Unstoppable Read online

  Harrison made his move on the plate, removing it from the checkered tablecloth and hurrying to the sink, where he got in two quick licks before slipping it into the soapy water.

  “Did you lick that plate?” Mrs. Constable’s voice cut his ears like a razor.

  “No, ma’am,” Harrison lied without pause.

  “You better not.” Mrs. Constable removed the plate from the soap and smudged at it with her fingertip.

  Harrison didn’t ask why she cared whether the soapy water got the dribs of yolk instead of him. “No, ma’am.”

  After the scrape of his chair, Mr. Constable stood and belched and pulled on his suit coat. “Time. I’ll be back, Mrs.”

  “You call him ‘Papa,’ you hear?” Mrs. Constable dropped the plate into the water and scowled. “That’s how you address Mr. Constable with the judge. You forget that and I’ll have a bar of soap to feed you before afternoon chores.”

  Harrison knew well the taste of laundry soap, and he had to admit that it was a good reminder to call Mr. Constable “Papa.” Harrison climbed into the bed of the pickup truck with Zip, the jug-headed yellow Lab. The truck jounced down the driveway, jarring Harrison’s bones until the tires hummed on the smooth blacktop. The wind whisked through his shortened hair and Harrison flicked at the tiny brown pieces still clinging to his neck. Town held the county courthouse and several brick government buildings as well as the crumbling storefronts of the past hundred and fifty years. Once busy with trade from the railroad, they now sold nothing much more than yarn and used furniture. There were also two bars, a diner, and a nail shop, while the rest of the windows held FOR SALE signs behind their dusty glass.

  The courthouse was a busy place, though. Just outside town a large modern prison housed the state’s less dangerous criminals and offered up most of the good jobs for fifty miles around. Half the people in the courthouse seemed to be prisoners, and none of them was ever as glum as Harrison would be if he had to wear handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit. Mr. Constable’s shoes clapped against the wood floor after they passed through a metal detector, and Harrison followed him to the back part of the courthouse, the new part with low ceilings, fake blond wood, and fluorescent tubes of light.

  In a courtroom that looked more like a classroom to Harrison, the judge sat on a low platform behind his bench. A state flag drooped alongside the American flag, and a brass clock hung on the wall. Mr. Constable waved to the lawyer, and they sat down. Harrison scanned the room for his mother, but she wasn’t to be seen. The judge scolded two teenage boys in orange jumpsuits before banging his gavel on the desk and watching them be ushered out by an armed guard. The boys looked scared, and the judge seemed satisfied with that.

  Harrison tugged at the collar of his shirt, replaying all the things he’d done recently that might put him in the company of the imprisoned boys.

  “Harrison Johnson.”

  The bailiff looked out over the courtroom. Mr. Constable leaned close. “Don’t forget—‘Papa.’”

  Mr. Constable stood. Harrison did too, and followed his foster father to the front along with the lawyer, a greasy-looking man in a green suit with food stains on its sleeves.

  “Melinda Johnson?” The bailiff craned his neck and Harrison turned his head, also scanning the room. “Ms. Johnson? Melinda Johnson?”

  Mr. Constable spoke to the lawyer under his breath. “All this fuss and she’s too drunk to show up.”

  The lawyer nodded as if it was just another expected part of his job.

  Harrison’s heart sank.

  “Is Melinda Johnson here, or counsel for Ms. Johnson?” The judge looked up over the top of his glasses and glared out across the room, clenching his teeth until the cords pulsed in his neck. “I see. Mr. Constable, will you approach the bench with your ward and counsel, please?”

  The judge looked at Harrison with distaste before turning his attention to the lawyer. “Mr. Denny, do you have the paperwork for this boy’s adoption?”

  The lawyer fumbled with his briefcase, nodding and winking until he came up with a thick packet of papers. “Right here, your honor.”

  “Then,” the judge said, examining the papers, “given the trouble Ms. Johnson has caused in all this and her apparent lack of responsibility—as well as respect for this court, I might add—all leads me to believe that the best course of action for this young . . . boy is to make him the legal and permanent son of Mr. and Mrs. Brad Constable.”

  A look passed between Mr. Constable and the lawyer that Harrison didn’t like. It was the look of two bank robbers who’d been invited into the vault. Harrison scanned the courtroom behind him again, feeling desperate and sensing that something very big was about to happen, something that would change the course of his life.

  Something that couldn’t be put right again.

  Something very bad.

  Chapter Four

  MR. CONSTABLE TOOK AN oath.

  The teeth in his big head had too much room between them to form a complete smile, but it was the closest thing Harrison could remember to one. At the clerk’s desk, the grown-ups signed papers while Harrison stood in his stiff white shirt, the hair itching him to no end. Panic choked him and he was unable to voice the protest he felt certain he should be making.

  Mr. Constable nudged him before Harrison realized they were all staring at him and waiting for him to speak.

  “Isn’t that right, Son?” Mr. Constable asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Constable’s smile tightened and his eyes seemed to radiate heat. “You don’t have to call me that, Son. Call me what you always call me.”

  “Yes . . . Papa.”

  For some unknown reason, that made the adults chuckle. The judge took the papers the lawyer handed to him, added his own signature, pronounced Harrison Johnson officially and legally to be Harrison Constable, and struck the desk with his mallet.

  There was a ruckus at the back of the courtroom as someone forced open the doors with a shriek.

  Chapter Five

  HARRISON FELT HIS INSIDES melt like butter in a hot pan.

  His mother’s dark frizzy hair shot out from her head in all directions. She wore a long raincoat and Harrison didn’t know what else besides a dirty pair of fluffy pink slippers. He could see the red in her eyes from across the room and the heavy bags of exhaustion they carried beneath them.

  Liquid pain pumped through his heart.

  “That’s my baby!” Harrison’s mother screeched as the bailiff and a guard held her arms. “You can’t do that to my baby!”

  “Order in this court!” The judge pounded and glared, but it had no effect. “Order, I said, or you’ll be in contempt!”

  “Nooo!”

  Tears welled up in Harrison’s eyes. He felt like a split stick of firewood, half shamed, half aching to hold her. He started toward his mother, but Mr. Constable’s big hand clamped down on the back of his neck so that the nerves tingled in his head.

  “Bailiff, remove that woman and take her into custody for contempt. I’ll not have it in my courtroom. I’ll not have it.” The judge pounded a final time as they dragged her out. Then he cleared his throat, gave an accusing look to Mr. Constable, and asked the clerk for the next case.

  Mr. Constable steered Harrison from the courtroom and all the way outside into the sunshine. A light breezed whispered through the trees, making the whole thing seem like a dream.

  “Where’s my mother?” Harrison asked.

  “It’s all right, Mud. You got a new mother now, Mrs. Constable. She’s your mother by law.”

  It was too much. Having a complete and legal family should provide comfort and nourishment for his soul, but it didn’t. Harrison thought of a snake he’d discovered under some boards behind the barn, a small snake that had swallowed a whole rat. It sat like a lump, helpless and unable to move for weeks, until it could finally digest its prey. He was that snake.

  Harrison’s new status seemed to include sitting up front in the truck. He lea
ned his head against the glass without feeling the bumps and bangs, even as they climbed the hole-filled driveway to the farm.

  Mr. Constable slowed down by the barn. “Chores.”

  “What about school?” Harrison asked.

  “You’re excused for court.”

  “But we’re done.”

  Mr. Constable reached across the seat and grabbed a handful of Harrison’s trimmed hair at the back of his head, twisting it until his head thumped sideways against the dashboard. Mr. Constable moved his face close, also tilting it so they both looked at the world in the same knocked-over way. “You’re done givin’ me lip, you understand?”

  Harrison nodded his head.

  “Say it.”

  “I understand.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “I understand . . . sir.”

  Mr. Constable turned him free. Harrison spilled from the truck, tripped, and fell to the ground.

  “Chores.” Mr. Constable reached across the seat and yanked the door shut. Harrison sat dusting himself off as the truck pulled away toward the house.

  He didn’t know all the reasons why Mr. Constable wanted to adopt him, but he knew without a doubt that it would somehow end in the Constables getting more money from some charity or government program. He knew all the kids on the farm had started out as foster kids, only to be adopted by the Constables for some unspoken reason. While they didn’t seem to mind, Harrison had never—and would never—stop thinking of Melinda Johnson as his one and only true mother. He would no more think of himself as Harrison Constable than he would as Mud Johnson, let alone Mud Constable.

  Cyrus’s switch whistled through the air and snapped against the barn door. “I heard ‘chores’ mentioned. I’m busy with the vet. I need hay for the calves and I need it now.”

  Without speaking, Harrison got to his feet and headed for the hay barn. He loaded several bales onto a wheelbarrow and bounced it across the barnyard to where the veal calves sat tied to the little plastic capsules that kept them out of the rain. With a pitchfork, he broke down the bales and scattered hay at the feet of each calf.

  Finished, he put the pitchfork over his shoulder and headed for the noise in the milk barn. When he arrived, he saw Cyrus and the vet down in the parlor working on a cow whose head had been clamped down between some bars. The cow was having a calf, but something had gone wrong and the men shouted and hurried back and forth. Mr. Constable stood at the railing above, looking down with a stem of grass in his teeth. He turned and scowled at Harrison.

  “I said ‘chores.’”

  “I finished feeding the calves.” Harrison couldn’t help but notice the cow’s violent kick and the vet’s quick movement to dodge it.

  “No, you’re lying again.”

  Harrison’s face felt hot. “I’m not lying. I finished.”

  Mr. Constable pointed behind Harrison at the box stalls where they kept sick animals. “Them two sick calves ain’t fed yet. Lying again. I said I won’t have it, and I won’t.”

  Mr. Constable started to loosen his belt.

  “No.” Harrison shook his head.

  “No? I’ll show you, no.”

  “You lied!” Harrison surprised himself as the shout rose above the braying cow and the excited men, who both looked up from the parlor. “You said for me to call you ‘Papa.’ That’s a lie!”

  Mr. Constable’s belt whipped out at him—not the leather part, but the buckle itself, a treat only for the most special occasions. When it licked Harrison’s forehead, blood spurted from his skin and one eye went dark.

  Harrison wasn’t exactly sure what happened after that. He knew he used the pitchfork, and he heard Mr. Constable scream in pain as two of the tines buried themselves in his leg. Why he flipped backward over the railing Harrison couldn’t imagine, but he did. Harrison didn’t blame himself for the cow. It was a wild cow, mad with pain from a bad birth, and Mr. Constable fell into it and the cow kicked him with all its might. The crack of Mr. Constable’s skull was what Harrison remembered most, like a cobblestone split by a heavy sledgehammer.

  And then the blood . . . and the screams . . . and the words. In the madness, at one point Mrs. Constable grabbed his ears and pulled his face close to hers so she could spit her hot words directly in his face.

  “You killed him!”

  Chapter Six

  IT WAS THREE DAYS before a woman from the county found him, locked inside the abandoned silo, hungry enough for his stomach to hurt bad and so thirsty he wished he hadn’t wasted his own pee. Still, when he saw the woman’s face and those kind, sad eyes, he had enough moisture in his body to cry, so he knew he must not have been too bad off. She put a blanket around him and tucked him into the backseat of her car, where he bounced comfortably down the drive, staring at Cyrus’s tilted trailer for what he somehow knew was the last time.

  “They said you ran away.” The woman looked at him in the rearview mirror. “The police looked for you everywhere. It was your foster sister Dora who told a teacher at school. She’d be locked up herself if I had anything to do with it—not Dora, your foster mother.”

  The woman’s eyes burned like little campfires. “Not that I have anything to do with it, though.”

  Harrison nodded.

  She took him to a doctor who looked at his eye and gently cleaned the dried blood from the gash Mr. Constable’s belt buckle had left him with.

  “He’ll live.” The doctor held Harrison’s head in his hands and looked down into his eyes, first one, then the other, with a penlight. “And I don’t think we’ll lose the eye. It should be fine when the swelling goes down.”

  Harrison never thought about losing an eye.

  After two fish sandwiches and three bottles of Gator-ade, he was taken to the police station, where he talked for a long time to an officer who was as nice as the woman. After that, she drove him to a place behind a high fence and metal gates. He took a shower and was shown to a small bedroom, where he expected to find an orange jumpsuit like the rest of the prisoners wore. The stiff, dark blue jeans and soft cotton shirt surprised him, and he looked at that same woman—she called herself Mrs. Godfrey—in confusion. There was even underwear and a pair of sneakers that looked big enough to fit him.

  “I’ll close the door so you can change,” she said. “Then you can give me the towel.”

  Harrison looked down at the towel around his waist and by the time he looked up, she was gone. Dressed in his new clothes, he sat down to wait. After a soft knock, Mrs. Godfrey stuck her head inside the room.

  “You all right, Harrison?”

  He nodded.

  She took the towel from him.

  “Am I in jail for a long time?”

  Mrs. Godfrey looked around at the room with no pictures or lamps or rugs. “No, Harrison. You’re not in jail . . . well, you’re not going to be here for long; it’s just temporary, and it’s not really a jail. It’s a juvenile center.”

  Harrison tried to believe her.

  It was hard, but after several weeks of walks and talking and good food and safe nights, he trusted Mrs. Godfrey. She believed him when he told her the stories of how he’d gotten to the point he was at, four different homes over the years, fighting, and the truth about how his eye had been broken open and Mr. Constable was kicked by the cow.

  When she announced to him one day that the judge had undone his adoption to the Constables, he believed her, even though it was hard to understand the part about Cyrus being a hero of sorts by swearing on Harrison’s behalf and saying he acted in self-defense against Mr. Constable.

  “I guess he hated the Constables more than me,” Harrison said, as much to himself as to Mrs. Godfrey.

  Several more weeks went by before Mrs. Godfrey appeared one morning with a very serious and very different look on her face. The two of them sat at a picnic table outside the center in a shady spot on the grass.

  “Harrison, I am very sad to tell you this, but I have to tell you because you need to know.”


  A spark flared in the back of Harrison’s brain. “My mother.”

  “Yes.” She covered his hand with hers. “She’s gone, Harrison. I’m very sorry.”

  “She moved away?”

  Tears glistened in Mrs. Godfrey’s eyes. Slowly, she shook her head. “No, gone. She passed.”

  “My mother?”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  Harrison didn’t cry. He just blinked at her and watched a tear roll down her nose and drop off the end of it, spattering onto the table where they sat.

  “Was she sick?” he whispered, his eyes on the spattered drop.

  “I think she was very sick, and very tired, and I think she’s in a place now where she’s at peace and watching you and loving you just like she always did.”

  Harrison stared at the broken tear for a long time before he spoke. “Mr. Constable said she didn’t.”

  “Harrison, most people in this world are good, but some are bad. Mr. Constable was a very bad man, and he was a liar. That’s all I can say about it.”

  They sat for a while before Mrs. Godfrey brought a hand to her mouth and cleared her throat. “Now I have some more news for you.”

  Harrison studied her eyes, afraid.

  She patted his hand. “Good news, this time.”

  Chapter Seven

  “TOMORROW YOU’LL BE GOING with a new family.”

  Harrison looked at his hands and sighed.

  “I think you’ll like them.”

  He looked up at her, unable to stop the anger from burning in his eyes. “That’s what they always say.”

  She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “This will be different, Harrison. I promise. Did anyone ever promise you before?”

  He scowled down into his lap. “Only my mother.”

  Mrs. Godfrey stayed quiet for a minute, and he thought she might be about to leave until she cleared her throat again. “Well, I’m different from your mother. I’ve been a lot luckier than she has, and because I’ve been so lucky, I’ve been able to keep my promises.”