I unlatched the back gate and wheeled him plumb out into the stubble of the hayfield behind the house. Then the going got pretty rough, wheelchairwise, so we didn’t go far, just to where I could get the runny-go I needed to send that sucker to the moon. The clouds were scooting by, throwing shadows like a herd of wild monsters rumpusing over the field, and I was right there with them. I hefted the kite and let out the string, more and more till it was not but a speck in the sky. I could feel rain starting to spit on us, and who cared. Let it thunder.
The string was pulling hard in the wind, but I towed it back to Mr. Dick and put it in his hand. “Hang on tight,” I said,
and flopped on the ground beside him, panting like a dog. He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had.
The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with
his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a
feed bag. The man was a giant.
28
We sat in the parking lot waiting. Me with my gut full of rocks, Jane Ellen with her workbook opened out on the steering wheel, doing math problems. What is the deal with women, somebody tell me. A day can be going to hell in a hornet’s nest, you’re fixing to lose your breakfast, but she’s still going to get her homework done.
“What if Coach Winfield doesn’t show?” I asked.
“He will.” Her pencil never stopped moving. I guess I didn’t either. She’d already told me to stop fooling with the glove box before I busted it. An ’89 Comet is what she drove.
“What if he doesn’t?”
She erased something, then turned over her wrist to look at her watch. “He’s not that late yet. We got here early.”
I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn’t any food left on the planet, you’d still keep feeling hungry too.
“Je-sus,” I said. A car had pulled in, and the guy getting out of it was the weirdest-looking human I ever saw, not counting comic books. Stick legs, long white arms, long busy fingers that twined all over him. Running through his hair, wrapping around his elbows while he stood looking around the parking lot. A redhead, but not my tribe. He was the deathly white type with the pinkish hair and no eyebrows. That skin that looks like it will burn if you stare at it.
“Great day in the morning.” Jane Ellen shut her workbook.
“Snake Man to the rescue,” I said.
She couldn’t help herself smiling, with that tongue stuck in the gap of her teeth. We both stared, rude as you please. His car was a late-model Mustang with a big trailer hitch, normal. But this guy, my Lord. He stood there hugging himself with those arms, looking around. Then looking at us. He walked around to the side of us, checking out Jane Ellen’s car.
“What’s he looking for?” I whispered.
“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “What does a snake eat?”
She had her hand on the key, ready to start the engine. But then he came straight at us and we froze. Stuck his hand in the open window on my side. We both reared back.
“I reckon you all are Betsy Woodall’s.” Creepy voice. Too quiet.
“Who wants to know?” I asked.
“Coach Winfield got tied up this morning. Saturday practice can run real long.”
“Then who are you?” Jane Ellen was getting back on her game. Not about to turn me over to some random freak outside Walmart.
He waved a long hand in front of him, like shooing flies. “I’m nobody. Assistant coach.” He leaned farther in and reached his hand across to Jane Ellen, causing her to rear back again. “Ryan Pyles,” he said. “They call me U-Haul.”
She stared at the freckle-zombie hand. “Why is that?”
He pulled back his hand, ran it through his stringy pink hair. We waited.
“I move equipment for the team. Your pads, helmets, Igloo coolers. Coach wants it hauled, I’m the one gets it there.” He moved his head backward on his neck like he had extra bones in there. The man was a reptile. “I didn’t hitch up the trailer. You got a lot of gear, son?”
Being no son of his, I said nothing. He stuck his head in the window, checking out my one suitcase on the back seat. “Okay, let’s get ’er done.”
I looked over at Jane Ellen like, Don’t feed me to Snake Man! And she was like, What am I supposed to do? She couldn’t go back to Murder Valley with the boy-cargo still in tow, I knew that. Probably she’d get her education extended by twenty years.
I went, but not without a fight. Jane Ellen marched him over to a pay phone and made him call somebody to vouch. They didn’t get Coach Winfield, but some secretary at the school evidently said, Yes, that sounded right. U-Haul Pyles will get the boy where he needs to go.
That turned out to be a mansion, sitting on a big hill overlooking downtown Jonesville. This place had a lot more going on than a normal house, extra parts jutting out with their own separate roofs and windows. Not a castle but headed that direction. Which stood to reason. If Lee County had a king, he’d be the Generals coach. U-Haul geared down to take the steep driveway, and all I could think was, No way am I going in. A mansion. I wouldn’t know how to act.
“Home sweet home,” he said, in this eat-me tone. He cut the engine and turned a glare on me that scorched. His brown eyes were almost red, like little round windows out of hell, no eyelashes for curtains. How did he look in the mirror with those eyes? He grabbed my suitcase, and with me thinking, Shitshitshit no escape plan as usual, I followed him in the front door.
Inside was a shock. It looked like a regular house, with junk all over the place. Boxes of cleats, resistance bands, rolls of athletic tape, dumbbells, a busted car mirror. An exercise bike in the middle of the room with clothes draped on it. There were certain castle aspects for sure, a gigantic fireplace chimney with the mantel made of a sawed log. And a gigantic dangling light over the gigantic dinner table, where nobody had eaten I’m going to guess since the invention of forks. Amongst the piled-up papers and magazines I counted three pairs of sunglasses, more dip cans than you want to know about, and one Nike Air Max. On the table. It made me miss Mom.
U-Haul said Coach would be down in a minute and to excuse him because he had things to do in Coach’s office. He shook my hand in a sneak attack, then slithered off towards the back of the house. I felt slimed. I wished for a bathroom where I could wash my hands. There was a big staircase with the curved railing like in a movie. I wondered if it was the same pigsty all over, or just concentrated here in the end zone around the front door. The one tidy spot was the mantel with a photo of a girl, or lady actually. Young. Sad-looking, apart from having the hair explosion thing from the eighties going on, which no girl would be caught dead in now. So, she probably was. Dead. The tragic wife raised up by my grandmother and taken young. Just a guess.
I turned around and freaked out, due to a kid looking at me with the exact same face, the photo come to life. Scrawny though, almost my height but skinnier, wearing one of those dweeb flat caps that would instantly get a guy poundcaked at school, if not for the badass leather jacket and Doc Martins. Those things cost, meaning there’s backup somewhere, so watch who you’re punching. This kid looked sad, a little soft, a little scary. All of those, at the same time.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m Angus.”
“Angus like the cattle?”
His eyes shot sideways, and back. “Exactly like that.”
“So, I guess I’m supposed to be staying here a while. With Coach Winfield.”
“Yeah, I know. He’s my dad.”
Oh, the little orphan baby. Reset. I asked him what grade he was, and he said eighth.
“So you’re on the JV squad?”
