Snakes of St. Augustine, page 5
Serena glanced at him, half-smiling. “Okay, but where does she live?”
“Ocala.”
Her eyebrows rose. Had Serena ever been to the state hospital? On his last visit, Meghna’s room had been thick with the smells of baby powder, used diapers, and hair spray. Her black bobby pins were scattered across the windowsill. “A couple of hours southwest of here,” she said.
“She moved there two years ago.” Jazz peered into the sack, inhaling a cloud of warm salt. Usually, he tried to stick with vegetarian food, but he was hungry. “Some good kayaking over there, I heard. Spanish moss, green pools, and alligators lying around. I’ve got a student loan, so I stayed here to finish school.”
At another crossing, Serena eased to a stop. A horn honked. “The scene of the crime,” she said, barely audible. “Which way?”
“Right, then left.”
The park rolled into view—a playground covered with rubber-tire mulch, palm trees with the coconuts hacked off, islands of tropical flowers, and finally, farther down the road, his picnic pavilion—white stucco with a bench out front, a colorless awning, and a single unisex bathroom. God willing, nobody had jacked his stuff from under an azalea bush. He had kept everything he loved, including a kid’s cartoon toothbrush (a green muscle man), a comb, a dozen shirts and shorts, his favorite books (Winnie the Pooh and Leaves of Grass), and a photo of his mother—the items he had been able to fit into his backpack, a year after she was sent upstate and the landlord kicked Jazz out. No need to hang on to more than he could use in a week. Serena put the car into gear without killing the engine.
Jazz held up her bracelet. “I could tighten the clasp. I’ve got a little screwdriver over there with my things.”
“I’d better get going.” She reached out and closed her fist around the jewelry. “Hope you’ll be okay.”
“It would take maybe thirty seconds.” Jazz remained motionless. He could feel her uncertainty vibrating between them. “I wish you’d let me repay you.”
When she looked up, her face was twisted. “For what—injuring you?”
She was smiling, but not in a happy way. The veins in her neck looked like they might snap. “For dinner.” He felt guilty, letting her think the accident had been her fault, but at that moment he couldn’t bring himself to tell her he had chased her down. He didn’t want her to think he was some kind of creepy stalker. It wasn’t like he had been riding his bike around her house at night or anything. He happened to see her and he got too excited. That was all.
Her eyes clicked up and down the side of his head where it had hit the ground and scanned his knees and the bloody handprints on his shirt. She gave the bracelet back to him and popped her door open, talking at the same time. “I’ll get your bike out.”
“Thirty seconds,” he said again. He raced for the pavilion, dropped their food on the picnic table, and scrambled for his backpack—still there. He plowed through his possessions until he found the tool, an inch-long screwdriver with a miniature prong, and he ran back to the car, where she was hoisting the bike. He took it from her and closed the hatch, relieved because his hands seemed to be working fine.
The bike wasn’t as badly damaged as he had thought at first. Although the frame was bent, the tires hadn’t popped. He could fix it. He had assembled the whole thing from spare parts in the first place. Serena looked at the food, eyes sagging. “My head feels light,” she said.
He brushed some ants off the bench, taking care not to kill them. He was relieved when she sat down, and he parked beside her, in the glare of a yellow light. Serena spoke from behind her hand while chewing. “How long have you been here?”
Jazz inserted the screwdriver into the clasp, pleased with his surgical placement of the tool. “I’ve always felt that time is relative.” She crunched into the taco again, and he gave the screw another turn. “You were joking with me earlier about your age, but when I look at you, I see you as a child, with a child’s heart—a sad one, I have to say. Walt Whitman said age comes after us with grace, force, and fascination.”
“Whitman, huh?” She had spread the meal out as if she meant to stay for a while, which made Jazz happy and eager to explain everything flying through his mind. He would have to remember not to talk too fast. People had told him that was a problem. “Do you ever just answer a question?”
The clasp opened and shut with a clean click. He tested it three times before sliding the bracelet across the table. “Six months, I think. Before that, I lived at the bicycle repair place where I worked. I’ve been in transition since my mother moved, but that’s okay. Something big’s about to happen.”
“The Hacker’s Challenge?”
“I could win it. I’m the best computer programmer in the country.” He wanted to add, People don’t know what I’m capable of, but he stopped himself. He didn’t want to sound arrogant. He only wanted to tell the truth. “Guaranteed job placement. It’s a big deal.”
She had inhaled her taco so quickly, Jazz thought, the roof of her mouth was probably burning. She left her chips untouched. “How well did you know my brother? Tell me the truth.”
Jazz opened his bag, made a little village with a paper napkin and the food—a taco, a small bag of chips, and a plastic container of salsa. No drink. He was thirsty. “I helped him out with a math problem in class one time. He seemed like a good guy. I sent him a friend request on Facebook. We said hello at school a few times. That was it. I think he went to Colorado.”
The food sack crackled under her fingers, which were contracting into fists. “Why would you say that? What do you know?”
Jazz pulled a chip out of his mouth without eating it. He folded his hands together, pressed one thumb over the other, and held it down. He needed to be careful. He didn’t want to get her hopes up. “It’s only a guess. He bought the parka, and a few days ago, right before he stopped posting on Facebook, he added a link about some festival in Boulder.”
“He posts a million stupid links to music festivals.” She was talking too loudly. To Jazz, every word felt like a laceration. “He wouldn’t leave to chase a rock band across the country.”
“A lot of people are heading out there to work the weed farms.” Jazz kept his tone low and slow, and he nibbled at a corn chip, trying to muffle the crunching sound. He wanted her to feel comfortable disagreeing with him. He was only casting lines to see if some truth might get stuck on one. Gethin could be anywhere. He could be dead. Jazz didn’t know.
An ant trundled across her pinky finger. Serena sent it flying. “Gethin’s been clean for more than a year.”
Jazz chewed and swallowed a bite of taco. “I’m just trying to help you figure it out. I was thinking, you know, how people say Colorado’s the latest Gold Rush.”
The pale crepe under her eyes twitched. “He wouldn’t do that to Rocky and me. He’s got more personal discipline than that.”
The wind kicked up. Jazz had to hold down his hair. He was losing her. “I’d like to think he went off on an adventure. If he didn’t leave of his own free will, I mean—”
“You don’t have to say it.” She stood up and hiked a leg over the bench. “You either don’t know what you’re talking about, or you’re scamming me, like Rocky said. I’ve got to go.”
“Serena.” He grabbed the edge of the table, squaring his shoulders. More than anything, he wanted to bring the light back into her eyes. “I want to offer you a visualization.”
She scratched an eyebrow with her pointer finger. “What?”
“An image, for strength.” Jazz was on his feet with his hands outstretched, moving forward. “A meditation.” Blue hydrangeas with pink and purple streaks through the petals, like the ones Serena had been holding in Gethin’s online photo of his sister—the one that had made Jazz fall in love with her.
“No, thanks,” she said, and she was gone, sprinting across the sandy playground border, cranking her car. The tires whined. The brake lights flashed. Under the yellow light, next to his uneaten food, her turquoise bracelet gleamed. He grabbed it, tried to chase after her, but stopped at the swing set. Her car was gone and his legs hurt.
He limped back to his spot and ate quickly, gulping chunks of meat, cheese, lettuce, and Serena’s uneaten chips like a dog afraid of getting caught with its head in a pantry.
First things first. He would need a plan. Into his phone, he tapped three tasks:
Fix bike
Feed Inca the talking bird
Make Serena love me
He cleaned the table—brushed it with a bandanna, polished it until it was as close to glossy as the old wood would ever be, dragged the bench under an awning in case of rain, picked his teeth with a twig, and stared up at the sky. A sliver of sunlight was shrinking into the horizon, shooting pale orange stripes through a bruised cloud. Jazz dropped to his knees, cringed when his scraped skin hit the grass, and spread his arms wide, inhaling the smell of fresh mulch. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said, and he dictated a Facebook status update into his phone. “I am the light and the love, right here, right now, for you. If you agree, reply. If thy name is Gethin, show thyself.”
His wounds weren’t too bad, and the bike wasn’t so heavy, after all, braced against his shoulder while he ran, laughing at the birds that seemed to be calling to him from the trees. He whistled. They whistled back, following him—he knew it. A brown one flapped along the telephone wires, calling his name: “Jazz E., Jazz E., Jazz E.” Ahead of him, a cloud shaped like his own face expanded and split in two. With the bike on his back, he ran under the gap in the sky, into himself.
The bike shop was locked, as he had suspected it might be. The owner liked to drink beer with whatever guys showed up at sunset, but he tended to wrap it up well before dark. He would weave toward his truck and rattle off, wasted. Jazz had prayed for Bantam to be free—sober at last, or dead in his sleep. Either way seemed better than the life he was living. Bantam wasn’t even his real name, which was Paul. He loved rooster fights, an activity Jazz couldn’t bear to imagine. The old man never meant to fire Jazz. He had been drunk and angry, is all, yelling at Jazz to “stop talking a mile a minute about nonsense.” Bantam had apparently felt guilty afterward, sent word through one of the guys to let Jazz know he could still pick up his mail and charge his phone there.
Jazz had permission, kind of, but no key. He hauled a ladder from the side of the blue stucco building and pulled himself up to the second-story window. Protected by shutters with a couple of slats missing, the window offered easy access. The upstairs loft was his favorite place, covered with plastic turf, throbbing under red Christmas tree lights. On a ledge overlooking the first floor, a gold-painted Buddha statue sat sentinel. The red light rolled over its crossed legs.
Downstairs, Inca the Toucan let out a riot of old-fashioned swearing, which he had learned from Bantam: “Suck it” was the bird’s favorite, along with, “Shove it, shove it, shove it.”
Inca was furious with hunger. Jazz unlocked the side door and rolled his broken bike through it, locked himself in, and went into the kitchenette where the old man kept his booze stash and whatever pitiful few bites of food he could hold down in a day. Sure enough, Jazz found a half-eaten cereal bar on the counter. He folded the wrapper over the open end, cracked it with his fist, and carried it out to Inca, who shrieked and stuck out his triangular tongue. “Cracker, cracker,” the bird said. Jazz shoved the crumbled granola bar through the slats of Inca’s cage. The bird had pecked himself mostly bald.
Finding spare bicycle parts would be no problem. Every corner of the shop was piled to the ceiling with broken or abandoned bicycles, orphaned tires, frames bent beyond all functioning, and handlebars stripped of their steering mechanisms. Within a minute, Jazz had the wheels, the gear shift, and the pedals off his bike. Building something from nothing, whether it was a computer program, a poem, or a bike, made his blood throb so hard that his temples and wrists began to ache, but he couldn’t slow down. He didn’t want to stop.
The pain from his injuries had completely disappeared. His fingers flew—screwdriver, wrench, nut, bolt, next! While he worked, he talked to Inca, making up rap songs for the bird’s benefit. The poor thing was lonely and underfed most of the time. In no time, Jazz had put purple handlebars onto a bright green frame with canary-yellow fenders. When he added a pink seat, Inca squawked. Jazz squawked back. “No, the colors don’t match, but cut me some slack,” he said, hammering out a toolbox rhythm for his rap song. “Gotta get my lady’s brother back.”
Inca hooked his talons around the cage, lifted his tail feathers, and splattered poop everywhere. “Shove it, shove it,” he said. Jazz had never allowed children into the shop. Any parents who didn’t know better than to bring Little Jimmy or Sally around Inca and Bantam were guided to a row of bikes for sale on the sidewalk. Jazz had trained himself to eat less after he got kicked out of his mother’s apartment, and he had taught himself to talk less after getting fired. Maybe he could train Inca to say nicer things. “Pretty bird, pretty bird,” he said. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
“Suck it,” Inca said again.
Jazz finished remaking his bike, rode it around in a few test circles, and made another one from scraps. Again, he chose the brightest colors he could find—orange, teal, red, and chartreuse. He would leave the extra bike as a gift for Bantam, who had given him a prepaid phone for his birthday. When he was finished, he stood back and admired his work, but couldn’t bear to stand still. Out loud, he said, “Drop and give me fifty,” like a drill sergeant or Serena the Savage, and he laughed. The pushups hurt his hands only slightly where the skin was raw under the gauze pads. He kept going to one hundred.
His hands were bleeding again after that, and Bantam’s rags were greasy, but Jazz used one anyway, took a photo of the bike, and turned on the computer by the cash register. The old relic crackled and glowed like a nuclear reactor. Jazz jogged in place for maybe another five minutes while the screen came into focus one pixel at a time. He posted an image of the bike to the shop’s website, gave it the title, “Jazz E. Frankenbike,” and logged on to Facebook, still jogging.
On Gethin’s page, his profile picture appeared—an extreme close-up that made his nose look like it was surging forward, about to break out of the computer and hit Jazz in the face, 3-D style. Jazz’s reflection overlapped and merged with Gethin’s picture—eyes wide, mouth pursed, nose to nose. Rocky had posted a sad message, asking for help. A few people had written surprised replies—“OMG!” and “what happened?” and “praying for you,” but with no information. Going through Gethin’s photos, Jazz found a folder full of shots from Boulder. They looked like internet grabs of landscapes where Gethin might like to go: a green mountain slope dotted with pink and yellow wildflowers, an empty ski lift on a snowy peak, and an outdoor amphitheater with a rock band on stage.
Next, Jazz clicked on Gethin’s list of friends. Unexpectedly, a new photo popped up. In it, Gethin wore his trademark giant sunglasses, but also a purple and orange jester hat with spikes dangling in all directions. He had updated his profile photo. He was alive. Either that, or Rocky was online, sending Gethin a sarcastic message about being a joker.
As soon as it appeared, the image vanished like a jack-in-the-box, taunting Jazz. After that, the whole Facebook page went blank. Jazz tried logging on again, but the account seemed to be gone. The guy clearly wanted to be invisible, but why?
Jazz, on the other hand, had been trying for a year to escape the margins, to be seen and heard. Sometimes when he walked by a mother and child in the park, they didn’t make eye contact; instead they looked straight through him like he was only some homeless, potentially dangerous ghost, out of focus and wavy around the edges. If anyone asked, he would identify himself as “Jazz in the park.” No one ever did.
Without warning, the Tired Dragon slammed down on Jazz, sinking its fangs into his neck, making his head feel too heavy to hold up. Soon, he would lie down and sleep for a day. He punched the cash register open and dropped fifty cents into it, for the half-eaten granola bar. The drawer got stuck when he tried to close it. He had to slam it, which sent Bantam’s mail tumbling to the floor. An envelope with Jazz’s name on it landed between his feet. The return address had two snakes at the end of it. The letters in his father’s name rattled up at him: Terence McGinness.
6
Fletch
His first night back on the beat, Fletch set two goals for himself—Number One, find Trina’s stolen snakes and possibly her sister, although in his mind, that objective was secondary to protecting his friend’s livelihood, and Number Two, don’t kill anyone or be killed. The second goal was proving more difficult than it needed to be, thanks to his rookie partner, Officer Kala Foster. She was a passably good egg, fresh out of school, but with an unfortunate gung-ho streak. All afternoon, Foster had been trying too hard to impress him by pointing out jaywalkers and litterbugs she wanted to “collar.” Every gum wad spitter prompted Foster to nail Fletch with a blank, expectant stare, which he tried his best to ignore while driving. Her hard, slightly green eyes and ruddy complexion made him think of two peas in a bowl of tomato soup.
On the patrol car’s console, the radio squawked. “Car Four, Car Four, are you ten-eight?”
