Prodigal Son | Page 7

didn't seem to notice.
"What happened?" she asked. "How--"
"Pneumonia," I said. "He'd been living with Andy, grew up here in the carnival. It happened a couple of years ago. I'm sorry."
"Sorry," she said, and nodded. She didn't seem able to make sense out of what I was saying.
Frank Burlenbach turned to the boy. "Is all that true?"
Buddy nodded.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
Buddy looked at me and I said, " Go ahead. Tell him."
"I...I don't really come from anywhere, I guess." He looked to me for help again bur there was nothing I could say. "An orphanage in Tampa," he said. "I been in and out of it all my life. Until I ran away to Gibtown, you know, Gibsonton, where all the carnies live. I heard they help kids our sometimes. That's where I met up with Andy, and when he saw me he got his idea."
Burlenbach walked over to where they were putting the cuffs on Andy and reading him his rights. Georgia Burlenbach's hand stayed in mid-air, where she'd left it, for just a second. Then it slowly dropped to her side.
"Clever," Burlenbach said. "We hadn't seem him since he was two. We had no idea what he would look like now. And with the shirt, and a few details he couldn't possibly have faked, why should we doubt him?"
The set of his shoulders changed and I could see him digging his feet in for balance, Clarence Darrow going after the jury. "And what difference does it make to you if you opened up wounds that had taken years to heal? What if you brought back all the doubts and nightmares and guilt that almost tore my wife and I apart ten years ago? What do you care? We're just marks, right? Yokels. What difference does it make to you?"
He had worked himself up to where he was almost shouting, and Lieutenant Rogers took him by one arm. "Easy there, Frank."
But Andy had come back to life. He was staring at Burlenbach, and I could see the little muscles working at the tops of his cheeks. "You didn't deserve that boy, mister. You had no right to him, no matter what your laws say."
Suddenly something was wrong with Burlenbach. He obviously hadn't expected Andy to talk back to him, and now he had gone pale and was backing away.
"You know what I'm talking about," Andy sneered, and Burlenbach did. I looked over at his wife and she was standing with one fist at her mouth, biting down hard on the knuckle.
"You want me to tell your cop friends?" Andy said, leaning forward against the two patrolmen that held him. "You want me to tell them about--"
"Shut up!" Burlenbach yelled. "Shut up!"
"--about the bruises that were allover that little boy's face when I found him? About that cut over his eye that took two months to heal up?"
Burlenbach had covered his face with his hands and fallen onto his knees.
"Shit," Andy said. "When I saw that poor kid in that shopping basket, all beat up, the rain coming down like that, I just couldn't let him go back to somebody who was going to treat him that way. So I took him. I took him, and I cared for him, and I brought him up. And I buried him. That was never your boy. You lost the right to call him that before I ever came along."
The cops were pulling at Andy's arms now, and after one last look at Burlenbach he let them take him away.
*
I gave Georgia Burlenbach a lift downtown. She didn't look as though she could drive, and I didn't think she wanted to be with her husband just then.
On the way I asked her if she was all right.
"I don't know," she said. "I don't know what I feel like. Things keep turning around. First Tommy was back, then he was gone again, and now he's dead...I don't know.
"When he first disappeared, ten years ago, I was so afraid it would all come out. Then I was sort of relieved. I couldn't stand what was happening to Frank, the violence...he'd always been so gentle, but after Tommy was born he'd just go crazy. I just couldn't believe that it was really Frank doing it, somehow. It just wasn't real. You know?" She finally turned and looked at me. "You know?"
Around midnight they told me I could go, and I went out through one of the side offices. Buddy and Andy were sitting there, with a couple of cops standing guard. I waited in the shadows for a minute or two, where they couldn't see me.
"...put me away for a while," Andy was saying, "but I don't see how they could do anything to you. Stick you back in that orphanage, maybe."
"They can't