Slashback

6

Niko

Twelve Years Ago

I didn’t want to believe it. Yet there it was. Black and white, a piece of someone’s soul stapled to a telephone pole.

It was brutal and ugly and in no way matched the pure blue sky of a perfectly crisp autumn Saturday. The sun itself was cooperating, spreading a buttery glow on peeling siding, warped wood, weeds masquerading as grass and scrawny trees that had two or three poppy red leaves—gilding something tawdry into a place that for that hour looked as if it was a home you’d actually want. It was the same as that moment in The Wizard of Oz when it turned from black and white to every color in the spectrum. This wasn’t a movie special effect; it was a natural one.

And it was ruined by the paper fluttering against the wood where it was pinned.

Cal saw it first, but then he had been watching for something like this. I hadn’t. He didn’t point it out. He stopped the skateboard that was all but useless on the cracked and broken sidewalk and squatted down to pretend to tie his sneaker. I noticed that it was already tied in an effective, if sloppy, Cal knot almost at the same moment I noticed the poster. It covered layers of LOST posters but it didn’t say LOST. It said MISSING in bold black letters. I always wondered about that—the difference between missing and lost. Whichever word was chosen for you, you were still gone all the same.

Whichever was chosen, you rarely came back.

“Kithser.” I studied the face on the cheap photocopy. “David.” I hadn’t known his first name was David. I’d only known him as the seventeen-year-old drug dealer and probably thief three streets over who’d once tried to sell crack to Cal. It was the week we’d first moved in. Kithser was big for someone who did crack. Big boned, muscle-bound enough that if he wasn’t doing crack, he was certainly juicing. Definitely well fed, I guessed, by the family who was now looking for him.

Did his family know how he was on the streets? That he was mean and nasty with the steroid psychosis lurking in the twitching beside his glassy eyes. Who knew? Either they were softhearted and hoped he’d change or they’d made him the way he was and missed that drug money.

When had I become this cynical? I reached out to fold a corner under and keep the paper from flapping in the wind. “It’s an old picture,” Cal noted, giving up on his sneaker. A finger plopped directly in the middle of David Kithser’s face. “See? It doesn’t show where you broke his nose.”

Whether someone loved him or not, you didn’t try to sell my little brother crack. Cal wouldn’t have taken it, but the next step would’ve been Kithser trying to steal any money he had on him. That would’ve led to Cal bashing him in the balls . . . testicles. Damn it, whacking him in the testicles with his battered skateboard. From that point on, it was hard to say what would’ve happened. Cal had been armed. I didn’t let him take a knife to school, but after school and on weekends, I wanted him able to protect himself. Against Grendels. Against Kithsers, against those even worse than the Kithsers. The only good neighborhoods we knew were the ones we rode through on buses.

Luckily I was two blocks down, saw it, and that was the end of Kithser bothering my brother. I could’ve taken him down without hurting him much. Steroid muscle is useless muscle for the most part. But with drug dealers, bullies, perverts, and what else oozed about, you needed to make an impression. A thoroughly broken nose did that and was essentially harmless in the long run. Kithser had never seen a drop of his own blood in his life until then, I could tell. Most bullies haven’t.

And Cal helpfully kicking him in the b— testicles when he was down and rolling around screaming about his nose hadn’t done much for his pride either. Kithser had paid attention to the lesson and he hadn’t come back to our street. So I’d thought.

Or maybe someone had gone over to his street instead.

Expectant eyes slanted up at me in a rainwater gaze. Now I’d see the truth. No way to avoid it. Not even I could ignore this. “You know the killer got him. Right, Nik?” You’re not an oblivious idiot anymore, are you? Because worrying about keeping you alive is getting to be a chore. I could see all those thoughts spinning under the dark hair.

I rested a hand on his shoulder and squeezed lightly. His bones were thin and light under my fingers. Fragile. Breakable. A spun glass version of a brother. I hoped for that growth spurt soon. A knife and some hand-me-down martial art moves from the dojo wouldn’t always be enough.

“Maybe,” I answered, noncommittal. “He leads a bad life. Lots of trouble.” Missing a week now, the poster said. Not crashing at a friend’s place then. “But . . . maybe.”

Cal blew a random strand of hair out of his eyes and rolled up the too-long sleeves of his cast-off sweatshirt one more time. “Can we get pizza after?”

I’d already ripped the stapled poster free. I’d done it completely without thought and stared at it with a combination of dread and curiosity. What was I doing? “After what?” I asked, distracted.

Picking up his skateboard, Cal tucked it under his arm and nodded at the paper. “After you go around the neighborhood asking stupid questions about Kithser.”

“How do you know that’s what I’m going to do?” Bemused at his sudden psychic ability to know what even I hadn’t known, I folded the missing poster in half.

“Because that’s you. Good.” He had an expression of patient resignation on his face that I knew was identical to the one I wore when I was cleaning up his SpaghettiOs and soda handprints in the kitchen. “Just . . . good. You can’t help yourself. You don’t want to get someone in trouble if they don’t deserve it. You know, in case the weirdo next door is a butcher.” There was a heavy load of sarcasm on the word butcher.

“Wouldn’t you want the same benefit of the doubt?” I knocked lightly on top of his head. “Although all the trouble you get in you almost always deserve,” I added with exasperated affection.

Cal was stubborn and getting him off topic wasn’t easy at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times. “You’re right, Nik. He is a butcher. But he butchers people, not cows.” That’s when the glow that hung in the air faded and the sun was only the sun again. The wizard behind the curtain was just a man, possibly one with an inhuman grin and huge, serrated knife dripping blood.

By then Cal was already walking toward our rental, done trying to convince me. There was work ahead and he wanted it over with as soon as possible. “Bible or crutches?”

We’d learned a few techniques from watching Sophia. She could work an entire block in twenty-five minutes lifting valuables to be fenced later and she had a routine that didn’t fail often. It was difficult to get into a house to talk to and scam suspicious neighbors in our crumbling section of town. It helped to have one of two things.

“The Bible or the crutches?” Cal asked again. “And what about the pizza?”

“The crutches,” I decided. The Bible worked less and less for Sophia. It seemed people were as upset by pushy Christians knocking on their door as much as they were the possibility of a home invasion. “Yes, pizza, but vegetarian. You need some vegetables. Otherwise you’ll turn into a can of SpaghettiOs.”

“Okay, but extra cheese.” Which was remarkably agreeable for a kid who loved pepperoni and any other kind of questionable meat more than life itself. It made me wonder uneasily exactly how bad the smell was to him coming from next door. Was there meat in that basement and was it questionable in a very different way?

I planned to find out.

After retrieving the hard-used crutches, we started canvassing the neighborhood. I went from a fifteen-year-old who looked seventeen to a teenager with a hugely swollen foot and ankle, two pair of socks stuffed with more socks, a pathetic limp, and a solemn-eyed little brother holding a box of cookies he could only be selling for school. Granted it was an empty box, another prop and victim of Cal’s appetite, but it would get the job done.

Crutch and drag. Crutch and drag. I looked down at Cal. “This is wrong, all right? We don’t do things like this unless we’re trying to find out if a killer lives next to us and I don’t think that will ever come up again. We don’t do it to steal. We’re not Sophia.”

“I know, Nik. You’ve said it like a thousand times. We’re not. But sometimes I think things would be easier if we were.” That was true. I wasn’t so naïve I didn’t know that, but that didn’t mean it was the way it was going to be. Not for me and not for Cal. I’d remind him as often as I had to. If it had to be a thousand, then a thousand it would be. He was holding up the box, taking a whiff, and giving a small smile at the lingering aroma of cookies.

He caught me watching him from the corner of his eye and gave me a look of his own as he kicked a small chunk of concrete down the sidewalk. “You should slump more,” he suggested. “You still look too tall and too . . . um . . . ninja-ish. Badass.”

Right then I gave up on the language. His school was the educational version of Pulp Fiction. Mine was a teen version of a supermax prison, metal detectors, police, and all. If we made our way through with only foul mouths, we would be doing well. There also might be a serial killer and there were monsters. All that was enough to worry about. So I let it go and took his advice. I slouched more, aimed for a pained expression, and slowed my pace.

We talked to Mrs. Spoonmaker first, Cal remembering to cough once or twice for that flu I’d told her he had the day before. We didn’t pull the cookie scam on her. I thanked her for calling our schools and casually asked if she knew David Kithser? If she’d seen him around lately. We went to school together and he owed me money for doing his homework. That she would believe. If I said I was his friend and she knew him, she wouldn’t talk to me at all. He was a bad guy. In our world minding your own business about bad guys was good business for yourself.

Cal perched on her couch covered in faded orange and red roses. Covering him were her seven cats. Cats liked him, loved him really. The moment they smelled him they would swarm. Now wasn’t any different. They draped over his shoulders, lap, and feet. If they happened to have a dead mouse tucked away, they’d present it at his feet like an offering. Cal didn’t mind. Affection from anyone but me was rare. He knew when to appreciate it—even in the form of a dead rodent. He stroked the cats, surrounded by a cloud of purring and flying fur. Each one took a turn bracing on his chest to stare into his eyes. I didn’t know what they were hoping to see, but they always seemed satisfied when their turn was over.

Mrs. Spoonmaker knew Kithser. “No better than he had to be,” she’d said with pursed pink lips that matched the pink tint in her short curly white hair. She also said that she hadn’t seen him in months and good riddance. We moved from house to house after that. Five houses down Cal stopped on the sidewalk, several feet away from the porch. “Dog,” he warned. “Big dog.”

I couldn’t smell him like Cal could, but a second later I heard the barking. Loud, ferocious, and absolutely crazed. Big dog was right. Big and wild to attack. Unlike cats, dogs did not like Cal. Not some dogs, not most dogs. All dogs. They had two reactions: fight or flight. And when the reaction was fight, it was instinct that ran back to their prehistoric ancestors—to the death.

Dogs were good for howling their lungs out when the Grendels were around too. We didn’t talk about that, Cal and I, but he knew. Dogs hated him because dogs hated Grendels. Man’s best friend hated monsters and man’s best friend hated Cal. There was nothing to be said about that because it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t.

“We’ll take the next house,” I said.

Cal stood silently behind me as the dog next door continued to bay the invisible moon down from the sky. This door, boiled cabbage green, opened to a hugely tousled mane of platinum blond hair with glossy black roots, long red fingernails with a rhinestone at each tip, and an impatient expression. “I’m running late. What the hell do you kids want? And what the hell is that damn dog barking at?” Beyond the yellow, crimson, fake diamond glint and irritability, there was a woman. She was dressed in a skintight miniskirt, thigh-high boots, and a glittering bikini top that, while extremely skimpy, NASA must’ve helped engineer to hold up an enormous cargo load. She was holding a shirt in her hand as well, but that didn’t seem quite as important.

How did they stay up? Physics had never been so interesting or useful until now.

“Mrs. Breckinridge,” Cal said, surprised, moving up beside me. “Nik, she’s a substitute teacher at school.” I cleared my throat. He was never going to be the male equivalent of Miss Manners, but there were some requirements I expected of him, behavior that helped us blend into average society. “Um . . . sorry. Mrs. Breckinridge, this is my brother, Niko. He broke his ankle. He’s helpless and pathetic and won’t rob you.” He was curious at her presence, but he was also a Leandros when he had to be, there with the story. “Hey, I didn’t know you lived on my street.”

“I’m never home long enough to really live anywhere. Too many bills to pay.” Thick, fake eyelashes blinked. “You’re the kid with the weird name who always sits in the last row? Haliban. Caliban. Something from Shakespeare, right?”

His teacher but obviously not a very good teacher.

Cal said flatly, “Cal. My name is Cal.” Sophia had told him long before school ever would about Caliban, Shakespeare, and The Tempest. She wanted him to know why she’d named him after the shambling monster-child of a bitch sorceress. The only part she’d gotten right was that about the bitch.

“Well, Cal”—she fished a five out of her pocket and passed it to him—“my new favorite student. How about you forget you ever saw me and what I do for a second job. The principal is the stick-up-her-ass kind. All sorts of morals—her morals, the judgmental old witch. She’d fire me like that”—she snapped her fingers—“if she knew I was stripping. Dancing, I mean. Dancing. You think you can do that? Keep your mouth shut?”

Cal gave her a “no skin off my nose” shrug, the five-dollar bill already a mere afterimage in the air, before grinning cheerfully. “You know me and rules, Mrs. B.”

She grinned back under a thick layer of scarlet lipstick. She looked as if she’d broken more than a few rules in her life too. “You walk to the beat of a different drummer, there’s that for sure. You spend more time talking to the principal than her own damn husband does, which he’s probably happy as hell about. And, sugar, I’m forty. You might want to look me in the face, appreciate me for my brain because when this top comes off my brain is still in the same place but my tits will be four inches lower.”

It took me a second to realize that last part was directed at me and I could feel my skin flush hot and mortified. I read about Buddha, Nietzsche, Sun-Tzu, Jung, poetry, physics, chemistry, advanced mathematics, and I trained to kill Grendels, to be ready if they came looking for a fight, but I couldn’t do anything about the fact I still had normal teenage hormones.

“Hold it in,” Cal whispered. “Virgins live. Horn-dogs die.”

“Horn-dogs? You’re eleven. Do you know how much trouble you are . . .” I swallowed the rest and asked Mrs. Breckinridge, while looking directly at her face this time, politely, “We were wondering if you knew about David Kithser.” She worked at Cal’s school. The cookie excuse wouldn’t work on her. I might as well come out with what we actually wanted. If our neighbor was a murderer, I doubt I had to worry about her spending any time with him—droopy and pitiful as he appeared, and definitely not enough time for them to discuss our interest in Kithser.

“Cecily? Cee-cee? Who are you screwing around with now? Every time I turn my back, there you go.” The man, once big and athletic, now just big and fat, appeared out of the gloom of the tiny house. Graying hair stuck up on end, small ferret eyes shied away from the light. He was shirtless and needed Mrs. Breckinridge’s structurally improbable bikini top more than she did. He was in boxers, splitting at the seams, but still fighting the good fight. “Look at him. What is he? Sixteen? Seventeen? You’re into jailbait now because a real man’s too much for you? I oughta—”

“You oughta get out of my face, Virgil, or the next time you’re sleeping off a drunk, I’m taking the shotgun out of the closet, loading for bear, and sticking the barrel up your fat—” The door slamming in our face cut off the last word, but I didn’t think either of us had to guess at what it was.

Cal, again, checked the cookie box, hoping against hope a sympathetic universe had magically refilled it. “Mrs. Breckinridge is my favorite teacher,” he announced with a more than slightly evil smirk. “She never gives homework. She knows everything about everything. And she tells us.”

“I’ll bet she does and she really shouldn’t do that.”

“And she said you shouldn’t look at her tits but you did.” His expression was pure and guileless as a baby on Santa’s lap at Christmas.

“That is it. No TV next week. None. Maybe some silence and a good book will bleach your brain of that filthy language.” As I started for the next house, the complaining started and didn’t stop as we trudged through the front door of our own house fifteen minutes later. I thought I saw the twitch of a curtain in one of Junior’s windows, but he had no reason to be suspicious. We had the box of cookies. We actually took two orders for the nonexistent sale, and I didn’t ask about Kithser at every house. I also had never seen Junior outside talking to anyone on the street. He didn’t socialize with the neighbors. I’d say that was a bad sign, but except for Cal and me and the old ladies, none of the neighbors wanted to have anything to do with anyone else. It wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. That was good. It meant that word shouldn’t get back to him.

Not that we’d found word of anything suspicious. Either no one had seen Kithser in weeks or didn’t know him at all. To me that meant there was no evidence of a connection between Kithser and Junior. To Cal it meant that Junior was still not killing where he lived but close enough for convenience. But his belief that Kithser’s body was now in Junior’s basement was nothing compared to the lack of television.

“Yes, I know it’s not fair. You’ve said that twenty-two times now. But I’m trying to keep you from saying words that will incite any dates you have in the future to stab you in the eye with a nail file.” I leaned the crutches on the wall and sat on the couch to peel off all the extra socks that had faked an impressive swollen ankle. I then picked up the notebook and looked at the list I’d started before we’d left the house that morning. There were two columns—the For and Against regarding serial killer evidence.

“Maybe I won’t want to date. Girls might not like me. When do we go get the pizza? You promised pizza.” He sprawled in the ugly plaid chair that had come with the house, his legs flopped over one arm and his head and arms over the other. His upside-down gaze was accusing when he mentioned the pizza.

“Why wouldn’t they like you? Once I go to college and we get away from Sophia, we’ll have a normal life,” I said. “And if you stop cursing like a forty-year-old bouncer there’s no reason girls wouldn’t like you.”

There also wouldn’t be any reason that I couldn’t let myself like some girls without our wonderful mother trying to steal their jewelry, wallet, or their hair to sell to a wig maker. That wasn’t advice I wanted to give to anyone I brought home: please keep moving at all times or you’ll wind up penniless and bald. Cal wasn’t the only one that thought it at times. Life did suck. Buddha might not agree or he might agree in much more flowery language, but he had dealt with it much better than I was. I still had so much to learn.

For now I had other things to think about. Tapping the notebook with the pen, I reluctantly put Kithser’s name under both the For and Against columns. They instantly canceled each other out, but I did it anyway. It was part of the plan after all.

“Nik, monsters follow us wherever we go, I’m half freak, and we live next to serial killers. It doesn’t matter if I say bad words or not—we’re never going to be normal.”

Startled, I looked up from the paper at him. His hair was hanging in a dark waterfall toward the stained carpet, his hands were linked across his stomach, sneakers randomly knocking heels with boredom, and his face was as smooth and unaffected as if he’d said the earth revolves around the sun. It was what it was. It wasn’t going to change and thinking differently was not only pointless, but incredibly naïve on your part.

“Cal, that’s not true.” He’d said two days ago that of course our neighbor was a murderer because that’s the way things were, but I hadn’t thought he’d meant that’s the way things would always be. I didn’t know he didn’t believe that I could change that. Most of my life had been spent thinking of ways to fix it all. Get away from Sophia, be able to fight the Grendels if necessary, obtain an education, raise my brother to be the person I saw in him—strong and proud. To be normal. Something that Cal accepted wasn’t going to happen, wasn’t ever going to happen. Had accepted it a long time ago as offhand as the words had been.

I wasn’t letting that go. He deserved a life. We both did and we were getting one. There was not a thing in this world I wouldn’t do to give us that.

“Besides,” I said firmly, “if our normal is dating only in the daytime to keep the Grendels from watching and moving away from any neighbors who kill spiders in their house much less people, then that normal is good enough for me.” I pointed my pen at him and added, “And if you call yourself a freak again, the next TV you watch will be the one you have when you’re old enough to get a job and buy one yourself.”

That was a threat that hadn’t failed me yet.

Cal’s sneakers smacked together again, the expression on his face thoughtful. “Grendels aren’t much uglier than Mrs. Breckinridge’s husband. Maybe you’re right. It might not be so bad—our own kinda weird normal.”

Before I could say anything about the husband comment and judging people by their appearance, although there was some truth to it in this case—quite a bit of truth—there was a knock. Brightening, Cal vaulted out of the chair toward the front door. “It’s the pizza genie. We won’t have to walk four miles to get some after all. That’s better than seven wishes.”

“Cal . . .” I was about to remind him, but he was already peering through the blinds. We couldn’t know who might be standing on our porch. Monsters, Sophia’s exes (worse than monsters), Sophia’s victims with baseball bats and vengeance on their mind, cops. Social workers—the list was long and not good. Not good in any way whatsoever.

“It’s just a guy in a fancy suit with a cool car. A really cool car. He looks lost.” Leaning closer to the window, he reconsidered. “Not lost, but he looks like he doesn’t want to be here.”

If he had a nice suit and an expensive car, chances were high that Cal was right. He didn’t want to be here and wasn’t here on purpose. I stayed on the couch, but kept my eye on my brother as he opened the door and my hand on the handle of a switchblade I hid under the well-worn cushion of the sofa. All that Cal knew about hiding knives, he’d learned from what I’d taught him and from watching me from a very young age. Monkey see, monkey do. Monkey do, monkey survives.

I couldn’t see the man but I could hear his irritated voice in answer to Cal’s less than polite and borderline hostile “We don’t want religion. It gives us hives. Go away.”

“I am not offering religion, you incredibly rude creature. I have a flat tire and a dead cell battery. I need to borrow your phone.”

“We don’t have a phone.” Cal scratched the back of one calf with his foot, his tone implying that was the most stupid request he’d heard in all of his eleven years.

“Of course you have a phone. Don’t be absurd. Everyone has a phone. Fetuses are issued one with a friends-and-family plan two months before they pop out of the womb. Are you after money? You are rude, but hustling me for money does make you a con man after my own heart. I’ll pay you to use the phone.” The irritation was now smoothed over by a mellow flow of amusement that made me think of a symphony’s rich sweep, the velvet thrum of a satisfied cat’s purr, the warmth of a fire in a huge hearth in an expensive house. All good things, all comforting things. The best con artists had voices like that. Our mother sounded like that—to everyone but us.

Cal had grown up listening to her voice pouring the richest of verbal chocolate, sex, and brandy over marks. He was immune to it. He switched feet and scratched his other calf, squinting in suspicion. “I’m eleven and you want to give me money? Are you a pervert?”

The amusement vanished as the unseen man squawked much like a startled rooster. I knew the sound as we’d once squatted at an abandoned farm for three months. “No. I am not a pervert.” There was a pause. “Technically . . . no, that’s only been with consenting adults, always has been, which is legal or should be. Therefore not a pervert.”

With a very obviously unconvinced expression as he loved nothing more than poking people, mentally or physically, Cal crossed his arms and looked up and down at the man that I couldn’t see. “Your clothes are kind of fancy, like a pimp in those old cop movies. You don’t belong in this part of town and you’re giving away money. Yeah,” he announced his conclusion, “you’re some kind of weird door-to-door pervert.”

“Pimp?” There was an audible grinding of teeth. “Have some respect. This suit is Versace. I’m not a pimp and I’m not a pervert, you foulmouthed little . . . oh.” The exclamation was ripe with surprise and what I thought sounded like eagerness. “I know you. I know you. Where’s your brother? May I speak to him?”

“How do you know I have a brother?” Cal wasn’t playing anymore. The suspicion was real and I was already moving, the switchblade hidden in my hand.

“You always do. Or a cousin or a best friend bonded by blood. Something of that dramatic overwrought nature. Someone who is virtually attached to you at the hip. Let me speak to him. He’s invariably more reasonable.”

“Nik, the pervert wants to talk to you.”

“And I am not a pervert,” the man declared. I was at Cal’s side by that time to see him when he said it.

He had wavy brown hair, green eyes that every chicken saw right before red-furred jaws snapped their necks, a mobile face, and a wide grin that could’ve sold pornography to the Pope. A con man through and through, but from his clothes and car—a screaming red Jaguar—a much more successful one than Sophia. There were all kinds of con men. He could be a politician or a talk show host or a car salesman.

I rested a hand, the one without the hidden blade, on Cal’s shoulder. “What do you mean you know him? I know everyone my brother knows and I don’t know you.” The threat was audible, just as I meant it to be.

He waved a hand that was holding a pair of sunglasses I thought cost more than the house we were living in. “Like him. I mean I know kids such as him. With attitudes like his . . . very . . . ah . . . lively, yes, precisely the word I was looking for . . . which means that they usually have someone who makes certain everyone shows appreciation in nonviolent ways for their smart-a— their challenging attitudes.”

“You can say smart-ass. He knows what he is and, worse, he’s proud of it.”

The stranger was suddenly enthusiastic and friendly instead of demanding, but that didn’t mean the man was harmless. He was too balanced on the balls of his feet, a nonstop mouth yet a stillness within and an awareness of everything around him from the periodic rapid flicker of his eyes to take in the street around him. He reminded me of some of the older and more lethally skilled teachers I’d learned under over the years. I wasn’t there yet. I hoped to be someday. No, this one was not harmless at all, but he didn’t have any reason to be dangerous to us personally that I could see.

He looked down at Cal and the grin changed to a smile you’d have to be blind to see wasn’t full of affection. “Proud. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

It should’ve made me tense and on edge. Cal had been toying with the guy in his best cat-and-mouse style, but in our world molesters were a real threat. You had to be careful and willing to cut off someone’s balls in a heartbeat. Cal and I were good enough with the threat and the flash of a blade that we hadn’t had to castrate anyone yet, but there was always a first time.

Past history should’ve made me wary, but I wasn’t. I knew the monsters, otherworldly and human, when I saw them. There was nothing twisted in that smile and the affection was what you’d show a close friend or a family member. I knew because it was the same as Cal showed me. “You know kids like us?” I glanced at his car. Flat tire. He hadn’t been lying.

“I had friends who had to be kids like you. I know because when they were adults, they were very much still like you.” The smile faded somewhat, but he remained cheerful enough. “But friends go and they come.” The smile faded further at that. “About the phone?”

Go and they come? That was an odd way of saying it and the opposite of the usual “they come and they go.” “Sorry. Cal’s right, mister. We don’t have a phone.” Sophia had a cell phone, but she was elsewhere and there wasn’t a landline in the house—not one that had been paid up and worked. I aimed another look at his woefully deflated tire. “Why don’t you just change it?”

“Call me Robin . . . Rob Goodman, I mean, and hello?” He spread his arms, hands flicking inward then out to cover all of what I highly suspected he thought of as his glory and magnificence. He could be a televangelist. There was the same strong self-loving vibration coming off of him that I saw in quick flashes Sunday mornings as Cal channel surfed.

He repeated the “behold the splendor that is me” gesture, making sure I didn’t miss it. “As I said, Versace. Oil, grease, and the essence of manual labor do not come out of Versace. Ah, idea.” He fished out a wallet that was made of alligator, ostrich skin, velociraptor hide, who knew, I reflected bemused. The most exclusive of choices to be sure. “I’ll pay you fifty dollars to change it for me. You look as if you could make use of fifty dollars.” He was studying our clothing. The smile was gone now as he switched his gaze from us, stepping back on the porch to get a better look at the house that was held up by spit and the million husks of dead termites. I knew what he saw. I hadn’t lived in better, you would think I’d be used to it—accustomed—think it normal, but I didn’t. People didn’t let you. People judged. People never failed to judge.

Poor. Worthless. Lacking.

Goodman’s lips flattened and this time I couldn’t read the emotion behind it. “You know, you’re lucky. I’m in a hurry. Someplace I have to be. Important man, that’s me. In constant demand. Busy, busy, busy. There would be hell to pay if I’m not . . . wherever. I’ll pay you five hundred dollars to change the tire.”

Charity.

I would rather he’d judged instead.

I had a thing about charity. Issues. We were clothed thanks to Goodwill and the Salvation Army. Our lunches at school were free thanks to the county. Half our furniture came off someone’s curb or out of a Dumpster, but that didn’t mean I liked it even when it was anonymous and to accept it from someone standing in front of me feeling pity for me, that I hated. The humiliation burned through me to curl down deep inside like an ill-tempered cat with claws slicing into my stomach.

I was about to refuse when Cal, who thought I was an idiot on the subject, intervened. Things were things, whether you scavenged them, bought them, or people were stupid enough to just give them to you. He had the same attitude about money. He snatched the five one-hundred-dollar bills out of Goodman’s hand and elbowed me. “Nik, go on. Change the tire.”

He elbowed me again when I didn’t move and asked Goodman innocently, “What kind of watch is that? It’s really cool. I don’t have a watch. We’re too poor.” He drooped, a sad victim of a rapacious economy. His eyes had the bleak thousand-yard stare straight out of the pictures of children from Depression-era photos I’d seen in my history books. “I’m always late for school ’cause of it, the no watch. I miss so much class I can barely read. I’m shockingly illiterate. I’m afraid they’ll kick me out and I’ll end up living in one of those cardboard boxes on the street.” Finishing mournfully, he added with the perfect touch of wistfulness, “I wish I had a watch like that.”

Goodman’s smile was back and as amused as ever. More so actually. It showed more brilliant white teeth than a human being should have. With that in his arsenal, he’d leave Sophia in the dust when it came to swindling a mark. “You’re shockingly articulate to be so shockingly illiterate. Nik? That’s what your brother, Cal, called you, correct? Nik, do you think you could change my tire before your brother talks me out of my watch, clothes, and future firstborn son?”

“It doesn’t look like I have much choice.” I didn’t. Pride had to bow before money that meant college and that future I would make for us. “Naïve of you to assume he wouldn’t get your car too though. And it’s Niko. Only Cal calls me Nik.” I caught the keys he tossed me and headed for the car.

There was a noncommittal hum that said Goodman wasn’t as worried or gullible as Cal believed. “Niko and Cal. I don’t suppose you want to tell me your last name.” Cal had shown his true colors when he’d opened the door: suspicion personified in a pair of sneakers. I was more subtle at showing it, but I was the same.

“What do you think?” I said mildly. They say what people don’t know won’t hurt them. I said what people don’t know wouldn’t hurt us. Cal’s version was what people don’t know won’t make him stab them in the foot. Three different variations and all true.

Goodman wasn’t offended by the answer. He wasn’t offended by Cal or me in any way and wasn’t that peculiar? Particularly with what Cal was currently doing. “Fair enough,” he replied as he moved his hand and wrist above Cal’s head as small fingers had drifted with invisible stealth toward his watch. Almost invisible as Goodman saw the movement clearly.

Twenty minutes later the car was ready to go and so should’ve been Goodman, but he lingered several minutes talking about nothing whatsoever but making it somehow fascinating like con men do before he finally squared his shoulders as if he had an unpleasant task ahead of him. He was reluctant, I realized, to leave. He didn’t want to go. Someone not wanting to leave us, there was a first.

That was definitely Cal talking, I thought with fond exasperation.

“Here’s my card.” He handed it to me. “If the two of you make it to the Big Apple in the next eight or so years and need a job, look me up. It’s rare that I don’t have some sort of business going. I’m an entrepreneurial soul. I can always use the help.”

“You’re not a car salesman?” I asked, surprised. With the Jaguar, the suit, and the whole Goodman experience, snake-oil mouth included, I’d finally mentally labeled him with that.

“Cars?” He gave an intrigued quirk of his lips. “I haven’t done that yet. It’s a thought.”

I tucked the card in my pocket. “Eight years is a long time. You’ll forget all about this.”

He climbed behind the wheel of the Jaguar and flashed a wicked, knowing grin. “Eight years is nothing and I never forget anything I don’t want to.” He took a last look at our shack of a house and went solemn as quickly as if a switch had been flipped. “Life gives hard lessons to mold brave boys into great men.” Eyes remaining grave, he gave one last smile. “Tell your brother to take good care of the watch.”

Now I did smile. “It’ll be pawned before your car makes it off the block.”

He laughed. “Tell him to at least get three thousand for it. I paid ten.” Then he was gone, the roar of the car’s engine the only thing left. It hung in the air, a predator’s lazy howl, even after the Jaguar disappeared from view. Strange guy. Nice enough, but . . . strange. Strange to be giving when I knew his kind were more into taking. Strange with the “I know you” and playing it off as if we reminded him of friends “gone but yet to come”? I knew an accidental truth when I heard it. He had thought he knew Cal and I’d seen and heard that same bloom of recognition with me. Strange that he’d want to help us years from now when most would forget us before they made it a mile down the road, because people generally weren’t like that. People helped themselves and their own. Anything else would be as strange as Rob Goodman himself.

I pulled his card out of my pocket and bent the thick creamy stock between thumb and forefinger. It had been a strange experience altogether. It couldn’t have been much stranger, if I thought about it.

“What a nut job,” Cal proclaimed as he moved up beside me, holding up the watch to admire it in the afternoon sun.

“Maybe.” I didn’t necessarily agree, but as for Goodman’s good-natured ways and his willingness to throw money around like beads at Mardi Gras: things that seemed too good to be true always were. Decision made, I let the card flutter from my hand into the garbage can at the curb.

If there was anything we didn’t need more of in our lives, it was strange.

I picked up the lid Cal had left lying carelessly on the ground beside the can as always and wedged it in place. It was trash day Monday. That meant that I’d have to get up early, around three a.m. that morning, to make sure Junior didn’t have Kithser’s body stuffed in his own garbage can. Cal would insist.

The things you did for little brothers.