Jake looked at Sal again. The family court in Lovelock had sent him here because these men were his uncles. Open and shut case. They probably hadn’t even checked to see whether it was a fit place for a boy to grow up.
A yellow dog was chained to an upended wheelbarrow in front of the double-wide, and it walked stiff-legged toward them, its teeth bared. In the sand were a thousand prints that marked the boundaries of its range, paces upon paces upon paces, and its eyes held not just hostility but a dull, perplexed misery.
Beside Jake, Sal took a deep, quiet breath, held it, then let it go.
“Are your uncles home?” Sheriff Watterly asked.
Sal shook his head. “No.”
Mason turned around in the driver’s seat. He had his notepad out. “What are their names?”
Sal opened his mouth but didn’t speak. His palms were pressed flat against the vinyl car seat. Jake answered for him. “Gideon and Ezra Prentiss.”
“What’s their phone number?” Mason asked.
Sal glanced over his shoulder at the road. “I don’t know.”
“Look around, Mason,” Sheriff Watterly said with disgust. “You think these folks are on the grid?”
Mason ignored him. “Listen, buddy,” he said to Sal. “I know it’s tough, finding something like this. But we’re going to need to talk to you about it some more, at the police station. Have your uncles get in touch with us, okay? As soon as they can.”
“Okay.” Sal was trembling, but Mason didn’t seem to notice.
“Get on out, then,” Sheriff Watterly said. Sal slid out and Mason backed the car up the driveway. The boy stood beside the dog and watched them go. It wasn’t until they reached the curve in the road that Jake saw him turn toward the double-wide, and it wasn’t until he disappeared from view that he realized Sal wasn’t wearing a school backpack.
Sal
Sal met the math teacher six and a half months before the math teacher died. It was the first day of sixth grade, a beautiful morning under a cloudless sky, and Mr. Merkel saved him from humiliation with a touch of his hand.
The school bus stopped outside the Marzen General Store at seven fifteen, and Sal got up at five thirty to make sure he wouldn’t miss it. His uncles were still asleep, so he moved quietly, making a bologna sandwich for lunch and checking his backpack to make sure the notebooks and pencils from fifth grade were in order. When he set out the sun hadn’t risen above the hills, but the sky was a faint blue, and he could see Samson under the wheelbarrow. The dog lifted his square head as Sal walked by, then laid it down again.
The only sound as Sal walked the fire road to Marzen was the crunch of sand under his worn sneakers. He felt grown up and brave, walking alone to the bus that would take him to a new school in another town, but he couldn’t help thinking about how this day would have gone if his mother were alive. She would have made him scrambled eggs for breakfast, packed him a peanut butter sandwich and Fritos for lunch, and walked him the two blocks from their house to the bus stop. Though it was also possible she would have slept too late to do any of these things, and this thought made Sal’s head feel bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. To distract himself he made up a story.
Sal was a quiet boy, but his stories were loud, filled with angels and demons and epic battles between good and evil. Today the armies of Heaven and Hell flooded the hills with blood until Angelus, the greatest archangel of them all, slew Hell’s minions with a scythe Death himself had given him. Angelus had been Sal’s champion since Sal was five, sick with a fever so high it painted monsters in the corners of his room until the archangel strode in and killed them all. As Marzen came into view he knelt on his mighty knee in the fire road, victorious as always, while the heavenly host sang his praises to the sky.
Sal was thirty minutes early for the bus, so he sat on the curb in front of the general store and watched Angelus and the host dissolve in the newly risen sun. Then he took a sketchbook and a pencil from his backpack and drew Angelus with stars for eyes and his scythe raised high, battling a demon. He would color it that night, with the colored pencils his mother had given him for Christmas two years before.
Ten minutes before the bus came the seventeen other middle and high school students straggled up in ones and twos. None of them spoke to Sal; none were in his grade. It was dumb luck, his mom always said, that nobody else had a baby the year he was born. They barely spoke to each other, either—they were slurry and tired, yanked from their summer slumber and shoved into the morning. When the bus came they took seats as close to the back as they could. Sal sat by himself behind Mr. Curtis, the bus driver.
Thirty-five minutes later the bus pulled up to Pershing Middle School in Lovelock, and Sal stood on the sidewalk amid a swirl of students and parents. The confidence that had carried him from his uncles’ house had evaporated as the bus lumbered down the interstate, and now he felt the first stirrings of panic. The school stretched low and flat to his left and right, and it was so much bigger than the three-room Marzen elementary school that it made him dizzy.
Gretchen Suarez, a seventh grader from Marzen, studied a piece of paper before setting off, her pink flip-flops smacking the cement. A group of Lovelock kids walked by, and they had those papers, too. Everybody had them. Everybody knew where to go except Sal, because he didn’t have the paper. His mom would have given it to him, like all the other kids’ moms had done, but she hadn’t woken up that one morning, and now Sal was going to cry, and this made him angry—at himself for being such a baby, and at his mother for leaving him all alone without the paper that would tell him where to go. He couldn’t be the kid who cried on the first day of school. It wouldn’t matter that he was wearing basketball shorts like all the other boys’, or that his backpack was the same dull blue as everyone else’s; he would always be the kid who cried on the first day, and that would ruin everything left that could still be ruined.
Then Sal felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up to see a man in his fifties, with kind gray eyes behind silver glasses. “You seem a little lost.”
Sal couldn’t speak, so he nodded.
“Let’s see if we can figure out where you belong.” The man led Sal through the blue front doors and into a small office. A woman with plastic-looking blond hair sat at a desk, typing on a keyboard with the longest, skinniest fingers Sal had ever seen. He couldn’t stop looking at them, even when she raised them from the keyboard and folded them together like a spider bunching up its legs. She looked over his head at the man.
“Can I help you?”
“This young fellow doesn’t know where to go.” The man’s voice was whispery, but a thin wire of sound ran through it that settled Sal’s anxiety from a boil to a simmer.
“Didn’t you get the email with his schedule?” The woman sounded annoyed.
The man coughed an apology cough. “I’m not his father. I’m Adam Merkel, your new math teacher.”
At this, the woman’s whole face changed. She pushed back her chair and reached out one of those skinny hands. She’d painted her fingernails the same color as her skin, and it made her fingers look even longer. “Dr. Merkel! How wonderful to meet you! I’m Dee Pratzer.”