I&#39ll Be There (2 page)

When you first met Clarence Border, you understood you were talking to someone who was anxious. His thin body seemed to crackle with energy. His fingers fluttered at his sides when he spoke,
moving like he was playing an invisible piano that must have been located on the tops of his bony thighs.

It wasn’t that he twitched. He was more in control than that. It was that he was hardwired to run in the blink of an eye.

And to take you with him.

Clarence was a good-looking man. He had a full head of dark hair and a strong jaw. When he was dressed in his always clean black jeans, you couldn’t see that on the inside of his left leg,
curled around the calf, was a tattoo of a black snake. He’d given it to himself, and it looked like it.

Clarence stood over six feet tall, and you could tell in a single glance that he knew how to throw a punch – and that it wouldn’t take much to get him to do it.

His voice was deep and steady, and you’d think that would be a good thing, but then his fingers would start moving and it was like he was getting a message from some far-off place, not
from circuitry in his frontal lobe that just didn’t seem to work right.

There are many ways Sam’s father’s life could have played out. He could have stayed in Alaska, living near the old cabin where he was born, hunting and fishing and on occasion taking
something that wasn’t his and selling it to get by. But he’d gotten caught trying to unload an outboard motor to an off-duty patrolman.

The arrest uncovered a string of other misdeeds, and Clarence found himself at the age of twenty-two in prison for three years. When he was released, he left the state, and the only thing he
knew, truly deep in his heart, was that he’d never go back to living behind bars.

Which was not to say that he was going to live a life of virtue. Far from it. Clarence Border’s vow wasn’t one of decency. It was a vow of preservation and desperation. He’d do
anything, to anyone, to keep one step ahead of the government.

For a time, life in Montana, which was where Sam was born, was without major incident. Clarence had met Shelly at the Buttrey Food & Drug store. She appeared in the aisle just as he was
preparing to slip a box of cheese-flavored Goldfish crackers into the back of his bulky winter coat.

Shelly was ten years older than he was, and he could tell right away that she liked him. Since she was wearing a name tag, he just needed her phone number. She gave it to him without his even
asking.

Six weeks later, Shelly was pregnant with Sam and she was living with Clarence above her parents’ garage. He worked odd jobs under the watchful eye of her family, and while the whole
arrangement didn’t actually work, it wasn’t yet a colossal failure.

Shelly’s father, Donn, was an electrician. If he’d had more opportunity, he’d have been an engineer. He understood not just wiring and current and all things mechanical –
he also understood operating systems.

The first time Donn met Clarence Border, he knew that his daughter had hooked up with a man who had a busted mainframe. He tried to warn her early in the game, but Shelly was pregnant before
anything could be done.

Donn then took a different approach. He’d teach the shifty snake a profession. As the months wore on, a new plan took shape. If he couldn’t make Clarence understand electricity, Donn
could electrocute him and probably get away with it.

But the snake struck first.

The voices in his head couldn’t be ignored, and the morning of the bite they told Clarence that he’d need to be righteous when someone had done him wrong.

Donn wouldn’t let Clarence smoke cigarettes when they were in the truck, and when they got to the Weiss Sand and Gravel Company, there was a
No Smoking
sign in the work area.

Clarence seethed as he unloaded their tools. Someone would pay for the way he was feeling.

Shelly’s father was up on the roof attaching a new transformer to the pole when Clarence unhooked the ground wire. The old man was cooked in a single jolt that flung his body halfway
across the roof into the company’s TV dish. Smoke came off his body.

All Clarence could do was stare at the
No Smoking
sign and feel a sense of satisfaction.

After that, Shelly and Clarence moved from the garage into the main house, and Shelly’s mother, consumed with grief, stopped speaking to him. He’d look back on this
period as a time of focus.

When Sam was almost four and a half, Shelly got pregnant again and then, a month early, tiny Riddle was born. From the start, Riddle cried all the time. His weak sobs drove Clarence out of the
house and back into the garage apartment.

The kid had colic. And some other problems. His nose ran constantly, and he squinted as if the sun were in his eyes even on rainy days.

By the time Sam and Riddle were seven years old and two, the house had liens and the bill collectors didn’t just make calls, they paid visits.

Shelly’s mom couldn’t take it any more, and even though she’d grown attached to the two little boys, she moved down to Louisiana to be with her deaf sister. She said
she’d send money when she left, but no one had believed her. Clarence hadn’t worked in forever, and his wife finally went back to stocking the aisles at the Buttrey.

Shelly came home after an eight-hour shift on a cold, rainy day in March and the front door was wide open. The truck wasn’t in the driveway, and the garden hose by the garage was missing.
Clarence had taken the two kids, some power tools, one suitcase of clothes, and her Indian Head penny collection, which had belonged to her great-uncle Jimmy.

Sam was in second grade and the star of his class, reading books for fifth graders. Ten years later, he could still picture exactly what that classroom looked like.

He’d never seen another one since.

Since they’d left Montana, Sam’s father always told the same story. His wife had died giving birth to the young one, and then he’d lost his business. Riddle
always looked like he was either just getting over a cold or just coming down with one.

He’d squint out at the world, and people just naturally felt bad for the whole motherless family.

Clarence said he’d been in auto parts. Not many people asked him about auto parts, and that was a good thing because he knew next to nothing about them.

He’d explain that he couldn’t pay his employees healthcare insurance premiums, but he’d chosen his workers over profit. He kept it going for as long as he could, and then
finally the government came and forced him to declare himself bankrupt.

Sam and Riddle’s father believed in life experience. That’s what he told the two boys. That’s why he’d never let them go to school once they took to the road.

But they really didn’t go to school because Clarence didn’t just hate all teachers, he loathed the whole system.

The two boys had slept late for years. Now that they were older, their father didn’t bother to even try to feed them, and they always woke up hungry.

Sam and Riddle had been taught to stay out of sight during school hours because people wanted to know why two boys were wandering around doing nothing. Plus it was better to let fast-food places
open and have trash build up before they headed into the world.

They made a habit of not hitting the streets until the sun was high in the sky and knew to say that they were homeschooled if anyone asked. But Sundays were different. Sundays, they could be
seen at any time.

And Sundays there was music.

Sam pulled on his shoes and stared at his little brother, who was asleep on the stained mattress on the floor in the corner. Riddle’s breathing, as always, was heavy, and his permanent
congestion had the wheeze of some kind of new bronchial infection.

Sam thought about trying to prop his head up higher on the pillow because sometimes that helped, but instead he took a pen off the floor and wrote in large letters on a scrap of paper,
Be
back soon
.

Sam had seen the First Unitarian Church when they originally came to town.

Was there a Second Unitarian and a Third? Was it some kind of contest?

Because now, standing in front of the brick building on Pearl Street, he could see that this house of worship was much more upscale than what he was used to. These First Unitarians were the
winners. The parking lot was mostly full and the cars were new and clean, and that wasn’t right for him.

This church was in the best part of town, and nothing about it looked desperate. He didn’t go into places like this.

The way he saw it, the less money people had, the more instruments they played and the more food they put out. And the easier they were for him to be around.

But Sam had been all over his own neighbourhood and, without Riddle at his heels, he had walked faster and somehow had ventured farther than before.

Sam had heard the pipe organ playing from down the street. It was just too intriguing. And now he could see that the First Unitarian’s large wooden doors at the front were propped
open.

He could get in and get out.

And maybe catch a glimpse of what was making the amazing sound.

But it wasn’t that easy.

The first problem was that no sooner had Sam entered than a man appeared from nowhere and closed the oversize doors. It sounded like the closing of an entrance to a vault.

Sam slid silently into the pew in the last row. The organ stopped playing almost immediately, and a minister appeared. He wore a robe but also a tie. He leaned into a microphone and offered up
some words. Sam never heard anything these people said. Instead he studied the large space.

To Sam, a room that was clean and smelled vaguely like flowers and candles was exotic. And scary. He was now giving this place his full attention.

The walls were covered in wood that looked to him like pieces of soft leather. There was a large light fixture that hung from the ceiling up front, and it had rows of tiny candles, but they
weren’t really candles. They would look better, he thought, if they weren’t fake. But then it would be impossible to light them without a huge ladder. And also they might drip down onto
people, which would be painful.

The long wooden pews were not comfortable. But they never were. If you want people to pay attention, it was important to keep them from settling in. Hadn’t his father taught him that?

The man in charge finally stopped speaking, and a choir stood up from a section off to the side. The singers were all ages and shapes, wearing white robes, and they looked to Sam like birds. He
didn’t know the names of many types of birds, but he’d seen his share, and he felt sure that some place must have big white birds with clean feathers and hairy heads.

Then the organ again began to play, and Sam watched as a girl in the group started to weave her way through the other singers. He could see that she was his age. And he could tell, as she edged
towards a microphone, that she was very nervous.

Emily was feeling all sweaty but sort of cold at the same time. This was just ridiculous. Her father, who was standing off to the side, waving his right hand in some way that
was supposed to be significant, was for sure not going to ever get any eye contact.

Once she got to the microphone, she seized on her strategy. She was going to focus on the back.

The way back.

Because that’s where the people sat who checked their email and monitored sports scores. The back of the church was filled with bodies that were there but not there. The nonlisteners.

Those were her people. Or her person.

Because when she raised her eyes from the floor, she could see that today there was only one body in the last row.

Emily lifted her chin and opened her mouth and now sang directly to him.

‘
You and I must make a pact

We must bring salvation back

Where there is love,

I’ll be there.
’

She could hear herself. But not hear herself. And that was the only blessing of her day. Emily knew the song. She knew the words.

‘
I’ll reach out my hand to you

I’ll have faith in all you do

Just call my name and I’ll be there.

I’ll be there to comfort you

Build my world of dreams around you

I’m so glad that I found you.

I’ll be there with a love that’s strong

I’ll be your strength, I’ll keep holding on

Let me fill your heart with joy and laughter

Togetherness, well that’s all I’m after

Whenever you need me, I’ll be there.
’

She was singing this all to a guy who she’d never seen before.

She could see that he was tall and thin. He had dark brown hair, which was wild and messy. Like it wasn’t cut right.

The person who she was singing to was tan, like he spent a lot of time outside, even though it was still late winter.

And she realised that he looked uncomfortable. Like he didn’t belong back there. Just like she didn’t belong on the platform up front.

And he was intently watching her.

Pretty much everyone was watching her.

But what suddenly mattered was only that he was watching her.

Because all that had mattered to her was watching him. And now she’d made that commitment and she couldn’t stop.

She was definitely giving the words of the song new meaning. Isn’t that what her father had wanted? A heartfelt reinterpretation?

Was she having an out-of-body experience?

Her mouth was moving and sounds were coming out, but that didn’t make sense.

What made sense was in the back row.

She could not really sing.

That was just a fact.

But it was also a fact that she was riveting. She was raw and exposed and not really hitting the notes right. But she was singing to him.

Why him?

He wasn’t imagining it.

The girl with the long brown hair had her small hands held tight at her sides and, maybe because of how bad she was, or because she was staring right at him and seemed to be singing right to
him, he couldn’t look away.