Lost Boys: A Novel Read online

  “Hey, Glass,” said Step. He came a little way into the room. There were several programmers there, but they were goofing around, not working—he knew that, because he recognized the games that were on the screens, and none of them were published by Eight Bits Inc. They did that sometimes, staying after work and fooling around with other companies’ games. They called it “industrial espionage” but the truth was that they loved computer games, and here were all these machines and all this software lying around, and most of them didn’t have families anyway except maybe parents, and so why the hell not stay late and play?

  “Heading for home?” asked Glass.

  “Wish I had time to play,” said Step. “But yeah, I’m going home.”

  “Ray was looking for you,” said Glass.

  “I got the messages. I was taking a late lunch.”

  “It sounded important.”

  “Well, when I got back, I called in and so Ray knew that I was back and he didn’t call again, so it can’t have been too important.”

  Glass rolled his eyes. “Do you know what the term ‘deep shit’ means?”

  “Glass,” said Step, “Dicky knew where I was. Dicky didn’t like where I was, but it was my lunch hour, and I wasn’t cutting out on work. So if this is even a halfway rational universe, I’m not in deep shit.”

  “I didn’t say you were in it,” said Glass, grinning. “I just asked if you knew what it meant.”

  Step faked slapping him across the face. “Why, I oughta . . .”

  “Oughta what?”

  “Never mind, you’re too young,” said Step. “In fact, I’m too young. I don’t get it myself. Seeya tomorrow, humans. Seeya tomorrow, Glass.”

  Step headed out to the car. On the way, it occurred to him that he’d seen practically every game on the market for the Atari, and he didn’t remember any of them with that pirate ship he had seen Stevie playing with. He’d have to check and see what the game was. Probably just one of the games he brought home from work to look at—it was one of the perks of working for a software company, that you could bring games home as long as you brought them back. Stevie must have found one that Step hadn’t actually seen on a machine yet.

  By the time he got home, his mind had turned to other things, and when he finally stood there in front of the Atari, he could only remember that there was something he wanted to do with it but he couldn’t remember what. Oh well, it would come back to him.

  The family actually had dinner together, and he was able to coax Stevie into playing some games with them afterward. He wasn’t much fun, though, but at least he was playing, and after he saw that things were better at school, maybe things would also start to get better at home.

  Step was all set to help DeAnne get the kids through bathtime and bed when the phone rang. It was Sam Freebody, the elders quorum president. Freebody was a tall man, sloppily fat, and he seemed determined to prove every cliche about the joviality of fat people. So it took a bit of convivial chitchat before he finally came to the reason for the call. It was what Step had expected—and, truth be known, dreaded. “I’d like to give you your home teaching assignment,” Brother Freebody said.

  “You know,” said Step, “if you could hold off on that for a while, I’d be grateful.”

  “We’re really short-handed in the quorum,” said Freebody. “Everybody has to do his share or the Church will grind to a halt.”

  Step remembered giving the same speech many times when he was elders quorum president back in Vigor. “Brother Freebody,” he said, “I know what you mean, and I believe in home teaching and I’m actually an excellent home teacher, but right now at work I’m putting in twelve-hour days most days and I never get to see my family and I don’t think it’d be fair to them or to me if I spent one of my few days home going out—”

  “You’re home now,” Freebody pointed out.

  Step wanted to scream over the phone, It’s none of your business! But he knew Freebody was only doing his calling, and doing it well. “Yeah, I guess so,” said Step. “OK, look, I’ll do my best. I just warn you that I might not get to everybody every month.”

  “Right now, Brother Fletcher, you would improve our quorum average if you just got to anybody, any month.”

  Step laughed and then wrote down the names of the families they were supposed to visit and a few notes about each of them. Freebody was an excellent elders quorum president, Step realized—he actually knew who these people were, they weren’t just names on the roster to him. Home teaching wasn’t just something Freebody had to get other people to do, it was an enterprise that he cared about and understood. It made Step determined to take the time to do his home teaching, to help Freebody and because Step, too, believed in the program. Really believed in it, except when he forgot to think about it at all, which was most of the time.

  “And your companion is a young prospective elder named Lee Weeks. He’s a new convert, nineteen years old, and I’m hoping to get him ready for a mission maybe in a year or so. So set him a good example!”

  “You mean, like, don’t take him out for a beer afterward?”

  Freebody guffawed. “I mean show him what a normal member of the Church is like. He has a lot of enthusiasm, but some of it is directed toward some kind of weird ideas.”

  “Weird ideas?”

  “How can I put this, Brother Fletcher? Let’s just say that he was first contacted by Brother and Sister LeSueur, and he took all the lessons in their home.”

  “I’m not sure I know what that means,” said Step. Of course, he knew exactly what Freebody meant—the kid had been exposed to the strangest, most self-servingly charismatic version of the gospel that could be imagined. But Step was already getting into the spirit of the way things worked in the Steuben 1st Ward: You know that certain people are difficult, but you just work around them as best you can and try not to put the nastiness right out in the open. As a westerner, Step was used to a more direct way of doing things. But if this elaborate effort to avoid hurting anybody’s feelings or provoking any conflict was the southern way, then Step would learn to act southern.

  So Step wasn’t surprised when Freebody’s only explanation was to say, “You’ll see. He’s a good kid, though.”

  Step wrote down Lee Weeks’s name and phone number. “Does he live at home or will I maybe get a roommate when I call?” he asked.

  “Lives at home. His mom’s a shrink. Divorced, so I haven’t met the father. She approved of Lee joining the Church, though, so there’s no problem with hostility.”

  “So she’ll deliver messages.”

  “Heck, she’ll probably push him out the door to go home teaching with you. She even drives him to church on Sunday.”

  “He doesn’t have a license?”

  “I guess not, or maybe he cracked up the car once too often or something. She drives him, anyway.”

  That was that. Step said his good-byes and hung up the phone and sighed as he sat back down at the kitchen table.

  “Home teaching, right?” said DeAnne. She was loading the dishwasher.

  He got up and started helping.

  “No, Step, I’m almost done, and you’ve already been the hero of the day. I just want to hear the tape.”

  “The kids are all bathed?”

  “I’m real fast now,” said DeAnne. “Splish-splash and I pop ’em in bed. And Stevie takes his own bath. Done in record time. I’m a wonder.”

  “You are, you know,” he said.

  She smiled. “Let me hear the tape.”

  So they sat in the family room and listened as Step copied the tape from the microcassette recorder to the cheap little Panasonic that clearly wanted to be a boom box when it grew up but would never, never make it. The quality of the recording wasn’t that good, especially when Step had been across the room from her, but it was certainly good enough to hear pretty much everything, and even the copy was OK.

  “Oh, Step,” said DeAnne when the tape was finished. “You are sly.”

&nb
sp; She meant it as a compliment, but to Step it had a hollow ring. He didn’t like thinking of himself as a sly person.

  “You should have heard me later,” said Step. “I stopped being sly, and turned into a bully.” Then he told her in some detail what he had done after he stopped recording. And how Mrs. Jones had called it blackmail, and he wasn’t sure but that she was right. At some level, anyway.

  DeAnne slapped him playfully on the arm. “There, I hereby punish you. Case dismissed.”

  “I just thought it would feel better than it did.”

  “Come on, didn’t it feel just a little bit good when you pulled out the recorder and showed her?”

  “Yes,” said Step. “But afterward . . .”

  “Afterward you found a way of making yourself the villain of the piece,” said DeAnne. “But you weren’t. You were rescuing your little boy.”

  “Yeah,” said Step. “When I remember that, I feel better. But I don’t always remember it.”

  “Then I’ll remind you,” she said. “Again and again and again.” To his surprise, she kissed him long and soft and deep, and he realized that she was going to make love to him tonight.

  “Maybe I should bully defenseless teacher ladies more often,” he said, when the kiss was finally done.

  “Shut up, Junk Man,” she said, and kissed him again.

  “Step! Step!” He dreamed that DeAnne was very, very upset and she was calling to him, softly so she wouldn’t wake the kids but her voice was full of fear. Then he opened his eyes and looked at the clock and at the same time heard her call his name again and he realized that it wasn’t a dream at all, it was three in the morning and something was wrong and DeAnne was calling out for help, she needed him to help her.

  He threw back the covers and got up and realized that he was naked; he must have fallen asleep as soon as they were through making love. I hope I stayed awake long enough to actually finish, he thought. And then remembered that yes, he had. DeAnne had not been left unsatisfied tonight, as she had so many nights before.

  He inwardly slapped himself for the churlish thought and went to get his bathrobe out of the closet. The only light in the room was what spilled in from the kids’ bathroom, which was around the corner and down the hall, so he could hardly see anything; but he found the robe and put it on. She called again.

  “I’m coming,” he said, trying to be loud enough and yet soft enough at the same time.

  “Put on your slippers first,” she said.

  “I don’t need them,” he said.

  “Yes you do!” she said, and her voice rose almost to a scream at the end, and so he put on his slippers and then went to the door into the hall and just as he was turning on the light he realized that he had just stepped on something, and something had just bumped against his leg, and now the light was on and he saw that the floor was jumping with crickets. Dozens of them, hundreds of them.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “I mean good heavens.”

  “Where are they coming from, Step?”

  “What an excellent question,” he answered. He bent over and brushed several of them off his legs. It was almost impossible to take a step without crushing one under his feet while others jumped at him, landed on him.

  DeAnne was standing there holding a can of Raid. “I don’t think I should be breathing insecticide fumes when I’m pregnant,” she said.

  “There isn’t enough Raid in a can to kill them all,” he said. “We’d asphyxiate the children long before we got the crickets.”

  “What, then? Sweep them up into garbage bags?”

  “Sounds better than trying to stomp them all,” he said. “Where are the seagulls when you really need them?”

  “I’ll get the garbage bags,” she said, heading for the kitchen.

  While she was gone, he tried to find the source. The hall was the worst place, it seemed—there were only a few in Betsy’s room and in the bathroom. But when he turned the light on in the boys’ room, it was even worse. The crickets were so thick on the floor that in places he couldn’t even see the carpet. The crickets jumping on him made him want to scream, and walking was very slow when he had to keep brushing them off, and finally he just stopped brushing them off, even though he couldn’t stand the way it felt to have their feet on his naked legs. He couldn’t brush them off because they were here in his children’s bedroom and he had to get rid of them and so what did it matter whether he was comfortable or not?

  They were coming up from a small gap in the back of the boys’ closet. He could see them crawling out, first the antennas and then their black, mechanical bodies, their legs like pistons. Robot crickets, that’s what they are, he thought. Somebody made them.

  And then he thought, I made them. Crickets from hell. A plague of crickets. A sign to me that God saw the way I bullied that woman today and he knows that I secretly loved doing it, that I loved the power I had over her. So just like Pharaoh, I get a plague.

  DeAnne was in the room now, holding several garbage bags—and a broom and dustpan. “You’ll have to hold the dustpan while I sweep,” she said. “I can’t bend over that far these days.”

  “Forget the dustpan,” said Step. “They’d just jump off. I’ll hold the bag open for you. But first we’ve got to stop them from coming in.”

  “You found the place?”

  “A crack between the floor and the wall in the back of the closet. Do we have any rags?”

  “All the old socks,” she said.

  “Get them wet and we’ll jam them in,” he said.

  “Wet? Why?”

  “Oh, please, DeAnne, I don’t know, just do it.” He wasn’t really sure why. He just had some vague idea that if the socks were wet then he could jam them in tighter and they’d stay in place better and it would do a better job of keeping the crickets from coming through.

  It took all the socks DeAnne had been saving for dustcloths, but when he had jammed them in, no more crickets were able to come through.

  Then the hard part started. The crickets were not inclined to hold still, and so it seemed an almost sisyphean task. Step would keep the bottom of the garbage bag flat on the floor by holding down two corners with his feet, and then hold the top open as far as he could with his hands, while DeAnne tried her best to sweep them in. All the while, of course, they were jumping up at Step’s head and onto his arms and legs; yet he couldn’t let go of the bag to brush them off, he could only shudder and shake his head. The boldest of the crickets seemed to enjoy this, and hung on for the ride until Step finally asked DeAnne to sweep them off.

  Gradually they began to make progress, especially after Step figured out that by spraying Raid into the garbage bag itself from time to time, he could convince the ones they had already caught to stay put. It took an hour before all the visible crickets were collected and the bags tied tightly and carried out to the garage. Then began the hunt for the strays.

  They pulled the kids out of their beds, one by one, and perched them sleepily in Step’s and DeAnne’s room, where there were no crickets remaining; then they closed the door. Since the kids had slept right through the time when masses of crickets were moving around, there was a good chance that they wouldn’t see any of the crickets at all, and therefore wouldn’t have nightmares about them later.

  I hope we’re so lucky, thought Step.

  They found three crickets that had crept down into Robbie’s sheets, which meant that DeAnne would not think of anything less than stripping down all the beds and changing the sheets—even the top bunk, Stevie’s bed, where no cricket could possibly have reached. But finally it was done. All the crickets were gone, or at least if there were any left they had the sense to stay out of sight and not chirp. DeAnne proposed bathing the kids again but Step told her to forget it. “These weren’t dung beetles, honey, they were crickets, and let’s let the kids get back to sleep.”

  They already were asleep, sprawled in a tangle on top of Step’s and DeAnne’s bed, but one by one Step carried them ba
ck to their rooms and DeAnne tucked them into bed. In moments they were sleeping again.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice,” Step said to DeAnne as she tucked Betsy into her clean sheets, “wouldn’t it be nice if all the bad things in life could happen in their sleep and we could make them go away without them ever knowing what happened?”

  “I’ve got to wash,” said DeAnne. “I can still feel cricket feet all over me.” She shuddered. “I’m surprised I didn’t go into labor.”

  Now that she mentioned it, he still felt the tickling of those tiny feet, and it got worse the more he thought about it. “You get the first shower,” he said, “but make it snappy.”

  She didn’t make it snappy, but he understood. When it was his turn, he had to soap himself up and rinse himself off three times before he finally felt clean enough to dry off and go to bed. And even then, he inspected the sheets, though no cricket had jumped on their bed and he knew it, he knew it, but he still had to look. He had to be sure.

  “Tomorrow, the exterminators,” he said as he finally pulled the covers up over him.

  “Yes,” she said, “I already thought of that. I’ll call Bappy to find out if they have some kind of contract, like with Terminex or somebody.”

  The next morning he was late to work, of course, later than usual, because he had lost so much sleep the night before. He came in to find a memo sitting on top of his desk. It was from Ray Keene, and even though it was addressed to everybody, Step knew that it was aimed at him.

  It has come to my attention that some employees have been abusing our relaxed attitude toward work hours. Therefore a new policy is instituted beginning tomorrow. All employees must he at their work stations promptly at eight-thirty. Lunch is to be taken from twelve noon to twelve-thirty, the only exceptions being that those who must work the telephones will be assigned half-hour shifts between 11:30 and 1:00. Anyone arriving even five minutes late in the morning or taking a lunch even five minutes over thirty minutes will be dismissed on the spot. The only exceptions are for medical reasons or genuine, documented family emergencies.