Spoonbenders

Buddy put down his hammer and stood up. “He’s not there.”

“The Buddha speaks,” Frankie said. Then: “Who’s not there?”

Buddy said nothing.

Frankie walked toward him. It looked like he was building a form to repour the cement step, which had been listing for the past decade. But why now? Why anything, with Buddy. “Why do you care who I’m looking for?” Frankie asked. “Maybe I’m looking for Irene.”

Buddy squinted at him. Then Frankie realized that Irene’s car was nowhere in sight.

“Okay, fine,” Frankie said. “Where’s Dad? And don’t you fucking shrug at me.”

Buddy stood very still, emphatically not shrugging. After thirty seconds, Buddy said, “It’s all going to work out.”

“Really? Work out?” Frankie stepped close, getting in his space. “Work out like the fucking casino?”

Buddy blinked down at him.

Jesus Christ, all Frankie wanted to do just then was clock him. But he’d never laid a hand on his brother. When they were kids, Buddy was too small to smack, and then, suddenly, he was much too big. At any size, though, there was no point to it. It’d be like punching a golden retriever.

Buddy’s gaze went glassy, like a TV show had clicked on in his head.

Frankie snapped his fingers at him. “Hey. Retard.”

Buddy focused on Frankie. He frowned.

“Why’d you do it?” Frankie said. “Come on. Just come clean.” Buddy had never told him where he’d disappeared to with his stack of chips. Never told him why he’d sent him to the Alton Belle in the first place. He was supposed to be rich, damn it. Bellerophonics would have been saved, and he wouldn’t be in hock to the fucking Outfit and wondering if the next time he stuck a key in the ignition the van was going to explode.

Buddy said, “It’s all going to—”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Frankie said. “Of course it will.”

AUGUST

10 Buddy

The World’s Most Powerful Psychic has been dead for twenty-one years. Long live the World’s Most Powerful Psychic.

Buddy doesn’t feel powerful, however. Time’s riptide is having its way with him. He’s clawing to stay in the present but keeps being dragged over and over into the past. Once, his memory of the future was as lengthy (and full of holes) as his memory of the past. But now, there’s so little future left. Everything ends in a month, on September 4, 1995, promptly at 12:06 p.m.

Zap.

Sometimes when he thinks about that day he’s terrified. Other times, he’s merely sad. He will miss out on so much, but what hurts most of all is that he will never see his true love again.

But still other times, he’s grateful. There are undoubtedly many awful things to come after that dead stop, and he doesn’t have to watch them over and over. The future will no longer be his responsibility. Someone else will become the World’s Most Powerful Psychic, and he’ll be able to rest at last.

The small supply of futurity, however, only makes the pull of the past stronger. He knows he can’t wallow in history, but sometimes—like right now, this very moment of consciousness—he longs to be somewhen else, somewhen cold, snow outside the window. Because in this now it’s ninety-five degrees and the sweat is running off his naked chest. He’s bent over the front step, setting out ceramic tiles in rows and columns, and his underwear is plastered to his ass. It’s imperative to lay out the tile, dry, before cementing it in place.

“So is this the way you want it?” a voice asks. Oh, right. Matty—the fourteen-year-old version—is helping him. He’s mixing up the thinset in one of the big plastic buckets.

Buddy nods. But then the kid moves on to new questions. Wants to know everything about the Amazing Telemachus Family. Where they performed, what people thought of them. Buddy ignores him. The less Matty knows, the better. At least, Buddy thinks that’s true.

Matty keeps talking. He really wants to know about his grandmother. What did she do onstage? Did she really work for the government? “Could Grandma Mo travel outside her body?” he asks.

This question makes Buddy look back at the boy and frown.

“You know,” Matty says. “Like, walk through walls?”

Buddy stares at him.

“Because that would be real useful, right? That would make her the perfect spy.”

Buddy nods slowly.

“How far do you think she could travel? I mean, all the way into Russia? Frankie said the Russians had psychics, too. Do you think she could go anywhere she wanted?”

Buddy shakes his head. She had no limits, he thinks. Nothing could stop her except for one thing. Time.

His mother sits across from him at the kitchen table. There’s snow outside the window, and soon his father will come home with pizza for dinner, and his brother and sister will rush in, their jeans soaked, faces red from the wind, after sledding with the big kids. But now, right now, he’s in the warm kitchen with his papers and crayons—and Mom. She is doing her own project, reading and rereading a stack of business papers with business numbers on them. She’s been crying, but now she’s stopped crying, because she sees he’s scared.