wouldn’t have to know that worry.
There was a police cruiser in the Chambers’ driveway when we got there and an ambulance was parked up on the sidewalk. Paramedics rushed in and out of the house, calling to each other and radioing information in to some dispatch center and some hospital. Terms like exsanguinated and deep laceration went back and forth, but at the time I didn’t understand them. Then I saw the garage door open and the ambulance pulled away from their front lawn.
The tension was all too familiar. Mr. and Mrs. Chambers left with Matt in their family’s Dodge Aspen wagon and followed behind that ambulance. Matt sat in the very back—long before the click-it-or-ticket laws—and waved a hand at us.
The police followed the Chambers’ car in their cruiser. Its lights were on, but the siren wasn’t. When we were kids, we were told that was a bad sign and I thought the worst. I know now that if an ambulance is involved, it often means the patient has a chance. As it turned for Sean, my bad feeling was correct.
“What do you think happened?” Danny asked me.
I shook my head east and west.
“It doesn’t look good.”
“I didn’t see Sean,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you think it was because of that...”
“Don't say it, Danny,” I said. “Don’t even think it.”
He didn’t say it. It was a silly command, don’t even think it. I was thinking it. I’m sure he was too, and wherever that car was headed, I was pretty sure Matt was inside thinking it as well. Nataliya had done something to Robin, and she had done something to Sean…how long before it was me.
I looked up at the Chambers’ house and then down the street towards our own when something grabbed my attention. The crushed bike was there in the road and so was the white Chevrolet with the blood smear on its dented hood. Robin sat up in the street. Her head was crushed but her one remaining eye was locked on mine. She waved with one hand just like Matt had from the back of his parents’ Aspen. Her other arm hung limp and broken. Sean was there, next to her for a moment, and then the whole vision was gone. A wave of nausea hit me like a hard smack to the face. I stumbled trying to turn around and run back home. I remember not wanting to be sick in the street, not in public where people might see me.
I made it to our house just as the feeling passed. I was immediately exhausted but something pulled me up the stairs into our bedroom and to Danny’s desk. I opened the drawer and pulled out Robin’s drawings. I had a suspicion that Danny pulled them out from time to time, but I hadn’t looked at them since that awful Monday. The image of her on her bike was still first. I placed it aside and spread the rest out on the desktop. There was an image of Sean. He was smiling in the way little kids drew faces, and he held a baseball bat up on his shoulder. A wide, crescent moon-shaped smile with giant white teeth covered the lower half of the brown oval that made his head. A pair of dots made the eyes and another oval, a smaller orange one, was his nose. Under the beaming grin was one Russian word: лезвие. I still didn’t know what the word meant. Not yet.
Anxiety took me and I needed to decipher those words like an addict needed a fix. I needed a library or someone who spoke and read the language. The other pictures were also crayon and held the same childlike innocence. Mine read “Она поедает”, Matt’s “Oранжевый, облизывает” and Danny’s read “белый и светло он сжигает ночь.” I recalled the hissing voice of Nataliya as I looked at the words and wondered if they weren’t the same. I wondered how my little sister might know how to write them. The faces in her drawings had that cutesy stick-figure grin. The simple lines of crayon made me want to cry for my sister. By themselves, they would have been cute, but the Cyrillic writing in Robin’s unpracticed hand made me quake with fear.
The last picture on the bed was the most disturbing. It was a house, obviously the Russian House, and the lines were scrawled more than drawn. Heavy black lines outlined the form of the house and their interiors were filled in with scribbling. Standing in the front door of the house was a stick figure with long stringy hair that stuck out wildly in all directions. There were two blue spots for eyes—dark lumps of crayon wax so think I could feel it. The figure had no pupils, and the rest of its face was a swirl of black crayon. It said Наталія, which I knew in my heart meant Nataliya.
That afternoon, I convinced my mother to take us to the library. Danny sat in the kids’ corner and read from Dixon’s Hardy Boys collection while I sought out the librarian. I approached the main desk near the entrance and tapped on the counter. A woman sitting with her back to me turned and smiled.
“I’d like to speak to the head librarian,” I said.
Her mouth formed a tiny O shape and she put a finger to her chin as if she’d lost something and was trying to recall the last place she’d seen it. Then she pointed and whispered.
“He’s right over there.”
I nodded my thanks.
Right over there was an older gentleman shuttling a cart through the stacks as he filed books according to the Dewey Decimal system. He placed each one on the shelf using the same care with which a grandfather might hand an infant back to its mother. I heard him groan a little with each stretch for the upper shelves and each squat to the lower shelves.
“Excuse me,” I said.
He turned to face me, a tall, thin man in his seventies with white hair that trimmed his bald head. He had a thick mustache, even thicker glasses and tobacco stained teeth that looked like the dinosaur bones at the natural history museum. Those teeth also looked like they might have been part of the original package. He wore a light blue sweater vest and bow tie.
“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?” he asked in a near whisper.
“I need help finding something.”
It was a dumb statement. Of course I needed help finding something. Why else stop and ask? But he wasn’t offended, nor did he seem troubled by my statement. He smiled and that mustache spread like the wings of a bird taking flight.
“A book perhaps?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
“Intriguing. Well, I am Mr. Calvin Sewell. You can call me Cal if you like. I’ve been here at this library for forty-two years in one capacity or another. If it’s here, I can point you to it. If not, we’ll just look somewhere else.”
Mr. Sewell held a giant hand out for me to shake and I did so with a smile. His grip was firm, but his hands were frail, with paper-thin skin.
“Todd McNeill,” I said.
He nodded and cocked his head as if he needed to shake something loose in his brain to make room for my name.
“What is it you need that may or may not be found inside a book, Todd McNeill.”
“I need some words translated.”
His eyebrows raised and his spectacles slid to the tip of his nose. He pushed them back up into the red notches that had been worn there.
“I see.”
He left his cart, still half full of books, at the end of one of the aisles and shuffled across to the reference section. I followed.
“Have you uncovered an ancient relic? Perhaps a stone tablet with something carved upon its surface? Maybe a piece from an alie
n ship?”
“No. Nothing like that,” I said, grinning at the idea.
“Do you know which language you seek, young man?” he asked.
“No. Well, not really. I think it might be Russian.”
He stopped and looked at me with big, bloodshot eyes.
“Oh, that is interesting. Most interesting.”
His hands slid along one of the shelves until it hit a series of volumes that looked like school textbooks. I reached in my pocket and pulled out a slip of paper on which I had carefully copied the words Robin had written and I held it up for him to see.
“Ahh. What is it exactly that are you investigating, Mr. McNeill? Or can you tell me?” Sewell said.
“Nothing really,” I lied.
Then I felt bad. The Hardy Boys wouldn’t have lied. It made me think about Danny reading his book in the kid’s corner and I wondered how they would handle the situation.
“Some pictures I found had these words on them. Just wondered what they meant,” I said and felt a little better.
“Cyrillic. These words could be Russian or a dozen other languages,” Sewell said and chuckled. “I’m not familiar with any of them.” He laughed again. It was a wheezy laugh, as if he was so old, dust had settled on his insides. “I’m a bit of a student of languages. Speak four myself, but none of the Slavics. Either way, let me see what I can do to help you.”
He fumbled a pair of books from the shelf and palmed them with his large hands. He might have been a big, even intimidating man at one time, but gravity and arthritis had shrunk him down and those hands were the only remnant. I followed him to a table where he put the books down and then I sat and waited while he flipped through a few pages.
“I’m not sure how best to search for these words if you don’t speak them. Maybe they’re in alphabetical order. The cyrillic alphabet, that is.” He craned his neck to look at me and said, “Do you have any ideas?”
I didn’t. In my head, I guess I thought it would be easy. Today, we’d just punch those characters into the internet, or copy and paste them with a computer and answers would pour forth like so much water over a damn…but back then, books held all the answers. I think they still might. The process was slow, but effective.
“Nope,” I said. “I thought I’d just hunt until I found them. Unless you know anyone who speaks Russian.”
He crossed his arms and tapped his index fingers on his elbows.
“I can’t say as I do. I’m not sure I ever have, Mr. McNeill. This cold war keeps us on opposite sides most of the time.”
I didn’t really understand what he meant. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t about nuclear war or a government rivalry for supremacy. It was simply a language issue between me and a dead girl. He patted my shoulder and straightened up with a groan.
“If you need any more help, let me know. I’ll do what I can.”
I didn’t as it turned out. I found some of the words but not all. The phrases didn’t translate as easily as I’d hoped, and what did translate didn’t make much sense. It was nonsense in fact, at least that’s what I thought at the time. The one word that stuck out and bothered me the most was written on Sean’s picture. I remember his smiling crayon face and the way he stood there with what I initially thought was a baseball bat. He had been on the high school team, and even made it to the state championship one year.
I grabbed Danny from the kid’s corner.
“Come on,” I said. “The Hardy Boys can wait unless you want to check the book out.”
He shook his head and placed the book in the rolling cart at the end of the aisle. With a smile, he bounced along beside me. I knew he wouldn’t check the book out. He only read when we were at the library. At home, even comic books didn’t hold his attention. Maybe it was the colorful beanbags in the kid’s corner. I waved at Mr. Sewell on the way out the front entrance.
“Find all you needed?” he asked.
“Some. I made some notes. We’ll come back soon.”
He smiled.
“I look forward to it, Mr. McNeill. You be sure and bring your little friend there with you.”
When I got home and looked back at Robin’s drawings, especially the one with Sean on it, it worried me. It wasn’t a bat as it turns out. When I looked at it again, it looked like something completely different, like something I hadn’t considered before, and it wasn’t leaning on his shoulder, but pointed at his neck. I never went back. Not to that library anyway. The word I had found scared me and I didn’t want to find anymore.
The Russian word was лезвие, and the closest translation I could find for that word was blade.
