Disappearance at Devil's Rock (15 page)

Arnold: “He's been gone for a while?”

Tommy looked away, past them all, and nodded. It wasn't so much that his head moved but his whole torso, like he was rocking in place. A full-body yes.

Luis was getting pissed, and it wasn't because Arnold was totally focused on Tommy and here Luis was with his trivial homework-dad diagnosed and tossed to the side. That wasn't it at all, and it wasn't that he was already into his second beer. He said, “Don't make him talk about that if he doesn't want to.”

Arnold: “I'm sorry, Tommy. I didn't mean to make you feel bad. Sometimes when I start seeing, I can't stop. It sort of takes over, and—”

Tommy: “No. No worries.” He drank the rest his of beer in one sip, and held the can upside down to prove it was empty. “Finished. You know what?”

Arnold: “What?”

“Beer kinda tastes like sucks.”

Luis: “
The
sucks. Get it right.”

Arnold: “It kinda does. You want another one?”

Tommy said, “Yeah.” He took a second one, put it down next to him unopened, and then he started talking about his father and what
he remembered about him. He'd never really done that before, at least not with Luis around. Josh knew Tommy way back when they were kindergarteners, and Luis didn't become friends with them until fourth grade, so Luis had always assumed that Josh had to have talked to Tommy about his dad at some point. But then again, he wasn't sure. Luis never asked Josh what he knew about Tommy's dad. It was this unspoken thing that Tommy's dad was gone and they would all deal with it. Dealing with it could mean different things: trying not to talk about his own dad around Tommy; trying (and often failing) to keep Luis's parents from fawning over Tommy like he was a homeless boy and made of glass; Luis and Josh making sure they did something with Tommy on Father's Day and on the anniversaries of his father's leaving the house and his death. On the increasingly rare occasion Luis made a father joke or some unthinking, throwaway reference to a father, any father, Luis would say, “Sorry.” That was it. Sorry. And Tommy would say, “No worries,” and that would be the extent of any discussion.

Tommy grabbed a twig and passed it between his fingers. His head was down and he wasn't looking at any of them as he talked. “I don't remember much about my dad. I remember his face was scratchy with beard stubble all the time. I remember jumping onto his back from the couch. And that's about it. I only really remember what he looked like from pictures and I don't really remember what he sounded like. I have his voice inside my head somewhere, I think. I don't know. It's weird.

“My parents got separated, divorced, whatever, when I was four and Kate was two. I don't remember much. I remember them fighting sometimes, and Mom would bring Kate into my room and tell me to play nice. I'd be there with my big bin of plastic dinosaurs. It'd be night, close to bedtime. Mom would shut the door and they'd start yelling at each other. I don't remember what they were saying.
They were so loud. And I remember being scared but telling Kate that it's fine. That was my little-kid catchphrase, yeah?
It's fine.
Kate sat there and she wouldn't move, wouldn't do anything. I'd pretend she was a mountain or a cliff or something and I'd, like, balance the dinos on her and pretend to scream when they fell off. So weird I remember that.

“Then, you know, one day at breakfast, Mom told me that Dad was going to live somewhere else but he was still my dad and he loved me very much and I'd see him but not every day, and that I could talk to him on the phone too, if I wanted. She promised I'd still see him, said it like a hundred times until I said,
It's fine.
I know it wasn't the next day, but it seemed like it, and it was breakfast again, and she was telling me that Dad wasn't calling because he went away and she didn't know how long he was going to be away, and that was all she said, I think. I don't know. I was only four, right? And then, one morning I got up and my grandmother was there in the kitchen with Mom, and Mom told me something happened to Dad, something really bad, and that he died, and he was gone. I remember dressing up for the funeral but I kept taking off my clip-on tie. We were in church forever, and then after we stood in line and all these people I didn't know sticking their huge-ass faces into mine, telling me I was a little man or some shit like that and rubbing my hair. I got so pissed at that. Didn't want the tie, but didn't want them messing up my hair, you know, I was supposed to be dressed up and looking nice. Mom didn't tell me how he died until I was in fourth grade. I used to bug her to tell me and she'd say,
When you're older, when you're older.
There was this one random day I asked again, in the car, on the way back from school, expecting her not to tell me anything. Mom flat-out told me, right there in the car, that Dad wasn't handling things too good, he was very unhappy, that he ran away and was gone for eight months and no one knew where he was and then he was out drinking, shouldn't have been driving, and
she thinks he was driving home, maybe, because of where he crashed. Over in Canton, not too far way, crashing into that big, stone railroad bridge, and that was it. He died.

“He pops into my head at these totally random times. I'll go days, maybe even weeks, without thinking about him. Then there'll be days where I'm like totally obsessed with him. I get stuck there sometimes, wondering what he would look like, what he would think of me.”

Tommy paused. Luis didn't think he was done yet. Tommy scraped the small twig against the rock, wearing it down to a nub. He looked up, smiled at us, and added, “Or would he be a cool dad or a total hardo, right?”

Josh said, “And, like the most important, what would his zombie contingency plan be?”

Luis couldn't believe he said that. It was probably the best worst thing he'd ever said, and they all laughed. Tommy the loudest.

Tommy: “Yeah, I've totally thought about that! Seriously! What, you a seer too now?”

Josh : “I'm gonna practice and get good at it.”

Tommy: “And you know what's weird, since summer started, I have been thinking about my dad a lot. Like
a lot
.”

Arnold said, “Nah, that's not weird. Not weird at all.”

Tommy and Josh needed time to work off their buzzes before dinner. They were in no rush to get home, and they walked their bikes over the rocky, winding paths of Borderland. There would be no repeat of the painful mock-DUI demolition derby from a couple of days ago, especially not after everything Tommy had told them about his dad.

Instead of being maudlin or contemplative, Tommy laughed at everything Josh said, even if it wasn't supposed to be funny. Was it the two beers? For a kid that never said more than three words in a row
(unless it was about zombie preparedness), he couldn't stop talking, going on and on about Arnold and his seer abilities.

Luis was miserable and tried to hide it by being nonresponsive. He knew it was better to not say anything, even if he couldn't quite admit to himself that he was jealous of the attention Tommy had received today from Arnold. Two days ago it had been Luis and Arnold making the deeper connection and talking movies, and the other two had been relegated to the background, quietly listening in, nervously plotting how to dump out their beers without anyone seeing. Today, it was as though Arnold had dismissed Luis, determined him to be less interesting, less special. Proof? This second day at the rock had ended with Tommy and Arnold exchanging Snapchat usernames, and worse, Arnold had offered Luis and Josh his username as an oh-yeah-you-guys-can-send-me-messages-too-if-you-really-want-to afterthought. Luis didn't even bother storing it in his phone.

Tommy said, “The zombie stuff, sure, yeah, whatever, right? But there's no way he could've randomly guessed that shit about your dad. That was amazing. He's like a real psychic or something. Don't you think that was amazing?”

Luis said, “
Amazing
, bruh. I get it. Yeah. I guess.”

Tommy: “You guess?”

If Luis continued to argue against the amazingness of Arnold, they'd call him hardo and mock his always being the contrarian (it was a matter of time before one of them said,
Classic Luis
). He actually agreed with Tommy, that what Arnold had said today was legit and strange and more than a little scary.

Luis said, “I don't know. Like, parents get all over kids about homework. It's what they do. He could've been talking about anyone's dad or—” and he quickly added, “—or mom,” as though he could cross out the
dad
reference, still aware of the no-dad-talk-around-Tommy rules that had been in place for the entirety of their friendship, or in
place pre-Arnold, anyway. “He could've said that same thing about Josh's parents.”

Tommy: “Classic Luis.”

That stung a little, even though he knew it was coming and he sort of deserved it. He hoped that Tommy would understand what he was trying to do with his point-counterpoint, even though Luis didn't quite fully understand it himself.

Josh: “Nah. He totally described your dad. That was all him. Mine doesn't go nuts over homework like yours does. Not even close.”

Luis: “Whatever. I'm just sayin' he might not definitely be, you know, psychic. Maybe he's like doing a—a live version of catfishing, or something.”

Josh drunk-laughed. It was fake and high-pitched and couldn't have been more mocking or dismissive. Luis wanted to cry and kick him in the balls at the same time.

Tommy shook his head yes with a big, fake, open-mouthed smile. Then said, “Nope. I don't get it.”

Luis: “So Arnold says something about homework and my father, right? Then he watches my reaction, and yours. You guys went totally stupid—”

Josh: “Chirps!”

Luis: “—whenever he said something that was true, or even close to being true, so he knew he guessed right and just kept going.”

Josh: “Nah.” He dropped his bike, its frame clattering off a football-sized stone at the edge of the path. “Piss break.” He stomped off into the woods. Luis and Tommy walked a few yards ahead, and then they dropped their bikes, too.

Tommy looked at Luis with a hopeful, we're-done-talking-about-this-right? look.

Was Luis implying that Arnold was ultimately trying to manipulate them? Maybe. And Luis couldn't articulate that his jealousy was mani
festing as professed skepticism, which was rooted in his near-constant feelings of inadequacy. Luis was aware that he'd never seen Tommy so outwardly happy. He felt bad that in a very real sense he was trying to tear that down. But he still kept picking at it.

Luis: “Arnold said ‘someone important' was missing, yeah? Say that to anyone and then they go
Whoa, my grandmother died two years ago, how did he know that
?”

Tommy: “He didn't say just someone. I mean, he did, but, you know, he was talking about your parents and Josh's and then you guys were talking about like all parents and then he looked at me. He looked right at me and—and I don't know, it felt so weird. Then he said—”

Luis: “He said
someone
important
was missing. That's what he said. He didn't say your dad first, and kinda let you fill in the blank.”

Tommy really seemed to consider this, and as he did so, he went through a subtle physical transformation: his head tilted down toward the ground, nervous eyes mostly hidden by his bangs, arms wrapped around his middle, shoulders gone slouchy, bending his back forward, contorting his body into a question mark. That Tommy wasn't more popular at school was at times a mystery, given that he was graceful, tall, handsome, and not totally blighted with acne. But it was this punched-in-the-gut posture Tommy carried throughout most of the day at school, as though some unseen sadness manifested in him physically and the desperate herds of classmates could sense this flaw, this otherness, within him. No one picked on Tommy or made fun of him like they did Luis and Josh; they stayed away from Tommy, and maybe that was worse.

Tommy said, “No. That's not what happened. At all. He knew about my dad. I can tell. He just knew.”

Luis stopped himself from saying
If you say so
or
That totally proves it
, or similar go-to snark when he's in the endgame of the argument. He wasn't sure he wanted to win.

Josh stumbled out of the woods, shouting, “I'm gonna be covered in ticks.”

Luis picked up his bike and started walking ahead. He shouted back at Josh: “There ain't no tick that can find yo' dick!”

Tommy was the last to pick up his bike. Picked it up like it was a delicate artifact, but then he caught up quickly to Luis. He said, “You're so wrong, you know. So wrong. But let's pretend for a second you're not, okay? So—why would Arnold do that? Guess and pretend he can see stuff?”

Luis: “I dunno—”

Tommy: “Exactly.”