“Did he think you were stealing stuff or vandalizing?”
“No. He was surprised to discover me.”
“They don’t know I come here, either.”
“I mean he was surprised to discover me in particular. He knows me from … another place and time.”
“Where, when?” I asked.
“It’s not important. He wanted to rape me then, and he almost did. He wanted to rape me tonight. Though he used a cruder word than rape.”
Sadness overcame me. “I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Who does?”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not.”
She said, “I’m eighteen.”
“I thought no older than sixteen, maybe even thirteen now that I’ve seen you up close.”
“I have a boyish body.”
“Well, no.”
“Well, yes,” she said. “Boyish the way that very young girls can seem boyish. Why do you hide your face?”
I was intrigued that she had taken so long to ask the question. “I don’t want to scare you off.”
“I don’t care about appearances.”
“It’s not just appearances.”
“Then what is it?”
“When they see me, people are repulsed, afraid. Some of them hate me or think they do, and then … well, it goes badly.”
“Were you burned or something?”
“If it were only that,” I said. “A couple of them tried to set me on fire once, but I was already … already what I am before they tried.”
“It’s not cold in here. So are the gloves part of it?”
“Yes.”
She shrugged. “They look like hands to me.”
“They are. But they … suggest the rest of me.”
“You’re like the Grim Reaper in that hood.”
“Look like but am not.”
“If you don’t want me to see you, I won’t try,” she said. “You can trust me.”
“I think I can.”
“You can. But I have a rule, too.”
“What rule?”
“You can’t touch me. Not even the slightest, most casual touch. Especially not skin to skin. Especially not that. But also not your glove to my jacket. No one can touch me. I won’t permit it.”
“All right.”
“That was quick enough to be a lie.”
“But it wasn’t. If I touch you, you’ll pull the hood off my head. Or if instead you make the first move and pull the hood off my head, then I’ll touch you. We hold each other hostage to our eccentricities.” I smiled again, an unseen smile. “We’re made for each other.”
AT THE AGE OF EIGHT, WITH NO IDEA WHERE I was bound, I came to the city on a Sunday night, aboard an eighteen-wheeler with a flatbed trailer hauling large industrial machinery that I couldn’t identify. The machines were secured to the truck with chains and covered with tarps. Between the tarps and the machines were nooks where a boy of my size could conceal himself. I had gotten aboard when the driver had been having dinner, near twilight, in the coffee shop at a truck stop.
Two days earlier, I had run out of things to eat. My mother had sent me away with a backpack full of food, which I supplemented with apples from an untended orchard that I chanced upon. Although I had raised myself more than I’d been raised, though I had grown up more in the wilds than in our small house, I possessed no knowledge of what safely edible smorgasbord, if any, forests and fields might offer.
After a day of hunger, early on Sunday morning, I made my way through a sort of pine barrens, where the soil was peaty. The land spread out too flat and the underbrush grew too sparse to allow me to feel safe. For the most part, there was nothing to hide behind but trees, with the boughs far overhead and the trunks not all that thick. When I looked around, I seemed to be in a dream about a vast cloister where thousands of columns stood in no discernible pattern. Through the staggered trees, you couldn’t see far in a straight line. But as I passed through, horizontal movement in all that vertical architecture and stillness, I couldn’t possibly be missed by anyone who happened to be there.
Voices raised in song should have sent me scurrying toward some distant silent place, but instead I found myself drawn to them. I ran in a crouch and then, nearing the last of the pines, crawled to the tree line. Cars and pickups were parked on a graveled area a hundred yards to my left. Half that distance to the right, a languid river flowed like molten silver in the early light.
About forty people were gathered at the water’s edge, singing a hymn, and the preacher stood in the river with a woman of about thirty-five, engaged upon a full-immersion baptism. To one side of the choir stood a man and two children, who seemed to be waiting their turns for salvation.
Directly ahead of me, across an expanse of grass, past all those people, stood a humble clapboard church, white with pale-blue trim. Near the building, in the shade of a great spreading oak, were chairs surrounding picnic tables that appeared to be laden with enough food to provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner during a full day of church and family fun.
The members of the congregation stood with their backs to me, busy with their hymnals and focused on the joyous event in the river. If the minister looked my way, I would be screened by the members of his congregation. I might not have much time, but I thought I would have enough.
I stripped off my backpack, zippered open its main compartments, broke from the trees, and sprinted to the picnic tables. On the grass near them were baseballs, bats, and gloves, also a badminton net not yet erected, rackets, and shuttlecocks. I had never played such games or heard of them, and those items meant nothing to me; I would not be able to identify them, in memory, until years later.
When I tore the foil off a platter, I found thick slices of ham. I wrapped several in the foil and shoved them in the backpack. There were potato salads and pasta salads covered with plastic wrap or lids, pies and cakes, none of them easy enough to pack. But I also found baskets of homemade rolls and biscuits covered by napkins, oranges, bananas, hard-boiled eggs pickled purple in beet juice, and cookies of all kinds.
From a pocket of my jeans, I withdrew part of the wad of cash that my mother had given me, peeled off a few bills, and dropped them on the table. Considered in retrospect, I probably paid far too much for what I had taken. But at the time, shaking with hunger, I felt that no price was too high to satisfy my growling stomach.
Sweating cans of soda and tea and juice were layered in plastic tubs of ice. After I slipped the straps of the backpack over my shoulders, I snatched up a cold Coca-Cola.
Just then someone behind me said, “Child, it’s time for the Lord, not breakfast yet.”
Startled, I turned, looked up, and saw a man coming out of a side door of the church, carrying a pan piled high with barbecued chicken legs.
Under thinning hair and a high brow, his face was soft and kindly—until he saw my face enclosed but not fully hidden by the hood of my jacket. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes widened as if the darkness of Armageddon had suddenly fallen upon the world and as if he were straining