Skyrizer

Thirty

One

Before tonight, Mason McCoy was never afraid of heights. Looking down on the world, the city’s harsh lights muted and softened; the looming towers, like his problems, shrunk down to a less threatening size, the hard edges and ugly realities cloaked in shadow. Up above it all, Mason lost himself, dreaming he could fly.

He loved heights.

Even when he and his Mom were living in a cheap motel or out of their car, he always found his way up on the nearest tall rooftop whenever he needed space to think.

Now, he was remembering those long-gone days when he imagined he could just step off the edge and soar up above everything and out of the troubles of this world forever. He didn’t believe he could fly anymore but right now, he was still thinking very seriously about stepping off that edge.

He shivered, though he was wearing pretty much everything he owned.

It was a beautiful night. Cold and clear, the sky scrubbed clean by a frigid north wind that howled and moaned down alleys and streets and kept the sidewalks clear of pedestrians.

Good.

He’d hate to land on somebody.

Those kinds of things happened if you went off in a heat. And he didn’t want to hurt anybody or leave a mess. He’d thought all of this out, and every time, he’d come to the same conclusion.

There was simply no way out of this day for Mason McCoy that wouldn’t leave one hell of a mess. Not quite old enough for the law to consider him a man, yet he had more than a man’s share of problems. He could sit here from now till doomsday without any answers.

If he had a phone, would he check in with one of those crisis hotline people, just to make sure he wasn’t making a mistake? They’d say whatever the script taped to their cubicle told them to say to people at the end of their rope, and he’d invite them to spare him the pep talk, grab a calculator and do the math.

I’m almost seventeen. I dropped out of school and I’ve got no home. No job. No family. Nobody who cares... except my girl, and she can’t see me anymore because of her dad... He said, if I come around again, he’ll kill me...

Well, those certainly are big problems, the crisis operator would say, switching to the big binder full of scripts, but everybody’s got them. They must be set up in some kind of flow chart, so she’d have an answer for everything ready at hand. That’s no reason to give up...

So how about this, then? I had no other way to make any money, so this guy on the street paid me just to hold something for him, and he’d give me more than I’d make all week in a regular job...

That sounds like real trouble, the sensible operator would say, with or without a card. Sounds like something illegal. You didn’t...?

Sure did, and I don’t even know what I was holding, money, drugs or whatever...

Well, even if you’ve done something illegal, the operator would say, you can still make it better. She’d be deep down in the book now, skimming the scripts they used for the ones who weren’t just angling for attention. The really, truly desperate...

You don’t understand... Nobody does. I lost the thing I was supposed to hold onto.

You lost it?

I got robbed. One time I try something like that, and I screwed up and now they’re coming after me.

Go to the police.

What planet are you from?

There must be some other way...

I’ll never make it up. They know I can’t. So they’ll toss me off a rooftop or bust me up real bad or make me work it off, and everybody will know...

And her father will know he was right to keep you away from his daughter. Even if you survived, you’d be finished with the love of your life. Am I close?

Yeah, that’s the whole thing. So what should I do?

The operator would skip ahead to the end of the big stack and she’d probably take a big sip of herbal tea and do some fancy yoga breathing before she gave her final verdict. If she really wanted to help, she’d say, You should jump, and then hang up.

* * *

And aside from waking up cold and hungry in a strange, empty house, it had started out such a perfect day...

His friends were already gone when he rolled out of his sleeping bag. A note by his head said BKFST AT MISSION AT 8?

They were lucky last night, and didn’t have to sleep on the street. There were still hundreds of empty foreclosed houses a short train ride from the city center.

The owners of this one must’ve taken it hard when they got kicked out. The carpets were trashed, the appliances destroyed, the heating ducts spiked with dead, rotten fish. But it was a roof.

Mason had only pretended to be still asleep when his friends went out. He had something else on his mind.

Getting paid.

When a guy called himself C-Train and cruised the Southside in a lowered Lexus, you could safely jump to the conclusion he wasn’t a recruiter for Microsoft. So when Calvin Harden grabbed a spot near Mason at the basketball courts and asked him if he wanted to make some money yesterday, Mason didn’t kid himself he was talking about an office job.

I’m not a thug, man, Mason said. No offense...

None taken. C-Train wrinkled up his face in what he probably thought was a smile. Just hold this for me, C-Train told him, till I come back for it. The fat manila envelope passed between them as they leaned against the chain link fence. None of the others noticed.

What for?

A hundred reasons. C-Train pointed his chin at Mason’s hand in his pocket. And more later.

Work? That wasn’t work, that was free money. Work was some backbreaking, thankless thing nobody wanted to pay a homeless dropout to do. If he just did a little nothing like this a couple times, he’d have enough for a ticket for a C-Train ticket, or a bus. A few more, he’d have two...

You be around here at eight tonight, C-Train said. Don’t make me come find you. He bounced off the fence and into the pickup game, leaving Mason with a lot of unasked questions. The packet was inexplicably heavy, yet made hardly a bulge in his pocket. Folded up on top of it was a crisp, clean, new hundred-dollar bill.

Two minutes later, a couple plainclothes cops strode up and called for Calvin Harden. C-Train left the game to get in a car with the detectives.

Just then, Mason’s only real friend in the world, Marvin Barnes, came over with a couple sodas, shaking his head, watching C-Train get escorted away. Fools, man. Easier than work, until you get busted. Why would anybody choose that life?

Mason took the soda and drank half of it to avoid coming up with an answer.

The day almost let him forget he was holding anything at all. Mason and Marvin tried to get work unloading freight downtown and donated blood in return for lunch. He looked away and said nothing when Marvin asked him if he was going to take a bus south to haunt Melinda’s apartment complex.

I got something to do, he said, and let it dangle. Marvin shrugged and didn’t pick it up. Mason promised to catch up with him at the community center before they went looking for beds. If his friend suspected something or got his feelings hurt, he didn’t show it. They touched shoulders briefly and separated.

Mason hurried around a corner with one hand on the packet in his overcoat’s breast pocket. He was thinking about the money, about seeing Melinda again. Two hundred was enough to take her out to dinner and buy her something nice. They wouldn’t have to run away if he could show her dad he was a provider.

Hurrying down a side street, he passed a local landmark. Even the neighborhood gangsters crossed the street to avoid the Spaceman. Pushing a cart piled high with aluminum cans and assorted junk he was collecting to build a rocket or something, the shaggy, skeletal giant added a good foot to his height with a tinfoil pyramid hat. Mason detoured into the street to put a line of parked cars between him and the crazy vagrant.

They claimed this world before the Stone Age! Their implanted hybrids are everywhere! You only know what they want you to know! Ain’t nowhere to hide, where they can’t see you, young blood...

Mason looked up at the sky. I don’t see anything up there, he said. Sometimes, with friends, they’d kid the Spaceman to get him wound up. It was funny when other people were around. Alone, he was a little scary, but mostly just sad. Once, when they passed him on the street and Mason had laughed at him, his mom had said, His name is Dwayne Culbertson, and he’s ill. He used to be someone with a job and a family and things to live for. He was locked up for observation in a snake pit state hospital with other dangerous crazy people like your mother. Now, he’s even sicker from years of neglect, and nobody who can help him wants to bother. How funny is that?

Mom could take the fun out of anything, if you let her.

The implant they put in my spine the first time I was abducted in 1987 transmits whenever they’re in our solar system, and boy, they’re so close... You could be one of them already, and not know it.

Mason hurried by without saying another word.

He was early, but he could afford to buy a real dinner. A pang of guilt stronger than hunger shot through his gut. He’d bring something for Marvin, who’d be so grateful for the unexpected feast that he’d not press too hard about where it came from.

If all the work was as easy as this, he could pick up enough to get a roll and buy a phone, then he could blow off going back to school. He’d have no trouble getting a real job and a place, and when he had enough saved up—

They hit him so fast Mason didn’t even realize what was going on until his head hit the wall. Someone caught him before he fell and shook him, threw him against the steel roll down door on a pawnshop.

Give it up, one of them said. The other kicked him in the small of his back as he tried to get up.

Mason couldn’t catch his breath to say a word, never mind fight back. It was raining fists and feet. By the time they went through his pockets, he just wanted to play dead until they went away.

Through eyes squeezed tightly shut against the pain, he saw only his attackers’ feet. One wore big high-top sneakers, at least size 13. The other had surprisingly small feet and fancy kicks with blinking red and blue LED’s in the heel and toe. He let Mason see them up close once more, then tried to let him taste them.

They went away laughing.

There seemed little point in meeting up with C-Train after that.

* * *

He sat on the northwest corner ledge of a twelve-story apartment tower, overlooking a vacant lot overgrown with weeds and a couple totally confused lemon trees. Across the street, the basketball courts were a sea of shadow with a few isolated islands of ruddy arc sodium lamplight. Mason didn’t own a watch, but he had to figure that any minute now, the Lexus would show up down there.

It wasn’t the beating. He’d taken worse at school. He could probably even take C-Train in a straight fight, if a thug like C-Train could be dragged into a fair fight. It wasn’t even being in a hole with C-Train. It was what it felt like to find himself even this far down the one road his mother made him swear he’d never set foot on.

Swear, she’d said more than once, that you’ll remember. If his life meant anything, it was a message to you... stay off that road.

The road to becoming just like his father. The road that ended in a cell for a crime too stupid to explain to his son... No, it ended in a box in a potter’s field after a cheap death, shivved for no good reason on the exercise yard. If that was his future, if that was all he had to look forward to...

The wind knifed through his coat and two sweaters and prickled his skin. This time of year, most people his age were shopping for Christmas presents and winter gear for hockey or snowboarding. Most people Mason hung out with these days stuffed newspaper and shopping bags into their clothes to keep out the chill.

His teeth chattered. Just the wind. He wasn’t afraid. Been afraid my whole life. Now, I’m just tired.

By all means, give up, then, said a voice in his head. Not so much like how the crisis line operator would sound, but more like his mom, if she was still alive.

That would be about all she’d have to say, he thought, sourly. When the going got tough, Mom got going. Right out of this life.

He looked up at the stars. There were an awful lot of them out tonight. And just then, a streak of white light cut across the sky. It seemed to flicker and shed every color in its trail before it winked out.

A shooting star—

Make a wish, he said. He didn’t believe in wishes any more than he believed he could fly, but in the back of his mind, he made one anyway.

For just a moment, he felt strangely lifted, like something had touched him, something lighter than moonlight...

It only turned his despair to anger.

He’d always believed someone was up there. Now, the thought just made him furious. If someone had a hand in making all this—in taking his father away, making his mother too weak to stick it out and raise her son, in every bad, worthless, sad thing that came after—then he was a rat in a maze with no exits. What choice did he ever have? What chance, to do better?

The only choice he had was the one facing him now.

The light grew brighter until he was sitting in a pool of shadow. At first, he thought, police chopper, and he rolled off the ledge, but then froze, looking up.

The light wasn’t right for a chopper, he thought, but then he saw it. A shooting star far brighter than the other one, growing brighter... and larger.

And then he heard it.

A door the size of the sky slammed shut