Never mind. The first time I’d seen him was in the park—the first time I saw him, watched him, he hadn’t cared anything about me. He was already playing his game. There were no new players wanted or needed.
I spotted him in the overgrown empty lot six blocks from the schools, the elementary and junior high next to each other. The empty lot was part of a “green space”, fucking hysterical, next to an abandoned dog food factory. Nothing else smells like that, coating the inside of your mouth. This one had shut down twenty years ago and it still stank. That didn’t stop most of the kids from pretending the weedy area was a park, that the yellow ragweed was flowers and that the broken and cracked concrete blocks were benches. They’d lived here long enough, they didn’t smell the factory anymore. Lucky them, because their park was on my way home, and I could smell it fine. I walked home instead of taking the bus.
I used to ride it when I was younger, but I hated it now. It was a cage full of screaming and shouting. It was too much and made me want to punch and kick until there was quiet. Niko had said it was “excessive stimulation and acted as a trigger”. I hadn’t been exactly sure of what he meant. I knew what a trigger was, but what all that noisy crap was triggering specifically other than violence or why it did, I hadn’t known. But I had known he was right, that it was too much. Just too much. After I was kicked off the bus a few times for fighting, he’d agreed walking was an improvement over punching. It was a long walk, but I didn’t mind. Anything was more peaceful than a tin can full of screaming, thrown books, and the sound/sight/smell of anger.
I’d told Niko about the smell—sweat/adrenaline/rage, how it was even worse than the noise, how it made me feel the same, only maybe more so, considering I’d tried to shove one extremely loud kid out of a bus window. It sucked that he was chunky and didn’t fit. Nik said it was hormones. The kids, they’d all grow out of it. I’d noticed he didn’t say the same about me. I hadn’t cared if the other kids grew out of it or not, as long as they weren’t around to piss me off. The walk was good, and rain or smothering heat, I didn’t mind. The bus was a frenzy on wheels, and I didn’t miss it. I called it Thunderdome from a really old movie we’d seen on TV once. Nik hadn’t known whether to laugh or admit I was right.
He did call me Mad Max for a week or so.
Normally, I didn’t stop at the park that wasn’t a park. I’d lived in big cites, tiny towns, and deep enough in the country that your only neighbors were cows, which smell more but stink less than the factory. Nope, a patch of weeds was a patch of weeds. I’d wait for the next time we were on the run from the cops and were back in the trees, the soft grass, and the stars that flowed in a river in the night sky. That was real peace…
If you didn’t notice how many more shadows there were, how many more hiding places you needed to watch. Had to watch. Would sooner stop breathing than stop watching.
But the past didn’t matter. The grass and the wide wash of light that shone above were gone, same as the deeper, darker shadows. We were in the city now, and I knew a real park, and this wasn’t one. Why bother sitting in a patch of weeds and half-dead bushes? If it was all you’d known and all you’d had, that didn’t mean it was enough. The Dairy Queen parking lot put this to shame.
Yeah, I wasn’t a fan and I never stopped, but when I saw him, the man in the park, I did. That once. I stopped the second I recognized him or what he was. He wasn’t in the shadows, but that was because he carried the shadows with him. Under a bright sun, he’d still been hard to…not see, that wasn’t quite right…but to see as more than a smudge of dried blood on an even larger smudge of rust. They weren’t the same at all. One was carelessness and rain, and one was what kept you alive. He was that, a splatter of death against the enormous rusty machine of buzzing life that was the world around him. They were the opposite, but they blended into one anyway.
It made him almost invisible, halfway there and halfway not. That was his talent, a snake in the grass, one you didn’t see until its fangs were hooked into your flesh. Camouflaged, waiting for a bite of fresh meat, and that meat could be you. The city was his grass and he was the hide-and-seek serpent. He was the poison that hardly anyone would see coming. I saw him, though. He was special, in a venomous way, but I was special, too.
Special enough that “almost invisible” didn’t cut it with me.
Mr. Bailey, who worked mopping the floors at school said “almost” only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades. He’d been in the war, he’d said. I didn’t know which one; there were lots of wars. He said, too, he’d grown up on a farm in Kentucky for a while, dodging kicks while mucking out stalls. Mucking meant shoveling horseshit, he’d whispered to me gleefully. Mr. Bailey had killed people in a war, he was pretty gleeful about that as well, and he’d seen lots of horseshoes flying at him. Mr. Bailey was batshit crazy, but he knew when “almost” counted.