The Witch of the Wood

by Michael Aronovitz

  “She’ll be the first one I text.”

  “Funny.”

  “Not kidding. Bye.”

  He kissed his father on the cheek and made for the door.

  “Take it slow on your first day,” Rudy said. “Measure the field.”

  Wolfie did neither.

  Rudy was in the middle of explaining Hemingway’s subtle illustrations of formalized masculine rites of passage to his Widener Comp 102 students when he got the indicator. His left palm shot to his ear and Greg Hynman looked up from his notes with half a grin. A couple of girls in the front stopped chewing their gum and stared. Rudy winced, recovered quickly, and told everyone to write a response paragraph illustrating all the theatrical elements exposed in italicized pre-chapter six of In Our Time. He was going out to his car to get an aspirin while they did the assignment, and he was collecting.

  Rudy rushed off to the bathroom down at the end of the hall, hoping it was vacant. It was a safe bet. By 8:10 A.M. all the early morning classes were in high gear, and students didn’t often excuse themselves that early in the session. It wasn’t polite. He ripped open the door and headed for the corner stall, the indicator wailing in his head for a second time. His eyes bulged. In the back of his mind he registered that he’d left his roll book back on the podium. Not professional; there were grades in it, and it was too late now. He grabbed his left thumb.

  He saw what Wolfie was looking at and gasped. It was a polished block wall in what felt like the far corner of a dark basement hallway, and there was graffiti here, old sayings merged with the new, a layered kaleidoscope of word pollution. Standing out at eye level was, “Until the year we graduate, Franklin Heights is three years of hell,” but the “Until the year we graduate, Franklin Heights is” and “years of hell” portions were faded and dull. Pronounced was the “three,” more so because the artist had scrawled it as the Roman numeral “III.”

  “What does it mean?” Rudy said out loud. It echoed there in the stall, and he hoped no one had come in to take a piss in the last fifteen seconds or so. Of course, Wolfie couldn’t hear him, but Rudy knew he was thinking along the same lines. The number three was supposed to be his timeline to architect the future massacre, not some prophetic piece of wall-art here in the present.

  Wolfie turned to the left, and there was a thick steel door, deep maroon with a small dark window at the top, that had diamond wire crossed inside of it. Above the jamb was the room number 129. His mentor teacher, Mr. Bond.

  Wolfie’s hand closed on the knob and pulled.

  It was the wood and metal shop: two stationary bandsaws in the center of the space, a lathe, a portaband station with the oblong tool mounted bottoms-up on a stand, a pegboard to the left with power tools, their cords wrapped neatly with wire-ties, and a wall of steel saw blades hung by size and tooth number, as the taped and retaped label-tabs indicated. Wolfie moved forward across a cracked and oil-stained concrete floor with a drain grate in the middle, slightly sunken where the rinse-hose had worn the cement down to its aggregate over time. In the far corner there were a couple of industrial basins, paint-splattered and shadowed with old grease and soot, and a worktable along the back wall with a huge bench vise. Over at the other end of the worktable facing away, there was a man bending slightly and welding something, sparks jumping on either side of him.

  Wolfie approached, and the man must have sensed him, turning slowly, blowtorch hissing in his hands.

  He had on a welding helmet with a dome light affixed above the tinted eye plate. Behind him in the catty-corner, the wall had old rubber soundproofing material glued to it, black with sparkles in the design. A “cloak of darkness” that shimmered.

  “Move!” Rudy cried out to no one.

  Of course, Wolfie didn’t hear him, but he’d recognized the tools and trappings of the Dark Guardian most probably sooner than had his father. The edge of the vision Rudy was connected to actually bristled red, and Wolfie closed in fast. Rudy was gripping his thumb so hard he thought he might have been cutting off his circulation. The vision was slanted a bit and for a horrible moment Rudy associated what he was experiencing with the original audience for Carpenter’s Halloween, not watching Michael Myers, but taking the steps as Michael Myers after he put on the mask.

  Mr. Bond had been playing possum, and he swiped the welding torch right in Wolfie’s face at the moment before contact. Rudy didn’t feel the heat of course, but he knew Wolfie had at least gotten a first-degree burn across the nose from it.

  Bastard! Even if he couldn’t kill him, he’d planned to maim him, weaken him by nullifying his weapon of beauty!

  Wolfie’s right hand came into view at the bottom corner of Rudy’s vision, and it was tensed and hooked into a claw-shape. Then it slashed up across Mr. Bond’s chin and neck area, ripping the helmet clean off the head.

  The rest was a flurry of slash and gouge, Wolfie’s hands windmilling across the vision he shared with his father in a blur of slants and angles that raked deep furrows and curled the skin along the sides of each, rending so quickly and in such fury and cross-hatch that it was difficult to picture what Bond had looked like the moment before. He was suddenly ribbons on bone. There were exposed tendons that had held like stubborn circus wires on the left side of his neck and beneath the right cheek, and both lips were sheared clean, the teeth beneath grinning with the bloody residue they repelled, like dewed-up moisture on a car recently waxed.

  Wolfie’s bloodstained fists grabbed Bond’s welding cloak at the chest and bunched. Then was the lift, and Bond’s head lolled around like a zoo-balloon on a stick. Wolfie hoisted him onto the table with a thud, jumped up after him, straddled and hunched and then leaned in close . . . so close the vision lost focus.

  At first, Rudy thought his son was kissing his victim.

  When the vision pulled back, Rudy saw that Bond had been further violated. His chin was missing, the vacancy defined by an arc that looked like a frown beneath the skeleton’s grin above it. Rudy almost threw up. The vision he shared was moving slightly, jogging a bit up and down, and there was a muted crunching sound.

  Rudy disengaged, stumbled out of the stall, and pushed through the door to the hall. Somehow, he made it back to the classroom without zigzagging like a drunk or catching his toe on the edge-trim in the doorway and taking a header. His shirt was pasted to him beneath the cover of his black sweater, but he couldn’t hide the sheen on the sides of his neck, his brow, the top of his head. He looked ill and he played it.

  “I’m not feeling well,” he said. “Read through ‘Cross Country Snow,’ the last of the Nick Adams stories before we get to ‘The Big Two-Hearted River.’ Write a response for Thursday that links Nick’s father the doctor, Ad Francis, Krebs, Mr. Elliot, and the husband of the lady with the cat caught out in the rain with our lead character in terms of feministic shadowing outside the metaphorical arena. You’re dismissed.”

  That would hold them.

  When he got home, Wolfie was already there. He was in the bathroom, retching.

  Rudy got to the doorway and held himself there, chest heaving.

  “Hi, Dad,” Wolfie said. He had his legs curled under and folded to one side. He reached up and gave a mercy flush, and in any other circumstance Rudy would have made a dry joke about holding the kid’s hair back, or the fact that he looked as if he’d partied till he puked, something relating to those war wounds of youth that we all looked back on with pain and fondness.

  “Let me see you,” Rudy said.

  Wolfie turned and shook his hair out of his face.

  “What?”

  “You’re not burned.”

  “I jerked back. You saw the entire path of the flame, Dad. Perspective. If it had scorched me it would have actually disappeared from your vision.”

  He turned suddenly, shoulders up in points, palms pressed down to the porcelain rim. Then he vomited so hard there was upsplash that made it out to the floor. Rudy came in, slipped a bit, and got him a towel. The boy came up w
et, wiping his face and grinning weakly. He flushed again.

  “There he goes,” he said, “down into the bowels of the earth, his underworld, through the dirty pipes he would have been proud to forge and seal. Now each time you flush, you’ll be able to distinguish his moan inside of that hollow refilling drone.” He cocked his ear down. “Do you hear it? Home . . . he’s saying.” Wolfie looked down to the toilet and screamed into it.

  “At home in your own filthy mechanism! The ghost in the sewers! Eating my sewage the way I ate your face!”

  “Is that all you ate, Wolfie?”

  He looked up soberly.

  “Of course not.”

  “But you can’t have gotten everything.”

  “Can’t I have?”

  He was smiling now, but his face blanched and he turned and bent to retch once again. After what sounded like a particularly violent (and meaty) eruption, he flushed and held his hand on the knob-spoon for a second in recovery. He kept his face away.

  “I ate all the evidence, Dad. His privates were no particular joy and his liver stunk like poison. I’m not stupid. For all intents and purposes he disappeared, nothing more. I’m not ready for the police yet. My arrest has to be ceremonious, almost religious. Mr. Bond would have been anticlimactic, at least to those around us.”

  Rudy let breath come through his nose.

  ”But it isn’t only the body . . .”

  “I didn’t just study collapsing stars in the library, Dad. I am familiar with the rudimentary devices law enforcement would use in their initial investigations, that is, when they’d gotten that far. My tongue . . . are you sure you want to hear this shit?”

  Rudy swallowed. Wolfie’s linguistic spikes and socio-emotive retrogressions would have been entertaining if not for their content. And the stench in here. “Sure,” he said. Wolfie turned and gave his profile now.

  “My tongue is a sponge, Dad. Wood, concrete, and cloth are only so absorbent, and what would stain and retain form under normal circumstances becomes solvent almost upon initial contact, not even accounting for the pressure I can apply.”

  “So you’re saying you literally licked the crime scene clean.”

  “Coveralls, floor, table, everything. Why do you think I keep puking? I am half human after all, and I didn’t really enjoy eating dirt and WD-40, let alone . . . everything else.”

  Rudy looked around.

  “How about this room?”

  “They won’t connect those dots, but if it makes you feel any better I would suggest a contractor’s specialty store and some sort of industrial acid cleanser you disperse with a pressure tank and a hose with a nozzle.” He grinned. “I wouldn’t want to take a piss in a room where there was evidence of a man being flushed down the can either.” The grin vanished. “But you’ll never get away from the sound, Dad. The ghostly moaning in the pipes after you flush, and the laughter on its heels from the witches buried nearby, celebrating his journey to the waste water treatment plant as he rushes past them down there in the dirt.”

  Rudy folded his arms.

  “What if someone saw you go into the shop?”

  “They didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  Wolfie turned and sat cross-legged there on the floor.

  “Just like I was able to see all the blood evidence as you would best imagine in a violet light scenario, I remind you that I can read and study things at a lightning pace. In terms of my initial approach to the school, I was instinctively wary. I could see from across the street and through the glass doors, the main console that had the grid of live video shots mounted up above the records receptionist. I had a ‘free’ and entered the building through an open gate back by the trailers, therefore avoiding the surveillance cameras sporadically positioned in the main entrance, the cafeteria, and various hallway points most populated by underclassmen. I blinked into the library, slid behind a book rack with a cloaked route to an exit door by a tech closet and warehousing space for English and history books, and then moved downstairs to the shop area. I assure you that my alibi is sound, and in fact will never be questioned, unless I don’t return immediately. I have to shower, change, and make homeroom by 9:27.”

  “All according to plan.”

  “Faster than you think, Dad.” He stood and started removing his clothes. “I need to rehearse the manipulation of the social network, but the practice has a purpose that will cause my departure earlier than I’d originally figured on, especially since I’ve disposed of the only fucker that could have stopped or slowed my progress. You’ll need to get ready for us to split up, Dad.” He looked down. “It never goes as you plan.”

  “How soon, Wolfie?”

  He slipped out of his pants and straightened.

  “It will take me two days to divide them. By Friday, the student body will be ready to explode.”

  “And you are the detonator,” Rudy said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And you are going to kill someone.”

  “Most certainly.”

  “Publicly.”

  “It will be the number one hit on YouTube for months.”

  He removed his underwear and stood naked before his father. Such a specimen. Suddenly Rudy felt he was going to burst into tears, but he held it.

  “Theme?” he said.

  Wolfie let his eyelids come down slowly, then reopen in that marionette’s crystalline stare.

  “Undetermined. For now, I have to go back to school and study the grid.” He pointed casually to the pile of clothing there on the floor. “You can burn those if you like after I’ve sucked them clean. Or stick them in a trash bag and dump them in some gas station garbage container back by the detailing vacuums. Whatever makes you feel better; I just don’t want to look at them again. Easier for both of us to move past the footnote.”

  Rudy nodded, backed out numbly, and gave Wolfie his space. Once he bagged the clothes and dumped them he was an accessory to that footnote, and he wondered if his son’s new world standards would make it so that fact would no longer matter.

  On paper maybe . . .

  Rudy spent the day brooding, making scattered attempts at lesson planning, halfheartedly trying to fulfill a promise to read a colleague’s paper on postmodernistic foreshadowing in medieval margin art, puttering around the apartment, measuring his life.

  He was becoming a crooked equation.

  For dinner, Wolfie brought people.

  The apartment was packed with kids, and Rudy had already been out twice, the first on a run for guacamole and chips, and then for diet soda and Red Bull. Wolfie had made a whole lot of friends it seemed, and Rudy was the “cool dad,” weaving his path between groups of teenagers, some quieter than others, yet none really animated except for two girls by the front door who kept poking each other and shrieking because they couldn’t seem to get over the fact that they’d both worn the same sweater. There were a number of young men salt and peppered about, mostly shy-looking types that flipped hair off their faces with an air of practiced noncommittal, and then those who had too many blemishes, or noses too big, or waist sizes too broad, all with an open sensitivity they wore on their sleeves. Rudy couldn’t be sure of course, but he would have bet dollars to donuts that the chess team was well represented here, along with band, the tech crew for theater, the anime appreciation society, and the debate club. On the other hand, the girls were a smorgasbord—the quiet and insecure side by side with the Barbies.

  And from the running conversation, Rudy had quickly gathered that Wolfie had organized an anti-bullying meeting, the subject of everyone’s discourse, a junior named Brian Duffey. The case against him was blunt and familiar, almost cliché, but no less intensive.

  He was a football player (starting defensive end) who lived in one of those saltboxes up on the hill overlooking the Blue Route, his father the type with a ponytail that you didn’t fuck with, a roofer by trade, and his mother a “crazy bitch” with a missing front tooth and hair too long for a woman h
er age, commonly seen at her son’s football games sitting in the back bed of their pickup with the tailgate turned down, drinking Coors Lite and shouting obscenities at the refs.

  Duffey was six foot three and two hundred and fifteen pounds. He had had bad acne when he was in middle school and now wore an older man’s pockmarks on the sides of his thick neck. He had cold little eyes (one of the girls described them as watermelon seeds that gleamed), and a fighter’s bowlegged ramble of a walk.

  His grin was almost friendly, kind of dopey and silly, but it was a lie. Duffey’s favorite move was what he called the “cell cramp,” where he’d rip the phone right out of your palm while you were texting and crush it under the heel of his sneaker. He roamed the hallways with his wolfpack, fellow football players Gerry Rush, Bryce Wallace, and Frankie Hanrahan, along with part-timer Ricky Fitz, a stoner they kept around because they liked his ability to come up with awesome nicknames for all the “fags” and “brains” like “Cunt Bubble” or “Ass Monkey.”

  Duffey didn’t like Jews, even though yarmulkes had grown in popularity with the cable show Weeds, and a lot of people greeted one another nowadays with the word “Shalom.” He didn’t like skinny intellectuals who won the science fair, he didn’t like sand-niggers, he didn’t like sensitive long-hairs who played the acoustic guitar, and he didn’t like dirty little cheap-ass dot-heads who thought they were comedians. Black guys were O.K. because they shared the line with him out on the field, but he never invited them over the house for burgers and Ore-Ida onion rings. And sure, he liked hip-hop . . . he’d even drink a cold Miller with a “Blackie” or two down the back end of the quarry by the stacks of concrete pipe and abandoned front end-loaders, especially if they brought weed. But that usually ended up going sour and tense, as the drunker Duffey got the more familiar he tried to become, thinking that doing a mock “nigger” accent with mock “nigger” mannerisms would make him more real to the “brutha’s.”

  He’d invented “The Duffey Fountain”—a dousing from a bottle of Deer Park he’d give you from behind in the cafeteria. That meant that he’d be watching for you in the halls, the bathrooms, or out past the tennis courts.