Tom Finder (6 page)

It was getting dark, but he knew these streets like the back of his hand now, and they were both broken.

Chapter 4

I chattered—and that was bad.

– Act 2, scene 29

On the way back to the island, Tom sauntered back and forth in front of the police headquarters. For the first while he hoped someone would come running out, saying they had just got his picture and his parents were searching frantically for him and what was wrong with his poor hand. When that didn't happen, he hoped he'd get the guts to go in. Finally, he gave up, told himself he'd go in on a hungry day when there wasn't anything in his stomach to throw up.

As usual, Tom saw Samuel Wolflegs on the bench by the river.

He was getting used to the routine. “What did you find today, Tom Finder?” Samuel said to him as he came closer. “Never mind. Looks like you found a fight.”

“Sort of,” Tom said.

Samuel led him to the river and got him to put his hand in the water. It felt good. In a few minutes Samuel looked at it, made Tom move his wrist, his fingers.

“Hospital,” Samuel said.

“No,” Tom said.

Samuel didn't argue. “Not much they can do with hands anyway.” He pulled an enormous handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped Tom's hand up snugly. “So, what did you find today, Tom Finder?”

“Food” and “money” had been good enough the first few times he'd been asked to report. After that they had not been acceptable answers. Samuel Wolflegs liked to hear answers that told him Tom was looking, really looking. He would look at him with a wolf in his eyes which made the hair stand straight up on Tom's forearms and made Tom remember that this man knew where he slept. He had grown so thin that Tom didn't think he could hurt him much, but his wolf's eye had grown hungrier. His beautiful beaded jacket hung loose on him.

“I found that if you look in their eyes, people have signs just like streets,” Tom said.

For a moment the wolf looked as if it would prefer to eat pizza rather than boy.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Well, most people have ‘yield' signs in their eyes: You may sit here as long as you don't sit too long. Security guards have yield signs. The priest at the cathedral on Seventh has a ‘one way' sign. The train cops and the police have ‘stop' signs: you can't sit here, you can't eat here. Then there's the do-gooders. Nice people, bring you tea and sandwiches, but their eyes have signs saying ‘no exit.' And then there's some people who have ‘danger' signs . . .”

Samuel nodded. “You are a Finder,” he said, almost as if to comfort himself. “You know those danger signs, Tom, but watch out for those with ‘dead end' eyes, too. They seem like friends at first, but you meet them at night in the dark. You cannot see that they only want to rob you, and not just of money.”

Tom looked for the peach Samuel often had for him.

“What else did you find today, Tom?”

Maybe it wouldn't be a peach—maybe a cheese sandwich, or a chocolate bar. “God,” Tom said. “I found God.”

“Too easy,” Wolflegs said. “What about my boy, Daniel?”

Tom shook his head. He'd heard so much about Daniel that he was beginning to miss him, too. He sighed.

“He has a scar on his chin, don't forget,” Samuel said. “When you're looking . . . he has lots of scars. Didn't think he'd live to be the age of twelve, that boy.” He chuckled. “He never walked—only ran. He never walked around things, he climbed over them. He has scars from climbing fences, trees, falling off bikes, horses, skateboards. Once when he was seven he found a bullet—decided to see what would happen if he hit it with a rock. He's got a hole in his shin from that one.” Samuel shook his head and laughed a little, and then his mouth bent down and he pressed his thumbs into his eyes.

“Sorry,” Tom said, because of nice.

“Being a Finder doesn't mean you find everything right away,” Wolflegs said gently.

“Who did he hang with?” Tom asked. “Do you know the name of any of his friends?”

“Pepsi,” Wolflegs said. “I remember Pepsi. I don't know his real name.”

So Tom looked for Pepsi, who was much easier to find.

Tom found a tiny green park in the Core. When street people walked by, he asked them about a kid named Pepsi. You could tell the street people. They acted like the street was the place where they could sleep and eat and make out and cry and laugh as loud as they wanted.

Tom liked this park. It was just the size of a house lot between two skyscrapers, green, and carefully landscaped. There was a cement waterfall, flowers, a few bushes, a bench, and one enormous tree, which looked small, dwarfed between the towers on either side of the park.

Today, on the bench was a silver-haired man in a suit and tie and a black all-weather coat. His briefcase was the thinnest. He was sitting with his head tipped back to the sun, his eyes closed, his hands clasped behind his neck. From the saggy look of the old guy's face, Tom figured he must have fought and lost a few battles with gravity in his life.

Tom stared. He'd never seen a downtown worker sit on a bench, just doing nothing, just letting the sunshine fall on his face. The downtown workers usually didn't stop except at red lights, and sometimes not even then.

The man felt Tom's stare and opened his eyes. Tom wanted to ask, “Are you my dad?” Instead he said, “Are you rich?”

The man straightened his head. “You don't look much like a mugger,” he said.

Tom shifted his backpack. “I'm not.”

The man looked at Tom a long moment, closed his eyes, and raised his face to the sun again. “Yes. I suppose by some standards one could say I was rich.”

“How'd you make your money? Don't say hard work, because you're just sitting.”

The man chuckled. “You may have a point there. I made my money in the stock market. Company shares.”

“The company shared?”

“Well, I had to have a little capital.”

“What's capital?”

“Money.”

Tom nodded. “Got me some capital in a locker at the Greyhound station.”

“Well, son, my advice to you is to invest. By the time you're my age, you'll be a wealthy man.”

“I can't wait that long,” Tom said. “Have you got any more advice?”

The man shaded his eyes and looked at Tom. “Do what you love. If you love it, you'll do it well. If you do it well, the world will reward you. What do you love to do?”

“I like to write things.” Tom glanced up at the sky, as if gravity were there waiting to pounce.

The man nodded. “That's along my line of work. I'm in newspapers.” He handed Tom a card.

“Yeah? Maybe if I wrote something down, you'd pay me money for it.”

The man eased back in the bench and raised his face to the sun. “That what you're doing it for? Money?”

“No. Maybe.”

The man laughed shortly. “See, I could retire. I could have retired ten years ago. I don't because of words.”

He opened one eye to see if Tom was listening. He was.

“I read a great book once,” the old man said. “It was better than money. I realized having a word was more than having a buck.”

Tom nodded slowly.

“Think of a word,” the man said.

“Gravity,” said Tom.

The old man pointed a long finger at him.

“Now there's a word. Gravity was here before there were words. But did we know that? Not until we named it did we really start to learn about it. Now, think of the word
antigravity.”

Tom shook his head. His neck and jaw creaked. “No such thing.”

“No? But just because there's a word for it, every year millions in dollars and big brains go into looking for it. By gum, they'll find it, too.”

Tom thought about antigravity. It was like mooning the universe to even say it.

“If I wrote something, would you tell me if the world would reward me for it?” Tom asked.

“You can find me here early mornings. Got osteoporosis—a woman's disease. I don't tell anybody but you. I need my vitamin D.”

“My name's Tom.”

The man peered at him with an eye that could assess. “You're not in school?”

“I don't have a school.”

“Ah. You have a home?”

“No. At least, temporarily no.” T–E–M–P–O–R–A–R–I–L–Y.

“What's it like living on the streets?” the man asked.

Tom was going to explain that he wasn't living on the streets, he was living on an island, but the man spoke again.

“Why don't you write it down for me, what it's like to be living here on the streets, how you got there—”

“I'm not really—”

“I'd pay for that,” the man said. “Good money for that. If you can write, of course.” The man stood, picked up his thin briefcase. “Back to work.” He nodded curtly to Tom and left.

He wasn't a street kid. He was an island kid. He was between addresses, a temporarily lost soul.

Tom walked past the cement waterfall and noticed that people had thrown change into it as if it were a wishing well. He determined to come back later that night and collect the change.

When it got dark, Tom returned to the park. It had been a hot day, so he bathed in the waterfall and the pool below it before he collected the change. He sat under a tree to count it. The tree rustled without wind.

“You stealin' wishes, man,” a voice said above him.

Tom jumped to his feet.

It sounded as if it were coming from the sky, and for a moment Tom wondered if God was speaking to him. He looked up. He could see a small platform lodged in the crotch of the branches, and leaning out from the platform was a black head.

“Who is it?”

“Don't believe you, man. You stealin' people's wishes they made. Might have to fight you for that.”

“They wished a kid could have his wish today,” Tom said. “I'm just making sure their wish comes true.”

“Well, I got twelve dollars worth of wishes in there, and I jus' as poor as you.” Tom thought a minute. He dropped the coins back into the water.

The black head flashed two rows of the whitest teeth Tom had ever seen, and then Tom recognized the face. “Hey, you're the one who helped me get away from the Train Cop.”

“Come up. I got sunflower seeds, the kind with dried worms in the bottom of the bag.”

Tom climbed. He was nervous. Climbing made you vulnerable to gravity's tricks, especially when you had a sore hand. The platform was covered in down coats.

“You sleep here at night?” Tom asked.

The black kid nodded. “Can't stand walls. Name is Jeans.”

“Tom.”

“After the train I seen you in the park a few times. Been tryin' to figure you out. Maybe you a Head?”

“What's that?”

“If you don't know what it means, then you not it. Well, you don't belong to my gang, so what are you?”

Tom hesitated a moment. No one knew what a Finder was, and he didn't feel like getting into that discussion. He said, “I'm a writer.”

Jeans's teeth flashed like a crescent moon. “Maybe you like to join my gang.”

“Gang?”

“Yeah. The Perfs. You gotta have a hole in you to join. Ever been shot or stabbed?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe you tell them you a writer and they'll let you join 'cause of the hole in your head.” Jeans laughed and then stopped. “Just a joke, man. Here, have some sunflower seeds.”

Tom took a huge handful.

“I seen you runnin' from the train cops,” Jeans said. “You a sweet nanny goat jus' runnin' its belly. Why don't you jus' buy a ticket?”

“Can't,” said Tom with a mouthful of sunflower seeds.

“Can't?”

“Mean to. Mean to every time. But I'm savin'.”

“Saving? Saving for what?”

“Savin' to be rich.”

“Me too,” Jeans said.

Tom wanted to smile, but his cheek muscles still hadn't remembered how. “What are you getting rich to buy?”

“Gonna buy me a ticket back to Jamaica. Got me a girl there name of Gina, and she waitin' on me.” Jeans settled down into the nest of coats. A few feathers floated up.

“Port Antonio is where she is, my girl Gina. I met her there while working as a chicken cooker. That's how I got a hole in me—dropped a knife on my foot—but don't tell Sasky that. I save my money, and I have just enough to buy her a gold weddin' band. Then I begin to be thinkin' about how I could buy a plane ticket with that money, how I should come to visit cousin Walter in Canada and make so much money. Gina, she says to buy that plane ticket, that be my ring. I say, no, that is your ring and your house and your microwave oven, don't you see?”