The Red Hunter(2)

“Number 103, right?” I say.

He’s staring at me now. There’s a slight tremor to his head, almost like he’s shaking it no. His eyes are a watery brown, still blank, but weak, not strong and cold like I remembered. His body has failed him. Years in prison, hard living, and illness have aged him terribly. I’ve seen men his age look fit, robust. Not him.

He doesn’t have much longer, and his life is grim and lonely. I could just leave him be. The possibility hovers, a flicker of light teasing in the periphery of my consciousness. I could take another path.

But. He doesn’t deserve to eat fresh berries and spend the morning watching television, does he? He doesn’t get to go to the park later and feed his stale bread to the pigeons. He’s doesn’t deserve those simple human pleasures at the end of life.

You don’t get to decide who deserves what.

Oh, but I do.

I unlock the door to his apartment and walk inside. It’s dark and bare, just an old recliner and a television on a stand. A bed in the corner, neatly made. A picture of a woman in a frame, a paperback novel, and a glass of water sitting on a wobbly end table. And, of all things, a Bible open on the kitchen counter by the phone.

“Have you found Jesus?” I ask him. “Are you saved?”

“Get out of here,” he says, snatching the groceries from my hand, pushing past me. “Go on now. Get out.”

I close the door. He turns and takes me in with those eyes.

There he is.

The monster I remember.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Don’t you know me?” I ask with a smile. It has been many years, and a lot has happened between then and now. A whole lifetime really.

But he does know me. He does. I can see it as he starts to back away.

“You.”

“That’s right,” I say. “Me.”

He stumbles back a little more, as I lock and chain the door. He falls heavily into his old recliner. His breathing is labored, filling the room with its wheeze. It’s lung cancer, I have learned.

“Where is it?” I say.

“What?” he asks. But his glance over toward the bed gives him away. I reach under the mattress and retrieve the gun I was sure he had. I put it on the counter, well out of his reach.

I have something of my own. I take it out of my pocket and hold it up so that he can see. I wonder if he recognizes it. He used it on me once. I still bear its marks. Outside and in. A single tear trails down his cheek. His lips are moving in a whisper. It takes me a second to realize he’s praying.

Is this who you want to be?

It’s my uncle’s voice, the uncle who is not an uncle and somehow more like a father because he took me in, loved me, taught me everything I know.

I take a step toward the man. A faint skein of music leaks in from the apartment next door. There are things I need to say. Questions I want to ask, but they are lost in the red fog that crowds my thoughts.

Yes, it is, I answer to the voice in my head. It is precisely who I want to be.





part one


TWO GRAVES





one


Raven looked repentant, but Claudia knew that she wasn’t. The girl had her head bent, and the sheets of her blue-black hair, thick and impossibly glossy, fell to hide her face. It was October. A week from Halloween, and this was Claudia’s second time in the principal’s office since school began. The first one was about grades. Raven was already struggling. We can see from her test scores that she’s capable of more, the desperate math teacher said. But it’s like she’s just not here. Not paying attention. Leaving answers blank on her test. Mrs. Bishop, she’s not even trying.

Claudia could already see it on Principal Blake’s face: The Look. It was the expression that careful people, kind people got when they started to wonder if there was something wrong with Raven.

“It’s difficult to start a new school,” said Principal Blake. “But here at Lost Valley Central we have a zero-tolerance policy for physical violence.”

Physical violence? That was new. Claudia still wasn’t sure what Raven had done. She’d raced in as soon as Principal Blake had called. A bland man with a soft voice and graying head of hair, he had greeted her in the office with an understanding smile. We’ve had a problem in the cafeteria. A girl has gone home.

“Oh, really?” said Raven. “So, it’s okay for her to be verbally abusive to me, and I just have to sit there and take it?”

“That’s enough, Raven,” said Claudia. She wondered if she sounded as exhausted by her daughter as she felt. The kid’s capacity for outrage was endless.

“There are other ways to solve your problems that don’t involve flipping a lunch tray onto someone,” said the principal easily. “What did she say to you exactly? What made you so angry?”

Raven shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

The principal answered her with a quick nod, like he got it, like he knew how cruel kids could be and how words could hurt as badly as any blow.

“I understand that bullying can be verbal and emotional as well as physical. And Clara Parker has had her moments; she’s sat here with me more than once. Still, when we step over that line into the physical, that can’t be tolerated.”

Oh, god, thought Claudia. She’s going to be suspended—expelled. She could just hear her sister Martha crowing, I told you that changing schools wasn’t the solution. You can’t just keep running away.