Bad Things

by Tamara Thorne

  He’d heard his parents talk about the Ewebeans, but he’d never seen them before. They were the only relatives left. His dad had sometimes joked that gypsies must have left his sister, Jade, on his parents’ stoop one night, because she didn’t look or act like any of the other Pipers. Grandfather had studiously pretended she didn’t exist.

  Seeing her for the first time, Ricky thought that, except for the way her breasts were trying to pop the buttons of her faded plaid dress, she looked a lot like the woman in the painting called American Gothic. And Howard looked just like the man, skinny and bald and sour. All he needed was a pitchfork. Ricky stifled a giggle.

  “Come on, Ricky,” Carmen said, touching his elbow. “We better be polite.”

  Heart sinking, he watched them climb out of a dirty, smoke-belching pink and gray Rambler. Aunt Jade turned briskly toward the open car door. “Come here, Buffems,” she called in a cloying, nasal voice. “Come here, Buffem-wuffems.”

  He heard yipping, and a second later, he saw a dog leap from the car. It was a poodle, small and white, with a poofy, goofy haircut and a green plaid collar studded with rhinestones. Its high-pitched frantic whining turned briefly into a growl as it saw him, then Jade called it again, and it threw itself into her arms. It was the most loathsome creature he’d ever seen.

  Then a girl slithered out of the car, and he forgot about the dog. Ricky knew she had to be his cousin, Evangeline. She was about three years older than him, and the look in her pale muddy eyes, combined with the smile she bestowed on him when she noticed him staring at her, said she’d instantly pegged him as kibble for the horrible poodle. His blood ran cold.

  “Oooh, wittle Buffems,” Aunt Jade cooed into a fuzzy pink ear. “Is you my wittle baby? Is you?”

  Buffems licked her face, waggling its tail like a golfball on a stick. Suddenly he saw its weenie stick out and rub against Jade Ewebean. He slapped his hand over his mouth a second too late to keep the giggle inside, and the sound of it hung in the air like a big red arrow, pointing directly at him.

  Aunt Jade looked at him. Uncle Howard looked at him. Evangeline looked at him. Even the poodle looked at him.

  “You,” Howard Ewebean grunted. “Which one are you?”

  Ricky stared dumbly at him.

  “You deaf, boy?” Aunt Jade asked. “Answer your uncle.”

  The poodle growled, its gums obscenely pink.

  “I, I—”

  “This is Ricky,” Carmen said, putting her hands protectively on his shoulders. He leaned gratefully against her.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Howard demanded. “He a mute?”

  “No,” Carmen said. Ricky could tell she was angry and trying to hide it. “He can talk, but he’s just lost his parents, so he doesn’t feel much like it, you know?”

  Jade drew herself up to her full, considerable, height and threw her shoulders back. “You’re the maid?”

  “Housekeeper,” Carmen replied with dignity.

  “Well, you ain’t going to be the maid long if you mouth off to me again.”

  “Miz Ewebean.” Carmen spoke calmly. “Did you and Mr. Ewebean read all the legal papers?”

  “Course we did,” Howard grunted.

  “Then you know you can’t fire me. It’s in the papers. My husband and I take good care of the boys and the house. We see nothing bad happens to any of them. The Pipers, they knew that and they put it in their papers. If you did read them, you know that too.”

  Howard grunted and blew his nose into a wrinkled handkerchief.

  “We’ll see,” sniffed Jade. “We’ll just see how much you’ll care about those boys when you don’t get your paycheck.”

  “The lawyer’s office sends my money, and since you say you read the papers, you know that, too, so don’t pretend to be stupid, Miz Ewebean. And don’t pretend I am either. That way we’ll get along a lot better.”

  “Look, Mama.” Evangeline’s voice was high and whiny, and she never took her eyes off him as she spoke. “Look at the boy. He’s staring at Buffems like he never seen a dog before.”

  “You never seen a dog, boy?” Aunt Jade asked.

  “Madre de Dios,” Carmen said quietly to Ricky. One of her hands left his shoulder, and Ricky knew she was crossing herself.

  “Speak up, boy,” Howard grumbled.

  “I—I’ve never seen such a fu—funny-looking one.” A small hysterical giggle escaped, and he felt his face flush.

  “It’s a sin against God,” Carmen hissed.

  “I thought they had money,” Jade said to Howard.

  “They do,” Howard said. “ ’cause we got it too, long as we take care of their brats.”

  Jade nodded knowingly. “Pity. I guess having money don’t mean having fashion sense. You’re a stutterer, boy?” she asked.

  Ricky shook his head no.

  “Where’s the freak?” Evangeline Ewebean asked loudly.

  “You got him locked up somewhere?” Howard chimed in.

  Carmen’s hand tightened on Ricky’s shoulder. “We don’t call him words like that. His name is Robin.”

  “Yeehaw!”

  As if in answer, Robin’s joyful cry pierced the air. Ricky and the others turned toward the house, and Ricky watched the leaves in the oak tree move as Robin, invisible, climbed down from the bedroom window. Suddenly he dropped from the lowest branch to the ground. He landed on his hands, elbows flexing, and then he ran forward, hands hidden in the overgrown grass.

  “Oooh, look at it!” squealed Evangeline.

  The poodle let loose a hysterical volley of yaps and strained to get free of Jade’s arms.

  “Stop it, Buffems,” she ordered. “Will you look at that thing move?” she asked.

  “Hauls ass,” Howard allowed.

  Robin arrived at the walkway leading to the driveway, and the slap-slap of his hands hitting the bricks seemed very loud to Ricky. The Ewebeans just stood there and stared, Jade clutching Buffems against her breasts, until Robin arrived next to his brother. Ricky moved closer to Carmen.

  “Hello, Aunt Jade. Hello, Uncle Howard.” He paused, looking Evangeline up and down. “Hello, Evangeline.”

  She giggled.

  “I’ll be goddamned, if that ain’t the goddamnedest thing I ever saw.” Howard slowly shook his head. “Belongs in a circus. What’d you say his name was?” he said to Carmen.

  “Robin,” she said.

  “Robin? Hell!” cried Howard. “He don’t look like a robin. He looks like a lump to me. He oughta be called Lumpkin, ’cause robins got wings.”

  “He’s gonna grow up and be third base,” Evangeline supplied.

  The poodle, still yipping, suddenly squirmed free of Jade’s grasp. Instantly it turned to face Robin, its legs stiff, its lip curled. Eat him, Ricky wished, then closed off the thought.

  “Lumpkin,” said Robin merrily. “Lumpkin, Lumpkin, Lumpkin!” With that, he flipped into a handstand and ran, head down, across the yard, climbing the oak tree like a monkey.

  “Don’t that beat all?” Howard said, chuckling and sending his boozy breath in Ricky’s direction. “That thing’s gonna be a hoot.”

  “Give Ricky a nickname too,” Robin yelled from the tree.

  Howard snorted, but before he could open his mouth, Robin screamed, “He’s icky Ricky! Icky Ricky! Call him Icky Ricky!”

  The Ewebeans looked at Ricky and laughed.

  Things deteriorated after that. Rick stared at the ceiling. Howard was a mean drunk, Jade was his match, and their daughter didn’t fall far from the tree. Evangeline, at thirteen, was well into puberty and intent on torturing every male she came into contact with.

  Rick yawned. The first few years were bad, but he still had his locking bedroom and Carmen. When he wasn’t in school, he lived by spending countless hours at Carmen and Hector’s or, if he couldn’t, remaining locked alone in his room, reading, writing, thinking. The Ewebeans didn’t miss him, the Ewebeans didn’t care. At night, when he’d wake up screaming because he
’d dreamed again about finding his dead parents, they ignored him or hollered at him to shut the fuck up.

  Two years later, when he and Robin entered early adolescence, things became far, far worse.

  A silent tear ran from his eye. Quint moved one paw up and touched it, just as he had when he was a kitten.

  Rick stared at the ceiling. I don’t owe Jade Ewebean a thing, Rick thought drowsily. Not a damn thing. She owes me.

  30

  August 20

  After a month of work, Don Quixote still didn’t look much like a knight errant, but his noble steed had taken on a distinctly horsey cast. Rick stood back and surveyed his work with satisfaction. The legs and tail were completed, and if not perfect, they at least had the long-limbed wraithiness that he so admired.

  Scratching his chin thoughtfully, Rick studied the belly of the beast. He wasn’t sure how to handle the penis, and as a result, he’d spent the morning perusing equine genitalia in his Metropolitan Museum of Art book. Eventually he decided that his horse must indeed have one, but wasn’t sure of the logistics—macho or subtle was the problem now. After a final moment’s thought, he chose subtle; nothing flashy, a simple Daumieresque pointy suggestion of stallionhood.

  He used his discarded shirt to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then pulled the mask back down and went to work on the underside of the horse. After a few moments, he was snickering to himself, feeling juvenile, and wishing Dakota were here to crack a few of his off-color Mr. Ed jokes.

  He’d heard from Dakota regularly. O’Keefe had made a point to phone him—as well as Audrey—every Sunday to get the lowdown on their latest date. Each week he also asked if he’d told Audrey that he could actually see the “jack-offs,” as he called them. Rick would say no, he hadn’t, and don’t you tell her, either. Since the night he’d told her the tall one about the cousin in Scotland, he’d religiously sidestepped the topic every time it started to come up, and Audrey was kind enough to let him. He would have liked to know if she really had done any research, but it was easier to avoid the whole thing.

  Still and all, things were going very well. Over the last few weeks he and his family had settled into a pleasant routine. Though Rick still avoided going out at night as much as he could, he found that his rather Pavlovian response to the phrase “I’m Thomas” helped him see the greenjacks as something more closely related to annoyance than crippling fear. It concerned him far more that he saw them at all, though the cat’s reaction had made him suspect that he wasn’t completely mad. That knowledge diminished his fears more than anything else, and perhaps that was why he’d originally told Audrey as much as he had.

  As for Shelly, she spent most of her time at her job in the mall and the rest of it with new friends, other high school kids, none of whom, as far as Rick could tell, wanted to be exotic dancers or rock stars.

  There’d been no serious trouble between father and daughter since she’d been working, and Rick had quickly rewarded her, and himself, with cable and paid half the fees to have her own phone line installed. So far, she’d asked for nothing else and had even talked about saving for a car. Impressed, Rick had started to secretly scan the used-car ads with the intention of giving her the surprise of her life for her seventeenth birthday at the end of the month.

  Cody, meanwhile, had turned down Rick’s offer of metal sculpting lessons in favor of studying under Hector Zapata’s green thumb. Rick wanted to feel hurt, but gardening was so much safer than what he proposed that, in truth, he was more than a little relieved that Cody was occupied with vegetables, flowers, slugs, and snails, not to mention the coveted twice-weekly rides with Hector on the sit-down mower. Bob the Invisible One was still his best friend, but Rick figured that once school started and Cody made some real flesh-and-blood friends, old Bob would be history.

  Cody also adored Carmen, and she was as good with him as she had been with Rick. Her protective streak still ran deep, which made life much easier for him.

  She and Rick got along fine now that she had ceased mentioning the need for the two of them to talk. As much as he loved her, he couldn’t help being uneasy around her. He felt like she knew something he didn’t, and suspected that it had to do with the fleeting visions of her in the blue nightgown, smelling of cold, still water, that had haunted him since his arrival. He couldn’t shake it, but he couldn’t place it either—not that he wanted to. He only wanted it to go away, and had come to suspect that the vision had something to do with whatever it was she’d wanted to talk to him about since his return. The past, he told himself frequently, was the past.

  That old blast from the past, Aunt Jade, had behaved herself amazingly well since that one awful night. He’d barely seen her, and no more poodles had made unwanted appearances. He’d never gotten her to admit that she’d told Cody about the passages, but he was certain she had: She wouldn’t look him in the eye when she denied it.

  Rick had briefly feared that all was lost with Audrey after Jade’s obscene demonstration and his angry reaction, but that wasn’t the case, and their relationship continued, tentative and slow, but very enjoyable. Delicious, in fact.

  He was falling in love, he knew that, and he didn’t try to fight it. If they were to continue, he supposed he would eventually have to tell her the truth about the greenjacks. He couldn’t lie to her forever. In the back of his mind, he had a partial plan that had something to do with waiting until Halloween and making sure she saw Big Jack—assuming, of course, the creature actually existed. So many of Rick’s memories were elusive or nonsensical that he sometimes wondered if they were all false versions of what had really happened.

  And that possibility was too upsetting to dwell on. He’d decided the only healthy thing to do was to stop thinking about the past and concentrate on today: the challenges of home ownership, career, and family.

  The only real problems he had were with the house and his own indulgences. He intended to begin renovations, but there was no time between his column and his sculpting. When he began the Quixote project, it was supposed to be something he did once or twice a week, a hobby, nothing more. But he’d become obsessed with it to the point that he’d apologized to Carmen for his laziness. Carmen, bless her soul, had responded that he actually was working on the house, because the sculpture would be a decoration for the garden. Thin as it was, he appreciated the excuse and used it whenever he felt guilty.

  As he welded another seam together, he reminded himself that there were some things that needed to be done soon, excuse or no excuse. Although he’d driven two nails into the hidden passage in Cody’s room, he hadn’t sealed any of the others yet because he was still putting fresh bait inside them: It took a long time to do in twenty years’ worth of rodents.

  Even out here, there were still rodents. Frequently he heard their scrabbling around the ancient Rambler in the corner. He’d replenished the bait several times, but they kept coming.

  “Ricky?” Carmen stuck her head in the open doorway. “You want some lunch?”

  He turned off the torch and removed his heavy gloves and welding mask, which took the temperature in the workroom down about a million degrees. “Lunch?” His damp hair clung to his forehead, and he pushed it back with his fingers.

  “I’m making chili dogs.” She smiled. “Cody says they’re your favorite.”

  “He does, huh? You never made hot dogs for me!”

  “They had pork guts and hooves in them back then. I didn’t want to poison you. I got chicken dogs.”

  “Beaks and claws!”

  “Ricky!’ She feigned anger.

  “Sorry. Sure, I’d love one. Do I have time for a shower?”

  “If you hurry!” With that, Carmen turned and walked quickly away.

  A few moments later, Rick ascended the stairs, humming contentedly to himself until he saw that the door to his room was ajar. He knew he’d latched it—he always did.

  Entering, he saw with relief that everything appeared normal and decided that Carmen must have
come in to take his laundry basket and had forgotten to close the door.

  “Quint?”

  No answer. Shit.

  By now he knew to check under the headboard for the cat. Sure enough, he was there, ears and whiskers flat back, unwilling to come out. The feline had uncharacteristically sulked virtually all the days they’d been here, acting frightened and nervous, and exhibiting none of his usual cocksure arrogance. Now he growled in a high-pitched tone that spoke of fear, not aggression.

  “Quint?” he called, feeling on the nightstand for his flashlight. “Quint?” His hands closed on it and he brought it down, flicking it on and shining the beam on the cat.

  The animal was soaking wet.

  “What’d you do, cat?” he asked, chuckling.

  The cat growled.

  “I’ll bet you saw a mouse and ran so fast, you tipped over your water bowl. Is that it, fur-ball?”

  The cat was not amused.

  Poor idiotic cat. Smiling to himself, he left Quint where he was, walked into the dressing room, and stripped, dropping his dirty clothes on the floor. He’d have to remember to put them in the hamper before Carmen saw them.

  He entered the bathroom, surprised to see Quint’s water bowl pristinely full, the floor around it dry. “Where the hell did the water come from, Quint?” he called as he opened the shower door.

  “My God.” He staggered backward, not comprehending what he saw hanging low in the shower. “My God.” His bare buttocks hit the countertop and he stood there, blood pounding in his head, making him dizzy. He stared. “My God.”

  It was a poodle, soaking wet and limp, its white fur matted, its pinkish flesh showing between the clumps of fur. The shower massager’s hose was knotted around its neck.

  “Jade, you crazy bitch,” he whispered as his heart slowed down. “Great, just great.” She’d hung one of her damned stuffed dogs in his shower and probably ruined the hose to boot. At least I have a couple spares under the sink.