Mad Tom whistled his favorite song to himself as he skipped along a stream that wandered through Sin Trail Park, the heart of the City. Baby, the blue ox had tripped and crushed open the front of a grocery store between Duane and Reade, triggering a round of looting (once the goddler had wandered off) that hadn't been seen in months.

Tom had no truck with looting. He preferred to mug the unsuspecting as they were making their well-laden way out of the rubble. Much less trouble.

It had been a good day. It promised to get a damn sight better when Tom rounded a creek bend and spotted Wicked Willow pulling some unsuspecting napper into his wooden gut -- said napper wearing very nice, very new, and very expensive shoes (the only piece of clothing still showing outside the tree itself).

"Oy!" Tom shouted. The tree seemed to start in surprise. "Leave em go, Will!"

The tree's branches wagged back and forth in violent negation.

"He's not ripe yet! Give 'im over't me and I'll getcha summat this nice jerky." Tom waved some of the packaged meat from the store. "Mmmm... salllty, Will. You love yer salt..."

The tree still seemed reluctant, and the sun was getting low, which tried Tom's patience. "... and I won't go get that can a' gasoline I've been saving for a special barbecue..."

There was a pause, then the boy (for it was a boy) came flying out of the tree with a *pop*, following by a keening whine as the willow begged like a dog for the promised meats.

"That's a lad," Tom cooed, tossing the still-wrapped jerky into the rotten gash in the tree's trunk. "Oy, beggar-boy, getcher ass over here and lemme have a lookitcha."

Bobby blinked, staring up wide-eyed at the barefoot homeless man with the shiny cardboard crown on his mangy head.

Tolkien was never like this. Tom returned the boy’s dumbfounded stare (as well as his relatively clean, warm clothes) with a canny one of his own, then made a face. "Awww, yer not addlepated, are yah? I didn’t just save myself some kinda dimwit retard?" Bobby made no response, though the thought occurred to him (spoken in his mother’s voice) to tell the man that saying 'retard' was bad.

"Hey!" Tom was suddenly standing right in front of him, bending forward until his rotten-tooth breath was all Bobby could smell, and snapping his fingers in the boy’s face. "Are yah in there?"

Bobby leaned back from the crazy man. "Yeah… I… I'm fine. Thanks." He looked back over his shoulder, where the tree was still (somehow) masticating the older man’s jerky. "Thanks for saving me."

Tom squinted hard at Bobby, as though suspicious that the boy’s words held some unseen meaning. "Well... weren’t entirely for your benefit, you understand." He stood up to his full height (not more than a few inches taller than Bobby himself) and offered the boy a grimy hand. "Folks like yerself are often valuable to me."

"Oh." Bobby pushed himself off the ground, pretending not to see the offered hand until it was too late to matter. "I... don’t have any money."

For a moment, he thought he’d insulted the man and, looking at the light deep in his narrowed eyes, realized that that would be a very bad thing to do. Before he could apologize, his mystery savior laughed, loud and hard, like he was trying to win a contest. "Yer a funny little bastard." He wiped at his eyes. "Your money's not much good over here, boy. Now," he glanced around them. "Come on with me. It's getting dark soon, and dark is no time to be out of doors."

---

Tom's house, if you could call it that, was not much in the way of shelter, but by the time they'd arrived at it's door it was well into a deepening dusk, and Bobby didn't mind so much; the things he heard (and seen) stirring as the sun sank behind the Mad City's sky rapers gave him a powerful desire to be indoors, even if the door itself was rickety and let a worrisome amount of light out through large cracks.

Bobby could hear someone crying even before the door was pulled open; the sound only became clearer as he stepped into the room.

"I'm home, ducks!" announced Tom, sweeping his arms up. "And I've brought us a guest."

Bobby could only stare. The girl hunched up in the corner didn't seem to be much older than he was -- early teens at best -- her hair was wild and tangled, especially in the back, and her face was filthy and streaked with tears, but she was still pretty. The ugliest thing about her was the look of cowed terror she gave Tom with her red-rimmed eyes; the most hurtful part was when she gave the same look to Bobby.

"Boyo, this is my little Mary Maudlin, my own personal sailor's star. Mary..." Tom edged in closer, a smile on his face. "I've brought yah some elderberry wine... your very favorite." He pulled a fifth of Maker's Mark out of his look bag. "Just the thing after a hard day of housekeeping, isn't it, my love?" He twisted off the cap and held the bottle forward, like someone trying to coax a half-wild animal out from under their pouch with the lure of a treat. "Have a drink."

The girl stared at Tom, then the bottle, her eyes wide. She shook her head, once, then again -- strong enough to make her wild hair wave.

Bobby couldn't see Tom's face from the angle the old man was facing, but he could see tension settle across the man's shoulders. "I said..." His voice was steady and even, but it cracked a bit at the end. "Have a drink."

The girl's eyes somehow widened further. She didn't move for several long seconds, then one thin hand crept out from the dirty sweater she was huddled in and, shaking, plucked the bottle from Tom's hand. She took a long swallow, her eyes never leaving his, like a child forced to take foul medicine under the watchful eye of a parent.

Tom didn't move for several seconds after the girl had finished her drink (shuddering and wiping the back of her arm across her mouth, eyes squeezed shut), then he clapped his hands together. Bobby and Mary both jumped.

"Right," he said. "Suppertime!"

---

"Don't mind the tether," Tom leaned back in his chair. "Out little Mary gets lost sometimes, and it falls to me to look after her."

Bobby nodded, trying not to look (again) at the handcuff fastened around the girl's ankle, the other loop latched to a log chain that she drug back and forth as she worked at a small hibachi grill in the corner of the shack behind Tom.

Tom watched his face. "You're a bit of a puzzlement, boyo." He leaned forward and resting his elbows on the table. "You're not from around here, that's certain, which means your from --" He gestured over his shoulder in the way someone from Arkansas might indicate the general direction of Budapest, neither knowing nor caring the exact location. "parts further abroad, but most anyone like that usually goes bibbling crazy when they see the glorious sights of our fair city."

Bobby shrugged, knowing it iritated adults but unable to block the habit. "It's not really that bad." He looked up at the girl as she laid three (cheap, plastic, mismatched) plates on table. "I dream weirder stuff than this all the time."

"Do yah now?" Bobby looked back at his host. In the candlelight, the old man's whiskered face looked like a wolf's. "That's interesting."

---

"Not too shabby, if I say so myself."

Dinner (two cans of chili, simmered in a skillet) was done. Tom sat back in his chair with a satisfied belch. "My little Mary angel can cook, can't she?"

Bobby nodded, looking at the girl as well. She didn't return the glance -- had not looked up throughout the meal, in fact, and had only eaten when Tom had told her to. "It was good. Thank you, Mary."

"Sam." Her voice was more whisper than anything else.

"I'm sorry?"

"She didn't say anything." Tom laid a hand a hand on the girl's shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

Bobby looked at the hand, but not at Tom, then stood up and begin collecting plates.

"What the hell'r you doing?"

Bobby shrugged. "She cooked. Someone else should clean up?"

Tom snorted. "Who taught you something like that?"

"No one." Bobby walked past him to the cooking area. "It's just the rules."

"The rules." Tom didn't turn to talk to him. His eyes were distant -- his hand continuing to squeeze the girl's shoulder in a slow rhythm. Finally, he shook his head. "You fit in here all right, boyo."

Bobby wiped one of the plates with a crusted, dirty towel. "Thanks."

Tom leaned forward on the table, nodding to himself. "I was thinking you should stay on here. We can make it one big family."

Bobby sat the last plate down and bent for the skillet. "That'd be okay, I guess." He turned, holding the skillet handle in both hands, and slammed it into the back of Tom's head.

"I'm glad you agr--" Tom tried to stand, the commands going out at the same moment that his brain lost all ability to issue further orders. The result was a ragdoll flopping that threw his body over the table.

"Holy crap!" Bobby dangled the skillet in one hand. "This is real!"

"How do you know?" The girl (Mary/Sam) hadn't looked up.

"When I dream it," he explained, moving around the table. "I can't lift the pan. It's too heavy. Where's the key for your chain?"

"Around his neck." She still hadn't moved, but her voice wasn't as flat -- as though the conversation was becoming mildly more interesting.

Unable to roll Tom over, Bobby dug under the old man's shirt and beard until he pulled loose a tarnished silver chain with a strange key dangling from it. He stared at it. "This isn't for handcuffs."

Sam looked up, pushing her hair back. "It isn't just for the handcuffs." She was crying again, but the tears were different this time. "It opens anything."

Bobby looked at her, then the key.

Then he grinned. "Oh really?"

---

-- Doyce Testerman

• Horn And Ivory
• The Snows Of The Street
• Skeleton Key
• Probably some others

The Stories