I never liked the way Uncle Bones smelled. Elaine said I should just zip my lip and keep my opinions to myself.
Bones smelled like . . .
Well, it’s hard to be precise, if you’ve never met a Stinky. Ever stuck your nose near a dead thing? I don’t mean a piece of steak fresh out of the freezer. That’s dead cow kept cool and clean. I’m talking about dead and disgusting. We tried to make a joke out of it, Bones and me. It was an old gag he’d heard from his grandfather, who was also Elaine’s granddad, of course, my great-granddad:
“My dog has no nose.”
“Yeah? Then how does he smell?”
“Terrible!”
Ha ha. But it’s not so funny, being a walking dead man. Once I overheard Bones talking to my mother. “It’s better than being six feet under,” Bones said, “but only just.”
“It’s a lot better than being six feet under,” Elaine said, and her voice broke. “If they’d brought John back, I’d bless every smelly cell in his poor dear body.”
It’s hard to know how much I actually remember about my father and how much I know because I’ve seen the vids. He’s teaching me to catch a softball, or jogging along the Riverwalk with me on his shoulders. When he left to go fight in the Saudi, he hugged me so hard it hurt. I was only like three but I remember that.
We had a Social Studies class on the Stinkies. Sorry, I’m the last person who should use such an ugly word. “Revitalized citizens.” That class got me thinking, and maybe ended up killing me. I didn’t really know that much about Bones and exactly how he got that way. It’s not that I never wondered. But he just didn’t talk about himself, and that became a kind of unspoken rule. Mrs. Bartle’s class made me want to know anyway. Maybe it would upset Bones, but hey.
That afternoon I rushed through most of my ’work, then went into the family room, kind of nervous, trying not to show it. I took a deep breath, and then wished I hadn’t. The room was rank, even with the front window open a crack. My uncle never wore a mask indoors, and hardly ever outdoors for that matter, so he was stinking up a storm just breathing. He glanced up from his look, and I blurted out, “Hey Bones, I’ve been wondering, um, how long ago did you, uh—”
He said, after a silent moment, “Spit it out, son, I won’t bite.”
I swallowed. “—did you, you know, die?”
He frowned and said in his whispery voice, “Twelve years, Jim.” He looked at the top of the news page, at the date, and I saw his cracked, dry lips moving silently. “And four months,” he added. “And a few days.”
No wonder I couldn’t remember it. Three years after I was born. Oh. Of course. Both of them probably.
He sighed. “The army medics patched me up, even though I was going stiff already when they found me. Brought me halfway back, best they could do. Anything else on your mind?”
All the things we never, ever talked about. I swallowed even harder. “So you and my dad . . . were you with my dad when—”
Elaine was in the kitchen getting dinner ready, but she obviously had her ears pricked up because she came galloping into the family room and whisked me away.
“Sorry, Bonaparte.” You know how mothers are. She took me firmly by the arm. “Don’t be nosy, Jim, it’s rude.” Over her shoulder, she asked, “Can I get you anything to drink, Bones? We’re out of milk, but Jimmy can run down to the shop and get some.”
“Milky coffee would be good.”
Elaine put me out the back door with the exact change, including coins. She didn’t like to use cards, too easy to scam. I was supposed to go the extra three blocks down to the convenience store and gas pump place on East Courtland to get a big carton of milk because the price was about $3.40 cheaper than at the McCullough Grocery at the end of our block. We don’t have much money, I guess that should be obvious, and Elaine often said she didn’t have a buck or a moment to spare, but when Bones came to visit he expected her to look after him hand and foot. He came and went without a word. Bonaparte Hector Jones had been Mom’s older brother when he was alive. Well, he was still her older brother, except you didn’t exactly think of dead people that way, like family. Unless someone got in your face about it.
Coming back from the store, I took a short cut across the corner of the car wash on McCullough Street. Elaine didn’t like me cutting through the car wash because she figured someday I’d get run down by a monster hydrogen-guzzling sport utility vehicle piloted by some weedy accountant who figured he was the shit. I wished I’d listened to her when I remembered the Boofhead brothers were working there after school. Bill dropped the gushing hose with the brush on the end. With a happy whoop, he caught me before I could get to the street, jerked me off my feet, and his brother Sam kicked me in the ankle. It was like being stuck in some old Simpsons episode with all the bullies yelling “Nyah-hah!” I dropped the carton of milk when I fell over and wanted to see if it’d spilled, but if they saw me looking they’d jump on it and waste it all. My mother would finish off whatever was left of me after the Boofheads got through.
“You stink, gayboy!” Bill yelled in my ear. Spittle sprayed the side of my face.
With brilliant wit, I said back, “You stink,” clawing to get free. I felt sick and frightened.
Sam shoved me in the gutter. “You’re the dirty Stinky-lover!”
It’s true I never liked the way Uncle Bones smelled, but that doesn’t mean I’ll put up with some stupid shithead mocking people who live in my own house, especially my own flesh and blood. Even if they don’t have blood, and their flesh is flaking off. But Bill Boofhead was yelling in my face. “He’s associating with gnome fellas, Sammy, that’s what this creep’s Stinky uncle’s doing. Associating with gnome fellas!”
Not a clue what the prick was talking about, and I didn’t care much because he was squeezing my mouth so hard my teeth ached.
A pasty-faced guy crossed the street, baseball cap wrong way round, bill in front, and for a mad moment I thought I was saved. What he gave the two Boofheads was a filthy look. Gee, thanks. Bill stared right back at him. The guy sniffed and sidled past, then turned back.
“You okay?” he called out to me.
Yeah, right, bozo. Happy as a mud crab in crap. Sam was shoving me along in the gutter, banging at my bruised ankles, and Bill was trying to fit my right arm into my left hand pocket.
“Just having some fun, aren’t we, stinky?” Bill said with a sneer.
I croaked something. It was getting hard to breath. Bill had his armpit right in my face, gag a maggot. I wished I had Dodger with me. The Dodge was my main man even though he went to a different school, over six feet tall already and not even a year older than me. I’m more the stocky, low-to-the-ground type. It’s not just that Dodge is bigger and tougher than me—he’d get mad. His older sister Ashanti was the only other Stinky I knew except for Bones. Not that I’d ever met her. She never left their house.
The old guy came a bit closer. “It doesn’t look like fun to me,” he said. “How about letting him go, you thugs?”
“Yeah, sure.” Sam made a horrible wet noise and spat at the ground. The loogie was a big green one, sucked backwards out of his nose, and it hit the concrete about an inch from the guy’s shiny ’boks. “What’re you gonna do about it?”
The guy pulled his foot back quickly, and the look on his face said he wanted to beat the crap out of Sam, but instead he plugged his phone in his ear and starting thumbing numbers. “Well, for starters, call the cops.”
That made the Boofhead brothers break up shouting hilariously. They laughed so hard they let go of me, so I took my chance, grabbed the milk carton, and ran like hell across the street, nearly splattered by a bus in the process. I heard Sam yell at the guy, “Hey, great idea, dude. Ask for Sergeant Bouvier.” On the far side, half-safe, I stopped to watch. I’m curious, okay?
Bouvier was their father. Huge pot belly and thick red arms covered in red hairs, a red bald head. Like seven feet tall. One time I saw him drag two cursing thugs out of the Bloodhouse on North Main and shove them into his cop car, no sweat.
The Boofhead brothers slouched back to an old Dodge Ram covered in streaky foam bubbles. Half the soapy water was pouring down the drain and the rest ran out on the street. I don’t think they got paid much, but they probably liked the job because they could hang around cars. Bill was old enough to drive legally, Sam not quite although he was a year and a half older than me even if he was in the same class. The baseball hat dude had taken his phone off. He caught my eye and shook his head, looking disgusted. I shrugged and ran the rest of the way home. My arm still felt pulled from its socket, but my legs worked, I wasn’t bleeding, and the carton had all the milk on the inside. I’d gotten off easy.
As I say, that was the day Mrs. Bartle had ranted on in Social Studies about revitalized citizens, and how we should treat them with respect. Imagine the reaction. Sam Bouvier the Boofhead got out of his seat and lurched around like a zombie, groaning and letting drool froth out of his mouth. Jenny Bean, who loves watching old movies from the twentieth, pulled a scared face and shoved out her tits and whispered loudly, “I . . . see . . . dead people,” and the whole class screamed with laughter. That made Mrs. Bartle angry and depressed, and she got very scientific about the topic. It didn’t stop the sniggering.
I could tell a lot of them were sniggering at me, because they knew about my revie uncle, and that made me mad—at them, and at Uncle Bones. It wasn’t my fault we had a dead guy living with us! Hey, Jim! I told myself. Not fair to poor Bones! My uncle was a good guy. Those times when he came to stay at our place he’d been the closest thing to a father to me. He took me swimming in the Guadalupe River where the water was so clear you could see every rock on the bottom. Sure, people moved away from us, scowling, but we didn’t care. I didn’t, anyway, not back then; I was having fun splashing about. You could see scars where he’d been shot right through the heart. When I was a Cub Scout, Uncle Bones taught me how to tie knots and play table tennis in the Youth Center, but not for long. He’d been a scoutmaster, before he was killed, but they didn’t like having him around there, either.
Mrs. Bartle mentioned side-effects, which wasn’t real major news. Being turned into a Stinky was the biggie. I’d covered my ears during lots of the lesson, because it made me feel creepy and sick to think about Uncle Bones that way. Barf. So they banned it under some law called the Nanotechnology Terrorism Lumbago, whatever. What they’d done was, they injected my uncle’s dead body full of millions and billions of teeny endobots but it couldn’t completely stop him rotting inside. And they didn’t bother making his heart beat again, because the nanobots shoved oxygen from his lungs through all his tissues, which just about kept him going.
Twelve years ago. Wow. Okay, Bones must have been killed in Saudi, when they were trying out Revitalization. Not just on soldiers who died in the war, either. A lot of revies were offed by criminals or gangs, others got totaled as road kill. A few were very sick kids who died in the hospital, like Dodger’s sister Ashanti. But if you just wore out and died of old age, so sad, too bad.
That’s all I knew, though. Stinkies kept to themselves, usually, like Ashanti, and you couldn’t blame them. Sure, it was better than being really dead and buried in a coffin in the ground—but as Bones said, maybe not that much better. Elaine always changed the subject. She really, really didn’t like talking about it.
I went in the back way through the alley, gave Elaine the carton and went straight into my room, past the family room. Its door was closed, and Uncle Bones was talking to someone in his whispery voice. You couldn’t tell when someone called him, because he kept his phone on vibrate—he really hated ringtones, said they were “the music of the devil.” And he didn’t like being interrupted, even though it was Mom’s house, and mine, too, for that matter. My own door was still covered with smartass signs from when I was a little kid saying stuff like GENIUS AT WERK with the last word crossed out and work scribbled in. I’d started to clean it off once, but Elaine stopped me. I think she yearned for those days, closer to the time when Dad was still with us. As I closed the door behind me, I heard Bones say, “Look, I have to take a dump. You can leave, or you can wait. My bowels won’t.” He sounded angry.
Huh? Bones never had visitors. A moment later I heard him shuffle past in the hallway. I screwed my face up. Probably the real reason revies were called “Stinkies.” The stench they left behind in the bathroom . . . You don’t want to know.
My look is a cheap old recycled thing, but it works okay. I kicked the chair sideways and sat down. It showed the spaceship Discovery in orbit around Jupiter, from my favorite movie, 2010. The year I was born. I’ve been airtyping since I was a kid, it’s still the best way to score high in the top games. Uncle Bones showed me how to type, come to think of it. I guess by then I’d sort of learned to deal with the way he smelled, and how he looked like a zombie. That’s why it made me mad, hearing the Boofs diss him like that.
Anyway, I was suddenly curious, so I Googled on dead people. Mostly what I found was spam, advertising bogus cures.
“YOU CAN LIVE AGAIN! Forget those expensive masks and perfumes! Walk free and proud in the streets, without people STARING and LAUGHING. For just $1,999.99—”
They’d warned us about this sort of thing when we were taught how to sort spam from useful information. Criminals tried to suck in revs and scam all their savings and insurance so their skin wasn’t rotting, and most of all, they’d be able to get it up again. Pure bogosity, but some revs threw away more and more money because, you know, it had to be true. The skells worked behind layers of steg, cops following along miles behind, and kept finding new ways to rip off the schmucks.
I kept clicking. Mostly I found pages and pages of hateful stuff about how the Stinkies should be killed again, they were fiends from Hell walking the earth (which I knew wasn’t true), they should be locked up in those old detention centers where illegals used to be kept.
And more spam, along with all the other shit clogging the net. It made me feel sick.
I clicked on the new game called Yeah-No, but I couldn’t get into it, and crashed out on the fifth level. I couldn’t keep the Boofheads out of my brain. Associating? Was that what they’d said? With gnome fellas. Some sort of cop jargon they were repeating mindlessly. Why can’t voters just say what they mean? I keyed gnome fellas into Google, which asked me politely:
Did you mean: Known felons
So I clicked and got this, which made me feel cold even on such a warm day:
felon
person of bad or criminal character
I keyed in the whole associating with known felons phrase, and found
for example:
While out of jail on probation, he was arrested for associating with hired killers and other known felons
Whoa! I sat back and stared at the look. Bones? Hanging around with hit men? Skells, they call them on TV. While out of jail on probation? Poor old lazy Bonaparte Jones had been arrested and charged? What for? I certainly couldn’t picture him locked up in jail, it just wasn’t him.
Oh well. I clicked the sounds icon, found Jangle Central and clicked it, then turned the volume down. Elaine always said “that kind of racket” gave her a headache. She and Bones only liked classic rap and hip-hop. I grunted along to the rhythm, Googling some more on consorting, but it didn’t get me any further. It struck me that I could just go and ask Bones, once he was back out of the bathroom and settled again in his comfortable chair. Dad’s old chair. Hey, Uncle B., is it true you did time in the big house? And how about that “associating with criminals” thing? Yikes! Imagine Mom’s face, and the pressure of her fingers on my arm as she pushed me out of the family room. Yeah. She’d love that. Calling her poor dead brother a skell, to his face, right in our own house.
Still, it beat messing around on the net and getting nowhere. I slammed my door behind me and slouched into the family room. A huge man in a blue uniform stood up from Dad’s old armchair and started toward me. Sergeant Bouvier, the father of the Boofheads. I had no chance to screech to a stop and head back to the safety of my own room like the Road Runner when it sees Wile E. Coyote. He held his arm out in front of him, and it looked like a baseball bat covered with muscle, sunburned skin and red hair. He smelled of some manly fragrance, aftershave or hair gel or something, not that he had much hair on his head.
“You must be the Stokes boy,” he said. His thick fingers closed on my own hand and squeezed. “I’m just waiting for your uncle, we’ve been talking. Why don’t you sit down over here with me, boy?”
Uh-oh. I blurted out, “It wasn’t my fault, it was Bi—”
I swallowed my words. The first and second rule about bullies is, you don’t tell. The last person in the world to tell about Bill and Sam was their own father. He wouldn’t believe me, and I’d be in deep crap because he’d assume I was lying. Worse still, maybe he would believe me. If he believed me, he might roust out the Boofheads, and then I was sure to hear about it again. And it would hurt, a lot.
He noticed. “Been having trouble with some of the other kids picking on you about Boney, haven’t you?”
Did he know it was mostly his own sons? Elaine used to make excuses for Bill and Sam whenever she heard from snitches that they’d got in trouble. She’d shake her head and explain that they’d missed out on a mother’s care and attention. Big deal, I’d lost a father in the terrorism war, they’d lost a mother in a head-on traffic crash, it was all so sad, but so what? I didn’t go around punishing little kids. I didn’t like the Boofhead brothers and they didn’t like me, but still, that didn’t mean I was about to rat them out. I just nodded.
“I bet they call your uncle a Stinky,” the Sergeant was saying. “Dead Meat. Zomboy. Johnny Rotten. Other nasty names like that.”
He drew me by my upper arm toward a chair, and sat me down on it.
I really was starting to get alarmed. Had Bones done something truly bad? Was the Sergeant here to arrest him and haul him away? I craned my neck to look through the curtains and saw his cop car parked out the front. Not a social call.
“Look at me, son, we still have those questions.”
I looked him in the eye, swallowing hard.
“Okay, young James—”
“Jim,” I said. “Jimmy.”
“Jim, I need to ask you if your uncle has been acting oddly lately. Staying out all night? Meeting with strangers, maybe?”
I jerked my head around, blinking. Bones should be finished crapping by now. I hopped up and moved quickly to the door into the kitchen. “I’ll get my uncle for you, sir.”
“Boney will be back,” the cop said. He didn’t have to move a muscle. I turned sheepishly and returned to my chair.
“Uh, okay.” I tried to force myself to meet his eyes again, but stared at his feet instead. Really enormous shoes, very black, a bit scuffed at the toes. What terrible crime had Bones committed? That couldn’t be it, or the Sergeant would have read him his rights and locked his wrists in shiny bucky ties and hauled him off to a cell. If you can trust cop shows.
“No need to be scared, boy.”
Mom came into the room then, flour on her hands. She liked cooking our dinners, even though she was tired after being in the office all day, she said it relaxed her. “Sorry, Wi— Sergeant. Come on Jim, back to your homework.”
“I’ve finished,” I started to say, but the Sergeant interrupted me.
“Please join us, Mrs. Stokes, there’s something I’d like to show you both.” To my surprise, he was fishing about in the top pocket of his blue shirt. He pulled out a creased old photo and held it out to Mom, saying nothing. She wiped off the last of the flour and took it from him carefully and we both stared at it. She said nothing, and after a moment she let me take it from her hand.
Four young men in some sort of uniform. Maybe they were soldiers, the camo uniforms didn’t look like what police wear, all blotches of brown and green and gray. One of them looked like Bill the Boofhead with short hair, almost shaved down to his skull. With a jolt I realized that it was an old picture of Sergeant Bouvier, when he was way younger. I stared at the other three men. One I’d never seen before. The other two were healthy, smiling fit to bust. One was my father, John Stokes, and the other one looked a bit like Elaine if she’d been a man with a shaved head.
“It’s you and my dad and my Uncle Bones.”
“Correct, son.” The Sergeant took back the photo, slid it into his uniform pocket without another glance. You could tell he treasured it. “Bones Jones and I were friends back during the war. He introduced me and John to your Mom here when we were home on leave, and John was lucky enough to marry her.”
“William,” Mom said to him in a funny voice, “that’s all in the past.” She went back to the kitchen, and said over her shoulder, “Don’t go filling the boy’s head with a lot of nonsense about his father.”
I couldn’t quite take all this in. Most of my life, Uncle Bones had been a dead man. For some reason he and Elaine hadn’t kept any old pictures of him around the house, although there were five photos of Dad and Mom on the mantelpiece and hanging on the walls of the lounge room, and another one in a silver frame next to Mom’s bed. Maybe it made Bones depressed to be reminded how young and healthy he’d been, back when he was alive. Well, he didn’t smell like a Stinky back then, either.
“He was a hero, you know, your uncle.” Sergeant William Bouvier’s voice softened. “And your Dad, too, son. Both of them damned wonderful heroes.” He sighed. “And only one of them came back. I think maybe your mother blames me for that. But it was nobody’s fault. Just really awful timing.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. I looked down again, feeling my eyes prickle. I felt incredibly sad, even though I couldn’t remember my dad very well.
Sergeant Bouvier shook his head in a sort of unhappy amazement. We were both quiet for a moment, then he added: “I’m sorry, Jimmy. The doctors tried, you know, but they just weren’t able to save your father. He’d been dead too long.”
I swallowed hard, to make the lump in my throat go away. I didn’t want the policeman to see my tears, so I looked out the window again. I thought: I’ll bet my dad wouldn’t have wanted to get turned into a Stinky anyway.
“Maybe Bones was worried you might be coming to arrest him,” I heard myself say.
“And why would I be doing that, Jim?”
“Maybe he was mixed up in something.” My voice dropped to a whisper. “A kid said. Something about skells.”
“Hmmm. Where’s he got to, anyway?” Sergeant Bouvier jumped to his feet and went to the door, put his head into the kitchen. “Mrs. Stokes,” he said to Mom, “I’m getting a bit worried about Boney.”
In a rather strained voice, she said, “Not a problem, Sarge, he had to go to the—you know.”
“Yeah, quite a while back. You don’t suppose he’s got into any trouble? Perhaps you could knock on the door and check?”
“I’ll do that, William,” my mother said. I heard her open the hallway door and close it again. The Sergeant came back but didn’t sit down. He was frowning. After a moment Elaine came in, looking panicky. “He’s gone, William. He didn’t answer, and I tried the bathroom door, but it’s locked, and I called his cell and he didn’t answer, so I went outside to see if he was in the yard and the bathroom window is open—”
Sergeant Bouvier ran to the hallway, and I scampered after him. With a tremendous crash, he broke the lock of the bathroom, kicking it hard with the heel of his heavy shoe. He looked inside, shook his head. “He’s gone,” the policeman told us. “The silly man has run off. Now I’ve got to go chasing after him.”
It came together in my head. Bones was mixed up with spam artists. Paying criminals for fake medicines, pissing his pension away? The other possibility made me feel sick to consider it. Was he one of the criminals himself ? Scamming bogus medications to Stinkies just like him?
No, I really couldn’t believe it!
Sergeant Bouvier ran out the back, and Elaine stopped me from following him.
“Don’t get underfoot, Jimmy.”
“I just want to see—”
“I know, but I’m sure Bonaparte hasn’t done anything wrong.” She saw right through me, smiled in a concerned way, kissed me on the forehead. For once I didn’t pull away (I mean, man, I’m way too old for that stuff). “Go play with your computer, son. I’ll let you know when we find Bones. Come on, I’ve had a hard day at work and now I have to finish making dinner.”
Sergeant Bouvier came in the back door, out of breath.
“No sign of him, he’s not in the alley. I’ll have to put out a bulletin. I think he might be in a bit of trouble, nothing we can’t sort out. Don’t worry, Mrs. Stokes, he can’t have gone far.”
I ducked my head down, chewing at my lip. I knew where Bones had probably hidden himself. Should I tell them? No, I couldn’t believe old Bones was a scummy skell. I didn’t want to point an accusing finger at my mom’s dead brother. Elaine was looking at the Sergeant, biting her own lip. “I wish you wouldn’t get all formal like that, William. Why don’t you just call me Elaine?”
“I’m on duty now, Mrs. Stokes. Proper procedure.” His red face was getting redder, and he pulled his police hat on and shoved mirrored shades in front of his eyes. In his blue uniform he looked exactly like a cop, and not at all like an old friend of my father and Uncle Bones. I couldn’t get that photo out of my mind. So weird, all of them together, back during the war.
Mom gave me a little push in the back. “Say ‘Good evening’ to Sergeant Bouvier, son.” I did, and he shook my hand quickly, then half-ran for the front door. I trotted off down the hall, and opened my own door. It smelled terrible in my room, and not just from my socks and dirty underpants on the floor. I opened my closet door, and looked up at Uncle Bones. He waved his bony hand at me, making shushing noises. In a shadow of his usual whispery voice, so soft I could hardly hear him, he said, “Not a word, Jimmy. I’ll explain in a moment. Is he gone?”
“Just left,” I whispered back, and my throat felt tight and painful. I started coughing and my eyes watered. It was scary, standing there looking at this rev hiding in my closet, even if it was just old Uncle Bones. Man, the cops were after him! “What have you—?”
“Shh! Shh!” Bones waved his hands frantically in front of his mouth. The skin was peeling off, as usual. His face was screwed up as if he was in terrible pain, but I knew that wasn’t it, because revs can’t feel pain. That’s what they’d told us at school, anyway.
“I have to go out and help Mom with dinner,” I said. “Please don’t run away ’til I get back.”
“I have things to do,” Bones said, not promising anything. “Not a word, you hear?”
“Okay,” I said, doubtfully.
“Everything will work out fine.” Bones paused, and then gave me a mischievous, surprising grin. “Scout’s honor.”
Elaine took off her apron and poked at her hair a bit.
“I’m going out to look for Bonaparte, Jimmy. I don’t know what the poor man has got himself caught up in now.” She kicked off her green plastic sandals and pulled on a pair of socks and walking shoes. “I can’t imagine what Will—what the Sergeant could have said to upset him so badly.” She leaned across and kissed me on the forehead, and went to the front door. “Keep an eye on the house, sweetie, all right?”
“Okay, Mom. I’ll do my homework.” I’d already told her I’d finished it, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“You’re a good boy, Jimmy,” she said, and turned around to give me an extra quick hug. “I’ll be back in one shake of a lamb’s tail.”
The moment she was gone, I shot into my room and threw open the closet door. My heart sank. The smell was faded. Uncle Bones was gone. I felt a little sick at my stomach. I had a quick look at the carport. He hadn’t driven off in Elaine’s car, but probably wasn’t just roaming around, because most people resent revs walking freely in the street. You see them sniffing angrily as the Stinkies pass. Sometimes they even shove them into the gutter. Bones had to be in some safe place that nobody ever went. “Scout’s honor,” he said. Oh.
I jumped up with a shout, put my fist in front of my mouth, shook my head and grinned. Nobody was in the house to hear me. I wanted to run out, but I’d promised Mom I’d stay in the house until she got back. I hopped from foot to foot, grinding my teeth and clenching my fists. “She won’t mind,” I muttered. Yes, she would mind. She’d be majorly pissed if we both disappeared, Bones and me. I was getting dizzy with excitement. The toilet window was still wide open where Bones had pretended to escape before he snuck back and hid in my closet before he really escaped. Scraps of scaly white skin were stuck to the frame where dead stuff had scraped off his hands. I pulled the window shut, smelling the faint odor of decay.
Sergeant Bouvier thought it was better than being really dead and buried, like my dad. What was the point of being a hero when you were dead and buried? I sent Dodger an Instant Message. He was probably the only person who’d understand, because of his sister. No response.
d00d, unw? cops r chasing bones
He came on the look, holding his iBerry. He was on a basketball court behind his private school, sweat running down his face. Dodger’s father had been a three-point shooter for the San Antonio Spurs, back in the day before he blew out his right shoulder.
“Can’t talk now, buddy. Hoops practice. Catch ya later.” He clicked off.
It felt like there was nothing I could do. I was going nuts.
“How’s the homework going, Jimmy?” Elaine was in the hallway, headed my way. I switched back to the Discovery flying through deep space. My heart was pounding like it was ready to explode.
“Done. Going out now, Mom.” I tried to sound bored. “Me and Dodger want to go down to the mall and watch the new bot fighters.”
Elaine stood in my doorway, looking worried. “All right, son. Keep out of trouble, and be home by six-thirty for dinner. And no junk food!”
“Okay. Love ya, Mom!” I dashed out the back way before she could change her mind, and headed along the alley in the direction of the old closed-down building used by the Scouts when Bones was a kid, right next to the McAllister Freeway where it crossed Highway I35.
I wasn’t supposed to go into this rundown neighborhood by myself. Elaine would shit a pig if she knew. Weeds grew all around the dilapidated old place. A few gaps in the cyclone fence showed where homeless people must have crawled through to get some shelter for the night. I tripped on an empty bottle in the long grass. The front door had been locked ever since the place was shut down, so I didn’t even try it, and the downstairs windows were covered with corrugated steel sheeting firmly nailed into place, but I went around to the far side, where the shadowed ground stretched under the enormous expanse of the concrete freeway. Up there, cars were streaming home from work, driving fast, thudding high above me. You could see in the shadows where someone had been burning old scraps of wood in a fire, either for warmth or to cook their dinner.
It hadn’t always been this bad. According to Elaine, when the freeway was built it had cut our part of San Antonio in half. People started drifting away, and the houses were left unrepaired. Our own place was nearly at the edge of the bad neighborhood, easy walking distance, I hadn’t needed my bike. A few years ago, Uncle Bones had walked past here with me and Mom, revisiting their childhood memories. It used to be a school gymnasium, then it was used for scout meetings. They’d closed it before I was born. I used to walk down here sometimes and think about my mother and Uncle Bones when they were young and my dad was still alive. But I’d never tried to get inside.
One of the thin sheets of rotting plywood that covered the back door had been partly kicked in. I crouched down, whispered through the opening: “Bones? You there?”
Nothing. I heard a train in the distance, hooting each time it approached a crossing. Something scurried inside the old building. Might have been a mouse, or a feral cat, or Bones trying to hide. It was impossible to see anything from where I was. Late afternoon summer light was still bright, but all the windows were blocked up and the inside was dark. I pushed the decaying plywood aside and crawled in.
I smelled him before I saw him.
The room was musty—mice had been leaving their droppings on the floor—but you couldn’t miss the stink of a Stinky.
More loudly, staying just inside the half-opening, I said, “Uncle Bones, I know you’re here.”
A flashlight came on, dazzling me. I raised my arm in front of my eyes, squinting. A dark figure held the flashlight, standing near the rotten staircase in front of the closed main door.
“You shouldn’t be here, Jimmy,” a whispery voice said. The light moved away from my eyes. I blinked, seeing two red spots. “You’ve got to go.”
“Well, you’ve caused all kinds of trouble, Bones,” I said accusingly. “Mom is worried, and Sergeant Bouvier—”
“That busybody!” Bones switched off the flashlight and we stood in the smelly darkness. “He’s had years. Outstanding time to pay a social call.” His laugh sounded like a bark. “Bill Bouvier and I used to be friends, Jim. And your father. Thick as thieves, we were.”
“Thieves!” I blurted it out. “Is that why you’ve been associating with felons?”
After a strange silence, Bones burst out laughing, or coughing, it was hard to tell the difference. He sounded like he was coughing up a lung. Maybe he was.
“Associating with felons? Jimmy boy, who have you been talking to now?”
“Bill Boof—Bill Bouvier. He said that to me today. Maybe he heard something from his dad.”
He coughed some more. “Those boys have been completely out of control since their mother died, everyone says so.”
“Bones,” I started, then stopped. He didn’t say anything. “Bones, why did you run away from the Sergeant?”
“No, the real question, Jim, is what to do with you.” Bones groaned. “You can’t stay here, you’ll be in danger. But if you go straight home, I suppose you’ll tell Elaine and she’ll call William Bouvier back and everything will be ruined. Months of hard work. Look, I’ll give you some money and you can catch an IMAX for a couple of hours.”
“Mom—”
“I’ll call your mother so she won’t be worried.” The light fell briefly on his other hand, holding his cell at the ready.
That was just nuts. Go to the movies? But he was right—if I couldn’t talk him into coming back home with me, I’d have to tell Elaine where he was hiding. I felt sick with fright again, this was so terrible. My mind raced round and round like the reflector on a bike wheel.
“Hey!” I yelled out aloud.
“Shoosh, silly puppy. We don’t want to attract attention.”
“You’re trying to trap them.”
Bones said nothing, and then, “Scammers.” I thought I could see him grinning at me like a skull. “We’ll stop stinking,” Bones said bitterly. “We won’t rot with our skin falling off us. Our hearts’ll start beating again. So we can be ordinary people and not get spat at in the street.”
In a faint voice, I said, “But it is a scam, isn’t it? They can’t really do any of that, can they?”
“No, they can’t, Jim. They are maggots and grave-robbers, but this time their victims are still alive. Almost alive.”
Stuff still didn’t fit. My eyes stung in the dark. “Sergeant Bouvier wanted to know if you’d been hanging around with any strange people.”
“I’m a sort of cop, too, James. I was in the army with your dad—”
“And with Sergeant Bouvier,” I said, thinking of the photograph.
“William Bouvier was older than us, but yeah, we were friends back then. Before your dad and I got killed.” He fell silent, and I could tell he was looking down at the dark floor, seeing nothing, remembering those days. “And the medics pulled me back, but not Johnny.” He sighed. “Ah well, what’s done can’t be undone. Not all of it, anyway. Yeah, we were in the army. I still am, undercover. I’m a military policeman, Jim. I’ve been hunting down these maggots for years.”
He looked at his watch again. “I have a meet set up here in half an hour. That’s really as much as I can tell you, and now it’s time for you to get out of here and go straight—”
I heard a loud crash and my eyes were dazzled. It was like the sound the Sergeant made kicking in the lock of the bathroom. This time it was the front door of the old decaying hall. Dark figures burst in through the brighter rectangle of the door, wide open now but already swinging closed again: two men, three. They must have been blinded by the darkness inside; Bones grabbed me, shoved me behind him.
“That was unnecessary, gentlemen,” he said in his voice like paper rustling in a breeze. “The door was unlocked. I used to be a Scoutmaster here. Now what is all this nonsense? We have an arrangement. You’re early, that’s not polite. Are you ready to unload the stuff ?”
Stuff ? I thought.
“I don’t trust you, Jones,” one of the men said in an unpleasant, sneering tone. I started crawling away along the wall to the hardboard gap where I’d snuck in. “Yeah, we’ve got the goods, you’d better have the transfer keyed in.”
Light slashed the man’s face. The beam of light twisted in the air. Bones’ long, heavy flashlight hit the skell in the forehead, and he yelled. I saw a flash of light from overhead, heard a loud cracking, then another. Twilight poured into the room from above. Two men in black uniforms dropped on ropes from manholes in the ceiling, followed by another pair. They held tangle-guns, and started firing streams of yellowy-green sticky gloop the moment their feet hit the floor. Men’s voices shouted and cursed. The scammers were on the floor now, tangled up in green, luminous spaghetti. One of the morons pulled something heavy from his coat and threw it into the air. Nothing radioactive, it turned out, thank god. But you could see the shaped shock of concussion go upward into the dust, and I felt the bang.
The rotten old top floor, weakened by years of rain leaking through the roof, gave up the ghost.
