Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

He passed it to me with crisp and assured pace. I swatted it back to him but not as well. He had to stretch to bring it in, and once he did, he dismissed me and started juggling. The ball a magnet to his feet, thighs and head, he moved it around his body and there was no chance it’d touch the ground. I watched rapt and proud.

In the sixty-foot trees behind me I heard Kevin! Kevin, help me!

I turned around quickly like someone had tapped me on the shoulder, my eyes scanning the trees. Johnny’s ball-work staccatoed its leather-on-leather thumps behind me. A shape in the trees. I knew it to be a kid nest. This one had the look and shape of a brown felt bag. The bag bulged and rolled like a third trimester belly and from it the cries came more muffled now . Ke-uhnn… Elllp eee .

“Heads up,” he said, and as I spun around I heard a thump unlike the others. I didn’t see the ball but rather felt my head snap back and then my feet flying out from under me.

Johnny’s shadow fell over me. I couldn’t move yet, still stunned. I rubbed my right occipital bone. In my periphery, I saw the ball in the grass.

“Sorry about that,” he said, stifling a laugh. “You okay, Kev?”

In my periphery, the ball was gone. I turned to look for it. Where it had been, a riven fist-sized stone.

He stood over me now, blocking much of the sky. He did Rooney’s Christ pose. “Helluva shot, eh? One for the books,” he said.

He puts his hands on his hips, looks down at me. “I’m your brother so I’m not scared of you, but the rest are. Scared of you yet needing you. When we’re near you, we feel more our old selves. You’ll be able to help us bridge the old world and the new. But right now is a time of change. We’re not ready. And something…” Johnny’s eyes hollow out, his face falls into a terror mask, but then snaps back bright like a struck match. He sighs one of those oh-well , what’re you gonna do? sighs. “I can’t talk about it.”

I sat up on my elbows and squinted at him. My mouth felt stuffed with cotton.

Johnny looks at the sky and seems to draw from it. Then, the blue of the sky having transferred into his otherwise brown eyes, he lowers his head and stares into me. “You’re it, my brother. You have been for a long time.” He chuckles to himself, pops his cheek. “Don’t know why it’s a dork like you, but.”

The muffled cries grow louder. Johnny looks in the direction from which they come, narrows his eyes to slits. “Don’t listen to that, Kevin. They don’t understand.”

Maggie growls. Nate’s talking. My eyes fly open. Nate is sitting up, staring ahead unblinking, mumbling in his sleep. He doesn’t react to the flashlight when I point it at his face, but his pupils contract to pinpricks and his speech clears. “You have to go, Kevin… you can only go one way.… you already know. You must go alone.” Then in a faraway disembodied flange voice he says, “ It’s only me, brother. No other. ”

Those six words are said in Johnny’s voice.

I detect that he’s conflicted. He’s breathing hard.

“Nate, wake up.” Barely awake myself, I find it hard to separate Nate’s words from Johnny’s, the dream world from this one. They overlap and I am unsure. “Please, Nate, wake up and talk to me for real.”

This kid sitting up and staring past the flashlight glare speaking in monotone had my pulse going, the reality of now thrumming through me.

I yelled at him. “Nate! Wake up!”

I beat on his legs with my open palm. He blinked, turned his face toward me. Growling from Maggie. Maggie leaning into me, ready to pounce.

Nate’s face gathered up into a fearful shudder. He recoiled and pulled his legs away from me. “Oh, no! It’s you!” His eyes grew wide and he shook his head with petulance like the child he was. “No. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”

“Don’t want to what, Nate? C’mon, it’s me. Kevin. You’re okay. You’re safe here.”

“No, I’m not safe. Never safe.” The voice wavered between old and new.

“That’s not true. Don’t you remember? We’ve been together all day today. I’ve told you all about me.” I reached out to touch his shoulder. He jumped back onto his heels on the couch, his knees at his chin. Maggie startled but I made sure she stayed put with my other arm.

“Why did you come here?” he asked in a whisper.

“I told you.”

“They’ll find me!”

“Nate—”

“And I don’t want to go back to them and I don’t want to be with you because you make my head hurt. I just want to be left alone.”

“Nate—”

His eyes shot back and forth and his breathing shallowed in rapid hitches. He huffed his breath and whimpered in abject pain, overwhelmed.

My presence confuses things for him.

“When they find me, they’re going to…”

“What?” But I already knew. I flashed onto Simon’s freckled face, fish-belly white, peering through the curtain of green.

“Because I’m not… I’m not… complete.”

He looked up at me and his eyes implored that I believe him. I took the flashlight beam off his face, no longer interrogating him. “And they’ll just kill you for it.” I remember saying this without derision. I said it quietly, stating fact.

Though he did not respond, his face was grim.

The night’s black didn’t allow me to see that puddles in the gravel quivered with droplets until I waved my beam out across the drive. Lifting the light up, I saw the dogs’ eyes spark yellow. They sat still, watching, ears perked to our conversation. I lit new candles on the bar. Sleeping no longer occurred to us.

I sat and slumped back into the couch next to him. Nate sighed deeply, chin to his chest.

“You’ll stay with me. Here. I like it here,” I said.

“You can’t protect me.”

“Worked so far.”

“They wait.”

“For what?”

“For you.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Yes you are.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

“Forget it, Nate. We’re staying here. We’ll wait them out. Things’ll settle. They’ll stop being so scared and after a while we’ll be able to make contact and work together.” I embellish that line a bit, because right now, floating along, I feel this is true.

“No. You don’t understand. They’re not scared of anything anymore. Except you.”

“Hush—”

“Haven’t you ever needed something so badly that you were afraid of it?”

There’s need and there’s want. Wants came to mind. Publishing my first book, the bookstore letting me play my trombone at the first reading. I thought of wanting to be with Kodie, watching her ring up customers, wanting to be with her. No, that felt more like a need.

I thought of Grandma Lucille with her eyes closed listening to me play, then eyes closed laying in her coffin. I thought of how badly I wanted the world to be different as I sat up on that boulder smoking… and then here came that single rolling wave…

It needs you to need it.

“Of course,” I said.

“That’s how we, they, feel. They need you but they’re scared.”

We sat there looking at each other in a bit of a standoff. The tension of the moment tormented Maggie and she jumped down and looked back and forth at both of us and whined. I found myself questioning this kid. He’d stayed behind, sure. But now I’m really wondering why. Is it even possible that they’d let him, that they’d not notice? Or did they leave him here to serve a purpose?

In the old world we’d call him a plant, a spy, or in this case, a double agent.

These thoughts bearing questions had no answers. If I asked him, I don’t think he could give me a real answer if he wanted to.