Untouchable (32 page)

He rarely went into that room. He did not sleep in that bed.

The trick of the job is to forget what happened.

They ate drive-thru chicken for dinner, sitting in the pickup in the restaurant parking lot, listening to the radio news. The Kid didn’t eat all of his dinner, said he wasn’t that hungry, he’d take what was left to school the next day for lunch. He wrapped the leftover chicken in a napkin, wondered if his dad believed him, if it was obvious that he was lying. He knew you could tell someone was lying by the sound of their voice, like that day his dad had told him the lie about what happened to his mom. But he wondered if someone could tell you were lying just by the things you wrote, by the way your words looked in a notebook.

His dad kept clearing his throat and covering his mouth, holding his mouth closed like maybe he was going to be sick, maybe he was going to throw up. The Kid wondered if his dad had food poisoning from the chicken, or if maybe The Kid’s B.O. and bad breath was making him sick. He tried to sit as far away from his dad as possible, close to the door, tried to keep his own mouth closed and breathe through his nose.

They pulled into their driveway and The Kid could see something strange happening on the front porch, some weird movement. His dad had forgotten to leave the porch light on and The Kid could only see the outline of something, hear something thrashing around. The dog. The dog moving in an unnatural way.

His dad ran up the yard to the porch. The Kid approached slowly, not sure what was happening. His dad fumbled with his keys, unlocked the security screen, the front door. Reached in and turned on the porch light. A burst of moths from the bulb, fluttering out into the night. The dog lay on his side on the porch, flopping violently, snapping his jaws, his eyes rolled up into its head.

“Steve,” his dad said. “Steve Rogers.”

The dog kept flopping, stiff-legged, making strangled gargling sounds from his throat. The Kid stopped at the foot of the steps, not sure what to do.

His dad maneuvered around the porch, trying to get into a good position where the dog wouldn’t bite him. He finally knelt, put his hands on the dog’s sides, held him down.

“He’s having some kind of seizure,” his dad said. “We just have to hold him steady until it passes.” His dad didn’t sound so sure. His dad didn’t sound completely convinced by his own explanation.

“It’s okay, Steve,” his dad said. “This is fine, this is okay.”

The dog thrashed, bucked, sputtered.

His dad looked at The Kid, saw that The Kid was scared.

“Take notes, Kid,” his dad said. “That’s your job during this. Take notes about how we get him through this.”

The Kid pulled out his notebook, his pencil. Wrote down what his dad had said to the dog, the first step. This is fine, Steve.
This is okay.

The dog thrashed and jerked under his dad’s hands. His dad held the dog down, adjusted himself on the porch as the dog moved.

“We’ve got to get his tongue,” his dad said. “We’ve got to hold onto his tongue so he doesn’t swallow it.”

The Kid wrote this down. He thought of that long, gray tongue wrapping in on itself, working its way down into the dog’s throat, cutting off the air. He thought of his own face in the dirt in the alleyway, Brian’s weight on top of him, holding him down, The Kid unable to breath. The Kid knew how the dog felt. He nodded to his dad. He hoped his dad knew what he was doing.

His dad put a knee on the dog’s ribs to hold him down. He grabbed the dog’s snout with one hand, his jaw with the other. Pried the dog’s mouth open. Steve Rogers’s teeth flashed in the porch light, snapping at his dad’s fingers. His dad reached around in the dog’s mouth, wrestling with his tongue. Looked like he got it and lost it a couple of times. The dog bucked again, harder this time, and his dad’s knee slipped. The dog’s jaws came down on his dad’s hand, and his dad fell back onto the porch.

“Fuck,” his dad yelled, shaking his hand. The Kid wrote this down, even though he wasn’t supposed to use that word. He figured this was an extraordinary circumstance, and this was his job, to take complete notes.

His dad’s hand was bleeding. He wiped it on the leg of his jeans, moved back in toward Steve Rogers. “Forget the tongue,” he said. “We just have to hold him steady.” He held the dog with his hands this time, one hand on the dog’s ribs, one on the side of its head, careful of the snapping jaws, holding Steve Rogers steady to the floor of the porch. Dad-strength.

The dog began to shake. A new phase of the seizure. The dog stayed in place and vibrated under his dad’s hands, just shook and shook. The Kid took notes. The dog started to pee, just squirted out pee onto the porch. His dad ignored the pee, talked softly to the dog.

“It’s okay, Steve. It’s all right. We’ll wait. We’ll just wait.”

The shaking went on for some time. Finally it slowed; finally it stopped. Just a few random twitches. The dog was panting hard, his head against the wood, tongue spilling out of the side of his mouth, a white froth making a wet spot on the porch. His dad held the dog steady, held the dog in place, ran his hand gently along the dog’s ribs. The Kid wrote this in his notebook.

“We did it, Steve,” his dad said, hand bleeding, breathing almost as hard as the dog. “We did it, Kid. It’s going to be all right now.”

He sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and looked out the window into the backyard. Steve Rogers sniffed the perimeter, lifted his leg every few steps, marking. The dog seemed to be okay, seemed to have forgotten what had happened the night before.

She’d lain here naked one morning, her body spread out across the kitchen floor, a growing smile on her face, their new house, a house of their own, taking his hand and pulling him gently down to her.

She’d stood here late one night and called the toll-free number on one of her father’s infomercials that had surfaced on TV. Darby had stood in the bedroom doorway and listened to her on the phone, saying she didn’t want to order anything, she wasn’t interested in buying anything, she just wanted to see who would answer when she called.

She’d sat sprawled here one evening, banging a bottle of olive oil on the linoleum, trying to get it to break, trying to get something to break.

He sat at the kitchen table drinking his coffee. He could hear that bell in his bad ear, that faraway morning ring. He stuck his finger in his good ear.

There it is, he said. Can you hear that? There it is.

He stood at Lucy’s desk at the back of the house, looked at the class list, the last seat in the middle row. Thought of her in the arms of someone he didn’t know.
Green, D.
It was a game day, a Friday. On game days you wear your best clothes, pressed black slacks and starched button-down shirts, perfect and white.

“Greene, D.” He said the name out loud, shifting the silence in the house. He said it again, “Greene, D.” It was an actual thing, a true thing. It existed. It made a noise in the quiet house. He said it again and again, the sound filling the rooms, creating something from nothing.

No one but The Kid seemed to care when Michelle didn’t show up at school. Miss Ramirez marked her absent in the morning and that was it. The Kid sat and looked at Michelle’s empty desk. He couldn’t believe that no one else knew what he knew. He wondered if she was okay, or if something had happened, if the grabbing men from the library lawn had somehow tracked her down.

At lunch, he and Matthew sat in silence at their picnic table. It was the night that The Kid usually went to Matthew’s for dinner, and The Kid wanted to ask him if that was cancelled, but whenever The Kid looked over at him, Matthew looked away. The Kid figured that he probably had his answer.

In the library, he heard excited whispering, tried to ignore it. Rhonda Sizemore and Arizona and a couple other girls were standing on the other side of the shelves in the next aisle. The Kid could see them in the spaces between the books. They were pulling books from the shelves, pretending to read the back covers while they whispered. They weren’t whispering about the books, they were whispering about him. The girls telling Arizona that The Kid had gone crazy when he’d attacked Rhonda Sizemore. That The Kid’s dad had gone crazy in the mall, gotten into a fight in the food court. That his dad made blue star tattoos in a bathroom laboratory. The Kid couldn’t see Arizona’s face clearly, couldn’t see what her reaction was. He tried to ignore the whispering, concentrated instead on the titles on the spines of the books as he moved down the aisle. He was looking for information.

This was something his mom always told him when he woke up in the night with a scary thought, something he’d heard at school, on the TV news, something he didn’t understand, something that had been mottled and magnified by a dream, plastered across the front of his brain. Look it up, she’d tell him, sitting on the edge of his bed or down on the living room couch, a single lamp alive in the darkness. Find out the truth, she’d say. Go to the library. It’s harder to be afraid of something that you understand. And it usually worked. It usually made him feel better, finding the subject in a book or a magazine, the certainty of answers in writing, facts in print, knowing that someone else had already tackled that thing, had already felt that fear.

He was in the section of the library devoted to animals. A shelf with nothing but books about dogs. A book with nothing but diseases that afflicted dogs. His mom had been right. The Kid sat on the smelly carpet, his back to the shelves.

The pages were filled with descriptions, glossy color photographs. Page after page of canine affliction. There were blotches, blights, bumps, rashes. There were parasites, fleas and ticks, worms that lived in dogs’ intestines, in their skin, in their hearts. There were broken bones, sprained joints, arthritic limbs. There were urinary tract infections, bowel disorders, heart and lung diseases. There was no end to the list of things that could go wrong.

There were diseases of the brain that lead to fits and seizures, neurological malfunctions illustrated in the book by drawings of an electrical storm over the dog’s head, dark clouds with lightning bolts. There were photographs of dogs gripped by these malfunctions, dogs lying on kitchen floors, bathroom floors, legs shot out and stiff, jaws snapping, mouths frothing, eyes glassy and wild. Dogs that looked like Steve Rogers on the porch, about to bite The Kid’s dad, about to pee all over himself.

Canine Epilepsy.
A term for it, a name. Something already discovered and researched. There was no known cause, no definite reason some dogs had seizures. Maybe it was inherited from the dog’s parents, maybe the dog had some trauma to its head. A blow, a beating. Maybe it had been trapped in the sewer for days, weeks, eating rats, maneuvering in the dark. There was no reason. It was just something that happened.

There was a loud whisper from the other side of the bookshelf, Rhonda Sizemore telling Arizona to
Keep away from him.
The Kid tried to ignore it, tried not to worry if Arizona would believe what she was being told, if she’d follow this advice. If she’d be scared away completely. He concentrated on the book instead.

The book said that there was no real way of predicting when a seizure was going to occur, but sometimes the dogs knew. Sometimes the dogs acted funny. This was called the aura phase. Also called the prodrome phase. During this time, a few minutes before a seizure, a dog might act frightened, spooked, might come looking for comfort, for company. The best thing to do during this phase was to get the dog to a safe, open area, away from furniture or sharp objects, away from electrical cords they might get tangled up in.

During the seizure, there wasn’t too much that could be done. The dog will shake, the dog will make unnatural noises. The dog might lose control of its bowels. Its tongue might turn blue. These were all documented things, things people had seen and experienced before. There were pictures in the book. A seizure usually lasted two to three minutes. The book said that you should write down details of the seizure, keep a written record of what was happening. Keep your hands away from the dog’s mouth. Don’t worry about the dog swallowing its tongue. The dog won’t swallow its tongue. Its tongue is too long. Be patient. Stay calm. It will only last a few minutes.

The Kid wrote these things in his notepad under the heading
Steve Rogers, Epileptic
. It was reassuring, transferring this information from the library book to his notebook. The comfort of a known thing.

After school, he took a long, roundabout route to the burned house. He didn’t want to stay outside, vulnerable on the street to Brian or Razz, but he was in no hurry to get to the house. He was afraid of what he would find. He expected police cars, TV news vans, Miss Ramirez and the vice-principal, Michelle’s angry mom and her mom’s drunk boyfriend, the bawling twin sisters, the porch and front yard crowded with people and cameras and lights. This was a major event. A girl had run away from home, had spent the night in the burned house. Michelle would be arrested, taken to jail. The Kid would be shown as an accomplice. The mural would be discovered, broadcast on TV, unfinished before the signal could be sent out, the angel still missing a hand, exposed for everyone to see.

He stopped at
Gift 2000
and bought a few things for Michelle. A box of cereal, a word search book. Finally screwed up enough courage to make his way down the street.

There were no news vans, no police cars. There were no people crowded on the sidewalk. The burned house looked like it always looked, quiet and empty. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that something like this could happen and no one would know.

There seemed to be another candle missing from the ring by the front door. The Kid couldn’t be sure, but he thought he remembered more candles the night before.

He opened the security door, moved through the front room quietly, into the hallway, past the bathroom. There was no guarantee that Michelle was even still there. He might find the living room empty, the expired candle, a note that said she’d left for the Twin Cities.