Strays (23 page)

Tom cocked his head and scratched rapidly behind his ear, the motion looking more feline than anything he had done in human form.  “There’s not much to tell,” he said.  “We only know a bit ourselves.”

“So tell me what you do know,” Sarah said.

Tom nodded and looked at her, and his eyes had softened, were almost laughing.  “I was sent up north to get you,” he said flatly.

“By who?” Sarah asked.  “Trudy?”

Trudy shook her head.  “Heavens, no.”

“Then who?”

Tom looked away and went back to scratching behind his ear.  “It’s not for me to say.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know, okay?”  His hand stopped scratching, and he placed it on the table, his fingers flexing as if trying to claw the linoleum top.  “I have my suspicions, but even that’s too crazy for anyone to believe, so let’s leave it at that.”  He looked back at her, and his eyes had stopped smiling.  “Someone had to come and get you, and I was the one to do it.”

“Why?”

“To protect you.”

“That’s not entirely true,” said Strawberry. 

“The hell it isn’t!”  Tom cocked his head to look at Strawberry, his mouth slightly open, and Strawberry met his stare, pursing her lips together.  Sarah almost laughed in spite of the moment.  What had she been worried about?  There was no chance that these two might become an item.  If anything, they quarreled like brother and sister, or at least the way brothers and sisters fought in the shows on TV.

“See here,” Tom, continued.  “Haven’t I protected Sarah?  Haven’t I kept her safe?”

“You got her here,” Strawberry said.  “And in one piece.  Your work is finished.”

“No,” Tom growled.  “It’s not finished.  Who’s going to look after her better than me?”

“You already know,” Strawberry said.

At this, Tom cocked his head back and laughed.  It was dry and acerbic, without little if any humor.  “Yeah,” he muttered.  “I know.  And forgive me if I don’t exactly have faith in
that
guy.”

“Who are we talking about?” Sarah interrupted.  “Is it the one—”

“The clown you’ve been dreaming about, yes,” said Tom.  “You told me about him on the bus, and I think I said then that I didn’t have much faith in him.”

“It’s not about
your
faith, Tom.”  It was Trudy who spoke, and she reached over to touch his hand the way Strawberry had done earlier from the opposite side.  “It’s his part in this.  It’s what he’s supposed to do.”

“Well, pardon me if I find that laughable.”

“What is your problem with him, Tom?” Strawberry now, tag-teaming the lone boy in the room from the other side.  “You don’t know him.  You haven’t even met him yet.”

“I know enough,” Tom said.  “So do you.”  He turned and looked directly at Sarah, eyes narrow and unblinking.  “We get word of these things, you know.”

Sarah met his gaze, which suddenly seemed cold and almost frightening.  “What do you know?”

Tom grinned with nary a hint of warmth.  “I know he can’t do what I can.”

“He’s not supposed to, Tom,” Strawberry barked.  “Have you ever thought of that?”

“I’ve thought of it.”  He glanced over at Trudy for support, but if there was any to be found he could not see it.  “Tell me,” he said, “do you think Sarah would be here if it had been him in the woods instead of me?  Do you think he would have stood a chance against any of them, against that freak with the long hair or against Jack in that car?”

“How do you know that?” Sarah barked.  Her voice was sharp and more adult than Tom had heard before.

Tom shrugged.  “I was there, wasn’t I?”

“No,” Sarah said.  “Listen to what I’m asking.  Twice you said the name of the man in the car.  Jack.  I remember the name because it reminded me of Jack the Ripper, and then I started thinking of him as Creepy Jack.  But I never said his name to you, not once.  So how did you know his name?”

Tom held her gaze, but already the stone edge in his eyes was weakening.  He took a deep suck of breath in his nose and leaned back as if repressing a sigh.  He shot a look at Strawberry, but she turned her head away, leaving him alone to deal with the question.  

“This boy,” he said, “the one that’s coming to be with you.  He can’t protect you.  That’s the bottom line.  He can’t protect you.  Not from your stepfather, not from that punk in the woods, and certainly not from Jack.”

“But he
has
to,” Strawberry said, still refusing to look at him.  “Can’t you get that through your thick skull?”

Tom grinned.  “It’s not a matter of what he
has
to do.  Sarah, you go to school, you take a test, you
have
to answer so many questions right to pass, right?”

“That’s right.”

“And if you don’t do them, you fail, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s what this thing is, right Strawberry?”

Strawberry looked at Sarah and rolled her eyes. 
Let him talk,
the eye-roll said. 
Let him get it out of his system.

“This thing is like a test,” Tom said.  “For him.  If this boy is going to protect you, he
has
to do certain things.  Which he can’t do.  Which he won’t do.  He’s going to fail.”

“Give him a chance,” Strawberry insisted.

Tom shook his head and grimaced like he was sniffing ammonia.  “I will be surprised if he even makes it here,” he muttered.  “I don’t think Jack lets that happen.”

“He’s traveling with a friend,” said Strawberry.  “She’ll take care of him.”

Tom’s grimace softened, and he pressed his lips together, sucking them in to turn his mouth into a thin line.  He drummed his fingers on the table and continued to shake his head.  “I don’t think she’s going to make it either,” he said, and real sorrow hovered in his voice.  “Not if she’s with
him
.  Not if she has to
rely
on him.”

Strawberry pushed herself away from the table, leaving her cup of tea untouched.  “I think he’ll prove you wrong,” she said.  She spun on her bare feet and thumped out of the room, disappearing in the narrow doorway to the dining room.

“That’ll be the day!” Tom called after her.  “In the meantime, I’m not letting Sarah out of my sight!”  He turned and fixed his eyes on Sarah again.  “Not out of my sight.”

Sarah did not turn away.  Tom’s eyes were fierce, but this was not the piercing stare of Big Buddy that used to reduce her to nothing in his presence.  This was an angry and perhaps frightened friend, someone who had promised her that she would be safe at all costs.  He was having a small tantrum right now, and it bothered her.  Not even her brother, Little Bud, had been so stubborn.  And yet, there was comfort in the knowing that this tantrum was for her, that his only wish was that she be protected.  Who could blame him for being afraid?  After all, she herself had also seen the boy, the one who came in dreams, gangly, awkward, not even able to withstand a single blow from the dream version of her brutish stepfather.  Tom was right to be worried.  She was a bit worried himself.  

She looked at Tom and smiled.  “You promise?” she asked.

Tom grinned, and his pale, freckled face softened.  “Promise.  I’m keeping my eye on you twenty-four-seven.”

“Not when I’m taking a shower, I hope.”  She looked at Trudy and angled her head the way Tom and Strawberry tended to do.  “Last time I cleaned up was yesterday morning, and that was in a stream a whole state away.”

Trudy took a sip of her tea and rose from the table.  “Let me get some fresh towels.” 

*   *   *   *

Sarah took her shower and spent the afternoon with her new friends, talking, laughing, learning.  They sat down for dinner just after six p.m., the gentle sun still hanging somewhat high in the Pacific Northwest sky.   Trudy prepared eight freshly cleaned trout that one of her neighbors had caught from a nearby pond.  She battered the fish in flour and fried it in a skillet, and the smell floated into the yard, making the crowd of cats pace about and mewl. 

Just as Trudy brought the platter of fish to the table and told everyone to dig in, Sarah felt a chill, as if a gust of arctic air had found a crack in the wall.  There was the awful sense that something else was in the room, perhaps standing in the narrow doorway to the dining area, just back in the shadows and watching.  She wanted to turn and check, just to make sure they were alone, and yet she feared that if she
did
see something there, snorting and grinning from the darkness of the hallway, she would go mad and scream louder than she had in the C-store bathroom two nights prior.  As she gripped the table and swallowed down her panic, a soothing hand fell upon her shoulder.

“You okay?” Tom asked.

“Yeah,” she said.  “Just a little … what do they call it?  Panic attack?”

Everyone was silent but had stopped eating to listen.

“You know,” Sarah joked.  “Like a cat walked across my grave.”

“You have plenty of cats here to walk across it for you,” Trudy said with light chuckle.  “Maybe we’ll hold a lottery to see which one gets to go first.”

The others laughed, and although it wasn’t all that rich and wonderful, it was enough to distract Sarah from the fear.  The chill did not go away, not entirely, and as she poked at her fish, which was really quite good once she took a taste of it, she found herself glancing out the window to her right, out into the golden evening and the sea of cats that stood at the ready in the yard.  Something was coming, she knew, something awful.  She wondered if even Tom was enough to stop it.  She hated to admit it, but she agreed with him about the silly boy she saw in her dreams.  If this was her protector, he sure didn’t seem to have much of anything working at the moment.

At the same time, almost a thousand miles to the east at a gas station in Ft. Collins, Colorado, that silly boy was getting his first real look at evil, a vulgar creature in biker’s clothes worse than a hundred Big Buddies … a thing that called itself Jack.

Kyle vs. “Dad”

About an hour after his stand-off with Jack at the Ft. Collins C-store, Kyle and Molly were hitting the I-80 junction north at Cheyenne, where they caught the interchange and headed west across Wyoming.  The sun was low above the far horizon, that perfect spot that managed to burn a driver’s eyes as it hovered in the sky just below the sun visor.  Kyle stretched and pushed himself up so the visor blocked the scarlet sky, focusing his eyes on the white dashed line that marked the middle of the lane.  Molly blinked and shielded her eyes, and finally she lay back down, her head resting on Kyle’s leg, and within minutes Kyle could feel her hot breath through his jeans again.  He drained the last of his soda, which was riding in between his legs, and reached over to turn on the radio.

The Impala’s radio was nothing to brag about.  It had an oblong dial with numbers and notches like a ruler, and little red bar that slid up and down the ruler when you turned the big silver knob on the right.  The only other features of the radio were a second knob on the left to control the volume and five stiff silver buttons that could be set to preferred stations.  The buttons had been programmed years earlier by his grandfather, who liked to listen to the farm reports when he was out and about, and Kyle never found a favorite station when living back in Landes because the radio was strictly AM, with no FM and not even a decent tape deck.   

He turned the silver knob on the left and heard the click of the radio tugging in power from the Impala’s large battery.  There was a crackle of static, and Kyle turned the far right knob, listening to the ghostly noises as he tried to tap a frequency.  It took two passes, but finally he picked up the end of a commercial, and then the low buzz of what sounded like a baseball crowd.  He paused and listened, and sure enough, it was baseball.  An announcer named Dave Niehaus welcomed Kyle back to the Kingdome, where the Seattle Mariners went into the bottom of the fifth holding a 4-2 lead over the California Angels.

Kyle did not like baseball, that was no secret, but right this moment he needed to hear it.  He had more than a few memories of long evening drives with the family when he and his brothers were still children, usually on a summer vacation with Dad wanting to drive that extra hour to get to the perfect campground.  Baseball had been a part of these drives, and Dad liked to fumble the radio dial for several minutes until he found a game.  Once the gentle rhythms of the announcer’s cadence began to flow into the car, Dad’s shoulders would soften, and the tension in his neck would seem to ripple away, and he often pushed the drive even further just so he could listen to a little more of the game. 

No, Kyle did not like baseball.  But he did like the peace that it had once brought, the musical tones of the announcer flowing first to Dad and then through and to the rest of the car.  Pleasant memories, those.  He turned the volume up just a tad and listened.  Kirk McCaskill was on the mound for the Angels, facing the top of the Mariners order.  John Moses drew a lead-off walk, and Phil Bradley, batting second, followed suit, sticking McCaskill with runners on first and second with nobody out.  When Jim Presley (no relation to Elvis, Kyle assumed) stepped up to the plate and slammed the ball over the left-field wall for a three-run home, Kyle figured the game was over.

He reached over and twisted the right knob again.  Molly did not stir, and her breath was barely felt now, so deep was her slumber.  Kyle explored the dial and found a plucky little melody being coaxed out of a sharp acoustic guitar, a bouncy piano following it note for note.  Kyle knew this tune.  It was from one of his brother Eddie’s jazz albums, a guitarist named Earl Klugh that Eddie had tried to emulate.  Kyle could not remember the name of the song, but he could see the album cover, a tight shot of an open matchbook with only two matches left, since the album was one of Klugh’s collaborative effort with a keyboardist whose name escaped Kyle at the moment.  The quality of the music was harsh and sizzling on the old AM, but Kyle listened all the same.  Eddie had moved out of the house years earlier, but suddenly Kyle ached for a time when the family was together, when Kyle was but a boy, too fixated with going to see the second
Star Wars
movie to pay attention to the elegant music filtering out of Eddie’s room.