by Jeffrey Ford
“I saw a thing on TV,” I said, “about a kid who was ten years old but he had a disease that aged him to ninety. He looked like a weird little leprechaun.”
“Was he magically delicious?” asked Jim.
We got back onto our bikes and went home. I dozed off on the couch in the stillness of the afternoon and slept so hard I drooled.
The Splinter
That night after dinner, my mother, already slurring her words, decided to operate on my splinter. She had Mary run and get her a sewing needle. She called me into the living room and told me to sit next to her at the table. I already regretted having told her about my thumb. My mother put on her reading glasses so they perched at the end of her nose. Taking my hand in both of hers, she turned it palm up. There was an inch-and-a-half-long red line at the bottom of my thumb, and at the tip the darkness of the splinter’s wood showed through a thin layer of skin.
“That’s a bad one,” she said.
Mary brought the needle.
“Will you need a sheet for the blood?” asked Jim.
My mother told him to shut up. She took the needle, lit a match, and then ran the silver tip back and forth through the flame till it turned orange. To cool it she shook it like a thermometer.
She grabbed me by the wrist and drew my palm closer to her. The hand that held the blackened needle wobbled as it descended. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I didn’t feel pain, only pricking. She picked at my skin with the tip of the needle so many times it went numb. A few moments later a sharp ache blossomed through the numbness. I took another deep breath.
She stopped and told Mary, “Tweezer.”
Mary ran to the bathroom and quickly returned. I opened one eye and hazarded a peek. My mother spent a few seconds aiming the silver pincers, and then she lunged. Squeezing my eyes shut again, I couldn’t see what she was doing, but right at the center of the splinter’s dull ache I felt something sliding. She drew the entire thing out, a long gray shard of wood, and held it up to the light.
“Open your eyes.” She smacked me playfully. “Look at the size of that,” she said.
“Treachery,” said Jim.
Two seconds later the door opened, and Nan was standing there. “Gert,” she said to my mother. “We have to take your father to the hospital.”
“Is his arm bad again?” asked my mother.
“Pains all up and down it, and he’s pale and sweaty.”
“Let me just get my coat,” said my mother. Nan went home to get ready. When my mother stood, she weaved slightly, steadying herself by touching her fingertips to the table.
“Can you drive?” asked Jim.
“Of course,” she said, and straightened up.
Nan came back through the door, leading Pop. His right hand gripped his left bicep. He looked sad and so tired. None of us kids said anything. My mother went to his other side, and they led him slowly out the front and down the steps. We followed.
At one point, on the way to the car, his knees buckled slightly, and they had to hold him up. They got him into the car, and my mother got behind the wheel. Looking at us through the car window, she said, “I don’t know how long this is going to take. Jim’s in charge. Your father will be home around midnight. I’ll call you as soon as I can and let you know how long we’ll be. Be good.”
The car backed out of the driveway, and I tracked the taillights all the way up the dark street. It was a warm and blustery night. I turned toward the house. Jim and Mary had already gone inside.
They were sitting on either end of the couch with George between them. Jim looked over at me as I came through the door and said, “I’m in charge. I could make you both go to bed right now.”
Mary, whose legs were curled beneath her, never looked away from the television but said, “Shove it.”
Jim laughed.
“What’s this?” I said, nodding at the TV as I sat in my mother’s rocker.
“I can’t believe it after today,” said Jim, “but it’s about a grasshopper that gets too close to an atomic explosion and turns giant.”
We watched it, but Jim was wrong—it wasn’t a grasshopper, it was a praying mantis. When the show was over, Jim went into the kitchen and brought us out two cookies each. Mary found a war movie on the tube. A tank rolled over a guy’s arm.
About halfway through it, right after a scene where a soldier throws a grenade into a foxhole full of Germans and gets killed, I started wondering how Pop was doing and if they’d made it to the hospital with my mother driving.
“What do you think’s happening?” I said to Jim.
“Colonel Candyass just blew up a bunch of krauts,” he said.
“No, with Pop.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Mom didn’t look good.”
“They’ll probably wind up in the bay with her driving,” said Jim.
“No they won’t,” said Mary.
Ten minutes later the commercial for Ajax Liquid, which supposedly cleaned your kitchen floor like a white tornado, came on, and the combination of cleaning fluid and the whiteness of the animated twister made me think of Mr. White. Jim and I looked at each other at the exact same moment. He jumped up from the couch and turned off the television. I sat forward on the rocker. Mary looked from one of us to the other.
“Get the front door,” said Jim as he ran through the kitchen to lock the back one.
“Mr. White?” asked Mary.
I nodded. Jim came back into the living room and stood still, cocking his head to the side as if trying to hear something. I went and checked the front window for the white car.
“It’s not there,” I said.
“Mr. White moved in Botch Town today,” said Mary.
“I thought you couldn’t do that anymore,” said Jim.
“I was down there this afternoon, and I saw his white car, and the numbers came all of a sudden,” she said.
We ran down into the cellar. Jim lit the sun. There was the white car parked in front of our house. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Jim said to Mary.
“I thought we were all forgetting about it,” said Mary.
“Are you kidding?” he said. He told me to go over on the other side of the cellar to Pop’s workbench and get the flashlight and the hatchet. “I’m going up to get George,” he said.
George was confused at being on the leash in the cellar, so Jim let him off. The dog went around sniffing at everything. “He’s gonna pee,” said Mary, and the moment she said that, the lights went out.
“Give me the flashlight,” Jim whispered. “I knew he’d turn off the lights. I bet the phone’s out, too.”
“He’s coming?” I said.
“Look,” said Jim, switching the flashlight on, “when he gets to the cellar steps, we go out the back window like Ray did.” He picked up his Botch Town chair and carried it over to the back wall. Stepping up onto the seat, he handed the flashlight to me and said, “Aim it up here.”
I did. He latched the window to the hook on the ceiling. The night came through the opening. He stepped down and told Mary to get up on the chair. “You stay there, and when I tell you to go, pull yourself up through the window into the backyard.” He shone the flashlight on me. “You help her,” he said to me. “Then you go through.”
I said, “Okay,” but I doubted whether I could manage to pull myself up.
Mary got on the chair and reached her hands up to grab the bottom of the windowsill. “I can do it,” she said.
“When I tell you, you gotta go fast,” he said. “And the minute you get outside, start running for the school. Don’t wait for us. We’ll catch up.”
We stood in the dark and waited. Upstairs, the phone started ringing. Jim told us to ignore it, that it was a trick to get us upstairs. He held the flashlight pointed at the cellar steps and, in his opposite hand, the hatchet.
I was shaking, remembering that Mr. White had the power of total silence. Out of nowhere a plan came to me, and I whispered it to
Jim: “We should get the extreme-unction box and open it in front of him, like Dracula and the cross.”
“Forget it,” said Jim.
Right after that I heard George give a low growl. His nails tapped across the concrete floor as he circled. It was quiet for a half a minute, and then he growled again.
“He’s here,” said Mary, and Jim turned off the flashlight. In the silence we could hear someone messing around with the lock on the front doorknob.
I don’t know how many minutes passed before we heard the front door upstairs groan open, but in that time I wished I’d told my father everything back when I’d found Charlie. I was too scared to cry. The flashlight suddenly cut through the darkness and lit a pale hand sliding down the banister of the cellar steps. It was perfectly quiet, and we watched Mr. White descend as if he were floating. George started barking.
“Go, Mary,” Jim said.
I reached up and grabbed for her legs. She was already halfway through when my arms closed around them and I pushed up. I looked back into the light and saw the face and hat, lit like in the photo. He was coming toward us.
“Get him, George!” Jim yelled. The dog lunged forward, and although I couldn’t see anything, I could tell from the sounds that he was biting Mr. White’s shoes and ankles.
“Go,” said Jim, his voice trembling.
I got up on the chair and grabbed the sill. As I jumped, I hit my head on the ceiling but held on, ducked, and went through the opening. Mary was there. She reached down into the well and pulled my arm. Before I got my feet through, I heard George give a sharp cry, followed by the sound of metal hitting concrete. Jim had thrown the hatchet.
“Come back here,” said Mr. White in a cold, quiet voice.
I was out. I had Mary by the hand, and we were running. Out of the backyard, under the mimosa on Nan’s side, to the street, where we headed for East Lake. I could taste the adrenaline, and my heart was pounding. Mary kept up with me, and we flew past the front lawns. As we ran, I kept listening for Jim, turning my head to glimpse behind us. When we reached the Manginis’, I stopped and turned around.
“Don’t stop!” Jim yelled from two lawns behind us, and I was so relieved to hear his voice. We turned and ran, and before we made it to Mrs. Grimm’s, he passed us and led the way. Headlights flooded the road from behind.
We ran harder. I could hear the engine of the white car and the sound of its tires on the gravel. We flew past the school gate and onto the field, heading for the side of the building.
“Hurry!” called a distant voice that wasn’t Jim’s.
I looked up and saw Ray’s silhouette on the roof. He was waving both his arms over his head. In that moment, although my heart was pounding and I could hardly catch a breath, it struck me as odd how perfectly the plan was working. How could Ray have known we were coming? As we passed the kindergarten playground and headed for the back of the building, I turned and saw that Mr. White had parked in the bus circle and was getting out of his car.
We saw the shadow of the ladder leaning up to the roof of the school. Ray stood above us, whispering, “Hurry.”
Jim made Mary go up first and me after her. I’d always been afraid of heights, but at that moment I didn’t even think of it. What I did think of was the fact that we were climbing Pop’s extension ladder. Ray grabbed us as we got close to the top and helped us up the last few rungs.
“I’ve been waiting all summer for you,” he said to Jim as my brother reached the roof.
“We couldn’t get out,” said Jim.
All of us leaned over the side of the school and watched Mr. White come slowly around the back corner. When he got close enough, Ray picked up a pebble and threw it at him.
“Okay, he sees us,” said Ray. “Let’s get in place.”
We backed away from the edge. “You guys go over there toward the gym,” he said. “If I get him into the courtyard, we’ll just go back down the ladder, but if anything goes wrong, we’ll have to climb the wall ladder up to the top of the gym. It’s bolted to the wall over there, in the shadows.”
“What do we do now?” asked Jim.
“When he comes up on the roof, you guys jump up and down and make noise to distract him. I’ll crouch next to the opening for the courtyard over there.” He pointed. “When he starts heading for you guys, he’ll pass the opening, and I’ll shove him over the edge.”
It had sounded like a perfect plan when he’d first explained it in the cellar, but now the whole thing seemed ridiculous. “Mr. White has powers,” I said.
“Shut up,” Jim told me, and led us to our spot. We stared at the top of the ladder, waiting.
“Look,” said Mary, pointing, as Mr. White’s hat and then his face came into view, glowing against the dark like thousand-year-old starlight. He moved cautiously, turning his head quickly this way and that, like a bird, peering into the night.
I remembered then that we were supposed to make noise and draw his attention. I tried to whistle—no good. “Hey,” I yelled, but it came out as a whisper.
“Over here, White, you turd sniffer!” called Jim. Even Mary was able to get out a “Yeah!”
He pinpointed where we stood, put his hands in his pockets, and took a step forward. In order to reach us over by the gym wall, he had to move a few steps closer to the opening above the courtyard. We waved our hands to keep him from noticing Ray, who was crouched down low like a ball of shadow. White took two long strides, and just when he got as close to the edge as possible, we saw Ray spring up and rush forward. White never turned to look at him, never seemed to even hear him, but took another step. As God is my judge, Ray passed right through him, not around him but through him. I froze on the spot. The dark presence of Ray, though he didn’t budge Mr. White an inch, seemed to weaken him for a moment, and White hesitated. All of this happened so fast, but it seemed so slow that I caught every detail. Almost. What I missed was the fact that Jim had taken off running. The rest of the action unfolded like a movie.
White shook his head, like he was clearing mental cobwebs, straightened up, and was about to take another step when Jim hit him low and hard. His arms pinwheeling, Mr. White stumbled to the edge of the roof. His jacket flapped, and his hat fell back out of sight into the courtyard. He struggled to right himself at the edge, and one of his hands came down, grabbing Jim by the sleeve of his shirt. Jim grunted and pushed him. White went backward, but as he fell, he grabbed Jim’s ankle, pulling him down to the surface of the roof. I saw one arm of the white overcoat and that pale hand clutching the bottom of Jim’s leg.
Mary started running before I did. Jim’s screams for help sparked me to action. I got to where he was slowly being pulled over the edge in the same instant Mary did. He was struggling to pull himself back. We started stamping the pale wrist and hand, the arm. Finally I jumped up as high as I could and came down on it with both feet. There was a snapping sound that echoed across the rooftop, followed by a high-pitched cry of pain. The icicle grip loosened, and Jim pulled his ankle free.
We didn’t notice that White had grabbed the edge with just the fingertips of his opposite hand, but Mary did. She stepped up and finished the job with a single stamp of her foot. We heard the thud below and a wheeze of stale air pushed from his lungs. Stepping closer to the edge, we looked over and saw him lying flat on his back, his coat spread out like wings behind him, his hat next to his head. I could see that his eyes were open and that he was watching us. Jim leaned over the side and spit on him. Mary did the same, and he never moved or called out.
Jim shoved me. “Get going,” he said.
We went down the ladder, Jim first, me last, and Mary in between us. Once we got to the ground, I said, “What happened to Ray?”
Mary shook her head.
“I don’t know,” said Jim. “He’s gone.”
Before I could ask, “Was he a ghost?” Jim said, “We have to hurry. We gotta get home and call the cops.” He started walking fast around toward the front of the building. “Th
e courtyard will hold him for a while, but he’s tricky,” Jim called back over his shoulder.
We were passing through the front gate of the school, Jim up ahead, and I turned to Mary and asked her if she, too, had seen Ray pass through Mr. White. The thought of it still made me giddy.
It was a few moments before she nodded and quietly said, “Right through him.”
When we got home, the front door was locked. White must have locked it behind him after he’d entered. Jim went in through the cellar window in the back, and we waited for him on the front stoop. While we were standing there, the lights went back on, and I knew that Jim had been at the cellar fuse box. Even before he could open the door for us all the way, I saw George scurrying around his legs, looking no worse for wear. Neither my mother nor my father was home yet. We went into the kitchen, and Jim picked up the phone and dialed. He waited for an answer, and Mary and I stood still and held our breath.
“Somebody’s breaking into East Lake School. Check the courtyard,” he said in a voice deeper than his own. Then he hung up quick. As soon as the phone was on the hook, we all started laughing. I laughed so hard my eyes watered, and so did Jim’s and Mary’s.
Mary went to the refrigerator, took out the Velveeta cheese, and cut a big hunk off the end. She threw the orange wedge to George, who caught it in midair with a snap of his jaws.
It was over. I knew because most of my fear left me the same way the crazy energy went out of my mother—all at once, like a balloon deflating. A few minutes later, we heard the sirens coming down Willow. Two cars sped by, flashing red, as we watched from the front window. I knew that the neighbors would leave their houses and walk over to the school as they had the night Tony Calfano shot out the windows, but we let the curtain fall back into place and turned on the television. No one said a word.
Nan and my mother arrived home. They told us Pop had had a stroke and that he’d be in the hospital for a while. It was late, but my mother poured two glasses of wine for her and Nan. She thanked us for being so good, and we were sent to bed. We told them nothing.