The taller Slit took a step toward Devin. His eyes were calm. Blank. All business. Devin felt his grip on the crowbar weaken, his shoulders slump. He moved his hand to wipe the moist rain from his eyes.
“Come on, Devin!” Cody said. “Gotta get off that fence sometime. Now would be good.”
“Yeah, Devin, what’s it going to be? I don’t have all night,” the Slit said, grinning.
In a flash, the grin vanished. Something hit him hard from the side, sending the Slit down and out of Devin’s field of vision. Devin turned, confused. Cody was down on the Slit, pummeling him, hitting him again and again in the face and the chest, really wailing on him.
The twitchy Slit was stunned by the sudden attack, but recovering. Any second, he’d jump Cody and it’d be two-on-one.
Whatever happened next was up to Devin. But why? How far was friendship supposed to go? If crazy Cody was stupid enough to borrow money from thugs, why should Devin risk his neck?
“Devin! Do something!” Cody shouted between blows. The Slit below him tried to block the manic flurry of punches, but Cody was too fast.
The other Slit shifted.
The car door was less than a foot away. Devin could get in quickly, then wait and watch. Like he always did.
“Devin!” Cody bellowed. He turned his head. When he did, the Slit landed a blow to the side of his face. Cody was mean and fast, but no street fighter and not very heavy. He went sideways. In seconds, the two reversed positions, the Slit on top, ready to get medieval.
Shaking, frightened, Devin tightened his grip and held the crowbar up, hoping he could have it both ways and scare them off without actually doing anything. He took a step, but his foot found something slick on the rain-wet road. His foot flew back and he flew forward.
The shorter Slit raised his arm as the crowbar came down. It hit him in the center of his forearm, with all Devin’s falling weight behind it. There was a loud sound, a crack like a thick branch splitting. Devin hit the ground and ate some street. Badly scraped, he managed to stumble back to standing in time to still see the look of surprise on the Slit’s face.
A voice in the back of Devin’s brain said, Did I hurt him?
Numbly, he raised the crowbar again. The Slit, arm folded in a funny way, moved back. Devin turned toward the one atop Cody. The cracking sound had turned him around, too, long enough for Cody to pull back and slam him full on in the crotch.
In pain, the Slit moved sideways a bit and snarled. The mask of calm he’d worn previously vanished, revealing something savage and animal.
Moving like a caffeinated maniac, Cody rolled out and up onto the balls of his feet. The Slit, grabbing his crotch, looked around and saw his partner cradling his arm and moaning. He stumbled back to their car, pulling his friend along. Just before he vanished into the driver’s side, he said, “This isn’t over.”
With a squeal of tires on the wet asphalt, the small car spun and zoomed off into the darkness.
Devin watched it go, catching his breath a moment. He turned back to Cody, who was laughing, harder and harder, and saying, “That was great! That was amazing! We are Torn!”
Devin looked at him, shocked. How could he be laughing? What could be more stupid?
Then he started laughing himself. He was relieved. Happy, like he’d won something, like maybe, even though it was an accident, even though he hadn’t really decided anything, he was now bad enough to be in a rock and roll band.
3
Hours later, Devin McCloud lay in his comfortable bedroom, waiting for sunrise. The house was quiet, his parents fast asleep. He was exhausted. By rights he should have been unconscious, but his brain was locked—and not on Cody and the Slits. Though the nervous energy that propelled his thoughts was probably a leftover from that encounter, his focus was on the fact that Torn was getting together in less than twelve hours to record “Face” in Devin’s garage, and sometime before then, he would have to fire Karston.
Grateful though Cody had seemed because Devin had fought by his side, he had not given up on that point. Karston’s bass was supposed to be there; Karston was not.
When the Slits had fled, Devin had felt exhilarated. Now he just felt tired and kind of sick. Shifting up onto his elbow on the soft mattress, he stared out his large round window at the manicured lawns and squared hedges of the gated Meadowcrest Farms housing development. As far as he could tell, the development had nothing to do with a meadow, a crest, or a farm. It had more to do with tiny, well-tended yards, and neighbors who seemed to pose as they stopped and smiled and waved. The squares, rectangles, and circles that made up the houses were tight and perfect. Everything seemed held together by money.
But even in the dim light of early morning, Devin could see exactly where the lawn mowers and hedge clippers stopped and something else began, something jagged and unkempt: a dark forest that went on for miles. As a child he hadn’t been allowed to go in there; now he just didn’t want to, as if all the years of comfort and security had left him too comfortable and secure.
He wasn’t like Cody. He wasn’t a natural. He wasn’t driven. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t even know if he could write any decent songs. What was “Face,” anyway? What did it mean?
As his eyes half closed, a line from the lullaby drifted back to him. It was his grandma’s song; Namana, he used to call her.
Your heart beats slowly, drowsy eyes…
It was a pretty thing, the tune. Even the small bit playing in his mind relaxed him. The rest of the words and the melody licked at the edge of memory, teasing, just out of reach, like the woods. As he reached for more words with his mind, they dissipated, like ghosts.
Half awake, he found that strong images came to him more easily. He remembered being curled up deliciously cozy in Namana’s lap when she babysat. There was a stuffed toy in his hand. When she started singing, he’d bury his head in the toy, hide in its darkness until he felt drowsy. He could feel the rough fur against his cheek, hear her old voice as she croaked more than sang.
Or else the wild will come for you.
And snatch bad children away? A tingling along his spine told him he was on the right track.
Be good or else.
By the time he was six, his mother said, he had demanded Namana never sing it again. It was too horrible—he thought it might be real, that something might really come and kill him. Stupid. But at six, you think everything might be real, everything except real-life horrors like the Slits.
Be good or else.
Funny, but weren’t all the lullabies and nursery rhymes like that? Lost children, cannibalistic witches? Didn’t the famous ones talk about dying before you wake, or a baby falling screaming out of a treetop? Wasn’t ring-around-the-rosy about the black plague? The symptoms and the fatal sneezing fit were wrapped into the cute lyrics:
Achoo! Achoo! We all fall down!
As if they were waiting for just the right moment, a few more strands of the lullaby came back. They gave him a rush more familiar than the adrenaline frenzy of his fight. This was the kind of rush that came when something inside of him filled him up to bursting, the kind he got whenever he was trying to write a song and he was on to something. This was something.
Your heart beats slowly, drowsy eyes…
Devin thought maybe he could call Namana, visit her, ask her how it really went. The senior care facility was just an hour away. She’d love it. No one ever visited. But no. He didn’t want to deal with that place, or with her being old and feeble. The last time she hugged him (two years ago at Christmas?) her hands and arms felt so thin against his neck, it was like being grabbed by a skeleton.