Strays (15 page)

*   *   *   *

It was just another Saturday night, and Bran the Man was alone.  He had called DC to see what was up, but DC had gotten the number of a girl he’d met at the quarry and had a date that night.  Next, Bran the Man called Marty, and here he hit another dead end: Marty’s grandparents were in town, and he needed to stay close to home.

And so it was on this night—one week before Kyle and Molly would leave Landes, but the same night that Sarah Smallhouse was stealing away from her nightmare of a life in Tacoma—that Bran the Man took to the streets alone. 

He drove up and down Main Street for awhile, but the sidewalks rolled up early even on a weekend.  He thought about driving over to Wichita, but without the other two-thirds of the BTB it seemed like a waste of time.  In the end, he drove north on the main highway that cut through the business district until he reached the Last Chance Liquor Store at the upper edge of town.  He pulled into the shadows, just out of sight of the picture windows that graced the storefront, and killed the engine of the Accord.  It was a slow night for Last Chance.  Nevertheless, when the right customer appeared, he would know it.

Much to his surprise, the customer found him.  He had not been there ten minutes when someone slapped the roof of the Accord twice—
ba-dam-bam!
—making Bran jump in his seat.  He shot a look out his open driver-side window, and the stranger was there, shadow-eyed and almost ordinary-looking were it not for the abundance of facial fur.  His hair was full, puffing about down to his shoulders, a deep reddish tint with wisps of gray, and the beard—that amazing beard—belonged on a Viking storming the shores of North Africa.  His eyes were dark and a bit too round and empty.  Brandon squinted and could not see the whites of them.  They reminded him of the eyes of the shark in
Jaws
(which was a regular staple on cable), but then for just a second they seemed to flicker like fluorescent lights coming on.  The mass of fur that covered the stranger’s chin parted to reveal a pale but even smile.

“Whatcha doing?” the stranger asked.

“Huh?” Bran the Man stammered.  “Oh, just … you know, just waiting.”

“Waiting for someone to buy you beer, I ‘spect,” the stranger replied.  He held that smile as perfect as a mannequin.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I know.  I was young once myself.  What do you want?”

Bran the Man looked him over but only for a second.  The stranger was here and he was willing.  He would do.  “Just a six-pack,” he said.  “Whatever’s cheap.”

“You got it.”  The bearded stranger tapped the top of the car again and strode across the gravel parking spaces next to the store’s dock.  He was tall, Bran realized, and he wore faded jeans with thready patches worn in places.  His t-shirt was black and without sleeves, and although his arms were thin, the muscles looked chiseled and powerful.  He reached for the door with his left hand, then turned and grinned back at Brandon.  Bran could see a dark tattoo on the right bicep, a name or a word, but before he could make it out the stranger pulled open the door to the liquor store and disappeared inside.

Minutes later, he stepped back out of the store with something in a paper bag and walked back to the Accord with long strides.  Bran the Man noticed something folded in his other hand, what looked like a magazine of sorts.  The stranger sat the sack on the ground, stooped, and leaned his elbow against the door, grinning inside the window.

“Miller’s on sale for four-ninety-nine,” he said.  “I’ll cover the tax, so five’ll call it even.”

Bran dug into his back pocket for his wallet.  “You sure?  I’ve got change for tax in the ashtray.”

“I’m sure.  Five’ll do.”

Bran flipped open his wallet and peered out the window.  “Didn’t get anything for yourself?”

“Nah.  I don’t drink.  I bought this.”  He held up the folded magazine with his other hand.  Bran could make out the Ford Truck logo from an ad printed on the back of the periodical.

“So why did you buy that beer for me if you didn’t want any yourself?”

The stranger shrugged, and one of his pointed shoulders stretched the fabric of the t-shirt.  “I was just out taking a walk and saw a brother in need.”

Bran pulled out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the stranger.  The stranger’s arm was leaning on the jamb of the window—his right arm as the stranger was turned to the front of the car—and Bran noticed the tattoo for the first time.  It was a single name, four letters, etched in a rough attempt at dripping, melting font:
JACK
.

“Jack,” Bran the Man repeated.  “That you?”

“At your service.” 

The stranger, Jack, picked up the bag of beer and passed it into Brandon’s car.  He made no attempt to be careful or covert about it.  Bran snatched the bag quickly, tucking it down on the floorboards on the passenger side.  When he sat back up, Jack was still there, leaning into his window, and showed no signs of leaving anytime soon.

“Well,” Bran said.  “Thanks.”

“I know you?” Jack asked.

“No, sir,” Bran the Man replied.  “I don’t think so.”

“No, I know you,” Jack insisted.  “You’re that quarterback out at the high school.  What was it they called you?  The Beast of something or other.”

Bran the Man grinned.  He had thought the community had forgotten.  “Beast With Three Backs,” he said.  “BTB, baby.”

“Yeah, that’s right.  Man, I loved watching you guys play last fall.”

“Thanks again,” Bran the Man said.

“Shoch, right?  Brandon Shoch.”

“Yes.”

“And those other two guys, Catella, Segerstrom.  They were pretty good too.  But you, man …” Jack shook his head and chuckled.  “You were a field general out there.”

“Thanks, man,” Bran the Man said.  “I appreciate it.”

“So, Brandon,” Jack began, “what’s up next?”

“Uh, next?”    

“You know, where are you going with your life now that you’ve graduated?”

Bran the Man shrugged.  “I hadn’t really thought about it.  Might play football out at K-South, but no one’s offered me a scholarship or anything.”

“I don’t mean
that
, Bran,” Jack said, shortening Brandon’s name the way everyone did in high school.  “College, man, it’s just purgatory.”

“Purgatory?”

“You know what that is, Bran?”

Bran the Man shook his head.  “Something like hell.”

“It’s the place between this life and the next,” Jack said.  “You die, right?  And purgatory is where you go to be purified for heaven.  You’re kind of stuck in the middle there.  Catholics, man, they’re great storytellers.”

“Yeah,” said Bran the Man.

“That’s what college is, Bran,” Jack continued.  “It’s a purgatory … a
manhood
purgatory.  The boys back here in high school think you’re now a man.  But the men out here in the real world think you’re still a boy.  Turns out you’re neither.  Purgatory.”

Bran the Man nodded, considering this.

“So you need to be a man
right now
, Bran,” said Jack.  “You need to get your ass out there and do manly things.”

Bran the Man looked at him, at those icy shark’s eyes and that abundant beard-framed smile.  He wondered for some reason how old Jack was.  Too old to be fresh out of one of the high schools at a neighboring town.  He was older, maybe 30, 40, probably some dead-end loser working at the local foundry.  Still, there was something about him that Bran the Man liked.

“What kind of manly things?” Bran the Man asked.

At this, Jack offered the magazine and unfolded it to reveal the cover.  It was an image of a large rubber raft, oval-shaped but angled on one end, its inflatable tube as big around as a large barrel.  It was wide enough to accommodate what looked like six individuals, dressed in bright orange life-jackets and waggling paddles in multiple directions, and the rest of the picture was a splash of gray-and-white foamy water.  The title of the magazine was
WHITE FURY
, and in the lower left-hand corner of the cover were printed the words:
CASCADE CRAZY!  SHOOTING THE DESCHUTES
.

“Deschutes,” Bran said.  “What’s that?”

“It’s a river,” said Jack.  “In the Cascade Mountains in Oregon.  I try to raft there at least twice a year.  Matter of fact, I’m heading up to Maupin next week.”

“Where’s Maupin?”

“Little town in Oregon, right on the Deschutes,” Jack explained.  “Meeting some buddies up there to shoot the rapids.”

“Sounds cool.”

“Ever whitewater raft before, Bran?”

Bran shook his head.  “No place to raft around here.”

You ought to hit the Deschutes with us.  Bring your friends too.”

“Seriously?” Bran the Man asked.  “Head out to Oregon with you?”

“Not
with
me,” Jack admitted.  “I’ve got some traveling to do, so I won’t be at Deschutes until … let’s see …”  He scratched his beard, and his lips puckered, drawing the wooly mustache down to cover the upper half of his mouth.  “First Monday in August, that’d be a week from now.  You could leave next weekend and drive it, probably go all night and be there before me.”

“Yeah,” Bran the Man said.  “That would be cool.”

“Come on out to Maupin.  Bring your buddies too, those two guys you used to play football with.  You guys can hook up with me and my friends, and we’ll show you how to run the rapids.”  Jack nodded as if it was already decided, and when he finished he thrust a hand into the window of the car.  “Sound like a deal?”

Bran the Man looked at the hand and then at the wooly face of the stranger who had been kind to him.  The eyes were still two black holes, no color or life within, but it did not matter, not at that moment.  He gripped Jack’s hand and offered it a firm shake.

“Deal,” he said.

“All right, my man.”  They broke the handshake, and Jack patted him on the shoulder.  “Monday next, then.  And you
will
bring your friends, right?”  His voice dipped into a shallow darkness, making this sound like a command.  “Dusty and Marty?”

Bran the Man grinned, never pausing for a moment to consider how Jack knew so much..  “Sure, I’ll talk ‘em into it,” he said.  “Our last hurrah before we go off to college.” 

“I’ll be looking for all three of you, Bran.”

“Where will I find
you
?”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Jack said, pushing himself back up to his feet.  “I’m real, real easy to find.”

Boy In the Closet/Cat In the Bag

The wallpaper was as Sarah remembered it, a repeating pattern in various shades of piss-yellow that looked to her young eyes like a cross between a fleur-de-lis and a bouquet of paramecium.  She had learned both of these obscure terms in school,
paramecium
because her favorite class was Science with Mr. Hall, and
fleur-de-lis
because a boy she kind of liked wore a t-shirt with a New Orleans Saints helmet embossed on it, and Sarah had asked Mrs. Jackson, her English teacher, what that symbol on the helmet was called.  At one point, she had tried to cover the wallpaper’s ugly recurring pattern with posters of Peter Frampton and Sylvester Stallone, but Big Buddy had ripped them down, claiming that they would damage the walls and he would get less back on his security deposit.

Sarah whiplashed awake, bolting upright in the short twin bed with bad springs and looked around.  “No,” she whispered.  No … not here …”

They had moved into the house on South Tacoma Way when she was 11 years old, when Big Buddy claimed that Little Buddy had wanted a room of his own.  That turned out to be a lie; every night after Sarah went to sleep, Little Buddy was there within minutes, crawling in between the sheets to sleep with her.  Later, when Big Buddy would come for her, he would chuckle a little at the loveliness of his son, carry the sleeping boy back to his own bedroom, and then stamp back down the hall in his filthy boots to play the game.  Sarah would hear him coming, scuffing the boots and staggering into the wall of the hallway after the requisite number of beers, and then he would be there, in the doorway like something out of the late night Creature Feature, framed in the heavy shadows cast by the single 40-watt bulb Sarah left on in the closet.

“Hey, little girl,” he would groan.  “Let’s play.”

Sarah snapped her head to the doorway, and he was there, Big Buddy in his muddy boots, his old work coveralls reeking from the stench of a thousand cigarettes.  There it was, then.  This was what was real.  She was back in the house on South Tacoma Way, a place that she had come to think of as the Nightmare House, and here was Big Buddy, hovering in her doorway and ready for the awful game.  The last few weeks of being on the road, crouching in C-store bathrooms, dashing in terror through the woods, and at last taking comfort in a mysterious boy named Tom … all of it had been a dream.  She had not escaped.  There was no hope out there, waiting in the woods to save her.  This was the real, the awful, her dark and terrible castle lorded by a giant called Big Buddy.

“You awake, little girl?” Big Buddy growled.  “Let’s play.”

Something twitched in the corner of Sarah’s eye, a shadow cast across the wall that wasn’t there before.  She knew every shadow of this room, from the shape her hanging clothes made against the south wall by the bulb of her closet to the silhouettes of the trees at various stages of foliage from the street lamp out her window.  But this was a new shadow now, mingled in with the shape of her clothes, something wavering and lurching from deep within her coffin-sized closet.

From the doorway of the room, Big Buddy took a step inside.  He leaned against the open door, thudding it hard against the north wall.  Sarah jumped at the noise and imagined the doorknob pocking the awful wallpaper, those twisted vomit-gold bouquets that in the right light looked like laughing faces. 
That’s going to leave a mark,
she thought. 
That won’t be good for your security deposit.

The shadow on the south wall grew larger, and Sarah could see the thing now, whatever it was, slapping about in her closet.  It did not make a sound; there was no jangling of coat hangers, no whish of her hanging clothes as whatever it was tried to claw its way to the surface of her world.  It was as if she was watching a silent movie of it all, Big Buddy coming from the hallway, some new monster coming from her closet, two horrors for the price of one.