Living Things

by Landon Houle

  The pup had broken loose before, twice since Moto had gotten him—once to chase a squirrel, the other time to chase a car.

  I’ll take him home then. I’ll put him in the house.

  This won’t be a minute, David said, and Lonnie said, Yeah, Moto. Just a minute, all right?

  Lonnie and David were inside the house now, and there was a certain smell that came from the paneled darkness, and it wasn’t terrible exactly, but even still, Moto didn’t like it, and the words seemed to burst out of her like the swift swing of a fist that’s bound to miss: We don’t know you!

  David had eased Lonnie down on her one good foot. Lonnie stood there, with her knee bent like some delicate bird, and David stared at Moto, studied her. He was sorry again, this time for shutting the door. Air conditioning, he explained. He explained everything, and even though Moto was thinking the worst—kidnappers and abusers and molesters—it was true that those sorts of things didn’t really happen in Black Creek, and David looked pretty much like a regular guy. David was big, but he didn’t leer or drool like the videos of perverts they showed in school. When Moto looked at him, she really didn’t see much of an expression at all, and once he’d shut the door, she wasn’t sure she could even describe him if someone had asked. Squinty eyes, she might say. Bald. He could have been her math teacher. Or the principal. Or the mailman.

  For a minute, Moto stared at her own reflection in the door’s glass pane. She was trying to figure out what to do. She might have barged in after them. If the door was locked, she could have broken the window and turned the knob from the inside. The important part was to wrap your hand in a T-shirt. She’d seen that in a movie and was pretty sure she could do it. She had a cell phone in her pocket. She could dial 9-1-1 and say her friend had been abducted, but had she?

  Over David’s shoulder, Lonnie had given Moto a hard look, and the message was clear. Tell him we love him, Lonnie had said that day at the cemetery. No matter what Lonnie said now, Moto knew there was a minute when she wanted to believe. Tell him we loved him. That might work.

  In the glass, Moto’s face was round. Her hair was in a ponytail. She might have been twelve, eleven even.

  She spun around, yanking hard on the leash. She fell into one of the chairs on the porch. There was an ashtray full of butts. Moto took one of the filters, sniffed it, and threw it back on the pile. Sometimes she thought Lonnie was right. Sometimes she hated this place, too.

  Moto waited, listening but hearing nothing except the birds in the trees. Across the street, a woman was working in her yard. She had a shovel, and she nearly stood on the end of the blade to cut into the dirt. She bent and hefted, and in her thin pale arms, the shovel seemed very heavy, but the woman just kept working. Her face was a shadow under a hat. Her overalls hung loose. Moto imagined the woman was digging a grave. Then she imagined that she was that woman, that she was the one holding the shovel.

  The pup was thirsty. He licked at her fingers, and Moto patted him on the head. She told him it was okay, even though she didn’t think it was, and right then, she wasn’t sure it ever would be again.

  Moto’s grandmother was dying and had been for some time now. Mama Powell had known it from the beginning, when she first started feeling the pains in her belly. She reminded Moto of all the things she’d done for her, namely taking her in when no one else would. Moto would be in the wind if it weren't for her. She made Moto promise, made her swear that she wouldn’t take her to some hospital or over to Twilight, where she’d get filled up with needles and tubes and medicine that would only make her sicker. She wanted to die at home, in her own bed, quietly and with some peace. Swear to me, Makeisha, she said because this was the girl’s real name and not something some other fool girl—Lonnie—had made up. Swear to me on your mother.

  And Moto did swear, though at the time, she couldn’t know all that her promise would mean.

  Mama Powell, true to her intuition, had gotten sicker and sicker, and when she could no longer get out of bed, Moto half-expected the rush of a crowd. A doctor. A preacher. Other old ladies. But her grandmother was a private woman who, after a certain preacher left, quit going to church though Moto believed the truth was that her grandmother didn’t much feel like going anymore. No one knew she was ill, and sometimes Moto wondered if anyone even knew they existed. Mostly at night when the street lights were the shade of the sun caught behind a thunderhead and beyond their odd glow, the darkness was cast even deeper, it seemed to Moto like she and her grandmother were the last people in the world.

  And now Mama Powell hardly seemed like a person at all. She didn’t talk anymore or in any way fend for herself. Moto fed her spoonfuls of chicken broth and changed her diapers and did her best, with a bucket of warm soapy water, to give her grandmother a bath.

  This had been terrible at first, the baths somehow even more embarrassing than the diapers, but now, Moto was used to it. Though her grandmother’s skin was old and loose and miraculously wrinkled, it was, to Moto, no different than a child’s, and she cleansed it out of love and necessity and ritual. Gently, she ran the rag across her grandmother’s chest and the soft belly where, she sometimes remembered, her own mother had once been.

  It’s amazing, Lonnie said, to be that close to a person.

  It was Friday, the day after Lonnie had cut her foot, and in that time, she’d told Moto—multiple times and in great detail—all of what had happened between her and David inside the red brick house. It had started in the bathroom where, true to his word, David had taken out the piece of glass. He hadn’t had peroxide after all but only a bottle of alcohol, which had burned. When Lonnie said so, said that she was hurting worse than she’d ever hurt before, he’d blown on her heel. Then he’d kissed her foot—Imagine, Lonnie said—and then her leg and then other parts of her, and then he’d carried her to the bedroom, to the water bed. It was, she said, everything she thought it would be. I get it now, she said. I get all of it.

  Moto wanted to ask what there was to get, but she didn’t.

  They were at the cemetery, not because they were trying to talk to ghosts—Lonnie didn’t do that stuff anymore—but because the cemetery was their meeting place. Lonnie sat on a thick granite tombstone with her foot propped on the head of an angel.

  Moto listened to the story until it was finished. Her breath came quick. There was a soreness at the back of her throat, but her face must not have registered the thrill or the admiration or whatever it was that Lonnie was after.

  Lonnie scraped at a pimple on her forehead in the way that she always did when she was irritated. In the past, she might have yelled at Moto. And now, she opened her mouth, but she seemed to catch herself. She smiled instead and said that Moto just didn’t get it. She wasn’t mature enough. One day, Lonnie said, Moto would understand. One day, Moto would understand everything.

  Moto was pacing around a certain plot she favored. The pup was laying in the shade. His tongue lolled, and though he sometimes looked at Moto, his tail did not move, and she had the sense he was not seeing her at all.

  That wolf, Lonnie said. You got a name for it yet?

  There wasn’t any thought in what Moto did next. She just moved, lunged at Lonnie and grabbed her by the front of the shirt. He ain’t no wolf, she said.

  Their faces were close together, and Moto could feel Lonnie’s breath on her face, and Lonnie was mad, but Moto was madder.

  Let me go, Lonnie said, and when Moto still held her, she said it again. Let me go, I said!

  Finally, Moto turned loose, and Lonnie staggered back. She rolled her shoulders, adjusted the neck of her shirt. She squinted at Moto.

  I said we shouldn’t come here anymore. It’s stupid.

  Moto looked around at the stones. She knew the names and even some of the dates by heart.

  But this is where we go. This is what we do.

  Lonnie shrugged.

  And now, Saturday, Lonnie was gone. Her mother had taken her to Mohawk’s concert after all. Moto couldn’t g
o, not because she wasn’t allowed but because she had to take care of her grandmother. Lonnie said she’d just go by herself then, but Moto wasn’t so sure. Moto thought maybe Lonnie had asked some other girl.

  Moto finished with her grandmother’s bath. She set the bucket of soapy water down on the rag rug. She took the soft thin towel and dried the places that were still wet. Then she squeezed out some lotion and warmed it between her hands before rubbing it into her grandmother’s elbows, her knees, her ankles.

  The old woman barely blinked. There was something in her eyes that reminded Moto of an animal, a bear she’d seen on a field trip to the zoo. Even though the bear turned in a circle and kicked a soccer ball, and played dead, he looked like, at any moment, he might bite.

  There was one person who knew about her grandmother’s condition, and that was Moto’s father. Jerry dropped by at times that were never predictable. Sometimes, he came twice a month, but a year might pass when Moto didn’t see him at all. He and Mama Powell had never gotten along. The old woman didn’t think Jerry was good enough for her daughter, Moto’s mother, and there was a time, early on, when she was probably right. Occasionally, Jerry brought money when he came, but most of the time, he asked for it.

  Moto signed her grandmother’s social security checks and cashed them at the gas station down by the bridge, and out of this, she’d give her father ten dollars, sometimes five if she felt it was all she could spare. You got a heart of gold, girl, Jerry told her once, but Moto knew this wasn’t true.

  Her grandmother wore a thin cross around her neck, and it shone and caught the light even in the dark bedroom. It was gold, and no matter how long Moto stared at it, it was nothing like what she felt. Whatever was in Moto’s chest was sharp and cold, and lately it seemed to grow and turn upon itself in ways that made Moto feel like something terrible was happening.

  Things change, Lonnie had said. It seemed like the worst part of the world, and yet there were times when it was all Moto wanted, for everything to be different than what it was.

  She looked down at her grandmother, this naked, wasted body that did not speak, that only stared without seeing. It could be over. Fast and easy. It was, like breaking into houses, a trick she’d learned from the movies. Moto’s hands moved for the pillow. Or she might have done it with the necklace, turning it, tightening it until it was over. No, it could not have been gold in Moto’s heart, but what it was would remain there, a twisted scrap, because from outside, from that impenetrable night, came a yelp and a snap.

  The sound stopped Moto where she was and then drew her to the porch where she’d tied the pup and where now, from the cheap metal rail, hung only a section of rope. Moto looked out into that darkness. During the day, Black Creek was so humid, you’d swear you were walking through a cloud, but some nights, the air seemed to thin, and like a kind of vacuum, it could take your breath away. In the streetlight, the moths and the June bugs floated and spun like motes, nearly weightless.

  There was no sign of the dog, there or beyond, but Moto went out anyway. She glanced back, but from here, she couldn’t see her grandmother. She stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind her.

  She went out into that black night. The other times the pup had broken loose, he hadn’t gone far—just to the stop sign or to the bottom of an ancient oak tree where in the branches a tensed squirrel crouched in a last posture of defense. But now, the dog was nowhere Moto could see, and she could barely see at all.

  Still, as if playing by the rules of some unusual gravity, she half-walked and half-ran the streets alone, whistling in that way that was meant to draw things. It must have been nearly midnight. Most of the houses were dark, but in one, lit from within, the curtains moved and a face appeared. A face appeared but no door opened.

  Moto searched the darkness for some glimmer, some reflection. The pup had been a present from her father. He’d got it up in Minnesota on one of what he called his routes. He told her that it was a purebred husky, papered he’d said, but he’d lost all that somewhere between there and here, and now the pup’s eyes weren’t as blue as they had been, and he’d thinned out considerably. He didn’t look like the pictures of huskies Moto had seen. She’d checked some books out from the library. She was afraid he really might be something else, something wild.

  And now that she loved him, now that she’d lost him, she didn’t know what to do. Those streets that she’d walked with Lonnie a thousand times had turned to paths cut in the thickets of some other planet. She felt that clinch in her throat. The air in her chest came even faster, shorter.

  She very nearly ran down Quinby and then Ferry Road, by the very house where the witches had lived. People thought the woman might have put a curse on Black Creek, but Mama Powell said that was dumb stuff. The whole world was cursed and that had happened nearly two thousand years ago, and the best anybody could do was try to find some peace.

  Moto wasn’t sure what peace really was, but maybe it had something to do with everything Moto was supposed to understand, the it Lonnie said she would get one day.

  Moto was never more alone than in that moment, and yet, she sensed she was being watched. If only she could find the pup. If only Lonnie was there, if only someone was.

  Glass broke beneath her shoes. She had made the turn and was back on Quinby. There ahead was the house where she’d seen the woman in the yard, the woman digging. And there across the street was the red brick where she’d sat with the pup.

  She whistled again, as if the dog might have come back to this familiar place, but it was Moto who was being drawn. It was Moto who moved by instinct.

  She crossed the road. She moved from one side to the other, and she did not look both ways or even any way. She was climbing those steps and knocking on the door, and when David appeared she said, I want you to do to me what you did to Lonnie.

  David did not turn on the porch light, and so in that darkness, Moto could not see his face. She didn’t need to.

  What I did, he said.

  I told you, she said. I want you to do it to me, too.

  Maybe a minute passed. Maybe it was only a few seconds. But eventually, David stepped back and Moto stepped in.

  Lonnie had said that one day Moto would understand, and this was what Moto wanted more than anything. She wanted to stop imagining what things could be. She wanted to make sense of the way things were. She wanted to be grown because grown people didn’t seem to hurt as much. They didn’t seem to feel a whole lot of anything, and maybe this was it. Maybe this was peace.

  David made almost no noise on top of her. It happened fast and indistinctly, and it didn’t matter that none of Lonnie’s details were right—that it wasn’t a waterbed, that David didn’t have a blue fish in a jar or a mirror on the ceiling. All of this was just a part of a story and nothing that made a difference, not even the toy planes which hung suspended over the bed.

  There was a time when Moto thought this moment would make her more like Lonnie, more like all the other people in the world, but lying there in the bed and staring up at the ceiling, she thought only of her grandmother. Pain and then a welcome numbness spread throughout her body. She thought it came from outside, from some distance, that series of yips and the long lowering howl. Moto’s eyes were open, and like an animal’s, caught the light and she saw then that even when it came fast—as sudden as a pillow over the face or a gold chain pulled taut—a person didn’t go out of this world all at once. The leaving started early and it happened in pieces that were as mean and jagged and beautiful as broken glass, and once some things were gone, it didn’t matter if you knew what had been lost. There was still no way to call it back.

  ABOUT THOSE PLANES

  They’re almost there.

  Sweat beads above Lynn’s lip, mottling the heavy powder she’s daubed. Under her hair, too, at the back of her neck and around her ears—this damp heat, and also, in her mouth, the grit and bile of salt that has settled and persisted in the eight—no, seven—months since she
moved with Ed to Myrtle Beach. The ocean won’t turn loose of Lynn even when they’re driving away from it. Oh God. Jesus and Joseph. She grabs at the vents, diamonds casting giddy lights. We’re almost there, she says, more to herself than to Ed because really, when you get right down to it, Ed isn’t all that pleasant to talk to. Lynn quit trying almost as soon as she started. We’re almost there.

  What’d you mean? Ed says and calls her silly. Silly old goose. We are there. Don’t you see we’re here?

  Lynn turns her head, and when she does, it’s as if the edges of the world blur and run like those watercolor beach scenes she and every other old lady and some old men try to paint. Idiots in white linen. Thin skin burning. At the beach because where else? That’s how Ed put it. Everything is so easy for him. The beach is where the old people go, and so they went, and it is like so much else Lynn had done in that she did it without question. That is to say, all the questions came too late.

  There are houses and trees and mailboxes, and if Lynn focuses the center of her vision, she can see, she can certainly read the sign that says Quinby Place, but nothing looks the same. Nothing looks right, and she turns to tell Ed because even though he’s nothing to talk to, Ed is like Myrtle Beach in that, for Lynn, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative, but when Lynn opens her mouth, it’s Ed’s voice—gravel and gruff—saying, There, see.

  He’s pulling over, the ridiculous white and chrome hulk of an SUV, so oversized even Ed calls it The Rig. Ed’s vision isn’t what it used to be, and he scrapes the curb with a tire. There’s a sharp grinding sound like something heavy about to give way, and Lynn blinks and sees her very own porch, the red brick arches that made her say, the first time she saw it, Hansel and Gretel.

  It’s little wonder, though, that Lynn didn’t know it at first—the yard all gone to weeds and grown up and all her wicker porch furniture gone not with her and Ed to Myrtle Beach but to the Salvation Army. And the paint around the windows flaking, and even though that one shutter had always hung crooked, it is, Lynn notes, more crooked now. There is about the whole place a sense of sag—longer than seven months worth—that does more than irritate Lynn. The disrepair, the passing of time and neglect that’s caused it, scares Lynn nearly to the point of phobia. This is a fear she knows well, a tremor at the edges, which is how Lynn sees the world. Her neck, her arms, but more than her body—Lynn is smart enough to know she can’t put any stock into that anymore—what’s inside, everything spinning in an unsteady wobble, and David at the center of it. David coming out of the house, and he is pale, and he is swollen, and he is nothing like what Lynn ever wanted him to be, but here he is, opening the door. Here he is still calling her Mama.