The Good Boy (33 page)

He doesn’t remember much of the game since there were all sorts of things to do besides watch basketball, like trying to catch T-shirts from a rocket launcher or keep up with Benny the Bull. Also, there were a lot of timeouts, and then the Loveabulls would run out on the court in different little costumes. Joel liked them. They were really good dancers.

Then there was a contest on the jumbotron where a doughnut and a bagel raced each other to the finish line, and if you had the winner on your ticket, you got a free coffee. Joel didn’t win and the Bulls didn’t either, but being there with his dad was pretty cool. He learned a lot more about basketball after that.

Butchie stops, this time to pee on a big sign for an office building called Furnetic Animal ER, and when Joel looks around, he realizes they’ve crossed over the Eisenhower Expressway to the other side of presidential territory. He can’t believe they’ve covered so many blocks, and that he was so caught up in memories. He wonders how many cars passed by; if there was another Mizz Redbone. Had he really seen the one, there at Lake Street? He’s pretty sure he has a fever.

He wonders if Butch feels as foggy. The ER is right here: they would help him.

But they wouldn’t help Joel. They’d call his parents.

Joel kneels, takes Butchie by his face. “Can you get us there, Butch O’Hare?” His eyes are clear. His gums are pink. The skin of his scruff is elastic. Except for what came out the other end, he looks like he’ll be fine.

And that means Joel will be okay, too. No matter how his guts feel right now. Anyway, this is
for
Butchie. They have to keep on.

They move easily along the next residential stretch where cars are few, pedestrians nonexistent. Seems like the storm chased everyone inside and persuaded them to stay there, and Joel is envious: the homes down here remind him of those in the friendly-looking neighborhood they passed through this morning.

One front window’s corners are steamed up, as though it’s so warm inside; oh, if he could climb the porch steps and knock, ask to use the bathroom.

There’s action on Taylor Street, mostly from a pizza place on the opposite corner where delivery drivers stand around smoking cigarettes, their cars double-parked. Joel thinks of one of his favorite movies where the hero hides in a pizza guy’s backseat to get him across town. The hero is a pint-size toy, though, and he doesn’t have a hundred-pound dog with him.

Joel keeps his head down as he leads Butchie past; he isn’t worried about the delivery drivers or any other drivers—it’s the pizzeria, the smells of pepperoni and sausage and garlic and bread in the oven—that kills him. Because he’s starving, but he is also sick.

What didn’t come up before sits in his stomach like Drano, and it’s working its way pretty quickly through the drain. He’s going to have to find somewhere to go.

They make it past the next bright-lit alley and then Joel can’t make it another step. He leaves Butchie on the sidewalk and squeezes in behind low bushes that line the basement windows of an apartment building and drops trou and then everything else, immediately.

He feels terrible, but he really can’t help it. He hopes nobody’s in the basement unit, an unfortunate witness.

As he squats there, headlights appear, a car turning onto the street.

“Butch,
hier!
” Joel says, peeking through the bushes as the car’s headlight beams angle up toward the treetops and back down again, like the driver had flashed his brights. He can see Butchie out there, and apparently he ignored Joel’s command because he’s busy dragging his butt right there along the sidewalk. What a way to get caught.

Except that the driver must not see him, or must not want to catch him, because the car goes right on by.

Joel breaks off a branch from one of the bushes, the leaves for wiping. He uses another Jewel bag to pick up after himself, which is strangely revolting, though he doesn’t bat an eye when he does it for Butchie. His stomach still feels like it’s curdling cheese, so he tries not to think about it.

Back on the street, he snags Butchie’s leash and dumps the bag into an alley can. When another car approaches they take cover and Joel figures out why the driver’s headlights flashed: there are speed bumps along this block.

“Speed bumps,” Joel says to Butchie, “that’s all.”

Joel’s pretty sure the dog would shrug if he could.

At the end of the next block they reach a cul-de-sac—a strange place to curb a street since Roosevelt Road sits on the other side, a giant six-lane stretch. Past the intersection, a bright White Castle sign is a light among bland shadows. Including the turn lanes, he counts ten for them to cross at the walk.

Or fifty yards straight across, if they sprint.

Which they do.

They’re in the third lane when a car blows the red light.

Joel hears the skid of the tires and the last-ditch bleat of its horn and he pulls Butchie toward him and he feels the air around them sucked in by the rush of the car. It passes so close to his face that he thinks about his jaw—wonders if its side-view mirror hit him in the jaw; at the same time he looks after it, brake lights blinking twice, driving on. He touches his face, intact. He looks down at Butchie, the dog’s eyes white pinpoints, reflecting a set of headlights from another car, a car that didn’t blow the light. It comes and slows and stops in front of them, watching, engine murmuring, a curious animal.

And they are caught, unless they sprint. Again.

They do: across the fourth lane and then another block, and one more. A stop sign. An abandoned building. A blur.

And then, a single streetlight; a semi truck parked underneath. And a broken-down A-frame house all alone at the end of the street. The end, literally: just black beyond. There is only one window lit in the house, upstairs, as all the bottom floor’s windows are boarded up. An American flag hangs, stripes down, on what should be the front door. It isn’t patriotic.

“Butch?” Joel asks, because this feels like a dream. His voice sounds small, a child’s.

Butch looks back, as if someone’s coming.

They move beyond the house, into the black, and once there Joel can see the concrete wall that protects a steep, tree-topped rise. Above the rise the sky is brown, looks smog-pressed.

And then a long horn. The diesel rumble of idle trains.

“Union Pacific,” he tells Butchie. Remembers the rail yard from the map.

They scale the wall and climb the rise and follow the fence east until they find a place to cut through. A place where someone else cut through.

And then Joel can see for miles: train tracks disappear to the west, freight cars await yard switchers to the south, and to the east, over the repair yard, the whole of Chicago’s skyline stands, alive.

Joel leads Butchie along the fence line, looks for a place to camp. He feels better: it’s warmer up here. And they are alive.

He finds a secluded spot in the trees where he drops his pack. He has no idea if railroads run freight on weekends, or how many workers might be in the field, so he stays on lookout for a while. Butchie situates himself nearby, settling in next to a bundle of old ties.

As he watches steam rise over the grounds, he thinks about all the places a train could take him. And the one place he really wants to go: home.

Exhausted, he lies down, and as sleep comes he dreams of his sister, standing there in the living room, arms crossed, so much attitude. She’s already said
fuck
a million times. She’s so pissed. And also worried.

And his parents, on opposite sides of the room. They’re worried, and mad. And quiet. So quiet. He hopes they aren’t mad at each other.

And he hopes they all know he wants to come home.

23

“Are you warm enough?” Pete asks Molly. They’re sitting outside on the back steps; she came by without a coat, so Pete made McKenna lend one of hers. And a hat.

“I’m okay,” Molly says, but she doesn’t look that way. She looks like someone dragged her out in cuffs.

“I won’t keep you long,” Pete says, fiddling with the knobs on the walkie-talkie she brought over—her link to Joel that’s gone silent.

“It’s okay,” she says, equally unconvincing. She picks at her nail polish, flecks of bright red enamel.

Pete gives her a minute, or maybe he gives himself one. Sarah said Molly had been in contact with Joel via the walkie-talkies the two kids used to play cops and robbers or whatever in the neighborhood. Molly had radioed Joel this morning, but apparently this afternoon someone else tuned in. Someone who scared her. When her grandmother Sandee found her in tears about Joel, she brought Molly straight over. Well, not straight over. They stopped at the Little India for takeout.

Of course, getting Molly’s story from Sarah was about like a game of tin-can telephone, the words and meanings all mom-strung. When Sarah claimed that Joel must’ve run away because of his posttraumatic stress disorder, Pete stopped her there, because he didn’t know Joel
had
posttraumatic stress disorder, and he was pretty sure Molly hadn’t told her that, either. He told Sarah to keep Molly there; he’d talk to her himself.

When he and Rima arrived at the house, Pete knew he was going to have to get Molly alone, because she was unable to manage so much as a hello before Sandee started putting words in her mouth and Sarah put those words in her own context and Ri tried to put everything in perspective. McKenna was the only one who wasn’t involved; she just stared at the table and put a piece of naan in her mouth.

“I want to thank you, Molly,” Pete finally says, “for coming forward—ah, coming over.” It’s awkward; he means to treat her as Joel’s helpful friend, but she’s also an accomplice.

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“If Joel is in trouble, he needs your help.”

“Joel is going to hate me. I promised him I wouldn’t snitch.” Molly works on her thumbnail.

“None of what you tell me has to go past me.”

“That’s a lie.”

“No, wait a second—”

“It’s okay, Mr. Murphy: I know how this works. I’ll tell you what I know and you’ll do whatever you think you have to do and you won’t care how I feel about any of it. Just please, don’t tell me everything’s going to be all right, because you don’t know that.” McKenna’s hat is too big on her; it hides her eyes.

Pete looks down, sees a forgotten rubber-newspaper dog toy at the base of the steps. He says, “I don’t know if anything is going to be all right.”

“He wrote it all down,” Molly says. “Joel did. Everything he remembered about the party. To like, keep a record. To help his case.”

“He told you that?”

“It was my idea. I gave him a notebook.”

“Wait, you saw him? When?”

“Last night.”

“Does Mrs. Murphy know about this?”

“No. As soon as I told her about the other boy on the radio she started saying how Joel was acting out, and then she was, like, sticking up for him, but also she wanted to know where he is, and she got mad at me, or like, she didn’t believe me, because I said I didn’t know. And then she was calling the cops—or you I guess—she said I had to talk to the cops—”

“But you saw Joel. At Zack Fowler’s? Were you there, too?”

“No. He came to my house after. Him and Butchie. He was all bloody—Joel was. He said Butchie went crazy and dragged him around. He said they were in trouble, and these boys were going to kill them because Butchie bit somebody. That’s why he ran away.”

“Do you know the boys he was talking about?”

“No.” She chews on her thumb, a speck of polish on her lip. “Joel was mixed up about them anyway. That’s why I told him to write everything down. Like, not just what happened, but details, too.”

“Do you remember any of the details?”

“I’m the one who wrote them down.”

Pete turns, knees toward Molly; he’s sitting a step below, but he’s still head and shoulders above her. “Can you tell me any of those details? About the boys?”

Molly tips the too-big hat back on her head. “I remember there was a boy named See. The letter, or like, ‘see’? And one had a gun. They were in a car called Miss Redbones—”

“Mizz Redbone.” Holy. Fuck.

“Yeah, painted on the side or something. They went into the party, and after that Butchie jumped the fence. That’s when Aaron Northcutt got shot. Then the Redbones boys came out and said one of them shot Aaron and, and that’s when, like, they said they were going to youthnize Butchie. And they tried: they shot at Butchie and Joel.”

The gunshots. “Two and three.” And marker 16. The blood.

“What’s two and three?” Molly asks.

“What’s
youth
-nize?” Pete asks, her funny pronunciation echoing a terrible possibility.

“I told you, the Redbones said they were going to youthnize Butchie.”

“Yes, where did you get that word?
Youth-
nize?”

“I’m not saying it right?”

Pete stands up, takes the steps down to Butchie’s cage, hangs on to the fence.

Maybe the big fucking piece, the one missing in the middle of the puzzle, is the one Pete is afraid to place: the shooter was Elgin Poole.

And maybe Rima was right: the shooter missed his target.

“Mr. Murphy?”

“No,” Pete says. Elgin Poole is supposed to be in jail. Elgin Poole is supposed to be a nonfactor.

“No?” Molly asks.

“I have to, I should call, I need to—” Pete says, but he doesn’t know what he’s saying.

“You’re doing the same thing Mrs. Murphy did,” Molly says, her tiny fingers curled around the cage wires below his. “You don’t believe me, do you.”

“I believe you, Molly. I’m afraid I do.” Pete looks at Butchie’s water dish, all dried up. He’s lost so much time already. “Will you go back inside, and I’ll be there in a minute?”

“Okay,” she says, turning for the house. She holds on to McKenna’s hat as she skips across the yard and up the steps.

*   *   *

Pete starts the engine and gets the Toughbook going, navigating the Department of Corrections database to search the inmates for Elgin Poole. Pete finds him by name and recognizes his photograph—the same one Pete’s had tacked up on his mental corkboard along with Ja’Kobe White’s.