William Krueger - The Devil's bed

It was a long way to the river, and Bo walked the whole distance in heated strides. The streets were empty. The season was autumn, the night cool and windy. All around him Bo heard the scrape of dead leaves on pavement. He made for a grove of cottonwood trees near the High Bridge where an old school bus sat wheel-less in tall grass. The bus smelled of urine and was full of litter, but it offered seclusion and a measure of protection, and kids often gathered there to get high and sometimes to crash. As he approached, he could see a glowing ember in the dark inside.

“Hey, man,” a voice called to him in a laid-back greeting.

“Otter, that you?”

“Halloween in a couple of weeks, Spider-Man. I thought maybe you were a goblin.” Otter laughed softly. He sat near the middle of the bus with his feet propped on the back of the seat in front of him. He was a tall kid, awkward-looking, but when he moved it was with a slow kind of grace that always put Bo in mind of a giraffe. “Late to be out, even for you.”

“You, too,” Bo said. He sat down across the aisle from Otter and accepted the joint his companion offered.

“The devil’s in my old man tonight. Figure I’m better off here until he cools down.”

Otter’s old man was infamous. A huge railroad worker, he was a brute who laid into his son with frightening regularity. Bo had often sat in the bus with Otter while his friend smoked or drank away the pain of a beating.

“So what’s up?” Otter asked.

They were hardly more than a stone’s throw from downtown St. Paul, and the lights of the city drizzled a neon illumination over the grove of cottonwoods and the bus within it. Bo could see Otter’s face, long and serene.

“Fight with my mom,” Bo replied.

“I wouldn’t mind fighting with your mom,” Otter said. The attractiveness of Bo’s mother was a constant subject of comment among Bo’s friends.

“She hit me,” Bo said. “She’s never hit me.”

“She hit you hard?”

“Doesn’t matter. She hit me.”

“It matters, believe me,” Otter said.

They were quiet for a while. Bo saw something big moving on the river. The trees made it difficult to see exactly what, and the wind through the branches covered any sound.

“Hear that?” Otter said

Bo heard only the wind and the leaves.

“I think it’s the dead getting restless.”

“What are you talking about?” Bo asked.

“I’ve been hearing it a lot tonight. With Halloween coming on, I figure all those dead folks are getting anxious for a little action.”

Otter was definitely stoned, probably drunk as well. The restless dead thing Bo decided to chalk up to altered consciousness.

Bo said, “I’m going to take a piss.”

He left the bus and walked out of the trees to the riverbank. The Mississippi was like a strip torn from the night sky and laid against the earth. Bo could see the glow in the pilothouse of a towboat that was nearing Harriet Island. Maybe that was the sound Otter had heard, the deep thrum of the engine as the towboat had passed. Bo watched the light until it disappeared beyond a bend in the river, and he imagined what it would be like to escape on a barge bound for New Orleans. He relieved himself in the grass on the riverbank, zipped up, and returned to the bus.

Otter offered him a swig from a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Bo declined. “You going to spend the night?” he asked.

“Probably,” Otter replied. “You?”

“Naw. Think I’ll go back home.” He headed to the front of the bus. “Later,” he said.

“Later, Spider-Man,” Otter called after him.

It was going toward morning by the time Bo returned to the apartment in Frogtown. The walk had done him good. Probably the joint, too, and the mellow influence of Otter. When he stepped inside, the place was quiet. He could see that the door to his mother’s bedroom was slightly ajar. An open door usually meant that the man who’d come with her had done his thing and left. Bo went to the doorway and peeked in. He saw the bedding in a jumble and saw the stains, black in the darkened bedroom. He hit the light switch, and he saw the rest-a bloodied broken bottle, and his mother’s skin, once marred only by stretch marks, marred now, and forever in Bo’s memory, by the deep cut of glass.

All his life, Bo would wonder if other people had a moment that clearly divided their lives. There was everything before, and everything after, and between, only one unforgettable heartbeat. Standing at the door to his mother’s bedroom with his hand still on the light switch, Bo had his moment. It ended in a cry that brought the neighbors running.

They never found the man who murdered her. Bo hadn’t seen him nor had anyone else, and there was little for the police to go on. Bo wanted desperately to move back in time. He wanted to protect his mother, wanted never to have said the things he said, wanted never to have deserted her. He also wanted to find her murderer and to kill the bastard with his own hands.

He kept all this to himself, kept it in his heart, which had become a fist. He refused to talk about it to anyone, not his social worker, not the psychologist social services provided, not the foster parents he was sent to live with and from whom he eventually ran away, not even Otter who joined Bo after he, too, split from home. All the time that he and Otter, and later Egg and Pearl and Freak, lived together in the bus in the cottonwoods, Bo never once spoke about what his mother’s death meant to him. What would have been the point? They’d all been wounded. And Bo, like the others, believed that was just the way life was, harsh and unforgiving.

It was Annie Jorgenson who set him on the way to a different view of the world. He appeared before her in juvenile court after being arrested for petty theft. The cops had discovered the bus by the river and had taken Bo’s street family into custody. Bo was prepared for the worst. What he received was something far different, something he would be grateful for all his life. A second chance at growing up.

He was brought into her office and left alone with her. She wore reading glasses and slowly scanned the documents in front of her. She looked up at Bo with her intelligent blue eyes.

“Thief,” she said. “That’s what it says here. You’re a thief. Do you think that’s true?”

Bo shrugged. Let her do what she wanted, he didn’t care.

“I’m not asking if you stole things. We both know you did. I’m asking, do you think of yourself as a thief?”

The truth was that he didn’t. He saw himself as a provider, a protector. Stealing was the means to that end. He was about to offer her another shrug, then changed his mind. He shook his head.

“No,” she said, giving voice to his gesture. “As I understand it, you pretty much took care of-how many was it? four? — other runaways besides yourself.” She glanced down again at the documents in front of her. She nodded to herself, then she took off her glasses. “I see a lot of runaways, Bo. Most of them end up here because they’re being used in despicable ways by other people, usually adults. They’re prostitutes. They’re drug runners. They’re thieves in a den of thieves. In my view, you’ve done your best to keep four other kids out of the hands of the people who would use them that way, and out of my courtroom. I think that’s admirable.”

Bo tried to remember the last time an adult had praised him in such a way. What was this judge up to?

“These other kids, were they your friends?” she asked.

“Family,” Bo said.

“Family.” She nodded. “Family is important.” She folded her hands on her desk and leaned toward him. “Well, Bo, I have a couple of options. I can send you to the juvenile correctional facility at Red Wing. Your family there would be pushers, punks, bullies, some who go on to be murderers. Do you want that?”