Dispatch (11 page)

Feigning a bravery I did not feel, I stopped and confronted her. "What do you want?" I demanded. My voice, thankfully, sounded very strong.

She held her left hand, palm up, and with her right began making scratching motions on the palm. It looked like she was ... pretending to write.

My chill deepened.

Don't write.
That's what she'd been saying. I was pretty sure it was the same thing she'd said to the three of us that night long ago.

She'd been standing by a mailbox, I recalled. And the bird that had fallen from the sky was a pigeon. Carrier pigeons had once been used to deliver messages.

No. This was getting too crazy. I was reading far too much into this, and I turned away from her.

"Don't write!" she screeched at the top of her lungs. Even people in cars turned to stare at her. "They'll find you!"

I had no idea what she was screaming about, and I didn't want to know. The woman was crazy. I hurried quickly away. Maybe she wasn't a real witch, but the truth was that she scared the hell out of me.

I decided to do something about it.

Flush with my success at creating a new college-bound persona for myself, ruining the reputation of Sandra Fortuna and turning back Acacia's tide of redevelopment, I wrote a series of letters to the mayor, city council and police chief decrying the presence of mentally ill people wandering the streets of our fair city and accosting ordinary citizens.
In particular
, I noted,
there is an old woman commonly referred to as "the Witch of Acacia," who walks throughout the downtown business district scaring away customers from our stores.
I repeated this sentiment in every letter, wording it slightly differently each time, then signed the letters with names that sounded like fine upstanding members of the community, slightly pompous Waspish names like "James R. Worthington" and "Graham Oswald." One I signed with the name of my old buddy Carlos Sandoval, president of the Hispanic Action Coalition, for some flavor and added weight.

Homelessness was now a major national issue, so it was on everyone's mind, but there was no consensus as to how it should be dealt with. The only thing all seemed to agree on was that the mentally ill who were now wandering our streets as a result of budget cuts that had closed outpatient clinics and hospitals should not be where children could come into contact with them—a point I made in my letters.

I told Robert and Edson what I'd done, and they were amazed by my audacity. The witch still creeped them out, too, and Robert said, "You better hope she doesn't find out who wrote those letters."

"Maybe she knows," Edson said.

"Jesus Christ," I told them. "She's not a real witch. There's no such thing."

"Remember the bird?" Edson said.

"Well, if I drop dead or turn into a toad or something, you'll know why. Tell my parents to sue her."

But the truth was that I
was
a little worried. I didn't believe in witches, but the old hag still freaked me out, even at my age, and I planned to make sure that if I ever saw her again, I stayed out of her way.

As it happened, I saw the police pick her up a little over a week later. I'd mailed my letters over a period of several days so as to stagger them and not make them look so suspicious, and I assume the accumulation of complaints caused the police to finally act. The witch was doing nothing really, simply walking down the sidewalk the way she usually did, in her weird birdlike manner, but she was walking in front of the high school and toward the junior high, and I guess the proximity to children gave them the pretext they needed. I was at my locker getting out my sack lunch and putting away my math textbooks when I looked out toward the street to see what the commotion was. I watched two policemen get out of their vehicle, walk up to her, talk for a few seconds, then lead her to the backseat of the patrol car.

They drove away.

I couldn't be positive, of course, but I had a pretty good idea of what had happened, and I immediately tracked down Robert and Edson to tell them what I'd seen.

"She's gone," I bragged to my friends. "The streets are once again safe!"

I wondered what the police were going to do with her, what they were going to charge her with, how long it would take until she was back on the street. I imagined her being photographed and fingerprinted, wondered whether she'd be scared or angry. This was all because of me, I thought.

But I didn't have much time to reflect on the day's events when I got home. The house was in an uproar: Tom was leaving. My dad was yelling at him from down the hall and my mom was shrieking crazily in the kitchen, but Tom emerged calmly from his bedroom, carried a suitcase out to the crappy Dodge Dart he'd bought, then walked back in to pack more stuff.

"You never could plan ahead!" my dad was shouting. "That's what's wrong with you!"

"Let him go!" my mom yelled. "Let him do whatever the hell he wants! I don't care!"

I didn't even want to get involved, and I walked back to my room and closed the door. I passed Tom in the hallway, but neither of us looked at each other or said a word. Personally, I didn't care what he did. Stay or go, it was all the same to me. I had no contact with him. With him gone, however, there'd be no one else to take the heat off when my parents went on the rampage. I'd bear the full brunt of their anger.

And judging from the screaming outside my door, that was going to start the second he was gone.

I hated my fucking family.

I wondered whatever happened to my friend Paul. I still missed him sometimes. And his family. I wondered, if he had stayed, whether we'd still be friends.

The next week was a living hell. My parents were angry with Tom, but he wasn't there so they took it out on me. My mom, in particular, would chew me out over every little thing, every minor infraction of her ever-shifting household rules. I spent as much time as I could away from home, at school or with my friends. I even lied to my parents and said that someone had called in sick and I had to work two extra nights at Gemco—I spent those evenings at the mall, wandering aimlessly from store to store just so I wouldn't have to be in that house alone with them.

I read in the local paper several days later that the witch had died in jail at the hands of another inmate who claimed to have been "hexed" by the old woman. The witch's name, it turned out, was the prosaic
Nora Wood
, which police discovered from a cache of letters found upon her person. According to the article she was a retired Thompson Industries file clerk whose electrical-engineer husband had died in 1975, leading to a spiraling series of mental problems. The reporter made no mention of the fact that Nora Wood had spent the last decade wandering the streets of Acacia and that a
lot
of people thought she was a witch.

The following afternoon, a Saturday, I received a letter. Luckily I went out to get the mail, because if my parents had done so, they doubtlessly would have thrown the envelope away. It was addressed only to
The Boy
, but everything else was perfect down to the zip code. The envelope's preprinted return address was
Acacia City Police Department
, and the second I saw it, I knew who the letter was from.

The witch.

Instead of making one phone call, she'd asked to write one letter.

I tore open the envelope, but the missive inside was disappointing. And confusing. There was only a sheet of official police stationery and on it the words
Stop now. Don't let them.

I had no idea what that meant, but I did experience an involuntary shiver of fear as I read the cryptic note, realizing that the witch had been keeping tabs on me, that even if she didn't know my name, she'd known where I lived.

I had nothing to worry about, though.

The old bat was dead.

I went back and reread the article to see if I could find any clues that would help me decipher her message, but other than the reference to her cache of old letters, there was nothing.

I thought for a moment, then tore up both the envelope and her letter, flushing them down the toilet. They belonged in the sewer with the rest of the shit. Instantly, I felt better, as though I'd unburdened myself of some cursed object. Once more, I reread the article. The other inmate may have killed her, I realized, but I was responsible for her death. If I hadn't had her picked up—

Don't write!

—she would still be alive. Curiously, though, I felt no remorse. Instead, I was filled with a strange sense of power, the feeling that I possessed the ability—the
right
—to determine who lived and who died. It was akin to what I imagined doctors felt: the responsibility of deciding how to use a special knowledge or gift, whom to help and whom not.

Robert and Edson did feel remorse. They felt guilty just knowing how and why she'd been arrested in the first place, and for the sake of our friendship, I feigned contrition, pretended to be devastated by the news. But the truth was that I was proud, absurdly energized by this gruesome turn of events. I had slain one of my childhood boogeymen, and I felt good about it.

Again, I thought about writing a letter to my dad's work, getting him fired. The bastard had been on my ass constantly since Tom's departure. I was making almost enough at Gemco to cover my expenses, and I figured that if I did get a scholarship or some sort of financial aid, I could be out of the house and living on my own by September. I wouldn't need shit from that fucker.

So I did it.

I wrote a letter to Automated Interface.

The day he got fired, he came home drunk, the first time in several years, and he threw a water glass at my mom when she started calling him a weak, stupid, selfish prick. She spit on him, then swiveled on her heels and strode out of the kitchen.

I'd been standing by the refrigerator, having come in to get a drink, and I couldn't help twisting the knife.

"What does
God
think about this?" I asked him.

And he hit me.

He hit me in the chest, although I think he was aiming for the stomach, and I backed up, moving away from him. "What does God think about
that
?" I demanded.

"How dare you?" he roared, and came at me. I stepped aside like a bullfighter, and he was so drunk that he tripped over his feet and fell on the floor, bumping his head on the bottom of the stove. I could have hit him or kicked him while he was down—and, believe me, I wanted to—but that would have brought consequences later on. So instead I took the high road. I leaned down and said with as much disgust as I could muster, "You're pathetic."

Turning, I walked down the hall to my room, closing and locking the door behind me.

I lay down on my bed.

And smiled.

Principal Poole actually expected me to show up for his SAC meetings and to participate. I found this out when I received a note from the office one Monday reminding me that the advisory committee met that night. Grateful for a legitimate excuse to get out of the house on an evening I wasn't working, I told my parents I had to go to the meeting and walked back to school after dinner. I passed the mailbox where the witch had stopped and pointed her cane at us before the pigeon had dropped from the sky, and I hurried on, shivering. I didn't feel guilty, but I felt responsible, and in that place, in the dark, I was more than a little spooked.

Don't write!

The SAC met in the biology lab. I'm not sure why the principal chose that particular classroom—it seemed kind of weird commandeering student seats and moving them close to the podium, since there were only five of us, and we could have met just as easily in the office conference room—but that's what Mr. Poole wanted, so I made my way down the darkened hallways, past the rows of lockers to the lighted rectangle that was the biology lab door.

The committee consisted of Mr. Poole, me, and three annoying overachieving students whom I recognized from various assemblies and attendance-mandatory events but didn't really know.

"We're very informal here," the principal said, and indeed it was strange to see him in a casual sweater rather than his usual uniform of suit and tie.

They started out discussing how to better publicize the school's peer counseling program. They obviously
needed
to publicize it better because I'd never even heard of it. Mr. Poole suggested having the newspaper do an article on the program. He looked at me, nodded and smiled, as though I'd come up with the idea. One of the overachievers—Laci, a pretty, blond babe still wearing her cheerleader outfit from earlier today—thought we should recruit art students to make posters.

"Make it a contest!" said Kay, one of those ultraorganized girls who you just knew was going to become a businesswoman. "Solicit entries from the art classes and offer a prize for the winning design. We'll have posters
and
generate buzz!"

I did not want to be here.

The next topic involved the type of surfacing material to be used on the parking lot, which was scheduled to be repaved over spring break. Admittedly, I wasn't that familiar with what the Student Advisory Committee was supposed to do, but this seemed way too technical for kids to be deciding. Nevertheless, a heated discussion ensued, with Laci and Kay arguing vociferously for some type of coating made from recycled plastic, while Timothy, the other boy, lobbied for something cheaper and more traditional.

"What do
you
think?" the principal asked me. All eyes turned in my direction.

I was clearly out of my depth. I mumbled something about how this was my first meeting and I wasn't really qualified to judge, but Kay broke in, "I'm sure by now you have
some
opinion!"

I didn't really, but just because she irritated me, I said I agreed with Timothy.

The next hour and a half was spent in much the same way, with me being dragged into conversations I neither knew nor cared about, and it seemed to me that the goal soon became to trip me up or make me look stupid. I needed to beef up my resume for a scholarship, but I wasn't sure if it was worth putting up with this crap. Mr. Poole wasn't any help to me, either. He'd drafted me into this, but now he was looking at me in a strange way I did not like. I was grateful when the meeting ended, and I got off campus as quickly as I could so I wouldn't have to talk to anyone after.