The Forgetting Time(75)
“Who took care of Horntail?” the kid said.
“I took him with me to Grandma’s,” he said, and started to laugh. “I let him loose on her carpet one time just to freak her out. She didn’t like that one bit.”
“Nah, she hates lizards.”
“Yeah.”
“And snakes.”
“Yeah.”
He looked down through the branches. He could see the lights from the police flashlights moving through the fields and the woods. They were looking for the kid, but the kid was floating high up above all that, the kid was somewhere else entirely.
“I’m sorry I broke your sub,” the kid said.
“My sub?”
“Your submarine that Papa gave you.”
“Oh.”
The last time he’d seen Tommy. That last day. They’d had a big fight. His dad had come back from a long tour and he’d brought Charlie a shiny new submarine and Tommy had gotten only a book and, boy, was he mad. Tommy wanted to play with his sub, just one turn, he kept saying, but Charlie never had anything Tommy wanted, it was always the other way around, and he loved his shiny new sub that Tommy wanted and he said, “No way.” He said, “Get your own stinkin’ sub.”
“Just one turn,” Tommy had said.
“No,” Charlie said. “It’s mine and you can’t even touch it.” And Tommy had grabbed it out of his hands, right then, breaking the periscope in two.
“Anyway, I’m sorry about it,” the kid was saying now.
“That’s okay. It was my fault. I should have let you try it,” Charlie said. It occurred to him that he was talking to the kid as if he were Tommy. That was followed by another thought (the thoughts were hitting him like blows, one after the other, making him see stars) that only he and Tommy knew that Tommy had broken the periscope. He had meant to get his brother in trouble for it but he had disappeared before Charlie had the chance. He looked out in the dark through the rustling branches and felt overcome with vertigo; he sat himself down on his bottom and pushed his long legs out across the floating floor. Look: here was his body, his legs covered with goose bumps, his shiny shorts, his high-tops.
“I broke it ’cause I was mad. It was so nice,” the kid said. “I never had a sub like that.”
“That’s okay.”
Charlie was sitting there with his mouth open. It occurred to him he ought to close it. “You’re him, aren’t you?” he said, wondering at the words as they came out of his own mouth. “How can you be him?”
“I don’t know how,” the kid said.
They were silent. The kid ran his palm over the spikes on the lizard’s back.
“Thanks for watching Horntail.”
“It’s nothing,” Charlie said. He was proud of himself, all of a sudden, for keeping Tommy’s lizard alive all these years. He felt his whole body flush with pride, like when he was a kid and he’d thrown a good pitch and Tommy had said, “Good pitch, Charlie!”
The kid stroked the lizard up and down his sides, Horntail looking back at him with its yellow eyes. He wondered if it had missed Tommy and recognized him now or if it was just another day for the lizard.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Charlie said finally.
“You didn’t do it.”
“I maybe coulda stopped it though.”
“Nah, Charlie. You were a little kid.”
Charlie gulped. His chest hurt. He could feel the words burning up through his throat and then he said them. “Mama told me to tell you to come home for lunch. To come home from Oscar’s. She told me to tell you that. But I was mad at you for breaking my sub and I didn’t want to talk to you and I didn’t do it. And maybe if I had said that you would have come home early—maybe then—”
“Nah, Charlie. Anyway, I was dead already.”
“You were?” Charlie said.
“Yeah. I was dead pretty fast.”
“What happened?” Charlie said. He’d been waiting years to know. The kid didn’t answer. His nose started running again. The lizard ambled down his arm to the floor, so Charlie picked him up and held the cool, breathing body in his hand. After a while he heard a rustling sound down below. Someone else was down there, breathing. The person didn’t say anything.
“I saw him,” the kid said at last.
“Who?
“Pauly.”
“Pauly?”
“Pauly. Down the street?”
“You mean Paul Clifford?”
He nodded.
“He’s the one … that killed me.”
“Paul Clifford? Pauly down the street? He’s the one who—he killed you?”
He nodded.
“Fuck. Paul Clifford? What’d he do?”
“I don’t know. It happened so fast.”
The kid took a deep breath.
“I was on my bike riding to Oscar’s and I saw Aaron’s brother Pauly was there. He said—he said he had this rifle and did I want to take a shot with it, it would only take a minute. So I said okay ’cause he said just a minute and you know Mama never let us touch guns.”
“Yeah.”
“So we went to the woods to do some shooting and he shot all these bottles and he wouldn’t give me a turn at all. So I asked him if I could have a turn and then he shot me.”