Ron hands her a tissue. He takes the note and pens in the final you, along with his telephone number.
Lucy tapes the message to the front door.
“Should I lock it?” she asks—and the butcher says, “Yes, you probably should.”
43
Everyone’s Guilty
Thomas Pittimore, of course. In the shower, unable to masturbate, thinking, I did it, I made him run away—the thought progressing: I hope he doesn’t come back. I hope he dies. Shame becoming anger becoming fury. Why should Edgar be getting all the attention? It’s like he’s famous now—his face everywhere.
I’m a genius compared to him, Thomas thinks, punching, in the shower, his own fat belly. I should be famous.
Instead he’s mocked now. At school, everyone knows about the man outside the Mark-O-Market—how he’d called Thomas a pervert, slapped him down to the pavement, made him run away in tears. “Move your fat ass,” boys say, imitating the man.
The world is upside down. Thomas feels like he’s falling.
He stands behind some trees at the edge of the football field where no one can see him. It’s nighttime. Practically the whole school is gathered on the dead lawn for a candlelight vigil. Pretty girls crying, holding pictures of Edgar. There’s even singing. Jarell is there. He’s been ignoring Thomas lately, which makes Tommy’s anger sometimes feel like sadness. Jarell is with Bethany Harvow; they’re holding hands. They probably think they’re in love—it’s disgusting.
What makes Tommy madder than anything is not the boys mocking him—it’s not even Jarell’s treason. The greatest outrage is that faggy little Edgar Fini could have a father who loved him that much—enough to go ape-shit on Thomas, just to protect his stupid disease of a son.
Not knowing Edgar’s family history, Thomas has never assumed that the man outside the Mark-O could be anyone other than Edgar’s father. Who else would care enough about the kid? Edgar’s parents were probably the type to be like, Oh my goodness, we just feel so blessed to have a little diseased baby like you. We’re just so lucky!
“What’s the matter?” Thomas’s mother asks him. “Why are you eating like that?”
“Lah wah?” he says, his mouth full of food. Some of it falls back onto the plate.
His father slaps him. More food goes flying.
When Thomas’s brother laughs, he gets it, too—though not as hard as Thomas.
* * *
Someone once said, Love makes the world go round. Thomas isn’t sure where he’s heard it—it might be a song. The singer keeps saying the words over and over like he’s insane. It’s like circus music. The only way to stop it would be with a gunshot. For Halloween this year, Thomas’s costume was a white hockey mask—which means mass murderer.
He knows the truth, though. That he’s a coward. He’d like to go to the police and tell them how Edgar Fini’s father beat him up on the street.
But what if the police laugh, too?
He wishes he had some great plan to get back at the world. He puts on his hockey mask.
When other people were mean to you, you had to be meaner. If that wasn’t your philosophy, then you should get out of New Jersey and move somewhere like California. New Jersey wasn’t for wimps. It wasn’t for lovers. Look at a map, for Christ’s sake. The state was shaped like Frankenstein’s head. New Jersey was a monster.
* * *
Sometimes Thomas googles the boy.
Edgar Fini Ferryfield New Jersey
Immediately a line of photos pops up—plus links to articles that go on for pages and pages. Local girls sob about Edgar on their blogs; he’s a hot topic in at least a dozen e-prayer circles. One site (A Light for Jimmy) offers a ready-made poster with a high-res pic they ask you to “kindly print and put up in your local coffee shop, place of worship, or community center.”
Every week there are more pages, more links. Once you get to around page twenty of the listings, it’s necessary to use the translate function. Edgar in France, Spain, China—even Turkey! When Thomas turns a Bangladeshi site into English, the translating wizard seems more like an idiot.
The white child is missing.
Have you seen the white child?
If you see him, he is lucky.
See him!
Around Edgar’s picture there’s a frame of red roses and glittery golden stars, like he’s the frickin’ Dalai Lama. When he googles his own name, Thomas Pittimore—the search engine rudely asks him: Do you mean Thomas Mattimore? It’s like he doesn’t even exist.
At least he still has Supersluts.com. He can always go there when he needs to relax. Of course, when he’s finished, he often feels strangely weak—as if all his power has been drained from him.
He cries sometimes—it’s stupid. The world is so stupid. He doesn’t really want Edgar to die.
44
Liars
Ping!
“Beautiful.”
Ping!
“He’s on a roll.”
Ping!
“Holy baloney.” Conrad used his funny voice here, but Edgar didn’t laugh.
“I’m trying to concentrate,” he said, taking aim.
“Sorry, maestro.”
The next shot whistled past the cans, making a muffled thuff in the carpet of pine needles. Edgar unstrapped the BB gun and sat on the ground. He grabbed a handful of dry weeds and slowly crushed them. “I’m just going to be quiet now, okay?”
“Okay,” said Conrad, who by this point was familiar with the boy’s moods, which fluctuated wildly. At any moment, he might stop what he was doing and—there was no other way to put it—play dead. When he exhibited such behavior (lying on the ground for long periods without moving) Conrad often felt that the boy was taunting him. He was curled up now on the damp moss—his right hand clutching some bog asphodel, while his left rested delicately across the barrel of the air rifle. The gun was properly turned away from him, the safety latched, as Conrad had shown him.
“Take your time, kiddo. I’ll go and fix us some lunch.”
Edgar sprinkled the leaf dust over his corduroys, watching the tiny flakes fall between the wales. “I didn’t feed the fish this morning,” he called out.
Conrad shouted back that he’d take care of it.
The ground was cold; Edgar could feel it sneaking into his bones—a slow paralysis that made him want to sleep. It was a coldness that almost felt warm. It wasn’t so different from the feeling he had when Florence would visit him; which she did occasionally—always in the same spot: a small clearing among the pines, less than thirty yards from the cabin.
The boy stood, slapping the dried leaves from his legs. Hearing Conrad in the kitchen made him angry. Something wasn’t right about the way the man had been talking to him the past few days. Even when he was being friendly, he often sounded impatient—and sometimes it seemed to Edgar that Conrad was making fun of him. It was hard to know for sure.
The boy looked at the shot-up cans, the rotting crabapples, the two guns: his own pellet gun and Conrad’s larger one. The light in the sky was indecisive. Edgar wandered toward the clearing, though he knew his grandmother wasn’t coming. She never came when he was angry, but seemed to pop up only when he was staring into space and not thinking so much about his problems. Whenever she appeared, neither of them cried or made a fuss. They only stood there quietly, sending bits of themselves back and forth. Edgar could stare at her face for hours. She didn’t look dead at all. She looked the same as she had in life—her hands still red, her feet still cracked. You could even smell the perfume.
Unfortunately, she could never be tempted inside the cabin—preferring the violet shadows among the trees. Often, when she came, the pines trembled and whispered. Today, though, the trees were silent, which made Edgar wonder if more snow was on its way.
If that were true, then he’d better do something now. Once the snow started, it might be a while before the roads were clear again. With the tip of his boot, he dug up a half-buried stone and then kicked it.
&n
bsp; He was mad at his mother, too.
She hadn’t answered any of his letters. Just a few days ago he’d sent another one, bringing the total to ten. It was a depressing number—almost irrefutable.
Edgar picked up the gun.
Ping!
Right through the window of 21 Cressida Drive. How could she just ignore him? He’d said a lot of nice things. He’d even apologized.
Edgar closed his eyes against the light. The short days, the angle of the sun—for a while, he’d known something awful: his birthday had passed. He didn’t say anything to Con, who would have made a big deal out of it, maybe even given him a party.
Edgar didn’t want a party, though. He wanted a letter from his mother.
But his mother was an alcoholic. Conrad had explained this after Edgar had told him about the daily six-packs and the vodka in the freezer. A lot of her behavior made sense now. Conrad was smart about other people—though sometimes Edgar wished he hadn’t told the man so much about 21 Cressida Drive. Maybe he’d given Conrad the wrong impression about his mother.
What did it matter, though? Why should he care about protecting a person who hated him? Conrad hadn’t used the word hate; he’d only said, “It sounds like she doesn’t like you very much.”
Edgar shot again and missed.
How could he be nine years old? It was unbelievable. Nine wasn’t a man, but it wasn’t a child, either. Conrad was always telling him it was time to act.
Letters were not acting. Writing one was fine, but waiting for one back required a kind of patience that was beyond Edgar. E-mail would have been better, but there was no computer. And the cell phones were long gone; Conrad said the waves were dangerous, they could give a person cancer. He had a tendency to exaggerate—though, lately, Edgar had the impression that Conrad was doing more than exaggerating. He might actually be lying.
When Edgar first suggested writing to his mother, Conrad agreed it was an excellent idea. “Just to let her know where you are.”
“Of course,” he added, “there’s always a chance her boyfriend will read it first.”
“He’s not her boyfriend,” Edgar protested, blushing.
“Oh, I thought you said he was?”
“I don’t know who he is. Anyway, I’m not going to address it to him, I’m going to address it to her.”
“Some people don’t respect that, though,” Conrad said.
Edgar knew it was true. He’d seen his mother go through Florence’s private papers, some of which had been letters.
Another problem was that he didn’t have a very good return address.
Edgar Fini
c/o Conrad Billings
Pinelands National Forest
New Jersey
Not even a zip code. And the Pinelands was over a million acres. But Conrad said it was fine; it would work. If she wrote a letter back, he assured Edgar it would get here.
Still, the boy was worried. Christmas was coming (the telltale light hid nothing), and everyone knew what mail was like during the holidays. Slow as molasses, his grandmother had always said.
Christmas had meant a lot to Florence. She loved decorating the house. Mistletoe and twinkle lights. She took great care in arranging the Nativity set under the tree. Delicate hand-painted figures with rosebud lips; they even had eyelashes and pale pink flecks for fingernails. Florence would sometimes let Edgar put the little glass star on the barn’s roof—and then it was all done except for the manger, which was always left empty until Christmas morning.
“Where do you keep the baby before then?” Edgar often asked—and Florence’s answer was always the same: “I’m not keeping him anywhere. He hasn’t been born yet.”
People who loved you often lied. If Conrad lied, maybe it was the same sort of thing. A way of protecting you from the truth, or trying to help you believe in something better. For the most part, though, it seemed that Conrad was honest. Many of his comments were properly directed against the butcher. “After what he did to your finger, there’s no way of knowing what he’s capable of. You’re safer here.” Of course, it was always implied that Lucy was in cahoots with the butcher.
Conrad had even suggested that Edgar might get in trouble if he tried to go home. Running away was a punishable offense. There was no guarantee he’d even be allowed to stay at 21 Cressida Drive. He might be sent away to live in a foster house, or in some shelter with dozens of other runaways.
But what if Conrad was wrong? What if the butcher was holding his mother prisoner—even hurting her? Such thoughts had only recently occurred to Edgar.
A prisoner. It made a lot of sense.
The boy sighed and set up some fresh cans on the stump. While he was making sure they were evenly spaced, a deer emerged from the trees. It was rust-colored, with white spots—which meant it was still a baby. It stared at Edgar, but said nothing.
Gleaming fur, twitching ears. It was beautiful.
After a moment, it disappeared.
But that didn’t mean it wasn’t still there. From church, Edgar knew that invisibility was not equal to absence. “Ask,” the old woman had often said, holding the boy’s hand in the pew at St. Margaret’s. “Ask Him to help us.” And she wasn’t just referring to the half-naked man hanging on the wall; she was referring, as well, to something you couldn’t see, which was the Holy Ghost. She said it could change a person’s life. When the Holy Ghost went inside you, it opened your eyes. Like swallowing the red pill in The Matrix, supposed Edgar. You saw everything. And you knew exactly what to do.
* * *
“But you never get any mail.” The screen door slammed behind Edgar. “Do they even deliver mail here?”
Conrad was pressing a spatula onto a grilled cheese, making it sizzle in the frying pan. “It’s our constitutional right to receive mail, Edgar.”
“But what if it got lost?”
“It’s possible. I’ll check if there’s anything at the ranger station the next time I go out for supplies.”
Edgar looked down at his muddy boots. “Maybe I could drive with you.”
“That’s an idea,” Conrad said, flipping the sandwich in the frying pan.
“We could even go today,” suggested Edgar—his eyes still focused on his boots.
“Well, it’s already two o’clock—and you haven’t watched your video yet.”
Edgar made a small sound—half resignation, half annoyance.
Conrad had purchased dozens of DVDs—National Geographic specials, science programs, documentaries about animals and artists and music. Edgar was supposed to watch at least one DVD every day. It was Conrad’s idea of “school.” In some ways it was preferable to real school. Edgar got to sit alone; there was no risk of someone spitting on your shoe or slashing your arm.
“I could watch it when we get back,” offered Edgar.
“Today’s not a good day. Can you wait until I go out for supplies next week?”
“On Monday?”
“Monday or Tuesday. Let’s just see how the weekend goes.”
Edgar pulled out his chair with a scrape and sat down heavily.
“What?” asked Conrad. “Are you mad at me?”
“No. But I think you’re burning that.”
“It’s perfect.” Conrad slid the sandwich onto a plate and brought it to the table. “Is that perfect or what?”
When Edgar didn’t respond, Conrad asked him if he wanted a hug.
“No, thank you.” He felt like screaming.
“Come on. Come here.” Conrad knelt beside the boy’s chair.
“I’m not really in the mood to be touched.” Edgar kept his eyes on the plate.
“Okay. That’s okay. Eat your sandwich while it’s hot.” Conrad stood and walked around the table.
Edgar dutifully picked up his knife and sliced the grilled cheese in half. “I should probably see her,” he said. “Talk to her.”
“Who? Your grandmother?”
Edgar looked up. That’s not who he’d meant. Why was Con
rad trying to confuse him? He’d come in the door with a plan, but suddenly he was feeling funny, almost feverish.
“Let’s just get through the weekend,” the man said again. “Plus, tomorrow, I was going to let you use the Rossi. Be great going home with a new skill, right?”
“I don’t like the sound.” Edgar pressed on the warm sandwich, making orange goo seep from the sides. “And I doubt I’ll even be able to do it.”
“Do what?”
Edgar stared at the bread.
“Do what?” the man repeated, banging his fist against the table.
It took a few seconds for Edgar to catch his breath.
“Kill the devil,” he said quietly.
45
The Devil
Not only were there snakes and lizards and eagles, feral dogs and swamp frogs with orange stripes—but there was a devil, too, in the Pine Barrens. It had two legs, with hooves, and it could fly. Its wings were similar to a bat’s. Conrad had shown Edgar pictures from a book—drawings based on descriptions from people who’d actually seen it. To Edgar, the creature looked like something from outer space—but Conrad explained that it had been born right here in the Pinelands. The devil’s mother was a bad woman from one of the old bog-iron towns. Conrad had used the word whore—looking at Edgar sympathetically, as if it were a word the boy would understand and that might cause him some distress. The whore made booze from crabapples; was a drunk—and because she’d had so many babies with so many different men, God had punished her. Her thirteenth child was cursed. As soon as it was born it killed her—clawing her neck, before escaping up the chimney and flying off into the pines.
Edgar had no trouble believing that such a creature could be real. First of all: if aliens were real (and they were), there had to be secret creatures on Earth, as well. In fact, one of Conrad’s DVDs was all about the bizarre animals that lived in the deepest part of the sea. Some of them were even stranger than the Jersey Devil; one looked like a transparent brain with Christmas tree lights inside.
Besides, how could Edgar not believe in impossible creatures? He was one himself—his unnatural color often inspiring fear and derision. Casper and Snow White were only the tip of the iceberg; there were colder words, as well—freak, creepy, midget of the living dead—some scrawled on his locker, some said straight to his face. Being different from other people was exhausting. Other people’s dread became your own; you ended up haunting yourself. Mirrors were awful.
Edgar and Lucy Page 38