I Will Save You (15 page)

“It’s a fake gun,” he said between laughs. “It’s not even real.”

“What?” I said.

“It’s fake. I stole it from this prop shop on 101. Right next to a music store.”

I kneeled in the sand ’cause my legs felt wobbly.

“We made that guy cry over a fake gun, Special. Isn’t that amazing?”

I didn’t say anything. Just looked at the sand and shook my head. I didn’t know what to think or feel.

“What we told him, though,” Devon said. “That part was real.”

“What
you
told him,” I said.

“We gave him something important to consider.”

Devon tossed the fake gun and it landed in the sand right
in front of me. “Take it,” he said. “Feel free to use it on anyone you think needs a dose of reality.”

I looked up and watched him walking away, toward the steps. As he climbed them, two at a time, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I thought how Devon’s death drive was way worse than before. When he escaped from his group home at the start of summer, to find me, the world became less safe. Not just for himself but everybody.

I knew right that second Devon would end up either dead or in jail. Those were the only possibilities.

After he got to the top stair and disappeared into the campsites, I looked down at the gun in front of me. I picked it up to feel how heavy it was. I’d never held a gun before, not even a fake one. I looked real close and saw Devon’s bloody fingerprints all over it. And then I looked at my own hand, which was bloody, too.

When he slashed me in the shoulder he must’ve cut deeper than I thought. ’Cause blood was flowing down my arm.

I stood up and threw the fake gun into the ocean, as far as I could.

Then I sat in the sand, holding my bloody shoulder, my whole body trembling ’cause I was so mad and confused and fighting off the pain. I stared at the ocean, trying to think what I could do about Devon.

And thinking how I had to make sure I didn’t end up dead right along with him.

They gave me and Mr. Red
three days to fix the fence on the cliff, but it only took us two. First of all, they didn’t supply us with enough material. And second, Mr. Red told me if we finished a day early he had a surprise trip we could do.

We worked as hard as possible, knocking out most of the old fence, hauling it to the dump, digging new ditches along the edge of the cliff, sinking wood posts, sealing everything with the cement Mr. Red mixed himself in his rusted wheelbarrow.

We barely talked.

My shoulder where Devon cut me hurt some, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I just duct-taped it so no blood would show through my shirt. Mr. Red had told me that some police came through the campsites the night before, asking questions. He said somebody had pulled a gun on some college kids up the beach. They told Mr. Red to call the station if he heard anything.

He didn’t seem like he suspected me or Devon or anything. He was just mentioning it. But I still decided to avoid Devon for a while.

I didn’t even need to worry, though. In the week since the fake gun Devon hadn’t come around even once.

During the second day Mr. Red was working so hard he took off his sombrero and hung it on a tree branch. I stared at it while I held one of the fence posts and Mr. Red poured cement. There were two holes in the front of the sombrero and the rim was partly rubbed off and you could tell it probably started out way lighter. It was the most beat-up hat I’d ever
seen. I wanted to ask Mr. Red why he didn’t just buy a new one, but I decided not to bother him.

At the end of that day I held up the last post we had and he secured it and taped everything off, and then we both stood back and looked at all the work we’d done.

“A shame, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head.

“What?” I said.

He pointed at the part where the old fence still stood, right at his favorite place to check out waves. “Only twenty more feet and we could’ve fixed the whole thing.”

“Couldn’t they get us more materials?”

“They could. But they won’t. Management’s cheap like that. Said the job was to replace the faulty parts and leave the rest as is. They didn’t believe me when I said the whole thing was faulty.”

I rubbed the cut on my shoulder.

Mr. Red shook his head. “Lucky I keep this part sort of hidden.”

“I know.”

“Only thing standing between some kid and falling forty feet down the cliff is whether or not he’s stupid enough to test it.”

I looked at the old part of the fence, and for the first time in my life I had that vertigo thing people talk about. Where your stomach hurts just imagining yourself falling.

Mr. Red shot me a look. “You all right, big guy?”

I nodded and went down on one knee and acted like I had to redo my shoelace.

Mr. Red grabbed his sombrero off the tree limb and stuck it back on his head. “Good news is we finished early.”

“We’re really not working tomorrow?”

He kicked at the old part of the fence and watched it sway back and forth. “Nope,” he said. “I’m taking you on a field trip.”

Mr. Red’s Surprise

The next morning me and Mr. Red were driving in his truck, and he was explaining to me how many hours people work during their lifetime.

As he talked I looked out the window, at all the other cars. Everybody staring straight ahead, barely blinking. I thought how I was now a person who worked, too. And then I wondered if I’d ever considered myself like that before. An actual person. Like everybody else.

“That’s why it’s so important to like what you do, big guy. You’re gonna spend a ton of hours doing it.” Mr. Red sped up a little to pass a big rig, one of his hands on the steering wheel, the other flipping the radio dial to a sports station.

Maybe it was being outside of Horizons. Or maybe it was meeting Olivia. Or maybe it was Mr. Red’s talk about jobs. But for the first time I found myself wondering what would happen with me in the future.

“Money should be the last thing people think about,” Mr. Red went on. “I know dozens of folks who end up doing something they hate just because they like the numbers on their paycheck.”

I nodded when he looked at me.

“A guy can buy a lot of stuff, Kidd, but he can’t buy back all the hours he’s spent doing a job he hates.”

“Do you like our job, Mr. Red?”

“I like where our job
is
. We work at the beach, man. We breathe in the Pacific Ocean all day.”

“The beach is the best smell,” I said.

“People should work to live, not live to work. Know what I mean?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

He changed the radio station back to music and kept driving.

Ten minutes later we went off the freeway and turned into a huge parking lot with a sign that said
WORLD FAMOUS SAN DIEGO ZOO
.

As Mr. Red looked for a spot he told me: “One day, Kidd, you’re gonna do much better than a maintenance job at the campsites.”

“I am?”

He nodded. “It’s the reason I brought you down here today.”

Mr. Red bought us tickets and we walked in together.

I wondered if anybody we passed thought he was the dad and I was the son. Then I thought what that would be like. And if I would’ve turned out different from how I am.

Mr. Red.

My dad.

The only problem was, his hair was shaggy and blond and mine was short and brown. And his skin was way lighter. So we didn’t really look related.

Mr. Red handed me a zoo map and said: “Wherever you wanna go.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“What about what
you
wanna see?”

“Already seen it. This trip’s about my partner.”

I looked at him and then looked at the map. Then I looked at him again.

He laughed, said: “Look, you can either pick a place on the map and figure out how we get there, or we can just wander around. Totally up to you.”

I looked on the map, then pointed to the center and said: “Maybe the monkeys?”

“Lead the way.”

Over the next few hours I led us through almost the entire zoo. We watched the monkeys swing from one tree limb to another, sometimes whacking each other on the back of the head. We looked at the elephants and hippos and giraffes and zebras. We looked at polar bears, which seemed soft enough to be stuffed animals you could play with. We went in the reptile part and looked at alligators and giant turtles and coiled snakes and colorful lizards.

We bought sandwiches and Cokes and ate on a bench near the koalas. We went on the Skyfari, a ride the zoo has that takes people over the whole place, and when you look down, at all the heads of people walking by, they look like ants.

I asked Mr. Red a million questions, and for a while he tried to answer them. But eventually he told me it might be better to just take everything in and think about it later.

So I tried that.

I stared at all the animals and the people watching them through binoculars or taking pictures. I saw a kid tossing sticks
into the baboon enclosure. A mom holding her little baby up to a flamingo, and the baby crying. I went by myself in the petting zoo, where baby sheep and goats ate food pellets right out of people’s hands. I watched workers drive by in miniature zoo carts.

I saw a squirrel running up and down a tree, and I thought how it was free, even though it was just as much of an animal as the ones in cages. Which seemed weird. But I quickly put it out of my head like Mr. Red said and just watched.

That was when Mr. Red checked his watch and said there was someone he wanted me to meet.

Another Girl Mr. Red Knows

We walked into this part called the Tiger River Trail, down this narrow cement walkway where fog came up from the ground. The walls were made to look muddy with roots sticking out. And it was colder.

Mr. Red hopped off the walkway and waved for me to follow him up to this big wooden fence that said
EMPLOYEES ONLY
where he knocked.

We stood waiting.

“Are we supposed to be here?” I said.

“Doubt it,” he said. “But you gotta trust me.”

The fence stayed closed.

Mr. Red knocked again and called out: “Hey, Jess!”

“Who’s Jess?” I said.

“Met her around six months ago at Seaside Market in Cardiff. We both reached for the same melon and our hands touched. One of those things, I guess.”

I looked back at the fence, wondering why Mr. Red wanted
to know so many different women. Me and him were the opposite about that. He wanted to know a million, and I just wanted to know one.

“Do you like her?” I said.

He looked at me. “Who?”

“The woman in there.”

He nodded a little, said: “She’s great.”

“Do you like her better than Maria?”

He got a frown on his face and just looked at me.

I remembered how Mr. Red and Maria would always be laughing when they were together, and how me and all the other kids at Horizons said they should get married.

He pulled off his sombrero and ran his fingers through his hair, said: “Look, Kidd. Maria’s the best woman I know, all right? Out of all of them.”

“She is?”

He nodded. “That’s why we can’t be together.”

I looked at him, confused. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Actually, it does,” he said. “She deserves better than me.”

I was about to say something else, but right then the gate swung open and a pretty Asian woman dressed in a zoo work outfit stepped toward us and said: “Hey, Red!”

She gave him a big hug.

He looked past the back of her head and winked at me.

After Mr. Red introduced us, Jessica took us behind the scenes and we saw two huge tigers in separate cages, pacing back and forth. Their heads were giant up close. Their paws, too.

Jessica pulled out some keys and jingled them and both tigers roared so loud me and Mr. Red jumped.

“Get a hold of yourself, big guy,” Mr. Red said, straightening his shirt. “They’re in cages. They can’t get to you.”

Jessica put away her keys and said: “Don’t worry, Kidd. Red actually hid behind me.”

We laughed and I pointed at Mr. Red and said: “See? You were scared, too, sir.”

He frowned.

Jessica gave us a tour of the zookeeper offices and we met two other keepers, and they told us about the history of Tiger River and how it was the first to be its own section, but now almost the entire zoo was that way. And then the keeper with the beard, Al, gave me a tiger whisker and said it was good luck.

“You’ll see,” he said. “One day it’ll change your life.”

“He’s right,” Jessica said.

“Thanks,” I told him.

I looked down at the whisker in my fingers, thinking how I wanted my life to change.

I pictured Olivia.

Jessica took us down this long hallway and pulled open a thick metal door and looked at me with a big smile. She rattled her keys and two little tiger cubs poked their heads out from behind a giant stuffed bear.

They were the cutest-looking animals I’d ever seen. They tried to hiss and growl at us, but their growls were so tiny it just sounded funny.

“Here,” Jessica said, handing me a thick rope with a knot tied on both ends.

“What do I do?” I said.

“They love to play tug-o’-war. Max, the one with the light ears, will go at it for hours.”

I took the rope and tossed half of it to the baby tigers. At first they backed off and growled at me more. But then Max darted at the rope and gripped it with his paws and bit it and tried to pull it out of my hands. The other one bit the rope, too, and suddenly I was pulling against two little tiger cubs. It was unbelievable.

I never thought I’d ever be so close to baby tigers.

We played together for over a half hour, while Mr. Red and Jessica stood behind and talked. Jessica gave me a glove for my right hand and I let the baby tigers bite into it. They grabbed and hissed and I batted them around, but we were just playing.

As we got up to go I realized I loved those baby tigers. I really did.

Like how I loved Peanut.

Back in the office part we got water and sat in chairs. Then Mr. Red stood up and looked at Jessica and she nodded and he said he had to go to the bathroom. When he was gone Jessica touched my arm and said: “You were really good with them.”