November 19 - 4:29 pm
Balance of Power
The smart choice is to head for the nearest telephone and call for the cavalry. But at my best pace, I’m ten minutes from even the closest houses at the edge of the park. And then I have to hope I catch someone at home and willing to open the door to a man raving about meth heads and mad-eyed apparitions in the park. By the time the troops arrive, anything could happen to Danny. I don’t like the possibilities simmering behind Myra’s dark eyes.
I pat down Big Ed’s body, can’t decide to laugh or cry when I find no gun. The fucker snookered me. But there’s no time for recriminations. I leave him to serve as a cry for help and head down to the loop drive in the direction I saw Danny run.
The rain starts as I head up the path from the soap box track, the direction I think Danny may have gone. I’m gasping before I’ve run a hundred feet, but I don’t let myself slow down. The path curls up Tabor’s south face into a thick stand of Douglas firs, a dirt-and-gravel track favored by mountain bikers and dog walkers. The cold rain soaks to my skin and my feet slip on the slickening mud as I climb, but I keep moving. One foot in front of the other. Between gulps of air, I call out. “Danny! Come out, Danny!” My voice sounds dull in my ears.
A kid on a bike, college-age, rolls down the path toward me. I wave my arms. He skids past me, wheels throwing up a fan of mud, almost wipes out.
“Jesus Christ, old man!”
“Did you see a little boy? Maybe a woman chasing him up the hill?”
He doesn’t seem to hear me, flips me off.
“Call 9-1-1—!” But he’s already rolling off through the rain. I see him cut left down the grassy slope above the south reservoir short of Big Ed’s body. I turn, continue uphill.
I’ve walked through the park on a sunny summer day, six o’clock, unable to spit without wetting someone. But on a chilly November evening in the rain as the sun sets, the park is shadowed by a forbidding emptiness. With each step, I feel more and more certain I’ve made the wrong choice. There are a thousand places Danny can hide in the park. And, my luck being what it is, I’m sure whoever Ed was meeting—Grandpa, I assume—will find him first. I’m unarmed, gasping for air, frozen and wet. What the fuck do I think I can do, except add myself to the body count?
The rain tip-taps among the firs and tilting maples on the slope around me. The glow of the city stretched out below provides no illumination. The darkness under the trees is almost total, the only light the remnants of sunset suffusing the cloud cover to the west. I stop at a tree to catch my breath. “Danny!” Nothing. My stomach burns and water runs in my eyes. I wipe my face.
A cough pulls me around and I gape into the black for its source. Another cough, and I see him. Eager Gillespie sits on the ground at the foot of a tree, a dozen feet off the path. I move over to him, kneel down. “Eager, Jesus, what the hell is going on?”
I wish the light was better, but up close I can see his face, ash pale and tinted by the blood that flows, thick and slow as syrup, from his bulging red eye. He looks up at me, his expression blank. When he opens his mouth, his thick tongue presses against his teeth.
“What up? What the hell up?” He makes a choking noise and for an instant I feel a hot panic in my chest until I realize he’s laughing. Still, it’s a sick, dangerous sound. “You need to be in a hospital.”
He shakes his head. “No can do, dude. I’m busy.”
“Busy hell. You need to get to the emergency room. Where’s your cell phone?”
“Made a funny sound, stopped working.” He gestures and I look, see the phone on the wet fir needles at his side. I grab it, but it drips water. Dead.
“Come on then, let me help you.” I grab his arm, wonder if I can help him to his feet, if the two of us can hobble down the hill together to find help.
“No, no. I’m the ace. I’m the card up the sleeve.” He shifts against the tree and I see he’s got his other hand stuffed in the pocket of his zip-up hoodie. He sees where I’m looking and pulls out a gun, sloppy grin on his face.
“Where did you get that?”
But I know. Not an S&W 500, not a Python. Big enough though, .357, late of Mitch and Luellen’s kitchen, I’ve no doubt. I reach out to take it from him, but he holds on with surprising strength. “No. Got a job. I’m the ace.”
“Eager, I don’t know what you’re talking about—” He swivels his head, peers up the hill through the shadows. Voices trickle down from above, the sound broken by trees and falling rain.
“They’re bad.”
“Who?”
“I gotta stop ‘em.”
“Eager, don’t be ridiculous. We need to get the police.”
He shakes his head, tries to lift the gun again. “No time.”
I don’t want to, but I believe him. I’ve seen too much already; Myra, Big Ed, the stranger with the hole in his head. I can’t make out the words from above, but the anger is unmistakable. I guess they’re at the top, south end of the summit near the Harvey Scott statue. Not far from where Michael Masliah found Eager and the Tabor Doe three years earlier.
“Who’s up there, Eager?”
He rolls his head, tries to look. He coughs. The gun slips out of his hand. Someone shouts, someone else screams. A man, a woman, I can’t be sure. “Is it Luellen?”
His head yaws. “Yeah. Luellen.”
“And Danny’s grandfather?”
“Grandpa and some dude with a gun. They want Danny.”
“Danny ran away.”
The crazy grin fades and he closes his eyes. His swollen orb won’t quite shut. A red bubble seems to press against his eyelid. “She’s still okay only as long as they don’t got Danny.”
“What do you think you’re going to do, Eager?”
He pushes the gun toward me. “S’prise them. They don’t know about me. I’m the ace.”
I try to make sense of what I’m hearing. The ace in the hole? ... Eager? He comes out of the woods with the gun, unexpected, and changes the balance of power. At least, that’s what he thinks he’s gonna do, though whether or not he can would be an open question even if he wasn’t crumpled half-dead at the foot of a tree.
“Eager, you can’t just walk up to a man and shoot him.”
“Have to. You fucked it up. Now I gotta fix it.”
“Eager, damn it ...”
“You supposed to take care of her, protect her. That’s why I told her to buy the house, cuz you would make sure she was okay.”
“Jesus.” I press my fingers to my eyes.
“You thought I was casing the joint. But I never went in for house prowls.” He laughs again. “You were supposed to protect her. Now I gotta. But I can’t lift the gun.”
“They’re bad people.”
Up the hill, the shouting continues as the rain falls and my feet sink into the mud. Eager pushes the gun toward me and I pick it up. Heavy. It’s been a while since I held a gun.
“Eager, how long have you known Luellen?”
“A while.”
“How long?”
“Whole time, I guess. Since the day she got to town.”
“And when was that, exactly?”
He rolls his head downhill. His next words are mumbled.
“Speak up, Eager.”
“You know.”
I have no idea what’s going on, but there’s already a man face down in mud, a boy lost in the woods, and too many questions without answers. If Luellen is up there, if the stranger with the brain injury is up there, if there really is a man who’ll kill for a little boy, what are my choices?
Eager stares at me, bulging eye like a boil.
“Remember that day we met, Skin?”
“Eager, come on.”
“Seriously. Remember it?”
I sigh. I have to figure out a way to get help, find Danny. It’s all bigger than I am. “Of course. Crazy day.”
He moves his head side-to-side, a slow-motion negation. “Not that day.”
It takes me a moment to realize what day he means. “Out in front of my house. You were on your board, I was putting out the recycling.”
“I was lookin’ for you. Found you. Now you found me.” He laughs his strangled laugh. “Full circle, my girl would say.”
“We have to get the police, Eager.”
“No.” His voice finds sudden strength “Can’t be any police.” I know why Eager doesn’t want cops, and not just because he’s a thief and a scammer. He was a cop. I wonder if it would matter if he knew about Big Ed down the hill. Probably not. Other thoughts are bouncing around in Eager’s mind, clanking pinballs of certainty. There is too much I don’t know, too much Eager couldn’t explain even if he was able to form a coherent thought.
Yet here under the trees in the rain and the dark he’s been trying to make me understand. The house across the street. Mitch and Luellen’s house. I was supposed to protect her, he said. It’s with a dull shock I finally recognize the bridge of trust Eager tried to build between us. Not just a punk messing with the head of the cop too dumb to catch him, but a kid who looked at me and somehow saw a man who would do the thing he was unable to do.
Is it possible to fail at a task you didn’t know was yours to begin with? Looking into Eager’s focusless eyes and blood-drained flesh, I see the answer. I’ve grown blind and bitter, congratulating myself for babysitting a four-year-old, all the while unaware his mother looked to me as her guardian. And where is Danny now? Lost in the woods, hunted by a savage tweaker and faceless figures out of the inscrutable past of a girl who, unbeknownst to me, put her faith in me.
I lean back on my haunches. I’d like to believe it wasn’t always like this. I’d like to believe Ruby Jane saw something greater in me when she accepted, for the briefest moment, my fumbling advance. Can I become a Skin who doesn’t fear his own imagined irrelevance? Accept the charge given to me by Eager Gillespie, dipshit stray, enigma, man-child with a gun? Can I find my way out of the dark?
The voices above flicker through the trees, bitter motes and fear and rage. I grasp Eager’s icy shoulder, and for a second his focus clears.
“Someone’s coming.” His good eye blinks.
“Who?”
He breathes, a gasp. I don’t think he has many more in him. “It’s time, dude. Don’t worry about me. Help my girl.”
“Eager, please hang in there.”
But he slumps. The last thing he says to me is a faint whisper. “The only problem with being dead is it lasts such a fucking long time.”
The young bastard has become who I wish I could be before my eyes.