All the Broken Things (24 page)

“Get down, kid.”

It was Soldier Man, his smothered words. He pushed through the scrub, his hand welted from thorn slash. He was entirely filthy. They all were. Bo made an effort to bathe in the various ponds, keeping to the edges and splashing himself—the opaque water could hide anything. But without soap, it was futile. The grime and smell accrued upon him. Soldier Man was panting, aggravating the bear, who began to make little aborted charges, huffing, a low growl forming. Bo dropped to a crouch next to Bear.

“Down,” Soldier Man murmured, and he reached over to Bo and solidly pushed him down by pressing on his head with the flat of his palm.

Bo hadn’t felt the touch of another human for weeks, and this, more than the violence of the man’s gesture, affected him. He felt grateful.

“They’re coming,” said Soldier Man.

Bo heard it then, a helicopter circling the park, a harsh line of light sweeping by them. The chopper was loud
and Soldier Man was clearly spooked, wide-eyed and reliving some dream, or some past life.

“It’s nothing,” Bo said, too loudly.

“Shh.” Soldier Man brought his finger up to his lips, craned toward him and handed him a rag. “Cover your head, put this over your nose and mouth. They’re coming, dude.”

Bo watched the yellow skis of the heli twist upward and away. He wondered if they’d spotted him, but figured no. They were looking for something else. A criminal on the run, a missing child who’d wandered off. The helicopter sliced up the sky, a swoop of searchlights, again and again. Soldier Man slammed flat to the ground, panting to calm himself, bring the tension down. And only when the helicopter putter was far away, when they could no longer hear it, did he let up his vigilance.

After, he was a brittle mess. “Oh, fuck,” he said, the swear word like a sigh emerging from deep in his belly. “Fucking hell, kid. I’m sorry.”

“It was nothing. Just city cops.”

“I know. Yeah.” He panted like an animal. “Shit.”

Strange to watch someone leave himself like that. Bear tromped a tight circle around them, sensitive to Soldier Man’s freak-out, going round and round, pawing at the dirt, lifting a stick with her fangs and shaking it, channelling some predatory neck-cracking technique that was so built in, she couldn’t not do it.

Soldier Man stared at the ground. “In the war they flew over us and sprayed wherever they thought the enemy might be hiding. The shit billowed and wafted. The wind would take it. I’d have hated to be the VC. That shit stung even by the time it was dissipated in the wind. Better you get some bit blown off than breathe that shit. Man.”

Bo was so still. His father gasping. His mother breathing it. “What was it?” he finally said. But he knew.

“Defoliant,” said Soldier Man. “Agent Orange. Devil’s handiwork.”

In the dark, Bo imagined his father and mother crawling just below the fog as it roiled in and down. He stifled a sob, told himself he didn’t care.

“You couldn’t get away from that shit, kid.” The Soldier Man quieted, sensed something, then, “Hey, what’s the matter? I say something wrong?”

Bo shook his head, shook it to unwind the pressing tears and loosen the sense of desperation that was pushing at him. Then finally, when he could, he said, “No. I’m good.”

“Hey, kid, how old were you in ’75?”

“Six.”

“Shit.” Soldier Man got up to leave. It was dry out this night. He slurred his words. “I scared you pretty good, I guess,” and then he was gone into the dark, the undergrowth whispering his departure.

Such silence, then, as if the world had sucked itself deep into a hole. Bo couldn’t even hear Bear huffing and
snorting, nothing. No airflow, no beetle scuttle, no bird rustle, no water trickle, nothing.

“Bear,” he said, and Bear jerked her head up at him. “Come.” Bo slid on his belly. He shifted along the ground, imagining his father, and forced his face into the ugliness he had witnessed on Soldier Man’s face and held this expression, so that he merged the two men—the veteran and his dad—and played them, shuffling through the undergrowth to the eastern reservoir. The bear ambled beside him not caring what game this was. She would plunge into the water for the wetness of it, and swipe her paw at any fish or frog that dared to jump near her.

“Down, Bear,” Bo said, and flattened his hand toward the ground, until she hunkered, watching him for what was next. Bo pulled himself toward the water, down the incline, looking up periodically when he remembered the pluming threat of chemical descending. What that looked like, he could not recall, and so he substituted cumulus clouds and had them scud across and down. He pulled his shirt up over his mouth and gasped, and choked, and went into elaborate death throes. It should have been awful, real, some link to his dad, but he kept on until he was laughing at his game and guilty with it.

The last true memory he had of his father: a thin, sun-baked man, perched with his legs bent, his elbows propped upon them, on a bench along the prow of the fishing boat, looking out to the horizon. The sky was a deepening blue,
and would become a storm, but this happened later, at least in his memory. His father’s face had erupted with sores, and even his eyes were seeping some unholy wetness. His mother had told him not to disturb his father, that he was in pain and needed to stay still, let the sun bake the edges of these wounds and scab them over.

And so Bo stood at a hatch, in this memory, looking out at his father—had this happened? Yes. The sore-pocked face turned toward him and stared for just too long, so that either of them might have smiled, though neither of them did. Eventually, his father saluted, sharp and perfect in its execution, and Bo saluted back, some boyish code for love. And then his father broke eye contact and went back to staring at the horizon.

“Growl,” Bo said to Bear, and she did, low and resonant. He felt it up through the earth. Bo made the hand signal to go with it. “Bare teeth,” and Bear pulled her lips back less in a snarl than a smile. Again, he had to laugh, because she seemed to know that they were playing. “Oh, Bear,” he said, “come here,” and when she did, he hugged her. But when he wrapped his arms around her neck, he felt the growing vibration of a real growl building deep in her body.

Six months and more since he’d first cradled her, and now they were nearly one creature. He listened for some primal stillness in the back of his head. Sometimes, he and Bear talked in huffs and snorts. He never knew whether this was real talk, of course. The talk was
untranslatable, like talking to Orange, but deeper and thicker, as if the thoughts moved from the stomach and the heart rather than the brain. Bo sat still with her for a long time, listening to the park sounds.

There was nothing unusual, and he finally said, “It’s okay, Bear.”

But Bo was jumpy, and twice in the next week, he and Bear had rambled late at night into the Junction, when the feeling of being watched ate at him. They slept in Emily’s pool shed, and both times, left before anyone noticed them. He couldn’t say why he didn’t want to see Emily, except it had made him lonely and anxious to have seen her. It began to feel like magic that they were never found. And he began to count on that magic.

O
NE NIGHT IN EARLY
A
UGUST
, Bo finessed Bear’s wrestling skills in the middle of the park. He got her standing and then, huffing his intentions, he slammed his body into the bear’s side. In the moonlit glade, they locked together, and when Bear’s lips pulled back, so did Bo’s, and so they were both smiling. Not the smile of people enjoying a good joke, but the smile that comes from the body gleefully expressing itself as a body. Bo grappled with Bear—himself, bear. And then Soldier Man showed up, the gleam of the moon dancing down his ragged clothes. Bear bounded recklessly at him.

“Stop, Bear. Stop,” Bo called, and through his own prickling fear of what might be about to occur, Bear
checked and moved left into the trees behind Soldier Man and disappeared.

“She’s a big motherfucker,” Soldier Man said.

Bear emerged from the brush, licked her belly, keeping busy until they would move again, and Bo saw burrs clinging to her undercoat and saw how much dirt was caked there. Soldier Man had a box of pizza he had scavenged and they sat down to eat it.

“How long have you been in the park?” Bo asked, wondering why he hadn’t asked before.

“Oh, ten years, I’d say.”

Bo remembered Sir Orfeo suddenly, and how Orfeo had wandered in the forest for ten years before rescuing Heurodis. And then Bo had to think of Orange and his mum. A fury pierced him. It hurt behind the solar plexus, as if he had punched himself.

“What day is it?” Bo asked, staring at the broken soldier. It was as if he had abandoned himself, in some crucial way, these weeks in the woods.

“You forgot something important, kid?” Soldier Man laughed at him. His eyes mocked Bo.

“My sister,” Bo said, and already he was running, Bear beside him.

“It’s a dream, kid,” Soldier Man called after him. “Get used to it.”

He would not get used to it.

Bo ran to his lean-to, and settled Bear. Then he pulled
out his journal, held it by the bindings and shook it until the wallpaper with the knight and the photographs fell out of it. He shuddered to see them. Orange must be changed by now, he thought. He imagined her behind a window somewhere in Max’s sideshow, not knowing that people gawked at her, made jokes, felt pity, felt something, anything, then went home grateful they were normal—this last was the worst, he thought.

She did not look like herself in the photographs. If he only looked at the first photographs of his sister—the ones that weren’t blurred—he could convince himself he was not a bad person. They were only curious views. One showed Orange settled back on the floor wondering what a camera might be; another caught her in the moment between wondering and grabbing at this new thing, so that her expression was strangely, beautifully, in flux. Her baby skin was porous and lively in the photographs in a way that was different, somehow more luxuriously real, than in life.

The pictures freaked him out. The bend of Orange’s arms, the face, like someone had smeared it. And looking closely he saw shadowy spots. They looked like sores, and he recalled once seeing his mother half dressed, scrambling to pull a cheap cotton kimono up over herself, gasping. She had not wanted him to see the sores running the length of her torso.

“What—?” he had begun.

“Nothing.” But they had been something and the recognition of that must have set upon his face. Rose added, “They don’t hurt.”

They must have, though. After that, when he heard her high-pitched moans in the night, he knew what it meant. She had rolled over, and the pain vexed her. And now in the pictures it was as if Orange had hints of something waiting to erupt. Photographs were supposed to hold people in time. He would not look at them again, he told himself, though he knew it was a lie.

Suddenly wanting an adult, someone to take care of him, Bo called out to Gerry. Stillness. The faintest echo of his own words bouncing back to him. His skin prickled, and defiantly he stood and lined the photos up on the bare earth outside his sleeping place so that they were like a film flickering along the ground. The last photo that came out of the stack disturbed him more than all the rest. It was the snapshot of Teacher, floating, that she had given him. The tape had gone brittle and it had come unstuck from the page in his journal.

He hadn’t thought of her for weeks, hadn’t thought she mattered until he saw the photograph, and her eyes. And then she was so important and so necessary that he was forced to keep her out of his view, so that even as he watched the jarring stop-action film of himself as a phantom pursuer snapping Orange, Teacher’s grey eyes, her whole face called him.

“Miss Lily,” he yelled, which was stupid. Guilt overcame him. He had betrayed his sister, and now he was sobbing. How stupid Bo had been for not heeding his mother’s wishes for him. How stupid for thinking he could do anything on his own, that he could busk with a bear. He was a moron—a weak, little boy.

“Gerry?” he yelled into the dark. A futile waste of energy, but it felt good to yell. “Gerry!”

“B
OY
.” I
T WAS LATER THAT NIGHT
, Soldier Man calling from outside Bo’s lean-to. “Kid?”

“Here.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re back,” muttered Soldier Man. “Gooks.”

Bo said, “I need to tell you something.”

“You look like shit, kid. What’s up?”

“My sister—”

“You really have a sister?”

“She’s defective. From Agent Orange.”

“Serious?”

Bo nodded. “That guy who’s been looking for me? His boss wants her for his freak show.”

“That’s fucked up, kid.” Not a heartbeat went by before Soldier Man was pointing. “You see that—?”

There was nothing. A shrubby plant struggling under a willow near the pond. If Bo swung his head quick he could imagine some movement, but if he kept still, there wasn’t anything to see.

“There’s nothing there.”

“You got to get him before he gets you. If it looks like a kid. Or a woman, even an old lady, someone’s grandmother. Don’t be fooled. Fuckers all got machetes.”