The Forgetting Time(64)

“We’ll come back in just a bit, sweetie. Okay?” The lady ruffled his hair. She didn’t seem like a cop anymore.

“NO!” The kid was getting on his nerves now.

“We’re coming back, Noah. It’s okay.”

The kid started to cry. The man squatted down beside him and asked him something in a low voice Charlie couldn’t quite make out. The kid nodded. Then he pointed right at him.

“Sure. That’s Charlie,” he said.

The old guy and the lady looked at Charlie. He began to sweat, as if he’d done something wrong. “I didn’t do anything to this kid,” he said. “I don’t even know him.” Looking beseechingly at their staring eyes. He guessed this pot wasn’t so good after all. It was making him paranoid.

“Is that your name? Charlie?” The old guy asked.

“Yeah.”

They stood there, the four of them shifting on the little concrete doorstep, the blond kid still crying, giving him the heebie-jeebies.

Finally it occurred to him that maybe his mama knew these people. They knew his name, after all. She’d kill him if she found out he kept them waiting out on the stoop.

“Would you like to come in?”

“That would be nice, thank you,” the old guy said. “We’ve been traveling for a long time.”

*

What did you do with a grandpa and a woman and a sniffly little kid all standing in your living room? The old guy perched expectantly on the edge of the couch and began writing notes in this tiny spidery handwriting on a yellow pad.

“This is it,” the kid said again. He sounded real excited. He started running around the room, the lady (he was pretty sure she was the kid’s mom) following right behind him.

He knew there was something he ought to be doing. The idea came to him slowly, a shimmering density on the other side of the room that slowly took on weight and motion, wafting over to his brain like a helpful ghost. Food. When people are in the house you offer them food. “Would you guys like something to eat? A snack, or something?”

“That’d be nice,” the old guy said. He looked really grateful, like he hadn’t eaten all day.

When Charlie got back from the kitchen (empty-handed but for a few glasses of tap water—there was nothing in the fridge but some old pasta sauce and the ice cream in the freezer he was saving for himself) the kid was standing in front of the fireplace, pointing at the picture of the farm his Grandpa Joe had painted back when he was alive. “That was upstairs,” the kid was saying. “In the attic.”

“Yeah, we moved it down here after Pop left—” and then he fell silent. “What’d you say?”

“Papa’s not here?”

“My dad lives in Yellow Springs, now.”

“Why’d he move there?”

“Well, he and my mama weren’t getting along anymore, so they—”

The kid was looking up at him wide eyed. Man, this was one weird kid.

“My parents—they’re separated.”

“Separated?” The kid’s face was moving around like he was taking it in.

“You know what separated means, honey?” the lady said. “That’s when a mother and a father decide to live in separate places—”

The kid was walking over to the piano now, lifting the lid on the bench.

“Where’s all the music?”

“We don’t have any.”

“There was music.”

Charlie felt himself beginning to lose it. Freaking out. His grip on reality was slipping the grid. Maybe there was something else in Harrison’s brother’s friend’s pot, like some peyote or something. He’d heard that sometimes people did that, spiked the stuff with something trippy that could send you to some crazy places, though why anyone would want to do that he couldn’t figure, since the whole point as far as he was concerned was to sand down the edges.

He looked at the kid. He was sitting on the piano bench. Try, Charlie, try. “You play piano?”

The kid just sat there.

“No, he doesn’t play,” the lady said.

Then the kid started to play the piano. It was the theme song from The Pink Panther. He could tell that right off, after the first couple of notes. He hadn’t heard that melody in years, but back when he’d heard it, back when his brother played it, he’d heard it every day, sometimes every couple hours ’til their dad threatened to strangle him, and he knew beyond a shadow of a shadow of a doubt that He Was Fucked. He was Fucked-Up. He was Fucked-Up and he was going to freak out, right now, in front of all these white people.

“You gotta stop playing that,” he said.

The kid kept on playing.

“You gotta stop playing that.”

He heard the car coming into the driveway with its telltale hissing muffler.

Oh, Sweet Jesus, thank you. Mama’s here.

“Hey, Kid.”

Fucking Pink Panther.

The kid said: “Don’t you know me, Charlie?”

The car door slammed shut. She was getting something out of the trunk. Come inside the house, Mama. Come inside and sort this shit out, take it out of my hands.

“No,” Charlie said. “No, I don’t know you.”

The kid said: “I’m Tommy.”