Downers Grove

by Michael Hornburg

  “Whatayatalkinabout?” the quarterback slurred, as if I was spoiling all his fun. Tracy looked up at me, and I gave her the death stare.

  “Guys,” she said, slapping their knees, “it’s been fun, but I have to go meet my boyfriend.”

  “She’s your boyfriend.” The quarterback pointed at me. “The carpet muncher. The queen of shag.”

  Tracy stood up and walked toward the door.

  “From one homosexual to another,” I said, nodding to him, then kicked the coffee table, and the pyramid of cans came crashing down into his lap.

  “Hey you stupid bitch”—he brushed the cans off his legs—“who the fuck do you think you are?”

  I gave him the bird with one hand while Tracy grabbed the other and pulled me toward the door. When we were outside Tracy started laying into me about how I always had to ruin everything. When we got into the car she gave me the silent treatment royale: Her Hole tape cranked and the Berlin Wall between us.

  As we drove away I saw the fathead I made love to in the john come running out into the parking lot with a paper towel caressing his nose, obviously looking for moi. I had a good laugh. Several yahoo companions were right behind him. One of them pointed at our car while the rest loaded into an Olds-mobile that quickly backed out behind us. As we drove up Woodward Avenue past Wal-Mart, I looked back and saw Revenge of the Steakheads tearing up pavement behind us. Tracy was puttering along and I wondered if I should warn her or just let the circumstances fly.

  It was only seconds before they pulled up beside us. Chuckie started throwing half-empty beer cans at Tracy’s car. She rolled down her window.

  “What the fuck’s your problem?” she yelled.

  “I’m gonna kill that bitch!” Fatso leaned out of the car and pointed at me, his other hand still nursing his nose. I prayed for a telephone pole to chop off his head.

  “Who is that pig?” Tracy asked. I squirmed in my seat.

  “I think his name is Chuck or something.”

  “What did you do?” Tracy rolled up her window.

  “He busted into the John looking to play Mr. President, and when I said N-O he got pushy, so I was forced to suppress his advances.”

  “Did you mace him?” Tracy sped up the car.

  “No, I kicked him in the balls!”

  “That’s it?” She looked into her rearview mirror, shook her head back and forth slightly, a tiny grin lifting from the corner of her lips. I could tell she was starting to side with me. “You should have flushed his head in the toilet and gave him a swirlee.” She took her foot off the acclerator, rolled her window down again. The carload of monsters roared up beside us, their fearless leader still leaning out the window.

  “Hey you!” Tracy yelled. “The guy in the backseat!” She pointed at him. An onion-headed dweeb peered out the rear window. Tracy slowed down even more, but not enough for them to do anything stupid, just enough so she didn’t have to scream.

  “You know what your boyfriend’s problem is? He got beat up by a girl!” She laughed.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” he said, and then spit at her, which of course, because of the wind, blew back in his face.

  Tracy just lost it. She cracked up so hard I thought we were gonna crash. She rolled her window shut and made a sharp right into the far end of the empty Wal-Mart lot. The girl is a genius.

  I looked back and saw the Oldsmobile spinning through a U-turn and into the lot behind us. They weren’t giving up. Tracy kept her eyes peeled straight ahead, bouncing over speed bumps, determined now to lose them. But they were insane. Within seconds the deathcar rolled up and kissed Tracy’s car from behind. We were knocked forward. Tracy reached for her seat belt and I did the same.

  “Those assholes are really starting to piss me off!” Tracy made a sharp left out of the lot and raced back down Woodward to Sixty-third Street. The deathcar was still on our case. Tracy turned left onto Sixty-third, trying to cut them off at the light, then sped toward the highway entrance. The deathcar ran a red and followed, then roared up right behind us and rammed the back end of the car again. I looked back and saw their laughing faces and started to get real scared.

  “Who are these creeps?” Tracy looked into the rearview mirror again. She seemed oblivious to the terror now racing through me. She was totally in control, not a speck of fear, pure kamikazee. I was starting to sweat for real, this was like some scary movie about to get ugly.

  “What are we gonna do?” I asked.

  “Look and see what’s in the backseat,” Tracy said. “Maybe we can throw something back at them.”

  I unbuckled my seat belt, leaned into the backseat, and waded through the dirty gym clothes and empty water bottles.

  “Why do you have a car battery back here?”

  “I was supposed to drop it off for recycling. Bring it up here. I think I see the recycling bin now.”

  “What?”

  “Just get it!”

  I reached for the battery, and lugged it into the front seat. The thing weighed a ton.

  Tracy smiled at me. “Okay, this is what we’re gonna do.” She took a hit off her cigarette, flicked it out the window, turned down the music. “I’m gonna slow down and let them crawl up on our ass. When they get too close you pop out the sunroof and drop them a valentine, okay?”

  “This?” I shifted the battery on my lap.

  “Here they come. Ready?” She started rolling back the sunroof. A fierce blast of wind swept through the car and whipped my hair around uncontrollably. I turned, crouched on my left knee, and pressed my back against the dashboard. Tracy slowed down, and sure enough those assholes snuck right up like a bunch of lazy thieves smelling opportunity.

  “Now!” she said.

  I lifted the battery up to my chest, then stood and heaved that sucker with two hands as hard as I could. The battery’s flight wilted instantly, but it clipped the front end of the hood, bounced once, and then crushed the windshield. The deathcar skidded slightly to the right, then slowed down and stopped in the middle of the highway. I prayed for a huge semi-trailer to come and flatten them like a pancake, but it limped slowly over to the shoulder like some half-dead roadkill looking for a less hostile place to die.

  Tracy pulled my pants leg. “What happened?”

  I crawled back into the car, flopped down into my seat. Tracy closed the sunroof, looked over at me.

  “It fucking totaled the windshield.” I looked back the other way to make sure they weren’t still behind us.

  “Whoa,” she said, trying to find them in her rearview mirror. Tracy looked over at me, cracked a huge smile, grabbed my knee, and shook it. “See! Now wasn’t that fun?” She exited the highway and tailored a route using back roads all the way home.

  I had a sinking feeling that we hadn’t seen the last of our new friends and that it wouldn’t be long before they crawled out of the sewer for a sequel. My body was shaking in this hyper-euphoric way, like I’d just jumped out of an ice-cold river and there wasn’t a towel, but there was also a constant fearful shine, like when you’re on the swing set and you’ve gone a little too high.

  “I might have just killed someone,” I said.

  “Well at least you got that out of your system.”

  “Tracy! It’s not funny.”

  “They fucking deserved it.” She looked into her rearview mirror as if they were still there. “They could have just as easily killed us!”

  “I think we just made a big mistake,” I said. My stomach was turning against me.

  Tracy flipped over the tape. “If those fuckers ever mess with you again, I will get crazy,” she said, trying to reassure me. “I’m serious.” She flicked her lighter and waved it around. “I’ll light their fucking hair on fire!”

  THE FIELD

  ALL through the night I churned in and out of consciousness, tracing the outline of my room, making sure everything was still in its place. A white noise rang in my head as if both ears were covered with seashells. My mouth was a past
e factory. Menstrual cramps were rising from the dead.

  I rolled over and played it all back in dreamy slow motion: the car battery rolling over the front hood and shattering the windshield, the wind slapping my face, the car fading in the distance. I crunched my fingers tighter around my pillow and tried to knock the guilt out of my conscience, but it only doubled and then tripled. In a few fast seconds the next chapter of my autobiography had accelerated to a dangerous new level. Certain the doorbell would start ringing any moment now, I kept glancing out the window for mysterious cars curling down the cul-de-sac. The backs of my knees felt sore, the muscles around my shoulder and neck were killing me. I called Tracy, but her line was busy. Figures.

  I swallowed more aspirin and tried coaxing myself to sleep by tuning into an airplane, following its drone across the black sky, listening as it evaporated into the horizon. But my eyes wouldn’t close. I was fluent with visions. I couldn’t turn them off.

  My mother was at the other end of the hallway, sipping bourbon and fornicating in front of late-night television with the man from Mars. What I couldn’t hear I imagined. Her occasional outbursts of passion seemed to rattle through the air vents like some haunted sexual demon lurking in the walls.

  I kicked off my blankets and crept down the staircase into the kitchen, then opened the sliding glass door and slipped out into the yard. Cool air swarmed around my ankles, my feet were baptized in the slippery grass. A full moon bleached the star-spangled sky. The wind lifted the sound of freight trains rumbling across the open prairie, of cars racing along Sixty-third Street, of crickets mating in the weeds.

  Beyond the long sharp fingers of the pear trees was a canopy of scraggy lilac bushes that marked the borderline of our yard. The branches looked like twisted wizard canes creeping up from some Gothic underworld deep below the surface of clover-choked grass. Across the street was a patch of waist-high weeds and small sickly trees—a big stoner hangout called The Field. Stuck between developments it’s a place where the soil sinks and water collects into small marshlike ponds, an uninhabitable place in a county where people rely on sump pumps to keep their basements dry. It used to be full of scaly brown toads that looked a thousand years old. Pheasants and ducks once nested in the spiky underbrush, but even the mosquitoes have disappeared since the bulldozers arrived.

  On the corner of the lot stood an ancient willow tree. Its drooping branches hung like a firework frozen in time. I clawed the ridged bark of the fat black trunk and pulled myself up, then climbed steadily from one branch to the next. No matter how many times I’d done it before, it still made me nervous.

  This tree was as old as the days of horse-drawn carriages, back when boys carried rifles and girls wore long white dresses with high collars, when Indians were as common as mailboxes at the end of driveways. I come up here to listen to the wind shake the leaves. It’s hypnotizing. I almost fell off once.

  My legs wobbled with caution all the way to the crest where three branches cupped into a perfect seat high above the yard. Fireflies sparkled in the moon shadows. Clouds slipped into one another. I found a satellite and watched it sink into the horizon. The sky seemed wide open. I wished I could fly from tree to tree, from town to town. I wished the sun would never rise, that the world would just go on sleeping.

  Only a few days away from graduation and suddenly a bad shadow is clipping at my heels. The cops will probably be here any minute. Why do I listen to Tracy?

  My legs were superwobbly. I felt shaky and unsettled, so I climbed back down, then jumped from the lowest branch and fell into the grass. The ground was hard as rock. I crossed the lawn to the outer ring of evergreens that marked my grandmother’s property line. She lived behind us in a small farmhouse. Grandma moved here when this town was still a swamp-filled county of tumbling barns and sticker bushes. My dad grew up in that old white house. She sold a good portion of her land to the developers who built our house. I guess Dad got some kind of deal as part of the arrangement, and that’s why we’re neighbors. Grandma’s yard was lush with flower beds, fruit trees, and most recently a sixteen-foot satellite dish. In the dark it looked like a flying saucer had crashed behind the house. Grandma put it together herself from a kit she ordered out of some magazine. It sucks down every channel in the universe.

  I wouldn’t really call her an inventor, but Grandma sure liked her experiments, especially anything to do with electricity, but sometimes her formulas got a little out of hand. Once she tried harnessing lightning with a flagpole rigged to the chimney and nearly burned down the house. Her basement was packed with glass beakers and wild electro gear from the days of Dr. Frankenstein. Wires run in every direction. There are jars filled with condensors and transistors and a whole shelf of various glass bulbs. She’s always melting or dissecting something. Mom blames her weirdness on Dad, says that since his vanishing act Grandma has veered even farther off center, that her universe was no longer balanced, and a lot of other mystical New Age whatchamacallit.

  I don’t know what lured me over to Grandma’s sky vacuum, but that’s where I found her, sprawled out in the grass. She scared the hell out of me. I thought she was dead.

  “Grandma!” I jumped down and shook her. I was in a panic until she mumbled a few incoherent phrases. She carried on as if she were having an argument with God at the front gates of heaven or something, probably trying to renegotiate her lease or being stubborn and refusing to go in without her remote. I couldn’t understand a word of it, so I shook her gently.

  “Grandma, Grandma,” I sang sweetly. She was in her own world, far away from mine, bartering for a better deal on whatever it was she wanted. I wondered if I should leave her there and let the sunlight sober her up, or call an ambulance and have the men-in-white rush her away to a world of narcotics and life-saving drills, or just hold her hand and let her be. Grandma’s face was crinkled as a dried-up riverbed. Blue veins thick as bones bulged through her skin. Her white hair was wild and unkempt, sorta matted to the top of her head. She was wearing a man’s shirt and pants. When I put my hand on her forehead, her blue eyes slowly fluttered open, then stormed into consciousness. Grandma jerked up and grabbed my hand. “What the hell?”

  “Grandma, it’s me, Chrissie. What are you doing out here? I almost stepped on you!”

  She twisted her neck slowly, as if to uncap the mystery, or at least try and get the facts straight. “I was having trouble with the reception, so I came out here to check on my soup bowl. That’s when it happened, a total ambush, must have been three or four of them, faces like bandits … I think … maybe I …” She shook her head, trying to remember.

  “You got mugged?”

  “No, no.” She leaned up and brushed herself off. “Raccoons. They came right at me.”

  “Were you bit?” I lifted her up onto her feet, checked her skin for abrasions.

  “They scattered into the trees,” she said, pointing.

  “C’mon, let me help you back into the house.” I wrapped my arm around her shoulder.

  “I think it’s time I got a fence.” She limped back toward her little white house. I opened the screen door for her.

  “What were you watching?” I asked.

  “Huh?” Grandma was still a little out of it.

  “On television. What were you watching when the juice went out?”

  “Something about the end of the world.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I don’t know. I missed it,” she said. “You want a glass of milk and a little cherry pie?” she asked. And then she sang—“I’ve got some Cool Whip!”

  “No thanks, I’m kinda sleepy.”

  “You never say no to Cool Whip.”

  “I know but I—”

  “Why were you out wandering through the yard in the middle of the night?” Grandma pressed her nose against the screen.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

  “You got the swimmy eyes of boy trouble,” she said. “What’s your fella’s name?”


  “I don’t have a fella,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you got one in your sight. I can tell. A girl doesn’t wander around the yard in the middle of the night without boy trouble blowing through her head. There’s only one cure for restlessness,” she said, her head swaying back and forth. “Men are a terrible disease, but I suppose you gotta learn that for yourself.” She looked up at me. “You want me to leave the porch light on?”

  “Nah, I like the dark.”

  “Just like your father.”

  “What?”

  “Indian blood. I’m sure of it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She slammed her door and locked it twice.

  HISTORY

  I started having these weird dreams about Indians when I was in grade school. Whether chasing wild chickens or getting drunk with white men, it seems as if I had some previous life in this neighborhood. The land our house occupies was stolen from the Pottawatami Indians in 1832 by a guy named Pierce Downer. He scrambled out here when the frontier was opened by the U.S. government’s success in the Black Hawk War. There was enough gruesome slaughter on both sides to make an awesome miniseries, but nobody really gives a shit about Illinois in Hollywood.

  After an all-nighter at Fort Dearborn, the Indians were coerced to trade the land on this side of the Mississippi River for the land on the other side of the Mississippi. The Indians shook hands with their new friends, packed their bags, and spread out into the Black Hills, only to find General Custer creeping through their territory a few hours later. My guess is that the senior curse is directly linked to something that happened a long time ago and that the spirits we’re dealing with carry a nasty grudge.

  My grade school was called Indian Boundary because the land it occupies was once a place that marked a neutral zone of commerce between the two nations. Indian Boundary Road has a notorious curve with three oak trees lining the bend. It’s become the local dead man’s curve. There’s at least one every summer, and the corpses are usually young and almost always intoxicated.