That accent again, hard as rock and yet beautiful. “Are you Scottish?” I asked. “Like the Loch Ness Monster?”
He opened one eye and half-smiled around the pain. “Irish.”
I thought about that. “Like a Leprechaun?”
“Yeah.” The eye closed. “Like a leprechaun.”
I stared at his side. The blood was steadily soaking across his white t-shirt, like someone had spilled blackcurrant on a tablecloth. “My mom says you should wash cuts. Or you can get ill.”
He shook his head. “I can’t go inside. Your parents might call the cops.”
I bit my lip, considering. If he was scared of the police then he was bad and I was supposed to stay away from bad people. But...he didn’t seem bad. Maybe he was good bad. Like Batman.
I got to my feet. “I can get stuff and bring it here.
He blinked up at me, then looked towards the house. “Will you get into trouble?”
“Only if I get caught.”
He seemed to be about to tell me not to, so I ran over to the door before he could. Then I stopped, turned back and passed Perkins over to him. “Here,” I said. “If it hurts really bad, you can squeeze his paw.”
The man looked down at Perkins in amazement, then looked up at me and the sweetest smile I’d ever seen crept across his face. “Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t get blood on him.”
“I won’t.”
Then I was running, bare feet slapping the dirt. I climbed back up the trellis, slipped in through my bedroom window and listened: nothing, not even snoring. I raided the bathroom cabinet for what I needed: I’d watched Mom patch me up and, once or twice, when my step dad’s team lost a game, I’d helped her patch herself up. Then I went to the kitchen and grabbed a big bottle of water and some of my mom’s banana loaf.#p#分页标题#e#
Back in the tool shed, the man had lifted his t-shirt and twisted so that he could look at his side. There were two long, straight slashes across his muscles, blood welling and running. He looked up as I entered as if worried I’d freak out, but I shook my head: I’d seen blood before.
At first he tried to get me to give him the supplies so he could do it himself, but it was too awkward and he soon gave up and let me do it. I washed the wound out with water and then antiseptic: he hissed but managed not to yell. Then I pressed a gauze pad against it and stuck it in place with tape. “Did they do this to you?” I asked, jerking my head towards the road.
He nodded. “I got away but they came after me. They were wearing me down and then I came off my bike.” He ran his hand over his newly-dressed wound. “Thank you. I’m Carrick.”
Carrick. I’d never heard that name before. A foreign name from a mystical land. “I’m Annabelle.”
I passed him the water and the banana loaf. He stared at them for a second. “God bless you,” he muttered, and devoured them.
Over the next four hours he drank the whole bottle of water, plus another I fetched him, and worked his way through four thick slices of banana loaf. He told me about riding his bike, about the motorcycle club who’d just made him a “Prospect”—a potential member—even though he was only seventeen. He told me about the—he had to think hard to find words suitable for my ears—eejits who’d cut him with a knife, a rival club. He showed me the Hell’s Princes patch on the back of the sleeveless leather jacket he called a cut. Sometimes he’d doze, drifting off in the middle of a sentence. But each time he woke, his color was better.
When the sky started to lighten outside, he gingerly stood up. He was cautious at first, holding onto the wall for support, but he managed to stagger outside and retrieve his bike. As soon as he swung a leg over the saddle he seemed better, as if the bike and he had missed each other. “Will you be okay?” I asked.
He nodded, then looked at me. “Will you?” He looked around at our ramshackle house and the field of dried-out maize.
I thought about telling him my step-dad sometimes hit us. But my mom had always told me that I shouldn’t disrespect him, and telling other people our secrets probably qualified. So I just nodded.
Carrick looked as if he wasn’t satisfied. He reached under his t-shirt and took off a slender gold chain. “Have this,” he told me. “For good luck.”
It was a four-leaf clover in shining gold. I looked down at it in amazement as he settled it around my neck. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever given me.
“And I want you to have something else, too,” he said. He felt in his pockets, found a gas station receipt and a stub of pencil, and wrote a phone number. “You saved me. Where I’m from, that means I owe you a boon. A favor. If you ever need me, you call that number. Okay?”