How had he gotten himself into this mess?
Jude glanced toward the front counter; Roberto cautiously inched around the corner. He had a spatula still in his hand, as if it might be an effective weapon. He might as well have been carrying a flyswatter.
A voice called out from behind Jude. “Hey, you guys, come on, hurry up, this way.”
It was the middle cashier, Becka, gesturing impatiently to the trio of bodybuilders. She waved them through the line, moving them along quickly. She looked across the room for any sign of Jessup, then said to Jude, “It’s okay, these guys already paid.”
The three incredible hulks, agog and somewhat bewildered, shuffled their way past the line and out of the building. “Yeah, what she said,” one of them muttered, looking back scornfully at Jude.
“Are you out of your mind?” Becka asked Jude after they left. “Do you want to get yourself killed?”
“What?” Jude said. “You think I couldn’t handle those guys?”
She laughed. “Right, with guns like those…”
Jude flexed his biceps. “You kidding me? Sun’s out, guns out. I have to register these babies with the FBI,” he joked. “These are considered lethal weapons in seventeen states.”
Becka shook her head, rang up the next customer, and said, “He was going to squash you like a bug.”
“I know,” Jude admitted.
“Not very smart, are you?”
“I hoped I could reason with him,” Jude explained. “But it was like talking quantum physics with a water buffalo.”
She touched Jude’s forearm, like a concerned sister. “This is only a summer job. No one expects you to get killed for it.”
Jude nodded. “Right, no, right, it was totally dumb. I don’t even know what I was thinking. I guess I figured the guys behind the counter would have my back.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “What were they going to do? Throw hand grenades?”
Jude grinned. More customers pressed forward, impatiently waiting. “Thanks,” he said. “I guess I owe you.”
“Considering I just saved your life? Yeah, I think so,” she smiled. “Maybe I’ll let you buy me a pretzel someday.”
Jude assured Becka that he would. After all, he was already in love with her, and the pretzels were free.
FIVE
Jude stank of hamburger. He could barely stand it: the reek of cooked cow that clung to his clothes on the long bus ride home. He couldn’t wait to shower, rejoin the human race.
He saw his father out by the street in a skintight pair of Lycra running shorts, stretching his Achilles tendon with one foot against the curb. Way more of Dad’s butt than anybody needed to see.
“Hey, Jude,” his father greeted him. “I was just going out for a run. Want to join me?”
He always asked. Jude and his father hadn’t run together in years, but he always asked. It was almost sweet. And each time when Jude declined, there was a fleeting look of disappointment in his father’s eyes. But there was no way Jude could do it. When it came to running, they were complete opposites.
Jude pulled at the front of his sweat-stained shirt. Shook his head. “I’m covered with grease, can’t.”
Mr. Fox nodded as if he understood perfectly and checked his sports watch. It was his new toy, a runner’s watch with all the latest features, heart-rate monitor, pace alerts, session distance, GPS capability, the works. Jude’s father loved data, and as far as Jude was concerned, his father did everything possible to suck the last living ounce of joy out of jogging. Mr. Fox turned something as simple as going for a run into advanced mathematics, measuring every mile, every step, a middle-aged man still chasing his PBT (Personal Best Time). Even so, Jude had to admit it: The guy was in great shape.
“Mom inside?” Jude asked.
“Yes, um, she’s upstairs, resting,” Mr. Fox answered. “The heat, and—”
“No worries,” Jude answered. “I ate at work.”
“Oh, that’s right. You worked today! How’d it go?”
“Pretty much okay. They gave me a paper hat.”
Jude kept the details to the bare minimum. He saw that his father was only half listening. Mr. Fox brought two fingers to his carotid artery, lips moving as he counted the pulse.
“Have a good run,” Jude said.
“I’m doing Bender Hill today, five times up, five times down,” Mr. Fox announced. “I should be back in roughly sixty-five minutes.”
Yeah, roughly. Jude was halfway up the walk and gave no reply. There was never enough light in the house. It could be a beautiful day outside, like today, but you’d never know it. One reason was the overgrown bushes that crowded the front windows and a towering pine that grew too close to the foundation, keeping the home in shade and shadows, its roots causing the front walkway to buckle. When Jude asked his parents why they didn’t just cut it down, his father looked away and his mother said the shade helped keep the house cool in the summer. Besides, as she often reminded Jude when she drew the curtains, sunlight faded the carpet.
Jude’s mother liked things cool and dark, and had long ago declared war on light itself. She continually snapped down the blinds, pulled closed the curtains, walked around in thin, white sweaters. On good days, Mrs. Fox went to the club for lunch or played tennis with the ladies, lobbing shots from baseline to baseline. But the good days seemed to come less and less. She was a nervous woman who suffered from what she called cluster headaches that forced her to retreat to a darkened bedroom where she lay for long hours at a time. She claimed that sunlight made the headaches worse. Dark and forbidding, it was a house where plants came to wither and die. Jude’s father eventually gave up buying Easter lilies or Christmas poinsettias and instead came home one holiday with a large plastic ficus tree. Even his mother’s neglect couldn’t kill it.
Jude showered and dressed. In the hallway, he paused outside the closed door of his parents’ bedroom, tilted an ear, listening for movement.
“Jude?” his mother called.
“Yeah, it’s me, Mom,” he answered. “How you feeling today?”
A long silence. “I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing for you in the kitchen,” she finally said, her voice muffled, as if groaned into a pillow.
“That’s okay, Mom, I’m good,” Jude replied. He considered telling her about work, how some girl saved him from getting pummeled by a trio of behemoths, but it felt awkward trying to talk through a door. He placed his right hand on the door as if to push it open, and he saw his fingers as the legs of a fleshy spider perched there, tingling. Jude rested his head against the jamb, shut his eyes. He waited in the hush for something to happen, some change to occur, but nothing did.
Nothing ever did.
SIX
Corey dropped by around seven. He lived around the corner, and Jude was probably the first friend Corey’d made after moving into the neighborhood. That was almost nine years ago, back in second grade. Corey was one of those guys who couldn’t stand sitting around at home; his parents were crazy-strict super-religious types, so he visited other houses and sat around there. Ate their food, too. Jude’s parents usually left the boys alone to do as they pleased, so it was a win-win for all concerned.
“Where to?” Jude asked. “Downstairs or…?”
Corey pointed. “Up. Okay?”
They made a short detour into the kitchen where Jude grabbed a bag of pretzels. “Anybody home?” Corey asked.
“They’re around somewhere,” Jude answered.
Out of long familiarity, Corey led the way up the stairs and into Jude’s room. He eased open the second-floor window and climbed out onto the narrow front edge of the roof. Jude followed in bare feet, pretzel bag crinkling. Together they worked their way around to the side of the house, hoisted themselves up like circus performers to the highest point, and perched there like a couple of teenage gargoyles looking down on the neighborhood. Something about that vantage point pleased Corey, soothed him, so Jude never denied his friend that pleasure. Some
times they’d joke about falling off, daring the other boy to go to the roof’s edge, to take a flying leap, but it was only talk. No one ever got close to the upper lip, and no one really wanted to see the other go near it, either.
Though Jude had casual friends and socialized easily in school, there were parts of him that remained fenced off, private places that no one could touch. Corey was the only one Jude allowed inside, the only real friend he had.
Corey was an enthusiastic reader and a nonstop talker. He’d go on jags where he’d read everything by a given author, or anything about a specific topic, until one day he’d announce that he was “full up on it” and had moved on to, say, Stephen King or true-life murders or everything by Max Brooks. Zombies—or Walkers, as he called them—were never far from Corey’s mind since, to him, the zombie presence explained everything that was wrong with Long Island.
“Getting near dusk, and the Walkers come out,” Corey mused, peering down across the suburban sprawl at neighbors in floppy hats who puttered in gardens, fussing over beds of zinnias and marigolds with pruning shears and watering cans. It was a picture of the American dream, the nice houses and the big cars, but Corey saw something sinister in it, an underlying menace. Jude felt the same way, but for different reasons. Corey Masterson was a misfit in town. He was black in an overwhelmingly white community, and though it rarely ever came up in conversation—why talk about it?—Corey’s outsider status was a fact that could not be denied. Jude’s sense of alienation was different, harder for him to pinpoint, some inner feeling that he didn’t belong to this or any other tribe. Maybe that’s what bonded the two boys; they both watched from the fringes with a shared sense of unbelonging.
Corey gestured to where a small group of neighborhood women had gathered. He dabbed a finger at each and said, “Zombie, zombie, zombie.”
Jude almost believed it, especially in the case of his next-door neighbor Mrs. Buchman. She was into everyone else’s business, always watching, pretending to be friends with anyone who stepped on the sidewalk. “I never liked that woman,” he said. “She’s into everybody else’s shit.”
Corey raised an eyebrow at that, the surprising note of anger in Jude’s voice, but let it slide. Mrs. Buchman seemed okay to him, for a Walker, with three little blonde daughters, always with a smile on her face. Maybe Jude knew something he didn’t.
“Zombies are like terrorist sleeper cells waiting to be activated,” Corey continued. “They live here, go about their business—shop, garden, go to PTA meetings—then one day you look up, and they are clawing the eyeballs out of your sockets, gnawing on your bones like you were a rack of baby back ribs!”
Jude lay back, hands behind his head, and watched the sky turn twilight.
“It’s easy to fall into their trap,” Corey warned. “You look at them and you see a neighbor. The nice ladies who pick up after the dog, smile at the mail carrier, and go to the Y for spin classes. They look at you—and see lunch.”
“You watch too much TV.”
“Who doesn’t?” Corey grinned. “Check out that sweet swimming pool behind Ansari’s house, all lit up with floodlights.” Corey whistled. “Man, that water is calling my name. We should grab Vinnie and the guys, sneak out, and go pool-hopping some night. I wonder how many we could do. What do you think, Jude, if we swam our way across town? Hopping from pool to pool. That would be a trip.”
Jude fell into a brooding silence. He had a history with swimming pools.
Six summers before, Jude’s sister Lily drowned in their built-in pool. She was only four years old. There was talk of moving after that, just getting the hell away, but for some reason his parents stayed. Maybe they were frozen in place, stuck there. So they hired an excavation company to fill in the pool. That whole week, Jude watched the men work. They tore at the pool with jackhammers, drilling holes in the bottom, breaking down the sides of the walls. After just one day, it looked like somebody’d bombed the place. The men next appeared with a backhoe, hauling out chunks of concrete. Then came the loads of dirt fill, with a layer of black topsoil for the new garden. Transfixed at an upstairs window, Jude watched the men toil. He felt as if a part of him was interred in that wild torrent of dirt and rubble. And so he buried Lily a second time, and from his window whispered good-bye, lips pressed to the pane.
The next spring his parents labored to transform the scarred earth into a memorial garden. They scratched the dirt and planted shrubs and flowers, a Chinese maple, installed a bench and gravel pathways, but his mother soon lost heart in the project. Over the winter the snow came and most everything died, never to bloom quite the same again. It was supposed to be a garden of tranquility, but in the end the backyard grew into a ramshackle mess of scraggly annuals, a crumbling rock wall, a litter box for neighborhood cats, and weeds, weeds, weeds.
That’s the way it was, Jude figured. Everything eventually turned to shit.
Corey read the sullenness in Jude’s face and kicked himself for his mistake. Even now, even after all those years. A darkness had descended over Jude. Like that, fast as a finger snap. He was wrapped in it, as if a heavy cloak had fallen around his shoulders.
“What about a movie?” Corey suggested.
“Not tonight,” Jude answered.
“Tomorrow night then,” Corey persisted. “We’ll call the boys. Hang.”
“Okay,” Jude relented. “Tomorrow.”
SEVEN
Jude was back on the grill Sunday, working shoulder to shoulder with the self-proclaimed grillmaster Billy Motchsweller. Jude’s glance kept returning to the girl in the middle booth, Becka. She was nice-looking, no doubt about that. Not the sexpot type, not someone who’d cause traffic accidents by walking down the street, but there was something about her that set Becka apart.
“You know her?” Jude asked Billy.
Billy looked up, eyed Becka appraisingly. “Not bad. I’d tap that. She’s what we call new talent around here. You like her?”
“Just asking,” Jude said.
Billy nodded. “I got a girlfriend at home, man. Four weeks now. I’m faithful, not a player. I come here, do my job, keep my head down, smoke a little weed, and try not to stand around panting like a dog after all these babes in string bikinis that are just ridonkulous. I try, I really try. But some days it’s hard.” He made an obscene gesture. “You know what I’m saying?”
Jude knew what Billy was saying. He would have to be as dumb as a garbage truck to not know what Billy was saying; so he made the required response, laughed knowingly. “Har-har-har.” Guy talk, just a couple of working stiffs shooting the breeze, pointing and grunting and laughing it out. The kind of conversation most guys felt they were supposed to have as part of the brotherhood of boys: leering, crude, funny, sex-obsessed. It was common ground, like sports talk—“What about them Yankees?”—the shared place where guys could meet. We’re all a bunch of horndogs, right? Jude wasn’t wired like that, but he knew the rules of the game. He was here to work, not make waves; let the pull of the moon take care of the tide.
Besides, it was more disturbing that Billy actually used the word ridonkulous in a sentence. That was harder to forgive. You could say it as a joke, with lifted eyebrow, but it was another thing altogether to say it straight-faced, like you actually meant it. For the record, Jude felt the same way when people said ginormous and cool beans. For Jude, it was like watching and enjoying a terrible movie. He loved seeing those movies with Corey, and together they spent giddy hours snorting over the best-worst movies of all time. Classics such as Roadhouse, Anaconda, The Beastmaster, and the all-time best-worst, Plan 9 from Outer Space. The thing was, you absolutely had to know it was bad—that’s what put the fun in the funny. But if someone like-liked it without irony: Yikes, that was just depressing.
Jude watched as Jessup went out to the cashiers, talking casually with them, full of confidence. Tall, muscular, and handsome, he was the type of all-American hero who could definitely get on a normal, subaverage guy’s nerves.
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br /> When Kath returned from break, Becka rose to switch places. Jude leaned in for a better look. She was narrow hipped, thin but not frail, about five five. Becka came around the counter, walked past Jude, said something to Roberto that made him laugh, took a bottle of water, lifted a pretzel from the warmer. He watched as she carefully studied the pretzel, sniffed it, dusted off the excess salt, and tore off the tiniest piece imaginable. She was alone in the great wide world with her pretzel, performing some strange ritual, unaware of being watched, cute as all get-go.
He watched her glide into the back room, take off her hat, free that mess of black hair, grab a paperback from her things, and walk out the back door into the sun. When Jessup returned to his back office, Jude went over to Roberto.
He asked about the girl.
“That’s Becka McCrystal,” Roberto said, sucking down a soft drink. “I kind of know her from school.”
“Kind of?”
Roberto shrugged. “We’ve been in a couple of classes together. We dissected a frog in lab once—she sliced and I diced. It was a bonding experience.”
“What else do you know about her?”
Roberto gave him a look. “Who are you, Christopher Columbus? Did you just sail in on the Mayflower? You going to stick a flag in her, claim her for King Ferdinand?”
“Dude,” Jude said, laughing. “The Mayflower? That was the Pilgrims. Plymouth Rock. Columbus drove the Santa Maria.”
“I thought he rode in on some chick named Nina,” Roberto joked, chortling, his big belly shaking with mirth.
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