The Bewildered Read online

  The two boys just stared at her, faces serious, trying to appear bored.

  “It broke his leg in three places,” she said.

  No one said anything; the subject matter of Kayla’s story—or joke, or whatever it was—had raised a temporary uneasiness between them. They had a policy about this; they didn’t talk about sex. Of course, they had codes about sex itself, any kind of attraction. It was banned, especially between the three of them.

  Kayla’s jeans had a hole in the knee, the edges frayed; on her smooth, pale skin was the chalky circle of a lost scab, and her name written in red ballpoint, and another word or two that were mostly hidden, that Chris could not make out. He turned away from her, stared at his own reflection in the window. His hair seemed dark, cut this short, and he looked younger, his head smaller. He ran his hand over the smooth bristles. He had gone with Leon to have his head shaved, for solidarity; the accident, just a week before, had left Leon with hair on only one side. He had to even it out. When Chris had asked the barber how much it cost to get a shave, the barber had condescended, as adults liked to do, saying For you? I could put a little cream on there, under your nose, bring my cat in here to lick it off.

  “I didn’t tell you that story because I thought it was interesting,” Kayla said. “But because someone else thought so. That’s what’s interesting about it. Pathetic.”

  “Still,” Chris said, “you see how everyone acts at school—you give yourself over to that, it forces all the thoughts out of your head.”

  “And as soon as you start copulating,” Leon said, “you can have children, of course—and then you might become a parent.”

  “It’s not completely their fault,” Kayla said.

  “They should have seen it coming.”

  “And we’ll become just like them if we’re not careful,” Chris said.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Leon said.

  “Unless,” she said, “unless we can figure out another way to be.”

  “Right, right, right.”

  Ahead, the skinny, bearded man straightened his long legs, all the way across the aisle. He stretched his neck, twisting his face toward them, then away again.

  “It was just a stupid story,” Kayla said. “Probably wasn’t even true.”

  “Definitely wasn’t,” Chris said.

  The three sat, silent again, waiting, their skateboards propped against their knees, grip tape scratching rough against their jeans. They all skated Santa Cruz decks, but scraped off the brand name; they wrote in magic marker, and circled the insides of their Kryptonics wheels, covering the words. They all rode Independent trucks; there was no way to disguise that. Now they checked the bearings, the bolts that held on the trucks, the tension and tightness of the trucks themselves. Chris took out a wrench and loosened his; he wanted to make wide, carving turns, coming back down the hills in the darkness.

  “What about Natalie?” he said.

  “What about her?”

  “She’s not the same,” he said. “I don’t think so. Not like other adults. I mean, the way she talks to us, all business. She doesn’t shift the tone of her voice because we’re younger, she doesn’t condescend, doesn’t really care if we like her.”

  “But we never really hear her talk to other people,” Kayla said.

  “Still, she’s different.”

  “You just think she’s different,” she said. “You want her to be.”

  “You don’t?”

  “It’s not like I have a crush on her or anything.”

  The MAX stopped and started again, sliding past PG&E Park, all the dark empty seats, the black slant of the baseball diamond far below.

  “It’s been a week,” Chris said. “You think we’ll work for her again?”

  “You know the deal,” Kayla said. “I have to call her every day at the same time, and she tells me yes or no. Lately it’s ‘no, no, no.’”

  “What else does she say?” Chris said.

  “I should get the money soon,” she said. “The payment for the last time. When are we going to put it away?”

  The money was adding up; the three of them kept it, never spent it, stored it in their hiding place. One day they would all move away, and they would live together, somewhere, and they would live in a way that no one had lived before, a way they were still figuring out. The money was an important part of the plan. Crucial.

  “Maybe she’s worried because of what happened last time,” Chris said.

  “She doesn’t even know,” Kayla said. “Even Leon hardly knows.”

  Leon didn’t seem to notice she was talking about him. He was too busy adding some scratchiti to the train’s window, using a house key to mark the letters B-E-W-I- and starting on an L. The other two watched him; as he worked, he made a noise with his lips that seemed unintentional. Silver duct tape circled his shoe, holding the sole on—they were the same shoes he’d been wearing when the accident happened. Lately he seemed calmer, quieter, the set of his jaw less antagonistic than usual. He was hardly hungry at lunch, or after school; he seemed disinterested in studying. When they asked him about the accident, what had happened, what it felt like, he acted as if he could not remember it. It didn’t feel bad was all he’d say, and that was both frustrating and tantalizing. They had difficulty believing there wasn’t more he could tell them, something he was keeping back. Secrets were against the code.

  “What, Leon?” Kayla said. “What are you thinking?”

  “Hey,” he said, looking up.

  “I don’t know,” Chris said. “It seems like ‘The Bewildered’ is a good name for a band of losers, maybe, but more like the opposite of a name for people who are smart.”

  “And we don’t need a name,” Kayla said.

  “Also,” Chris said, “that makes us seem like people who join things.”

  “Joiners,” Kayla said.

  “It’s not a name,” Leon said. “I mean, saying someone is bewildered is always in comparison to what everyone else agrees makes sense, you know. So if everyone else, all the adults think you’re bewildered, then you’re actually not, you probably actually have a clue.”

  Chris looked up, out the window, at Highway 26, running parallel. A lone car, a long sedan, kept pace; suddenly, the driver opened his door—to slam it tighter or to spit something on the street—and the inside of the car was illuminated. An old man with tangled white hair, smiling to himself, driving late at night, going home or running away. He slammed his car door and the light went out, he disappeared, and in the same moment the train plunged into the tunnel, underground.

  The lights flickered; something was wrong with them. Had the pointy-bearded man moved a row closer? It seemed as if he had, but it was hard to say, because now it was dark. The three sat close together, waiting; the next stop was theirs.

  “Anyway,” Kayla said, “don’t worry, I have a plan. I’m gathering all the information we have about Natalie, in a notebook. I’m figuring how to find out where she lives, moving backward from the phone number I have for her. Then we can find out some more, find out how different she really is.”

  “Washington Park,” said the woman’s prerecorded voice from the speaker overhead. The lights returned, and the three stood, braced against each other as the train jerked to a stop.

  They exited through the sliding doors. Chris looked behind them, but it didn’t seem like the bearded man had followed. He’d stayed on the train, which was already gone, leaving them here, in the white tile of the tunnel.

  “Holy crow,” Kayla said, spitting down onto the tracks. “I can’t wait.”

  “Listen to you,” Chris said. “Look at you. Copying. Maybe you’re the one with the crush on Natalie.”

  “Je nai yo!” she said.

  Leon was already waiting, holding the elevator door open. Now they were close, preparing themselves. Only Chris had a helmet, a skull sticker on one side; Kayla took out her leather gloves, the palms and fingers worn down, shiny. She practiced kick-flips, the sharp crack of
her board’s tail on the metal floor echoing off the walls. The numbers above the buttons counted the elevator’s rise, the feet above sea-level. The tunnel was at 450 feet, and they climbed; the doors opened at 693 feet. They stepped out, surrounded by the zoo parking lot and the signs for the Washington Park shuttle, which didn’t run this late. Lamps cast circles of light, here and there, illumination for security—exactly what they hoped to avoid.

  They moved silently; they did not skate; not yet. A double thickness of ten-foot chain-link fence, with barbed wire on top, stretched up from the entrance gate a hundred feet away. The three moved closer, up to the right. Tossing their skateboards over, whispering, they went under the first fence, climbed the second—Kayla tapping the metal NO TRESPASSING sign with her fingernails—and slid down a slope of ground cover, tangled bushes. Regrouping, they climbed up through more of the same undergrowth, staying low and quiet, then pulled themselves up through the supports of a long wooden deck, and atop it, helping each other.

  Here they stood, on the deck, near the mountain goats—asleep, white and shaggy, raising their bearded, horned heads at the sound of the whispered voices, the dark shapes of the three hurrying past.

  “Hey, boys,” Chris said, waving. “We’re back.”

  “Quiet,” Leon said.

  When they reached the asphalt, they gently, quietly set down their boards. They paused for a moment, looking down the slope, the whole zoo below them. They could already smell the animals; low calls and night cries rose here and there.

  “We have to remember to time it,” Kayla said. Her round watch face flashed at her wrist, moonlight catching there. “How long did it take, last time?”

  “Eight minutes through the zoo,” Leon said. “Twenty to downtown.”

  With that, he was gone, out ahead, the sole of his right foot flashing—the straight stripe of duct tape, there—and then both feet on the board, his body down in a tuck, his left arm angled straight out in front and his palm facing down, his hand cutting the air and streaming it over him.

  “Go ahead,” Chris said to Kayla. “I’ll catch up.”

  “Right,” she said. “Try.”

  She pushed off and Chris followed, keeping her in sight. They went slow at first, the bumps still there, the lighter stones in the asphalt blurring together into straight lines as the warm air shifted cool and the ground went smooth. All three liked the speed, though none so well as Kayla, who could control it best. They shot across the bridge, the dull empty tracks of the miniature zoo train below, the wind in their ears, their eyes going teary. No one else did this; no one would think of it. Here was the first sharp right into an S turn—Kayla ahead leaning into it, dragging her gloved fingertips along the ground—and then the swooping left under a low arch, out past the sea lion pools and the otters, and under another arch, underground—into a cave, Chris holding his breath because it was almost like being underwater, the edges of the dark glass walls lost and the shadowy fish suspended, hanging, swimming around him and then here was the stretch of carpet under his wheels, slowing him with its friction that had to be anticipated, leaning back, Kayla already off it, and then asphalt again and his wheels loose as he shot past the elephant seals, rising so wise and fluent like huge black ghosts on a flickering white movie screen, watching, waving flippers and tails, huge enough to swallow three of him—and he was out, cool, unfishy air rushing past as he swooped around the penguin house and began to lose speed on the flats (this was a dangerous section, exposed and slow; the second time they’d done this a night watchman, some kind of security person, had run out, emerging near the Bearwalk Cafe, but by the time he got to where Kayla had been she was fifty yards past him, and he was facing the wrong way, watching her go, as Leon and Chris passed on either side, howling as they swept by, toward the gibbons) and had to start pumping hard to maintain momentum. He could hear Leon’s foot, and Kayla’s, their feet slapping in syncopation as they shot past the gibbons in their tall cages, up all night on manila ropes. The sound of wheels startled, roused the bears, off to the left. The air was thick with the smells of manure and hay and strange animal musks. Bamboo and ferns and cool, broad-leafed plants slipped by, slick against his bare arms. His legs ached, but the next long slope was coming, right after the Asian elephant building, and then gravity again letting loose, just enough—

  —swooping down under the tall totem pole with its arms outstretched, all the frightening heads in profile, piled up, and he rocketed past the Alaskan Tundra, the slow musk ox and the hidden grizzly bear and the ragged, halfhearted gaunt wolves howling now. There was no better feeling, no name for it, no better sound, and the best was to be together, the three of them—Chris, Kayla, Leon—the points of a triangle, bending and twisting the sides, the corners and angles; he liked to be last, to keep the other two in sight, and to imagine how at the same time all the snakes were winding themselves tighter, the jaguars and tigers pacing, snapping through liquid turns like his own, and the crocodiles’ slitted yellow eyes staring beneath lukewarm water, and the bad-tempered zebra, the blue-tongued giraffe turning its long neck in wonder.

  They skated, their twelve wheels roaring. There was only the moon overhead, the animals above them, the city below. No one else did this; no one would think of it. And ahead Chris could see a strange light in the sky. Glaring, shining, dead ahead, calling them in. He watched as Leon, still out in front, stood up from his crouch, his body straight but his trucks wobbling, the board unsteady beneath him at that speed. Leon’s head turned and his face flashed sideways in the moonlight—what was he looking at? not where he was going—and his wheels caught something or he simply lost it. His body catapulted and skidded on one side, his board kicked back, spinning so Kayla barely missed it, so Chris had to swerve around it.

  Both shot by where Leon lay motionless, dark against the asphalt. Kayla leaned back, put her gloves down and slid sideways, her wheels screeching, her body only inches above the ground. Chris rode off the shoulder, leaning against the bite of the gravel, the friction, but it was too much and he was jerked loose, forward, his board lost behind him and his feet still underneath, trying to catch up before he went down, arms windmilling, feet slapping as he ran up the side of a hill, saved like a runaway truck, helmet rattling on his head, his heart and breath rattling, too, as he turned, searching back toward Leon, toward the light.

  Kayla had already reached Leon, who was trying to climb a fence, to get a better view. The left side of his jeans was shredded, the sleeve of his flannel shirt completely gone. Blood there, and in the moonlight the grit visible, dark asphalt in the wound. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “Are you in some kind of shock?” Kayla was saying. “What is your deal?”

  She and Chris tried to climb up, to be at the same level as Leon, to talk to his face, to see what he was seeing. He didn’t seem to hear them.

  Highway 26, the Sunset Highway, stretched out below, a few car headlights climbing. Closer, fifty feet away from the three, a workman stood in a cherrypicker, bright floodlights fixed on him from below. The man was working on the electrical line. He wore a yellow helmet, and a black, rubber outfit, thick safety gloves. He adjusted the lines with a long-handled pole, assorted pincers and attachments on its end. The crane that held the cherry-picker aloft groaned, moving the man higher and lower when he gave hand signals. A spark kicked out, fell, disappeared. Leon clung to the fence, watching, transfixed.

  “Listen,” Kayla said. “We can’t stay here. We’ll be caught. We’ve got to get through the fence, over there, then down to the streets.” She pointed toward the enclosure of the tree kangaroos, where the fence was bent out.

  Leon looked over at her, as if awakening. He turned and smiled at Chris, then began to climb down.

  “Are you all right?” Chris said. “Can you skate?”

  “Of course I can skate,” he said.

  5.

  IT WAS NOT EASY TO PURSUE SOMEONE by public transportation, but if Natalie didn’t call them, come to them, t
he three would come to her. They needed darkness, even as the days were getting longer, even if it was a school night. Things were complicated, but the three appreciated complications; they recognized them as opportunities.

  “Thank you!” they called to the bus driver as they climbed out the back door. He didn’t answer. He was still bent at them for practicing their music in the back of the bus; Kayla on the flute, Chris on the clarinet. It would’ve been even louder if Leon had taken out his trombone, but he’d refused to play. He’d just sat there with a lost, thoughtful look on his face, holding a galvanized nail between his teeth.

  Now the #75 pulled away from them, the lighted windows sliding around a dark, long curve, disappearing. The three watched it go, their instruments put away, their skateboards on the ground, their packs on their backs. It smelled like trash burning somewhere, an unseen fire.

  “It’s down this way,” Kayla said, checking the address in her notebook. “South of Johnson Creek.”

  Leon took the nail from his mouth and threw it into the bushes. They began to skate on the rough street, past the dark houses. Chris had new shoes—black Chuck Taylor high-tops, as always—and his mother had bought them a full size too big, so he stumbled a little when he kicked off. Leon skated better than he walked; he limped a little, lately, though claimed he didn’t. A week had passed since his spill at the zoo, and under the high streetlights it looked as if his arm was still bleeding, hardly forming a scab. Leon kicked harder, away from Chris, trying to catch Kayla. She was out ahead, proud that she’d done the detective work, found the address, wanting to get there first.

  The blacktop gave way gradually, the street beneath them turning to dirt. Picking up their boards, they began to walk.

  “So we’ll just go up to her door and knock?” Leon said. “I doubt she’ll be very happy to see us.”

  “I just kind of want to see her house,” Chris said, “you know? See if she lives with someone else or she doesn’t, or if she’s married, or what—”