We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  “My dad owns that,” said Julie, matter-of-factly.

  “For real?”

  “That’s his thing. Christianity in colonial America. What witchcraft has to do with it beats me.”

  Heather shrugged. “You can’t have one without the other,” she reasoned.

  “Like chocolate and peanut butter,” Julie said. She remembered seeing an ad a long time ago on TV in the television department at Sears as she waited for her father to buy a necktie. It really made an impression on her, the way the two people in the commercial collided so hard their snacks got contaminated. She’d never looked at peanut butter the same way again. Not that she ever got it much. The Prophet had a peanut allergy.

  “Sure,” Heather said, but her mind was on the book. “How do you know he owns it?”

  Julie remembered the fight. It was several years ago, the Prophet still a baby. Usually if something was amiss, her parents were more likely to give each other the silent treatment, each of them a Frigidaire with the setting dialed to nuclear winter. They rarely yelled. But the book had brought out another side of her mother she’d never seen. It wasn’t yelling per se, but speaking as if punctuating every word. I. Don’t. Want. That. Book. In. This. House, declared Mrs. Kaling, Mr. Kaling countering, It’s. Research. RESEARCH.

  “Then why are we here wasting our time?” asked Heather.

  “I dunno, you called me,” said Julie. She was surprised by the snark in her own voice. Quickly she checked herself, though she sensed that if she allowed herself to follow that way of speaking, she might end up somewhere unexpected—and holy heck! She might even discover she liked it. “I’m not really allowed to go in his study,” she said.

  Heather continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Bring it tomorrow and we’ll read it over G period.” Julie was about to tell her friend that she had plans for G period, but something stopped her. Heather was already putting her pens and pencils, her colored tabs, back in her pencil case. Julie sensed it was already settled. The way her mother sometimes said things like, that dress looks a little short on you. That was that. Case closed. Scene. Period. Somehow she would get the book. It was as good as gotten. If, right this very minute, she were to produce an egg from her book bag and crack it into a glass of cold water, she would see it there, floating in the egg white. A ghostly hammer and a witch’s hat, a tiny book hovering in the rheumy liquid.

  “You coming over to watch Cheers?” asked Heather. They were waiting for the bell to ring.

  Julie shook her head. “I’m not allowed out for a while.” She didn’t mention that her mother was afraid Matthew had contracted a case of head lice. True, Mrs. Kaling never saw anything during the few seconds she held him down long enough to scour his head, but the way he kept scratching, a tomcat at a woman’s calf in a brand-new pair of pantyhose, had her convinced. Consequently, the Kaling family was under quarantine until the outbreak was under control, the whole family on a strict regime of Nix shampoo and clothes boiling. Julie sincerely hoped the Nix worked. Her fear was that somehow fire would be next on the list of remedies.

  “Too bad,” said Heather, just as the bell rang, ending the first day of school. “It’s the season premiere.” She was about to offer to tape it, but then she remembered the Kalings didn’t own a VCR.

  * * *

  —

  After school, field hockey practice was both uneventful and mind-blowing. Uneventful because we’d covered everything during Double Sessions—the Rotating Rhombus, how to avoid getting called for advancing, where to stand during a corner. Mind-blowing because we could hardly believe it was just last Friday at the end of Double Sessions that Abby Putnam and Jen Fiorenza had been named team captains.

  Today was their first official outing as such. You could tell Jen wasn’t sure what her role should be, if she should play bad cop to Abby’s perennial good cop. At first, she tried to be even sweeter than Abby, offering saccharine encouragement to anyone anytime they messed up, her Claw a deformed halo. But when Little Smitty flipped Jen the bird after she chimed, “Way to be there,” after Little Smitty missed a pass, she stopped with the canned praise and looked a little lost. By the end of practice, her Claw sat atop her head, a deflated soufflé, unappetizing and undercooked.

  “You guys find anything?” Mel Boucher asked later in the locker room. The spot on her neck no longer appeared flat but like there might be a slight protuberance to it, like a young girl’s nipple just starting to bloom.

  “We’re working on it,” said Heather.

  “Well, work a little faster,” chided Jen. “Friday’s our first game against Swampscott.”

  “Like they didn’t know,” said Sue Yoon, rolling her eyes.

  “We’ll definitely have something by tomorrow,” Heather promised.

  Julie felt her heart rising again in her throat, a lump of uncooked bread that might choke her. Tonight it was the Malleus Maleficarum or bust. Either she’d hold the tome in her sweaty little palms, or she’d have to admit total annihilating defeat, her teammates clucking their teeth every time they passed her in the hallways, Heather’s glasses forever fogging up in Julie’s presence as if Julie were invisible. She stepped out of the bathroom stall she’d been changing in and caught Heather’s eye. She wondered if her friend felt the same darkness rising in her gullet, a mixture of fear and dread. Would they be able to walk back whatever darkness The Hammer of the Witches might unleash? Could they control what might come next? She remembered the look in Heather’s eyes as they’d walked unmolested out of Senior Privilege, the whole world at their feet. Would they know when to stop, or would they simply sail through every door DHS and the world had to offer?

  “What is that?” AJ Johnson asked, pointing to something Girl Cory had just pulled out of her locker. They all crowded around to look at what proved to be yet another offering from “Philip.” It took each of them a few seconds to puzzle it out. It was a Rubik’s Cube, but all the colored stickers had been peeled off, the thing just a block of black squares.

  “See you tomorrow,” Julie chirped, secretly glad everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere.

  Not everyone was zoned in on the mutilated Rubik’s Cube. “À demain,” said Mel, the thing on her neck a lidless eye giving Julie the once-over.

  * * *

  —

  When Mrs. Kaling pulled up in the parking lot in the blue Hyundai, Matthew was sitting in the passenger seat. Julie’s mother looked exhausted. It was obvious Mrs. Kaling couldn’t imagine how she’d get through another 179 days of first grade. Julie slipped into the seat behind her brother, not bothering to ask if she could drive. As they drove through the two-lane streets of Danvers, Julie noticed a maple tree on Holten with one bright red leaf in its canopy, the thing a single drop of blood.

  Her brother was fiddling with the radio dial, violently twisting the knob back and forth, the stations pouring through the car’s speakers in a blur of sound. Her mom didn’t tell him to stop. She barely seemed to notice, her face like the faces of women in those old black-and-white photos from the Depression, women without hope scanning the horizon for the first signs of rain, the rosary swinging lifelessly from the rearview mirror.

  Julie gave the passenger seat a sharp kick. The worm had finally turned. “Cut it out,” she said. This only made the Prophet turn the volume up even louder. “I said cut it out,” she repeated, her voice rising as she reached around the headrest and punched her little brother hard in the shoulder.

  For a moment, the late-afternoon air seemed to fill with the sound of sirens. She imagined Danvers High’s two favorite rent-a-cops, Bert and Ernie, appearing alongside her mother’s Hyundai and signaling for Mrs. Kaling to pull over, the taller officer with the strip of fur sprouting between his eyes slapping a pair of cuffs on Julie, the shorter one reading her her rights. She wondered how much time she’d have to serve, if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would have mer
cy on her immortal soul. Come All Hallows’ Eve, Julie would be eighteen, twelve whole years older than her little brother. He had learned to walk when she was fourteen. All his life, she was practically an adult. She had never laid a finger on him. Annoying or not, punching your little brother was surely a crime. She braced herself, waiting for the earth to open up and swallow her whole.

  The Prophet turned off the radio. They rode the rest of the way home in silence, just the sound of the Prophet softly whimpering as he rubbed his arm. In a way, it was a kind of music, her brother’s mewlings slightly harmonic, rising and falling with the breath. Julie felt like she should be remorseful, essentially picking on a small defenseless child, even one with horns. But she didn’t. Instead, something inside her began to spread its dark and feathery wings, somewhere an inner gland swelling with the rich ichor of potential. There was a lesson here, if only she could figure out what the world was telling her. For the moment she was content to simply feel her wings unfold, grow steely, the way a butterfly lets itself dry in the open air after first emerging from the chrysalis, recognizing that at any moment now it might soar, the whole world spread out before it, an endless buffet, dominion at long last over the delicious experiences of the world.

  * * *

  —

  For dinner the three Kalings had chicken patties. It was a new thing at the Danvers Butchery. Breaded white-meat patties shaped like hamburgers that the lady of the house could slap between a couple of buns if she was in a hurry or uninspired and voilà! Dinner. If the Kaling lessers had their way, they’d eat chicken patties every night, each patty basically an oversized Chicken McNugget. It was the closest Julie and her brother would ever get to Mickey D’s. To them, McDonald’s was just a dream you whizzed past in the car on Route 114, the golden arches open to one and all except the two of them, a fast-food heaven for people who didn’t care so much about the real one. As a small child, Julie had assumed the prohibition about Ronald McDonald was codified somewhere in the Bible. Thou shalt not eat of two all-beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese…The first time she ate a McDonald’s French fry at Heather Houston’s twelfth birthday party, she cried as she slowly licked the salt off her fingers. It was so obviously a sin. Nothing in her life had ever tasted so good.

  Tonight she and Matthew sat eating their good fortune in silence. Mrs. Kaling hadn’t even made a vegetable. Judging by the look on his face, the Prophet had forgotten about the punch in the shoulder earlier in the car. Mrs. Kaling, on the other hand, hadn’t forgotten about whatever was eating her. She was still exuding the same Depression-era resignation that had blanketed her earlier. Mr. Kaling was teaching a graduate seminar. He wouldn’t be home until late.

  What did Heather Houston say she’d told Julie’s father? Fortuna audaces juvat. Fortune favors the bold. Ever since punching her brother, the world had been rolling out the red carpet for Julie. First chicken patties for dinner. Now postdinner, there was her mother upstairs attempting to Nix the Prophet and then wrestle him into his pajamas, her father out at class, The Hammer of the Witches left unguarded and simply hers for the taking. She could hear the water running on the second floor, hear the eternal struggle as her mother tried to do what needed to be done without drowning her only son.

  Julie pushed open the door to her father’s study. It was adjacent to her parents’ bedroom—Mr. and Mrs. Kaling slept on the first floor, the kids upstairs. She had no real memory of ever being in this room. It was a place her father retired to each night and then disappeared. Boldly she turned on the overhead light to see what all the fuss was about.

  Her confidence began to waver. There were books everywhere. Books lined up along the baseboard, books piled on chairs, books arranged as shelves for more books. And the papers! Julie had been changing in one of the bathroom stalls in the locker room when she’d heard Heather’s comments about her dad’s book manuscript. What had she said? That he needed to get cracking? Julie wondered if her mother ever entered this room, if her mom had any idea what was going on in here, that it was some kind of book graveyard, a place where paper went to die. Julie glanced over some of the notes scattered on the desk. One was covered with quotes and a series of small handwritten doodles of numbers decorated with ornate flower patterns.

  That there is a Devil, is a Thing Doubted by none but such as are under the Influences of the Devil.

  —COTTON MATHER

  Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

  —JOHN UPDIKE, The Witches of Eastwick

  Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making.

  —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

  With color, one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.

  —HENRI MATISSE

  The giving up of witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.

  —JOHN WESLEY

  Tacked up on a corkboard was a large sheet of oaktag. She recognized her father’s neat lettering. WHY DID THEY DO IT? Underneath this question was written: ATTENTION, ECONOMICS, BAD RYE.

  Julie sat down in her father’s chair at his desk and started reading what was in his typewriter. Heather Houston’s family had had a Texas Instruments since 1982 and had recently bought a Macintosh with slots for two hard disks, but Julie’s dad stuck to his old manual Smith-Corona:

  Imagine you want to pass on to your family what you’ve worked so hard to achieve in this life. But it’s all on the line. Someone has accused you of the worst crime imaginable in your society. There’s a madness in the air, the whole community as if infected by a rabid animal. If you enter a plea and are found guilty, as every other accused person has been, then all you own will become the property of the state. If, however, you never enter a plea, if you never say either way whether you are innocent or guilty, then your trial can never begin and your estate will be left intact, your heirs free to inherit what you built through your own hard work with your own two hands.

  Suddenly the overhead light switched off. She turned around. The Prophet was standing in the doorway, his hair wet. She could smell the shampoo from across the room, the smell both chemical and heavily perfumed. He was wearing his Superman Underoos, one of her parents’ few concessions to the culture. Nebuchadnezzar was draped over his shoulder, the cat like a muff, Neb’s eyes still yellowy, piss filled.

  The Prophet turned the light back on. He walked over to a built-in cabinet and reached behind it. Then he approached and handed her what he’d pulled out. She looked at the cover. On the front was a woodblock of a woman in a pointy hat stirring a cauldron. She looked questioningly at her brother. “I like to look at the pictures,” he said.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I want what you want,” he said. “I want to be like everyone else.” She had never heard him sound so calm, so rational.

  Friday after the field hockey team’s opening win of the season against Swampscott, the Prophet would find the first offering lying under his pillow in a paper bag from Spencer Gifts. He would never take it out of its original packaging. Each time he played with it, he kept it in the box, the thing looking out at him through the stiff cellophane window. Even in the box, you could tell who it was by the tiny red carpenter’s pencil tucked behind his ear. Handy Smurf. Today in real dollars it’d easily fetch $70 on eBay.

  * * *

  —

  The next day during G period Heather Houston could hardly breathe. The thing was more than four hundred pages with endnotes and reproductions of period woodcuts. “Manischewitz,” she said. “How we gonna get through this?”

  “Guess you better get cracking,” said Julie. She wasn’t used to delivering snark. Once it was out of her mouth, she was surprised by how good it felt. In the library’s AC, the air suddenly seemed a little warmer. Heather opened the book and began reading, the words reflected in
her glasses. The room grew deathly quiet. Old Mrs. Bentley, the school librarian, sat behind the counter waiting for rain.

  The answer that could potentially take us all the way to States arrived in the most unexpected of packages. There were ten minutes left in the period. Just yesterday at the end of the first day Jen Fiorenza had made an announcement. “Tomorrow, Thursday, after practice I call a mandatory fifteen-minute sit-down,” she’d said. “Heather and Julie are going to give us a full report telling us how to feed and care for Emilio.” At that point, Julie hadn’t even slipped the book out of her father’s study yet. Nevertheless, Heather had looked cool as a cucumber. Her hot-pink glasses were starting to agree with her.

  Now in less than a few hours the two friends were scheduled to deliver the goods. But truthfully, with only ten minutes left in G period, it looked pretty hopeless. They had ten minutes to find the answer, ten minutes to explain how to recharge Emilio, or there was going to be hell to pay, Jen Fiorenza with the silver Claw atop her head like a gavel just waiting to bring down Its furious judgment upon them. Looking back on it all, that first breakthrough, the one that powered us through our first month of wins, seems so simple even a child could see it. As the saying goes: out of the mouths of the babes at Riverside Elementary.

  Heather was enamored with The Hammer of the Witches. Drool formed in the corners of her lips, as she was so engrossed she kept forgetting to swallow. In an attempt to look helpful, Julie picked up the eighth and final copy of yet another book titled The Salem Witch Trials. It had probably gotten misshelved in the inner-library loan system, the borrowing card clearly stating that it was property of Riverside Elementary. There were pictures of women in bonnets, men wearing hats with buckles on the front. The book had an almost zen-like quality to its narration. When you do bad things, you make it rain. In 1692, a group of girls did a bad thing, and made it rain all over Salem Village. There was a picture of a group of girls pointing accusingly at an old woman. The woman was crying, her tears “raining” all over the page.