Strays (13 page)

There was no sign of her. 

He wished that he had brought his thermos.  He had not needed it in awhile, but he needed it now.  Still, if he remembered right, it was almost empty when he had last hid it in the root cellar, and he had no more bottles from which to replenish it.

Kyle grunted and looked to the east.  The horizon was bluing, but it was still dark enough.  With sharp strides he headed back west down Amurcork, then crossing on the alley over to the 600 block of Pinoak.  He looked for the glowing cherry of Old Man Hansen’s cigarette on his porch.  It was there, of course, and Kyle strode up the walk to meet his favorite customer.

“Hey, Kyle,” Mr. Hansen said.  “Where’s that little girl I been seeing you with?”

“She’s been sick,” Kyle said.  “I was wondering if I could ask—”

“Say no more,” Mr. Hansen interrupted.  “The usual?”

“I was thinking a bit more.  Like maybe five bottles.  Pay you a C-note.”

“C-note?  Where you come off talking like that?”

“It was in some gangster movie on cable.  It means a hundred dollars.”

“I know what it means.  Look, a hundred’s too much.  You’ve already been paying almost four times too much.  I’ll get you five bottles for eighty bucks.”

Later that morning, Kyle took a walk down to Capital Federal Savings on Central and Gortner and withdrew $100 from his passbook savings.  He checked the account balance.  It was still just under $2200.  He would be fine.

That night at dinner, Kyle told his parents he was driving to Wichita to see a movie.  It was not an uncommon thing what with the Landes Theater closing three years earlier. 

“What movie are you planning to see?” Mom asked.

Kyle told her
The Karate Kid Part II
had opened that weekend.

“Are you going with anyone?”

“Maybe Seby if he wants,” Kyle lied.

“I don’t think you should be driving in Wichita at night,” Mom said.  “It’s not a safe place.”

“He’s an adult now,” said Dad.  “He can do what he wants.”

Grandpa’s 1973 Impala, the car that had been given to Kyle, was a massive beast, four doors, bench seats, an engine that roared like a dragon, and a chassis built like a tank.  Of course, 1973 was not quite the year to make it a classic—those would be the rag-tops from around 1970—but it was sturdy and it ran well. 

Kyle grabbed a stack of towels from the laundry room in the basement, tossed them in the back seat, and drove over to Old Man Hansen’s house on the 600 block of Pinoak.  He backed into the driveway.  Mr. Hansen was sitting on the front porch, and for the first time, in the evening light, Kyle got a good look at the man.  Hansen was thin as an ax handle, almost so thin he made Seby Lee look like a linebacker.  He wore gray canvas slacks that were too big for him and hung like clown pants on suspenders.  When he saw Kyle back the car into the drive, he rose from his chair on the front porch and shuffled down the steps.

They made the exchange in the back of the house.  Kyle took the towels from the car and went into the back of Mr. Hansen’s house, into his kitchen.  The smell of cigarette smoke was heavy as pewter.  Hansen had purchased the five bottles of vodka, each a fifth of a gallon in size.  Carefully, Kyle wrapped each bottle in a towel to pad it.  Then, one at a time, he delivered each bottle to the vehicle and slid it under the seat on the passenger side.  By the time he was finished, the bottles were packed in tight, too tight to move and unable to clink each other with the towels wrapped around them.  Kyle figured he had the only keys to the Impala and that as long as he lay low and kept up a nice “good son” façade with his parents, Dad would have no reason to search the car.

He paid Mr. Hansen with four crisp $20 bills from the bank. 

“So what’re you up to t’night?” Mr. Hansen asked.  “Seeing that little cutie with the dark hair?”

“Driving over to Wichita to see a movie.”

“Got something for you.”  He went into the house, rummaged around, and returned with a paper bag with water stains on it.  “Got five beers in there four you.  Makes the drive a little shorter.  Don’t take the highway though.  Cops like to set up camp out there.  Take the back roads over by the landfill.”

Kyle thanked him and took the beers.  He did not drive to Wichita.  He drove instead to Landes Lake and parked on the dam and sat on the hood of his car, listening to the water and drinking his beer. 

This is how it feels, he thought.  This is how it feels to be the last man on earth.

*   *   *   *

Sunday morning, he was up at the usual time, a sharp tightness in his temples.  He stumbled downstairs, rubbing his forehead, and when he went out the front door to pick up the heavy Sunday bundles of the
Eagle
, Seby was there waiting for him. 

“Hey, Kay-Dub,” he said.  “Need a little help?”

“No,” Kyle said.  “I don’t need any help.”

But Seby stayed all the same.

They rolled the papers together, and they walked the route together, and Seby talked.  He talked about the movies coming out that he wanted to see, and he talked about the comic books and fantasy novels that he had read.  He talked about watching TV with his stepdad, and how said stepdad had been so much nicer to him since that cat had come along. 

“For real, Kay-Dub,” Seby chattered.  “I mean, he comes home from work and that cat is right there in his lap, and instead of yelling and throwing things he’s actually pretty cool.  I read somewhere that cats take away your stress without absorbing it themselves.  You ever hear that?”

“No,” Kyle said.  “I don’t read much.”

Seby, without skipping a beat:  “So what are you doing now that we’re graduated?  Where are you going to school?”

“Dad’s got me going out to the college, to K-South,” Kyle said.

“Oh, too bad.”

“Something wrong with K-South?” Kyle snapped.  “My Dad teaches there, and if you’re talking bad about my Dad, so help me—”

“No way,” said Seby.  “I wouldn’t say nothing about your Dad.  He’s way cooler than the one my Mom brought home, I can tell you.  No, I just thought maybe you’d be wanting to get out of here, you know?  As long as you’re going to the college here in town, you’re kind of stuck.”

“Something wrong with here?”

“Nothing at all,” Seby admitted.  “But this is a small place.  You’n me, we belong in a big place.”

“So what big place are
you
going to?” Kyle asked.

“Got a scholarship at KU.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, I’m a National Merit Finalist.  Scored in the 97th percentile on my SATs.  How’d you do?”

“I don’t know,” Kyle said.

“What?”

“I didn’t bother to see.”

“Oh, Kay-Dub.  You’ve got to get out of this place.”

There was no argument there.  Kyle looked at Seby as they walked and struggled with a hideous urge to punch him.  This is what that cat had done for him all those years ago.  Not only did it demote Kyle to the lowest echelons of social status in high school, but it had also empowered the one-time freak and “faggot” Seby Lee.  Now Seby was getting out, off to make something of himself, and he, Kyle, would be stuck in their small town forever, alive, unhappy, and now—thanks to Molly’s disappearance and Seby’s upcoming migration—friendless as well.

Congratulations,
Seby,
Kyle thought. 
I’ve now become a bigger loser than you.

But if Seby could hear his thoughts he was not listening.  He just continued to talk, and Kyle continued not to listen, and he shuffled the rest of his route without speaking, longing for his thermos and a lifetime of silence.

*   *   *   *

As July crept in and the days grew hot and sticky, the uneasy dreams became lost in the Kyle’s mornings.  Far too often, Kyle would find himself trudging his route, the weight of the newspapers far more arduous than usual, each step as heavy as an anvil.  He would sweat in the nighttime humidity, and gnats would buzz about his face, and just when the route was finished and he would stumble up the driveway to the cool of his parents’ central air conditioning, a song would buzz in his ear, Peter Gabriel and his “Sledgehammer” or Kenny Loggins crooning about the “Danger Zone” or Janet Jackson reminding him it was “Miss Jackson if you’re nasty.”  And he would flutter his eyes open, still in bed and waking to the clock radio, sick with the realization that it had all been a dream and the misery of the paper route in the heavy summer air was still before him.

The dreams of doing the route became so frequent that at first it seemed he had two different paper routes to walk.  Later, both dream-route and waking-route overlapped into one big paper route until the route was his whole reality, the essence that defined him.  Kyle would slouch about the street, canvas paper-bag bouncing at his side, his mind’s edge carefully dulled by the contents of his thermos, no longer aware of where dream-route ended and waking-route began. 

The awful morning he saw the old woman, he could not tell if she was real or imagined.

This much he remembered about that morning.  He had come around the corner where Taylor met Central, and he was tramping east in front of the Methodist Church.  It had to be a Sunday because the papers were larger on that day and sometimes took two trips.  It seemed he was heading back to the house for a second load, but not even that was certain, for if it
was
Sunday, why was Seby not with him? 

He had taken the sidewalk past the front steps of the church and was cutting across the empty parking lot when he saw her, an old woman in polyester pants the color of dead leaves, a gray sweater pulled over her shoulder.  She was skidding her shoes as she baby-stepped across the lot, moving as slow as a migraine, body no doubt wracked with arthritis and osteoporosis.  Kyle had no idea what an old woman was doing wandering the Methodist Church parking lot at five in the morning.  He guessed that she lived nearby, perhaps with the family of one of her grown children, and it was quite possible that in her demented state she had wandered out into the night.  Whatever the case, it made him uneasy—“gitchy” as some of the locals liked to say—and he hastened his step to pass the old woman and be done with her.

In the light from the parking lot lamps, his shadow extended in front of him a good eight feet, an inky scar across the asphalt.  The old woman’s shadow, shorter than his own but long and icy nonetheless, was also there, cast out in front of her.  Kyle walked with quick, brisk steps, striding past the woman without saying so much as boo, and then he was in front of her, moving to put distance between the two of them. 

But then he looked at the asphalt before him.  Two shadows, his own long silhouette, lumpy with the canvas paper-bags that hung from him like dead skin … and the murky outline of the old woman.

Impossible, he thought.  He picked up his pace, trying to outrun the shadow, but sure enough the old woman’s dark outline stayed right there with his, matching him stride for stride, cast long and ugly from just behind his shoulder.  Kyle thought about turning, thought about confronting her.  There was no way this old woman could have moved that fast, no way she could have kept up with him that way.  And yet there was her shadow, hovering next to his own, pacing him gentle and relentless.

Kyle stopped, and the shadow stopped with him.  Even in its elongated form, he could see the outline of the old woman’s nappy hair tossed askew, the hump of her shoulder as she hunched forward.  He took a step.  The shadow moved with him, as if attached to his own shadow like a sidecar. 

Kyle felt a thick ache in the pit of his stomach, low and burning as if his bladder was filling with acid.  He took another step and watched his shadow glide forward.  The old woman’s shadow matched him, remaining in perfect proximity with his own.  He took another step, this one sideways, watching to see if there would be separation from her shadow.  There was none.  The old woman’s shadow slithered sideways, tethered to his own. 

He remembered something he had heard in church, something from the Bible written by Paul: “When I would do good, evil is present with me.”  He had no idea why he thought of this verse at that moment.  It wasn’t like he was trying to do good, and there was no evidence that the woman was evil.  But like that verse, the shadow of the woman was ever present, refusing to be abandoned, clinging to Kyle like greasy little Seby Lee had clung all through high school. 

The ache in his stomach began to burn.  Thoughts of Seby Lee had that effect on him anyway, but this time the rage was turning on the creepy old woman who was now stalking him through the Methodist Church parking lot.  Who did she think she was?  She wasn’t his mother.  He didn’t owe her anything.  Why couldn’t she just—

“
Heeeeroooo …
”

The voice had come from behind, from the owner of that shadow lingering next to his.   The shadow itself stood fast, but that voice, high and husked like a bag of broken glass, sounded to be right on top of him.

“
Looking for a heeeerooooo …
” the old woman said.  “
Looking for yoooouuuu …
”

The shadow began to change then.  It stretched and spread, a pool of leaking black blood pouring across the lot.  Kyle saw the shape of two arms jut from the shadow’s side, crooking elbows out and then twisting and rising above its head as it crept up to grab him.

“
Let’s plaaayyyyyyy …
”

He was running then, feet pounding hard down the street, his back teeth grinding into his cheeks to keep from screaming.  He did not remember making it home, and he did not remember waking up with the sounds of the clock radio announcing his day.  He only remembered the woman and the shadow and running as he did, and in the end, as vivid as the memory of that moment was, he still could not vouch for its veracity. 

The Other Girl

It seemed a cliché, but the story of Sisyphus came to mind.  Eternity in Hades, pushing a stone up a hill only to have it roll back to the bottom once he neared the top.  That was the paper route for Kyle, that eternally rolling stone.  Every night in his dreams, over and over he walked the route, sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes three or four times.  And then awake, walking the route for real, his great sorrow numbed by the contents of the thermos, and then back home, back to bed, to dream of the route some more.  Some nights, the route went easy, like Mondays when the papers were very light.  Other times, the route went hard, like Wednesdays when the paper was packed with what seemed like hundreds of pages of ads and inserts.