Steven Gould

JUMPER

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublisher 2008

Copyright © Steven C. Gould 1992

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover art copyright © 2008 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007275991

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007283514

Version: 2018-11-01

For James Gould, soldier, craftsman, sailor, father

and

Laura J. Mixon, engineer, teacher, writer, wife

Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Part 1: Beginnings Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Part 2: The Pursuit Of Happiness Chapter Five Chapter Six Part 3: Adjustments Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Part 4: Chinese Curse Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Part 5: Searching Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Part 6: Playing Tag Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Part 7: Olly, Olly, In Come Free Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Acknowledgments About the Author By Stephen Gould About the Publisher

PART 1:

BEGINNINGS

ONE

The first time was like this.

I was reading when Dad got home. His voice echoed through the house and I cringed.

“Davy!”

I put the book down and sat up on the bed. “In here, Dad. I’m in my room.”

His footsteps on the hallway’s oak floor got louder and louder. I felt my head hunching between my shoulders; then Dad was at the door and raging.

“I thought I told you to mow the lawn today!” He came into the room and towered over me. “Well! Speak up when I ask you a question!”

“I’m gonna do it, Dad. I was just finishing a book.”

“You’ve been home from school for over two hours! I’m sick and tired of you lying around this house doing nothing!” He leaned close and the whiskey on his breath made my eyes water. I flinched back and he grabbed the back of my neck with fingers like a vise. He shook me. “You’re nothing but a lazy brat. I’m going to beat some industry into you if I have to kill you to do it!”

He pulled me to my feet, still gripping my neck. With his other hand he fumbled for the ornate rodeo buckle on his belt, then snaked the heavy Western strap out of his pants loops.

“No, Dad. I’ll mow the lawn right now. Honest!”

“Shut up,” he said. He pushed me into the wall. I barely got my hands up in time to keep my face from slamming nose-first into the plaster. He switched hands then, pressing me against the wall with his left while he took the belt in his right hand.

I twisted my head slightly, to keep my nose from grinding into the wall, and saw him switch his grip on the belt, so the heavy silver buckle hung on the end, away from his hand.

I yelled. “Not the buckle, Dad! You promised!”

He ground my face into the wall harder. “Shut UP! I didn’t hit you near hard enough the last time.” He extended his arm until he held me against the wall at arm’s length and swung the belt back slowly. Then his arm jerked forward and the belt sung though the air and my body betrayed me, squirming away from the impact and …

I was leaning against bookshelves, my neck free of Dad’s crushing grip, my body still braced to receive a blow. I looked around, gasping, my heart still racing. There was no sign of Dad, but this didn’t surprise me.

I was in the fiction section of the Stanville Public Library and, while I knew it as well as my own room, I didn’t think my father had ever been inside the building.

That was the first time.

The second time was like this.

The truck stop was new and busy, an island of glaring light and hard concrete in the night. I went in the glass doors to the restaurant and took a chair at the counter, near the section with the sign that said, DRIVERS ONLY. The clock on the wall read eleven-thirty. I put the rolled-up bundle of stuff on the floor under my feet and tried to look old.

The middle-aged waitress on the other side of the counter looked skeptical, but she put down a menu and a glass of water, then said, “Coffee?”

“Hot tea, please.”

She smiled mechanically and left.

The drivers’ section was half full, a thick haze of tobacco smoke over it. None of them looked like the kind of man who’d give me the time of day, much less a lift farther down the road.

The waitress returned with a cup, a tea bag, and one of those little metal pitchers filled with not very hot water. “What can I get you?” she asked.

“I’ll stick with this for a while.”

She looked at me steadily for a moment, then totaled the check and laid on the counter. “Cashier will take it when you’re ready. You want anything else, just let me know.”

I didn’t know to hold the lid open as I poured the water, so a third of it ended up on the counter. I mopped it up with napkins from the dispenser and tried not to cry.

“Been on the road long, kid?”

I jerked my head up. A man, sitting in the last seat of the drivers’ section, was looking at me. He was big, both tall and fat, with a roll of skin where his shirt neck opened. He was smiling and I could see his teeth were uneven and stained.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Your business. You don’t look like you’ve been running long.” His voice was higher-pitched than you’d expect for a man his size, but kind.

I looked past him, at the door. “About two weeks.”

He nodded. “Rough. You running from your parents?”

“My dad. My mom cut out long ago.”

He pushed his spoon around the countertop with his finger. The nails were long with grease crusted under them. “How old are you, kid?”

“Seventeen.”

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t care what you think. It’s true. I turned seventeen lousy years old yesterday.” The tears started to come and I blinked hard, got them back under control.

“What you been doing since you left home?”

The tea had gotten as dark as it was going to. I pulled the tea bag and spooned sugar into the cup. “I’ve been hitching, panhandling a little, some odd jobs. Last two days I picked apples—twenty-five cents a bushel and all I could eat. I also got some clothes out of it.”

“Two weeks and you’re out of your own clothes already?”

I gulped down half the tea. “I only took what I was wearing.” All I was wearing when I walked out of the Stanville Public Library.

“Oh. Well, my name’s Topper. Topper Robbins. What’s yours?”

I stared at him. “Davy,” I said, finally.

“Davy …?”

“Just Davy.”

He smiled again. “I understand. Don’t have to beat me about the head and shoulders.” He picked up his spoon and stirred his coffee. “Well, Davy, I’m driving that PtetroChem tanker out there and I’m headed west in about forty-five minutes. If you’re going that way, I’ll be glad to give you a ride. You look like you could use some food, though. Why don’t you let me buy you a meal?”

The tears came again then. I was ready for cruelty but not kindness. I blinked hard and said, “Okay. I’d appreciate the meal and the ride.”

An hour later I was westbound in the right-hand seat of Topper’s rig, drowsing from the heat of the cab and the full stomach. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, tired of talking. Topper tried to talk a little more after that, but stopped. I watched him out of narrowed eyes. He kept turning his head to look at me when the headlights from oncoming traffic lit the cab’s interior. I thought I should feel grateful, but he gave me the creeps.

After a while I fell asleep for real. I came awake with a start, unsure of where I was or even who. There was a tremor running through my mind, a reaction to a bad dream, barely remembered. I narrowed my eyes again and my identity and associated memories came back.

Topper was talking on the CB.

“I’ll meet you behind Sam’s,” he was saying. “Fifteen minutes.”

“Ten-four, Topper. We’re on our way.”

Topper signed off.

I yawned and sat up. “Jeeze. Did I sleep long?”

“About an hour, Davy.” He smiled like there’d been a joke. He turned off his CB then and turned the radio to a country and western station.

I hate country and western.

Ten minutes later he took an exit for a farm road far from anywhere.

“You can let me out here, Topper.”

“I’m going on kid, just have to meet a guy first. You don’t want to hitch in the dark. Nobody’ll stop. Besides, it looks like rain.”

He was right. The moon had vanished behind a thick overcast and the wind was whipping the trees around.

“Okay.”

He drove down the rural two-lane for a while, then pulled off the road at a country store with two gas pumps out front. The store was dark but there was a gravel lot out back where two pickups were parked. Topper pulled the rig up beside them.

“Come on, kid. Want you to meet some guys.”

I didn’t move. “That’s okay. I’ll wait for you here.”

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s against company policy to pick up riders, but my ass would really be grass if I left you in here and something happened. Be a sport.”

I nodded slowly. “Sure. Don’t mean to be any trouble.”

He grinned again, big. “No trouble.”

I shivered.

To climb down, I had to turn and face the cab, then feel with my feet for the step. A hand guided my foot to the step and I froze. I looked down. Three men were standing on my side of the truck. I could hear gravel crunching as Topper walked around the front of the rig. I looked at him. He was unbuckling his jeans and pulling down his zipper.

I yelled and scrambled back up to the cab, but strong hands gripped my ankles and knees, dragging me back down. I grabbed onto the chrome handle by the door with both hands as tight as I could, flailing my legs to try and break their grip. Somebody punched me in the stomach hard and I let go of the handle, the air in my lungs, and my supper all at once.

“Jesus fucking Christ. He puked all over me!” Somebody bit me again as I fell.

They grabbed my arms and carried me over to the open tailgate of a pickup. They slammed me down on the bed of the truck. My face hit and I tasted blood. One of them jumped up on the truck bed and straddled my back, his knees and shins pinning my upper arms, one hand gripping my hair painfully. I felt somebody else reach around and unbuckle my belt, then rip my pants and underwear down. The air was cold on my butt and upper legs.

A voice said, “I wish you’d gotten another girl.”

Another voice said, “Who brought the Vaseline?”

“Shit. It’s in the truck.”

“Well … we don’t need it.”

Somebody reached between my legs and pawed my genitals; then I felt him spread the cheeks of my butt and spit. His warm saliva splattered my bottom and …

I pitched forward, the pressure off my arms and hair, the hands off my bottom. My head banged into something and I struck out to hit my hand against something which gave. I turned, clutched at my pants, pulled them up from my knees, while I sobbed for air, my heart pounding and my entire body shaking.

It was dark, but the air was still and I was alone. I wasn’t outside anymore. A patch of moonlight came through a window six feet away to shine on bookshelves. I tasted blood again, gingerly touched my split upper lip. I walked carefully down to the patch of light and looked around.

I pulled a book from the shelf and opened it. The stamp on the inside cover told me what I already knew. I was back in the fiction section of the Stanville Public Library and I was sure I’d gone mad.

That was the second time.

The first time I ended up in the library, it was open, I wasn’t bleeding, my clothes were clean, and I just walked away … from that building, from that town, from that life.

I thought I’d pulled a blank. I thought that whatever my father did to me was so terrible that I’d simply chosen not to remember it. That I’d only come back to myself after reaching the safety of the library.

The thought of pulling a blank was scary, but it wasn’t strange to me. Dad pulled blanks all the time and I’d read enough fiction to be familiar with trauma-induced amnesia.

I was surprised that the library was closed and dark this time. I checked the wall clock. It read two o’clock, an hour and five minutes later than the digital clock in Topper’s truck. Jesus Christ I shivered in the library’s air-conditioning and fumbled at my pants. The zipper was broken but the snap worked. I buckled the belt an extra notch tight, then pulled my shirt out so it hung over the zipper. My mouth tasted of blood and vomit.

The library was lit from without by pale white moonlight and the yellow glare of mercury streetlamps. I threaded my way between shelves, chairs, tables to the water fountain and rinsed my mouth again and again until the taste was gone from my mouth and the bleeding of my lip had stopped.

In two weeks I’d worked my way over nine hundred miles from my father. In one heartbeat I’d undone that, putting myself fifteen minutes away from the house. I sat down on a hard wooden chair and put my head in my hands. What had I done to deserve this?

There was something I wasn’t dealing with. I knew it. Something …

I’m so tired. All I want is to rest. I thought of all the snatches of sleep I’d had over the last two weeks, miserable stolen moments on rest-stop benches, in people’s cars, and under bushes like some animal. I thought of the house, fifteen minutes away, of my bedroom, of my bed.

A wave of irresistible longing came over me and I found myself standing and walking, without thought, just desire for that bed. I went to the emergency exit at the back, the one with the ALARM WILL SOUND sign. I figured by the time any alarm was answered, I could be well away.

It was chained. I leaned against it and hit it very hard, an overhand blow with the back of my hand. I drew back, tears in my eyes, to hit it again but it wasn’t there and I pitched forward, off balance and flailing, into my bed

I knew it was my bed I think it was the smell of the room that told me first, but the backlit alarm-clock face on the bedside table was the one Mom sent the year after she left and the light from the back porch light streamed through the window at just the right angle.

For one brief moment I relaxed, utterly and completely, muscle after muscle unknotting. I closed my eyes and felt exhaustion steal over me in a palpable wave. Then I heard a noise and I jerked up, rigid, on the bedspread on my hands and knees. The sound came again. Dad … snoring.

I shuddered. It was. strange. It was a very comforting sound. It was home, it was family. It also meant the son of a bitch was asleep.

I took off my shoes and padded down the hall. The door was half open and the overhead light was on. He was sprawled diagonally across the bed, on top of the covers, both shoes and one sock off, his shirt unbuttoned. There was an empty bottle of scotch tucked in the crook of his arm. I sighed.

Home sweet home.

I grabbed the bottle neck and pulled it gently from between his arm and his side, then set it on the bedside table. He snored on, oblivious. I took his pants off then, pulling the legs alternately to work them past his butt. They came free abruptly and his wallet fell from the back pocket. I hung the pants over the back of a chair, then went through the wallet.

He had eighty bucks plus his plastic. I took three twenties, then started to put it on the dresser, but stopped. When I folded the wallet, it seemed stiffer than it should, and thicker. I looked closer. There was a hidden compartment covered by a flap with fake stitching. I got it open and nearly dropped the wallet. It was full of hundred-dollar bills.

I turned the light off and carried the wallet back to my room, where I counted twenty-two crisp hundred-dollar bills onto the bed.

I stared down at the money, four rows of five, one row of two, my eyes wide. My ears were burning and my stomach suddenly hurt. I went back to Dad’s room and stared at him for a while.

This was the man who took me to the mission and the secondhand stores to buy clothes for school. This was the man who made me take peanut butter and jelly to school every day rather than part with a crummy ninety cents’ worth of lunch money. This was the man who beat me when I’d suggested an allowance for doing the yard work.

I picked up the empty scotch bottle and hefted it, shifted my grip to the neck. It was cold, smooth, and just the right size for my small hands. The glass didn’t slip or shift as I swung it experimentally. The glass at the base of the bottle was extra thick where the manufacturer had chosen to give the impression of a bigger bottle. It looked very strong.

Dad snored away, his mouth open, his face slack. His skin, pale normally, looked white as paper in the overhead light. His forehead, receding, domed, lined, looked egglike, white, fragile. I felt the base of the bottle with my left hand. It felt more than heavy enough.

Shit.

I put the bottle back down on the table, turned off the light, and went back to my room.

I took notebook paper, cut it dollar-bill-size, and stacked it until it felt as thick as the pile of hundreds. It took twenty sheets to match the stiffness of the money—maybe it was thicker or just newer. I put the cut paper in the wallet and put it back in the pocket of his slacks.

Then I went to the garage and took down the old leather suitcase, the one Granddad gave me when he retired, and packed it with my clothes, toiletries, and the leather-bound set of Mark Twain that Mom left me.

After I’d closed the suitcase, stripped off my dirty clothes, and put on my suit, I just stood looking around the room, swaying on my feet. If I didn’t start moving soon, I’d drop.

There was something else, something I could use….

I thought of the kitchen, only thirty feet away, down the hall and across the den. Before Mom left, I’d loved to sit in there while she cooked, just talking, telling her stupid jokes. I closed my eyes and pictured it, tried to feel it.

The air around me changed, or maybe it was just the noise. I was in a quiet house, but just the sound of my breathing reflecting off walls sounded different from room to room.

I was in the kitchen.

I nodded my head slowly, tiredly. Hysteria seethed beneath the surface, a rising bubble that threatened to undo me. I pushed it down and looked in the refrigerator.

Three six-packs of Schlitz, two cartons of cigarettes, half a pizza in the cardboard delivery box. I shut the door and thought about my room. I tried it with my eyes open un-focused, picturing the spot between my desk and the window.

I was there and the room reeled, my eyes and maybe my inner ear just not ready for the change. I put my hand on the wall and the room stopped moving.

I picked up the suitcase and closed my eyes. I opened them in the library, dark shadows alternating with silver pools of moonlight. I walked to the front door and looked out at the grass.

Last summer, before school, I'd come up to the library, check out a book or two, and then move outside, to the grass under the elms. The wind would ruffle the pages, tug my hair and clothes around, and I would go into the words, find the cracks between the sentences and the words would go away, leaving me in the story, the action, the head of other people. Twice I left it too late and got home after Dad did. He liked supper ready. Only twice, though. Twice was more than enough.

I closed my eyes and the wind pushed my hair and fluttered my tie. The suitcase was heavy and I had to switch hands several times as I walked the two blocks to the bus station.

There was a bus for points east at 5:30 A.M. I bought a ticket to New York City for one hundred and twenty-two dollars and fifty-three cents. The clerk took the two hundreds without comment, gave me my change, and said I had three hours to wait.

They were the longest three hours I’ve ever spent. Every fifteen minutes I got up, dragged the suitcase to the bathroom, and splashed cold water in my face. Near the end of the wait the furniture was crawling across the floor, and every movement of the bushes outside the doors was my father, belt in hand, the buckle razor-edged and about the size of a hubcap.

The bus was five minutes late. The driver stowed my suitcase below, took the first part of my ticket, and ushered me aboard.

When we passed the tattered city-limits sign, I closed my eyes and slept for six hours.

TWO

When I was twelve, just before Mom left, we went to New York City for a week. It was a terrible and wonderful trip. Dad was there for his company, all his days spent in meetings and business lunches. Mom and I went to museums, Chinatown, Macy’s, Wall Street, and rode the subway all the way out to Coney Island.

At night they fought, over dinner, at the one play we went to, and in the hotel room. Dad wanted sex and Mom wouldn’t, even after I was asleep, because the company was footing the bill for one room only and I was on a rollaway in the corner. Three times during that week he made me get dressed and go down and wait in the lobby for thirty minutes while they did it. The third time, I don’t think they did, though, ’cause Mom was crying in the bathroom when I came back and Dad was drinking, something he never did in front of my mother. Not usually.

The next day I saw that Mom had a bruise on her right cheekbone and she walked funny—not limping on any particular side, but like it hurt to move either leg.

Two days after we got back from New York, I came home from school and Mom was gone.

Anyway, I really liked New York. It seemed a good place to start over—a good place to hide.

“I’d like a room.”

The place was a dive, a transients’ hotel in Brooklyn, ten blocks from the nearest subway stop. I’d picked it with the help of the Pakistani cabdriver who drove me from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He’d stayed there himself.

The clerk was an older man, maybe my dad’s age, reading a Len Deighton novel through half-glasses. He lowered the book and tilted his head forward to look at me over the

“Too young,” he said. “You’re a runaway, I’ll bet.”

I put a hundred down on the counter, my hand still on it, like Philip Marlowe.

He laughed and put his hand on it. I lifted my hand away.

He looked at it closely, rubbing it between his fingers. Then he handed me a registration card and said, “Forty-eight a night, five-buck key deposit, bathroom’s down the hall, payment in advance.”

I gave him enough money for a week. He looked at the other hundreds for a moment, then gave me the room key and said, “Don’t deal here. I don’t care what you do away from the hotel, but if I see anything that looks like a deal, &Iota;’ll turn you myself.”

My jaw dropped open and I stared at him. “You mean drugs?”

“No—candy.” He looked at me again. “Okay. Maybe you don’t. But if I see anything like that at all, you’re history.”

My face was red and I felt like I’d done something wrong, even though I hadn’t. “I don’t do stuff like that,” I said, stammering.

I hated feeling like that.

He just shrugged. “Maybe not. I’m just warning you. And don’t bring any tricks here either.”

A memory of rough hands grabbing me and pulling down my pants made me cringe. “I don’t do that either!” I could feel a knot in my throat and tears were dangerously close to the surface.

He just shrugged again.

I carried my suitcase up six flights of stairs to the room and sat on the narrow bed. The room was ratty, with peeling wallpaper and the stench of old cigarette smoke, but the door and the door frame were steel and the lock seemed new.

The window looked out on an alley, a sooty brick wall five feet across the gap. I opened it and the smell of something rotting drifted in. I stuck my head out and saw bagged garbage below, half of it torn open and strewn about the alley. When I turned my head to the right I could see a thin slice of the street in front of the hotel.

I thought about what the clerk had said and I got mad again, feeling small, diminished. Why’d he have to make me feel like that? I was happy, excited about being in New York, and he jerked me around like that. Why did people have do that sort of shit?

Wouldn’t anything ever work out right?

“I don’t care how talented, smart, bright, hardworking, or perfect you are. You don’t have a high school diploma or a GED and we can’t hire you. Next!”

“Sure we hire high school kids. You seem pretty bright to me. Just let me have your social security number for the W2 and we’ll be all set. You don’t have a social security number? Where you from, Mars? You come back with a social security number and I’ll give you a try. Next!”

“This is the application for a social security number. Fill it out and let me see your birth certificate. You don’t have your birth certificate? Get it and come back. No exceptions. Next!”

“I’m sorry, but in this state, if you’re under eighteen, you must have parental permission to take the GED. If you’re under seventeen it takes a court order. You come back with your mother or father, and a birth certificate or New York driver’s license, and you can take it. Next!”

There is a point where you have to give up, at least for a while, and all you want to do is shut down. I rode the subway back to Brooklyn Heights, and walked numbly in the direction of my hotel.

It was late afternoon, heavily overcast, and the dingy, gray street seemed entirely appropriate to my mood.

God damn them! Why did they have to make me feel so little? With every interview, every rejection, I’d felt guiltier and guiltier. Ashamed of something but I didn’t know what. I kicked out at a piece of trash in the gutter and stubbed my toe on the curb. I blinked rapidly, my eyes blurring, the breath harsh in my throat. I wanted to just crawl into bed and hide.

I took a small cross street to get over to the avenue the hotel was on. The street was narrow, making it even darker, and there were plastic bags of garbage piled on the sidewalks, up against the stoops of old brownstone buildings. I didn’t know why they called these row houses brownstones; most of them were painted green or red or yellow. The garbage was piled so high before one building I had to step out into the street to pass. When I stepped back on the sidewalk, a man stepped out from a doorway and came toward me.

“You got a subway token to spare? Any change?”

I’d seen lots of panhandlers that day, mostly around the subway stations. They made me nervous, but those hungry days hitching away from Dad were still fresh in my memory. I remembered people walking past me as if I didn’t exist. I dug into my pocket for the sixth time that day while I said, “Sure.”

My hand was coming out of the pocket when I heard a noise behind me. I started to look around and my head exploded.

There was something sticky between my cheek and the cold, gritty surface I was lying on. My right knee hurt and there was something about the way I was lying that didn’t seem right, like I’d been especially careless in going to bed. I tried to open my eyes but my left one seemed stuck shut. The right one looked at a rough concrete surface.

A sidewalk.

Memory and pain returned at the same time. I groaned.

There was the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk and I thought about the muggers. I jerked heavily up onto all fours, my head throbbing like the dickens, my sore knee becoming even more so as I put weight on it. The sticky stuff on the sidewalk was blood.

Standing seemed impossible so I turned over and sat, my back to a row of garbage cans. I looked up and saw a woman carrying two grocery bags slowing down as she walked around the giant pile of garbage bags and saw me.

“My gawd! Are you okay? What happened to you?”

I blinked my open eye and put my head in my hands. The effort of sitting up made a sharp, throbbing pain stab at the back of my head.

“I think I was hit from behind.” I felt for my front pocket, where I’d been carrying my money. “And robbed.”

I pulled the lids of my left eye apart with my fingers. My eye was okay, just stuck shut with blood. I carefully touched the back of my head. There was a large lump there, wet. My fingers came away red.

Great. I was in a strange city with no money, no job, no family, and no prospects. That stabbing pain at the back of my head didn’t compare with the hurt of somehow feeling I deserved this.

If I’d only been better as a kid. Maybe Mom wouldn’t have gone, Dad wouldn’t drink so much….

“My apartment is just two doors down. I’ll call nine-one-one.” The woman didn’t wait for a response. I watched her hurry past, a container of Mace in her hand, connected to her key chain. As she walked down the sidewalk, she stayed away from the buildings, checking the doorways as she went by.

Smart. Much smarter than me.

911. That meant police. I’m a minor and a runaway. I have no ID and I don’t want my parents notified.

I thought about my hotel room, still three blocks away. I didn’t even feel like standing, much less walking three more blocks. I knew I’d feel safer there. I thought about my arrival there, of the steel door with the good lock, of the torn wallpaper. It was even paid up for three more days.

I closed my eyes and jumped.

The hotel floor was warmer than the sidewalk and I felt much safer. I edged over to the bed and pulled myself up, slowly and carefully.

I got blood on the pillow but I didn’t care.

Around midnight I went down to the bathroom, walking carefully, like my Dad after a night of drinking. It was empty. I locked the door, then ran a bath while I peed.

In the mirror I looked like something out of a slasher movie. Blood had run across my hair from the scalp wound, matting it and making the light brown stuff black and nasty. The upper left side of my face had also lain in the blood where it pooled and it was patchy, flaking off and leaving the skin underneath discolored. I shuddered.

If I’d felt well enough to walk back to the hotel, I doubt I would have made it without the police being called every block.

I got into the tub, amazed that there was hot water. The last two days it had been tepid at best. I eased onto my back and lowered the back of my head into the water. There was a slight stinging but the heat felt good. I worked soap into the hair gently, and washed my face. When I sat up, the water in the tub was brownish red. I rinsed the soap and residual blood out of my hair with the tub’s faucet, and was drying off when someone tried the door.

“I’m almost done,” I said.

A voice from the other side of the door said loudly, “Well hurry it up, man. You got no right to be hogging the toilet all night.”

I scrubbed harder and decided to let the hair dry by itself.

There was a loud noise, like someone hit the door with the flat of their hand. “Come ooooonnnnn. Open the fucking door!”

“I’m getting dressed,” I said.

“Fuck. I don’t care about that—let me in, you little faggot, so I can pee.”

I got angry. “There are bathrooms on the other floors. Go use one of them!”

There was a brief pause.

“I’m not going to no other bathroom, shithead. And if you don’t let me in right now, I’m going to hurt you real bad.”

My jaws hurt and I realized I was grinding my teeth together. Why can‘t they leave me alone? “So,” I finally said. “You gonna wait there, with a full bladder, or you gonna go find someplace to pee?”

“I’m not going anywhere, little fucker, until I carve a piece of your ass.”

I heard a splashing sound and yellow liquid began running under the door. I picked up my clothes and, without dressing, jumped back to my hotel room.

My heart was pounding and I was still angry—“pissed off,” you might say. I opened my door a crack and looked down the hallway to the bathroom.

A tall Anglo, heavily muscled and wearing nothing but jeans, was zipping up his pants. Then he hit the door again and shook the doorknob.

From one of the other rooms, someone said, “Shut up already!”

The man at the bathroom said, “Come and fucking make me!” He continued to pound on the door while he reached into his back pocket for something. When he brought it out he flicked his wrist and something shiny flashed in the hall’s dim light.

Jesus Christ.

I still felt scared, but the more I looked down the hall, the angrier I got. I put my clothes on the bed and jumped back into the bathroom.

The pounding on the door was deafening. I flinched away from the force of it, then picked up the trash can from the floor and dumped its few paper towels out onto the floor. Next I filled it with bloody, soapy water from the tub and propped it above the doorway, on the arm of the spring-loaded mechanism that closed the door. I studied it critically, my heart still beating, my breath hard to catch. I shifted it slightly to the right.

Then, one hand on the lock catch, I turned off the light, unlocked the door, and jumped back to the hotel room.

I opened the door just in time to see him rattle the doorknob, find it was loose, and push forcefully into the room. There was a dull thud and water splashed out into the hall. In the middle of that he yelled and slipped on the floor, his head and shoulder coming into view as he slammed down on his back. He grabbed at his head with both hands in a manner I could identify with, if not sympathize. I didn’t see where the knife had gone, but he wasn’t holding it at the moment.

Other doors opened slowly in the hall and heads cautiously peered around doorjambs. I shut my door softly and locked it.

For the first time since I arrived in that hotel, I smiled.

Well, it was time to face it. I was different. I was not the same as my classmates from Stanville High School, not unless some of them were keeping a pretty big secret.

I saw several possibilities.

The first was that Dad had really given it to me that last time, inducing brain damage or other trauma to the point where I was dreaming the whole mess. Maybe even my mugging was just a detail added by my subconscious to correlate with the “real” injuries. I could be lying in the St. Mary’s Hospital intensive care unit back in Stanville, a little screen going beep, beep, beep over my still form. I doubted this, though. Even in my most terrifying nightmares I’ve had an awareness of the dream state. The stench of the garbage from the alleyway seemed too real.

The second possibility was that I’d done most of the things I remembered and most of the bad things that had happened to me had. My mind just warped reality in dealing with the results, giving to me the more palatable alternative of escape by a singular paranormal ability. This seemed more likely. Each time I’d “jumped” there was a feeling of unreality, of disorientation. This could be my shift into an irrational psychosis, an adjustment to a nasty reality. On the other hand, it could be the result of every sense reeling as the environment surrounding me changed completely. Hell—the very nature of the jump could be disorienting.

It was this third possibility that I distrusted the most. The one that meant I might finally be someone special. Not special in the sense of special education, not special in the sense of being a problem child, but unique, with a talent that, if anybody else had it, they hid. A talent for teleportation.

There, I’d thought the word. Teleportation.

“Teleportation.”

Aloud it vibrated in the room, a word of terrible import, alien to normal concepts of reality, brought into existence only under special circumstances, in the framework of fiction, film, and video.

And if I was teleporting, then how? Why me? What was it about me that made me able to teleport? And could anybody else? Is that what happened to Mom? Did she just teleport away from us?

Suddenly my stomach went hollow and I began breathing rapidly. Jesus Christ! What if Dad can teleport?

Suddenly the rooms seemed unsafe and I pictured him appearing before me, the belt in his hand, anywhere, anytime.

Get a grip. I’d never seen him do anything like that. Instead, I’d seen him stumble down the street a half mile to the Country Corner, to buy beer when he’d run out, hardly able to walk or talk. If he could teleport, surely he’d have used it then.

I sat on the narrow bed and dressed myself, putting on my most comfortable clothes, With extreme care, I combed my hair, checking the result in the tiny mirror on the wall. The bump, still large and aching, looked like a barber’s mistake. There was some slight seepage of blood, but it wasn’t really visible through the hair.

I wanted some aspirin and I wanted to know if I was crazy. I stood up and thought about the medicine cabinet in our house. It was funny that I still thought about it as our house, I wonder what my dad would say about that?

I didn’t know what time it was, other than after midnight. I wondered if Dad was asleep, awake, or even home. I compromised and thought, instead, of the large oak tree in the corner of the backyard. It was another place I used to read. It was also a place I used to go when Mom and Dad fought, where I couldn’t hear the words, even though the volume and anger still carried that far.

I jumped and my eyes opened on a yard that needed mowing. I’ll bet that pisses him off. I tried picturing him behind the mower, but I just couldn’t. I’d done the lawn since I was eleven. He used to sit on the back porch with a beer in his hand and point out the spots I missed.

The house was dark. I moved carefully along until I could see the driveway. His car wasn’t there. I pictured the bathroom and jumped again.

The light was out. I flipped the switch and took a bottle of ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet. It was half full. I took a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and some gauze pads as well.

I jumped to the kitchen then, because I was hungry and to see if I still could. He’d bought groceries since the night I’d left for New York. I made myself two ham-and-cheese sandwiches and put them and the stuff from the bathroom in a paper bag I took from the pantry. Then I carefully cleaned up, trying to make it no more clean or messy than I’d found it. I drank two glasses of milk, then washed the glass and put it back in the cabinet.

There was the sound of tires in the driveway, that old sound of dread and tension. I picked up the bag and jumped back to the backyard. I didn’t turn off the light, because he would have seen it through the window. I hoped he’d think he’d left it on himself, but I doubted it. He used to scream at me enough for leaving the lights on.

I watched the lights go on down the length of the house—front hall, living room, back hallway. The light in his bedroom went on, then off again. Then the light in my room went on and I saw him silhouetted in the window, a dark outline through the curtains. The light went out then and he walked back to the kitchen. He checked the back door to see if it was locked. I could see his face through the window, puzzled. He started to open the door and I ducked around the trunk of the oak.

“Davy?” he called out, barely raising his voice above conversational level. “Are you out there?”

I remained perfectly still.

I heard his feet scrape on the back porch and then the door shut again. I peered around the trunk and saw him through the kitchen window, taking a beer from the refrigerator. I sighed and jumped to the Stanville Library.

There was a couch with a coffee table in Periodicals that was away from the windows and had one of the lights they left on above it. That’s where I ate my sandwiches, feet propped up, chewing and staring off into the dark corners. When I was done eating I washed three ibuprofen down at the water fountain, then used the bathroom.

It was a relief not having to worry about someone crashing through the door. I soaked a few gauze pads with hydrogen peroxide and dabbed at the cut on the back of my head. It stung more than the time before and the pad came away with fresh blood. I winced, but cleaned it as best I could. I didn’t want to end up in a hospital with an infection.

I bagged the ibuprofen, gauze, and peroxide, then flushed the used gauze down the toilet. I jumped, then, back to my hotel room in Brooklyn.

My head hurt and I was tired, but sleep was the last thing in the world on my mind.

It was time to see what I could do.

THREE

In Washington Square Park I appeared before a bench that I’d sat upon two days previously. There was a man lying on it, shaking from the cold. He had newspapers tucked around his legs and his fists knotted in the collar of a dirty suit jacket, pulling it close around his neck. He opened his eyes, saw me, and screamed.

I blinked and took a step away from the bench. He sat up, grabbing for his newspapers before they blew away in the light breeze. He stared at me, wild-eyed, still shivering.

I jumped back to the hotel room in Brooklyn and took the blanket from the bed, then jumped back to the park.

He screamed again when I appeared, shrinking back onto the bench. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.” He repeated it over and over again.

Moving slowly, I put the blanket on the other end of his bench, then walked away down the walk to MacDougal Street. When I’d walked fifty feet or so, I looked back at the bench. He’d picked up the blanket and wrapped it around himself, but he wasn’t lying down yet. I wondered if someone was going to steal it from him before morning.

As I neared the street, two men, dark figures silhouetted by the streetlights, blocked my path.

I looked over my shoulder so I wouldn’t be taken by surprise again.

“Give us your wallet and your watch.” There was the gleam of a knife in the streetlight; the other man hefted a length of something heavy and hard.

“Too late,” I said. And jumped.

I appeared in the Stanville Library, back in front of the shelf that went from “Ruedinger, Cathy” to “Wells, Martha.” I smiled. I hadn’t had any particular destination in mind when I’d jumped, only escape. Every time I’d jumped from immediate, physical danger, I’d come here, to the safest haven I knew.

I mentally listed all the places I’d teleported to and considered them.

They were all places I’d frequented before jumping to them, either recently, in the case of Washington Square and the New York hotel, or repeatedly over a long period of time. They were places I could picture in my mind. I wondered if that was all it took.

I went to the card catalog and looked up New York. There was a listing under guidebooks, Dewey decimal 917.-471. This led me to the 1986 Foster’s Guide to New York City. On page 323 there was a picture of the lake in Central Park, in color, with a bench and trash can in the foreground, the Loeb Boathouse to one side.

When Mom and I were touring New York, she wouldn’t let us go farther into Central Park than the Metropolitan Museum on the park’s east side. She’d heard too many stories of muggers and rapes, so we didn’t get to see the boathouse. I’d never been there.

I stared at the picture until I could close my eyes and see it.

I jumped and opened my eyes.

I hadn’t moved. I was still standing in the library.

Hmph.

I flipped the pages and tried the same thing with other places I hadn’t been—Bloomingdale’s, the Bronx Zoo, the interior of the base of the Statue of Liberty. None of them worked.

Then I hit a picture of the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

“Look, Mom, that’s the Chrysler Building and you can see the World Trade Center and …

“Shhhh, Davy. Modulate your voice, please.”

That was Mom’s expression, “Modulate your voice.” Much kinder than saying “Shut up” or “Pipe down” or my dad’s “Shut your hole. “We’d gone there the second day of that trip and stayed up there an hour. Before I hit the picture I hadn’t realized what an impression it made on me. I thought I only had hazy memories of it at best. But now I could remember it clearly.

I jumped and my ears popped, like they do when you take off and land in an airliner. I was standing there, the cold wind off the East River blowing my hair and ruffling the pages of the guidebook I still held in my hands. It was deserted. I looked down into the book and saw that the hours were listed as 9:30 to midnight.

So, I could jump to places I’d been, which was a relief in a way. If Dad could teleport, he wouldn’t be able to jump into my hotel room in Brooklyn. He’d never been there.

The view was confusing, all the buildings lit, their actual outlines nebulous and blurring together. I saw a distant green floodlit figure and things fell into place. Liberty Island was south of the Empire State and I looked down Fifth Avenue toward Greenwich Village and downtown. The twin towers of the World Trade Center should have clued me in.

I could remember Mom feeding quarters into the mounted telescope so I could see the Statue of Liberty. We didn’t go out to the island because Mom was queasy on boats.

I felt a wave of sorrow. Where had Mom gone?

I jumped, then, back to the library and replaced the guidebook on the shelf.

So, was it just any place I’d been?

My granddad, my mother’s father, retired to a small house in Florida. My mom and I visited only once, when I was eleven. We were going to go again the next summer, but Mom left in the spring. I had a vague memory of a brightly painted house with white tile on the roof, and a canal in the back with boats. I tried to picture the living room but all I could picture was Granddad in this indefinite, generic sort of room. I tried to jump anyway, and it didn’t work.

Hmph.

Memory was important, apparently. I had to have a clear picture of the place, gained from actually being there.

I thought of another experiment to make.

I jumped.

On Forty-fifth Street there is store after store specializing in electronics. Stereo equipment, video equipment, computers, electronic instruments. Everybody was closed when I appeared at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth, including the vendor of Italian ice that I’d patronized the day before.

I could see into the stores, though, their interiors lit for security or display purposes. There were steel bars lowered over most of the windows, secured with massive padlocks, but you could peer between them.

I stopped before one store with wider bars and better lighting than most. I studied the floor, the walls, the way the shelves were arranged, the merchandise closest to the window.

I had a very real sense of location. I was here on the sidewalk just six feet from the inside of the store. I could picture it clearly in my mind. I looked up the street both ways, closed my eyes, and jumped.

Two things happened. First, I appeared inside the store, inches from hundreds of bright, shiny electronic toys. Second, within an instant of my appearance, a siren, very loud and strident, went off both inside and outside the store, followed by the blinding flash of an electronic strobe which lit the interior like a bolt of lightning.

Jesus! I flinched. Then, almost without thought, I jumped back to the Stanville Library.

My knees felt weak. I sat, quickly, on the floor and shook for over a minute.

What was the matter with me? It was just an alarm, some sort of motion detector. I didn’t have this reaction when the two thugs in Washington Square accosted me.

I calmed down. That hadn’t been so unexpected, so abrupt. I took several deep breaths. I could probably have stayed there, transferred several VCRs back to my hotel room, before the police showed up.

What would I do with them? I wouldn’t know who to sell them to, not without getting ripped off or busted. The very thought of dealing with the kind of people who bought stolen goods made my skin crawl And what about the store owner? Wouldn’t he be hurt? Or would insurance cover it? I started feeling guilty just picturing it.

Another thought set my heart to beating harder and faster. Maybe that flask was for photos? Maybe they have closed-circuit TV cameras set up?

I stood up and started pacing across the library, breathing faster, almost gasping.

“Stop it!” I finally said to myself, my voice loud in the quiet building. How the hell are they going to catch you, even if they had your fingerprints, which they don’t? If they did catch you, what jail would hold you? Hell, no merchandise was stolen, no locks forced, no windows broken. Who’s going to believe there was someone in the store, much less press charges?

Suddenly, like a weight descending on my shoulders, I was exhausted, weaving on my feet. My head began to ache again, and I wanted to sleep.

I jumped to the hotel room and kicked off my shoes. The room was chilly, the radiator barely warm. I looked at the thin sheets on the bed. Inadequate. I thought about the man in Washington Square Park. Is he warm enough?

I jumped into the dark interior of my room in my father’s house, scooped up the quilt from the bed, and jumped back to the hotel room.

Then I slept.

It was midday when noise from the street, a horn I think, woke me. I pulled the quilt higher and looked at the cheap hotel room.

It was Wednesday, so I thought my dad should be at the office. I stood up, stretched, and jumped to the bathroom in the house. I listened carefully, then peered around the corner. Nobody. I jumped to the kitchen and looked out at the driveway. His car wasn’t there. I used the bathroom, then, and had breakfast.

I can’t live off my father forever. The thought made my stomach hurt. What was I going to do about money?

I jumped back to the hotel room and sorted through my clothes for something clean to wear. I was running out of underwear and all of my socks were dirty. I considered going to a store, picking out a selection of clothing, and then jumping without paying the bill. The ultimate shoplifter.

Real class, Davy. I shook my head violently, gathered up all my dirty clothes, and jumped back to my father’s house.

There—more and more, I was thinking of it as his house, not ours. I considered that a good step.

Well, he had left some of his clothes in the washing machine without moving them to the dryer. From the smell of the mildew, they’d been there a couple of days. I piled them on the dryer, then started a load of my clothes.

If it was his house, then why was I there? He owes me at least the odd meal and had of laundry. I refused to feel guilty for taking anything from him.

Of course, while the washer ran, I paced through the house and felt guilty.

It wasn’t the food, or doing laundry. I felt guilty about the twenty-two hundred I took from his wallet. It was stupid. The man made good money but made me wear secondhand clothes. He drove a car that cost over twenty thousand dollars but kept me, so he wouldn’t have to pay my mom child support.

And I still felt guilty. Angry, too.

I thought about trashing the place, tearing up all the furniture, and burning his clothes. I considered coming back tonight, opening his Cadillac’s gas tank and lighting it off. Maybe the house would catch fire, too.

What am I doing? Every minute I stood in that house made me feel angrier. And the angrier I got, the more guilty I felt This is not worth it. I jumped to Manhattan and walked through Central Park, until I was calm again.

After forty minutes, I jumped back to Dad’s house, took the clothes out of the washer and put them in the dryer. Dad’s mildewed clothes I put back in the washing machine.

There was something else I needed from the house. I went down the hall to Dad’s den—his “office.” I wasn’t supposed to go in there, but I was a little past caring about his rules and regulations. I started in the three-drawer filing cabinet, then moved to his desk. By the time the clothes were finished drying, I was finished, too, but I hadn’t found my birth certificate anywhere.

I slammed the last drawer shut, then gathered my dried clothes up and jumped back to the hotel room.

What am I going to do about money?

I put the clothes on the bed, then jumped to Washington Square, in front of the park bench. There was no sign of the sleeper from the night before. Two old women sat there, deep in conversation. They glanced up at me, but kept on talking; I walked down the sidewalk.

I’d tried to get honest work. They wouldn’t take me without a social security number. Most of them also wanted proof of citizenship—either a birth certificate or a voter’s registration. I had none of these. I thought about illegal aliens working in the U.S. How did they get around this problem?

They buy fake documents.

Ah. When I’d walked down Broadway in Time’s Square, several guys had offered me everything from drugs to women to little boys. I bet they’d also know about fake IDs.

But I have no money.

I felt very third world, caught in a trap between needing money to make money and no superpower’s loan in sight. If I didn’t pay my hotel bill the next day, I was also back out on the street. I would need some form of debt relief.

The shriek from the Forty-second Street burglar alarm seemed less frightening in broad daylight. I thought about stealing VCRs or TVs and hocking them at pawn shops, then using the money to try and buy fake ID.

The thought of carrying a VCR into a pawnshop frightened me. I didn’t care that I was uncatchable. If someone was itchy enough I might take a bullet. Perhaps I was being paranoid. If I stole something worth more? Jewelry? Go to the museum and rip off paintings? The more expensive the item, the more chance I had of not making any money from it, getting ripped off or killed.

Maybe the government would hire me?

I shuddered I read Firestarter by Stephen King. I could imagine being dissected to find out how I did this thing. Or drugged so I wouldn’t do it—that’s how they controlled the father in that book. Kept him on drugs so he couldn’t think straight. I wondered if they already had people who could teleport.

Stay away from the government. Don’t let anyone know what I can do!

Well, then—I guessed I’d have to steal money itself.

The Chemical Bank of New York is on Fifth Avenue. I walked in and asked the guard if there was a bathroom in the bank. He shook his head.

“Up the street at the Trump Tower. They have a rest room in the lobby.”

I looked distressed. “Look, I really don’t mean to be a problem, but my dad’s meeting me here in just a few moments, and if I’m not here he’ll kill me, but I really got to pee. Isn’t there an employees’ rest room somewhere?”

I didn’t think he’d buy it, but the lie, plus any mention of my father, was making my distress real. He looked doubtful and I winced, knowing he was going to send me away.

“Ah, what the hell. See that door there?” He pointed to a door past the long line of teller’s windows. “Go through there and straight back. The bathroom is on the right at the end of the hall. If anyone gives you a problem, tell them Kelly sent you.”

I let out a lungful of air. “Thanks, Mr. Kelly. You’ve saved my life.”

I went through the door as if I knew what I was doing. My stomach was churning and I felt sure that everyone who passed me could read my intentions and knew I was a criminal.

The vault was two doors before the bathroom. Its huge steel door hung on hinges larger than myself, open, but a smaller door of bars within was shut and a guard sat before it, at a small table. I paused before him, looking past him to the interior of the vault. He looked up at me.

“Can I help you?” His voice was cold and he stared at me like a high school principal looks at a student without a hall pass.

I stammered, “I’m looking for the bathroom.”

The guard said, “There are no public rest rooms in this bank.”

“Mr. Kelly said I could use the employees’ rest room. It’s kind of an emergency.”

He relaxed a little. “End of the hall then. It’s certainly not here.”

I bobbed my head. “Right. Thank you.” I walked on. I really hadn’t gotten a good enough look. I went into the bathroom and washed my hands.

On the way back I stopped and said, “That sure is a huge door. Do you know how much it weighs?” I stepped a bit closer.

The guard looked annoyed. “A lot. If you’re quite through using the bathroom, I would appreciate it if you returned to the lobby!”

I pivoted. “Oh, certainly.” I stared at the door again from my new angle. I saw carts and a table up against one of vault’s interior doors. The carts had canvas bags on them, as well as stacks of bundled money. Another step and I glimpsed gray steel shelves against another wall.

Got it!

The guard started to stand up. I looked away from the door and saw his face color.

“On my way,” I said. “Thanks for your directions.”

He growled something, but I walked briskly down the hall. As I walked past the lobby guard, I smiled “Thanks, Mr. Kelly.”

He waved and I went out the door.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the library, back in Stanville, first reading the encyclopedia entries under Banks, Bank Robberies, Alarm Systems, Safes, Vaults, Time Locks, and Closed-Circuit Television, then skimming a book on industrial security systems that I found in Applied Technologies.

“David? David Rice?”

I looked up. Mrs. Johnson, my geography teacher from Stanville High School, was walking toward me. I looked at the clock—school had been out for an hour.

I hadn’t been to school in three weeks, ever since the first day I had jumped. I felt my face get hot and I stood up.

“It really is you, David. I’m glad to see you’re all right. Have you gone home then?”

For some reason I was surprised that the school knew I’d run away. I started to agree. It was so much easier to lie, to say I’d come back and that I’d be in school tomorrow. I know that’s what I would have done a month before. Take the path of least resistance. Avoid fuss. Say whatever was necessary to keep people from being mad at me.

I hated for people to be mad at me.

I shook my head “No, ma’am. I haven’t. And I’m not going to.”

She didn’t seem shocked or even surprised “Your father seems very worried. He came up to the school and talked to all your classes, asking if anyone had seen you. He’s also put up those posters … well, you’ve probably seen them around town.”

I blinked, then shrugged. Posters?

“What about school?” she asked. “What are you going to do about classes? How are you going to go to college? Or get a job?”

“I … I guess I’ll have to make other arrangements.” I felt good about not lying to her, but was still afraid she was going to disapprove of me, “I tried to take the GED,” I said. “But they won’t let a seventeen-year-old take it without parental permission or a court order.”

Mrs. Johnson licked her lower lip, then asked, “Where are you staying, David? Are you getting enough to eat?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m okay.”

Her words seemed chosen very carefully. It dawned on me that she wasn’t going to bawl me out for missing school or for running away. It was as if she was trying to avoid spooking me—avoid scaring me off.

“I’m going to phone your father, David. It’s my duty. However, if you like we can talk to the county social worker. You don’t have to go home if you don’t want to.” She hesitated and then finally said, “Does he abuse you, David?”

The tears came then, like an anvil falling out of a clear blue sky. I thought I was fine up until then. I squeezed my eyes shut, and my shoulders were shaking. I kept quiet, stifling the sobs.

Mrs. Johnson took a step toward me, I think to hug me. I recoiled, stepping back and turning away, wiping furiously at my eyes with my right hand.

She dropped her arms to her side. She looked unhappy.

I took a deep, shuddering breath, then two more, the shakes gradually diminishing. “Sorry,” I said.

Mrs. Johnson spoke then, softly, carefully. “I won’t call your father, but only if you come see Mr. Mendoza with me. He”ll know what to do.”

I shook my head. “No. I’m doing okay. I don’t want to go see Mr. Mendoza.”

She looked even more unhappy. “Please, Davy. It’s not safe on the street, even in Stanville, Ohio. We can protect you from your father.”

Oh, yeah? Where were you for the last five years? I shook my head again. This was going nowhere.

“Do you still drive a gray VW, Mrs. Johnson?” I said, looking over her shoulder.

She blinked, surprised by the change of subject. “Yes.”

“I think somebody just hit it.”

She turned her head quickly. Before she figured out that you couldn’t see the parking lot from where we were standing, I jumped back to the Brooklyn hotel.

God damn it all to hell! I threw the industrial-security book across the room, then scrambled to get it, a wave of guilt washing over me, both about getting angry and about mistreating a library book. Books didn’t deserve to be abused … did people?

I curled up on the bed and pulled the pillow over my head.

It was dark when I sat up, dazed and uncomprehending, waking in slow, confusing stages. For a moment I looked around, expecting to find Mrs. Johnson standing over me and telling me many fascinating facts about western Africa, but I woke up a little more and the dim light coming through the thin shade revealed the room, my condition, my state of being.

I stood up and stretched, wondered what time it was, and jumped to the Stanville library to look at their wall clock. It was 9:20 P.M. in Ohio, and the same in New York. Time to get to work.

I jumped to my backyard, behind the oak tree. Dad’s car was in the driveway, but the only lights on were in his room, the den, and my room. What’s he doing with my room? I felt panic rising, but forced it down. Ignore it. You’ll be able to get to your room.

The gardening stuff was in the garage, on a shelf above the lawn mower. Rakes, shovels, and a hoe hung on nails across the wall below the shelf. I appeared before this collection and groped past insecticides, fertilizer, grass seed until my hands closed on the old gardening gloves. I put them on, then jumped to the front driveway.

Dad’s Caddy gleamed in the streetlight, a huge, hulking beast. I walked to the passenger side and tried the door, gently. It was locked. I looked in, at the plush upholstery and the gleaming dash. I could vividly remember the smell of it, the feel of the seats. I closed my eyes and jumped.

The car alarm went off with a whooping shriek, but I was expecting it. I opened the glove compartment and took the flashlight. The porch light came on and the front door started to open. I jumped to my room.

The alarm sounded a great deal quieter from here, but still unpleasant. I was sure that porch lights were coming on all over the neighborhood.

The ski mask was in the bottom drawer of my dresser, buried under several pairs of too-small long underwear. I found it just as the car alarm stopped. I started to jump, then realized I didn’t have the flashlight in my hand. I looked around the room and saw it on the dresser.

The front door shut and I heard footsteps in the hallway. I picked up the flashlight and jumped.

The gloves were leather, old and stiff. They hurt my fingers just to bend them. The ski mask was large enough, even though it was four years old. All the stretch was gone and it was pulled out of shape, but I thought it would work. Positioned right, it covered all of my face except my eyes and the bridge of my nose. The bottom half hung loosely over the rest of my face, but it concealed it.

It itched like hell.

I jumped

I appeared in a pitch black room with dead air and a smooth floor. I waited a moment before I turned on the light, steeling myself for the scream of an alarm. I was also afraid I wasn’t in the right place and didn’t want to rush the moment of failure’s discovery.

I didn’t hear any alarms, though, for all I knew, lights could be flashing on a dozen monitor consoles from the bank all the way to the police station. If there were other teleporters in the world, wouldn’t banks know about them and take measures? Like flooding the vault with poison gas when it was locked? Or booby traps? The air around me turned thick, and the darkness pressed in on me until I thought that perhaps the very walls were moving in. I flicked the flashlight switch without conscious volition.

So much money!

The carts I’d seen earlier were stacked high—either with neatly bundled piles of money or with trays of rolled coins or rough canvas bags with “Chemical Bank of New York” stenciled on their sides. Most of the shelves held bundled stacks of new bills.

I closed my eyes, suddenly dizzy. By the vault door there was a light switch. I turned it on and fluorescent lighting lit the room. There didn’t seem to be any TV cameras in the vault, and I couldn’t see any little boxes on the wall that looked like any of the heat sensors I’d read about that afternoon. No gas flooded from vents. No booby traps sprang into action.

I turned off the flashlight and went to work.

The first cart I came to was obviously from the previous day’s deposits. The money was definitely used, though bundled neatly. I picked up a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills. The paper band wrapped around the middle said “$5,000” and was stamped with the Chemical Bank’s name. There was a cardboard box on another cart. It was filled with packets of one-dollar bills, each packet holding fifty bills. I tried to estimate how deep the stack went, then shook my head. Count later, Davy.

I picked up the box and jumped to the hotel room. I dumped it on the bed, then jumped back.

I started at one end and moved to the other. If the packets looked new, I checked to see if the bills were in serial-number order. If they were I left them. If they weren’t I put them in the box. When the box was full, I jumped to the hotel room, dumped the contents on the bed, and jumped back.

When I was done with the loose money on the carts, I checked the bags. They seemed to be transfer deposits from subbranches, all in used bills. I took all the bags, without checking the contents of the others. Money was already spilling off the edges of the bed so I put the bags on the floor, under the bed.

The shelves held new bills, the range of their serial numbers neatly written on their paper bands. I left them and took a last look around. Still no ringing alarms. The door was solidly shut.

It didn’t matter. If what I had read about time clocks was true, it would take a very special set of circumstances to open the door before the next morning, even if alarms were ringing.

For one brief second I considered leaving a thank-you note, perhaps even some spray-painted graffiti, but decided against it.

I imagined there would be enough excitement the next morning without that.

I jumped.

FOUR

On Times Square the big electronic billboard said it was eleven o’clock. I blinked. I’d done the whole thing in under forty minutes, and that included getting the gloves and the flashlight.

People still swarmed the square, young adults mostly, in pairs and groups. Some of them lined up at movie theaters, others just walked along Broadway looking into the stores that were still open. There was a festival atmosphere like the midway of carnival.

I walked into a shop filled with T-shirts, most of them extolling the virtues of New York City. “Welcome to New York City—Now Leave,” said one. I smiled, even though I was trembling and reaction was making me nauseated.

In my pocket was a packet of twenty-dollar bills, fifty of them. I’d taken off the paper wrapper and made sure I could pull them out one at a time, but I was still nervous. The back of my head, where the muggers had hit me, was aching and I kept looking over my shoulder in almost involuntary twitches.

Christ, Davy, you’re broadcasting victim like crazy. Calm down!

The T-shirt store also sold luggage—cheap nylon bags, duffles, overnighters, sports bags, and backpacks. That’s what I really wanted. I picked up one of each kind and color.

The clerk stared at me, then said, “Hey, kid, unless you’re going to buy all of those, look at one at a time, okay?”

I kept on picking up bags and he came around the end of the counter, an angry expression on his face. “Didn’t you hear me? I said—”

“I heard what you said!” My voice was shrill and loud. The clerk took a step back and blinked. I took a deep breath, then said in a quieter voice, “I’ve got twenty bags here. Ring them up.” I walked over to the counter and put the bags on it.

The clerk still hesitated, so I took some of the twenties out of my jacket pocket—more than I meant to, in fact. Probably half, around five hundred dollars.

“Uh, sure. Sorry I yelled. You know we get some kids in here who shoplift. I’ve got to be careful. Didn’t mean nothing by it. I—”

“Fine. Don’t worry about it. Just ring it up, please.”

As he rang up each bag, I stuffed them into the largest one, a duffel with a shoulder strap.

He must have felt bad about misreading me, because he gave me a ten-percent discount for quantity. “So that comes to two twenty-two fifty with tax.”

I counted off twelve twenty-dollar bills, then said something I’ve always wanted to say. “Keep the change.”

He blinked, then said, “Thanks. Thanks very much.”

I walked out the front of the store, turned right, and jumped.

I sorted the money by denomination first, piling the packets against the wall opposite the bed. I had to move the cheap dresser across the door to give me room, but I didn’t mind. I was feeling pretty paranoid by now, so I hung the quilt over the window shade, completely blocking the window.

By the time I cleared the bed and had reached the bagged money, I had two piles of ones over two feet high, twenty-five packets to a layer. I didn’t stop to figure amounts yet. I continued my sorting, throwing the empty bank bags on the bed. Once, I jumped to the Stanville Library to check the time.

Finally, I finished sorting and stacking. I hadn’t figured amounts yet. That would come later.

I gathered the empty bank bags, then, and put my ski mask and gloves back on. It was 2 A.M.

I took several deep breaths and tried to keep calm. Nervous exhaustion was setting in, though I wasn’t in the least sleepy. I concentrated on the interior of the vault and jumped, trying at the same time to keep the Stanville Library in my mind in case they’d opened the vault.

They hadn’t.

Jeez, I left the light on. I dropped the bank bags on one of the empty carts and turned to turn off the light. Light? Christ! Where’s the flashlight? My heartbeat increased and I felt panic in my throat Oh, God. I don’t need this. I sagged against the wall when I saw the flashlight on the first cart I’d emptied. I knew it didn’t have my fingerprints but it might have Dad’s. And where were you, Mr. Rice, last Friday night?

Right here in Ohio, of course. But I don’t know where my son is ….

I picked the flashlight up, turned off the vault’s lights, and jumped back to the hotel room.

I’d been hurrying, stacking the money so I could take the bags back before morning. I didn’t want them in my possession. I realized that I could get rid of them anywhere. I could even put bricks in them and drop them into the East River, but I thought that there’d be more confusion if I left them in the vault.

As if there isn’t going to be enough confusion as it is.

Still, I’d been in a hurry, so I hadn’t really looked at how much money I’d stolen. I sat back on the bed and stared.

Each layer of the piles was five packets by five. Call it a little over a foot along the wall by two and a half feet out from the wall. There were more ones than any other denomination, three stacks each over four feet high. There was one stack of fives just under two feet high, one stack of tens about a foot and a half high, one stack of twenties about nine inches high, almost one layer of fifty-dollar bills, and seventeen packets of hundred-dollar bills.

I jumped to the Stanville Library and borrowed a calculator from behind the circulation desk. I counted the layers and did all my calculations twice. I did them more than twice if the first two times didn’t match.

There were twenty-five packets per layer. That meant there were, for instance, twelve hundred and fifty dollars per layer of ones and twenty-five thousand dollars per layer of twenties. I had one hundred and fifty-three layers and six packets of ones, which gave me, in singles alone … I dropped the calculator onto my lap and fell back onto the bed shaking.

I had one hundred and ninety-one thousand and four hundred dollars in one-dollar bills. When all the calculations were done and redone, I had a nine hundred fifty-three thousand and fifty dollars, not counting the seven hundred and sixty dollars in my jacket pocket.

Nearly a million dollars.

Since there were seventeen packets of hundred-dollar bills, I divided the five-through-hundred-denomination packets into seventeen of the nylon bags. This gave me almost fifty thousand per bag, give or take a year’s salary. Then I stuffed enough one-dollar packets in each one to fill it the rest of the way up. In some bags this added as little as seven hundred dollars. In some of the bigger bags it added as much as thirty-two hundred dollars. Then I stuffed the last three bags, the larger duffels, with one-dollar packets, until they were almost too heavy to pick up. There was still a pile of ones two feet high. I counted the layers and put it at thirty thousand dollars. Even when I refilled the cardboard box from the vault there was twenty-five hundred dollars left.

Jesus! Where am I going to put this stuff?

From the street outside there was the sound of a siren, an almost continual noise in New York, but this one was closer than most. I stopped breathing. When the sound continued past, I drew in a shuddering breath and cold sweat beaded my forehead. It reminded me how dangerous this neighborhood was. It reminded me of the bathroom incident just down the hall and of my mugging.

Here I was, a rich man for only an hour, and I was paranoid already. Money doesn’t solve all problems, I thought. It just makes new ones.

I wondered what time it was. I’ve got to get a watch! I jumped to the Stanville Library and saw that it was 3:30 A.M. I put the calculator back behind Circulation and was about to jump back when I glanced up.

The Stanville Library was built in 1910, a large granite building with fourteen-foot-high ceilings. I knew this because Ms. Tonovire, the librarian, used to practice her tour on me. When they added air-conditioning to the library, in 1973, they put in a suspended ceiling to cover the ductwork. This was about ten feet high.

I climbed the magazine shelves back in Periodicals and pushed on one of the foot-and-a-half-by-three-foot panels. It lifted up and slid to one side. It was dark above.

I jumped back to the hotel room and moved ten of the bags to the top of that duct, spacing them out to distribute the weight. I also put the box of ones there.

The hotel room seemed empty without the piles of money or the jumble of filled nylon bags. The one bag that was left I zipped shut and slid under the bed. Then I took off my shoes, turned off the light, and lay down.

My body was tired but my brain raced, nervous, excited, exalted, guilty. I don’t want to get caught. Don’t let me get caught! I shifted, trying to make my body comfortable. My mind wouldn’t stop. I kept hearing noises in the street and couldn’t sleep. I tried to reassure myself. How would they catch you? If you spend the money carefully, you’re home free. Besides, they couldn’t keep you, even if they had a clue that you’d done it.

I rolled over on my side.

The library? What if they decide to clean the tops of shelves? Won’t they be suspicious when they find my foot prints in the dust? I shook my head and tried to burrow deeper into the pillow.

I tried deep breathing. It didn’t work. I tried counting backward from a thousand but that brought up images of the money-stacks and stacks of money. The fifty or so thousand dollars under the bed seemed to push at me through the bed, seemed to have a presence that was almost animate. Dammit, it’s just a bag of paper! I pounded the pillow, pushing and rearranging it, then firmly closed my eyes.

An interminable amount of time later, I sighed, sat up, put my shoes back on, and jumped to the library.

Only when I’d dusted the top of every shelf in the building and dawn sunlight was coming in the windows of the library could I put the duster away, jump back to Brooklyn, and fall asleep.

“Well, what kind of watch are you looking for?”

“I want one that lets you see what time it is in several different time zones. It should also have an alarm of some kind, be waterproof, and look classy without being pretentious. I want it to look nice in dressy situations, but I don’t want to be hit over the head every time I walk through a questionable neighborhood, just because I’m wearing it.”

The clerk laughed. He was wearing a closely trimmed beard and a yarmulke, the little circular hat some Jews wear. It was new to me—I’d only seen them before on TV. He spoke. “Given it some thought, I see. What was the price range you wanted?”

“Doesn’t matter. I just want those features.”

The store was on Forty-seventh Street, a jewelry/electronics “boutique.” I’d come here first thing, jumping to the subway at Grand Central Station, then walking the remaining six blocks.

The clerk pulled three different watches out of the case.

“All three of these do what you want—the time zone thing and alarms. This is the cheapest—it’s fifty-five ninety-five.”

I looked at it. “Not very dressy.”

He nodded, very agreeable. “Yeah. These other two are much classier. This one“—he pointed at a watch in gold metal with a gold and silver metal strap—“lists for three hundred and seventy. I think we have it on special for two ninety-five.” He pointed at the other one, a slim watch with a lizard-skin strap. “This one doesn’t look as flashy as the other one, but it’s gold-clad silver where this guy”—he held up the gold-metal-banded watch,— “is anodized stainless steel.”

I prodded the slim watch. “How much?”

He grinned. “Thirteen ninety-six and thirty-five cents.”

I blinked. He started to put the expensive watch away. “I love to watch a customer’s eyes when I tell them that. It’s not as if we’re up on Fifth Avenue. I don’t know why it’s even in the inventory.”

I held up my hand. “I’ll take it.”

“Huh. This one?” He reached for the flashy gold watch with his other hand.

“No. That one, the fourteen-hundred-dollar job. What’s that with tax?” I thought for a moment, then reached into my right front pocket—that’s where I’d put twenty hundred-dollar bills. When I started counting them out onto the counter, he grabbed his calculator quickly.

Behind him a row of televisions of varying size and shape all showed the same program, an afternoon soap opera. It ended and a “News Before the Hour” logo came on, then showed the outside of the Chemical Bank of New York. I stared. Reporters poked microphones at a grim-faced man who was reading from a sheet of paper. None of the sets had the volume on.

The clerk noticed and looked over my shoulder. “Oh, the bank robbery. Won’t be long before they get them.”

My stomach was hurting and I felt like my knees would collapse. I managed to say one word: “Oh?”

“A million dollars gone from the vault from the time they closed it to the time they opened it again? It had to be an inside job. If that money wasn’t there when they opened the safe then it wasn’t there when they closed it.”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“The news broke at eleven-thirty,” he said, counting my change out on the counter. “Apparently a teller tipped the press. There, fifteen hundred and eleven fifty-five out of fifteen twenty leaves eight forty-five.” He looked back at the TV. “Whoever did it is going to have to hold that money for a long time.”

I carefully stowed the change. “Why’s that?”

“Well, all the employees with access are probably going to be watched like hawks. When they spend one penny they can’t account for, whammo!” He handed me the receipt and warranty card for the watch. “You need anything else? A nice VCR? A camcorder? Computer?”

All that neat stuff—but I didn’t have any place to put it yet. “Perhaps later.”

“Any time. Any time at all.”

I ate at the Jockey Club in the Ritz Carlton, just south of the park. The bell captain looked at me funny when I walked through the lobby and down the stairs to the restaurant, but the hostess saw me to a table and acted like it was a pleasure. I picked the most expensive thing on the lunch menu.

While I waited for the food I played with the controls on my watch and watched the other patrons to see how they were dressed and how they acted in a fancy restaurant. There were fresh flowers on each table and the waiter brought hot rolls and butter automatically.

I didn’t have much experience in restaurants—not since Mom left. She’d tried to do more than show me how to eat with my mouth closed, but I was self-conscious.

When the food came, I only ate half of it. There was too much of it and I wasn’t too hungry. The news program had upset me, made me paranoid again.

I tried to pay the waiter when he brought the bill, but he gently corrected me. “I can take this up to the cashier for you, if you wish, or you can just pay on the way out.”

I said I would do that and thought for a moment how he’d guided me without making me feel stupid. If it had been my father he would have said, “Pay the cashier, dip-shit. Don’t you know anything?” The difference was considerable. I left the waiter a twenty-dollar tip.

Paying for a fifty-dollar lunch seemed unreal, just as buying the watch earlier seemed a game. It was like playing with Monopoly money, like playing make-believe.

What would you do, Davy, if you were rich?

I’d be happy. I walked across the street and into Central Park, green and lush, and somehow alien in the middle of all the concrete and steel.

Well, I can try.

PART 2:

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

FIVE

I met Millie during the intermission of a Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It was my sixth time to see it. After paying the first time, I just popped to an alcove at the back of the mezzanine five minutes after eight. The houselights are off by then and I would find a seat without any trouble. If it looked like someone arrived late and was headed for my claimed seat, I would bend down as if to tie my shoe and jump back to the alcove. Then locate another empty seat.

I don’t mind paying, but I often don’t decide until after curtain time that I want to see it. Then the box-office attendant will waste my time trying to get me to buy a ticket for another night. Too much trouble.

This was a Thursday-night show and the crowd was surprisingly heavy. I was pressed against the balcony railing drinking overpriced ginger ale and watching the lines at the bathrooms.

“And what are you smiling about?”

I jerked my head around. For a moment I thought it was one of the ushers about to evict me as a gate crasher, but it was this woman, not much older than me but apparently over twenty-one—at least, she was drinking champagne.

“Are you talking to me?”

“Sure. Maybe that’s presumptuous of me, but in a crowd this dense, intimacy is a foregone conclusion.”

“Well, yes it is. My name is David.”

“Millie,” she said with a vague wave of her hand. She was wearing a dressy blouse and black slacks. She was pretty, wore owl-like glasses, no makeup, and had her shiny, black haircut long on top, then tapering in to the neck. “So what were you smiling about?”

I frowned “Oh … I guess I was feeling a little superior, not having to wait in line. Does this temporary intimacy extend to talking about bathrooms?”

She shrugged. “Why not? I’d be in line myself, but I ducked out in the first act. I’ll probably have to do it again later. What’s your secret? Bladder of iron?”

I turned red. “Something like that.”

“Are you blushing? Wow, I thought teenage males talked about bodily functions continuously. My brothers certainly do.”

“It’s hot in here.”

“Yeah. Okay. We won’t talk about excretory functions anymore. Any other taboo subjects?”

“I’d rather not give you any ideas.”

She laughed. “Touché. You a local?”

“Sort of. I travel a lot, but this is home for now.”

“I’m not I’m here for a week of the touristy stuff. Gotta go back to school in two weeks.”

“Where’s that?”

“Oklahoma State, majoring in psych.”

I thought for a moment. “Stillwater?”

“Yeah. I guess you do travel.”

“Not to Oklahoma. My grandfather went to school there, back when it was Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“I don’t. Haven’t the aptitude.”

She looked over her glasses at me. “You don’t sound particularly stupid.”

I blushed again. “I’m just taking my time.”

The lights began dimming for the second act. She finished her champagne and dropped the plastic glass in the trash. Then she stuck out her hand.

I took it. She pumped it twice firmly and said, “Nice talking to you, David. Enjoy the rest of the show.”

“You too, Millie.”

I cried during the second act. Sweeney’s wife, who’s had her child stolen away from her and has been driven mad by rape, is revealed to be the mad, dissolute street beggar/ prostitute, but only after Sweeney kills her when she witnesses the murder of her rapist, Judge Turpin.

The first time I saw this scene I decided I didn’t like it. I went away, in fact, with a very negative impression of the show. It was only after I found myself examining the face of every bag lady on the street to see if she was my mother that I realized why I didn’t like the scene.

Still, I didn’t stop looking at bag ladies and, after a while, I started returning to Sweeney Todd.

I skipped the finale and jumped to Grand Central Terminal. It’s one of the places you can find a cab late at night. I stuck my hand out and this black man, perhaps twenty-five and raggedly dressed, jumped out in the street “Cab? You need a cab? I’ll get you a cab.”

I could have walked to the regulated taxi stand on the Vanderbilt Avenue side, but what the heck. I nodded.

He stuck a chrome police whistle in his teeth and blew it, two sharp piercing blasts. Down the block a cab pulled over two lanes and pulled up. The black guy held the door for me. I handed him a bill.

“Hey, man. Two dollars to get a cab. Two dollars.”

“That’s a ten.”

He stepped back, surprised. “Oh. Yeah. Thanks, man.”

I had the cabbie go back across Forty-fifth to the theater where Sweeney was showing and had him park it on the curb. I stood on the sidewalk, one foot still in the cab, and fended off people who wanted the cab. “I’m picking someone up. This cab is taken. I’ve already got this cab. Sorry. No, I don’t want to share this cab. I’m waiting for someone. Go away.”

I was beginning to question this endeavor when Millie finally appeared, looking very New York with her purse around one shoulder and her neck, her face very determined and purposeful.

“Millie!”

She turned, surprise on her face. “David. How did you get a cab?”

I waved my hands and shrugged. “Magic. Let me give you a lift.”

She came closer. “You don’t know which way I’m going.”

“So.”

“I’m staying down in the Village.”

“Close enough for government work. Get in.” I held the door for her and told the driver, “Sheridan Square.” I frowned. Close enough for government work. My dad used that phrase. I wondered what other things I did that were like my father.

Millie frowned. “Where is that?”

“It’s in the heart of the Village. It’s also near some really great restaurants. You hungry?”

“What is this? I thought we were just sharing a taxi.” She was smiling, though. “How much is the fare going to be? I was going to take the subway back. I didn’t exactly budget for a cab. I’d heard how impossible it is to get one after the theaters let out.”

“Well, it’s true. It felt like planet of the zombie taxi-seekers there while I waited for you.”

“You were waiting for me?” She looked nervous for a moment. “My mother told me not to talk to strangers. How much is the cab going to be?”

“Forget the cab. I offered a lift, not half a taxi. And I’m good for something to eat if you want.”

“Hmmm. Just how old are you, David?”

I blushed and looked at my watch. “In forty-seven minutes I’ll be eighteen.” I looked away from her, at the passing lights and sidewalks. I remembered the events surrounding my seventeenth birthday and shuddered.

“Oh. Well happy almost birthday.” She stared ahead. “You act older than that. You dress awfully nice and you don’t talk that young.”

I shrugged. “I read a great deal … and I can afford to dress like this.”

“You must have some job.”

I wondered what I was doing in this cab with this woman. Lonely. “I don’t have a job, Millie. I don’t need one.”

“Your parents are that rich?”

I thought about Dad, the skinflint, with his Cadillac and his bottle. “My dad does all right, but I don’t take anything from him. I have my own money—banking interests.”

“You don’t go to school and you don’t work? What do you do?”

I smiled without humor. “I read a lot.”

“You said that.”

“Well … it’s true.”

She looked out the window on the other side of the cab. Both her hands clutched tightly around her purse. Finally she turned back and said, “I ate before the show, but some cappuccino or espresso at one of those sidewalk cafés would be nice.”

A couple of days after the bank robbery, when my nerves had settled somewhat, I moved into the Gramercy Park hotel. This was nice for a while, but the atmosphere of the hotel and the size of the room got to me after a month.

I started looking for an apartment in the Village, first, but, even though I could afford things there, most of the places wanted references and ID and bank accounts—stuff I didn’t have. Finally I found a place in East Flatbush for half the money with half the hassle. I got a year’s lease and paid the landlord in postal money orders for the deposit and three months’ rent.

He seemed happy.

Shortly after I moved in, I did some minor repairs, added iron brackets on both sides of the doors to hold two-by-four drop bars, and walled up a walk-in closet off the hall. When I was done, it was just another blank wall, a room without an entrance.

Except to me, that is.

And, except for the odd pounding, which I was careful to do during the day while my downstairs neighbors were at work, nobody was the wiser since I’d jumped the materials directly into the apartment from a lumberyard in Yonkers. Nobody saw me carry the lengths of two-by-fours or Sheet-rock into the apartment.

I moved the money from the library after that, stacking it neatly on the shelves in the hidden closet and devoting an entire week to replacing the Chemical Bank paper straps with rubber bands and then burning the paper straps in the kitchen sink.

Before that, I just knew that I was going to show up at the library and find a policeman waiting for me. Now the worst I feared was the landlord coming in and wondering what I’d done with the closet.

Covering the wall so cleanly really did something for me. It wasn’t something I bought with money. It wasn’t something someone else did for me. It left me feeling good about myself.

I resolved to do more work with my hands in the future.

To furnish the apartment I bought only furniture that I could lift. If something was too big for me to lift, it had to break apart into liftable pieces. That way I could jump them directly to the apartment.

Most of my furniture purchases were bookshelves. Most of my other purchases were books.

Millie was in town for four more days. She let me follow her through several traditional New York sights—the Bronx Zoo, the Metropolitan Museum, the Empire State Building. I took her to see two more Broadway shows and to a dinner at Tavern on the Green. She accepted them reluctantly.

“You’re really sweet, David, but you’re three and a half years younger than me. I don’t like you spending money on me under false pretenses.”

We were walking in Central Park across the Sheep Meadow on our way to the mall. Kites, bright daubs of flitting pigment, tried to paint the sky. Bicyclists went by in clumps on the sidewalk on the other side of the fence.

“What’s false about it? First of all, I am not trying to create an implicit contract between the two of us. I have this money and I like spending time with you. The only thing I expect from it is the time itself. Time that I’m not alone. I wouldn’t mind something else, but I don’t expect to buy it.

“And this age thing is a crock of sexist shit. I’m surprised at you.”

She frowned. “What’s sexist about it?”

“If I were three years older than you, romantic involvement would be possible, even probable. Have you ever dated someone that much older than you?”

She blushed.

I went on. “I think it’s acceptable in society because older men have accumulated more worldly goods. Therefore they make better suitors. Perhaps that’s the original reason. Perhaps it’s that alpha male crap. Older bulls have survived longer, making their genes worth coveting. Aren’t you above those outdated factors? Are you going to let a male idea of what and who you should be make your choices for you?”

“Give me a break, David!”

I shrugged. “If you don’t want to spend the time with me for other reasons, just say so. Just don’t use that age thing.” I stared down at my feet and said in a quieter voice, “I have to put up with enough shit because of my age.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time, until we were walking past the fountain café. My ears started to burn and I was mad at myself—almost ashamed for some reason. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

“It’s not particularly fair, is it,” she said, finally. “We get this conditioning, this mind-set. It’s pumped into us from the time we’re little kids.” She stopped walking when we were back on the sidewalk, and sat on a nearby bench. “Let me try it another way. It’s not fair to get involved with you, not for either of us, when I’m flying back to Stillwater tomorrow.”

I shrugged. “I already travel a great deal. OSU isn’t that far out of the way.”

She shook her head. “I just don’t know.”

“Come on.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her up. “&Iota;’ll buy you an Italian ice.”

She laughed. “&Nu;&omicron;. I’ll buy you an Italian ice. My budget will stretch that far.” She held on to my hand after she was up. “And I’ll try to keep an open mind about things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Things! Just things. Shut up. And quit smiling.”

It wasn’t until after I got the apartment that I went back to Dad’s house. While I was staying in the Gramercy Park, I had the hotel do my laundry and I ate room service if I didn’t want to go out, so I had less reason than usual to jump back to Stanville.

My second day in the apartment, though, I needed a hammer and a nail to hang a framed print I’d bought in the Village. I could have jumped to a store, but I wanted to hang it right then.

I jumped directly to Dad’s garage and rummaged through the shelves for a nail. I’d found one and was picking up the hammer when I heard footsteps. I glanced out the garage door windows and saw the top of Dad’s car.

Oh. It’s Saturday.

The door from the kitchen started to open and I jumped back to my apartment.

I hit my thumb twice while pounding in the nail for the picture. Then, when I hung it, I found that I’d put it too low and had it to do all over again, including hitting my thumb.

Damn him, anyway!

I jumped back to the garage, threw the hammer down on the workbench with a loud clatter, and jumped back to the apartment.

Serve him right, I thought, to come running back in again and find nothing.

The next week I jumped to the house and, after determining he wasn’t home, did a load of laundry. While the washer ran I walked through the house, seeing what was changed.

The house was much neater than when I’d done laundry four weeks previously. I wondered if he had hired someone since I wasn’t there anymore to do the housework. His room was not quite as neat, socks and shirts thrown in a pile in the corner. A pair of slacks hung crookedly over the back of a chair. I remembered finding Dad’s wallet when I’d pulled a pair of pants like those off him. That was when I’d found the hundred dollar bills.

The back of my head throbbed, as usual, when I remembered that money. Most of that money had been taken from me when I was mugged in Brooklyn. I felt a twinge of guilt.

Hell.

It took me less than half a minute to jump back to my money closet, pull twenty-two hundred-dollar bills, and jump back. The money made a nice pattern on his bedspread, five rows of four, with a single hundred dollar bill for each side.

I thought about him coming back into the house and finding them there, laid out. I savored the surprise, the shock, and thought about the language he’d use.

When I took the clothes out of the dryer, I resolved to find some other place to do my laundry. I liked the feeling of being out of debt to him.

The only things I would take from the house from now on, I resolved, would be things from my room, things that belonged to me. Nothing else from him. Not a solitary thing.

I started looking for other jumpers in the places I was most comfortable—libraries. My sources were books I used to laugh at, shelved in the occult/ESP section. There wasn’t much I could credit as anything more than folklore, but I found myself reading them with a desperate intensity.

There were an awful lot of books in the “woo-woo” section of the library: pretty bizarre stuff—rains of frogs, circles in wheat fields, hauntings, prophets, people with past lives, mind readers, spoon benders, dowsers, and UFOs.

There weren’t very many teleports.

I moved from the Stanville Library to the New York Public Library’s research branch, the one with the lions out front, There was more stuff, but lord, the evidence wasn’t very convincing. Well—actually, what evidence?

My talent seems to be documentable. It’s repeatable. It’s verifiable.

I think.

To be honest, I only knew that I could repeat it. I knew that my experience seemed repeatable. I hadn’t performed it several times before unbiased witnesses. And I wasn’t about to, either.

The only objective evidence I could point to, was the bank robbery. It made the paper, after all. Maybe my hunt for other teleports should pursue reports of unsolved crimes?

Right, Davy. How does that help you find other teleports? It doesn’t even guarantee that there are other teleports, just unsolved crimes.

I dropped the search for a while, discouraged, and instead thought about why.

Why could I teleport? Not how. Why? What was it about me?

Could everybody teleport if they were put in a desperate enough position? I couldn’t believe that. Too many people were put in those positions and they just endured, suffered, or broke.

If they escaped the situation it was by ordinary means, often—like my encounter with Topper—running from the frying pan into the fire. Still, maybe there were a few who escaped my way.

Again, why me? Was it genetic? The thought that perhaps Dad could teleport made my blood run cold, made me look in dark corners and behind my back. Rationally I doubted it. There were too many times he’d have jumped if he could. But no matter how many times I told myself that, the gut feeling still remained.

Could Mom teleport? Is that what she did? Jump away from Dad, like I did? Why didn’t she take me? If she could teleport, why didn’t she come back for me?

And if she couldn’t teleport, what happened to her?

All my life, I’d wondered if I was some sort of alien— some sort of strange changeling. Among other things, it would explain why Dad treated me the way he did.

According to many of the more extreme books, the government was actively covering up all this information— concealing evidence, muffling witnesses, and manufacturing spurious alternative explanations.

This behavior reminded me of Dad. Facts constantly shifted around our house. Permissions changed, events mutated, and memories faded. I often wondered if I was crazy or he was.

I didn’t think I was an alien, though … but I wasn’t sure.

My landlord gave me a funny look when I asked if I could pay him the monthly rent in cash.

“Cash? Hell, no. Those postal orders are bad enough. Why don’t you get a bank account? I thought it was strange when you paid with those postal orders, but I put it down to you being new in town. You want to have the IRS down on me?”

I shook my head. “No.”

He narrowed his eyes. “The IRS really frowns on large cash transactions. I wouldn’t want to think there’s something funny about your income.”

I shook my head. “No. I just have a lot of cash left over from a trip I took.” My ears were burning and my stomach felt funny.

Later in the day I gave my landlord another postal money order for the rent, but I could see him thinking about it.

A woman on the phone told me that to open an account with her bank I would need a driver’s license and a Social Security number. I had neither. Even talking to her I had to use a public phone. I was afraid to try and get a phone without I.D.

I put a thousand dollars in my pocket and jumped to Manhattan, west of Times Square, where the adult bookstores and porno theaters line Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. In two hours I was offered drugs, girls, boys, and children. When one of them said they could provide a driver’s license, it was only to lure me down an alleyway, so they could “jump” me. I jumped first and quit trying for the day.

* * *

The Stanville Public Library is just off the downtown district, a three-block-by-two-block area of public buildings, restaurants, and dying stores. The Wal-Mart at the edge of town and the big mall twenty miles away in Waverly were taking the downtown business.

I walked along Main Street and thought about how different this stupid little town was from New York City.

The boarded-up front of the Royale movie theater had graffiti on the plywood, but the message was “Stallions Rule!” In New York the graffiti on theaters was obscene or angry, not high school athletic bragging. On the other hand, there were over fifty movie theaters in the mid town section of Manhattan and that didn’t count the porno houses. Here in Stanville the only theater was closed, done in by the video business. If people wanted a real movie theater, they had to drive to the sixplex in Waverly.

It was pointless to compare restaurants, but the variety and range of them hit home when I came to the Dairy Queen. It was brick with high glass windows and bright fluorescent lighting. It had all the atmosphere and charm of a doctor’s examining room. I thought of seven spots in Greenwich Village that would serve me anything from gourmet ice cream to “tofutti” to frozen yogurt to Bavarian cream pie. I could be at any of them in the blink of an eye.

“I’d like a small dip cone, please.”

I didn’t know the elderly woman behind the counter, but Robert Werner, who used to be in biology class with me, was flipping burgers. He looked up from the grill, saw me, and frowned, as if I was familiar but he couldn’t place me. It had been over a year, but it hurt that he didn’t recognize me.

“That will be seventy-three cents.”

I paid. In the Village it would have been considerably more. As I walked back to one of the plastic laminated booths I saw myself in the mirror that ran along the back wall. No wonder Robert couldn’t place me.

I was wearing slacks from Bergdorf’s, a shirt I’d gotten from some snotty clerk on Madison Avenue, and shoes from Saks Fifth Avenue. My hair was cut neatly, slightly punkoid, far different from the untrimmed mess I’d worn a year before. Then I would have been wearing worn, ill-fitting jeans, shirts with clashing patterns, and three-year-old tennis shoes. There would have been holes in the socks.

I stared for a moment, a ghostly overlay of that earlier, awkward me causing me to shudder. I sat down, facing away from the mirror, and ate my ice cream.

Robert came out from the kitchen to bus a table near me. He looked at me again, still puzzled.

What the hell.

“How’s it going, Robert?”

He smiled and shrugged. “Okay. How about you? Long time no see.”

He still didn’t place me.

I laughed. “You might say that. Not for over a year.”

“That would have been at …?” He paused, as if remembering, inviting me to fill in the blank.

I grinned, “You’re going to have to remember all on your own. I won’t help you.”

He glared then. “Okay. Dammit. I know you, but where from? Give me a break!”

I shook my head and nibbled on my cone.

He turned to finish bussing the table, then straightened up suddenly. “Davy? Christ, Davy Rice!”

“Bingo.”

“I thought you did a milk carton.”

I grimaced. “Poetically put.”

“Did you go back home?”

“No!” I blinked, surprised at the force in my voice. More softly I said, “No, I didn’t. I’m just seeing the old hometown.”

“Oh.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Well, you look really good. Really different.”

“I’m doing all right. I …” I shrugged.

“Where are you living now?”

I started to lie, to tell him something misleading, but it seemed petty. “I’d rather not say.”

He frowned. “Oh. Is your dad still putting those posters up?”

“Christ, I hope not.”

He started wiping the table. “You going to be here on Saturday? There’s a party at Sue Kimmel’s.”

I felt my face turning red. “I was never in with those guys. Half of them are college kids. They wouldn’t want me there.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Hell, maybe they think too much about clothes and things. They only invited me because my sister’s close to Sue. You look more like you’d fit in now than I do. If you want to go with me, I’ll vouch for you.”

Christ, I must’ve changed a lot.

“Don’t you have a date?”

“Nah. Nothing definite. Trish McMillan will be there and we sort of have this thing, but it’s not a date.”

“It’s nice of you, Robert. You don’t really owe me anything like that.”

He blinked. “Well … it’s not like I hang out with a high-class group. Maybe you’ll add something to my image.”

“Well … I’d like to. You working here all week?”

“Yeah, even Saturday until six. That old college-fund grind.”

“When do you think you’ll be ready to go?”

“Eight, maybe.”

“You driving?”

He pointed out into the parking lot. “Yeah, that old clunker’s mine.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to go to his house. I didn’t know what his parents would say to me or about me to Dad. The thought of going to that party, though … that really tempted me. “Could you pick me up here?”

“Sure. Eight sharp, Saturday night.”

I spent some time that evening talking to Millie on the phone. It was frustrating because I kept having to put quarters in the pay phone.

“So, how’s school so far?”

“Okay. Haven’t really had to struggle yet. It’s just the first month.”

A recorded message asked me to add more money. I shoved several quarters in. Millie laughed.

“You really need to get a phone.”

“I’m working on it. Getting a phone in New York … I’ll call you with the number when I get it.”

“Okay.”

I was standing at the phones in the back lobby of the Grand Hyatt by Grand Central, a small mountain of quarters on the ledge in front of me. People swept past, going to the bathrooms. Occasionally a Hyatt security man in a suit would roust nonguests out of the bathroom. They were usually black, poorly dressed, and carrying plastic bags filled with miscellaneous belongings.

For some reason it bothered me that the security guard was black, too.

“What did you say?”

Millie was indignant. “I said there’s a party I’ve been invited to in two weeks. I don’t want to go because Mark will be there.”

“Mark’s your old boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Only he thinks I’m still involved with him.”

“How’s that? I thought you didn’t return his calls or let him in your apartment.”

“I don’t. He’s amazing. Oblivious. And the sonofabitch keeps it up even though I know he’s dating someone else.”

“Hmmm. You sound like you’d really like to go to this party.”

“Well. Shit. I don’t want to make decisions based on avoiding or seeing him. It pisses me off.”

“I could—”

The recording had me put more money in.

“What did you say, David?”

“I could go with you if you like.”

“Get real. You’re in New York.”

“Sure. Now. In two weeks I could be in Stillwater.”

She was quiet for a moment “Well, it would be nice. I’ll believe it when I see it, though.”

“Hey! Count on it. Will you pick me up at the airport? Or should I take a taxi?”

“Christ! A taxi won’t run sixty miles to Stillwater. I’ll come get you, but it will have to be after classes,”

“Okay.”

“What, you mean it?”

“Yes.”

She was quiet again. “Well, okay then. Let me know.”

That took care of my next two Saturday nights. I said good-bye and hung up. The security guard came out of the rest room following closely behind another street person. I swept the rest of the quarters off the ledge and dropped them in one of this guy’s plastic bags. He looked at me, startled and, perhaps, a little frightened. The security man glowered at me.

I walked around the corner and jumped away.

Leo Pasquale was a bellboy at the Gramercy Park, the nice hotel I’d stayed at before I got my apartment. He was the winner in the hotel-staff dominance due over who waited on me.

I tip well.

“Hey, Mr. Rice. Nice to see you.”

I nodded. “Hello, Leo.”

“Are you back with us? What room?”

I shook my head. “No. I’ve got an apartment now. I could use your help with something, though.”

He looked around at the bell captain, then tilted his head to the elevator. “Let’s ride up to ten.”

“Okay.”

On the tenth floor he led me down the hall and opened a room with a passkey. “Come on in,” he said.

The room was a suite. He opened a door and we walked out onto a large balcony, almost a terrace. The afternoon was pleasant, warm without being muggy. The traffic noise rose up from Lexington Avenue in waves, almost like surf. Buildings rose around us like mountain cliffs.

“What do you need, David? Girls? Something in a recreational drug?”

I took the money out of my pocket and counted out five hundred-dollar bills. I gave them to him and held the remaining five hundred in my other hand where they were still visible.

“Down payment The rest you get on delivery.”

He licked his lips. “Delivery of what?”

It was my turn to hesitate. “I want a New York State driver’s license good enough to pass a police check.”

“Hell, man. You can buy a fake driver’s license for less than a hundred … a good one for under two-fifty.”

I shook my head. “Your money is just a finder’s fee, Leo. I’m not paying for a fake ID with this thousand. I’m paying to be hooked up with an expert. I expect to pay for his services myself.”

Leo raised his eyebrows and licked his lips again. “All of the thousand is mine, though?”

“If you come up with the product. But if it’s hackwork, if it’s no good, forget the second five hundred. Find me a wizard and the rest of the money is yours. Can you do it?”

He rubbed the bills between his fingers, feeling the texture of the paper. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure. I don’t know anyone directly, but I know a lot of illegals with really good papers. You got a number I can reach you at?”

I smiled. “No.”

“Cagey.”

I shook my head. “I don’t have a phone. I’ll check back. When will you know something?”

He folded the money carefully and put it in his pocket. “Try me tomorrow.”

I paid a homeless man twenty dollars plus cost to go into a liquor store and buy a magnum of their more expensive champagne. He came out with the large bottle in one hand and a jug of wine under his other arm.

“Here, kid. Have a hell of a time. I certainly intend to.”

I thought of Dad. I considered taking this guy’s wine away from him, grabbing it and jumping before he could do anything. Instead I said “Thank you” politely and jumped back to my apartment as soon as he’d turned away.

The champagne barely fit in the tiny refrigerator lying down, but not standing, and even then it bumped against the door. I leaned a chair against the door to keep it shut.

I spent the next two hours up on Fifth Avenue, buying clothes and shoes. A few of the clerks even remembered me. After that I went to my hairstylist in the Village and got a haircut.

You don’t even like those people, Davy. Why all the fuss?

I shaved carefully, scraping the few whiskers from my face with only a few nicks. I resolved to buy an electric razor. Hope the bleeding stops before tonight. The face in the mirror was a stranger’s, quiet and calm. There was no trace of the shaky stomach or the pounding heart I wiped at the tiny bright beads of blood with a damp finger, smearing them.

Hell.

I still had three hours before the party, but I didn’t want to read or sleep or watch the tube. I dressed in some of the old, comfortable clothes, the ones I brought with me to New York, and jumped to the backyard of Dad’s house.

The car wasn’t there. I jumped to my room.

There was a thin film of dust on the desk and windowsill. There was the faint smell of mildew. I tried to open the door to the hall, but the door was stuck. I pulled harder, but it wouldn’t budge.

I jumped to the hallway.

There was a bright, shiny padlock hasp screwed into the wood on the door and frame. A large brass padlock held it secure. I scratched my head. What on earth?

I walked down the hall to the kitchen and found the note on the refrigerator.

Davy,

What do you want? Why don’t you just come home? I promise not to hit you anymore. I’m sorry about that. Sometimes my temper gets the better of me. I wish you wouldn’t keep coming into the house unless you’re coming home for good. It scares me. I might mistake you for a burglar and accidentally shoot you. Just come home, okay?

Dad

It was held to the refrigerator by a magnet I’d decorated in elementary school, a day blob in green and blue. I slipped the note out and crumpled it into a little ball.

More promises. Well, there’s been enough broken promises in the past. As an afterthought I uncrumpled one corner of the note and stuck it back under the magnet. It hung there, a ball of paper held to the refrigerator by the blob of colored clay.

Let’s see what he thinks of that.

I was angry and my head hurt. Why do I keep coming back here? I picked up the flour canister from the counter. It was a large glass jar with a wooden top. I tossed it up, high above the floor. It slowed, just below the ceiling, hung there, and then dropped. Before it hit the floor I jumped.

SIX

“Christ, where do you get your clothes?”

I shrugged instead of answering and climbed into Robert’s car. The springs creaked and I had to slam the door twice before it would catch. I put the champagne bottle on the seat between us, a white ribbon tied around its neck.

Robert eased out of the parking lot gingerly, the springs rocking excessively as we went over the gutter. “Shocks are shot,” he said. “But it’s ugly.”

“Great. How many people are going to be at this party?”

He waved his free hand “Oh, fifty, a hundred, who knows. They got band for it, I think. She can afford it.”

“What will her parents be doing?”

“They’re out of state.”

Good.

We had to park half a block down the street because of the accumulated cars. There was a crowd of Stanville High football players standing around the front door, beer cans and cigarettes in hand and mouth. We threaded our way between them.

One of them called out, “Who’s your date, Robert?”

Robert just kept on walking like he hadn’t heard, but I saw his neck turn red. I paused at the door and looked around. They were all grinning. The one who spoke was Kevin Giamotti, who used to extort lunch money from me in junior high. I looked at him, my stomach knotting for a second, my heart beating faster.

Christ, he’s just a kid!

I shook my head and started to laugh. Compared to those guys in the alley near Times Square, Kevin was a baby. And I’d been scared of him? It seemed ridiculous.

Kevin stopped grinning. “What?” He started to frown.

“Nothing,” I said, waving my hand. “Absolutely nothing.” I turned, laughing even harder, almost uncontrollably, and went into the house.

Sue Kimmel stood at the end of the hall talking with a couple who seemed far more interested in touching each other than listening to her.

“You two in heat or what?” she said. “The bar’s in the living room. If you’re going to drink, give your keys to Tommy. He’s behind the bar.”

The couple moved on, joined permanently at hip and lip.

“Hello, Robert. Who’s this?”

Robert opened his mouth and I said quickly, “I’m David.” I brought the bottle from behind me and presented it with a slight bow. “So nice of you to let me come.”

She raised her eyebrows and took the bottle. “The pleasure, Miss Doolittle, is all mine, I’m sure. Bollinger? They don’t sell this around here. Folks around here think Andre’s is hot shit.” She touched the bow and ran her finger down the condensation on the bottle. “Where did you get it?”

I swallowed and said, “My refrigerator.”

She laughed. “Subtle. Well, I shan’t stare down the horse’s mouth any longer.” She looked at Robert. “Trish was looking for you. She’s out on the patio.”

“Thanks, Sue.” He turned to me. “You want to meet Trish?”

I started to say something but Sue Kimmel said, “I’ll bring him along in a minute. After we open this.”

I found myself being gently steered down the hall and into a large room crowded with men and women my age or older. The temperature was several degrees higher than in the hallway. I loosened my tie and followed as Sue pushed her way through the crowd, using the cold, wet champagne bottle as a shepherd’s crook, steering people right and left by touching exposed skin or thin cloth.

We finally ended up at a long bar running the length of the far wall. A big man, perhaps six feet four, stood behind the bar, using a built-in tap to fill a beer mug for one of the guys pressed up against the bar. He wore a strap over his shoulder festooned with car keys.

“Yo, Tommy!”

“Yo, Sue.”

She put the magnum of Bollinger on the counter. “Glasses.”

“Yo.”

He pulled two wineglasses off a rack behind the bar.

“Not those … the flutes. Christ, Tommy. Champagne flutes.”

She looked over at me and rolled her eyes. Tommy blushed.

“I use mason jars myself,” I said. I smiled at Tommy and he nodded after a minute, then moved down the bar to fill another beer mug.

“Well?”

I turned to Sue and raised my eyebrows.

She gestured at the bottle.

“Oh, well, okay.”

I’d read up on opening champagne, just in case this happened. The lead foil came off pretty much like it should and I started on the wire, untwisting and lifting it gently away from the cork. The way Sue had swung it around, I was afraid it might go off like a bomb.

The book I read said to ease the cork out gently, keeping a firm grip on the cork, to prevent it from flying off and hitting someone. Shooting the cork off, the book said, “was for buffoons and fops.”

I tried to ease it out, but the thing seemed immovable. I resorted to tugging and twisting, but it still wouldn’t move. I lifted it off the bar and put it between my legs, so I could get a better grip. This put my head down at the level of Sue’s breasts.

“My, David? What’s that between your legs?” She put a hand behind my head and pulled me slightly closer. My forehead bumped against the hollow of her throat and I stared straight down her dress. She smelled of perfume and skin.

I tried to straighten up, my ears and face burning. The cork loosened slightly in the neck of the bottle. I managed to pull away from Sue.

Sue was laughing, watching me blush. Then her smile died and I felt a hand grab my shoulder and pull me around. A voice, loud and deep, shouted in my ear. “What the fuck you doing with my girl?”

He wasn’t as big as Tommy, but he still towered over me, large, blond, bearded. I stared at him, blank, still holding the unopened bottle. He shoved me and I took a step back, bumping into the bar and Sue, and inadvertently shook the champagne. That’s when it went off.

The cork caught him on the chin, snapping his mouth shut on his tongue. Champagne geysered forth, soaking both him and me. I stared in horror, trying in vain to stop the flood with my thumb. This just caused the foam to spray rather than gush.

Beside me I heard Sue say, almost under her breath, “Premature ejaculation … again.”

“You little shit!”

He lunged for me, his hands going for my throat. I dropped, collapsing into a ball, his weight coming down on top of me, covering me, hiding me.

I jumped.

The champagne-soaked tie and shirt made a wet thwack as it hit the wall in my bathroom. “Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.”

Why does this shit always happen to me?

There was an ache in my throat and I wanted to punch something, break things. I stared at myself in the mirror.

Wet hair plastered my forehead and my jaw was clenched tightly shut. The muscles stood out on the side of my face and neck. I relaxed my jaw and found that my teeth had been aching. I took deep breaths, leaning forward on the counter.

After a minute I ran cold water and washed my face and rinsed the hair in front, to get rid of the wine smell. I combed my hair back in a slick, smooth shell.

The difference in my appearance was striking. My hair looked much darker and the shape of my head was changed. I frowned, then went into the bedroom and picked out a black shirt with a stiff, upright collar. I put it on and checked out the result in the mirror.

I looked very little like the boy who walked into Sue Kimmel’s with the champagne.

I jumped.

The football players had abandoned the front porch, but their spoor, crushed beer cans and cigarette butts, dotted the walk and grass. Even before I got to the house I could tell that the band had started—bass and drumbeat shook the sidewalk and made the windows rattle. I opened the door and the sound struck me with almost palpable force.

I considered jumping home again, but took a deep breath and leaned into the noise.

The hall was more crowded than before, but when I finally won free to the room with bar, it was less so. The wall of noise came from the other end of the room. I could see people dancing like they were insane.

There were only a couple of people at the bar, though Tommy was still behind it, drumming on the surface in time with the music. There were twice as many keys around his neck as before.

I hooked a foot on the bar rail and leaned my elbows forward. He glanced at me, then looked again. He came down to the end of the bar and shouted over the music. “Christ. You sure changed quick. I thought I knew everybody who lived in this neighborhood.”

I shook my head. “You probably do. I’m not from around here.”

“Well, you sure faded fast. Sue was looking for you.”

“Oh?”

He reached down behind the bar and came up with the magnum of Bollinger’s. “There’s some left. You probably could have drained a quart from Lester’s shirt, but that would taste rancid.” He pulled down a tulip glass and filled it, draining the bottle to do so.

“Was Lester the guy who jumped me?”

“Yeah. Sue sent him home. She was furious.”

I smiled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come back myself. I’m glad he’s not here though.”

Tommy nodded. “He could fall down a hole for all I care.”

I blinked. “Don’t like him, eh?”

He nodded, grinned, and went down to the other end of the bar.

The champagne tasted like unsweetened ginger ale, its aftertaste unpleasant. I looked in the bar mirror and un-wrinkled my nose. I shifted my grip on the glass, trying to look more sophisticated, less awkward. I sipped at the champagne again and shuddered.

Some sophisticate.

I took the glass and wandered out onto the veranda, away from the music. There were tables and chairs, white, wrought-iron. Three of them were occupied. One was off by itself, in the shadow of the hedge. I sat down.

The band started playing oldies, songs from the early sixties. They’d been hits before I was born, but I’d heard them often enough. My mom would listen to nothing but old rock and roll, songs from her teens. I grew up listening to them, wondering what they were about. Didn’t particularly like them, didn’t particularly dislike them.

I knew all the words.

“There you are.”

Sue Kimmel pulled up one of the patio chairs and put down a glass of something with ice. “Tommy said you were back, but I walked past you three times before I realized you’d changed clothes.”

I licked my lips. “I didn’t mean to cause problems.”

She rolled her eyes. “Lester is the one who caused problems.”

“He must love you very much.”

She laughed. “Love? Lester doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Lester stakes territories. Lester would piss on fire hydrants if he thought other people had a keen enough sense of smell.”

I didn’t know what to say so I took another sip of the champagne. Ugh.

She swallowed some of her drink and smacked her lips. “I wanted to apologize to you, actually, for Lester’s behavior. He doesn’t realize it, but we’re in the process of breaking up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve nothing to be sorry about. I’d been thinking about it all week. He’s pissed me off too many times.”

I took another sip. The taste was bad, but it didn’t seem quite as bad as before. I lifted my glass to her, but didn’t say anything.

She lifted hers and drained it. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s dance.”

I felt a rush of panic. Dance? I set the glass down. “I’m not very good.”

“Who cares. Come on.”

“I really rather not.”

She grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the chair. “Come on.” She didn’t let go of my arm, pulling me toward the music.

The band was playing something very fast, very loud. We threaded our way between gyrating bodies until a few square feet of floor space opened up. I felt closed in, threatened by all the close bodies and flying limbs. She started to dance. I stood there for a moment, then started moving. The music pounded on me like waves at the beach. I tried to find a rhythm that matched it, but the tempo was too fast.

Sue was oblivious, her eyes closed, her legs pumping in counterpoint to the music. I tried not to stare at the parts of her that bounced up and down. I felt miserable.

I waited until she was spinning around, facing away from her, and jumped back to the patio. Someone gasped to my right. I looked over and saw a girl staring at me from one of the other tables. “Jesus! I didn’t see you walk up, dressed in all that black.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” I picked up the champagne flute and took it back to the bar.

“Yo, Tommy.”

“Yo, David. No more champagne, man.”

“Fill it with ginger ale. And put a head on it.”

He grinned and filled it from the fountain gun. “Ze ginger ale, monsieur.”

“Thanks.”

I moved back onto the porch and reclaimed my seat. After a moment, Sue came out, looking puzzled, and a little angry.

“What’s the big idea? Don’t you know how many guys at this party want to dance with me?”

“I can see why. You’re very attractive and you dance like a dream.”

She blinked, her mouth half open to say something. She closed it and sat down. “That was good. Very good. Almost too good. Why don’t you want to dance with me?”

I shrugged. “I feel foolish. You know what you’re doing out there. I feel like a clumsy jerk. The contrast is painful. I’m shallow, I guess, but I don’t want everybody to know just how shallow.”

“Yeah. Real shallow. Compared to Lester, you’re a bottomless pit.”

“I’ll bet Lester can dance.”

“In a fakey, self-centered kind of way. More John Travolta than Baryshnikov.”

I shrugged again and felt stupid. Is shrugging the only expression I know?

“I’m going to get a drink. You need anything?”

I held up my ginger ale.

“Don’t disappear on me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She came back with her glass filled with some amber fluid. Behind her came Robert and a pretty redhead I vaguely recognized from high school. She was Trish McMillan, the girl Robert “sort of had a thing” with.

“Hell, man. I’ve been looking all over for you,” Robert said. “You okay? I heard Lester climbed all over you.”

“I’m fine.”

“How’d you change so quick? You have a bag with you?”

I smiled and resorted to the ever popular, multipurpose shrug.

He looked like he wanted to ask more, but Trish spoke then. “Robert said he brought you to the party, but I didn’t realize that you were David Rice. How long ago did you run away?”

Sue looked from Trish to me. “What do you mean, run away?”

I picked up my glass and drank some more ginger ale. I didn’t think a shrug was going to work. “I left home one year and two months ago.”

Trish wouldn’t leave it alone. “Well, jeez. You look like you came out all right. Do you recommend it?”

“It would depend.”

“On what?”

“On how bad you had it at home. It’s got to be pretty awful before being a runaway is better.”

“Well, what about in your case?”

I put my glass down. “I’d rather not talk about my case.”

She blinked. “Well, I’m sure I didn’t mean to pry. Sorry.”

“No problem. Nice weather we’re having.”

Robert looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, some weather. David, I’m going to run Trish home. I can come get you after.”

I shook my head. “Thanks. I can get home from here.”

They got up to leave. Sue said, “Contraception, Trish. That vital conversation before.”

Trish and Robert blushed in unison.

“Yeah, right,” said Robert.

When they were gone Sue turned back to me.

“Nice kids. Where do you live?”

I saw no reason to lie. “New York City.”

“Oh. So you’re just visiting the old hometown.”

“I do that.”

She laughed. “What else do you do?”

“I read a lot.”

She swallowed some more of her drink.

“What is that you’re drinking.”

“Glenlivet.”

I shook my head, not understanding.

“Scotch.”

“Oh.”

“Want some?”

An image of a man in his underwear, black socks, hairy legs, unshaven, an empty bottle of scotch cradled in his arm like an infant, mouth open, eyes shut—Dad.

“No. Thank you for asking.”

She leaned forward, her neckline drooping. I looked away. She straightened, pulled up a shoulder strap. I sipped at my ginger ale.

“So, have you seen the house, David?”

I shook my head.

“Come on. We can find someplace quieter to have a conversation.”

She stood and, staggering slightly, led me back into the house and up the stairs. Her tour consisted of “this is the upstairs hall. This is my bedroom.”

Oh my God.

“Uh, Sue. What are we doing up here?”

She shut the door behind us.

“Conversation. That conversation that I was talking about earlier. You know, to Trish and Robert.” She walked up to me; I took a step back and fetched up against the closed door. She kept coming.

“You don’t know me from Charles Manson, Sue. I could have every STD in the book.”

She put her hands on my shoulders. In her heels she was slightly taller than me. “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Have any sexually transmitted diseases.”

“Uh, not to my knowledge.”

She pressed her mouth hard against mine. Her tongue flicked along my lips, darted between my teeth. I felt the skin crawl along the back of my head and down my back, an eerie, not unpleasurable sensation. Her mouth, though, tasted of scotch. I pushed her gently away.

“Uh, hold up.” Oh God, she’s beautiful. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to sleep with her. I wanted to run. I wanted to just jump away.

What about Millie?

She molded her body to mine. “What? You don’t like me? Is this something else you don’t do?”

“Uh, uh … Where’s your bathroom?”

She pointed to a door on the other side of the room and followed me over to it. I went inside and found a small bathroom with no other exit. Oh shit.

She turned on the light

“Condoms,” she said. “Are in the bottom drawer.” She shut the door with a snap, not unlike the popping noise a mousetrap makes when it trips.

I opened the bottom drawer. One box of Trojan Gold condoms sat among hair ties, curlers, and a tube of K-Y jelly. Only one box? Does that make her conservative or easy? I pushed it shut and looked at the window. It was two feet square, to the right of the sink. It opened inward. I stuck my head out. There was a drop of twenty feet on a sheer brick wall.

It would have to do.

I took some of her lipstick and wrote on the mirror, “SORRY, I CAN’T.” Then I flushed the toilet, made sure the door was unlocked, and jumped home to Brooklyn.

“They found someone who matched your physical stats and duplicated his license with your picture. The name may be a little different, but close. Of course the address is his, but if they run your license, the dispatcher will find everything agrees in the computer.” He paused and looked at me. “Oh. They also have access to the real plastic, and stock, and embossers. Your license is real.”

“What about the signature?” I asked Leo.

“Well, you’ll have to practice that.”

I walked in silence thinking about it, glancing occasionally at the card.

We reached Lexington and started up it.

“It’s really a good deal, Mr. Rice. Honest.”

“Relax, Leo. It’s okay. I agree.” I paid him the fee, plus a bonus, and we parted.

Later that day, I put thirty thousand dollars in a share draft account at Liberty Savings & Loan for David Michael Reece. That was the name on my newly acquired driver’s license. I made up a Social Security number. The girl offered me a choice of a toaster oven or a food processor. I took the toaster.

With my new checks I bought a ticket, first-class, one-way, to Will Rogers World Airport, Oklahoma City.

“Are you sure you don’t want a round-trip ticket? If you buy a one-way ticket back, it’ll cost you over three hundred dollars more … first-class.”

“No thank you. I don’t need a return ticket.”

“Oh, you’re not coming back?”

I shook my head. “No. I’m coming back. Just by other means.”

“Oh. You must be driving.”

I shrugged. Let her think what she wanted.

Since I didn’t have a “major credit card” she said I’d have to pick up the ticket after the check cleared.

My ears started to burn and I felt like I’d done something wrong. “Why don’t I just pay in cash then?” I took out a roll of fifties.

She stared. “Uh, we prefer not to deal in cash. Are you in a hurry to get the ticket?”

“Yes.” I bit off the word. What’s wrong with me?

“Let me check with my boss.”

She walked back through a door. I felt, for some reason, like I was sitting outside the principal’s office, waiting to be lectured on proper behavior. I felt like walking out. I felt like smashing things. I felt like crying.

I’d just about decided to jump back to my apartment and blow off the whole experience when she came back through the door with an older woman.

“Hello, Mr. Reece, I’m Charlotte Black, the owner.”

“Hi.” My voice was colorless, listless.

“We normally don’t take cash, because our accountant frowns upon it. Also, I take the deposits to the bank and, frankly, it makes me a little nervous to carry cash in this neighborhood.”

“Ah. I can understand that,” I said. The back of my head twinged. “I don’t want to make a big issue of this, but I’m going to be traveling a great deal. I’d like to make all my arrangements in one place.” I paused. “But I don’t want these waiting-for-the-check-to-clear hassles.”

She frowned. “You could establish credit with us and we could open an account, billing you at the end of each month.”

“How would that work?”

“You’d fill out a credit application and we’d have our credit agency check you out.”

Oh, great. That’s all I need, inquiries into my past.

“How about this instead,” I said. “I’ll write you a check for ten thousand dollars. When I’ve used up that, you tell me and I’ll write another check. And,” I added, “I’ll wait until the check clears to pick up my ticket to Oklahoma City.”

She blinked and inhaled sharply. “That would be acceptable.”

I scribbled out the check, trying to make the signature look casual as well as resemble the one on my driver’s license. She picked it up and looked at it. “Oh. We bank at Liberty. I’ll take this over at lunch. Can we call you this afternoon?”

I shook my head. “My next stop is the phone company. I don’t have a phone right now. How about I drop back by around three.”

“Very good, Mr. Reece.”

Millie met me at the gate with a smile that didn’t touch her eyes. I felt something shrink inside.

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