Right Behind You Read online

  And all the inhabitants were edgy, so we took a lot of pills. Pills were the Loon Platoon’s version of base-ball cards. Barter and protection cloaked in another person’s spit.

  We were in art therapy once when Slice ’N’ Dice sidled up close to Cowboy, TwoFer, and me.

  “Hey, player.”

  He leaned in close to Cowboy. “I have info you might want, bro.”

  We were all white, but reality wasn’t Slice ’N’ Dice’s long suit.

  “What’ll it cost me?” Cowboy asked.

  “Tongue your sleeping pill, and give it to me to-morrow.”

  “Ask for one of your own.”

  Slice peeked over his shoulder and down the stark, gray linoleum-floored halls. “Man, they write all that down and give it to the Feds.”

  “And the Feds do what with that information?” Cowboy asked.

  Slice scratched his head. “You want to know what’s up or not?”

  “Hey,” I said. “I’ll give you mine. Cowboy needs his.” I’d take my own pill. By tomorrow Slice ’N’ Dice would have forgotten or decided the missing pill was part of a global conspiracy.

  He crooked his finger, motioning us forward, looking around, probably checking for federal listening devices. “There was another shoot ’em up,” Slice said.

  Cowboy turned to stone.

  “Yeah. In Boston. Or maybe Maine. You know, lower forty-eight, it’s all alike.”

  I watched Cowboy’s face, but there wasn’t even a flicker.

  “This player did it up proud,” Slice said. “More than you. Then he ate the gun.”

  I swear I saw Cowboy shimmer and dim.

  “Player’s gonna be famous, man. You’re gonna be an also-ran.”

  “Get out of his face, Slice,” I said.

  Slice ’N’ Dice’s eyes raked me from head to foot. His voice turned lethal. “Man, you gotta learn to get along.” He pulled away then looked over his shoulder. “You got a dog? I might get outta here someday.”

  That afternoon, Cowboy brought a broken toothbrush into his shrink’s office, placed it against his own jugular, and jammed it home. Right in front of the doctor. Cowboy wanted that newspaper ink, even if he had to die to get it. He did die. I guess you can’t put a tourniquet on somebody’s neck.

  We were all put in lockdown for twenty-four hours except for our private sessions and one group session on our floor. Did Slice goad Cowboy into suicide? In my mind Cowboy was a dead man since the day he shot up his classroom.

  So what was I? Why hadn’t I thought about offing myself? Why didn’t I think about killing anyone else?

  On my twelfth birthday, I came into The Frown’s office, sat down, and put my newly big feet on his desk in imi-tation.

  The Frown called this a different stage of denial. First I denied “the incident” with shock, loss of speech, loss of memory. Now I denied with attitude. The I-don’t-need-to-talk-about-what-didn’t-happen-dude ’tude. The Frown couldn’t get me back to cartoon coyotes or remembering the smell of gasoline on a hot day in July.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Present. To you from me.”

  “Cool,” I said. He’d never given me a gift — birthday, Christmas, nothing. Why didn’t I see the trap about to be sprung?

  I tugged the ribbon and opened the box. A baseball glove. The color of leaves when they first drop to the ground.

  I stared into the box like it was a well of lost secrets. The soft brown leather looked as supple as my mother’s summer-tanned skin.

  “It was his birthday present, too,” I said.

  “I know.”

  When I looked up, The Frown was blurred. His feet off the desk. “I interviewed Bobby’s parents over a year ago. Asked them why Bobby came to your house that day.”

  “He was showing off his glove.”

  “Were you mad at him?”

  I nodded, looking back into the box.

  “I wanted to ruin the glove.” I pushed my fingers through my hair, tugging for the pain. I closed my eyes. “I don’t think I even saw Bobby. I just saw that glove. If I could get rid of it, if he didn’t have it, we would be even, sort of.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t want to hurt Bobby?” the Frown asked.

  And for the first time ever, I was sure. Somewhere deep the thought had been gnawing and chewing me, digging at me with sharp teeth where I couldn’t identify what it wanted.

  “I just wanted Bobby to go home. I didn’t want him to hear the argument. I didn’t want to hear it either. Everything Bobby had was good and my life was all in pieces. And he had that glove.”

  “And if you ruined the glove, he’d go home,” The Frown said.

  I nodded. “But I saw those flames . . . eat up Bobby’s clothes and then his hair and his skin and he screamed and I screamed and then I knew. Nothing would be like the cartoons. And then zero. I couldn’t hear it or see it and . . .”

  I snatched the glove up out of the box and hurled it at the wall. “All this.” I opened my arms. “All of this” — my voice broke and I fought back the tears that stung my eyes — “is Dad’s fault. He left that gas out there. And a lighter. What kind of a father does that?” I leaned toward the desk. “I hate him for that. I was a little kid. None of this would have happened. Bobby would be alive and I would still be a kid, if he had . . .”

  I couldn’t be still, and jumped to my feet and paced. “And Aunt Jemma trying to take me away. I lost my mom, now she wants me to lose my dad and my home? My head hurt all the time. Just pound, pound, pound. Like somebody kicking me.

  “And Mom. She went and died. I was nine years old. How could she do that to me?” I picked up the bowl of multicolored candies and flung them across the room. The plastic bowl made a decent thud against the door. “But . . . I — I am NOT a monster!”

  “You’re angry. You were carrying a lot of weight for someone that young. All the people that were supposed to protect you seemed to have let you down.”

  He had no idea how right he was. And there was also that secret I couldn’t tell him.

  “You,” I shouted at The Frown, “need to know when to back off. You’re going where you don’t belong. Did you get your degree online or something?”

  My shouting had alerted Orderly of the Day. He came through the door looking for action. I gave it to him. I launched at him and head-butted him square in the chest.

  Instead I ended up on the floor and wasn’t even rewarded with a satisfying “ummph” from OOTD. His chest was a brick wall and my head was a melon.

  “I’m guessing you have another headache,” The Frown said. He wasn’t sarcastic. He was sad, like he expected all this. “I’m locking you in for a couple of days. You can have something for your head.”

  OOTD pointed me to the door without a word. I kicked the chair as I left.

  We walked in silence until we reached the ward entrance. As he unlocked the doors, his deep voice was quiet, calm. “Every bit of that goes in your file. The judge reads it. Kicking the chair, everything. You don’t want that.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “I’m not putting that on your record. You know why? You’re not tough. You’re broken.”

  Chapter 6

  TOUCHSTONES

  The pill for my headache put me down for a few hours. I woke up groggy and kept dozing in and out.

  I saw some papers and crayons next to me. My homework must have been delivered when I was conked out. We didn’t get pencils or pens when we were in lockdown. Nothing sharp.

  I nodded back out. Half dreaming about how the teachers hated grading our homework from lockdown. Dozing. Dreaming about crayons. Dreaming about Mom.

  “Goodness, Kip, are you angry at that picture?” Mom asked.

  I was scribbling in hard, rough strokes, blotting out the picture of a moose in my coloring book.

  She sat beside me at the table. “You broke the crayon.”

  She took my hand and rubbed it, easing the muscles, stretching each finger, rota
ting my wrist. “You’re so much like your father. So tense.”

  She picked up a brown crayon and handed it to me, took a yellow one for herself. “Let’s do this page together. Watch me for a minute.” She gentled the crayon against the paper, smoothing the color into the shapes, staying inside the lines.

  “Isn’t that pretty?” Mom pointed to the page. “You try the tree trunk.”

  She showed me how to hold the crayon like she did. This time I didn’t tear the page.

  “Oh, that’s beautiful. Now let’s do the leaves,” Mom said.

  I put the crayon down. Trying so hard to go easy, to stay inside the lines, made me want to jump out of my skin.

  Dad would have fussed about a job left unfinished, but Mom laughed. “Go. When you come back we can read.”

  I smiled at her as she helped me into my fur-ruffed hooded jacket.

  Mom understood.

  I learned to read earlier than most kids. As I sat in Mom’s lap, she would read book after book, pointing to the words, showing me how they were alike and different. I don’t know how or when it happened, but one day I was reading the words without her.

  Dad read with me, too, but only one book. The Runner. It had been his when he was a kid. We read it a million times. After he’d read the last page, he’d close the cover, then run his fingers over the picture of the boy riding his horse, The Runner, with his dog, Shadow, trotting alongside him. Dad’s fingers stroking the book reminded me of how he would sometimes touch my mother’s cheek or hair, like he was praying for something.

  “I’d never be without this book. . . . It’s my touchstone.”

  Mom’s mouth would go straight and a little hard, but then she’d sigh and relax. “It’s where this all started, that’s for certain.”

  I didn’t ask what a touchstone was, but I knew there was something else between the covers of that book that I didn’t understand.

  Dad brought me The Runner when they moved me to the ward. Along with a picture of my mother. He thought those two things would be what I would want most, my treasured possessions.

  I hadn’t read the book since I was eight or nine. So while I was in lockdown I scrounged it up and read it. And I finally understood the pebble of resentment between my parents.

  It’s about a horse and a boy and a father that don’t-can’t-won’t fit into regular society. They live on their own terms — not exactly wild, but free.

  That’s Dad for certain. And I was definitely wild, yet not free.

  “Wild” or “free” really wasn’t Mom at all. I think she loved the beauty of Alaska, but the loneliness killed her just as surely as the cancer did.

  And I think she let both of them do it.

  For the next year I rode the anger train. I punched other members of the Loon Platoon. I tried to throw down on the orderlies, but they were bigger and tougher than I was. I fought walls and broke bones in my hands; I fought with my dad; The Frown; anyone, anything that crossed my path.

  When I was in lockdown because of the fights, I read to pass the time. I checked out as many books as the roving library would let me, and the English teacher sent me some others. He put a note in with War and Peace.

  Kip,

  I didn’t read this ’til I was a sophomore in college. But I think you can handle it.

  Mr. Cannon

  I returned his kindness with sneering contempt.

  Mr. C.,

  I read it last year.

  Mr. Kip

  I fought using my mouth instead of my fist with Dad, too. We spent three of our weekly visits with Dad chatting and me glaring. When he tried to hug me before he left, I shrugged him off. The next time he came it was for a sit-down with The Frown.

  I came in with Dad’s copy of The Runner.

  I plopped into my chair then tossed the book onto The Frown’s desktop.

  “You can have that back. I don’t want it.”

  “Why?” Dad asked.

  My first response was a disgusted sigh. Then: “Because it’s yours.”

  The Frown broke the silence that followed. “Do you mean you don’t want anything that belongs to your father, or that you feel it’s not rightly yours but his?”

  “Is there a difference?” I said.

  “Kip, we’re past crap like this. Don’t manipulate,” The Frown said.

  “Fine. I want Dad to know I’m pissed.”

  “You made that clear when you wouldn’t talk to me.” Dad sounded sad, but he still had that hard bottom in his voice. Like a warm stream with a stony bed.

  “I reread that book. And I remembered how Alaska was all about you. You had to live in the bush. You had to be ‘free’ like that guy in the book. You didn’t care what Mom wanted. You didn’t want a crowd around, but Mom was lonely. And you were all about work, work, work. Do this, do that. Work harder. It’s not done until it’s right.”

  I stood so I could, for once, be taller than Dad. “I was a kid, not your slave. And Mom wasn’t either.” Now I was shouting. “What happened to her, what happened to me — you were always right in the big middle.”

  Dad was on his feet and stepping into my face. “Sit down. Sit down and never, ever say anything like that to me again.”

  “Those aren’t the rules here. You can’t make the rules here.” I stepped into him until we were chest-thumping.

  Dad, red-faced and sweating, took a deep breath and looked to The Frown.

  “Redirect,” The Frown said.

  Dad nodded, backed off, and sat down. He breathed in deep a few times, blowing the air out hard. Then he gripped the side of his chair so hard I could see the tendons standing out in his wrists, the scars from his burns white and ugly. Dad stared at the floor.

  What the hell was going on?

  “Sit down, Kip,” The Frown said.

  I sat.

  “‘Redirect’ is a phrase from Anger Management classes. Your father took them, too.”

  Dad released his hands and rubbed them together. “Your mother always said that I flew off the handle at anything.”

  I perched on the edge of my chair. Now that this anger stuff finally wasn’t all about me, I almost laughed. Instead, I picked up The Runner and banged it against the desk. WHAM! WHAM! WHAMWHAMWHAM! Then sidearmed it across the room.

  I slammed out of the door into the grip of the Orderly of the Day.

  The only place I could keep myself in check was in classes. Mom had homeschooled me, so I was used to doing things on my own.

  Even though I was not quite thirteen, I had classes with the fourteen-year-olds. Most of them were finger-pointers and mouth-breathers, so it wasn’t that big of a deal, but I got a lot of the teacher’s time to discuss the books we read.

  Close to Christmas he assigned “A Christmas Memory,” by Capote. Then he showed the movie because he was pretty sure the mouth-breathers either didn’t read it or didn’t understand it. Hammer. Nail. Direct hit.

  When the movie was over, the teacher asked for comments.

  Zip. Zero.

  Finally, a kid we called Toe Jam, because his foot odor announced his presence in any room, said, “If I got hold of some whiskey, I wouldn’t pour it on a cake.”

  Scattered laughter.

  The teacher put both palms on his desk and leaned forward. “What’s the book about?”

  A longtimer trying to ass-kiss his way into shaving off some of that time said, “Little kid and his whacko aunt making Christmas fruitcakes.”

  “Yes,” the teacher said. “On the surface, but it’s really about the innocence of childhood.”

  That lit my fuse with a blowtorch.

  “Did you read the book or did you just read the words in order?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You come in here every day with your sissy cappuccino and your starched khaki pants and you think we don’t know that you wouldn’t be here if anyone else, anywhere else, would hire you?”

  “I think you —”

  “Actually, you don’t t
hink. You just proved that.”

  “Take your seat, please —”

  “Hold on. I’m not done. First, this isn’t a book. It’s a longish short story, and it’s not a sweet little tale about the innocence of childhood. Get a grip.

  “My mom taught me that when you read a book, you question it. Who is this kid and why is he there? Answer. His mother doesn’t want him. So she hands him over to his really poor, loony aunts. They don’t want him either. So, innocence? Maybe not.”

  I looked around. The English teacher was glaring and the rest of the class looked like someone poked them in the eye with a sharp stick.

  “The looniest of the aunts and the kid make cakes. Fruitcakes. That nobody wants. They waste the little money they have on something people are going to laugh at and throw away.

  “And what’s the end of the story? The dog dies. The aunt dies. Death and abandonment. Why does he write the book looking back when he’s older? Because now he knows they were the town joke. That’s his Christmas memory. Humiliation and pain.”

  I flipped the book on his desk. “There’s more in a book than words, numbnuts.”

  That got me another stare-down session with The Frown and a two-day lock in, but I got to do my class work without morons around me. The Frown also told me that I got bonus points for excellent vocabulary. I don’t know which word he thought a twelve-year-old shouldn’t know: abandonment, humiliation, or numbnuts.

  And when the State reviewed my case, there was no way this teen who couldn’t begin to handle anger was going to be allowed to live among the peaceful and unsuspecting citizens of Alaska.

  Chapter 7

  CHANGING LANES

  The last fight I remember having in the hospital was in the cafeteria. I was thirteen. A newbie came in. So full of himself it leaked out of his pores. The hip-rolling bad-boy walk, the I-don’t-care slouch, and the don’t-mess-with-me chin jut — this guy had it all. He slid his tray onto the table and started maiming the mystery meat with his plastic spork.

  “Hey, losers. Good news. I’m here to run the place now. We’ll get together and see who takes what drugs and I’ll decide when you tongue your pills and give ’em to me.”