Living Things

by Landon Houle

  She stared at Cathy, a woman she sometimes called her partner. Other times, they called each other friends or even roommates depending on who they were talking to. Cathy’s eyes were closed again, and she’d started back at the beginning of the list, and now she was stuck. Now she needed help. All right, Cathy said. She was giving up. What’s the last one?

  Bev looked down at the card. She read, They can reproduce.

  Cathy’s hands were fists, and she beat them against her head. Then she actually slapped herself, hard across the face. I knew that, she said. I knew that all along.

  Bev reached out, but before she could touch Cathy, before she could say anything, Cathy was picking up all the cards and jamming them into her pockets. There were so many compartments and loops and zippers in those pants, Bev had joked about Cathy carrying bullets and grenades. Like, she said, you’re going into combat.

  Cathy slid off the stool. I gotta take a leak, she said.

  Where are you going? Bev said, even though Cathy had just told her. Everything moved so quickly, and Bev’s mind was sluggish. She was still thinking about explosions and bears, the way things sounded so distant when you were underwater. She shook her head, willing what was inside to catch up with all that was happening. Hey, she said, I’ll go too.

  But Cathy was already gone, already behind the filigreed door that led down into the restaurant. Bev took her drink and slid off the barstool. The glass was cold in her hand, and she felt a deep chill in her chest. In her mind was a song without words. She walked to the edge of the roof.

  Reproduce. Respond to stimuli. Adapt to surroundings. Bev remembered studying something like that when she was in school. Surely she had. Sometimes Bev was as forgetful and confused as some of the residents at Twilight, and there were times when she wondered if everyone around her wasn’t just saying whatever wouldn’t cause trouble, whatever wouldn’t wake her up.

  That weekend, it was supposed to be sunny in Asheville. Here, though, the sky was gray, and the wind still blew, and with it came a few drops of very cold rain. Soon it would be winter.

  Cathy had gone to the bathroom. Of course she had. But she must have also forgotten something in the car because there she was on the street below. Bev could see the top of her head, the white shine of her scalp beneath the short hair. Cathy would make a good paramedic. Once, she’d found a baby squirrel under a tree in the backyard. Bev was certain the squirrel wouldn’t make it, but Cathy had nursed the little thing with a bottle until it was ready to live on its own. Everywhere Cathy looked, she saw something worth saving.

  There was a time when Bev had felt that way, too.

  She hadn’t told Cathy about what happened with Mozelle. She hadn’t told Cathy about a lot of things. Maybe now was the time. If she told it right, she might even make Cathy laugh.

  Bev wanted to call out to Cathy. It would have been strange for them to see one another from such an angle. Bev meant to wave or blow a kiss or stick her thumbs in her ears and wiggle her fingers. She meant to do something, but her voice must have been lost in the cars that passed, in the mounting wind, and as Bev watched, she saw Cathy leaning up against the car. She saw her pull out the cards. She saw her reading the words, memorizing the terms.

  Bev stumbled back. She was losing her balance. She was trying to say, I’ve got to tell you something funny. She was trying to say, Slow down. Easy.

  WHERE WE GO

  It was June, and Lonnie and Moto were walking the streets. They’d done it the past couple of summers. Propelled by boredom and curiosity and blinding teenage desire, Lonnie and Moto, long tired of their own dumb yards and their own stupid rooms, hit the busted sidewalks just to go some place, any place, but this year something was different.

  This year, they were fifteen. Lonnie’s shorts were shorter, tighter. Moto hadn’t grown much, but now she had a dog, a lanky husky pup ill-suited for the swampy climate of Black Creek, South Carolina. These things weren’t the same as they were, but they also didn’t make any real difference. The real difference was something else, something that Moto couldn’t quite name but was just as tangible as Lonnie’s long legs or the panting dog or the rain that didn’t fall but hung in the air and made a haze of everything. The real difference moved the hair on the back of Moto’s neck. It curled around and tightened against her throat. At night, when she was alone with the pup, she could hardly stand the weight of this new and uncertain fear.

  She’s so stupid, Lonnie said about her mother. She walked a few steps ahead, and Moto saw the pink flash of her bare feet, the yellow polish on her toes. Lonnie said she didn’t need shoes and rolled her eyes when Moto said something about rocks and nails. Don’t be a baby, Lonnie said.

  Moto watched the feet, the ankles and the more delicate bones, the cords that held everything together.

  You’re lucky, Lonnie said. She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to.

  Shut up, Moto said.

  Lonnie shot her a look. You know what I mean.

  Moto was going to say something, but she coughed and swallowed instead. She didn’t let other people say things like that, but Lonnie didn’t have a dad, and there were other factors that added up to Lonnie being able to talk to Moto like other people couldn’t. They’d been friends since the fifth grade. Sometimes she and Moto talked to each other without even speaking at all.

  If I were you, Lonnie said, I’d do whatever I wanted.

  The pup stopped to sniff the bottom of a rusting mailbox. Moto pulled on his leash. For a second, he tried digging in, setting his stance for the long sniff. But when Moto said, Come on, the pup looked at her. Then the muscles in his hips relaxed, and he did. He came on.

  Lonnie was talking about some concert she wanted to go to. Moto didn’t know the band, but she pretended. I’ve heard of them, she said. I think I have.

  Yeah. So my mom says she won’t take me because I didn’t do the dishes or some shit. I don’t know.

  Moto wrapped the leash around her wrist, one loop and then another.

  So, Lonnie said.

  Maybe you could wash the dishes. Maybe then she’d let you go.

  Lonnie looked back over her shoulder. She was glaring. You always take the other person’s side.

  Do not.

  Do, Lonnie mocked.

  Somebody had thrown out a bottle. It was shattered there on the sidewalk, and Moto saw it glittering up ahead. She was about to say something. She was about to give some kind of warning, but Lonnie just walked right through. She never stopped talking, and it was hard to say if she saw the glass and stepped in all the right places or if she just got lucky, but there was Lonnie on the other side and no worse for it.

  Moto pulled the pup, guiding him out and around the sharpest pieces. The slivers glittered in the sun, and it was hard to believe it was never anything more than a beer bottle.

  They were at the corner of Quinby now and turning down the sidewalk that lined Ferry Road. It was an old street lined with antebellum mansions and oak trees hung with Spanish moss. A few of the houses were in good condition, one kept up by an orthopedic surgeon with a casual interest in real estate. Another by a retired judge turned eccentric. But these nicer homes were closer to the courthouse, and Lonnie and Moto were headed in the other direction.

  Down this part of the street, the houses were just as big—some as many as four stories with built-on rooms and attics and wide front porches. But these houses hadn’t been painted in years, decades even. The boards were rotted. Sections of roofs were draped in frayed blue tarps. Porch columns leaned and threatened to give way.

  As many as six or seven cars crowded around the nearly condemned houses, many of which had been divided into apartments, and in one of these houses, in one of these makeshift apartments, lived a boy with a blue Mohawk that Lonnie was trying, she said, to hook. She pulled up her shorts, rolled down the waistband. Her back went stiff, as if something there hurt when she stepped a certain way.

  Mohawk was the bass guitarist in the b
and that was playing the concert that Lonnie couldn’t go to because she didn’t wash the dishes, and Moto shouldn’t have felt too bad because hardly anyone had ever heard of them, but, Lonnie said, one day, everybody would be singing their songs. He’ll be famous, Lonnie said, and the way she said it, being famous seemed like the best thing anyone could be.

  Mohawk hadn’t lived in the house long. Lonnie had seen him for the first time one day last week. She’d been out walking the streets alone because what else was there? Moto was busy, something with her grandmother.

  Lonnie had seen him there on the end of the porch. She told Moto that he was sitting on the rail, plucking a guitar, not a bass. His ultimate goal, Lonnie said, was to be the lead. Lonnie could hear him humming. It sounded a lot like this one song by another band Moto didn’t know, but it was probably something else, something really original, Lonnie said.

  So Mohawk was playing this guitar, and when he looked up and saw Lonnie, he stopped. She pretended not to see him at first, of course, because that’s what you do, but when he waved, she waved back. And then he said hey, and then she said hey, and that’s when he told her about the band and the concert, which was this Saturday.

  That’s it? Moto said when Lonnie finished the telling.

  What do you mean that’s it? Lonnie said. She made a face that said Moto couldn’t be dumber. She seemed almost angry. That is everything.

  Now Lonnie was focusing. She threw out her hips and pointed her chin up in the air. In the sun, the pimples across her forehead were an even deeper shade of red. A dry rash crept up from her tank top and spread across her wide bony shoulders. Lonnie was thin, and her legs were long, but she was not a pretty girl, and there was something about her that made the cheerleaders and the beauty queens turn up their noses, as if, about Lonnie, there was a certain and repelling odor. They acted the same way around Moto, but Moto didn’t much care about the girls and their clothes and their lip gloss and their boyfriends. Lonnie still cared, though. Lonnie cared a lot.

  It was one of these houses, Moto couldn’t remember which one exactly, where there used to live an old woman and her brother. Some people said they were witches, but who did those same folks run to, Moto’s grandmother said, when they got into trouble? When come Saturday night, they lost their minds and laid down with dogs, Mama Powell said. They didn’t wake up praying. That’s for sure. They woke up Sunday, and there they were with them dogs and a nest of fleas, or there they were on their way to having some pup, and then those same folks who liked to say witch-this and witch-that were hotfooting it down to Old Man and Sister. That’s what Mama Powell said.

  Moto tried to tell Lonnie this story once, but she started at the wrong place—when the woman was a teacher before anybody knew she was a witch—and Lonnie said, Nobody cares about all that old stuff.

  Ahead, Moto saw Lonnie’s shoulders slump. Her butt went flat, and her walk went back to the familiar heavy drag. Mohawk was nowhere to be found.

  The pup pulled. He wasn’t full-grown, but he wasn’t little anymore either, and his muscles were tight ropes. A few houses down, there was a woman who kept a flock of geese. The pup scented the air, let loose a thin whimper.

  Want to make the block? Moto said, but Lonnie was already turning around.

  Let’s just go, she said. She doubled back on Moto, passed her. This is stupid.

  Lonnie walked on, and Moto stood there a minute between her friend and the pup. She could have kept going on her own. She didn’t have to stay with Lonnie, but something pulled her back. It was the thing she couldn’t name, the difference that made her feel like she might scream as she saw Lonnie getting further and further away. Moto had the sense that both of them were walking along a steep edge even though there was the sidewalk and there was the street, same as it had always been.

  She jerked the leash, harder than she meant to, and the pup, caught off guard, lurched and scrambled on long legs to catch himself. Come on, Moto said, as if either of them had a choice.

  We could, Moto said, go to the park.

  The park was not the kind of park with a slide and swings and a merry-go-round. It was a nature park, swampland mostly that was all around Black Creek. Lonnie always said it was so ugly.

  Maybe we’ll see a snake, Moto said.

  Lonnie didn’t answer. She just kept moving.

  Moto tried again. We go to the cemetery.

  I don’t believe in that junk, Lonnie said. I’m over it.

  To hear Lonnie talk, a person would think years had passed, but it was just that spring they’d hauled a box of candles and a blanket up to the cemetery. They’d sat on one of the graves and, holding each other’s hands, they’d tried to perform a séance like something Moto had seen on TV. Nothing had happened, but maybe there were things they couldn’t sense, things they couldn’t measure. They didn’t have all the right equipment. If we just had a thermal imager, Moto had said, which was something else she’d seen on TV. She remembered the heat of Lonnie’s hands in her own, the flinch of Lonnie’s thumb.

  Now Moto wasn’t sure what she believed. Were there really such things as witches, or was it just a story that, like a lot of stories, her grandmother had made up to scare her? Once, Moto thought she’d seen her mother, a kind of quick-moving shadow in the corner. She slept in her mother’s old room, so it made sense, but then again, Moto’s mother wasn’t dead. She was just gone.

  I hate this place, Lonnie said.

  They were making the corner again and now stepping over the same broken glass. Only this time, Lonnie wasn’t so lucky. This time, she stepped just right or, really, just wrong, and when Moto heard the yelp, she already knew what had happened.

  Moto ran to catch up. The pup, excited by the quickness of Moto’s pace, strained. He was sniffing the air, the blood—a thick dark line that traced its way from the ball of Lonnie’s foot where a shard of thick green glass was stuck deep.

  Lonnie’s face twisted in pain. She swiveled her body and sat down in the grass. She held her foot in the air, and a heavy drop of blood fell and splattered against the hot cement.

  Moto felt a lurching in her chest. The hand that held the leash was a fist, and she wanted to hit Lonnie with it. I told you, she said.

  Lonnie narrowed her eyes. Air came out through her teeth.

  Moto passed the leash to her other hand. She uncurled her fingers and reached out. Even before she’d touched the foot, Lonnie howled.

  I’m gonna pull it out, Moto said. We have to.

  Lonnie started screaming even more then. She tried to jerk away—Let me go! she yelled—but Moto held on. Be still, Moto said. She had to shout to be heard, and they were this way—like much younger children, screaming at each other and wrestling there on the side of the road—when the man came up behind them.

  Here, he said, let me.

  His voice wasn’t deep, but all the same, there was something authoritative about it. Or maybe it was his impressive height or the baldness or the way he seemed to simply appear when they needed someone the most. Whatever it was, both girls responded with a kind of surprised and obedient silence, and when he stepped between them, Moto sort of staggered backward with a feeling that only later, she would recognize as relief. She reached down for the pup, and although he had not barked or even growled, Moto was surprised to find that the hair on the back of his neck was stiff.

  I'm David, he said

  Like in the Bible, Lonnie said

  David looked at her. Like my uncle.

  David squatted down. He looked at Lonnie’s foot, but he didn’t touch it. Yellow is nice, he said. Yellow’s my favorite color.

  It’s green, Moto went to say, thinking he meant the glass, but then she remembered the polish on Lonnie’s toes. It was a nasty shade like what the sky turned just before a storm.

  Yellow like yell out, David said. That’s where the word comes from.

  Lonnie blinked. Mellow yellow, she said. That’s all I know. She laughed and sniffed all at once.

 
; Moto hadn’t noticed until now, but at some point, Lonnie must have been crying.

  David was smiling. Lost your shoes?

  Lonnie’s cheeks were wet. Her bottom lip was puffy. I forgot ’em, she said.

  You didn’t forget, Moto said, but nobody seemed to hear.

  Well, David said, bet you remember from now on. Sometimes we gotta learn the hard way.

  He told them he had some tweezers and peroxide. Right over there, he said, and tipped his chin toward the red brick house. It had a little front porch with an arched doorway, like something out of a fairy tale if you didn’t look too close.

  We’re okay, Moto said. She adjusted her grip on the pup’s collar. She could take the glass out herself. She knew she could. Thanks anyway.

  David turned toward her. He was a big man, but his eyes were small, and they seemed to dull when he turned them on Moto. Where’d you get the wolf? he asked.

  Moto looked down at the pup. He’s not a wolf.

  I know a wolf when I see one.

  Lonnie moaned, and it was a sound like a cat made. It was hard to tell what it meant. She can’t walk like this, David said.

  She can hop, Moto said.

  Will it hurt? Lonnie asked, and David said not for long. He bent down and picked her up, and she might have been nothing at all for what little pause her body caused him.

  Wait, Moto said as David carried Lonnie across the street.

  Moto was about to say more, but over David’s shoulder, Lonnie was making a clear and distinct face. She was talking without talking. David was making his way up the stairs now. The closer Moto got, the more teeth Lonnie showed.

  At the door, he stopped and turned. Sorry, he said and glanced at the pup, allergies.

  Moto looked down. The pup’s mouth was open. His long pink tongue dripped. I’ll tie him up, Moto said.

  No! Lonnie said. She yelled it, but when David looked down at her, she added, in a changed voice, He’ll run away.