“He’s got a knife, Uncle Keven!” I shouted, racing toward the house. “A knife!”
By the time I jumped onto the porch, Jake lay face-down on the doorstep. Uncle Keven didn’t take his eyes off him. He lifted Jake’s right shoulder with the toe of his boot and rolled Jake onto his back, like flipping over a rusted sheet of tin. Jake’s hands rose and fluttered in front of his face. They moved back and forth as if trying to shoo invisible demons.
Uncle Keven stood above Jake’s head. He watched the hands tremble, stared at the broken, bent leg, then frowned at Jake’s hands.
“Hold ‘em down, Amp,” Uncle Keven said, still not looking at me. “You have to hold his hands down.”
“He’s . . . he’s got a —”
“I don’t want them touching my face.” The icy words just fell from my uncle’s mouth, like they weren’t his own.
I looked down at Jake. His head was tilted back as if he were trying to see inside the house, past Uncle Keven, but his eyes were pinched shut. His mouth opened and closed like a suffocating fish on land, sucking at the air. But the mouth made no sounds. His coarse Adam’s apple bobbed beneath the stretched skin.
Uncle Keven stepped to the side of Jake. He propped the baseball bat against the door, knelt alongside the trembling hands, then grabbed the left wrist and slammed it to the floor. Jake’s right hand still fluttered, as if unaware of what the other was doing.
“There can’t be any blood.”
“Wh . . . what?”
“Here. Step right here.” I placed my boot heel on Jake’s left wrist. It felt rubbery. I reached and held the doorjamb tight with both hands.
“Now, this one.” Uncle Keven moved my other foot into place.
I obeyed, trapping Jake’s right wrist under my other boot. Jake started to moan. I kept looking forward, down the hall, into the kitchen. My eyes searched my own home as if I’d never seen it before. I stared at the fireplace. The pink plastic flowers decorating the mantel. The white candles standing like frozen fingers. I counted them, over and over, and then started again. I saw the wood-framed photos of Sarah. Of me. My mother. Of Uncle Keven in his Marine uniform.
“There can’t be,” Uncle Keven whispered, “any blood.”
I couldn’t speak. I stood in the doorway like some cocky cowboy with his legs spread wide, towering over two grown men. My feet burned. My uncle moved silently, as if under water.
I glanced down just as Uncle Keven lay the wooden baseball bat across Jake’s throat. He shifted his weight on his knees and slid both hands down to the ends of the bat. He looked like a hunched-over baker with a huge, misshapen rolling pin getting ready to knead dough.
I closed my eyes, tilted my head back, and squeezed the doorjamb with all my might, trying to hold on to a world that couldn’t stop spinning. I kept counting.
Jake’s mouth made no noise.
The seconds twisted into years as my Uncle Keven bore down. He finally stopped. But the crackling, the crunching, never have.
~ * ~
The Palouse snow slants across Highway 16, tossing shadows into an already gray January afternoon. My windshield wipers cake up with ice and screech across the glass. I pull off the highway, head up the gravel driveway, and stop at the top of the hill. There they are. The Holy Trinity sitting one, two, three. Pointed heads. Wide silver bellies.
I’m cold. Colder than I can ever remember being.
Uncle Keven’s house is hollow. Empty. The bantam chickens are long gone.
I sit in the car with the engine idling. The wipers rest. I count the years since I saw Jake walk down this road. Thirteen. Still counting, I think, after all these years. My hands curl up into fists.
Sarah and my parents never visited this house, the one over the rise, sitting beneath the Holy Trinity. None of them could ever forgive Uncle Keven for disappearing off the front porch that evening. Sarah would turn her head at the sight of her uncle, my uncle. She’d call him “him.” “Are you going over to visit ‘him,’ again?” she’d ask me. “I saw ‘him’ in town today.” But, she never heard “him” asking her teachers how she was doing in school, if her grades were good, if she needed anything. She never saw “him” sneak out at her wedding after she said “I do” to some pig farmer’s fat son who muttered the same words but didn’t mean them. But I saw “him.”
After that summer, Uncle Keven and I rarely discussed my “ticket” out of Endicott — baseball. I lost every ounce of interest I’d ever had in baseball. I helped him seed his winter wheat each fall but never stayed the night with him again. That year, Mother moved my bedroom downstairs, complaining, “You moan too much at night. “
Uncle Keven never uttered a word about what took place that evening after Jake’s fingers quit twitching beneath my boot heels. “Get on back to Sarah, Amp,” is all he said. His voice never sounded the same to me after that.
I got my boyhood wish. Uncle Keven willed me the farm.
And I’ve never emptied the Holy Mother of God — and I never will.
<
~ * ~
ANNETTE MEYERS
You Don’t Know Me
from Flesh and Blood
“Hear them moving around?” She presses her ear to the door.
He doesn’t hear anything, and standing in the dark outside her parents’ bedroom scares him. What if they come out and catch him and her listening? And they don’t know him, don’t even know he’s in their place. He gets anxious, like he always does when he’s scared. He can’t help it.
“You’re afraid. What are you fuckin’ afraid about? They’re my parents, not yours.”
“I gotta go,” he says. The sweat is dripping off him, and his glasses slide down his nose. He has to pee.
She’s disgusted with him. “You gotta do better than this or you can’t hang out with me.” She drags him back down the hall to the other side of the apartment. It’s this huge place that goes a whole floor with their own elevator stop. She has her own bathroom.
He can’t pee while she stands in the doorway watching him, talking about them. It’s all she talks about. She hates them. “They’re always on my case.” She makes her voice whiny. “Why do you have to dress like that, Lila? Like you’re a boy. You’re such a pretty girl, Lila.” She changes her voice. “Do you like the way I dress, Anthony?” Raising her baggy sweatshirt, she flashes little apricot tits at him. “You think I look like a boy, Anthony? What do you say, Anthony? Do you think I’m a pretty girl?” She stands there and waits.
“Yeah,” he says. He can hardly hear himself. The piss comes gushing out of him. “You’re beautiful.” He feels like his feet are glued to the floor. His beeper starts going.
She lowers her T-shirt. “Forget it. Call your mama.”
She scares him, but everything scares him. He doesn’t want her to stop talking. He’s never met anyone like her before. She’s so free. She does whatever she wants to do, goes wherever she wants, says what she wants. He doesn’t understand why she complains all the time.
“. . . can’t imagine them having a conversation,” Lila says. “They never talk about anything real except when they’re talking about me, and even then they don’t relate to me.”
Hands shaking, he zips up. It’s after midnight and he’s skipped his last pill. Yeah, his mom’ll be on his back in a minute. Why isn’t he home? It’s a school night. And just like that his beeper goes off again. It’s going to wake her parents.
But she laughs and lies down on her bed, her arms behind her head, and stares at him. His and his mom’s whole place could fit in her bedroom. Her bed has this thing called a canopy over it. Her stupid mother’s stupid idea. He feels stupid.
She jumps up and goes, “Let’s get some beer and hang out.”
The apartment has a back door and back stairs. This is how they get out. She steers him to the lobby’s side entrance, the way they came in. The doorman is this tall jerk with no chin and a skinny mustache. Benny, she calls him. When Benny opens the door
for them, he gives Anthony a wink, like he knows something.
“Go on, Anthony, what’re you waiting for?” She gives him a push. He stands on the sidewalk and looks back. She’s passing something to the jerk doorman.
It pisses him off, like she’s got something going with the asshole. Anthony wants her for himself. “You getting something on with him?” His beeper goes off. His mom gave him the beeper so she could keep track of him. No one keeps track of Lila. She wouldn’t let them.
Lila laughs at him. “Why don’t you call your mama, baby?”
Fuck, she makes him mad. He grabs her arm and she shakes him off, gives him a look like he’s a piece of shit. “Don’t you ever touch me like that,” she says, swiping him with the back of her hand. Her ring nicks him on the cheek. She goes off down the street toward the all-night grocery.
~ * ~
It’s only two weeks since he first saw her. He’d started hanging out in the park on his way home from school, where a lot of kids his age hung out with hippies and bikers, drinking beer and smoking weed. Sometimes he’d Rollerblade. He didn’t talk much, and pretty soon they were making fun of him because he didn’t do weed, and didn’t drink.
He was on these pills, two different ones, and he was not supposed to, not even beer, but Anthony didn’t tell them that. He didn’t go to regular public school because he got anxious attacks. But he was doing better at Harrison, where the classes were small and they didn’t keep telling him to do better.
He’d come into the park this one day and bladed up and down the trails. When he came to the bandstand, he didn’t see the usual crew, except for the two homeless men who were collecting the empty beer cans. They looked at him, then pointed down in the low valley near the lake. Getting closer, he heard the whistles and shouts. The fight was between two kids he knew who hung out. They were really smacking each other around, kicking and rolling in the grass.
“Kill him, slice him!”
Anthony looked to see where the shout came from and he saw a girl in baggy pants and a T-shirt on the path going up the hill. She lifted a can to her lips, drained it, and threw it at the fighters. It bounced off the head of the one standing over the other, who was lying on the ground.
The standing kid yelled at the girl, “Fuck you, bitch,” distracted just long enough to get an up-punch in the balls from the kid on the ground.
The girl laughed and bladed off.
“Who’s that?” Anthony asked Robert Paredes, one of the boys watching the fight.
“That’s Lila. She’s crazy, man, but she can fight. I seen her hurt another bitch bad.”
Anthony followed her but not too close. After a while she began to look over her shoulder at him. She was crazy. She’d pass people and clip them hard, then go fast so by the time they began to yell at her she was gone. One time she stuck her foot into the spokes of a bike as the biker rode by and the bike jerked and threw the rider into the road in front of a cab. The cab stopped just in time.
Anthony heard her laughing, but he couldn’t see her. He kept going on the path, but he’d lost her. He was tired. He sat down on a bench next to a backpack someone had left. He looked around, prodded the backpack, looked around again. He stood, reached for the backpack, and started to go.
“Where you think you’re goin’ with my backpack, asshole?” She was standing in front of him, holding a can of beer. She took a long drink, then snatched her backpack from him, unzipped it, and offered him a can of beer. He stared at it, then popped it, and drank. This wild, crazy feeling came over him.
After that, he was with her. They bladed along the park paths with her yelling at people, like, “Outta my way, fuckhead,” and “When they let you out, crazy ass?” He liked to see the look on people’s faces when she did that. She had the power.
They ended up on the steps near the lake with some other kids and some old fart hippie bums with beards and long hair, and bikers, all smoking weed and drinking beer. Everyone knew Lila and looked at him differently because he was with her.
“Pass the beer,” she said. “I got weed.” She took a couple of Baggies from her backpack and flashed them. Two bags full of joints.
“We’re out,” one of the hippies said. “But how about some grass?”
She flung one Baggie up in the air and they all jumped for it, scrambling over each other.
His beeper went off.
She stashed the other Baggie in her backpack. “What’re you, a dealer or somethin’?”
He said the truth. “My mom.”
“His mom wants her baby to come home,” Lila yelled. “Yeah, yeah,yeah.”
He felt his face get all hot.
She laughed. “How’d you get those?”
He looked down at the scars on his wrists and back at her.
“Come on, let’s get some beer,” she said.
He followed her out of the park to a deli, where he watched her pick up two six-packs and lay down the bills. She had a lot of twenties all wadded up in her backpack.
“You been drinking?” the clerk asked.
“You talkin’ to me?” she said.
Out on the street she said to Anthony, “So I’m a drunk, so what?”
They went back to the lake and sat around smoking and drinking till he didn’t know what time it was, but it was real dark and the cops kept coming and waving their flashlights and telling them to clear out.
His mom went after him when he got home. “Whatsa matter with you? You missed your medication. Where’d you go? Why didn’t you answer your beeper?”
He wanted to say to her what Lila would say, something free, but he couldn’t get the words straight in his head, so he didn’t say anything. But he knew Lila now and he would do what he wanted like her, and there was nothing his mom could say to him anymore that would change that.
~ * ~
So now he watches Lila walk away from him, like he’s nothing, and he doesn’t know if she means it or not. He touches where her ring nicked him and it’s wet. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.
“What the fuck you waitin’ for?” He hears her screaming from all the way down the street.
He puts on his glasses. He can barely see her in the light of the street lamp. People turn around and look at her. Like she’s a celebrity. She’s like no one he knows in his whole life. He catches up with her and waits while she buys two six-packs. She hands one to him and they head out to the park.
The sky is full of dark, rolling clouds, hiding the moon. The park has this wet feel though it hasn’t rained, and the air lies heavy over them. It’s very dark and after closing time, and the cops are making their rounds. Lila sees better than he does and she hisses when she spots them.
The real night people are settled on the steps leading to the bandstand, talking, drinking. He knows most of them by sight now. They’re all different ages. Mostly guys. Some have regular jobs, but like to hang out and drink and do drugs. Anthony’s seen some do hard drugs and pass out. The drunks always end up puking by the lake.
An old black man lies snoring on the steps blocking their way. He’s giving off a big stink. “Move it, nigger,” Lila yells. She kicks at him. He groans and clutches the air, but can’t keep himself from tumbling down the rest of the steps. He lies at the bottom of the stone steps, then picks himself up and stumbles away.
Anthony and Lila sit at the top of the stairs, and she begins passing out the cans of beer. His beeper goes off. He shuts it down.
“Get the weed,” she tells Anthony, who takes some joints from her backpack and gives them to her.
This big middle-aged guy stands up from a few stairs below. He lifts his beer can to Lila.
“Hey!” Lila looks at him like she knows him.
He gives her another look and comes up the stairs to them. He’s wearing this shirt with the sleeves rolled up, half in and half out of his pants. He’s carrying a jacket.
“Hey,” he says. He sits down on the other side of Lila.
“Remember me?”
she says. “I’m Lila from rehab.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Lila from rehab.” He slurs his words and keeps nodding his head.
It’s like they’re in some kind of private club together that won’t let Anthony in. Anthony moves in closer to her. Lila gives him a mean look, like who the fuck does Anthony think he is, and Anthony inches away.
“Danny Boy,” she says.
“Yeah,” the drunk says, and like he passes out.
Not long afterward a three-wheel cop car comes along with a searchlight that swirls all over. A loudspeaker goes on and the cop tells them to disperse, get out of the park, the park is closed for the night.
The Best American Mystery Stories 3 Page 38