After I got dressed, I went down to the smoke shop. Lowell was leaning on his counter with his pipe in his hand. There weren’t any customers but that wasn’t unusual for early Saturday morning. He straightened as I came in from the stairwell, and eyeballed me as he stuck the pipe into a pocket.
“You’re a mess, Tenn,” he said. “You’ve got to quit doing this. You’re too nice a guy.”
My sluggish brain couldn’t come up with anything to say about that.
“Well, you feel better now?” he asked.
I shrugged. My headache was gone but mostly I just felt numb. I lowered myself down at one of the tables he kept for customers who wanted to relax and smoke – or vape since he also sold nicotine and cannabis in liquid form.
He eyed me some more, then he said, “You’re killing yourself, Tenn. I know you’re upset about the school situation but this isn’t the way to handle it.” He sighed and came from behind the counter. He slid out a chair across from me and took a seat.
I looked at him with eyes that I knew were bloodshot and muddy. I’d never asked Lowell if he’d ever done anything other than run the smoke shop. He’d been doing it since well before the Event, and he was about the same age as my father. In fact, he reminded me a little of my father, even had a slight Jamaican accent. Though he was a shade darker, he had the same brown eyes and was about the same height though he was heavier. His head was nearly bald whereas my father had been in no danger of losing his thick salt-and-pepper hair.
I squelched the thoughts of my father because with it came the memory of the day I’d removed him from the deck. I decided that Lowell looked like Lowell.
He stared back at me and came out with a soft snort, and shook his head. “Look, I’m not going to lecture you, but I like you, Tenn, and I don’t like seeing you going down this path. Tell you what; I’ve got a friend that has a problem. I think you might be able to help him out and he’ll pay you for your time.”
I stared at him, frowning. “Uh, what kind of problem?” Shit. I had enough problems of my own. How could I help someone else?
“A problem with his son. Just go talk to him. He’ll tell you what he wants.” He handed me a card. “He owns a restaurant. He’s there this afternoon.”
I couldn’t imagine what kind of work a man who owned a restaurant would offer me that involved helping him with his son unless it was tutoring – something I didn’t think I was capable of right then – but I took the card. I figured I had nothing to lose so I went to see the man.
No tutoring. As it turned out, he’d heard about my success in finding my cousin and his friend Tremaine, likely from Lowell. He offered his sympathy for my having found him in a morgue but thought it was remarkable I’d been able to find him at all considering how chaotic everything was at the time. He was especially impressed with how I’d found Tremaine.
I supposed he was right though I’d never thought about it. Then he asked me if I thought I could find his runaway teenaged son. I thought about it for a minute, intrigued in spite of myself.
I made my decision.
“What will you pay me for something like that?”
“Well, what do you want?”
Having no idea what to charge, I told him the only thing I could think of at the moment.
“Give me two months’ rent,” and thinking about Will, I added, “and a promise not to kill the messenger if the news is bad.”
He looked intently at me, then said, “He is all I have left. His mother, brother, and sister died that morning.” I wasn’t surprised when tears crept down his cheeks. He swallowed and wiped at his eyes with a napkin, and then went on in a choked voice, “If you find him in a morgue, well, I won’t take it out on you, but I have to believe you’ll find him alive. When you do, please, tell him I love him and I just want him to come home.”
Five days later, I found his son in Maryland in reasonably good shape. The boy wrecked his car and wound up in the hospital with broken ribs and a punctured lung. He was also under arrest for driving without a license. He was scared to contact his father because he knew he’d be upset with him for taking his car and running off. Well, he was sixteen-years old. Critical thinking isn’t something kids that age have in abundance.
I convinced him that his father wasn’t going to kill him, sprung him from the hospital – and the police, something that was easier than I thought it would be but they had bigger troubles than the one he presented. I took the boy home to his grateful father.
I never figured out why Lowell sent me to see that man. Maybe he simply wanted to see if he could get me out of feeling sorry for myself, to think of something other than how miserable I was and therefore keep me from drinking myself to death or getting myself killed one night. I never asked him although that’s pretty much how, almost two years after the Event, I became a tracker.
The man at the restaurant told someone about my finding his son and word got around. Soon, I had folk offering to pay me to do a search for them. I didn’t especially love what I was doing to earn a living, so I told the bosses at my two jobs that I was leaving and they wished me well, even telling me I could come back if things didn’t work out for me. Nice guys.
I checked to see if I needed a license to track – I didn’t as long as I wasn’t a bounty hunter – and set up business in my flat, where I curtained off the kitchen end of the front room and used the rest as an office. I got a real desk, too. It was my father’s and was old and scratched, but it was sturdy and serviceable. A friend of Lowell’s with a pick-up truck went with me to the old house to get it. It was a pain getting it up the narrow stairs and into the apartment, but once in, I cleaned it up, sanded and re-stained it, and it looked good. It made the office look more professional. Small, but professional.
I decorated the windowless room with some of Missy’s painting. Not the one of Zoni, which I kept in my cramped bedroom, or the small ones of our parents but three others that were impressionistic. They were nice – one was a painting of an actual window looking out on a meadow that ran to a forest. I put a sign on the door that said simply, “Tennessee Murray, Tracker”. Lowell put a sign with a big arrow on it pointing up the stairs that led from the smoke shop to the flat that said, “Tracker Up”. Lowell was a bit of a comedian.
I learned tracking was a job that could be erratic but it paid better for my services than any of the other jobs I’d held, so it became my main line. It wasn’t easy a lot of the times and it kept me on the move but I found that being on the move kept my mind better occupied than street sweeping, dishwashing, or any of the other jobs I’d held. It gave me focus and I gradually learned to walk the edge between the apathy and the rage.
Chapter Twelve
WHEN I SAY I BECAME THE BEST TRACKER out there, it’s not a brag just a fact. Dead or alive I always found them. There were even a couple that involved abductions by a noncustodial parent and one involving a gang-related kidnapping. I got them back safely.
Finding someone could be hard, and at times, damned hard, and telling a client the worst when the object of my search wasn’t in good shape wasn’t easy. It always brought back the memory of my cousin Will. For those, I always offered to forfeit the rest of my fee.