by Jack Ketchum
Bitch, I thought.
And then I did feel guilty. Because that was personal.
That was about Meg.
And then I felt depressed.
It was as though part of me knew—didn’t want to believe it or even think about it but knew all along.
I was never going to get that ducky. It had been bullshit from the beginning.
Just like Eddie said.
And somehow the reason for that was all wrapped up with Meg and with girls and women in general, even with Ruth and my mother somehow.
It was too big for me to grasp entirely so I suppose my mind just let it slide.
What remained was depression and a dull ache.
“Come on,” I said to Kenny. He was staring at the house, still not believing it, like he was expecting the lights to come right back on again. But he knew too. He looked at me and I could tell he knew.
All of us did.
We trooped back silently to the tent.
Inside it was Willie Jr., finally, who put the canteen down and spoke.
He said, “Maybe we could get her into The Game.”
We thought about that.
And the night wound down from there.
Chapter Nine
I was in my yard trying to get the big red power mower going and sweating straight through my T-shirt already because the damn thing was worse than a motorboat to start, when I heard Ruth shout in a kind of voice I don’t think I’d ever heard her use before—really furious.
Jesus Christ! -
I dropped the cord and looked up.
It was the kind of voice my mother had been known to use when she got unhinged, which wasn’t often, despite the open warfare with my father. It meant you ran for cover. But when Ruth got mad it was usually at Woofer and all she had to do then was look at him, her lips pressed tight together, her eyes narrowed down to small glittery stones, in order to shut him up or make him stop whatever he was doing. The look was completely intimidating.
We used to imitate it and laugh, Donny and Willie and I—but when Ruth was the one wearing it it was no laughing matter.
I was glad for an excuse to stop struggling with the mower so I walked around the side of our garage where you could see over into their backyard.
Ruth’s wash was blowing on the clothesline. She was standing on the porch, her hands on her hips, and even if you hadn’t heard the voice or what she said you could tell she was really mad.
“You stupid shit!” was what she said.
And I can tell you, that shocked me.
Sure, Ruth cursed like a sailor. That was one of the reasons we liked her. Her husband, Willie Sr., “that lovely Irish bastard” or “that idiot mick sonovabitch” and John Lentz, the town’s mayor—and, we suspect, Ruth’s onetime suitor—got blasted regularly.
Everybody got some now and then.
But the thing is it was always casual swearing, pretty much without real anger. It was meant to get a laugh at some poor guy’s expense, and usually did.
It was just Ruth’s way of describing people.
It was pretty much like our own. Our friends were all retards, scumbags, lardasses or shit-for-brains. Their mothers all ate the flies off dead camels.
This was wholly different. Shit was what she said, and shit was what she meant.
I wondered what Meg had done.
I looked up to my own porch where the back screen door was open, hoping my mother wasn’t in the kitchen, that she hadn’t heard her. My mother didn’t approve of Ruth and I got enough grief already for spending as much time over there as I did.
I was in luck. She wasn’t around.
I looked at Ruth. She hadn’t said anything else and she didn’t need to. Her expression said it all.
I felt kind of funny, like I was spying again, twice in two days. But of course that was exactly what I bad to do. I wasn’t about to allow her to see me watching her, exposed the way she was. It was too embarrassing. I pressed up close to the garage and peered around at her, hoping she wouldn’t look over my way for any reason. And she didn’t.
Their own garage blocked my view, though, so I couldn’t see what the problem was. I kept waiting for Meg to show up, to see how she was taking being called a stupid shit.
And then I got another surprise.
Because it wasn’t Meg.
It was Susan.
I guessed she’d been trying to help with the laundry. But it had rained last night, and it looked as though she’d dropped some of Ruth’s whites on the muddy, scruffy excuse for a lawn they had because you could see the dirt stains on what she carried, a sheet or maybe a couple of pillowcases.
She was crying, really crying hard so that her whole body was shaking as she walked back toward Ruth standing rigid on the landing.
It was pathetic—this little tiny girl moving slowly along with braces on her legs and braces on her arms trying to manage just this one small pile of whites tucked under her arm that she probably shouldn’t have had in the first place. I felt bad for her.
And finally, so did Ruth I guess.
Because she stepped down off the landing and took the stuff away from her and hesitated, watching her a moment as she sobbed and shook and stared down into the dirt. And then slowly you could see the tension go out of her as she raised her hand and rested it lightly, tentatively at first on Susan’s shoulder, then turned and walked back to the house.
And at the very last moment just as they reached the top of the stairs Ruth looked in my direction so that I had to throw myself back fast and hard against the garage.
But all the same I’d swear to what I saw before that.
It’s become a little important to me, actually, in retrospect. I try to figure it out.
Ruth’s face looked very tired. Like the burst of anger was so strong it had drained her. Or maybe what I was seeing was just a little piece of something—something bigger—something that had been going on unnoticed by me for quite a while now and this was just like a kind of crescendo on a long-playing record.
But the other thing I saw was what strikes me to this day, what puzzles me.
Even at the time it made me wonder.
Just before I threw myself back, as Ruth turned looking skinny and tired with her hand on Susan’s shoulder. In just that instant as she turned.
I’d swear that she was crying too.
And my question is, for whom?
Chapter Ten
The next thing was the tent worms.
It seemed to happen practically overnight. One day the trees were clean and normal and the next day they were hung with these heavy white sacks of webbing. In the bottom of the sacks you could see something vaguely dark and unhealthy-looking and if you looked closely enough you could see them moving.
“We’ll burn ’em out,” said Ruth.
We were standing in her yard near the birch tree, Woofer, Donny and Willie, Meg and I, and Ruth, who had on her old blue housedress with the deep pockets. It was ten o’clock in the morning and Meg had just finished her chores. There was a little smudge of dirt beneath her left eye.
“You boys gather up some sticks,” she said. “Long ones, thick. And be sure to cut them green so they won’t burn. Meg, get the rag bag out of the basement.”
She stood squinting into the morning sunlight, surveying the damage. Virtually half the trees in their yard including the birch were already strung with sacks, some just the size of baseballs but others wide and deep as a shopping bag. The woods was full of them.
“Little bastards. They’ll strip these trees in no time.”
Meg went into the house and the rest of us headed for the woods to find some sticks. Donny had his hatchet so we cut some saplings and stripped them and cut them roughly in half. It didn’t take long.
When we came back Ruth and Meg were in the garage soaking the rags in kerosene. We wrapped them over the saplings and Ruth tied them off with clothesline and then we soaked them again.
She handed one to each of
us.
“I’ll show you how it goes,” she said. “Then you can do it by yourselves. Just don’t set the goddamn woods on fire.”
It felt incredibly adult.
Ruth trusting us ith fire, with torches.
My mother never would have.
We followed her into the yard looking, I guess, like a bunch of peasants heading out after Frankenstein’s monster, our unlit torches aloft. But we didn’t act so adult—we acted like we were going to a party—all of us silly and excited except Meg, who was taking it very seriously. Willie got Woofer in a headlock and ground his knuckles into his crewcut, a wrestling move we’d picked up from three hundred-pound Haystacks Calhoun, famous for the Big Splash. Donny and I marched side by side behind them, pumping our torches like a couple of drum majors with batons, giggling like fools. Ruth didn’t seem to mind.
When we got to the birch tree Ruth dug into her pocket and pulled out a book of safety matches.
The nest on the birch tree was a big one.
“I’ll do this one,” said Ruth. “You watch.”
She lit the torch and held it a moment until the fire burned down and it was safe to use. It was still a pretty good blaze, though. “Be careful,” she said. “You don’t want to burn the tree.”
She held it six inches or so below the sack.
The sack began to melt.
It didn’t burn. It melted the way Styrofoam melts, fading, receding back. It was thick and maultilayered but it went fast.
And suddenly all these writhing, wriggling bodies were tumbling out, fat black furry worms—smoking, crackling.
You could almost hear them scream.
There must have been hundreds in just that one nest. A layer of the sack would burn through to expose another layer and there were more in there. They just kept coming, falling to our feet like a black rain.
Then Ruth hit the mother lode.
It was as though a clot of living tar the size of a softball spilled out directly onto the torch, splitting apart as it fell.
The torch sputtered, there were so many of them, and almost seemed to go out for a moment. Then it flared again and those that had clung to it burned and fell.
“Jesus shit!” said Woofer.
Ruth looked at him.
“Sorry,” he said. But his eyes were wide.
You had to admit it was incredible. I’d never seen such slaughter. The ants on the porch were nothing to this. Ants were tiny, insignificant. When you tossed the boiling water on them they just curled and died. Whereas some of these were an inch long. They twisted and writhed—they seemed to want to live. I looked at the ground. There were worms all over the place. Most of them were dead, but a lot of them weren’t, and those that weren’t were trying to crawl away.
“What about these guys?” I asked her.
“Forget them,” she said. “They’ll just die. Or the birds will get them.” She laughed. “We opened the oven before they were ready. Not quite baked yet.”
“They’re sure baked now,” said Willie.
“We could get a rock,” said Woofer. “Crush ’em!”
“Listen to me when I talk. Forget them,” said Ruth. She reached into her pocket again. “Here.” She started handing us each books of matches.
“Remember. I want a yard left when you’re through. And no going back into the woods. The woods can take care of itself.”
We took them from her. All but Meg.
“I don’t want them,” she said.
“What?”
She held out the matches.
“I … I don’t want them. I’ll just go finish the laundry okay? This is … kind of …”
She looked down at the ground, at the black worms curled there, at the live ones crawling. Her face was pale.
“What?” said Ruth. “Disgusting? You offended, honey?”
“No. I just don’t want …”
Ruth laughed. “I’ll be damned. Look here boys,” she said. “I’ll be damned.”
She was still smiling, but her face had gone really hard all of a sudden. It startled me and made me think of the other day with Susan. It was as though she’d been on some sort of hair trigger all morning with Meg and we simply hadn’t noticed it. We’d been too busy, too excited.
“Look here,” she said. “What we’ve got here is a lesson in femininity.” She stepped up close. “Meg’s squeamish. You understand how girls get squeamish, don’t you boys? Ladies do. And Meg here is a lady. Why sure she is!”
She dropped the heavy sarcasm then and you could see the naked anger there.
“So what in the name of Jesus Christ do you suppose that makes me, Meggy? You suppose I’m not a lady? You figure ladies can’t do what’s necessary? Can’t get rid of the goddamn pests in their goddamn garden?”
Meg looked confused. It came so fast you couldn’t blame her.
“No, I…”
“You damn well better say no to me, honey! Because I don’t need that kind of insinuation from any kid in a T-shirt can’t even wipe her own face clean. You understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She backed away a step.
And that seemed to cool Ruth down a little. She took a breath.
“Okay,” she said. “You go ahead downstairs. Go on, get back to your laundry. And call me when you’re finished. I’ll have something else for you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned and Ruth smiled.
“My boys can handle it,” she said. “Can’t you, boys?”
I nodded. At that moment I couldn’t speak. Nobody spoke. Her dismissal of Meg was so complete with authority and a strange sense of justice I was really a little in awe of her.
She patted Woofer’s head.
I glanced at Meg. I saw her walk back to the house, head low, wiping at her face, looking for the smudge of dirt Ruth said was there.
Ruth draped her arm across my shoulder and turned toward the elm trees in the back. I inhaled the scent of her—soap and kerosene and cigarettes and clean fresh hair.
“My boys can do it,” she said to me. And her voice was very gentle again.
Chapter Eleven
By one o’clock we’d torched every nest in the Chandlers’ yard, and Ruth had been right—the birds were having a field day now.
I stunk of kerosene.
I was starving and would have killed for a few White Castles just then. I settled for a bologna sandwich.
I went home.
I washed up in the kitchen and made one.
I could hear my mother in the living room ironing, humming along to the original cast album of The Music Man, which she and my father had bussed to New York to see last year, just before the shit hit the fan about what I could only assume was my father’s latest affair. My father had plenty of opportunity for affairs and he took them. He was co-owner of a bar and restaurant called the Eagle’s Nest. He met them late and he met them early.
But I guess my mother had forgotten all that for the moment and was remembering the good times now with Professor Harold Hill and company.
I hated The Music Man.
I shut myself in my room awhile and flipped through my dog-eared copies of Macabre and Stranger Than Science but there was nothing in there that interested me so I decided to go out again.
I walked out the back and Meg was standing on the Chandlers’ back porch shaking out the living-room throw rugs. She saw me and motioned me over.
I felt a moment of awkwardness, of divided loyalty.
If Meg was on Ruth’s shit list, there was probably some good reason for it.
On the other hand I still remembered that ride on the Ferris wheel and that morning by the Big Rock.
She draped the rugs carefully over the iron railing and came down off the steps across the driveway to meet me. The smudge on her face was gone but she still wore the dirty yellow shirt and Donny’s old rolled-up Bermudas. There was dust in her hair.
She took me by the arm and led me silently over to the side o
f her house, out of sight lines from the dining room window.
“I don’t get it,” she said…
You could see there was something troubling her, something she’d been working on.
“Why don’t they like me, David?”
That wasn’t what I’d expected. “Who, the Chandlers?”
“Yes.”
She just looked at me. She was serious.
“Sure they do. They like you.”
“No they don’t. I mean, I do everything I can to make them like me. I do more than my share of the work. I try to talk with them, get to know them, get them to know me, but they just don’t seem to want to. It’s like they want to not like me. Like it’s better that way.”
It was embarrassing. It was friends she was talking about here.
“Look,” I said. “So Ruth got mad at you. I don’t know why. Maybe she’s having a bad day. But nobody else got mad. Willie and Woofer and Donny didn’t get mad.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand. Willie and Woofer and Donny never get mad. It’s not that. Not with them. It’s just that they never seem to see me here, either. Like I don’t exist. Like I don’t matter. I talk to them and they grunt and walk away. Or else when they do notice there’s something … not right about it. The way they look at me. And Ruth …”
She’d started now and there was no stopping her.
“… Ruth hates me! Me and Susan both. You don’t see it. You think this was just one thing just this one time but it’s not. It’s all the time. I work all day for her some days and I just can’t please her, nothing’s right, nothing’s ever the way she’d do it. I know she thinks I’m stupid, lazy, ugly …”
“Ugly?” That, at least, was obviously ridiculous.
She nodded. “I never thought I was before but now I don’t even know. David, you’ve known these people all your life practically, right?”
“Yeah I have.”
“So why? What did I do? I go to bed at night and it’s all I can think about. We were both real happy before. You know, before we came here I used to paint. Nothing very much, just a watercolor now and then. I don’t suppose I was ever too great at it. But my mother used to like them. And Susan used to like them, and my teachers. I’ve still got the paints and brushes but I just can’t start to do one anymore. You know why? Because I know what Ruth would do, I know what she’d think. I know what she’d say. She’d just look at me and I’d know I was stupid and wasting my time to even try.”