by Russell Moon
Witch Boy
Russell Moon
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
I am looking at myself, in the reflection of the…
Chapter 2
The music is loud and uninteresting, and I can honestly…
Chapter 3
I run. I run for home. I run flat out,…
Part Two
Chapter 4
“God, you must have been tired,” Eleanor says, speaking to…
Chapter 5
The first few days in the new house pass, if…
Chapter 6
We learn about the town by trying to get out…
Chapter 7
The party, symmetrically enough, is at Arj’s house. His house…
Part Three
Chapter 8
I wake up screaming, sweating rivers, screaming.
Chapter 9
I spend the balance of the day on the couch.
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
I am looking at myself, in the reflection of the still water in one of the many here-today-gone-tomorrow pools that appear in the woods. My woods.
Hands and knees sink into the damp earth at the edge of the small pool as I crouch lower, lower and lower to examine myself more closely. My bluetick hound, Chuck, is hard on my shoulder, he and his reflection every bit as confused by me as I am.
The frayed tips of my long black hair contact the water, and I stop. The reflective me and the actual one meld, a sort of liquid hair frame boxing us in together, stuck with each other. For moments, I cannot move.
This is no Narcissus here. I am not loving what I’m seeing, and would in fact be the happiest guy if I looked down and saw something else, someone else. I keep checking, every day, as I pass every reflective surface.
But I always find this face. And I ask again, “Who in hell is this?”
By the time I look around, I have no idea where my dog is. They are familiar woods, our woods, and Chuck could be in any part of them. Something happens, I guess, when I go looking, when I go thinking, when I go down there into reverie. I don’t know what it is, but it upsets Chuck, and he’s gone.
“Chuck,” I call out, and hear my voice roll out, around, and back to me. Birds alight, critters skitter, but Chuck does not return.
I know he hears me. I hate it when he does this. He’s being dramatic. Either that or he’s getting laid.
“Chuck!” I bellow.
He has no sense, no discretion, no discrimination. My dog feels about sex the way most cats feel about killing: anything that moves.
“Chuck!”
I surprise myself with the intensity of my yell. He makes me get like this. It’s not that he has to be obedient and stupid all the time like other dogs. We don’t have that kind of relationship. It’s well beyond that. We’re more like brothers. It’s like if your younger brother were going around having loads of sex before you ever even…
“Chuuuuck!”
The entire woods shake with my rage. I squeeze my eyes shut, my fists pulled so tight my fingertips just might pop through the backs of my hands.
I open my eyes to see it actually happening, the trees trembling, pine needles and leaves parachuting to the ground, branches snapping.
One old maple, thirty yards ahead, finally gives up and falls with a cracking, snapping fanfare. Three younger trees are flattened underneath.
“Cool,” I say, coolly. I used to scare myself when I did this kind of almighty crap. But you get used to it. What else can you do?
The dog yelps. He remains in hiding.
I am patient.
The tree quietly shifts, rustles, as if settling down into death. Only it’s reversing. It comes up off the ground a foot, then three, then six, as if pushing itself up, then slaps back to earth.
I did that, you see. It’s what I do.
The dog yelps again.
“I see a big boulder,” I say out into the distance. “Chuck, would you like to see the big boulder?”
Chuck does not want to see the big boulder. He comes slinking out of the brush. He won’t look at me as we resume our walk, to our place. First I scared him into the trees with my inexplicable behavior, then I scared him back out likewise.
This of course is totally unfair, but what isn’t? It is not Chuck’s fault that I am tense and frustrated. But it’s not mine either.
“What was it this time, Chuck, you pervert? A chipmunk? A duck?”
It is not his fault, what is happening to me, to us. It is not his fault that we are not what we once were. We are not a boy and his dog. Haven’t been for about six months now, since around when I turned seventeen, and things have gotten weirder and weirder. Things like not recognizing my own reflection. Things like knocking down trees and throwing two-ton rocks. Without even touching them.
You know, things like that.
And that is the extent of what I know.
There is more to know. You know there’s got to be more to know.
So who does know?
Maybe Chuck. My best friend, my better me. The further I get from myself, from knowing myself, the more I feel I need him by my side. I have no explanation for this, I simply feel it.
But if he does know, he’s not talking.
“Sorry,” I say to him as we reach our spot. I crouch down, run my hand lightly over his flat, velvety head and make sure his eyes catch mine. “Sorry,” I say.
He snorts, then circles around behind me and climbs on my back. I climb us up the tree.
This is as close as we get, these days, to rightness. We are sitting in our tree, in our woods. Like we do. We are above it all, away from it all, yet somehow in control of it all.
When we’re up here, I immediately feel a different relationship with everything. I look across the woods, the fields, the nearby houses, and on a good day, across the far hilltops. And if I can see it, it is mine.
Like I said, I move things. With my mind. The rocks, boulders, rotting tree trunks in the woods below us. Cows in the meadow beyond. I look at them, stare at them, think about them where they are and think about them someplace else. And there they go. Haven’t you always wanted to do that? You have, of course. I always did, and then I did it. I stared at one of those big-headed cows, standing in the same spot, chewing the same plug of cud over and over, until I just couldn’t take it anymore, and somewhere, way deep in the itchiest innermost section of my brain, some synapsey thing screamed, Do something with yourself, you goddamn cow! And then, before I could even comment to Chuck on the irony of it all, HowNow—that’s what me and Chuck named her—HowNow was chewing from the farthest point away in the field. Just where I’d imagined throwing her in my frustration.
That’s how I found out I could do it. I’ve thrown a lot of crap now, in the last six months.
It is the one single singular thing I do, and I haven’t the vaguest idea how I do it. Chuck and I are the only two who know about it, because until I get a grip on whatever the hell is happening, I don’t dare try to explain it to anyone else.
I’m afraid of what someone might say or do. I’m afraid of what I might say or do.
I’m afraid, to tell the truth, of being whatever the hell it is I am.
I look at Chuck whenever I’ve done it, and he gives me the look. Wrinkles up his intelligent, dirty sweat sock of a face in slow-eyed recognition. Appreciation. He’s my dog, my boy. Whatever I do, he will give me the appreciation face. That’s his job.
No matter what he really thinks.
“Sure, Chuck,” I say today. “Big deal, isn’t it? I can move rocks and cows. Does it do me one single ounce of good? Does i
t enhance the experience of being me one bit? I can defy nature, but can I throw a baseball two hundred miles an hour? No. Can I sing? No. Can I invent a computer games system that will bring Wall Street and Silicon Valley and girls to my feet? No. Trees fall down when I tell them to, and I’m still such a mouse in my own life that I’m jealous of my dog.”
Chuck gives me the appreciation face. Superior sonofabitch.
“Right,” I say. “Of course you’re all serene and philosophical and all. I’d trade tricks with you in a second. C’mon, let’s swap. You make stuff fly around, and I’ll lick myself in mixed company. Whaddya say?”
Chuck knows. I know he knows.
He gives his boys a lick and grins at me.
It is a long walk home for Chuck and me, longer than usual. It is our last walk together in these woods, because tomorrow we are leaving Port Caledonia for a place called Blackwater. Nice college town: rolling hills, running water, good four-season climate with snow in winter and sweat in summer so you never wake up not knowing what month you’re in. But more than missing Port Caledonia, and all the friends I didn’t quite make here, and all the good times I almost had but didn’t, I am going to miss bits. Bits like the big roundabout on the cul-de-sac where our house is. It’s covered in crap from everybody walking their dogs there and not picking up after them, but we have the greenest grass and the earliest-blooming dogwoods as a result. I learned to ride my bike spinning around that roundabout alone four, five, six hundred laps at a go.
I’ll miss the woods. I’ll miss the woods badly. There are piney woods all over this part of the world, so I’m not afraid that I’ll never find another one. But I will still miss this one. Things happened to me here. Me and Chuck became me and Chuck here. I learned to move things twenty times my size without touching them here. A guy doesn’t forget stuff like that.
My dad shed the old mortal coil here in P.C. That is, he died here. Not that that should make much difference in how I feel, because I have no recollection of the man. His ashes were scattered here too, though I have no recollection of them, either. He was here and then he was not, and while that does not leave me with a bunch of memories of the two of us hauling catfish out of the river or throwing curveballs to each other across the front lawn, it leaves me with something all the same. It’s not a memory. It’s a memory of a memory, and it lives here.
I stopped being a kid here in the Port Caledonia woods. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I know it’s a big thing.
I’m going to miss Jules, mostly. I don’t even like to say it, because saying I’ll miss her brings me that much closer to tomorrow and reality and being without her. She is my oldest friend, not really my girlfriend, really my true fine love. We have the kind of love, Jules and me, where we know instinctively that there has always been a sort of not-to-be-ness about us, but we are wrecked at the mention of being separate. So for the most part we’ve been leaving the whole issue alone.
Alone. Right.
Tomorrow is it, then. And tonight it’s good-bye. We haven’t even had sex yet, me and Jules—me and anybody—and so we have decided that we need to do it tonight. There’s a party: we are meeting there, and when the music and beer and, I don’t know, the lighting, are all right, we are going to slip away someplace and make love, me and Jules. Make love, me and Jules. That’s what it will be, love. No matter how botched and weird and awkward the act is going to come off. It is going to be love. Making love, me and Jules.
I do like to say it.
Probably more than I want to do it.
I’m not a freak. Or maybe I am. I don’t know what it is, but make no mistake—I am the problem. We would have done it a long time ago if I didn’t keep coming up with strep throat and dead grandmothers and old weightlifting injuries. It is I who stand between me and us, because Jules is well into the idea for reasons not immediately apparent to any of her friends. I, like every other guy in Port Caledonia and a vast majority of the girls, would be honored to be Jules’s bedmate or conqueror or supplicant or whatever the deal is supposed to be. Yet something, something deep and strident and genuine, has told me over and over: no.
But tonight I will ignore it. Tonight I will be with Jules because being with Jules is, even more so, too right to ignore. And then I’m going to tell her about what I can do.
And then, I’m hoping, maybe something will be different. And tomorrow we won’t be as alone.
I walk into the house, the home, soon to be the memory. Right now all it is is a warehouse. Brown corrugated boxes line the entrance hall. All we own, save a few essentials, is in these boxes. The furniture, such as it is, is ours if we want it, but we don’t. Nothing matches, nothing works, nothing much matters. Every stick has been picked up at a garage sale or a junkyard, and we couldn’t care less. The new house comes furnished, and that was all we needed to know to leave all the old stuff behind.
I stop just inside the door and take in the reality of it. My life in a box. Every thing of consequence, of my life, of my mother’s life, fits into pretty small boxes. If it can’t fit into the bed of our pickup truck, it ceases to be part of our lives anymore. It becomes instant past.
I guess we live kind of blinkered. And that’s just fine with me and Eleanor.
There are two machines that complete what you might call our family unit. One is clearly my mother’s favorite. He is a green Apple iMac she calls Big Ben, and on whom she taps day and night.
“Hi, Ben,” I say as I walk past the study/bedroom door. “Hi, Eleanor.”
Eleanor is my mom. She is a very good mother and leaves me alone much of the time because I can be trusted and she knows that, and because I want to be left alone and she knows that. She is also a very good anthropologist because she never leaves her research alone. That’s why she’s got this big-deal fellowship. That’s why Blackwater State College.
“Hi, Chuck,” she says, looking up from the screen with a dirty, guilty smile. She always looks like I have seen her at something seriously intimate when I catch her alone with Ben. As if I’m bothered by her preference for technology over most human interaction. “Hi, Marcus Aurelius,” she says.
Please, though. It is just Marcus. Birth-certificate-wise the Aurelius bit is true, but I don’t use it. Would you?
The other machine is the one I shamelessly favor. Even Chuck gets jealous. It’s Brainwave, and I love it and I excel at it. I check in on it every time I walk into the house, the way new parents must check on an infant. I enter my bedroom, walk to the desk, plunk down in front of it, and gently caress the thumbpads. “Yo, B.W., did you miss me?” I say as the machine heats up.
A groan comes out of Chuck. I disregard him. I am in position, poised, alert, good posture. I face the wall of my bedroom, where the screen flickers at me, on the opposite side of the wall where Eleanor’s screen flickers at her. Like we are about to commence a gigantic game of Battleship.
Port Caledonia. Woods. Cows and trees and boulders and did I say I learned to ride my bike right out there on that roundabout? Six hundred circuits. Jules.
Chuck sighs and flattens himself like a rug.
The game begins.
“’Bye,” I say out loud, to Eleanor and Chuck and this world where the rest of you dwell.
“’Bye,” I hear in return.
CHAPTER 2
The music is loud and uninteresting, and I can honestly say that I could not identify one single band if anybody asked me. Fortunately, no one is likely to ask me that or any other question at Doone Howe’s party. Aside from wealth and good looks there isn’t a lot bad you can say about Doone Howe. He was good enough to invite me to his end-of-summer party, which is commendable since I don’t get a lot of invites and he doesn’t know who I am. But there are a lot of rich, beautiful boys who still would exclude people just because they can.
And Doone has excluded nobody, as far as I can tell. I sit in the corner of his expansive living room farthest from the stereo, watching all of Port Caledonia’s un
der-twenty-one population meander in. There is dancing going on, and drinking, and laughing, and head-butting. People spill out through the sliding glass doors and into the steam of Port Caledonia August, spread out on Doone’s dad’s pearly green lawn or continue out to the sand barge and even into the river.
I gaze out the window. You can forget sometimes, but from this vantage point the pull of the water, of the particular landscape of Port Caledonia, is undeniable. The clean, strong River Cal meets the estuary right out there, under the big bridge. Woods seem to accumulate from all over to meet here, hard by the running water. This is where forest meets ocean, estuary, river. Can’t ask for much more out of a place than that.
I pull myself away from the window. I drink beer. And I watch. I am, for the moment, sad and mad at myself because I notice that this is also the kind of party where people could actually bring their dogs. I should get Chuck. Chuck would love this. Everybody is feeding pretzel sticks and tiny sausages to every dog who comes by, and I look at all the mellow mutts and I know if I’d brought Chuck that one of us would have gotten a little piece of action, at least. In the event the other one had chickened out.
I am a wreck already, thinking about Jules and Jules alone, and if I am any sweatier by the time she arrives I am going to have to tell her I went in the river with all the happening guys out there.
Which, I freely admit, I am not. A happening guy. I have never been what you would call an insider, couldn’t even imagine it, frankly. But I’m no outsider either. Outsider has a certain something, a cachet, about it and, it has always seemed to me, a kind of b.s. about it. It’s something to be achieved, outsiderhood, something you have to actually strive for, and I have just never been able to make the effort required.