"Red Fox Torn"

Levittown – 1984

Breakfast for Penance would be a little less opulent than the posh offerings in the Aurelia Arms. There was some kind of gray, creamy mush dripping near his head, but it probably didn't have the rich taste and bold texture of goose liver. The underside of a municipal dumpster, after all, had rather lousy service.

Unfortunately the accommodations did come with a wake-up call.

The dull tap of a nightstick on the rusting dumpster startled him. Penance jerked, knocking the wrapped stack of cookies over with his face.

It was around nine or so, near as he could reckon. But it was hard to 'reckon' anything with the flashlight shining in his face.

"Hey, got him here, Bill."

The man lay on his stomach, peeking his head beneath the dumpster like a spelunker inspecting a cave opening. Penance could make out the distinctive silhouette of a policeman's hat on his head. A set of black boots stood behind him.

"Your name 'Penley', son?"

"Not really," the boy mumbled.

"Well, now, you're not in trouble, son," the man held out an open palm with his free hand. "That nice lady at the house you visited last night was just a little concerned about you. All we wanna do is talk. And how'd you like a little breakfast, son? There's a McDonald's just down the street."

Penance gave the cop this much: he knew the best way to trap a wild animal.

All the same Penance wouldn't be taking the bait.

"Hang on," the boy muttered, rolling to his side and grabbing his backpack. He wormed further back under the dumpster and emerged at the narrow gap between it and the back of that quaint little hardware store.

"Son?" The officer called out to him.

Penance set his back to the brick wall and cemented his leg on the dumpster, giving it a faint test-push; it was nearly empty.

He sighed through his nose and shook his head.

"Sorry about this," he mumbled.

"Sorry about wh—"

That's as far as the cop got before the dumpster slammed into him, sending him rolling like a tossed hay bale. In that moment of confusion and very creative cursing Penance took his leave, sprinting around to the front of the store and down the street.

He'd violated one of the cardinal rules of being a street urchin: never make camp in suburbia. Now a poor cop who was just doing his job got his bell rung for his trouble. He seemed nice; Penance guessed that he probably would have taken him to McDonald's before turning him over to CPS.

In the back of his mind the boy considered whether he could've gotten a free meal off him and then dashed. Maybe he could've faked stomach problems, gone to use the bathroom and then snuck away.

But then again if he had any of those grease-soaked sponges McDonald's had the audacity to call 'hash browns' he wouldn't have needed to fake the stomach problems.

"And I wouldn't be able to run very far, leaving a 'trail'."

Penance laughed between sharp breaths. He knew it wasn't proper form to laugh at one's own jokes. Besides, that was more a Galabeg-style joke. If she were on speaking terms with him at the moment she'd probably have said it.

But she was being immature at the moment, so sadly there'd be no defecation jokes, for now.

X

X

X

He ran at that full sprint until his legs started losing steam and a stitch heated up at his side. At that point he dashed through a row of neatly-ordered trees. A long one-story building awaited him on the other side and he instinctively raced to a nearby railing, finding a narrow set of steps leading to a basement-level landing. He touched down on a grimy concrete floor outside a tiny room, the window dark. Through that window he saw individual student desks stacked up in a heap, along with spare rolling blackboards and boxes of art supplies.

He wasn't keen on staying on this landing, visible to anyone who might walk by above him, and so he gave the door a try. Luckily it opened, but it squeaked fiercely on neglected hinges, making Penance wince. He ducked into the storage room and gently drew the door shut.

"You'd think a school would have better security," he grumbled.

He was about to look around for a secluded nook to hole up in for the next few hours or so, at least until cops gave up their search, but a sudden noise startled him and cut off his breath.

But it also brought a tingle to the nape of his neck.

A piano— perfectly in tune— struck a soft E-major chord, then slowly wound through a string of arpeggios, methodical and precise. At first he looked around with confusion, certain that he really had lost his mind. That'd be just as well: instead of being haunted by ghosts he'd end up going loony and listening to soft piano music.

There were worse ways for a mind to go.

After a moment he realized that the little storage area was only a small section of the room; it continued out around a far corner, opening up into a larger space. He didn't dare peek around that corner, but the acoustics told him as much.

And, of course, he wasn't going to peek, either. Not a chance in hell of that.

Those fingers on the keys then launched into the docent chords of a strange song— one he wasn't at all familiar with— and then a wispy voice began singing. It was soft at first— barely audible— but it grew with each beat of the song.

"And the blood will dry... underneath my nails... and the wind will rise up... to fill my sails..."

The voice and the chords waxed and waned between his ears, rolling like soft ocean waves across his brain. The tune was catchy enough but the fragile, plaintive drone of the singer was downright hypnotic.

"So you can doubt... and you can hate... but I know... no matter what it takes..."

He found himself drawn around the corner, despite himself; Penance dared to at least peak out into the dark room. Chairs and music stands sat in silent attention on his side of the room, while a piano rested against the far wall.

The woman at the piano launched into the chorus of the song, rhythmically pounding out a precise wave of simple chords, replacing the lyrics with soulful humming. Penance's racing heart fell into cadence with the sweet meter of the chords; against any and all better judgment he dared to step further out from the corner's safety.

The player stopped humming, but she continued working the keys. A dirty mirror spanned the length of the wall before the piano. Even in the darkness of the room Penance noticed her head slowly turn; a pair of eyes met his through the dusty glass, though he couldn't tell the color for the darkness.

Her hair was black as coal, done up in a tight, professional bun. It reminded him of how Martha would bundler her hair before her shifts at the hospital. She was dressed in a modest, ankle-length black watch plaid dress and a crisp white top with ruffled sleeves and a sharp, elaborately-decorated cardigan collar. Her impeccable fashion sense would've left her in good standing for tea with Gilbarta. Combine all that with her rigid posture and steely gaze and the word 'schoolteacher' instantly came to mind.

Penance would know; he'd had hundreds of them.

"And just what are we doing down here in the dark?" Her voice had a sharp curtness to it. It wasn't angry, but rather rustically brusque. It reminded him of Cadha's fondness for short words that carried far.

As to the woman's question Penance didn't have a good answer, and that should've probably bothered him more than it did.

"Just... hiding out," he answered.

"You're one of mine?" The woman arched a thin, well-trimmed eyebrow.

"Uh, no. I'm from a different class."

"Are you?"

Penance couldn't tell if this was a question or not. The woman focused her attention back on the keys. The boy, meanwhile, could only focus his attention on her.

"Who are you?" Penance asked.

"Don't you think you're overstaying your welcome, here?"

She continued drumming out that soft, sweet melody, and still it transfixed him. Penance took another step towards the woman, squinting into that dirty glass over the piano to get a better look at her.

"I'd hate to have to get the principal involved. Or— heaven forbid— the superintendent..."

This managed to break at least a bit of the hypnotic haze.

"I, uh... I'm sorry. I can go..."

The woman chuckled, and her laugh was as lyrical as the piano. It reminded him of Whip's sonorous laughing. Thinking about Whip again brought an ache to his chest, like a patched wound torn open.

Not that he would know what that felt like, either.

"Well, I don't want you to be sorry; you've got precious little to be sorry about," she said. "And there's no shame in 'hiding out' every now and then." She turned her head just enough to miss making eye contact with him, still staring at him through the mirror. "And my name is Miss Bronstem."

"Music teacher?" Penance asked.

The woman shrugged.

"You can teach an awful lot through music. I wouldn't mind if that's all I did, but these days I've got a bit more on my plate. Right now I'm stuck teaching history, actually." She let what Penance would call a cheeky smile form on those dark red lips. "It's not my favorite subject, mind you."

"Mine, either," Penance answered.

She grunted, again facing forward.

"Dry topic, usually with very unpleasant overtones. You've got to have students that want to study the facts, and even then not misinterpret them. It's one thing to know what happened; it's another to know what it meant."

"But you're a good interpreter, aren't you?"

Her hands thumped down on a diminished chord and then held it, letting the piano's strings naturally lose their energy, allowing the off-putting sound to haunt them as it faded to nothing.

"That's not my job," she said.

The woman then launched into a classical piece, and this one Penance instantly recognized: Bach's Goldberg Variations. He knew this one from his time in Vienna around the turn of the century, when he'd made an awful mistake; he'd been noodling on a school piano after class and inadvertently caught the ear of one of the teachers, who deemed him a 'budding virtuoso' on the spot.

Put simply: he wasn't, and Penance knew it.

Not to shortchange his abilities, mind you. He could play the piano about as well an anyone who had spent 250 years casually trying their hand at it, and he sounded downright prodigious for a '12-year-old', but he was no great artist with the thing. A billion years of study couldn't make a great artist if the raw materials weren't there to begin with; you just can't teach genius.

He could 'play' something like the Goldberg Variations, sure. But he couldn't really play them.

He was no great artist with anything, really.

Except maybe his little knife.

And that didn't count.

In any event his little stunt bought him six months of intense private lessons, including a healthy diet of Bach, his instructor's favorite. He was supposed to play a section of the Goldberg Variations at a public recital, but then a ridiculously drunk Immortal ended up attending on a whim, and he was the touchy-feely type. Penance had to launch into a rousing little dance number in order to keep the sot hyped-up and distracted from trying to shake Penance's hand.

It was a long story, and it ended with three overturned tables, six broken windows, four injured members of the Viennese constabulary and three respectable ladies covered in Kaiserschmarrn and lingonberry. And that was a shame.

It was damn-good lingonberry.

"We're covering the 'Age of Sail' in class, now," she explained. "Ships of the line, and that sort of thing. Know anything about those?"

"A little," Penance said.

"The teaching module covers most everything about them. Bow to stern, crow's nest to keel, and the duties of every soul aboard from captain down to powder monkey." Another smile graced her lips, but this one more somber. "Now that's a phrase that gets laughs from a roomful of children." Again she turned her head, and again she just missed making direct eye contact with the boy. "Do you know about that job: the 'powder monkey'?"

"Yeah. I've— uh, I've heard of 'em. They were boys on a ship that would run and get gunpowder from the inner stores and bring it out to the cannon crews."

He knew the ins and outs of that job well-enough. He'd 'monkeyed' around a little bit during the War of 1812.

He served aboard a ship called the USS Vixen, no less.

Galabeg had a good laugh at that one...

The woman stared down at her hands, nodding. She continued to play flawlessly, with perfect tempo and impeccable phrasing. In her hands Penance saw something he'd never seen in his own: true artistry.

True artistry that counted, anyway.

"It always made me sad: the thought of sending little boys to fight the wars of aged men. They've got enough to worry about without running headlong into bullets and bayonets to fix the mistakes of their elders, don't you think?"

Being from the generation— generations— that he was, Penance's first instinct was to downplay the matter; boys in combat were a regular thing until quite recently, historically speaking. Seemed like only yesterday a cold and hungry boy his age could sign on with the military and get his share of rations and warm bunking for the effort.

But then an image forced itself into his head: Sam— that kind, generous kid who managed to bring Penance to tears with a simple offering of half-stale cookies— being forced to shuffle through the decks of a ship hot in combat, scrambling with a load of unstable powder for the guns, bullets hammering the wood around him as he desperately winds through the haphazard innards of the ship, splintered, filthy and bleeding sweat in fear...

Penance looked up at the woman's reflection with stern eyes; she quickly avoided his gaze, as if embarrassed.

"When there's a small job that needs doing, and a small body to do it... well, that's just simple. And the bigger bodies are busy with 'bigger' things, right?" He said.

"Is it right, do you think?"

Again that image of Sam 'monkeying' aboard a ship crowded his head, and again the woman averted his gaze.

This time he gave the answer a little more thought, although the conclusion he reached wasn't much different.

"No," he said. "It's not right. But it can be necessary. And not all boys are exactly equal, you know—"

"In my experience they are—"

"Some can take it—"

"And how big a weight should a set of small shoulders be demanded to take on, do you think?"

A sharp gulf of silence met his ears after this, and it was deafening; the woman had stopped playing, altogether, and the quiet was harsher than the cold of a grave.

Penance didn't let the silence faze him; he had an answer to the question ready.

"As big as is necessary; you can't ask anything more from anyone."

The woman stared at Penance through that dirty mirror for a time, her expression ineffable. Finally, after what almost seemed like hours, she returned her attention to the keys, tinkering about with a bit of melancholic noodling.

"I suppose you can't," she answered. "I'm a case in point, really: the principal has me in charge of getting one of the school vans repaired— that's in addition to everything else on my plate, of course— and I've had a devil of a time arranging for the auto shop down in Mansfield to come get it." Again she turned her head as if to look at Penance, and again she came up short. "That's down south, you know, right off the Turnpike. Their main auto repair center is way up the road in Perth Amboy— a straight shot on the Turnpike—right across the water from Staten Island, in fact."

Penance, only half listening to the woman, suddenly perked-up at these last words.

"Staten Island?" He whispered.

"Mmm." She shook her head, sighing. "And I just know they won't be able to get that poor van fixed at the Mansfield shop; it has so many problems. 'Unlucky number 7', we call it. No: once they get it towed down there they'll almost certainly have to send it all the way up the Turnpike to their Perth Amboy facility. Awfully inconvenient. They might as well take it over to Manhattan, while they're at it!"

His breath caught in his throat and his heart dropped, like he'd been startled awake from a falling dream. He felt these pains distantly, because all at once there was a strange feeling that seized him: a kind of 'clanging' in his body, as if his very bones were bells and they were being struck by hammers.

It was almost like singing, but nothing like that vulgar 'singing' in his veins; it wasn't a discordant and desperate clamor.

There was a resonance to this, and his whole body was in on the show, skullcap to toe-bones.

"Manhattan?" Penance spoke in a dreamy and confused whisper.

"Blessing in disguise, really. I messed up the dates and hadn't been able to book an appointment with them until next week, and we'd had to put a field trip to the City Museum on hold; the exhibits we were supposed to visit should've been moved out, by now. Well, the principal was furious, and my job might've even been on the line for it. But the body shop will be here for the van this afternoon. Within the hour, I'd say. They promise they'll decide on whether to take it up north before the end of business, today, so odds are it'll probably be all the way up there before supper."

He stared at the hem of the woman's plaid dress as she spoke, and while she was speaking he mouthed that same single word, again feeling his bones ring.

Every bone, muscle and string of sinew in his body was in accord: he had to be in that van when it left. He had to get up there. He had to go north. He'd known that for some time, now, of course.

But now he knew where.

He didn't know 'why', but that question was unimportant compared to the aching song ringing through his body.

Penance took a step back, slow and quiet.

"I'm sorry to have intruded. I think I need to go, now—"

The woman ignored Penance's words and continued her story, seemingly oblivious to the boy's sudden impatience; for his part he was still too polite to just run out on her, so Penance willed his muscles sill.

But he couldn't will away that sweet resonance in his skeleton.

"It was just in time," she said. "And it's funny, actually. The body shop says that the only reason they had time to fit us in was because another client of theirs had a mix-up with one of their faxes— a cat had walked all over a repair request form with toner on its paws and made part of the service request illegible— so their appointment ended up being cancelled when they couldn't be reached by phone. And that client? Well, turns out it was the moving company hired by the City Museum, no less! Without a truck to move the exhibits they're staying on an extra week, and that's enough time for our van to be repaired and for us to make the trip to see them."

The woman again turned her head as if to look at the boy, but still she came up short.

"I find it funny the way things can work out like that. Just put a little animal in the right place, in the right time, and it's better than a stitch. It can save far more than 'nine', at least."

Penance's patience reached its limit.

"Yeah. It's neat. Listen: I gotta go—"

He made it two steps before the woman barked out two words that quickly stilled him, her voice returning to that rustic brusqueness.

"One moment."

Her curt command startled him; Penance turned around and met her gaze through the mirror, and this time he saw something else in that porcelain face. His eyes must've adjusted to the dark better, as now he could see the woman's eyes better, framed under crescent moon eyebrows. They were blue, piercing and radiant, with a faint gold luster around the edges, looking something like fresh seawater pounding the shoreline.

They reminded him of the eyes of another woman he'd 'met'; a woman in white, her head adored with a delicate mantilla. It wasn't her; he was quite sure of that, but at least for a moment he saw her in those eyes.

Terror welled up in his heart, but the woman's smile was only warm and welcoming.

But then so was the woman in white's, wasn't it?

And still it terrified him.

More than anything, in fact.

He might've thought to ask himself 'why', but the woman's words cut off his introspection.

"Can I ask you a question?"

Maybe it was the way she said it, or maybe it was his nerves bringing imagined terrors to his mind, but suddenly the strain of an imposing weight came down on Penance's shoulders. Dread welled up in his chest, and he didn't for the life of him know the source.

He did, however, know that he had to answer this next question.

He didn't know how he knew that, any more than he knew why his bones were ringing with that strange energy, but still he knew.

He would've answered her anyway, of course, just to be polite.

But he knew that he had to. And he knew that there would be consequences.

He didn't even bother thinking about 'why'.

Penance nodded at the woman.

"Do you believe," she asked, "that things can happen for a reason, if there's a reason for them to happen?"

The boy's brain did a mental loop-de-loop at her logic; the woman registered his confusion.

"I mean," she said, "if a coincidence is always just coincidence, or if bad luck is always just bad luck, or if the randomness of life is always just the randomness of life. In the mess of events that unites and divides do you think there's any..."

"'Meaning', you mean?" Penance finished her sentence for her, his voice drawn out with uncertainty. He knew with certainty that this was what she meant.

That wasn't what he doubted.

The woman nodded. Penance's mind was already drifting back through the clouds of time's memories. Most of his life he'd been a pinball, bouncing from place to place by others' moves— either immortals that forced his hand, or regular adults enforcing an adult's control over a child's life, or even by simple gravity of circumstance, including randomness, for good and for ill.

And it was meaningless randomness, certainly. It couldn't be anything else, could it? No rational mind could disagree. There was a murderous priest that gave him his gift and his curse; stamping horse's hooves that brought him to Uallas; a fascination with brewing strange berries that saved his life; an unstable cavern entrance that brought him to Gilbarta; a mopey need to have some 'comfort entertainment' and go see a movie that eventually brought him to Whip.

And through it all he'd survived his battles and lived to lick his wounds. By luck, certainly.

And 'randomness', definitely.

He looked at the back of the woman's head, ready to give his answer. In her features he again saw those things that reminded him of ghosts both long gone and not: Gilbarta's dignified fashion sense and regal posturing; Cadha's gruffness and that certain 'backhanded warmth' she radiated; Whip's bright laughter lighting dark surroundings.

He felt himself drawn to tea time in a grand parlor; a rustic kitchen chopping herbs for a haggis feast; an open-air ruin of a bedroom, sharing secrets with a friend.

And he was drawn to a field he recognized, just outside Zaragoza: a place where his legs felt 'shorter', somehow. A place where he chased at fireflies dancing in the growing dusk. Where a strange voice called out from somewhere behind him.

It said one word.

Five simple syllables.

He pulled back from that 'when and where' before the word was fully spoken.

It was a meaningless word.

And a painful one.

When he opened his eyes— when he came back to the 'here and now'— he drew a long, quiet breath. He realized he hadn't answered the woman's question yet, and so he did.

He wavered on the issue for a moment more.

But in the end no rational mind could disagree.

"Yes," he whispered. "There's meaning, sometimes. Maybe a coincidence isn't always a coincidence. And maybe a mistake isn't always a mistake."

The woman looked down at the piano keys, and for a moment Penance thought he saw a curious thing in her reflection. In retrospect he knew it had to be from a streak from the dirty glass, but at the time it almost looked like she'd shed a single tear down one cheek, thin as a reed on her porcelain face.

Or thin as a crack in some old glass.

That had to be it, yes.

"Thank you for speaking with me," she said. "I suppose it's about time for you to be moving along, isn't it?" She smiled her impish smile. "So make like a good 'powder monkey' and get 'monkeying'."

He gave her a nod and turned to leave, but then she said one more thing.

And what she said was not without consequences.

"You know, I don't find it hard to disagree with you. I live over in Morrisville, near St. Anthony's, and they were talking about some street youth who'd been hiding out in the cemetery on the church grounds recently. Idle rumor, right? Well, just early this morning I'm walking through an alley behind the church and I actually see her sneaking inside. How's that for coincidence? Although heaven knows how a vagabond girl could get her hair that silky and shimmering. And homeless youths don't tend to fancy a tight French-braid..."

The beating of Penance's heart replaced the ringing in his bones.

"What?"

"It's just another case of being in the right place, in the right time, I guess..."

Before Penance could ask any more questions a loud rap sounded around the corner, coming from the little nook he'd entered through. Someone was trying to open the door outside.

All at once that hypnotic hold on Penance fell and he looked to the main classroom door. Without another word to the woman at the piano, who launched into another classical piece— Mozart's Turkish March, for what it's worth— he bolted out the door and found himself in a spacious hallway. Thankfully it was deserted. He moved through the place as quickly as possible as safely as possible, not sprinting to avoid attracting attention.

That part became inevitable when he pattered up a set of stairs and rounded a corner, coming face-to-face with two girls and a boy— perhaps 8th graders— the girls dressed in pleated knee-length uniform skirts and the boy in khaki pants, dress shoes and a shirt with the school emblem on it. They gave him curious stares as he passed them, eyeing his jean shorts and faded He-Man shirt, but he moved too quickly for them to start asking questions.

And once out of sight he turned that fast walk into a dead sprint.

By luck he reached the back doors of the school before running into any more people and he burst out onto a small loading dock. Beyond was the parking lot for the teachers; pulled up near the curb was a fleet of large vans, all painted the same muted blue, bearing the school's emblem on oversized sliding doors. There were only four of them, but the numbers on their side appeared random: 2, 8, 15, and 7.

'Unlucky number 7' sat apart from the other three, nearest the loading dock. Penance ignored the sudden urgency of his situation and instead slowly walked up to the van's passenger door. He put his fingers on the handle and pulled down, somehow knowing even before he tried that it would open, and it did. Inside the van's seats were clean and tidy, and behind the multiple rows of seats was a cargo compartment laden with supplies stowed away in bulky bags.

It was quite a lot of equipment. So much that a small boy hidden away in the mess would almost certainly be overlooked.

Penance closed his eyes, imagining the van reaching that place in Perth Amboy. He imagined the waters there: the Staten Island Sound. And beyond the island he could see it in his head. Not 'imagine'. He could see it, clear as he could see through another immortal's eyes whenever he fell into that deep, dark trance:

He could see the Hudson River.

And he could see his destination.

He didn't know how long he stood there, hand on the door, entranced. The ringing in his bones seemed to turn into a slow burn, as if he were catching fire from the inside-out. Pounding through all that was the beating of his heart in his head, and that's what won out over his sonorous skeleton.

Penance shut the van door, backing away from the vehicle.

He couldn't cross the Hudson River. Not yet, at least.

He wasn't finished with the Delaware.

Whip was out there, probably looking for him. And Noirbarret was probably looking for her. Penance had made a mess of things, and he knew it. He knew it as soon as he attacked her on that bridge, knocking her out 'for her own good'.

Whose good had it really been for?

He knew that, too.

It was a mess. And it was his fault.

And he was going to fix it.

"St. Anthony's," Penance mumbled. He pressed his hand against his side, feeling the staghorn grip of his little knife, the only 'instrument' in his life that had ever really mattered to him.

The weight drawing him towards that van— tugging at his intransigent feet, as if to tear his body in two— faded with every beat of his heart until it was all but gone. For now, at least. It would be back.

But Penance wouldn't heed it. Not until he fixed this mistake.

Of all the shadows of his past there was one that was still breathing, and he'd keep her that way.

And to hell with Manhattan.