The Everborn Read Free Page B

speaker fumigating the neighborhood with an Old MacDonald that drifted and hung in the air like a vaporous dirge.
    The three bicycles raced faster, over dampened concrete and past the graffiti of a lengthy wooden fence. Missing boards revealed vacant lots beyond and between the overlooking doleful buildings; crabgrass shot out from broken sidewalk and crept beneath the rusty metal of an old abandoned Ford, and beneath a slumbering transient. The reflecting tones of an overhanging billboard sported a gleaming medieval knight which, despite its spray-painted Spanish profanities, boasted that the detergent suspended from its lance was stronger than dirt.
    “Jesus, guys, hold it a second,” declared the oldest of the children, the jolting KER-THUMP of a pothole meeting his bike’s front tire in a drenching splash. Threadbare Hushpuppies slid from spinning pedals and ground to a muddy halt, the other children stopping in turn. He was a haughtily streetwise nine-year-old, a bubblegum renegade whose appetite for daring mischief proved an enticing retreat from an asylum of dull poverty.
    “What? What is it, Matthew?” breathed Dabby, disheartened by her friend’s startled aversion. She was second youngest, a pudgy elf of a girl whose emerald Asian eyes peered out from beneath a tattered grey baseball cap.
    Matthew had silently fixed his gaze attentively upon something ahead. The three children were midway down a small cul-de-sac now, which jetted into several alleyways surrounded by still more decaying buildings. Directly before them loomed the rusty remnants of Rothchild Cannery, shut down and dormant since a month ago, about the time when Fall had announced its annual migration of lunch-pail juvenilities for the initiation of another school year.
    It took a moment or two before the girl caught sight of what had drawn her friend’s attention. Throwing off a succinct giggle and proceeding forward with her bike, she informed him, “If it’s the s’curity man you’re wining over, it’s only the same man as last week. Gave me that groovy spaceship, remember?”
    Imprisoning Rothchild Cannery was a tall chain-linked fence garnished with barbed wire. Behind this fence and no more than a few yards from it sat a secluded Volkswagon Bug, the rainwashed orange paint of its back end reflecting pale sunlight. Inside, facing sideways with an arm propped lazily against the steering wheel, Max Polito struggled against the remaining hours of uneventful guard duty. From his AM radio, the shrill monotone of a newsman babbled methodically about the Mexico City Olympics and the Apollo 7 spacecraft. Then, a bit more than dazed, Max upped the volume with the stroke of his thumb: A.J. Erlandson, a less-than-famous B-horror director, was once again a newsworthy notable. And, if only lightly, a concern to Max.
    A.J. had directed several rather cool midnight movies before he disappeared without a trace in ‘66, a handful of months to spare before he was father to a set of twins. Both of Max’s parents had been employed by the studio which financed most of A.J.’s features, Max’s father having served as a camera operator on three of those, his mother production coordinator on the director’s last. That was two years ago, and the missing director was just as missing beneath even further mystery, for it seemed as though one of his twins had vanished now as well.
    No one had a clue as to how or why, but Max supposed his folks would bombard him with theories upon his return to their Santa Monica home. Regardless of what anyone thought, Max carried his own concerns. And they had nothing to do with his parents or with Tinsel Town.
    Max flexed his wrists suddenly and gazed at his watch. Webs of smoke rose softly from a cigarette crushed minutes before, and he reached into his ashtray to stifle the resurrected butt. He failed to notice the three kids wandering along outside the fence until their friendly waves met his sight at the rearview mirror.