The Witch of the Wood (11 page)

Then he lost Wolfie.

They had just passed the parking garage connected to the Wharton Steinberg Center just north of Spruce Street when he noticed his son was missing. Rudy had been lagging in the back of the group watching Ben Alspach text and walk, absently relating it to chewing gum, and he literally felt the vacancy behind him.

He stopped, then snapped his head all around, looking at everything and nothing all at the same time: A Steak Queen Food truck across the street, a Flex Box, a rather dirty and dented POD storage unit half blocking a maintenance entrance, a Penske Rental truck parked too close to a hydrant.

No Wolfie.

Some of the kids had turned and slowed, and Rudy waved them on.

“Thirty-sixth and Walnut! Go ahead, I’ll catch up in a minute!”

He walked a few steps in reverse, turned, and started to jog back toward the walking overpass where he thought he’d last registered Wolfie there at his elbow. He got to an alley on the left and gave a glance. It was an alcove where there was an outdoor café, currently closed, its yellow table umbrellas folded in.

Wolfie was there on the brick walkway, and he was dancing.

With a bird.

Rudy stepped forward, mouth slightly ajar. Wolfie had drawn the hood of his sweatshirt tight around his head and almost looked alien-like. Above and around him, a small black bird was gliding and diving, making figure-eights while Wolfie, in perfect rhythm, waltzed along the brick cobblestone. They were beautiful moving shapes, as if held together by some invisible set of cosmic wires, and then Wolfie started doing “the Blink.” The bird followed, darting to where the image had just been erased, then anticipating and sweeping back around within centimeters of where the boy reappeared. There was something classic about it, cutting and clean, almost as if boy and bird were meant to share these lovely, erratic patterns that sketched themselves upon the February breeze.

Wolfie stopped suddenly, snapped out his hand, and grabbed the bird from mid-air. The thing screeched and one of its feathers popped loose, cutting half-moon arcs to the ground.

“Fucking tree rat,” Wolfie snarled. Then he clapped his hands together. There was a wet popping sound, and Rudy saw one black eye burst loose, caught on a dark tendril that wrapped under at the base of Wolfie’s thumb. Out of the other end a runner of shit, white with black streaks, had burst from the bird’s anus and squirted down Wolfie’s wrist.

“What—” Rudy managed. Wolfie tossed the carcass aside and went to one of the tables where some moisture had pooled in a dent. He pressed down his hands and then rubbed vigorously.

“What?” he said.

“That was disgusting.”

“Was it?” He flicked the wetness away and wiped his hands on his pants. “Are you sad for the little worm-eater? The bark-bum? The one who pollutes the sky with the exhaust of his swooping brethren? A bird’s brain is smaller than a fingertip, and the thing camouflages itself behind the fluttering leaves of the prison stalk in absolute cowardice. It feeds on the screams of the inmate of the grain and mimics the sound with its idiot chirping. How do you think the name ‘Mock-ingbird’ came about?”

“You can’t kill them all,” Rudy said evenly.

“Why not try? Will it fuck the ecosystem out of seed dispersal and pollination, making it so we can’t pretty up the landscape with the flowers and plants that make the trees look more as if they blend? Will car washes go out of business? Will the men who service horizontal phone cables suddenly starve?”

He strode over to a decorator tree, still a sapling really, growing through its black protector foot-grate that was of rather intricate Greek design. He toed it with distaste.

“This here, Daddy-o, is a thornless honeylocust. Isn’t it lovely? Eventually it is going to grow to about fifty feet, but even in its infancy it has a little secret there under its roots that twine beneath the firebrick. Due to her eighteenth shadow-transfer from her original prison thousands of years ago, here lies a beautiful shape-shifter. She has pure white skin, lips of ruby, and her heart is still beating down there. Her name is Belinda. Would it be funnier if it was Sabrina? Or Samantha?”

“Wolfie.”

“What, Dad? I’m a teenager and I’m angry. I have certain powers, a ton of advantages, but I’m part human too.”

Rudy smiled thinly.

“Well, I don’t buy the ‘I’m just a kid’ excuse. I didn’t when I taught high school, and I won’t now. You need to manage your emotionality, or you’re going to draw attention to yourself.”

The boy stared for a moment and then the air seemed to go out him. His shoulders drooped.

“I’m sorry, Dad.” He removed his sunglasses and revealed that he’s shed a couple of tears. “It’s just that like the birds . . . I can hear her screaming.”

Moved, Rudy wanted to reach out for his son, but he didn’t want to be the one to cause more of a scene either. Strange. The kid was sophisticated in certain ways beyond imagination, yet had chinks in the armor, socio-emotive deficits common to his surface age. In terms of mood, he’d retained more mastery as an infant.

Rudy’s phone rang, and he struggled it out of his pocket.

“Yes?”

“Roo?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Pat.”

“I know.”

“Oh.”

He put his palm over the face of the phone.

“I’m hesitant to leave you on your own, Wolfie.”

A muffled voice buzzed in Rudy’s palm,

“Is that my angel? Rudy? Rudy! I want to talk to him!”

He jerked the phone to his ear.

“I’ll call you back!”

He closed the unit and raised his eyebrows. Wolfie shrugged.

“I’m going to high school tomorrow, Dad. You have to trust me.”

“But that’s tomorrow,” he insisted. “Even stuck as a teen for a month, your growth pattern within it is exponential day to day. And in high school you know what to expect from my biography, at least to an extent. Out here in the city we don’t know who or what you’ll bump into.”

His phone rang again, and he ignored it. They talked through the ringing.

“There’s a spy-link for the father,” Wolfie said. “If you’re going to worry so.”

“A what?”

“A spy-link . . . a way to see what’s going on the way I see it, as I see it.”

The cell went to its silent voicemail, and Rudy briefly pictured the tale full of pain and injury that was being presently recorded in his message center.

“Do tell.”

Wolfie kicked at a loose stone and watched it ping off a recycling container that assured in bright white letters that the world was a beautiful place to keep clean.

“You grab your thumb. The left with your right hand.”

“Just like that.”

The phone rang again, and they both grinned.

“Let me talk to the poor thing,” Wolfie said.

“A minute,” his father replied. “Explain what happens when I grab my thumb.”

Wolfie leaned over and spat, kind of a hanger-on he had to hover over for a second before it released itself. Rudy had to talk to him about that, either to teach him to do it better or not at all. Wolfie wiped off the residue with his sleeve.

“You become a passive passenger in my head,” he said. “Not for sharing thoughts or anything, but like watching a movie.”

“Passive.”

“Right.”

“Can I communicate with you?”

“No. You can only watch. Go ahead. Check it out. Grab it.”

The phone had stopped ringing and Rudy put it in his pocket. He grabbed his left thumb.

There was an instant exchange of vision. While Rudy could still feel himself holding his own thumb and sense the vibration against his thigh as Pat began ringing his cell phone yet again, he was suddenly looking at himself holding his thumb with the other side of the alley as his background.

I need a haircut,
he thought,
and this is a great way to find out if I have food in my teeth.
He saw himself grin and then heard Wolfie’s voice come from directly beneath where his new vision was.

“What’s so funny?”

Rudy let go of his thumb and was instantly switched back to his own perspective.

“Nothing.” He dug the phone out of his pants and opened it. “What, Pat, for God’s sake?”

She was weeping.

Wolfie approached and took over, turning away, saying sweet nothings into the mouthpiece. He returned, forfeiting the phone sadly.

“Such a sweet spirit,” he said.

“My ass.”

“She wants to see me Friday.”

“Same answer, Wolfie. She’s not a part of our lives. She’s clinging and draining and an absolute nuisance.” He studied the decorator brick for a moment. “And even though we fell apart, I don’t want to be reminded of things. Nice things. The way it started. I’m still letting her go.”

Wolfie smiled warmly.

“That’s the first piece of sense I’ve heard from you in hours.”

“So?”

“So.”

Rudy shrugged, a bit annoyed that he’d picked up on a mannerism he would have rather left for Wolfie to enjoy by himself.

“You have no problem with my ‘popping in’ through the thumb-link whenever I want?”

“Of course not, Dad. I’ve got nothing to hide from you.”

“Can you pop in on me?”

“No.” His eyes narrowed playfully. “Why? You scared I’ll catch your technique jerking off? I’ve already seen it, Dad, in your biography.” He started walking away toward the alley entrance. “We’re going to be late. If there’s something I want you to see, I can send you an indicator by grabbing my own thumb. You’ll get an alarm in your left ear. It’s quite specific, and you’ll know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I’m calling.”

Rudy chuckled wryly and stepped along the brick cobblestone to catch up. Grabbing thumbs? Spy-links? Indicators? He almost felt cheated, as if he should have been aware of this foreshadowing earlier. Would have helped knowing the baby was all right in the house! It was also rather silly, at least the way it came off with the “code names.”

But then again, Rudy wouldn’t have been informed of this aspect earlier, because the baby had been more emotionally stable. This was a failsafe built into the growth pattern. While Wolfie was advancing intellectually, he was regressing and “humanizing” in terms of his feelings, and Rudy as protector was informed of his ability to be the watchdog when it had become relevant. And maybe the code-names weren’t so odd after all. They were first to be utilized when Wolfie was a teen, and so the word associations would reflect what one at his socio-cognitive level would naturally come up with based on the image of teens in Rudy’s biography. Even in terms of Wolfie’s language patterns, far more sophisticated at their base than even Rudy’s most decorated superiors, the boy was wired to “fit in” with the age group he’d adopted for this relatively significant period of time.

And really, when you thought it over, was the thumb-grabbing so silly? What would a space traveler think of men shaking hands . . . actually touching each other in such an otherwise homophobic society? What would he think of air-kisses between casual friends, pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth, crossing oneself and kissing it up it the sky before stepping in a “batter’s box”?

A bright wail of a sound exploded in Rudy’s left ear. It stopped him dead in his tracks and made him bend over, hand to his head.

“Jesus Christ!” he said. The actual “sound” had only lasted half a moment, but the memory of it was extreme, still ringing out sharply in his mind.

“I told you it was ‘specific,’” Wolfie called back with a laugh. “Catch up.” He jogged off around the corner and kept grabbing his thumb, sounding the indicator in Rudy’s left ear. Laughing, Rudy clapped along the pavement after him, palm pressed to his head. Wouldn’t a cell phone suffice here? His own started ringing again, and he frowned, slowed, grabbed it out of his pocket and shut it off.

No cell phones.

The last thing Rudy needed was for Patricia to be calling his son every five minutes, expressing her love and devotion, begging for a visit so she could show him her garbage sculptures, her junk jewels, her hat collection, her pottery junkyard.

He and his son had a world to restructure.

And the first night without him was difficult.

Rudy had always been a rather lonely sort of person. It was part of his makeup. When he interacted with people professionally he could always sense that he was considered “the other,” the stranger with the past that was like deep pockets not meant to be turned out to the open. He was the one you didn’t really joke around with too much, the one who had been through rough waters. Rudy seemed like the kind who’d lost a close loved one in some tragic circumstance years back, or the type who had been subject to harsh childhood poverty, something that made him put up shields, build that flat, hardened persona that made him the dark, emotionless figure who handled that small corner of your life (like your English grade), then went to perform his personal functions off the grid, mechanically, silently, effectively, until he was next needed to do a holistic edit of a nursing paper, or focus corrections for a student with a tense issue. In all actuality, it was more like what Ringo had said, “It’s really just me face,” but through the years Rudy had grown into what others had made him, now the hardened border-soldier, showing his age lines but putting on a clinic for the way one would sustain a poker face over time.

Until April Orr, who treated him like a man.

Until Wolfie, who in a single day had filled Rudy’s dry world with close and personal humanity: his embrace in the car as an infant, his birth fluids, his incredible intelligence, his magic, his humor, his fear.

He is my
son, Rudy thought. He was sitting at his coffee table, face in his hands.
My boy.
He couldn’t stop obsessing over Wolfie’s vulnerability, the terror in his eyes when he’d woken from his dream. And though Wolfie was a supernatural being, spring-loaded to woo mere mortals into overwhelming fits of love and attraction, either heterosexually, homosexually, or paternally (take Pat, for example), Rudy had to believe that his own deep wanting to hold and comfort this man-child was genuine.