Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet Read online

  Fang’s fingers bit into my upper arm. He yanked me toward him, into the heat of his breath and body, and never mind the crowd, never mind we were two inches apart, he started yelling, shaking me and yelling, “You knew. You fucking knew.” I told him to shut up, just shut the fuck up, I knocked his hand from my arm, but by that time it wasn’t only Fang. Chad Turner and Dwight Slater and a few of the other guys had broken through the shock and were jabbering about what I’d said, and pretty soon everyone was swinging from Stan’s body to me and back again, like spectators at some slo-mo tennis match. The horrified crowd eventually set their sights on me. Silent. Waiting. Eyeing me like I’d just leapt the net and beaten the favorite to death with my racket. In the hush, even the ambulance guys paused to check out the blasted kid up front, the one everyone was gawking at. If people were expecting an explanation, I sure as shit didn’t have one. If it was an apology they wanted, I knew there was nothing anyone could say that would make this right. Stan was dead. I had to bail.

  I went to push my way out, but there was no need. Everyone took a neat step back, line dancers in retreat, and I sashayed up the lane they cleared for me and hopped on my board and I split, a thousand pairs of eyes pressing on my back.

  I rounded the corner, was halfway up the block when I saw Faith. Stan’s Faith. Riding her bike along the opposite side of the street, chin lifted just a little toward the sun, hair flowing in a wind of her own creation. Something gorgeous slicing through the madness. Someone innocent of the mess on the sidewalk ahead. She raised her hand to wave, she smiled, but I dropped my head and pushed even harder for home, my board wobbling underfoot. Still, the snapshot of the girl on the bike followed me, a haunting thing of beauty I knew would break around the next bend, sure as a glass slipping from my hand.

  At my neat little house on Clive Avenue, I barricaded myself inside. I locked the doors, yanked the curtains closed, shuttered the blinds, constructed a modern-day fortress before crashing in my room. I’m not going to bore you with all the crap that went through my mind while I was lying there, but I will tell you that after a couple of hours I got up and went to the bathroom to fondle a few razor blades and check out our pill supply. (My mom was pretty anti-meds, I wasn’t holding out much hope. Inside the medicine cabinet, three Extra Strength Tylenol, a box of Imodium, some Midol, and an old bottle of penicillin, which I’m mildly allergic to. I took the Tylenol but left the rest because I had no desire to break out in a rash and not shit for a week, and although I was suffering, it wasn’t from cramps.)

  I was on my way back from the can when I heard the noise outside. I pulled the blind on the hall window back a bit, and fuck, the WDFD van and its crew were setting up out front. The roving-eye guy, the one with the long shaggy blond hair who likes to pretend he’s some surferesque dude (yeah, right, in Stokum), came and pounded on the door. He waited awhile, staring straight ahead while the cameraman hung over his shoulder, all ready in case anyone was stupid enough to open up. After a while of filming my front door—brown, wooden, three rectangular windows at the top, nothing special, really—they went and did their spiel on the sidewalk. One of the neighbors probably figured I’d finally committed the grisly felony they’d always known I was capable of, and they must have called my mom at the Michigan Savings and Loan where she works as a teller, because she pulled into the driveway about ten minutes later.

  By that time I was back in my room, but I was still peeking out, so I saw her arrive. It made me sick the way the reporter and his cameraman crowded around so that my mom, who is really small, had to fight her way out of the car. Surfer boy pushed his microphone in her face, which was so bewildered and scared I could tell she didn’t have a clue what he was even saying. She made it onto the front stoop, but her hand must have been shaking really badly, because it took her a long while to get in. Once she did, though, she kicked it into high gear. Flying around the first floor, screaming my name, before pounding up the stairs two at a time.

  My bedroom door ripped open and my mom staggered blind and breathless into the room. It took a few seconds for her to find me, crouching by the window in the half-light of an afternoon behind drapes. And man, she went all shattered pixie on me then, fingers fluttering to her throat, staggering backwards, sagging against the door frame, all the energy that usually holds her up gone. And she kind of choked up her next couple of lines.

  “The radio said a boy had been killed, on a skateboard, then I got a call and … and …” She covered her face and her chest started heaving and I realized she’d driven all the way home thinking I was dead. God, seeing my mom hiding out in her hands, watching her slide down the door frame until she was at my level, well, let’s just say I was pretty happy I hadn’t followed through on the Midol overdose or anything equally retarded.

  When she did finally lift her head, it was to quietly ask, “Who?”

  I couldn’t even look at her. “Stan,” I said to the dark blue carpet between my feet.

  “Oh, Luke.” My name quivered into the room on a soft push of breath. “Oh no. Not Stan.” I dared to glance up. From across the room, from fifteen feet away, I could see her eyes were already glistening. Me, I wouldn’t cry for days. And even then, it wouldn’t have all that much to do with Stan.

  MY MOM DIDN’T ASK ME about the camera crew outside right away. Even if I wasn’t bawling, she could tell how shaky I was. She took me downstairs and made us both a cup of chocolate milk, although I was definitely in need of something a tad stronger, and she probably was too. Then she sat across from me at the kitchen table and carefully asked about the van out front. It took me a couple tries to get going, but I finally gagged up my tale. I told her what had happened in Fang’s basement the night before, although I bypassed the bit about the skank weed short-circuiting my brain and channeling me into some psychic freak-show wavelength, which was my only theory at the time. I blamed the dope, always an easy target.

  My mom didn’t say much. She just fiddled with her glass while I talked, and when I was done she gave this long, kind of whistling sigh and got up to phone my dad. She ran her fingertips along the wall as she made her way to the hall, where the phone sat on a little table by the front door. I stayed in the kitchen. Normally I like the kitchen. The 1950s Westinghouse Frigidaire with rounded edges and a silver pull handle in one corner. The metal-edged Formica table with matching red leatherette chairs in the other. Last summer my mom and I spruced up the old cupboards with a coat of high-gloss white and threw down some chunky black and white checked linoleum. So now the kitchen has a real cookies-and-milk kind of vibe, and usually it’s an awesome place to hang. But that day I just laid my head on the table and wrapped my fingers around its cold edge and held on until I heard the squeal of tires on pavement and the slam of a car door.

  After my dad pushed through the media madhouse outside, he and my mom whispered in the hallway for a bit. Then he called me into his office at the back of the house and closed the door. I basically went through the same drill I had with my mom, but it took a lot longer. My dad is fairly detail oriented, being the head honcho supply chain guy at the Kalbro plant where, like, everybody in Stokum works if they aren’t employed by CME, Central Michigan Electric, the big coal-burning power plant south of town. (At Kalbro my dad makes sure things are lined up so that Ford and GM always get the auto fabrics of their dreams, just-intime. You know that slick blue nubbly crap you drive around on? The tawny faux Naugahyde? The burgundy velveteen? That’s Stokum, man.)

  My dad badgered me all through the story, like he was going to personally present my case to the big guys in Detroit or something, and I had to tell him exactly what happened at Fang’s, couldn’t skate around anything, including the bad weed. (I admitted we’d “tried” pot, but I made it sound like it was one of the first times so he wouldn’t think I was a complete stoner and get all disappointed and shit.) Still, even with him, I didn’t bother mentioning anything about the weird musical shiver under the tree that morning. Even if I’d wanted to, I
couldn’t have found the words to explain that freakiness.

  We ate leftover tuna casserole in front of the TV that night (normally forbidden given that dinnertime is “sacred”), tuned in to WDFD’s six o’clock report. I was seriously hoping Stan and I hadn’t become, well, big news, and we weren’t the lead story, which was a happy one. Evidently the terrorists were all talked out, chatter was on the decline. John Ashcroft, our homeland security hombre with the heavy brow and the oh-so-serious, tuned-into all-things-terrorist face, actually offered America a steady, if guarded, smile. He announced that the national threat level, which had been jacked up to orange around the joyless first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, was being dropped. We were now to live careful, yellow lives rather than the highoctane orange ones we’d been leading. Unfortunately, this American didn’t find the news as comforting as Ashcroft had probably hoped, and I was definitely still in an orange funk when the roving-eye guy came on with the real news at the end of the hour.

  He was standing in the 7-Eleven parking lot with the van behind him. Thankfully, Stan’s body had been removed, but still, I felt sick just looking at the whole scene. The reporter pushed his hair out of his eyes and started in with all the usual crap. “A minor, whose name is being withheld pending notification of family members, was killed this morning when he was struck by a van turning into the 7-Eleven parking lot across from Jefferson High. The young man had been skateboarding along the sidewalk on his way to school when he was hit.” After about two seconds of this, the dickweed cameraman zoomed in on the bloody sidewalk while the reporter blabbed offscreen, building up the suspense as to why this wasn’t just another “tragic traffic accident.” Then the camera pulls back from the bloodstain and there’s fucking Slater standing next to surfer guy, his hair all combed and his zits battered over by pancake makeup. Dwight’s trying to look all broken up about Stan, but when he starts in with the story it’s obvious he’s totally getting off on being behind the mike, I mean, you can just sense his hard-on excitement. I will say, he stuck pretty much to the facts, but I didn’t think his big dramatic pause before he got to the part about the license plate was really necessary.

  “BLU 369,” he said, and then he repeated it just so everyone would know it had really stuck with him. “It’s easy to remember, because it’s the color blue, like without the e, and then three, six, nine, like, you know, you just keep adding three.” When he turned and pointed at the van and the camera panned to the plate, well, both my parents started shifting around in their seats like their underwear had just jumped a mile up their asses or something. Then, catch this, my buddy Fang climbs out of the “soundproof ” van where he’d been waiting like some cloistered game show contestant. He repeated the story, only he was all nervous and everything and he messed up the license number, got the BLU wrong, which made Dwight—still standing on-camera, thrilling at the airtime, playing at sad—look like a real wizard.

  I was shaking my head at the lame antics when they cut over to my place and gave what little background they could on me. I came off as “just an average kid,” which I thought was pretty decent because, seriously, I’d been expecting worse. But then the reporter raised an eyebrow and said that I had refused “all requests for interviews,” and they flashed a close-up of my freshman yearbook photo and let the picture do their fucking dirty work. God! There I was with hat head (the photographer had insisted I take off my cap) and my eyes half closed and this pained grimace on my face because I still had braces and refused to open the lid on all that metal. Their average-teen crap was laughable next to the picture that told the real story, the story of a loser with bad skin and so little self-confidence he couldn’t even face a camera head-on, whose main hobbies include skateboarding, smoking illegal substances, predicting the deaths of close friends and, oh yeah, whacking off. Then they zoom in on my window and there I am, all hunched up and peering out like some child molester or something, and Lance lays out his last line.

  “While we were hoping that the teen at the center of this story, Luke Hunter, would come forward and talk to the roving-eye team, for now Stokum’s own Prophet of Death is keeping all predictions to himself. Lance Winters, on the scene, for WDFD.”

  My dad turned off the television then, and my mom put her hand on my knee and said, “Well, there you go. That’s over now,” a couple dozen times to try to make herself believe it. We were still sitting there, in a stunned sort of silence, when the phone started ringing. Loud and aggressive, like some mighty intruder charging in and out of our living room. No one moved. The phone kept squealing. Finally my mom got up to grab it. My dad and I listened to her murmuring in the hallway for a few minutes before she appeared in the doorway.

  “It’s for you,” she said, holding the receiver out as far as its spiral tether would allow.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Mick.” My absent uncle. Her missing brother. My mom kept her face blank and her voice steady. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Mexico.”

  I dropped my head and found a super-interesting spot on the carpet. No one said a word, but we all knew that WDFD’s signal barely reached across the state, let alone the continent. And we all knew that Mick never called.

  For just an instant my eyes flickered up. “What’s he doing down there?”

  “Helping some farm co-op locate well sites.”

  “Witching for water, you mean.” Lots of sneer to the words.

  “Yeah, witching for water.” Her voice was hard now. She pointed the receiver in my direction. “Luke?”

  I got up, but I pushed right past my mother, and my uncle in Mexico, on my way to my room.

  But I’d only made it halfway up the stairs when it happened again.

  THREE

  My hand was on the banister, I was mid-step, and this flash hit me, clear as the newscast we’d just been watching. By the time I put my foot down, I knew that Mr. Bernoffski, the old Polish guy who lived two doors down, was going to get crushed under his John Deere riding mower when it rolled on the steep part of his backyard, where the lawn slopes down to the cedar hedge. His chest would be crushed by the weight of the mower, a broken rib would puncture his left lung. He would be unable to breathe or call for help and would die from lack of oxygen at 3:18 P.M., October 9, 2002.

  I think I went into some sort of preprogrammed self-survival mode right then. I made it to my room and collapsed on the bed. I stared at the ceiling—mind gone, body wiped—before fading out completely. I woke up around four A.M., still fully clothed, drenched with sweat, gasping for air, basically scared completely shitless. It took a long while for me to even get my breathing under control, and even then I could feel the vapors of terror pumping through my veins, refueling, getting ready to spin me out around the next corner if I didn’t hold tight.

  As I lay there trying to stay sane, I saw my running shoes sitting neatly beside my bed. Toes lined up with the edge of the carpet, laces worked loose. I knew that one of my parents—my dad probably, he was the neat freak—had come in and, seeing me crashed, had bent down and slipped off my shoes, carefully, so he wouldn’t wake me up. Like I was still just a little kid he’d carried in from the car after some late night drive home. I stared at those shoes and my heart slowed beat by beat by beat until I was finally able to think about Stan and Mr. Bernoffski and what the hell was going on. The only thing I really came up with was the importance of preventing the close encounter between my Polish neighbor and his John Deere from happening. I figured if I saved Mr. Bernoffski, if he just didn’t die, then maybe my life wouldn’t completely derail. The glowing green numbers of my alarm clock crawled toward seven o’clock, by which time I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up, snuck out the kitchen door and headed for the house two doors down.

  I cut through the Connellys’ backyard before the Bernoffskis’ fence pushed me out front onto the street. It was a bit of a mind melt to see the roving-eye van still parked in front
of my place, a nasty reminder that this nightmare was way real. I pulled my hood down as far as possible, hopped the porch railing and rang the bell, one eye on the van, one eye on the door. When the old guy finally opened up, he looked crabby as hell and I could tell he was all suspicious and shit. He was tugging at this ratty blue bathrobe, trying to cover his gut, but I was so revved up I just started rambling.

  “Hi, sorry to bother you. I don’t know if you recognize me, I’m Luke Hunter, I live just up—”

  “Jesus Chrrist, you tink I’m stupid? I know you. You Doug’s boy. Of course I know. Jesus Chrrist, what time is it?”

  “Ahh, yeah, it’s early, sorry, but I go to Jefferson High and I have to do community service work, you know, like help out an old person or a kids’ soccer team or something like that. It’s mandatory for my civics class, and I was wondering if I could cut your lawn for a couple of months, for free of course, and I could come whenever you want me to, but I’ve gotta start right away, and—”

  “What you be say?” His voice was loud. He looked confused. So I repeated the whole thing, really slowly, which practically killed me, what with the van on my ass and everything. Still, I could see that, second time around, Mr. Bernoffski was catching my drift, because his face sort of relaxed and he started nodding, following along.

  “So you want to cut my grazz,” he said when I’d finished, and by this time we were both bobbing our heads at each other like two of those bobble-head, spring-necked dolls, and I was thinking I’d just saved this guy’s life when he says, “No one touches my tractor. No one. I cut my own grazz. I no need no help,” and he starts to shut the door.