Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  “Yes.”

  “And instead of lookin for Slender-Man, you lookin for the witches that, uhh—”

  “Yes.”

  Another man came out of the kitchen. His hair was going gray and his drawn Latino face was a hash of wrinkles, but Robin recognized Miguel from the photograph behind the register. “Hey,” he called. “We got to get ready for lunch.”

  “Untwist them panties, hero,” said Joel, grabbing at the air in a zip-it motion. “I’m just doin some catchin up.” He slid out of the booth and stood up, stretching. Up close in the window’s light, she could see that he was exquisitely chiseled.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Her mama used to babysit me and Fish when we was kids.” Joel coughed into his fist and took a bottle of hand sanitizer out of his apron pocket, squirting it into his palms and wringing his hands. “Robin Martine.”

  Miguel’s brain seemed to hang like a busy computer program and then he subtly crumpled. “Oh.”

  An awkward silence lingered between them, and then one corner of his bushy mustache ticked up in a wistful half-smile. “I remember hearing about, uhh…” His belly bobbed with one hesitant breath. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  Robin tried her best to be gracious, but didn’t know what to say, so she echoed his expression and dipped her head appreciatively.

  “I didn’t really know her, but I heard she was a good person.”

  “She was.” Robin’s hand had found its way around the can of coffee while she wasn’t paying attention, and now she drummed soft fingers against the aluminum. The two men watched her with expectant eyes, the quiet pause only scored by the sound of furious washing and banging in the kitchen.

  Robin looked down at the Monster can. “Five years ago. I decided this year I would finally come back to Slade and visit her. This year I’ve decided I feel like I can finally…finally push through the dark and say the things I need to say to her. I guess.”

  “Well,” said Miguel. “Welcome back, Kotter. Mi casa es su casa.”

  Joel followed him back into the kitchen. “What he said.”

  “Thank you,” she called after them, and put the prescription bottle back in her jeans pocket.

  2

  THE HOUSE WAS A two-story Queen Anne Victorian, an antique dollhouse painted the muted blue of a raincloud. A wraparound porch encircled the front, and the whole thing was trimmed in white Eastlake gingerbread. It was streaked with black like mascara tears, as if the house had been weeping soot from its seams. Empty sashed windows peered down at them like eyes, darkness pressing against their panes from inside.

  “What did I tell you?” asked Leon. “Cool, right?”

  The boy unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned up, pushing his glasses up with a knuckle. He gazed up through the U-Haul’s windshield at their new base of operations. “It looks like the house from the Amityville Horror or something.”

  1168 Underwood Rd cut an impressively Gothic silhouette against the stark white afternoon sky. The neighborhood stretched out to their right, a mile and a half of red-brick Brady Bunch ranch-houses, double-wide trailers with toys peppered across their lawns, white shepherd-cottages, a few A-frame cabins lurking deep in the trees.

  Across the road from 1168 was a small trailer park, eight or nine mobile homes marching rigid lockstep toward a distant treeline. Since his window was rolled halfway down, Wayne could hear the faraway mewling-seagull-cry of children playing.

  His eyes broke away from the watchful windows, coins of white reflecting off his lenses. A grin crept across his dark face. “It’s awesome.”

  Leon beamed.

  They got out of the box truck and clomped up the front steps. The porch was wider than he expected, four lunging steps across—wide enough to ride his bicycle up and down the length of the porch if he wanted to. Wicker chairs lined the wall underneath the front windows, and a swing was chained to the ceiling where the porch angled around the corner.

  Click. The portentous sound of his father unlocking the front door made him twitch. “It even locks with an old-timey key,” said Leon, showing Wayne the long, thin skeleton key. He pushed the door open with his fingertips.

  Disappointingly, it didn’t creak open in that spooky, melodramatic way, but the doorknob did bump against the opposite wall. Leon winced and stepped inside, checking behind the door for damage.

  Wayne went in behind him and stood there, turning in a slow circle, taking it all in. The thick, astringent smell of fresh paint cloyed the air. The front hallway was interminably tall—the ceiling looked like it was fifteen feet high—but it seemed cramped, with only enough room for maybe three men to walk abreast. He felt like he could lie on the floor and touch the walls with his feet and hands.

  To his right, a doorless archway led into a small den. To his left, a stairway climbed to the second floor and a dark bathroom yawned at the foot of the stairs, dim daylight glinting from the teeth of its chrome fixtures. Dead ahead, the foyer hallway went on past two closet doors and opened into the kitchen, the floor turning into turtle-shell linoleum.

  An intricate red carpet runner had been laid down by the real estate agent, new and clean. Regardless, every shuffling footfall, every little noise they made and word they spoke reverberated in short, hollow echoes throughout the house.

  “Hello?” called Leon. With the lights off, his Jamaican complexion was dark enough that he melted into the shadows—a business suit and a grin. He was wearing a blue two-piece suit and a cranberry tie.

  For a terrifying second, Wayne almost expected to hear an answer from upstairs.

  He loved it. “Do you think it’s haunted?”

  Leon tucked his hands in his pockets. “Who knows?”

  The den was a cozy space, unfurnished as of yet with anything other than empty bookshelves and a cushioned reading nook in the front window. The walls were unpapered, painted the same rainy blue as the outside. A modest fireplace occupied one wall.

  “I think I need to see if one of our neighbors might be able to give us a hand with the sofa.”

  “I can help you.”

  “I don’t know, it’s big. I don’t want to see you get hurt. We barely got it out of the apartment.”

  They passed into the kitchen, where the walls had been wallpapered, and had been done so in yellow sunflowers that probably should have looked cheery, but were more forlorn and drab than anything else. The fridge was a new side-by-side slab of black humming efficiently in the corner, and the countertops were malachite-green marble over dark cherrywood cabinets.

  Wayne decided that the kitchen would not be his favorite room. Leon went around to all the windows, parting the curtains and letting sunlight in. Dust satellited in the soft white beams.

  The pantry was surprisingly large, a narrow ten-foot space lined with three tiers of shelving. He started to climb them to see what was on the top shelf, but his father shut him down with a hand on his shoulder. “Nope. Come on, let’s go look at the bedrooms.”

  The stairs were steep and creaked as if they were made of popsicle sticks, groaning and cracking and thumping.

  1168’s second story seemed somehow more spacious than the first. As soon as they stepped up onto the upper landing, a narrow T-shaped hallway led some twenty or thirty feet toward a window at the bottom of the T, flanked by a pair of doors. The right one opened onto the master bedroom, unfurnished, with a walk-in closet that stank of mothballs. The left went into a bathroom, with a claw-foot bathtub and a porcelain sink.

  The bathroom’s wainscoting was done in rose-pink and teal tiles, but halfway up the walls and ceiling became painted sheetrock. Leon touched the wall. “I just realized—that sheetrock’s gonna be a bitch to keep mildew out of. I am diggin this pink, though.”

  Wayne screwed up his face. A ring of metal was bracketed to the ceiling, and a diaphanous plastic curtain hung into the tub. “What kind of bathtub has feet?”

  Back in the hallway, he stood dejectedly with his hands in his pockets.
“Where’s my bedroom?”

  “Ah.” Leon searched the hallway, even looking out the window and peering into the master suite again. “I thought I forgot something. I guess you’ll have to sleep in the garage, chief.”

  Wayne’s heart sank. “You’re full of crap.”

  His father rubbed his goatee, then thrust a finger into the air and hustled away as if he’d suddenly remembered something. “There’s one last place we haven’t checked. There’s a closet out here on the landing you can sleep in, if you can fit.”

  “A closet?”

  “Yeah, like Harry Potter.”

  “Harry Potter lived under the stairs.” Wayne followed him in a daze back out to the end of the landing, then traced the banister down to a window that cast out onto the back of the house. From here, he could see a rickety tool shed and a huge back yard.

  Next to the window was a door, which Leon opened to reveal a set of stairs leading up into soft sunlight and around a spiral, climbing out of sight.

  Leon shrugged. “After you.”

  Wayne set off up them, hitching his knees high, almost clambering up them on all fours. The stairs spiraled once and a half, opening onto a small room inside a dome of windows that made him think of the belfry in a church steeple. The room wasn’t a perfect circle but an octagon like a stop sign, with eight walls.

  The ceiling was just high enough that his father didn’t have to stoop, but he stood there with his fingertips pressed against it as if he were trying to hold it up.

  “It’s called a cupola,” said Leon. “What you think?”

  The ‘cupola’ seemed small, but as Wayne went from window to window assessing the view, the room proved to be larger than he initially gave it credit for. Plenty of room for his bed and at least two dressers besides, and each of the four windows stood atop a small nook bench that folded open to reveal storage space.

  Across the street, a long gravel drive snaked between a trailer park and a series of cottages, climbing a hill to a building that looked like pictures he’d seen of the Alamo. Mud-pink walls topped with Gothic wrought-iron teeth, a triangular facade front, brown clay roofing tiles. A man drove a riding lawnmower up and down the hill out front, cropping dull green grass.

  “I like it,” said Wayne. To the south, he could see the tops of buildings in distant Blackfield, rising over the trees behind the house.

  “Then welcome to your new Batcave, Master Wayne.”

  “The Batcave is underground.”

  Leon continued his Atlas impression, hands against the ceiling. “Work with me, here. I’m old and out of touch.”

  “Batman’s older than you are.”

  “Keep it up and I’ll make you sleep in the garage anyway!”

  ❂

  As the afternoon wore on, Wayne and his father managed to get most of the boxes and furniture into the house, with the exclusion of the sofa and dining-room table. The most troublesome items by far were Wayne’s mattress and box-spring, which Leon could handle well enough by himself (with Wayne pushing helpfully from behind) until they got into the spiral stairway to the cupola. That became an arduous trial of swearing, sweating, and banging around in the stuffy space that left them flustered and irritated with each other.

  To get the dining room table in, they carried the table up onto the front porch, then turned it on end like a giant coin and rolled it through the house. Leon ushered Wayne in ahead of the table, confusing him at first, but when his father started humming the Indiana Jones theme and pretending the table was the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark, he couldn’t help but run away from it in slow-motion.

  Their steel-blue Subaru already sat in the gravel driveway, in front of the U-Haul; Leon had brought it down before the move. They took a break to run to town in the car for hamburgers at Wendy’s, and they came back to failing light as the evening came over the trees to the east.

  “Damn, I hate to bug anybody this late. These rednecks givin me weird looks,” said Leon, unlocking and opening the U-Haul. “But I’d really like to get this truck back as soon as possible. I guess we’ll finish tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Hey,” said a husky voice behind them.

  A chubby white kid with brush-cut hair was making his way up the driveway, his hands buried in his hoodie’s pockets. He seemed to be about Wayne’s age, if several inches taller. Wayne thought he looked like Pugsley Addams gone mainstream, or maybe the older brother from Home Alone.

  “Hey,” said Leon.

  Pugsley’s voice was the high-pitched rasp of a boy accustomed to shouting. “You guys movin in?”

  “Yep.”

  “Cool.”

  A weird silence settled over them. “Nice to meet you,” Leon offered, smiling. “Anything we can help you with?”

  Pugsley seemed to snap out of a trance. “Oh! I, uhh, I wanted to say hi, and…maybe see if you needed any help. But it looks like you’re pretty much finished.” He stepped forward and held out a stubby pink hand. “I’m Pete.” Pointing across the street at the trailer park, he added, “Pete Maynard. I live over there. With my mom. I go to school over in Blackfield. Fifth grade.”

  Leon visibly relaxed, shaking the offered hand. “Nice to meet you, Pete. Leon Parkin. This here’s my son Wayne.”

  Pugsley-Pete shook Wayne’s hand and said to his father, “Welcome to Slade. Anybody ever told you you look like War Machine from Iron Man? What’s his name—”

  “Don Cheadle?” Leon had memorized his answer.

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “Only once a week.” Leon stuck his hands in his pockets. “Well. I reckon since we got you here, you can help if you want.”

  “Sure.”

  With much grunting and swearing, the three of them got the sofa down out of the U-Haul, up the front stairs, and into the den. To get it out of the foyer and through the den door, they had to turn it sideways and angle the armrests around the doorframe. Wayne mashed a finger and Leon got pinned against the wall, but they finally managed it.

  Once they’d gotten it into the room, screwed the feet back onto the bottom of it, and pushed it against the back wall, the boys sat on it to rest. “So what are you guys doin out here?” asked Pete, watching Wayne buff his glasses with his shirt. “I don’t think I know anybody that dresses up to go to work.”

  Leon had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. “I took a teaching position at Blackfield High School.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Gonna teach Literature.”

  “That’s cool. Maybe I’ll be in your class one day. I like to read.”

  “Maybe. That’s good. More kids your age should read. Hey, you had dinner?” Leon took the tie off. “I got us ice cream for when we got done with everything.”

  “No,” said Pete, “but I don’t eat dinner most days.”

  Wayne’s head tilted. “Why not?”

  “Just…not really hungry. My mom says I eat like a bird.”

  He couldn’t imagine that. “Birds eat their own body weight in food every day. That’s what I heard, anyway.” Pete’s hoodie was straining at the sides under his love handles, and he had two chins. The slope-shouldered boy was taller than the short, gangly Wayne by several inches and outweighed him by a dozen pounds.

  The ice began to settle again.

  Wayne broke it. “You like Call of Duty?”

  Pete rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know. I guess it depends on which one you’re talkin about. I only have the first one for the Xbox. I haven’t, uhh—haven’t really played any of the new ones.”

  “Sounds like you guys have your evening figured out,” said Leon, standing up. “Pete, does your mom know you’re over here?”

  “Oh yeah. Yeah—she’s cool.”

  Leon rolled up his tie like a giant tongue, giving Pete the teacher stink-eye. “That sounds suspiciously like a no.”

  “She knows I came over here. She doesn’t really care when I come back, as long as she knows where I went and I stay out of trouble.” Pete sou
nded non-committal, lax. Wayne got the feeling he was accustomed to being autonomous. “And I’m not like my dad. I stay out of trouble.” He jerked up straight all of a sudden and put up his hands as if to ward off a blow. “Oh, I can head out of here if you guys—”

  “Oh no, no-no, you’re fine, man.” Leon picked up his suit-jacket and beat the dust out of it, laying it over his arm like a sommelier with a towel. “You look like a good kid to me. And Wayne needs friends. He’s the F-in’ New Guy, remember?”

  Pete smirked, but Wayne gave his father the side-eye.

  “So yeah, hell. Hang out, by all means, this creepy-ass house is gonna need some cheerin up anyway. Me and him, we can’t fill it up all by ourselves. We’re from Chicago, we’re not used to this kind of quiet, you know?”

  “Okay,” said Pete, in obvious gratitude.

  Leon pointed at Wayne. “Why don’t you head upstairs and start on putting your clothes up and make your bed? When you get done with that, feel free to play Playstation to your heart’s content.”

  Wayne feigned belligerence. “Do I gotta?”

  “How are you gonna sleep in a bed if you ain’t made it? At least make the bed. We’ll worry about unpacking when that’s out of the way.”

  The two boys got up and left, creaking and crackling up the stairs to the second landing. They sounded like two colonial Redcoats marching across bubble wrap. “I can hook up the TV and Playstation while you make your bed and stuff, if you want,” offered Pete.

  “You got a deal.”

  Wayne led his new friend down the landing. When he opened the closet door to reveal the steep second set of stairs, Pete seemed impressed, if confused. “Wait, your dad’s got you in the tower?”

  “Yeah. It’s the only other bedroom in the house. If you can call it a bedroom.” They started up the almost ladder-like stairs. “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothin, man, nothin. I think it’s freakin awesome. I’m surprised, is all.”

  With the dressers and the bed in it, the cupola was a lot less spacious. Wayne and Pete had just enough room to sit on the floor between the bed and the television, a modest flatscreen set up on one of the windowsills. There weren’t any power outlets in the cupola, so his father had bought a dropcord on their dinner trip and run it up from an outlet on the landing. The cord draped down the stairs for now, but they’d use nails to pin it out of the way later.