by Andrew Smith
I turned back around, but Bartleby was nowhere to be seen.
“Sam? Why is your door wide open, and why are you standing there in your underwear? We’ve been waiting for twenty minutes, so your mom sent me in to see if you’re okay.… And, Sam, WHY IS THIS EVEN HAPPENING TO ME RIGHT NOW?”
Karim, never one to miss an opportunity to overdramatize a non-event, covered his eyes and turned around.
I felt myself turning even redder (if that was possible), and getting mad at the same time too. I was mad at Bartleby for saying I had a crush on Bahar and then disappearing; I was mad at my dumb33 claustrophobia; I was mad at Karim for walking into my dressing room34 when I didn’t have any pants on; I was mad at my mom for taking me—and everyone else—shopping in the first place; and I was mad at Blue Creek for just being so Blue Creek.
I dug around in the pile of loose clothes I’d placed (and forgotten about) on the bench inside my dressing room, and found the old Sam-shorts I’d worn for the Uniontown Mall shopping expedition, and pulled them on.
“You can turn around now, Karim,” I said. “Just do one thing for me. Tell my mom that everything fits perfectly fine. I just want to get out of this—excuse me—stupid store.”
Karim said, “Oh. You had that thing happen again, didn’t you?”
I was so mad, I felt my voice shake and crack. “I don’t want her to know that I’m scared about leaving, Karim. Everyone’s expecting me to do this, and I’m going to do it. Just don’t say anything about it, okay?”
“Nobody wouldn’t think you’d be scared about going away, Sam. Anyone would be scared to leave home.”
“Would you be scared?” I asked.
Karim rolled his eyes and shrugged. “I’d be terrified, Sam.”
Sometimes—on rare occasions—Karim could actually let his guard down and show people he truly cared about things in ways he was usually too sarcastic to be honest about. That’s why everyone liked him as much as they did.
Karim helped me gather up all the school things I was supposed to be trying on for Mom.
He said, “Just leave it to me, Sam. I’ll take care of everything.”
31. If armadillos had front doors, that is.
32. (excuse me)
33. (excuse me)
34. Even if the door was wide open.
BATMAN, ROBIN, AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION
“Every one of these outfits fits him perfectly, Mrs. Abernathy,” Karim said, holding up the armful of clothes I’d supposedly been modeling. “Except for these blue shorts—they fit, but Sam thinks they make him look fat.”
Mom gave me a hurt and concerned look that seemed to say, Why didn’t you let me see?
Bahar stared at me. I could tell she knew that something was wrong. Maybe it was just me. Or maybe she could tell from the tone of Karim’s voice that he was running his distraction play.
But Karim, always on his grown-ups game, handed the blue “fat shorts” clipped onto their plastic hanger back to my mom. He said, “The reason he was in there for so long is that he was on the phone to that Pine River school, or whatever it’s called, asking about if there were specific-colored socks that are required for their uniform.”
“Oh. I didn’t think about that!” Mom said. “So, what did they say, Sam?”
I was lost, but Karim didn’t miss a beat.
He said, “Sam told me they’ll kick you out and send you home if the socks are anything other than black, fire-engine red, or white.”
My mom nodded and said, “Fire-engine red! I really appreciate schools that enforce discipline!”
“Me too!” Karim said, looking at me and grinning with every tooth he had.
Fire-engine red.
So I almost died when Mom led us all into the boys’ pajamas, socks, and underwear section, right in front of Bahar. Dylan kept squealing, “Underwear!” and Evie laughed and laughed. So there was ultimately nothing I could do to get through the ordeal, except immerse myself in the dread that in just a few weeks I was going to find myself about two thousand miles away from Blue Creek.
And I thought that maybe saying good-bye to all this would be more of a relief than a curse.
I was going to have to say good-bye to all this.
Nothing, no dread, embarrassment, or disappointment, could stop the spiders.
But right now, thanks to Karim, I was hopelessly lost inside a clothes-shopping nightmare, looking for fire-engine-red socks with half the kids in my neighborhood.
I was mortified.
Mom picked out some pajamas with soccer balls on them for me.
Karim announced to everyone that pajamas with soccer balls were probably less likely to get me beaten up than pajamas with Princess Snugglewarm on them (but I still thought Princess Snugglewarm was better than soccer). And then Mom said the worst thing a mother could say to a twelve-year-old boy in front of a fourteen-year-old girl he kind of liked35 and who was also the cousin of his best friend, which was this: “Oh! These are so cute! Do you like these undies, Sam?”
And Mom held up a package of size ten/twelve boxer briefs with Batman and Robin on them and fanned them around in front of everyone, which included Bahar and my little sister.
Karim started laughing so hard, I thought we’d have to call the paramedics.
And yes, my mom shamelessly uses words like “undies” in front of my friends.
Bahar stared at me and said, “Sam. You wear those?”
“Not right now, he’s not! Sam’s are camo today!” Karim blurted out.
I felt like there was enough heat coming off my forehead to trigger a fire alarm or something, and as I waited for the store’s overhead sprinklers to activate, I just said, “Fine. Whatever, Mom. Can we be done now, please?”
It was horrible.
And while Karim laughed and laughed, Mom waved her hand and the stupid36 package of Batman and Robin underwear in the air at me, and said, “Stop being silly, Sam.”
* * *
It was probably something worthy of an internet search—trying to see how long it would take someone like Bahar or Karim to forget about something like my undies, but twenty-four hours was probably not the right answer. And now here we were, the next day, all sitting on the floor in my bedroom with another article in front of us from the Hill Country Yodeler, while I was waiting—just waiting—for one of my friends to bring up something embarrassing about Batman and Robin.
It was bound to happen, I thought. Maybe Karim was just playing me like a hooked largemouth bass.
“Anyone who has a dead raccoon electrically wired with a lightbulb screwed into its head is statistically much more likely to participate in the occult arts than people who don’t,” Karim said, studying his checked-off list of the things he’d concluded about the new residents of the Purdy House.
Karim’s theory sounded reasonable to me.
And Bahar said, “Maybe they named the raccoon ‘Little Charlie.’ ”
Ever since the Monster People had moved into the Purdy House, it seemed that nobody in Blue Creek had seen or even noticed them. The only one of us who had seen them at all was Karim, on that first morning before sunrise when he’d snapped the picture with the movers and the people watching from the porch, and the ghostly little boy standing in the upstairs window.
But you could tell that someone was living—or residing, I should say—in the Purdy House. Sometimes the drapes in the windows would be open, and later they’d be closed, and there was an old orange Volvo station wagon parked in the circular drive on the other side of the iron gates, which still had the NO TRESPASSING warnings posted on them.
Empty moving boxes had been piling up on the front porch.
“This next article is a feature about the Purdy House,” Bahar said. She handed Karim and me each a couple of photocopied sheets of paper. “It’s from 1933, during the Great Depression,” she said.
And then, sure enough, Karim did it. He said, “I wonder if kids in 1933 had Batman and Robin on their undies. What do y
ou think, Sam?”
I glared at my friend and reminded him coldly, “I cook food for you, Karim. And I enjoy mayonnaise.”
The April 18, 1933, issue of the Yodeler was a little more modern-looking than the 1919 version. The front page had stories about President Franklin Roosevelt throwing out the first pitch of the baseball season at a game between the Senators and the Athletics; an editorial essay about whether or not Texas was going to legalize beer; a story on Winnie Ruth Judd, who chopped somebody up and traveled to California with the body parts in a suitcase; a news report on a woman from Brownsville who’d been granted a divorce from her wrestling champion husband, who “would not stay home”; and a feature on Blue Creek history—in particular, on the Purdy House.
Blue Creek History:37 A Look Back at the Notorious Purdy House
The town of Blue Creek has long been fascinated with the fabled Purdy House, the notorious landmark which has stood unoccupied for nearly thirty years, ever since the mysterious disappearance of its last owners, Ervin Purdy and Cecilia Pixler-Purdy.
Whether or not the house is haunted, as many of Blue Creek’s townspeople contend, the history of the home and its odd inhabitants has perplexed curious citizens for decades.
Originally called the Pixler House, the stately home was constructed in 1881 by Ethan Pixler and his young bride, Cecilia, new settlers to Blue Creek.
Ethan Pixler gained notoriety and scorn as a ruthless criminal who had robbed no fewer than a dozen banks in south and western Texas. Pixler was arrested, tried, and hanged outside Blue Creek in 1888 amid rumors of a vast, hidden, and secret fortune. None of the money stolen during Pixler’s legendary robbery spree has ever been recovered.
It was a scant three months after the execution of Ethan Pixler when his widow, Cecilia, married a traveling vaudevillian, a hypnotist named Ervin Purdy who had established some reputation for his entertaining antics and miraculous feats across Texas and southern Oklahoma. Ervin Purdy claimed to be able to restore vision to the blind through hypnosis, although he had been arrested in Kansas for swindling an entire church congregation out of thousands of dollars with a fraudulent talking-armadillo scheme.
It was shortly after their marriage, in 1889, that Ervin Purdy and his bride adopted the celebrated boy known as “Little Charlie,” an undersized youth reported to have been raised by wolves in the wilderness of south Texas.
Besieged by the surprising number of journalists and charitable organizations wishing to study the boy, Mr. and Mrs. Purdy began to advertise the haunting of the house by Mr. Pixler’s angry spirit. Many local citizens familiar with the Purdys have said this was a means of discouraging intrusion into their lives.
The story of Little Charlie only serves to add more complexity to the rumors surrounding the house, the fates of Cecilia Pixler-Purdy and her second husband, and the mystery of the rumored hidden fortune of Ethan Pixler.
The oft-recounted story claims Little Charlie was rescued from a family of wolves by a band of outlaws who used the boy for entertainment purposes in saloons and at town fairs. The Wolf Boy was ultimately traded to immigrants from Germany in exchange for three bottles of liquor and a mule, but his new family found the boy impossible to pacify. Little Charlie, the Wolf Boy of Juno, as he’d been called, reportedly scratched at himself incessantly, chewed on household furnishings, constantly tore away his clothing, rolled his naked body on the carcasses of decaying animals, and howled inconsolably every night. He was said to only tolerate eating raw meat, and was blamed for the killing of many of the settlers’ small animals, as well as those of their neighbors.
Ultimately the German immigrants became so frustrated with Little Charlie’s intractability and unwillingness to learn the German language that they gave the wild boy up for adoption to Mr. and Mrs. Purdy in the summer of 1889.
It was in the years following the adoption that the story of Mr. and Mrs. Purdy, Little Charlie, and the Victorian home they lived in became a matter of increasing speculation, rumor, and fear. Townspeople in Blue Creek often reported wails and painful howls emanating from the house at night, and the youngster, Little Charlie, became a rumored suspect in the disappearance of household pets and livestock around Blue Creek. On three occasions, Little Charlie used his bare hands (which had frequently been described as claws) to dig up the casket of Ethan Pixler, prompting the Purdys to excavate a shaft and bury Pixler more than fifty feet below ground, in an attempt to get the savage child to stop exhuming Pixler’s remains. Mr. and Mrs. Purdy, beleaguered by the rumors and gossip around Blue Creek, became housebound recluses, and were not seen in public for months on end.
Some witnesses reported sighting a large black figure that arose at night into the air above the roof of the house, and unsubstantiated claims of human bones and open graves on the inner grounds have fed into the unfavorable reputation of the home.
The house itself became a site of scorn, and residents of Blue Creek eventually avoided passing anywhere near it throughout the 1890s. Ervin Purdy and Cecilia Pixler-Purdy entirely ceased interacting with neighbors. There were frequent reports of strange lights and noises from within the Purdy House, and shadowy figures watching like demonic sentinels from the home’s upper, darkened windows.
In 1905, the Purdy House was locked and shuttered behind its imposing iron gates. Mr. and Mrs. Purdy, and their adopted son, Little Charlie, had disappeared entirely from Blue Creek some months earlier, never to resurface anywhere up to the time of this story’s publication.
The house has remained sealed, fueling speculation, primarily among Blue Creek’s young folk, about a sinister haunting presence that has never been substantially verified.
“So, basically, both these articles only give everyone more to be afraid of about the new people and the Purdy House,” Karim said. “As soon as the poison gas dissipates and they come back from the nudist colony in Mexico, I’m going to ask my parents to move.”
“You already did move, Karim,” I said, pointing to the camp cot my dad had put in my bedroom for him. “And if you want to, you can just use my phone and call your mom and dad, who are probably enjoying a quiet evening together, alone, at your house, which is about a two-minute walk from here.”
And then I added, “I can’t get over the fact that ten pounds of potatoes cost twenty-one cents in 1933.”
There were food ads at the bottom of the page.
“In my opinion, both of our articles only show how exaggerated and overblown the story is, how prejudiced people around here can be, and that there is nothing really dark or sinister about the Purdy House at all,” Bahar said, continuing to be, as always, so Bahar.
And really, everything Bahar said made perfect sense to that grown-up part of my brain, even if the regular part of my brain was willing to throw all reason overboard and side with Karim as far as his policy of staying the heck38 away from the Purdy House forever.
35. But who—and let me make this perfectly clear—I did NOT have a crush on.
36. (excuse me)
37. Apparently, at some point between 1919 and the Great Depression, people around here stopped calling it Blue Creek-Town.
38. (excuse me)
WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE MONSTER PEOPLE (PART 3)
What Everyone Needs to Know about the Monster People:
Have not been seen in daylight. May be vampires.
Have a lamp made out of a dead raccoon.
Have a hideous black flying beast that is bulletproof and comes out of their house at night during all the screaming.
Have a coffin buried fifty feet below the ground to keep the Wolf Boy from digging it up again.
AN EMPTY PAIR OF SHOES AND THE DESTRUCTION OF PARIS
Anyone in Blue Creek who’d ever posted a résumé on the bulletin board of Trey Hoskins’s Teen Zone in the public library had to know that it was NOT the most popular place for prospective employers to conduct recruitment searches, unless they wanted someone like Michael Dolgoff to wrangle up a can of hellgramm
ites,39 or to possibly get some yardwork and babysitting or something, but nothing that required any real talent or skill.
I mean, I should know because I’d never been called for any home chef services by anyone who’d been to the library, and my “Help Offered” flyer had been posted in the Teen Zone for almost six months. When I’d put it up, Karim had told me that it wasn’t a good selling point to list that I was well versed in the preparation of gooseneck barnacles,40 since the people of Blue Creek were more than satisfied with the chicken-fried steak on a stick at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner. I was beginning to think Karim was probably right about the barnacles. And I realized I probably made things worse by also listing that I knew how to make gnocchi, which, like gooseneck barnacles, nobody in Blue Creek had ever heard of.
However, I had been hired two times from an ad I’d hung at Lily Putt’s—once to make a thirtieth anniversary dinner of beef Wellington (that’s so 1980s!) for Mr. and Mrs. Rubenacker, who owned the movie theater, and another time to prepare merit-badge cookies for Blue Creek Boy Scout Troop 116.
Blue Creek’s most successful teen entrepreneurs always seemed to be the boys who mowed lawns in spring and summer, or those who climbed up on roofs in foul weather to clean out rain gutters in fall and winter. Gnocchi in brown butter sage sauce or gooseneck barnacles in lemon cannot compete with free-flowing rain gutters in Blue Creek, I suppose, no matter what the weather’s like.
“One time, Brenden Saltarello found an entire dead squirrel when he was scooping out the rain gutters on Mrs. Benavidez’s house,” Karim told me. “The squirrel’s head came off in Brenden’s hands when he picked it up.”
“Does he still clean gutters?” I asked.
“Yes, but he’s a vegetarian now,” Karim said.
That explained why all those times I’d seen Brenden playing golf at Lily Putt’s with some of the other guys on the baseball team, he’d never ordered a burger from me at the snack bar.