The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) (16 page)

“It
was
kinda fun, wasn’t it?”

“Well, it was something. And you got some balls on you. I’ll give you that.”

“I only did it because you did it.”

Kyle wagged a finger and twisted his voice into a haggy cackle. “Just say no!”

I smiled and nodded. We both knew how stupid that notion was.

“Seriously, though,” Kyle went on, “I was only messin’ with you. If you hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have thought any less of you.”

Whether this was true or not didn’t matter. I
had
done it. If he didn’t owe me respect for that, then he at least owed me a favor.

“That girl who lives under the bridge,” I said.

Kyle squinted. Elaboration was necessary. Several girls worthy of his memory must have lived under that bridge.

“The one who gave you the … stuff,” I continued.

Nodding solemnly, he made the connection. “Crazy Gina Rizetti. What about her?”

“She can get things? Anything?”

“Most things. Plutonium? Maybe not. You building a time machine?”

“Would you take me to see her?”

“Right now?”

“No. I’m already late for dinner. Soon.”

“How about tomorrow? She’s shipping her kid off to Grammy’s for trick-or-treatin’. So her house is free to throw a rager. Costume and clothes optional.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh, it’s a big-boy party, all right, but I think you can handle it. I can’t be contributing to the delinquency of a minor, though. So you’ll have to find your own way there. But Gina’s cool. I’m sure she’d help you out. This about that girl of yours?”

“Maybe.”

“You dog!” Kyle whooped. “I can only imagine.”

An understatement. I shrugged my response, and Kyle took it as being complicit in some conspiracy. He grinned and said, “Rock and roll.”

Then he turned up his radio and proceeded to peel out, for my benefit, I suppose. As soon as his van disappeared around the corner, I wheeled my bike to our garage.

I lingered there in the dark. I needed a few moments before going inside and facing my parents. I was thinking about something that would shock them even more than if they learned about our game of jack-in-the-box. Would they see the trepidation in my body and ask me what was going on?

Probably not, but doubt and darkness are good friends, and the longer I stayed in the garage, the more unsure of myself I became.

I’ll go to Gina’s, but I won’t ask for it.

I’ll ask for advice.

Someone else needs to know.

And that someone else wasn’t going to be either of my parents. I took a deep breath and went inside.

H
ALLOWEEN

I didn’t have a costume picked out yet. I wasn’t opposed to them, but I wasn’t like Charlie. My nerves weren’t attuned to such things. As harmless as it was, pretending to be someone else infected my body like any other lie. It made me blush and stammer and apologize. Even when I was five or six, standing at my neighbors’ doors with my jack-o’-lantern bucket, I tried to explain my superhero getups. “I can’t really fly,” I’d tell them. “Mom made this cape using curtains and the sewing machine. It isn’t real.”

No one dressed up during the day anyhow. That was more of an elementary school thing. Any seventh grader who dared to show up in character was definitely not celebrated for bravery. Quite the opposite. Sure, there were always teachers who wore witch hats or vampire fangs, but otherwise Halloween was a normal day of classes.

That’s not to say kids weren’t excited about the evening’s activities, though. They dominated any and all conversations.

I still wasn’t sure what to say to Fiona, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell her what I was considering. In my mind I tried to justify my plans, but every few seconds my mind turned its coat.

You’re crazy, Alistair!

No, you’re doing what a man would do.

Tell the police, Alistair!

No, don’t tell a soul. Because they won’t believe you. And they will try to fix her. And you will lose her. You will never see her again.

Luckily, I didn’t have a chance to even see Fiona at lunch and have what was sure to be an awkward conversation. As soon as I entered the cafeteria, Principal Braugher’s secretary intercepted me. She brought me to the head office, where Braugher was sitting at her desk, plastic spiders dangling from her ears. A bowl of candy sat in front of her.

“Help yourself,” she said.

I pocketed a caramel. “Thank you.”

“No,” Braugher said. “Thank
you
. Mrs. Dwyer says you’ve been a good friend to Charlie. And I appreciate your bringing him his assignments.”

“It was only a few times.” It was hardly that.

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “It was enough.” She slid a piece of paper across her desk and motioned for me to take it.

It was a gift certificate to the Skylark. Twenty-five bucks. “For me?”

She smiled. “Treat your family to lunch.”

“Thank you. I didn’t do it for—”

She waved me off. “You’ve got a good heart, Alistair. Good hearts deserve rewards. Last time we talked, you asked me if I worry about kids. The thing I worry about most is friendships. At your age they go in either direction. Charlie thinks the world of you, you know?”

“Maybe.”

She shook her head. “That wonderful short story Charlie wrote for the
Sutton Bulletin
a few weeks ago? There’s a reason he named the hero after you.”

The
Sutton Bulletin
was a weekly paper that covered sports and politics and human interest stories. Occasionally they’d print poems and short fiction by locals. My parents had canceled our subscription at least a year before, when they realized they were shelling out a dollar a month for what amounted to unused papier-mâché supplies. So I had no idea what Braugher was talking about. My response was thus a neutral one. “Charlie does what Charlie does.”

“And, it appears, he does it quite well.”

I didn’t know Charlie wrote stories, let alone submitted them to local papers. Since he didn’t brag about them, I assumed it meant they weren’t very good. Braugher seemed to believe he had talent, and my curiosity about this outweighed any fear I had of embarrassing him by reading something he clearly didn’t want me to see. After school, I headed straight to the library.

Ms. Linqvist showed me where they kept copies of the
Sutton Bulletin
. They were in the study room, hung on a rack of wooden rods like they were towels left out to dry. I took the five most recent issues to a nearby table and flipped through them. I found what I was looking for in the October 14 issue.

ALIENS OF THE SEVENTH GRADE

A story by Charlie Dwyer

There once was a boy named Alistair, and he was in the seventh grade. He was a regular boy with regular problems. There were kids in his class who weren’t regular. The day that he found out that these kids were aliens was the day that everything made sense …

Character names had been changed, the title tweaked, but this was “Sixth Grade for the Outer-Spacers.” Word for word.

Sickness stood in for anger. Last spring, I had given Charlie a copy of my story fresh from the computer printer. He took it home and read it that night. The next morning he delivered his review over the phone: “Don’t quit your day job. You’ll end up starving.”

Looking down at the newspaper, at Charlie’s baffling act of plagiarism, I felt like I
was
starving. Sourness filled my stomach. My throat lurched. For a moment I was tempted to rip the paper up, stuff it in my mouth, and swallow it. It was a weird temptation, but an honest one. I wanted to drown the existence of such a thing. Drown it in acid.

Better senses won out, and I pushed the paper away and stood up from the table. Without saying a word, I sprinted out of the library.

The two miles I ran from the library were probably the most I’d ever run. It was still early, but little kids were already out, walking hand in hand with their parents. There were princesses and firemen and gypsies and hobos and every sort of cute animal. Probably half the kids donned cheap store-bought costumes with plastic masks that were held on by rubber bands and pressed cockeyed against their faces. When I was younger and my mom was making all of my costumes, I envied kids like this. They got to be the latest movie icon or popular toy. They were quietly and instantly recognizable, while I always had to explain.

I was still in my school clothes—jeans, a jacket, a sweater, a turtleneck—not exactly the attire of a runner. Parents exercised caution, guiding their children out of my path as I dashed by. They must have taken me for both types of mad, and I guess they were right. By the time I reached Charlie’s house, I was also exhausted. On his front porch, I doubled over and tried to cough myself back to normal. The sourness in my stomach had gotten worse. I was having trouble remembering my stomach without it.

When I finally brought my head up, I saw that the front door was open and Charlie was standing there in his pirate attire.

“So what’s your costume?” he asked. “Tuberculosis?”

I gulped back my nausea and said the title. “‘Aliens … of the Seventh … Grade.’”

That was all it took. Charlie stared at me for a moment and scraped his hook against the doorjamb. I was a bit surprised he didn’t have a canned response. Surely he knew this day was coming.

“Let’s face it, Alistair,” he finally said. “You were doing nothing with that story. If it wasn’t for me, no one else would have seen it. A thank-you might be nice. For getting people to actually read your writing. And for saving your life.”

I could have punched him right in his smug face. I could have kicked him square in the crotch. I could have watched him writhe in pain, and I could have told him that he was no friend of mine, that I owed him nothing, that he owed
me
everything, for all of the years I’d indulged him, for all of his crap I’d endured, from the morning with the wasps to the night with the sleds and any number of incidents I don’t have the time or energy to delve into now. I could have done a lot of things.

I chose to walk away.

H
ALLOWEEN

P
ART
II

My doorbell rang at a quarter till seven. Mike and Trevor, darkly clad and wearing backpacks, waited on my front steps. Ski masks clung to their brows, but they hadn’t pulled them over their faces yet. On the street behind them, things were under way. A trio of girls dressed as M&M’s sprinted by, the orbs that encased their bodies exploding into red and blue and yellow as they passed beneath a streetlight.

“We’re giving you five minutes,” Trevor said. “Ninja now or ninja never.”

“Whatcha got there?” I asked.

Mike took his backpack off and opened it up. He pulled out rolls of toilet paper, a carton of eggs, and a can of shaving cream with the nozzle melted down so the opening was nothing more than a pinprick. “Good times,” he said.

Weaponry like this was suddenly irresistible. My encounter with Charlie had left me ravenous for revenge. I imagined the eggs flying at his face, breaking on his cheekbone, and oozing down his neck.

“I’m in,” I told them.

I didn’t have a lot of dark clothing, so I had to make do with a navy blue long-underwear top and black dress shoes and dress pants—the same ones I wore to the wake. Instead of a ski mask I found an old wool hat and I used the tip of an umbrella to spread the stitching and create two eyeholes. When I pulled it over my face, it only reached down as far as my chin. Ridiculous, but it concealed my identity. It would have to suffice.

“Ninja, huh?” my mom said when she saw me tiptoeing to the door. “Please tell me my son is more creative than that.”

“I’m twelve,” I reminded her. “I’m sorry if I can’t go as a bunny rabbit anymore.”

“Keri is dressed as a cat,” she countered as she poured a bag of miniature candy bars into a glass bowl. “Wasn’t so hard to put together.”

“Really, Mom? Are you really saying this?”

She grabbed a bar, tore it open, and took a bite. She winked. “Have fun. Keri gets until ten, so you get until ten, but only tonight.”

I met the guys in the yard, where Mike loaded up my backpack with my share of the supplies. “First things first,” he said. “Heard that 167 Maple has a basket of full-size Snickers sitting on the front porch with a note that says
Please take one
.”

“We’ll be taking more than one,” Trevor informed me. I had assumed as much.

A divorced college professor owned the house. I didn’t know his name, but my parents referred to him as Dr. Leadfoot because he tore around the neighborhood in a little blue sports car, rarely even slowing down for stop signs. He was never out for a stroll, never participated in the block parties or the neighborhood garage sales. The windows of his house were almost always dark.

They were dark when we got there, and as we darted across the lawn toward the door, Trevor pulled his mask over his face and a pillowcase out of his backpack. “I’ll take ’em all and we’ll divvy ’em up later.”

Mike and I nodded our approval, and Trevor assumed the lead. He leapt over the front steps and onto the porch. As promised, the basket was there, and he snatched it immediately, but when he got a look inside, his head dropped. He tilted the wicker to show us the contents: broken eggs.

“We’re too late,” Mike said.

“You’re right on time, actually,” someone responded.

An egg pelted Trevor on the side of the head. As he recoiled, a water balloon struck him on the arm. Liquid smacked his chest. Attackers were somewhere on the porch, but we couldn’t see them.

“Freakin’ gross!” Trevor howled, and he sprang back over the steps and hit the ground running. Mike and I fumbled through our bags, desperate for retaliation. I grabbed the first thing I found—a rotten banana—and threw it toward the porch. It struck a support beam and splattered.

“It was pee! Oh god, I think it was pee!” Trevor yelled as he sprinted toward the road.