Tom Finder (8 page)

He closed the book, then opened it again. He wrote: He is a man—yes, he liked that—who keeps a promise. He will find Daniel Wolflegs before he goes home. That was good writing.

Tom lay on the springy mattress, which smelled of tobacco smoke and throw-up. He got his pen ready in case he thought up a nice design for the billboard.

Wanted: Parents of Tom. Then what? He didn't have a phone number. Maybe this: Lost son? Check Prince's Island Park. No. Too many words. Besides, that could be any number of boys. It had to be catchy and bold. His dad might be an advertising executive. He'd expect Tom to display some creativity.

While he was thinking about it, a girl sat beside him.

“You're the poet,” she said.

Tom stared.

“We've seen you around, writing in that book. We call you the poet. What are you writing now?” she asked.

Tom closed the book. “Nothing.”

“Cool. That's what I write, too,” the girl said. She looked overweight and malnourished at the same time, as if she ate only potato chips. Tom realized he had seen the girl before, standing on the street corner near the day care. Her hair hadn't been washed in a while, and there was dust and lint stuck to it. She had pretty eyes, but there was something spooky about them. She wasn't looking at his face or his haircut or his clothes or his crooked bottom tooth. She was looking at the backs of his eyes.

Tom looked away.

“I'm Janice. What's your name?”

Tom didn't think he could look back into her eyes, even 58 knowing about nice.

“Hey. Aren't you going to answer her?” In the doorway stood another girl. She was the most beautiful real live girl he had ever seen. She was wearing a tight T-shirt that said C
ANADIAN GIRLS KICK ASS
. He wished someone would kick his so he could stop reading her T-shirt.

Tom swallowed and looked into the other girl's spooky eyes. “I'm Tom.”

“The poet,” Janice said.

“Well, I just write things—not poetry, but—”

“Oh,” Janice said. She stood up. “Well, I only talk to poets.”

“Why?”

Janice looked at him and turned away without answering. Tom saw the Canadian girl smile. She was going to leave with her. “Hey,” he said quickly. “Do you know a kid named Daniel Wolflegs?”

T-shirt girl shook her head, but Janice nodded.

“I need to talk to him. Can you tell me where to find him?”

“Sorry,” Janice mouthed, with no sound. “I only talk to poets.”

The T-shirt girl shrugged and smiled at him and began to turn away.

“What if I was a Finder?”

They stopped.

“What's a finder?” the poet asked the T-shirt girl.

“What's a finder?” the T-shirt girl asked Tom.

How could he think when the words on her T-shirt expanded and shrunk like that when she spoke?

“Uh . . . it might be a kind of poet,” he finally thought to say. Anything to make that girl stay.

Poet girl looked at him skeptically. “Okay, read me one of your poems,” she said without sound.

“She says, read her one of your poems,” T-shirt girl said.

Tom squirmed uncomfortably. He opened his book so that only he could see the words. He could make it up on the spot, but what if she really was a poet and she could tell? He decided to read her something he had written in his book.

It might have something to do with drums.

I remember drums.

The other music is gone.

I remember fighting.

And gravity. That gravity always wins.

Without it we would all fly off into space, and the earth would wander, and the whole universe would close up like a book. With it, we can't fly, and we always lose. I remember that, too.

When he was done, T-shirt girl looked questioningly at Janice.

Janice shrugged. “Good try,” she said out loud. T-shirt girl smiled, a big smile, the most perfectly beautiful Canadian smile Tom had ever seen. It was obvious to him now that the way to get to know this girl was to be nice to her poet friend. Luckily for him, nice came easy.

“Read me one of your poems,” he said to the poet girl.

Poet girl looked uncomfortably at Tom, and then at the T-shirt girl. T-shirt girl frowned and put her arm around poet girl. “You can't read her poetry.”

“Why?” Tom asked.

“Because,” she answered. “Because it's all space. People never stop to think that it's the spaces inside the letters that make the letters. Letters are just spaces on a string. Everyone thinks the lines are so great, nobody thinks about the space. Janice celebrates space.”

Janice the poet girl smiled at T-shirt girl. “Yes,” she said. “That's it.”

Tom thought there must be a lot of space inside Janice's head, but he only nodded.

Janice smiled at Tom. She hadn't brushed her teeth in a while. “Hey,” she said. “I liked the way you answered: with space. You didn't say anything.”

“What's your name?” Tom asked T-shirt girl.

“Pam. Yours?”

“Tom. So you must write poetry, too, since Janice talks to you.”

“Nope. No poetry in me. I tell futures,” Pam said.

“That are sheer poetry,” Janice said.

“So how come you're here?” Tom asked, nodding at the walls of the shelter.

Pam shrugged. “Just for a while, until I get a job. I'm going to be a window dresser. I've applied at a few places. They say come back when I'm done high school. Like anything I'd learn in high school has anything to do with being a window dresser.”

“I'm looking for my daughter,” Janice said. Tears spurted from her eyes, completely missing the tops of her cheeks and splashing halfway down. She blinked in surprise, as if someone had thrown water into her face.

Pam put her arm around the other girl. “C'mon, Janice. Let's get some sleep.”

“Listen,” Janice said to Tom. “Daniel hangs with the dead. I don't know his people. But you might try hanging out at the LRT station. I've seen him there. He's been sick, strung out. Bring some smokes for bait. Got to go. I need my space.”

After they left Tom wrote in his book, Tom found a girl. He closed the book, then opened it again. Tom is a poet, he wrote. A Canadian poet.

Chapter 5

You go on blowing your flute, I am going to play a different tune.

– Act 2, scene 28

That night Tom was awakened often, every time the toilet flushed, every time someone cried out in his sleep. Someone was snoring. A few people were laughing all night long. They were going to sleep when Tom got up. It was still dark out, and the social worker was sleeping. Tom took a shower, ate some cornflakes, brushed his teeth with the toothpaste, and left. It felt good to be clean, but the shelter made him uneasy. The red-haired social worker looked at him a lot and asked him hard questions like, “What's your last name?”

When his parents looked at him, the day they found him, they would see him the way he really was: nice, good speller, able to hold his own in a fight. A God-fearing swimmer. And a saver. Maybe he'd gotten that from his mom. His dad was probably the kind that spent too much money on stuff for his son. They were probably worried sick, calling all his friends, the police.

Why didn't he just go to the police?

No.

Something to do with gravity. Something to do with the way he wanted to throw up and cry every time he even thought of it. His parents would understand when he told them about losing his memory, about needing to be invisible for a while. Tom went to the LRT station to look for Daniel.

The Stampede station was empty when he arrived. The smells of tobacco and perfume and fries hung in pockets that you could walk in and out of. The wind skittered cigarette butts and discarded tickets along the cement platform. He walked around the station while the sun lightened the sky. No one showed up that could be Daniel Wolflegs. Tom looked for good cigarettes to use as bait.

That day he found a lipstick, Tender Pink. He kept it all day. His eyes liked to lick it. He kept the lipstick in his pocket when he left the station to look for H
ELP
W
ANTED
signs. When he inquired, people were looking for someone older, or more experienced, or with a résumé.

You were allowed four nights in the shelter, so Tom slept there again. Janice the poet and Pam the Canadian weren't there. Tom showered and used mouthwash and stole three containers of floss.

The next morning he met up with the newspaper man again. This time his tie was off and his shirt collar unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up.

“Well, it's the little mugger. Written anything for me yet?”

“Not for you. Just for me,” Tom said.

“Yes? Let me look at it.”

Tom hesitated, but the man gestured impatiently. He handed him his notebook.

The man read. Once he nodded. Twice he nodded. He handed it back to Tom.

“So?”

“Shows you can spell,” the old man said.

“I can spell,” Tom said.

“Spell
proficient.”

“P–R–O–F–I–C–I–E–N–T.”

The man nodded. He unfolded a piece of tinfoil and held it under his chin.

“Am I a poet?” Tom asked.

“A poet? That's not my area of expertise. But I memorized a poem once in school. I can't remember the periodic table or the dates of a single war or how to multiply fractions, but I remember that poem.” He closed his eyes and recited:

“Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy . . .”

His eyes popped open, and he eyed Tom. Perhaps he'd had second thoughts about Tom who-might-be-a-mugger.

“By William Wordsworth,” he said. He looked at Tom for a long moment, then dismissed him with a gesture. “Go write something for me.”

The next day, in the train station, he found an address book. He wondered what it would be like to have so many friends that you couldn't remember where they were. Or maybe the person just wrote them down so she could flip through the pages and feel lucky.

That night in the shelter a kid with a Betty Boop tattoo on his arm saw Tom's lipstick and told the supervisor that Tom wasn't a boy. Tom left, and threw the lipstick away on his way out.

The day after that Tom found a grocery list. At first he thought it was a poem in a foreign language, until he got to a part of the list he recognized as food: chicken, tomatoes, onions. But what were cumin, pesto, hoisin, and gingerroot? He wrote the strange words in his notebook so he wouldn't forget.

He felt like an archeologist trying to decipher the garbage of a lost people. The whole world seemed to understand something that Tom was trying to figure out. That was the worst thing about forgetting. The best thing was that anyone could be his mom. When people got off the trains, he picked the prettiest woman or the rich-looking one or the one with lots of kids, to imagine that she was his mother. He tried to catch the eye of the ones that looked smart. Proof that his mother was smart: he could spell. None of them saw him. He figured he wouldn't be invisible to his own mother.

Tom tried different LRT stations, looking for Daniel. When he found good cigarettes, he saved them, put them beside him on the bench. Only white kids tried to bum them. Sometimes he gave them out and said, “If you see a guy named Daniel Wolflegs, tell him I have to talk to him about something.”

When the office-worker people were gone home and the station was empty except for the ghosts of smells, Tom would look for things and find them. Someone lost a book called
How to Improve Your Memory.
Tom read it cover to cover, but it didn't help.

The best thing he found was an entire purse. He studied it for hours before he turned it in. The wallet was stuffed with business cards, credit cards—one with the hologram of an eagle—and plastic-covered photos. There was a makeup case, a bag of lemon drops (Tom ate four), and a daytimer. The daytimer was full of the ordinary secrets of a good and invisible life, the life of someone that might have been his mother. He resolved that, being from an honest family, he would turn it in, though minus the $8.51 in the wallet which he would keep as a reward.

He decided to leave the purse on the doorstep of the police station. He walked back and forth on the street across from the station. Once, twice, three times. Every time he went to do it, he felt his bones go weak. Stepping off the curb to cross the street made him feel like he was going to fall. He told himself he would do it on the seventh try. Maybe seven had been his lucky number. The seventh time he told himself all the reasons why he could do it, why he could do anything he put his mind to. He was strong, up for a fight, able to swim and spell. On the seventh try he crossed the street halfway, chucked the purse at the steps, and ran.