Everything Breaks (5 page)

If one small impossible thing happens, that makes anything possible.

My eyes came open with a start and I saw that the shadow spiral on my bedroom ceiling had been replaced with weak, flickering daylight. I'd slept some after all and now it was morning, Sunday, which meant it was Janet's busiest day at Bob's Family Restaurant. She would have left at six. My digital clock said 6:37. She'd be gone.

A feeling of overwhelming doom was coming awake along with me. I tried to hold it back, tried not to let it swamp me. But toxic images from last night came pouring like acid into my head, destroying all sense, all reality. I pulled my pillow over my face and concentrated on sending all my attention to the burning in my legs.

They felt turned inside out. It was an ordeal getting up. My knees would barely bend, and the sheet beneath me was bloodied, a real mess that I couldn't let Janet see. I hobbled into the bathroom, got into the shower, and watched blood and mud mix at my feet and swirl down the drain. I pushed my hands and forearms hard against the shower wall, but still I heard myself moan. I hobbled back into my room and dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, biting my bottom lip bloody as I pulled that rough denim up over all that skinless flesh.

The phone kept ringing and ringing, the one downstairs. I'd turned off my own phone yesterday, hoping to get some studying done before the bonfire. Now I took it from the backpack on my desk and saw it was clogged with messages. I frowned at it, then bent, stifling a groan, and threw it under the bed. I heard it skid into a nest of books and shoes, out of my reach and sight.

Janet's father, Bud, was still snoring across the hall, which was good. Since we shared the bathroom, I'd been worried I'd wake him before I could figure out how to dodge him. The last thing I wanted was to have to talk to anyone, and it was especially hard to talk to Bud these days, he was so old. I stripped the bed and took the long and painful journey down the stairs. I shuffled to the laundry nook, stuffed my sheets into the washing machine, dumped Tide and half a gallon of Clorox in with them, slammed the lid, and started the machine. Then I shuffled aimlessly back into the kitchen.

There was the usual note from Janet tacked with one of her heart-shaped magnets on the refrigerator, written Saturday night before she went to bed, giving me Sunday morning instructions and late-breaking Saturday news and so forth.

Tuck—Just thought you should know Bud made me take him for his driver's test again this afternoon and, no big surprise, he failed. The eye test part, like both other times. They won't let him take it a fourth time, so he'll be grouchy tomorrow when he gets up. Just thought you ought to be warned. xxoo Janet PS Don't show this to Bud!

Good old Janet, always leaving a
PS
to warn you of something obvious. She'd written this, what? Three hours before she got the midnight police call? I stared at the bright yellow bee printed in the corner of her notepaper. The smile of the identical bees on each sheet of Janet's notepaper was not just insane like I'd always thought but completely sinister, I saw now. It mocked those who actually had to somehow live, not just pretend to, who actually had to deal second by second with three dangerous dimensions. I wanted to tear off that bee's paper legs, to make it suffer, because suffering was another thing it knew absolutely nothing about and never would.

I crumpled the paper and tossed it hard into the waste bin, then wandered out the back door from force of habit, heading vaguely to the hoop house like I did all mornings. The dew crawled up my jeans, clammy and cold against my throbbing legs.

Things inside the little greenhouse were so lush. Arugula, chard, all those good salad fixings. This would have been a perfect barbecue day, cool and sunny.

I began to shake, hard, all over. I fumbled for some of the vegetables nearest my feet and rolled them into my shirt, then I lumbered back inside, dumped the bright, strobing vegetables onto the table, and stared at them, trying to remember what they were.

The phone in the kitchen started ringing again. I picked it up before I remembered I didn't want to. It was Mary Beth Chandler. Under other circumstances, I would have considered a call from her an answered prayer. Any boy in the junior class would have.

“Dead,” she whispered into my ear. “Zero, Trey, Steve, all dead. It's just so unbelievable, Tucker, you know? And we figured you were with them last night . . . before? So Jessie and Aimee are here with me. We had a sleepover after the, well, after the bonfire was, you know, called off because of, well, you know. And we're calling to tell you we're, like, really, really sorry. But glad it wasn't you too, I mean. Oh, Tuck! This is just so awful, you know? Well, of course you do, you guys were best friends.”

“Right.” I knew all three things she'd mentioned. It was unbelievable, and it was awful. And we were best friends. Zero and then Steve ever since they moved to Clevesdale, but Trey and I practically forever, since we were barely four years old.

At first I hated Wee Ones Preschool because this kid named Charley kept hitting me on the head day after day with a can of chicken noodle soup he'd pilfered from somewhere and kept hidden in his Spider-Man backpack. Then suddenly this boy with crazy orange hair arrived for the first time, teary-eyed from being left behind by his mother. I told him a story to make him feel better, the one my own mother had told me the day she first left me there, something about a bulldozer named Annie who loved doing preschool things, sharing crayons, making music. By the end of that story our friendship was sealed, and the very next day Trey saved me from Charley.

He tricked Charley into taking off his right shoe by telling him there was a rock in it, then he threatened to have a Ninja Turtle action figure bite off Charley's big toe unless Charley gave up that can of soup. I can still see four-year-old Trey kneeling, his hair a bright tangled curtain on both sides of his face as he held that action figure so close to Charley's bare foot that Charley didn't dare move or even scream for grown-up help. Trey calmly waited for Charley to quit his angry but silent crying and to simply surrender his unlawful weapon, and Charley finally threw the can of soup at the wall and a girl named Jessica pounced on it and took it home in her Barbie case that afternoon.

Everyone was so impressed by the clever bravado behind that plan that Trey pretty much took over leadership of the rug-rat societal structure at Wee Ones. We all began letting him decide complicated things—how long someone's block tower had to stand before someone else could charge over and knock it down, what you could cut when we got to use scissors and what it wasn't cool to cut even if the teacher wasn't looking, how many people it took to cram the ragtag stuffed animals back into their tattered refrigerator box at day's end.

Over and over again I saw Trey gain that same sort of respect in various situations. He was the renegade trickster rabbit that people wanted to win the costume contest, not because he was bad in a cool way or even because his costume was good in a gross way but because he was unpredictable and fun-loving and patient with his plans. Trey never settled for smiling if the flashier response of howling was what the occasion called for.

He was fond of risks because they made his life exciting and paid off for him far more often than they didn't, and he was lucky and well liked. And I was his friend and became entitled through his friendship to the other two good friends Trey picked up along the way, guys similarly flashy and lucky and risky. Zero in eighth grade, Steve in ninth.

“Tucker? Hey, are you still there?”

“Right.”

“So, Jess and Aimee and I are making black armbands, enough for everybody. Out of, like, respect? To wear at school and stuff. We'll give them to the juniors tomorrow, and the senior cheerleaders will give them to the seniors. Because see, Jilly and Kim and Traci are making them too. It was Traci's idea. We wanted you to know. It's the least we can do. What . . . was it like, Tuck? Awful, right?”

A large black ant was traveling across the windowsill, dragging a crumb behind him. The ant was acting like the whole future of the world hung on what it was doing with that probably moldy piece of something. At any second I could drop on it with my fist and crumbs or anything else would have absolutely no meaning for it any longer.

“Tucker?”

“Mary Beth, did you see a large black dog at the bonfire? Or . . . or on the bluff road?” I swallowed. “A sort of . . . well,
deformed
dog, in the air, like, flying?”

A few beats of silence. “Tucker, I know you're messed up, but that's not funny. And I'm supposed to ask you, for Lily, if Steve was going to ask her to the dance next week, because Tonya said he had already asked
her
and Lily's so upset that she's just hysterical because she feels Tonya is just a liar because how could she prove it, and—”

I hung up the phone, though I wasn't sure Mary Beth had finished talking. Now the ant was climbing vertically up the window. It went behind the curtain, so I tore the curtain down and kicked it out of the way. The ant was still dragging that precious crumb, but at my slightest whim the crumb would disintegrate into microscopic crumbs of a crumb and the ant would become just a shiny blotch of shapeless black. Its friends at the anthill would never have any idea what had become of—

“What happened to Janet's little blue curtain?”

I jerked up and turned, my heart slamming. “G'morning, Bud.”

He was standing in the kitchen doorway, wearing his usual gray pants and white shirt, but he was barefoot, which was very, very strange. I couldn't remember ever seeing him barefoot, without his brown nylon socks and shiny brown dress shoes or at least his leather slippers. The hairs on his toes were as black as the hair on my own head, though Bud's few head hairs had been white for as long as I'd known him.

“Right, Bud. Uh, I guess it fell.” I tried not to yelp as I bent to retrieve the curtain. When I had the thing hanging again, I took some stiff, calculated steps toward the doorway, hoping to somehow ease past Bud and get on up to my room. Bud journeyed to a place—a doorway, the bathroom, the narrow lane between the table and refrigerator—then just stood there and was basically unmovable. He was built like a tree trunk, wide across the shoulders, waist, and hips. He was basically rooted wherever he stood.

He raised a hand to stop me, then took the other hand from behind his back. “I believe you left these in the bathroom.”

From his big, blunt fingers dangled the police sweatpants. He gave them a little shake, and dark clots of hardened blood fell like sleet onto the kitchen linoleum.

V

I WATCHED MY ARM
reach for the blood-encrusted pants. “Thanks,” I croaked.

I gripped one leg, but Bud held on to the other and pulled me a step closer to him with it. “Korea,” he said grimly and quietly. “Thirty-eighth Parallel. I saw some things. They burn a tattoo right onto your soul. Try losing it. You can't!”

My throat went dry. “Who . . . who burns a tattoo, Bud?” I pushed out.

“When Janet got a call from the police last night, I turned on my radio. Three boys killed in a car and one injured. I'm guessing from the look of these pants and the police call that you were that fourth boy, am I correct? And that the others were those three boys you've brought to the house now and then.”

I took a long, shuddering breath. “I got out of the car and they drove on.”

Bud didn't reply to that, just nodded and let go of his leg of the police pants. He began his usual slow morning trek through the kitchen to the refrigerator. He pried the refrigerator door open and stood eyeing the empty egg container, shaking his head. It was no secret that Bud thought Janet should be home, buying eggs, talking to him, and being happy. For some reason Bud's look of egg despair hit me hard, though, and my stomach began to feel all knotted and strange. I needed something, maybe orange juice.

“We've got Pop-Tarts,” I told Bud as I eased past him and headed to the toaster.

Bud turned from the refrigerator to his chair and dropped into it with an exhausted groan. His toenails looked like hooves, thick and yellow, curving inward over his toes.

While the Pop-Tarts cooked, I got out the orange juice and two glasses.

“So, the police picked you up on the bluff road, drove you down to the beach, and called Janet to meet you there and bring you home?”

Even two-handed I couldn't make the juice hit our glasses more than the counter. The toaster made the trampoline sound it makes when the Pop-Tarts are done.

“Something like that.” I groped for a subject change. “Aren't your feet cold?”

“Nah. I got no feeling in them since this last heart event.
You're
walking like your legs are wood. I'm guessing that's where your worst injuries occurred, in your leg area.”

I got the Pop-Tarts and put them on a couple of saucers for us. Neither of us made a move to eat ours, though. I can't speak for Bud, but mine just didn't seem appetizing. I don't know what can go wrong with a simple Pop-Tart, but it seemed off. Made of something like plastic foam, or flesh.

“Janet should get those Hungry Jack biscuits again,” Bud grumbled.

I stared at my plate and muttered, “She wants to take me to the doctor this afternoon.”

“Well, don't let them give you a cockamamie eye test,” Bud muttered back. “I been driving without a bit of trouble since I was fourteen years old!”

“Right, no eye test,” I assured him, then I took a deep breath and pushed myself up to a stand. I gathered our plates and glasses and began the long, painful walk to the sink.

“Dead friends,” Bud said quietly behind me, then sighed a long, rickety sigh. “Lucky you didn't see yours that way. Dead, I mean. The sight burns a tattoo right into your soul. Shut your eyes and there they are, against your lids. Or you'll look at an empty sky and it'll suddenly fill with the sight.”

I decided rinsing our stuff could wait, and I clattered the plates and glasses into the sink. “Later, Bud,” I threw over my shoulder, then I got out of the kitchen.

The trek upward was agonizing, much worse than coming down had been. You never think about it, but climbing stairs absolutely requires bendable knees.

Once inside my room, I pushed the door closed and leaned back against it. I stared at nothing for a while, then I covered my eyes with my hands and, just like Bud had said, the thing started replaying itself against my lids, Trey behind that wheel, Trey when that smoke had lightened for that second, Trey doing his fire-fueled crazy dance. That rubber tarp blowing off Zero for a second before faux-hawked Larry tacked it back down.

I began a wooden-legged sort of clumsy pacing, huffing in little bits of air without exhaling. I'd forgotten
how
to exhale, how to do the simple act of breathing! I got dizzy, light-headed, but all I could think about was keeping my eyes stretched wide open.

And then, a handful of rocks suddenly hit my bedroom window, the sort of small hard-thrown pebbles Trey was always picking up from the little kids' play area at the park behind his house and saving in a coffee can in the Mustang for when he needed my attention in the middle of the night.

No one but Trey ever threw rocks against my window. No one.

I froze for maybe five seconds, completely froze, then I ordered my burning legs to move and I charged to that window and looked out, my fingers splayed against the glass. Was I longing for it to be Trey? Trey back from wherever? Ghostly Trey, skeletal and charred Trey? I could see our whole block of small houses, and there was nobody around. The trees in the yards of our subdivision are small and scrubby ones, and no one, not even a tiny child, could hide behind one of them. There was nothing out there.

But caught on the window ledge, still teetering, was one of Trey's brown pebbles.

Breathe,
I told myself.
Breathe!
Things were going black around the edges, but in the nick of time I grabbed a deep gulp of air, my head cleared a bit, and then, I saw it.

Near the McKees' mailbox, almost directly across the street.

The dog. It was working at the ground with its tremendous forefeet, digging exactly where I myself had stood just yesterday afternoon when Trey had ordered me to drive. Then it stuck its middle head into the hole it had made and came up with a small bright green something in its mouth.

So there it was, in broad daylight. With its middle head it looked proudly up at me with that green thing in its mouth as though it expected some kind of reward. Meanwhile its left head was turned to gaze down Cottonwood Street in the direction of Best Buy. Its right head stared with great interest at the long string of something that looked like moldy sausage hanging out of one of the overflowing garbage cans in the McKees' side yard.

I could see a dizzy sort of movement in its eyes that was those spooky spirals.

I pushed off from the window, then stumbled through my room, knocking over a chair, slip-sliding on clothes. I exploded out the door and into the hallway. I bounced stiff-legged down the stairs three at a time and staggered through the den.

Bud was snoring in his La-Z-Boy recliner, and when I passed, I yelled, “Bud, there's something you gotta see, right across the street! Hurry!”

Gruff and grouchy Bud, who could be a better witness? People would believe him because he never bothered to lie. And if Bud saw no three-headed dog? “You're crazy, kid,” Bud would say, and he'd be right. Either way, I had to know.

“Whassit? wha . . . ?” Bud sat up, then pushed himself to a wobbly stand, disoriented but game. “Go ahead!” He waved a hand. “I'm right behind you.”

I jerked open the front door and ran across the porch, but I could already see that the dog was gone. I jumped the porch stairs and did a bouncing jog across the street. There wasn't even a hole in the McKees' yard to show where the mutt had been digging.

But when I got right to the spot where the dog had been, I saw Trey's cheap little bright green Bic cigarette lighter lying in the brown grass. I grabbed it and stashed it in my pocket before it too could disappear, then I loped stiffly back to where Bud was framed in the open doorway of the house.

“There was a dog over there a minute ago,” I called to Bud.

Bud frowned. “So? What's the big deal about a dog?”

“It looked a lot like our old Lab, Ringo.” Except for a few huge details.

We heard Janet's muffler in the near distance and turned to watch the Taurus swaying slowly down the middle of the street.

“She left work awful early for a Sunday, way before the Baptist rush,” Bud observed. “I expect she got to thinking she didn't want to wait until afternoon to get you to the clinic.” He snorted and muttered, “She's big on hauling people to that clinic.”

The pain came surging back, worse than ever. It had taken a brief vacation while my brain used all its energy to try and figure out the deal with that dog. But now the red throbbing returned and I welcomed it, the only real thing I had now that everything else was disintegrating into senselessness.

I pushed my hand deep inside my pocket and gripped the lighter. “I don't want the clinic messing with me,” I heard myself murmur darkly. “I
need
this pain.”

“I read you loud and clear, kid,” Bud totally shocked me by responding. And then he came slowly down the porch stairs and walked in his stiff-backed way clear down the sidewalk to stand rooted near the garage.

Janet maneuvered right over the curb and into the driveway. She gave us both a tired smile as she threw her shoulder against her door and got out.

“There are a couple sacks of groceries in the trunk, Tuck.” She bent to gather her purse and waitressing uniform. “Dad, I got you some of those breakfast biscuits you've been wanting.”

I took the keys from the ignition and walked back to the trunk.

“Janet, a man's wounds are his own,” I heard Bud tell her. “This guy doesn't want to go to the clinic, so don't pester him about it and that's that!”

Bud never talked to Janet like that. Never. I stayed hidden behind the open lid of the trunk. Janet said nothing, and a couple of minutes later I saw Bud walking back toward the porch in a proud way, putting all his weight on one foot at a time, holding his arms out from his body for balance.

I finally hung both grocery sacks from my left wrist and slammed the trunk closed.

Janet was looking straight at me with tears in her eyes. “I just don't want to take any chances with you, Tuck,” she said in a ragged whisper.

But that ship had sailed. All the chances had already been taken as of last night. She didn't get that, but Bud did, from Korea.

I twisted my mouth into a reassuring smile. “My legs feel a hundred percent better. Once I showered, they turned out to be barely scratched.”

I went on inside with those groceries, thinking how I owed Bud a huge one.

• • •

The rest of Sunday afternoon I stayed up in my room, lying on the bed and flicking Trey's lighter. Ringo lay there next to me with his head on my chest, comforting me with his terrible, familiar breath. He's so old that he usually doesn't climb the stairs, but that afternoon he somehow knew how much I needed him and made an effort.

I listened close in case more pebbles hit my window, but they didn't.

One time I heard Bud and Janet arguing and drifted out to the hall to eavesdrop, thinking it would be about the clinic and my legs. It turned out to be about Bud, though. Apparently the eye test people weren't the only ones giving him grief. His heart doctor wanted his driver's license taken away from him as well.

“But Dad, you
know
that Dr. Hitchford said if you had another heart attack and lost consciousness, it would be tragic if you were behind the wheel and—”

“I get a sorta warning before I pass out, Janet! I'd have
plenty
of time to pull over! What's Dr. Hitchford know about bum hearts anyhow, him barely forty years old?”

“Well, Dad, he
is
a cardiologist,” Janet said meekly.

I went back to my room shaking my head, wishing there was some way I could trade places with Bud. He wanted to drive more than anything in the world, and the idea of driving made me sick to my stomach, as sick as when I'd bailed from Trey's car and thrown up in the ditch. I would never drive again. That hadn't been a hard decision, hadn't even taken any actual thought. It was just a fact. Driving a car had slipped quietly and firmly all by itself onto the list of things I was never going to do, like eating live scorpions, or cutting off one of my ears, or sticking my hand into boiling tar.

• • •

After we ate that night, Janet went back to the restaurant to help close up. I was sitting in the den with Bud when the phone rang. It was Aimee, the cheerleader who'd dated Zero for a couple of weeks in September, then had dropped him flat and more or less broken his heart for about a day and a half.

“Tucker?” She was crying. “Listen, Zero gave me a white rose corsage for the dance last month, did . . . did you know that?”

“No.” She must have ordered Zero to buy her that. You had to tell Zero everything where the everyday world was concerned. His head was filled with velocities and angles and variable resistances. There was little room left for things like flowers.

I began watching Bud for something to do while Aimee talked. He was staring glassy-eyed at a really, really old VCR tape of a Monday night football game. The Chiefs were playing. Joe Montana was going long, long. . . .

“Pure white roses were . . . were
our
flowers, Tuck. One day in study hall Zero kicked the back of my chair twelve times, and I turned around to glare at him and he just smiled back that goofy smile nobody could resist. Then that afternoon this florist arrived at my house with a huge box of . . . of twelve white roses. That's how we . . . started.”

I'd bet anything Aimee ordered Zero to buy her
those
twelve roses too, probably as a fine for kicking her chair. I'm also guessing he didn't really think about there being the most beautiful girl in class in that chair when he got the urge to do a little resistance experiment using the back of the chair and the toe of his boot. I bet he was recording the amount of reverb each time he kicked, the number of centimeters his boot bounced back.

Zero's smile
was
lopsidedly goofy, but it went with his flashing eyes and his flowing mess of wild hair. Had Aimee dated Zero on a dare from her girlfriends? We wondered. But then again, Zero's confidence and his startling looks always seemed to work in his favor, at least at first.
I wanta ride the sky like I was an eagle!
Since he thought he could fly his skateboard down Hawk's Slope, he probably could have. Since he thought he could date Aimee, he could, for a little while.
How you do a tricky jump is you plot it out and think it, then right before you start, you don't think it. You know?