12
“Hey, Brian-want to see a trick?”
The boy on the bicycle looked up fast, the hair flying off his forehead, and Alan saw an unmistakable expression on his face: naked, unadulterated fear.
“Trick?” the boy said in a trembling voice. “What trick?”
Alan didn’t know what the boy was afraid of, but he understood one thing-his magic, which he had relied upon often as an icebreaker with children, had for some reason been exactly the wrong thing this time.
Best to get it out of the way as soon as possible and start over again.
He held up his left arm-the one with the watch on it-and smiled into Brian Rusk’s pale, watchful, frightened face. “You’ll notice that there’s nothing up my sleeve and that my arm goes all the way up to my shoulder. But now… presto!”
Alan passed his open right hand slowly down his left arm, snapping the little packet effortlessly out from beneath his watch with his right thumb as he did so. As he closed his fist, he slipped the almost microscopic loop that held the packet closed. He clasped his left hand over his right, and when he spread them apart, a large tissue-paper bouquet of unlikely flowers bloomed where there had been nothing but thin air a moment before.
Alan had done this trick hundreds of times and never better than on this hot October afternoon, but the expected reaction-a moment of stunned surprise followed by a grin that was one part amazement and two parts admiration@idn’t dawn on Brian’s face.
He gave the bouquet a cursory glance (there seemed to be relief in that brief look, as if he had expected the trick to be of a far less pleasant nature) and then returned his gaze to Alan’s face.
“Pretty neat, huh?” Alan asked. He stretched his lips in a big smile that felt every bit as genuine as his grand father’s dentures.
“Yeah,” Brian said.
“Uh-huh. I can see you’re blown away.” Alan brought his hands together, deftly collapsing the bouquet again. It was easy-too easy, really. It was time to buy a new copy of the Folding Flower Trick; they only lasted so long. The tiny spring in this one was getting loose and the brightly colored paper would soon begin to rip.
He opened his hands again, smiling rather more hopefully now.
The ’ bouquet was gone; was once more just a small packet of paper under his watchband. Brian Rusk did not return his smile; his face wore no real expression at all. The remnants of his summer tan could not cover the pallor beneath, nor the fact that his complexion was in an unusual state of pre-pubescent revolt: a scatter of pimples on the forehead, a bigger one by the corner of his mouth, blackheads nesting on either side of his nose. There were purplish shadows under his eyes, as if his last good night’s sleep had been a long time ago.
This kid is a long way from right, Alan thought. There’s something badly sprained, maybe even broken here. There seemed to be two likely possibilities: either Brian Rusk had seen whoever had vandalized the jerzyck house, or he had done it himself. It was paydirt either way, but if it was the second choice, Alan could barely imagine the size and weight of the guilt which must now be harrowing this boy.
“That’s a great trick, Sheriff Pangborn,” Brian said in a colorless, emotionless voice. “Really.”
“Thanks-glad you liked it. Do you know what I want to talk to you about, Brian?”
“I… guess I do,” Brian said, and Alan was suddenly sure the boy was going to confess to breaking the windows. Right here on this street-corner he was going to confess, and Alan was going to take a giant step toward unravelling what had happened between Nettle and Wilma.
But Brian said nothing more. He only looked up at Alan with his tired, slightly bloodshot eyes.
“What happened, son?” Alan asked in the same quiet voice.
“What happened while you were at the jerzycks’ house?”
“Don’t know,” Bran said. His voice was listless. “But I dreamed about it last night. Sunday night, too. I dream about going to that house, only in my dream I see what’s really making all the noise.”
“And what’s that, Brian?”
“A monster,” Brian said. His voice did not change, but a large tear had appeared in each of his eyes, growing on the lower arcs of the lids. “In my dream I knock on the door instead of riding away like I did and the door opens and it’s a monster and it eats… me… up.”
The tears brimmed, then rolled slowly down the disturbed skin of Brian Rusk’s cheeks.
And yes, Alan thought, it could be that, too-simple fright. The sort of fright a little kid might feel when he opens the bedroom door at the wrong time and sees his mother and father screwing.
Only because he’s too young to know the look of screwing, he thinks they’re fighting. Maybe he even thinks, if they’re making a lot of noise, that they’re trying to kill each other.
ButBut it didn’t feel right. It was just that simple. It felt as if this kid were lying his head off, in spite of the haggard look in his eyes, the look that said I want to tell you everything. What did that mean?
Alan didn’t know for sure, but experience taught him that the likeliest solution was that Brian knew whoever had thrown the rocks.
Maybe it was someone Brian felt obliged to protect. Or maybe the rock-thrower knew Brian had seen him, and Brian knew that. Maybe the kid was afraid of reprisals.
“A person threw a bunch of rocks into the jerzycks’ house,” Alan said in a low and (he hoped) soothing voice.
“Yes, sir,” Brian said-almost sighed. “I guess so. I guess it could have been that. I thought they were fighting, but it could have been someone throwing rocks. Crash, boom, bang.”
The whole rhythm section was the Purple Gang, Alan thought but did not say. “You thought they were fighting?”
“Yes, sir.”
4 1is that what you really thought?”
“Yes, sir.”
Alan sighed. “Well, you know what it was now. And you know it was a bad thing to do. Throwing rocks through somebody’s windows is a pretty serious business, even if nothing else comes of it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But this time, something else did come of it. You know that, don’t you, Brian?”
“Yes, sir.”
Those eyes, looking up at him from that calm, pallid face. Alan began to understand two things: this boy did want to tell him what had happened, but he was almost certainly not going to do so.
“You look very unhappy, Brian.”
“Yes, sir?”
“’Yes, sir’. does that mean you are unhappy?”
Brian nodded, and two more tears spilled from his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. Alan felt two strong, conflicting emotions: deep pity and wild exasperation.
“What are you unhappy about, Brian? Tell me.”
“I used to have this really nice dream,” Brian said in a voice which was almost too low to hear. “It was stupid, but it was nice, just the same. It was about Miss Ratcliffe, my speech teacher. Now I know it’s stupid. I didn’t used to know, and that was better. But guess what? I know more than that now.”
Those dark, terribly unhappy eyes rose to meet Alan’s again.
“The dream I have… the one about the monster who throws the rocks… it scares me, Sheriff Pangborn… but what makes me unhappy are the things I know now. It’s like knowing how the magician does his tricks.”
He nodded his head a little, and Alan could have sworn Brian was looking at the band of his watch.
“Sometimes it’s better to be dumb. I know that now.”
Alan put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Brian, let’s cut through the bullshit, all right? Tell me what happened. Tell me what you saw and what you did.”
“I came to see if they wanted their driveway shovelled this winter,” the boy said in a mechanical rote voice that frightened Alan badly. The kid looked like almost any American child of eleven or twelve-Converse sneakers, jeans, a tee-shirt with Bart Simpson on it-but he sounded like a robot which has been badly programmed and is now in danger of overloading. For the first time, Alan wondered if Brian Rusk had maybe seen one of his own parents throwing rocks at the jerzyck house.
“I heard noises,” the boy was continuing. He spoke in simple declarative sentences, talking as police detectives are trained to talk in court. “They were scary noises. Bangs and crashes and things breaking. So I rode away as fast as I could. The lady from next door was out on her stoop. She asked me what was going on. I think she was scared, too.”
“Yes,” Alan said. “Jillian Mislaburski. I talked to her.” He touched the Playmate cooler sitting crookedly in the basket of Brian’s bike. He was not unaware of the way Brian’s lips tightened when he did this. “Did you have this cooler with you on Sunday morning, Brian?”
“Yes, sir,” Brian said. He wiped his cheeks with the backs of his hands and watched Alan’s face warily.
“What was in it?”
Brian said nothing, but Alan thought his lips were trembling.
“What was in it, Brian?”
Brian said a little more nothing.
“Was it full of rocks?”
Slowly and deliberately, Brian shook his head-no.
For the third time, Alan asked: “What was in it?”
“Same thing that’s in it now,” Brian whispered.
“May I open it and see?”
“Yes, sir,” Brian said in his listless voice. “I guess so.”
Alan rotated the cover to one side and looked into the cooler.
It was full of baseball cards: Topps, Fleer, Donruss.
