by J M Lassen
So I just froze when I saw him there.
“Well, well,” he said. “If it ain’t the little pussy scuzz.” He blew smoke from the perennial cigarette.
“Hello, Luke,” I said. I nodded to his companions, who included Spike, Animal, and a virtually hairless, pale gorilla who went by the unlikely name of Corky. As I spoke, I slipped my latest purchase into my shoulder bag and hoped he didn’t notice.
Corky grabbed me by the back of the neck and said, “Whaddaya want me to do with him?”
But before Luke could respond, I said, “Hey, have you still got the dead kid at the fort?”
They all hesitated. They weren’t expecting that.
“Well he’s cool,” I said. “I want to see him again.”
“Okay,” said Luke.
We didn’t have any other way to get there, so we walked, about an hour, to Cabbage Creek Woods. Luke dispensed with ceremony. We just crawled into the fort and gathered around the pit.
The smell, if anything, was worse.
This time, the dead kid was already moving around inside the box. When Luke opened the cardboard flaps, the dead kid stood up, with his horrible, pus-filled eye-sockets staring. He made that bleating, groaning sound again. He clawed at the edge of the box.
“Really cool,” I forced myself to say, swallowing hard.
“I can make him do tricks,” said Luke. “Watch this.”
I watched as he shoved his finger through the skin under the dead kid’s chin and lifted him up like a hooked fish out of the pit. The dead kid scrambled over the edge of the box, then crouched down on the dirt floor at the edge of the pit, staring into space.
Luke passed his hand slowly in front of the dead kid’s face. He snapped his fingers. The dead kid didn’t respond. Luke smacked him on the side of the head. The dead kid whimpered a little, and made that bleating sound.
“Everybody outside,” Luke said.
So we all crawled out, and then Luke reached back inside with a stick and touched the dead kid, who came out too, clinging to the stick, trying to chew on it, but not quite coordinated enough, so that he just snapped his teeth in the air and rubbed the side of his face along the stick.
I could see him clearly now. He really was rotten, with bone sticking out at his knees and elbows, only scraggly patches of dark hair left on his head, every rib showing in hideous relief on his bare back, and holes through his skin between some of them.
“Look!” said Luke. “Look at him dance!” He swirled the stick around and around, and the dead kid clung to it, staggering around in a circle.
Corky spoke up. “Ya think if’n he gets dizzy he’ll puke?”
Luke yanked the stick out of the dead kid’s hands, then hit him hard with it across the back with a thwack! The dead kid dropped to all fours and just stayed there, his head hanging down.
“Can’t puke. Got no guts left!” They all laughed at that. I didn’t quite get the joke.
But despite everything, I tried to get the joke, despite even the incongruity that I really was, like it or not, a more or less “normal” kid and right now I had a model kit for a plastic Fokker Triplane in my schoolbag. I still wanted to measure up to Luke Bradley, for all I was more afraid of him than I had ever been. I figured you had to be afraid of what you did and who you hung out with if you were going to be really bad. You did what Luke did. That was what transgression was all about.
So I unzipped my fly and pissed on the dead kid. He made that bleating sound. The others chuckled nervously. Luke grinned.
“Pretty cool, Davey, my boy. Pretty cool.”
Then Luke started to play the role of wise elder brother. He put his arm around my shoulders. He took me a little ways apart from the others and said, “I like you. I think you got something special in there.” He rapped on my head with his knuckles, hard, but I didn’t flinch away.
Then he led me back to the others and said, “I think we’re gonna make David here a member of the gang.”
So we all sat down in the clearing with the dead kid in our circle, as if he were one of the gang too. Luke got out an old briefcase from inside the fort and produced some very crumpled nudie magazines and passed them around and we all looked at the pictures. He even made a big, funny show of opening out a foldout for the dead kid to admire.
He smoked and passed cigarettes out to all of us. I’d never had one before and it made me feel sick, but Luke told me to hold the smoke in, then breathe it out slowly.
I was amazed and appalled when, right in front of everyone, he unzipped his pants and started to jerk off. The others did it too, making a point of trying to squirt on the dead kid.
Luke looked at me. “Come on, join in with the other gentlemen.” The other “gentlemen” brayed like jackasses.
I couldn’t move then. I really wanted to be like them, but I knew I wasn’t going to measure up. All I could hope for now was to put up a good front so maybe they’d decide I wasn’t a pussy after all and maybe let me go after they beat me up a little bit. I could hope for that much.
But Luke had other ideas. He put his hand on the back of my neck. It could have been a friendly gesture, or if he squeezed, he could have snapped my head off for all I could have done anything about it.
“Now David,” he said, “I don’t care if you’ve even got a dick, any more than I care if he does.” He jerked his thumb at the dead kid. “But if you want to join our gang, if you want to be cool, you have to meet certain standards.”
He flicked a switchblade open right in front of my face. I thought he was going to cut my nose with it, but with a sudden motion he slashed the dead kid’s nose right off. It flew into the air. Corky caught it, then threw it away in mindless disgust.
The dead kid whimpered. His face was a black, oozing mess.
Then Luke took hold of my right hand and slashed the back of it. I let out a yell, and tried to stop the bleeding with my other hand.
“No,” Luke said. “Let him lick it. He needs a little blood now and then to keep him healthy.”
I screamed then, and sobbed, and whimpered the way Albert had that first time, but Luke held onto me with a grip so strong that I was the one who wriggled like a fish on a line, and he held my cut hand out to the dead kid.
I couldn’t look, but something soft and wet touched my hand, and I could only think, Oh God, what kind of infection or disease am I going to get from this?
“Okay David,” Luke said then. “You’re doing just fine, but there is one more test. You have to spend the whole night in the fort with the dead kid. We’ve all done it. Now it’s your turn.”
They didn’t wait for my answer, but, laughing, hauled me back inside the fort. Then Luke had the dead kid hooked under the chin again, and lowered him down into his box in the pit.
The others crawled back outside. Before he left, Luke turned to me, “You have to stay here until tomorrow morning. You know what I’ll do to you if you pussy out.”
So I spent the rest of the afternoon, and the evening, inside that fort with the dead kid scratching around in his box. It was already dark in the fort. I couldn’t tell what time it was. I couldn’t think very clearly at all. I wondered if anyone was looking for me. I lay very still. I didn’t want to be found, especially not by the dead kid, who, for all I knew, could crawl out of the box and the pit if he really wanted to and maybe rip my throat out and drink my blood.
My hand hurt horribly. It seemed to be swelling. I was sure it was already rotten. The air was thick and foul.
But I stayed where I was, because I was afraid, because I was weak with nausea, but also, incredibly, because somehow, somewhere, deep down inside myself I still wanted to show how tough I was, to be like Luke Bradley, to be as amazing and crazy as he was. I knew that I wasn’t cut out for this, and that’s why I wanted it—to be bad, so no one would ever beat me up again and if I hated my stepdad or my teachers I could just tell them to go fuck off, as Luke would do.
Hours passed, and still the dead kid circled around and around ins
ide his cardboard box, sliding against the sides. He made that bleating, coughing sound, as if he were trying to talk and didn’t have any tongue left. For a time I thought there was almost some sense in it, some pattern. He was clicking like a cricket. This went on for hours. Maybe I even slept for a while, and fell into a kind of dream in which I was sinking slowly down into incredibly foul-smelling muck and there were thousands of bald-faced hornets swarming over me, all of them with little Luke Bradley faces saying, “Cool… really cool…” until their voices blended together and became a buzzing, then became wind in the trees, then the roar of a P&W light-rail train rushing off toward Philadelphia; and the dead kid and I were hanging onto the outside of the car, swinging wildly. My arm hit a pole and snapped right off, and black ooze was pouring out of my shoulder, and the hornets swarmed over me, eating me up bit by bit.
Once, I am certain, the dead kid did reach up and touch me, very gently, running his dry, sharp fingertip down the side of my cheek, cutting me, then withdrawing with a little bit of blood and tears on his fingertip, to drink.
But, strangest of all, I wasn’t afraid of him then. It came to me, then, that we too had more in common than not. We were both afraid and in pain and lost in the dark.
III
Then somehow it was morning. The sunlight blinded me when Luke opened the vine curtain over the door.
“Hey. You were really brave. I’m impressed, Davey.”
I let him lead me out of the fort, taking comfort in his chum/big-brother manner. But I was too much in shock to say anything.
“You passed the test. You’re one of us,” he said. “Welcome to the gang. Now there is one last thing for you to do. Not a test. You’ve passed all the tests. It’s just something we do to celebrate.”
His goons had gathered once more in the clearing outside the fort.
One of them was holding a can of gasoline.
I stood there, swaying, about to faint, unable to figure out what the gasoline was for.
Luke brought the dead kid outside.
Corky poured gasoline over the dead kid, who just bleated a little and waved his hands in the air.
Luke handed me a cigarette lighter. He flicked it until there was a flame.
“Go on,” he said. “It’ll be cool.”
But I couldn’t. I was too scared, too sick. I just dropped to my knees, then onto all fours and started puking.
So Luke lit the dead kid on fire and the others hooted and clapped as the dead kid went up like a torch, staggering and dancing around the clearing, trailing black, oily smoke. Then he fell down and seemed to shrivel up into a pile of blackened, smoldering sticks.
Luke forced me over to where the dead kid had fallen and made me touch what was left with my swollen hand.
And the dead kid moved. He made that bleating sound. He whimpered.
“You see? You can’t kill him because he’s already dead.”
They were all laughing, but I just puked again, and finally Luke hauled me to my feet by both shoulders, turned me around, and shoved me away staggering into the woods.
“Come back when you stop throwing up,” he said.
IV
Somehow I found my way home, and when I did, Mom just stared at me in horror and said, “My God, what’s that awful smell?” But Stepdad Steve shook me and demanded to know where I had been and what I’d been doing? Did I know the police were looking for me? Did I care? (No, and no.) He took me into the bathroom, washed and bandaged my hand, then held me so I couldn’t turn away and said, “Have you been taking drugs?”
That was so stupid I started to laugh, and he smacked me across the face, something he rarely did, but this time, I think, he was determined to beat the truth out of me, and Mommy, dearest Mommy didn’t raise a finger to stop him as he laid on with his hand, then his belt, and I was shrieking my head off.
All they got out of me was the admission that I had been with Luke Bradley and his friends.
“I don’t want you to associate with those boys any further. They’re unwholesome.”
He didn’t know a tenth of it, and I started to laugh again, like I was drunk or something, and he was about to hit me again when Mom finally made him stop.
She told me to change my clothes and take a bath and then go to my room. I wasn’t allowed out except for meals and to go to the bathroom.
That was fine with me. I didn’t want to come out. I wanted to bury myself in there, to be quiet and dead, like the dead kid in his box.
But when I fell asleep, I was screaming in a dream, and I woke up screaming, in the dark, because it was night again.
Mom looked in briefly, but didn’t say anything. The expression on her face was more of disgust than concern, as if she really wanted to say, Serves him damn right but, Oh God, another crazy kid we’ll have to send to the so, so expensive psychiatrist and I’d rather spend the money on a new mink coat or a car or something.
It was my kid brother Albert who snuck over to my bed and whispered, “It’s the dead kid, isn’t it?”
“Huh?”
“The dead kid. He talks to me in my dreams. He’s told me all about himself. He’s lost. His father’s a magician, who is still trying to find him. There was a war between magicians, or something, and that’s how he got lost.”
“Huh? Is this something you read in a comic book?”
“No! It’s the dead kid. You know what we have to do, David. We have to go save him.”
I have to give my brother credit for bringing about my moral redemption as surely as if he’d handed me my sanity back on a silver platter and said, Go on, don’t be a pussy. Take it.
Because he was right. We had to save the dead kid.
Maybe the dead kid talked to Albert in his dreams, but he didn’t tell me anything. Why should he?
Still, I’d gotten the message.
So, that night, very late, Albert and I got dressed and slipped out the window of our room, dropping onto the lawn. He wasn’t afraid, not a little bit. He led me, by the ritual route, under the arching bushes, through the tunnels of vines to all our secret places, as if we had to be there first to gain some special strength for the task at hand.
Under the bushes, in the darkness, we paused to scratch secret signs in the dirt.
Then we scurried across the golf course, across the highway, into Cabbage Creek Woods.
We came to the fort by the light of a full moon now flickering through swaying branches. It was a windy night. The woods were alive with sounds of wood creaking and snapping, of animals calling back and forth, and night-birds cawing. Somewhere, very close at hand, an owl cried out.
Albert got down on all fours in the doorway of the fort, poked his head in, and said, “Hey, dead kid! Are you in there?”
He backed out, and waited. There was a rustling sound, but the dead kid didn’t come out. So we both crawled in and saw why. There wasn’t much left of him. He was just a bundle of black sticks, his head like a charred pumpkin balanced precariously on top. All he could do was sit up weakly and peer over the side of the box.
So we had to lift him out of the pit, box and all.
“Come on,” Albert said to him. “We want to show you some stuff.”
We carried the dead kid between us. We took him back across the golf course, under the bushes, to our special places. We showed him the secret signs. Then we took him into town. We showed him the storefronts, Wayne Toy Town where I bought models, where there were always neat displays of miniature battlefields or of monsters in the windows. We showed him where the pet store was and the ice cream store, and where you got comic books.
Albert sat down on the merry-go-round in the playground, holding the dead kid’s box securely beside him. I pushed them around slowly. Metal creaked.
We stood in front of our school for a while, and Albert and the dead kid were holding hands, but it seemed natural and right.
Then we went away in the bright moonlight, through the empty streets. No one said anything, because whateve
r the dead kid could say or hear wasn’t in words anyway. I couldn’t hear it. I think Albert could.
In the end the dead kid scrambled out of his box. Somehow he had regained enough strength to walk. Somehow, he was beginning to heal. In the end, he wanted to show us something.
He led us back across the golf course but away from Cabbage Creek Woods. We crossed the football field at Radnor High School, then went across the street, up in back of Wyeth Labs and across the high bridge over the P&W tracks. I was afraid the dead kid would slip on the metal stairs and fall, but he went more steadily than we did. (Albert and I were both a little afraid of heights.)
He led us across another field, into woods again, then through an opening where a stream flowed beneath the Pennsylvania Railroad embankment. We waded ankle-deep in the chilly water and came, at last, to the old Grant Estate, a huge ruin of a Victorian house which every kid knew was haunted, which our parents told us to stay away from because it was dangerous. (There were so many stories about kids murdered by tramps or falling through floors.) But now it wasn’t a ruin at all, no broken windows, no holes in the roof. Every window blazed with light.
From a high window in a tower, a man in black gazed down at us.
The dead kid looked up at him, then began to run.
I hurried after him. Now it was Albert (who had better sense) who hung back. I caught hold of the dead kid’s arm, as if to stop him, and I felt possessive for a moment, as if I owned him the way Luke Bradley had owned him.
“Hey dead kid,” I said. “Where are you going?”
He turned to me, and by some trick of the moonlight he seemed to have a face, pale, round, with dark eyes; and he said to me in that bleating, croaking voice of his, actually forming words for once, “My name is Jonathan.”
That was the only thing he ever said to me. He never talked to me in dreams.
He went to the front of the house. The door opened. The light within seemed to swallow him. He turned back, briefly, and looked at us. I don’t think he was just a bundle of sticks anymore.