Wait Until Twilight

by Sang Pak

  “Two days,” says Yoshi.

  After a moment of silence, “Fo’,” says an unfamiliar voice from the far rear cubicle.

  Mrs. Smith suddenly comes through the door and we get quiet. “Who was talking?” she asks as soon as she comes in. No one says anything. “I heard talking.” There’s only silence. “In about three seconds, depending on a turn of events, you’ll either get more lockdown or back to business as usual.”

  “Why?”

  “Who said that?”

  “Why are you such a Nazi?” I say from my cubicle.

  “Whut? Who said that?”

  I stand up. “We didn’t do anything to you. So what if we exchanged a few words? What do you expect? My God, even prisoners can talk.”

  “I want to know who talked,” she says.

  “It was me. I talked.”

  “You just earned yourself another day, mister.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Keep talking and you’ll get more.”

  “I love it here. It’s nice and quiet so I can get my studying done. I even get my lunch delivered by a Nazi.” She looks at me with this look of utter horror on her face, like I slapped her or something, and then walks out. The heads of everyone slowly come up over their cubicle walls.

  “You crazy!” says the black kid. I’m not sure if he means it as a question or a general statement. I head for the door.

  “Where will you go?” asks Yoshi.

  “I don’t know, but I think she’s bringing reinforcements. And I really want to get the hell out of here,” I say. This must be the exhilaration convicts get when they break out because it does feel damn good.

  “It looks like it’s going to be that kind of day,” says David, who stalks out, taking out a cigarette.

  “You crazy, too. You gonna get us all in trouble,” says the black kid.

  “I was just gonna go outside for a smoke, man,” says David.

  “Everyone goes, then I go, too,” says Yoshi. I’m already out of the trailer when Yoshi comes hopping out with his spiky black hair. He smiles and stretches out his arms into a Y and then takes a deep breath like he’s going to start doing some stretching exercises or something. I wonder if he even knows we’re getting into a heap more trouble.

  With a cigarette in his mouth, David stops at the door of the trailer and looks back in. “We’re an equal-opportunity breakout,” he says. I hear a muffled answer from inside the trailer. “Suit yourself. You can tell them whatever you want.”

  Yoshi comes up to me and says, “By coming to America I miss my Japanese anime the most.”

  “Anime? No anime here, man,” I say. “Just old Nazis and cruddy peanut butter jelly. Peanut butter jelly! Peanut butter jelly,” I sing. David joins in. “Peanut butter jelly! Peanut butter jelly!” Then Yoshi, too. “Peanut butter jelly!”

  It keeps going then like that until David stops us. “My house is just up the street from school. C’mon, before old Nancy Battleaxe comes back.”

  The black kid finally comes out with an angry look on his face. “Shoot! I feel stupid in there alone.”

  We all take a path through the practice field and head around the gym to the west parking lot. Once we climb over the chain-link fence at the end of the lot, we’re free. Just two streets down we make a right into a suburb to David’s house, which is a small duplex-style suburban home. “Come on in. Make yourself at home.” He leads us into the kitchen. “I don’t know about you fellas, but I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.” David cooks bacon. I fry the eggs, and the black kid toasts bread. Yoshi watches us cook and asks questions like, “You like to cook? What is your favorite food?” We’re making egg and bacon sandwiches and eating them almost as fast as they’re being made. When David’s mom shows up, we’re in the middle of our feeding frenzy.

  “Hey, boys! What’s this?” she asks loudly. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you around, Samuel.” She gives me a hug. Her big boobs push up against me, and I can smell the sour alcohol breath on her. She doesn’t even mention the fact that we’re not at school.

  “I was over here last week,” I say.

  She stares into my eyes with her tired brown-glazed eyes that seem to be measuring me into a shot glass. “Oh yeah, that’s right. How could I forget a cute face like yours?”

  “At least you look better than your head is,” I say, trying to be funny.

  She laughs and slaps me on the back. “I’ve heard that before, kid. Here, hold this for me,” she says, handing me a metal flask, and then she grabs a grocery bag. It reeks of alcohol. “It’s the good stuff,” she says, and with that begins restocking the fridge with beer and a variety of other alcoholic beverages. She’s organizing them into sections while quietly talking to herself. Along with all the alcohol she’s bought a couple loaves of bread, which is funny because there’s a stack of toast on the counter that the black kid has made. I get a couple slices and make another sandwich and then offer David’s mother one of the wine coolers I’m drinking. She laughs. “You think I want to end up in the gutter like you fellas. Hell no.” She bends over into the fridge, sticking out a large quasi-shapely butt. “Just a joke. Don’t get your feelings all hurt. Just finish high school.” With that she takes her drink into the living room.

  After cleaning up in the kitchen, we go into David’s room. “When do you gotta go in to work?” I ask David.

  “Not till four thirty. I told them I was suspended and that I wouldn’t get out of school till four, so I got all day.” He slowly leans back in his bed and groans.

  The black kid, whose name we finally find out to be Cornelius, asks Yoshi, “Why’d you come here, anyhow?”

  “You mean America?”

  “Yeah, I mean America.”

  “I came here to learn English and about American thinking. Everybody in Japan must learn English. People who speak English and understand Western culture get good jobs. I was real bad at English, but then something bad happened to me to make me study harder.”

  “What happened?” asks David.

  “When I was in sixth grade, I living in Singapore. I sitting by a pool with my younger brother one day when a Westerner spoke to us. Unfortunately, I can’t understand that much English then, so I just smile at him, though I had no idea what he saying. He kept talking, and I could sense he was getting more and more pissed off at me. I kept smiling at him, hoping it would calm him down. But no, it didn’t. He blew up and suddenly grab my legs. He swung me around like it was hammer-throw event in the Olympics, you know? I ended up in the pool. I wish I learned English better then so I could respond and he wouldn’t throw me in the pool. I still wonder what he was talking about.”

  “That’s crazy,” Cornelius says. “If somebody tried to do that to me and my brother, he be dead.”

  “Ah, he was just playing,” I say. “If he was really mad, he wouldn’t have thrown you in the pool.”

  “Yeah, us Americans like to punch when we’re angry,” David says with a laugh.

  “Ohh! This anime was very popular in Japan five years ago!” Yoshi says. He points at the television on a dresser. There’s some cartoon about robots that turned into werewolves and vampires. I’ve never seen it before but it looks ‘crazy,’ as Cornelius likes to put it. “It was first a manga—a very famous comic book in Japan. It’s a video game, too.”

  “I thought I saw it somewhere,” says Cornelius. “I played that at my cousin’s. He got that game for Christmas. We played that all day.”

  “Oh yes, very fun. In Japan little high school girls love it!”

  “High school girls? Damn!”

  We spend the last hour before school officially ends lying around on the floor listening to hippy-sounding country rock and roll by a group called the Flying Burrito Brothers.

  “Are you serious?” I ask when he tells us the name of the band.

  “Yeah, and the slide guitarist, his name was Sneaky Pete. He invented Gumby,” David says.

  “Who the hell’s Gu
mby?” ask Yoshi and Cornelius.

  David looks at the two and says, “Forget it. Just listen.” I’m not much into hippy-sounding rock, but it doesn’t sound half bad. It’s sure easy to listen to. I even nod off a couple times, it’s so damn relaxing.

  “Any of you ever hear of some monster babies?” I ask.

  “Monster babies?” asks Yoshi.

  “Yeah, some people say there’re these freakish babies somewhere in Sugweepo. I heard they were out heading south, past the swamps somewhere.”

  “I heard about them babies. My little brother said something about that one time,” says Cornelius. “He said some kids been talking about like it’s real.”

  “They are real. I saw them,” I say. “We saw them. Me and David.”

  “You’re lyin’,” says Cornelius.

  “No man. We went to their house and saw them. They had these big jug heads.”

  “Bigger than David? Ha-ha!” says Cornelius.

  “I’m serious. And their eyeballs were like…one big as a silver dollar and the other as small as a penny. Everything was out of whack. One arm or a leg was just a little stump with some fingernails on it and then another almost normal. The only thing one hundred percent normal were their mouths.”

  “Their mouths?” asks Yoshi.

  “Yeah. They had these normal mouths.”

  “I wish I could of seen it,” adds Cornelius.

  “No you don’t. They were nasty.”

  “Maybe they’re not real,” suggests Yoshi.

  “When I first saw them I wasn’t so sure myself. But the way they were squirming around…Jesus…I don’t even want to think about it…”

  “They were real, all right,” adds David. “Enough to make Samuel puke.”

  “You puked? Damn!” says Cornelius.

  “What’s puke?” asks Yoshi.

  “Like this, Blahhhh!” Cornelius put a finger in his mouth and fake-barfs.

  “Hey hey! If you live twice, you’ll never see something like that,” I say. “Just be glad you didn’t have to see what we saw.”

  “Only me and Samuel know for sure, so don’t be telling everybody. Mrs. Greenan doesn’t want people snooping around making rumors and all that,” says David. “My mom’s friends with Mrs. Greenan’s sister, and I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Yoshi can tell his friends back in Japan. They won’t bother her, right?” I say.

  “Yeah, Yoshi, when you go back, tell everyone about the alien babies in Sugweepo,” says Cornelius. “You be a hero.”

  “Nobody believe me anyway.”

  WHEN THREE O’CLOCK COMES AROUND I sneak back into the student parking lot and drive back around to David’s so I can give Yoshi and Cornelius a ride home. Cornelius doesn’t live too far from David. His house is on the other side of the highway on a dirt road that I didn’t even know about, even though I had driven around that area hundreds of times. Turns out there’s an entire community of low-income houses. They look kind of like shacks, with blue tin roofs and dirt front yards. And they’re built directly on the ground with no real foundation, except for some cinder blocks.

  “Right up there,” directs Cornelius.

  We pull up in front of some chicken wire that serves as a fence to a front yard of dirt. His house is like the rest of them. It seems to be built on stilts, and in the windows I can see some white eyes peering out at us from the dark. “Hey, thanks for breaking out with us,” I say.

  “Yeah, man, but we gonna be in some serious shit tomorrow.”

  “It was worth it,” I say.

  “Sho’ was.”

  “Good-bye, Cornelius,” says Yoshi.

  “Later,” Cornelius says, and then pauses. “Yo, sorry about the rock.”

  “No, don’t worry. I’ve had much, much worse. Thrown in pool, remember!”

  Next I take Yoshi to his host family’s house. On the way I take the back roads, making sure to go through Underwood and pass by Mrs. Greenan’s house. “Yoshi, that’s where the babies live.”

  “In there?”

  “Yeah, but remember, don’t tell anyone except your friends back in Japan.”

  “Okay,” he says. I slow down so he can get a good look, but I get a bad feeling, and for just a second I think I can hear a door slam from inside the place. “Looks kind of scary.”

  “I know.” I speed up on past and take Yoshi home. I pull up the driveway to what looks like a small mansion. His host family is rich.

  “Do all black people live like that?” Yoshi asks me before getting out of the car.

  “No,” I say. “Not all of them.”

  “Yes, that makes sense. Bye.” On the way out I almost back into the brick-layered mailbox, which makes me nervous, like something bad’s going to happen. I figure the feeling will go away once I get home, but it doesn’t. And then I see it on the second shelf of my desk: the video camera and tapes stacked neatly on top of each other. I stick tape two into the video recorder and hook it up to the big television in the living room. I want to see it again. Maybe it’s just sick curiosity. Maybe it’s the thing that’s been bothering me. I don’t know. I press play and study the screen. The camera pans over the babies, then to the mother at the door, and then back to the babies. They’re squirming around, moving their little arms and legs about the best they can, reaching and grabbing at things. I can see now their bug eyes are not only different sizes but different colors: blue and gray, with hardly any white, as if it was just pupil and iris. It’s the same misshapen forms with the perfect mouths whispering. The video lasts only a minute or two before it stops and fades. It’s something I could never even imagine, like seeing a true-to-life ghost with my own eyes. It’s so creepy, yet I watch again and again before finally putting it back on the shelf. I sit there at the edge of my bed for a while. I got this cold feeling inside me. And the light in my room dims for a minute. I decide to take a nap, so I crawl under the covers for a while.

  Dad doesn’t get off work from the family hardware store until late that day. He’s been running it since I can remember. I’ve spent plenty a weekend there goofing off and working the register. Since he’s coming home late it gives me time to make some beef and vegetable stew. Whoever comes home first makes dinner, and that’s usually me, unless we go out or get takeout. Mom was a hell of a better cook than me. That was a weird thing to adjust to when she died: not having someone who could cook. It was like, there’s no food and now what? Mom must have seen this dilemma coming because when it came time for me to cook, I opened the coupon drawer, where she kept a list of recipes on a notepad, and it was all rewritten nicely in a brand-new notebook. Casseroles, stews, meat loaf, I had to learn all of it. I just followed the directions and it usually came out okay. Luckily, the stew comes out good today, and later on when Dad comes home he has two servings. I wait until he looks nice and relaxed before I tell him about skipping out on suspension. I make sure to include how Mrs. Smith was being a crow.

  “She sounds pretty bad all right.” He chews on a dinner roll. “Next time just keep your mouth shut and do your time. Save yourself and me some trouble, okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “I want to see some A’s on that report card.”

  “The only class there’s even a chance of me getting a B in is algebra, and I don’t think that’s likely.”

  “Don’t get so cocky, son. It’ll bite you back in the end.” After dinner Dad watches television in the living room. I’m lying in bed in my boxer shorts with the phone to my ear talking to David when Dad comes into my room.

  “Have you seen Trixi?” he asks me. Trixi’s a black-and-gray tabby cat we found when she was just a stray kitten meowing by the back door, hungry and dirty. At the time Dad wanted to take her to the animal shelter, but Mom wouldn’t let him do it. And we raised it ever since. At least my mom, Jim, and I did. Dad always hated that cat. Couldn’t stand the sight of it. He always wanted a dog. But ever since Mom died he acts like it’s his favorite thing in the world. He
talks to it, follows it around, gives it tuna. You’d think it was his daughter or something.

  “No,” I say.

  “It’s been a couple of days. Something might have happened.”

  “Cats do that all the time, Dad,” I say. “They disappear for a while then show up again.”

  “I’m gonna go out and look for her. Do we have any chicken? She loves that chicken. Maybe I’ll go out and get some chicken.”

  I hang up the phone and walk out into the kitchen, thinking that if Mom were here, she’d just say, “Leave it alone, George. Trixi will be okay.” And that would be that. My dad takes a couple of the change jars, one filled with pennies and the other filled with nickels, and pours them out onto a table. “Maybe I’ll get a live rooster and we can skin it,” he jokes before leaving for the store. He comes back fifteen minutes later with some sliced chicken sandwich meat. “Come on,” he says as he goes out the back door. I put on some flip-flops and follow him out back, still wearing only my boxers. He walks out to the woods behind our neighbor’s house. Mrs. Heard is an old lady who lives alone. Back in her part of the woods behind her yard is a little path that I used to play around years ago when I was little. Walking out there that evening, I’m surprised how far it stretches. It goes so far as to reach some more streets and houses on the other side of the woods. I follow my dad, who has gotten way ahead of me. It isn’t until I see a woman coming out of her house with the garbage that I seriously reconsider what I’m wearing.

  She shakes her head and yells, “Ya should cover yourself up some before going out like that. Something bad might happen.” It almost sounds like a threat.

  “Yeah, I know, that’s why I’m going home!” I yell back at her. I turn around and start jogging back, but I’m thinking to myself, Lady, get a grip. I’m not naked or anything. On my way back an old guy with a gray beard’s standing outside his fence smoking a pipe, and he nods to me as I jog by in my boxers. Dad comes home thirty minutes after me without the cat. I hope it comes back, because if something were to happen to that cat, I think it’d tear my dad up pretty bad.

  CHAPTER 3