Monstrous Affections (12 page)

These days, my Dad figured that Mr. Natch was too busy
counting his money to spend much time at the Grill and Fun-Park.
Over the years, he’d put in about fifty picnic tables, slapped up two
separate dining buildings with their own washrooms, set up a lame
amusement park with a little carousel and the CARLINGSBURG
RAIL MUSEUM in an old train car. Sometime in the last ten years,
he’d built a completely enclosed footbridge across four lanes of
highway to a parking lot on the west side — so people coming south
back to the city could stop at Natch’s too. Dad thought he must have
bribed someone high up in the government to get permission to
build the bridge across the highway like that. I didn’t know if he did
or not but he certainly could afford to. The place was packed. It was
so packed there were actually security guards, wearing blue shirts
and carrying walkie-talkies and strange black wands, making sure
nothing bad happened to Mr. Natch’s considerable investment.

“Okay,” said Nick. “I see what you mean.” He was looking at a table
two over, where a four-year-old girl with pigtails had overturned
her milkshake onto her brother’s french fries. Her dad, a big-bellied
bald man in a Carlingsburg Panthers T-shirt, sipped at his own
milkshake without seeming to notice. “If that were my kid, maybe I
would want to strangle her.”

Lenore took a bite out of her pretzel. “
Our
kid,” she said, “would
never do that.”

Lenore didn’t notice how Nick winced, but I sure did. Nick had
been wincing a lot over the past two weeks he’d been at our cottage.
He winced when she talked about how after graduation next year,
the two of them would apply to the same college. He winced when
she talked about how before college, the two of them could audition
for spots on the Up With People tour and spend the whole summer
criss-crossing the United States spreading cheerful songs and
right-thinking values to those “less fortunate” than Lenore. And he
particularly winced when she would go on and on and on about all
the things they’d do together after college. I wasn’t surprised one bit
when Nick offered to drive me back to the city along with Lenore, to
give my parents some “alone time.” “Alone time” was something he
and Lenore had altogether too much of over the past two weeks.

“Hey!” The boy across from us got up, one soggy vanilla-flavoured
french fry in his hands. His sister stuck her tongue out at him. “You
little rat!” he shouted.

“Don’t call your little sister names,” said their father as he sipped
at his milkshake and looked off into the distance, and the little girl
smiled. “
Don’t call your little sister names
,” she said in a sing-song
voice that was designed to be irritating. Then she crossed her eyes
and turned over to look at us.

“Fezkul,” she said.

I leaned forward, trying to figure out what she was trying to tell
me. But she wasn’t trying to tell me anything. Someone answered
from behind me:

“Good girl, Blair. You are a rocking kid.”

The voice sounded like a little boy — a little boy leaning right over
my shoulder. I turned around, and for an instant, I saw him: a kid
wearing low-slung jeans and a baseball cap, an oversized T-shirt and
a big smile.

It was a smile with rows of saw-teeth. It made him look like a
shark.

“Holy crap,” I said. But then I blinked, and he was gone. Or I’d
dreamed it. Or he was just gone. I shook my head.

The little girl giggled and clapped: “Fezkul!” she said. Her dad set
his cup down on the table and looked at his watch.

“We should get back on the road,” he said. “Your mother’ll have
my neck.”

The girl stopped giggling and her face fell. “No!” she said. “Wanna
go see Fezkul!”

She pointed across the picnic ground to the woods.

Her father made to protest, but she hollered back that “new
daddy” would let her and just like that, he gave in.

“Weird kid,” said Nick.

My sister shook her head. “She’s not weird. She’s manipulative.
Her poor dad’s probably just got them for the weekend, and she’s
probably been holding that ‘new daddy’ line over his head the whole
time.” She looked up into the clear blue sky overhead, as if asking
God to back her up. “Divorce is so terrible. Let’s never get divorced,
Nicky.”

“Um,” said Nick.

“What’s with Fezkul?” I said.

They both turned to look at me. “Who?” said Lenore, and Nick
said, with a certain amount of relief in his voice: “
Fezkul
. That’s what
she said. I couldn’t make it out. You got a good ear, bro.”

“Fezkul,” said Lenore. “It’s probably some character off the
Cartoon Network. Or out of one of your Dungeons and Dragons
books.” Lenore was forever dissing my Dungeons and Dragons
books. “
Kids
.”

“Sure.” I nodded like I agreed with her, but I didn’t buy it for a
second. I couldn’t get the picture of that weird kid with the creepy
smile out of my mind. That kid was no cartoon character.

“I got to go to the bathroom,” I said.

“All right,” said Lenore. “But don’t take too long. Tomorrow’s a
school day.”

“Do what you got to do, bro,” said Nick as I got up and hurried off
to the main building.

I didn’t have to do anything, at least not in the bathroom. But I did
have to go. There was something about that kid Fezkul; something
about his voice, those teeth. I figured it must have been an optical
illusion, those rows of shark teeth, but still . . .

I was having what my dad called a curiosity attack. Ever since I
was two, these attacks would come on with varying intensity and
they would cause me to do all sorts of things which, looking back,
seemed pretty stupid: climbing telephone poles; sticking my head
through metal grating; one time, eating a bug. Dad told me that this
curiosity disease would — how did he put it? — “Doom you to a life of
journalism” (which is what he did before he quit the newspaper and
went into web design) “if it doesn’t get you killed first.”

What can I say? It’s a sickness.

I started my search for Fezkul at the museum, and checked out
the kids standing in line. There were only five of them, and twice as
many parents. None of them looked like a Fezkul.

So I headed for one of the dining buildings. It was nice out, so
there weren’t very many people inside, just a couple of clusters of
senior citizens who looked at me nervously while they munched on
Natchie Burgers. A teenager in a bright orange Natch uniform was
busy mopping up an immense puddle of something in the middle of
the floor. There were some old video games — which struck me as the
kinds of things that might attract a kid like Fezkul — but no. I nodded
at one old woman, who nodded back and looked away, and stepped
around the puddle, and so it was that I left the dining hall. Rather
than try the other one, I figured I’d head for the heart of Natch’s
Highway Grill and Fun-Park — the place where it had all started:
The grill house.

“Hey, Fezkul,” I said as I headed across the gravel to the old,
glassed-in former donut shop where Mr. Natch worked his barbecue
magic on squashed balls of ground beef and pepper. “Fezkul Fezkul
Fezkul,” I whispered. “Fezkul.”

Now I remember some fairy tales where if you say the guy’s name
five times, he shows up like magic. Rumplestiltskin comes to mind.
Or the dude in that old Clive Barker movie,
Candyman
.

That is not exactly what happened when I said ‘Fezkul’ five
times.

I was just about to step up to the door and worm my way inside,
when I felt the hot, sweaty hand of authority on my shoulder.

“Where’s your parents, kid?”

I turned around and found myself looking into the glaring,
stubble-covered face of — I glanced down at his nametag — Tom
Wilkinson. His nametag was pinned on the left pocket of his blue
security guard uniform. He did not look friendly, and he looked even
less friendly when I answered: “I don’t have any.”

I know that’s not entirely true. I have two perfectly good parents
and I love them to bits. But you have to understand: my parents
weren’t here and I was with my sister and her boyfriend on the way
back from the cottage to start school, and it was a lot easier to say I
didn’t have any parents because that was partway true right at the
moment and . . . and . . .

I panicked, all right? And it was a bad time to panic. I admit it.

Tom Wilkinson struck me as that kind of security guard who’d
gotten into the business after giving a really good try at being a
policeman and somehow not measuring up. Maybe he didn’t make
the academy because he was too fat (which he was) or because he
wasn’t bright enough (which from the look in his tiny squinty eyes
suggested he might not have been) or because he was just too evil for
police work and had flunked the evil detector test.

As he turned me around and held up the weird little wand that
they all carried close to my face, I was pretty sure that the evil
detector test was what had got him.

“You,” he said slowly, “are coming with me. Punk.”

I had to walk fast to keep up with Officer Tom as we made our
way through the line and around the back of the grill house. There
was an old, broken dumpster out back — the lid didn’t close properly,
and the sides were kind of bent out. Beside it was a big metal door
that said OFFICE on it, and I guessed correctly that that was where
we were going. “Inside,” he said as he swung the door open.

“Look,” I said, “I was kidding about not having parents.”

We were not in an office, but a little hallway. Ahead was a pair
of swinging doors that led to the grill — I could smell the seared
meat and deep fryer from here. But there was another door, also
marked OFFICE. This one was actually the top of a metal stairway
that went down two flights. “Down,” said Officer Tom. I did as I was
told, feeling terrible. At the bottom was another door, with OFFICE
written on it. I was beginning to feel like the whole OFFICE thing
was an elaborate joke. But this time, when we went through, there
was
an office. The room was walled in painted cinderblock, like a
school hallway but without any lockers. In the middle was a lime
green desk with a laptop computer plugged into a power bar big as
a two-by-four. Seated behind it was a skinny man, who was sipping
from a big bottle of water. He peered over it, first at me, then at
Officer Tom.

“Yes?” he said.

“Mister Natch,” said Officer Tom, “this kid knows Fezkul.”

So this was Mister Oliver Natch. I thought back to when I was a
kid — a real kid — to see if I remembered him. With his high forehead,
curly blond hair and wide, expressionless eyes, you’d think I would
have. But he didn’t register. Mr. Natch nodded quickly and set his
water down by the computer. And he knew about Fezkul.

“Does he?” he said, then turned his gaze on me. “You’re one of
Fezkul’s? You seem old.”

“I’m fourteen,” I said.

“Hmm. That is old.” He looked back at Officer Tom. “That
is
old,
Wilkinson. Why are you wasting my time?”

Officer Tom’s mouth opened and closed, and he blinked. I thought
that Natch might be doing something to Officer Tom’s airway, like
Darth Vader did in that old
Star Wars
movie. He looked like the sort
of guy who would do that.

“He-he was saying his name,” said Officer Tom. “A bunch of
times. I thought — ”

“Yes.” Mr. Natch looked at him like he was stupid, which was a
good way to look at Officer Tom. “You should be back on patrol,” said
Natch. “You know what day it is.”

Officer Tom nodded. “You want me to find this kid’s parents?”

“Back,” said Natch, “on patrol. I’ll talk with the boy a moment.”

Officer Tom left, muttering under his breath: “Patrol. Like I ever
see anything on patrol.” Although I never would have thought it, I
was sad to see him go. Mr. Natch tapped quickly on his computer
keyboard, squinted at the screen, and looked at me, hard.

“
Fezkul
,” he said finally, then said it again, more slowly. “What’s a
boy like you, doing saying
Fezkul
on a fine Labour Day Monday like
today?”

It was time to start telling the truth. “I heard a little girl say it,” I
said. “And then I saw another kid.”

Natch nodded.

“Another kid. With sharp short teeth in his mouth and in his
eye a mischievous glint? A glint that sometimes glows with inner
hellfire?”

Something in Mr. Natch’s own eye told me that my telling-the-truth idea was not a good one to stick to.

“I dunno,” I said.

Mr. Natch looked very serious and he leaned forward. “I don’t
think that’s true, now,” he said. “Do you? What did you say your
name was?”

I don’t know why, but I thought then about movies and books
where you told someone your name and it turned out they were a
wizard and they had power over you. So I said “Stan,” not Sam.

“Well, Stan,” said Mr. Natch. “Are you enjoying your day here? At
the fun park?”

“We’re just stopped here for a bite,” I said.

“Hungry work,” agreed Mr. Natch, “driving south.”

I shrugged —

“And you saw Fezkul.”

— and shrugged.

Mr. Natch’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t buying it, I could tell. But I
wasn’t ready to ’fess to anything either.

“Come around here, erm,
Stan
. I have something I want you to
see.”

I went around the desk and looked at the computer screen.
There were pictures on it — pictures that looked like they were from
security cameras, maybe during a big riot. Except the rioters weren’t
guys in bandannas; they were little kids. There was one where it
looked like a dozen kids were crawling all over an SUV. One of them
was bending its antenna at almost a right angle, and another one
was standing on top of the cab, holding what looked like a torn-off side view mirror over her head like it was a bowling tournament
trophy. There was another one where three kids were hefting one of
the RAIL MUSEUM’s signal posts between them while a bunch of
others watched on. Another showed five kids at a dumpster behind
the grill house, lifting what looked like a barbecue propane tank into
it. One of the kids had a long barbecue lighter and was flicking it.