Tilt (12 page)

“Leave him with me till you're settled.”

Stan heard the door of the taxi open. Just on the edge of his peripheral vision he saw the cabbie get out. An old man in a turban.

“Did someone call for a taxi?”

“Leave Feldon here,” Stan whispered.

Know the outcome of the battle beforehand. Know in your mind you're going to win. Then it won't matter how much of a beating you take. You'll keep going till you've achieved what has already played out in your own mind. That's how determination and bloody-minded effort overcame size and weight and years and everything else a father might have over a son.

A shitheel, cowardly father with both hands full. Both knees exposed.

“Taxi for you, sir?” the driver said. He was halfway up the walk now, but Stan could sense the man was wondering what he'd stepped into this late at night.

Stan didn't let his eyes waver. It was Ron who looked away first.

“Does your girlfriend . . . does she live around here?” Ron asked.

“A couple of blocks. They're a great family. Her father is an investor, very wealthy. Beautiful mom. They're good people. They can keep a secret. You're right, I was just going there now. I was going to see my girlfriend.”

Stan reached for Feldon, who turned to him. How much did he understand?

Stan pulled the boy from his father's grasp. It's what you did with cowards. He stepped aside so the coward could have a clear path to the taxi.

“Is it morning?” Feldon asked sleepily.

Stan had him two or three paces off the front walkway now. Plenty of room for Ron to pass by.

“Just sleep,” Stan whispered.

Ron, his father the coward, handed the brown suitcase to the taxi driver, shuffled his old gray self into the back of the vehicle and said something to the driver. Bus station? Train station? Somewhere on the edge of the highway?

Stan didn't want to know.

“Where's Daddy going?”

“Your mommy's coming soon to pick you up,” Stan said.

Feldon buried his face in Stan's shoulder.

How much of this scene would he remember? When he got to be Stan's age, would he play it over and over again in his head?

The taxi backed out and headed away into darkness. Stan stood with the boy in his arms.

What kind of father abandons his son in the middle of the night? Just hands him over?

If he wanted out so badly, why didn't he leave Feldon with Kelly-Ann in the first place? Just out of spite?

Feldon was heavy. And he was holding onto Stan like he was never going to let go.

The next step was clear. Stan carried Feldon into the house. He would take him up the stairs straight into his mother's room and wake her up.

Wake her and tell her.

Stan's heart was drunk with it. He'd stood up to the giant! Taken Feldon from his father's arms! Without a punch, without a kick!

Just with words and with knowing what the outcome had to be.

No way Stan was going to let his dad take Feldon on the run in the middle of the night. He'd done exactly the right thing.

Now he climbed the stairs. Even with Feldon lumpy and heavy, not a sound. No creaking boards.

Sirens, practically, going off in his head. He was a man now, who used his powers for good.

His mother's door was closed. All he had to do was open it and tell her.

But his feet turned into his own room, not his mother's. His arms put Feldon in his bed again. He was going by feel.

Feldon turned over as soon as his body hit the bed. Stan pulled off Feldon's coat and shoes, covered him with a blanket. Then he walked out, stood in front of his mother's closed door.

She'd hit the roof. She'd think Ron had left another kid for her to look after. So Stan would have to tell her right away that Kelly-Ann was going to be there soon.

As soon as they could contact her.

The door was locked. If he knocked — if he whispered loud enough — then Lily would probably wake up, too.

Where was Mr. Strawberry?

Feldon hadn't been clutching him when Stan put him in bed just seconds ago. Feldon must have dropped him on the front porch. So Stan ought to go down and get Mr. Strawberry so that as soon as Lily woke up he'd have that to give her, to shut her up.

He descended the stairs again, walked out into the cold air. Mr. Strawberry was on the lawn where Stan and Feldon had been standing while the taxi drove away.

Stan picked up Mr. Strawberry, but instead of climbing the porch stairs again, he threw the doll onto the front bench.

Maybe . . . maybe he wasn't supposed to go back inside right this moment and wake up his mother and probably Lily and Feldon, too. Maybe that could wait until morning.

Maybe he had something more important to do just this instant.

—

To get to Janine Igwash — the girl whose breast peeked above a blanket in the verse now tattooed on Stan's brain — Stan headed back to the alley with the basketball hoop and the fence. Which Janine had slithered up so easily.

Stan did not slither. He was more a groaning, grasping beast pulling himself over rusted barbed wire. On the other side of the fence, in the little opening in the grubby hedge at the very back of the duplex's shared yard, Stan clumped painfully and unheroically to the ground.

There was her window. How high? Fifteen feet? Stan approached the ordinary-looking brick wall. There was no trellis to climb, no downspout that would bear his weight. A real rock climber would be able to press fingertips into the slight indentations between the bricks and become buglike in defiance of gravity.

But he wasn't a rock climber.

Stan looked around for a pebble to toss up against her window. If he moved the ladder by the carport . . . 

It was quite a large one, and in his focus on looking for the stones he almost knocked it over. But he grabbed it in time and felt himself smiling, giddy. He propped it up against the wall.

Then he was just climbing up . . . a long aluminum ladder . . . in the middle of the night . . . closer to morning, maybe . . . to a point just below the window of a beautiful and fascinating girl who had kissed him.

A tilted girl. He was tilting toward her.

He was just climbing so that he would pause like this, princelike, his face about six inches from her shut and blinded window.

Was this her window?

What if Stan knocked on it now and Joe poked his big head out and punched him in the face like any father would if some guy showed up outside his daughter's bedroom window balanced on a ladder in the middle of the night?

“Janine?” Stan's voice died in the cold darkness.
Tap, tap.
“Janine, it's Stan. I'm over here, at the window!”

A breath of cold wind blew through the empty night.

“Stan?”

“Shh! I'm just outside. If you'll . . .”

She opened the window. She was in flannel pajamas.

“What are you doing here?”

The screen was still between them. Otherwise he might have just kissed her again. Probably he would have lost his footing and fallen to a spinal injury and a lifetime as an invalid.

“I'm standing on a ladder,” he said.

She was trying hard not to laugh.

“I can see that.”

He was freezing. The aluminum of the ladder was particularly cold. Maybe it was going to snow. The clouds had that look to them, even though it was early in the season for snow. Stan could just see some of them in the purplish night sky. Blurry cold blobs just above the lip of the roof. Dawn coming.The screen on the window, the shadows made it possible to imagine this was all a dream. In a moment Stan was going to step off the ladder and fall slowly down, only it would be like falling in water.

He'd wake up just before he hit the ground.

“I took my half-brother, Feldon, away from his dad tonight. Our dad. I just stood in the way and took him. And now Dad's gone. I just changed Feldon's life.” Stan wasn't saying it to brag. He hoped, at least, there wasn't too much bragging in his voice. He was saying it to be true.

To be true to this girl.

The screen made it seem like one of them was in prison and this was visiting hours.

“And your dad went away?”

“He's running again. That's his pattern. I can see it now. When he left us the first time, it wasn't about starting his new family. He was running away from something he'd started with us. Now he's running from Kelly-Ann. He was going to take Feldon but I wouldn't let him.”

It was starting to sound like bragging now so he stopped.

If the screen weren't there he'd kiss her. Then they'd know for certain what was happening between them.

“Is your mother all right with that?” she asked. “Are you going to, like, adopt him?”

His fingers were cold anyway and he probably wouldn't be able to work the fiddly little window clasps, even if they were on the outside.

But they were on her side.

“Nobody knows yet. Feldon doesn't even know. He slept through most of it. You're the only person who knows except for me and my dad. When I was about Lily's age —” This was why he'd come, he saw it now, to tell Janine Igwash this story — “I remember sitting in the closet. The exact same closet where Lily sits sometimes now for a hiding spot.”

He was doing all the talking. But he couldn't help himself.

“I was sitting in the closet when my dad flung open the door and looked in at me. He had a tennis racket in his hand and he was really mad. He said, ‘Where did you put my blue striped tie?' I don't know why he had a tennis racket in his hand to ask that. Years later when he left, he took his tennis racket and a couple of bags. Mom told me. I didn't see him go, and Lily was pretty small. I remember thinking for some stupid reason, it was the tie. If only he'd found it. He couldn't have been mad for years about a tie. But I thought maybe it
was
my fault. Maybe I did use the tie for something. I used to dress up my teddy bear.”

She was still at the window. Smiling now.

Maybe the dream was going to be over as soon as he stopped talking.

“But you think about stuff like that. You never forget it. I just figured out tonight that my father is a . . .”

The ladder shifted then, a sudden lurch to the right as if it was going to go over. Stan grabbed the side of the window with his right hand and his left . . . 

His left went through the screen. Just pushed a hole right through.

“Stan!” Janine grabbed his hand. The ladder steadied.

It wasn't a dream. He was going to have to get down soon.

“So why do you like girls?” he said.

“What's not to like about girls?”

She was holding his hand like Feldon had been clinging to him not too long ago.

Nails in flesh,
his father had said.
Either you're running at midnight chasing some scent, or you're breaking their grip, trying to get your flesh free
.

If the screen wasn't there he'd just kiss her and then they'd know.

But the screen was there and he had to be careful not to cut his wrists and bleed out in a silly death that would maybe win some Internet award for stupidity.

Maybe he really was his father's son.

Stan eased his hand back out the jagged hole in the screen.

“I think maybe it's time —”

“The first time I kissed a girl it was a total accident,” Janine said. “It was eighth grade, right after cross-country. This girl, Idelle, she was from the Caribbean. She was really silly. We'd be running wind sprints up Criminal Hill — we had this hill behind our school and that's what we called it. We'd be running up and if you got ahead of her she'd grab your shorts. If a boy had done it I'd have hit him but none of the boys could keep up with Idelle and me. She'd reach around and pinch your nipple just when you were standing there. Then she'd laugh. Huge white teeth, and her skin was chocolate, big brown eyes. You couldn't be mad at Idelle. Anyway it was after a race, and I'd just about killed myself to get to the finish line ahead of her. I had no muscles left. And it was cold. Just before the snow. Like tonight — you must be freezing out there!”

Stan leaned toward the hole in the screen. He willed himself warmer.

“The whole team had piled all their jackets and packs and warm-ups around this big tree behind the finish line. I crawled into the pile of clothes and lay there. Idelle burrowed in right beside me. I think I came fifth. It was the best race in my whole life. And Idelle burrowed in. We were like two kids hiding in a fort. Like you in your closet. And then we were kissing. I don't know how it happened. I don't know who started it. I just remember it was like swimming naked at night. It was that perfect.”

Freezing. Stan was shaking on the ladder. He wasn't sure how much longer he'd be able to stay there.

But he didn't want to go, either.

“You didn't . . . wonder what the hell was happening or —”

“We just did it. We did it and then we wondered about it later.”

“And the dance . . .” he said. Was it just last night? Time was turning hallucinogenic. “When we kissed. We just did that, too. And then you ran back to Leona.”

“No.”

“You did! I saw you!”

“I ran but . . . not to her. I just ran.”

“Why?”

Cold, cold. She didn't turn her eyes away, but she wasn't going to answer.

“You never need to run from me,” he said. “I hate it.”

She could unlatch the screen from her side and kiss him again. He saw now that she had to be the one to do it. It would be no good if he pushed.

“My dad's coming!” she said then harshly, and the window fell shut. Stan scrambled down three rungs so his head was well below the sill. All Joe would have to do would be to pop his head out the window, to look down a little bit . . . 

Cold, cold wind. Flakes of snow bit into his cheek. He couldn't hear anything from Janine's room. Was her father there? Did she make it back to bed in time?

Should he climb up the three rungs again and see?

He didn't know.

But he did know this was no dream.

Slowly and stiffly he lowered himself down to the ground. As quietly as he could he replaced the ladder. Then he stood in the chill and watched the bruised clouds at dawn crawl across the sky.

Nothing more at her window. He could see the hole where his fist had gone through.

But then, a hand. A paper airplane glided down. A gust caught it and for a second it looked like it might end up in a tree. But it landed finally in a chilly bush. Stan reached it with just a small jump.

I like you, Stan Dart. I really do.

No signature. Just a faint image of a beautiful girl, behind a screen, watching him.