The Fall of Never(71)

“Carlos-Carlos,” the man says. He is rolling the name around on his tongue, trying its pronunciation with different accents. “You dark. You ain’t a nigger-boy, is you? You ride the bus a’ time? Me—I don’t like it.”

Carlos cannot look away from the stranger, he is so completely frozen in terror. The man’s face is loaded with red, flaking patches of skin and bulbous whiteheads. His lips are like two broken snaps of balsa wood, brittle and peeling. And behind those lips is a row of teeth the color of turpentine, gums the color of day-old bruises. A dried tongue of snot clings ornately to one nostril.

“I think I sick,” the man says. His eyes are moving fast. They are yellow. “You get sick onna bus, boy?”

“No.” It is hardly even a whisper.

“Thass you a big fella then, right? Carlos-Carlos-Carlos. Big like some big man.”

The bottle of root beer suddenly drops from his sweaty hands and lands in his lap, dumping the remaining soda on his pants. A burning embarrassment abruptly wells up inside him and he wants to scream, wants to cry. His breath starts coming in great wheezing gasps.

“Now-now-now,” the stranger says, “what we done? You done it, Petey can see you done it. Foolish thing, it is.”

And then the man’s right hand comes out, slides itself between the bag of groceries and Carlos’s chest, and reaches down for the bottle. Paralyzed with fear, his throat too constricted to utter a single sound, he can only watch that hand slide across him and reach down into his lap. It is like watching a film in slow motion. The hand is enormous, he sees, and sprouts silvery wires of hair from the knuckles. It is a multicolored hand, adorned with a selection of brown splotches and tiny, bloodied nicks and cuts and scratches. The fingers are impossibly long and wide, capped with thick nails packed with crud.

The hand lingers in his lap too long. Carlos feels a pressure in his groin as Petey the Stranger presses the glass root beer bottle into his privates, delicately swiveling the bottle from side to side. And that desperate scream is caught in his throat, caught there and useless, and he actually feels his mind begin to creep away from what is happening. In a flash he is back on the kitchen floor. Juan’s knees are pressing into his wrists, pinning them to the linoleum, while Michael straddles him good and holds his legs to the floor beneath his weight. In Michael’s hand is a balled up pair of gray gym socks, still dense with sweat, and jeez-it-all if he can’t smell those socks from here, from where he lay bound by his brothers to the floor, from here on the bus—

And then his brothers and the gym socks are gone.

And then so is the stranger’s hand.

Carlos manages to look down at his shorts—they are soaked with root beer—and then glances over at the stranger from the corner of his eye, not wanting it known that he is actually looking in the man’s direction. Petey holds the empty soda bottle on his lap. He is scraping at the bottle’s label with a curled yellow thumbnail.

“Done messed yourself, Carlos-Carlos. We should clean you up. Where you goin’ to, boy?”

Blessedly, he feels his throat sear open, feels a rush of air enter his windpipe—then tighten again as the man leans over him and kisses the top of his head.

The sound of hissing air-brakes and the bus jerks to a stop. In that same instant, the man—Petey—dislodges himself from the bus seat and bunches his long coat up in front of him as he makes his way down the aisle toward the bus’s doors. Though Carlos suspects he might, the old man does not turn to look back.

Once the bus starts moving again, Carlos pulls his legs up to his chest, rests his head against the window, and stares at the traffic below. Ashamed, he cries.




There was a surge of warm air at his face followed by the sensation of something large shifting directly in front of him, and Carlos Mendes opened his eyes and jerked away from Nellie Worthridge. It took several seconds for his thoughts to properly regroup, finding their appropriate niches, and the world swam back to him in one great rush.

“I…”

He was anxious to speak (though he had no idea what he wanted to say) yet he found himself too busy searching for breath. It was as if the wind had just been knocked out of him. And he was sweaty and shaking all over. His mouth was pasty and dry.

Like some medieval witch, Nellie sat perched on her chair in the darkness in front of him, her face unchanged and without expression. Well, almost—her eyes had narrowed and her crooked lips appeared to be working over the beginnings of words. The congruity of her form, slated in darkness, suggested the gnarled and mangled rudiments of an ancient tree. She looked very near death, Mendes noted. Only her eyes proposed any implication of life: they remained narrow and grating, nearly allowing him to feel the full force of their stare scraping along his flesh.

“I…” was all he could manage.

“Some good people, some bad,” Nellie interjected. Again, it looked as if she were trying to smile. “But I guess you know that, don’t you, Doctor?”

Even now, even here, the doctor could almost smell the stranger from that bus—Petey, his name had been—and remembered the terror that had welled up inside him as he sat there in that seat, helpless. He clearly recalled the heat from the sun amplified against the bus window, hot to the touch, and the panels of light that spread in great lunging rectangles across the green vinyl seat in front of him.