The Boys Come and Go

Ben Stone escaped down the alley that connected one silent street to the next with a backpack slung over his shoulder. Nothing stirred except fenced-in dogs that didn’t bother to bark. He tucked his chin into his collar and hunched his shoulders against the cold. He was dressed in baggy pants with a hat slouched to the side, which matched his lopsided gait. The chain that hung off his billfold dangled against the leg that was one inch shorter than the other due to a congenital mishap, boot heel worn thin from his body’s effort to even things out.

The backpack was for his mother’s benefit. He wasn’t going to school.

It was his morning to recite, and while memorization came easy to him, thinking of Michelangelo, he had a serious case of stage fright amplified by the growing certainty of what would circle him home—the neighborhood gang that only knew him as Stone; boys who wouldn’t take to a dark-skinned pussy transient with a photographic memory. Boys who were on the cusp of going nowhere but didn’t care because they couldn’t see past the tracks that cut their town in half. Content with their ten square blocks of going nowhere.

The new teacher who called him Ben had fleshed out his talent and assigned him Eliot.

I think you can handle it.

He could, but really, Eliot?

The damp seeped in around his collar and slicked the sidewalk buckled by tree roots and neglect. He jumped a crumbled section and crossed the street for the other side of town where the sidewalks were edged and the buildings were bricked. He needed a place to hide out for eight hours— his other talent was procrastination—and anyone could make use of the public library and disappear amongst the stacks.

If he got there right when the woman with the lisp who called him son unlocked the door, the cubbyhole in the back would be empty. Nobody bothered you in the library. He could collect a few of his favorites without drawing attention and settle in. The water fountain was right around the corner and the donut shop was next door, and he had three loose bills in that chain-linked wallet. He hummed under his breath with the anticipation of that secret alcove and the water fountain and donuts for lunch.

The siren pierced the morning air, and the soft hairs under his collar rose on a wave. With squealing tires, the squad car careened around the corner and pulled up to the curb, lights flashing and radio crackling with the high-pitched voice of the dispatcher reporting a burglary in progress in the store next door.

He jumped back, palms splayed flat against the brick storefront, and watched the two policemen, armed and dangerous, climb out of the squad car. He looked around for the culprit, but the sidewalk was empty and the hairs on his neck did a wave in the other direction.

They approached him, all boots and brass, and he remembered the marijuana cigarette in his pocket that he’d snagged from his brother’s dresser. Had Ricky turned him in? Just because his girl had kicked him out and he had to move back home, and Ben wanted to keep the big room and Ricky had to take the foldout? Would you turn your brother in over one lousy joint even if he took your old bedroom?

These thoughts tumbled through his head like a mongoose after a rat, and he panicked and ran. By virtue of the run, he committed a crime. He was trying to evade a police officer, and when they took up pursuit, he was endangering a police officer. His name was Ben Stone, and he’d just set himself up for life in prison.

They ordered him to stop, but of course, he didn’t. He was younger and faster, and his lungs were pumped and full of oxygen because he smoked but rarely, and Jimmy and Cribs, partners until death, were heavy smokers with reduced lung capacity. They didn’t know he was a fledgling poet with a case of hives. They saw a punk, one of dozens who flipped them the bird when they drove by and hung out on corners and wasted public resources.

They ordered him to stop, but he couldn’t, but they didn’t know that he couldn’t. He was full-throttle committed to the run, hyped on adrenaline overdrive. It coursed through his veins and dampened his palms, and he had no control over this genetic predisposition to flight passed down from a Native American who outran a grizzly who got it from an Inuit stranded on cracking ice who got it from an ancestor hunting killer whale on the Bering Sea in a leaking canoe with a spear that missed its mark.

It wasn’t his fault he was predisposed to run; he didn’t hear the order to stop.

Cribs called for backup. Cribs was out of breath.

Jimmy was younger and closer and gaining. He was going to get the motherfucker who had given him the finger the day before. One of several—they all looked the same—scrawny scum with no respect.

He jumped a curb on his own surge of adrenaline and hit the kid on the fly in the back with the Taser. The barbed darts caught and held. The little fucker jumped and twitched like a Mexican jumping bean. He fell to the ground, hitting his head on the pavement. Blood squirted from the tear in his scalp as he got to his feet and staggered to the bus stop shelter. The people waiting for the Number Two bus scattered to get out of the way of the bleeding, twitching kid who only wanted to sit down.

Jimmy ordered him to put his hands up, but Ben dropped them in his pocket, wondering if the joint was still there. Wondering if he could just hand it over. He was ready to surrender.

Jimmy screamed at him to show his hands.

Hands? What was wrong with his hands? Ben couldn’t breathe. His heart, with the undetected birth defect, was clenching three-quarters of the time, and he didn’t know how one lousy joint could be so much trouble. He couldn’t put his hands up because he couldn’t find them.

Jimmy fired his backup shot, fear breeding fear, and the kid jerked and fell off the bench, grasping his stomach, and there was blood everywhere, because head wounds bleed like a mother, and someone screamed from a distance, and then the bus pulled up, and the driver opened the door and peered out at the scene.

Cribs came up beside Jimmy, panting with spittle in the corners of his mouth, and they looked at the kid, splayed on the ground in a pool of blood, subdued and settled.

“He was twitching, man,” Jimmy said. “Did you see him twitch?” He shoved the Taser back in his holster. “He was going for a gun.” He stared defensively at Cribs, bent over, hands on his knees, catching his breath. “Didn’t you see?”

The onlookers closed in on them, wanting to see. The circle tightened, a frozen tableau with cold seeping in.