Strays (14 page)

I should end this,
he thought. 
I should take Dad up on the offer and quit this route.
 

And yet he pressed on, rising and walking, lying down and dreaming, the never-ending definition of his life.  July had passed—it had not been all that long since Molly had left—and yet it felt an eternity, pushing the stone and watching it fall.  Soon, autumn enrollment would begin at K-South and he would be expected to go stand in line with a whole new crop of classmates to reject him.  At least Seby would be gone, some 130 miles northeast at Lawrence, unable to drag Kyle down any further.

Some mornings after his route he would walk to the library, sit on a swing in the playground behind it, and drink a full thermos.  He was through his first stash of vodka perhaps a bit too quickly, but Mr. Hansen was always amiable, and as long as Kyle had the cash, replenishing his reserve was not a problem.  It got to where the thermos was the only thing he looked forward to, that magical potion that made him funny and handsome and strong.  He sat on the park swings, ticking back and forth inches at a time, feet dragging the earth, working on the thermos.

It was during one of these times that he saw the second girl.

She was smaller than Molly, thin and pale, with hair a sandy blonde.  From Kyle’s vantage point on the dangling swing, he could see the girl at the edge of the park, right where the short stone wall drops off to the grass by the curb.  She was not looking at Kyle, but she peered about as if being watched, and then Kyle heard the voice:

“
Saaarraahhhh …
” it hissed, deeper than the voice of the old woman in the Methodist Church parking lot.  “
Sarrrahhh, let’s plaaayyyyy …
”

It seemed to come from everywhere, an invisible giant the size of a planet hovering over them, whispering lest the might of his voice rip them in half.  On instinct, Kyle leapt from the swing, his feet twisting about themselves as he fought to steady himself, and shuffled toward the girl.

“Over here,” he said.  “You, girl.  Over here …”

The young woman did not seem to hear him at first, but when he said the word
girl
she jumped.  Kyle continued to stumble toward her, the vodka doing a number on his head as he stretched his arms out to reach—

“
Let’s plaaayyyyyy …
”

It bellowed on the wind, echoed in the clouds, and even seemed to be a throb between Kyle’s eyes.  It was a hangover made flesh, taken to infinity, and he clutched his temples as he made his way to the girl.  She was small and she was dirty, and she looked like a child, and Kyle was overwhelmed with the desperate need to protect her.  He crooked his head backward, looking to the sky, trying to locate the source of that voice. 

“Come get some then,” he growled.  “By God, you come get some.”

The air was filled with a throaty laugh that rolled through the trees like thunder.  Kyle glanced over at the girl, who was on her knees now, holding her head in her hands.  She was just a child, barely able to stand on her own, it seemed.  He staggered a few steps toward her and turned with his back to her, looking into the trees.

“
Saarrrahhhhh …
” the voice whispered, a massive burst of steam.

“You come get some!” Kyle shouted.

“
Let’s plaaaayyyy, Sarrraahhhhh …
”

“You want her you come through me!”  His voice burned with the heat of the vodka he had been sipping, and he coughed to clear it, wincing with the sting.  “You come right through me,” he croaked.  “I’ll give you a fight!  I got nothing to lose, and I’ll give you such a fight like you nev—”

A blast of wind hit him in the chest, blunt as a fist.  Kyle felt his body lift off the ground, and he landed hard on his backside, rolling end over end to come to rest at a base of one of the old ash trees that had graced the park for generations.  The laughter was louder now, more insistent, making the earth tremble, and he groped for the tree’s ragged bark to push himself to his feet.  This was it, then.  This was his shot to be a hero.  Whatever it was, it could kill him.  At least he would die fighting, something he never did while living.

“Come get some!” he screamed.  “Come on out and play then!”

But there was no answer.  The wind was gone, the voice was gone, and when Kyle looked over at the edge of the park where the wall dropped off to the grass by the curb, the girl was gone too.  He was alone.  There had been no girl, no wind, no malevolent threat.  Worst of all, there had been no moment in need of a hero … which meant there had been no hero.  There had only been Kyle Winthrop, the lowest cockroach on the food chain.

In the end, perhaps this was a dream too.  He never knew because he didn’t remember waking up or walking home.  It was as if chunks of his life now were being erased like words on a chalkboard.  When he tried to transcribe the words into his history, there were pages missing, pieces of himself he could no longer retrieve.

This,
Kyle mused,
is what madness feels like.  This is what it is like to go mad.

And then it went dark. 

*   *   *   *

Something small and soft against his face.  Kyle blinked his eyes and the face was there, black and furry, eyes the color of blood.  It stood not more than five inches from his head as he lay on the grass, purring and sniffing about his eyes.

“Go away,” he told Seby’s damned cat.  “You’re nothing but trouble.”

He closed his eyes again, and a moment later, he felt hands on his face, lightly caressing his forehead.  He sighed, eyes still closed, and allowed the hands to work into his hair, stroking his head as if he were an old dog.

“Kyle.”

He groaned at the sweetness of the voice that spoke his name, not the bellowing monster in the sky but something close and gentle, something that cared for him.

“Kyle,” she said again.  “Wake up.”

He let his eyes ease open, and she was there, squatting at his side, touching his face to soothe him from that world into this.  When he saw her everything made sense, and he allowed himself to smile.

“Molly,” he said.

“Hello, you.”

“Where have you been?”

“I’ve been around.”

“I thought you left me.”

Molly smiled.  “I won’t deny I tried.”

Kyle blinked and looked her over.  She was pale and smooth, her bare skin shimmering in the moonlight.  “Where are your clothes?” he asked.

Molly laughed and ruffled his hair.  “You don’t like?”

Kyle tried to smile, but something pulled his eyes over to the edge of the park.  “There was a girl …”

“I know,” Molly said.  “I know all about her.  You have to get up, Kyle.  Right now.”

“I can’t,” Kyle said.  “I need more sleep.”

“You’ve been asleep too long.”  Her voice was almost a growl now. 

“But I can’t …”

“Kyle Winthrop, if you say
can’t
one more time, you will never see me again.”

Kyle looked at her dark eyes.  They now seemed to churn like boiling blood.

“That is a promise,” Molly said.  “I need you to get up now.”

Kyle shook his head sharply to clear it and planted his hands in the grass.  He pushed himself up into a sitting position.  Molly stood, offering full view of her naked body to Kyle, and extended a hand.  He took it, letting himself be pulled to his feet.

“What now?” he asked, trying not to stare at her.

“Now we go.”

“We?”

“Yes,” Molly said.  “You and me.”

“Where are we going?”

“Away from here,” she said.  “Far away from this town.” 

She looked up at him, her eyes going softer now, and she slid her arms around his waist, pulling her face close into his chest.  Kyle touched the smooth skin of her back and held her for as long as she allowed.  When she finally broke the hug, he looked into her eyes and saw that she was crying.

“What’s going on?” he asked.  “Tell me.”

“I will,” Molly said, wiping her eyes.  “But not now.  There’s no time.”

Kyle chuckled and felt the burn of the vodka in his throat again.  “We have
all
the time, Molly.  This is my life now, and I have all the time in the world.”

“I won’t argue,” Molly said, reaching up and touching his face.  She was not smiling.  “If we don’t go soon, Kyle, all the time in the world won’t amount to much time at all.”

Part III:
Vagabonds

The BTB

To this day, the locals still talk about the 1985 Landes Coyotes, who went 10-0 in the regular season and made it all the way to the 4A High School Football Regionals, falling to the 9-1 Derby Panthers 34-35 on a botched two-point conversion.  The boys may have lost, but they played their way into Kansas football lore.  Back in those days, football games were won on toughness and fundamentals, the victors abstaining from showmanship or trick plays, and the Landes ‘Yotes were no exception.  A year earlier, the team had been working offensive variations out of a classic veer formation with only one wide-out, two tight ends, and a quarterback and two running backs split in the backfield.  They passed the ball maybe 30% of the time, with most of the offense being ground out by one of the three exceptional backs: Brandon “Bran the Man” Shoch taking snaps; Dustin “DC” Catella flanked on the left but running like a traditional tailback; and big Marty Segerstrom as a kind of mobile fullback on the right.  The personnel looked essentially the same every down, the formation shifting sometimes to power I or a variation of wishbone, and from this set the ‘Yotes ran roughly 14 different blocking schemes and running plays, making their running game a force to be reckoned with. 

In early October 1985, with the ‘Yotes 5-0 and seemingly unstoppable, the football team held a school contest to see who among their classmates could come up with a cool nickname for this offense, something like The Four Horsemen of 1920s Notre Dame or The Three Amigos of present-day Denver Broncos.  The submissions they received ranged from the cliché (Three Musketeers) to the insulting (Three Stooges), but it was Seby Lee, of all people, who provided the winning moniker.  Seby, always more interested in academics than sports, nonetheless heard plenty of talk in the hallways about the mighty “three-backed” offense.  He had just finished
Othello
for extra credit in Honors English and for some reason couldn’t get Iago’s famous euphemism for sexual intercourse, “the beast with two backs,” out of his head.  Here was the perfect opportunity to be a wise-ass.  When Seby wrote “The Beast With
Three
Backs” on his suggestion form in home-room science class, he had meant to imply that Bran the Man, DC, and Marty secretly liked to create such a “beast” in the post-game showers.  Little did he realize that knuckle-dragging jocks less literate than himself would fall in love with the name.

That thrilling Regionals game of November ’85 was the last hurrah for the Marty, DC, and Bran the Man, and all three of them knew it.  Graduation was the following May, and although Marty and DC were being considered as walk-ons at Oke State and Mizzou, Bran the Man was considered too small for Div. I football and would be stuck playing at K-South … if he decided to play at all.  For the remainder of ’85, and the spring semester in ’86, the three backs milked their moment in the sun like death row inmates taking a final walk in the yard.  As long as they still had cachet in the LHS hallways, they worked their reps with swagger and aplomb.  After a time, “Beast With Three Backs” was no longer synonymous with the entire ‘Yotes offense but with the trio of backs themselves, and after shortening the trio’s handle to “Beast” and then “Three-Back,” Brandon came out with the acronym BTB, which seemed to him more “gangsta and cool.”

After graduation in May, the summer of ’86 was hard on the Bran the Man, in some ways even harder than it was on local paperboy, Kyle Winthrop.  Now far removed from the halls of Landes High and its adoring fans, Bran the Man was almost lost.  Without DC and Marty to ease the inexorable loneliness, he might have gone mad.  That summer would be the last that they had together, and they all knew it.  Afterwards, they would go off to separate colleges and start again from scratch, losing everything they had built for themselves since junior high. 

For Brandon, the BTB was making its final victory lap in Landes, Kansas.

For a time, the cinema offered a pleasant distraction from the inevitable.  Bran the Man had his wheels now—his father had signed over his ’82 Honda Accord as a graduation present—and the jaded trio made regular trips to Wichita to catch a movie.  Stallone was big that summer as a heavily armed cop named
Cobra
, and Arnold was pissed about the
Raw Deal
he had been given, but it was
Top Gun
that had captured their imaginations.  For the better part of June and July, the three friends must have gone to Wichita to watch Tom Cruise take on MiG-28s at least ten times.  Afterwards, if it was evening, they would wait outside one of the liquor stores on East Douglas until they could convince someone to buy them beer, then take the gravel roads home, abusing the Accord on what few hills they could find.  Once in awhile, if they hit an incline with enough speed, the car would actually fly into the air.  “Ground control to the BTB!” Bran the Man would shout, wishing that the moment would hang there forever.

The summer crept by.  Brandon grew restless.  Lazy afternoons were spent with the BTB on those same gravel roads looking for kicks.  For awhile they tried a game called “Kansas Surfing,” in which one person drove the Accord and the other two “surfed” on its hood.  Other times, they drove to the reservoir outside of nearby El Dorado to swim in what had once been a dry rock quarry before the building of a dam had flooded it.  There were girls at the quarry most days, girls from all the surrounding small towns who liked to watch the boys show off as they dived from the jagged cliffs.  Sometimes these girls were willing to kill more than a little time with Bran the Man and his friends.  But even this didn’t to satiate the emptiness and boredom that Bran the Man felt, and each waking minute he spent in the company of his two best friends only reminded him that they would soon be gone.