Boy, Snow, Bird(62)

“Who are you?” he asked, real loud, as if he was scared, as if he was in my place and I was in his. I reached up, or down, it was hard to tell because my head slammed against the tree trunk and I saw my feet swinging in the air above me—my body was twisted around the branch and I locked my hands around it and held tight. The wood pushed through my skin, I said “Vvvahhhh,” or something like that, my teeth chopping at my tongue, the branch groaned, it wasn’t going to hold me, it was coming away from the tree. I’d fall six feet or more. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Please. Please.”

He stopped pulling. “Get down here.”

I climbed down without answering him, hands and feet slipping in bloodied mud, and my knees gave out as soon as I was back on the ground. He put an arm around my neck and made me get up. We walked backward into the bushes. I was crying, but he didn’t care. What he held flat against my hip bone was scarier than a knife—it was a syringe filled with clear liquid. The needle. There was a plastic cap on it, but light flashed along it as I struggled to breathe. “Control yourself,” he said. His mouth was right against my ear, and his lips were wet. There was liquor on his breath. Some kids walked past, arguing, laughing. The girls were trying to teach the boys pig Latin. I turned my head so I was looking right at the man with his hand over my mouth—he pushed my face away from him, but I waited and then turned my head toward him again.

“Ha, looks like Bird lost her dumb hula hoop,” Fat Kenneth Young said. I heard a splash—I think he kicked at it.

The man asked me what I was staring at. He was a white man, clean-shaven. Ultra-clean-shaven; not a single cut. He had a round nose and wide-awake blue-green eyes and his white hair went up into a peak above his forehead; if we’d met some other way, I might have looked at him and thought, Weird, it’s a dolphin-man, or a man-dolphin, in a plaid shirt and jeans. He looks nice, maybe Gee-Ma would like him.

“Please let me go home,” I said, in a calm, completely fake voice. “My mom and dad are expecting me and—”

“Shut up,” he whispered. “Who are you? I’ve seen you with Boy. At her job. And you try to boss her around at the grocery store. Queen of Sheba my ass.”

(We haven’t seen you.)

“I’m Bird.”

He said: “You are Bird.”

“Yeah. I’m—Boy’s my mom, that’s why I’m with her a lot.”

The other kids’ voices faded into the distance, and he let go of me once we were alone again. I never saw what he did with the syringe. I don’t think he dropped it. Hands shaking, he fumbled around in the top pocket of his shirt, pulled out a pair of eyeglasses, put them on, and looked at me. Then he took the eyeglasses off and muttered: “Well. What can I do?”

He looked sick to his stomach. He tried to hide it, but he couldn’t. His skin turned a little gray and his cheeks puffed out. I could have stood there for hours, watching him turn to stone, watching the gargoyle appear. That was his real face. Or do people only turn ugly for as long as they’re looking at something ugly? I played dumb. I said: “Uh . . . what’s wrong? What did I say?”

He answered me so quietly I pretty much had to lip-read. “I came to meet with my granddaughter, and you are her.”

I dried my eyes on my sleeve and sighed. I didn’t want it to be true, would have given a lot for it not to be true, so it had to be true.

He raised his voice. “You are slow or something? You didn’t hear me?”

“I heard you.”

“Well?”

“Well.”

“What has your mother told you about me?”

“Nothing.”

He rubbed his chin. “You hungry?”

“What?”

He offered to buy me a cheeseburger. I said I’d eat at home, but changed my mind and went to the Mitchell Street diner with him after he promised to tell me how to catch rats, and also what Mom had been like as a kid.

“Do you really want to know how to catch rats?”

“Yeah.”

“They just want the rats to go away. They believe that they should not have to think about the rats that sneak out of their garbage and into their walls, they should not have to see how those disgusting creatures die. That’s what I’m paid for. I’m supposed to catch my rats and hold my tongue and let it all be like magic.”

“Well, tell me about it.”

“You are not squeamish?”

“Yeah, I am. But I still want to know.”

“I shouldn’t have treated you this way that I have treated you. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t believe him and I walked behind him so I’d have fair warning if he went for me again. I guess I wanted to have something to tell Snow.

We took a booth at the Mitchell Street diner. Susie Conlin handed him a menu before she took me to the restroom and soaked my hands in a basin. She dabbed disinfectant on the cuts the linden tree gave me. There were seven. She counted them aloud and made me count along with her. She was my regular babysitter for about a year and a half, so she still talks down to me something awful, and maybe always will. I don’t mind her doing it, though. She just likes looking after people. Dad’s making her a tiny rainbow stud for the piercing she just got in her nose.

—

i ate my cheeseburger with a knife and fork so it wouldn’t taste of disinfectant. But Frank thought I was trying to be ladylike. “Your father teach you that?” He grinned, and I did the same. I just took what was in his grin and gave it right back to him. He choked on a french fry and I passed him a napkin.