Hero (22 page)

I was the only kid in my class without a cell phone, so I had gotten pretty good at finding pay phones. I knew how to use one, too. I bet all the cell phone users in my class couldn't have made a collect call with a gun to their heads.

"Hi, yes, I'd like to a make a collect call, please, to a Ms. Ruth Whitliff," I requested.

The operator asked me to hold as she connected the call. I heard the phone ring and ring, and I prayed for her to pick up. I don't know why, but I just felt like she was the only person I could call, the only one I could talk to. She was the only one whose reaction had been slightly different when Dad showed up at the League, and that had to be a sign. I needed to find her. Pick up, pick up.

"Sorry, no one's answering," the operator said.

I asked for her to let it ring a little longer, told her that sometimes it took Ruth a while to make it to the phone.

"Sir, there's still no answer. Would you like me to try another number?"

"No thanks." I slammed the receiver down hard and kicked the concrete trash can and almost broke my toe. Damn. I sat on the curb to untie my shoelace and look at my bashed toe.

That's when I saw Ruth's old, army green Gremlin parked diagonally in the handicapped space. She leaned out the window, grinning with a Pall Mall stuck to her bottom lip. I was shocked for a second. Then she waved me over and I got in the car.

"How'd you know I was here?"

She took a drag of her smoke and tapped her temple with her forefinger.

"I see things, remember?"

*   *   * The woman drove like a maniac, nearly running down two dogs and knocking over a group of power cyclers as we careened into Riverside Park. She pulled out a bucket of fried chicken, led me over to a picnic table, and handed me a drumstick.

"You want your corn cobbette?"

I shook my head no, and Ruth leaned over and snatched it.

We ate and watched the candy-colored paddleboats glide across the river. I was famished. I hadn't eaten since lunch yesterday, so I wolfed down the drumstick and devoured two thighs and a breast. I looked up at the sun bearing down on us and took a deep breath. It felt good to breathe easy for a change.

"Quite a show you and your dad put on yesterday," Ruth said. I didn't say anything.

"You have some choices to make," she said.

I looked down at my greasy fingers and really wanted to wash them.

"You know what I'm talking about, don't pretend like you don't. That whole evasive, wounded, sensitive-guy thing you go into. I know everything, remember?"

I looked up, startled.

She saw the panic in my eyes.

"I'm not talking about that. That's not a choice. Don't listen to the bigots or the zealots; you like what you like. Don't let that distract you." Ruth handed me a moist towelette for my fingers.

I couldn't believe someone was actually talking about this with me. I'd never told anyone about my feelings before, and apparently she didn't need me to tell her now. I always thought somehow it would be more cataclysmic when someone finally called me out for liking guys, where I'd have to make some kind of epic confession. She glossed right on past it, grabbed another drumstick, and took a bite.

"For someone who's supposed to be a healer, you're really clueless sometimes."

Now I was totally confused. What was she talking about?

"It's like this: everyone's got a tremendous amount of pain; that's how life works." She waved the drumstick, punctuated her sentences with it. "Take me, for instance. And I'm not talking about what happens to my stomach when I eat a green pepper and drink a Pepsi at the same time. I'm talking about pain. The real stuff."

"Are you gonna tell me about that guy in the Wrecking Balls?" I asked.

"Christ, kid, hold your horses, I'm having a moment here. Now, where was I? Oh yeah, so when I was young—and yes, it was obviously a long time ago, so don't give me that look. Anyway, when I was just a little older than you, I fell in love, ran away, and eloped."

She stopped and polished off the little bit of meat that remained near the knuckle of the drumstick. Then she stared out at the river and watched the boats.

"Is that it?"

"No, smart-ass, that's not it. That's where you, the sensitive healer, are supposed to step in and figure out that I'm hurting deep down inside and pinpoint what it is. Jeez, kid, do I have to do everything?"

I hadn't thought about that part of my powers before, but I guess she was right. I did it with the coach that time I saw his heart condition. I wondered if he'd ever gone to get help. It was pretty shitty of me not to follow up on that, especially knowing how bad off he was.

I stared at Ruth hard for a minute. I tried to see past the nylon, flower-patterned pantsuit that reminded me of the couch my parents had in all my baby pictures. I studied her face and tried to look deep into her eyes, back into the past, and I found something floating around inside her body. It wasn't like with Coach; it wasn't attached to any one organ or anything specific like that. It was a peculiar haze, and it permeated her entire body and coated her with a grayish hue.

"Got it yet?"

"It's a deep pain in your stomach, in your head, and in your heart. . . like you've been holding something inside so long that it just ruptured. Seeped out into your body."

Ruth tossed the drumstick into a trash can with a resounding clunk.

"That's what happens when you let something fester inside you your entire life."

She fired up a cigarette. "I want you to tell me if you can see what happened."

I looked deeper and I started to feel a little faint—I'd never used my powers like this before-—but suddenly I began to see Ruth without wrinkles, with big, bright eyes and full cheeks and soft skin. I dug deeper inside her, and sobs began to echo in my ears, and all of a sudden I latched on to a feeling.

"What was his name?" I asked softly.

"Jerome. Jerome Freeman." Ruth looked out at the paddle-boats and sighed. "He was the one. The only one. We met right after he got back from the war. We kept it from our parents for as long as we could, and then we eloped."

"Why'd you keep it from your parents?"

Ruth ran her finger across the graffiti on the picnic table, carved deep into the wood like wounds.

"He was black." She took a drag from her cigarette. "And I wasn't." She took another drag from her cigarette, like she couldn't get enough air. "Back then, that was enough." She looked at the river passing by and lost herself in thought.

I didn't want to intrude on her memories, so I waited for a while and watched her stare at the water currents as they drifted by us.

"What happened to him?"

She turned ever so slightly on the picnic table, just enough so I couldn't see her face.

"My father was a prominent man in our town. He was the president of the bank, and it wouldn't do for the president of the bank to have a daughter who ran off with a colored man. That's what they called them back then, colored, I mean. So my father hired a party of concerned citizens to track us down and bring us home."

I thought about how she'd felt the need to explain to me what colored meant because people didn't use the term anymore. I wondered if the same thing would happen one day to faggot.

"I kicked and screamed, but they pulled me out of the motel and put me in a car and took me home and locked me in the attic for weeks. And the whole time I kept seeing Jerome as he called out for me over and over again, while those men pummeled that perfect, smooth face."

I was afraid to ask the next question.

"Go ahead," she said. "I know you're going to ask anyway."

"Why didn't you go back?"

"They let me out of the attic after they were sufficiently convinced I wouldn't go after him. They told me it was no use to go looking, I'd never find him. Sometimes I'd get spitting mad and break things and threaten to leave and find him, but my father would just chuckle and go back to reading his paper or ignoring my mother. I never liked the way he did that, like he knew something I didn't."

"But you could have looked, couldn't you? I mean, didn't you even try to—"

"I was afraid."

And there it was. Her confession.

"Did you ever see him again?"

"A few years later I took a trip to Natural Bridge. My girlfriend and I spent the day hiking up the mountain. After we crossed the bridge, we went to the gift store at the foot of the hill, and I found a cute little glass dome with a picture of Grandfather Mountain that filled up with snow when you shook it. I went to the cashier to pay for it, and the guy behind the counter told me five dollars or some such outrageous amount for the time, especially considering we weren't even at Grandfather Mountain, we were at Natural Bridge. But the guy was a real prick and said he was charging double, specially for me. I didn't like that at all so I pretended to reach for my bag, and I knocked the bauble off the counter.

"It shattered into a million tiny pieces, indiscernible shards of glass across the wood floor, past the point of any fixing. I put on my best face and apologized like a sweet girl my age could always get away with. The guy behind the counter was so mad he shook.

"He shouted out toward the back room at the top of his lungs, 'Boy, get out here!' and a door opened in the back and his janitor hobbled out, limping on one leg, a knobby walking stick in his left hand as a cane.

" 'Yes, sir,' he said as he came over and started to sweep up the mess with his bare hands. The cashier yelled at him to use his pea brain, and threw a dustpan at him so he wouldn't shred his hands to pieces. The janitor was slow to react, and the pan knocked the stick out from under him. I didn't like to see people treated like that, not one bit, especially to clean up my mess. I grabbed the dustpan and began to clean it up myself. I picked up his walking stick off the floor, and when I handed it to him I got a clear look at his face."

Ruth took a deep breath and didn't say anything for a minute. I let her take her time. And just when it looked like she might find tears that had dried up years ago, she continued with her story.

"He looked about twenty years older than I was. He'd put on at least fifty pounds, and his bottom lip hung low in a way it never had before, like an unseen force pulled it toward the ground. I reached out to touch his face, that face I'd remembered so differently, and he pulled away like he didn't recognize me. That was when I noticed the scars. All over his face. A number of crude zipper scars, the kind of thing you'd see on a horse when a country vet stitched it up. I tried to speak but the air was trapped inside me and I couldn't make a sound. He looked at me for such a long time, and then, slowly with that long lower lip, he spoke.

'"Ruth,"' he said.

"I wrapped my arms around him as tight as I could and prayed for the kind of power you hold in your hands today, that I could go back and make everything okay again.

"I didn't want him to see me cry, I didn't want to upset him, so I told him I was going to go outside around to the ladies' room to powder my nose. I'll never forget what he said to me next."

Ruth stopped and looked up to the sky.

"What did he say?" I asked. It was a while before she answered.

"He said, 'I'll wait for you.'"

Ruth scratched the corner of her eye. I wanted to ask her what she did next. She turned and answered as if I'd asked it out loud.

"I ran outside and stole a car from the parking lot and drove away and never looked back."

We didn't talk for a while after that. We just watched the wispy clouds float by overhead. We watched kids playing with their parents on the paddleboats. Young couples splashing in the water. Whenever I got a chance, when I thought she wasn't looking, I tried to steal a good look at Ruth.

"I had started to get pretty good at seeing things by then, and I decided to get back at the world by robbing banks." She said it casually, like it was the obvious next step. "I started with my father's."

Good. I hope she bankrupted him and ruined his life.

"I hooked up with Joey my second year as a two-bit hood. He actually came and found me when he heard that I could sometimes see codes in my head when I looked at the lock on a safe. He was all muscle, and he needed some brains."

I remembered Ruth arguing with that big old Wrecking Ball in front of the hospital that day I screwed up.

"Had a real violent streak, that one." She shook her head. "That's why we split."

Her tone was matter-of-fact, a simple retelling of events, but when I looked at her I saw pain, that same grayish hue, flow in and out of her body. She was very good at not letting anything show on her face, but I could see through it now.

I reached out and gently placed my hand on hers. I thought I saw a faint smile begin to appear on her lips, I hoped it was one of comfort. I concentrated on the grayish hue and thought about making it burn away, and then I felt my palm start to sizzle where it met the sunspots on the back of her hand.

And suddenly she yanked her hand away.

"A while back I decided to start using my powers for something good for a change. I'd been using them to get back at this shitty world ever since the day I stole that car, when the only person I had to blame was myself. I'm old, I'm alone, and I have no one but me to thank for it. That's what I'm trying to tell you, Thorn. You've got to make choices in life. And then guess what happens after that. You have to make more choices, and more after that. Sometimes you'll make good choices. . . ." She ripped open a moist towelette and dabbed the spaces in between her fingers. "And some will be bad. It's up to you."

I nodded. I understood as much'as I could without having lived a minute of her life.

"You can't go on like you're going to start really living one day, like all this is some preamble to some great life that's magically going to appear. I'm a firm believer that you have to create your own miracles, don't hold out that there's something better waiting on the other side. It doesn't work that way. When you're gone, you're gone. There's no pearly white gates with an open bar and all the Midori you can drink. You only get one go-round and you gotta make it count. I know that sounds harsh, but it's true. Don't wait."