by Rich Terfry
Buzzy was likewise darkly obsessed with the “freaks” that stayed with the Millers. Even when the heyday of such sideshows had passed, the Miller family took in people with deformities and other abnormalities and gave them love and care. But Buzzy hated these folk. He couldn’t see them as human. Maybe the religion Buzzy was raised with did something to him.
“God! That Dennis fucker makes me sick! He’s so disgusting! And that Beula! Fuck! Her parents shoulda drownt her in the lake when she was born. She’s so gross! I think the devil musta fucked her mother …”
When Buzzy wasn’t going on about the “freaks” or the virtues of Burt Reynolds, he was trying to squeeze someone for a dollar. He’d try to sell anything to anyone. He had a knack for lucking into lost and neglected commodities—berries, milk crates, a box of toothpicks, scrap copper—and making you feel that you couldn’t live without them. He could sell a polar bear a glass of ice water. He’d hustle friends, he’d hustle strangers. He hustled in the schoolyard during lunch, he hustled in the picnic park on weekends. He never did make much money when we were kids, but no amount of failure deterred him. He was a huckster, and enjoyed the performance aspect as much as the money. As for the money he did make, I never saw him spend it. He once told me didn’t trust anyone with his money—not his parents, not even the banks. He hinted to me that he kept his fortune in a tin that he’d buried in a hole back in the woods.
The thought did cross my mind that Buzzy might have stolen my baseball glove and sold it to someone else. You’d only have to turn your back for ten seconds for him to pull off a transaction like that. But although he was a great actor and manipulator, I believed him when he swore he didn’t know where it was. Buzzy did, however, come under suspicion on one of the darkest days in Mt. Uniacke history, the spring day that Walter the Human Walrus—ward of the Millers—was found in a ditch at the edge of town, bleeding and unconscious. Poor Walter. Everyone loved him—everyone but Buzzy.
Under suspicion though he was, nothing could be proven against him and Mt. Uniackers continued to buy whatever Buzzy was selling. By the time he was fourteen, was wearing suits all the time. He practiced his smile and his handshake like he was training for the Olympics. He lost interest in Burt Reynolds and started running semi-legit hustles: he sold magazine subscriptions and then Bibles and encyclopedias, and then vacuum cleaners and Amway.
Buzzy was the first of my friends to leave Mt. Uniacke. Toward the end of our high school days, he explained to me that there were deeper pockets in bigger cities and that his arms were too long for this town. I only half-knew what he meant at the time. We lost touch, and last I heard he went to jail after a historic Wall Street insider-trading bust. No doubt he’s running some kind of racket on the inside now.
•
In lieu of the law and government, Mount Uniacke was effectively run by a cast of characters with great nicknames. Buzzy’s father was known to all as Crust. He was the ersatz mayor, who had lost both his hands and had them replaced with hooks. He’d entertain us kids by using the hooks to crush cans or rip a phone book in half. To us, he didn’t have a handicap, he had a superpower. He collected disability cheques and bad habits and dirty jokes. A woman named Truck dressed in a puffy brown snowsuit year-round, even in summer. Rumour among us kids was that she wore nothing underneath. She always showed up uninvited to umpire our pickup baseball games. Truck’s real name was Marilyn Monroe—like the movie star—but she looked more like Orson Welles. She snored, even when she was awake. A kid named Torque was a nunchuks expert and talked like a boy imitating a girl, except he wasn’t pretending. His voice may have been the result of his electroshock therapy treatments. He also ate bees. Another boy, named Peach, never ever wore a shirt. A jacket sometimes, yes, but never a shirt. He was a bird caller, specializing in owls. Addicted to inhalants, Peach was rarely seen without his trusty plastic bag. He died of combustion, but there was nothing spontaneous about it. Teen Wolf was an old-timer who lived in abject squalor. Despite his age, he was still the best hockey player in Mount Uniacke. He was also a cockfighter and could predict the weather. He erected a Stevenson screen in the wreckage of his yard, among the corpses of old automobiles and heaps of scrap metal.
Then there was Lunk. He was much bigger than all the other kids and most of the teachers. This was due—in part—to his being older than the rest of us. He had a hard time in school and was held back year after year. I couldn’t see it at the time, but in retrospect, he was handsome. He had great hair. It was blond and looked good even when it was messy.
Lunk hated playground balls. He made it his daily assignment to patrol the playgrounds and rid them of their infection. If you were playing with one and lost control of it, Lunk would snatch it up before you could and then he’d punch it onto the roof of the school. Your game would be over and you wouldn’t dare say anything because Lunk might punch you onto the roof of the school next. Sometimes Lunk would kick the balls into outer space. I liked it when he took the balls and kicked them, because his kick was such an impressive display of power. Honestly, sometimes the balls would disappear in the sky. You might hear the sad thing crash into the woods behind the school twenty minutes later.
One day I was walking around the playground when I heard a tangled burst of shouts and screams, as if every player in a jazz band was soloing at the same time. This was a warning, but I realized it too late. When I finally understood that fifty kids were yelling “LOOK OUT!” at me, I glanced up—just in time to see one of Lunk’s booted playground rockets a few inches from my face.
Although the ball was travelling at two hundred miles per hour, it seemed to make its final approach in super-slow motion. It first bopped me on the nose like a doting aunt. It had the burned-gunpowder smell of moon dust. The ball had come so far, I thought in that second; it had so many stories to tell. It told them by wrapping itself around my face. I was swallowed by the ball. I was told the secrets of the cosmos. For a split second, the mysteries of the heavens were revealed to me. I tasted death and it had the flavour of marshmallows and gasoline.
After the ball doinked off my skull, it ricocheted onto the roof of the school in accordance with Lunk’s master plan. I was sent tumbling backward down a cliff and deposited on the sidelines of the sports field below. When I came to, I opened my eyes to the sight of a ring of concerned faces huddled above me. They were the faces of friends and classmates—blood-obsessed boys, and girls I had been longing to kiss. Some were weeping; others laughed. The circle was broken at the three o’clock position by Lunk himself. I had never seen him close up. It wasn’t the most flattering angle, but he still looked very handsome. He smelled like a horse.
“Who did it, buddy? I’ll git ’em for ya.”
This was one of Lunk’s oldest and most clever tricks. He’d cause some kind of trouble and then throw his test down at your feet: you could dare to blame him for what had happened and get your ass kicked to kingdom come, or you could finger someone else so Lunk could play the hero and go off to beat up an unsuspecting innocent.
I had to think quick. I didn’t have a personal problem with anyone, but I didn’t want to lose my teeth.
“Wayne Fancy,” I said.
Poor Wayne. He was a bit of a troublemaker, but he had never done anything to me.
Lunk disappeared from the circle and stormed off to serve his crooked justice.
Years later, the rumour around town was that Lunk had killed a guy named Woody with a chainsaw. Wayne, meanwhile, became king of the roller disco in the nearby town of Sackville.
•
Death was everywhere in Mount Uniacke, but most of it was self-inflicted. The epidemic was bad enough to make many townspeople believe in the presence of evil spirits. The fever affected teenagers most often. Rusty was the first of my friends to go. He was the class clown and sat next to me in homeroom the year it happened. Eighth grade. He was thirteen years old. Jesse was another who went. He lived a few doors down from my house. My parents were visiting his wh
en they heard a bang from the basement. Jesse didn’t answer when his mother hollered down to ask what happened. My father volunteered to check on him. He found Jesse’s body in the bathtub with his head blown clean off. By the time I finished high school a dozen kids I knew had taken their own lives—almost all of them with guns.
Maybe the evil fed off the man-made hatred that polluted the breezes in Mount Uniacke. Criminals of every stripe were tolerated, but anyone who looked or thought differently was not. Curiosity was punished. Interest in the sciences was regarded as a threat. Interest in the arts was for sissies. Even beauty was attacked as the work of the devil. In fact, pretty girls had it harder than most.
For as long as I could remember, the name Stella Kuhn was used as an epithet or a hex. There was nothing worse for a girl than being labelled with that name. A boy accused of kissing “Stella Kuhn” was shunned. You’d see the name written in graffiti on the walls of abandoned buildings and bathroom stalls. I never thought to ask where it came from. I assumed it referred to a fictional character—a Gorgon, or maybe one of Ed Miller’s performers from years gone by.
One day I was walking down the corridor at school when I was stopped by an extremely agitated kid called “Flounder,” who was a few years older than me. He grabbed two handfuls of my shirt and his eyes were bulging out his head.
“Did you see who that was back there!” he said. His voice was pitched at a shouted whisper, a loud hiss.
“No. Where?”
“In that classroom, right there!”
“No. Jeez, what’s the big deal?”
“It’s Stella Kuhn!” he said, running away.
I froze. My ten-year-old brain spun in its skull.
“Stella Kuhn … is real?” I asked the floor.
I was afraid to look, but I had to. I tiptoed to the door and then edged one eye to the window. My heart was pounding in my ears. Peering into the room, I saw two people sitting at desks, having a conversation. I recognized one as a teacher. The other was her. I gasped and spun away from the door. My mind raced with confusion, making me so dizzy I braced myself against the wall. My god, she’s prettier than Crystal Gayle, I thought.
I came to know years later that Stella’s only mistake was living on the wrong stretch of road. She lived in the poorest and most well-hidden part of Mount Uniacke. The lie was that the families back there were inbred—a taint she could never wash away. Her rare beauty was confusing and thus marked her twice.
I believed the evil in Mount Uniacke lived in the woods. I believed it knew how to find me, knew how to find all of us. Sometimes, lying in my bed at night, I could hear it breathing in the trees. Other times, while I was playing in the yard just out of its reach, its hiss and snap of branches would freeze me. It pulled my gaze into its endlessness and wouldn’t let go. Its hypnotic hum would grow louder and louder. This evil killed kids. It hexed others. It seduced and raped men to make them its servants. In summer, it whispered promises of escape from the sun and then waited with its billion poison needles. In winter, its black smoke became everyone’s favourite smell. Another trick. When it got inside people, it changed their blood forever. I wear its shadow on my face in photos taken on days from before I can remember.
One of the ways the evil found me was through a guy who used to live up the road. He moved away when I was still quite young. I don’t remember his name and I can’t quite remember what he looked like except that he wore a toupée.
He wasn’t a friend of my parents, so I don’t know how we became acquainted. People thought he was weird because he didn’t have a yard or a driveway and his house was in the woods. I suppose that is a bit peculiar.
I would go to his house to visit sometimes. He thought it was funny to slowly peel his toupée off. This made a terrible sound and scared the baby Jesus out of me. I didn’t understand that his real scalp wasn’t coming off.
The thing I remember best about this man’s house was his basement. It was cold and he used it for two things: meat storage and boxing training. Sometimes the two would be combined—big carcass slabs would be used as punching bags, like in the movie Rocky.
He taught me how to fight—how to work the speed bag and the heavy bag. He made me jump rope and do sit-ups. Sometimes I’d shadowbox or punch pads he wore on his hands. Sometimes he’d work up a bit of a sweat and his toupée would come loose and go crooked.
And once in a while, in the middle of an afternoon of training, another kid would show up. Sometimes I knew the kid; sometimes I didn’t. It was strange when I didn’t, because I lived in such a small town. Where did these kids come from? Why didn’t they go to my school?
I never saw my friend train any of these other kids. They just showed up to fight me. My friend would give us boxing gloves and we’d go at it—no boxing ring, just his cement, death-smelling basement.
I always won. None of the other kids could ever beat me. I remember one kid who was a pretty good match for me. He was tough and I had a hard time with him. After about ten minutes of going blow for blow, my friend pulled me aside. He’d noticed a habit the other kid had—a potential weakness. He whispered a couple of quick tips in my ear and sent me back. Ten seconds later I knocked the kid out cold.
My friend was really into watching me and other kids box. Sometimes he’d say things about how he wished he could fight too, and it made me feel bad that he was left out. I didn’t want him to think I was a wimp like the other kids, so one day I finally said, “I’ll fight you.” This made him very happy.
To show him how tough I was, I went at him with full-gorilla aggression as soon as he had his gloves on. I was determined to knock him out, even though he was several times my size. I couldn’t reach his face but gave him a blizzard of body blows.
At first, he seemed to be humouring me. I didn’t like that. I took a step back and began to fight with focus, using everything he’d taught me. I hit him with a cross to the gut, and when he doubled over, I was ready with an uppercut to the jaw that made his teeth clack together.
That made him mad. He shook off the anger and lowered his centre of gravity. Then he reared back and gave me an uppercut that lifted me off the floor. I flew backward about five feet. The blow had landed flush in the centre of my face. Somehow nothing was broken, but my face had exploded, and there was a torrent of blood. The fight was over. The whole thing had lasted thirty seconds.
As I lay on the concrete floor, stunned, I heard him and the other kid who was there that day laughing. I wanted to cry. I wanted to run home. But I didn’t. I just lay there, unable to move. Then I joined their chorus of laughter, proving I was the toughest kid in the world.
•
Maybe I was physically stronger than most other kids because I worked hard. I put myself to work by digging holes. And I dug a lot of them. For years, my main project was digging a hole to China. I worked in a top-secret location in the woods not far from my house. Because I didn’t want anyone to know about my secret project, when I was finished digging for the day, I would cover up the hole with a cross-hatching of sticks and a layer of dead leaves and other forest detritus, until it was invisible. No one knew about it. Not my family, not my friends. In fact, only one person ever found out about it and he found out the hard way.
One Halloween, in what proved to be the last year of my project, there was a full moon. Something in the air inspired in me an usual appetite for mischief. Late that evening, I snuck a few eggs from my mother’s refrigerator and secreted them in my fanny pack. Then, dressed in all-black, I took to the night.
I staked out in some bushes by the road and listened for cars. With samurai patience, I waited until one came along that I didn’t recognize as a neighbour’s. Then I struck. Although my throwing arm wasn’t yet the lethal weapon it would become, I hurled one of the eggs with everything I had. It struck the car’s rear quarter panel with a heavier sound than I was expecting. The driver stomped on the brake, bringing the car skidding to a halt on the gravel at the side of the dirt road.
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When I heard the car door open, I turned and hightailed it into the evil black of the woods.
“Fuckin’ kids!” The driver’s curse was punctuated by the slamming of his door.
As I tore through the tangle of dense forest, I could hear branches snapping and popping behind me. I was being chased. I was blinded by panic but guided by the instinct I had for a terrain I knew well. These woods were mine. Without thinking, I locked into a route I had been running every day for the previous few years.
And as I ran, a one-in-a-million-shot escape plan took shape in my mind. For it to work, I had to make the terrifying decision to slow up a bit and let my pursuer gain on me. I was confident I could outrun him, but I had to make sure he followed in my exact footsteps. When he was close enough for me to hear him grunting and growling behind me, I made straight for my China hole. As soon as it was about fifty feet in front of me, I went into a dead sprint. I reached the edge of the hidden pit and leaped like a hurdler, never breaking my stride. I was beautiful.
A second after clearing the spot where my hole was, I heard the sounds I had gambled on hearing: a crash and a fading scream. My plan had worked like a charm. The man who was chasing me, who I imagined killing me with his bare hands had he caught me, had fallen into the hole and halfway to China.
It’s hard to describe how I felt in that moment. Of course I was relieved that my ordeal was over. But a new shade of panic cancered in me: had I erased the existence of a man from the face of the earth? The woods were silent again.
I made my way back to the road in a wide circle through the trees and came out at a spot around the bend from where I had entered. With the devil gone out of me, I slowly walked back along the shoulder, unsure what had really happened. But I needed to know. I walked until I saw what I feared: the man’s car on the side of the road, lights still on, engine still running.