* * *
—
The second time he did it, the very next day, I wasn’t quite as forgiving; there was still a reach for his collar, but I dragged him across the lawn.
“What the hell are you thinking?” I asked. “What the hell are you doing?”
But Clay was happy, he couldn’t help it; he’d quelled it again, momentarily.
“Are you even listening?”
We stopped at the fly-screen door.
The boy was barefoot-dirty.
I said, “You have to promise me.”
“Promise what?”
It was the first time he noticed the blood down there, like rust between his toes; he liked it and he smiled at it, he liked that blood a lot.
“Take a Goddamn guess! Stop bloody disappearing!”
It’s bad enough he’s disappeared.
I thought it but couldn’t yet say it.
“Okay,” he said, “I won’t.”
Clay promised.
Clay lied.
He did it every morning for weeks.
* * *
—
Sometimes we went out, we searched for him.
Looking back, I wonder why.
He wasn’t in abject peril—the worst would be losing his way again—but it somehow felt important; another holding-on. We’d lost our mother and then our father, so we couldn’t lose any more. We simply wouldn’t allow it. That said, we wouldn’t be nice to him, either; he got dead-legged upon return, at the mercy of Rory and Henry.
The problem, already back then, though, was that it didn’t matter how much we hurt him; we couldn’t hurt him. Or how much we held him; we couldn’t hold him. He’d be gone next day again.
Once, we actually found him out there.
It was a Tuesday, seven a.m.
I was going to be late for work.
The city was cool and cloudy, and it was Rory who caught a glimpse. We were several blocks east, where Rogilla met Hydrogen Avenue.
“There!” he said.
We chased him to Ajax Lane, with its backstreet line of milk crates, and tackled him into the fence; I got a thumbful of cold grey splinters.