Bob and Weave

The Last Child

104 The Last Child His first summer at the Home he lured a stray bitch into the barn and clubbed her to death with a bat. He said she crumpled up like a balled-up piece of paper on fire. Said that would teach her to spit her litters out all over his land. His second year at the Home he cornered the director’s daughter in the gym and wouldn’t let her pass. I pulled him away and she ran. He studied her routines, was watching when she walked home from school, when she headed out on her bike, when she rode on the front seat of the white Cadillac between her mother and father. One night in his last few months, he stole a neighbor’s car, drove it to the director’s house, tried to lure the daughter into the car with a wrapped present, but she kept backing toward the porch. Ten minutes later he flipped the car over on Highway 21 heading out of town. Broken bones shut him up for a month. Meanwhile I quit the Home— too confused myself I guess to be soother of savage children, tired of being afraid all the time 105 of what he might do next— and moved from job to job, lived in mobile homes in one-light towns. It took five years for the first time, but he found me. The phone rang: he’d changed his name from Billy to Bill to Mister B. He hit my door with the flank of his fist and walked on in, looking around. His pack was full of soiled underwear. His red beard was longer than mine. He needed a place to stay and money. I found him a job with a friend, but after three days Mister B knew more about disk brakes than they did and they booted him out. The last time was the worst. He wasn’t interested in work. While I was out he kept the blinds pulled, drank beer, lit one cigarette off another and watched porno on the tube. When the neighborhood girls ganged up on him with bamboo sticks, I didn’t even ask why, just drove him into town, put him up in the YMCA, and gave him a hundred bucks. Next day I quit my job and got out of there. Even I didn’t know where I was going. It was okay when he talked about his life on the road, 106 what it was like to sleep under the overpasses, how the taste of discarded food was the best. I enjoyed his descriptions of abandoned cars where he would live for days, of the women who were far enough gone on drugs or booze to run with him until he left them unconscious and alone in the dry ditch of a park. But I wanted to be a good neighbor to good neighbors, I wanted to find a real friend. I didn’t care that he’d changed his name to Red, that he considered himself the ultimate philosopher of sleaze and degradation. I hated that I listened, that sometimes I even laughed. Two thousand miles and twenty years from the Home and still he’s found me. He knows I’ve seen him through the closed blinds. I haven’t had a date in years. The last child I touched ran away and cried in her mother’s lap. I part the blinds and study the way he waits, the way wind blows trash down that almost empty street. ...