by Jeffrey Ford
When I was done and had closed the notebook, she sat for a moment in silence. Finally she looked at me and said, “I’ll take Mrs. Harrington to place.”
Our mother called us in then. Since it was the weekend, my father had just gotten home from work, and it was time for us to visit our aunt Laura. We piled into the white Biscayne, Jim and me in the back with Mary between us. My father drove with the window open, his elbow leaning out in the sun, a cigarette going between his fingers. I hadn’t seen him all week, and he looked tired. Adjusting the rearview mirror, he peered back at us and smiled. “All aboard,” he said.
St. Anselm’s was somewhere on the North Shore of Long Island, nearly an hour’s drive from our house. The ride was usually solemn, but my father sometimes played the radio for us, or if he was in a good mood, he’d tell us a story about when he was a boy. Our favorites were about the ancient, swaybacked plow horse, Pegasus, dirty white and ploddingly dangerous, that he and his brother kept as kids in Amityville.
This hospital was not a single modern building, smelling vaguely of Lysol and piss. St. Anselm’s was like a small town of stone castles set amid the woods, a fairy-tale place of giant granite steps, oaken doors, stained glass, and dim, winding corridors that echoed in their emptiness. There was a spot set amid a thicket of poplars where a curved concrete bench lay before a fountain whose statuary was a pelican piercing its own chest with its beak. Water geysered forth from the wound. And the oddest thing of all was that everyone there, save the patients and old, bent Dr. Hasbith of the bushy white sideburns, was a nun.
I’d never seen so many nuns before, all of them dressed in their flowing black robes and tight headgear. If one of them came toward you from out of the cool shadows and your eyes weren’t yet adjusted to the dark interior, it was like a disembodied face floating in midair. They moved about in utter silence, and only rarely would one smile in passing. The place was haunted by God. I couldn’t help thinking that our aunt was being held prisoner there, enchanted like Sleeping Beauty, and that on some lucky Saturday we would rescue her.
As usual, we were not allowed to accompany our parents to the place where Aunt Laura was kept. Jim was left in charge, and we were each given a quarter to buy a soda. We knew that if we went down a set of winding steps that led into what I thought of as a dungeon, we would find a small room with a soda machine and two tables with chairs. Our typical routine was to descend, have a drink, and then go and sit on the bench by the fountain to watch the pelican bleed water for two hours. But that day, after we’d finished our sodas, Jim pointed into the shadow at the back wall of the small canteen to a door I’d never noticed before.
“What do you think is in there?” he asked as he walked over to it.
“Hell,” said Mary.
Jim turned the knob, flung the door open, and jumped back. Mary and I left our seats and stood behind him. We could see a set of stone steps leading downward, walls close on either side like a brick gullet. There was no light in the stairway itself, but a vague glow shone up from the bottom of the steps. Jim turned to look at us briefly. “I order you to follow me.”
At the bottom of the long flight of steps, we found a room with a low ceiling, a concrete floor, and a row of pews that disappeared into darkness toward the back. Up front, near the entrance to the stairway, was a small altar and above it a huge painting in a golden frame. The dim light we had seen from above was a single bulb positioned to illuminate the picture, which showed a scene of Jesus and Mary sitting next to a pool in the middle of a forest. The aquamarine of Mary’s gown was radiant, and both her and Christ’s eyes literally shone. The figures were smiling, and their hair, along with the leaves in the background, appeared to be moving.
“Let’s go back,” I said.
Mary inched away toward the stairs, and I started to follow her.
“One second,” said Jim. “Look at this, the holy fishing trip.”
We heard a rustle of material and something clunk against the heavy wood of one of the pews behind us. I jumped, and even Jim spun around with a look of fright on his face.
“It’s a lovely scene, isn’t it?” said a soft female voice. From out of the dark came a nun, whose face, pushing through the black mantle of her vestments, was so young and beautiful it confused me. She, too, was smiling, and her hands were pale and delicate. She lifted one as she passed by us and climbed onto the altar. “But you mustn’t miss the message of the painting,” she said, pointing.
“Do you see here?” she asked, and turned to look at us.
We nodded and followed her direction to gaze into the woods behind Mary and Jesus.
“What do you see?”
Jim stepped closer and a few seconds later said, “Eyes and a smile.”
“Someone is there in the woods,” I said as the figure became evident to me.
“A dark figure, spying from the woods,” said the nun. “Who is it?”
“The devil,” said Mary.
“You’re a smart girl,” said the nun. “Satan. Do you see how much this looks like a scene from the Garden of Eden? Well, the painter is showing us that just as Adam and Eve were subject to temptation, to death, so were the Savior and His mother. So are we all.”
“Why is he hiding?” asked Jim.
“He’s waiting and watching for the right moment to strike. He’s clever.”
“But the devil isn’t real,” said Jim. “My father told me.”
She smiled sweetly at us. “Oh, the devil is real, child. I’ve seen him. If you don’t pay attention, he’ll take you.”
“Good-bye now,” whispered Mary, who took my hand and pulled me toward the steps.
“What does he look like?” asked Jim.
I didn’t want to be there, but I couldn’t move. I thought the nun would get angry, but instead her smile intensified, and her face went from pleasant to scary.
Mary pulled my arm, and we took off up the stairs. Not bothering to stop in the canteen, we kept going up the next set of steps to the outside and only rested when we made it to the bench by the fountain. We waited there for some time, hypnotized by the cascading water, before Jim finally showed up.
“You chickens should be hung for mutiny,” he said as he approached.
“Mary was afraid,” I said. “I had to get her out of there.”
“Check your own shorts,” he said, shaking his head. “But she told me a secret.”
“What?” I asked.
“How to spot the devil when he walks the earth. That’s what Sister Joe said, ‘when he walks the earth,’” said Jim, and he started laughing.
“She was the devil,” said Mary, staring into the water.
That night, back at home, the wine flowed, and my parents danced in the living room to the Ink Spots on the Victrola. Something dire was up, I could tell, because they didn’t talk and there was a joyless gravity to their spins and dips.
Before we turned in, Nan came over from next door and told us that while we were out she had heard from Mavis across the street that the prowler had struck again. When Mavis’s husband, Dan, had taken out the trash, he heard something moving in their grape arbor. He called out, “Who’s there?” Of course there was no answer, but he saw a shadow and a pair of eyes. Dan was an airline pilot who flew all over the world, and one of his hobbies was collecting old weapons. He ran inside and fetched a long knife from Turkey that had a wriggled blade like a flat, frozen snake. Mavis had told Nan that he charged out the back door toward the arbor, but halfway there tripped on a divot in the lawn, fell, and stabbed his own thigh. By the time he was able to hobble back beneath the hanging grapes, the prowler had vanished.
While my mother sat in her rocker, eyes closed, rocking to the music, Jim and I arm-wrestled my father a few times, and then Mary danced with him, her bare feet on his shoes. “Bed,” my mother finally said, her eyes still closed.
At the top of the stairs before Jim and I went into our separate rooms, he said to me, “He walks the earth.” I laughed, but h
e didn’t. George followed me to bed and lay by my feet, falling asleep instantly. He kicked his back leg three times and growled in his dreams. I stayed awake for a while, listening to my parents’ hushed conversation down in the living room, but I couldn’t make anything out.
I wasn’t the least bit tired, so I got up and went over to my desk. Nan’s talking about Mavis and Dan gave me the idea to capture them in my notebook before I forgot. All I found interesting about Dan were the things that he owned: the leopard-skin rug, the shrunken head, the axes and knives and ancient pistols. Otherwise he was a pretty blank person, save for his toupee, which sat on his head like a doily. Mavis, on the other hand, had been born in Ireland, in the town of Cork, and had the most beautiful way of talking. She had grown up with the actor Richard Harris, who sang the song about the cake in the rain.
By the time I was done, it was quiet downstairs, and I knew that my parents had finally gone to bed. Still, I wasn’t tired, and on top of that I was a little spooked by the day’s events. Any thought of death was capable of conjuring the angry spirit of Teddy Dunden. To dispel his gathering presence, I got out of bed and tiptoed quietly down the stairs. In the kitchen I stole a cookie, and that’s when I decided to visit Botch Town.
Every old wooden step on the way to the cellar groaned miserably, but my father’s snoring, rolling forth from the bedroom at the back of the house, covered my own prowling. Once below, I inched blindly forward, and when my hip touched the edge of the plywood world, I leaned way over and grabbed the pull string. The sun came out in the middle of the night in Botch Town. I half expected the figures to scurry, but no, they must have heard me coming and froze on cue. Peering down on the minute lives made me think for an instant about my own smallness.
Scanning the board, I found the prowler, with his straight-pin hands, on the prowl, hiding in the toothpick grape arbor netted with vines of green thread behind Mavis and Dan’s house across the street from ours, his clever, glowing eyes like beacons searching the dark.
The Retard Factory
School started on a day so hot it seemed stolen from the heart of summer. The tradition was that if you got new clothes for school, you wore them the first day. My mother had made Mary a couple of dresses on the sewing machine. Because he’d outgrown what he had, Jim got shirts and pants from Gertz department store. I got his hand-me-downs, but I did also get a new pair of dungarees. They were as stiff as concrete and, after months of my wearing nothing but cutoffs, seemed to weigh fifty pounds. I sweated like the Easter pig, shuffling through school zombie style, to the library, the lunchroom, on the playground, and all day long that burlap scent of new denim smelled like the spirit of work.
Jim was starting seventh grade and was going to Hammond Road Junior High. He had to take a bus to get there. Mary and I were still stuck at the Retard Factory around the corner. None of us was a good student. I spent most of my time in the classroom either completely confused or daydreaming. Mary should have been in fourth grade but instead was in a special class in Room X, basically because they couldn’t figure out if she was really smart or really simple. The kids they couldn’t figure out, they put in Room X. Although all the other classrooms had numbers, this one had just the letter that signaled something cut-rate, like on the TV commercials: Brand X. When I’d pass by that room, I’d look in and see these wacky kids hobbling around or mumbling or crying, and there would be Mary, sitting straight up, focused, nodding every once in a while. Her teacher, Mrs. Rockhill, whom we called “Rockhead,” was no Mrs. Harkmar and didn’t have the secret to draw the Mickey of all right answers out of her. I knew Mary was really smart, though, because Jim had told me she was a genius.
Once they called Jim into the psychologist’s office and made my mother go over to the school and witness the tests they gave him. They showed him pages of paint blobs and asked him what he saw in them. “I see a spider biting a woman’s lip,” he said, and, “That’s a sick three-legged dog, eating grass.” Then they asked him to put pegs of various shapes into appropriate holes in a block of wood. He shoved all the wrong pegs into all the wrong holes. Finally my mother smacked him in the back of the head, and then he and she started laughing. Throughout sixth grade he incorporated something about Joe Manygoats, a Navajo boy written about in the fifth-grade social-studies book, into all his test answers, no matter the subject, and signed all yearbooks with that name. Still, he never failed a grade, and this gave me hope that I, too, would someday leave East Lake.
My teacher for sixth grade was the fearsome Mr. Krapp. To borrow a phrase from Nan, “as God is my judge,” that was his name. He was a short guy with a sharp nose and a crew cut so flat you could land a helicopter on it. Jim had had him for sixth grade, too, and told me he screamed a lot. My mother had diagnosed Krapp with a Napoleonic complex. “You know,” she said, “he’s a little general.” He assured us on the first day that he “wouldn’t stand for any of it.” The third time he repeated the phrase, Tim Sullivan, who sat beside me, whispered, “He’d rather get down on his knees.”
Krapp also had big ears, and he heard Tim, who he made get up in front of the classroom and repeat for everyone what he’d said. That day we all learned an important lesson in how not to laugh no matter how funny something is.
School brought a great heaviness to the hours of my days as if they, too, had put on new dungarees. By that year, though, it was business as usual, so I weathered it with a grim resignation. The only thing drastic that happened in that first week occurred on the way home one afternoon: Will Hinkley, a kid with a bulging Adam’s apple and curly hair, challenged me to a fight. I tried to walk away, but before I knew what was going on, a bunch of kids had surrounded us and Hinkley started pushing me. The whirl of voices and faces, the evident danger, made me light-headed, and what little strength I had quickly evaporated. Mary was with me, and she started crying. I was not popular and had no friends there to help me; instead everyone was cheering for me to get beat up.
After a lot of shoving and name-calling and me trying to back out of the circle and getting thrown into the middle again, he hit me once in the side of the head, and I was dazed. Clenching my fists, I held my hands up in front of my face, assuming a position I had seen in fights on TV, and Hinkley circled me. I tried to follow his movements, but he darted in quickly, and his bony knuckle split my lip. There was little pain, just an overwhelming sense of embarrassment, because I felt tears welling in the corners of my eyes.
As Hinkley came toward me again, I saw Jim pushing through the crowd. He came up behind Hinkley, reached around, and grabbed him by the throat with one hand. In a second, Jim wrestled him to the ground, where he punched him again and again in the face. When Jim got up, blood was running from Hinkley’s nose and he was quietly whimpering. All the other kids had taken off. Jim lifted my book bag and handed it to me.
“You’re such a pussy,” he said.
“How?” was all I could manage, I was shaking so badly.
“Mary ran home and told me,” he said.
“Did you kill him?”
He shrugged.
Hinkley lived, and his mother called our house that night complaining that Jim was dangerous, but Mary and I had already told our mother what had happened. I remember her telling Mrs. Hinkley over the phone, “Well, you know, you play with fire, you’re liable to get burned.” When she hung up the phone, she flipped it the middle finger and then told us she didn’t want us fighting anymore. She made Jim promise he would apologize to Hinkley. “Sure,” he said, but later, when I asked him if he was really going to apologize, he said, “Yeah, I’m going to take him to Bermuda.”
His Air Was Cold
In reality, the start of school was anticlimactic, because the prowler had surfaced twice more. The Hayeses’ teenage daughter, Marci, spotted him spotting her sitting on the toilet late one night. The Mason kid, Henry, who regularly proclaimed in school that he would someday be president, found the shadow man in their darkened garage, crouching in the corner behi
nd the car when he took out the empty milk bottles after dinner. As he told Jim and me later when we went to talk to him about it, “He ran by me so fast I didn’t see him, but his air was cold.”
“What do you mean, ‘his air was cold’?” asked Jim.
“It smelled cold.”
“Unlike yours?” said Jim.
Henry nodded.
That evening, down in the cellar, Jim made tiny red flags out of sewing needles and construction paper and stuck them into the turf of Botch Town in all the spots we knew that the prowler had been. When he was done, we stepped back and he said, “I saw this on Dragnet once. Just the facts. It’s supposed to reveal the criminal’s plan.”
“Do you see any plan?” I asked.
“They’re all on our block,” he said, “but otherwise it’s just a mess.”
Apparently we weren’t the only ones concerned about the prowler, because somebody called the cops. Thursday afternoon a police officer walked down the block, knocking on people’s doors, asking if they’d seen anything suspicious at night or if they’d heard someone in their backyard. When he got to our house, he spoke to Nan. As usual, Nan knew everything that happened on the street, and she gave the cop an earful. We hid in the kitchen and listened, and in the process we learned something we hadn’t known. It so happened that the Farleys had found a human shit at the bottom of their swimming pool, as if someone had sat on the rim and dropped it.