Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  A gardener-man, then, Delilah thought, duck-walking over to the bale of pine needles and settling down beside it. I wonder if he plants tulips? She loved tulips, loved the light sweet smell of them.

  “I’m going to find you,” said Ginny from somewhere in front of the truck. It had been parked facing the apartment building, with the rear pointing at the dark street. Delilah could hear her new shoes clopping along the pavement as she skipped from car to car. “Ah-ha! . . . no, I guess not.”

  Delilah froze in place and slowed her breathing; inhaled . . . exhaled . . . inhaled . . . exhaled through her mouth. Her belly rose and fell under her My Little Pony t-shirt and she pinched the seams of her jeans, anticipating her discovery in the hot dark camper, studying the rough denim with her fingertips as she listened.

  “Are you in here?” Ginny asked. She heard a car door open with a metallic crackle.

  A couple of heartbeats passed. “Nope.” The door slammed shut, ker-tunk!

  Silence.

  Delilah sat there in the gas-smelling dark, straining at the limit of her hearing, pine needles poking her through her jeans. She could hear the other girl doing something superficial, manipulating something with her hands.

  “Over over over!” barked the radio.

  She gasped and turned it off. Hopefully, Ginny didn’t hear that. She slid an inch to her left as quietly as she could manage and pressed her shoulder and hip against the bristly straw bale.

  Ginny sounded closer. She gave a surfer-like “Woah,” and walked right up to the snake truck. “Check that out.”

  Delilah listened to her creep around the vehicle, taking in the entirety of the artwork. The girl trailed a hand down the side of the panel, starting at the gas cap and sliding down to the tail-light with susurrant hiss that sounded more snakelike than Delilah wanted to admit. She shifted to get away from a needle that was poking her in the butt and rested her feet against the burlap sack. Whatever was inside was solid but had a strange sort of give. Whatever it was, it wasn’t fertilizer.

  “Woah,” Ginny said again, this time from the passenger side of the truck. She giggled. “Look at those boobies. She looks like Thor. Haha.”

  Delilah could hear her breathing even over her own. Ginny was a tall, Nordic little blonde girl that never had any trouble clearing her plate at dinner and stayed stocky and moon-faced even though she was an active kid and played kickball. Delilah could see Ginny in her mind’s eye, swiping a wispy lock of hair out of her big pink grinning face.

  A voice called from the apartment building. Ginny’s mother. “Regina! Time to come in!”

  Ginny sighed. “Okay, mama,” she called back. She walked away. Delilah thought about popping out to surprise her, but realized that she could re-use this spot for next time. Why ruin it now? “Okay, Lilah! You can come out now!” shouted Ginny. “I have to go back in!”

  Delilah stayed quiet, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then it hit her: she really was a ninja! She had gone undetected. She was a stealth master. She was Jackie Chan, Zhang Ziyi, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, all rolled into one. She got up off the floor of the bed and crouched there in the womblike red shadow, striking a kung-fu pose. “Kyah,” she whispered spirit-shouts to herself. “Wishaw. Eeyah!”

  She threw a punch, and then another with the other hand, then tried to kick but the low ceiling didn’t give her enough room to maintain her center of balance, so she fell back on her butt. She caught herself with her hands, raking the inside of her forearm down the rock-chipped edge of the weed-trimmer head. “Ouch!”

  Her hand was on some angular object inside the burlap bag. It was flat on one side.

  She raised her arm into the light and examined it; the trimmer hadn’t broken the skin but there was a four-inch red welt that throbbed and smarted. She hugged it to her belly and groaned. Tugging back the rim of the burlap sack, Delilah saw a New Balance tennis shoe.

  The great cogs of time ground to a halt. Even the forest full of cicadas silenced themselves, though not all at once—they dwindled to three or four and then one buzzing razz that tapered off into nothing. All thought of kung-fu and ninjas and Michelle Yeoh fled her mind. She was a seven-year-old girl again, bewildered and vulnerable and alone.

  Fear didn’t quite enter into it, at least not yet. Right then she had rationed off some part of logic that told her the bag was full of old hand-me-down shoes; maybe a load of clothes destined for the Goodwill store. Perhaps the owner of the truck was a good-hearted man that collected old giveaways for the church and took them to the consignment store.

  She pressed her fingertips against the burlap sack again and felt another shoe inside. Good. It was a bag of shoes. A big bag of shoes for the church. She relaxed and peeled the bag open a little bit more.

  Wrapped in a striped sock, a skinny ankle protruded from the mouth of the shoe. It was slender and hairless, pale. A tiny pink scar at the top of the calf.

  Delilah’s mouth moved, but nothing came out. If something had come from her mouth, it would have been “Mama. Mama. Mama.” over and over again, but for some reason her voice-box didn’t want to work, the wind wouldn’t catch the guitar strings, her throat wouldn’t respond. She just kept mouthing the word over and over again.

  Her legs didn’t want to work either. She wanted to get out of the truck, to crawl over to the sash and push it open, throw herself out of the camper shell, and run home. But she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the sight of seeing a little boy’s legs poking out of a fertilizer bag in the back of a stranger’s truck, and it was the confusion that kept her frozen. Instead of directing her feet to propel her outside, her brain could only spin in place, trying to reconcile one with the other, tires in deep mud.

  She touched the leg. It was cold. Dead cold.

  This was incorrect. It didn’t make sense. People didn’t die like this. People died in hospitals at a ripe old age and other people cried over them at Lane Funeral Home in town, people in cheap gray suits and Stan Lee bifocals. They were buried in cemeteries with wreaths of flowers and pretty headstones with carvings of angels and animals, their names and the day they died. You don’t walk on graves. That’s rude, Miss Delilah Lee. Go round them.

  She knew it was stupid, knew it was an idiot thing to say, but she pressed her hands into the burlap again. “Are you okay in there?” The words came out wrong; strangled, wet. She touched her own face and realized she was crying. “Boy? Are you oh—are you okay?”

  She took the edge of the sack opening in both hands and pulled it up, up, up, past the boy’s knees. He was wearing a pair of black gym shorts. She would have kept going but the trailing edge of the opening was caught on the toe of his shoe.

  With a reverential respect, Delilah pulled the bag back down, covering the boy’s legs. She started sobbing outright. The inside of the camper swam in red chaos, a hot-box full of blood, and she went for the back sash. Halfway there, she snagged her foot in the weed-trimmer’s forward handle and went to her hands and knees on the pine straw.

  The needles pricked at her palms and legs. “Oooun,” she sobbed, and dragged her feet through the straw. She reached up for the sash handle and found nothing but a round hole where the handle once was.

  For the second time in as many minutes, the world ceased to color inside the lines. Delilah’s damp hand swept back and forth across the middle of the sash, looking for the handle, but it wasn’t there. It had been removed, and the only thing marking its prior presence was a round hole in the sash frame.

  Inside, she could see the mechanism that operated the latch but there was no handle to turn it. She stuck her finger in and searched the hole, but she couldn’t figure out how to move the parts.

  In the cab of the snake truck, someone sat up in the passenger seat.

  The shadow of a grown man tilted into view through the rear cab window as Delilah watched. She became moveless and silent, unwilling to give herself away, a fawn in the grass. The man fetched a heavy sigh and unlatched the rear window, sl
iding it open. The pane slid maddeningly slow, catching twice on the way. He shook it and pulled it until it wedged to a stop on the far side.

  He twisted in the seat and peered inside, a silhouette crowned with a shock of fiery copper hair. She couldn’t quite see his face, but his head was big. He had the affect of a pit viper, with a wide-set jaw and narrow throat.

  “Hey there,” said the man. His voice was dry and high, like sandpaper, like the scraping of sandstone vaults.

  Delilah said nothing.

  “I know you’re back there, your friend woke me up looking for you.”

  Delilah’s burning eyes refused to blink. She was afraid to take her eyes off of the wide-headed shadow in the front seat. Snot crept down her upper lip.

  “What’s your name?”

  Nothing.

  “Not talkin, huh? I can dig it. Stranger danger,” he said, emphasizing the phrase with a brief jazz-hand. “Smart. Y’know, when I was your age, I was the king of hide-and-seek. Nobody could find me. I knew where all the best hiding places were. That’s why my friends used to call me Snake when I was a kid—cause I could wriggle into the littlest places.”

  “Liah,” said the girl. She hunkered against the tailgate, shivering beyond hope of control.

  “Hmm?”

  “My name is Delilah.”

  “Delilah,” said the man. “That’s a pretty name. But yeah, hey. Maybe I can teach you a few things about hiding, huh? You don’t want to jump in the back of a crazy-lookin truck like this one. Y’know? This is a bad place.”

  He put a zip-tie between his lips and let it dangle there, as if it were a wheat-straw in a cowboy’s mouth. Delilah thought it looked like a snake’s tongue. “I can show you where to hide where no one will ever, ever find you.”

  Deet-deet. The stillness was broken by an electronic alarm.

  The snake-man took a phone out of his pocket and studied it, the screen illuminating his face. His nose was pointed, his nostrils wide, his eyes thin and somehow both clever and stupid at once. As he read the message, his cruel slash of a mouth formed silent words.

  “Goddammit. Looks like I’ve got somewhere to be. No rest for the wicked, huh?” His eyes flashed up to Delilah and he got out of the truck.

  The back window opened with a thump and a creak, and the Serpent scowled in at the little girl. “Out of the truck, princess,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “The game’s been called on account of rain.”

  It wasn’t raining, but Delilah didn’t care. She just wanted out of that truck. She clambered over the tailgate and stumbled onto the pavement.

  Leaning over her, the snake-man pointed at her nose with one long, gnarly finger. “Run on home, honey. And if you tell anybody I was here, well…I know where you live. And I promise you, you don’t want to play the game we’ll play if I have to come back.”

  Delilah stared at his rugged, weaselly face.

  “Do you understand me?”

  Words bubbled up her throat, but refused to come out, as if they were too big for her mouth, all crowding at the top of her lungs like a rush of people trying to get away from a fire.

  He reached out and caressed her cheek, fingertips like rough wood brushing her temple. Then they clamped down on the outer rim of her ear and he shook her with it. Pain streaked down that side of her neck.

  “Do-you-understand-me?”

  “Oww,” Delilah replied, her face twisting up. Tears sprung to her eyes. She nodded, nodded again. “Eeyeahhh!”

  The snake-truck man let go. “Good. Now run along.”

  He didn’t have to tell her twice, but at first she had trouble making her legs work, as if they were put on backward and she had to relearn how to walk—and then everything clicked and she turned and bolted over the sidewalk for the safety of her own lawn.

  Wet grass crunched under her feet and she slipped and fell with that funny rrrrrt! wet-rubber croak, landing on her belly with one arm folded underneath.

  The shock and indignity was what broke her composure, and she cried in earnest, big quivering tears running down her cheeks. Green skidmarks stained the front of her clothes and the palms of her hands.

  Getting back into his truck, the Serpent regarded her with those tiny, venomous eyes.

  “Stay outta strangers’ cars, kid. You’ll live longer.”

  FRIDAY

  6

  SINCE THERE WERE NO curtains or shades in the cupola, the sun pre-empted Wayne’s alarm clock. Exhaling faint white vapors, he sat up to discover one of the most beautiful sunrises he’d ever seen in his life. A majesty of royal-purple and orange-gold rippled throughout the eastern sky, an explosion of color and light.

  The bedroom was cold, surprisingly so. Wind pressed against the north side of the cupola, making the windowpanes crackle subtly in their frames. Wayne pushed back the covers and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, stretching like a cat. He was trembling by the time he got his clothes dug out of one of the boxes.

  “It’s freezing up there,” he told his dad as he came down, his shoelaces dragging on the floor. He flinched at the cold chain of his necklace as he kissed his mom’s wedding band and slipped it into his shirt.

  Leon was brushing his teeth, hugging himself in front of the bathroom mirror. He wore only a pair of sweat-pants. “You’re a Chicago kid, and you wanna complain about the cold?” he asked, and spat a mouthful of foam into the sink. “Be glad it ain’t snowing. Hell, this is mild compared to what I grew up with.”

  “I know, I know.” Wayne tromped downstairs. “Barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways, blah blah.”

  “Tie your shoes before you fall and bust your face,” said Leon’s voice from the top of the staircase. “You don’t wanna start your first day in a new school with a broke nose, do you?”

  “I thought chicks dig scars.”

  Breakfast was a bowl of cereal and buttered toast. Wayne was still licking his lips and burping up Lucky Charms as he went out to stand by the mailbox and wait for the school bus.

  According to Pete Maynard, the bus ran at seven, but it was six-fifty and he didn’t see Pete in the small gaggle of children standing on the other side of the road. Two girls, two boys, all of them but one younger than Wayne. The oldest was a tall teenager in a parachute windbreaker, her straight mousy hair lying curtain-limp down her cheeks.

  As he approached them, they stopped chattering at each other and fell quiet.

  “Hi,” he said to them, kneeling to tie his shoes.

  At first they didn’t respond, but then the tall girl said “Hi,” and rapped a knuckle on one of the boys’ chest. “Say hi. It’s nice to do that.”

  “Hi,” said the boy.

  The others glanced at him and chimed in with their own morose greetings.

  Wayne tried to think of something else to say.

  “You’re the one that moved into the haunted house,” said one of the boys.

  Wayne twisted around to look at the Victorian, and back to them. His puffy jacket hissed and huffed with every movement in the still morning air. “I did come out of it, yeah.”

  The tall girl backhanded the boy in the chest.

  “Ow. Why you do dat?”

  “That’s rude, Evan,” she said. She shrugged in a sulky, downcast way. “I’m sorry. My name’s Amanda.” She poked the two boys in the temple with her fingertips in turn, pushing their heads. “This is Kasey, and this is Evan. They’re my brothers and they’re both shit heads. The little girl is Katie Fryhover. She lives in the trailer behind us with her grandmama and their dog Champ.”

  “My name is Wayne. Wayne Parkin. We just moved here from Chicago.”

  “Amanda—”

  “Hugginkiss,” said Evan.

  Amanda belted him again. “Shut up. My name is not Amanda Hugginkiss. It’s Amanda Johnson. God.”

  “Have you seen any ghostses?” asked little Katie Fryhover. Her upper lip glistened with snot and one of her front teeth was missing.

  “I ate breakfast w
ith one,” said Wayne, becoming aware of the cold wedding band lying on his chest. The kids’ eyes bugged out of their heads in shock. He instinctively reached up to rub the ring through his shirt. “I eat breakfast with a ghost every morning.”

  “Woooaaah,” Evan and Kasey Johnson cooed in unison.

  Amanda regarded him warily.

  “Really?” asked Katie.

  “Yup.” Wayne smiled. “My dad and me leave a place for her at the kitchen table. Nobody ever sits there except her.” The reverent, mild way he said it had a chilling effect on the kids’ excitement, and they fell quiet.

  A door slapped shut somewhere in the trailer park, and Pete came huffing and puffing up the gravel drive to join them at the road. He was pulling on a jacket as he went, trading a Pop-Tart from hand to hand, and when he reached them he was still fighting with it, one arm hiked up behind his back.

  “Goddammit!” he fussed, the Pop-Tart in his mouth. The kids laughed. Pete accidentally bit through the Pop-Tart in frustration and tried to catch it with his free hand, but he slapped it into the culvert. He chewed in anger, the boys laughing even harder. “Are you even for real right now?”

  Amanda giggled into her hand. “I’m sure it’s not the first one you had.”

  “I just hate to waste food.” Pete wrenched the jacket on, popping stitches. His shirt was pulled up, revealing his pale belly and a deep navel smiling under a roll of fat. He hauled it down over his stomach and blew a stream of vapor. “Morning, Bruce Wayne. How was your first night in the House of a Thousand Corpses?”

  “It was okay. I only saw a few corpses, though. Nothing special.” One corner of Wayne’s mouth came up in a smirk. “Nothing like they said it would be in the commercials.”

  “Not as advertised, huh? That sucks.” Pete came across the road to give him a good-natured slap on the back.

  The distant snore of the school bus groaned somewhere in the trees, and Amanda and the kids came over to stand on Wayne’s side of the road. He knew they were only positioning themselves on the passenger side of the bus to make it easier to climb aboard, but seeing them cross the road and stand beside him felt as if it signified some measure of solidarity, as if they’d accepted him as one of their own, and he let himself believe it was.