Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  Well, I reckoned it was getting late: just about time for me to run screaming for my life. With a casual grunt, I stood out of my squat. Stretched. ‘Yeah, well, you know, ghosts aren’t real. Or anything,’ I told her. ‘There aren’t really any ghosts.’

  I do believe she’d been saving this last glance of hers. It was something out of a horror movie. She turned it up at me from where she knelt. Blasted me with a couple of campfire eyes, a grand smile of insane knowing. ‘That doesn’t mean you don’t see them,’ she told me. ‘You have to see them. Ghosts. They’re like the sky. The sky isn’t real. There is no sky. It’s just particles that make us see the blue in the light.’

  ‘Yeah. So?’ I said. ‘I knew that.’

  ‘But you have to see it. It’s not like other things, other things that aren’t there. Like dragons or … or monsters or something. You can’t just say it’s not there and stop seeing it. You have to see it. So it is there. Like ghosts.’

  ‘Well, yeah, but … I mean, you could go up through the sky with a rocket, so it isn’t there really,’ I said desperately.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘yes.’ And she finally got that face off me, turning back, motherly, to her basket of creatures. ‘Yes. That’s what makes it so strange.’

  Whatever else I was going to say, I swallowed it, glug. Things were spooky enough already. It made me feel dizzy, in fact, this sky notion. Made me feel light on my soles, adrift. A sky’s the sort of thing you want nice and solid. Climb up your ziggurat of an evening, give her a rap. Yessir, screwed on tight. For a second there, I lost that sense of it. I had a sense instead of being in a shoebox tableau with the lid suddenly pulled off and everything floating free. Trees, earth, grownups floating. Stream floating up in gouts and droplets. Everything around me spreading thin like smoke, parting like the fabric of smoke and atomizing in twilit space. A bizarre glitch in the general proceedings.

  I tried to steady myself with a wet-dog shake. Tried to anchor myself again on Dad and Mrs Sole. She was appealing to him now, eyes upturned into a stray gleam of sunlight. He was running one hand through his thinning hair, the other on his hip, pushing his jacket back to show his paunch.

  ‘Is that your Dad?’ Without warning, the girl was standing next to me. Holding her basket placidly in front of her jumper. And oddly, it was a look at her that righted things for me. The sight of her worried brown nugget of a face brought me down with a clunk.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Is that your Mom? Mrs Sole?’

  She nodded. ‘She’s your Dad’s client. He’s nice, your Dad.’

  There was a delay before I heard this. I was still busy looking at her. Feeling earth, trees, water, feet sucked back into place. I looked at her so long I had to say something finally. ‘My name’s Harry, by the way,’ I said.

  And flash, there was her smile, ordinary, like her giggle, like any girl’s.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Agnes.’

  My father saw the two of us coming toward him and spoke up quickly, ‘Okay, Harry? Ready to go?’ Cut Mrs Sole off in mid-sentence. She whipped around quickly with a bright smile for us.

  ‘All done?’ she asked her daughter.

  ‘Yes,’ Agnes said.

  Mrs Sole waggled her fingers at me. ‘Well, then, bye, Harry. Nice to meet you.’ And at Dad, ‘Thanks, Michael, we’ll talk about it again.’

  ‘Right-ho,’ said Dad.

  And he and I stood side by side a moment, as mother and daughter walked away from us along the shadowy bank.

  ‘Agnes is a nice girl, isn’t she?’ my father asked, as we climbed out of the trees and started across the grass to the street. The light had gone here now too. It was dusk.

  ‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘The figures she makes are pretty good.’

  ‘Her mother, you know, is a client of mine. We’re discussing some business. A piece of property back there …’

  ‘Yeah, you told me already.’

  ‘Oh. Did I? Right.’

  He was quiet after that. I was glad. I wanted quiet. There was something going on, in me, as I walked beside him. I wanted to check it out. I felt peculiarly alert; I guess that’s what it was. Historians may disagree whether this was technically the first of my legendary Walks Home From Agnes’s, celebrated in song and/or story from generation to generation. I mean, I only walked over the lawn to my father’s car that day. But the formative principle was there, no question. That weird, cool feeling of transparency, the light wandering through me; of permeability, me waxing subatomic and the whole scene buzzing in and out of the interstices. Which just comes down, really, to an odd, inhabitive awareness of the assembling crickets and their calls and to the worsted texture of the graying day, to blade of grass on sneaker tip, and to the one-dimensional look that houses get just at that hour, as if they were cardboard cutouts raised against the sky. And the sky, just at that hour … What a bizarro girl, I thought suddenly, and I suddenly goose-pimpled under my jacket sleeves – because the sky at nightfall, I discovered then, actually does lose its solidity. It becomes granular and vertiginous and deep.

  I was glad, I don’t mind saying, to find that it was a momentary thing. When I wrapped my hand around the cold metal handle of the Caddy door and raised my eyes one last time suspiciously, I could see that the order of the sky’s distance and substantiality had been re-established, thank you very much, by the gradual appearance overhead of Vega in Lyra, the night’s first star.

  For each of three Fridays thereafter you could find me, just before dusk, Shwinning down Piccadilly, clean out of my way. Not confessing it, but looking for her. Just passing by, you understand, but secretly calculating the proper hour for voodoo ghost-sister drownings – on the chance it might be a regular sort of thing with her, you see. I would lay my bike down on a lawn and wander in there, in among the trees behind the houses. Peek in at the stream, do a quick study up and down of the sun-pocked strand. Just popped in to guzzle some serenity, I’d tell myself, searching the snarled branches for her and the shade under the budding leaves. Just here for an aftertaste of the transcendental blast, nothing to do with monkey-face. Oh, but I was undeniably intrigued. Well, I had no overview of it, no perspective on that alchemic pinch of zen she’d dropped in my nine-year-old pudding. Nine years old; Jesus – I hadn’t even grasped the truths that would later crumble around me. I hadn’t seen her deflated corpse at the roiling river’s edge, or sleep-walked into corruption day by dreamy day like anyone. I didn’t know I was like anyone, like everyone. I had the strangest feeling that all this, this life business, was happening specifically to me.

  Anyhow, she never showed. I biked home each Friday, secretly disappointed, secretly relieved. And the only new wrinkle in the Harry universe I can remember was the occasional laying aside of a daydream or so during the walk to school those weeks; a stern, forced, philosophical converse or two with the heavens as I tried to recover that weird, vivid sensation that had hit me that twilight after our first talk. Then I’d drop it, start to dream again – dreaming about this purge of mine. Wondering: wouldn’t it be more interesting if when the population came before King Harry to be judged, they were naked? The women especially. If they had to parade up to me like the girls in Freddy’s father’s magazines. Naked and pink and trembling …

  Just a thought, you understand. And on I’d bounce up Bunker Hill.

  The next week I gave up the search and – wouldn’t you know it – bumped right into her. I was pedaling home from a ballgame down Plymouth Road, where she shouldn’t have been. But there, in fact, she was, walking along on the sidewalk up ahead of me. Marching behind her chin like any stuck-up schoolgirl, her braids going tick-tock behind her neck. It gave me quite a start to realize that it was she.

  Coolly, nevertheless, I continued to bike up the street. I rattled past her – then faked a double-take and put on the brakes.

  ‘Hey, aren’t you that girl who makes figures?’ I asked as she reached me. I pretended to search my memory. ‘Agnes, right?’
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  ‘Oh yes,’ she chirped primly. ‘I remember you. You’re Harry, Mr Bernard’s son. I have to get home by sundown,’ she added, to explain why she kept on walking.

  I pedaled along beside her slowly, wrestling the handlebars as my front wheel wobbled. ‘Are you, like, religious or something?’

  ‘No. Well, we light the candles. But then only my father goes to temple. He says I can decide for myself when I grow up.’

  I nodded – and conversation lagged. This wasn’t the sort of talk I wanted to hear from her, and I couldn’t think of anything to add to it. I considered telling her how I’d overheard my mother say religion was all hooey, but that didn’t seem very polite …

  ‘Uh …’ I said.

  Agnes began to sing. ‘“Oh, Mary Mac, Mac, Mac, with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back, back …’” She eyed me sidelong. ‘That’s a jump-rope song. I was jumping rope with Jessica. She’s my friend. I was over her house today. That’s why I’m coming back in this direction. “She jumped so high, high, high, she touched the sky, sky, sky, she didn’t come back, back, back, till the fourth of…” You don’t go to JFK, do you?’

  ‘Uh … No … Bunker Hill.’

  ‘Oh. Jessica and I go to JFK. I like it there. I’m in third grade.’

  A car coursed by and my front wheel switchbacked. Agnes pulled ahead of me as I righted myself. This gave me a moment to consider. What was going on here? I felt like I’d taken a cold douse in the kisser. I mean, here I was, talking to a girl about a jump-rope song, for crying out loud. Talking about her friend Jessica. With a girl younger than me. And with her braids clocking. And with her prissy nose in the air. He came for witchcraft, he left with cooties – I could see the headlines now. What a let-down this was turning out to be.

  I pulled up alongside her again just as we reached the corner of Piccadilly. I wanted some answers here. Where was the eerie girl I’d met by the stream? How come she was so different now?

  ‘Uh …’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said Agnes. ‘I have to go. Bye.’

  ‘Bye,’ I managed to get out.

  She turned off, marched away. I pedaled up to speed and got the heck out of there.

  So that was the end of my plaintive pining streamside. No more hankering after Agnes either. It definitely was a let-down, but not the worst surely. I couldn’t even recall exactly what it had been, down there by the water; what she’d been like exactly that day that had put the spook into me so. By now, my soulful converse with grass blades on sneaker tips etcetera had more or less rotted away to the purely philosophical. Illusion, reality, the reality of illusion – who can say when you’re nine years old? And after that, who gives a damn?

  So the next Friday, I was back out on Hampshire Road playing baseball as the sun went down. Up at the sewer, with Dave lobbing them in this time, Freddy and Rick sharing the narrow outfield which went only from curb to curb. I had invisible men on first and third, two outs and two fouls on me – and we allowed foul-outs in this game to keep it moving so I could go down with any swing. And it was that time of day again, the light failing. And the big front window of Andrea Fiedler’s house had gone ebony again and was shimmering with the reflection of gnarly apple branches, sparsely blossomed. My Louisville Slugger, circling over my shoulder, was pictured on the glass as well, and so was the tennis ball coming in. And her shape, her silhouette, Andrea’s, was also there, I imagined, melding with the other blackness as she hovered spectral in her living room, watching me perform.

  Dave’s pitch reached me. I swung. Gave it a thok, a real shot. Usually I pulled those over the housetops, a long strike, but this one stayed true. Soon, it was bouncing way the hell down by the corner of Hartford and Sloane. Rick, who was fast, was tearing after it, but he had no chance of catching up. He could only watch where the ball landed and report back.

  ‘Home run,’ he shouted.

  I made only the most restrained gesture of triumph, yanking the air in front of me into my fist. Then I pivoted from the plate to walk off the energy. And I saw that the light had come on in the Fiedlers’ window.

  Mrs Fiedler was in there, setting the dinner table. Then, as I watched, a toilet flushed faintly in the distance and Andrea skipped in too and started to help with the cutlery. She came in, I saw, from the back of the house somewhere. She hadn’t been stationed at the window, in other words. She hadn’t been watching me.

  I returned to the sewer for a few practice swings, while Rick and Freddy relayed the ball back to the mound.

  The next day, Saturday, was a warm, pleasant day in May, but I awoke somehow in the tar pits of meditation. I didn’t know why I was in such a funk. I even watched the cartoons scowling. In pajamas till ten, my hair uncombed. Nothing satisfactory. Finally, somewhere between ‘How come we never have any good cereal?’ and ‘This is a stupid house, there’s nothing to do here,’ my mother got sick of me. ‘It’s a lovely day,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go outside and play?’ And I was banished to the suburban streets.

  Like a lonesome cowpoke, I wandered aimlessly. What was life? What good was anything? Why did I have to be stuck in Miss Truxell’s class? It had ruined my existence. Nothing was ever any fun anymore. And where was my dog – why had my parents killed my poor dog two years ago without telling me? Oh, Clancy, Clancy, if only you were here. Eyes on the macadam, sneakers kicking stones, I shuffled east to Plymouth and then Piccadilly Road. I was going to think this world out, I decided. I was going to know what I believed and stand for it and never complain and watch everything with an air of dangerous quiet and make terse, profound statements through tight lips. And hey, what if the women were not quite naked but were in their underwear and leaned forward and said, ‘Please, please, King Harry, you can do anything you want to me?’ The sun was at my back, the lawns were dewy, birds sang, and the air was like sponge cake, soft, warm and sweet.

  A screen door banged. I raised my eyes and up ahead was Agnes.

  This time, she was not only flouncing smugly from one lawn to the next, but was decked out in green beret and brown smock – a Girl Scout uniform. Now she was selling Girl Scout cookies, for Cripes’ sake. She headed up the path to the next door, primly toting her sample boxes, clipboard and order form. Disgusting. I shook my head, determined to mope right past her.

  So, of course, there was no one home at her next stop and I came abreast of her just as she laid off the chimes and came prancing down the front walk toward me.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  I stopped. Lifted my world-weary visage, as if surprised to see her there. She was standing flat-footed on the sidewalk, facing me straight on in that unnerving way girls have. I tipped her the lorn, lonesome wave of the ambling saddle tramp.

  ‘Taking a walk?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I sighed, grimly remembering how I’d killed a man in a gunfight in Abilene.

  ‘I’m selling Girl Scout cookies. I’ve done twenty boxes so far just this morning, although my mother took five. Jessica and I are going to share our sales so neither of us has more than the other. And that way we’ll both have more than Michelle. She’s our friend too but she’s kind of annoying.’

  I nodded with a sad, kind of faraway look in my eye.

  ‘Well … I have to go home for lunch now,’ she said. ‘You could come if you wanted to. We’re having wagon wheel noodles and Girl Scout cookies for dessert.’

  Normally, I’d have refused out of simple shyness – and, too, it was just about time for me to be movin’ on to another town. On the other hand: wagon wheels and Girl Scout cookies – those vanilla creme sandwiches especially … And it’d teach my mother something if I just didn’t turn up for her lunch.

  I shrugged. ‘Okay.’

  And we walked off together to the top of the hill.

  And so, The Queer Lunch. There’s no doubt it was the beginning of something. And it sure was queer, too, right from the start, right from the minute I walked in the door. There was the smell of the place, first o
f all. Not your usual kid’s house smell, open to the air, the screen door banging, laundry going, lunch on. It was that other smell, stagnant and ripe, plush with the must of another country. Not that I actually thought of Grandpa or the Nouveau Riche Hotel Of Parental Death or anything. But the defeated-looking stuffed chairs in the living room, and the rattle of Hummel shepherd boys on the mantelpiece and of hand-sculpted glass on the coffee table as I tromped through after Agnes – these did feel familiar to me, even as they felt unalterably foreign.

  The kitchen was better. Brightly lit with a window on the trees out back. Yellow wallpaper and shiny floor tiles. And the starchy smell of noodles steaming. And there was the Mom, Mrs Sole, hair up and apron on, comfortably at her stove, a recognizable and reassuring presence.

  ‘Hi, Mom, I’m home,’ Agnes said.

  She turned from the noodle pot, wooden spoon in hand. Smiling. ‘Oh, hel …’

  Did I register the way her eyes went flat, the way her cheeks, pinkened by the noodle steam, drained suddenly to chalk? Her smile was back in place in a pulse beat.

  ‘And Harry! How – how nice to see you.’

  ‘He was taking a walk,’ Agnes said. She dropped her cookie-selling stuff on the kitchen counter. ‘Can he have lunch with us?’

  ‘Lunch?’ whispered Mrs Sole. We regarded each other, she and I, she with her wooden spoon upraised.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Agnes. ‘Can we eat now?’

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ said Mrs Sole. She glanced desperately back at her noodle pot. ‘I guess we have enough, I …’ She looked at me again. I looked up at her blankly. I wondered if she was feeling sick or something. ‘Of course,’ she said finally. ‘You’re more than welcome to stay, Harry. We’d love to have you.’

  ‘He’s our friend Mr Bernard’s son,’ said Agnes.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I know,’ said Mrs Sole, and cleared her throat.

  ‘Are we eating now? Should I call Daddy?’