Tom Finder Page 6

They stopped.

  “What’s a finder?” the poet asked the T-shirt girl.

  “What’s a finder?” the T-shirt girl asked Tom.

  How could he think when the words on her T-shirt expanded and shrunk like that when she spoke?

  “Uh . . . it might be a kind of poet,” he finally thought to say. Anything to make that girl stay.

  Poet girl looked at him skeptically. “Okay, read me one of your poems,” she said without sound.

  “She says, read her one of your poems,” T-shirt girl said.

  Tom squirmed uncomfortably. He opened his book so that only he could see the words. He could make it up on the spot, but what if she really was a poet and she could tell? He decided to read her something he had written in his book.

  It might have something to do with drums.

  I remember drums.

  The other music is gone.

  I remember fighting.

  And gravity. That gravity always wins.

  Without it we would all fly off into space, and the earth would wander, and the whole universe would close up like a book. With it, we can’t fly, and we always lose. I remember that, too.

  When he was done, T-shirt girl looked questioningly at Janice.

  Janice shrugged. “Good try,” she said out loud. T-shirt girl smiled, a big smile, the most perfectly beautiful Canadian smile Tom had ever seen. It was obvious to him now that the way to get to know this girl was to be nice to her poet friend. Luckily for him, nice came easy.

  “Read me one of your poems,” he said to the poet girl.

  Poet girl looked uncomfortably at Tom, and then at the T-shirt girl. T-shirt girl frowned and put her arm around poet girl. “You can’t read her poetry.”

  “Why?” Tom asked.

  “Because,” she answered. “Because it’s all space. People never stop to think that it’s the spaces inside the letters that make the letters. Letters are just spaces on a string. Everyone thinks the lines are so great, nobody thinks about the space. Janice celebrates space.”

  Janice the poet girl smiled at T-shirt girl. “Yes,” she said. “That’s it.”

  Tom thought there must be a lot of space inside Janice’s head, but he only nodded.

  Janice smiled at Tom. She hadn’t brushed her teeth in a while. “Hey,” she said. “I liked the way you answered: with space. You didn’t say anything.”

  “What’s your name?” Tom asked T-shirt girl.

  “Pam. Yours?”

  “Tom. So you must write poetry, too, since Janice talks to you.”

  “Nope. No poetry in me. I tell futures,” Pam said.

  “That are sheer poetry,” Janice said.

  “So how come you’re here?” Tom asked, nodding at the walls of the shelter.

  Pam shrugged. “Just for a while, until I get a job. I’m going to be a window dresser. I’ve applied at a few places. They say come back when I’m done high school. Like anything I’d learn in high school has anything to do with being a window dresser.”

  “I’m looking for my daughter,” Janice said. Tears spurted from her eyes, completely missing the tops of her cheeks and splashing halfway down. She blinked in surprise, as if someone had thrown water into her face.

  Pam put her arm around the other girl. “C’mon, Janice. Let’s get some sleep.”

  “Listen,” Janice said to Tom. “Daniel hangs with the dead. I don’t know his people. But you might try hanging out at the LRT station. I’ve seen him there. He’s been sick, strung out. Bring some smokes for bait. Got to go. I need my space.”

  After they left Tom wrote in his book, Tom found a girl. He closed the book, then opened it again. Tom is a poet, he wrote. A Canadian poet.

  Chapter 5

  You go on blowing your flute, I am going to play a different tune.

  – Act 2, scene 28

  That night Tom was awakened often, every time the toilet flushed, every time someone cried out in his sleep. Someone was snoring. A few people were laughing all night long. They were going to sleep when Tom got up. It was still dark out, and the social worker was sleeping. Tom took a shower, ate some cornflakes, brushed his teeth with the toothpaste, and left. It felt good to be clean, but the shelter made him uneasy. The red-haired social worker looked at him a lot and asked him hard questions like, “What’s your last name?”

  When his parents looked at him, the day they found him, they would see him the way he really was: nice, good speller, able to hold his own in a fight. A God-fearing swimmer. And a saver. Maybe he’d gotten that from his mom. His dad was probably the kind that spent too much money on stuff for his son. They were probably worried sick, calling all his friends, the police.

  Why didn’t he just go to the police?

  No.

  Something to do with gravity. Something to do with the way he wanted to throw up and cry every time he even thought of it. His parents would understand when he told them about losing his memory, about needing to be invisible for a while. Tom went to the LRT station to look for Daniel.

  The Stampede station was empty when he arrived. The smells of tobacco and perfume and fries hung in pockets that you could walk in and out of. The wind skittered cigarette butts and discarded tickets along the cement platform. He walked around the station while the sun lightened the sky. No one showed up that could be Daniel Wolflegs. Tom looked for good cigarettes to use as bait.

  That day he found a lipstick, Tender Pink. He kept it all day. His eyes liked to lick it. He kept the lipstick in his pocket when he left the station to look for HELP WANTED signs. When he inquired, people were looking for someone older, or more experienced, or with a résumé.

  You were allowed four nights in the shelter, so Tom slept there again. Janice the poet and Pam the Canadian weren’t there. Tom showered and used mouthwash and stole three containers of floss.

  The next morning he met up with the newspaper man again. This time his tie was off and his shirt collar unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up.

  “Well, it’s the little mugger. Written anything for me yet?”

  “Not for you. Just for me,” Tom said.

  “Yes? Let me look at it.”

  Tom hesitated, but the man gestured impatiently. He handed him his notebook.

  The man read. Once he nodded. Twice he nodded. He handed it back to Tom.

  “So?”

  “Shows you can spell,” the old man said.

  “I can spell,” Tom said.

  “Spell proficient.”

  “P–R–O–F–I–C–I–E–N–T.”

  The man nodded. He unfolded a piece of tinfoil and held it under his chin.

  “Am I a poet?” Tom asked.

  “A poet? That’s not my area of expertise. But I memorized a poem once in school. I can’t remember the periodic table or the dates of a single war or how to multiply fractions, but I remember that poem.” He closed his eyes and recited:

  “Not in entire forgetfulness,

  And not in utter nakedness,

  But trailing clouds of glory do we come

  From God, who is our home:

  Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

  Shades of the prison-house begin to close

  Upon the growing Boy . . .”

  His eyes popped open, and he eyed Tom. Perhaps he’d had second thoughts about Tom who-might-be-a-mugger.

  “By William Wordsworth,” he said. He looked at Tom for a long moment, then dismissed him with a gesture. “Go write something for me.”

  The next day, in the train station, he found an address book. He wondered what it would be like to have so many friends that you couldn’t remember where they were. Or maybe the person just wrote them down so she could flip through the pages and feel lucky.

  That night in the shelter a kid with a Betty Boop tattoo on his arm saw Tom’s lipstick and told the supervisor that Tom wasn’t a boy. Tom left, and threw the lipstick away on his way out.

  The day after that Tom found a grocery list. At first he thought it was a po
em in a foreign language, until he got to a part of the list he recognized as food: chicken, tomatoes, onions. But what were cumin, pesto, hoisin, and gingerroot? He wrote the strange words in his notebook so he wouldn’t forget.

  He felt like an archeologist trying to decipher the garbage of a lost people. The whole world seemed to understand something that Tom was trying to figure out. That was the worst thing about forgetting. The best thing was that anyone could be his mom. When people got off the trains, he picked the prettiest woman or the rich-looking one or the one with lots of kids, to imagine that she was his mother. He tried to catch the eye of the ones that looked smart. Proof that his mother was smart: he could spell. None of them saw him. He figured he wouldn’t be invisible to his own mother.

  Tom tried different LRT stations, looking for Daniel. When he found good cigarettes, he saved them, put them beside him on the bench. Only white kids tried to bum them. Sometimes he gave them out and said, “If you see a guy named Daniel Wolflegs, tell him I have to talk to him about something.”

  When the office-worker people were gone home and the station was empty except for the ghosts of smells, Tom would look for things and find them. Someone lost a book called How to Improve Your Memory. Tom read it cover to cover, but it didn’t help.

  The best thing he found was an entire purse. He studied it for hours before he turned it in. The wallet was stuffed with business cards, credit cards—one with the hologram of an eagle—and plastic-covered photos. There was a makeup case, a bag of lemon drops (Tom ate four), and a daytimer. The daytimer was full of the ordinary secrets of a good and invisible life, the life of someone that might have been his mother. He resolved that, being from an honest family, he would turn it in, though minus the $8.51 in the wallet which he would keep as a reward.

  He decided to leave the purse on the doorstep of the police station. He walked back and forth on the street across from the station. Once, twice, three times. Every time he went to do it, he felt his bones go weak. Stepping off the curb to cross the street made him feel like he was going to fall. He told himself he would do it on the seventh try. Maybe seven had been his lucky number. The seventh time he told himself all the reasons why he could do it, why he could do anything he put his mind to. He was strong, up for a fight, able to swim and spell. On the seventh try he crossed the street halfway, chucked the purse at the steps, and ran.

  He found a trash can in an alley and threw up the four lemon drops. Then he went to his locker at the Greyhound station and deposited eight dollars. He kept fifty-one cents for spending money.

  Tom had been hanging out at LRT stations for over a week when the space poet showed up.

  “Hey,” she said, sitting down beside him. “Any luck finding Daniel?”

  Tom shook his head. “How’s the poetry?”

  “That depends,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On what color the paper is.”

  She laughed. Tom cleared his throat. “So. Where’s Pam?”

  “New boyfriend.”

  “Oh.” Tom looked down at the pile of cigarettes, thought maybe he should take up smoking, and then decided his parents were probably health-conscious and wouldn’t approve.

  “I came to tell you. She likes you. I bet you could get her away from him.”

  Tom shrugged. “Hey, it’s her life. I don’t even know her.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him. “He’s not a real boyfriend. He’s a player, a seller. Used to hang out sometimes with my old boyfriend.”

  Tom sat up straight. “Well, why does she—?”

  “She doesn’t know. The guy comes along—Cupid, you’d think the name would tell her something. He buys her some clothes, takes her out to a real restaurant for dinner, tells her she’s gorgeous, special. She thinks he loves her, thinks he’s gonna take care of her, buy her a duplex and a dog. She wants a fence with sweet peas growing on it. He says: Sure, baby, sure, me too.” Janice folded her arms over her chest. “Same old, same old.”

  “Didn’t you tell her?”

  “I did. She says I’ve gone zoid. She doesn’t believe me. But you watch. In a couple of months he’s gonna say: Baby, money is so bad right now and can you just do this one favor for me and then we’ll be fine and we’ll make our dreams come true and we’ll go to TO and have a good time. Just a couple of weeks. If you really love me, you will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “ ’Cause that’s the way it went for me. I got out of the life when my daughter was born.” She was quiet a moment. She was looking into his eyes, even though he wasn’t looking back. “You’re not one of us,” she said soberly.

  He looked away.

  “Pam says yes you are, but I say no, you are not one of us, not yet.” She laughed and hit his arm. “But that’s a good thing, right? Listen, are you really a Finder, Tom? Because if you are, could you look for my daughter? She looks like me, only cute.”

  “You really have a daughter?” Tom asked. “How old are you anyway?” Her spooky eyes stopped looking into the backs of his eyes and started looking into the backs of her own eyes.

  Her voice seemed to come from her stomach. “I was the baby mom. My social worker took her away from me. You want what’s best for her, don’t you, she said. She said my baby’s father was fishy. Fishy. So I said, well, we’ll go away to the sea.” Janice laughed too loudly. “I wanted to keep her, but they told me I shouldn’t, if I loved her I wouldn’t . . .” She rocked herself.

  “Come on,” Tom said. “I’ll take you back to the shelter.”

  She got to her feet and walked beside him. She started hitting her left elbow with her right hand. She kept looking around, searching, as if she might see her daughter right there in the station.

  “I told them I’d be good, I’d prove it to them, and then I’d come back for her. Now I’m being good. I just have to get a job or something. In the meantime, I look for her all the time, at all the babies I see, but none of them have fins.” She laughed again. “Let’s go to the park and look.”

  “Janice, come on. I’m taking you back to the shelter.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Why do people always say because?”

  “Because.”

  She laughed and followed him. “My social worker said no guy who loves you would turn you out.” She was quiet for a minute.

  “It’s good you got away from him,” Tom said.

  They walked a long time in silence. Once she said, “Anyway, just thought I’d tell you about Pam. Maybe you could talk to her.” It was getting dark out. She sighed. “I’ll tell you a secret, Tom. I saw my man once. In the river. I was standing on the bridge. He was underneath the water, staring up at me, asking me to jump to him. Jump, he said. The water’s fine. Jump. I would have, if I hadn’t remembered that I had to find my baby.”

  They had arrived at the shelter.

  The red-haired social worker opened the door. She touched Janice’s arm as she walked in. To Tom she said, “Coming in?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “Tom, who are you?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Tom said, and he said good-bye.

  At the LRT station the wind blew over the platform. He sat heavily down on the bench and considered looking for Pam. He thought about her with Cupid and fought off an urge to break a window.

  Maybe he had enough to look for. Daniel. His parents. A job. He picked up an old newspaper that had blown into a corner and turned to the personals section to see if anyone was looking for a boy named Tom. He’d picked up the obituary page. There was a picture of a young man, maybe sixteen, who looked familiar. Tom grabbed the paper with both fists to read it. Sivorak, Peter.

  That name didn’t sound familiar. He looked at the picture again. He knew that face. Maybe he’d known him in school. Maybe he could find these Sivorak people, say sorry about your boy, and do you know who I am? He read on.

  Peter died after a long struggle with su
bstance abuse. He is survived by his loving parents . . .

  Substance abuse. Tom looked at the picture again, and then he knew who it was.

  “Pepsi,” he said aloud.

  The train pulled in, silent on the rails, but Tom didn’t pay attention. Gravity was trying to force him to put the paper down, but Tom wouldn’t. He kept reading: Peter was an avid Scouter as a youngster, and loved hockey . . .

  The train whispered to him as it pulled out. Tom looked up. He looked up just in time to see a warrior leaving the train platform. He was tall, wide-shouldered, and lean as a lost dog. His hair was long but not braided.

  “Hey!” Tom shouted.

  “Hey!” the station echoed back.

  Hey, hey, hey . . .

  Except it wasn’t his own echo, it was Train Cop yelling. He was walking toward Tom, yelling something about not being on the platform without a ticket and something about a seven-hundred-dollar fine, something about lazy, smelly, snotty kids. Tom ran, still clutching the obituary column.

  The tall boy had disappeared. Tom kept running. Finally, he stopped under a streetlight and read the obituary again. Could you get so invisible you disappeared from life? Stay away from Forget, Pepsi had warned him. Once you forget, you’re already dead.

  Tom walked until he was across from police headquarters. This could all be over so quick. Stupid to save for a billboard. Zoid, when you could just walk into a police station.

  Gravity.

  Needing-Gravol-type gravity.

  Tom took a deep breath. He could do it. Anyone who could fight and write and swim could walk into a police station. Maybe his dad was a cop. Maybe his mom was a cop. That’d be just like her, to go and do something risky like that.

  He walked in, clutching the obituary, his skin crawling, but it was all right, all right, because no one looked at him.

  He stood a long time at the desk, holding onto it for fear he was going to fall. He gasped, startled, when an officer finally noticed him.

  “What can I do for you?” the officer said without coming close to the desk. He put his hand on his hip, which was hung with a holster.