(2005) Wrapped in Rain (20 page)

"YES!"

All at once, we popped the tops and a fountain of beer foam spewed skyward. Before the first bubble had hit the ground, I had popped three more tabs and handed cans to each of them. They stuffed them in their arms and jumped up and down like NASCAR drivers in the winner's circle. Beer showered the sky, and I aimed at Katie first and covered her in frothy foam. She grabbed two more cans, popped the tops, and handed one tojase, and they doused me in about eighteen ounces of foam. The empty cans piled up and clinked around us on the marbled porch. I was down to my last few, so I popped three tops, held all three like a triple-barreled shotgun, and chased them around the horse one more time. Jase picked up the last can and held it up to me. I shook my head, breathing heavily, and said, "Go ahead, partner. It's all yours." He held it at arm's length, shook it one time for good measure, then popped the top. Beer shot straight up and showered us, Rex, and his horse in an umbrella of beer mist and laughter.

Dizzy and breathing heavily, with empty and spent cans lying all around us, we collapsed, rolling in a puddle of beer and drunk with delirium.

I sat up, flung the beer off my fingers, and said, All right, who's ready for dinner?"

Jase jumped across Katie and pounced on me. He wrapped a death hug around my neck, squeezed me as tight as his two arms could squeeze, and said, "I like drinking beer with you. Can we do it again?"

I didn't know whether to hug him or not. I lifted my arms and then looked at Katie. She mouthed the words, "Thank you," and I wasn't sure if those were tears or beer cascading off her face. I wrapped my arms around Jase and for a brief instant remembered Miss Ella and the night she pulled me through her window when my people place was aching.

I wrapped my arms snugly around his waist and felt his smile spread from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.

Feels good, doesn't it?

THE SUN ROSE OVER THE CYPRESS TREES AND GLISTENED off the crystal water lapping over Mutt's toes. His nails were dirty and needed cutting. The water was a murky blue, soapy with bubbles, and Mutt's hands were spotless. Mud, leaves, and bug bites covered the rest of him. He had spent the night listening, watching, and thinking-if you can call it that. The sirens had died a few hours ago. He had heard boat motors, but they never came this far up the creek. Throughout the night he had worked to occupy his hands and mind. He had tied flies, played chess, tied more flies, and so on. At daybreak, the leaves around his head were covered in live flies, but he didn't mind because the buzzing was better than listening to the alternative. Inside, his mind was racing, the voices were screaming eight different conversations at once, and his arms and face had begun to twist and contort under their control. His eyes looked at everything and nothing, and yet one thought confined the entirety of his mind.

KATIE CARRIED JASE BENEATH THE COVERED WALK TO Miss Ella's for another shower while I went back downstairs. After yet another cold shower, I climbed the stairs and found the two of them waiting expectantly in the kitchen next to the fire.

Something was wrong. I couldn't quite place it, but the skin crawling up my back told me I should know something that I didn't. I looked around, but nothing seemed wrong. They were warm, both smiling, and seemed oblivious to whatever was bugging me. Then I took a deep breath. The smell. The air smelled of lavender. I sniffed again, following the trail, and it carried me to Katie.

"Hope you don't mind," she said, waving her hand across the air around her neck. "Truck stops don't really carry much variety, and it was in the bathroom. Sorry if I assumed. . .

I held up my hand and shook my head, "No, no. And I don't think she would either. It's just something I haven't smelled in a long time."

"You like it?"

Unlike most girls, she showered quickly. That surprised me. I hadn't hurried, but I hadn't dallied either, and she beat me to the top of the steps. "It reminds me of a hug she once gave me." I fished the keys from my pocket, pointed to her clean clothes, and toweled my hair. "You're quick."

"Didn't used to be. It comes with motherhood."

I threw the towel down the spiral staircase. "Well, let's eat. All that shaking made me hungry." I dangled my keys and opened the door, and the phone rang. I dismissed it. "It's probably for Glue. The machine will get it." After four rings, the machine picked up and we were halfway out the door. The dialer hung up and immediately dialed a second time. Katie looked at it with that same nervous, swivelperch look. I shrugged and she picked up the phone. Her voice trembled when she spoke. "Tucker Rain residence."

While the caller spoke, Katie's shoulders and face slowly relaxed. She leaned against the door frame and listened. After a minute, she said, "Hold on just one minute." She held the phone to her chest. "Somebody named Wagemaker."

I took the phone. "Hello?"

"Tucker, this is Gilbert Wagemaker."

"Gibby?"

"Tucker, Mutt's gone. Twenty-four hours ago."

"What happened?"

"Slipped out his bedroom window. We have no idea where he is." Gibby's tone sounded like the beginning of a very bad story. "A waiter at Clark's identified him with a picture and told us Mutt ate a big dinner, enough for three people, but there's no trace of him from there. We have no idea where he is."

I closed my eyes and ran my fingers through my hair. Katie stepped closer and put her hand on my arm. "I'll be there in the morning."

"Tuck?"

"Yeah?"

"His medication will wear off in about twenty-four hours."

"Meaning?" I already knew the answer.

"He's a ticking time bomb and I'm not sure what he'll do when he goes off."

WHEN MUTT AND I WERE TEN, WE HAD TWO FAVORITE games-other than baseball. To its, baseball was the game, still is, but when we weren't playing that, we liked to do two rather sinister little things. The first was playing the shock game. That's where you slide across a hardwood floor with your socks on, building up the static electricity, and then touch the first person you see. We must have shocked each other ten thousand times. Miss Ella wouldn't let its do it to her, so we were pretty much limited to each other.

The second game was feeding the crows in the pasture. Except we used a different kind of bird food. We used Alka-Seltzer, and we loved to watch them eat it. They'd eat about three tablets, fly off to the water tower for a few sips, launch themselves back into the air, feeling light and bubbly, and the reaction would hit them about midway across the pasture. Forty flaps after the water tower, they'd buckle and dive like the Red Baron. They'd hit the earth with a thud and we'd line up some more tablets for the next flock. We knew Miss Ella wouldn't let its play the bird game from the back porch, so we snuck down to the corner grocery, bought five boxes of Alka-Seltzer, told the cashier that Rex had indigestion, and then lit out down the paved road and ducked under the fence on the north side of the pasture. We lined up all our Atka-Seltzer around some roadkill that looked like it used to be an opossum. With forty empty wrappers in our pockets, we dove back under the fence and could barely control our giggles when the flock of buzzards landed. We weren't expecting buzzards, mind you. Up to this point in the game, our opponent had been crows.

The buzzards were a true coup d'etat. Those big, black, ugly birds gobbled up those wafers like sugar tablets. For about five minutes nothing happened, and we started thinking that maybe Alka-Seltzer didn't work on buzzards. Then they started foaming at the mouth and dropping like flies. It was the most amazing thing we had ever seen. Buzzards were flapping, puking Alka-Seltzer foam everywhere, and walking around like Rex after ten or twelve drinks. About twenty of them flew off because, fortunately for them, they were the weaker birds and didn't get a chance to eat the Alka-Seltzer since the strongest ones made it to the kill first-a total reversal of the survival of the fittest.

When the flapping cleared, eight dead buzzards riddled the north end of the pasture. About that time, Miss Ella rang the dinner bell and we knew our goose was cooked. I looked at Mutt and said, 'We're in deep crap." Somewhere along in here I had grown cool and learned to cuss when Miss Ella couldn't hear me. He nodded and pointed to the field. There was no way we could bury eight buzzards before dinner, so we decided to leave them until morning, when we'd sneak down here with a shovel and cover up both the birds and the wrappers.

We hopped on our bikes and took off down the paved road, and a misty rain started to fall. Just a few hundred yards before the Waverly gate, a white Cadillac pulled up behind us with its blinker indicating it wanted to pull into the grocery store across the highway from us. The driver erratically passed Mutt, but I sped up. Thinking I had outrun the Cadillac, I turned and watched the big, long car cut directly in front of Mutt. Mutt kicked hard on his Bendix brake but only started sliding. He slid sideways, T-boned the side of the Cadillac, flew over the handlebars and the white cloth top, and landed face-first on a manhole cover just a few feet from me. When his head hit, it bounced, exploded like a red balloon, and slid along the manhole cover. The driver gunned it, spun the tires, fishtailed sideways, and took off. I looked down at Mutt, but his eyes were closed and he wasn't moving.

He lay crumpled in a pile of limp arms and legs. I dropped my bike, ran to the corner store, and told the man behind the counter, but he was already calling for an ambulance. When I got back to Mutt, he was balled up like a baby, eyes wide, and shaking. He was red from head to toe and lying in a puddle of blood and pee. The paramedics arrived a few minutes later. I told them what had happened and gave them Mutt's name and address, and they slid him into the back of the ambulance. In sixty seconds, the sound of the siren disappeared like the haunting sound of a midnight train, and I stood in the rain wondering what in the world I was going to tell Miss Ella.

Knowing I had to fens up and that I'd better do it quickly, I jumped on my bike and headed for home as fast as my legs would pedal me. I rode down the half-mile drive and ran in the back door, soaking wet and screaming, "Mama Ella! Mama Ella!" She came running, and when she saw me and no Mutt, she grabbed the keys for Rex's old Dodge Power Wagon. She threw me in it, mashed the pedal to the floor, and spun dirt out the drive. On the way, I told her what happened. Including the bit about the birds. There was no use lying to her, so I told her the truth, which caused her lips to grow tighter, her foot heavier, and her knuckles whiter. At one point, I glanced at the speedometer and it had passed ninety. We arrived at the hospital and the lady behind the counter checked her chart. She said they had admitted a Matthew Mason, but we'd have to wait while the doctors examined him. When Miss Ella said, "Can I see him?" the woman snipped, "No!" and tore off around the corner.

We waited an hour. Miss Ella sat with her back to the window, purse resting atop her lap, watching the counter for any sign of life and chewing on her lower lip. When none appeared, she stood up, hung her big black purse over her shoulder, grabbed my hand, and marched up to the counter, dragging me with her. Without a word to anyone, she reached around the counter, punched a large red button that operated the two mechanical swinging doors, and we walked through. At the end of the first hallway, a great big black woman lay draped in blood and surrounded by a team of scurrying doctors. Miss Ella covered my eyes and we turned right down another hallway, but the scene didn't get much better. Two kids about my age lay spread across the next room, surrounded by almost as many doctors. And in the third lay a big, broadshouldered white man with a great big belly. Somebody had cut off his overalls and dumped them in a muddy and messy pile on the floor. His doctors were covering his face with a sheet. Miss Ella saw that and said, "Lord Jesus, have mercy!"

Finally, we turned a second corner and headed back down another hallway toward the entrance. We passed a supply closet crammed with syringes, bandages, and bottles of every shape, size, and color. In the corner, I saw a stretcher pushed up against the side with a little boy curled up and shivering uncontrollably. I tugged on Miss Ella's arm and she snapped at me. "What, child?"

I pointed. "Oh, Matthew, honey ..." She stepped in. "I'm so sorry." Miss Ella grabbed a little rolling seat like doctors slide around on when they're examining you. She rolled over to the side of the bed and looked under the railing, her eyes about six inches from Mutt's. He was shaking a lot. I stood next to the bed, watching the two of them watching each other.

He was covered by a thin sheet, but his skin was cold. He looked pale, and somebody had cut off everything but his Spiderman underwear. Miss Ella slid her hand along the bed and pulled his pale fingers from around his knees. She put one hand behind his head, and tears trickled down her cheeks. "Matthew? Matthew, can you hear me, sweet boy?" Mutt nodded and the shivering slowed. Miss Ella's voice was like that. Miss Ella grabbed my hand and pulled me close. "Tucker, we're going to pray for your brother."

"Yes ma'am."

"Lord, this boy is scared. We're all scared. But You didn't give us fear. You gave us power, love, and a sound mind." She put her hand on his head. "I'm putting Mutt at your feet and ask You to wrap him up. Hold him in the hollow of Your mighty right hand." She pulled me closer and said, "Both of them, Lord." I knew at that moment I was finished being cool and buying Alka-Seltzer. "Wrap Your blanket around both these boys. Do what I can't. Be their shields, their protectors; stand guard over these precious ones." She opened her eyes, tried to smile, and squeezed our hands. "Amen?"

"Amen," we said. I said it loud too, because I wanted her to know that I had repented from cussing and killing those birds.

Mutt opened his eyes and said, "M-M-Mama Ella?"

"Yes?"

"I don't think I like hospitals. Can I go home now?"

She touched his nose with her finger and said, "Me either, and yes." She turned to go when a tall, blond female with a long white coat and stethoscope walked in holding some x-rays.