by Eli Nixon
Chapter 5
"I FEEL like an idiot."
Rivet slapped me on the shoulder. "You'll be fine, bub. You look like John Wayne."
We were standing on the front porch of my house waiting for Jennie to join us. We'd taken it easy with the dope this time. Just a tiny pinch for each of us. Maintenance doses, Rivet was already calling it. Even so, water collection had gotten sloppy. Jennie'd gone upstairs and scrubbed about a quarter of the tub before giving up and turning on the faucet, then she'd come back down to help the rest of us fill every glass, bowl, and coffee mug in my kitchen. Rivet had gotten this idea to, and I quote, "save counter space" by building a pyramid out of the filled drinking glasses.
"There," he'd turned toward us, smile radiant and eyes glassy. "We can just take what we need from the top and work our way down." But when he turned back around, his knee bumped the cabinet. For a breathless moment, the entire shimmering glass structure teetered and it seemed like it would hold, then it came crashing down. Half the glasses shattered and water and splintery shards sprayed over the kitchen floor.
We were in the middle of yelling about it when Jennie clapped a hand to her mouth and raced out of the room. Rivet and I both turned toward the sound of her feet thumping up the stairs. When she came back down, her face was sheepish and her sneakers were sloshing with every step.
"Left the tub on too long," she'd mumbled as she went back to filling up coffee mugs.
By the time we finished with the water, we had twelve coffee mugs, seven glasses, two water bottles, a milk jug, and a bathtub full of water of questionable quality. We made a unanimous decision to save the tub for bathing, then set about finding weapons for our dangerous quest to Old Lady Winters's.
And now here we were on the porch, waiting for Jennie.
"Seriously," I said. "An absolute idiot."
"Don't be so hard on yourself," Rivet was scanning the street for activity. So far, we hadn't seen a single person or vehicle on the road. My house was in a quiet suburb that was a tad on the lower edge of middle class. There weren't any posh community guidelines about stuff like how short to trim your lawn or where your trash bins had to be placed on the curb, and most of the residents didn't give much of a shit about those things anyway.
Directly across the street from us was a dilapidated yellow bungalow that was sagging dangerously on its foundation. Could have been sold to a blind family as a split-level, but even real estate agents didn't stoop that low in Joshuah Hill, so for the past two years it had sat empty while its front lawn grew up like a jungle. Most of the windows had been nailed up, but a few of the boards had been removed by neighborhood teens and junkheads. Two broken windows in the front glared out across the street like a pair of menacing eyes. It had always given me the creeps. I looked away and up the street, where the houses were in decidedly better condition. That was where actual families lived.
Down the other way was an oblong cul-de-sac with a few more vacant homes in various states of disarray. My house was the first one on the street that was lived in, and as such it felt at times like there was a plague creeping up the lane from the cul-de-sac on the right and my home was next in its path of destruction.
If I was forced to be honest, my house wasn't in much better shape than any of the vacant ones.
"What if we actually run into trouble?" I asked Rivet. I looked down at the object in my hand. "This won't do anything."
"Poke 'em," Rivet said, eyes still down the street. "What's that car doing?"
"Where?"
"There at the end, the truck near the stop sign."
I squinted into the afternoon sun and saw a little green Ford pickup parked at the curb near the intersection with Bloomingdale Lane.
"Oh, that's Janet Wazowski's second car. I think it used to be her husband's. Or ex's; she's divorced. She uses her Mazda and leaves that one parked on the street."
Rivet silently resumed his search.
"They'll be right up on me before I can even touch them," I spoke into the strained silence. "Wouldn't a knife or something be better?"
"If there isn't anything wrong, a junkie walking down the street with a steak knife is going to get the cops called on us. And we can't afford that." He patted the chest pocket of his button-up shirt as if to prove his point. He'd wanted to bring the junk in exchange for letting me and Jennie carry weapons. When I'd calmly pointed out that it wasn't his goddamn place to decide whether we could arm ourselves, he'd gotten sullen and uncooperative, so of course I had to let him have his way.
Jennie slapped open the screen door and joined us on the front porch. Rivet ignored her, and she watched him scan the street for a moment before looking down at my hand.
"Is that a ballpoint pen?" she asked.
"Yeah. It'll work," I said defensively.
"What're you going to do with it? Sign a check to make them leave?"
"I can, you know, poke them with it. Gouge out an eye."
"Better than this." She hefted a bright yellow umbrella still in the store's plastic wrapping from when I'd bought it years ago. I noticed she stood with me between her and Rivet. "We ready?"
"Ready as I'll ever be," I said. "Let's go, Rivet."
Finally, he turned to us. The sun was dipping slightly in the sky behind him and from the left, outlining his features in severe golden light. One eye glinted at us from the soft shadow cast by the bridge of his nose. He looked almost majestic, in a disheveled way. Somehow, that chipped wooden porch with peeling paint felt like a dock at the end of the world. A neighborhood I'd known my entire adult life had, in the blink of an eye, become an unknown, a dangerous realm where shadows held killers and danger lurked just beyond the visible.
Then the moment passed and I couldn't help feeling foolish. It was just a regular afternoon and we were taking a stroll down the street. My imagination would do me in one of these days. I brushed past him and started down the cracked concrete walkway to the street.
"Come on," I said over my shoulder. I heard the creak of the wooden stairs as they followed me down.
On the street, I cut left, heading toward Bloomingdale Lane and Janet Wazowski's lone green pickup. There were no sounds on the street, the entire neighborhood seemingly caught in a muffled hush. Even the footfalls of our rubber sneakers sounded mute on the asphalt. Jennie and Rivet quickened their pace to catch up and sidled up beside me, one on each side. Maybe it was the surreal atmosphere that had descended over the afternoon, but the three of us floated away from the curb and, in a straight line, marched boldly up the center of the street.
Was the world already ours? It felt that way. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a little thrill working up my spine. I was a child again, playing guns and swords in the sparse woods down by the trickling creek full of runoff from the uptown manufacturing plants. Crouched in the weeds, every sense tuned for the crack of a twig or the whisper of fabric sliding across a tree trunk, Nerf gun spray-painted black at the ready in my tiny hands. Ready to take down the approaching threat, the enemy at the gates, the world, if that's what it took.
A calming sense of nostalgia settled over me as Jennie, Rivet, and I paraded down the middle of the deserted street, pen and umbrella and drugs at the ready. Why had we even grown up in the first place? We hadn't asked for it, for this so-called gift of adulthood. Life had been so much simpler as boys, before the jobs and worries. Before the junk. Just me and Rivet making adventures as we went along, never stopping to appreciate the opportunities laid before us in a wide swathe. The future was distant, and we were young. We had only to conjure a dream to make it true.
You learn a lot growing up in a small town, but one thing you never learn is how to really experience something. To us, Joshuah Hill was a jumbled canvas onto which countless generations had tried to paint their own Rockwell of normal life. Kids laughing in washtubs, a happy dog sneaking away a sock. Smiles, nostalgia, infinite shades of dusty brown. It wasn't real, though. That was the problem. None of those paintings stuck; they just smeared un
der each new rain and left the canvas a little dirtier, a little more worn, than before. Nobody ever, truly gave a shit about Joshuah Hill, so as the years passed, nothing actually changed.
The junk was our whitewash. Just our own version of it, like so many others that had come before it. Painted it clean, like. Ready for our own projections. Maybe that's why it was so easy to get into the stuff. After awhile of hopscotching from one part-time to another, the car wash, the washed up bowling alley, hardass Mr. Collins's general store, you run out of steam, and you run out of options. Every job's just the same picture with a fresh coat of watercolor.
Truth is, we sucked at life. We grew up with starry eyes filled with cities and lights, but those visions eventually faded. Postcards and movie sets. They weren't real. Couldn't be, to us. Life doesn't always begin in Joshuah Hill, but that's where it ends. We have the cemetery to prove it.
Rivet was humming, on my left. I told him to shut up and he told me to put it in writing. I jammed the pen in my pocket, incensed. I peeked into Janet Wazowski's pickup as we passed, then scanned the shuttered windows of the house behind it. Everything was empty, dead. The street, the houses. Not even dogs were barking.
"Hold it," said Jennie as we neared the Bloomingdale intersection. "You guys see that?"
"Why aren't there any birds?" Rivet asked, head tilted up. "The sky, the power lines. Where the fuck did they go? Here, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon..."
"Look, guys. Back here," Jennie insisted, ignoring Rivet and backpedaling a few feet to the old pickup. "See that?"
There's an active sandstone quarry up north of Joshuah Hill. Most kids my age, twenties or so, they'd be finding their careers up there about this time. They blast once or twice a week, and the fallout is this fine particle dust that settles over everything in Joshuah Hill in a thin, brown layer like a sugar dusting. You don't sweep every day, the dust builds up and gets over everything, on the counters, in the cushions. Shades of brown, right? So this truck we were looking at, you could tell it's green by the sides, but since Janet never used it, the hood and cab roof had accumulated about a quarter-inch of sandstone dust, making it into a half-hearted chameleon trying to blend in with the street.
And right on the edge of the hood, down in front where the metal meets the headlight, was a long, smeared handprint in the dust that showed the green metal beneath. A little chill ran up my back and I reached into my pocket to grip my trusty BIC.
"So, what?" Rivet said from behind us. "I swear, you guys are jumping at every—BOO!" He shouted it, leaping forward. Jennie jerked visibly. Rivet chuckled.
"Fuck you, Rivet!" Jennie shouted. "Why don't you take a bite out of my fucking face again! Go ahead, get it over with. I'm so done with this, both of you. I'm going home."
"Jen," I said, trying to keep my voice low and reassuring. "We have to stay together. Rivet's an asshole, but he was just kidding. See? He's sorry." I arched my eyebrows at Rivet, who mumbled something that could have passed for an apology in a thorazine clinic.
"He bit. My ear," said Jennie. She was shaking, and her eyes were reflecting the light more than they had a moment ago. "Maybe I was in shock before, but you know what? That little fact is starting to hit home real quick. He's a quack, a real bitchtits psycho. I guess you don't know, Ray. Don't even know what your friend is really like. You know what he said to me when we were dating? He said..."
"Jennie," Rivet cut in. "I'm sorry, right? I said that. Can you calm down before you say something you don't mean?"
"I damn well mean it, Ritchie." Rivet twisted his little stud earring, something he always did when he was nervous. Whatever was happening between them right now, this wasn't the best time. I saw the handprint on the Ford's hood again out of the corner of my eye. I was nervous, too, but for a different reason.
"How about this?" I offered. "We head back to the house for awhile, just to clear our heads. Sit down. Think. Have another hit." I eyeballed Rivet, sure that the last would get his attention, but he kept glancing at Jennie and twisting, twisting that little stud. "We shouldn't be arguing out in the open like this."
Jennie rounded on me. "You too, Ray. Give it a rest with the zombie thing. We got freaked out, but get this: We were high!" she yelled. "That doesn't happen. Rivet's just off his meds again. That's it."
"...meds?" I asked Rivet. "What's she talking about."
"Like she said, she's high," Rivet said. "Let's get go—fuck. What was that?"
"It wasn't funny the first time," Jennie glowered.
"No, there's somebody in the house. Janice's house, there."
"Janet," I corrected.
"Whatever. There was a face in that little window, on the door. Someone's watching us."
His words hit us slowly, like something brushing your ankle before you realize it's a hand under your bed. I squinted at the window, but didn't see anything. The lights were off inside, and the glare was all wrong. I could have imagined a million faces in that tiny square of glass, none of them real.
"Back to my house," I said. "Something's not right. Janet works weekdays."
"Maybe she's sick today," Jennie said. "Or maybe Rivet's an asshole."
"Come on..." I urged.
"Guys..." Rivet whispered. "It's still there."
I squinted again, puzzling past the shapes and reflections, and I saw it: Just the half-dome of a pale, partially shadowed face and one wide eye. Staring straight at us. I stepped back involuntarily. I couldn't tell if it was Janet Wazowski.
"Christ," I breathed. "My house. Let's go."
"Let's check it out," Rivet said.
Jennie looked fit to strangle a hog. "Of all the dumb, dipshit, bullshit suggestions, Rivet."
"I'll just knock and call a 'halloo,' " Rivet said. He was already walking across the lawn.
"Rivet," Jennie and I both hissed. I knew what he was doing. Knew it and hated him for it. He was getting back at Jennie for bringing up the medication, whatever that was about. He was halfway across the lawn now, strolling up like a neighbor for a cup of sugar. I couldn't see anything through the window anymore, but someone was in the house, and I'm not good at much, but I'm terrible at shaking a feeling I've been having all day.
"Ahhh," I intoned indecisively, glancing at Jennie.
"Don't you even think about it, Ray," she warned. She'd backed up a few steps and edged sideways so the pickup stood between her and the house.
"But what if?" I said. "Isn't that always the question? You told me that in eighth grade. What if? And...shit. Two's better than one." I took off across the dead lawn in a brisk trot, covering the distance quickly to catch up with Rivet just as he ascended to the cracked stone stoop.
"Heidy ho," he said softly, failing miserably at nonchalance. He was twisting his earring hard enough to get a friction burn and staring holes through the door. The window, clearer now that we were closer, was empty.
"She gets it, Rivet," I whispered. "You made your point. Game's over."
"Game's never over, Rayman," he replied. I cursed him silently. It was our childhood goodbye when we parted ways at dusk after playing in the woods after school.
"I hate you," I said, but without feeling. He smiled sideways at me. I couldn't help grinning back. "Just get it over with."
"Halloooo-ooo," Rivet crooned, then rapped loudly on the door. Inside, the muffled echoes faded quickly into the shadows, as if they'd collapsed into a pile of black velvet. Nothing moved on the other side of the door.
"There," I said. "Nobody home. Now let's go."
I turned away just as the door creaked open.