by James, Guy
It was a comforting sound, a constant reminder that there was an outside world, a place beyond the fence that could one day be alright to go to again. He turned around and walked back to the bed, looked at Sasha, turned around again and went back to the window, then returned to the bed. He was already developing a pacing habit, just like Alan, and he was getting in some good practice now.
The insects were out in full force tonight, and their chatter gusted about the bedroom, touching the chipped and peeling walls, laughing at the overwrought crown molding, and finally settling on the timeworn, wooden floorboards and the flaking ceiling. The insect hum loved those places—the horizontal ones—and why it preferred those would remain a mystery. If the floor and ceiling were the places it wanted to make a home, who would we be to question it?
Sasha stopped flipping through the jumble of papers. “This one,” she said, her voice a bit whiny. “I wanna trace this one.”
Jack looked at the sketch, which was a neat pencil-work of a bridge, then over at her.
“Please,” she said.
It was a partial bridge, really. Two-thirds of it were obscured in fog, and when you looked at it, you could follow it as if you were walking on it until it became muddled in haze and disappeared. There was no way to tell if the bridge went on, or if it ended in a sudden drop. It seemed like it was at the same time a bridge to nowhere and a bridge to the only place there was left to go. But that was a silly thing to think.
Sasha sneezed, losing her grip on the papers, which ended up scattering slightly on the blankets like an unfolding deck of cards. She sniffled loudly, giving voice to the cold she’d had for days.
If only she could imagine the power one of those sneezes would have tomorrow: the power to alter the course of a great many lives. But, then again, the sneeze would be just one of many dominos, each of which had to be in its proper place for the show to go on. And the show must go on. It would likely have found another way, if not for her cold, but you play the dominos you’re dealt.
“I broke it,” she said. “Sorry, Jack.”
It was the pencil she’d been holding behind the clutter of sketches. When she’d sneezed, she’d broken off its tip.
Jack thought she looked like she might tear up, but it was just her cold.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Give it to me.”
She handed it to him.
“I’ll sharpen it,” he said. “Now drink your soup.”
A cup of corn and potato soup was cooling on the bed table beside her. He’d made it for her, hoping it would make her feel better, but she’d only had a few sips before declaring that it was too hot and she didn’t like corn that much anyway. Who didn’t like corn?
“It’s too hot,” she said.
“How do you know it still is?”
“Look,” she said, pointing to the steam rising from the cup.
He frowned, got a pencil sharpener, and turned the pencil in it until the point had been regained. Sasha watched him do it.
“I’m sorry I broke it,” she said.
He shrugged. “It’s okay. Not a big deal. There’s plenty of lead left in this one. And there’s plenty of other pencils, too.”
“Okay,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Stop being sorry,” he said, grinning. “It’s fine.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “Here,” he said, handing her the pencil. “Good as new.”
She took it and began to draw. Jack watched her. He felt uneasy about something, but if you asked him what it was, he’d have no clue. He usually found the scratching of her pencil comforting. He liked to watch his half-sister draw, or, attempt to, as the case was. He couldn’t wait for her to start drawing things on her own. She already did that, sometimes, but usually she just liked to trace Faith Crabtree’s pencil drawings, and once in a while to try to recreate them from memory on clean sheets of paper.
Once in a longer while, Sasha would make things up to draw. Those were the best of her drawings, and because she didn’t stay at the house every night—she didn’t really live in any particular place these days—he kept them for her, stashed away in the bed table.
He’d used to worry that his dad would get mad about her staying there so often, Knapp still hated her for some reason, but he didn’t seem to care much these days. He didn’t seem to care much about anything now except that stuff he drank, chugging it down, and making more of it. Jack had tried it once, and so had Sasha. The taste wasn’t for them, and they’d spat until their mouths were dry to get the flavor out.
Sasha stopped her tracing. Briefly, she thought about how Knapp had been more kind to her recently, and she almost smiled.
“I’m tired,” she said. “I wanna go to sleep.”
“Okay,” Jack said.
He got up from the bed and put on the nightlight. Then he reached to turn out the lamp, and he was just about to do it and get back in bed when he saw what Sasha was doing and froze like a red-haired, freckled statue.
71
Sasha was playing with a wooden toy crocodile that was sanded in places where it had started to splinter. Knapp had done the sanding years ago, and now other parts of the animal were starting to crack and peel and would need their own sanding fix soon, but they wouldn’t get the tender love and care they needed, not soon or ever.
Jack was staring into the indentation that was the wooden beast’s left eye, entranced. He understood then, for the first time—he’d had the toy for as long as he could remember—that the eye, that reptilian eye that was nothing more than a pockmark in wood, was unmistakably sinister. It stood for evil of the worst kind, and he suddenly wanted nothing more in the world than to be rid of the eye and the coldblooded wooden body in which it lived.
There was something about crocodiles playing in the back of his mind, some spotty tape that had begun to play when he saw Sasha waddling the thing back and forth on the blanket, something the adults sometimes spoke of but he didn’t quite understand, something…bad, very, very bad.
She kept on walking the croc back and forth, and she was talking to it, talking to it, and having it talk back, not only to her, but to the hairless stuffed animals of yesteryear that he’d stockpiled for her, a rabbit with both ears torn off, a teddy bear with a leg missing, a goat with no eyes, and all missing what had passed for fur when the toys were new.
He was gripped by an urge to snatch it away from his half-sister and throw the bad—no, evil, he was sure now that was what it was—thing out the window, except that wouldn’t be enough. More had to be done to it.
It had to be maimed and hidden from sight. It had to be put somewhere it couldn’t raise its ugly, scratched, wooden snout again, and the snout wasn’t ugly because of the scrapes and scuffs on it that marked its age, no, it was ugly because of its very nature, for the purest reason of all, that it was a malevolent force, and had been so from the moment it had come to exist in the mind of whatever man or woman had carved it.
But Sasha looked so happy, and Jack couldn’t stand how he felt right now. He needed to get the thing away from her, but he couldn’t take it away while she was playing her game. She and the croc and the injured bunny and bear and goat—they were called Hoppity, Roary, and Duncan—were having a full on conversation about how Duncan had got his name. He’d been named by Sasha of course, and it was a very good name for a blind goat indeed, or any goat, for that matter.
Duncan got up and walked over to the edge of the bed, with Sasha’s gentle help. She’d put the croc down for the moment. Duncan looked up at Jack.
“Hello, Jack,” the goat said through Sasha’s lips, which she was hiding behind her hand. “Baaaa!”
Jack couldn’t help but smile. “Hello, Duncan.” He patted the little goat’s head and Sasha pushed its head into Jack’s hand, giving him a friendly head-butt. “I think you mean ‘maaaa!’”
Sasha laughed.
“Maaaa!” Duncan said, and began to trot back and forth along the
edge of the mattress. “Maaaa!”
Jack’s smile deepened and he bleated back at the sightless goat, which began to canter with increasing delight. Sasha was still bleating for Duncan, but she’d taken her hand away from her mouth and was giggling uncontrollably between goat noises.
After a time Duncan stopped and said, “Come to bed, Jack. Maaaa!” So Jack did, turning off the light and taking the croc toy away without drawing attention to it.
He would hide it later, and then he’d take it apart and go out and bury the pieces in a lot of different holes so there was no chance of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men putting the evil croc back together again. He could tell Sasha that he’d lost it. As much as he didn’t want to take it away from her because she enjoyed it, it was more important that no one, especially Sasha, ever play with the croc again.
72
Jack put the old crocodile toy down on the floor on his side of the bed and lay down next to his half-sister, careful to stay on his side of the mattress, but not so close to the edge that he would fall off in the middle of a dream, probably one involving flamethrowers if this night’s film reel didn’t stray too far from the norm.
Burning the croc, he thought, I hope I dream about that.
He closed his eyes and began to drift off. He was a quarter of the way to dreamland when a noise from downstairs startled him wide awake. It was the sound of something being overturned, probably a chair. He glanced over at Sasha. She was breathing steadily, her chest rising and falling ever-so-slightly, but her eyes were still opening and closing, so she wasn’t asleep.
A curse—voiced with no effort at all to muffle or restrain it—shot up through the floor. Jack heard it clearly.
Larry had snapped off a ‘Fuck-all and all be fucked,’ which was one of his trademark sayings. He snapped off one more such salute and Jack glanced over at Sasha, growing more nervous that she wouldn’t get any sleep any time soon. She sometimes cried when Larry got to cursing, and Jack just wished she could sleep through the night.
To his relief, she seemed not to have heard, or maybe she just didn’t care anymore. For a few moments, Jack waited with bated breath for the next bit of foul language, but none came.
There would probably be more later, but by that point Larry would be more drunk, and he’d be quieter, more emotional and inside his own head. The cursing got Jack to thinking about their relationship—the whole triangle whose points were Sasha, Larry, and himself. His mother and Sasha’s real father were somewhere too, but their points were dim and blinking, like they were off in another dimension.
If the lines were all connected, it would be called a pentagon, although it would be a bent one. Jack knew that and the pride in his remembering the term almost made him happy, but then he remembered his anxiety about Larry’s drinking games downstairs waking Sasha up, and that awful crocodile toy he needed to dispose of.
Larry was getting better though, Jack told himself. He was getting better, yeah, he was, and maybe…maybe sometime soon, they could all do things together. It was a lot to hope for, so Jack just considered it, and didn’t let it get into the hope chest in his mind. For now, he would just recount the facts and let the case build itself.
Lately, Sasha had been staying here, in Jack’s room, more often. It was Larry’s house, and he’d never liked the idea of her staying there, but it seemed that she’d grown on him over the last few months, or all the wheat beer he drank was making him softer all of a sudden, or wiser, or perhaps it was all of those things.
Sasha didn’t think he quite hated her anymore—he never threw things at her or yelled at her now—but he wasn’t friendly with her either. These days he looked at her like a person with better things to do might look at a stinkbug on a ceiling, and that was a solid improvement.
The bug was there, but not worth the effort of squashing or chasing out, because Knapp had much in the way of business to attend to, so long as said business was limited to downing every last drop of beer as quickly as he could make the stuff and get it to his always-parched lips. It was a matter of thirst-quenching after all, a basic life function that needed no explanation. His vitals depended on the yeasted goodness.
As she drifted toward dreamland, Sasha was trying to think of a way to make Knapp not just not quite hate her, but not hate her at all. She loved Jack and the other townspeople, and they were all nice to her, so why wasn’t Knapp? She didn’t understand what she was doing wrong. It had to be her. What was she doing wrong?
Then she looked at Jack and the thought was gone.
Now she was thinking about how as recently as the spring, Jack had been worried about her staying in his room because he said that might make Larry—Jack called their father Larry, while Sasha always thought of him as Knapp…maybe that was because he was not really her father—angry and maybe violent. Jack had still let her stay there, though, because Sasha was always having nightmares then, and he took it upon himself to protect her from their father if the need arose, so that she wouldn’t have to wake up from a bad dream in the middle of the night and be alone or in some other person’s house without Jack.
She’d stayed with Senna and Alan a good amount, and some with Nell and Rad, and with the Klefekers, and with Betty Jane Oswalt, but she felt best with Jack, and, for some reason, in the home that, though it had been broken, had once been her mother’s. She knew that she wouldn’t be around had her mother not made a fool out of Knapp, whatever that meant, but then her mother might still be alive, and maybe, she thought, just maybe that would’ve been for the best.
That way, her mother and her real father might still be alive, and Knapp wouldn’t be quite as mean, of course she wouldn’t have been born, but that would be four people alive versus the current three, two of whom were children, and the third of whom was almost entirely useless to New Crozet. Was this all Sasha’s fault? Could she fix it? She really didn’t know how.
She brushed a stray tear from her cheek and reached out to Jack and proceeded to fix the floppy mop of red hair on his head, combing it to one side with her fingers.
He waited patiently for her to finish, then tousled her work.
“It was better the other way,” she said. Her inflection was slightly exasperated, but the corners of her lips were curling upward in a happy, sleepy smile.
“I like it better this way.” Then, thinking of a cleverer retort, he added, “My hair, my rules.”
“You’re hopeless,” she said, imitating the phrase she’d heard Senna say to Alan, usually after he’d mis-buttoned one of his shirts, the tricky things. “Night.”
“Night.”
She tried to get her own hair under control, which, though it wasn’t red, was almost as unruly as Jack’s.
There was more than enough moonlight coming in through the window to ward off the darkest of the shadows, so Jack turned out the nightlight, and this apparently excited the insects because their cries flew up as if in a crescendo plea, and the rising breaths of their muttering filled the room. Sasha adjusted herself, rising up from the bed a few inches before settling back down and resting her head with decided force on Jack’s discolored pillow. Jack took a look at his spare pillow, a flatter, more tattered—flatter and tatter, but what did that matter?—version of what Sasha was lying on, and got up.
“What’s wrong?” she murmured.
He only shook his head.
“Jack?”
“Nothing. Just not that tired. Sleep.”
“Okay.” She was too tired to worry or wonder about anything anymore, and was asleep within moments.
73
Jack crept to the window on his tiptoes and peered out. As he looked at the faint lights that were still glowing in New Crozet, he thought of the drawing that Sasha had picked out for her tracing work. It was a bridge that you couldn’t see all of, and what did that mean, and what did it have to do with lights?
Did bridges have lights so that people walking across them could see in the dark, or did people bring thei
r own lights? How did lights work, anyway? He wanted to learn more about electricity, and fire, and the world, but mostly about gadgets.
Alan appeased this need of his to some degree by telling him about these things, by describing them in detail, but Jack wanted to see the old technology himself. There wasn’t much of it in New Crozet. What there was actually was more than enough for Jack, but it didn’t seem that way to him.
He wanted a limitless supply, great factories with production lines and power stations with tall electrical towers like the ones that Alan told him about. He wanted to see those places and walk around in them and understand everything about how they worked. He wanted the whole enchilada of technical knowledge, to have it and eat it and wash it down with juice. Maybe he was too young to understand it all, but maybe he wasn’t.
There were some books in the New Crozet library—it wasn’t Crozet’s original library, which was outside New Crozet’s perimeter, but a small house that no one lived in that was used as a book dump instead—but most of the books were fiction and not the sort that Jack wanted to read, anyway. The repository was full to the brim with paperbacks whose covers featured muscle-bound men who were strange looking—their faces were all hard edges and their hair was long and for some reason they’d all lost their shirts somewhere, and some of them had apparently experienced the same problem with their pants.
The women on the covers were usually dressed in lace that strained to contain their large breasts, and they had looks of wanton need on their faces. The pictures made Jack feel weird and he didn’t want to read anything unless it had engineering specs in it anyway.
There were better things to do in town than read those books—not as good as looking at books about electronics or automobile engines or planes or rockets would be, but much better than reading or looking at the… What were those books called? Jack tried to remember and after a few moments did—Nell Rodgers had named them when she was there in the book depot house with him—romance novels.