The Complete Lockpick Pornography (9 page)

David is trying to tell me about lasers as we make our way through the woods. He says, “No, that's not what I said. I said ‘coherent light.' I have a book. It means that the light waves are in phase with each other.”

“They're what?”

“They're lined up!” he says.

It's hard to hear him, because he's walking a few feet ahead of me and he won't turn around when he talks. My dress gets caught on a bramble again, and this time it tears. The trees block out the sky, but every once in a while I can catch a glimpse of the laser's light through the branches. It looks like it's getting closer. I can see the beam all the time now, not just when it's touching a cloud. It looks like a strand of mint dental floss, pulled tight across the sky.

“You know an awful lot for an eight-year-old,” I say. “Are you some sort of scientist?”

“I'm going to be a physicist,” he says. He climbs up on a rock. “Like Richard Feynman. I'm going to learn how to do everything. I have books on mathematics and chemistry, and maybe if we make another atomic bomb I can work on that too. I'm going to learn to pick locks and pick up women like he talks about in his books.” He jumps down from the rock and turns to grin at me.

“I can teach you how to pick locks,” I say, and he laughs.

“Richard Feynman won the Nobel prize,” he says. “He was smart like Einstein, but he was funnier. You probably work at a hair salon, or with computers. You probably work at Kentucky Fried Chicken,” David says. “How would you know how to pick locks?”

“I taught myself,” I say. We come to the edge of the woods. “Picking locks is a way of making sense of the world on your own, without people explaining what things are for,” I say. “Picking locks is like wearing a dress if you're a boy.”

This is someone's backyard, and above their satellite dish and chimney the laser is brighter than ever. As a cloud drifts over it, a point of brilliant green appears, wavering up and down with the shape of the cloud.

“It looks closer now,” I say.

“What will we do when we get there?” David says.

“It's probably up on someone's roof. Maybe they'll let us inside to see it.”

We walk in silence for a while, David running ahead, across people's lawns, but never too far ahead. He must know by now that something weird is going on. I don't think he understands that we're kidnapping him. My anger has worn off. I'm not thinking about saving him, about opening his mind to the knowledge that it's okay to be different, for boys to dress like girls. I'm not thinking about reversing the damage his father has done to him. All I'm thinking about is finding the laser. I don't know what I'll do afterward, but right now he and I are going to find that laser together.

On our right there are a few men sitting out on their porch. They're leaning back in their lawn chairs, and as we approach I can hear them talking. The first words I can make out are “What the fuck?”

“Don't pay any attention to them,” I say to David, before the first of them even begins catcalling. “Just keep walking until we get to the corner.”

“Hey, faggot, isn't he a little young for you?” a voice yells. “That's a nice dress.”

“Yeah,” says another. “Is that your wedding dress? Are you going to try and marry him? I don't think they've made pedophile marriages legal yet, have they?”

There are three of them, and I have to force myself to keep walking. I want to turn around and rush them. I want to bloody my elbows and my knees with them. I don't want to hurt anyone in front of David though.

“Hey, kid, is that guy bothering you?”

“Leave us alone,” David yells, and he starts walking faster. We get around the corner, and I can see that his face is flushed. “Why are you wearing that?” he says. “They wouldn't have yelled if you weren't dressed up like a gaylord.”

“They yelled because they were assholes,” I say.

“They yelled because you're dressed up like a girl. You're a faggot,” David says, and I want to slap his face. Instead I grab his wrist, hard, and pull him up a lawn and into the backyard of the house on the corner. We cut through backyards until we're behind the house with the drunken assholes. I can hear them out front, laughing to one another.

“They don't let pedophiles get married too, do they?” one says, and they all laugh, reliving their moment of glory.

I open my clutch and pull out the lockpick set.

“What's that?” David whispers. I lead him to their back door, and I get down on one knee. “Is that a lockpick?” He watches, fascinated, as I slide one of the picks into the lock, using my other hand to work the tension wrench. “You really can pick locks,” he says.

“We can't talk when we get inside,” I say. “We have to be very quiet. We're just going to sneak in and then sneak out, okay?”

“What are we doing?”

“We're going to steal a toaster,” I say. “They made fun of us and said we were getting married. Well, people always give toasters at weddings. We're going to collect our wedding present.”

“I've never stolen anything,” David whispers.

“Well, I won't tell if you don't.”

The lock moves, and I let out a sigh of relief. I push the door open a fraction of an inch, sliding the picks back into their case, and the case back into my purse. We have no flashlight, and so we move very slowly, waiting for our eyes to adjust.

David runs across the kitchen to grab a toaster, and he pulls the cord from the wall.

“Got it!” he says.

The lights come on, and a man steps into the kitchen heavily. It's one of the men from the front lawn.

“What the fuck?” he says. He pushes David to the side and grabs the front of my dress. “How the fuck did you get in my house?”

David's watching, his eyes wide, and there has to be a way out of this without violence. He's eight years old. I shouldn't have brought him into this house. Fucking Christ.

“Listen,” I say. “He's only eight. We'll just leave, all right? We'll forget this ever happened.” He has my chest hair through the dress, and I want to bring my knee up and into his crotch. He isn't that much bigger than me. I wonder what he'd tell his friends if he got stomped by a faggot.

He shoves me against the wall and grabs the toaster out of David's hands. He starts wrapping the cord around his fist. My own hands are fists now, and all I can think to say is “David, close your eyes.” This fucker has a punch in the throat coming. But before he can step forward, and before my fist can come up, he drops the toaster and staggers to the side, his hand on his back. His hand comes back with blood on it.

“What the fuck?” he says.

David is staring at him in shock, his little knife still in his hand. There is something smeared on the blade. I grab David's wrist and we're out the door and into the neighbours' backyard before I can even start thinking. I can't believe he stabbed the guy. Eight years old. I'm the most irresponsible kidnapper ever.

From the front yard we can hear yelling. I slow down to see if I can hear what they're doing, but David shoves me from behind.

“Run!” David says, pushing past me.

We run. Above us, the laser slices through the clouds. I can't stop looking up. David is looking up while he runs too.

“It's close,” I say. “It's way closer than before. It can't be more than a few blocks from here.”

And then we aren't running from anything anymore. We're running toward the laser. We're pushing through bushes from one backyard into the next, our eyes on the clouds and that beacon in the sky.

We stop on a street that's all dark, some new suburb with skeleton houses and dirt everywhere. The laser looks thick in the sky now. I can see it all. David sits down on the curb and cries. He's still holding the little knife in his hand. He ran all this way with an open knife. I didn't even notice.

“We're almost to the laser!” I say, but David just cries harder. “Don't you want to see?” He shakes his head, and all my excitement is gone. I can't pretend anymore. I'm glad he's not wearing a dress right now. What if that fucker back at the house had turned on David first? What if he'd done something before I could react?

“I want to go back to the car,” David says, and I sit down on the curb beside him and pull him into a hug. I squeeze him hard, and he shakes against me, silently.

“Richard will call soon,” I say. “He'll come and get us, and we'll go get some ice cream or something.” There has to be an all-night ice-cream place somewhere.

“I don't want any ice cream,” David says. He looks down at the knife in his hand. Then he folds it up and puts it back in his pocket.

When Richard calls, he says, “We can't just take him home. Are you crazy? We'd be arrested three blocks away.” Someone in the background on his end says something. “Alex says we should leave him somewhere and then call the cops to tell them where he is.”

“And how long would it take the cops to get there?” I say. “We just leave him in some McDonald's by himself to wait for the cops?”

“I don't want any McDonald's,” David says.

“He doesn't even like McDonald's,” I say.

“Nobody said anything about McDonald's, man.” Richard pauses. “Listen,” he says, “there's got to be a safe place we can leave him.”

“Okay,” I say. “I know where.”

“Where?”

“Come get us,” I say. “Just you, Richard. We don't need a car full of people.”

“Where are you?” he says.

I look around.

“Hey,” I say to David. “Run over and take a look at that street sign.”

In the car I sit in the back with David. I tell Richard how to get to Mrs. Hubert's neighbourhood. I straighten my dress and pull my seat belt on. David isn't crying anymore, but he's staring out the window.

“Hey, have you got the internet?” I say, and David nods without looking at me. “There's a book you can download off the internet called
The MIT Guide to Picking Locks
,” I say. I have my lockpick set in hand, and I reach out to place it in his hand. “You just read it again and again until it starts to make sense to you.” David is looking down at the lockpicks. “There are other guides and things on the internet, but the
MIT
one is the best, I think.”

“Okay,” David says.

Richard parks his car two blocks away, and David and I walk under the trees toward Mrs. Hubert's house. I want to say something to make him feel better about stabbing the guy, but I don't know what I'd say. I don't know what it would mean if I convinced an eight-year-old that it was all right to put a knife in someone. Would it be worse to have him grow up afraid of his own ability to be violent? What if he got so afraid that he wouldn't defend himself?

“Hey, David.” I stop walking and sit down on the curb. David stops too. He's holding the lockpick set in his fist, and in the streetlight he looks more tired than scared. “Do you think it's okay to hit a girl?”

He looks at me for a long time.

Mrs. Hubert's husband answers the door and takes one look at us and closes the door again. I ring the doorbell once more, and this time Mrs. Hubert answers. She looks tired too, and I realize I have no idea what time it is.

“Can you call his dad in the morning?” I say, putting my hand on David's back.

“Is he the boy that's gone missing?” Mrs. Hubert asks, and I nod. “He's okay?” She kneels down in front of him, and I kneel beside him.

“Mrs. Hubert will take care of you until your dad comes to get you, all right?” I lift up his hand and tap on the lockpick set. “You keep this hidden, or your dad will take it away. You keep it a secret,” I say.

Mrs. Hubert is looking at me now. “What about you?” she says. “You look tired.”

Later on, Richard will refer to this whole thing as “making the drop” and he'll talk about the time we “burlap-sacked the son of a political figure.” Richard will tell the story of this meeting like we had planned it this way all along. We get the kid, take him out, have a homophobe shout and threaten him, and have the kid stick up for himself, stab the asshole, and we drop him off before bedtime. If he mentions Mrs. Hubert at all, he probably won't have her say, “You look tired.” He'll probably have her say something else, something trite and expected and designed to make us look like heroes.

He definitely won't tell anyone that I stand back up and smile at her. He won't tell anyone that I say, “I
am
tired.”

David gives me a hug goodbye, and as I walk back to the car I try to think of something to tell Richard. I try to think of something we can do tonight, the four of us, some organization that needs their windows smashed, some slogan we can spray paint on every storefront.

Back in the car, Richard says, “What happened?”

I sit, looking out the window at the suburbs we pass, still trying to think of something we can do.

“She said she'd give the police a call in a half an hour, so that we could get far enough away.”

“Really?”

“She gave me a hug too,” I say.

I should have washed the blood off David's knife, I think. I roll down the window and stick my hand out, enjoying the feeling of the wind on my skin.