The Shark Curtain
Page 1
Table of Contents
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Chapter One: Pablo, When They’re Kissy
Chapter Two: The Swimming Ribbon
Chapter Three: Peace Lake
Chapter Four: Lickety-Split
Chapter Five: Things I’ve Killed
Chapter Six: Jesus’s Secretary
Chapter Seven: Stealing Mommies
Chapter Eight: Pissing in Three Acts
Chapter Nine: The Savage Boy
Chapter Ten: If It Weren’t for Kevin
Chapter Eleven: Legless Cuckoos
Chapter Twelve: Barbie Island
Chapter Thirteen: SOG
Chapter Fourteen: Picasso’s Not Home
Chapter Fifteen: Jars
Chapter Sixteen: Sleeping in What Is Small
Chapter Seventeen: Poor Martin Hornbuckle
Chapter Eighteen: The Shark Curtain
Chapter Nineteen: Pretending
Chapter Twenty: The Slap
Chapter Twenty-One: The Report Card
Chapter Twenty-Two: God Bless the Midway
Chapter Twenty-Three: Emptiness Pulls
Chapter Twenty-Four: Clam Dip
Chapter Twenty-Five: Frog Boy
Chapter Twenty-Six: Nails
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Red Strings
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Spider Eyes
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Hey Seuss
Chapter Thirty: On Mars
E-Book Extras
Acknowledgments
About Chris Scofield
Copyright & Credits
Also Available from Black Sheep
About Akashic Books
To Ray,
first, last, and always
Chapter 1
Pablo, When They’re Kissy
Lauren laughs and points at me. “Lily’s got fleas!”
I’m thirteen and I don’t have fleas but I have been scratching and my fingers freeze like dinosaur talons over my arm. When I hold them up and make a face like a hungry T-Rex, my younger sister says I’m “weird,” but she doesn’t know a T-Rex from a T-Bird, or that all birds are dinosaurs, or that Mom’s new car is a 1960 fire engine–red Thunderbird. The Thunderbird is a Mexican bird that went extinct before the dodo did.
“Dodo did.” That’s funny.
“Mom, Lily called me a dodo.”
Our beautiful mother rolls her eyes. She stands at the breadboard making banana-and–peanut butter sandwiches for tonight’s star party. “All right, Lima Bean. Thanks for the APB.” APB stands for All Points Bulletin. Mom smiles at me and asks, “Itchy?”
Yes.
No.
I shake my head and stick my hands in my pockets one, two, three times. I consider the word “itch.” It’s onomatopoeic, which means the word sounds like what it means. I love words: big, small, musical.
Mom says I’m the smartest teenager she’s ever met.
She wraps the last sandwich in wax paper and sticks it in the fridge. Second shelf, left side, piled one on top of the other, folded side down. I open the fridge and double-check that they didn’t shift when she closed the door. I open the fridge and triple-check.
“You find something to wear yet, Lily?” Mom’s distracting me on purpose. “Lauren?”
“Jeez, I can dress myself!” Lauren says as she paws through sweatshirts and cardigans, Gramma Frieda’s ugly crocheted afghans, flashlight batteries, and rolls of star charts on the cluttered kitchen table. “Gross,” she says, pushing aside an ashtray of lipstick-stained cigarette butts.
Mom says artists are messy: “It’s as obvious as that.” Her work shirt hangs on the back of her easel, on the floor a paint-splattered wood drawer holds tubes of paints and dirty rags. She rinses out the big thermos and sets it in the drainer; we’re taking hot chocolate too.
There are three wineglasses in the sink (four yesterday, three the day before), all Mom’s. She cleans them and puts them away. They were a wedding gift from Frieda (Dad’s mom), imported from Portugal, the colors of stained glass. Mom ignores me when I rearrange them so red stands between the green and blue.
We had a late lunch and are saving our appetites until our midnight picnic under the stars. It’s August and meteor season.
Dad walks in with a sack of powdered doughnuts. The “star party” was his idea.
“How much longer?” Lauren whines.
“You tell me.” Dad points at the wall clock, then kisses Mom’s neck, but she swats him away.
No one asks me, though I look at my watch and answer anyway. “Three hours, two minutes, and forty seconds.” I like to be specific. I like the way some numbers are multiples of each other, and others reach into infinity.
The clock over the fireplace chimes. The antique dealer said it was from Eastern Europe, most likely Polish or Czech. Mom’s people are Eastern European. Mom and her sister Jamie were Romanian Jews once, but now they’re nothing. They were sent away, orphaned by the war; they even left their accents behind. The clock makes a deep distant sound like it’s chiming on a mantel far away then bounces off a star in the middle of the ocean before finding our house in Portland, Oregon. The ocean is like the sky, only upside down, and meteors and comets are speedboats flying across it.
It’s time for Sea Hunt! Repeats of course, but who cares? Time will crawl unless we keep busy. I dash to the family room and plop down in front of the TV.
Soon the whole family joins me.
Stupid ads drone on and on. When Edie Adams slinks across the set in a long tight dress, singing about cigars, Dad peeks over his Sports Illustrated and whistles.
“She’s married to Ernie Kovacs,” Mom says, sitting on the arm of his chair. “Bet they’d be fun at a cocktail party, don’t you think, Paul?”
Dad shrugs.
Mom loves cocktail parties. Mom loves cocktails.
Finally the TV screen fills with a watery scene and a voice introduces Sea Hunt’s star Lloyd Bridges as ex–Navy frogman Mike Nelson.
Mom whistles this time.
It’s a stormy day and Mike’s out on his boat with two clients. One, a young guy with Poindexter glasses who doesn’t know how to scuba dive, but his busty girlfriend does. She’s a student of Mike’s and today is graduation, but he suggests she wait a day or two before the final dive. He warns that the water is unusually choppy and muddied, but the girl starts college on Monday. “It’s now or never,” she insists.
Mike frowns. “Stay close,” he says before slipping overboard.
Dad tsks. “Anyone else smell trouble?”
Mom and Lauren raise their hands.
Everything’s fine until they can’t see through the boggy blur of water. Mike spins around cautiously then gestures for her to stay close. A sudden movement behind him catches the girl’s eye . . . and just the smooth gray cheek of a shark is visible before it disappears into the soupy water. Her eyes swell to saucers, and, unable to remember the hand signal for trouble, she points over Mike’s shoulder, then toward the surface. When Mike looks again, he sees nothing. He shakes his head and gives her a thumbs-up.
“That’s right, ignore her. Typical man,” Mom mutters. “Haven’t we seen this one before? Aren’t they all reruns these days?”
“Turn around! Turn around!” I yell.
While the girl finally breaks for the surface, the sleek, gray, pin-eyed animal picks up speed, aiming itself at Mike like a torpedo, its giant jagged mouth ripping a hole through the blurry curtain of water between them.
I throw my hand over my mouth.
On the surface, Poindexter pulls his girlfriend aboard just in time to see the shark’s fin skim by.
Underwater, Mike raises his spear gun and fires into the shark’s mighty mouth. The animal jerks away, and quickly
swims off, a trail of blood scenting the water around him.
“Whew,” Mom says in an exaggerated voice, “that was close.”
“It’s all over now,” Dad responds. “He’s history once his friends get a snootful of blood. Right, Lily?”
Mom reaches for the TV Guide. “Another happy ending. What else is on?”
“Lily?” Dad repeats, but I’m still underwater, my air hose torn. Bubbles fill our family room.
Lauren throws a pillow at me and, startled, I yelp. “Dummy,” she says.
“That’s enough,” Dad snaps.
Lauren’s not supposed to make fun of me. It’s a family rule.
* * *
I watch each TV show to the end of the credits, and when Sea Hunt is over, Dad calls us to the kitchen. “Okay, troops,” he says, “meet here at twenty-three hundred, sharp. Take a nap if you need to, but be dressed for the big night.”
Mom pours herself a glass of wine. “That’s eleven p.m., girls. You’ve got . . .”
Lauren tears outside with her jump rope. It’s summer and still light.
“She’s like a grasshopper,” Dad says. “Do you think it’s healthy for her to jump so much?”
“It makes her happy,” Mom says. “That’s good enough for me.”
There’s a “shark curtain” in my bedroom closet. Every time I pull the string to the bulb overhead, I see only white and I have to wait for my eyes to refocus to see more. Bad things can happen while you wait. Until Mike Nelson finally saw the shark curtain, he didn’t know he was in trouble.
Each room, as I head down the hall to mine, draws me in. I try not to look. Doors open, lights off, curtains closed to keep out the summer heat, darkness fills each room to brimming. Beyond it are more shark curtains, more blurry darkness.
At the threshold to my room, Mrs. Wiggins, our St. Bernard, lies on her left side snoring. “Sea Hunt,” I explain as I bend down to pet her. Her tumor is hot under my hand and the old dog tenses before she relaxes and wags her tail. Maybe the cancer isn’t as bad as Mom thinks it is.
Maybe Mrs. Wiggins just doesn’t like to be touched sometimes. I don’t.
When I flip on the overhead light, my fingers brush the framed picture of Jesus that Gramma Frieda gave me. His chest is open and His heart is wrapped in roses and thorns, but it doesn’t bleed. He looks down at the art books Mom put on my bed: Leonardo’s Gifts and Pastoral Landscapes of the Romantic Age.
Groovy. Mom never lets me look at her art books.
On the cover of Pastoral Landscapes, a golden sky turns black as it disappears into a blurry stand of trees, a place too thick and dark to make out what’s happening inside it.
In the living room, Mom and Dad laugh and talk. My best friend Judy calls them Romeo and Juliet.
A rock hits my bedroom window screen. “Watch!” Lauren calls from the driveway. “Hot peppers, Lily! Watch!” I count thirty superfast twirls before she makes a mistake.
On the sidewalk behind her, Missy Crenshaw rides her new Schwinn bicycle, smiling and waving like a Rose Festival princess. It’s a warm August night and still light at 9:17 p.m. Across the street, a phone rings and young, blond Mrs. Savage throws down her garden hose and steps inside. Somewhere a baby cries; a dog barks; a golden-oldie radio station plays “Mr. Sandman.” Rusty and Sherman, each in coonskin caps, sit on the curb across the street, quietly loading their cap guns.
I watch Judy the longest. Slouched and sad, she sits in her front yard reading a magazine, but she never turns a page. “If things don’t get better,” she told me once, “I’m running away.” So I watch her intently, looking for anything that would say she’s finally ready to pack her bag and sneak off in the middle of the night. She’s saved her allowance for six months, her babysitting money too.
Where would I go if I was running away?
Mom’s books are big and heavy and full of beautiful glossy pictures.
In Leonardo’s Gifts, I stare at Leonardo da Vinci’s sculptures, focusing on their white empty eyes and marble sex organs; I always thought penises were bigger.
I trace one of Leonardo’s flying machines, paste it into my scrapbook, and glue strips of Mom’s “ratty old mink stole” to its wings. Then I turn to the centerfold of The Last Supper and trace that scene into my scrapbook too. I give the table a long tablecloth painted with stars and planets, and fill the windows behind it with comets. I’ve seen the picture at Gramma Frieda’s church and I know that Jesus’s hand is raised (Dad says He’s asking for the check), but when I look closer this time, I see powdered doughnuts on the table.
And powdered sugar on Jesus’s face.
I slam the book shut and look at my watch.
Mom says I’m good at entertaining myself. She says my imagination is a work of art. The Last Supper is a work of art. Maybe my imagination is on the next page; I saw something like that on The Twilight Zone once.
When I dare to look at Jesus again, He raises an eyebrow and shrugs.
“Stop it!” I yell. Mrs. Wiggins moans and briefly raises her head.
On TV, people who hallucinate famous dead people (like Jesus) are taken to the hospital where they put jumper cables on their heads. They wear diapers and pajamas all day, and cry all night because they want to go home.
* * *
“Crawford Quarry is perfect viewing,” Dad told us earlier. He knows all about the planets and stars, but he still calls Mom his “favorite heavenly body.” He checked out books from the Multnomah County Library and drew star charts that we’ll look at when we get to the pit. He bought us each a flashlight too.
Lauren and I’ve never been to Crawford Quarry, but when our parents told us about the huge pit where people dig rocks out of the ground with big Flintstone-style steam shovels, my little sister giggled. She loves The Flintstones.
At 23:00 (11:00 p.m. exactly), we meet in the kitchen. Lauren’s been sleeping and she’s hard to wake up, but I’ve been watching the clock—listening to the little ticks inside each tock and matching them to my heartbeats; visualizing every step between here and the entrance to Crawford Woods.
“Okay, kidlets,” Dad says, pulling on his windbreaker,“it’s time to go.” Mrs. Wiggins looks up from the floor in the family room and wags her tail. “People are sleeping, but their windows will be open, so no talking. And Lily? Leave your watch at home.”
“Why?”
“Because you look at it all the time, dummy,” Lauren says.
“And none of that, girls, or we’ll turn right around and come home. Got it?”
Lauren and I draw zippers across our mouths.
I grab Mrs. Wiggins’s leash. “Not this time, honey,” Dad says. The star charts crinkle when he pulls a rubber band over them. “Mrs. Wiggins is too sick to go with us. She can watch the house while we’re gone.”
“But what if we need her? Her breed is strong enough to pull people out of snowdrifts. Besides, she’s used to babysitting us. She wants to go.” Mrs. Wiggins wags her tail but doesn’t lift her head.
“You’re being selfish, Lily,” Dad says. His words pierce my heart. “She’s old and sick. You wouldn’t want to be dragged around if you were her.”
“I won’t drag her around.”
The cold water faucet whistles when Mom fills a glass for her evening “happy pill,” and we all turn around to watch. Mom gets unhappy faster than Speedy Gonzales and the pill “gives her balance,” Dad says. “We’re lucky to live in a pharmaceutical age.”
He puts his hands on his hips. “Okay, Asher family. Are we ready to roll?”
Mom smiles; Lauren claps.
“Home no later than three a.m.,” he says. He also says something about the bogeyman and carriages turning into pumpkins too, but Lauren and Mom are already out the door.
I tuck my wristwatch in Mrs. Wiggins’s bed, say a prayer, and draw a pie chart over her, blessing her the way a priest would. “I love you,” I say in Pig Latin.
Dad puts his hand on my shoulder, but I shrug it off.
It’s a twenty-minute walk from our home on Aiken Street, uphill past the fancy houses in Crawford Heights, to the entrance of Crawford Butte. As we pass the big houses, Mom points out her favorites. Against the dark blue sky, they look like outlines of giant ships. In daytime, they’re all the same: big and white with used brick trim, bay windows, and fake columns, some in the Greek Ionic tradition, some in the Doric. Other columns look like Lincoln Logs or upside-down umbrella stands.
I’d like to build a table-sized Acropolis, paint scenes on the inside, then spin it like a zoetrope. Aunt Jamie said she’d help.
It’s a beautiful night.
My family’s quiet, though inside people’s houses, dogs bark at us anyway. It’s late but televisions light up most living rooms. Jack Paar was Mom’s favorite late-night host but Johnny Carson’s on now. Tonight’s guests are Woody Allen and Ed Ames.
We finally arrive at the dark woodsy path leading to the quarry pit and Dad double-checks our flashlights. He checks that we’re each still carrying a blanket too, and asks after the hot chocolate, tin cups, sandwiches, and powdered doughnuts in Mom’s picnic basket. When he also asks if I zipped my windbreaker, I don’t answer. I’ll be fourteen in two months; I’m not a baby.
Trying to be funny, Dad runs his new binoculars up and down Mom’s legs. “Ooga, ooga,” he jokes. Judy says he bought them with money he won at the horse track, but how does she know?
Dad walks ahead of us, kicking an empty can out of his way. It’s motor oil, probably for the motorcycles that tear through Crawford Woods all hours of the day and night. There’s an empty wine bottle in the bushes too, old yellowed newspaper, and dirty Dixie Cups.
“Litterbugs,” Lauren says, leaning into me. Messes make her nervous.
Mom and Dad stop where the trees begin to darken and blur and I stop too. “Wait a minute,” Dad says, turning around. He sniffs. “What’s that?” It’s his teasing voice. “Does anyone else smell it?”
Mom turns her flashlight beam on him. “Paul,” she warns.
He sniffs again. “Is that . . . carrion?”
“What’s carrion?” Laura asks.
“Come on, Paul. No ghost stories. You promised.”
“All right, all right.” He smiles, and taking Mom’s hand finally leads the way into Crawford Woods. When they slip out of view, my sister and I hurry up behind them. Every five steps, I stop and listen.