The Fall of Never (29 page)

A gap in the traffic sends the wedge of pedestrians scooting across the street. Carlos Mendes scoots with them, nearly riding the coattails of the zaftig brunette in the flowery dress. To his left he hears a man shout something about goddamn son-of-a-bitch cracks in the street. Somewhere up ahead he can hear someone—a policeman?—bleating a whistle.

Two minutes later and he is seated at the back of the uptown bus, bumping along through the stop-and-go traffic. With the shoulder of his T-shirt he wipes sweat from around his mouth and sits watching the traffic through the side window. Beside him on the empty seat is the bag of groceries and his backpack. As if struck by sublime intentions, he yanks the pack nearer to him, unzips the pouch, and produces a bottle of root beer and a bottle opener—what his brother Michael calls a “popper-topper,” even though Michael was older. He pops the cap, lets it drop to the floor of the bus, and guzzles half the bottle in only two or three chugs. The root beer has gotten a bit warm in the heat but it is still good.

The bus stops and a handful of passengers boards. All but one of the newcomers claim some of the empty seats close to the front of the bus. The one remaining passenger moves jerkily toward the rear of the bus. He is old and looks lost, Carlos thinks, the way his grandfather sometimes looks. He wears a long coat and a hat like the detectives wear on the covers of the murder mystery novels he sometimes reads when his mother has gone to bed, and he walks with a disjointed, almost painful confusion. Though he is looking directly at Carlos—or at the seat beside him—he continues to shuffle around as if still searching for something or someone. At one point, it almost appears the old man will stand for the entire trip. Then, without asking permission, the old man approaches the bench seat beside Carlos, bends awkwardly at the knees, and pushes Carlos’s bag toward Carlos. The man drops himself onto the seat. Suddenly afraid that the stranger has crushed his mother’s groceries, Carlos reaches over and slides both the grocery bag and backpack all the way onto his lap.

The old man turns a white, blotched and grizzled face in young Carlos’s direction. He neither smiles nor scowls—just stares him up and down, as if considering whether or not it would be appropriate to eat him.

“Ain’t right takin’ up two seats,” the man says, his eyes still on Carlos.

Not saying a word, Carlos turns away from the stranger and looks back out the window. A few kids have unscrewed the cap on a fire hydrant and are trying to fill up plastic water guns beneath the blast.

He is suddenly aware of a ghastly stink, like burning cabbage, and he jerks his head back around to see that the stranger has slid closer to him on the seat and is leaning down as if to speak with him.

“Be it okay,” the stranger says. “Harm ain’t done, not here, no sir. See? We just sittin’ t’gether, me an’ you, you an’ me.”

Carlos feels a hot lump of spit at the back of his throat. And of course his mind suddenly replays the barrage of precautions his mother has drilled into him since he could walk and talk—precautions about strangers in strange places, about not talking to such people, not even making eye contact if he could help it.

He turns again and looks out the window.

He feels the old man press his shoulder against his own. And he is trapped, right here on the bus, caught between the window and some smelly old strange man. He suddenly doesn’t want the rest of his root beer. And when the bus comes to the next stop he silently prays that the strange man will get off. But he doesn’t.

If he doesn’t get off at the next stop,
he thinks,
then I will.

The stink of cabbage is nearly suffocating him. For some crazy reason, he thinks of the time Michael and Juan pinned him to the kitchen floor and proceeded to stuff Michael’s sweaty gym socks into his mouth. They managed to get both socks in there too, before his mother came in and they both scattered like mice.

“Petey,” says the stranger.

Carlos doesn’t answer.

“What’s your name, boy?”

Carlos still doesn’t answer.

“Not nice to ignore someone when they’s talkin’ to you.”

“Carlos,” he stutters finally, feeling his entire body break out in a wave of perspiration. Looming large in his head is the image of his mother’s face, her heart broken, wracked with disappointment, as if he has just driven a spear through her chest.

“Carlos-Carlos,” the man says. He is rolling the name around on his tongue, trying its pronunciation with different accents. “You dark. You ain’t a nigger-boy, is you? You ride the bus a’ time? Me—I don’t like it.”

Carlos cannot look away from the stranger, he is so completely frozen in terror. The man’s face is loaded with red, flaking patches of skin and bulbous whiteheads. His lips are like two broken snaps of balsa wood, brittle and peeling. And behind those lips is a row of teeth the color of turpentine, gums the color of day-old bruises. A dried tongue of snot clings ornately to one nostril.

“I think I sick,” the man says. His eyes are moving fast. They are yellow. “You get sick onna bus, boy?”

“No.” It is hardly even a whisper.

“Thass you a big fella then, right? Carlos-Carlos-Carlos. Big like some big man.”

The bottle of root beer suddenly drops from his sweaty hands and lands in his lap, dumping the remaining soda on his pants. A burning embarrassment abruptly wells up inside him and he wants to scream, wants to cry. His breath starts coming in great wheezing gasps.

“Now-now-now,” the stranger says, “what we done? You done it, Petey can see you done it. Foolish thing, it is.”

And then the man’s right hand comes out, slides itself between the bag of groceries and Carlos’s chest, and reaches down for the bottle. Paralyzed with fear, his throat too constricted to utter a single sound, he can only watch that hand slide across him and reach down into his lap. It is like watching a film in slow motion. The hand is enormous, he sees, and sprouts silvery wires of hair from the knuckles. It is a multicolored hand, adorned with a selection of brown splotches and tiny, bloodied nicks and cuts and scratches. The fingers are impossibly long and wide, capped with thick nails packed with crud.

The hand lingers in his lap too long. Carlos feels a pressure in his groin as Petey the Stranger presses the glass root beer bottle into his privates, delicately swiveling the bottle from side to side. And that desperate scream is caught in his throat, caught there and useless, and he actually feels his mind begin to creep away from what is happening. In a flash he is back on the kitchen floor. Juan’s knees are pressing into his wrists, pinning them to the linoleum, while Michael straddles him good and holds his legs to the floor beneath his weight. In Michael’s hand is a balled up pair of gray gym socks, still dense with sweat, and jeez-it-all if he can’t smell those socks from here, from where he lay bound by his brothers to the floor, from here on the bus—

And then his brothers and the gym socks are gone.

And then so is the stranger’s hand.

Carlos manages to look down at his shorts—they are soaked with root beer—and then glances over at the stranger from the corner of his eye, not wanting it known that he is actually looking in the man’s direction. Petey holds the empty soda bottle on his lap. He is scraping at the bottle’s label with a curled yellow thumbnail.

“Done messed yourself, Carlos-Carlos. We should clean you up. Where you goin’ to, boy?”

Blessedly, he feels his throat sear open, feels a rush of air enter his windpipe—then tighten again as the man leans over him
and kisses the top of his head.

The sound of hissing air-brakes and the bus jerks to a stop. In that same instant, the man—Petey—dislodges himself from the bus seat and bunches his long coat up in front of him as he makes his way down the aisle toward the bus’s doors. Though Carlos suspects he might, the old man does not turn to look back.

Once the bus starts moving again, Carlos pulls his legs up to his chest, rests his head against the window, and stares at the traffic below. Ashamed, he cries.

There was a surge of warm air at his face followed by the sensation of something large shifting directly in front of him, and Carlos Mendes opened his eyes and jerked away from Nellie Worthridge. It took several seconds for his thoughts to properly regroup, finding their appropriate niches, and the world swam back to him in one great rush.

“I…”

He was anxious to speak (though he had no idea what he wanted to say) yet he found himself too busy searching for breath. It was as if the wind had just been knocked out of him. And he was sweaty and shaking all over. His mouth was pasty and dry.

Like some medieval witch, Nellie sat perched on her chair in the darkness in front of him, her face unchanged and without expression. Well, almost—her eyes had narrowed and her crooked lips appeared to be working over the beginnings of words. The congruity of her form, slated in darkness, suggested the gnarled and mangled rudiments of an ancient tree. She looked very near death, Mendes noted. Only her eyes proposed any implication of life: they remained narrow and grating, nearly allowing him to feel the full force of their stare scraping along his flesh.

“I…” was all he could manage.

“Some good people, some bad,” Nellie interjected. Again, it looked as if she were trying to smile. “But I guess you know that, don’t you, Doctor?”

Even now, even here, the doctor could almost smell the stranger from that bus—Petey, his name had been—and remembered the terror that had welled up inside him as he sat there in that seat, helpless. He clearly recalled the heat from the sun amplified against the bus window, hot to the touch, and the panels of light that spread in great lunging rectangles across the green vinyl seat in front of him.

“That happened…” he tried again. Then: “I was just a kid. So long ago. I never…I couldn’t tell anyone about that and I was scared, I…I didn’t know what…” He paused, gaining control of his thoughts. “I haven’t thought of that in forever,” he managed finally. “I…I’d forgotten…”

Nellie offered a weak smile. “You may forget the past, but the past don’t forget you. It clings.”

“Okay,” he said, “okay, you…
see
things, know things…but what about my son? Nellie, you may not remember, but I need to know what’s going on. I need to know why you said what you said.”

“I tried,” she said. Her pale face appeared to regress into the shadows of the apartment. “I felt nothing.”

“Felt
nothing?”

“I searched your mind, Doctor, your soul. I dipped in for as long as I could, for as
deep
as I could, but there was nothing there.”

“How can that be? Nellie, you knew about my son back at the hospital. You even called me Carlito. My wife calls me that. How did you know that?”

“There aren’t definitive answers for everything, I’m afraid. Sometimes I just pick up things—there and then gone, like an old ham radio scooping up signals from Japan. Sometimes I remember them. Sometimes I don’t.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “no, that can’t be it. There’s got to be more to it, got to be some
way…”

“I know of no other way.”

“How is it you see inside my head yet you can also see things that haven’t happened yet, can see my son?”

“It all comes from the same place,” she said. “Everything’s connected in some way. I don’t fully understand it—I don’t think anyone does, really, nor are they supposed to—but I know that’s just the way it is. Your memories and thoughts and emotions are what I am able to read. Also, your future. Sometimes.”

“How?”

“Because to some degree, we all know our future. There is a predestination mapped out for all of us. It’s there at birth. We know who we are, who we will become, and when we will die. We also know this about those closest to us.”

“You picked up my son through me?” he said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Your son
is
you,” she said. “You are the closest thing to your son, you are made up of the same elements. There is only one other person who is closer.”

“Marie.” And he’d known this; somehow, deep within the recesses of his own confused brain, he’d known this all along. Perhaps Marie felt it even stronger than he did, she just didn’t have the confirmation of someone telling her the outcome, telling her the truth. Marie didn’t have Nellie Worthridge’s verification.

“Your wife,” Nellie said.

“So what more can we do? What is it? Tell me. Anything.”

“You don’t have it in you because you don’t have your son’s
soul
in you. Your wife
does.”

And like a flash he pictured Marie stretched out in the faded blue recliner in the living room, the dull glow of the television set washing over her soft features in the dark, the almost timid swell of her pregnancy perched on her lap like a child with her favorite toy. The image was so clear, so lucid, that he was suddenly confident that he was actually
seeing
his wife, seeing her as she was
right at that moment,
despite the impossibility of such certainty.

The world is full of impossibilities,
he thought then.
The world is apparently teeming with them. And they’re all very, very real.