Savior (21 page)

Doesn't seem like
anybody heard, Scissorhands.

No. Nobody hears nothing they don't want to, dude.

I guess you're right. You coming?

You going?

Yeah.

Then I'm coming.

All right. Let's go.

What about the Governor?

Let the dead bury the dead, Scissorhands.

That sounds about right.

A wise man once said that.

Okay then. If you say so.

I do.

Sixteen
—Pittsburgh

The two boys, one tall and heavy set through the shoulders, the other short and thin, a wisp, walked and walked along the road in the dark. Ricky stuck out his thumb whenever he heard a car coming. The night was cloudless and moonless, pitch black, and once beyond the town there were no lights along the road. Scissorhands walked slowly, shuffling his feet.

Hey, man. Where we going?

Away from here. Keep walking. If they come after us we're both going to jail, Scissorhands.

What you got in there? Any food.

No. We'll get something to eat when we get to Pittsburgh.

What's that?

That's a city.

I lived in Tucson one time. But I don't remember it. I think we had an Xbox there.

Yeah.

They got one ride from a woman going up to Murfreesboro. She was
driving to go pick up her son. He was getting out of jail. It was late when they pulled up in front of a Greyhound station. The car stopped at the curb.

Here you go. Get y'all out of here. I never saw ya, said the woman.

Ricky liked her. She laughed sharply and seemed like she cared enough about her son to spring him with some money she'd raised that afternoon. She'd sold some antique she'd had at a pawnshop. He’d been in jail for seven months for a fight he'd had with his girlfriend. Traffic moved again once the light changed. Scissorhands jumped out and stood on the sidewalk, whistling with his hands in his pocket like some under-sized hobo. Ricky looked across at the woman. She'd lit a cigarette and held her hand out the window, pinky extended with the plume of smoke blowing back in the car propelled by the occasional car passing by. Ricky tried to imagine her son. He tried to imagine being in jail for seven months and knowing that night your own mother was coming to get you out and you could laugh at the people who'd thought you'd be in there until you rotted. He looked at her ordinary profile, the hair falling in front of her eyes and thought his own mother had once looked like that, a casual, alive sort of look that could hold all the emotions, like the currents of a fast-moving black river seen from a bridge and just the hint of the force in the water as it rippled over some rocks. That was her face as she turned and looked at him.

Thanks.

Hey. Scat.

I'm not
a cat.

No, you're too stupid. But you're hungry. The two of y
'all's just hungry runaways.

You love your son, though.

If I didn't, then who else would?

She looked at him, weighing her thoughts against his, the way he was poised for flight, and suddenly she reached out with the hand on the wheel and touched his hand.

Nobody knows what that love word means. It's not a particularly effective word in any case.

Why not?

Don't you have a bus to catch?

I've got time.

Your little friend going with you?

Maybe.

Do you love him?

I don't know. Maybe.

See? Nobody knows. Truth is, nobody cares except the people that love you. And nobody loves you except maybe the people that you love. Don't have to worry about anybody else. They'll figure it out.

What if the world was going to end tomorrow? Then it would matter, right?

Well, if the world was going to end, I'm thinking you assume you either love everyone or don't love nobody. That's a choice every soul's got to make on their own.

She smiled.

Are you joking me now?

You are in a sorry state, asking so many questions. Y
'all better get on that bus and get on your way or you ain't going to make it.

I think I'll make it.

Go on and prove it.

Ricky reached for the door. When he stood out on the sidewalk, the lights of the bus station seemed to take a second longer than was normal to come into focus, as if the woman's words weighed his perception of time down. It was just a momentary shift, a wobble in the spin of the planet, but for a second it made him pause. Then he resumed his ordinary flow of thinking, the kind of thoughts that would get him where he needed to go. There were no more shifts of time perception. They went inside the station.
Gabe didn't say anything, careful not to upset Ricky's fragile equilibrium. He bought two tickets to Pittsburgh. The bus didn't leave until the morning. After paying, there was enough money left over to get some food in the Denny’s across the street.

Ricky felt sorry for
Gabe. He had no idea where they were going or why. In a way, he guessed that he kind of missed his old life at the farm, even though he'd been abused, probably since he was old enough to remember. But as they crossed the road to the Denny’s, Ricky tried to reach out.

That was expensive,
Gabe. I didn't know how expensive it would be.

Good thing you got some money.

That's all I had. We better find my Uncle Tony's house. I know it's in Pittsburgh.

He better be nice.

Oh, he is. Him and my Aunt Ginny. Both very nice.

Ricky ordered quesadilla burgers
and Gabe ordered spaghetti and meatballs. They both drank a variety of sodas from the soda dispenser. They were the only customers and stayed as long as they could. Gabe stretched out on the seat and closed his eyes. One person came in and ordered a coffee and a pie. He sat and ate and didn't glance at them, absorbed in the music coming from earbuds coming out of the hood of his sweatshirt. The manager came by and said they were closing. Two black men about forty started mopping the floor by the registers with mops that smelled of stale bread and two buckets that said
Cuidado Piso Mojado.
Ricky stood and felt sick to his stomach. He’d eaten too much, or maybe it had been too much soda. He shook Gabe by the shoulder gently.

D'you want to use the bathroom?

No.

Well, we're being moved. We need to go.

Fuck that.

No, we need to.

Why?

They're closing.

We could just stay here and be nice and peaceful, dude.

No, that's not allowed, said the manager.

The manager was a man in his twenties who scratched his nose. His skin was florid with acne. Under the fluorescent light of the restaurant with no other people aside from the cleaners, he seemed sad and vulnerable, too easy to pick on. He didn't want to be rude. He had no intention of pulling rank. He just wanted to go home because he was tired. Ricky understood. They were all tired. He was torn between wanting to stay and wanting to help the manager complete his workday with a minimum of fuss.

Come on
Gabe. We'll go back to the bus station and just wait. Could I have a coffee?

Yeah.

Thanks.

No problem.

The manager went inside and came back with a tall take-away, courtesy, red Denny's cup filled with lukewarm coffee and cream and three sugar packets.

Ricky mixed the sugar just outside the door
. The wind was blowing trash around the parking lot. They walked across the thoroughfare back to the bus station. They wanted to sit in the seats, but a policeman walked over and told them to move on.

Gabe
. It's not so bad. We had a nice meal. We'll walk it off until the morning.

Man. You got some more money. Why don't we find a hotel somewhere?

There is a hotel two blocks from here, said the policeman. The Doubletree Hilton.

Sounds good, said Ricky.

Back on the street, he confessed to Gabe that they had no more money. Easy it had come, easier still it had flowed away, but some good had come of it. He tried to explain the ethics of using ill-gotten gains for good purposes. He remembered his mother and father having a similar argument. It was not a hard argument to make if you were hungry enough, he realized now. His father had said that money was like water; it would always flow along the path of least resistance. Ricky wondered why people who had no money also did the same, as if in mimicry of the very object they sought.

Gabe
, are things getting better or worse or staying about the same? What do you think?

They were sitting around the corner from the entrance of the Doubletree, in the doorway of an exit
to the parking lot of the hotel.

Things are definitely getting better, dude.

Okay.

Ricky thought that perhaps under the surface things were falling apart. There seemed to be an abandoned aspect to the night, as if most of the good people had fled som
ewhere more amenable to convergence. He thought of the things he owned and they didn't amount to much. There was the tablet. He took it out of the backpack and ran his finger along the grain of the stone and the carvings and thought of the work that had gone into it and the intelligence behind it. It had been in honor of his mother that he had sought it. Now it all seemed very far away, the original impulse in the surf shop. And Coconut Juan murdered and Governor Harris likewise and his father gone into the vastness of a secret slavery. If he could only hear his mother's voice he thought all that could be erased, a soundtrack that was only a rehearsal. But that was another thing his dad liked to say. Life was an improvisation and there were no second chances. You had to hit it the first time you tried. There was no soundtrack. There was only the infinite white noise of the galaxies spinning in space, and the people, buzzing like flies on the lip of this, the only life there was.

The bus they rode was partially filled with a church group of older people talking about the last time they went to the Ryman Auditorium and how to get their photographs taken on stage. Then they changed in Columbus, and it got dark.
Gabe slept with his head in Ricky's lap. At some point Ricky got up and went and sat in the front and listened to the driver's radio giving a play-by-play description of a college football game somewhere out West. The cars on the highway were far off and then were gone. Ricky woke up in a cold sweat. It was Pittsburgh sometime in the middle of the night. Outside, the station's lit columns and arches looked like the Roman Coliseum. They climbed the stairs and sat at the top and watched police cars cruise by with their lights flashing on the crisscrossing streets. Behind them were some high-rise office buildings, and Ricky remembered being there before. He thought he could find his way.

This is a big place,
Gabe. But I'm sure I remember how to get there. Just let's try. What have we got to lose?

Ah, man. I am so tired right now.

I know. Just a little longer. Got to hang in there.

They walked through neighborhoods. Some of the houses had yards and others were
squeezed together with no space in between. There was a restaurant on one corner called Arcangeles Pizza. Ricky thought he remembered eating there with Uncle Tony and Aunt Ginny and his mom the last time they'd visited. He'd been almost as tall as his mother and he’d walked down this same sidewalk behind them listening to them talk about politics. His mother was always on the losing side. Tony believed technology would solve all the world's problems. His mother had a firm belief that everything had started to go wrong with the Donation of Constantine, when the true Church had gone from resistance to an embrace of the world's allure.

Gabe
kept asking if this was the house. Finally Ricky got tired and snapped at him. Then he saw a red clapboard house on one corner and thought they were near. A cream-colored row house with a front step of concrete and iron railings looked right. The sun was coming up, and there was a garbage truck going down a parallel side street. They could hear the clanking of the grate as it opened to take in the garbage and then the motor roar as it ran down the street away from them. Ricky went up the steps and rang the bell. A couple of minutes went by. He heard something and blew on his hands and ran his fingers through his hair quickly. The door opened and an old man in a bathrobe peered around the edge of the half-opened door. The hall light behind him mostly hid his craggy facial features in silhouette, but it was definitely not his uncle.

What is it? Better be good.

I was looking for somebody. Got the wrong house, I guess.

What address?

I, not this one.

Look, kid. I'm packing a Tec-9 in case you try anything funny. Tell all your pals.

No, I just thought my uncle lived here. I am sorry, sir.

What'
s his name?

Anthony Lyons. He’s a professor.

And you don't remember where he lives.

I swear I don't.

I'm going to call the college and find out. What was his name?

Lyons. Anthony Lyons.

All right. Well, it's been nice talking to you.

Where do you think I can find him?

The man looked at him with an exasperated, unbelieving stare. Then he gestured down the street.

C
ampus is about two miles from here. Get a move on, the two of you. Goddamned kids.