Acts of Nature

break it down some already,” I said, pointing to the metal strapping where I’d removed my impromptu pry bar. “Maybe you can figure a better way. You look like you might be the mechanical one of your brothers.”
    “They ain’t my brothers,” Wayne said, bending to pull at one corner of the frame with his left hand.
    “So, your name isn’t Morris?”
    “No. It ain’t.”
    “You kind of look alike,” I said, interviewing, and hoping it was not too obvious.
    “No, we don’t,” the kid said.
    I was guessing that he might be fifteen or sixteen, but on closer inspection, the barely discernable mustache he was trying to grow made me think he was possibly older, just a little behind in maturity. A follower? A simple ride-along? When I was still a cop in Philadelphia, I’d shot and killed a twelve- year-old tag-along who had joined one of his buddies for a late-night convenience store robbery. I’d been responding to an alarm and when the first guy out of the store took a shot at me, splitting the muscle and tendon in my neck, I returned fire and hit the second person out, a child who took the 9mm slug in the middle of the back. Just a boy, dead at the scene. It was the event that led to my resignation for medical reasons. It was the reason I’d come to South Florida to escape my inner-city dreams. Maybe it was part of the reason I was standing here, stuck to some natural destiny.
    “Let’s flip it over,” I instructed. “It might be easier to disassemble these legs. It will be a lot easier to move that way.” I started to turn my end and the movement forced the kid to expose his left hand for the first time. I’d noted his reluctance from the moment I’d seen him standing in the open, his shirtsleeves hanging down past his fingertips, his hand held slightly behind his hip. At first I’d thought—weapon. A handgun or even a knife. Now as he reached to twist the metal frame of the bed, I saw that he was missing his thumb. The scar told me it wasn’t something that happened at birth. It was a definite injury and one he was careful about showing. I thought of the round, quarter-size scar of white tissue on my own neck where the bullet on the street had burrowed through. I had not caught myself reaching for it in quite some time. I’d lost the habit, if not the memory of killing a child.
    Wayne got down on his knees to inspect the bolt system on the legs of the cot and then looked around.
    “Y’all got any tools?”
    I was right about his mechanical inclination.
    “I had to bend the metal of that strap to get it off, just worked it until it broke,” I said.
    “Yeah, I seen that,” Wayne said, like I’d pulled some third- grader stunt on the thing. He got up and I watched as he walked to the sink, now disregarding me. He went through a drawer and came out with some silverware—a spoon, a couple of butter knives with blades so dull they’d have a time cutting butter. I’d passed them all over on my earlier inspection.
    “So none of you guys seem to be injured from the hurricane,” I said, continuing my interview. “Your place must have held up pretty well.”
    “Yeah,” he said, giving up nothing more. Not a storyteller.
    I watched the kid set to the bolts, using the straight lengths of the two knife handles to pinch the metal nuts in parallel and then turn them. The fingers of his left hand worked in an odd but efficient manner, making up for the loss of his thumb. He’d adapted. Maybe this kid had never heard of the evolution of the opposable thumb that let man crawl out of swamps like this one a million years ago. Right now I was hoping for a little less sophistication in his perceptiveness.
    “Mr. Morris said your camp was up to the northwest, so are you all from Belle Glade or Clewiston or what?” I said.
    “Hell, no,” the kid reacted, like I’d put him in some rival high school. He started to go on but thought better of it.
    “How ’bout I loosen these up and you can finger twist ’em off, sir,” he said instead, looking over at me before moving on to the next leg.
    “Yeah, sure.”
    I changed positions with him and we worked together. The kid was either naturally closed-mouthed or savvy enough not to let loose any more information about himself and his buddies than he was forced to. His could be an attitude from too many times in the backseat of a police cruiser or in the local juvenile lockup, or a simple backwoods avoidance of people unlike himself. A perceptive