Living Things

by Landon Houle

  What is it? Marty was saying.

  And maybe this book hadn’t been for a class, but Makeisha had studied it all the same. The pages were rippled and marked. Passages were underlined—the modern study of wolves has revealed the true nature of the pack, and it is far less fanciful and far more familiar than many people had imagined.

  Candy turned the page. Certain pictures—mostly those of the lanky gray wolf pups—were circled with such force that Candy could feel the rut of the line beneath her thumb. She could feel the force of all that came behind it, of all that came before, and she could feel, too, her own blood pumping, a pulsing that came from her very core, and Marty was there now, and he was asking her what she’d found, and looking at him, Candy couldn’t imagine what she’d ever seen in him, what she ever imagined to teach him or anyone else. It’s nothing, Candy said, and Marty and everything in the room blurred and jerked and one thing could not, even by Candy, be told from another.

  Makeisha had drowned in Black Creek. This much they knew for certain. But they were still trying to determine the specifics, whether the drowning was accidental, suicidal, or, Marty said, otherwise. Too, they discovered that at the time of her death, Makeisha had been pregnant.

  Marty gave Candy this news over the phone. He said, That last part, you can’t print. Tonight. Corina’s. Me and you.

  Candy hung up the phone. On her desk was the book about wolves. She wasn’t supposed to take it. She wasn’t supposed to take anything, but she wasn’t supposed to touch anything either. She’d hidden the book under her jacket, stuffed it halfway down the waist of her pants.

  She read what Makeisha had read—all about wolves, their habitats, their predilections, the ways in which they were misunderstood. Candy had spent all that time trying to learn, trying to remember what all was on the inside, but now, what was left of the pancreas didn’t seem to matter so much.

  Candy read with her head in her hand, and with her brow hidden as it was, she looked like a child, and she was a child. She was a child and she was a forty-year-old woman, and in some way, Candy began to understand how she could become Makeisha, how she was Makeisha, how Marty was Makeisha, how Sue was Makeisha, how they all were Makeisha, and this didn’t make sense exactly, but Candy saw now that hardly anything did. The truth was that reasons and methods and formulas had little business in the dealings of real people. Things happened in a way that didn’t follow fixed charts and diagrams because when you got down to it, Mrs. Powell wasn’t alone in the dark. They were all there with her, a kind of pack that moved together, that hunted together.

  Candy saw now that she had no idea how to write this story or any other. Maybe the soap operas had it right after all. Maybe the purest form was a constant unraveling.

  She felt sick, to be sure, but there was also a not altogether unpleasing levity. What a person might feel, for instance, after she’s been gutted and what she’s carried all this time has finally, if violently, been removed. What, in such a moment, might a person say?

  Candy’s hands trembled above the keys, and at last, after all these years, she really and truly began.

  DRIVING LESSON

  The storm had come and gone, but in the woods, there was still the impression, a steady and audible drip, an environmental trick the people here knew as tree rain. Water caught in the leaves and slowly funneled down into the fecund soil, and the dark creek swirled and eddied around a cypress knee, a washed down trash barrel, a chunk of road conglomerate. Because it was evening now, when the people came, the owl was startled into flight and flew the heft of himself from one tree to another, farther tree where his head swiveled and his eyes watched, and his feathers against that tree were a kind of cloak for disappearing.

  The people made their way down the trail, and before this, they’d walked the length of Quinby Place because Quinby Place was where the girl had lived. Because this was where so many of them lived. And they’d met and gathered in the yard of Miss Miriam whose idea this was, who’d herself lost a daughter and a husband. And it was hot, especially so after the storm which did nothing to cool the day but charged it with a cruel humidity that collected on their necks and brows as if they were hard at labor and perhaps they were—the work of remembering what they would have preferred not to know in the first place. The people, the neighbors, longed for a glass of sweet tea, a conditioned breeze, a television court show. It was only human to want these things. Even, and perhaps especially, in their most noble moments that fought against the desires that governed one second and the next. They stood in the yard swatting mosquitoes and wanting what they could not have and doing their level best to consider what had been lost. This was important. This, mothers told their children, was serious.

  They held their candles and did their best to shield the flames from what little wind their bodies created as they moved together down Quinby Place. And probably they should have sung. Probably Miss Miriam should have started them all on a worn-out hymn, but Miss Miriam’s experience had taught her how little a song could matter, how much real silence was worth, and but for the occasional irrepressible scream of a child too young to understand memories, they moved without speaking, without much noise at all, and they did not wear dark clothes because it was hot and because this was no funeral. The funeral had been months ago.

  They wore, without much thought, the light colors of summer, loose fabrics meant for breathing, and if Lonnie let her eyes fog over as she liked to do particularly when smoking, she could trick herself into thinking those people down below, those figures which moved with an unusual and pointed solemnity were something altogether unworldly. The candle flames that danced and flickered. The pavement which, from the day’s rain and heat, steamed with figures all its own which were like ghostly reflections of the people who walked.

  Lonnie saw all of this from the roof of a house where she perched, one foot wedged against the brick chimney, with the bad guitarist who went by the name of Dots as in everything’s a circle, man, as in everything’s just one big black hole. It was this black hole, according to Dots, that was the beginning and the end to everything, to everyone. Some sooner than others.

  Lonnie kicked at the chimney. You lied to me, she said. You’re older than you say.

  Dots had just taken a hit, and he choked on it now, wasting what was perfectly good. He tried to suck it back, puckered his lips and moved his head through the air like a vacuum cleaner in some demented world where machines were people and people were machines.

  Lonnie watched him. I just want you to know. I want you to know that I know.

  Dots had given up on the lost hit, and now he looked at Lonnie with a kind of half-smile. Right. Sure thing.

  Lonnie stared down at the procession. There was this parade one time when I was a kid.

  You’re still a kid, Dots said and sat back against the chimney.

  It was Christmas, Lonnie said, and there were these elves, these midgets throwing candy.

  They don’t like that word, Dots said. Midgets.

  Those cinnamons in the red wrappers, Lonnie said.

  Little persons. That’s what they like.

  And butterscotches.

  It’s all about being politically correct.

  Hey, Lonnie said.

  Yeah? Dots said.

  And so these midgets were throwing these butterscotches and these cinnamons. And I saw one and I went after it, and my daddy, he yanked me up so hard, my shoulder pulled out of the socket.

  Dots’ head was back on his neck so all the loose skin of his throat hung in folds. Shit, he said.

  Lonnie stared down at the ground where the little girl screamed at her mama to let her hold the candle.

  I mean if you’re a dude, Dots said.

  It didn’t hurt, Lonnie said. I mean I didn’t feel it hurting.

  Dots grunted. Most of the time, the weed did an all right job of keeping Dots on an even keel unless he got to thinking about his step-daddy, as he was just now. Lonnie could tell by the way his mo
uth twisted up under his nose.

  That’s the way it was, Dots said, when I broke my jaw.

  Lonnie stared at the girl. Her mama had let her carry the candle, and now she was sticking her finger in the flame. She jerked her finger back. Then held it there longer.

  This was different, Lonnie said.

  Dots bit down on his lip.

  There was a car backing up, Lonnie said, and I’d reached up under it.

  Dots sort of laughed, mean-like, and looked at the joint. That is different, he said. Then he put the joint between his lips.

  One of the women walking had a poster. It was a school picture made big and glued at the corners with blue plastic roses.

  What good is this shit? Lonnie said. What good’s any of it?

  Dots took a bottle out of his back pocket. He unscrewed the lid, held it out to Lonnie.

  Lonnie turned her head, and she wasn’t looking at the picture anymore, but her face didn’t change. She took the bottle. She reached for the joint. She smoked it.

  So you told me one thing, Dots said.

  He waited.

  Lonnie rolled her lips. She held the smoke.

  The people walked on, the crying girl with her finger in the flame, the woman and her homemade poster, the rest of them with their candles. It wasn’t dark yet, but it would be soon.

  After a while, after the people had gone down into the swamp, and the owl had heard them, and the owl had flown, and the moon was rising like a sun, Lonnie said, I need your help with something, and Dots said, Right. Sure thing.

  If a place were only trees and creek and rain running off the leaves, then the place had not changed at all. Even that very bridge under which they found the girl’s body looked no different but for the flowers and the stuffed animals and the candles that would eventually go away to theft, to molder, to a trash-picking employee of the city who was finally told, It’s time. And then the bridge, like the water that ran beneath it, would bear no marker of the tragedy that had occurred there, and people would have to work hard, they’d have to tell exaggerated stories to remind themselves what happened.

  But place is not location. It isn’t woods or creeks or owls or, in the case of Black Creek, what the rest of the country calls The Corridor of Shame. Place, like everything, is people, and the people who lived on Quinby Place, the people of Black Creek had, in a few months, changed in ways that were dramatic and permanent and if mirrored in the Earth’s geology would have taken eons.

  Black Creek was not a place where children died. At least that’s what the people had thought even when circumstances said otherwise, and what changed about the people, about then, was that they realized that Black Creek was the kind of place where children died. Black Creek, like any where, was a little world unto its own, and with the girl they found in the water, they had, just before Christmas, buried the part of themselves that believed they were special, that they, in their world, were safe.

  You can see it, Sarah said, in their faces.

  She was down in the basement. She’d called for Lonnie to help her, which really meant she wanted Lonnie to sit on a stool in the corner, an out-of-the-way audience. Sarah was taking pictures again and not just for the school yearbook, not just to pay the bills. She was taking the kind of pictures she wanted to take, the kind of pictures, she told Lonnie, she took when she was young. She was starting, she said, to feel things again.

  After your dad, Sarah said. Before that even.

  Nothing Sarah said was clear or finished, and that had always, she said, been one of her biggest problems, but she was promising to try harder, she was promising to drink less, and she understood the way Lonnie saw her, the way, in fact, that Lonnie was looking at her, right then, during the sit-down Sarah called after she said she’d had some kind of epiphany out at Lake Darpo. She knew and understood what Lonnie thought about her, and she, Sarah, deserved that. She really did, but now she realized that she had a choice. She could either live or die.

  She’d tried to say it as if the choice were obvious, but to Lonnie, it wasn’t. To Lonnie, who’d once found her mother passed out on a near-lethal combination of drinks and pills, nothing was certain. Nothing could be trusted.

  When you look at her face, Sarah said now, what do you see?

  The photograph was taken down at the creek. A woman was on her knees on the bridge. She was looking out into the woods, like there was something there to see, like something was looking back at her.

  Nothing, Lonnie said. I don’t see shit.

  Sarah kept her eyes on Lonnie, like she was waiting for something else. She took in air. She let it out. She said, I’m trying. I really am.

  Lonnie stared at the floor.

  Maybe you could try too, Sarah said.

  Try what? Lonnie said.

  Try talking, Sarah said. Try telling me what you think, how you feel. Tell me what’s happening.

  Lonnie looked up, and her eyes were dark and flat, and Sarah turned away. Sarah dropped the photograph and held onto the edge of the table. You can say, she said, what needs saying.

  Lonnie stared at her mother, the knobs of her rounded back, the ridge of her knuckles. Sarah held the table like she was bracing for a hard hit, and Lonnie did want to hit her. She wanted to hit her as hard as she could, slap her across the face as she had that afternoon when she’d found her on the floor with her head under the foot of the bed. Lonnie had pulled her out by her arms, and it was instinct that pulled her hand back over her shoulder, that brought it down again across Sarah’s powdered cheek, so hard, a foam of chalky spit sprayed against the wall, so hard, Lonnie felt her hand stinging as she dialed 9-1-1, as she held the phone against her own cheek, as she said, My mother’s dead.

  Even then, Lonnie knew that Sarah wasn’t dead, but a part of her hoped that she was. A part of her wished she was dead, too. Everything was just so hard. An end, however it came, and whatever it brought next, seemed better than continuing.

  Sarah held the table, and her shoulders moved up and down, and she said, We’ve gotta tell each other the truth. That’s the only way this works.

  Lonnie jumped up so quick, her heel shoved the stool against the wall, and Sarah jumped. Sarah squeezed her eyes shut.

  Lonnie stared at her mother, at the sharp bones in her mother’s neck. Then she turned and went up the stairs, two at a time. The truth is, she said, I’m fucking starving.

  Lonnie was starving. She was so hungry, she was dizzy, and the stairs, the walls, her room, the tree outside her window, a million leaves spun around her, but more and more, this was the world for Lonnie. More and more what was down was really up and what was up was really down, and everything that should have been right was wrong, wrong, wrong, and it was this sense of wrongness that made Lonnie want to hit her mother, this sense of injury and injustice that moved Lonnie to open her father’s pocket knife, to make a short and careful cut just below her hip.

  Sarah wanted the truth, but everything Lonnie could think of seemed like a lie, like something somebody had imagined.

  Lonnie had changed too. That is, she was changing, so that even her own room seemed to belong to someone else, some girl who thought that if she tried hard enough, if she looked the right way and did the right things that were sometimes the wrong things, she might feel better. She might feel something.

  There was so much Lonnie wanted, so much Lonnie needed. For a while, boys began to stand for it all, and Lonnie knew it wasn’t boys exactly, but it was boys sort of, and so she’d worn the short shorts, and she’d flipped her hair, and she’d dragged Moto up and down the streets swishing and scoping, and they were searching, all right. They were looking as hard as they could, just not for the things that Lonnie claimed, and she’d wanted it. She’d wanted something. She’d wanted it so badly, she couldn’t wait, and so she’d lied and said she’d done it already. She told Moto, made up some big story and all the details—what the room looked like, what he smelled like, how it felt, how, she’d said, everything had changed. />
  None of it was true. None of it was real.

  Nothing, then, had changed. Lonnie’s father was still dead. Her mother was still trying to die, and somewhere in a corner of every minute, Lonnie was still slapping Sarah, over and over again, a string of foam hanging in the air.

  Now Moto was dead, and though the world spun as it always had, Lonnie saw it from some different place. She saw it for what it was, an ugly wobbling blur of dirt and smoke and fire and flash, and like Sarah, Lonnie wanted the truth. She wanted some kind of justice, some sense of reason and purpose. She wanted to hear something besides her own heart beating, and if you wanted something to happen, if you wanted more than a made-up story, you had to do it yourself. You had to open the knife. You had to press the blade until something broke, and then, at least for a minute, things would be right again.

  Lonnie made the cuts, and on her hip was a score, as if there could be some kind of victory in adding up all that she’d lost. When it was done, she went to the window, and on the other side of it, the leaves were still and no rain fell and she called Dots. She told him to get what they needed. She told him to be ready.

  When Moto figured out she was pregnant—and, because she was fifteen and, in some ways, a young fifteen, it was a sort of figuring, a slow progress of problem-solving as if the body had a complicated code that needed to be broken—Lonnie was the first to know.

  Moto didn’t, wouldn’t, say who she’d been with, but Lonnie figured it out soon enough, and when it hit her, when she came to that small and ugly awareness, there was also a larger sort of irrevocable knowledge that both girls sensed more than understood, and they stared, they looked hard at the space between them that seemed, just then, to widen until it was as broad as the streets they’d spent so much time walking together. Looking, Sarah said, for trouble.