20th Century Ghosts (24 page)

He took a few steps towards the car, and put one arm on the open door, resting his weight against it. He felt light-headed. She was already a long ways down the lane, a dark figure against the paler darkness of the woods.

For a short time Wyatt stood there, panting. Then his gaze happened to fall, and he saw Baxter staring up at him, his eyes large and round in his slender, fine-boned face. Wyatt saw, with a fresh wave of shock, the boy's tongue moving around in his open red mouth, as if perhaps he had some intention of speaking.

Wyatt's stomach plunged. He felt weak through the legs, looking at the boy again, at the slash across his neck, that almost fishhook shape that started behind the right ear and curved down to just below his Adam's apple. Looking straight down at him, Wyatt could see blood yet surging from this wound in thick, slow pulses. The seat under Baxter's head was puddled with it.

He stepped around the open door and stood over Baxter. He looked to see if the car keys were still in the ignition slot, thought maybe he could just drive the car up to 17K and then—but they weren't and who knew where they were. The bleeding—the important thing to do in a situation like this was stop the bleeding. He had seen about it on
E.R..
You found a towel and balled it up, pressed it into the wound and applied pressure until help arrived. He didn't have a towel, but there was the scarf, on the ground beside the car. He dropped to his knees by the open door and the overturned purse, and grabbed the scarf. One end was soaked and dripping mud. He hesitated for a single squeamish-sick instant, then wadded it up and pressed it against the slash across the boy's neck. He could feel the blood pumping against it.

The scarf was a thin, almost transparent piece of silk, already wet from the puddle it had been half-lying in, and in a moment it was saturated, and blood was leaking down his hands, the insides of his arms. He let go, let the scrap of silk fall away, wiped his hands compulsively against his shirt front. Baxter was watching him with stunned, fascinated eyes. Blue like his mother's.

Wyatt began to cry. He had not known he was going to do it until he was doing it. He could not remember the last time he had wept openly. He grabbed some of the papers that had spilled out of Mrs. Prezar's purse, and tried squeezing these into the wound, but they were even more useless than the scarf. They were shiny white papers, not at all absorbent, several pages stapled together; in the twilight Wyatt saw he was holding a credit card statement. Stamped across the top of the first page were the words PAYMENT OVERDUE in red ink.

He thought of dumping out what was left in her purse, looking for something else to use as a compress, then shucked off his jacket, pulled off the white vest that he wore to work, balled the vest up and pressed that into the wound. He held both hands over it and pushed down with the greater portion of his weight. The vest was an almost luminescent white in the gloom; but then, as he pressed down on it, he saw a dark stain spreading upwards through it, soaking into the fabric. He tried to think what to do now, but nothing would come. He flashed to a memory of Kensington, dabbing at her tongue with Kleenex, the way each ball of tissue paper was soon soaked red. He had a thought, strange for him, a thought that connected Kensington and the silver pin in her tongue and the slash across Baxter's throat; he thought how the young are pierced by love, innocent bodies torn and ruined for no reason, save that it suited someone who held them dear.

Baxter's left hand floated up from his side. Wyatt almost cried out when he saw it at the edge of his vision, a ghastly white shape gliding through the darkness. Baxter's fingers wavered in the general direction of his throat. Wyatt had an idea. He took Baxter's left hand and pressed it down to the compress. He reached into the car, found Baxter's other hand, placed it on top of the first. When he let go, the hands remained on top of the blood-soaked vest. They held it only loosely—but it stayed in place.

"I'll just go for a minute," Wyatt said. He was shivering violently. "I'll just run and bring someone back. I'll get to the road and I'll bring someone back and we'll take you to the hospital. You'll be okay. Just hold that against your neck. You'll be okay, I promise."

Baxter stared blankly up at him. His eyes had a dull, glazed look that Wyatt didn't like. He got to his feet and started to run. He went a few yards and then kicked off the one sneaker he still had on and started again.

He ran at a full, long-legged sprint, gasping in the wet cold air. The only sound was the heavy thud of his feet on the hard earth. It seemed to him, though, that he used to be faster than he was, that when he was younger, running was less of an effort. He had not gone far before he felt the sharp bite of a cramp in one side. Although he took great sucking breaths, he could not seem to bring enough air down into his lungs. It was the cigarettes maybe. He lowered his head and ran on, biting his lip, trying not to think about how much faster he might have been if only his side didn't hurt. Wyatt looked back, and saw he had only traveled a hundred yards or so, the car still in sight. He was crying again. As he ran he said a prayer. Words came out in whispered bursts, each time he exhaled.

"Please, God," he whispered into the February darkness. He ran and ran but didn't feel that he was getting any closer to the highway. It was like being in the rundown again, same feeling of hopelessness, of rushing towards the inescapable. He said, "Please make me fast. Make me fast again. Make me fast like I was."

At the next bend in the road, 17K came into sight, less than a quarter of a mile off. There was a streetlamp at the end of the lane, and a car idling underneath it. It was a tan Crown Victoria with police lights on top, switched off—a state trooper's car, Wyatt thought with relief. It was funny that he should just be thinking about the rundown again; maybe it would turn out to be Treat Rendell. A man—just a black silhouette at this distance—got out and stood by the front end. Wyatt began shouting, and waving his arms for help.

We were little. I was the Red Bolt and I went up the dead elm in the corner of our yard to get away from my brother, who wasn't anyone, just himself. He had friends coming over and he wanted me not to exist, but I couldn't help it: I existed.

I had his mask and I said when his friends got there I was going to reveal his secret identity. He said I was lunch meat, and stood below, chucking stones at me, but he threw like a girl, and I quickly climbed out of range.

He was too old to play superheroes. It had happened all of a sudden, with no warning. He had spent whole days leading up to Halloween dressed as The Streak, who was so fast the ground melted under his feet as he ran. Then Halloween was over and he didn't want to be a hero anymore. More than that, he wanted everyone to forget he had ever been one, wanted to forget himself, only I wouldn't let him, because I was up in a tree with his mask, and his friends were coming over.

The elm had been dead for years. Whenever it was windy, the gusts sheared off branches and flung them across the lawn. The scaly bark splintered and snapped away under the toes of my sneakers. My brother wasn't inclined to follow—beneath his dignity—and it was intoxicating to escape from him.

At first I climbed without thought, scrambling higher than I ever had before. I went into a kind of tree-climbing trance, getting off on altitude and my own seven-year-old agility. Then I heard my brother shout up that he was ignoring me (sure proof that he wasn't) and I remembered what had sent me up the elm in the first place. I set my eye on a long, horizontal branch, a place where I could sit, dangle my feet, and taunt my brother into a frenzy without fear of repercussions. I swept the cape back over my shoulders and climbed on, with a purpose.

The cape had started life as my lucky blue blanket and had kept me company since I was two. Over the years, the color had faded from a deep, lustrous blue to a tired pigeon gray. My mother had cut it down to cape size and stitched a red felt lightning bolt in the center of it. Also sewn to it was a Marine's patch, one of my father's. It showed the number 9, speared through by a lightning bolt. It had come home from Vietnam in his foot locker. He hadn't come with it. My mother flew the black P.O.W. flag from the front porch, but even then I knew no one was holding my father prisoner.

I put the cape on as soon as I came home from school, sucked on the sateen hem while I watched TV, wiped my mouth with it at the dinner table, and most nights, fell asleep wrapped in it. It pained me to take it off. I felt undressed and vulnerable without it. It was just long enough to make trouble underfoot if I was incautious.

I reached the high branch, threw a leg over and straddled it. If my brother wasn't there to witness what happened next, I wouldn't have believed it myself. Later, I would've told myself it was a panicked fantasy, a delusion that gripped me in a moment of terror and shock.

Nicky was sixteen feet below, glaring up at me and talking about what he was going to do to me when I came down. I held up his mask, a black Lone Ranger thing with holes for the eyes, and waggled it.

"Come and get me, Streak," I said.

"You better be planning to live up there."

"I found streaks in my underwear that smell better than you."

"Okay. Now you're fucking dead," he said. My brother hurled comebacks like he hurled rocks: badly.

"Streak, Streak, Streak," I said, because the name was taunt enough.

I was crawling out along the branch as I chanted. I put my right hand down on the cape, which had slid off my shoulder. The next time I tried to move forward, the cape pulled taut and unbalanced me. I heard cloth tear. I toppled hard against the branch, scraping my chin, throwing my arms around it. The branch sank beneath me, sprang up, sank again ... and I heard a crack, a brittle snap that carried sharply in the crisp November air. My brother blanched.

"Eric," he shouted. "Hold on, Eric!"

Why did he tell me to hold on? The branch was breaking—I needed to get off it. Was he too shocked to know that, or did some unconscious part of him want to see me fall? I froze, struggling mentally to unscramble what to do, and in the moment I hesitated, the branch gave way.

My brother leaped back. The broken limb, all five feet of it, hit the ground at his feet and shattered, bark and twigs flying. The sky wheeled above me. My stomach did a nauseating somersault.

It took an instant to register that I wasn't falling. That I was staring out over the yard as if still seated on a high tree branch.

I shot a nervous look at Nicky. He stared back—gaping up at me.

My knees were hitched to my chest. My arms were spread out to either side, as for balance. I floated in the air, nothing holding me up. I wobbled to the right. I rolled to the left. I was an egg that wouldn't quite fall over.

"Eric?" my brother said, his voice weak.

"Nicky?" I said, my voice the same. A breeze wafted through the elm's bare branches, so they clicked and clattered against one another. The cape stirred at my shoulders.

"Come down, Eric," my brother said. "Come down."

I gathered my nerve and forced myself to glance over my knees at the ground directly below. My brother stood holding his arms outstretched to the sky, as if to grab my ankles and pull me down, although he was too far below me and standing too far back from the tree for any hope of that.

Something glittered at the edge of my vision and I lifted my gaze. The cape had been held around my neck by a golden safety pin, hooked through two opposing corners of the blanket. But the pin had ripped right through one of the corners, and hung uselessly from the other. I remembered, then, the tearing sound I had heard as I collapsed on the branch. Nothing was holding the cape on me.

The wind gusted again. The elm groaned. The breeze raced through my hair and snatched the cape off my back. I saw it dance away, as if being jerked along by invisible wires. My support danced away with it. In the next instant, I rolled forward, and the ground came at me in a hideous rush, so quickly there was no time even to scream.

I hit the hard earth, landing atop the shattered branch. One long skewer of wood punctured my chest, just beneath the collarbone. When it healed, it left a shiny scar in the shape of a crescent moon, my most interesting feature. I broke my fibula, pulverized my left kneecap and fractured my skull in two places. I bled from my nose, my mouth, my eyes.

I don't remember the ambulance, although I have heard I never truly lost consciousness. I do remember my brother's white and frightened face bending over mine, while we were still in the yard. My cape was balled up in his fists. He was twisting it, unconsciously, into knots.

If I had any doubts about whether it really happened, they were removed two days later. I was still in the hospital, when my brother tied the cape around his neck and leaped from the top of the front stairs, at home. He fell the whole way, eighteen steps in all, hit the last riser on his face. The hospital was able to place him in the same room with me, but we didn't talk. He spent most of the day with his back turned to me, staring at the wall. I don't know why he wouldn't look at me—maybe he was angry because the cape hadn't worked for him, or angry with himself for thinking it would, or just sick at the thought of how the other kids were going to make fun of him, when they learned he had smashed his face trying to be Superman—but at least I could understand why we didn't talk. His jaw was wired shut. It took six pins and two corrective surgeries to rebuild his face into something like its former appearance.

The cape was gone by the time we both got out of the hospital. My mother told us in the car. She had packed it into the trash and sent it to the dump to be incinerated. There would be no more flying in the Shooter household.

I was a different kid after my accident. My knee throbbed when I did too much walking, when it rained, when it was cold. Bright lights gave me explosive migraines. I had trouble concentrating for long stretches of time, found it difficult to follow a lecture from start to finish, sometimes drifted off into daydreams in the middle of tests. I couldn't run, so I was lousy at sports. I couldn't think, so I was worse at schoolwork.