The Fading Read online

  He would gain speed and coast right out to where Dimples was standing in the middle of the road.

  Becky was halfway across her lawn when the disgustingly long sedan, its dirty metal grill angled up, its cream vinyl top sloping back and low, roared in from the left corner of her peripheral view and blurred past her property. She caught the wind made in its wake and ran three more steps before the shriek of the monstrous thing’s brakes slapped her to a terrified standstill.

  5

  Anthony Sobretti II, who was also called Anthony Sobretti Sr or Poppa S or sometimes just The Old Man now that he was a grandfather of eight, was just about goddamned fed up with the tidy little man who had taken over the Speedway Repair Shop inside the Mobil station down on Broadway. The tidy little man, who appeared one day without warning and announced he’d bought the place from Deke Penrose, was of what Poppa S thought of as the Asian Persuasion. He might have been Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or some mongrel mix of the above whose portions were irrelevant to Poppa S, but whatever he was, he was definitely of the Asian Persuasion.

  Poppa S had just gotten off the phone with the Asian Persuasion and now he was going to pay the sly little prick a surprise visit. The Oriental had been trying to explain in his soft nervous Asian Persuasion voice why he was justified in charging Poppa S forty-two-fifty for a new muffler, even though Poppa S had the JC Whitney catalogue right there in his lap and could see with his own polished glasses that the exact muffler cost just twenty-eight even. Poppa S pointed this fact out and the Asian Persuasion – who had the nerve to wear a name patch on his mechanic’s shirt that said Ronald, as if he were born in the US of A and related to the goddamned hamburger pitchman, even though Poppa S knew a G-BOB (get back on the boat) when he saw one – began to tell a cute little story about how the Caddy’s pipes were so rotted out with rust and the mounts were so stripped, he had no choice but to ‘salvage them’ (as if Poppa S’s entire vehicle were a rolling pile of scrap metal) with a weld job that ran nearly two hours. It was Poppa S’s fault he refused to pay for all-new exhaust pipes, but, now the job was done, you couldn’t unweld welded pipes, and, even if you could, the muffler couldn’t be returned, so Poppa S owed Ronald The Dirty Jap Oriental Asian Persuasion Bastard forty-two-fifty …

  That’s when Poppa S had slammed down the phone and stormed out of the living room, ramming the spare keys into his wife’s Caddy, and reversed out of the driveway seeing bloody slant red. Far down deep at the back of his mind was a foggy memory of himself standing in the Speedway’s office, telling Mitch, the Asian Persuasion’s college flunky assistant, sure, go ahead, do the repair, the goddamn car smokes and makes so much noise I can’t go anywhere without looking like a jerkoff, so get on it, tiger lily.

  But that memory was nothing but a postcard buried in the sand on a speck of fleashit Pacific island, old old news, not nearly as important as the World War II movie Poppa S had starred in on that same island, in 1942, when he’d watched the Dirty Jap Bastards come out of the jungle like a swarm of yellow ants and drill Anthony Sobretti’s platoon brothers in a haze of red mist and spiders and crotch rot. And then had come the bayonets, the sluice-gutting banzai screams …

  Poppa S felt better the second he shifted the Caddy from R to D, running the wheel under the heel of his palm as he straightened out onto 7th Street and gave the pedal all kinds of brick-stomp hell. He was not so much seeing slant red now as he was bug-eyed with happy hot horny fucking glee as he imagined the pleasure that would be, in less than five minutes, his honking and screeching arrival at the Speedway station on the other side of the park, just three blocks down Alpine, and the look on the Asian Persuasion’s face when Poppa S put a tire iron through the nip’s brand new fancy-schmancy Bubble-Up machine and maybe just maybe the goddamn cash register, too.

  Because, honey, this is what you got when you fucked with the wrong greaseball.

  He was driving too goddamn fast, no doubt about that. But though he was sixty-one and a grandfather of eight, Poppa S was no old goat. He had the reflexes of a panther and the balls of a bull moose and he could maneuver a piece of Detroit iron like Steve McQueen with an Ali MacGraw hard-on. The street was plain old fuckin’ empty this time of the morning anyway, so he laid it on, taking down about half a gallon of go-go juice at thirty-six cents a gallon. He didn’t need to check the speedo to know he was pushing sixty by the time he crossed Cedar. The houses began to blur but The Old Man wasn’t looking at the houses. He was staring straight ahead, knuckles white, eyes on the road, and the fuckin’ road was clear. No cars backing out, no kittens crossing, not even a tumbling leaf. Another four blocks and he’d shoot the S-turn over to Alpine, and then Ronald McDonald Bruce Lee, he of the Asian Persuasion, would be in for the surprise of his short goddamn li—

  There was a boy standing in the middle of the road. A little bitty pecker no more than four. And he didn’t come runnin’ and he didn’t pop out from behind a parked car. There was no before and after, no lost baseball of a warning, no movement on the kid’s part. It was like someone had spliced a single extra frame into a film strip. The road was empty and then faster than a blink (and by bloody shitting Christ Poppa S knew he hadn’t blinked, his eyes were too busy bulging out of their sockets with erect violence) the kid was standing in the middle of it, whole, all at once, perfectly still and staring right through the windshield at Poppa S with no expression at all.

  In the split-split-second before he stood on the Caddy’s brakes, Poppa S’s eyes locked with the kid’s. They held each other across no more than twenty feet of asphalt and morning sunlight, and Poppa S saw the kid wasn’t one bit afraid. He looked, Poppa S thought, like he had nothing to worry about because this wasn’t real, it was an illusion, and what was about to happen couldn’t hurt him at all. And maybe that was true. Maybe this wasn’t really happening, maybe by Holy Fucking Christ I’m Going to Kill A Little Baby Boy it was a freak hallucination.

  But to be sure, Poppa S, whose real name was Anthony Sobretti II, yanked the wheel anyway. Yanked it just about as hard as any old greaseball could.

  Becky couldn’t see the street beyond Mrs Fryeberger’s hedge and she couldn’t make her feet go one step more. The tires shrieked for a horribly drawn out moment – in which she closed her eyes – and then the shrieking became a heavy sliding sound, the sound of rubber being ground down dully against the road. A big double whump … another eternity of silence … and then a horrendous crunch and shattering sounds as the big car collided with something of equal or greater mass but which, to her ears, stood only thirty-nine inches and weighed just thirty-four pounds.

  In the ringing silence, Becky wailed and went careening into the street. Noel’s trike was lying on its side, in the gutter not fifty feet from her. He was not there with it. He was not on the sidewalk or in the other yards.

  He was half a block down, standing in the middle of the street. In his yellow striped shirt and knee shorts and tiny sneakers. He was turned in profile to her, his thin body as haloed as an angel glowing on the mantle, staring numbly at the big brown car that was now an accordion of metal and vinyl and glass pressed into the fully mature weeping willow at the center of the Elkinsons’ front lawn. Two parallel strips of clean dirt lay exposed where the tires had peeled sod from the earth. Steam rose from inside the lacy sagging branches while dozens of blade-shaped leaves dipped and spun lazily to the ground.

  ‘Nooooooooel!’ she screamed deep from her stomach.

  He turned slowly and stared at her with a numb no-look on his face.

  Unharmed, her boy was unharmed. She knew this but kept running and screaming to him anyway. She scooped him from the road and she was full of rage, not at her son but at the driver. The nasty sonofabitch who had come blowing down her street hell bent for—

  ‘It’s okay, sweetie, it’s okay, Mommy’s got you,’ she said into his ear, clutching him against her breast as she danced back onto the sidewalk. Noel was shivering, face buried in her neck and hair.

  T
he old woman, Mrs Fryeberger, emerged from her house, slippers flapping under her sensible blue polyester pants as she trampled out parallel to her hedge, hands on her hips, some kind of hideous pink and green kerchief tied around the clouds of her blue hair. Alice Fryeberger was the last woman on the block Becky would call a friend, but she became one now with the first words out of her mouth.

  ‘Reckless endangerment! That was Tony-Anthony’s boy and I guarantee you he’s drunk! Speeding! I saw the whole damn thing and you ought to sue that whole family upside down. I’ll testify, you bet I will!’

  Becky could only nod and seethe as the shock ran out of her. She kept glancing at the crumpled Cadillac, expecting the driver to stagger out and enter an argument with her. But no one had gotten out. The door probably wouldn’t even open, she realized as her ears stopped buzzing. Becky was grateful for Alice Fryeberger’s bold defense, but after another minute she couldn’t help feeling at least a pang of concern for the driver, whoever he was.

  ‘Your boy okay,’ Mrs Fryeberger said, more of a statement than a question.

  ‘Yes.’ She searched him again for scratches or scrapes but knew there weren’t any. If the massive car had so much as grazed him, he would be sprawled in the street right now, broken in five places. ‘He’s in shock. It was just so scary and I didn’t—’

  Becky’s throat locked up. She didn’t want to cry but the tears and choked sobs came anyway.

  Alice Fryeberger spat on the road and marched over to the smashed vehicle, parting the curtains of willow branches, right up along the driver’s door. She leaned sideways to peer inside. She scooted further along, closer to the hood. She lifted her chin as if inspecting fruit at the grocery store, nodded at something, and walked back, wrists folded against her bony hips.

  ‘Well, that’s not Tony-Anthony, the little one,’ Mrs Fryeberger said. ‘It’s his old man, the father. Anthony Sobretti Sr. Went to elementary school with him and used to be friends with his wife Stefana, bless her heart.’

  Becky squinted, holding her son tighter. Alice Fryeberger didn’t seem upset, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

  ‘Ambulance,’ Becky said, but her tongue felt swollen and it didn’t come out right.

  The old woman flapped her blouse at the chest, cooling some heat that had arisen there. ‘Oh, honey. He went out the windshield. His head opened up pretty good on that tree. Terrible mess. He’s a goner and he ain’t coming back.’

  Becky cried, and the boy cried with her.

  Noel Shaker, age two years and seven months, did not understand what had just happened. All he knew was that he had played the game wrong and done a very bad thing. There was no way he could explain to Mommy now, no way to show her the thing. It was a bad thing and he was afraid of it. He promised himself, in whatever ways such young children are capable of, that he would never do it again. He cried inside this early taste of guilt, inside his promise, and stared tiredly through his tears over his mother’s shoulder, up the street.

  There was no sign of Dimples. He had vanished just as quickly as Noel Shaker had been restored.

  6

  Few events altered the playground hierarchy like the appearance of a brand new Nerf football. Kids who barely knew one another, and others who possessed no speed or passing skills, suddenly flocked to the colorful foam beacon like stray dogs to a restaurant steak the chef has lobbed into the alley. Class divisions crumbled. Sworn enemies who had come to blows over stolen candy at Halloween found themselves backslapping one another after the completion of a mondo huck down the leaf-strewn sidelines. Shoelaces got tied in double knots. At least one tomboy crossed over from the rope-skippers to play safety. It was a mystery, the power this cheap toy commanded.

  But not a very deep mystery. It was an inviting ovoid, meant to be shared. The pebbled grippy fruit skin gave form to a soft missile that promised to chafe noses without bleeding them. In its simplicity and forgiveness, the Nerf suggested they were all worthy of touching it, running with it, savoring the fresh bike-tire scent of it whistling under their chins. It made their little hands feel as big and strong as Terry Bradshaw’s.

  Didn’t matter if the kid who brought it was the budding athletic star or the wall-eyed pencil neck with a down parka feather stuck to the corner of his chapped lips. The child whose mother had shelled out $4.99 for a navy blue or canary yellow or classic orange Nerf essentially crowned her kid king of the playground.

  Such Nerffound status, however, like the ball itself, never lasted more than a few days – and its chrysalis lifespan was precisely what made it so precious, a currency that knighted its owner. As the rubber coating began to crack and peel like a sunburned shoulder, as the laces stiffened and the ball found its way into a mud puddle, waterlogged, dried hard and devolved into a dog toy, so too did the adoration of its owner dwindle and fade.

  By age nine, Noel Shaker needed a Nerf football day. When pressed to fill a guest list for his birthday party, he could rustle up three or four names, but none were guaranteed to show. It wasn’t that he didn’t fit in with the sprouting jocks, the math whizzes and eager bookworms, the troublemakers from the low-income families or the nascent band of preppies who lately seemed to spend most of their lunch breaks posing and gossiping with actual girls. It was that no one clique desired his membership, and as a result he had become a master of tagging along. Or simply keeping out of trouble by keeping to himself.

  Among his teachers, the running suspicion was that Noel Shaker was on the fence and soon would fall (or jump) to one side or the other. Good kid, bad kid. Smart kid, wasting his potential kid. Unusually quiet and attentive kid, spacey and weird and sometimes downright creepy kid. There were a lot of fences, even in the fourth grade, and Noel Shaker straddled most of them.

  He hardly ever missed a day of school, his parents sent him into battle groomed and dressed decently, and looks-wise he was perched somewhere between a little awkward and androgynously striking. He was pulling mostly Bs with one A (language arts) and one unsettling D (science). Nothing much to be alarmed about. But for reasons unknown, Noel had become the kind of boy teachers and students approached with oven mitts on both hands. Though he had never turned violent, there was something in his tense posture and bracing brown eyes that suggested one push in the wrong direction and he would blow.

  Only thing was, as his gym teacher Mr Coach Kanasaki put it one morning in the teachers’ lounge, ‘You don’t know if he’s gonna blow like a house full of oven gas or like an electrical fuse. You know, where something tiny inside just goes click and the turn signals never work right again.’

  Mrs McGinnis, who taught music, had been married three times, and wore shawls her sister loomed for Christmas presents, unleashed a funnel of Winston Gold smoke over Coach’s head and nodded in grave agreement.

  ‘It’s his fiber,’ she croaked. ‘The boy lacks fiber. He does just enough. He’s like the second house in The Three Little Pigs. He’s not going to be the easiest to knock down, but when he goes, there’ll be a lot more than a pile of straw to clean up.’

  Waving a hand to clear the haze of Rosalyn McGinnis’s two cents, Coach K said, ‘I don’t know if the father is too hard on him or if he’s maybe just stitched a little too tight at the seams, but he’s a thinker. He’s living too deep for a kid that age.’

  ‘I’ve met the mother,’ Mrs McGinnis said. ‘I’m not sure I cared for the way she was keeping herself.’

  ‘Mrs Shaker is a dedicated mother,’ Coach K said. ‘I don’t see a problem on her end—’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Mrs McGinnis said, further browning her teeth with a swig of lounge decaf.

  Coach K frowned. ‘Okay, I don’t know what that means, but my point is, if Noel can hang on till middle school and Bud Jarvis over at Centennial can get him on a team, a lot of that pent-up energy can be converted into points on the board. He has good legs. He should be running. Best thing for anxiety—’

  ‘Sports,’ Mrs McGinnis said. ‘It all comes back to sport
s with you.’

  ‘Then why don’t you teach him to play the guitar, Rosalyn?’ The phys-ed teacher slapped the table where a decimated box of Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins sat seeping grease onto copies of the latest Cougar Courier. Coach K thought the cartoon cougar on the masthead of the school’s newsletter and Rosalyn McGinnis were beginning to bear a suspicious resemblance to one another. ‘Do you really think the piccolo is going to unlock the passion in their souls?’

  ‘It’s called the recorder, you tone-deaf ape.’

  As it happened, Noel wasn’t able to hang on till middle school, or much past today. Which was a shame because the morning had gotten off to a promising start. He rode to school avoiding his mother’s eyes from the passenger seat of their rattling loud microbus, but he knew without looking that hers were circled in darkness, watery, her nose red at the tip. She’d been crying again, last night while his dad worked late again. When they pulled up, seven minutes past last bell according to Noel’s rubber Timex, he shouldered the door open but his mom stopped him, pulling on his sleeve.

  ‘Wait a sec, hon. I forgot to give you this last night.’

  She dug into the clutter between the seats, cast aside a small pink umbrella, and bobbed up holding a two-tone maroon over black Nerf football. For a moment it sat there between them like some imaginary bird’s lost egg, belonging to neither mother nor son, and Noel didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Where’d you get that?’ he finally managed, his Carnation Instant Breakfast turning thick in his belly.

  ‘Where do you think, silly? Don’t you want it?’

  ‘Did Dad bring it home?’ He regretted this as soon as it escaped his lips. He could feel his mom tense, saw her uneven fingernails threatening to puncture the Nerf’s delicate packaging.