against gravity, and wore her considerable weight in a soft wide landing pad around her middle. The better to hug him with, Melody figured; the better to do the Bump as they boogied around the kitchen. Ruth had fallen for the boy hard and thought nothing of spending the whole day in foolery to coax an unexpected smile from the foursquare of his face. Melody had watched Ruth sneak glances at Wrecker throughout each day; together they’d seen his sober face go quickly livid with anger or frustration, watched it brighten with delight until he noticed and swallowed it, embarrassed. The change was quicker and more intimate than the weather. He was scarred and volatile and more luminous than any celestial body. There had to be a way to defuse some of his explosive anger, Ruth worried, before the boy blew himself up by accident.
“I made you something,” Ruth said, her eyebrows lifting and wiggling like nascent caterpillars. Wrecker chortled, a cascade of raspy giggles that Melody matched without meaning to. He had wrinkled his face, trying to duplicate the burlesque routine Ruth performed with her bushy brows. Ruth turned away and reached under the sink, rustled about with some clinking sounds. She creaked herself back up. In her hands shimmered a sheet of crushed soda cans wired together. “Get over here,” she commanded. When Wrecker advanced toward her, she fed his arms through holes in the sides and let the tunic-shaped contraption dangle about him. She stood back and beamed. “You’re invincible, buddy. Nobody can mess with you now.”
“Dinty Spaceman?” Melody ventured.
“In the flesh. Newly outfitted with his ray-deflecting armor.” Ruth gave him a gentle shove and the tin cans jingled. “Now get out to your spaceship and make the galaxy safe for mankind.”
Melody stepped narrowly out of his path as Wrecker bulldozed his way for the back door. The woman was obsessed when it came to the boy’s happiness. Ruth lived in a makeshift room under the rafters of the farmhouse and came down most mornings to find him waiting impatiently for her in the kitchen, and each day Ruth outdid herself, inventing games no one had played before and tableaux Wrecker could reenact for hours. She folded paper airplanes that fell from the sky, grew expert at farting noises made under her armpit. The two of them invented knock-knock jokes with incoherent punch lines. Twice a week she would fill the metal tub and scrub Wrecker raw, banish dirt from behind his ears and between his toes, and discuss twenty-car pileups. But none of that held a candle to Dinty Spaceman-a-Go-Go, with his metal colander for a helmet and rocket ship docked in the yard. In the absence of rocket fuel, Dinty Spaceman had to dance on the hood to activate the thrust engines and prepare for takeoff. Indeed, any time he noticed a decrease in power he had only to climb through the window and stomp a few steps—the wilder the better, as Go-Go was never mild—on the wide hood to revitalize the engine. He could fly to the moon, then. He could zoom through the Milky Way.
Sure, and he could slip off the rain-slicked car hood and crack his head so his brains poured out, Melody thought, but so far there had been no serious injuries.
Melody watched the boy through the kitchen window and glanced toward the front door when the hinges squeaked. Sitka the dog entered first, with Johnny Appleseed the human close behind. Johnny Appleseed the mostly human, Melody corrected herself. Her friend was as far on the spectrum as a person could get and still belong to the same species. Tiny, leathern, silent as the night, he pictured himself some hybrid form of plant and animal in a base of dirt and water. The women moved over to make room for him at the window. Melody lifted her chin and gestured toward the boy. “He gave you some trouble last night?”
Johnny shrugged. “He’s no trouble to me. Just to himself.” He tipped his head toward the boy in a gesture of respect. The day before, as they were driving the Mattole Road toward South Fork, the motor of Johnny’s beloved Ford Falcon had burst into flames. “That was the end of it,” he told them, his dark eyes drooping sorrowfully. With Wrecker’s help he had shoved the rusty vehicle from the bridge into the river below. Aghast and euphoric, they’d watched it dip and bob in the current, and then they’d trudged