Brood Page 15

  Polly’s kiss is hard, inflexible—not like those tonguey, drooly ones on TV, where the two kissing seem to be having a contest to see who can get the most spit down the other one’s throat. It is way more surprising than it is pleasurable.

  She pulls away and pushes him back, shoving his shoulders as if he had kissed her.

  From somewhere deep in the apartment, a door bangs open, followed by the sound of laughter and the pounding of feet. Moments later—with Adam standing there, still stunned, wiping the kiss off his lips with the back of his hand—Rodolfo comes galloping into the front of the apartment with Alice on his back, her knees pressing into his sides. She grips his long shiny hair as if she were holding on to the reins of a very spirited stallion.

  “Put me down, put me down,” Alice says, not very convincingly.

  But like most boys his age, Rodolfo is drawn to do the opposite of what has been asked of him. He runs faster now. It looks as if he is going to go straight through the window and out into thin air, a last ecstatic giddyup before he and Alice are obliterated on the sidewalk two hundred feet below.

  Alice screams with fright, but the giddyup game has made her giddy and there is a shimmer of delight in her scream, and though the mixture is nine parts terror and one part joyous excitement, Rodolfo chooses to heed only what he wants to heed.

  He comes to a sudden stop, but then the pace of his equine rounds through the apartment picks up radically. Now it seems as if Alice is riding not a boy who is playing at being a horse, but an actual horse. An unbroken horse with its first human rider. He careens from one corner to the next, leaping over furniture, crushing Coke cans in his way.

  Polly watches, her arms folded over her chest like an overwhelmed babysitter just about to blow her top. Her lips are pressed together, their color drained.

  “Your sister,” she mutters to Adam.

  My sister what? he wonders. She’s not doing anything wrong.

  At last, Polly can’t restrain herself any longer—as uncontrollable as the urge to cavort is in Rodolfo, the urge to stop him from touching Alice is just as strong in Polly. “All right, you two, stop!” she fairly screams. Her fingers curl; her teeth are showing. “You want to get us fucking kicked out of here, is that what you want?”

  At first, it seems as if Rodolfo has not heard a word. He continues to charge around with Alice, but he makes his way back toward Polly, and just when it seems he is about to race past her, as if she were just a checkered flag in some weird Grand Prix, he comes to a full stop.

  “You’s say?” he asks, grinning.

  “You’re acting stupid,” Polly says. “Really immature and stupid. Fucking stupid.” Stupid seems to be the operative word. She must keep her anger torqued; if she were to relax even a little, she fears she might start to whimper. It is so unbelievably painful to see how he carries on with that little shrimp. She knows she is acting like a bitch, but better to let them all hear the full blood-soaked and bloodcurdling roar of bitchiness than the brokenhearted whimper that is underneath.

  Alice slides off Rodolfo, rearranges her clothes, and tries to look as if she is relieved to be standing on her own feet again. She also tries to look a bit annoyed with Rodolfo’s roughhousing—but her smile of delight, as inexorable as a sunrise, gives her away.

  “Your hair’s wet,” she says to her brother.

  “I’m sure he did not want to use one of the dirty, smelly towels in our bathroom,” Polly says, showing she can sneer and explain at the same time.

  “What’s your problem?” asks Alice in as pleasant a tone as one can pose that question.

  “The way we live?” Polly says. She gestures first to the vials of blood on the sofa—for all the wildness of his tour around and around the place, Rodolfo has managed to leave the product unmolested—and then, with a larger gesture, she takes in the entire apartment. “It’s not for you. You don’t belong here. Let me guess.” She points at Alice. “You sleep in a little-girlie nightgown.” Now she points at Adam. “And what about you? Gym shorts and a T-shirt?” Quite correctly, she takes their silence as confirmation. “Well, you know what we wear when we sleep around here? Nothing.”

  “So what?” Alice manages to say.

  “We sleep nude.”

  “Since when you’s stripping all the way down?” Rodolfo asks Polly. He stands close to her, and then closer. He bumps his forehead against hers.

  “There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”

  “Is really stuff, or just the talking?” Rodolfo asks.

  “Stupid,” Polly says, but she is warming to him, and the warmth creates a little crack in her façade of anger and disapproval.

  “Me’s the stupidest boy in New York,” he says gleefully. And with that, he swoops Polly off her feet and slings her over his shoulder as if he were a fireman rescuing a girl from a house in flames.

  “Let me down, you stupid boy,” Polly says, with only the faintest trace of complaint in her voice.

  Alice and Adam stand there as Rodolfo charges down the long hall, off of which are three of the apartment’s bedrooms.

  “What’s with him?” Adam asks.

  “I don’t know. He’s okay.”

  “Where did he put our clothes and stuff?”

  “Back there. We’re getting our own room.”

  “Really? How long?” Nothing has ever been permanent in Adam’s life, so why should this be?

  “For as long as we want.”

  “Who says? Rodolfo?”

  “Don’t be against him. He’s awesome.” She sees the look of pained disapproval on her brother’s face. “Well, he is. I mean, he’s okay. He went all the way over to our house and got our stuff.”

  “Ever think about how he did it? You think he knocked on the door and said, ‘Oh, Ms. Kramer, I came here…’ ”

  “I know how he did it,” Alice said. “He was brave.”

  “Who’s even paying for this place?” Adam asks. “It’s really big.”

  “It’s not as big as our house. And anyhow, it’s on the West Side.”

  “Were you back there doing it with him?”

  “That’s gross, Adam.”

  “Well, were you?”

  “No.” She shakes her head; her expression is pained. “Never.”

  “For real?”

  “Look at me!” Alice exclaims. She steps back, moves her hand from her forehead to her waist. “I’m not like that.”

  Adam is silent for a moment. From the back of the apartment comes the bright silver burble of Polly’s laughter. “I’m starting to smell,” Adam says, his voice little more than a whisper.

  “Maybe you’re eating too much,” Alice offers.

  “I get so hungry.”

  “You can eat, just don’t keep it.”

  Adam makes a face, shakes his head. “We better call Mom,” he says.

  “Mom’s dead.”

  “You know who I mean. Cynthia.”

  “She’s our aunt. Not our mother.”

  “We better call her. It’s not even fair.”

  “So call her.”

  He pulls his phone from his pocket. It’s almost out of power.

  “What should I tell her?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Say we’re okay.” She thinks for a moment. “Yeah. And tell her not to call the cops or anything. Just say we’re fine.”

  “I think she’s nice,” Adam says.

  “I do, too. But…”

  “But what? Nice is nice.”

  “But she doesn’t understand us,” Alice says.

  “What if she does?”

  “She doesn’t.”

  Their attentions are suddenly seized by a high-pitched, unstable noise. It sounds like a kitten in a tin garbage can mixed with the electronic bleat of an alarm clock. They turn toward the sound’s source—it is coming from the long hallway.

  “Gort!” a girl’s voice calls. “Get back here!”

  A moment later, a little pink face peeks around the wall at the
end of the hallway. It’s a child’s face, a baby’s. Yet it is airborne. Is someone carrying the child?

  The twins hear a fluttering sound, as if a deck of cards were being shuffled. The infant’s eyes are wide and full of bright green cunning. The baby turns toward Alice and Adam, and its mouth turns up in a delighted smile. The baby’s tongue extends. Its eyes become brighter, more alive, yet at the same time less human somehow, less feeling.

  With the suddenness of movement of a hummingbird, the child zooms toward the twins. They see now it is a boy, naked; his little penis is squat and flaccid, like the tied-off end of a party balloon. His belly is round and strangely textured, like the rind of a cantaloupe. His little fingers wave yearningly while the pale gray wings that spring from his shoulder blades beat furiously in the air as he hovers before them. The wings themselves look moist, larval. He takes another long look at Alice and Adam, who cower, terrified, before him. But he seems to mean them no harm. He hears his mother’s voice calling again and he turns and darts quickly back to her.

  “We have to go home,” Adam says, his voice trembling.

  Alice shakes her head. “We are home,” she says.

  Chapter 14

  The Watertight Plumbing truck pulls into the loading dock on the north end of the vast, seemingly abandoned warehouse in Queens. A late-summer moon, dark orange, pocked and pitted like a rotted pumpkin, floats in the mottled sky, bright enough to draw the eye but not shedding any light whatsoever. It is never quiet in the city, even here in a so-called outer borough. There is always the noise of trains and trucks, the throb of music. The streets are never empty; there is always someone coming, someone turning a corner, walking a dog, jogging, looking for a parking space. In the constant back-and-forth, the unceasing activity, it is easy to go unnoticed. No one asks, What is that building behind the high-voltage fencing? No one wonders, Why would a plumbing truck be pulling into a loading dock when it is almost midnight? But the people running the project at this Borman and Davis lab have (successfully, so far) banked on the notion that the more witnesses there are to something out of the ordinary—an injured cat, a mugging—the less likely it is that any one of them will do something about it. If you feel you are the only person seeing something odd, dangerous, or illegal, you are likely to intervene, or at least report what you’ve witnessed. In a crowded situation, however, you have an out. You can assume (assumption being the sum of hope plus apathy) that someone else will take care of it, or that it has already been dealt with and so for you to register a complaint or call out a warning or enter into the fray in any other way not only is unnecessary but might actually muddy the waters and cause more trouble.

  And so tonight, as on many other nights, Dennis Keswick drives his truck up to the locked gate of this mysterious building and rolls the window down so the CCC can see who it is. The smocks and suits have refused to issue him a proper ID card, prepared as they are to completely deny any and all knowledge of Dennis should something go wrong. He has stopped agonizing about this insult, this continuous underestimation of his worth, and now he waits nonchalantly while whoever is working security tonight presses the button that allows the gates to swing open so he can proceed with his human cargo. The gates are a little out of line; the metal scrapes along the cement as they open wide enough for Dennis to roll through. He is in what he calls major-production mode. He has taken Rogers at his word and stepped up his program of tracking, capturing, and tranquilizing the wild children. Normally, he would bring them in one at a time. On rare occasions, he has snagged two.

  But tonight he’s got three. A tall redheaded girl whose hair smells like burning leaves; a lithe Asian kid who had a fat roll of fifties in his jeans (had being the operative word, since Dennis relieved him of his financial burden moments after administering the see-ya juice); and, the most obstreperous of the three, a rather massive young man, six three if he’s an inch, with a shaved head and a turquoise-and-red tattoo of feathers where his hair ought to have been. The big guy calls himself Salami; Dennis has him in the book as Gabriel Martin; his parents are or were Louise and John Martin. Gabriel has been on his own for six years, since he was eleven. Louise and John are unaccounted for, presumed dead. Most of the parents of the wild children are dead now—heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, inexplicable accidents; the mammalian, avian, and aquatic essences pumped into them were too much for their human, all too human, physiology to support. A few of them, though it is against animal nature to do so, even managed to commit suicide, evidently preferring death from a high terrace or beneath the steel wheels of the D train to a life under the constant control of their increasingly chaotic impulses and their decidedly outré appetites.

  Keswick’s haul is safely locked in the back of his van, each individually chained to the walls of the cargo space, not only for Dennis’s safety but for their own. Not all of those wild things get along with one another—some, he has been told, have all the capacity for resentment and evil peculiar to humans combined with the mindless aggression of a cornered beast. (Dennis will never forget helping his aunt Joyce in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, get rid of some red squirrels that had invaded her little storybook cottage in the woods. She wanted to dispose of them humanely and insisted on Havahart traps that would lure them in with some irresistible treat such as organic crunchy peanut butter and capture them but leave them unharmed. What she did not know was that every red squirrel considers every other red squirrel its mortal enemy. And so, when the kinder, gentler trap happened to catch two squirrels, only one of them made it through the night. The bulging, burping survivor was found alive the next morning, round and sated, with a glassy look in his pinprick eyes, and the only evidence of what mayhem had transpired while Aunt Joyce slept in her four-poster bed was the tiny, apparently inedible feet of his vanquished cell mate left on the trap’s metal floor.)

  Now Dennis hears the rattle and clink of chains echoing in the van’s metal back chamber. He is certain it is Salami who has regained consciousness. Not a real problem, more of a pain in the butt. Salami is such a large thing, with so much animal energy coursing through him, that one see-ya obviously did not suffice. Oh, well, more where that came from. He opens the glove compartment and takes out a screw-top jar that was formerly home to alcohol-soaked cleaning pads and now holds a baker’s dozen of the mini-syringes—they look rather like pushpins—he uses to knock the kids out before donating them to science, ha-ha, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

  He drives slowly toward the loading dock. Earlier that evening, there was a quick, furious summer rain, and pools of rainwater have collected in the many potholes in the facility’s old, neglected driveway. The bluish light that escapes from a few of the building’s windows is reflected in the puddles, which shimmer and shake with the van’s approach and break into bluish splashes when the tires roll through.

  He pulls in. He is about to give the horn a little tap but stops himself just in time. He’s already been reamed out for that. Come to think of it, maybe he will honk the horn. His hand hovers above the steering wheel. No, better not. Why reinforce every negative thought the smocks and their minions have about him? Instead, he flashes the brights on and off a couple of times.

  A few moments later, a rectangle of bright light appears as a small side door opens. An elderly worker emerges, dressed in baggy dungarees and a T-shirt, pushing a handcart. What, Dennis wonders, is this ding-dong thinking? Where in the Sam Hill did he get the idea that this is like unloading boxes of envelopes or bags of feed corn?

  He powers his window down and speaks to the old guy in an urgent whisper.

  “Hey, chief, we need four strong men and a catchpole.” He snaps his fingers, points at the old guy. “Pronto.”

  If the man minds Dennis lording it over him, he gives no indication. He simply shrugs, turns around, and heads back into the building. The bright light flares briefly as he opens and closes the door.

  “Me’s killing on you so hard, shithead,” says Salami. Even through the closed door
, his voice is harsh and heavy, with little striations of his boyish soprano still audible, threaded in like tinsel sewn into the fabric of a shirt.

  Oh, this is going to be work, Dennis thinks with a sigh of resignation.

  Moments later, four men equal to the task come out.

  “Two are snoozing,” Dennis says to the unloaders. “But the big one’s awake, and he’s upset.”

  “Open up,” one of the unloaders says. He has the catchpole, with its heavy leather loop on the end.

  “They’re secure in there, right?” asks another worker.

  “Unless they can break through steel,” Dennis says.

  “Well, can they?” asks the nervous one.

  Dennis gives his most derisive laugh. “On three, gentlemen,” he says. “One. Two. Three.”

  He flings the doors open. And there they are. Today’s catch. Two are sleeping. The girl, at first glance, looks dead. Her face is the color of fillet of sole a day or two past its sale date; her eyes are closed; her mouth droops open. She wears a halter top, shorts. Her bare legs are scratched from thorns and stickers, and her bony ankles are scabbed. Next to her is another unconscious wild one, a boy, also in shorts. His legs are long and lean with very dark hair on the shins. He has a pointy face that looks defiant and mischievous, even with his eyes closed and his chin resting on his collarbone.

  Salami, however, is fully awake, and he sits there glaring at Dennis and the other men. He has given up trying to break his shackles but has not surrendered in any other way. A sound like the grinding of gears emanates from his throat. He is gathering saliva and mucus, and a moment later he spits it out at his captors. The gob flies with the speed and accuracy of a stone launched by a slingshot. Dennis, used to the ways of these revolting creatures, moves quickly out of the path of the missile’s trajectory. The Borman and Davis employee with the catchpole, however, is not as fortunate. He was, in all likelihood, Salami’s target in the first place. The greenish gob finds its mark on Catchpole’s chin, and it hangs there, trembling and semitransparent, like a piece of interstellar goo.