“Free donuts?” Tub investigated the fine print. “It says here free donuts. How can that be true in this economy?”
Claire let out a chuckle. Her cheeks were red and the fall breeze whipped her hair out from under her beret. She hitched up her immaculate pink backpack and took another chomp of licorice. It was well known that she was a junk-food fiend; it was probably what kept her from the waif physique of the most popular girls. Personally I didn’t care what kind of saturated fats and granulated sugars were to blame for that excellent figure.
She had a laugh like the pounding of random piano keys.
“See!” Tub pointed at her and gave me a victorious look. “It’s a trap!”
“I’m laughing at the word, Mr. Dershowitz,” Claire said. “They call them ‘doughrings’ where I’m from. I don’t understand the ‘nuts.’ There are no nuts involved.”
“Oh,” Tub said. “In that case, let’s reconsider this. I’ve got a dentist appointment tomorrow. They’re putting on new braces. You probably noticed I have braces. I’m hoping the new set will be a little more dashing. But maybe I can make it afterward. I’m always up for doughrings. Nuts get stuck in my braces anyway. I guess that’s not need-to-know information. I don’t know why I’m still talking, to be honest. But here I am. Talking. Still.”
Claire offered up the same funny lip twist she gave me in math class, the one that made me feel like we were sharing a secret. She began saying something about how there were never enough “blokes” at tryouts, and how the drama club needed “new blood,” as her “da” would say. I nodded along but my attention wavered. Not many things could distract me from a direct encounter with Claire Fontaine. In fact, I could only think of one.
SMACK, SMACK.
I snatched the flyer from Claire’s hand and turned up the wattage on my asinine grin.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Tub shrugged and took a canary yellow flyer from one of the drama dorks.
“I’ll come for the doughrings,” he sighed. “Assuming I still have teeth.”
“Smashing, then!” Claire popped onto the toes of her hiking boots for a moment. “Noon, right here at Saint B. You chaps practice your sonnets and work on your brogues!”
“You know it!” Tub said.
More unsuspecting males were loping down the steps, and the girls swept over to woo them with the magic of RoJu.
“I have no idea what she just said,” Tub remarked.
I took him by the shoulder and shoved him down the sidewalk. Tub complained, but I held tight and focused on the goal of getting us out of the parking lot. Clutches of kids obstructed our path, but I kept weaving. The sound was closer now, faster, but I couldn’t pin down its origination point.
SMACK, SMACK!
Tub’s protests snapped off like a busted twig.
“Oh, crap. Crappity crap-crap.”
Tub pointed. Steve Jorgensen-Warner was wending his way across the parking lot, the basketball beating patiently against the pavement. Cars were making U-turns and peeling out and ripping around without mufflers, a driver’s ed film come to life, and yet somehow Steve never had to disrupt his gait. He saw us and put on a chilling, placid smile.
“Tell me you still have that fiver,” I hissed.
Tub shook his head.
“Vending machine. Sixth period.”
I gave him an aggrieved look.
“The human body needs food, Jim!” he cried.
I scanned for a safer route. A line of school buses idled along the front courtyard. Usually I walked home, a secret I didn’t share with Dad, but it would be easy to sneak Tub aboard. The driver was famously encumbered with cataracts. The only problem was that Steve and his basketball of doom were right in our path.
I dropped to my stomach and rolled under a parked truck.
“Jim? This isn’t shop class! No time for oil changes!”
“Get down here!”
His transition to belly took longer than mine, but the motivation of that smacking ball worked wonders. Greasy machine parts banged against our heads while our world narrowed to a cinematic rectangle: gray sidewalks, a sliver of grass, tires crunching over broken glass, and hundreds of disembodied feet hurrying by in all directions.
SMACK, SMACK! The noise approached the rear of the truck.
“Move!” I hissed. “Next car, next car!”
My elbows and knees throbbed from the day’s previous miseries, but nevertheless I used them to power me past the truck’s front wheels, into the blinding light of day for a couple of seconds, and then beneath the frame of a filthy four-door sedan. Tub was at my heels, gasping for air, pouring sweat. Bumpers and springs and exhaust pipes had already torn his shirt and pulled his pants down to crack level.
Steve’s ball was belting against the curb to our right. We could see his unscuffed designer shoes, the cuffs of his tailored pants. He stopped, as if detecting our position. I looked left at the thoroughfare being abused by cars. It was a dangerous, shifting maze—but then one of the cars paused to let another vehicle pull out.
“Now!” I hissed. “Now, Tub!”
I crabbed leftward, rolled through the sunlight, and then was under the idling car. Tub followed, panting. Wind blew the car’s exhaust our way and we coughed and fanned it aside. There: the buses were a short sprint away if we could just get a little closer. The car above us honked and we both jumped and banged our heads on the front axle. We heard the gear shift into drive position.
We scrunched up against each other, almost hugging, and let the car pull away. As soon as we cleared the back license plate, we scrambled out of the way of an oncoming convertible, tripped across a speed bump, and went somersaulting into the next row, right between two parked cars. Steve must have glimpsed part of our blundering because the basketball picked up its pace, that awful sound like a fist into flesh.
I scuttled beneath the car to the right, Tub to the left. My fingers locked into the slots of a manhole cover. The buses were close. We could make it. I located Steve’s sneakers. He was just far enough for me to dare to get Tub’s attention and gesture for us to break for it. But Tub was looking at me in terror.
I’m stuck, he mouthed. I’m stuck!
The car above me sunk as somebody got inside of it. My body went numb and I forgot how to breathe. The car started; in seconds, it would pull away and reveal my location. The ball blasted against pavement and I saw both it and Steve’s shoes moving toward our location in effortless harmony. He was five feet away, four, three, two. I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep myself from squeaking.
Metal scraped across cement, and I felt the manhole cover bounce beneath my elbow. I looked at it, expecting nothing more than vibration brought on by the car’s thrumming engine. But the cover was ajar and fed into the blackness of a sewer. I blinked for a moment, confused.
And then a massive, gnarled paw reached out from the depths.
I would have screamed had my terror not been so absolute. The paw was the size of my torso, the gray skin of the palm divided into leathery segments by the scars of untold battles. The fur that covered the back of the paw was black but hardened with the brown of congealed sewage. The hand oscillated like a radar until it faced me and then pounced, wrist and finger bones crackling. I contracted into a ball, and the paw scraped across the ground. Jagged yellow claws the size of my forearm pulverized the parking lot concrete as easily as if it were Ms. Pinkton’s chalk.
Far away, I heard the first bus pull away from the curb, followed by the rest.
I tried to squirm away from the manhole but was caught up by the back axle. The paw extended on an arm that just kept going, the muscles getting thicker, white scars crisscrossing the fur in gruesome glyphs. I looked to Tub for help, but he had his fists tight against his eyes, and I dimly realized that the basketball was right between our cars, beating out its patient, psychotic rhythm. I had bigger problems: the giant paw crawled at me like a spider. I curled between the rear wheels.
In a day devoid of luck, the luckiest thing saved us. The driver’s side door of the car above flew open and hit the basketball, and I watched the orange sphere strike awkwardly off a nearby bumper before rolling all the way across the lot.
“Oh, man, I didn’t see you,” said the driver. “I’ll get it. I’m so sorry. I’ll get it.”
There was a festering pause.
“No problem,” Steve said. “I got it.” But I could imagine his icy grin.
The spiffy shoes turned and went after the ball, and I rolled out from under the car and backed away on hands and knees until I was squatting against the rear bumper of a truck several spaces away, wheezing for breath, every inch of my skin tingling in the open air. My inadvertent savior drove away. After that I heard the pained hisses of Tub maneuvering himself from his undercarriage prison.
He walked over to me, dragging his weary feet. His face was smeared with oil and his jeans were torn, and yet he was laughing.
“You know how to throw a party, Jim Sturges Jr., I’ll give you that.”
“Is it…can we…is it safe?”
Tub checked the lot, but he seemed unconcerned.
“Coach Lawrence nabbed him for practice. We live to fight another day, soldier.”
“No…I mean, the thing…is it…?”
Tub frowned.
“The thing. Hmmm. Can you be more specific?”
I clutched at the bumper and raised myself to unsteady feet. I patted the truck bed, taking solace in the cake of dust. It was real; I was not caught in a nightmare. I smeared the dust with my fingers and smelled it.
“If you lick that, we’re no longer friends,” Tub said.
With utmost caution I edged over to the empty parking space where I had been trapped. I didn’t want to get too close and so skirted out into the path of exiting cars. I was met with honking and various colorful curses, but I ignored them. The cracks on the pavement that had been made by those vicious claws moments earlier looked like the unassuming marks that came with wear and tear and age. The innocent manhole cover was right where it was supposed to be.
“That.” I pointed. “Look at that.”
Tub leaned over the disc of iron.
“This right here?”
Tub kneeled down and brought his eye as close to the cover as his gut would allow. I tensed my stomach muscles and braced for the worst.
“I see it,” he said.
The blood drained from my face.
“You do?”
“I sure do. You want me to get it?”
“What? No! Just get away!”
He pointed at a small pink spot on the manhole cover.
“Looks like Bubblicious to me. Let me tell you a secret: I’ve got gum in my pocket that’s never even been chewed, which is a big part of what I look for in a gum. But far be it from me to stand between a man and his cravings.”
I didn’t say a word to Tub about what I’d seen. The fact that I had no proof to show him bothered me less than that I had no proof to show myself. There were no claw marks anywhere on my skin, no tufts of fur caught in my jacket zipper. For a long time I’d worried about the mental stability of my father. It was why Mom had left us, why we lived alone in a homemade prison. What if, printed in my genetic code, was a similar insanity? Tub might abandon me, too.
I looked past the football field, where the jumbotron workers were packing it up for the day. To the east, the crags of Mount Sloughnisse were bathed in peach light. To the west, a different kind of mountain had slipped into shadow: the towers of totaled vehicles at Keavy’s Junk Emporium, a legendary spot for late-night teen trespassing. I scanned the darkening sky to estimate the time. To Dad, getting home after dark was the worst possible offense.
“Hey, Pocahontas.” Tub chomped at a stick of the gum he’d offered me a few minutes earlier. “If you’re a few minutes late the old man will live.”
“You still don’t get it.”
“I get that he needs to put a couple more links in your leash.”
“He just worries. About a lot of things.”
“Congratulations, you are today’s winner of the Understatement Award! Honestly, I don’t know how a guy that wound up sleeps at night.”
The truth was that he didn’t sleep at night. Tub knew it, too, and grimaced at his own comment. I was going to tell him not to worry about it when he perked up his head and slapped my shoulder.
“Shortcut time?” His braces flashed in a mischievous grin.
The building closest to Saint B. High was the San Bernardino Historical Society Museum, a columned edifice mostly ignored by the local population but, if rumors were to be believed, celebrated by rare-artifact aficionados all across California, whose deep pockets made it possible for the society to announce new acquisitions annually. Much more popular was the expansive garden that surrounded the museum. Rare was the weekend that you didn’t see a woman in a white dress being photographed while the rest of her wedding party milled about and yawned. The garden was cordoned off by a mile-high fence, though, confounding any high schooler who wanted to save time going north.
Tub and I, though, knew a different route.
“I don’t know, Tub. We’re going to run out of luck one of these days.”
But he was already walking backward toward the museum, wagging his eyebrows and blinding me with those metallic choppers. Even in my current mood, I couldn’t help but laugh. He knew he had me and ran as fast as he could toward the front entrance. I hiked up my backpack and took off after him. Our shoes thumped down the hedge-lined sidewalk and up the grand marble stairs, and we passed beneath the jade owl that glared down at us from the frieze carved over the entryway.
Weekday afternoons were dead at the museum, and we laced through the empty queue line until we were passing Carol, our favorite cashier. She was older than us, probably in college, and always had an uncapped highlighter in her hand. She glanced up at us over the tops of her glasses.
“Picked a bad day, guys.”
“Good afternoon, my sweet,” Tub said.
“Lempke’s on the lurk. He’s all pissed about some late shipment. I strongly suggest you turn back.”
“No time, my dear, no time.”
“It’s your ass,” Carol said.
Tub held out his hand as he passed the admissions window, and without looking up Carol high-fived it.
“Thanks,” I said as I followed.
“You got it, good-looking.”
Through the turnstiles we ran, cutting a hard right to take a side staircase. We passed framed pieces we’d seen so many times we no longer registered them: some royal guy in a blue suit and a feathered cap surrounded by sporting hounds; two lines of soldiers heading at one another with rifles a-blazing; one of those omnipresent buckets of fruit that artists of yesteryear were so enamored with. At the top of the stairs was a gargantuan taxidermic bison head. Tub never failed to leap up and scratch the wiry under-beard. I didn’t even try—it was too much like the fur I’d seen coming out of the manhole.
Our path never changed. First we crossed through the Sal K. Silverman Atrium, a skylit dome kept empty so it could be filled with chairs for fundraisers and events. The floor was kept waxed, and we both took full advantage of the six-foot skid range. We slid out the other side of the atrium and sped past stuff that had once transfixed us: glass cabinets filled with ancient tridents; spooky masks from a dig in Ancient Mesopotamia; the reconstructed skeleton of an allosaurus.
We were giggling; the danger of this trip never failed to thrill. Straight ahead was a door marked STAFF ONLY, but we knew it was unconnected to an alarm. Tub pushed through it and we emerged into the same old ugly stairwell, onto the same old unpainted concrete steps. What was different this time was that Professor Lempke was standing half a flight above us, clipboard in hand, staring at us in shock.
Kids could talk all day about the backbreaking Ms. Pinkton or the overbearing Coach Lawrence. But they didn’t know Professor Lempke. Quite possibly the most arrogant
man in all of Southern California, he clearly believed himself to be the rightful heir to the secretary of the Smithsonian and was just polishing up his résumé before he got the call. He ruled the San Bernardino Historical Society Museum with a dictator’s fist, and though that was probably why it was a such an esteemed institution, it was also why kids avoided it. The guy expected everyone to stand before art as one would stand before God, silent and penitent. If you were a little kid and squealed with delight, he’d ask you to leave. If you were elderly and coughed too much, he’d make the same demand.
He was our nemesis and we were his.
Lempke whipped off his horn-rimmed glasses.
“For the last time, boys, this is not your playpen! Nor is this your playground shortcut!” He stuffed the glasses into the pocket of his tweed jacket and began stamping his way down the stairs. Each step revealed argyle socks so scrupulously arranged that the diamond patterns on either ankle were in dizzying alignment.
Tub affected a contrite posture. I followed suit, hanging my head.
“This is a vaunted institution,” Lempke continued, “filled with works beyond your conceptions of value. Should your horseplay knock a bust from its pedestal or a canvas from its frame, your parents would be in so much debt you’d be in the poorhouse before you could—”
“The poorhouse,” that was our cue. Tub jerked from his apologetic pose and went scrambling down the stairs. I was right behind him, beating at his shoulders, panicked and giddy all at once. Lempke knew he’d never catch us in his stiff jacket and argyle socks, but he bent himself over the railing and raised his clipboard as if it were a throwing spear.
“By my count, you each owe me over nine-hundred dollars in admission fees! Don’t think I won’t collect! As soon as I get a free minute, there’s a call coming to your mothers and fathers, mark my words!”
He had no idea that Tub lived with his grandmother and I only had one parent. Depressing thoughts usually, but for the moment the joke was on Lempke. We burst from a service entrance onto a loading dock, laughing like mad, and we didn’t stop running until we were back on the road. We hung on to each other for a few minutes until we got to the first intersection, reliving the escape through gasped sentence fragments.