Federal Bureau of Investigation
Testimony of
Ruby Finn Heckler
As it relates to the
FBI Counterintelligence Investigation
Of
Douglas “Lodgepole” Pine
And the “Helical Unfolded” organization
CASE#: 0486280616
Well, I got myself up a tree pretty good this time, and I guess I gotta tell this rotten story. It’s the damnedest thing and not a bit my fault, as you’ll see. But the FBI says I gotta make a statement—which I don’t like and don’t think is true, anyway. But they’re almighty worked up at me and all hollering and whatnot, and they say that if I tell this stupid thing, I can’t get in trouble for anything I did—which, I didn’t do anything anyway, like I said—but still, even if I did, I can’t get in any trouble for any of it. That’s important, and I want it on record. I may only be twelve, but I’m not an idiot. They also say Quinn can’t get in trouble for anything he did either, or any of a number of other folks I checked on and that you’ll hear about—except for Lodgepole, of course, who they’re calling Douglas Pine and who doesn’t care about them anyway. The FBI says I can swear and say anything else I want to, too, as long as I tell the truth, and they promise they won’t double back on me in any other way either, as far as that goes. I don’t know.
Anyway, you don’t know me, probably. Not unless you’ve been up to Hackers Loon, New York, in the last twelve years. It’s a tiny little town in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains and you wouldn’t have much reason to visit. Either way, I go by the name Ruby Heckler. It’s a shit name for a boy—I know it—but it’s mine all the same, and I haven’t figured a way to change it to anything else, as is. Don’t know that I would anyway. That kind of thing can mess with your medicine—the lucky spirits kind. They gave me the name when I was born, my parents, and I’ve had it ever since. I don’t know why they gave it to me, just to answer your question right off. I never knew my mom and dad—they’re dead—so I couldn’t get the story straight from them.
When this all started I was with my best friend, Quinn Hennessy, like I am most of the time, and we were betting on knife throwing at the Diggly Lumber Mill—which is a big lumber mill right through the woods from both of our houses. Quinn had a ripper of a knife his dad had given him, and we were getting good at throwing it. He usually won though, and I don’t mind saying it. Quinn won at everything. He could beat everybody in our grade in running and jumping and stuff, and he could climb a tree faster and higher than anyone I knew, at least.
The real reason we were out at the mill, though, was because Quinn came running into Miss Jane’s house that day all worked up sideways. He told Miss Jane—which is the lady that looks after me and gives me the hardest time—that he was wound up about a fishing hole he found and the huge lunker getting fat at the bottom of it. I could tell right off he was lying, so I played along, and by the time I had my sneakers on, we had Miss Jane talking backwards and were halfway across the yard. Quinn didn’t stop running till we reached the lumber mill.
“What’s chasing you, Quinn?” I yelled up to him as we got to the clearing before the mill, trying to get him to slow.
“Come on, Ruby,” he yelled, not slowing a bit. Quinn was like that when he got something in his head. Quinn was twelve, too, like me, but a little taller, and he had brown hair that was always buzzed, and he was usually carrying a shiner or something on one of his eyes from his older brothers and sister. They were tough. He had a shiner that day, too, but that was from us trying to jump Henderson Ditch on a hand truck.
Finally, when we got to the stacks of lumber, Quinn slowed down and turned back, real mysterious-like. “I got something good, Ruby,” he said, and I knew it must be good. Quinn was always getting into the best stuff. One time, he found an old car flipped over by Tanner Road that was half-buried under the ground and must have been there a thousand years. We dug that thing out and used it as a fort for two whole summers. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we found in there.
“Today’s the day, Rube!” Quinn hollered, slapping me on the back as I caught up to him.
“The day for what?”
“We’ll remember this day forever—forever when we’re cowboys and pirates and bank robbers! This is an important—”
But just as he was saying that, I saw a jackrabbit go bouncing behind a stack of lumber right behind Quinn. I jumped and grabbed my mouth and pointed, and Quinn looked and saw it, too, just as it disappeared. We both ran over and poked our heads around the stack of lumber, and there was that lone jackrabbit standing there with his back to us, sniffing the air.
Quinn turned to me and put his finger to his lips like I was jackass enough to say anything at a time like that. Then he reached down to his knife and pulled it out real smooth and quiet, and I almost keeled over. If he killed that jackrabbit we would be cowboys for sure, right off the bat, and maybe bank robbers, too. And not to mention, I’d own half the jackrabbit since I saw it in the first place, and Quinn was real fair about trades and halfsies and such.
Well, if you want to hear about the worst luck to ever fall on two people, then I’ll tell you what happened next. Quinn had the knife out and lined up just right, ready to throw it into the jackrabbit, and wouldn’t you know, right then at that very second, the whistle in the lumber mill rang out to end all rings, about as loud as you’ve ever heard. That whistle rang at certain times to tell people to do certain things or something like that, like a school bell, and when it rang this time, that jackrabbit jumped up like a jumping bean and turned right toward us, still not knowing we were there. Well, he looked up at us and about jumped out of his skin, and we looked down at him and about jumped out of ours, and then he took off zig-zagging away in the other direction faster than a whip.
Quinn threw the knife, but it wasn’t any use at that point.
Well, we cursed the lumber mill pretty good and got to kicking the dirt. The lumber yard is a great place for cursing. You never see Miss Jane down there. And when you can sneak up close enough to hear the workers talking, they curse just about as good as we do.
Anyway, Quinn cleaned the dirt off of his knife as we bad-mouthed the mill, and since he had it out, that was when we started throwing it at the ends of the stacks of lumber and betting on it.
After a couple of rounds, Quinn yanked the knife out of a board and turned to me. “What the hell are we doing?” he said, slapping his forehead. “Come on, Ruby!” And with that, he took off for the forest.
“Hold on,” I yelled and ran after him.
We ran into the woods and pretty soon found our secret trail and eventually reached our fort. We hadn’t been in this one for long, and it wasn’t at all like the old upside down car fort I told you about. We both admitted it wasn’t up to any decent standard of fort. We hadn’t even camouflaged the outside yet. With all the damn churching and schooling and everything else Miss Jane and Quinn’s parents made us do all the time, we hadn’t had a chance to find any supplies for it. We’d barely get to swing a hammer or kick some dirt before we’d have to run back home for dinner or chores or about a million other things. They never gave us an inch. And because of it, our fort wasn’t worth a damn to talk about. It needled us both.
But that day, Quinn didn’t even stop to look at the fort and shake his head and curse at our bad luck in not having a second of free time to find any supplies for it. He just dove right in and came up a second later holding a real-deal, no-baloney, twenty-two rifle.
“Holy shit!” I said and stopped in my tracks. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
“Ain’t that the best thing ever,” he said.
And it was. “Is it real?” I asked.
“It wouldn’t be worth much if it wasn’t.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Old Man Chilson’s shed.”
“How’d you do that?”
“He’s gone hunting,” Quinn said, smiling, looking at the gun. “I was over there catching nightcrawlers in the moss behind the shed, minding my own business, when I saw a raccoon prance right on into that old shed like he owned the place, probably knowing Old Man Chilson was gone hunting.”
I nodded because I knew he was right. Raccoons are rascals. Everybody knows that.
“Well,” Quinn said, “being the neighborly sort as I am, I set to rooting that raccoon out of that shed, for the good of the country and all, and I did it soon enough, and chased him off—at great risk to my health and wholeness, don’t forget. So when I was closing up the shed so no other raccoons or critters or folks would take up in it, I noticed this here lonely twenty-two rifle on the wall.”
I scratched my head. “What did the rifle have to do with it?” I said, still not seeing.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Ruby, if you shut your cake eater.”
“Well, go then.”
“I am, Ruby. That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying, I saw this rifle on the wall and figured that chasing that raccoon away was pretty damn nice of me, knowing as we do how nasty raccoons can be when you get to rooting them out of somewhere.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“So, for all my considerable work, I figured it would be fair and square if I just borrowed this rifle for the day, seeing as Old Man Chilson is gone deer hunting with his other guns and doesn’t have any use for it anyway.”
Quinn Hennessey can sure make sense sometimes.
“You get any bullets?” I asked.
“Well, hell, Ruby, what do you think I am, some kind of idiot?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, huh? Well, I’ll tell you, Ruby. I got sixteen bullets from Mookie Nelson on my way over to your house.”
“You got them from Mookie?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Damn,” I said, remembering the rattlesnake skin I wanted from Mookie. “Did he get them for the snake skin?”
“He sure as hell did,” Quinn said. “That and some other stuff. At least that’s what he told me. From Jeb. Jeb’s dad doesn’t lock up his gun stuff.”
“Shit,” I said. “So, Jeb’s got it now? I wanted that snake skin. You must’ve traded him a heap for the bullets.”
“Well,” he said. “Being that the bullets ain’t much use without a gun, and I was the one with the gun, I offered him to shoot five of the bullets tomorrow morning before Old Man Chilson gets home.”
“That’s a good deal.”
“Yeah, well, Mookie didn’t take it.”
“He didn’t?”
“No, he didn’t,” Quinn said. “You know Mookie. He knew I wanted the bullets bad and set to driving a hard bargain. You know how he does.”
I nodded my head. Mookie Nelson was a hell of a trader.
“Well,” Quinn said. “I wasn’t about to have my hands on a gun and not get the bullets. So, I did some dealing, and we agreed on two bullets for him to shoot tomorrow morning—and the piece of the plane.”
Well, I almost fell over. “What?” I shouted. “You gave him the piece of the plane?”
“Damn right,” he said, just like it wasn’t anything at all.
Quinn had been saving that piece of wrecked plane forever. I couldn’t believe it. He found it up on Bear Mountain—and nobody in the world went to Bear Mountain. Nobody who came back alive, at least. I hadn’t seen a kid yet with the guts to go across Crane Swamp even, let alone go all the way to Bear Mountain. Nobody but one that is: Quinn Hennessey.
Quinn went to Bear Mountain one day when he was hooking from school. He told us all about it the next day under the bleachers, and each and every one of us knew he was the king of the world. We all gave excuses as to why we couldn’t have skipped school, too, but the truth was, none of us would’ve stepped foot over that swamp anyway, not for ten snake skins. But Quinn did, and he found a piece of an old plane that had crashed on Bear Mountain a million years ago. It was the craziest thing ever. He even charged kids a nightcrawler apiece just to see it sometimes—when we needed nightcrawlers—and the kids lined up for miles at a time.
“Can we shoot it?” I asked, staring at the rifle.
Quinn just looked at me like I was an idiot. “What do you think we’re doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“We gotta go farther out, though.”
I nodded and we started walking, and before we knew it, we were past Jackson Creek and all the way to Crane Swamp. Miss Jane had a bell she rang when she needed me for one thing or another, and beyond Jackson Creek was out of bell range, so we didn’t go past there, normally. Or, I guess we did, if I thought about it. We just weren’t supposed to. We almost never went all the way to Crane Swamp, though, and definitely never across it. There was bad medicine across that swamp. Everybody knew that. You could feel it. And leeches in it, too.
“We gotta cross,” Quinn said when we got to the swamp, just like he was saying we had to put butter on our toast.
“Like hell,” I said.
“Like hell is right,” he said. “You ever want to be a pirate?”
“Well, of course I do,” I said, “but I don’t see wha—”
“How about a cowboy?”
“Of course I do. But—”
“You know any pirates or cowboys that never shot a gun?”
I thought about it, and I couldn’t come up with any off the top of my head. “You want to die of snakebites and Indian curses at twelve years old?” I said instead of answering.
“Don’t be a putz,” he said and started down to the water. “I crossed to get that piece of plane, didn’t I? And I’m not dead yet. And this time we’ve got a gun.”
It was a good point, I had to admit, but I didn’t feel much better about crossing. “I don’t know, Quinn,” I said.
You see, about a year ago, we all watched The Curse of the Waller Dog and a bunch of other scary movies about these curses that come at you from every angle if you say something wrong or look down a well or watch a movie or open a door or just about anything else you might do in your day-to-day life. And we’d certainly opened a hell of a lot of doors in the course of our lives, and who knew which ones were cursed. Anyway, we watched about eight of those movies, all in a row one night at Lump Douglas’s house when his parents were still soft on him after his tangle with the guy-line. Miss Jane never let me watch movies like that, and I always complained about it, but when we were watching those scary movies in the middle of the night at Lump’s spooky old house out in the middle of the woods, I was half-hoping some parent might step in and shut the whole thing down. But Lump’s parents were pretty laid back to begin with, and then there was the accident, so they pretended they didn’t know we were up there watching scary movies. And we watched them all.
Well, I don’t gotta tell you, but since then, we’ve all been pretty sure that curses and ghosts and one-eyed waller dogs are waiting to crawl out of just about anywhere. And then, when you add in all the Crane Swamp and Bear Mountain folk stories that go back about a million years in Hackers Loon, you end up a little edgy, especially if you’re standing there looking at Crane Swamp and your friend is talking about crossing it.
In the old folk stories, they say there was a massacre of Indians in the woods across Crane Swamp during the colony days. Women and kids and the whole bit, I guess. Most people don’t talk about it, but some people want to put up a plaque or statue out there somewhere to remember it, and some people think it’s cursed to high heavens and no man should set foot over there ever or even talk about it. There’s even a local thing in Hackers Loon where a bunch of the left-over Algonquins from up the river and bunch of Mexicans and other folks in town dress up like the massacred Indians at random times and run around Hackers Loon scaring people to high heaven and putting the voodoo on them. It’s a sight to see if you ever come across a group of them laying in wait for you. It’ll scare the pants right off of you. They got me and Quinn last year, right after we watched all those movies, and I didn’t sleep for a month after that. It’s a riot when you see it happen to other people, though, mostly. They almost gave Mister Tendrowski a heart attack one year, though, which wasn’t funny, and Missus Tendrowski broke one of their collar bones with her purse in the same incident. It was a big deal in the paper and around town and people said the police should crack down on it, like they say every time. But, what can you do? I heard it was agreed behind the scenes that they wouldn’t jump out at any blue-hairs anymore, and if they got their collar bone broke, or shot, for that matter, that was their problem.
“I don’t know, Quinn,” I said again, looking down at the swamp.
But Quinn didn’t care, and he just kept going, and when he got to the water, he just walked right in like it wasn’t nothing, wading across and holding the gun up out of the water like they do in the movies.
I didn’t like it one bit, but he wasn’t coming back. “Hold on,” I said and scrambled down to the water.
It was a long way across and gross and muddy and up to our arm pits. But we made it across alive. On the other side, we dumped out our sneakers and wrung out our jeans and checked ourselves for leeches.
We didn’t have any. Which was our last bit of good luck for a long time. What happened after we crossed that swamp makes me one-hundred-percent sure that all those old stories about Crane Swamp and Bear Mountain are right.
Once I was sure I didn’t have any leeches, I looked around. “Holy shit, Quinn,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he said, looking around, too. “See, it’s not much different.”
“I guess,” I said.
We started walking out into the forest on the other side, and I felt like I might puke.
“Would you feel better if you carried the gun?” Quinn asked after a few minutes, looking over at me.
“Yeah,” I said, so he gave it to me, and I slung it over my shoulder. I felt a little better when I had the gun, but not by much. You can’t stop curses with guns.
“Is Miss Jane still mad at us?” Quinn asked while we were walking, probably to try to get my mind off of things.
“Yeah,” I said. “I technically shouldn’t even be out with you right now.”
“She said it was ours a million times,” Quinn said. “I heard her myself.”
“I know it,” I said. “So did I. But it doesn’t matter.”
“I always knew she was crazy under it all,” he said.
It didn’t make any sense to me either. You see, Miss Jane has these cabins at our place that she rents out to people visiting town. She calls it Hackers Loon Adirondack Cabins, and she has eight of those little cabins, numbered one through eight, all in a row behind our house, and me and Quinn know that we aren’t supposed to be rooting around cabins one through seven, ever—those are for the guests. But she keeps one cabin, cabin eight, for putting boxes and other stuff in, and she says all the time, and where both of us can hear, that cabin eight is ours to play in if we want, as long as we stay out of the boxes and out of the other cabins.
Well, one Saturday, me and Quinn were just being good, like we always are, and weren’t bothering with cabins one through seven, and were only playing in cabin eight, which was ours, like Miss Jane said. Well, in the course of playing, we started rough-housing, and in the course of rough-housing, I gave Quinn a flying knee, and then he hockey checked me into the wall, and I’ll be struck dead if I didn’t go half through the plaster in the wall and make a big hole. Well, that was a lot of fun, as you can imagine, and being that cabin eight was ours, like Miss Jane had said herself about a million times, we started kicking holes in that plaster for fun, and had a ripper of time doing it, all the while being good and only playing in cabin eight, which was ours.
Well, when Miss Jane opened the door to cabin eight later that day, she just worked herself up sideways and didn’t want to hear one ounce of sense and took away my TV privileges for the rest of my life—which didn’t add up because were weren’t even watching TV when we did it—and she threatened to turn my backside red, too, and I thought she might actually do it that time, by the look of her. Then, she worked us practically to death the next two weekends making us fix all the holes in the plaster.
And that was another reason our new fort wasn’t anything to speak of.
“I don’t get that woman,” I said to Quinn, and he agreed I had it pretty bad.
We kept walking for a while before we came to a small round clearing in the woods with grass growing up under the branches of the oak trees and birch trees lining the opening.
“This spot looks good,” Quinn said when we got there.
I looked around and it looked pretty good to me, too.
“We’ll flip for who goes first,” Quinn said and pulled out a quarter. He flipped it, and I called tails and won.
Quinn was real fair, like I was saying, and he didn’t complain that I won, but just loaded the rifle and handed it to me.
“Well, you ready, then?” he said.
“I guess,” I said.
“What are you shooting at?”
I looked around and found a birch tree across the opening with a black scar on its side that looked like a good thing to shoot at. “That tree,” I said and pointed.
He nodded, and I got the gun all set and took some deep breaths and lined up the sights on the tree—and pulled the trigger.
The first sound was the gun, and it was loud in the quiet forest, like a lightning strike. But just after that, there was a sound like a scream from a bush behind the tree I was aiming at, and then a bunch of thrashing, and then a deer came bucking out from behind the bush. She didn’t go far, though, because her back legs weren’t working right, and in just a few hops, she fell down and then was wriggling around down on the ground by another tree.
At first, the deer scared the daylights out of me, when she came crashing out, but then, when she fell down, it was about the worse thing I’d ever seen in my life. She was still trying to get up with her front legs, but the back ones wouldn’t work, and she was rearing her head and looking over at us, bawling. Then two baby deer, still with their spots on, came walking out from behind the bush and looked down at their momma and over at us. They didn’t seem to know what to make of it all, but the momma sure knew she didn’t like it one bit and she was screeching at us and trying to stand up.
I stood there with my jaw on the ground, looking at the deer. Then I started crying, and I looked over at Quinn, and he was crying, too, and the deer was carrying on from the beginning, so we all three stood there crying.
“What do we do?” I said to Quinn, wiping my snot. It all happened so fast.
“We gotta kill it,” Quinn said after a minute, and I knew he was right, but the babies were standing right there.
I looked down at that momma deer and then down at the twenty-two rifle and almost threw up. I wanted to ask Quinn if he’d do it because I didn’t think I could. But I knew that’d be about the lowest thing I could ever ask anybody. I shot her in the first place, accident or not, by being an idiot, and I was doomed to hell. There just wasn’t any other way about it. But I would’ve done a hundred chores and dinners with Miss Jane’s grown-ups just to not have to shoot that deer again.
Well, if you ever had a bad word to say about Quinn Hennessey then I’d call you a dirty rotten foot and a salt liar besides, because right when I was feeling almighty low down about what I had to do to that deer, Quinn Hennessey came right up and took that twenty-two rifle right out of my hands. He stood there with that rifle and looked down at that momma deer, and he must have been the toughest kid ever to live in the world because he walked right over to it and hefted that rifle up to his shoulder.
The deer bawled real loud right then and the baby deers scampered off, and the momma shook her head like she wanted to ram Quinn to death, but she couldn’t, because she couldn’t stand up. Quinn looked down at the deer and said something gentle, but the deer didn’t listen and just kept trying to ram him, right up until Quinn pulled the trigger.
Then the sound was like a million lightning strikes, and the deer’s head and neck reared up like a dog that wanted to be pet, and she looked right over at me and fixed me with a look like she didn’t know what the hell was happening—and I guess she probably didn’t—and then her eyes rolled back till you could see the white, and her whole body tensed like she was flexing all her muscles, and her head bent down toward the ground real slow before she flopped to the ground whole and laid there with her tongue hanging out. Her front legs and neck were still moving real stiff, though, like she was Frankenstein, and we thought she was still alive because of it, but pretty soon, blood started coming out of her nose, and she stopped moving, and we knew she was done for.
I cried and cried and didn’t even try to hide it. We hadn’t ever killed a single thing bigger than a fish in our whole lives. We talked about it all the time and said we could, like the hunters in town, but we hadn’t. And she was a momma. My insides were getting hot, and I felt like I was on the dock at the beach when the waves come through, like everything was rocking—and then I puked.
Quinn was looking at the deer, too, and he was crying, too, and he said he felt bad, too, and that he didn’t know killing something made you feel like that. I said I didn’t either, and we both cried, looking down at the deer. She was just laying there with her tongue hanging out. She was way prettier when she was alive.
After a lot of crying and a little bit of figuring, Quinn said that if somebody ate the deer then it was okay, because then it wasn’t any different than a cheeseburger at the grocery store because somebody had to kill that cheeseburger just the same. And when he said it like that, it made sense.
So then we tried to figure how we could get somebody to eat that deer, being as it was way out in the woods and across Crane Swamp. We couldn’t just go shooting our mouths off that we’d killed a deer. We weren’t even supposed to have that rifle in the first place, or be across Jackson Creek. If Miss Jane found out that we’d been shooting a rifle, and that we’d killed a deer besides, all the way across Crane Swamp, she’d probably die of shame. And when she got around to it, I’d be beat red from head to foot for a hundred months on end—and this time for real.
Miss Jane was always threatening to beat me, but she hadn’t done it, yet. Quinn’s dad walloped us some, and he always said he was doing it for our own good, which didn’t make a lick of sense to me, since the only thing that came from it was a red backside. But he said it all the same, and every time. Quinn’s dad is always saying things that don’t make sense. He’ll say, “You want something to cry about? I’ll give you something to cry about,” when one of us is whining about something. That doesn’t make any sense. Who would want something to cry about? Sometimes he makes sense, I guess. I can’t really remember one off the top of my head, but I’m sure he does. He built their house and a bunch of other houses. And he can fix most things if he feels like it. He’ll say, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it,” to Quinn sometimes, and I always get a kick out of that one. Quinn doesn’t, of course, but he’s usually sore at his dad about something else at the time anyway.
Anyway, after a while, Quinn said we could drag the deer to the lumber mill and leave it there at night because most of the guys at the lumber mill hunted, and one of them could take it home and eat it, and we’d be off the hook with God and hell, probably.
Well, that made a lot of sense and made me feel a little better, so I agreed and we started dragging the deer. The deer was still really warm, though, and it gave me the chills when I touched her. We felt bad yanking on her, like we might hurt her, but Quinn said she was dead and wasn’t feeling anything anyways, and if we wanted to drag her out to the lumber mill, we would have to yank on her. There wasn’t any way around it. So we did, and it was almost dark by the time we reached the edge of the swamp.
Getting that deer across Crane Swamp was about the damnedest production you’ve ever seen in your life. That dead deer seemed to want to drown us both as payback rather than go across that swamp, and she almost succeeded a couple times. By the time we got her to the other side it was full dark and the stars were out and the moon was just starting to come up over Bear Mountain. We were emptying our sneakers and wringing out our jeans when we noticed the moon and stopped dead in our tracks.
It was a full moon.
If I had known it was full moon that night, I never would have crossed Crane Swamp, pirates or not. It all made sense when we saw that moon. The moon is something to keep an eye on any time, under any conditions—it’s a sneaky old planet—but especially when it’s full. A full-moon makes every curse worse and has a bunch of its own it can put on you, too. We kicked ourselves good for being so dumb. But we still had to get that deer to the mill to even start to set our souls right.
We dragged that deer forever, and eventually we got close to Jackson Creek, and I could hear Miss Jane’s bell ringing. “We gotta move, Quinn,” I said.
“Can’t go much faster than we are,” he said, and we both listened to that bell ringing and tugged on that deer and knew we were in it when we got home.
It seemed like a year before we finally got close to the mill. The moon was all the way up by then, and Miss Jane’s bell kept ringing every minute or so, and I could feel my backside welting on the spot.
“She’s gonna give it to me this time,” I said, listening to the bell.
“No she ain’t, you wimp. Grab that leg.”
Finally, we got the deer to the mill and dragged it all the way to the front door so there wasn’t any way they could miss it.
We stood there looking down at that deer and I felt a little better. If someone ate her then it was okay.
“You feel better?” I asked Quinn, and he said he did, and I said I did, too.
“Who do you think will eat her?” Quinn asked.
“Probably one of the bosses,” I said.
“I’m sure they’ll be fighting over her,” Quinn said.
“Yup,” I said, looking down at her.
Then we heard Miss Jane’s bell ringing again.
“I gotta go,” I said, and we did our handshake, and I ran off to home.
That night, I gave Miss Jane a line about helping Quinn’s aunt, and she bought it for the most part and was mostly just happy I was home safe.
Then, the next morning, me and Quinn met up in the woods and went to check on the deer at the mill. We climbed up to the top of Raker’s Restaurant across the street from the lumber mill, and when we got there, there were about thirty people standing over the deer, right where we left it, all in a circle. The owner of the mill—or kind-of owner—was there, Larry Diggly. He was always a jerk to us kids, threatening to have us arrested for trespassing on his mill when we were down there breaking old bottles or throwing knives at the lumber—or doing anything else. The lumber mill was a great place to get in trouble. I almost put my eye out one day hitting an old glass Mountain Dew bottle with a piece of rebar steel like a baseball bat.
That day, though, there were about a million people out in front of the lumber mill, and it wasn’t even open, and the state police were there, and Mayor Splitz was there, patting his belly and looking concerned.
Recently, the mill, which was called Diggly Lumber and Hardware, was bought up by a big corporation called the Timber Value Corporation. Larry Diggly still owned some of the mill, I guess, or something, and he still worked there, but the Timber Value Corporation was in charge and had their sign up on the front now. And they were sure in charge. The Timber Value Corporation was one of the biggest companies in the world and they owned about half the lumber yards in the United States and about a million other businesses you wouldn’t even guess, like television networks and refrigerator companies and hospitals and a bunch of other stuff. People were all up in arms about them when they first started sniffing around the Diggly Lumber Mill in Hackers Loon. Not that anyone liked Larry Diggly. That wasn’t what it was about. They just didn’t like Timber Value more. It was kind of funny because people were suddenly speaking up in favor of old Larry Diggly and how he shouldn’t be bullied into selling his mill and how he and his mill were town treasures—after they’d been bad-mouthing him for years. Miss Jane, for her part, didn’t like the Timber Value Corporation because of some of the stuff their companies did to the environment, dumping poison and stuff, and she didn’t like the politicians they helped put in office or something like that, I guess. I didn’t really pay attention to that stuff.
Either way, when the sale was in the works, some of the Hackers Loon folks made up signs and started marching around the front of the mill one Friday morning, making a big stink. But then on Saturday, everybody just went about their lives, and old Larry Diggly sold the lumber mill to the Timber Value Corporation for a boatload of money.
Since then—it’s been about three months—the whole town has been kind of eying each other and picking sides and starting to get a little snotty around town, putting up signs and stuff. About half the mill quit or got fired within the first month, and that opened the door for a bunch of new guys to come in, and they’re Timber Value people, through and through, I guess. Some of their kids moved to our school, and they’re all right, but the dads—and one mom—who worked at the mill aren’t very nice, depending on who you ask, and people sure made a stink when they came in to fill the jobs of the guys that were forced out or quit. Charlie Gomez just shook his head when Miss Jane asked him about it. Then he said, “God Bless America,” and packed up his house and family and moved to Saratoga Springs to work with the betting horses.
For me and Quinn, it was kind of fun, though, because the Timber Value bosses always stayed at Miss Jane’s cabins when they were in town—it was closest to the mill—and we’d sneak around and play pranks on them and keep pretty good tabs on what they were doing. They were an uptight bunch, for the most part, and they didn’t do many things just out of the goodness of their hearts, from what we saw, which made them an interesting follow. Town had become a lot more interesting all around lately with everybody getting sour back and forth, and me and Quinn tried our best to keep up with it all.
Right then, as we were up on the roof of Raker’s Restaurant, one of the head guys from the Timber Value Corporation was standing over our dead deer, hollering out at the growing crowd. His name was Caleb Gennelichh and he was the grandson of the owner of the whole Timber Value Corporation, Cal Gennelichh, who I’d only ever seen on TV, and who was rich as God and looked like a zombie and was practically dead, but was still fighting like a bull to take any penny he came across. Caleb, the grandson, was about forty-five years old and was there because his father, Ed Gennelichh, was under house arrest at their ranch in Wyoming because he was running Timber Value when they swindled about a trillion dollars and dumped a bunch of toxic poison into the Henson River which gave a bunch of people cancer.
While Ed was serving his time for that out there at his horse ranch in Wyoming, his son Caleb was running the show back here in the real world, and right then, he was pointing at our dead deer and yelling that this was a blame-faced act of terrorism by the Mexican drug cartels. Then he got ranting about rapists and drug tunnels and nine-eleven and America and the stars-and-stripes.
“Terrorism?” I said to Quinn. “You hear this?”
“Caleb Gennelichh is a dipshit,” Quinn said. “You’ve seen him on TV.”
“I know, but—,”
“And he’s a rich dipshit. And when you’re a rich dipshit, people listen to whatever you have to say, even if it’s stupid. Especially if it’s stupid. And if you’ve got a rich dad and a rich grandpa, multiply it by three.”
I guess it was true, and whether it made sense or not, people were listening to Caleb and starting to gather around, already stirred up from the last few months, sensing a bigger commotion.
“I can’t figure if this is good or bad for us,” Quinn said, scratching his chin.
“I don’t know either,” I said.
I was trying to make sense of it all when I heard Quinn howl beside me, and saw him jump up, grabbing at his hip.
I saw the nail when he got up, and it was a good one, sticking right up out of the roof.
“Did it get you?” I said.
He was hopping around and rubbing it, and I could tell it was a dumb question.
“Damn, Ruby,” he said and smacked his forehead.
“What?” I said.
“We’re still cursed, you idiot!”
He was right, of course, and with all the stuff going on at the mill, I’d half-forgotten about it.
“Shit,” I said.
“Shit rain is what it is. A goddamn shit-nado. This is just gonna get worse. Why the hell did you let us cross that damn swamp?”
“Bullshit, Quinn.”
“You need to get better at negotiating, is what it is.”
“Oh, bullshit! You need to get better at being less block headed, is what it is.”
Quinn just shrugged and rubbed the spot the nail went in.
“So, what do we do?” I said.
“What do you mean, what do we do?” He looked at me like I was a moron. “We high-tail it to Widow Jones’s is what we do.”
When we got to Widow Jones’s, she was down on her hands and knees tending to her garden, which was where she was most of the time. It was where she got the ingredients she needed for her potions.
“Oh, boy,” she said when she saw us coming, like she wasn’t happy to see us at all. She stood up and watched us walk up.
“Oh, Widow Jones,” Quinn hollered real dramatic when we got to the edge of her lawn. “I know you don’t want to see us, but we’ve got a bad one on us now.”
She just growled, like normal.
“Please, help us, Widow Jones,” I said. “It’s bad.”
“I’ve told you boys a million times! Do not call me Widow Jones,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Widow Jones, I mean, ma’am, missus. It’s just we got one on us bad,” Quinn moaned again, like that.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You boys have a terrible curse—again.”
“Oh, we do, Widow Jones,” I said. “We’ve got one, and it’s bad this time! Real bad!”
“I am not a widow!” she hollered. “I’ve never had a husband to die, you little shits, and I never will. Okay?”
“Whatever you say, Widow Jones, I mean, ma’am,” Quinn begged her.
“Don’t call me ma’am, either, you little vermin. And I am not a witch—why don’t you listen?” She said it just like that.
“We’re just about done for, though,” I said.
“I think it’s the worse curse we ever got, Widow Jones,” Quinn said. “We might just be doomed, and maybe the whole country, too.”
“Stop calling me Widow Jones, goddamn it! And stop talking about curses!”
She was always like that, and we were used to it.
“But, you’re the only one that can help,” I said.
“Argghhh,” she said, like that.
“Widow Jones— I mean, ma’am— or, uh, Missus Widdy,” Quinn said, talking softer and trying to make her see. “This one is really bad. I think it might do us in, and I think it got these Timber Value jackasses into it, too.”
“He’s right,” I said. “We were out in the woods in a full moon across Crane Swamp, and we didn’t have any salt eggs or frog eyes, and there was a deer—,”
“I am not a witch!” she hollered again like we didn’t hear her the first ten times. “I grow herbs and make herbal remedies,” she said. “Understand? Medicine! Got it? As a business! How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Bingo!” Quinn said. “That’s exactly what we need. We’ve got bad medicine on us bad.”
“I don’t lift curses!” she hollered.
“Why not?” I said. “We don’t have money, but we’ll do anything you say.”
“I am not a witch!” she said. “Mother of Mercy! I used to like you kids! What the hell happened to you two?” She was really huffing and puffing by then, and we were just staring at her, and she was just staring back at us, breathing heavy. We stood there like that for a while, just looking at each other, and I thought we might never get the potion.
But finally, Widow Jones threw up her hands and hollered, “Jesus Hollandaise Christmas Dinner! You boys drive me to madness—absolutely to madness—madness, madness, madness!” And then she turned around and grabbed a handful of one of her potions and shoved it into our hands. “You’ve got some kind a moon curse?” she said.
Well, it was good she was finally talking sense, and Quinn, he said, “That’s right, Widow Jones, I mean, ma’am, or Missus Widdy—.”
Well, she looked at him like she might smack him. But she stopped herself and just growled instead. “Go stick that in your—,” and she stopped, “—stick that in your ear, under the moon, and get your little asses off my property before I shoot you dead or call the cops, you little turds.” She was sure cranky. But she gave us the potion.
“Do we have to wait for another full moon?” Quinn asked her as we walked away.
“Get the hell off my property.”
“Is that a no?”
“Yes!”
“Yes, it’s a no? Or, just yes?”
“Get the hell off of my property!”
Well, we took it as a no, and Quinn gave me my half, and we stuffed it into our pockets and thanked Widow Jones and lit out for the woods. Widow Jones didn’t say You’re Welcome or anything, of course. She’s like that. She lives out in the woods at the end of Forrest Road, and people say she doesn’t much like visitors, which is true. But she’s the only witch we knew, so we put up with her bad attitude.
After that, we decided it was probably best to lay low till the moon came out, so I went home, and Quinn went to his place.
When I got home, I laid down on my bed and waited for the moon to come up, just laying there, staying still so the curses couldn’t get me and looking at my posters and all the junk piled into the corner of my room. I still couldn’t watch TV because of the whole cabin eight thing, so I just sat there in my room, looking at my pictures and posters to pass the time. I have a bunch of posters of the ocean and ships and boats and stuff on my wall, and my room is kind of made to look like a pirate ship, with some big thick rope Miss Jane got from the marina and a toy ship’s wheel in the corner and stuff like that. I like looking at that stuff and imagining being out on a ship on the ocean. I’ve always loved the ocean. I don’t know why. Before all this started, I’d only ever even seen the ocean twice, and I’ve never lived close to it at all. But for some reason, ever since I was a kid, I’ve been interested in anything to do with the ocean—especially pirate stuff. Mister Grimsteen—who is a sailor himself, and old and funny—says I have salty blood, which means that I have sea-folks in my background. I can’t say for sure about that, but I know I’ve always liked the ocean. There’s a lake in Hackers Loon, which is pretty great, and there isn’t anything like being on a boat on the lake, especially in a storm or when it’s windy, but we don’t have any oceans in Hackers Loon.
I laid there for a while, looking at pictures of the ocean and waiting on the moon, and the hours went by eventually.
Finally, after an itchy dinner with Miss Jane, the moon came up. And when it did, I pretended to be tired and went to bed and waited for Miss Jane to go to bed, too, then I climbed out the window to go get rid of that rotten curse. I shimmied out my window like normal and dropped to the ground, and when I dropped to the ground, I sank down into the mud up to my ankles. Miss Jane had hired some moron a few weeks before to do some yard work, and he dumped a bunch of dirt and other stuff behind the cabins, and since then, every time it rained, the water sat there behind the house and made a mess of mud. It was great for me and Quinn finding night-crawlers and playing war, but Miss Jane wasn’t real happy about it. And I wasn’t all that happy about it right then, either.
Anyway, I plopped right down into it, deeper than the top of my sneakers, and I was cursing the moron landscaper and kind of trying to shake the mud off my shoes when I heard a truck pull into the parking lot out front. I crept over to the corner and looked around and saw Caleb Gennelichh’s pickup truck pulling up the driveway to his cabin with another Timber Value truck behind him.
I snuck over that way, working my way around the mud as best I could. The trucks parked and Caleb and another Timber Value guy got out of the first truck, then Mayor Splitz and Larry Diggly got out of the second truck, and finally, another Timber Value guy and Pastor Jeff from the Holy Mountain Church next door to Miss Jane’s property got out of the backseat of the second truck, which was a surprise to me.
Behind their cabin, I could look straight into the main room and hear most of what they were saying when they went inside. I knew something fishy was going on, so I got a good station set up at the window and settled in to see what they were up to.
When they got inside, they shuffled around for a bit, and everybody but Caleb Gennelichh looked nervous. Caleb was standing tall and smiling, obviously running something over in his head. Eventually he thumped his chest a few times as he came out of his thinking, and he held up his hands and told everybody to shush.
“They screwed up with this,” Caleb said when everybody was settled down on the wooden log furniture around Miss Jane’s little cabin. “People didn’t like that deer. We can use this.”
“What do you mean?” Mayor Splitz said, looking plenty uncomfortable.
“Your whole town is primed for a fight,” Caleb said. “It’s perfect. We just need something to light the final fuse.”
Mayor Splitz grumbled, looking down at his shoes. “That doesn’t sound good.”
Caleb turned to him and fixed him a stern look that set Mayor Splitz back in his chair. “Don’t forget who put you in your little throne, Mister Mayor.”
Mayor Splitz slunk down in his chair and looked at the table legs.
From the corner of the room, Pastor Jeff spoke up in a shaky voice. “I appreciate you guys,” he said. “And you know I’ve supported all of you in everything you’ve done, and I’m awfully honored to be here, but I just, I guess I don’t know exactly why I’m here.”
“I’m glad you asked, Pastor,” Caleb said. “I was just getting to that.”
“Excuse me,” Pastor Jeff said and sat back in his chair.
“So, our guy needs a little boost in this election,” Caleb said to everyone. “You all know that. And we may have been given a gift here. Somebody is trying to scare us with that stupid deer. I don’t even know what the point is, but I’d guess it’s one of these backwoods dipshits out trying to feel tough. Either way, who cares? As far as anyone is concerned, this is just exactly what terrorists and the Mexican Cartels do to threaten good American citizens into voting for their lapdog candidates who want to open the borders and let their drugs and rapists in.”
“Jesus,” Pastor Jeff said from the corner.
“You said it, Pastor. Jesus. He will be our savior. And that is why you are here.”
“Okay—but, why is that, again?”
“Why? Because we want to give you a new church.”
“You do?” Pastor Jeff said, sitting up like someone had found an unopened Christmas present behind the tree with his name on it.
“I do,” Caleb said with an odd smile. “I do, and the demolition will begin tonight, in about twenty minutes.”
Pastor Jeff’s face sunk at that. “What do you mean?”
“We need to drive this home, Pastor Jeff, and you’ll get a brand spanking new church and a truckload of sympathy.”
“I don’t like the sound of this,” Pastor Jeff said.
“Is your church insured?” Caleb asked.
“For half a million.”
“That’s yours,” Caleb said. “You take that and tuck it away for a nice retirement when you’ve finally finished your holy mission, sometime in the long distant future.”
“What?” he said.
“We’ll build a brand new beautiful church for you, for Hackers Loon, as a show of solidarity with the community, all on the up and up. We’ll pay for it all—tax deductible—and the new church will be better than you can imagine, and you’ll have a nice little nest egg from the insurance to build your own personal future on.”
“And how do you plan to do this?”
“We won’t be doing this, Jeff. A terrorist bomb will be doing this.”
“A bomb?”
“We’ll do it at night. Tonight. And no one will be hurt.”
After Caleb really dug into the idea and knocked it around a bit, the rest of them were on board, and Larry Diggly and Mayor Splitz were kind of hemming and hawwing and looking at their shoes, but sure enough, they got voted in as in-favor, too, as if it mattered.
When I heard what they were planning, I was shocked. Then I got worried for Old Bill Jimson, the janitor who lived in the back of the church. He was a good guy and didn’t deserve to get blown up, and nobody in the Gennelich crew seemed to mention anything about him or remember him at all. So I took it upon myself and left what was a pretty good conversation and took off through the woods to the church to warn Old Bill.
As I ran there, I tried to make sense of what I’d heard, but it set me back. Pastor Jeff was supposed to be a good guy, the guy God talked to. It was hard to figure, but I couldn’t worry too much about the how and the why of it right then. I had to help Old Bill Jimson.
When I got to the church, I jimmied the side door and ran in, hollering in a whisper to Old Bill and eventually knocking on his door. But he didn’t answer. I jimmied his door open, and saw his bed empty. Then I remembered, like a jackass, that Old Bill was down in Florida visiting his sister, who was dying right then. I knew that already and even brought him a good piece of drift wood I found for him to make his little wooden people out of as a gift to say sorry about his sister. He made a little wooden Quinn and a little wooden me that night before he left and left them with Miss Jane to give to us. I kicked myself as I stood there in his empty room, because if it wasn’t for that damn moon curse, I probably would have remembered that Old Bill was gone to Florida before I got all discombobulated and went running over there like an idiot.
Anyway, there I was in that dark church that was about to get blown up, cursed by the moon and searching for a guy who was in Florida, when I heard Caleb Gennelich’s truck pulling into the driveway with the other truck behind it. Well, I kicked myself pretty good for my stupidity, and I looked for the best direction to run, but the trucks were parked in view of the only two doors out of the church. I looked around and found a small window in the pantry, and I clambered out of it in the nick of time and didn’t get seen—but in the process, my best flannel got hung up on a nail and I had to slither out of it and leave it there.
When I hit the ground, I ran straight for the woods, shouting at myself the whole time—in my head—for not taking care of that damn curse before I started snooping around. It cost me a flannel at least, and nearly my life. You know, people always laugh when you start talking about curses and things, like you’re just a kid, but then, they take you to something like a church on Sunday, just like the one I just jumped out of, and they start talking about all manner of weird curses and talking bushes and frogs flying out of the sky. Then, you might be in there thinking they’ve finally started talking sense after that, but once you get back outside the church or wherever it is, you might go up to one of these people and try to tell them about the old oak tree by the Nelson place that looks like it’s got a face in it and how you think you heard it say something to you last summer and maybe somebody better check on it in case God is on the line, and you can probably guess what would happen if you did that.
Anyway, after running for a while, I found a clearing in the woods with the moon shining through, and I grabbed Widow Jones’s potion out of my pocket and jammed as much of it as I could into my ear and let it work for a while, and afterwards, I didn’t feel much different, except for not cursed, I guess. Then, just as I was getting the last of it back out of my ear, the bomb went off in the church and the sky lit up and the ground shook like an earthquake.
I ran back to the church, and it was blown up and on fire, and sparks and shingles were raining down into the forest, and Caleb and the idiots were gone, and for a few minutes, it was just me standing there in the dark forest, watching that church burn. Then I heard sirens coming, and cars and trucks started showing up, and the fire trucks came and tried to put the fire out. Then Caleb and Pastor Jeff and Mayor Splitz and the rest of them all showed up and started hollering about how this was out-and-out war from terrorists and Mexican drug lords.
There was a lot going on. More fire trucks were arriving and people were running and shouting every which way, and I was watching it all when I heard Miss Jane running down the trail through the woods from our house hollering about how she couldn’t find me.
I was about to come out and tell her I was fine when Newey Carter came running out from behind the church with my flannel that was half-blown up, and they noticed my muddy footprints on the front porch—which was about the only thing still standing—and that really got people into a stir, and in no time, they were sure I’d been blown to smithereens in that church.
You could tell Larry Diggly and Mayor Splitz weren’t happy to hear about me being blown up in their plot, but Caleb Gennelich didn’t skip a beat and just kept hollering about how this was a tragic cowardly attack against Christianity and the American flag.
I was about to come out and tell them they didn’t get me, the bastards, when I realized that since they found my flannel and footprints, Caleb and the other idiots would know I had been there and had probably seen what they did, and if they knew I was alive, they might just kill me dead to be sure I didn’t squeal on them. I’d seen enough movies to know that. I was in a pickle, and I was trying to figure it out when it dawned on me that as of right then at that very instant, I was also free as a damned bird! I didn’t exist! I was dead as a doornail nailed to a coffin! And dead people don’t have to go to school or church or anywhere else. I was free!
I let that sink in, and when it did, I felt like I might just keel over from the freedom of it all. I wanted to run and tell Quinn about it. But it was nighttime and I knew I couldn’t just go prancing over to Quinn’s and maybe get seen by his parents or any of the other folks turning out for the fire. Then I wouldn’t be dead at all. Plus, if I told him, I knew he’d just want to come be dead with me, too, and there wouldn’t be any telling him no, and then we’d be in even more of a pickle because he wasn’t blown up and properly deceased like I was. I didn’t see any way it would work.
So, I started walking out the Bear Camp trail behind the church. I could find Quinn in the morning if I needed to, when the sun came up. For the time being, I knew of a few good places to hide out in the woods while I figured it out.
By morning, I was up in a tree by Duck Pond, in a nook in its branches that acted just like a lounge chair, and I was starving. I’d never really had to worry about that before. Miss Jane, for all her nagging, always made me sit and eat—after tenderizing me with an ungodly amount of soap and scrubbing first. When it started to get light, I thought about how I might get some bacon and eggs out in the woods, being as I was blown up dead and the whole town probably knew about it by then. If Quinn was there he’d have a plan for us and we’d be eating like kings in no time. But he wasn’t.
Then I thought about Pritchard’s Restaurant in town, and I knew that Pritchard’s had a back door to the alley that they kept open for air most days. And they had food. It was the best I could come up with, so I took the creek to town and came out of the woods right behind the hair salon. Pritchard’s Restaurant was across the street, which I hadn’t even thought about when I was making my plan, and that was because I wasn’t nearly the plan maker that Quinn was. He usually made our plans—and they were always rippers.
Luckily though, it was still early in the morning and the street was empty, apart from a big greyhound-type bus parked in front of Pritchard’s. My belly said it was time to go, either way, and I snuck down the side of the hair salon, like they do in movies, and peeked around the corner. There wasn’t a soul around.
I ran across the street and stopped in front of the bus and peered around it, up the sidewalk. The driver was outside the bus, near the back, half-burrowed into the giant luggage storage compartment, adjusting the bags and boxes. Apart from him, there wasn’t anybody, and I was about to run down the alley to the back door of Pritchard’s to steal some bacon, but that rotten potion Widow Jones gave us must have been a dud, because just as I was about to make a go for the alley, a policeman walked out of Pritchard’s Restaurant, almost right into me. I was already out in the open, and I looked for a place to hide, and all I saw was the open door to that luggage compartment under the bus. The policeman was looking down and putting his wallet back into his pocket, and I jumped for the open compartment, into the bags, and the policeman didn’t look up but just walked right by me like there wasn’t anything happening in the world.
I was relieved for a second, but just as the policeman went by, the door to Pritchard’s opened and about a million Chinese folks came pouring out, headed right for that bus.
I didn’t have any choice, so I stayed hid, and the driver came by my storage compartment and nudged the bags around a bit as he was chatting with the people, then closed the latch.
I could hear them all jabbering in Chinese as they piled on the bus, and pretty soon, I felt the bus start moving and then going faster and faster, and then it was going really fast, and I was hiding in its belly and nobody knew I was there.
I woke up to an awful racket and all those Chinese folks in the doorway of that luggage storage space, all hollering in their gibberish and pointing at me.
They didn’t know what to make of me, and I didn’t know what to make of them. And I wasn’t waiting around to find out. So, I hopped up from where I was hiding inside that little storage compartment, and I screamed as best I could and jumped out at all of them. They were pretty surprised by that—which is what I was going for—and I darted right through them, down the street.
They watched me run away, pointing and carrying on and scratching their heads. But they didn’t follow.
I didn’t know where I was, and I was worried we’d driven back to China, but I couldn’t worry about that right then, so I just ran down the street and ducked down an alley and ran up that alley and ran some more. There were buildings as tall as the sky all around me, and roads winding up and down and going every which way. And there was garbage right there in the street. It was great.
A sign with an arrow pointing back the way I came said, Albany Bus Station. And that about beat it: I was in Albany, New York, which is a big city. And I was alone—and free as a bird! I walked around for a while, looking at all the big city sights, and while I was walking, I saw two real-life bums pushing shopping carts across the street. They were wearing about a million jackets for no reason and pushing those dirty old carts full of junk. They acted surprised when I came running up, like they didn’t think I was talking to them.
Well, the lady bum—which was hard to tell till you got up close—said to leave them alone and started shuffling away, but I stayed with her, and we walked along for a bit. They didn’t seem to want to talk at first, so I did most of the talking, and they didn’t pay me much attention until I told them I was all alone and an outlaw—and hungry.
Well, that lady bum sure changed her tune a whole lot when she heard that, and she got to asking me questions and touching my head with her hands and carrying on like women do. “You ain’t had anything to eat?” she asked, like that, and I said I hadn’t.
“Where’s your parents?” she asked, and I told her they were dead—and, boy, did that get a rise out of her. She started moaning and saying poor boy this and poor boy that and touching my head all the time, which was annoying, and the guy bum just kind of looked on and nodded his head like he was agreeing with everything she was saying. And me, for my part, I was standing there not knowing what to make of either of them, but still hungry.
After the lady bum calmed down some—her name was Marsie, and the guy was Ted—they said to follow them, and I did, and they took me to this place that gave you food for free and you didn’t have to do anything for it. And they didn’t make you wash your hands or say grace, either, unless you wanted to. The bums said it was the best place to go on account of me being an outlaw and just a kid, besides. The other places might ask questions. They said that that place was run by a church, and they didn’t ask any questions but just gave you food. I never knew such a thing existed, and if I’d known before, I would’ve become a bum a long time ago.
After we ate our food, which was pretty good, being as I hadn’t eaten anything in forever, we started talking and went up to this place called the New York State Capitol, which is where all the politicians in the whole state of New York come to steal from the people, Marsie said.
When we got there, Marsie and Ted sat down, right there on the sidewalk, and they told me to sit down with them and act sad. So I did, because when you’re a bum, you get to do whatever you want.
While we were sitting there on the street acting sad, Marsie, the lady bum, pulled out a piece of cardboard, and written on it was, Hungry. Please Help.
I didn’t know why she was showing that sign, because I knew we just ate, and I asked her, and she just told me to hush up and act sad—I had forgotten about that for a second—and she got out a marker and wrote Family at the bottom of the piece of cardboard.
What happened next was a surprise to me, at least. Right then, a grey haired guy in a suit and tie stepped up to us and dropped five whole dollars into Ted’s hat, just like that, and didn’t even say anything. I almost fell over dead. We were rich!
I wanted to go spend the money, but Marsie and Ted said to just shut my trap and keep acting sad, but they said it nicer than that. And I did, because they’d been being good to me. They said, “God bless you,” to the guy who gave us the money, and he waved his hand as he walked away, and we kept sitting there, looking sad.
We carried on like that for a while, sitting there, and it was kind of interesting. I made a game out of it and studied the people walking up and tried to figure out who might put money in Ted’s hat. It was hard to figure, because the folks that seemed like they had the most money weren’t always the ones to give it to the hat.
Anyway, I was watching the people coming and going there with Marsie and Ted, trying to guess who would give us money, and at one point, I was trained pretty good on one guy walking up. He was old as sin and one of those rich-looking guys, with a fancy suit covering up his old spotty skin. I thought he looked familiar from something. He had a bunch of other people trailing off behind him, and they all looked nervous by nature, and I was studying him pretty good to see if he would give us any change when Marsie caught sight of him, too. She straightened up stiff as a board and her face went white as soon as she saw him. Well, I thought she’d seen a ghost and was about to ask her if she was okay, when she jumped to her feet and ran right at the guy.
Right about then, I started to recognize the guy from TV and other places. It was that old zombie Cal Gennelich, Caleb Gennelich’s grandfather and the guy who ran the whole Timber Value Corporation. I didn’t know what the hell to make of it all and was worried he was there to find me, maybe, somehow, because of Caleb’s bomb, so I hid my face as best I could and stood to the side. But he didn’t pay any attention to me at all—mostly because Marsie was marching right up to him shaking her fist like she was about to pound him.
“You son of a bitch!” Marsie screamed at him as she charged. She was just sitting there before, practically lifeless, and then all of a sudden, she was racing at him. “You son of a bitch,” she yelled again as she stopped inches in front of him, her finger pointed right in his face.
Cal Gennelich, for his part, recovered pretty quickly from the surprise, but before he did, there was a second where he looked like he might just piss his pants. He kind of sucked in a breath in terror like people do and went, “A-a-ahhhh....,” like someone had tickled him and kicked him at the same time. It was pretty funny, and I saw one of his assistant ladies crack a little grin at the sound he made. But he only lost it for a second, and once Marsie didn’t punch him right in the face, he straightened his spine back out, and tried to walk around her. His security guys were standing between them by then and other people were showing up.
Marsie lit into old Cal Gennelich pretty good right then. “You see this,” she said, pointing to herself and then down at the cardboard box we were all sitting on. “You see this, you son of a bitch!”
“Get this filthy woman away from me,” Cal screeched.
“This is what your company does to people,” Marsie yelled.
“Get her away from me!” he cried out, and two cops showed up and grabbed Marsie and held her away as that old zombie Cal Gennelich walked into the capitol building, muttering and shaking his head.
Well, Marsie straightened herself up and turned her attention to the cops and lit into them with a pretty surprising line about the constitution and some other smart things I didn’t quite follow. The cops didn’t really know what to make of her, either, and eventually they just told her to just calm down, and that it was all right, and just to calm down and she could go.
I was shocked. It all happened so fast. “What’d that guy do to you, Marsie?” I asked when she came walking back.
Ted held up his hand to tell me to hush up, but Marsie waved him off and sat down.
“That son of a bitch took everything from me,” she said, still huffing and puffing. “Everything.” And then she started crying.
I didn’t know what to make of it, so I patted her on the back, and so did Ted. “It’s okay, Marsie,” I said. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
Ted nodded at me and looked plenty long in the face himself.
“Want to go spend our money?” I said. “I think we got a heap of it.”
She smiled at me and wiped the tears away from her eyes, which smeared a good amount of dirt around, too. She was a sad-looking sight right then.
“I worked for the NCF television network,” she said, looking off. “They’re owned by the Timber Value Corporation.”
“You worked for NCF?” I asked. “I watch their Saturday morning cartoons.”
“I did.”
“I didn’t know they had anything to do with Timber Value.”
“Neither do most people. Do you know what a parent company is?”
“Sounds bad.”
She smiled. “It’s the company that owns the other company. In this case, Timber Value is the parent company that owns the NCF network, and about a million other things.”
“Okay.”
“I was a lawyer for NCF, if you can believe it, living and working in Manhattan.”
“You were a lawyer?” I said. It was hard to believe.
“I was. And I thought I had it made. Good job, benefits, an apartment in the city and a beautiful summer home on the Henson River in the town I grew up in.”
“Where’d you grow up?”
“In a little town called Fort Eaton, not far from here. Heard of it?”
“I think I know where it is.”
“It’s on the Henson River.”
“So, what happened?”
“Well, I was doing great: a lawyer for television network owned by one of the biggest and best companies in the world. Life was good. But then I got the first test result.”
“Test result?”
“Cancer.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, I was devastated. But I knew I could beat it, and I was determined. I immediately went to my boss to talk about it. She was great at first—but then, the next day, she called me into her office and a guy from the Timber Value corporate headquarters was there. He was looking at my file, and right away, he asked me where I grew up. I thought it was odd, but I told him: Fort Eaton. Then, without batting an eye, he told me that they had complaints against me, and that I was being fired for cause.”
“What does that mean?”
“It was made up bullshit, and I didn’t know why it was happening at first. I was just shocked, and devastated—and I had cancer—and I was fired. And, of course, Timber Value was such a big beautiful company that they also owned the insurance company I had my health insurance through, and the bank I had my mortgage through.” She looked at Ted and teared up. “So, when they fired me, everything disappeared before my eyes, right when I started chemo.”
“How can they do that?”
“They own everything,” she said between sobs, she was tearing up pretty good by then. “Including all of them.” She pointed to the Capitol Building.
“It’s okay, Marsie,” I said and put my hand on her shoulder.
She took a deep breath and smiled at me. “Thanks, Ruby. I’m fine.”
“We don’t have to keep talking about it,” I said.
“No, no. It’s fine. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“Cancer sucks,” I said.
She smiled at me. “Yes it does.” She took a deep breath and chuckled at Ted, wiping her snot. “In the end, I beat it, and I’m alive today, but it took everything from me. I had to sell everything I owned, and it still didn’t cover my medical costs—inflated costs charged to me by the Saint Michaels Cancer Hospital whose parent company is, guess who: Timber Value.”
I shook my head. “Aren’t the Saint-such-and-such Jesus hospitals free? Or at least cheap. Isn’t that the point?”
“HA!” she laughed. “Jesus ain’t got nothing to do with it. Just profits.” Then she started crying again. “They wanted to ruin me, to kill me,” she sobbed and Ted rubbed her back. “To shut me up.”
“But why?” I said. “I don’t get it.”
She took a deep breath and pulled herself together. “I found out two years later, as I was recovering, that my cancer came from the water I drank as a child from the Henson River. For years, a Timber Value factory just upriver from Fort Eaton had been dumping truckloads of toxic chemicals into the river, which eventually led to cancer for me and hundreds of other people downriver—and the death of the river itself. You probably heard about the bullshit Ed Gennelich trial last year. Timber Value had political ads on TV and all over the place about it.”
“I remember,” I said. “And I just—” I stopped. I wanted to tell her about Timber Value and the bomb in Hackers Loon. But I couldn’t tell anyone who I was. “You were one of the people that got cancer from that?”
“I was doomed from the time I happened to be born in Fort Eaton, New York.” She looked down at her arms in front of her for a long second. “And of course, to top it off, Timber Value is the parent company to Philip’s Pharmaceutical who produced and pushed the opioid pain pills I was fed during and after all of my cancer surgeries.”
“Oh, man,” I said. “Those are bad.”
She chuckled, patting Ted’s arm to thank him for comforting her. “It was like an all-out blitz on every part of my life, inside and out. They were trying to kill me, legally and literally, and I knew it. So once I got through the worst of the treatment, I tried to take those bastards to court. I was still a lawyer, after all. And I still believed in our system. Truth was on my side.”
“Did you win?”
She gestured to herself and her clothes to say no. “Timber Value set their legal dogs on me, and they spent a fortune—more than most people will make in ten lifetimes—and within a year, I’d been accused of everything under the sun, exposed as an opioid addict, and disbarred from ever practicing law again. Unable to kill me outright, they settled for blowing up my entire life, just to send a message to anyone else thinking about trying to hold them accountable. Disbarred and disgraced, with no income or insurance and rising medical debt, it wasn’t long before Timber Value’s bank took my house and my car, and soon, I was out on the street with nothing. All they let me keep was the heroin habit.”
“That guy did all that?” I said, looking up where old Cal Gennelich had walked into the capitol building.
She nodded. “That guy, Cal Gennelich, who just got a forty-million dollar quarterly bonus. Do you know what that means?”
“No,” I said, because I didn’t.
“He got an extra forty million dollars for the last three months in addition to his three-hundred-million-dollar yearly salary as CEO of the Timber Value Corporation.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“You’re damn right it is,” she said. “And it buys you a lot of politicians and a lot of power.”
“I can’t believe you were a lawyer,” I said.
“I was, my darling,” she said and looked off, and Ted gave me a look that let me know we should just leave her be.
“Hey, I gotta take a wizz,” I whispered to Ted after we’d been sitting there silently on the sidewalk for a minute, leaving Marsie to her thoughts.
“Right up there,” Ted said and pointed up to the giant capitol building.
“Up there?” I said. “They won’t let me in there.”
“That’s your house, boy,” Ted said. “You own every stone of it.”
“I do?”
“You do.”
“How?”
“You’re the People of the state of New York, and the People own that building.”
Well, I looked up at it, and it looked pretty big, and I was glad to hear I owned it, and I started walking up to it. I was a little unsure at first because it kind of leaned over you, but Ted was right: when I got to the top of the steps, the front door was open and the guards just let me walk right in—since I didn’t have any metal in my pockets. I had to pee pretty bad, so I got right to finding a bathroom and didn’t have much luck for a while, but after a few hallways and some doors and some stairs, I found a bathroom, and it was just in time.
I ran in and took my leak and was finishing up, monstrously relieved, when I jumped because I heard that same voice of old Cal Gennelich walking into that same bathroom. Well, I gathered myself and kept myself pretty hid as I finished up my leak. He was talking to another guy that was with him about how the Capitol needed better security, talking about Marsie. They each went into a stall and I was about to make a run for it, when I heard him start talking bad about Marsie specifically, and personally, saying things I won’t even repeat because they’re too mean. Well, I’d had about enough of that by the first sentence, and he kept going and going, and I didn’t like it a bit and stuck around and pretended I was just gonna wash my hands but instead went up to the sink and grabbed one of the plastic cups they had in a sleeve by the mirror. Cal and the other guy kept laughing and joking between the stalls, calling Marsie a filthy beggar and worse. I scowled at myself in the mirror when he said that, and I filled up the plastic cup with the coldest water I could get to come out of the faucet. Then I went over to the stall that old bastard Cal Gennelich was crapping in, and I jumped up and tossed the water right in, yelling, “That’s for Marsie, you old skunk!” I only waited long enough to hear him screech like a schoolgirl before I took off for the door and out into the hallway, laughing like a hyena. I felt damn good. I jumped down the stone stairs of the Capitol in leaps, and I could hear old Cal and his buddy come crashing out of the bathroom as I rounded the bottom of the stairs. I looked up, and Cal Gennelich was leaning over the stone railing above me with his hair soaking wet and his face screaming red. I laughed and flipped him the bird with both hands and turned around and stuck my butt out and made a fart noise in the center of that Capitol building and took off across the lobby before any security people could even figure out why crazy old Cal Gennelich was leaning over a railing screaming at the top of his lungs. I was out the door in a flash and was yelling to Marsie and Ted to heave to and run for their lives before I’d even reached the bottom of the stairs. They got the picture and took off surprisingly quick and the three of us ran for as long as we could across the lawn of the Capitol and out into the streets of Albany and into some alleys where we were safe.
We slowed down to a walk eventually, and I caught my breath and then told them what I did.
“No you didn’t,” Marsie said, putting her hand up to her mouth in shock.
“I sure as shit did!”
“You couldn’t have.”
“I did!”
“Right on his head?”
“Right on his stupid old zombie head as he was taking a shit on the shitter!”
“You are my hero, Ruby Heckler,” Marsie said in a quiet voice, like she couldn’t believe it. She grabbed me and pulled me in and hugged me for a long time. “You are my hero,” she said again. She pressed me into her jackets and I guess it made me feel good, even if it was coming from a bum—and she didn’t smell very good.
She let me go eventually, and we kept walking and were all in better moods. Marsie counted the money we’d taken in before the whole thing with Cal Gennelich and it came to eighty-seven dollars. It was a hell of a haul, and she put it into separate stacks and handed me thirty-five American dollars right there on the spot for me to keep for myself alone. I was rich—and excited, and so were they. They said they hadn’t had a day that good in a while, and I said I hadn’t either, and they said it was all because of me, and I was proud of that, and they said that was why they gave me extra money instead of just one-third, which is an amount. And that was how I got my first thirty-five dollars in my career as a dead runaway bum.
We kept walking down the street—me, Marsie, and Ted—and they stopped in a liquor store and each got bottles of vodka, which they called vodky. They held those vodky bottles in paper bags, and they’d pull from them and say things like, “And one for the doctor!” and laugh real loud and then, “How ‘bout a little lightnin’, Ted?” and clink their bottles together.
We found some good picnic tables and were hanging out, and I was having fun, I guess, but I was also itching to spend all that money on something, and I told them so, and they understood, so we decided to split up. They got sad then and said they would miss me and would pray for me, and I said, okay, and Marsie said I would always be her hero, forever, for what I did to old Cal Gennelich, and that sounded nice, and then she got misty and said to get on then, and I gave her a big hug. She wiped her eyes, and Ted was looking on, too, and he drank out of his vodky and put his arm around Marsie and I might have seen a tear in his eye, too.
“You’ll be okay, child?” Marsie said, in an asking way after we hugged.
“Yup,” I said, and she said, okay, and I said bye, and they said bye, and I left, and I never saw them again.
I walked around the city of Albany for a long time after that, thinking about things and soaking up my freedom, but mostly just trying to find something to spend my money on. I couldn’t decide on anything, and eventually, I found myself just staring at a giant concrete parking garage with stacks of cars to the sky, and I realized I was right back to that same spot the bus of Chinese folks had let me off at in the morning: the Albany Bus Station. It was sure nice and dirty.
I walked toward the bus station, and it was just a little building tucked in around a bunch of other stuff, and there was a rusted chain fence on one side and a newer one on the other and gates for the busses and a little lot with three busses parked in it. The bus parked out front with its lights on had a big lit up sign that said New York City on the front of it.
I started wondering at that time what Quinn might do if he was free as a bird with thirty-five whole dollars burning a hole in his pocket and there in front of him was a bus with New York City lit up on the sign in front of it.
I knew what Quinn would do. And I had thirty-five dollars and was dead as a doornail and could go anywhere I wanted.
A few minutes later, and after some convincing to a really nice lady with giant fingernails at the ticket counter, I had a bus ticket to New York City for twenty-nine dollars and seventy-three cents.
The ticket lady called me hun a lot as she rang me out and told me the bus left in half-an-hour. I said thanks and went over to some benches where I could look at my bus and the two other busses parked there.
I watched all the stuff going on and pretty soon, people started to gather around at the door to the New York City bus, waiting for the driver. There were about ten other folks standing there, and the first three in line were wearing the exact same thing—which was brand new blue jeans with shiny new work boots and new, creased, tan button-down shirts. They were each holding a big envelope—the yellow kind that school uses for bad news. One man was old and black, and the other two were younger and white, and one of the younger guys had tattoos all over him, even on his face. I went up and asked him if he was a pirate, thinking it might be my big break, but he just looked at me like I was joking, and I went back and sat down.
Pretty soon the driver came over in his uniform and said the New York City bus was boarding, and we lined up outside the bus door, and the driver took our tickets, and I went in and found a seat. The old black guy dressed like the other two younger white guys sat across the aisle from me.
The bus driver got on and took his seat and shifted around a bunch until he got comfy, and then he hung his driver’s hat up on a hook next to him and hollered back something about making way, and pretty soon, he eased the bus out of the parking lot and picked a road, and just like that, we were off to New York City.
I was nervous, but excited, too—and glad to be in a seat, at least, on this bus. I felt funny, and I watched out the window for a long time trying to figure how I felt. Eventually though, I just felt tired and rested my head against the window and fell asleep.
And the next thing I knew, I was waking up to New York City.
I was slumped across two seats, and the old black guy that was dressed like the other two white guys was sitting across from me looking the other way out the windows at everything.
It was New York City, and it was bigger than anything I’d ever seen in my life, and it was awesome and dirty, and the buildings were huge and all their walls had the craziest paintings on them with the wildest colors.
I turned to the old black guy. “It’s New York City!” I said, like that, and he looked over at me and said he was excited, too.
But then he looked off kind of sad and then stayed that way for a while. I asked him if he was okay, and he said he was, and I said, “Okay,” and that was when he told me that this was his first time back to New York City in twenty-seven years.
“Twenty-seven years?” I said, and that’s when he told me he’d been in prison!
I almost fell out of my seat. He had been to real life prison! That was why those three guys were dressed up the same way. Prison!
Then the old guy just started crying right there on the spot for everyone to see.
I didn’t know what to do, so I just looked out the window the other way and let him cry. He stopped eventually.
“Why were you in prison?” I whispered over, after he stopped.
But he didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and he looked out the window again, and then his eyes welled up again, and he started crying again. I felt terrible, and I said I was sorry, and he said not to worry and that it was just hard to think about because he’d done a terrible thing, and that not a day went by when it didn’t make him feel like the worst person in the world.
I told him I knew how he felt, and about making Miss Jane cry all the time by being a rotten kid in school and stuff. He was nodding his head like he was listening, but I don’t think he was because he just kept looking out the window, kind of half crying.
And then he said that he’d gotten hooked on dope and killed his best friend over fifty-seven dollars. He just popped out with it.
He had killed a man! I couldn’t believe it! It wasn’t even the end of my first day on the road, and I’d already met and made acquaintances with a real life murderer! I couldn’t believe my luck! I knew Quinn would be red when I told him.
The old man didn’t seem as excited about it as I was though, which made sense, I guess, so I tried not to smile too much about it or ask too many questions. He started talking on his own though, and said that he shot his best friend over fifty-seven dollars, and that for the first ten years he didn’t look in a mirror once, and that he still couldn’t do it very often, and that the only way he had been able to live with himself was through God.
Well, at that, I told him I knew a thing or two about churching, and I didn’t mention anything about what a damn nuisance it was, because he seemed like Miss Jane in that he probably wouldn’t put up with any badmouthing church. Instead, I said that God was forgiving and whatnot, if you’re asking for it, like they always say in church.
That made him smile. “You’re all right, kid,” he said, and I figured he was right, and felt pretty good about it.
“Thanks, mister,” I said.
“You can call me Cecil,” he said.
“This is great, Cecil!” I said, looking out at the things going on in New York City as the bus drove through it.
“It sure is, kid,” he said and looked out the window, too.
“You can call me Ruby,” I said, figuring I could trust him with my first name at least, since he was a murderer.
“That’s a strange name, ain’t it? Ruby,” he said, like that, not being mean about it or anything. “How’d you come across that?”
Like I had some kind of damn say in the matter. I told him I didn’t know, and about my parents being dead so I couldn’t ask them.
“Sorry to hear it, Ruby,” he said.
I told him it didn’t much matter and that I was free as a bird now and trying to become a bum.
He looked at me kind of weird, like he didn’t know what I was talking about, but he was distracted by being back in New York City for the first time in twenty-seven years. I bet it was like when you go back to school after summer and it all looks different.
The bus stopped at a place in New York City called the Bronx, which was a funny name, and when it did, Cecil got up to get off the bus.
“See you, kid,” he said as he stood up to leave.
I was surprised, and I looked around, and it looked like a good enough place to me, and Cecil seemed pretty sure about it, too, so as he was walking down the steps at the front of the bus, I jumped up and said, “Wait,” and ran down the aisle.
I jumped down the steps and caught up with Cecil a little ways down the sidewalk, but I don’t think he knew I was following him at first. We got out to the corner, and there was stuff going on everywhere and a million noises and a giant train track that ran right over the street with trains up there going back and forth, making the most racket ever—like a giant roller coaster.
Cecil took a deep breath as he stood there on the corner, so I took a deep breath, too, and it kind of smelled like pee. Cecil took a deep breath again with his eyes closed, and I did, too, and it smelled like pee again, but I guess it felt pretty good, anyway. Cecil liked it, and he smiled and opened his eyes—and then noticed me standing there.
I smiled at him, and he looked down at me in a funny way and asked what I was doing. I said I didn’t know, and he said okay, and then he said that he was going across the street to the store, and I said okay, and he went across the street to the store, and I went along with him.
He kind of looked at me but kept going and walked into the store, and I stayed outside.
Cecil came out of the store a minute later, and he stopped when he saw me standing there. “Whatchya doing?” he said, looking at me funny.
“I’m just hanging out,” I said. “This place is crazy.””
“I—,” he said and stopped. “Ain’t you supposed to be gone somewhere?” he said.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m pretty much free as a bird.”
“Me, too,” he said and smiled. “Feels good to be free, don’t it?” He smiled and looked around and breathed deep again.
“Look at all the people,” I said. They were zooming around everywhere.
“Crazy, ain’t it?” he said. “It looks different than I remember.”
“Crazy,” I said, looking around at everything.
Then Cecil looked down at me. “I just got out of prison, kid,” Cecil said.
“I know,” I said. “Congratulations. You seemed sad about it before. Are you okay now?”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” he said.
“What do you mean then?”
“I mean, I just got out of prison—and you’re a kid.”
“Yeah?”
He stopped and shook his head, and that was when he told me about a thing called parole, which meant you had to be really good, like for Santa Claus, but for a really long time, not just in December, and if you didn’t, they’d throw you in jail.
It sounded awful, and I told him about Widow Jones and how she could lift most curses, if you could deal with her bad attitude, but he just shook his head.
“Listen,” he said. “A convict who just got out shouldn’t be talking to no little boy, or girl, or whatever you—”
“I’ll kick you in the nuts, old man!” I said. “Do I look like a damn girl?”
“I’m just saying you should be going.”
“Going? Going where?”
“I don’t know a damn nothing,” he said, getting frazzled. “I just know—”
And just at that second a cop car pulled up.
“Shit,” Cecil said.
“What’s going on here, boy,” the cop said out his window.
“I’m not—” I started to answer, but the cop cut me off as he got out of his car. His partner, a giant black guy with a bald head got out the other side.
“Not talking to you, kid,” the first cop said, turning his eyes to Cecil. “Just get out?” he said, nodding at Cecil’s clothes and then over at me.
“Yes, sir,” Cecil said, looking down.
“What you doing with this kid?”
“What’s it to you?” I said to the cop, jumping in.
They both looked down at me and scowled.
“I don’t know this kid, sir,” Cecil said. “He just started following me off the bus.”
“It’s true,” I said. “And what’s it to you, anyway?”
“That’s enough lip out of you,” the cop said turning to me. “You wait here,” he said and nodded to his giant partner to watch me. Then he took Cecil aside and grilled him for a good long time and made him show papers and other stuff that proved that he just got off the bus from prison.
“See you, Cecil,” I yelled after them. “Don’t forget my name’s— uh— Mookie.”
The cop watching me rolled his eyes.
I was sure relieved when I saw the cop letting Cecil go a few minutes later, and I waved to Cecil and watched him walk away even though he never looked back. But my relief dried right up when I looked over and saw that cop walking back to me with a look in his eye that spelled trouble.
“Shit,” I said, under my breath.
He walked up to me and stood right in front of me and folded his arms and looked down at me. “What’s your story, Mookie?”
“Hi, mister cop,” I said. “I’m just out to get some cheese for my grandmother.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”
“I’ll see you later,” I said and tried to walk away, but he grabbed me.
“You live around here, huh?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”
“Which way to Yankee Stadium?” he said
Well, I gave it some thought and had a couple of choices and looked at all of them, but before I could answer, the cop asked me why I was on a bus from Albany by myself. That one stumped me, too. These two cops were onto me, I knew it, and I had to go. I think the cop could tell I was getting jumpy because before I could make a run for it, he grabbed me by both arms.
“Don’t you go getting any ideas,” he said, looking me right in the eyes and squeezing my arms.
That cop had a good grip on me, and I knew that if they got me, they’d ship me straight back to school in no time, and Miss Jane would probably actually lay that beating on me finally, and I wouldn’t ever get to be a pirate or a cowboy or anything else in the meantime, all because of this idiot cop.
Well, there’s no nice way of saying what happened next. I’m not proud of it a bit and wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t in such a pickle. But, well, to be full honest, I just hauled off and nailed that cop right in the nuts. And, by golly, do I wish I didn’t. I don’t know what was worse, the eyes on that momma deer after Quinn did it in, or the eyes on that cop in the Bronx after I gave it to him in the nuts. It was bad, and he made an awful sound that was kind of like when me and Quinn saw that bunny get half run-over on Montezuma Road, where he kind of squeaked one long squeak before he eventually died. That was what that cop in the Bronx sounded like.
I didn’t stick around to hear it for much more than a second though. The kick to the nuts loosened the cop’s hold on me, as you can imagine, and I took off like a whip as soon as he let go. The other cop was big, but I caught him off guard too and got out to a pretty good head start, so he didn’t have much of a chance once I got up to speed.
I ran for about as long as I’ve ever run in my life, darting this way and that and running up streets and down streets and eventually across a bridge to a place called Harlem where I saw a sign for Frederick Douglass Boulevard. I’d heard of Frederick Douglass—he was a boxer—so I went that way and kept running for a while until I saw a set of stairs going into the ground.
The stairs into the ground by Frederick Douglass Boulevard were separated into three landings with about the same amount of stairs in each bank. I hit the top one at full speed and took off in a leap down to the second landing, just like we do on the stairs in front of school. I nailed the first two leaps, just like at school, and went flying off the third landing, but there were a few more stairs in the third set, and I stretched about as good as I could—but it didn’t make much difference. I swallowed my guts and came up short and caught the second to bottom stair with my sneaker and went crashing and banging and booming and head over teakettle across the floor of that place, which I found out later was the subway station.
It was getting late at night by then, and it had been quiet in that room down there, I imagine, with only a handful of other people, and then, Bing! Bang! Boom! Here I come, bouncing down those stairs and crashing into a heap across the floor, finally stopping with my britches over my head, resting against a concrete column. It was a big commotion, and there beside me—just waking up as I crashed in—was a skinny little old bum lady that smelled about as bad as you can imagine and had hair that was all gray and frizzy and messed up. She was trying to nap along that column I crashed into, and when she woke up, she woke up in a bad way, like Miss Jane does sometimes when I crawl in her window to show her a catch of nightcrawlers in the morning or something like that. This lady was a bum, but she was a lady, all the same, so she got uptight when she woke up, just like all ladies. And, boy, did she get uptight. She started hollering and carrying on, and I could barely understand any of what she was saying, but I didn’t have to. She wasn’t happy, and she was swatting at me—and I was just hanging there upside down on that concrete column.
I kicked myself for my stupidity then, looking at that lady, because she reminded me: I was still cursed. That moon stuff hadn’t worked. That was why the cops had got me and why I caught that last step, and everything else, too. I was lucky I wasn’t shot dead by then.
I was a little embarrassed, too, to tell the truth, hanging upside down on that column—but I didn’t have much time for that. If I still had a curse on me, I needed help. Luckily, I crashed right into a lady that if she wasn’t a witch, she sure knew where I could find one. So, I got myself upright and told her I was sorry and started to ask her if she knew of anyone who lifted curses. But she was grumpy at the moment, like I was shining on, and scowling pretty good. I knew from my experience with Miss Jane that when women are grumpy when they first wake up, witch or not, you have to give them at least half an hour to themselves without you carrying on or pushing any buttons—or usually even saying anything really, because they think you’re pushing buttons no matter what you say when they’re like that. So, I shut trap and went over to a bench and sat down and didn’t say a peep and waited for the half-hour to be up.
That lady kind of glared at me, and I pretended I wasn’t looking at her, and I wasn’t saying anything or pushing any buttons. But she was still glaring at me.
We carried on like that for a while. While I waited, I checked myself for scrapes, and I had a couple of good ones on my left elbow and one on my knee, but the best of all was on my side, and it was a good one, and it stung. I started missing Quinn and the guys then, because I knew they would be impressed. It wasn’t anything like Lump Douglas’s mark, of course, but it was still a good one. I looked around the subway station, and there were a few benches, but it was mostly just a big open room with concrete columns and dirty tile walls. There were machines lining one wall that sold tickets for the trains, and a few bums were laying about—like the grumpy witch lady.
On the wall, there was a board with a list of a lot of different places and how much it cost to get to them. I studied that board to pass the time, and there were a lot of names up there, and I didn’t know what any of them were, but as I was studying that board I decided that New York City was for the birds, and I wanted some woods. There were a lot of places listed on the board, but none of them said if they were in the woods or not. It just gave names.
Well, I did the best I could, and I had five dollars left, and there were some places for more, so I had to find the ones for less. I studied the names, and there in the second column was a place called Hoboken, which sure was an odd name, and it rang a bell, too, so I started thinking about that one. I was pretty sure that was what Marsie and Ted said they were earlier: hobokens. I figured Hoboken must be where all the hobokens hang out, and that gave me some hope. I figured there was a place for hobokens because the cities for regular people are just too crazy. Everyone in New York City looked like Miss Jane does when she says she’s just a little stressed and needs me to be quiet. And I guess I felt like that, too, there in New York City. It makes you feel like you do when you crawl into your sleeping bag head first and your heart stops and you have to wiggle out of that thing as fast as you can, tearing and thrashing, like you might just die from the close space if you don’t. I was feeling like that in New York City, and an open place like Hoboken sounded way better.
I used the machine to buy a ticket and then snuck a glance over to check on the grumpy bum witch, and she looked like she was right back to sleeping.
I couldn’t let her go back to sleep. Then I’d have to start the whole thing over again and wake her up and wait another half-hour for her to stop being grumpy before I could ask my questions. And I couldn’t keep putting off these curses. I had to get them situated before they killed me.
Curses are particularly a pain because you can’t see them, and they can get you out of nowhere, and you really never know where you stand with a curse until after something bad happens—when you know you’re cursed—and even then, there’s not a real clear way of getting rid of them or even helping your chances without a witch involved.
Anyway, the grumpy bum lady was back along that column, curled up and sleeping, and I tried to figure what to do. I studied her pretty good and she didn’t look really asleep, and I know how people can fake it sometimes when they don’t want you to bother them, and I was pretty sure this lady was faking, so I went up to her and kind of coughed a little.
She stayed still, so I did it louder and stomped my foot, and she just laid there. That annoyed me, for one, and made me pretty sure she was faking, too, because even a sleeping person would rustle a little at that.
I wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure she was faking, but I was sure enough to kneel down and get a better look—and when I did, that lady smelled bad. She kind of smelled like the horse blankets in the Fosterson’s barn. Anyway, I leaned down to get a better look, and her eyes started moving under their lids, a little at first, then more—which I was pretty sure meant she was faking—so, I looked even closer, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t figure it out.
In the end, I didn’t have to figure on it for long, because whether she had actually been asleep before or not, she was suddenly definitely not asleep, without question. That lady opened her eyes, a little like a baby or a kitten, and kind of fluttered her eyes for a second and seemed real peaceful and all. Then she kind of came to and caught sight of me right there about touching noses with her, and she didn’t like that much, as you can imagine, and she jumped right up out of her skin and shrieked like I was stabbing her to death, causing about the biggest commotion in the world, everybody down there waking up and watching her yelling at me like I was doing something terrible to her. That lady was crazy.
She looked at me real wild then, and I knew I was in for it. I knew right then that she was a real witch that was gonna curse me right full of curses. And I would have known no matter what, but I knew even more because she kept saying, “Curse you, devil!” the whole time. “Curse you devil!” And she was hissing. So I had no doubt.
I didn’t think she needed to do all that. I hadn’t really done anything to her. But, like I said, witches are a pain, generally.
Well, that witch was stirred right up, and I knew she wasn’t worth anything to me at that point, and eventually, she left, still shouting at me and the other bums and the regular people who were walking down into the subway. Luckily, everybody just ignored her.
And that was why I had to leave New York City doubly cursed and without the least hope of finding another chance to lift my curses before I could reach the hobokens in Hoboken.
That train out of New York City was crazy and kind of like the roller coasters in Lake George but way bigger and pretty dirty, and it would zoom into subway stations, and people would just stand there as grumpy as they always are, not even paying the least attention to the train almost hitting them. It sure was something, and I watched for a while, and the next thing I know, I’m waking up to the police and the worst sight ever.
Now, first, I want to say that I didn’t steal anything and you can’t say that I did. And I just want to say again that I think the whole thing is bull, and I shouldn’t have to tell this stupid story. None of any of this was my fault or has anything to do with me, and I’m getting a little sick of having to tell everybody everything about my whole damn life. Just for the record.
Anyway, it all started with that grumpy witch at the subway station. When she took off—cursing me—she dropped a black jacket and a dirty and naked baby doll and a hair brush. I didn’t have any use for the hair brush or the baby doll, but I sure could use a jacket. It was huge and filthy and smelled to high heavens, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t want it back on account of the smell, anyway, even if she did come back for the other stuff. So, I took that jacket, and I should have known it would get me in a pickle. And it did.
I fell asleep on the train to Hoboken, like I was saying, and I had that big black jacket wrapped around my shoulders while I was sleeping, and I must have kind of scrunched up and slid down, because I ended up curled up in a ball between the seats on the train. The black jacket must have covered me up from above and made me hard to figure, I guess, because some nimrod came along and saw me and thought I was a suitcase or gym bag or something left there between the seats with bad intentions. I can’t really say exactly what happened, or what kind of idiot that guy was, but either way, I woke up to the god-awfulest sight: a giant metal scorpion robot coming right at me, trying to kill me dead.
When I opened my eyes and saw it, I jumped up from between the seats, and behind the robot was a giant green monster that was bigger than a bear. I later found out it was just a regular sized guy in what they called a blast suit.
And there you have it. They thought I was a bomb! I’ve heard some dumb things, but that takes it. A bomb?
Anyway, the scorpion robot was just something they used to work on bombs, but I didn’t know that, and I wasn’t prepared for it, naturally, because I wasn’t a bomb at all and was just a little cold and had taken a stupid jacket that smelled really bad and nobody wanted anyway.
I opened my eyes and saw that robot coming at me and the green monster behind it, and I didn’t know exactly what to make of the whole situation, but I was one hundred percent sure I didn’t like any of it. The whole business scared me straight to the store and back, and I jumped up in a flash from a deep sleep and threw the jacket and got to defending myself right away, as you can imagine.
Well, if you think me jumping up like that didn’t scare the blast suit pants off of that guy in the blast suit, then you’d be wrong. That guy jumped about as high as I did and even screamed a little like a woman and then farted, and I could hear the fart from where I was, and then he started laughing, and I could hear the laughing, too.
The fart was funny, I guess, when I think back about it now, but at the time I didn’t think the fart or anything else was funny. I thought it all was terrifying.
The robot was closest to me, so I went for it first. It was half the height of me and had a base with wheels and an arm that stuck straight up out of it with a camera on it. I went for the head and did a running kickball kind of kick right at the neck of that thing and its head went popping right off and started dangling there from its wires. It was just like the movies, and Quinn would have loved it, but the giant green monster was still between me and the door of the train, and after I karate-kicked the robot, the green monster kind of yelped from inside his suit and scrambled to yank off his head and started hollering at me to not hurt his precious machine. He was just a regular old bald guy when he got his head off, and he wasn’t laughing anymore.
I still didn’t really know what to make of him in his big suit, farting and pulling off his giant green head and everything. And I had just woken up besides, and to the worst of situations. So, I gave the robot another good kick and then made for the guy in the blast suit as fast as I could. The suit looked bulky—I could see that much—and I figured I could give him a good juke and maybe get around him if I caught him off-guard.
And I sure caught him off-guard. He was holding his giant green head in his arms and could barely move, and he got a funny look on his face as he saw me coming at him, like he didn’t know what I was gonna do, and he stepped back, and his foot caught one of the poles, and he fell over backwards in his big green suit with his giant green head rolling and bouncing off down the aisle.
It was kind of funny, but I didn’t stick around to watch. I hurdled over him and jumped out the door of the train, which was in a dark rail yard, on a track by itself, and I hadn’t much more than jumped down out of that train before I almost had a heart attack. There were the most cops you’d ever seen in your life, all surrounding that train with their guns out and their lights flashing in every direction. I almost threw up.
One of the cops started yelling, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” and I guess that was nice of him because they didn’t shoot me. Some of them looked pretty twitchy though.
I was grateful they didn’t shoot, but I knew that if they got ahold of me I would be in a heap. And I didn’t have much time to think about it, so I just went with what worked before and picked out a fat cop and ran at him.
This cop looked a lot like the guy in the blast suit did, and his eyes went wide, and he kind of glanced over at his friends and then back at me with a nervous look on his face. He was still holding his gun. “What the hell!” he hollered. But this guy wasn’t in a big suit like the other guy, and he kept his balance and then kind of crouched down like they do in football.
I ran right at him till I was just a hair out of reach, and then I kind of juked one way and went the other, and he went for it and got moving the wrong way and couldn’t make it back in time and grabbed at air and stumbled and his leg gave out and he toppled over and grunted like, “Ooofff,” as he hit the ground.
Other cops were making their way over to the commotion, and I don’t think they really knew what to make of me, but it didn’t matter anyway because I was tearing off across that railyard toward the trees as fast as I could.
I heard the guy I juked yelling, “What the hell was that?” in between gasps, and then I heard some laughing from the rest of them. Then another guy—I think the first guy in the blast suit—was saying that it was just a kid sleeping, which was me, and there weren’t any bombs, and he was kind of laughing, I think at the other guy.
“What the hell was that?” the second cop hollered again.
I had a head start on them, and I was moving along pretty good, heading for the trees, and I darted between the rail cars and was just about gone, when, of course, there at the edge of the railyard was a big stupid fence.
People just love putting fences around things.
Anyway, one thing I knew about fences: there’s always a way through, so I started running along, looking for a spot to slip through or climb over.
It wasn’t long before I found a hole.
And that was how I met Geno Platski—Geno and another hoboken named Gilbert.
At first Geno and Gilbert weren’t happy to see me at all. They were sitting there beyond the fence, watching the whole thing when I darted through their hole, just about landing in their laps.
“Aw, hell!” Geno grunted. “Why the hell did you have to pick this spot?”
Well, he surprised me worse than I surprised him, I can assure you that, and I didn’t much care for him complaining about me since I was the one who had half the world chasing after me with scorpion robots and giant green monsters.
“I’m just trying to get away from all those damn cops,” I said.
“You’re lucky you’re not shot,” he said.
“I know!”
“You’re lucky you’re not black,” he said, scratching his chin.
“What?”
“What’d you do to get the cops after you?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Why’re they after you then?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” he said, lifting his eyebrows like that.
Well, he wasn’t letting up with all his damn questions, so I told him real quick the story about the jacket and the robot and the monster and the fart and whatnot.
“That’s a blast suit,” Geno said and then turned to Gilbert, the other guy. “Now I get it. They thought he was a bomb.”
Gilbert grunted and drank out of a giant, plastic, fountain-soda cup. He was kind of dumb, in a nice way, but he didn’t talk so good and mostly just looked at what was going on and drank a lot of soda instead of talking. You couldn’t tell if he was happy or angry most of the time, and he was hardly taller than I was and looked just about as beat up as you’ve ever seen a human being and kind of pinched in the face and missing teeth and growling and drinking soda. He was great. He looked like a troll.
“Well, I’ve seen some things,” Geno said. “But that takes it.”
“That’s what I was saying!” I said. “Can you believe it?”
And he said he couldn’t, and Gilbert grunted and drank his soda, and between the three of us we’d been just about everywhere there was in the world and not one of us had ever seen the equal to what had just happened.
I was glad that I had been a part of something that nobody had ever seen before, but that didn’t change that I was still facing a heap if those cops got me. There were six of them coming across the railyard, right then, with their flashlights going everywhere, trying to get a look at where I went.
“What should I do?” I asked Geno.
“Aw, hell,” Geno said. Geno was a funny-looking guy in his own right. He had hair about as white as paper, and it was combed back in a curvy slick kind of thing, like the motorcycle guys did back when movies were black and white—but he was old. He was the kind of guy that made you chuckle a little just looking at him, and you were sure he probably had about a million stories and probably all of them as funny and adventurous as anything you could think of. Once I got to know him, I found out that I was right. He had been riding the rails, he said, off and on since he was my age and hadn’t ever been able to cure his itchy feet—which meant he liked to roam free. “Aw, hell,” he said, again, looking over at the flashlights coming toward us.
“Well, what do you want me to do?” I said.
“All right,” Geno said. “All right, get back into the bushes and give me a second.”
Me and Gilbert made our way back, like Geno said to, and Geno knelt down by the hole in the fence, real stiff and slow. Geno moved around like that, kind of like his knees didn’t bend except sideways, making him kind of swing back and forth. And he usually had a hand on his hip to hold himself steady like he might just fold over like a jackknife if he didn’t keep his hand there. He was always smoking a cigarette, too, and it would just hang out of the corner of his mouth, and he’d kind of waddle with his one hand on his hip, holding himself up, with a cigarette in his mouth, swinging around, and his other arm held out sideways like he was fighting to stay balanced on his bowed legs, like they might just give out at any second. He had the funniest way of moving around. But, when he had to, he moved about as nimble as a cat, and you wouldn’t even guess that he was as old as dirt and had trouble not just folding up like a handkerchief the rest of the time.
Geno kneeled down by the hole and started fishing a piece of wire through the fence, and in no time, he had that hole sewed up where you couldn’t even see it. He said they had been using that hole in the fence to jump trains here in Hoboken for almost five years and nobody had ever found it yet. Until me, which I was proud of. But we didn’t hang around to celebrate. We started moving.
The bushes weren’t in a forest at all, and no sooner had we turned around than we were on a street, a big street. There wasn’t anybody on the street at that hour of the night though and we snuck along the side of a building and then crossed.
On the other side of the road we ducked down an alley and onto another street, and it wasn’t long before we were at a giant abandoned warehouse with a long platform and a bunch of garage doors.
“Follow me,” Geno said and started down the parking lot of the warehouse. It was dark when we got off the street and the building was just as run down as anything you’ve ever seen in your life. The bricks were falling out of the walls and the few windows in place were smashed to bits and there was wood falling down and leaning every which way. It was great. I kind of bent over and snuck along as we went, even though Geno didn’t tell me to. It just seemed like a place you should do that. I was sure we were in great danger and could hardly hide my excitement. We walked to the very back of that warehouse, where the platform kept going the other direction. Geno waddled over to a spot under the platform and dipped down and disappeared into the darkness.
I didn’t know what to make of that, and didn’t really feel like following, but then Gilbert went right in, too, and I was out there in the dark alone. Then Gilbert stuck his head back out and kind of grunted to ask if I was coming.
Well, if you think you wouldn’t be scared to your underpants in the middle of the night crawling into a black hole at the back of a spooky warehouse in a place called Hoboken, then I guess you should just try it sometime.
I took a breath and went. Under the platform was spooky, but there was a broken window into the warehouse, and Geno crawled through that.
I didn’t much care for the look of that window either, once I saw it, but I was in for a penny, as they say, and I sure didn’t want to just stay under that platform waiting for poisonous snakes and zombies. So, I followed them in.
Geno was a smart guy. He didn’t look like it—or sound like it, or act like it—but he was. The inside of that warehouse was as big as anything you’ve ever seen, and it was abandoned, and he stayed there anytime he came to Hoboken and didn’t have to pay a dime for it.
Quinn would have loved it, and I was wishing he was there because Geno and Gilbert didn’t want to explore it at all. Geno just said, “You’re crazy,” when I asked him, and Gilbert just grunted and drank his soda, and that was him saying no.
There were a bunch of dirty blankets on the ground along the wall of a room in the back corner of the warehouse and Geno and Gilbert sat down and got comfy on those dirty old blankets. I liked them for that: they didn’t mind a dirty blanket.
Well, I wanted to explore, so I stood at the door of our little office and gathered up my courage, then I went out into the main warehouse to look around. The warehouse was pretty damn spooky once I was alone, and before long, I figured I had seen enough and moseyed on back and sat down with Geno and Gilbert in the office room. They were relaxing, and Geno was talking, and Gilbert was grunting and drinking his soda.
When I sat down, Geno stopped and kind of half-grinned at me in the goofy way he does, smoking his cigarette. He was a funny looking guy, like I was saying, and he made you smile. And he was funny the way he talked, too, like he was talking out the side of his mouth, with the cigarette always blocking up the other side. Nothing Geno did was ever balanced or seemed like it should work, but somehow it all came together with Geno in the middle, making his way through the world and working just fine, like a giant heap of metal and boards that had come alive like they do in the movies, all out of sorts, but still pretty jumpy. Geno was like that. He didn’t look like much most of the time, but he could sure move when he had to.
“Don’t think we’ve been prop’ly in’duced, half-pint,” Geno said, like that, after he’d chewed on his cigarette for a while. “I’m Geno Platski and that there is Gilbert Drum.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Care to tell us your name?” Geno said.
“Not really.”
“Okay.”
“Ruby,” I said, feeling bad for not telling him.
He looked at me funny, like he was figuring something. “You’re a boy, right?”
“Well, hell!” I said, bolting upright. “I didn’t come all the way out here to get made fun of by some crazy old hound—who’s funny looking besides!”
But, Geno was sorry right away. “Didn’t mean nothing by it, Ruby—if that’s your real name,” he said. “No need to get worked up.” He had a slow way of talking that kind of kept you from staying mad at him. “Just can’t always tell these days. Didn’t mean no offense. Wouldn’t matter one way or t’other.”
“I’ll give you one way or the other,” I said. “I’m a boy, and I don’t know why my parents gave me this rotten name, but I’ll kick you in the nuts if you make fun of it again.”
He kind of laughed and tried not to show that he was laughing, but I could tell, and I didn’t like it.
“I wasn’t making fun, boy,” he said, getting himself under control and tapping the ash off his cigarette, even though it had already fallen on his shirt about a minute before. And then the cigarette went right back to the one corner of his mouth, and he kept smirking out the other. “I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his face to try to keep from smiling.
“You’re damn right you are,” I said, still scowling at him. “And funny looking, too.” But I figured he meant it, that he was sorry, well enough, so I let it go.
“Is it like Johnny Cash and the boy named Sue?” he said after he scratched his chin a bit.
“The what?” I said.
“The Boy Named Sue,” he said. “Johnny Cash.”
“Johnny Cash? What do you mean?” I asked. Cash was money, I knew that, but not about Johnny—or Sue.
He told me about it all, and kind of sang a lot. He said that Johnny Cash didn’t have anything to do with money, but was the best singer ever. And he had a song about a boy named Sue whose dad gave him that rotten name because he knew he wouldn’t be around to raise him up proper, and he knew that with a name like Sue, people would make fun of the boy and beat him up and make him tough enough to fight his way through this cold, hard world by the time he was grown up.
I figured that made sense, and I wondered if maybe that was why my parents named me Ruby. I was glad they didn’t name me Sue, at least, when I heard about that. That was way worse.
“So, speaking of folks. What are you doing here anyway, Ruby?” Geno said, squinting his eyes.
“What do you mean?” I said. “I followed you.”
“No.” He grinned with his crooked face. “I mean, what were you doing on that train? Why were you on that train alone? Where are your folks—which named you Ruby—if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Don’t have any,” I said. “They’re dead.”
“Is that right?” he said and stopped smiling and kind of looked at me the way people do when they start pitying you.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
He nodded, knowing what I meant, and looked off, and we didn’t say anything for a while.
Then I said, “Do you think that’s why they named me Ruby, though? Because they knew they couldn’t raise me up proper and it’s a cold, hard world, like you were saying?”
Geno looked at me for a second and puffed on his cigarette. “It makes sense, I guess,” he said. “Do you think that’s why?”
I thought about it. “I guess,” I said.
“Well, all right,” he said, and he looked at Gilbert, and Gilbert grunted and drank his soda, and that was him saying he thought so, too.
“I feel better, I think,” I said.
“Good,” Geno said. Then he started chuckling. “You sure are a puzzle, Ruby.”
“I guess,” I said, but I didn’t really think there was anything puzzling about me—except for morons maybe. “What are you doing here?” I asked Geno, because I didn’t feel like being the only one prodded at the moment.
“Just trailing off after my feet,” he said, “like always.”
“Trailing off after your feet?” I said, chuckling.
Geno smiled. “Since I was about your age.”
“You’ve been a hoboken since then?”
“A what?” he said.
“A hoboken.”
“What?”
“You’re not? You definitely look like one.”
“Like a hoboken?”
“Yeah, and you’re in a town for hobokens, too,” I said. “And you probably haven’t showered in a week.”
“Well— I—”
“It makes sense.”
He huffed and spat on the floor. “Don’t you talk to me about my necessaries, boy!” he said, getting snippy like that. “I keep myself up just fine.”
“I’m not criticizing,” I said, holding up my hands. “I think, the dirtier the better.”
“I am not dirty!” he said. “I just— well, I guess— I’ve just— well— I don’t believe I should have to explain my lavational patterns to some damn child, anyway!” he said and patted down his blanket with both his hands, all grumpy.
Gilbert was chuckling.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” I said. “I just thought you looked like one. That’s all.”
“You’re not making any damn sense, boy,” he said and turned up his nose to light another cigarette.
“You’re not making any sense,” I said.
“Hoboken is a city, child. Do you realize that?” he said, spouting his cigarette ash all over himself.
“Of course I do!” I said. “I’m sitting in it right now! I’m not an idiot.”
“Okay,” he said and kind of looked back and forth between me and Gilbert.
“And don’t call me child,” I added.
He just looked at me, dumb.
“Hoboken,” I said, pointing around us.
“Yeah,” he said, squinting his eye.
“For hobokens,” I said, pointing to him and Gilbert.
Geno just looked at me with a confused scowl on his face.
Then Gilbert leaned over to Geno and said, “Hobos?”
I think it was the only thing I ever heard Gilbert say that wasn’t just grunts. He said it pretty good, I guess.
“Do you mean hobos, boy?” Geno said, turning to me.
And I guess I did. And that was how I learned that Geno and Gilbert weren’t hobokens at all, and that a hoboken wasn’t even a thing, other than a city that didn’t have any woods or witches or mountains.
At the time, I was pretty disappointed about it not being a town full of hobokens, and I was still hung up on what new curses I might have, and my chances of finding a witch were dwindling fast, so I jumped up and kicked at the ground and said, “Damn!” and then, “Shit!” and then I started pacing.
“What?” Geno sat up, looking around.
“Aw, dammit,” I said again.
“What the hell are you damning about, boy?” Geno said, getting up to his knees with a worried look, snapping his eyes back and forth.
“I might have a whopper of a curse on me,” I said. “Probably more than one. And I planned to get rid of them here, with the hobokens. And now you’re telling me I can’t because hobokens ain’t even hobokens. Have you ever seen The Curse of the Waller Dog?”
He kind of raised his eyebrows and looked at me funny and didn’t seem to know what to say.
“Do you know any witches?” I asked when he didn’t respond.
“Ha!” Geno laughed, and sat back down. “Too many to count,” he said, “but probably not the kind you’re looking for.”
Gilbert grunted and drank his soda, and that was him laughing.
“You know, though,” Geno said, thinking, “the witch I’m going to see in Pittsburgh might be that kind of witch, too. She’s into black magic and stuff. Maybe she could help you.”
Well, I didn’t know where Pittsburgh was, but either way, it sounded like a good plan. “Perfect!” I said.
“But,” Geno said, getting serious, “I’m not taking you anywhere until you tell me what you’re doing out here. I won’t judge you, and I won’t turn you in. I just want to know.”
“Shit,” I said, looking down. Adults. They’re all the same. But, I needed to get to a witch and some woods, and Pittsburgh was my best shot at the time, and I didn’t see many other ways to get there, so I swore him to secrecy and told him everything, mostly, just like I’m telling you.
And speaking of, I’m tired, and this whole thing is stupid, and right now, I’m leaving, and I hope you all stub your toe. Maybe I’ll tell you more tomorrow. Or maybe I won’t. But you can shoot me if you want to.
[Door opening]