The Spy's Little Zonbi (31 page)

And thirsty? The kind of thirst you get from trying to swallow a handful of baby powder. His tongue seemed to creak like an old stair as he willed it forward, hopelessly far from the surface of the water.

This was dying: being dreadfully tired and everything beyond your grasp.

Bob Marley was still telling him not to worry …

Chase had never been very good at managing worries. When you abandoned people you loved—like your best friend and your mother and father—a dark space formed in your mind. Chase imagined the space as a tumor-like black hole, surviving and growing as it ate away at the good things. But he also knew he wasn't special, that everyone had holes. He giggled painfully when it dawned on him that he'd recently acquired a brand new hole, thank you very much, Mitra. God, laughing was no good; it burned and twisted his guts.

As the minutes passed and the blood dripped, the pain from the hole punched somewhere in his stomach receded. It seemed that dying wasn't particularly excruciating once you got past the initial blast, which hurt like an absolute motherfucker. And he'd barked his right shin on the coffee table during the uneven journey out of the house. But then it was okay and the pain became manageable—as long as you kept from laughing. Chase was exhausted, and the rock was cold and not so comfortable, but nothing hurt anymore.

Chase decided that dying was mostly just melancholy. Despite some pretty big issues he'd had with Mitra, it was mighty sad to think of the lonely darkness he was headed for. He would miss dancing with her, especially those crazy weekend nights before Tylea and before her disco fad started. His petite biochemist turned small town librarian had been an amazing sight under the flashing lights. Floating among the Mohawk-headed, industrial punk boys, and the black-lipped goth girls with hulking shoulders, Mitra had been his little leather-clad pinball. If conjuring up images is something humans are able to pass time with in the hereafter, then those are the snippets he'd use to recall his wife.

Tylea? His funny little genius who'd made the newspaper as one of the rare children accepted into American Mensa. The reporter described her as a tiny, shy, bespectacled girl, politely quizzing the journalist on Occam's razor and the superstring theory during the interview.

His little girl would be crying herself to sleep an awful lot, and only because her father had screwed up and not seen this coming.

Tears burned his dry eyes, blurred the world. He remembered the look on Tylea's face when she'd scored her first goal. After three seasons and dozens of games against girls and boys who always seemed to tower over her, after being elbowed and knocked down and even laughed at by a couple of mean kids, after hundreds of hours of drills and juggling, of one-touch passes and shots, she had finally scored. And it was what they called a skill goal, as opposed to a lucky shot or just firing a blast from fifteen yards. Coach Chase's little striker dribbled through two fullbacks and chipped a soft shot over the diving goalie. Tiny Tylea Rain Allen looked at her coach with nothing more than surprise. Then she sprinted back to midfield for the kick off, ready to do it again.

Soccer is so beautiful. She is so beautiful
.

Chase wondered if you could still love someone after you were dead.

And he prayed Tylea wouldn't be the one to find his body, although she'd long since ditched her goldfish feeding chore. It was just too sad for her after the raccoon family incident. Christ, what would this incident do to her?

At some point, a new Marley song had begun. Chase thought he might have drifted in and out of sleep, in and out of consciousness, maybe.

The Rasta told him to rise up …

He'd had a great run, for sure. The nature of his job wouldn't let him show them off to the neighbors, but he was proud of the souvenirs collected over the years. A leper's right index finger he'd received as a present, his gun—the one used to shoot him, Adolph Hitler's favorite—the quarter he'd flipped in his dorm room that Stoney had finally found. All were treasures.

The reggae raised his energy level a bit and his eyes stopped tearing. He could see the blood more clearly as it began pouring into the pond, rather than dripping. Minutes passed and his arms began to tingle, seemed to go to sleep. He was no doctor, but could feel his pulse changing, becoming erratic, as though his heart was confused. By then a crap-load of blood had found its way into the pond.

“
I gotta move, boys,” Chase told his fish, not sure his tongue made the words, but pretty sure they wouldn't understand anyway. And without food flakes, he was just a huge disappointment. He struggled mightily, clenching his teeth in case any pain decided to return, as he rocked back and forth, side to side. With a final thrust, he managed to roll onto his back.

His new view showed exactly why they'd picked this house, with the tall skinny trees soaring upward. These trees couldn't be worried about wasting energy on lower branches. Their early lives had been purely a race to the sunshine, where they could finally spread out, grow leaves and sway mightily in the wind.

In a strong breeze, the canopy of trees waved like a field of wheat, tiny snatches of sunshine peeking through like flashes of lightning. Their chalet-style home faced the woods beyond the fish pond. It had two sets of sliding glass doors, with four huge panes of glass above. It was a struggle to heat in the winter, but he had loved feeling so immersed in nature, even when Tylea snuggled in next to him on the couch and stole the TV remote.

His little princess, Tylea.

His tiny, shy, bespectacled girl. He'd put the newspaper clipping in his journal.

Chase knew it broke one of the primary rules in the Spy Handbook—if there was such a thing—but he had his reasons for keeping a journal. Originally, he'd expected to one day burn it after having quit the business once and for all—one final grand gesture before setting out on a new life, with new adventures. Or maybe it was more like burning a mortgage after mailing off the last payment, a demonstration to say good riddance to that monthly burden.

Come to think of it, if his bosses ever found a journal containing details of his missions he could have been shot for treason. He laughed and it hurt again. And then the cold and heat came back hard and deep. His world blurred. It broke his heart to abandon Tylea like this. Even after she'd graduated from her big-kid booster seat, he had never left her alone in the Jeep, not even to run into the store or Post Office for just a second. Not even if he could still see her from inside. No way, not even when she begged him to go by himself so she could finish her book. He would never leave her alone.

Until now.

God, he was tired.

Why hadn't he seen this coming? He wanted her to know it didn't hurt in the end. When he'd started all this crap, he was just a stupid college kid, all jazzed-up about making a difference in the world. It had seemed so exciting. But his priorities all changed when Tylea came along. The best moments in his life were with her. Yes, and with her mom. He wanted to tell her not to be mad at him for dying and definitely not to take it out on her mother. None of it was Mom's fault. She had a job to do. And he could tell Tylea for a fact that even the worst wounds eventually stopped hurting. The pain slipped away and you forgot why you were crying.

The things we can't change, we just need to learn to accept
.

There was silence. But it wasn't because Chase was dead. He could still turn his head and see two little orange guys, again looking hopeful, staring up at the gigantic, shadowy thing that used to bring food.

Click
.

Chase knew the familiar sound. It was the CD player when it turned off completely and all the green and red lights winked out. The quiet was too much. After a few small test breaths he swallowed a big gulp of fresh air, intent on filling the void. Okay, he had a lousy voice, but it was time for a lullaby.

Chase began to sing.

W
ebster Jon Widgy streaked down the left sideline, waving his good arm, shouting for the soccer ball. He was clearly offside by twenty yards should the ball be passed to him, but this referee was not heartless enough to whistle the infraction. They'd never ask for it, but a team with four young lepers already down by a dozen goals catches a break every once in a while.

A twelve goal deficit was still pretty close for Chase's team, all things considered.

His own little white ghost—his Little Zonbi—was pushing the ball up over the smudged chalk at midfield. Two tall boys marked her tightly, but they were no match. She stopped the ball with the sole of her right cleat, pulled it back to draw both defenders even closer, then flicked the ball forward between both their sets of legs and sprinted around them to receive her own pass.

“
Dooble nutmeg!” screamed the delighted mothers who lined the dusty field. The women danced in the same spot the cheerleading lepers had twitched and murmured approval years earlier. Chase supposed most of those lepers were dead, and new drugs were helping to end the cycle of misery.

These cheerleaders were much more animated. Except for the tattered rag dresses and thick accents, these were the same mothers as on American fields, screeching at their kids, unsure of the rules but often swearing at the refs anyway. Chase's Haitian Creole was progressing slowly, so practices were a mix of languages, but soccer was more a game of show than tell. And in a land accustomed to so much anguish, Chase tried to be careful with words. His soccer moms began assigning nicknames during the first day of official practice: Difom, Kakas, Kochma, and Maldyok, which roughly translated to Deformed, Carcas, Nightmare, and Bad Eye.

He made a new rule regarding nicknames.

Chase had suffered his own hurtful nickname early on, when first disassembling the pot farm. Moreau's ranch had still been protected by hundreds of dead bodies when Chase took it over, claimed it for their home. He would hear the word Malveyan—or Evildoer—while picking up supplies in Port-au-Prince. But once all the bodies were laid to rest as carefully as someone not terribly familiar with the controls of a front-end loader could manage, curiosity began replacing suspicion.

“
Lion is okay,” he'd told the mothers, who believed nicknames were critical to the sport. “Nicknames should be positive. Like Tig, or Rebel, but,
silvouple
, nothing about missing body parts.”

Zonbi stuck for Tylea and Jeneral was sometimes his.

The soccer dads were a different matter. The Catholic priests, responsible for the property and many of the children, had recently voted to ban all the fathers who hadn't already been killed in the recent coup d'état, maybe for the rest of the season. Following a questionable call, two of them had brandished machetes and chased a referee off the field and down a narrow street. It was tough enough to get decent refs without crap like that.

The moms, though, had hearts in the right places. They were slowly learning proper etiquette and no longer cheered wildly when opposing players were injured. Getting them to stop bringing rotten fruit and cloudy water for halftime nourishment was another matter. Chase was still a stranger in a very strange land.

Tylea continued her magic on the soccer field. She dribbled past a chasing fullback who was unusually tall and bony as a skeleton. She did her step-over trick, faking a move toward the goal, and then dribbled into the penalty area to set up her right foot.

Webster Jon was now at the far post, unmarked because the other team knew he had only one working eye and often ran the wrong way when someone tried to pass to him; his depth perception had been wrecked by Hansen's Disease. The boy's breathing was wet and raspy because much of his nose was gone. Opposing players didn't like to cover him for a number of reasons, even though all the lepers had the proper medical slips proving they'd been on Dapsone for at least two weeks and were not contagious.

“
Zonbi, here I am!” He jumped up and down like a spastic pogo stick on his good right leg. Paralyzed small muscles in his left foot had turned his toes into claws and he couldn't tie that cleat. He hopped and hopped, his beautiful new uniform—Chase had bought them for the whole team—dancing as if on a string.

Tylea had a plan from the moment she'd stolen the ball deep in her team's own end. She wasn't captain just because Chase was coach; she'd earned it through her leadership, despite being the tiniest player on their dirt field. Her wonderful skills were from long summers of hard work and her love for the game, easily making up for any lack of muscle and size.

“
Now, now, Zonbi girl!” Webster Jon called, and Tylea took one more quick dribble before chipping a crossing pass over the charging goalie. She hadn't struck the ball hard, just enough to send it floating across the goal mouth. Chase's left wing, Webster Jon, stopped his crazy hopping and tried to get a focus on the ball's gentle arc toward him, the wide open net waiting for an easy header.

The mothers also froze. Their cheers stopped, and Chase could almost hear them draw in a deep, collective breath. All their teammates stopped to watch this pass, this gentle strike that seemed to travel in slow motion, first climbing out of reach of the goalie, then the lunging head of the last fullback. It had a slight backspin as it reached its apex then began its downward path toward Webster Jon's grimy forehead. Poor Webster Jon couldn't safely practice headers because of all the havoc his condition had wreaked on his face. Chase wouldn't allow it. He had to look out for all the players, but some more than others. Webster Jon's own mom wasn't here to cheer, having left him as a baby at one of the countless Port-au-Prince orphanages.