Ragged Company (29 page)

“What?” Digger said. “Fer fuck sakes, what?”

“They’ve been able to track his movements through his bank card withdrawals,” she said. “They have a rough idea of where he’s been but nothing concrete. For the first three days, he withdrew a few hundred from bank machines in different parts of the city.”

“Walking,” I said.

“Yes. It appears so. The bank machines are pretty far apart and it doesn’t appear he was taking a particular direction. He was just walking, apparently. Because it’s cash, they don’t know where he spent the money, only that he got it.”

Margo looked at us with tears building in her eyes. “Two days ago it stopped. No more withdrawals. Just one big one for eight hundred and no more. That was early in the morning two days ago.”

“Jesus,” Digger said.

“The police are looking for him but I think we all know that if he really wants to disappear in the city, there’s places where no one could find him.”

“Yes,” I said, quietly. “There are places like that.”

“James has contacted the media. I’m sorry, but he had to. He had to put Jonas’s picture out on the off chance that someone somewhere has seen him. Maybe they sold him something, maybe they rented him a room—anything that might lead us to where he is.”

“God,” Granite said. “Here we go again.”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, they’ll make a big thing of it. Homeless lottery winner disappears. Millionaire street person vanishes. All of that. And they’ll be after all of you, too.”

“We don’t gotta say nothing, though, right?” Digger asked.

“No. James and I and Margo can handle the dodge for you. But there’ll be cameras and reporters outside the door, you can bet on that.”

“Will it help get Timber back?” Dick asked.

“Yes. Well, it might,” Granite said. “More people knowing his face. You never know. Someone might see him or have seen him already.”

“Should we put up a reward?” I asked.

“No,” Margo said. “Not right away. Let the media machine do its work. People generally want to help, and if someone’s seen him they’ll let us know because they’ve seen it on television. James will be here shortly to fill us in on exactly what to do when reporters arrive.”

“What do we do until then? Until something happens?” I asked her.

She came and stood beside me, put an arm around my shoulder and bent her forehead to mine. “Pray, I suppose,” she said. “That seems like a good thing to do.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a good thing.”

They all came then, my boys, and stood around us, arms encircling us, heads bent close together, eyes closed, and joined in silent prayer for a lost one.

W
E NEVER WENT
to the movie store for a coupla days an’ there wasn’t nothin’ new for me to watch. So I started lookin’ through my collection for somethin’ kinda happy on accounta I needed that right then. Granite an’ Miss Margo had got me all kinds of movies they said I’d like an’ I never got all the way through them. There was a pile on my table waitin’ for me to watch. I thought about
Back to the Future
and
The Color Purple
on accounta they sounded nice, but the one I decided to watch was one called
E.T.
There was a picture of a boy on a bicycle ridin’ across the front of the moon way up high in the air an’ I figured that would be good on accounta I remembered always wantin’ to fly when I was a kid. So I put it in an’ started to watch.

At first I was scared on accounta this little guy gets left behind by a spaceship an’ has to find a place to hide. But then he gets helped out by a buncha kids an’ everythin’ was kinda happy for a while. Then some bad men come an’ try an’ take him away, so he’s gotta run away an’ that’s when he flies the boy on the bike across the front of the moon.

Then, it got to me. They sent a message into space an’ the spaceship came back for the little guy. But he was friends now with one boy an’ they was both sad on accounta nobody likes to lose a friend. I was thinkin’ of Timber right then an’ it kinda made me cry. Then the little guy points his finger at the boy’s heart an’ says, “I’ll be right here.”

Well, I set right to bawling on accounta I missed my friend. I cried hard. It scared me to cry so hard, so I had to have another coupla drinks to settle down. The movie was over, so I went over an’ sat on my windowsill an’ looked up at the moon that was full that night too.

E.T. went home an’ left his friend behind. He had to on accounta that’s where he lived. That’s where he belonged. And that’s when I knew. That’s when it come to me. That’s when I knew how come we couldn’t find Timber, an’ I ran down the hall to tell everyone.

I
WATCHED CLOUDS
. That’s all I did that first night on the bus. I sat in my seat, leaned my head against the glass and watched clouds sail by. There’s a funny thing that happens when you do that. When you look at something long enough and hard enough when you’re moving, it gets to looking like whatever you’re looking at is sailing alongside you. That’s how those clouds looked after a while. Like they were sailing beside the bus. It’s called parallax or the Doppler effect or some such thing she put in my head a long time ago. She called it ordinary magic. She said that kind of magic was everywhere all the time, and that we only ever have to open our eyes to see it. She said it was our minds, our brains, our rigid thinking that discounted it, made it a kid’s trick, a conversation starter and not the magic that it was. Relative motion. That’s what made it work. You both needed to be in relative motion to each other in order for clouds to chase a bus down the highway. In order for the magic to happen. I thought about that. Thought about how it works that way with people, too, how it works that way with lives, with histories. You can’t get away from ordinary magic. It’s always there. Waiting. Waiting for you to believe again, to open your eyes and look for it. That scared me. Being on this bus, crossing the country to get back to a city, a history, a life, a person I’d abandoned so many years ago, was the first time in all those years that I allowed myself to look for it, to open my eyes, to believe.

I never labelled anything that happened to us since we started going to the movies as magic. I couldn’t. I couldn’t open up hope like that. To me, it was all distraction, something to take us away from the lives we were living—entertainment, escape, disarray almost. Even the money. That wasn’t magic. It was a fluke, a jest, a cosmic joke. I always told myself that it hadn’t happened to me. It had happened to Digger. The magic was that he had shared it. To ascribe it to magic was to ascribe it to hope, and hope was something I had walked away from too. I had left a lot of things in that city by the sea and I had left hope in a chair beside a hospital
bed. You can only carry so much with you when you’re a rounder on the street and hope is a weight you can’t afford.

It wasn’t an easy choice to get on that bus. Walking around the city for three days, I wanted to die. I couldn’t drink enough, it seemed, and when I holed up in some shitty-assed hotel each of those nights, I hoped I wouldn’t wake up. But I did. And the thought came to me that death wasn’t going to come along and claim me. No, I was going to have to do something to force its arrival. I just couldn’t make that choice even though I felt like it. I walked. Walked and walked and walked and looked around for an appropriate height to jump from, an appropriate depth to dive into, or a sharp enough point to slip against. I didn’t find it. All I found was Sylvan. All I found was guilt. All I found was a jettisoned life I hadn’t had the courage to see through. Courage. That was the word. It wasn’t hope I’d abandoned in that chair at all. It was courage.

She told me once that courage was a French word originally. It came from
coeur
—the heart.
Coeur
-age then meant
from the heart.
To live with courage was to live from the heart, that involuntary muscle that drives a life, that beats in the darkness despite itself and propels us onward to become ourselves. Her words, not mine.

I loved Sylvan Parrish. My heart was filled with love, then and now, and if I was to have courage then I needed to return, to go back to that sad chair in that sad room and look into those eyes again and reclaim my heart. It was courage I needed to return to, and if hope came along for the ride, so much the better.

M
OST TIMES
a loogan’s a loogan. But when Dick come running downstairs to tell us E.T told him that Timber wasn’t in the city no more, well, it made sense. I’ll be frigged if I could figure out where he went in this town. Merton was there by then and he got right on the blower to the bulls. He was telling them to start running
Timber’s picture to the airlines to see if any clerks recognized him. I stopped him.

“He ain’t on no friggin’ plane,” I go. “He got here by bus and that’s the way he’ll go back.”

You wanna find a rounder, you gotta think like a rounder. Sure enough, a clerk at the bus station recognized Timber right away. Way Merton figured it, it took four days to get to the west coast. The two days he wasn’t taking no cash from the machine meant he’d been on the bus them two days and he’d be arriving there in another couple days.

“There’s really nothing we can do, legally,” he goes. “He can go anywhere he wants. He doesn’t need to tell anyone where he’s going. Not even us.”

“He’s not missin’ no more?” Dick goes.

“Technically, no,” Merton goes. “I’m still worried about his state of mind, though.”

“Aw fuck, Jimbo,” I go. “If he was gonna do himself he’da done it by now.”

“Maybe so,” he goes. “But what about what happens when he gets back there? What about if he manages to find her and it’s the same situation that he left originally? What if she still doesn’t recognize him?”

“That’s not why he’s going back,” the old lady goes.

“Pardon me?” Merton goes.

“He’s going back to sit in the chair again.”

“You lost me, Amelia.”

“The chair beside the bed. That’s where his life turned. When he got up from that chair and walked away from her, he left himself behind. He’s gotta go back and sit in it again. No matter what.”

“You’re saying he’s got no expectation? That he doesn’t carry the hope that she’ll look at him and all the years will vanish in a heartbeat and she’ll be his one true love again? He’s not going back for that?”

“Are you asking me if he’s crazy?”

“No. Well, yes. I mean, I guess so. It sounds crazy to me.”

“It’s not crazy. Even if he
is
hoping that. It’s love, and I don’t think love is crazy.”

“Me neither,” Margo goes.

“But he’s setting himself up for some major hurt,” Merton goes. “Just walking back into that situation after all this time, he’s setting himself up for pain. What will he do then?”

“James is right,” Rock goes. “I couldn’t imagine it, myself.”

“That’s why I’m going to the fucking coast,” I go.

“What?” Merton goes.

“I’m going out there. What do you expect me to do? Let my winger walk into a set-up? I don’t fucking think so, pal.”

“I’m goin’ too, then,” Dick goes.

“Me too,” Amelia goes.

“Not without me, you’re not,” Margo goes.

“Or me,” Rock goes. “He’s my friend. I can’t see him setting himself up for pain. Or at least, not alone.”

“Well, I guess we’re all going then,” Merton goes. “I have some contacts out there who can do the legwork before we get there, and maybe we can shorten the time he’s alone with it.”

“It’s perfect,” the old lady goes.

“Perfect?” I go. “How you figure?”

“Well,” she goes, “in the old stories I was told as a girl there would come a time of great trouble for the People. All kinds of things happened to the People then. Just like now. Most times, a hero would come forward and make things happen. But other times, times when great strength was needed, it took the People themselves. Everyone would make a journey, a trek.”

“Why?” Rock goes.

“When great strength is needed, great strength is gained.”

“Say what?” I go.

“Sometimes it takes a whole community to save itself, and when people come together in strength, on a mission, what they get in the end is what they spent in the struggle.”

“Stronger?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s drivin’, then?” Dick goes.

“Driving? We have to fly, Dick,” Merton goes.

“Fly?” he goes, all goggle-eyed.

“Yeah,” I go. “Fly. You sit on the handlebars, I’ll pedal like a bastard, and we’re out of here.”

He looks at me for like a whole minute, and you can see the light coming real slow like someone carrying a candle down a hallway. “Aw, Digger,” he goes finally. “That’s just
E.T.
Just the movies. We’re gonna take a plane.”

Like I said. Most times a loogan’s a loogan.

I
CARUS FLEW
too close to the sun. I wondered how many times in the history of man’s fascination with flight did expectation outweigh outcome. Icarus plunged into the sea to perish while Daedalus flapped onward alone. I wondered where we would seek our friend. I wondered if the cost of this journey would be a long, mournful flight homeward. I wondered if the escape from the Labyrinth of the street was worth a plunge into the sea of despair.

“What are you thinking?” Margo asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Some lines from Ovid.”

“Ah,
Metamorphoses.
”

“Yes.”

“‘Icarus, Icarus. Where shall I seek thee, Icarus?’ That riff?”

“Yes.”

“I love the myths. So much contemporary wisdom in those ancient stories.”

“That’s their charm, yes.”

“Amazing how much you can learn from a little paraffin problem, isn’t it?”

I laughed. “Yes. Yes it is.”

The plane began its taxi down the runway and I looked at the rounders across the aisle. This was the stuff of myth itself. Three beggars flying to rescue a fourth in a city by the sea. Amelia closed
her eyes and gripped the arms of her seat as the thrust built up. Digger sat stoic, unmoving, and Dick leaned toward the window despite the gravitational force and watched the ground flash by. They’d borne this adventure quite well. Dick had been fascinated by everything at the airport, especially the moving sidewalk, the horizontal escalator that moved travellers and their bags from landing gate to baggage claim. He’d ridden it twice while we waited. Digger, despite his standoffish defiance, was amazed at the conglomeration of people, their types and manner, humanity in its variety rendering him speechless. And Amelia just grinned her small grin and moved slowly, measuredly, through the rush and crush, moving like a matron at the fair, observant and attendant to her brood walking gangly-legged beside her. Perhaps the gravity of the journey held them up or else the enormity of the changes over the last year had granted them immunity from the strange, the fantastic, the world beyond their world. Either way, they were magnificent. Now, as the plane reached takeoff speed and lifted itself from the ground, I heard various muted expressions of awe at the power that caused it. Joy from Dick, discomfited admiration from Digger, and a sigh from Amelia. Rounders in the sky. I was far from inured to the changes around me.