Pawned

by Laura Bickle

  “Heh. Yeah. But the gist is that many universes can coexist in the same space. Infinite realities, actually. Everything that could possibly happen has happened, will happen, and is happening. There’s a reality co-existing in our space, for instance, in which sharks became the dominant form of life on this planet.”

  I stare at him with narrowed eyes.

  Bert makes a swimming motion with his hand. “Seriously, man. There’s a tiger shark swimming through your room right now. In some reality, that’s happening.”

  “Shit. I thought magic was weird.”

  “There’s some shit that would glaze your eyes over about quantum entanglement...which is actually how magic works. All this shit is interrelated. Hell, it might even be theorized that what you see with the Bunko is peering through a whole bunch of entangled past yarns.”

  This makes my head hurt. “Uh. But hell.”

  “‘Hell,’” Bert makes quotation marks with two pieces of licorice, “is all around us. One of many planes co-existing in space with our reality. It impinges upon our reality once in a while, when strings get crossed. At times, shit can cross back and forth. Usually energy. And then we get into all that shit about the human soul being energy and neither created nor destroyed, yadda yadda yadda.”

  “So you crossed over to this plane from another?”

  “Ding-ding. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. I got pulled over through what your pointy-headed nerds would call quantum entanglement. But which an alchemist called magic waaaaay back in the day.”

  “An alchemist?” I was instantly curious.

  Bert waved dismissively. “Ancient history. Literally. But my plane is a bit different from yours.” He flourished his hands up and down his reptilian body, like a game show hostess presenting a shiny car. “Behold. Mammals weren’t really successful in my world.”

  “So, you’re not really a demon?”

  “Kinda sorta, in the way that you understand us to be. Where I come from is dark, lightless, and there’s a lotta unpleasant stuff. Reptoids aren’t really burdened by a whole lotta your morality. It’s your vision of the underworld, pretty much.”

  “Reptoids...” My brow wrinkles. “Is that what you guys really call yourselves?”

  “Meh. It’s as good a descriptor as any other. There’s some guy on your plane who’s convinced we’re the Illuminati and we actually run your world. Also that Snuffleupagus is Cthulhu’s little brother.” Bert chortles and digs around in his bag of licorice. “And you don’t want to know what those ancient alien theorists think.”

  I take another piece of licorice from the bag and chew. “Do you miss it? Your world?” It seems sort of rude to refer to it as ‘hell.’

  “No. Being on your plane is more interesting. And you guys have beer.” Bert grins, but his toothy grin fades.

  “What?” I ask.

  “The thing to remember is...hell is always with us.”

  BERT IS ONE CHEERFUL sonofabitch.

  I try to sleep after he leaves. I pull the blankets up to my chin and stare up at the rafters. But images of what really could be up there dance in my head, skeins of worlds entangled in our own. Worlds that can touch ours, as Hoodie’s has.

  And I worry that Sid could be entangled out there soon, with Hoodie. I wonder if the shark-toothed nightmare is waiting by Sid’s beside like some malignant tooth fairy, ready to whisk him away to hell if he chucks a clot or something.

  Sid is, by my measure, a good guy. But I’m pretty sure that whoever’s judging souls or energy sloshing around in other planes has more ethics than I do. I’m reminded of the sculpture of Ma’at we have in the shop, her feather weighted against the hearts of the living.

  I doze, and I think I dream. I have an impression of things moving around in the darkness above me, feathers swirling in it. Wings beat, and a soft, mournful cry echoes.

  When I wake in the light of morning, thin as powdered milk, mourning doves coo above me. A gray feather lies on my blanket. I stare at it, transfixed. Two urges war in me: I want to both capture it and blow it away.

  Something flutters against my window, and I jerk fully awake. The feather blows off my bed and into the darkness near the closet, where I can’t track it.

  I sit up in bed, heart hammering. I remind myself that there are police guards. Young Don wouldn’t be so bold as to attack in daylight. Not after last night.

  Not that there aren’t still other things after us. I wait until my heart and breath slow. With trepidation, I crawl out of bed.

  The city’s waking beyond my window. Yellow lights flicker on in windows, pigeons gathering on the power lines to watch the sunrise. The doves murmur overhead in the gutters. I imagine that mama raccoon and her babies are nestled away in the rafters, preparing for sleep. It rained sometime during the night, and the pavement is wet and shiny, reflecting the streetlights as they wink out, one after another.

  My gaze draws in from the horizon, and I look next door. The light in Lily’s room is out, and the window is closed securely. Part of a broomstick is jammed in the sash, for good measure. Mrs. Renfelter no doubt gathered the girls to her like a mother hen last night, and they all slept in the same room, with a chair wedged under the doorknob to keep it from opening.

  A cop paces along the gravel in the alley below.

  My bleary eyes focus on the fire escape near my window and the dirty window itself. A piece of paper is wedged into the blistering paint of the frame.

  I wait until the cop has wandered to the end of the alley. Carefully, I open the window. I reach up and pluck the soggy paper from the sash. It’s plain notebook paper, folded in the shape of a paper airplane.

  I smile. I carry it to my desk, click on the lamp. I unfold the wings of the airplane and spread the soggy paper out on my desk.

  When Lily and I were children, we occasionally got in trouble. Okay, we got in trouble a lot. Once in a while, one parent or the other would ground one of us. Mostly, it was for dumb shit, like using our lunch money for comic books or banging a baseball into Mrs. Renfelter’s car. Grounding was a major bummer. We’d sneak out on the fire escape as much as we could, but Mrs. Renfelter has ears like a bat. So we figured out a really unsophisticated way of passing notes. We’d practice folding paper airplanes made from newspaper, littering the back alley with notes gone astray.

  I think once, when I was twelve, I declared my undying love for Lily in a paper airplane note, too terrified to confess it to her in person. I was horrified when the wind caught my paper airplane and sucked it up into the gutter of the Renfelter building. I watched in sick anticipation for weeks, wondering if it would ever come down or if it would rot there, terrified at both prospects.

  I smooth the creases of the airplane out. The paper is very wet. I don’t know how long it’s been out there. But Lily’s sharp handwriting sprawls in the middle of the page, bleeding a bit into the white of the paper:

  Are you okay? They wouldn’t let me in when I came over.

  -L

  I reach for my notebook to try to write a note. Three drafts get wadded up into balls before I get a decent reply going:

  I’m fine. Sid is hurt, bad. He’s in the hospital.

  I think I’m pretty well grounded.

  Be careful.

  -R

  I fold up the paper in precise angles, using the side of my thumb to make the creases sharp. Weighing the plane in my hand, I go through the motions of throwing three times before I’m happy with the balance of the wings.

  I lean out the window and wait for the breeze to settle down. I wait for the cop to make another circuit through the alley, until his back’s to me, and I throw.

  The airplane arcs through the space between the buildings until the nose crumples against the brick beside Lily’s window. The airplane falls and sags against the floor of the fire escape.

  I frown. I’m way out of practice. It looks like trash from here. But if Lily’s looking for it, she’ll find it.

  MY DAD DOESN’T GO ANYWHERE q
uietly.

  He can’t go to the damn convenience store without bitching about the price of cigarettes. He can’t go to the bank without arguing with the teller. He is a complete and utter pain in the ass at auto repair shops, because he knows that obnoxious engine squeal is the water pump, not the drive belt.

  And he sure as hell isn’t going to go quietly with the police.

  They come for him the next day. We all knew they would, even my father. He’s been on the phone with his lawyer and grumbling about not having enough cash on hand—to pay his bond, I assume. While the rest of us are trying to console Carl, who’s taken to curling up on the couch and calling the hospital every hour, my dad’s doing what he does best: plotting.

  Let me clarify something about my dad and money. He’s always bitching about not having any. And God knows he sure as hell doesn’t share what he’s got unless it suits his purposes. He says he saves it for a rainy day, like the thing when the Renfelter’s building burned. I get that; really, I do. But sometimes, he can be a real jackass about it. Like when I asked him for money for a field trip to Washington D.C.

  “Nope,” he said. “We don’t have the money. And there’s nothing in D.C. worth seeing, anyway.” End of discussion.

  Pops says there’s a difference between being cheap and being mean, and my dad doesn’t get it.

  I knew full well he could get the money for the trip if he wanted. He could liquidate some of the old baseballs or knives in the shop. We often don’t have a whole lot of cash around, and what we have usually goes right back out the door to other people. He could’ve gotten it, though. He just didn’t think that shelling out a couple hundred dollars for me to go see the Washington Monument and a bunch of museums with my eighth-grade class was important.

  He went out the next week and bought a car.

  Admittedly, the exhaust system fell out of our old car and was dragging on the pavement. It was fricking embarrassing. But the car he got was pretty damn nice—a ten-year-old Mustang that he paid cash for at a DOJ auction, where they sell shit seized from drug dealers. It forever smelled faintly of pot, and the interior panels that hid the weed never fit perfectly back into the frame. I always worried that the original owner was going to recognize it driving down the street someday and go apeshit.

  That was the last time I asked him for money. I never asked him for so much as lunch money after that.

  My dad stands in our kitchen in his bathrobe, pouring cornflakes into a bowl when the cops clomp up the stairs and open the door without knocking. He starts bellowing, and before you know it, there’s milk and cornflakes all over the floor. One of his slippers gets ejected to the couch, where it smacks Carl on the side of the head. My dad winds up standing in a puddle in one slipper while two cops have him up against the refrigerator, handcuffing him.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” my dad shouts. “You can’t charge me with nothing!”

  “You’re under arrest for desecration of a corpse.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Detective Ryan is in the back of the fray, watching, with his arms crossed over his chest. “There are children in the room. I’m not going to describe in detail how they were desecrated.”

  “Children?” Then it dawns upon my dad that he’s talking about Carl and me. “They were there...what the hell?”

  The detective’s eyes narrow. “The Mob guys were missing livers. And other stuff. I don’t think your kids did that.”

  I sit, still as a stone, on the couch with Carl. Pops stands behind us, and he’s not making a sound, either.

  The cops haul my dad away. They literally have to carry him, because he refuses to walk, like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum at the grocery store. Two of them have to lift him, feet dragging, out of the place.

  My eyes drift to the door then back to the detective.

  Detective Ryan looks at the three of us. “I don’t know that you two boys should remain here.”

  “I’m here!” Pops insists.

  Detective Ryan looks askance at him. “No disrespect intended, but I understand that your health’s not good. And frankly...the only reason you haven’t been charged is that you’re old.”

  Pops’s jaw drops. “I’m not that old.”

  “Pops,” I say. “Shut up.” He doesn’t want to demonstrate to the nice policeman that he’s virile enough to disembowel a twentysomething-year-old gangster or six.

  Carl starts rocking back and forth on the couch.

  “He’s had enough shock already,” I say. I can’t imagine us being separated, being away from the only home we’ve known. “Please don’t. We can stay next door. With the Renfelters,” I blurt, hands chewing into the couch cushion.

  “Look,” the detective says. “I talked with the county social workers. I want you to take a ride with me, talk with them. In the absence of any other relatives not under suspicion of a crime, I don’t know what they’ll say, but...”

  Carl puts his head in his hands. My arm drapes protectively over him.

  Footsteps thump on the stairs, and there’s a shrill voice arguing with the police: “I want to see my boy.”

  A uniformed cop comes to the door, looking behind him, dazed. “Detective...there’s a woman here who says she’s the mother of one of the boys. The older one.”

  I swallow. My palms start to sweat.

  “You want me to let her in?”

  The detective looks at Carl and me. The yearning must be painted all over my face.

  “Okay.”

  Shoes click on the stairs. My fingers dig so deep into the couch stuffing that I can’t feel them anymore.

  A familiar voice calls, “Raz!”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, so much wanting this to be real.

  CHAPTER 23

  But it’s not my mother.

  It’s just Bert. He rushes through the door with his little reptile arms spread out to gather Carl and me into a hug.

  I wonder how much he really looks like my mom. Bert snuggles between us on the couch, putting his arms around our shoulders and crossing his legs primly at the ankle. From the reflection in the darkened television glass, I see that he’s dressed in some ridiculous 1950’s era polka-dotted dress and red shoes. I stare at the reflection in the black glass, at my mother’s face.

  Jesus. It freezes the breath in my throat.

  She looks just like she did when she left. Her dark eyes gaze at me with love. Her brown curly hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Even the freckles on her face are perfect.

  I wish I could reach into the television, live in that world with that mother sitting on the couch, her arms protectively surrounding Carl and myself.

  Detective Ryan stares at us.

  “What?” Bert says.

  That sort of breaks the illusion for me. Bert sounds like...Bert. Which is to say, a man.

  Apparently, Bert’s glamour is only visual. Funny that I never noticed it. But I’ve never seen Bert in the guise of a woman before.

  Detective Ryan opens his mouth, closes it. “Mrs. Stannick?”

  Bert delicately touches his throat with his claws. “I have a cold.”

  I snuggle up into Bert’s armpit. “I’m glad you’re here, Mom.”

  Bert kisses the top of my head and croons, “I came as soon as I heard, baby.”

  I should be squicked out and want to squirm away. But I play along. Detective Ryan’s gaze is heavy on me.

  Pops serves the coup de grace. He hands Bert a mug of coffee, murmuring: “Good to see you, Jackie. Is that rotten son of mine paying alimony?”

  Bert primly drinks from the coffee cup. “We need to discuss that. Perhaps when he gets back from jail.” It’s said with just the right dash of snark.

  Detective Ryan watches us. “Will you be staying in town, ma’am?”

  “I’ll be staying right here,” Bert says. “As long as it takes.”

  I swallow hard. God, I wish my real mom had said that.

  The detective nods slowly.
“I’ll, uh, be back to check on you.”

  “Thank you, Detective,” Bert chirps in his manly lizard voice. I swear Bert winks at him.

  The cops clear out and close the door behind them.

  I stare at the television screen glass. Bert’s glamour falls, from head to toe, dissolving into his familiar reptile form.

  I’m sad to see my mom go. I scuttle to the other end of the couch. But I still wish... Maybe I could ask him to do it again sometime.

  Carl drops his head in his hands. “Now what?”

  Pops waits until the footsteps recede down the steps before he speaks. “Now we get down to the business of opening up that safe deposit box while your dad is gone and giving that cursed knickknack to the Mob.”

  I shake my head. “Dad’s been sleeping with that key around his neck. It was around his neck when they arrested him. We’ll never get it now—it went to jail with him.”

  Bert chortles. “We can get it. We’ll just have to think a bit out of the box.”

  I DON’T LIKE IT WHEN Bert gets creative. I mean...he’s a pantsless demon. How much further out of the box does he need to get?

  Bert doesn’t say much for the rest of the morning. He says he’s “thinking” and that it “isn’t time” to act, yet. He watches cartoons and eats cereal from the box. I’m not sure if he’s planning or just screwing around.

  Pops paces the floors in his socks, wearing a track in the carpet. All this stress isn’t good for him. One son in the hospital and the other in jail.

  “Pops.” I reach out to grasp his arm. “Sit down.”

  He shakes his head, continuing to pace and rub his temples.

  Eventually, the phone rings. Pops picks it up. I saunter over beside him and crowd up next to the phone. Pops lets me.

  “Hello?”

  “Dad, it’s me. I’m in jail.” My father’s voice is tinny over the din of people talking and beeping computers. Somebody in the background is screaming. I’m envisioning him in an orange jumpsuit, huddled over a phone in a large room with inmates.