The Nameless Dark: A Collection, page 2
Four sets of shoulders moved into Alden’s view, topped by sweaty, excited faces. They all wore swimming trunks, the plastic fabric rustling between their sunburned legs as they jostled for position, slinging their towels over their necks or wrapping them around their arms. Three of the boys smiled. The fourth, bigger than the others, wasn’t. “Where you goin’?” the tall one asked.
“Yeah, where you goin’?” the shortest one echoed.
Alden’s heart was pounding. He didn’t like confrontations, and he knew this was a major one. He was the new kid, always the new kid, and so he had to take his lumps. Maybe this time wouldn’t be as bad as the last.
“Looking for pets,” Alden said, holding up his pickle jar, as if in explanation.
The boys looked at each other, confusion quickly giving away to sneers and laughter.
“What are you, a fucking retard?” one of the other boys asked. Aside from the tall one and the short one, the two other boys looked very much alike. They might have been twin brothers, or just both really ugly.
“Yeah, you a fucking retard?” Echo Boy said.
Alden founds this question odd. Both times. “No,” he said.
“Well, you look like a fucking retard,” Tall Boy said, slapping the jar out of Alden’s hand, not watching as it smashed on the sidewalk, spraying them with shards of glass. The shrapnel surprised the other kids, and even kept Echo Boy quiet as he dug a chip out of his shoe. Tall Boy leaned in close to Alden, breathing the sour smell of strawberry soda into his face, and poked Alden in the stomach. “Tubby.”
Echo and the Two Others who had moved back to avoid the glass now closed in, hands balling into fists, lips stretching over missing teeth. One of them wound up his towel into a tight twist, holding it low, ready to unleash it like a whip.
“You get on outta here, now,” a voice called from above. The boys looked up and found a wiry woman with ash gray hair leaning out of her window, gesticulating with one hand, her other holding a phone. “Breaking glass on a public sidewalk? What in the world? I’m calling the police!”
“Come on,” one of the Other Ones said to Tall Boy, grabbing him by the shirt. “That bitch is crazy.”
Tall Boy’s peeved grin widened into smile of anticipation. “See you around,” he said.
They ran up the street, laughing and high fiving and bumping into each other as they veered around the corner, heading toward the dilapidated strip of boardwalk built atop the beach.
Alden stared down at the collection of glass that had been his pepper jar. Crystals glinted around a perfect tin circle lid with holes poked through it, which would have allowed those things trapped inside to breathe. It would have been the perfect environment. The ideal home. Alden would have made sure. Now it was just trash.
A bus squealed to a stop in the street, offloading a cluster of exhausted people in various stained uniforms. A faded banner ad on the side of the bus, marred by unimaginative graffiti, announced the unveiling of the new primate exhibit at the city zoo. Come experience the WILD! the advert dared.
“Are you hurt, son?”
Alden peered up at the woman in the window staring down at him, the phone receiver held limply in her hand. There was no cord attached to it.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Which way to the zoo?”
The route she gave him was wrong, and after an hour of walking in a gradually widening square, he noticed that there weren’t any more gulls circling overhead, nor could he smell the fishy brine of the ocean. He was far from his apartment, and probably nowhere near the zoo. Maybe that bitch was crazy. Crazy enough to get a kid lost without batting an eye.
Alden sat on the curb and took off his shoes to let his cramped feet breathe a little. Blood from a popped blister on his big toe stained his sock. He’d need to soak his foot in Epsom when he got home. If he ever got home, he thought to himself, weighing his excitement against his gnawing fear of being lost in a strange city, full of mean kids and old women who gave crummy directions. The sun was going down, and he thought about forgetting about the zoo and asking someone for a route back to his apartment, even entertaining the idea of calling his mother to come pick him up at one of the major cross streets. Maybe he could find a dime in one of the payphones guarding each block, most of them surrounded by shouting men and crying women in short skirts. But tonight was Friday, which meant that Uncle Duane was staying over for the weekend. Uncle Duane didn’t like Alden, which suited Alden just fine, as he didn’t like Uncle Duane either. There was something about him—the disjointed tattoos, the band of pale skin that circled the ring finger of his sunburned left hand, the way he looked at Alden when Regina was in the bathroom.
Alden gingerly put his shoes back on and stood up, raising a fleshy chin with determination. After approaching a hairy man who smelled like whiskey bottles, an old woman sitting on a park bench under an enormous blue hat, and a fruit vendor who Alden thought looked exactly like Bruce Lee, Alden got the proper directions to the zoo, and arrived minutes later just as it was closing.
It was a drab, tiny zoo, as zoos go. He had snuck into so many all over the country, wherever he and his mother had stayed, and would do the same here in this city. Security for caged animals was never very good, so Alden circled the perimeter of the property until he found a cut in the fencing. Other kids had been here before. Maybe even the ones who broke his jar. The Beach Bums. Alden hoped they hadn’t, remembering the way the cat landed on the cement, the sound it made. Fleshy and embarrassed. They could do so much damage in a place like this.
Alden waited by the fence, guessing at the contents of the buildings he could see and planning his route once inside. You always had to have a plan. After a half hour, just as the sun went down, the main lights along the thoroughfare blinked off just as the pale blue overnight lamps came to life. A humming refrigeration unit behind the snack bar suddenly went quiet, creating that weird sensation of removing a sound that you never heard in the first place. This was the power down. The main staff would be gone in a few minutes, leaving just the cleaning crew and whatever security detail was tasked with watching over animals that had nowhere to go, and no interest in going there anyway. These were broken creatures, robbed of everything that made them wild. Puppets for the public, reenacting the Nature play in a grotesque spectacle of enslavement and exhibition. Several cars drove out the front gate to his left. Time to start his visit. Alden squeezed through the opening in the fence, tearing his jacket on the jagged edges of metal, and walked up the deserted pathway.
The zoo was even drabber on the inside. Cracked paint and rutted pavement. Faded signage from before Alden’s mother was born. And the stink of tar, stale popcorn, and urine shrouding everything. That zoo smell. They didn’t know how to take care of their pets here. Not one bit. He wanted to burn this place to the ground, but only with the customers in it. The animals needed to be boarded onto parade floats and moved to that farm upstate that takes all the unwanted dogs and cats and lets them run free in the country. Alden vowed to visit that farm someday. Maybe they’d even let him work there. It would be a fine life. Alden the Pet Farmer.
He tried the doors to several buildings, but they were all locked. No sounds came from inside. He found the primate house, adorned with a picture of a baby chimpanzee. He liked baby animals. Easier to carry. He grabbed the knob. It was sticky, but he turned it anyway. The door clicked loudly, echoing off the deserted corners of the zoo and sending a shiver down his spine, then creaked open. He looked behind him and entered.
It was humid, almost stifling, smelling of feces and rotten fruit. He walked to the sole exhibit window in the room, and put his hand on the thick pane of cloudy glass, scratched with initials and an assortment of R Rated words. The enclosure was dark, with two fake tree trunks scattered randomly across the stained floor. Alden peered inside, making out a figure huddling in an alcove, blacker than the darkness around it, faced away from the glass. It was large, with bulging shoulders, and a low-slung head pressed against its massive chest. Alden knocked lightly on the window, careful not to make too much sound. Animals could hear things we couldn’t, and didn’t like loud noises. The gorilla didn’t move.
Alden wandered outside behind the primate building, glumly wondering what had happened to the baby chimp from the advertisement. Thoughts of a smoky card game organized by the loser overnight crew to determine the fate of the baby chimp spun in Alden’s head. Bunch of sweaty roughnecks in cutoff shorts, bandanas, and sleeveless shirts. They probably force-fed it beer and made it dance to disco songs when the rest of the staff went home. They probably sold it off to some black market collector of sad baby chimps. They probably threw it down into a culvert during a rainstorm, and watched it tumble out to sea, screaming until it drowned, dreaming of the jungle and its mama waiting in the trees. People did such things all the time, and not just to baby chimps.
While Alden tried to erase these depressing thoughts, he detected the low purr of filtration equipment, the lapping sound of water. He brightened, regained what bearings he had in this strange place, and followed the sound, heading up a switchback ramp, arriving at an open-air pool at the back of the zoo.
He rushed to the edge of the raised tank and looked down into the water, which reflected the bluish security lamps above like snatches of broken lightning. Just below the surface, black shapes moved and roiled in that slow motion way of underwater life, active now that the sun had gone down and all of the groping hands and horrible pink faces had gone home.
Alden watched the creatures slither over each other like intertwined tongues. Nurse sharks and stingrays. A few skates, with their smiling alien faces. Prehistoric cousins, all of them, stuffed too densely into this shallow pool. Bisected eyes stared up at him with cold accusation, as if he had designed this small enclosure for so many live bodies. He reached out a hand, realizing too late that he was now just as bad as all the rest of them. The stupid idiots who groped and grasped at animals that just wanted to be left alone. But he couldn’t help it. How could you not touch them? They were so beautiful, even angry as they were. So unlike their clumsy, two-legged descendents. How could one not touch human flesh to aquatic hide that still held the blueprint? Alden leaned forward, reaching his hand further, bringing his face close to the swirling water. A flippered wing of a ray broke the surface of the water and slapped against his forehead, sliding all the way down to his nose and mouth, before disappearing back into the black water. Alden stepped back, eyes wide. He touched the wetness on his forehead, brought it to his nose and sniffed, but it didn’t smell like anything.
The sound of footsteps coming up the ramp sent him scrambling into the thorny bushes surrounding the pool. A gangly security guard with bad skin and his skanky girlfriend whose skin was worse stumbled to the edge of the pool, where they smoked a joint and giggled. Alden grimaced, imagining the greasy pair giving the baby chimp some drugs before they did away with him. The young man unbuckled his heavy belt that was too large for his slight frame, unbuttoned his pants, and clicked on his flashlight, pointing the beam at what was growing in his underwear. His girlfriend took the wad of pink gum out of her mouth and flicked it into the pool, then crouched down quickly, losing her balance and skinning her knees on the concrete. She cursed. The man laughed.
Alden turned away, hoping nothing in the water ate that gum.
Alden climbed through the hole in the fence and made his way back into the city. It looked different at night, with new sights, sounds, and smells, not helped in the least by the fact that he had to flip his mental map and make opposite turns to retrace his steps back the way he came. Even with his best efforts and his normally excellent sense of direction, he ended up getting lost. He wasn’t so much scared as he was disappointed, as he had to come to grips with that fact that a point of pride had taken a blow.
As the city got louder and the air more interesting he turned down this alleyway and that, running from strange grunts in the darkness, cackled laughter, empty bottles rolling on wet cement. He looked for a pay phone, but there weren’t any around here, just broken windows and boarded up doorways. Remnants of posters were everywhere, on every fence, wall, and street lamp, leading Alden to believe that in the not so distant past, a great era of poster-making and display ruled the land, most likely replaced by magazines, and then television. The boy wished the posters were still up, in all their old timey grandeur and fantastical colors. Maybe one of them would have been a poster of the zoo when it was brand new, accurately explaining what sort of animals they had on exhibit. Maybe one of them would have been a map of the city, which would have come in real handy at the moment.
Alden stopped and pondered. He would have liked to think that his mother was at their apartment at that very moment, worried sick about him, pleading with Uncle Duane to set out on a search and rescue mission for her poor lost son, but he knew deep down that that would never happen. Not until his mom and Uncle Duane’s secret meeting in her bedroom, which sometimes took hours, and ended with something breaking behind the locked door. Alden didn’t like those secret meetings. Alden didn’t like Uncle Duane, and was pretty sure that he wasn’t really his uncle. The ones back in Pinewood Park always were. They were his people, every single Uncle of them.
The scuttling of an insect next to his shoe brought Alden to the realization that he had been staring at his feet. His eyes refocused and he followed the three-inch cockroach as it trotted up the alleyway, proud as the King of Siam. Alden followed, making room enough for a royal roach in the pocket of his jacket, cursing that tall kid for smashing his pepper jar. He’d call this one Sam of Siam.
Alden rounded a corner, just as the roach melted down into a crack in the pavement. He jammed his fingers into the slimy opening, but the insect was gone, disappearing into the bowels of the city, where all cockroaches lived and where Sam of Siam lorded over his own secret empire. Alden sighed and sat back, catching a smudge of light out of the corner of his eye. He turned and faced the most beautiful sign he had seen in weeks, basking in the fizzing pink glow of its faded neon. Maybe this crappy city wasn’t so bad after all.
OK Pets ‘n More was a cramped, dingy affair, with very few pets, and too much of the “more,” which in this case meant boxes of cheap electronics filling most of the front section of the room. But, to keep the promise of the name, a few cages were stacked in the back of the shop, flanked by a wall of filthy aquariums kept humming by a tangle of extension cords and three prong adaptors that bristled from the wall outlet just above the scuffed tile floor. Men with dark hair and fierce features walked in and out of the back room, grunting under the weight of more boxes of cheap electronics, which they carried to the front of the store. None of them paid any heed to the pets arranged in the corner, or to their lone customer.
Alden reverently approached the collection of cages. He’d only been inside two pet stores in his entire life prior to this day, so he marked the occasion as a chance encounter with divine providence. Alden walked slowly past each cramped pen that smelled of unwashed animals and bladdered ammonia. It was a wonderful odor, this musk of furry things, and he breathed in deeply, making sure to establish eye contact with each creature, looking past the mange, the cracked teeth, the gummy eyes. The cages were labeled with hand scrawled breed names, but Alden didn’t need any help. Douglas the Dachshund. Pinky the Poodle of Crying Castle. Feline Fiona. Gerald the Gerbil Knight. He nodded at each in turn, paying his respects, ignoring the fact that they ignored him. Fiona may have been dead. Gerald certainly was.
A light tapping brought Alden’s attention to the aquariums. He scurried over to the wall of segregated glass and moved his round face over each tank, peering inside, looking for any signs of life. In the middle aquarium, a small white fish emerged from the cloudy water and banged its nose into the glass, before shimmying back into the murk. It did this over and over, every twelve seconds. Alden knew this because he counted. Other than that lone fish—Twelve Second Charlie—and a few sluggish goldfish in the top row, the aquariums seemed empty, making liars of the stained tags advertising such exotic species as Kissing Gourami, Clown Loach, and Sailfin Molly. Alden didn’t see a thing in any of the other tanks. Not even a garden variety Guppy. The bottom tank, wider than the rest by three, was empty, aside from dust bunnies and a wolf spider that had taken up residence in the back corner.
The sound of expensive shoes clicking on tile turned Alden around. One of the men, who looked indistinguishable from the others, walked toward him, carrying a rusty tin bucket that sloshed water onto the floor. Alden stepped out of his way as the man stopped at the aquariums and set the bucket down. He slid the lowermost tank forward on its metal rack, and unceremoniously dumped the contents of the bucket into it. The man clicked on the fluorescent light inside and flicked on the water pump, before slamming it back into position under the rest of the tanks and walking away, his shiny leather shoes squishing through the pools of water on the floor.
Alden took one look at what was now living in the aquarium and opened his eyes wide, air hissing through his lips like a deflating balloon.
“Sir,” he called out when he collected himself, raising his hand like he was in school.
The man turned and glared at the boy with a mixture of irritation and surprise, as if noticing him for the first time. He said nothing.
“What is this?” Alden said, pointing to the tank. “It’s not labeled.”
The man shrugged before walking off, disappearing in a flap of plastic dividers that led to the back room
Alden bent to the bottom tank, his mouth opening slowly. On the other side of the glass, swaying with the movements of the settling water, was a bright orange bulk the size and shape of a decorative pumpkin. Almost the same color, too, but even more vibrantly orange. Eight arms unfurled beneath a stout body—the bloom of a fiery flower. A noble brow ridge topped two yellowish eyes, drawing down in the middle of the rounded cranium, giving the impression of a perpetual scowl of irritation or contemplation. It was an octopus. A big, round, beautiful octopus. It was real, and it was in the tank in front of him. And it was for sale. Alden touched his forehead, remembering the feel of the stingray’s wing on his skin. He made a gurgling sound that must have resembled the contented cluck of an infant, if anyone in the room was listening to the chubby boy huddled in front of the aquariums. Which they weren’t.
