Loser (12 page)

Voices.

And a sound like scissors:
ssnp ssnp.

He is warm. He doesn't want to look. It is warm and safe behind closed eyes.

“…never saw anything like it. Good thing I was paying attention.” A man's voice he thinks he's heard before. In the distance but he hears it clearly.

“He didn't say why?” His father's voice.

“Didn't say anything. Prob'ly couldn't anyway, way he was shaking. Funny though, when I stopped and got out, I swore I heard him singing.”

“And you knew who it was?” His mother.

“Well, I figured. I mean, who else could it be? He fit the description. Heightwise, anyway. Otherwise he looked like a drowned rat.”

“And you were on the lookout.” His mother. “You heard the description, and you were going slow and you were keeping an eye out.”

“No more'n everybody else.”

“One good thing after another.” His father.

“I was you, I couldn't wait to ask him why.”

“He's been doing that all his life.” Uncle Stanley. “Running from the house. Can't keep him tied down. Always going. Used to believe he didn't sleep. Used to sneak out of the house to get to school early. Early!”

“Not me.”

Chuckles.

“Me neither. But that's him. His sister too. When she was two she walked halfway to Cleveland one day.”

“To Ludlow Avenue.”

“Far enough.”

Laughter.

And he thinks: “Claudia!”

His eyes are open. He's in his parents' bed. Polly is kneeling beside him with a pair of scissors. She gawks at him. She bolts from the bed
and yells downstairs. “Mommy, Mommy, he's awake!”

Good-byes are said, the front door opens and closes, footsteps coming.

They're all in the room: his parents, Polly, Uncle Stanley. His mother sits on the bed. She feels his forehead. “I can't believe you don't have a fever.”

He is speaking, but his mother overlays his voice with hers: “Donald, what were you
doing
out there?”

The question is almost too silly to answer, but he answers anyway. “Looking for Claudia.” He adds, to show them how silly, “Like everybody else.”

They're staring at him, funnylike, all four of them. Uh-oh, he thinks, they
still
didn't find her.

Now they're looking at each other.

“Claudia?” his mother says.

“The little lost girl last night,” explains Uncle Stanley. “That's her name.”

The look on his mother's face is scaring him. Her eyes are sparkling directly above his. Her
voice is almost down to a whisper. “You were looking for the little girl?”

He nods, afraid to speak, afraid something will break.

“At one o'clock in the morning? All that time?”

He nods again. Her face is really scaring him now. So is his father's. Uncle Stanley turns away. He says, “He doesn't know.”

She's dead.

“Donald—” His mother's hands are cupping his face. He feels her breath. “The little girl was found shortly after she got lost.”

“Found her in somebody's car, in the garage,” says his father. His voice is hoarse. “Door wide open. She was pretending to drive.”

Uncle Stanley clears his throat. “She was back in her house by, what, seven thirty? Eight o'clock, tops?”

His father nods. “Yep.”

His mother is doing a trick with her face: It is sad and smiley at the same time. “But you didn't know that, did you? You just kept looking and looking.”

He nods.

Then starts remembering, and the more he remembers the more confused he becomes. “But I saw lights. And sirens.” She's looking down on him, crying and smiling. So if Claudia was found, back home safe and sound by eight o'clock, tops…

He looks up into his mother's sad and happy smile. He says, “Who were they looking for?”

And reads the answer at once in her face, but waits anyway for her to say it:

“You, Donald. They were looking for
you
.”

For the longest time the room is nothing but eyes. His mother, his father, his sister, Uncle Stanley—all staring at him, as if he will disappear if they don't. He's in a cradle of eyes.

Polly pokes him. “Yeah, dummy,
you
.”

And then the bed rocks and rolls as they all jump aboard. They're squeezing him and mussing his hair, and Polly is shrieking, “You're sitting on it!” She pulls something out from under his father, the thing she has been cutting with the scissors, a large piece of white paper cut to a fancy design. She unfolds it, holds it up proudly for him to see.

Uncle Stanley gives a groaning chuckle. “Just what he needs. Another snowflake.”

For the first time since he opened his eyes, he notices the light streaming through the bedroom windows. And remembers: “Are we having a snow day?”

“Ever since it came over the radio,” says his father, “six thirty this morning.”

He cheers weakly—“Yahoo!”—then looks at the windows again and thinks to ask, “What time is it?”

“Almost three in the afternoon,” says his mother. “You've been sleeping for thirteen hours.”

Oh no!
Only two hours of daylight left. Halftank Hill!

He tries to leap from the bed but is caught in a web of arms.

“Not today, pal,” says his father. “You are grounded.”

“Yeah, pal,” says Polly, shaking her finger in his face, looking stern.

“For the rest of today.”

“Yeah!”

“And you're going to
stay
grounded if I have to sit on you.”

“Yeah!”

Polly applauds. And now there's an evil grin on her face and she's reaching into her pocket and pulling out…

“My lucky stone!” He snatches at it, she pulls it away, sticks out her tongue. He whines, “Mom!”

His mother holds out her hand. “Give.” Polly gives.

“Mom, drop it!” He yells this so suddenly she does just that, she drops it onto the bed. “You can't touch it.” He picks it up.

She looks hurt. “But I'm your mother.”

She doesn't understand. A lucky stone loses its power if other people touch it. “Nobody can touch it but me.”

He stashes it under the pillow.

“Is that thing what I think it is?” his mother says.

“Bubblegum.”

“I thought so.”

“See?” Polly sneers. “It's not even a stone.” She juts her face at him. “And it ain't lucky. And it was in your mouth!
Eewwwwww!
”

“Do you want to tell us why it was in your mouth?” his mother says.

He thinks for a moment. “No, I guess not.”

His mother smiles. “Okay.”

Polly whines, “Mom, make him tell!”

“I'm making you get off this bed.” She pulls Polly off. “Give your brother some peace. You were sure nice to him as long as he was sleeping. Now shoo.”

Polly stomps from the bedroom.

The phone rings. It's Aunt Sibyl. She wants to know how the patient is doing.

Then it's Aunt Janet calling. Then Cousin Marty and Cousin Will and Aunt Melissa. When the doorbell starts ringing—first in is Mrs. Lopresti, the new neighbor—he's allowed downstairs to be bundled up on the sofa. For the rest of the day and evening neighbors and relatives come and go. There's talk and laughter and food all over the place.

Almost every person has the same question: “Why?” What was he doing out there? they want to know. And when his parents tell them why, they turn to him and stare at him funny; then they come over and some sit on the edge of the sofa and some just bend down, and they're all smiling that half-sad sort of smile his mother had upstairs, and they all seem to have to reach out and touch him. He can't remember ever being touched so much.

Somewhere in there among all the ringing doorbells and laughter, he looks up and it's Claudia and her mother standing there. Claudia pounces on him and kisses him loudly a dozen times. Then she says something to him. He can't understand her words, but he doesn't have to, he feels them. As for Claudia's mother, she doesn't say “Why?” like the others. She says nothing. She just sits on the sofa and pulls him into herself and won't let him go.

All in all, there's so much going on that he pretty much forgets he slept through a snow day.

It's almost ten o'clock when the last of the visitors leave and the party's over. His parents come and sit on the rug by the sofa and tell him how it happened the night before.

“You didn't come home when you were supposed to,” says his mother.

“As usual,” his father cuts in.

“But we weren't worried at first. We thought you were out playing in the snow. But then it was eight thirty, nine o' clock, and you still weren't home.”

“That's when we officially started to worry.”

His mother called the homes of kids he might be playing with while his father started trekking the streets, calling his name. They really didn't want to call the police. Only an hour before, there had been all that commotion over the little lost
girl on Willow Street, and now they knew how it would sound: Guess what? Another one's lost.

But when it's dark and the streets are deserted and every kid in town is safe and snug at home except yours, you don't care how it sounds, you call the police. And they came, like a flashing army, the same police cars and rescue trucks and emergency vans that had been out for the little girl only hours before. Now it was their street lit up like a block party.

“Only it wasn't like the little girl,” says his father. “We weren't finding you fast. And the snow was coming down, turning into sleet, then rain.”

“You were out looking too, right, Dad?” he says.

His dad looks at him. “Yeah, I was out.”

“Piece a cake for you, right?”

He's thinking of his father delivering the mail in all kinds of weather. He's remembering how he used to sit in school and picture his dad hunched like a fullback punching a hole in whistling blizzards.

His father gives him a lopsided smile and a squeeze on the knee. “Yeah, piece a cake.”

They tell him how slowly the minutes and hours passed, and how long Polly tried to stay awake but finally couldn't. There are things they tell him and things they do not tell him, and when they come to the end, when the man in the snowplow finds him far from home and brings him back, and the rescue squad takes over the house and gets him dried and warm and checked out “stem to stern” and he's just floppy dopey like a zombie and they're both so happy and his mother is “bawling like a baby,” when they come to the end of the end, how they carried him upstairs and put him right into their own bed between them—by then there's a smile on his face and he's feeling something he hasn't felt in years, like he's little again, like he's been hearing a bedtime story.

“So,” says his father, “just where were you, anyway, all that time? Where were you looking?”

He shrugs. “Alleys, mostly.” There seems no need to say more.

They stay up until midnight. “I know you're not tired,” his mother says, “but why don't you just give it a try anyway. See what happens.”

He asks them if he can stay downstairs and sleep here on the sofa. He's getting to like it.

They look at each other and finally say okay, as long as he promises not to go sneaking out the door as soon as they turn their backs.

They kiss him good night, one final hand on his forehead, and upstairs they go.

 

The house is dark and quiet, everything is dark and quiet but the inside of his head. In there it's still party time; the phone is ringing, the pizza dripping. In there it's still snowing and still raining, and still he treks the alleyways looking for Claudia. But now it's almost fun, because the rest of him is plenty warm and on the sofa, and Claudia got found by eight o'clock, tops.

He closes his eyes and gives it a try. Not much happens, but he keeps trying. He hums a lullaby to himself. In the dark a few small muscles here and there continue to stir: They do not want to sleep, they want to be out in the alleys, searching.

And it comes to him, what he needs to do. He gets up. He wears the blanket like a robe. In the
dark he feels his way to the front door. He feels for the deadbolt latch. He turns it slowly, as silently as he can, holding his breath. He turns the knob, silently, slowly. He opens the door. He leans out, trying to keep his feet on the carpet inside. The night air is cold on his neck. He leans out as far as he can and looks up. He smiles. The sky is clear. They're still there. The stars.

He comes back in, closes the door. Once again on the sofa, he pulls the covers snugly about him and in minutes is fast asleep.

After the snow day comes the weekend, and by Monday much of the snow is gone. It remains only in the shadows and corners and north-facing surfaces of the town, and on the edges of large parking lots, where the plows have shoved the snow into small gray mountains. The temperature is up to the low fifties, warm for December, and in gutters and alleys all over town water trickles toward sewers and drains.

Best of all, Monday is in-service day at Monroe Middle School. There's something special about playing just outside the school doors while all the teachers have to be inside. Kids are swarming: hockey on the parking lot, football and soccer on the fields, goofing off all over in the balmy weather.

Under a canopy of arcing footballs, two kids,
Tuttle and Bonce, are having a discussion. Tuttle is pointing. “See him? That kid there?”

He's pointing to a kid in a yellow baseball hat.

“Yeah.”

“Watch this.”

Tuttle calls for a ball. He spins the ball in his hand, he fingers the laces. “Watch.” He calls out to the kid. “Hey—yo—here ya go!” He winds up and fires a trim spiral at the kid. The kid reaches out with both hands as if he's about to take a baby from someone's arms. The ball passes neatly through the kid's hands and drills him in the chest. The kid's hat flies off. He staggers backward, almost falling. He scrambles to retrieve the ball and hat.

Tuttle and Bonce share the chuckle of the superior athlete among the underblessed.

“What a spaz,” says Bonce. “Look at him. He throws like a girl.”

“He throws like a
baby
girl.”

“Who is he?” says Bonce.

“Who knows?” says Tuttle.

They watch as the kid calls, reaches out for
someone to pass another ball to him. Finally someone does. This time the ball bounces off his head. Again his hat goes flying.

Tuttle and Bonce crack up, howling.

Tuttle calls, “Yo, Hobin! C'mere!”

Hobin joins them.

“Watch this,” says Tuttle. Tuttle calls for a ball and does what he did before, he whips a hard one at the kid in the yellow hat. Again the kid reaches out, and again the ball passes through his hands and nails him in the chest.

Hobin doesn't seem amused. He sneers. “Coulda told ya.”

The three of them watch as the kid this time tries to punt the ball back to them. On his first try, his foot misses the ball altogether. On his second try, the ball travels some ten feet in the air.

“So who is he?” says Bonce.

“His name's Zinkoff,” says Hobin. “He went to my school. He's nobody.”

“Yeah, but didn't you hear about him?” It's Janski, who has joined the group.

“Hear what?” says Bonce.

“About that little girl that got lost the other night?”

“Yeah?”

“This kid goes out looking for her, right? So they find her, like just a little while after she got lost?” The others nod. “So the little girl is home and all, and everybody else goes home, the search is over, okay? But
this
kid”—he nods toward the kid in the yellow hat—

“Zinkoff,” says Bonce.

“Yeah, he don't know it. The search is over and he don't know it.”

The four of them turn to look at the kid.

Bonce says, “The little girl is home all safe and found and he's still out
looking
for her?”

Janski grins into Bonce's face. He says it slowly:

“For…seven…hours.”

Tuttle shrieks. “Seven
hours
?”

“Seven…hours,” Janski repeats. “A snowplow found him at two o'clock in the morning. Almost ran him over. He was two miles from home.”

Bonce stares at the yellow-hatted kid, who again is trying to punt a ball. “He musta been half dead.”

“He musta been half stupid,” says Tuttle. “How stupid is that, looking till two o'clock in the morning for somebody that's already found.”

Hobin sneers. “Coulda told ya.”

“Was he froze?” says Bonce.

Janski shrugs.

“What a wipeout,” says Tuttle.

“Shoulda seen him Field Day in fourth grade,” says Hobin.

“Yeah?” says Tuttle. “Bad, huh?”

Hobin does not answer. They all stare at the kid, who is now running this way and that, trying to entice someone to throw him a ball. They try to picture how bad it was.

“And he
likes
school. He goes early.”

Everyone turns to stare at Hobin, who has spoken these words. They keep staring at him, waiting for him to say he was kidding. But Hobin says nothing else. They turn their attention back
to the kid in the yellow hat, who seems not to know he's being stared at.

At last Bonce says, “So, let's get a game.”

Everybody breaks from the trance. “Yeah!”

Tuttle calls, “Game! Game!”

Kids who want to play come running.

Teams are chosen. Tuttle and Bonce are the captains. They flip fingers for first pick. Tuttle wins.

“Hobin,” he says.

“Janski,” says Bonce.

They go on choosing sides—Tuttles here, Bonces here—until the only one left is the kid in the yellow hat. But the sides are even. Tuttle and Bonce have each chosen seven kids. Yellow Hat is a leftover.

But this kid's not acting like a leftover. A normal leftover would see that he's one too many, that everybody but him has been picked and that therefore he must be pretty hopeless and therefore he better just get on out of there and go play something he's good at, like Monopoly.

But this kid just stands there. He shows no sign of turning and vanishing. And he's not
just
standing there, he's
staring
at Tuttle and Bonce.

Tuttle says, “
We
got enough.”

So now the kid is just staring at Bonce. And Bonce wants to say “
We
got enough,” but he can't seem to say it. He wishes the kid would just turn and go away. Doesn't he know he's a leftover?

Hobin's voice rings out from the other side: “Tackle!”

They usually play two-hand tag. There are no pads, no helmets. And half the field is muddy from the melted snow. But no one objects. No one wants to appear to be afraid to play tackle.

Janski speaks: “The sides are even up. We don't need nobody else.”

The kid does not take the hint.

This is uncharted territory: a leftover who won't go away. Still, Bonce holds the power. All he has to do is open his mouth.
Please, go
, he thinks. The kid is still staring at Bonce. The kid really
is
stupid. The kid doesn't know that even if he's allowed in he's only going to be ignored. Or embarrassed. Or hurt. He doesn't know that he's a klutz. Doesn't know he's out of his league.
Doesn't know a leftover doesn't stare down a chooser. Doesn't know he's supposed to look down at his shoes or up at the sky and wish he could disappear, because that's what he is, a leftover, the last kid left.

But this kid won't back off, and his stare is hitting Bonce like a football in the forehead. In those eyes Bonce sees something he doesn't understand, and something else he dimly remembers. It occurs to him that he wants to ask the kid what it was like, those seven hours. He thinks he must be able to see them in the kid's eyes, some sign of them, but he cannot. He wants to ask the kid what it was like, being that cold.

This is goofy
, he thinks. He thinks of a thousand things to say, a thousand other ways this could go, but in the end there's really only one word, he knows that, one word from him and who knows where we go from there?

He points, he says it: “Zinkoff.”

And the game begins.