The Good Boy (16 page)

They pass by Joel’s door, no life apparent in there, either. He wants to look in, but if Butch is in there, they’re not so much in deep slumber as they are trading uncomfortable positions on the bed, and he shouldn’t chance waking them.

Sarah pauses at their bedroom door like she isn’t sure she’s in the right place, and then she says, “Jo Jo. His head again—look in on him?”

Pete wants to. He steps back and cracks Joel’s door.

In the sliver of light, he can’t see a thing.

He opens the door.

Can’t see anybody.

Steps inside. The light.

Finds nobody: not a boy or a dog, in the bed or under it.

Nobody. Anywhere.

“Sarah,” he says, an accusation, because, “Joel is gone.”

10

“What are you doing here?” Molly asks, her outside voice, even though the only thing outside her upstairs bedroom window is her face.

“Shh,” Joel whispers. “Can you come out?”

“What?”

He raises his hands and pulls them back like he does when he pretends he’s directing traffic.

Molly raises her hands, shows him ten red tips. “Nails are wet. Just, like, tell me.” Ever since school started,
like
has tripped up her talk, a girl-comma—another thing that makes him wonder how much longer she’ll be his friend. He hopes he’s got tonight.

“I don’t want your grandma to know.”

“What?” She leans out the window, hair falling over both shoulders.

“Your grandmother?”

“Oh. No: she doesn’t hear a thing when she’s snoring through her snoring mask.”

“Molly,
please.
”

“All right, jeez. Meet me around front.” She tries to palm the window closed but she can’t so she doesn’t.

Joel and Butchie are tucked safely into the shadows beside the porch when Molly finally turns on the light and kicks open the front door.

“Where are you?” she asks, flapping her hands, fingers spread wide. She’s wearing striped pajama pants and an orange shirt with a giant-eyed owl.

“I’m over here,” Joel whispers.

“Well, don’t be childish, come over here,” she says.

“Stay,” he says to Butchie, and then to Molly, “Please, could you please be quiet?” When he steps into the “here,” it’s clear she understands why.

“What happened to you? You’re, your—” She comes down the steps and wants to inspect him, but her nails, so she holds her hands out to her sides and bends over to get a look at his stomach, where the sidewalk made its mark, blood seeping through his shirt.

“Butchie got away from me,” Joel says. “I think he bit somebody.”

Molly stands straight up. “Who?”

“I don’t know. Someone at Zack Fowler’s party.”

“Why were you at Zack Fowler’s party?”

“They want to kill us. Molly. We need to get off the street. We can’t go home.”

“Oh. My. God.” Molly grabs both his arms and he flinches, then bends to her, skin raw.

“Ohmygod—” She lets go and steps back and looks at her hands and sees blood, the red much more real than her polish. “Oh my god.”

“You said that.”

“Bring Butchie,” she says, racing up the steps.

*   *   *

“I can’t believe it,” Molly says when Joel comes out of the bathroom wearing her old
LAKEFRONT ATTACK
team soccer T-shirt.

“I told you it would fit,” Joel says, although it doesn’t, really. Still, the too-small light-blue shirt with the city’s red-starred flag was better than option two, the oversized purple nightshirt Molly tie-dyed herself.

“I mean about Felis Catus,” she says, her arms around Butchie’s neck, a human collar. “It’s horrible.”

Before he cleaned himself up, Joel told Molly the whole story—so much for secrets, because once he started talking, they just came tumbling out, the whole lot knocked over like dominoes all the way back to Zack and the cat. He was surprised that Molly wasn’t surprised; he half wonders if she even believes him.

“What should I do with this?” he asks about the bathroom towel he used, now bloodstained.

Molly takes it, throws it over her shoulder. “I’ll just put it in the laundry. My grandma won’t notice. Or else she’ll think she did it. She’s been painting Abenaki Indians.”

Joel isn’t sure what that means, but Grandma Sandee is always doing something he isn’t sure about. He pictures her at a powwow where wild-eyed, brown-skinned, mostly naked people beat rawhide drums: there she dances, in beaded moccasins, her face war-painted, hair in feathers like the rest of the tribe.

“Let’s go,” Molly says, and she leads Butchie like a horse until he stops to sniff something in the living room that probably used to be an animal. “Sit,” she says to Butchie; “you too,” she says to Joel. “I’ll be right back.”

“Okay.” Joel picks the stool with a deer’s legs—there’s one made of an elephant leg, too—and looks around: he’s been in here before, plenty of times, but there’s always something new that’s really really old to look at. It’s because Grandma Sandee was a traveler when she was young and has, ever since, accumulated a Field Museum–size collection of things. Trinkets, gadgets, weapons, bones, teeth, tools—every shelf is a display. Jars filled with dinosaur parts, stingray fins, and snakeskin sit on the windowsill. Animal pelts and seashells have been fashioned into accessories that hang from hat racks and jewelry trees. The walls are covered with photographs of the Australian outback and the Shanghai skyline and the Brazilian rain forest; her cabinets are stacked with maps and books about all the places she’s explored in between. Joel always thinks of the poem his mom used to recite about what little boys are made of—“snips and snails and puppy dog tails—” and he is pretty sure Grandma Sandee has those, too, though he doesn’t really know what snips are and he doesn’t ever want to know if she has puppy tails.

“Okay, Butchie,” Molly says when she returns and pulls some kind of bone away from him. “Grandma
will
notice if somebody eats her walrus tusk.”

Molly opens the basement door and she and Butchie disappear down the stairs, and as Joel follows it occurs to him that this is one part of the house he has never toured.

He counts ten steps to the bottom, and when Molly turns on the lights, he discovers a much different kind of museum.

The space reminds him of the thrift store his mom makes him go to sometimes: racks of worn, thin-shouldered clothing with more of the same stuffed into boxes and black garbage bags; old, mismatched furniture standing in for shelves that stow incomplete dish sets and small electronics; suitcases full of forgotten items that no one would ever take on vacation.

“You can sleep here,” Molly says, passing Butchie’s leash off so she can move a bag of clothes from the couch. “He’ll be a good boy, right? He won’t poop or chew up stuff?”

“He’ll be good,” Joel says, dropping his backpack where the garbage bag had been.

As Molly drags the clothes across the carpet, the bag’s seam splits and an old gray sweater falls out; Butchie goes straight over to investigate.

“Hey,” Joel says to both of them, picking up the sweater. It’s a V-neck, a woman’s, the fabric pilled at the chest and forearms. He wonders why Butchie was interested and holds it to his own nose; it smells faintly like perfume and a little like sweat, but mostly like the plasticky old garbage bag it came from.

Molly snatches the sweater. “Don’t.”

Joel says, “I was only trying to help.”

“I don’t need help. You’re the one who needs help.”

“Sorry.” He turns Butchie around to sit him at the foot of the couch and notices a photo album there, on the side table. It looks like the pages are in the middle of being put together, or taken apart, and every photo is of the same dark-haired woman—presumably Mom—and on a night she wore a floor-length gown and a rich-red boa.

“What is all this down here?” Joel asks.

“My mom didn’t make it to court in time for the meditation,” Molly says, tying a knot in the bottom of the garbage bag.

“What’s meditation?” Joel knows, but the word doesn’t quite fit the story. She doesn’t make up words, but a lot of times she mixes them up.

“It’s like having a referee for your marriage,” she says. “My mom didn’t go—there was some mistake—and so my dad got everything and he moved it all here. For storage. For when she comes back.”

“When is she coming back?”

“Who cares.” Molly hurls the bag toward a trio of others in the corner, and Joel gets the idea there was no mistake. She says, “My dad and I are getting out of here when his tour’s over in January.”

“He’s been gone a long time.”

“
It’s not like it was
his
choice
.”

“My dad was called away for work once too.”

“You told me. That’s not the same thing.”

“It was still hard.”

“You still have two parents.”

“That might be harder.” Joel sits down on the couch and sees the red boa looped around the dressing table’s mirror. The evening gown is there, too, draped over the chair in front of the mirror as though the person wearing it has disappeared right out of it. A half-dozen other dresses are hangered and hooked to the adjacent file cabinet’s top drawer.

In the mirror, Molly catches Joel looking at the gown, and when their eyes meet, her reflection hardens. “What,” she says, exactly like Mike does when she doesn’t want him to ask.

Joel looks down at Butchie, whose eyebrows are raised as though he suspects the same thing: Molly’s been trying on these dresses. And she does care. Probably more than anything.

“What,” Molly says again, and so exactly like the first time that Joel wonders if she actually said it twice.

It’s then Joel feels like he’s dreamed all this tonight: every detail perfectly crisp, the situation completely sensible. But the reality is, “I’m scared.”

“You should be.” Molly carefully hangs the gown with the others and sits in the dressing chair, spinning around to face them. The owl on her shirt observes him, and Butchie, unblinking. “I mean, your parents?”

“What do you mean, my parents? What about those Redbone boys? They tried to kill us. They said they would find out where we live and kill us.”

“It’s not those Redbones you need to worry about. When you go home? Your parents will be the ones who subterfuge you. Sure, they’ll put their arms around you and say they’re so glad you’re safe and all that. They’ll tell you everything will be okay. But really, they’re just saying that, because they’re going to do whatever they think they have to do to make things okay. And you won’t get a vote.”

“A vote for what?”

Molly puts her hands on her knees and looks down at Butchie and the owl does, too, and she says, “They’ll probably have to youthnize him.”

She says it funny, but Joel knows the word. “That’s what that boy said. The one with the fangs.” It takes his breath. He scoots down to the floor and wraps his arms around Butchie’s big neck.

“I think it’s like, the law, that they have to put him down. If he attacked somebody? Didn’t you hear about the pit bull that got off his leash and bit that old man who was jogging along the lakefront last week? The
cops
shot him.”

He scratches Butchie’s ears, feeling his own get hot. “It was my fault.”

“Nobody’s going to care about that; you’re just a kid.” Molly gets up and pulls the chain to turn on the dressing table’s brass-footed lamp. Sweeping the dresses’ skirts aside like curtains, she retrieves a notebook from the file cabinet’s bottom drawer. “But here,” she says, turning the front cover around its spiral. “Everybody has a story. When you have to tell yours, to your parents or the cops, make sure it’s straight. Write it down.”

“What should I write?”

“Everything you told me. Maybe there’ll be something in there that will save you both.”

He gets the pencil he carries in the front compartment of his backpack and sets the notebook on Butchie’s withers. “Where should I start?”

“How about when you first got to Zack’s. What did you see?”

“Those boys in the Mizz Redbone car. They went into the party and we went into the neighbor’s yard to see in through the fence. I saw Danny and his gang, John-Wayne and Linda Lee—”

Molly holds up a hand,
stop.
“Write it down.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Joel looks down at the blank page. “What did I say first?”

“Jeez, Murph,” she says. “I’ll do it.” She takes the book and pencil and sits at the dresser and writes for a while, then says, “What comes next? After Linda Lee? Tell me what happened when the Miss Redbones boys got there.”

“Okay. I heard them talking when they came out from Zack’s. One was called Dez … and one Cee, I think? I can’t, you know, it was confusing, I don’t know who was talking. Maybe they were just saying
see.
”

“And one had a gun.”

“Yeah. The one wearing a sweatshirt that said … oh, it said something. In white lettering. Why can’t I remember it now?”

“Because you’re in shock. Try this: try pretending we’re playing Most Wanted. It’s a story. Tell me the story. The Redbones boys went in, and then what? What did you see through the fence?”

“Zack had these pills, or John-Wayne did, but I guess nobody wanted those, so then Danny came and they smoked some kind of pipe. Then Mike came out, and Danny—”

“What was Mike doing?”

“Forget that part about her. I don’t want to put my sister in this story. Just write that Butchie started to go crazy, so we went back out to the street. That’s where I lost control of the leash.”

“And then Butchie jumped the fence and bit somebody.”

“It was my fault.”

“I’m not going to write that.” Molly turns the pencil and erases before she goes on. “Then you heard a gunshot?”

“Yes. And when they came out, I heard one of them say that someone shot a boy, except he was trying to shoot Butchie. Then they wanted to find Butchie, but the cops were coming, so they said they were going to their grandma’s. I remember that. I guess that’s how I got the idea to come here.” Joel hugs Butchie’s neck.

“Do you remember anything else before Butchie found you?”

Joel thinks and thinks and all he can remember clearly is the boy with the long gold teeth. The way they caught his lower lip,
eufanize.
He can’t bring himself to repeat the word but he won’t ever forget it so he says, “No.”