If it had been daytime, the two children trudging down the road would have seen nothing but a pale gravel road framed on both sides by Jimson weed, crabgrass and dandelions narrowing down to a thread and stretching out into infinity. The plowed-over fields of sandy and stony dirt would have been broken at rare intervals by decaying farmhouses and sadly hunched trailers. There might have been a lone tree or two every now and again.
The waning moon didn’t offer much light even when it wasn’t hiding behind clouds, and its greenish white glow did little to help the boy see more than a few feet in front of him. What stars were visible were hard, unwinking pinpoints.
The land was silent; no dog barked, no cricket chirped, no bird or cicada sang. The only sounds the boy heard were the crunching of their feet on the rudely cracked gravel and the soft whisper of his pants rustling.
They were dressed in dark clothes, hard to spot in the moon’s meager light even with the little girl’s porcelain legs being bare. She walked upright, back straight and face forward, but slowly. The boy, a young man, really, mostly watched his feet move one before the other when he wasn’t bringing his head up and looking around. He did this every few seconds.
The girl’s elfin face seemed to come out of the very night itself, her black hair blending seamlessly into the nighttime sky. Her eyes, normally the colour of polished black onyx, seemed to be giving off a faintly greenish luminescence under the waning moon.
It was still sometimes a bit unsettling to see the irises weren’t always round.
He wondered what she sees, sometimes. She, too, looked around frequently, but she sometimes seemed to be following something in the dark with her eyes. He tried asking, once, on a night a lot like this one. She’d answered “stranger things than are dreamt of”, but she wouldn’t explain what she meant. She was a lot like the night itself, but stranger even than the roaring giant beast that sometimes charged after him in his dreams, and all the more terrifying at times because she could be so unmoving and so utterly quiet.
What scared him speechless, though, was when she looked afraid. She was never afraid, never even nervous, except when she thought she hurt him or when she was following something with her eyes in the dark, something he couldn’t see, something he might not have been able to see even in strong sunlight. What can scare this little girl?
“How much time do you think we have before they find the trailer?”
If he hadn’t been less than three feet from her, he wouldn’t have heard her voice. He kept his low, too.
“Who cares? It’s a hundred miles away by now, and neither of us is ever coming back anywhere near this place while I’m still alive.”
“They’ll find things. Hair. Blood. Your fingerprints.”
“On what? The trailer? What trailer? All they’re going to find there is a lot of ashes and half-burnt plastic. If they’re really lucky, they might find footprints in the yard. Same with the truck. Besides, my fingerprints don’t matter because nobody has them. What about yours? You’ve been around in this kind of stuff a lot longer, somebody somewhere must have gotten yours and put them in some federal filing cabinet or something.”
“I don’t have fingerprints.”
“... oh.”
“I’m really sorry about all this. All I wanted was some food and a bed.”
“Yea, you said that a couple times already. I said it’s not your fault more than a couple times already, too. What got into you, anyway?”
“Somebody once told me that things like me are around because people’s hearts are hard.”
“Um... OK... you said you don’t have fingerprints, right? Mr. Frankenbeans didn’t have a hard heart. You have to have a heart to begin with before you can have a hard heart. And what’s with this calling yourself a ’thing’ bullshit again?”
They trudged on in silence. She wouldn’t answer until she was ready. Sometimes, she’s never ready.
“What makes a man be like that?”
“Like what, exactly?” The boy has learned the hard way that the answers the little girl looked for weren’t always directly related to the questions she asked. She was smarter than she thought, and could pose some pretty complicated problems.
“Heartless.”
“I don’t know. Maybe nobody does. Maybe you don’t ‘make’ a man like that, maybe it’s like having blue eyes, they’re just born that way. You weren’t.”
“No. I was... made.”
“The man who ‘made’ you was like Mr. Frankenbeans?”
“He wasn’t a man.”
“Is that like saying you’re not a girl?”
“Yes.”
“Wrong again.”
“Not about... him.”
“Oh. Um, well, maybe not.”
“I have a hard heart, too.”
“We’re not going to play this game again right now, are we? My feet hurt, my back hurts, my head hurts, I’m hungry and cold. You can’t do anything about what you have to do to stay alive.”
“No, it’s not that. When I knew what that man wanted, I knew I was going to kill him. I didn’t have to do that to stay alive. I didn’t even have to do that to keep you alive. All I really had to do was make sure he couldn’t come after us, and then we could just take things and drive away.”
“You killed him just because you wanted to?”
“Yes.”
The boy thought about this for a few minutes.
“Did you kill the kids who were killing me just because you wanted to?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have to kill the kids?” Not an accusation. He still wasn’t quite clear on what happened that night.
“I didn’t know you were going to run away with me after.”
“But you could have just punched in a few faces and broken a few arms, right?”
“But I didn’t know. Putting one of them in the hospital didn’t seem to do any good. How was I supposed to know what they might do next?”
“Point, that.”
“And that’s what’s different. I didn’t have to kill that man. He couldn’t hurt me because he didn’t know how, and he couldn’t hurt you because he didn’t know enough to wait for me to be out of the way. The only reason I killed him is that I hated him because he was a lot like somebody else.”
No points for guessing who “somebody else” might be.
“Killing those kids didn’t make you feel bad?”
“No. I’m still mad at them.”
“Good. Me either, and me too. Killing Mr. Frankenbeans makes you feel bad?”
“No.”
Pause.
“Yes.”
Pause. She was fighting with herself.
“I don’t know. It makes me feel bad that it doesn’t really make me feel bad.”
“Heh, and you said you’re not a girl.”
She looked at him, not understanding for a moment. She snorted and punched him lightly on the shoulder.
“And because of the way I killed him.”
“What ‘way’ did you kill him?”
Sometimes, asking her a question is like asking a stone. Also, sometimes, no matter how long you walk along the road in the dark, you never get any nearer anything except maybe your own grave.
“I made sure he could feel it. I made sure he knew what was happening to him. I don’t do that. I always rush in, eat as fast as I can, and finish it right away. They feel it, but only for a few seconds. Even those kids I killed when I wasn’t hungry, they didn’t really feel what happened to them, and they didn’t have much time for being scared. And I never kill anybody just because I want to.”
Pause.
“Well, almost never.”
“So, what got into you, anyway? I get why you did it the way you did it, and that’s not a problem. It’s just like how I’ve seen you hunt, you just put up some kind of act to make people come in real close, and before they know anything, it’s over. I know why I would have done Mr. Frankenbeans, but I don’t think you did it for the same reason. Now that I’ve thought about it, you seemed so mad it was hard to tell you were mad. You were all cold and quiet.”
“Because my heart is hard.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I know.”
They trudged on. It’d been a few hours, and nobody’d come down the road to “rescue” them. Maybe nobody would come down that road all night. This was what life on the run was like sometimes. He’d be glad to find a bed, but please, not just now. She almost never talked, never let him know what’s going on inside. She told him once that’s because she’s empty inside, nothing going on except the darkness and the cold. The hunger.
He didn’t believe that, either.
She asked, “Why would you have done Mr. Frankenbeans?”
“Because somebody had to. He’d just go on killing people. And because what he wanted, it was just wrong. I don’t know, there’s some people you just can’t let live, I guess.”
Silence.
More silence.
Oh.
Uh oh.
“That didn’t come out right, did it?”
Even the breeze seemed to stop moving.
The boy sighed.
“Am I going to kill you while you’re sleeping?”
“You would have done that a long time ago, I think...”
Pause.
“... but you know me now. If you’d found out about me before we met, wouldn’t you have done me while I was sleeping?”
The boy’s eyebrows knitted together.
“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, yeah, you’re a girl and everything, but there are so many girls in the world, it’s hard to know where to start. Besides, before I even really got started cleaning the world up, they’d come and take me away to jail before I get very far. They’d be really mean, too, and put me in a jail full of girls. Slow death by smalltalk and gossip!”
She looked at him strangely for a moment, startled. Uttered a single BARK that might have been a laugh. Punched him softly in the shoulder.
“Could you imagine getting to know Frankenbeans well enough to say ‘maybe he ain’t so bad?’”
“I don’t think I could even make him do things for me... I mean, he just took what he wanted. What he really liked was screaming and crying. I think he ate it, the same way you eat potatoes.”
“And you think there’s no difference between you and him, because you just take what you need? Because you’ll just go on killing people, too, until somebody stops you?”
“... yeah.” Self-loathing is hard to pull off on the face of a twelve year old girl. She managed it effortlessly.
“Then why am I here?”
“You just stay with me because you like touching me.”
The boy who stood chin to forehead to the strange little waif punched her in the shoulder with a bony haymaker “THUNK!" almost hard enough to knock her off her feet. The girl drew her breath in a sharp hiss.
“Don’t. Somebody might hear us.” She drew herself upright again, looked around.
“Who’s going to be here of all places, and especially at this time of night!?”
“There’s...”
Two years and more of life on roads just like this, with no end in sight (either of the road or of this kind of life) teaches patience. The girl looked like she might say something.
She sighed, hung her head low, stopped walking. The boy waited.
“I’ve never tried to say things like this to anybody before.”
“You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to. You know that.”
The girl nodded her head ‘yes’ to her toes.
“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“That’s because you are.”
The girl turned, put her hands behind the boy’s head, reached her face up and put her lips on his cheek. Left them there for what seemed like forever. The boy ran his hands up and down her back for a moment, then moved them to her shoulders to give them a good squeeze.
“I see things sometimes.”
“You see all kinds of things, all the time.”
“This is different. I don’t know if they’re real or not.”
“How do you mean?”
“They’re there, but they’re not. Like in ghost movies.”
“So, you see ghosts?”
“I don’t think they’re people, or anything that used to be people.”
“So... what do they look like?”
“I can’t say what they look like. I’ve never seen anything that looks anything like them.”
“OK, but, I mean, are they like rocks or trees or something?”
“No. They move around.”
“So, they’re clouds or animals or something.”
“Maybe...”
She disengaged, stepped back. Thought for a moment. Turned and started walking again.
“These things scare you?”
“... yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has anybody else ever seen these things?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know what I mean. People like you.”
“I don’t know any people like me.”
“How long have you been seeing them?”
“Ever since I got to be like this”. Waved her hand over her body. A twelve year old girl running around all night in deserted fields wearing literally nothing but a T-shirt without shivering to death when it’s cold enough you can see the boy’s breath coming out in little foggy clouds is a bit unusual.
“Are they only out at night?”
“I’m almost never up during the day, and when I am, it’s always in a building. I’ve never seen one in a building.”
“What do you think they are?”
“I don’t think I know...”
The boy waited. The girl could see things he couldn’t, but he knew he can’t see everything that is real, things she can go and pick up and clobber him over the head with.
Was she crazy? She was different, but different isn’t crazy. It didn’t matter; if she was crazy, he’ll just have to be crazy with her, because he’d eventually go crazy without her anyway.
“You know I’m really a lot older than twelve, right?”
“I know you watch too much TV sometimes.”
“Ever since they started putting TVs in motel rooms, young man, when your mother was still a little girl, and don’t you forget it!”
The boy snorted.
“I can’t tell you how old I really am because I don’t know. People didn’t keep track of time, as if it just didn’t matter, and then I spent a lot of time trying to be... away... after. I don’t know how much time. I can’t even tell you exactly where I’m from because I never knew. It was just ‘the village’.
“I say I’m twelve because I look like I’m twelve, and because I don’t think like older people. They say things I don’t understand, and they know things I know I’ll never get. It’s like... when you grow up, you grow a new pair of eyes and a new pair of ears. You already know this because you know things I don’t, and you’ve tried to explain things to me that I can’t get. I know you know these things because things usually work out the way you say. You’re not the same as you were when you ran away with me, and we were the same age, and I had to do most of the explaining.”
The boy started. He could see things she couldn’t!? Didn’t seem possible.
“You know I can see things you can’t, too, but not with the same kind of eyes you have. I mean, I can see every blade of grass, every twig, every pebble and every bug for as far as you could even see at all in the sunlight, but I can also see when something is hot or cold. I can see if something is heavy or not. I can see which way the wind is blowing, and I can see the sun coming up an hour before anybody else can.
“But I don’t understand everything I see.
“I never talk about it because it’s just the way things are for almost as long as I can remember, and because people don’t believe me when I say I can see these things. They just think I’m crazy, and then they get scared when I prove it.”
The boy kept his mouth shut. She never talked like this. It was a little slice of heaven.
“I’ve been lots of different places at lots of different times and seen lots of different people. It didn’t matter where I was, or when, most of the people I’ve run into have just been people. They love their children and they work hard to keep their families safe, and they all love and hate pretty much the same things. They were like this before they started printing books, and they’re no different now. They wear different clothes and eat different foods and talk different languages, yeah, but nothing’s different from when I was born. Nothing’s different from where I was born.
“Most people are just people, but some are different. They sound different and do different things. Even these different people, though, most have just been people, and what’s different about them is just what they do. It’s like they don’t have a 'soul’ or a mind or something, so they stay away from people and spend all their time hunting or fishing or something, or just hide in their tents or caves or houses and make things, like spearheads or pots or furniture.
“Some of the different people aren’t like that, though. They’re always in the middle of things, trying to make things go their way. You know the kind of people I’m talking about. A couple of them tried to kill you.
“This is one of the things I don’t get. I’ve never been anywhere where there wasn’t a war, or a war that’d just been over for a little while, or a war that was coming. Whole groups of people who love their children and work hard to make their homes safe for their families get together, grab clubs or swords or bombs, and run over to somebody else’s place and just start killing other people who also love their children and work hard to make their homes safe for their families. Most of the time, I think it’s because of these different people who are always trying to make things go their way.
“Why do they do that? Why can’t people hear that these different people are different, that they don’t love their children and they don’t try to make their homes safe for their families? Why do people follow so many of these different people who don’t even have families?
“What happened to you is a lot like that, and it happens to all sorts of people everywhere. You don’t have to have knives or bombs to have a war, you just have to have people who do ugly things to other people to make them dead inside. You were almost dead when you ran away with me, and you stayed almost dead for a really long time.”
The boy cleared his throat. Getting a little nervous. The girl’s voice was starting to get a little strident. Just a little.
“So now we have movies and TV shows about people a lot like me. Sometimes, I’ll even watch them. Most of them are just wrong in lots of ways. Well, wrong about me, anyway, and even if there are other really different people, different like me even if they’re different in different ways, I’ll bet all those stories are wrong about them, too. We’re the things that go bump in the night, here to suck the breath out of your newborn babies, drag your young daughters off to dungeons and make whole armies of drooling idiots out of your sons to eat your brains and tear down your houses and fill your parking lots with rubbish! I am the evil thing that’s what’s wrong with the world!”
The boy put his arm across her shoulders, stopped her walking and nuzzled an ear with his nose. “You’re getting a little loud. Somebody might hear us...”
The girl rested her forehead on his shoulder. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You never talk enough.”
She sighed. Did her breath hitch just a little bit?
“I am, though. I’m the evil thing that’s what’s wrong with this world. All of it, everywhere.”
The boy murmured something inaudible.
“See, everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve seen these things. I’ve never heard them, and never felt them with my hands, and don’t even know if you can touch or hear them. Sometimes they’re kinda close, but mostly they’re far enough away you might not see them even if they were your kind of ‘real’.
“It seems like I see them more often where there’s a war of some kind going on.”
“Ok... um... and you’re seeing one of these things now?”
“Yeah, just a few minutes ago.”
“Do you ever see these things where there isn’t a war?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s always a war going on that most people don’t know about. Maybe I'm the war nobody knows about.”
“That... doesn’t really make any sense.”
“I also saw one of those things a little while after Frank went one way and Beans went the other.”
“... oh.”
Pause.
“You ever see these things when you eat?”
“Sometimes.”
“So if you’re the war, and these things are only around for a war, then why don’t you see them all the time when you eat?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do these things ever do anything besides just ‘move around’?”
“No, but they move around like they’ve got somewhere to go or something to do. I never see where they go.”
She thought for a moment.
“Do you ever get to see the thing that chases you in your dreams?”
“No. I hear it, and sometimes I can feel it in the ground like an earthquake, and I run from it best I can, but I never see it.”
“Do you know why you’re afraid of it?”
“No. I just know in my bones that if it ever catches me, I’ll die.”
“So, it’s never caught you?”
“Nope.”
“Does this monster ever show up at special times?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like, after I killed Frankenbeans, did the thing chase you?”
“You mean after we killed Frankenbeans, don’t you?”
“You were sleeping in a bed of poppies when that happened. You had nothing to do with it.”
“But I knew what you were going to do, and I didn’t stop you. I wanted you to. You were right, I’d have shoved that stupid knife of his through the back of his neck if he’d made me watch him doing things to you.”
“Right. You didn’t say anything, and if you had, I think I’d have listened.”
“But I didn’t. So, we charbroiled Frankenbeans.”
“OK, if it makes you feel any better, we did that.”
“And no, I haven’t seen or heard from my monster since then.”
“So you feel bad about helping me find food, but you don’t feel bad about doing people like Frankenbeans?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Didn’t we just ask that question a few minutes ago?”
“Did we answer it?”
“Yes, I did. I asked you why I’m still here.”
The girl moved very quickly out of his reach.
“You just stay with me because you like touching me.”
“Why, you little brat! You know I can’t run in the dark!”
“Nya nya!”
They both had trouble holding their voices down, holding their hands to their mouths and trying not to laugh out loud. After the giggles were over, they resumed their slow march towards the next town. Even in the fall, dawn comes too soon.
He didn’t want her to stop talking.
“I’m not at war,” the boy said, “I left it when I ran away.”
“When you ran away with me, you mean. When I practically kidnapped you.”
“No, I mean ‘when I ran away’.”
“So you know what I’m talking about when I say it’s like there’s almost always a war going on, it’s just that you don’t always see it?”
“Yeah.”
“So then you can’t say you left it. You just jumped from one war to another.”
“I don’t think so...”
“Seriously. See, I don’t understand what makes people be like that, and I think maybe you’re right, they’re born that way. There are enough of the bad kind of different people around always trying to make things go their way, and most regular people never get to see that they’ve gotten to be a kind of soldier because of them.”
“Yea, but I don’t usually kill them...”
“Heh.”
“I mean, like, Frankenbeans, he’s the enemy. Him and anybody like him.”
“Like me?”
“No. You didn’t really answer, but you did. Neither one of us could see anything in him that could make us think that maybe we could find something ‘good’ about him, that we could have gotten to know him well enough to say ‘maybe he ain’t so bad’.”
“But we didn’t get to know him. There’ve been people who didn’t get to know me, either, and I’m seriously lucky to still be alive.”
“No, we didn’t, and no, they didn’t, but I did. I did get to know you. And yeah, it’s just bad luck you had to be a girl...”
The boy moved as fast as he could out of reach, but wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid another light smack to the shoulder.
“... but as far as I can see, there’s nothing wrong with you as a person otherwise. I mean, you weren’t always trying to get me to do things. You never tried to get me to do anything. Except keep breathing, maybe.”
“I just...”
“You just wanted somebody to spend some time with, right? Yeah? Well, guess what! So did I!”
The girl shuffled with her head at half mast.
“Are you sure I never tried to get you to do things?”
“About as sure as you are that I never tried to make you do things for me, I guess.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Your acting like you did something wrong when you ask me that is a pretty good sign, I think.”
“I don’t think you get just how wrong I am most of the time.”
“I get that you feel wrong. What I also get is that you’re a lot stronger than I am. In the heart, I mean. You have one, even if you don’t believe it, and I think mine would have murdered me in no time if I’d gotten to be like you.”
“So, charbroiling Frankenbeans wasn’t wrong...?”
“Nope.”
“And you’re really sure about that?”
“Yup.”
“Then why am I seeing these things?”
“No clue.”
“It’s like this everywhere. Only, it’s like you can’t tell who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I can hear these different people, there’s something in their voices, and I know you can’t. I know regular people can’t. It’s got to be that they can’t, because if they could, I think they’d do the same thing we did. But, they can’t, and they don’t, and I’m the only - person? - I know that can hear this difference. So if I’m the only one who can hear it, maybe it’s like these things that I see that nobody and nothing else I know can see.”
“And maybe it’s all just in your head, like the thing in my dreams is. I’ve heard not being able to dream isn’t healthy.”
Her voice went steely. “Is there anything about what I am you might call ‘healthy’?”
His own voice went gutteral and growly. A young man’s voice shouldn’t be able to do this. It’s the kind of voice that makes you believe you won’t still be alive when it’s done speaking to you.
“Be kind to my girlfriend.”
She moved slightly away. She’s heard this voice before, but never from him.
The boy sighed. It seemed to be a night for sighing.
“Maybe you’re right, there’s always a war going on. I don’t have your eyes and your ears, but maybe you’re right and I have what you don’t. I know what kind of people you’re talking about because I can sometimes feel them. No, I don’t always, and yes, I can be fooled, but yeah, there are an awful lot of people like the kids who tried to kill me.
“If I’m from a war like that, then look at where I’m from. You can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys. They’re not just good guys, and they’re not always just bad guys. Sometimes, a good guy on Monday is a bad guy on Tuesday, and the good guy won’t be back until next Wednesday. I don’t know why that is. Maybe we’re ALL bad guys who just have good days every now and again.
“All I know for sure is, I had a mother who didn’t know how to care and a father who didn’t want to. I had teachers who didn’t teach anything that’d help me get through the day, and there wasn’t anybody else to talk to who wouldn’t put you in jail just for talking. I was on my own.
“Nobody cared if I died. Not really. Yeah, Mom would have been all broken up. It would have moved her from wine to vodka, and she could spend the night drinking herself into nothing listening to some idiot on TV jabbering on about how there’s a special place in heaven even for bad little boys like me. No idea what Dad would have thought. Nobody else would have even noticed. You know what would have happened to the kids who killed me?”
“They’d have gone to jail?”
“Maybe. Probably not. They’re kids. I’m a kid. When one kid kills another, most of the time, it’s just ‘well, the poor little thing didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know it was wrong, maybe he just needs a pill’. When a man kills another man, he goes to jail, or maybe a gallows. When a man kills a whole bunch of women, he goes to jail, waits about twenty years for people to fight over whether or not he deserves to die before going to the firing squad or the gas chamber. When a kid kills a kid, some kid goes to a ‘reformatory’ for a year or two and gets let out in a few months for ‘good behaviour’.
“So, do you know what that means?”
Silence.
“You do know what that means, don’t you?”
Silence.
The boy‘s voice could have curdled battery acid.
“It means my life isn’t worth anything. I’m not even worth the cost of a bullet until I turn eighteen.”
The girl moved in front of him, slid her arms under his and grabbed him in a tight hug. Stopped his walking. She played his ear with her nose and mumbled something about “they might hear”. Seemed to be a night for somebody maybe being able to hear.
The boy kissed her forehead, wrapped his arms around her shoulders. It’s too bad dawn isn’t a million years away, they could have spent those million years just like that, not moving so much as a single millimeter.
If the sun caught them crying, would it be enough to dry out the tears for them both?
“If we don’t get moving, we’re going to be sleeping in the field. I can’t even see any trees.”
“That’s because there aren’t any.”
She kissed him, gave him another squeeze, and they took up their hike again.
“But there are houses, and I think one of them might be empty.”
“Oh. That’s the trouble with not being able to see in the dark. It all just looks so empty and dead.”
“Even if it’s not empty, we could ...”
“Yea, I know. Trying not to think about that.”
“So, what’s the difference?”
“The difference? I don’t know! I can’t tell you if we’re the good guys or the bad guys. I can’t even tell you I care. You’ve been living with a whole world trying to kill you for as long as you can remember, so maybe it’s different for you. It’s only been, what? Maybe a year before you found me, and a couple of years since? Not a lot of time to get used to it. The cold is getting to me, and I’m bone tired. I’m starving, and there isn’t a single part of my body that isn’t screaming at me. I really wish we could have talked like this when I could be more patient and understanding.”
Silence.
More silence.
“Why does it matter?”
“It just seems...”
The boy waited. He was tired, cold and hungry, but not as much as he was letting on.
“... when I was a real girl, I was taught to believe in Right and Wrong. It was really easy. Giving people things was right, and taking things from them was wrong. Killing people was wrong. If you did things right, you were a good person, and if you did wrong things, you deserved to die.”
“Who killed the people who did wrong things?”
“...?”
“Who killed the people who did wrong things?”
“... we didn’t always kill them. Sometimes, we just sent them away. Yeah, I think that’s what we did most of the time, we just sent them away.”
“What happened to them then?”
Silence.
“Did you send them away just for stealing a loaf of bread?”
Silence.
“So, who killed the people who did wrong things?”
Silence.
“And who decided what was wrong enough that the people who did them deserved to die?”
Silence.
“Can’t answer those kinds of questions, can you?”
Silence.
“No? Well, guess what? Neither can I!”
She glanced at him before going back into a face-forward amble.
“Nobody can. This is one reason people fight so much.”
Silence.
“Would people from your little girl village have sent Frankenbeans away?”
Her voice was so quiet, he almost didn’t hear it, pitched in the lowest registers her voice has. This, too, is a voice you don’t want to hear if you want to live. It had the same booming finality of a cavernous stone crypt being sealed.
“No.”
“So, you want to know what the difference is?”
“Yeah.”
“The difference is, you’re right. I like touching you.”
“...!?”
“Yes, I meant that, too, but there’s more to it.”
“What more is there?”
“You said I stayed ‘almost dead’ for a really long time after we ran away together. What did you mean by that?”
“You know what I meant.”
“Yes, but I want to hear you say it.”
“Why?”
“Because you have a habit of avoiding questions you don’t think you can answer, and because I think you’re wrong when you say you don’t have eyes like mine.”
“Other people have played games with me like this before, too. It never got very far.”
“Maybe they didn’t understand that what’s wrong isn’t your eyes. It’s your mouth.”
Her voice went flat and acid.
“No kidding? When did this happen? How did you ever guess?”
“It’s not hooked up to your brain very good, and it doesn’t even seem to know you have a heart.”
“You’ve seen my heart. You’ve heard the noise it makes and the broken bodies it leaves behind. You actually want to hear it speak!?”
“Wrong heart. What did you mean when you said I stayed almost dead for a really long time?”
“You didn’t really seem to enjoy anything. You didn’t ask any questions. You were all ‘OK, whatever, if it’s OK with you, it’s OK with me’. You were like a zombie.”
“But I was alive, right? Not in a coma and not hibernating, right? Eating, sleeping, pissing on trees, all of it, right?”
“... yeah...”
“So why do you say I was almost dead?”
“Those kids almost killed you. Inside, I mean. Like, when I was still around, something inside you lit up like a full moon and stayed that way until I left. When I came back and found the kids killing you for real, you weren’t fighting back. You were just there, not moving. Waiting to die. I think you wanted it. I’ve seen people do that, more than I can count, and sometimes I even knew what made them give up like that.”
“It wasn’t just the kids.”
“No, it was lots of different things, but the kids weren’t helping. They were just finishing you off, but they were doing it just because they could.”
She suddenly clenched two fists. Perfectly ordinary fists any twelve year old girl might make, only, they looked like polished marble. She stormed off - quietly - and walked around in a circle once or twice. Trying very, very hard not to scream. A tiny rivulet of blood ran down her temple, black as ichor in the failing moonlight.
“I think you said you don’t have a heart.”
“Being able to get mad doesn’t mean you have a heart. Besides, I think what I said was I have a hard heart.”
“Then your hard heart didn’t tell you the rest of what was going on with me when I ran away with you?”
“... no...?”
“So, yeah, those kids were finishing me off. Yeah, I ran away with you, for lots of reasons, and you had a lot to do with some of those reasons, and nothing to do with others.
“Think about where I was at when we got off the boat. Here I was, a little boy who couldn’t go home because the police were going to be everywhere, and guess who was going to get into so much trouble because one of the kids who’d been ‘murdered’ was the one I put in the hospital. Think they’d listen to me? They didn’t listen to me the first time! I think they’d have called up some shrink, and I’d be spending the rest of my life swallowing happy pills.
“So, I couldn’t go home, and I didn’t know where I was going. I knew you, but not really. I thought I could trust you, but wasn’t sure. Honestly, sometimes I think I didn’t even care. My life was over, and nothing mattered. Just nothing at all. If you’d have said you needed something to eat, I’d have just said ‘Oh, OK. Don‘t forget to take out the trash when you‘re done’.”
“I know. Not fun times.”
“You did say you needed something to eat. Quite a few times. And when your gut started making all those mountain lion noises, you always ran. My life wasn’t worth the cost of a bullet, and I wasn’t even good enough to feed a monster like you!”
“Hey... that’s not fair...”
“What about our royally screwed up lives do you figure could possibly ever be ‘fair’!? I know that’s not how it was, but that’s how it seemed at the time. I was depressed, lonelier than I’d ever been, homesick and probably a dozen other things besides, not to mention having to get used to being around people being killed all the time and having to worry about getting caught for real trouble! Home might not have been such a heaven, but at least I knew what faces to watch for and avoid!
“So, you ran away a lot, just like you did in the hideaway that first time. You were judging me, and it took a long time to figure out what that judgement really was.
“Yeah, you think I was such a goddamn gentleman when I didn’t let you do things for me when I thought you were just doing what you thought you had to do? Want to know the truth? I didn’t want a pity pat! I thought that’s what you were doing, you know, even though I couldn’t figure out why. What I really couldn’t figure is why you didn’t just let me fall asleep in a snowbank! Man, I was messed up.
“You saved my life, no doubt about it. Lots of times, maybe even more times than I know about. You said you didn’t really have to kill Frankenbeans to save my life - is that true? You sure got up on your feet fast enough.
“That’s not all of it, though. Not even close. I’m not even grateful you went out and got food and clothes for me, and always looked out to make sure I had someplace warm enough to sleep in. I’m not grateful for all that trouble you really didn’t need to go to when you could have just ducked into some cave or sewer, even though I know I should be.
“What I’m grateful for is the time you gave me.”
The girl started. He’s grateful she gave him a little bit of time? What does time even mean when you’ve long ago forgotten whole languages, and likely to forget a few more before the sun rises for the last time?
“Time?”
“You don’t remember? You took the time to try to figure out how to cook a hot meal in a tin can over a brazing torch. Can’t say I enjoyed the results you got every time, but when I wasn’t feeling good, what you did kept me alive. You took the time to figure out how to work the washing machines at the laundry, even though that wasn’t needed to keep me alive. You took me places, showed me things. Explained things. Most of the time, you even answered my questions, and the answers you gave helped me see things. The answers you gave me were real.
“But most of all, you were just there. Whenever I felt lost, you were there. I remember you holding me when I cried. I did that a lot, didn’t I? You didn’t tell me to grow up and grow a pair, and you didn’t tell me to dry up or go away. You didn’t do a goddamn thing but just hold me. A lot of times, you didn’t even ask why I was crying.
“And you listened. When I had stuff to say, you listened, and when you didn’t understand what I was trying to say, you hammered me with questions. OK, so maybe you’re not a grownup, and you can’t understand things the way they can, but you tried, didn’t you? Crisse cochon, you tried!
“And that’s not even the best thing. I guess maybe for a lot of people that’s about as good as it ever gets, but that’s not even the best thing about being with you.
“The best thing is that you let me touch you. I’m not talking about your body. I’m talking about you, about the heart you say you don’t have. It’s the way you’re with me, just like now. You’re walking by my side - or I’m walking by yours, makes no difference - and we’re together. You think I could talk like this with anybody back home? Nobody had time! Nobody wanted to be any closer to me than they had to be for any longer than they had to be! They just couldn’t wait to get away! And here you are, listening to me rant the whole night, never interrupting, never saying I’m wrong, never looking at your watch, never doing anything but just walking beside me and being with me. You’re letting me touch you even when we’re far enough away from each other I can’t even see your face.
“Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?”
The girl said something that sounded like “blub”. It might have been a startled laugh. Maybe not. Her voice wasn’t real steady.
“Yeah, I think I might have an idea. Thing is, someday you’re going to have to get me a watch so I’ll have a watch to ignore.”
“No, I don’t think you do. If you did, you wouldn’t talk about yourself the way you do.”
“You just not a minute ago said something about a monster like me, didn’t you?”
“If I tell you to go kill some six year old girl because I don’t like her dimples, and you go do it, who’s the bigger monster? You, because you have to do what you do to stay alive, or me for not killing you so that girl can live?”
Silence.
“You’ve had a really long time to live with what you are. Like I said, I don’t think I could do that even once. Goodness knows I’m no angel, but I don’t think I can go cold-killing like that. Not for my own life.
“When I asked why it matters, it’s like, are you worried about getting caught and sent to trial? You’re worried about what they’ll say about you? Don’t. You know what they’ll say. Didn’t you say you’ve left town without your pajamas more than once? Just like there’s no place in the world for me, there’s no place in the world for you. What they think doesn’t matter, so long as they think it somewhere else.
“You’re right, we didn’t spend any time with Frankenbeans. We didn’t hang out and play cards and trade jokes and laugh at silly stupid monster movies. We know one of the things he liked, and I’d’ve had real trouble living with it, but neither one of us knew anything when we jumped into the truck, right? So, no, maybe what happened to him wasn’t ‘fair’ because we didn’t get to find out if maybe other kids tried to kill him, too, when he was a kid. We didn’t get to find out what kinds of monsters might chase him in his dreams. And, who knows? - maybe he’d have known what you were saying about the things you say you see that nobody else seems to.
“We didn’t have time for that. Maybe you might, if you’d been alone. I know you said you’ve ‘lived’ with men you didn’t really like and wound up doing things you didn’t want to. Maybe you’ve always had a lot more time than choices.
“Me? I don’t have that kind of time. I can’t spend ten or twenty years trying to learn to live with a monster like him. I met him, I didn’t like his tone of voice one tiny bit, and I really didn’t like how he was going to treat us, and now he’s dead. If it’s not fair that we killed a man because of what he was without taking more time to figure out what he was and how he got to be that way, that’s just life. That’s how the world works, and when we torched him, it wasn’t really just us. The world would have torched him, too, if they’d found out about him. You know this for a fact. It would have just been a lot slower, and there’d have been lots more people involved.
“Gas chambers, electric chairs or being torn apart by a different kind of monster, what’s the real difference?
“The world didn’t find him. We did. You said you killed him because he was a lot like somebody else. Three or four years ago, I’d have just run away from him because I wouldn’t have thought there was anything else I could do, and be damned what happened to the rest of the world. Maybe that’s changed; I meant what I said about somebody having to put that sick dog down, because I don’t think anybody could come up with a good reason for just killing random strangers like that when their lives just got pissed away for nothing. The people in the flower beds weren’t eaten, and they weren’t killed because they were enemy soldiers. They just died so a monster could have some fun.
“As much as the world pushed me so far away I could never want to come back and be a part of it again, I still don’t hate them, and I don’t want them dead. I just wanted what I’ve always wanted: to be left alone. What I really can’t get away from is what every single one of those flower beds means. Did those people have to go through something worse than I did before you came and took me away? I can’t handle that thought, and I can’t handle the idea that if we’d done nothing and just gone away, there might be another garden in Frankenbean’s lawn before the next full moon.
“It’s not fair that you’ve almost been killed the same way a few times. The people who did that didn’t know you. I’m just as sure of that as I am of the ground I’m standing on. If they’d known you - really known you - they’d have tried to help you. They’d have tried to find a way to let you live.
“Maybe those things you see are part of some Twilight Zone dimension, and they’re busy policing or administering or taking notes on their favourite lab rats, and maybe they’re just the heart you say you don’t have bothering you.
“And maybe, just maybe, there’s something nobody sees, not you, not me, not anybody, that’s behind the curtain pulling levers and turning knobs and making the world we do see work the way it does. And if that’s true, then you have to believe that we got thrown together for a reason, and maybe we were on that particular road that night for a particular reason because of those knobs and levers, and now there’s one less monster in the world to make people put up signs asking if you’ve seen this boy or that girl.
“Who knows? Is what you take balanced against what you give? Only the guys behind the curtains can say for sure, and I personally don’t believe in them. What I believe in is you, because you’re real, because you’re here, and because of the way you touch all the parts of me I didn’t even know I had. I believe in you a lot more than I do the rest of the world because I didn’t even believe in the world at all until you showed me there was one.
“Maybe I’d have done you if I’d found out about you before getting to know you. Probably, in fact. I think I’d have said the same thing I said about Frankenbeans, that all the people you kill die for nothing. How do you square off the life of one little girl against - how many thousands since you were a ‘real’ girl? How do you square off the life of a little girl against the dozen or so that died while you were in my town? Seriously, you just don’t.
“And maybe what’s not fair is that I did get to know you before knowing what you are. It’s not fair to the world because of the difference between Frankenbeans and you, what we’ve been talking about. The world can’t see that difference, but I can, and the question I’d ask the world, if they’d put a mallet and stake in my hands, is this: ‘Could you kill your son or daughter like this? Could you kill your mother or father? Your husband or wife? Your girlfriend?’
“And the question I asked you is this: ‘What about our royally screwed up lives do you figure could possibly ever be ‘fair’!?
“I gave up on ‘fair’ quite a few towns ago. The world that says we have a born right to live is the very same world does so little to help us, and it’s the very same world that was trying to kill me even before I knew you, and now it’s the very same world that would kill us both if it ever found us. We can’t figure the world out, and we can’t figure out how to live with it. I think that’s because the world can’t figure out how to live with itself.
“Maybe whoever told you was right. Maybe you’re around because people’s hearts are hard. Don’t you think maybe that means there’s something wrong with the world, rather than with you? Maybe you have a job to do, and nobody’s told you what it might be. Maybe you’re actually doing that job, and maybe really awful things could happen if you stop.
“What matters is what you’re willing to live with. You can’t worry about what’s right or wrong when just being alive is wrong unless you can live with being dead.
“One of the things you’re living with now is me. As far as I can see, I’m the only world you’re really living with. It’s really only my judgement that should matter to you.
“And that’s the difference. We don’t think anybody could say they loved Frankenbeans, because we don’t think Frankenbeans could ever truly say he loved anybody or any thing. Somebody who knew you could say they loved you because you can love. I know this for a fact; I’m still alive because of it. And I can’t tell you just how much I wish you knew that you can love. If you did, you’d understand just what kind of judgement love is.
“You judged me, and I’m still alive because of it. How do you really think I should judge you?"
Silence.
More silence.
Did the boy say something wrong? He turned his head and looked at her. Her head was up and facing forward, she wasn’t slouching and wasn’t shuffling. Looked perfectly normal, if maybe just a little stiff. Maybe she hadn’t heard one word he’d just said.
Until the moonlight caught two wet streaks running down her cheeks.
Sure seemed like a night for stopping a lot. The coming dawn still wasn’t a million years off. He held her. Close. Tight. She slid her arms under his, reached up and latched onto his shoulders, a little girl scared to death of drowning and not about to let go. Stood that way for a minute, or maybe a millennium, her nose buried in his neck. Frozen.
She fell apart in stages. Her arms started to shake. Then her head started to bob up and down. After a moment, her whole body started seizing. Icy breath came in great tearing jags, numbing his throat.
When her legs gave way, her whole body went limp and boneless, and she started saying something like “huh huh huh huh”, he picked her up, all fifty pounds of her or so, and carried her to where he thought she’d indicated there was a house that might be empty.
He’d never seen her cry before, and didn’t know if it had a screaming stage. Even in this deserted wasteland, screams might draw attention, and hers could shatter windows.
There was indeed a house, if that’s what you want to call it. Weather-beaten old shack, really, just waiting to start falling over.
It wasn’t empty.
It didn’t matter.