by Jeffrey Ford
When the cop was getting ready to leave, Jim stepped out of hiding and told him we had a footprint we thought belonged to the prowler. He smiled at us and winked at Nan but asked to see it. We led him back to the shed, and Jim went in and brought out the hatbox. He motioned for me to take the lid off, and I did. The cop bent over and peered inside.
“Nice job, fellas,” he said, and took the box with him, but later on, when I walked George around the block that night, I saw the pink cardboard box with its poodle and the Eiffel Tower jutting out of the Manginis’ open garbage can at the curb. I went over to it and peeked under the lid. The footprint was ruined, and I decided not to tell Jim.
As George and I continued on our rounds, autumn came. We were standing at the entrance to East Lake beneath a full moon, and suddenly a great burst of wind rushed by. The leaves of the trees at the boundary of the woods beyond Sewer Pipe Hill rattled, some flying free of their branches in a dark swarm. Just like that, the temperature dropped. I realized that the crickets had gone silent, and I smelled a trace of Halloween.
Down the block a wind chime that had been silent all summer sounded its cowbell call. I looked up at the stars and felt my mind start to wander, so I sat down at the curb. George sat next to me.
That day in school, they had herded us into the cafeteria and showed us a movie, The Long Way Home from School. It was about kids playing on the train tracks and getting flattened by speeding trains or electrocuted on the third rail. The guy who narrated the stories looked like the father from Leave It to Beaver. He told one about kids thinking it was fun to climb on train cars and run across the tops. Little did they know that the train was about to pull out. When the movie showed the train starting to move, he said, “Oops, Johnny fell in between the cars and was crushed to death by tons of steel. It’s not so much fun when you’re flat as a pancake.” After that came a scene of a kid shooting a slingshot at a moving train crosscut with another scene of a little girl in a passenger compartment pressing her hand to her eye as blood dripped down her face while the landscape rolled by. “Nice shooting, cowboy,” Mr. Cleaver said.
After the movie they made us line up out in the hallway on our knees with our heads down and pressed into the angle where the floor met the wall. “Cover the back of your head by locking your fingers behind it. This will protect you from flying debris,” said Mr. Cleary, the principal, one hand lightly stroking his throat. We were led to believe that this crouching maneuver would save us if the Russians dropped an atomic bomb on our town.
My mother had told us that if the air-raid siren ever really went off, I was to get home. She and my father had devised a plan. The minute the siren sounded, someone was supposed to shovel dirt into the window wells of the cellar and then get all the mattresses from the house and lay them out on the first floor to block the radiation from seeping down into the basement. At one time they had stocked a bunch of cans of food in the cellar and gallon bottles of water, each with a drop of bleach in it to keep them fresh. But as time went on, the supplies dwindled to a single can of Spam and a bottle of water that had gone green.
As George and I got up and headed back home, I daydreamed a Twilight Zone scenario of us projecting ourselves into the world of Botch Town to escape the horrible devastation of atomic bombs.
When George and I got home, the wine bottle sat on the kitchen counter, empty, and my mother was passed out on the couch. There was a cigarette between her fingers with an ash almost as long as the cigarette. Jim went and got an ashtray that was half a giant clamshell we had found on the beach the previous summer, and Mary and I watched as he positioned it under the ash. He gave my mother’s wrist the slightest tap, and the gray tube dropped perfectly whole into the shell.
I wedged a pillow under her head as Jim took her by the shoulders and settled her more comfortably on the couch. Mary fetched the Sherlock Holmes. Jim opened it to The Hound of the Baskervilles, the story that obsessed her, and gently placed the volume binding up, its wings open like those of a giant moth, on her chest.
We went next door to say good night to Nan and Pop.
“Where’s your mother?” asked Pop.
“She’s out cold,” said Jim.
Nan’s lips did that kissing-fish thing that they did whenever she was trying to trick you into ignoring the truth. I had first noticed it that past summer on the day the ladies came over and she read the cards for them. The widow, old Mrs. Restuccio, who lived by herself next to the Curdmeyers across the street, had drawn the ace of spades. Nan’s lips started going, and she quickly pulled the card from the table and exclaimed, “Misdeal.” There was a moment where the room went stone quiet, and then, as if someone flipped a switch, the ladies started chattering again.
Never Eat a Peach Leaf
The first Saturday morning after school started, I followed Pop around the yard holding a colander as he harvested the yield of the trees. Before he picked each piece of fruit, he’d take it lightly in his hand as if it were a live egg with a fragile shell.
As we moved from tree to tree, he told me things about them. “Never put a peach leaf near your mouth,” he said. “They’re poisonous.” When we came to the yellow apple tree: “This tree grew from seeds that no one sells anymore. It’s called Miter’s Sun, and I bought the sapling from an old coot who told me there were only a half dozen of them left in the world. It’s important to take care of it, because if it and the few others that remain die off, this species will be gone from the face of the earth forever.” He picked a small, misshapen yellow apple from a branch, rubbed it on his shirt, and handed it to me. “Take a bite of that,” he said. From that ugly marble came a wonderful sweetness.
We continued on to the plum tree, and he said to me, “I heard you were in a fight this week.”
I nodded.
“Do you want me to teach you how to box?” he asked.
I thought about it for a while. “No,” I said, “I don’t like to fight.”
He laughed so loud that the crow sitting on the TV antenna atop the house was frightened into flight. I felt embarrassed, but he reached down and put his hand on my head. “Okay,” he said, and laughed more quietly.
After retiring from the Big A, Aqueduct Racetrack, where he had worked in the boiler room for years, Pop had taken up an interest in trees, especially ones that gave fruit. On our quarter-acre property, he planted quite a few—a peach, a plum, three apples, a cherry, an ornamental crabapple, and something called a smoke bush that kept the mosquitoes away—and spent the summer months tending to them: spraying them for bugs, digging around their bases, pulling up saplings, getting rid of dead branches. I’d never seen him read a book on the subject or study it in any way; he just started one day within the first week after leaving his job.
Nan had shown us old, yellowing newspaper clippings from when Pop was a boxer in Jamaica Arena and photographs of him standing on the deck of a ship with an underwater suit and a metal diving helmet that had a little window in it. Once when my parents thought I was asleep on the couch but I just had my eyes closed, I learned that he had spent time in a mental institution, where they’d given him electroshock therapy. Supposedly, when he was fifteen, his mother had sent him out around the corner for a loaf of bread. He went and joined the merchant marine, lying about his age, and returned home after three years, carrying the loaf of bread. Later, when he was asked how his mother had reacted, his answer was “She beat the shit out of me.”
He was powerfully built, with a huge chest and wide shoulders. Even when he was in his old age, I couldn’t circle one of his biceps with both my hands. Every once in a while, we’d ask to see his tattoos, vein-blue drawings he could make dance by flexing his muscles: a naked woman on his left forearm, an eagle on his chest, and a weird fire-breathing dragon-dog, all curlicue fur and huge lantern eyes, on his back, which he had gotten in Java from a man who used whalebone needles. He told Jim and me that the dragon-dog was named Chimto and that it watched behind him for his enemies.
&nbs
p; The trees may have been Pop’s hobby, but his true love was the horses. He studied the Daily Telegraph, the horse paper, as if it were a sacred text. When he was done with it, the margins were filled with the scribble of horses’ names, jockeys’ names, times, claiming purses, stacks of simple arithmetic, and strange symbols that looked like Chinese writing. Whatever it all stood for, it allowed him to pick a fairly high percentage of winners. There was one time when he went to the track and came home in a brand-new car, and another when he won so much he took us all on vacation to Niagara Falls. Pop’s best friend was his bookie, Bill Pharo, and Pop drove over to Babylon to see him almost every day.
Mr. Blah-Blah
That Saturday afternoon, when my father got home from work, he called us kids into the living room and made us sit on the love seat. My mother and he sat on the couch across the marble coffee table from us. Before they spoke, my mind raced back through the recent weeks to try to remember if we could be in trouble for something.
All I could think of, besides the incident with Hinkley, which seemed to have blown over by then, was a night a week or so before school started when Jim and I had made a dummy out of old clothes—shirt and pants—stuffed with newspapers and held together with safety pins. The head was from a big, mildewed doll, an elephant stuffed with sawdust someone had won at the Good Samaritan Hospital fair that had been lying around in the cellar for as long as I could remember. We cut the head off, removed some of the sawdust, tied the neck in a knot, and pinned it to the collar of the shirt. The figure was crude, but we knew that it would serve our purposes, especially in the dark. We got it out of the cellar unseen by pushing it through one of the windows into the backyard.
We’d named our floppy elephant guy Mr. Blah-Blah and tied a long length of fishing line around his chest under the arms of the shirt. We laid him at the curb on one side of the street and then payed out the fishing line to the other side of the street and through the bottom of the hedges in front of the empty house that had, until a little more than a year earlier, belonged to the Halloways. We knew that it wouldn’t pay to do what we were planning in front of our own house, and the one we chose had the benefit of having a southern extension of the woods right behind its backyard. We could move along the trails in the pitch black, and anyone who tried to chase us would be hopelessly lost and have to turn back.
Hiding behind the hedges, we waited until we saw the lights of a car coming down the street. When the car neared the hedges, we pulled on the line, reeling in the bum, and in the dark it looked like he was crawling across the road in fits and starts, like maybe he’d already been hit by a car.
The car’s brakes screeched, and it swerved, almost driving up onto the curb and nearly hitting the telephone pole. The instant I heard the brakes, I realized that the whole thing was a big mistake. Jim and I ran like hell, bent in half to gain cover from the hedges. We stopped at the corner of the old Halloway house, in the shadows.
“If they come after us, run back and jump the stream, and I’ll meet you at the fork in the main path,” Jim whispered.
I nodded.
From where we stood, we had a good view of the car. I was relieved to see it wasn’t one I recognized as belonging to any of the neighbors. It was an old model, from before I was born, shiny white, with a kind of bubble roof and fins that stuck up in the back like a pair of goalposts. The door creaked open, and a man dressed in a long white trench coat and hat got out. It was too dark and we were too far away to see his features, but he came around the side of the car and discovered Mr. Blah-Blah in the road. He must have seen the fishing line, because he looked up and stared directly at us. Jim pulled me back deeper into the shadows. The man didn’t move for the longest time, but his face was turned straight toward us. My heart was pounding, and only Jim’s hand on the back of my shirt kept me from running. Finally the man got back into the car and drove away. When we were sure the car was gone, we retrieved Mr. Blah-Blah and threw him back in the woods. But that had happened more than a week earlier.
My father cleared his throat, and I looked at Jim, who sat on the other side of Mary. He looked back at me, and I knew that his memory was stuffed with that mildewed elephant head.
“We just wanted to tell you that we don’t think Aunt Laura is going to be with us much longer,” said my father. His elbows were on his knees, and he was looking more at our feet than at us. He rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them.
“You mean she’s going to die?” said Jim.
“She’s very sick and weak. In a way it will be a blessing,” said my mother. I could see the tears forming in the corners of her eyes.
We nodded, but I was unsure if that was the right thing to do. I wondered how dying could be a good thing. Then my father told us, “Okay, go and play.” Mary went over to where my mother was sitting and climbed into her lap. I left before the waterworks really got started.
Later that afternoon I took George and my notebook, and we traveled far. When I set out, I felt the weight of a heavy thought in my head. I could feel it roosting, but when I tried to realize it, reach for it with my mind, it proved utterly elusive, like trying to catch a killifish in the shallows with your bare hands. On my way up to Hammond Lane, I saw Mr. and Mrs. Bishop being screamed at by their ten-year-old tyrant son, Reggie; passed by Boris, the janitor from East Lake, who was fixing his car out in his driveway; saw the lumbering, moon-eyed Horton kid, Peter, big and slow as a mountain, riding a bike whose seat seemed to have disappeared up his ass.
We crossed Hammond Lane and went down the street lined on both sides with giant sycamores, leaves gone yellow and brown. To the left of me was the farm, cows grazing in the field; to the right was a plowed expanse of bare dirt where builders had begun to frame a line of new houses. Beyond that another mile, down a hill, amid a thicket of trees, next to the highway, we came to a stream.
I sat with my back to an old telephone pole someone had dumped there and wrote up the neighbors I’d seen on my journey—told about how Mrs. Bishop had Reggie when she was forty-one; told about how the kids at school would try to fool Boris, who was Yugoslavian and didn’t speak English very well, and his invariable response: “Boys, you are talking dogshit”; told about the weird redneck Hortons, whom I had overheard described by Mrs. Conrad once as “incest from the hills.”
When I was finished writing, I put my pencil in the notebook and pulled George close. I petted his head and told him, “It’s gonna be okay.” The thought I’d been carrying finally broke through, and I saw a figure, like a human shadow, leaning over Aunt Laura’s bed in the otherwise empty room at St. Anselm’s and lifting her up. He held her to him, enveloping her in his darkness and then, like a bubble of ink bursting, vanished.
Maybe He’ll Show Up for Lunch
That night, well into her bottle of wine, my mother erupted, spewing anger and fear. During these episodes she was another person, a stranger, and when they were done. I could never remember what the particulars of her rage were, just that the experience seemed to suck the air out of the room and leave me unable to breathe. In my mind I saw the evil queen gazing into her talking mirror, and I tried to rebuff the image by conjuring the memory of a snowy day when I was little and she pulled Jim and me to school on the sled, running as fast as she could. We laughed, she laughed, and the world was covered in white.
We kids abandoned our father, leaving him to take the brunt of the attack. Jim fled down the cellar to lose himself in Botch Town. Mary went instantly Mickey, encircled herself with a whispered string of numbers for protection, and snuck next door to Nan and Pop’s house. As I headed up the stairs to the refuge of my room, I heard the sound of a smack and something skittering across the kitchen floor. I knew it was either my father’s glasses or his teeth, but I wasn’t going downstairs to find out. I knew he was sitting there stoically, waiting for the storm to pass. I shoved off with Perno Shell down the Amazon in search of El Dorado.
Some time later, just after Shell had taken a cu
rare dart in the neck and paralysis was setting in, there was a knock on my door. Mary came in. She curled up at the bottom of my bed and lay there staring at me.
“Hey,” I said, “want me to read you some people from my notebook?”
She sat up and nodded.
So I read her all the ones I had recently added, up to the Horton kid on his bike. I spoke my writing at a slow pace in order to kill time and allow her a long stint of the relief she found in the mental tabulation of my findings. When we finished, the house was silent.
“Any winners in that bunch?” I asked.
“Boris the janitor,” she said.
“Go to bed now,” I told her.
The next morning my mother was too hungover to take us to church, so she told us to each say a good act of contrition and a Hail Mary. We raced through them. When we were finally gathered at the breakfast table, my father recounted some of his stories from the army. I wondered if my mother’s assault the night before had put him in mind of other battles. The phone rang, and my mother, now light and smiling, as if suffering amnesia of last night, answered it.
When she hung up, she told us the news—yesterday Charlie Edison, who was in my class at East Lake, had gone out to play and never returned. At dinnertime, when he didn’t appear, his mother had started to worry. When night fell and he still hadn’t gotten home, his father called the police. My mother said, “Either something happened to him or he’s been abducted.” Nan’s lips moved in and out, and she said, “Maybe he’ll show up for lunch.”
Charlie Edison was even more weak and meek than me. We’d had the same teachers since kindergarten. In class photographs he was clearly the runt of the litter. His arms were as thin as pipe cleaners, and he was short and skinny, with a pencil neck and a face that looked like Tommy the Turtle from the old cartoons. His glasses were so big it was as if he had stolen them from his old man, and every time I thought of him, I pictured him pushing those huge specs up on the bridge of his nose with one extended twiglike finger. Charlie’s daily project was trying to achieve invisibility, because the meaner kids liked to pick on him. I felt sympathy for him and also relief that he existed, since without him those same kids would probably have been picking on me.