The Fading (4 page)

Because, honey, this is what you got when you fucked with the wrong greaseball.

He was driving too goddamn fast, no doubt about that. But though he was sixty-one and a grandfather of eight, Poppa S was
no old goat. He had the reflexes of a panther and the balls of a bull moose and he could maneuver a piece of Detroit iron
like Steve McQueen with an Ali MacGraw hard-on. The street was plain old fuckin’ empty this time of the morning anyway, so
he laid it on, taking down about half a gallon of go-go juice at thirty-six cents a gallon. He didn’t need to check the
speedo to know he was pushing sixty by the time he crossed Cedar. The houses began to blur but The Old Man wasn’t looking
at the houses. He was staring straight ahead, knuckles white, eyes on the road, and the fuckin’ road was clear. No cars backing
out, no kittens crossing, not even a tumbling leaf. Another four blocks and he’d shoot the S-turn over to Alpine, and then
Ronald McDonald Bruce Lee, he of the Asian Persuasion, would be in for the surprise of his short goddamn li—

There was a boy standing in the middle of the road. A little bitty pecker no more than four. And he didn’t come runnin’ and
he didn’t pop out from behind a parked car. There was no before and after, no lost baseball of a warning, no movement on the
kid’s part. It was like someone had spliced a single extra frame into a film strip. The road was empty and then faster than
a blink (and by bloody shitting Christ Poppa S knew he
hadn’t
blinked, his eyes were too busy bulging out of their sockets with erect violence) the kid was standing in the middle of it,
whole, all at once, perfectly still and staring right through the windshield at Poppa S with no expression at all.

In the split-split-second before he stood on the Caddy’s brakes, Poppa S’s eyes locked with the kid’s. They held each other
across no more than twenty feet of asphalt and morning sunlight, and Poppa S saw the kid wasn’t one bit afraid. He looked,
Poppa S thought, like he had nothing to worry about because this wasn’t real, it was an illusion, and what was about to happen
couldn’t hurt him at all. And maybe that was true. Maybe this wasn’t really happening, maybe by Holy Fucking Christ I’m Going
to Kill A Little Baby Boy it was a freak hallucination.

But to be sure, Poppa S, whose real name was Anthony Sobretti II, yanked the wheel anyway. Yanked it just about as hard as
any old greaseball could.

Becky couldn’t see the street beyond Mrs Fryeberger’s hedge and she couldn’t make her feet go one step more. The tires shrieked
for a horribly drawn out moment – in which she closed her eyes – and then the shrieking became a heavy sliding sound, the
sound of rubber being ground down dully against the road. A big double whump … another eternity of silence … and then a horrendous
crunch and shattering sounds as the big car collided with something of equal or greater mass but which, to her ears, stood
only thirty-nine inches and weighed just thirty-four pounds.

In the ringing silence, Becky wailed and went careening into the street. Noel’s trike was lying on its side, in the gutter
not fifty feet from her. He was not there with it. He was not on the sidewalk or in the other yards.

He was half a block down, standing in the middle of the street. In his yellow striped shirt and knee shorts and tiny sneakers.
He was turned in profile to her, his thin body as haloed as an angel glowing on the mantle, staring numbly at the big brown
car that was now an accordion of metal and vinyl and glass pressed into the fully mature weeping willow at the center of the
Elkinsons’ front lawn. Two parallel strips of clean dirt lay exposed where the tires had peeled sod from the earth. Steam
rose from inside the lacy sagging branches while dozens of blade-shaped leaves dipped and spun lazily to the ground.

‘Nooooooooel!’ she screamed deep from her stomach.

He turned slowly and stared at her with a numb no-look on his face.

Unharmed, her boy was unharmed. She knew this but kept running and screaming to him anyway. She scooped him from the road
and she was full of rage, not at her son but at the driver. The nasty sonofabitch who had come blowing down her street hell
bent for—

‘It’s okay, sweetie, it’s okay, Mommy’s got you,’ she said into his ear, clutching him against her breast as she danced back
onto the sidewalk. Noel was shivering, face buried in her neck and hair.

The old woman, Mrs Fryeberger, emerged from her house, slippers flapping under her sensible blue polyester pants as she trampled
out parallel to her hedge, hands on her hips, some kind of hideous pink and green kerchief tied around the clouds of her blue
hair. Alice Fryeberger was the last woman on the block Becky would call a friend, but she became one now with the first words
out of her mouth.

‘Reckless endangerment! That was Tony-Anthony’s boy and I guarantee you he’s drunk! Speeding! I saw the whole damn thing and
you ought to sue that whole family upside down. I’ll testify, you bet I will!’

Becky could only nod and seethe as the shock ran out
of her. She kept glancing at the crumpled Cadillac, expecting the driver to stagger out and enter an argument with her. But
no one had gotten out. The door probably wouldn’t even open, she realized as her ears stopped buzzing. Becky was grateful
for Alice Fryeberger’s bold defense, but after another minute she couldn’t help feeling at least a pang of concern for the
driver, whoever he was.

‘Your boy okay,’ Mrs Fryeberger said, more of a statement than a question.

‘Yes.’ She searched him again for scratches or scrapes but knew there weren’t any. If the massive car had so much as grazed
him, he would be sprawled in the street right now, broken in five places. ‘He’s in shock. It was just so scary and I didn’t—’

Becky’s throat locked up. She didn’t want to cry but the tears and choked sobs came anyway.

Alice Fryeberger spat on the road and marched over to the smashed vehicle, parting the curtains of willow branches, right
up along the driver’s door. She leaned sideways to peer inside. She scooted further along, closer to the hood. She lifted
her chin as if inspecting fruit at the grocery store, nodded at something, and walked back, wrists folded against her bony
hips.

‘Well, that’s not Tony-Anthony, the little one,’ Mrs Fryeberger said. ‘It’s his old man, the father. Anthony Sobretti Sr.
Went to elementary school with him and used to be friends with his wife Stefana, bless her heart.’

Becky squinted, holding her son tighter. Alice
Fryeberger didn’t seem upset, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

‘Ambulance,’ Becky said, but her tongue felt swollen and it didn’t come out right.

The old woman flapped her blouse at the chest, cooling some heat that had arisen there. ‘Oh, honey. He went out the windshield.
His head opened up pretty good on that tree. Terrible mess. He’s a goner and he ain’t coming back.’

Becky cried, and the boy cried with her.

Noel Shaker, age two years and seven months, did not understand what had just happened. All he knew was that he had played
the game wrong and done a very bad thing. There was no way he could explain to Mommy now, no way to show her the thing. It
was a bad thing and he was afraid of it. He promised himself, in whatever ways such young children are capable of, that he
would never do it again. He cried inside this early taste of guilt, inside his promise, and stared tiredly through his tears
over his mother’s shoulder, up the street.

There was no sign of Dimples. He had vanished just as quickly as Noel Shaker had been restored.

Few events altered the playground hierarchy like the appearance of a brand new Nerf football. Kids who barely knew one another,
and others who possessed no speed or passing skills, suddenly flocked to the colorful foam beacon like stray dogs to a restaurant
steak the chef has lobbed into the alley. Class divisions crumbled. Sworn enemies who had come to blows over stolen candy
at Halloween found themselves backslapping one another after the completion of a mondo huck down the leaf-strewn sidelines.
Shoelaces got tied in double knots. At least one tomboy crossed over from the rope-skippers to play safety. It was a mystery,
the power this cheap toy commanded.

But not a very deep mystery. It was an inviting ovoid, meant to be shared. The pebbled grippy fruit skin gave form to a soft
missile that promised to chafe noses without bleeding them. In its simplicity and forgiveness, the Nerf suggested they were
all worthy of touching it, running with it, savoring the fresh bike-tire scent of it whistling under their chins. It made
their little hands feel as big and strong as Terry Bradshaw’s.

Didn’t matter if the kid who brought it was the budding athletic star or the wall-eyed pencil neck with a down parka feather
stuck to the corner of his chapped lips. The child whose mother had shelled out $4.99 for a navy blue or canary yellow or
classic orange Nerf essentially crowned her kid king of the playground.

Such Nerffound status, however, like the ball itself, never lasted more than a few days – and its chrysalis lifespan was precisely
what made it so precious, a currency that knighted its owner. As the rubber coating began to crack and peel like a sunburned
shoulder, as the laces stiffened and the ball found its way into a mud puddle, waterlogged, dried hard and devolved into a
dog toy, so too did the adoration of its owner dwindle and fade.

By age nine, Noel Shaker needed a Nerf football day. When pressed to fill a guest list for his birthday party, he could rustle
up three or four names, but none were guaranteed to show. It wasn’t that he didn’t fit in with the sprouting jocks, the math
whizzes and eager bookworms, the troublemakers from the low-income families or the nascent band of preppies who lately seemed
to spend most of their lunch breaks posing and gossiping with actual girls. It was that no one clique desired his membership,
and as a result he had become a master of tagging along. Or simply keeping out of trouble by keeping to himself.

Among his teachers, the running suspicion was that Noel Shaker was on the fence and soon would fall (or jump) to one side
or the other. Good kid, bad kid. Smart
kid, wasting his potential kid. Unusually quiet and attentive kid, spacey and weird and sometimes downright creepy kid. There
were a lot of fences, even in the fourth grade, and Noel Shaker straddled most of them.

He hardly ever missed a day of school, his parents sent him into battle groomed and dressed decently, and looks-wise he was
perched somewhere between a little awkward and androgynously striking. He was pulling mostly Bs with one A (language arts)
and one unsettling D (science). Nothing much to be alarmed about. But for reasons unknown, Noel had become the kind of boy
teachers and students approached with oven mitts on both hands. Though he had never turned violent, there was something in
his tense posture and bracing brown eyes that suggested one push in the wrong direction and he would blow.

Only thing was, as his gym teacher Mr Coach Kanasaki put it one morning in the teachers’ lounge, ‘You don’t know if he’s gonna
blow like a house full of oven gas or like an electrical fuse. You know, where something tiny inside just goes
click
and the turn signals never work right again.’

Mrs McGinnis, who taught music, had been married three times, and wore shawls her sister loomed for Christmas presents, unleashed
a funnel of Winston Gold smoke over Coach’s head and nodded in grave agreement.

‘It’s his fiber,’ she croaked. ‘The boy lacks fiber. He does just enough. He’s like the second house in
The Three Little Pigs
. He’s not going to be the easiest to
knock down, but when he goes, there’ll be a lot more than a pile of straw to clean up.’

Waving a hand to clear the haze of Rosalyn McGinnis’s two cents, Coach K said, ‘I don’t know if the father is too hard on
him or if he’s maybe just stitched a little too tight at the seams, but he’s a thinker. He’s living too deep for a kid that
age.’

‘I’ve met the mother,’ Mrs McGinnis said. ‘I’m not sure I cared for the way she was keeping herself.’

‘Mrs Shaker is a dedicated mother,’ Coach K said. ‘I don’t see a problem on her end—’

‘You wouldn’t,’ Mrs McGinnis said, further browning her teeth with a swig of lounge decaf.

Coach K frowned. ‘Okay, I don’t know what that means, but my point is, if Noel can hang on till middle school and Bud Jarvis
over at Centennial can get him on a team, a lot of that pent-up energy can be converted into points on the board. He has good
legs. He should be running. Best thing for anxiety—’

‘Sports,’ Mrs McGinnis said. ‘It all comes back to sports with you.’

‘Then why don’t you teach him to play the guitar, Rosalyn?’ The phys-ed teacher slapped the table where a decimated box of
Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins sat seeping grease onto copies of the latest
Cougar Courier
. Coach K thought the cartoon cougar on the masthead of the school’s newsletter and Rosalyn McGinnis were beginning to bear
a suspicious resemblance to one another. ‘Do you really think the piccolo is going to unlock the passion in their souls?’

‘It’s called the recorder, you tone-deaf ape.’

As it happened, Noel wasn’t able to hang on till middle school, or much past today. Which was a shame because the morning
had gotten off to a promising start. He rode to school avoiding his mother’s eyes from the passenger seat of their rattling
loud microbus, but he knew without looking that hers were circled in darkness, watery, her nose red at the tip. She’d been
crying again, last night while his dad worked late again. When they pulled up, seven minutes past last bell according to Noel’s
rubber Timex, he shouldered the door open but his mom stopped him, pulling on his sleeve.

‘Wait a sec, hon. I forgot to give you this last night.’

She dug into the clutter between the seats, cast aside a small pink umbrella, and bobbed up holding a two-tone maroon over
black Nerf football. For a moment it sat there between them like some imaginary bird’s lost egg, belonging to neither mother
nor son, and Noel didn’t know what to say.