9
PROOF POSITIVE
“Do you need help?”
“Is anything wrong out there?”
“Want me to call the police?”
Before Meat could scream, “YES!” to all three questions someone behind him called, “No, no. It’s just us—Herculeah Jones and Meat.”
It was Herculeah’s voice. Meat turned. He looked around in astonishment. It was Herculeah holding his arm. Herculeah!
“You’re sure you’re both all right?”
“Yes. Yes, we’re fine!”
The doors closed. The dogs were hushed. The street grew silent again.
When Herculeah spoke, her voice had lost its cheerful, everything‘s-all-right, go-back-to-what-you-were-doing tone.
“What has happened, Meat?” she asked in a low voice.
Meat still didn’t speak.
“You’re shaking. What’s going on?”
When Meat finally spoke, it was an accusation. “Why didn’t you let me know it was you back there? Why didn’t you call my name?”
“I did. I’ve been calling your name for two blocks!”
“Then why didn’t I hear you?”
“I don’t know. I finished taking my last pictures and decided to drop the film off at the camera shop, and Funny Bonz was on the way home, sort of, so I stopped in. They said you’d left, and I finally saw you and you walked like this and stopped like this and did that ...”
She paused to imitate his movement.
He was always offended by Herculeah’s imitations. He said coldly, “Well, if you had just come across a dead body, perhaps you would be doing this and that, too.”
“A dead body!”
“Yes.”
“A dead body! Meat, for once in your life, be original.”
He fell back as if he had been struck a direct blow, which he had.
“I pulled that this afternoon,” Herculeah went on. “I found a dead body, remember? A squirrel. April Fool!”
“This was no squirrel, and I’m not the sadistic sort of person who does April Fool jokes. I am thankful to say I’m beyond that. When I say I found a dead body, I found a dead body!”
He turned and walked away. Herculeah watched for a moment and then followed.
“So where was the dead body?” she asked.
“What do you care?”
“I care. Where was it?”
“In the bathroom.”
She couldn’t help herself. She snickered. Meat thought she would have been one of those fourth-graders who loved Mike’s imitation of Mush Mouth.
“Never mind,” he said coldly.
“Oh, come on. Where was it?”
“In the bathroom!” He spoke these three words through his teeth to give them extra force. He could see the spit in the light from the streetlight.
“I went into the bathroom at Funny Bonz—the men’s room. Guys. I could tell it from the girls’ bathroom because that was Guy-ettes. I walked in. The light was out. I turned it on. There was a wallet on the floor. There was a lipstick beyond it, closer to a stall. Then there was a brush, then a purse. Then the stall door came open and there was a body!”
The way he said it left Herculeah with no doubt that he had lived it.
“Whose body was it?”
“A girl. That’s all I know. I couldn’t see her face—her ponytail fell forward and hid it.”
“Like Madame Rosa,” Herculeah said. “Remember when I found Madame Rosa’s body, her hair was across her face? If I had lifted her hair and checked, then I would never have gotten in so much trouble.”
Meat wanted to say, “This is my murder, if you don’t mind, not yours,” but before he could do that, Herculeah spoke again.
“Go on.”
“I came out. I told everybody I’d found a body. Mike—that’s the teacher—said he’d check it out. In about a hundred hours he came back and said it was a false alarm. ‘No body, living or dead, in the rest rooms, so let’s get on with the class.’”
“And then?”
“Then we got on with the class.”
“Did he give any explanation.”
“He claimed he had a student who liked to play practical jokes. There are people like that.”
Herculeah recognized this as an insult, but she didn’t take offense.
“Maybe it was.”
He shook his head. “I forgot one very important thing. The rest room floor was so gross I didn’t even want to walk on it. You’d have to be dead to press your face against it.”
“You’re probably right.”
“In the middle of the class a guy wearing a backward baseball cap went to the rest room and when he came back, I looked at him, like I wanted to know if he’d seen a body, and he shook his head.”
“Could you have imagined it, Meat?”
“No! No! You’re just like everybody else. You ...”
He stopped. He took in a breath. He put one hand to his back pocket.
“I didn’t imagine it. I can prove it.”
“How?”
“I just remembered something.”
“What?”
“I picked up something off the floor.”
“What?”
Meat reached into his back pocket.
“This,” he said.
In his hand was a blue wallet.