by Hunt, S. A.
A lamp was plugged into it. Wayne turned it on.
To get them out of the way, he had already pinned up his posters on the narrow strips of wall between each of the cupola’s windows.
One of them was a movie poster for a Friday the 13th movie, with a full-body shot of the hockey-masked Jason Voorhees coming at you with a machete. Another depicted the cast of the TV show The Walking Dead, with the character Rick standing on top of a schoolbus aiming his giant revolver. Romero’s original black-and-white Night of the Living Dead. The popular zombie game Left4Dead 2.
The mattress was naked and had four cardboard boxes on it. Wayne opened a box and found it full of clothes. The next one had the videogames in it: a Playstation 3, a tangle of wires, and a handful of disc cases. “Here we are.”
Pete carried the box over next to the TV and went to work on untangling the adapter and video cords. Wayne opened another box to find his bedclothes.
He was on his hands and knees trying to pull the fitted sheet over a mattress-corner when something occurred to him. “Hey,” he said over his shoulder. Pete looked up. “Uhm. Do you know if this house is…. Do you know if it’s haunted?”
Pete stared at Wayne as if he hadn’t said anything. His eyes were flat in the arcane honey-glow of the lamp, but he slowly reached up and rubbed his cheek as though he had a toothache. The gesture seemed self-comforting, as if he were petting his face.
It took him a full seven seconds to answer. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in here. But some people say it is.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well.” Pete got to his feet and pulled the TV cart out, examining the connection jacks on the back. “You really want me to tell you?”
Wayne’s curiosity was a bonfire in him, straining for secrets. “Are you serious? Of course I want you to tell me.” He turned over and flopped down on his butt at the edge of the bed, the sheets forgotten. “Let me guess—what is it, there’s an Indian burial ground under the house? ‘They never moved the bodies! They never moved the bodies!’”
“No, there’s—”
“A serial killer used to live here?” The more he talked, the more animated he became. He was clenching his fists in anticipation. “And he buried his victims in the basement?” That made him wonder if they even had a basement, and what it looked like. He made a mental note to go check in the morning.
“No, dude, somebody died in this house.”
“Is that all? Man, tch…people die in houses all the time. Somebody died in the apartment next to ours back in Chicago. If people dying in a place made it haunted, nobody would be able to go into a hospital because of all the ghosts.”
Pete grinned a creepy grin. “Why do you think hospitals creep people out so much?”
Wayne deadpanned at him and went back to making his bed.
“Anyway, this one, people say she was a witch.”
“A witch.” Wayne was incredulous. “You’re shitting me.”
Both boys looked down the stairwell to listen for Mr. Parkin, then Pete continued. “No shittin.” He sat down on one of the thin-cushioned windowsill seats. “The cops and the newspaper said it was an accident at the time, but I hear she was pushed down the stairs by her husband.”
“A witch with a husband?”
Pete shrugged.
Wayne made a face. “I didn’t even know witches could have husbands. Anyway, maybe it was an accident. Maybe he didn’t mean to push her. I can’t believe Dad didn’t tell me about this.”
“I don’t know,” said Pete, going back to untangling the controller cables. “My mom says he used to beat her and her daughter.”
“So what happened to the husband?”
“He died a few months later in prison.”
“What killed him?”
“Nobody knows. I heard it looked like tubber—ta-bulkyer—”
“Tuberculosis?” Wayne asked helpfully.
“—Yeah, that. But they never could find anything. What’s this?” Pete held up the tangle of cords so he could see underneath them. He laid the tangle down on the floor and reached into the box, lifting out a Nike shoebox. Wayne abandoned what he was doing and politely took the shoebox, putting it on the bed.
“It’s, ahh…just some old stuff.”
Inside was a pile of photographs, a bottle of perfume, a gold ring with a simple ball-chain through it, the kind of necklace that usually has dog-tags on it. Wayne took out the ring and reverently lowered the chain around his neck, letting the wedding band rest on his chest.
“Nice ring, Mr. Frodo.”
Wayne looked up. “It was my mom’s.” He picked up the photographs and shuffled through them with delicate hands.
The photos depicted separate events and locations—one seemed to be a very young Wayne celebrating a birthday in a dark kitchen, everything washed out by camera-flash, his face underlit by the feverish glow of a birthday cake; another was an older but still juvenile Wayne with his father and a pretty, small-framed woman. She was in all of the photographs, always smiling, always touching, embracing, or pressing against her son.
Presently Pete came out of the funk and went back to pulling at the knot of cables. “What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“She died a couple years ago. In Chicago. Cancer. Throat cancer, I think. It wasn’t really the cancer that did it. Dad said, like, ‘complications’ or something. I don’t really know what that means. Something got infected.”
Wayne lifted the ring to his eye as if it were a monocle and gazed through it, the gold clicking against his right eyeglasses lens. “A couple of months ago, Dad was like ‘man eff this shit, we need to get out of here, there’s too many memories here, we need a change of scenery,’ so he got a job down here and we packed up and left.”
“Damn, dude. I’m sorry.”
The eye inside the ring twitched toward Pete. Suddenly the soft brown eye seemed a decade older. “When I miss her, I like to look through the ring like it’s a peephole in a door. I pretend that if I look through it I can see into a—uhh….”
“Another time? World? Dimension?”
“Another world, yeah.” Wayne tucked the ring into his shirt-collar and took off his glasses, buffing a smudge with his shirt. Emotion etched a sudden sour knot at the base of his skull. “I feel like I can see into another world where she’s still alive. You know, like Alice in Wonderland, lookin’ through the lookin’-glass.”
Pete seemed as if he were about to say something, but cut himself off before it could get out of him. Wayne thought he knew what he was about to say. He had thought it himself before, hundreds of times.
What if you look through that ring one day and she actually is there? What then, wise guy?
3
ROY WAS OUT GASSING ant-hills when the sun went down. He slipped a Maglite out of the pocket of his jeans and took a knee, watching the gasoline soak into the grainy pile. Hundreds of ants percolated up from the tunnels, scrambling over each other in the pale blue-white glow of the flashlight beam.
They had found a grasshopper somewhere and dragged it back to the nest, and they had been in the process of cutting it into pieces and pulling it down into the dirt when he’d interrupted them. He liked to imagine the jackboot tromping of their tiny feet, the sound of a klaxon going off as the gasoline washed down into the corridors of the nest, little panicked ant-people running to strengthen levees, hauling children to safety, swept away by the stinking flood into dark confines.
Roy enjoyed watching videos on the internet of riots and fights, natural disasters, and sometimes people falling off of bicycles and skateboards. Fights were fun as long as they were street-fights. Ultimate Fighting was too structured—he didn’t watch fights for the gore or brutality, the unpredictability was what drew him, the chaos and incongruity, the panic and frenzy that was almost slapstick in a way. Aimless beating, kicking, the rending of shirts and slipping and falling and flopping around, reducing each other to meaningless ragdolls.
&nb
sp; If he were a decade or two younger, he probably would have enjoyed playing videogames like the Grand Theft Auto series.
As it was, behind the wheel he often fantasized about driving off the highway and tearing through back yards and flea markets, plowing through birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. Not so much for the violence of it, but for the strange sight of a car tear-assing through a place you didn’t expect to see it. You just don’t see things like that, and that’s what he enjoyed: things ‘you just don’t see’.
When he was a kid, he’d gotten his hands on a smoke bomb and set it off in the gym showers after sophomore phys-ed, when he knew it would be full of unsuspecting people. Waiting until the smoke had almost filled the room and was beginning to curl over the tops of the shower curtains, Roy had shouted, “Fire! Fire!” and ran outside.
His father had whooped his ass for it, but seeing thirty butt-naked high-schoolers storming through the gymnasium had been the highlight of his freshman year.
He tipped another pint of gasoline into the ants for good measure and got back on the lawnmower, starting it up and climbing the sprawling hill toward the adobe hacienda. A garage stood open out back where the driveway snaked up out of the darkness and curled around the house like a cat’s tail. Roy drove the lawnmower inside, filling the space with a deafening racket.
When he cut the engine off, the silence was even louder. He sat in the dark stillness beside the girls’ Winnebago, packing a box of cigarettes.
Outside, the evening was tempered by the faint murmur of Blackfield’s fading nightlife, an airy, whispering roar washing over the trees. In close pursuit was the constant drone of cicadas and tree frogs.
Southern cities don’t necessarily have nightlife. You go up north or out to Atlanta, maybe, or Birmingham—Roy had been to Atlanta twice and didn’t care to ever go back, that traffic was horseshit—and yeah, the cities don’t sleep. Life runs around the clock. Out here in the sticks, though, a city of six thousand, seven thousand like Blackfield, there’s a few creepers after dark (meth heads, winos, that sort of thing, sometimes hookers) but for the most part the main boulevard is a clear shot from one end of town to the other after dark.
He lit up, wandered back up the driveway and around the house sucking smoke out of the Camel as he went. Standing at the top of the drive, he was treated to a horizon swimming with the red cityglow of Blackfield, and under the jagged rim of the treetops glimmered the windows of the blue Victorian on the other side of the trailer park, a tiny hive of glowing elevens in the night.
As he blew the smoke into the night, multicolored lights flickered in the cupola. Someone was watching TV up there. “Looks like somebody’s moved into the old Martine place.”
An old woman stood by a barbecue grill crackling with flames. The ice in her glass tinkled as she took a sip of a Long Island Iced Tea. Cutty always started dinner with one to whet her appetite. “Know anything about them?”
“Black fella from up north, I expect.”
Roy ashed his Camel and spat a fleck of tobacco. The wind rolling across the top of the hill pushed at his copper hair. He’d once let her make him a Long Island, but it was so strong he could barely finish it. No idea how she could manage it, with her scarecrow figure. “He brought the car down couple weeks ago and the real estate agent showed him around the place.”
“Have you spoken to him?” Cutty threw another handful of Watchtower tracts on the fire. The smoke stank, and the ink turned the flames green.
“No.”
She wore enormous shirts and patterned sweaters and dressed in loose layers, so that she always seemed to be wearing wizard-robes, even in the heat of summer. Roy was rail-thin and the jeans he wore draped from his bones, but even so he still sweat right through his shirts when he worked.
“Have you got anything for supper?” she asked the flames.
“No, ma’am.”
Cutty closed the grill lid and started off toward the back of the house. “Why don’t you stay and eat with us, then? Theresa is making porkchops.”
“I might just do that,” said Roy. “Thank you.”
As soon as the door came open he was bombarded by the aroma of pork rub and steak fries, corn, green beans, baked apples. Theresa LaQuices bustled around the spacious kitchen, buttering rolls and stirring this or that.
Theresa was a solid and ruggedly pretty iceberg of a woman, a few years younger than Cutty. Her raven-black hair was dusted with gray. Spanish or maybe Italian or something, because of her exotic surname and olive skin, but Roy never could quite pin down her accent and it never really struck him as appropriate to ask. She was given to dressing like a woman twenty years her junior, and today she had on a winsome blue sundress roped about with white tie-dye splotches.
He couldn’t deny that she wore it well. Against the well-appointed kitchen, she looked like she belonged on the cover of a culinary magazine. Reminded him of that Barefoot Contessa chick, only a lot older and a lot heavier.
“Well hello there, mister!” Theresa beamed. “Are you gonna be joinin us for dinner?”
Roy realized that Cutty had disappeared. She had an odd habit of doing that. “Yes, ma’am. And it smells damn good. I wasn’t even hungry before I came in here, but now I could eat a bowl of lard with a hair in it.”
Theresa made a face and gave a musical laugh. “I didn’t prepare any lard, handsome, but you’re welcome to a pork chop or two.”
“I’ll be glad to take you up on that.”
Roy passed through a large dining room, past a long oak table carved with a huge compass-rose, and into a high-ceilinged living room with delicate wicker furniture. On a squat wooden pedestal was a flatscreen television that would not have been out of place on the bridge of a Star Trek spaceship.
Behind the TV were great gaping plate-glass windows that looked out on the front garden inside the adobe privacy wall, a quaint, almost miniaturized bit of landscaping with several Japanese maples and a little pond populated by tiny knife-blade minnows.
The downstairs bathroom was one of many doors in a long hallway that bisected the drafty old house. The slender corridor, like the rest of the house, was painted a rich candy-apple red, and as the light of the lamps at either end trickled along the wall Roy felt as if he were walking up an artery into the chambers of a massive heart.
He washed his hands in a bathroom as large as his own living room. It was appointed with an ivory-white clawfoot tub, eggshell counters, white marble floor, gilded portrait mirror over a sink that looked like a smoked-glass punchbowl.
The vanity lights over the oval mirror were harsh, glaring. Roy was surprised a house occupied by three elderly women would have a bathroom mirror that threw your face into such stark moon-surface relief. Every pit, pock, blemish and crease stood out on his skin and all of a sudden he looked ten, twenty years older. And he had a lot of them for being in his forties.
His lower lids sagged as if he hadn’t slept—which he hadn’t, really, he didn’t sleep well—and his red hair was fine, dry, cottony, piled on his head in a Lyle Lovett coiff. The lights made his normally attractive face look sallow, made him look melty and thin, like a wax statue under hot lamps.
Junk food, that was probably it. Slow-motion malnutrition. He ate a lot of crap because he didn’t cook.
He could cook, no doubt—he could cook his ass off, learned from his mother Sally—but he never really made the effort. Not because he was lazy, but because he could never find anything in the cabinets that enticed him enough to cook it, and he never had anybody to eat with. So he really appreciated the chance for a proper home-cooked meal that left him out of the equation and gave him company to eat it with.
Back in the hallway, Roy passed an open door through which he could see a headless woman in a crisp new wedding dress.
“Hi there,” said a woman’s voice.
“Hello, Miss Weaver.”
An elderly flower-child came flowing around the mannequin to him, decked out in a busy, psychedelic dashiki. �
��How many times do I have to tell you?” she said, wagging a knurled finger. “Call me Karen. Are you staying for dinner tonight?”
Locks of silver-blonde hair tumbled down from underneath a green knit cap and a long curl of yellow tailors’ measuring tape yoked over the back of her neck, draping over her bosom. Karen Weaver had the open, honest face of a grandmother, and eyes as blue as a Montana sky. A silver pendant on her chest twinkled in the light, some obscure religious symbol he didn’t recognize. It could have been a pentagram, except there were too many parts, too many lines.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She playfully slapped him on the shoulder. Wisps of Nag Champa incense drifted through the open doorway behind her, accompanied by the sinuous, jangling strains of the Eagles. “Don’t ma’am me, young man.”
“Yes, ma’am,” grinned Roy. He flinched away before she could slap him again.
Dinner was excellent. The four of them ate at the compass-rose dining table under the soft crystal glare of a chandelier, Cutty hunched over her plate like a buzzard on roadkill, Theresa with a napkin pressed demurely across her lap. Weaver ate with the slurping-gulping gusto of a castaway fresh off the island.
In the background, the vinyl turntable in the living room was playing one of those old records the girls liked so much—Glenn Miller, Cab Calloway, one of those guys, he wasn’t sure which. Roy was a golden-oldie man himself, dirty southern rock. Skynyrd fan through and through.
“Cuts like birthday cake,” said Weaver, flashing Theresa an earnest smile. “I’ve been cooking for ages, and somehow I still don’t hold a candle to you.”
“You get a lot of practice, cookin for a long line of husbands.”