Knock Knock

by S. P. Miskowski

  By now the fire in the forest might have gone out by itself. Maybe people would be talking about it down at the tavern, and Shirley would remember the stains on her dress and sweater, and figure out what Ethel had done.

  No matter what happened, her story was ready: Miss Knocks set the fire. This was a perfect lie, because Shirley would have to admit that Miss Knocks was made-up, if she wanted to punish Ethel. It was the kind of plan Mr. Spock would like. Its logic would overload Shirley's mind, and smoke would pour from her ears, and she would no longer compute.

  The TV buzz infected Ethel's dreams. She lay awake and asleep at the same time, no longer in the room but sensing the electric hum faintly beneath everything. Leaves swirled around the room and out the door. A cloud of smoke lifted its head snakelike and whispered in her ear:

  "Sure as you're born."

  Vaguely from beneath the TV hum another noise emerged, a scratching sound: distant, quietly insistent, and then distinct. It seemed to move slowly but evenly down the length of the trailer, from the bedrooms at the end, past the kitchen to the living room, to the couch. It stopped there and stayed. It was coming from directly beneath the couch.

  Ethel opened her eyes and lay still, listening for a sound she hoped to identify as a branch blown free in the storm and stuck under the trailer. But now the scratching climbed deliberately and methodically up one wall, over the trailer roof, and down the other side, where it stopped.

  "Squirrel," she whispered. "Raccoon."

  Again the scratching unmistakably made its way across the trailer on the underside. Inching its way beneath the living room until it was, once more, directly under the couch where Ethel lay.

  She turned to look out the living room window. Framed by the glass, a good seven feet off the ground outside, the top half of a face was pressed against the glass, eyes in shadow, nostrils expelling air in short bursts that fogged the glass and cleared, fogged the glass and cleared, in rhythm.

  Ethel bolted upright, scattering cushions and upsetting the plastic dish on the table. She ran to the hall closet, yanked the door open, and shoved aside her father's fishing boots. She climbed inside and pulled the door shut behind her. In the close dark she could smell the rubber boots, the salty skin of an old raincoat, the musty scent of storage and un-swept corners full of dust, hair, mouse droppings, and dirt. Breathing hard, she sank down against the coats and boxes, but she held onto the doorknob, keeping it shut tight.

  Nothing moved. Only rain spatters and the sigh of the wind came from outside the trailer.

  She was still sitting in the closet, leaning back and holding the door shut, half-asleep, hands aching where they clenched the doorknob, when she heard the engine of her father's truck. Once she knew her father was home Ethel opened the door and ran out as fast as she could, all the way to her bed. She jumped in and started snoring. If she believed she had been sleeping and dreaming all along, it might be true. It would be true.

  The front door squealed on rusty hinges. Her father's hacking cough followed, then the metallic snap of his cigarette lighter. Next the fridge door opened and closed. These were his usual sounds. He would drink a beer and wait for Shirley to come home.

  Even the thought of the argument that would follow wasn't enough to keep Ethel's eyes open. She drifted down and in. She let herself tumble into deep sleep. Faintly, as the world slipped away, she caught the lingering scent of her father's cigarette in the next room. She dreamed of smoke trails, winding out the window and through the crackling woods.

  "Breathe!"

  Was it her father's voice?

  "Breathe! Come on, honey! Take a big breath for me!"

  Ethel inhaled. A sharp pain shot through her chest. She felt sick. She had to clench her jaw not to vomit. Pain came rolling up from her lungs and her stomach. She coughed hard, opened her eyes, and stared straight up at the morning sky. A dark-eyed junco went zigzagging across her view overhead.

  "I think she's good," she heard someone say. "She's going to be okay."

  She heard other voices and the crunch of gravel. She tried to turn her head. Her neck felt stiff and her head throbbed. She tried to sit up but a hand touched her shoulder and the voice said:

  "Take it easy, now. You're all right. Take it easy."

  The next thing she saw was light, not the light from the sky but a blue and red flicker. It bounced across the outside wall of the trailer, which was black and charred. Smoke was drifting from the door and the windows. She turned her head in the other direction and saw stretchers, two of them, covered with blankets, waiting to be loaded into an ambulance.

  "Where's my dad?" Ethel tried to ask, and found that her throat was raw, tasting of blood like the time when she had her tonsils out.

  "Take it easy."

  The man talking to Ethel wore a uniform. He tried to smile at her, but his eyes didn't smile. He looked down at her with what seemed like pity.

  "You've just got smoke in your lungs, sweetheart. You'll be okay. Everything's going to be okay."

  She looked again at the covered stretchers. Before she could form a real thought about what was lying beneath the blankets, the words came into her head:

  "Over and done."

  The Girls

  "Gangly" was how Beverly Sherman's mother described Beverly and her friends at fourteen. The previous year she had called them "string beans" and before that they were "nothing but puppies." Just to be precise in her contempt, Beverly looked up "gangly" in a dictionary and reported to the other girls. As they suspected, the term was not flattering.

  "Going on fifteen," each of the girls said, whenever people asked their age. "Almost fifteen. Pretty soon." Even though their birthdays were months away.

  It was a humid, overcast Saturday morning in early summer. The forecast was good but also notoriously unreliable.

  Mrs. Sherman had packed sandwiches for them. Now she stood next to the car saying goodbye.

  "Look at you girls!" She shouted. "Gangly as all get-out!"

  Beverly, Ethel, and Marietta stretched out their skinny legs in the back seat of the Bel Air. They wore cotton skirts and sleeveless blouses with sandals. Their swimsuits and shorts were packed in a canvas bag in the trunk.

  In the front seat Ethel's Aunt Constance smiled indulgently at Mrs. Sherman and fanned herself with a road map. They were getting a late start. If the weather were good Long Beach would be crowded by the time they arrived.

  "They're growing up so fast," Constance said.

  Three sets of solemn eyes gazed at her, framed by the rearview mirror. None blinked.

  "No," said Mrs. Sherman. "They're taller, but they're sure not growing up. At least mine isn't."

  She handed Beverly a ten-dollar bill through the back seat window. Then she stood up straight and smiled her broad, pink smile.

  "Look at you! Just a gaggle of gangly girls going up to the beach!"

  Mrs. Sherman laughed. She stepped back from the car and waved goodbye. The girls turned and watched her grow small in the back window as the Bel Air picked up speed.

  Constance always sat alone in the front seat on road trips. She hummed or sang along with the radio. The girls liked to chat and they didn't like to sing.

  "Your mama thinks we look funny," Ethel said, once they were on the road.

  "She thinks everybody looks funny," Beverly said. "She has nicknames for all of her friends, behind their back."

  "Like what?" Ethel asked.

  "Toad Neck," said Beverly. "That's for the cashier at Jessup's."

  The other girls grinned. Beverly went on with the list of women her mother liked to mock.

  "Half-Price, that's Carolyn Price, the Sunday school teacher, because she likes a bargain too much. Shiftless is my aunt Polly. I used to think it was because she doesn't wear a slip, but it's more than that. She stole my mother's boyfriend in high school. And your aunt has a nickname."

  Beverly lowered her voice and the other girls leaned closer to hear. They tilted their heads just a bit and
lowered their eyes.

  "Mother calls her James."

  Ethel and Marietta shared a blank expression. Then Ethel figured it out.

  "Oh, like a chauffeur on TV! 'Home, James!'"

  They all nodded. Constance was humming along to a Broadway show tune on the radio. She gave them a wink in the rearview mirror.

  "Well that's a rude thing to say," said Ethel.

  Her aunt was the only family she had left. Her father's middle-aged sister moved from Longview after the fire that killed Ethel's parents. Constance said it was easier for a grown woman to start over in a new town than to expect a girl Ethel's age to change schools and friends, after all she had been through. She sold her house in Longview and the lot she owned, the one the Burneys had been living on, and bought a decent little place in Skillute with a garage and a good-sized back yard. She ran a tailoring business from home.

  "She only ever sees your aunt when she's behind the wheel, taking us to school or the beach or a movie."

  "Connie drives us around to be nice," said Ethel. "Your mom's kind of mean."

  "Cry me a river," said Beverly. "I have to live with her."

  They passed through the stately old town of Astoria with the prim clapboard houses Beverly called "claptrap." A little over an hour later they stood in the back aisle of Marsh's Free Museum staring into the glass aquarium that housed the remains of Jake the Alligator Man.

  This was always their first stop as soon as they reached the peninsula. The girls couldn't explain their fascination with Jake, whose shriveled and blackened body, human from head to waist and alligator from waist to tail tip, was the main attraction at the souvenir store. Their attitude was one of revulsion mixed with pity, and there was something more, an affection, as if the creature in the display tank were a cousin they had to greet on every trip despite his hideous deformity.

  "He looks lonely," Ethel said.

  "He doesn't look lonely. He looks dead. He's dead."

  Beverly reminded Ethel of this obvious fact on every trip. It was another part of their ritual. Each time they went to the beach, they visited Jake. Ethel always noticed how forlorn the half-man, half-alligator seemed, and Beverly always said:

  "He's dead."

  This time she added:

  "And he's lucky he doesn't have to look at all the out-of-towners. That woman at the checkout stand is wearing the ugliest muumuu I've ever seen. Oh boy. Her bald husband is taking a picture of us. Like we're part of the exhibit! Turn your back to him."

  The sun they had hoped for never broke through that day. A storm was coming. Most of the tourists had snatched up their lawn chairs and towels and children, and fled indoors. Marsh's was nearly empty. The bald man crept closer to the girls, with his camera lens aimed at them.

  "If you all look this way and smile, I can get a real good shot," he said. "Then I can mail the picture to y'all later."

  Without turning around Beverly said to the man:

  "Do you think we don't have any pictures of ourselves?"

  She shook her head and gave a little snorting laugh.

  "If you take that picture," she told him. "We're going to scream and tell the cops you asked us to take off our clothes."

  The sound of shifting and groaning floorboards indicated that the man was hurrying back to safety. His wife was fishing for a wallet inside an enormous beach bag, to pay for a basket of seashells.

  "These will be so pretty in the bathroom," she said merrily.

  "Why do they buy those things?" Beverly asked.

  "Mementos," said Ethel.

  "So they can remember the day," Marietta added.

  Beverly laughed.

  "The day she wore an ugly dress and they hated each other and he tried to take pictures of three girls he'd never even met?"

  They wandered outside and down the sidewalk. They bought root beer at the general store next to Marsh's, and decided to stroll along the boardwalk in the cool drizzle. They agreed it was just their luck to have rain at the beach on a day that was forecast as a beauty.

  The air was heavy, damp, and pearl gray. It was hard to tell where the ocean ended and the sky started.

  Aunt Constance would be waiting at the rented bungalow. By the time they returned she would have everything ready. A fire would be blazing in the cast iron stove and she would be knitting. The girls would roast hot dogs indoors. Then they would make s'mores and play canasta. Late at night they would listen to Constance tell spooky stories about lighthouse keepers and ghost pirates and women from the sea.

  "Where do you think Jake really came from?" Ethel asked.

  They passed a weathered fence. Then they began to cross at a diagonal the grass-speckled approach that led from the boardwalk past their bungalow and on to the sea.

  "Maybe a circus," Marietta said.

  "I don't know about that," said Beverly.

  "Well, he must have been a freak," Ethel suggested. "So where else would he come from, if it wasn't the circus?"

  Beverly considered this. The call of seagulls carried across the water.

  "It's got to be one of two things," she said at last. "He was a boy his parents kept hidden all his life, maybe in a barn or a shed. When he died they couldn't bury him in a church graveyard like normal kids, so his parents wrapped him up and gave him to the museum."

  "Why?" Ethel asked.

  "As a warning to other people, everywhere."

  "A warning against what?"

  Beverly sighed. She held the root beer can to her lips and breathed against it, making a small arc of condensation. At last she said:

  "Against whatever bad things his parents did. They must have done something that was - "

  She searched for the word. The other girls waited.

  "Taboo," she said.

  "What's the other thing?" Ethel asked. "Where else could he come from?"

  "My aunt says he's a regular boy, sewn to an alligator's tail," said Marietta.

  The other two looked at her. Marietta was becoming more taciturn these days. Yet every now and then she would burst out with a statement that seemed crazy enough to be true.

  "In a way," said Ethel. "That's worse. It means that somebody cut him in half and threw away his legs, so they could turn him into a half-alligator."

  All three stopped to consider the implications. They sipped their root beer and walked on.

  "If that's what happened," said Beverly. "Do you think he was dead or alive when they sewed him together?"

  "Dead," said Ethel. "I hope he was dead."

  A cormorant waddled across the width of the sandy approach ahead of them. Its feathers were black as oil. It gave a grunting call and hopped a few steps toward the sea, away from the girls.

  "But the alligator part is charred just like the boy part," said Beverly. "You think somebody went to the trouble to find a burnt tail, to match the burned-up face, or the other way around?"

  Ethel was watching the bird on the beach. Suddenly Beverly flushed pink from ear to ear.

  "Sorry, Ethel," she said.

  "That's okay."

  "I forgot."

  "It's okay."

  Sharp and fast, something flew through the air and struck the cormorant. It gave a loud cry and lifted its wings, but it was too late. A second rock whistled across the sand and hit the bird in the head. It fell hard against the sand and started shrieking, turning over and over but unable to stand or fly.

  The girls watched a boy of nine or ten come from the left, whooping and laughing. He was closing in fast on the cormorant. The bird was coated in damp sand now and it slowed with each attempt to right itself, but its cries still pierced the air. The boy drew up next to it, lifted a stick of petrified wood and struck the bird with it. In its death throes the cormorant lay streaked with blood against the sand.

  Ethel and Beverly stood frozen, too shocked to move. They stared at the boy, who only now seemed to notice the group watching him. He gave them a defiant smile, and lifted the stick once more. It was a pointless gestu
re because the bird was near death. Yet he raised his arm higher than before, showing off now that he knew he had an audience.

  Marietta stepped ahead of Ethel and Beverly. She kept walking toward the boy until only about fifty feet remained between them. The beach and boardwalk were deserted but for the four of them. Marietta kept walking until she could see the boy's face clearly and he could see hers. He shook the stick overhead for emphasis and then brought it down one last time on the broken bird.

  All three girls heard it distinctly. As though no other sound occupied the air, not the ocean waves, the breeze, the cars passing on the wet and glittering road behind them. The only sound they heard was the clean, hard snap of young bones breaking. This was followed at once by a scream so shrill that Beverly and Ethel had to drop their soda cans and cover their ears.

  Only Marietta listened to the full-throated wailing of the boy, whose arm was fractured in three places. Only Marietta stood watching as he fell to the sand next to the dead cormorant, writhing and screaming for his mother who would soon hear him from their bungalow and come running to her boy in his agony. Only Marietta smiled.

  Marietta

  Blood flowing, warm crimson between her thighs. She felt it coming out of her in clots, then in streams. Heated by her body, it came thick, tinged with the scent of copper. Blood would run down her legs if she let it. If she stood still as an evergreen, feet stuck in the ground, shards of light cutting the shadows on all sides. She dreamed of standing so for days, weeks, or years in a darkened forest. Giving over, simultaneously, to the forces inside and out. It was her one soothing thought, the one that brought balance.

  Blood broke the pain in her head and her back. First came the tension in her neck, then the pain like a sewing needle stuck through the back of her head, wriggling behind one of her eyes, trying to propel it from the socket. Then the cramps came, deep in her abdomen, a vise tightening all day until she couldn't stand up. She was blinded, doubled over, gripped by a force ancient and unyielding.