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Sometime later—maybe fifteen minutes, maybe twenty—Doc helped himself to another cigarette and said, “He thinks he’s only lost two, but the rest slipped away last night. Me ’n Pando were the last. Except for Marm. Marm won’t leave him.”
From up front Pando said, “Marm’s as crazy as he is.”
“We risked our lives to bring you out, Finn,” Doc said. “I don’t expect thanks, but we did.”
Finn thanked him anyway. His voice was trembling and his legs were shaking. Shake, shake, sugar, but you’ll never shake me, he thought. That was Elvis, “Stuck on You.” Finn wondered if his grandma knew Elvis had gobbled up his twin brother, Enos.
“Thank you so much.”
“I don’t know if you’re worth a shite to anyone, but you don’t deserve to die just because he is the way he is now. Did you see that pamphlet he’s so proud of? Wrote it himself, didn’t he? But he wasn’t always that way. No. We did good work once upon a time, didn’t we, Pando?”
“Saved the fucking world in ’17,” Pando said, “and not more than a dozen people ever knew. But we knew, kid. We did.”
“Feeney’s up to something,” Doc said. “That much I never doubted. You weren’t a part of it, but he wouldn’t let it go. Even though he don’t remember squat.”
“Is it—”
“Shut up,” Doc said. “Just be a good little laddie and keep your goddamned mouth shut. Unless you want to get into worse trouble.”
From the front Pando said, “No, he wasn’t always this way. I remember… ah, never mind. For half a crown I’d put a bullet in your goddamned head myself.”
Two hours later—at least two—they came into another town, a biggish one from the sound of the cars and lorries and the voices Finn heard at stoplights. Voices and laughter, the sound foreign to him.
At last the van pulled up and Doc yanked the bag from Finn’s head. “This is your stop, son. And this is for your trouble.” He stuffed something into the front pocket of Finn’s jeans. Then, suddenly—Doc didn’t seem to know he was going to do it until it was done—he kissed Finn on the forehead. “Keep me in your prayers. I’ll need a fucking lot of them.”
He opened the back doors. Finn step-stumbled out. The van pulled away while Doc was still yanking the doors shut. Finn looked around like a man waking from a vivid dream. A bicyclist rang a bell and called, “Left, on your left!”
Finn stepped up onto the curb to keep from being hit broadside by an old buffer with a white mustache and a nose like the prow of a destroyer. To his right was the Randolph Street newsagent’s, where he bought Grandma’s word-search books, and sometimes—if he was feeling generous—an OK! or a Heat for his sisters. Next to it was the Yor Best chippie. Finn hadn’t spent half a fortune in there over the last ten years. He was less than a mile from home.
He walked that way slowly, looking around, meeting the eyes of other pedestrians (most looked away at once, surely believing they were crossing gazes with a crazy street person), looking at the sky, looking in every window. I’m alive, he thought. Alive, alive, alive. He also looked over his shoulder several times, making sure there was no sign of the black tradesman’s van.
He stopped at the corner of Peeke Street and peered around to make sure Bobby Feeney wasn’t running toward him on a collision course, bearing away the secret papers, or the blueprints, or heading for the bomb factory. No one was there. He reached into his pocket and brought out a wad of banknotes: green euros, forty or more. He stuffed the wad back into his pocket.
For every stroke of bad luck, two strokes of the good, Grandma had said. Well, he had at least four thousand, that was one stroke. And he had his life, that was another.
Home was only two blocks down and one street over. They would be worried about him, for all he knew his mother had flown home early from her big business thingy, but they could wait a little longer. He turned back along Peeke Street to Emberly, then from Emberly to Jane Street. Halfway down Jane was Pettingill Park. It must have been early afternoon of a school day because the playground was empty except for two toddlers on the roundy-round who were circling slowly, pushed by either their mother or their minder. Finn sat on a bench.
He looked at the Twisty and a terrible memory came to him. In his last year of school, Mr. Edgerton assigned them a story by Ambrose Bierce. After they had all read it (presumably; not all of Finn’s classmates were of the reading class), Mr. Edgerton showed them a short film based on the story, which was about the hanging of a slave-owner in the American Civil War. The slave-owner is pushed off a bridge, but the rope breaks and he swims to safety. The twist is this: the fortuitous escape was all in his mind, a kind of mini-dream before he’s actually pushed from the bridge and executed.
That could be happening to me, Finn thought. They went too far with the waterboarding and I’m drowning. Only instead of my whole life flashing in front of my eyes, as it’s supposed to do, I’m imagining that Doc took me out, Pando drove us away, and here I am, in the park I enjoyed so much as a wee lad. Because really, is my escape likely? Is it realistic? You might believe it in a story, but in real life?
Was it real life, though? Was it?
Finn seized one of his cheeks, still tender from slaps administered by Doc before Doc’s (unlikely) change of heart. He twisted it hard. It hurt, and for a moment Pettingill Park seemed to waver like a mirage. That was caused by tears of pain, though.
Wasn’t it?
Nor was it just Doc’s change of heart that was bizarre. Mr. Ludlum who used to be Mr. Deighton… the badly printed pamphlet (and badly spelled, don’t forget that)… the business about Elvis’s twin brother… wasn’t that all the stuff of dreams? What if Bobby Feeney hadn’t just knocked him on his arse but on his noggin? What if Finn had hit said noggin on the exact same place where it had once been cracked on the memorable (not that he actually did remember) day when he had been brushed by lightning? Wouldn’t that just be Finn Murrie’s luck? What if he was lying in a hospital bed somewhere, deep in a coma, his damaged brain creating some crackpot alternate reality?
Finn got up and walked slowly to the Twisty. He hadn’t climbed its curves in years, not since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, as Grandma would say. He climbed it now, pulling himself along by the raised sides. It was a tight fit, but he managed.
The mom or child minder had stopped pushing the kids on the roundy-round. She shaded her eyes with her hands and said, “What in heaven’s name are you about? You’ll break it, you great galoot!”
Finn didn’t reply, and he didn’t break it. He reached the top, turned himself around, and sat with his legs on the first curve. He thought, Either I’ll still be here when I get to the bottom, or I won’t be. Simple as that.
He looked at the woman and said, “Elvis has left the building.” Then he pushed off.
ON SLIDE INN ROAD
