by Ronald Malfi
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“Probably saying he was shell-shocked from the war,” my grandfather went on.
“But he wasn’t in the war. That’s part of the story. He was living over in Woodlawn the whole time.” Despite my incredulity while listening to Peter tell the tale, I found I had not only relayed the story with as much excitement and authenticity as I could muster, but I suddenly believed it wholeheartedly.
“Like in Vietnam,” my grandfather continued, not hearing me. “That whole Agent Orange fiasco. Everybody’s always looking for an out, looking to blame someone else for their problems. Don’t you think there was enough to complain about in the South Pacific? But you don’t hear me complaining, do you? And if you can’t blame the war, you blame your parents, your upbringing. Or the music you listen to.”
“But he wasn’t in the war,” I reiterated. “He—”
“Who?” My grandfather drew his wiry eyebrows together. He looked like someone suddenly asked to solve a complex math problem. “Who’s that?”
“The guy who came to my school.”
“What guy is this?” he said, though the corner of his mouth curled into a smile. He had been playing with me after all.
I laughed and said, “Forget about it.”
Headlights rolled down Worth Street, which prompted my grandmother to spring up from her chair and stare out the window. She continued to watch even after it was evident it was not my father.
“I’m going out tonight,” I said finally.
“Oh? Where’s that?” asked my grandmother.
“Peter’s house.” It was a lie. I didn’t like lying to my grandparents, but I couldn’t tell them that we were all going down to the docks to watch Michael Sugarland sink the homecoming cow.
“You want me to give you a ride?” my grandfather offered. He was always concerned about me walking around at night, even before the disappearances.
“That’s okay. I’ll take my bike.”
Despite the fact that I was fifteen and a half, which meant I was old enough to have my learner’s permit, my father had made the executive decision that I was still too irresponsible to have anything of the sort. I knew I faced a whole new battle once I turned sixteen and was legally eligible for my driver’s license.
My grandmother retrieved the pot of coffee that had been percolating for some time now. She set about filling two mugs while I carried my plate to the sink and washed my hands.
“Dress warm,” she said. “It’s cold out tonight.”
“I will.”
“And please,” she said, the tone of her voice slightly different, “don’t forget your curfew.”
“I won’t.”
I showered and dressed hastily in jeans, a Nirvana T-shirt, and a hooded pullover. I was of less-than-average height and possessed the body of a runner, though I was not a natural athlete. My features were dark and classically Mediterranean, not in a movie star way but in the contemplative, brooding fashion one typically associates with the juvenile delinquents in movies from the 1950s.
Adults regarded me as rigidly courteous, well-meaning, and considerate yet slacking on my potential. These adults were always calling me handsome, but I was never able to see it. My nose was too big, my hair stiff and wavy when short but greasy and disobedient when long, as it was now. My hands were small, and I’d once had a doctor who’d seemed surprised when I told him I could play the guitar.
Despite my awareness of having descended from a line of full-blooded Italian Americans, it never occurred to me that I was any different than the majority of the kids at Stanton School or in all of Harting Farms until last year. This realization struck me just before school let out for the summer as I went around to a number of the local businesses filling out applications for a summer job.
At a frame shop on Canal Street, Mr. Berke, the potbellied proprietor with a deeply grooved face, had told me to sit in his office with him while he reviewed my application. He grumbled to himself the entire time, and at one point I even saw his eyebrows creep toward his hairline.
“Is there something wrong?” I had asked, sweating in my nervousness.
“Yeah.” He set the application down on his desk, which sat between us in the cramped little office. He pointed to the nationality section. “You checked the box for Caucasian.”
“Doesn’t that mean white?”
“Yeah. But you’re Italian, ain’t you?”
“Well, yeah . . .” My gaze flitted down to the application. Perhaps there was a box for Italian American I had missed? But no, there was no such option. When I looked up at Mr. Berke, I couldn’t read his expression.
“This would be you here,” he said, jabbing a finger on the box beside the word Other. “See, you’re an Other.” His smile was humorless and caused the grooves in his face to deepen. “See that? See how we cleared that up?”
“Oh,” I said.
When I had gone back to the frame store a week later to check on the status of my application, Mr. Berke gave me that same humorless smile and informed me that he had decided he wouldn’t be hiring any summer help this year after all. Of course, I took him at his word, which was why I was confused when, weeks later, I learned that Billy Meyers, who sat next to me in homeroom, was working there.
Briefly, I had considered telling my dad what had happened. But then I thought I would be more uncomfortable relaying the story to my father than I had been sitting across from Mr. Berke in his stuffy little office, so I let the issue drop.
I dug my Nikes out of the closet and laced them up while I sat on my bed. All around me, my bedroom was devoted to my passions, the walls sheeted in posters of old Universal movie monsters and the more modern psychopaths such as Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. A glow-in-the-dark bust of the Creature from the Black Lagoon stood atop my dresser, surrounded by Star Wars figures that appeared to be protecting it as if it were some holy idol.
There were a few videocassettes piled underneath my nightstand, movies like Jaws, Gremlins, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, along with some old Springsteen record albums and cassette tapes. A Fender acoustic guitar leaned against the wall in one corner beside a poster of John Lennon wearing his signature circular glasses.
But mostly my bedroom was a shrine to books. There were lots of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, Peter Straub, and Ray Bradbury, since horror stories were my favorite. Yet there were more than just a few classics among the pulp, like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Stoker’s Dracula alongside Shelley’s Frankenstein, and a handsome collection of Robert Louis Stevenson novels in hardcover.
On my desk sat an old Olympia De Luxe typewriter, its sea-foam green and ecru metal body like the two-tone chassis of a 1950s Chevrolet. A few of the keys stuck from time to time, and the letter O had a tendency to punch holes in the paper if struck too hard, but the De Luxe was my most prized possession. I loved it more than my bike.
Set neatly beside the typewriter was the recent article from the Harting Farms Caller, the local paper, where my name was printed in stark bold font as the winner of the newspaper’s creative writing contest. Paper-clipped to the article was a manila envelope addressed to me, and inside the envelope was a check for fifty bucks. Next to the newspaper article was the thirteen-page single-spaced winning story titled “Fishing for Chessie.” It concerned two brothers living along the Chesapeake Bay who decide to try and catch Chessie, the Chesapeake’s version of the Loch Ness Monster. The boys never catch the beast, though at the end of the story, they see its giant gray humps rise out of the water.
It was a simple enough story and was apparently just what the Caller had been hoping to read, but the one I’d wanted to submit was a horror story called “Fear.” It was about a boy who learns an alternate reality exists between the first and second floors of his house. The entrance to this alternate realm is accessible through a linen closet, and the boy, who is the hero of the story, learns that there is a
monster who occupies this realm and feeds on young children from his neighborhood. Eventually, the boy confronts and destroys the monster.
I had thought it was perfect and had handed it off to my grandmother with a sense of real pride and achievement.
While she had proclaimed that it was very well written, she opined that the Caller was probably hoping to receive submissions of a more palatable nature. “No dead children, in other words,” she’d said but not unkindly.
My desk drawers were filled with such stories about werewolves and vampires, ghosts and goblins. Some were shameless rip-offs of other stories I’d read, though I emulated the plot and style in order to learn how the author had been so effective in transporting the reader. Other stories were wholly mine, salvaged from the depths of my own creativity. Last spring, I had purchased the newest edition of the Writer’s Market, and only recently had I begun sticking Post-it notes on some of the pages, where the entries detailed the submission guidelines for various genre magazines.
I wanted more than anything to be a writer.
By the time I was ready to leave the house, my grandparents had retired to the den to watch television. I kissed them both on the tops of their heads before slipping out into the night. I had a cigarette between my lips before I reached the end of the flagstone walk. I fished my dirt bike out from the dense wall of ivy that clung to the side of our house and hopped on, my feet quick to pedal, my backside never touching the seat.
It was jarringly cold. The residential streets were dark and poorly lit, and there were hardly any cars on the road. Deciding to take the shortcut instead of sticking to the main roads, I rolled up the Mathersons’ driveway, cut across their lawn, and whipped through a stand of hemlock trees that loomed tall and dark against the backdrop of night.
A moment later, I was thudding along a dirt path through the woods, my bike rattling while my teeth chattered. The woods here weren’t too dense, letting the occasional porch lights shine through the thicket so that I felt like Magellan being guided by stars. I’d used this shortcut an inexhaustible number of times in the past, typically at night, but it was never the same. The woods were always moving, always shifting.
I cleared the trees at a fine pace, bursting out onto an open field. It was mostly scrubland and unkempt bluegrass, but it made for tough negotiation on a weary, tire-bald dirt bike. To the east, the field sloped gradually down into a small valley surrounded by more woods. A small white farmhouse, abandoned for as long as I’d known it, sat in the center of this valley, obscured on this night by a heavy veil of mist. All I could make out was the light of the solitary streetlamp on the edge of the property, boring an eerie pinpoint of yellow illumination through the fog.
My friends and I called it the Werewolf House, because it looked just like the run-down cottage in a werewolf movie we’d seen a few years ago at the Juniper.
Beyond the Werewolf House was the Butterfield homestead. After a heavy snowfall, the Butterfield family farm accommodated countless neighborhood children hefting colorful plastic sleds and chucking snowballs packed frozen with ice at one another. But it was fall now, and that meant the farm would be crowded with pumpkins, squash, Indian corn, cider in unlabeled plastic jugs, and a grand assortment of fruits and vegetables.
There were Holsteins, massive lazy things, at the far end of the property, and if your fists were packed with reeds, you could approach them and feed them through the slats in their pens, their purple mucus-coated tongues lolling from their steaming mouths to wrap around the reeds like the tentacle of an octopus. While they ate, you could put your palms against their smooth-haired flanks and feel the heat radiating from them.
I pumped my legs harder, the reeds whipping against my shins, my face down against the freezing wind. The cold caused tears to burst from my eyes, and wind shear caused them to stream along my temples where they froze. Once I cleared the thickest of the reeds and could see the dim sodium glimmer of the streetlamps up ahead through the thinning fog, I knew I could let up on the pedaling without fear that my tires and chain would catch in the tall grass and jerk me to a sudden halt.
A pair of headlights appeared off to my left, maybe one hundred yards away. An instant later I heard the coughing growl of the vehicle as it sped toward me. At first I thought nothing of it. It wasn’t unusual for people to come off-roading in this field, particularly at night. Instead, I focused my attention on the glowing specks of the streetlamps along the road ahead of me. The reeds receded, giving way to frozen, ribbed dirt. It was like riding over a giant rib cage.
The pickup swerved, and I lost sight of its headlamps in my peripheral vision. Yet I still heard its engine, a bit louder than it had been a moment before. I didn’t realize that the vehicle was closing in on me until its headlights forced my shadow to stretch out on the cold black earth ahead of me. I thought I could feel the heat from the headlights across my back.
I chanced a glance over my shoulder. It was a pickup all right, and its driver was not concerned with spinning donuts in the field. The truck was directly behind me about twenty yards away and quickly closing the distance. Crazily, I heard Mr. Pastore, telling me to head straight home and no dillydallying.
I faced forward again, my legs pumping like machinery, my breath wheezing up my throat. I swore I could hear, even over the growl of the truck’s engine, the reeds whipping against the massive front grille and the tires biting into the solid, frozen earth, crushing stones into powder.
I was nearly to the street. For some ridiculous reason, I associated reaching the street with home base in a game of tag, until it occurred to me with a pang of hopelessness that pickups went faster on paved roads.
The driver of the pickup revved the engine. Despite the cold, I felt sweat bead my forehead and immediately freeze.
The streetlamps grew closer. Through the fog, I made out the cantilevered peaks of the nearest houses, pointed and triangular like the silhouette of a distant mountain range.
I was certain of it now: I could feel the heat of the truck breathing down my neck, could see the particles of dust and debris the tires kicked up floating in the headlights’ illumination. I thought, too, that I could feel the bits and pieces of tiny stones flung at the backs of my legs.
Then a blast from the horn sent me reeling. I jerked the handlebars, and my front tire thumped over a groove in the packed earth. Before I knew what had happened, I was thrown from my bike and rolling in the dirt.
The pickup shuddered to a stop no more than five feet from me. I saw steam rising from the grille, smelled the burning rubber of the tires. Something hissed, simmered, clicked. Frozen with fear, I only stared up at the vehicle as the driver opened the door and the dome light brought into relief the impression of my best friend, Peter Galloway, hysterical with laughter.
“That,” he said, hanging from the cab of the truck, “was priceless. Holy shit. I didn’t know you could ride that fast. I bet you thought I was some lunatic, huh?”
“Would I have been wrong?” I said, standing up and slapping the filth from my pants. There was a tear in the left knee. “Jerk-off. What the fuck are you doing, anyway? Is that your stepdad’s truck?”
Still chuckling, he climbed down from the cab and went over to my bike. With the toe of one sneaker, he lifted the handlebars out of the dirt until he was able to grab them without bending over. “Surprise, surprise. Got my license yesterday after school.”
“No shit? That’s awesome.”
Together we hoisted my bike into the bed of his stepfather’s pickup, then climbed into the cab, slamming the doors in unison. He had the heat blasting and Temple of the Dog playing low on the tape deck.
I wasted no time pressing my palms against the vents to resurrect the feeling in my numbed fingers. I was still out of breath, my heart still racing. “I can’t believe you’re driving,” I said. Then added, “I can’t believe your stepdad let you have the truck.”
“I know, right?” Peter turned the truck onto the street. We were the
only set of headlights in the thickening fog. “I was going to call and tell you. I figured I’d pick you up.”
“Ah, but then you thought it would be more fun to scare the shit out of me and practically run me over in the process.”
Peter laughed.
“Besides,” I said, “I wasn’t sure I was gonna come. But my dad got called out to work.”
“Because of that girl?” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”
“Well, don’t worry. I can get you home before curfew.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“My stepdad asked me point-blank if your dad cut back your curfew,” Peter said. “He figured your dad must have a good idea what’s been going on with those missing kids, so if he cut back your curfew he probably had a good reason.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him your curfew hadn’t changed. I hope you don’t mind that I lied.”
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
“Goddamn Ed the Jew,” Peter said, adjusting his position in the driver’s seat. He looked completely out of place behind the wheel, and I wondered if I was dreaming. “He’s always getting in my face about shit.”
Peter continually referred to his stepfather as Ed the Jew, but he never called him that to his face. Even though Peter was constantly bad-mouthing his stepfather, I didn’t think Peter truly disliked him. I knew Mr. Blum pretty well and thought he was a decent enough guy. Peter’s real father had stuck around till his son was almost three years old. Neither Peter nor his mother had heard from the man since. Peter didn’t even know if he was still alive.
Thinking about Peter’s stepdad made me think of my own father. I remembered how he had poured gasoline on a hornets’ nest last summer and set it on fire. I had watched him do it through the kitchen windows. Tiny fiery sparks spiraled up into the air, and although I supposed they might have been bits of burning leaves or cinders, I thought they could have just as easily been the burning hornets themselves, desperate to escape the conflagration.