by Tom Howard
* * *
Ruby and Cam are halfway through the intersection, and the old Ghost decides it isn’t quite done with the world after all and sputters back to life.
Ruby screams, then Cam screams, and then Cam’s crazy laugh explodes from the back seat. And Ruby laughs, too, though she doesn’t know why. But her son is laughing and the old Ghost is moving, and she thinks okay, yeah.
They round the corner in front of Blessed Burgers and turn onto Temple. No Burger Man, damn.
“Maybe next time,” she tells Cam.
“May-bee,” he agrees. Maddeningly reasonable now.
They cross the train tracks and come to the next intersection. The light’s green and as Ruby glides through she finds another car facing her, stopped under the green light. She slows down but doesn’t quite stop, and rolls down the window.
“Need any help?” she calls out, because the light’s green and the driver looks a little hypnotized. He’s staring up through the windshield at the treetops, lips moving soundlessly. Maybe a lunatic. Or maybe just lost, she thinks. Maybe just a little lost.
“Booger-man,” whispers Cam.
“Quiet,” Ruby says. She thinks maybe she knows the guy. Hopes he’s okay. Hopes for good things for him, whoever he is.
As she rolls past she hollers, “Well have a good day!”
In the back seat, Cam is laughing again.
4
Fierce Pretty Things
I had some fury in me on account of the note I found in study hall so I gave it to Muncie on the way home. He was sitting on the half wall beside the cemetery reading a book, and he didn’t see me coming. Muncie was an okay kid. He never stared at the birthmark on my face or said anything about where I lived. I appreciated that but I wasn’t in any mood, and there were black flecks at the corners of my eyes and my heart was burning, so I knocked Muncie off the half wall onto the grass behind him, and then I climbed on top and gave it to him. Muncie weighed the same as me but he was soft and easy to knock over. I got him in the stomach a couple times, left-right-left, sploosh sploosh sploosh in his flabby gut, and then I knuckled him in both arms and slapped him once in the face. The one to the face wasn’t hard but nobody wants to get hit in the face, and that got him crying. I flicked him in the ear for crying. Then I jumped down to the sidewalk and stormed toward Pence’s. When I got to Pence’s I went straight to the magazine aisle and waited around until Robby behind the counter was looking in my direction. I pulled down the latest issue of Juggs and Butts and tucked it in my shirt. Then I grabbed a packet of beef jerky and a box of Dots and stuffed them both in my pockets.
“What,” I said, because Robby was looking at me.
“Nothing,” he said, and looked away. He was twenty-eight and lived with his mom and his step-dad and his brother Joe, who everybody called Headly because he had water on the brain when he was born and it made his head really big.
“You think I’m stealing your crap?” I said, and I gave him the finger. The beef jerky package fell out of my pocket onto the floor. Robby and I both looked down at it.
“You dropped your jerky, looks like,” he said.
“Damn right, you bastard,” I said. I picked it up and tore it open and started eating it as I left the store.
A couple minutes later I was okay. I was still on edge but the flecks were gone and my heart was cool, and I had this song going through my head that I play sometimes when I need it—I think of it like there’s a record player in there, like the one we had in the house on Old Meadow, and I can just slide the record on whenever I want to hear it, which is a nice thing to be able to do. The song’s called “Wild Dog” by Toxic Death Spasm, and it’s from their second album, which was the best album they had. It’s about this kid named Wild Dog. His mother is a prostitute with a heart of gold, and she gets pregnant and gives birth to Wild Dog in secret because it’s against the prostitute rules to have a baby, only someone finds out and kills her and throws the baby out in the garbage. But he’s saved by a pack of wild alley dogs, and when he grows up he comes back into town and takes vengeance. The song has some fierce guitar playing, as you’d expect, but my favorite part is when this electric violin comes in toward the end, after Wild Dog finishes up with his vengeance and lights out for the western hills under a gibbous moon. I didn’t know what a gibbous moon was, but I liked that violin part. There was something sad and hopeful about that part, like you could imagine Wild Dog maybe sitting down and enjoying some Dots while he rode a railcar under that gibbous moon.
When Roy came home I was sitting outside on the houseboat, listening to the river.
“You give it to anybody today?” he said.
“Ledecky,” I said, taking a bite from the beef jerky. “And Muncie.”
“Let’s go to the Board,” he said.
The Board hung on the living room wall next to a bass fishing calendar. Roy swiped it from the office at the factory where he worked and filled it with the names of all the families he remembered from when he was growing up. Some of the names had stars or diamonds next to them that Roy never explained. Others had notes in parentheses right below, things they’d done that Roy remembered, like if somebody called Roy some name when he was six years old, he’d maybe put “(rat boy)” below the name as a reminder. We found Ledecky on the list in the bottom left quadrant. There were three dollar signs after Ledecky’s name.
“What’s with the dollar signs?”
“Ain’t no matter.” He pulled a red marker down from above the Board. “You want this one?”
“Go on,” I said, and he crossed off Ledecky’s name with the marker. Three quarters of the names were crossed off.
“How about Swofford?” Swofford’s name was in the middle and it had skulls on both sides, and the skulls had arrows going through their heads. Cole Swofford’s family had just moved back to town a few months back. His father owned the Golden Dove Diner and a couple miniature golf places.
“He stays pretty clear of me,” I said, and I took a bite of the jerky.
Roy grunted and slid the marker back in place on top of the Board.
Ma took me aside when she started running around with Roy. She said not to be put off by his talk. She said he’d had a rough go of it but it wasn’t his fault, or it wasn’t completely his fault. He didn’t drink so much then and I could see he was good with Ma, so I thought he was okay. When she died he took me aside and said, Well do you want to stay on with me, and I said I guess I did.
“Why’d you give it to Muncie?” he said.
“Ain’t no matter,” I said.
The note I’d found in study hall said What’s hateful, ugly, and smells like the river? And there was a drawing of a face with a pig nose and a purple stain on the one side and two fins sticking out the neck.
I went and stretched out on my bed and felt the houseboat swaying around me, and I listened to the river running past and the faint splash of the water against the bedroom wall. Sometimes I liked it, the swaying and the sounds, but today I didn’t. I lay there for a bit trying to make the house stop moving with my mind. Usually if I tried hard I could do it, but I couldn’t do it now. I rolled onto my stomach and stretched the note out on my pillow and studied it some more. The cursive was really nice, and the tails of all the letters that dropped down low—the g’s and the y’s and f’s—were real extravagant and swirly and impressive. Somebody took a lot of time getting that note to look nice, which almost brought the fury back. I brought the note to the wastebasket and set it on fire and watched it burn until the air smelled like sulfur and catfish. Then I put Toxic Death Spasm on my alarm clock CD player and started paging through Juggs and Butts. The girls looked nice but only if you didn’t look at their eyes. If you looked at their eyes then you felt kind of bad about it. So I tried to focus on their juggs and their butts the way I was supposed to. But I kept thinking about that note.
Thing is that I knew I was probably ugly, and maybe I did smell like the river even though I couldn’t smell it mu
ch myself. We’d been in the houseboat, Roy and me, since I was seven. But I didn’t like being called hateful. That made me sound like I was rotten, like some fruit that had gone bad. And once something went bad like that, it never got any better.
At dinner Roy said he was going out with his buddy Neal. Most nights he went out with Neal to the Lovejoy, unless Neal was in trouble with his wife and couldn’t make it out. When that happened, Roy’d say awful things about Neal for half an hour and then he’d say he was going to walk the river, or he’d say he was taking an extra shift at the quarry. I followed him a couple times and he always ended up at Sign of the Whale, which was on the edge of town near the quarry. I liked the name of that place, Sign of the Whale. It sounded like a secret society, maybe. It sounded like a place where you’d meet up with the resistance and plot to overthrow some alien warlords with horse heads and tentacles. But it was just a dark room with a bar full of old men not looking at each other too much.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Hang out,” I said.
“Who with?”
“The boys,” I said. I speared a fish stick with my fork and dragged it into a pool of ketchup.
“Probably getting into mischief,” he said. “Probably raising some hell in town with the boys. That the plan?”
I looked up and he was smiling, but not at me. He was in a good mood tonight. I said that if mischief came our way, me and the boys wouldn’t run from it, and he laughed. He told a story about when he was fourteen, when he and Neal siphoned the gas from all the police cruisers and then threw bricks through the windows of the Dillard’s department store. They watched from the shadows and howled as the cops came running on foot all the way from the station.
“One of the top days of my life,” he said. “Top five anyways.”
I said it sounded like a fine day, and he nodded. But some of the light went out in his face then, and he turned sort of gray. Like he was thinking on how long ago that was, like all the years were rolling over him one after the other and he was trapped under them. Then he took a shuddering breath and he looked like Roy again.
I waited until he was gone and then I stepped out too. It was cool outside but nice enough, and the leaves were falling as the sun was coming down. The cemetery wasn’t far. Ma was on the back side on account of her being a suicide. You went in through a little iron gate covered in ivy, and then you went up a hillside facing north, out of the sun, so it always felt cooler there than anywhere else. You could hear the river running when you were up there too. I set down my backpack by her marker, under the branches of a twisted white oak.
“Things are okay,” I said. I liked to say that straight away, just so she was in the right frame of mind and didn’t think I was in any kind of trouble or anything.
It’s good to see you again and you’re looking taller, she said. Or she didn’t really say that, but I could hear it well enough in my head. I could picture her too. In my head she was lying on one of the oak branches right over my head, and she looked like a cherub you’d see in an old painting, all chubby arms and puffy cheeks and a young pink face and curly brown hair that fell down to cover her bosom. She was too skinny when she was alive—I was only six at the time so mostly I remember her from pictures, but I knew she was too skinny. So I liked thinking of her as one of them cherubs.
I told her I’d gotten a B-minus on an essay I wrote about Saturn, and she said that was a fine thing and asked me if there were some interesting facts I read about when I was learning on Saturn, and I said yes there were. I told her about how each year on Saturn is like thirty years here on Earth because of how long it takes for it to go around the sun. So that means you’d only be a little over a year old on Saturn by now, I said, and I could tell she liked that, her being just a baby in Saturn years.
Then I told her I’d given it to Muncie on the way home.
She was quiet for a bit. Then she said, I guess he had it coming is what you’re saying.
“Well, maybe he did,” I said, sort of defensive because of her tone. “It’s hard to say for sure exactly.”
I’m sure it was Muncie who wrote that note, then, with all those swirls and flourishes.
I hadn’t told her about the note, which made the hairs on my arms stand up. I said the point was that it could’ve been Muncie. There wasn’t any way to know. And if I didn’t stand up for myself then nobody ever would. I said it was about balancing the ledger, which was something I’d heard Roy say.
I’m sure that’s right, she said.
I sat there holding my knees against my chest. It was just about full dark. I cleared my throat and said, “Tomorrow I think I’ll do better.” She didn’t say anything to that, so I went on. “There’s no reason I can’t do better tomorrow. I’m not some damn fruit that you need to throw away.”
It was dead quiet and I could hear the river running, far off. I said I needed some space and walked down along the water. When I got back to the houseboat I set up a lantern on the deck rail and fished for a while in the dark. There was a cool wind blowing and there wasn’t anything wrong with being on the river that I could see, but I was troubled. I felt like I was Wild Dog himself, and I played the violin solo on the record player in my head, but that didn’t fix it. Finally I reached into my bag and took out the plastic hand I lifted from a Dillard’s mannequin a while back. In the dark it looked real enough. I ran the plastic fingers through my hair a couple times. Nobody could see me, and there wasn’t anything wrong with it except that I’d lifted it from Dillard’s, which Roy told me was basically run by criminals.
There’s maybe something wrong with it, Ma said, in my head. But you’re okay.
Next day I gave it to Hoyle in the locker room, but only because he made a sniffing noise when I walked by. I knuckled him in the back of the head, and Kaminsky the gym teacher saw it and gave me detention, probably because Kaminsky was a Pole and had a grudge against Roy on account of Roy being German and Germany invading Poland back in the day. I didn’t mind the detention because I could just sit in my regular seat by the window and write out the lyrics to Toxic Death Spasm songs until it was over, and Graves, who was the shop teacher and always got stuck with me in detention, was afraid of me and left me pretty well alone.
But when I got into detention the room wasn’t empty. There was a girl sitting by the window right behind my regular seat. Her head was down and she was writing something in her notebook. That upset me but I didn’t know what I could do about it, so I signed in with Graves and looked around the room trying to figure out where I’d sit. I could see the black flecks coming on and Graves was watching me with a nervous look.
“Christ Jesus, Graves, I’m fine,” I said. And I went to my regular seat.
The girl didn’t look up. Her hair was long and dark and tangled and it kept her face hidden, but I knew who it was. It was Franny. She’d moved to town over the summer. I hadn’t ever talked to her and we didn’t have any classes together but I’d seen her walking sometimes, and there weren’t many new people who moved into town. She was living a few houses down from where we used to live on Old Meadow.
I sat down and pulled out my notebook and started in on “Wild Dog,” trying to write the letters all Gothic-like and extra grim. But I only got as far as One black night in the heart of Mississippi when I stopped because I heard her breathing behind me.
“You got to breathe so damn loud?” I said, turning my face toward the window so she could hear me.
“I got a right to breathe,” she said.
“I can’t concentrate is all,” I said.
She said, “What’s so special that you need concentrating for?”
I thought of calling her a rotten whore but I didn’t, because I was remembering my promise to Ma and I was thinking about being a bad fruit. I went back to my notebook.
“You’re tapping your foot now,” I said.
“I’m a dancer,” she said. “I can’t help it. I tap sometimes.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re in here,” I said. “Because you can’t help tapping your damn foot.”
“Maybe you’re a dummy,” she said.
I about snapped my pen in half then. I said, “Damn, why’d you have to sit here anyway?”
“Why’d you?” she said. “I was here first anyways.”
“You’re giving me the black flecks,” I said, clenching my fists.
That finally made her look up, and I saw her face. Beneath all that wild hair she was fierce pretty, with a face that was kind of dirty and eyes greener than anything I ever saw.
“What’s that mean?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to explain. Instead I looked down at her notebook, and I saw she’d drawn a picture of a family. Only they were all skeletons. A dad skeleton and a mom skeleton holding hands, and a little girl skeleton with a red hair ribbon tied around her skull.
“That’s weird,” I said.
“You’re weird.” She flipped the page over so I couldn’t see it anymore. On the next page there was some writing she’d done. It was upside down but I could see that it was in cursive. It was fine handwriting too. All the letters with tails that dropped down—the g’s and the y’s and the f’s—were extravagant and swirly too.
“Maybe I am,” I said. I set my jaw tight and I said, “Maybe I’m just somebody who’s rotten and ugly and smells like the river.” And everything was black then.
She blinked at me. “You’re Vardy,” she said.
I thought, then, of all the hateful things I wanted to say to her. I thought of calling her names, names that would sting her and that she’d keep with her for a long time, until she was older, until she was an old woman looking back on her days. She’d be a grandmother with all this history behind her, with a husband who was long dead and kids who had grown up and had kids themselves, and she’d have lots of good times to look back on. She’d be in some old retirement home with flowers on the windowsill and photographs everywhere, and on every holiday she’d get loads of holiday cards because of how much she was loved. Her eyes would still be green like they were now too. But now and then she’d look back over her life, because that’s what you do when you’re old, and she’d find me there. She’d remember the time she came face to face with me, and the things I said. And those things would hurt her all over again. That’s all I’d be, then. Just something rotten waiting in her mind when she looked back, to make her feel bad as she closed in on the grave.