by Ike Hamill
I was already there, so I obliged.
Now, a decent dog trainer would explain that I just reinforced the undesirable behavior. This dog just jumped up on me, and I punished him by scratching him behind the ears. I shouldn’t have taken my father to the Mini-Mart, and I should have never fulfilled his request for hotdog rolls. To do so was only guaranteeing that he would call again if he needed mustard, or toothpaste, or whatever. But I was a path-of-least-resistance guy. I was already at my dad’s, and the quickest way to get him to leave me alone was to get his damn hotdog rolls.
I planted him in the Dodge and drove down there.
I didn’t realize that my dad was packing heat. He had stashed his gun in his pocket for some old-man reason.
I didn’t realize that he was going to get really nervous while I was inside the Mini-Mart. Somehow, he decided that murderers were out to get him.
I bought the hotdog rolls, and I even picked up a box of those plain donuts that nobody buys. There’s nothing at all appetizing about a plain donut, but that’s what he likes. I didn’t even look at him as I rounded the car and pulled open the door. I tossed the bag in the back and tried to thread the key into the ignition. The Dodge had this thing where if you put the key in wrong, it would never turn. Most keys are binary things—they’re either in or out. For some reason, with this Dodge, you could push it in all the way, think it was fine, and then when you would try to start the car the whole switch would lock up.
I turned at the sight of something shaking.
It was my Dad’s hand. He was pointing his flimsy-looking gun right in my face. The little pea-shooter barrel was only inches away from my head.
“Dad?”
He didn’t answer. The gun stopped shaking a little as he tightened his grip and squeezed the trigger.
“Dad?”
BANG!
The gun went off and I was vaguely aware that my window had shattered behind me. Somehow, due to his stupid palsy, the bullet had missed me. It was a miracle.
The gun was shaking again. Before he could pull the trigger a second time, I reached back and pulled at my door handle. It snapped off in my hand, of course. The only thing that saved me from eating a bullet was the hysterical dog. It had started barking at the sound of the first shot, and my father’s hearing returned enough that he heard it before he could squeeze the trigger again. He turned to look. The dog was snarling and barking at the window of its own car and my father’s attention was pulled to that side.
I dropped the broken door handle and reached back through the shattered glass. I pushed it out of the frame. The little diamonds of glass were held together by a layer of plastic that they embed in auto glass. At least I think that’s how it works. Anyway, with the glass gone, I slithered through that window like a frightened snake. I landed on the pavement and stayed low until I was away from the car.
I ran inside and yelled for help as my father’s gun went off again.
The police took him away. I talked to them later and they said he was being evaluated. That night with the gun was the last time I saw him. He didn’t live long. I didn’t attend the funeral.
He was never a social man, and he didn’t keep up with Mom’s friends after she passed. They were all too young for him to socialize with. With few friends, and no family on speaking terms besides me, I doubt there were many people at his service.
I don’t regret missing the funeral. I’m not one to hold a grudge or anything, but I also don’t hold to sentimental ceremony. As far as I was concerned, he died when he tried to kill me. I know, it was probably just dementia or some other old-man disease. He didn’t mean to kill me. He probably had no idea who I was.
Still.
---- * ----
I wake up with a sharp, painful intake of breath. I’ve been dreaming of my father, and I don’t know why.
The ceiling is jagged rock that looks moist.
The damp, cool air feels like a cave. I look towards the entrance.
Yup—a cave.
Something warm and wet touches my belly and I look up. Her hand stops when she sees that my eyes are open. She has some kind of pelt in her hand. She was dabbing it on one of my cuts.
“Ungh,” I say. It’s not what I was trying to say, but that’s what came out. I can’t think of what I was trying to say.
The woman is naked. I shake my head, trying to dismiss the realization. The movement scares away my consciousness and my eyes shut again.
I think about my mother.
I was a teenager when we lost her. She went quick, so nobody had a chance to get used to the idea. One day we had an emergency meeting in the living room, and my dad delivered the news. He said, “Your mother is sick, so we’re all going to pitch in extra hard to make sure she gets enough rest.”
He meant that me and my brother were going to pitch in. He didn’t seem to pitch in at all. In fact, my father worked such long hours that he barely saw my mother during the last days she lived with us.
I open my eyes and blink until I can see again.
What was I thinking?
The woman dressing my wounds isn’t naked, and this isn’t a cave. I sit up quickly and wait for the world to catch up with me.
“Janice? What are you doing here?” I ask. It looks just like her—the woman who runs puzzleBox—but she doesn’t make sense in this context. Actually, this context doesn’t make sense. “Where are we?”
“Here,” she says. She presses a white towel into my hands.
We’re in a pretty small room—no windows and a wide wooden door. I’m sitting up on a firm cot and Janice is seated on a rolling chair. There’s very little furniture and no decorations. Janice sets down her pink plastic tub on a filing cabinet and uses another towel to wipe her hands.
I’m wearing some kind of sweatpants and no shirt.
“Are these new stitches?” I ask, looking down at my stomach.
Janice nods. “You were bleeding internally. They patched you up and cleaned up some of your other wounds as well.”
“Who? Where are we?”
I swing my feet to the floor. It’s a sketchy move. My body aches in strange and unexpected ways. Every tiny movement informs me of an injury.
“We picked you up near the hospital,” she says. “You weren’t doing very well.”
“But why? Who is we?”
“Listen,” she says. “You’ve been through a lot. Why don’t you get some rest, clear your head, and we’ll talk about it later.”
“No,” I say. I try to get to my feet, but my muscles don’t seem to have any real strength. Either that, or I just don’t have decent control over them. Before I can even start to lift myself from the cot, she stands, takes her pink bucket, and slips through the door. It seems like five minutes before I can follow her. The handle doesn’t turn—I’ve been locked in.
I barely make it back to the cot.
My consciousness begins to fade as I sit down. I’m vaguely aware that I slip onto my back.
Chapter Nineteen
* Past *
MY MOTHER GREW HERBS on the sill, flowers in the window box, and vegetables in the garden that the window overlooked. When she wasn’t at work, she would either be in the dining room, looking out over her garden, or she would be out there in the dirt. I don’t mean to say that she wasn’t a devoted mother. Back then, when I grew up, kids weren’t shadowed every moment by protective parents. We were allowed to go off on our own adventures, and Mom was allowed to have her garden time.
My brother and I were riding bikes down in the sand pits one summer day, and I rode back double-time with a question on my lips. She was out in the garden.
It look me a second to catch my breath.
She looked at her dirt-covered gloves and then wiped her forehead with her arm.
“Mom? Can we spend the night at the pits?”
“With the tent?” she asked.
My brother and I had anticipated this question. We weren’t allowed to use the tent because we h
ad gotten it all wet and bunched it back up without drying it out first. The result had been a disgusting mess of mold that took my dad a weekend to clean.
I shook my head. “Just sleeping bags. You know—out under the stars. The guy on the radio said it was going to be clear tonight.”
She looked down. “You’re standing on my gourd.”
I followed her gaze. A vine disappeared under my foot. Squished out the left side of my shoe was the end of a baby vegetable. Its tender life had been exterminated by my careless step.
I took a step back and pressed on with the request. “The other guys are all going too. We’ll just have a lantern—no fire—and we’ll bring sanniches.”
Back then, my brother and I ran with a crowd of like-minded boys from the neighborhood. Depending on who was away on vacation, there were seven of us. That night, I suspected only four would get permission to make the trip. Honestly, I had no idea if my mother would say yes or no. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable request, but sometimes parents used their knowledge and experience to invent crazy reasons to deny fun activities. A large part of me suspected that this trip would fall into that category.
“Okay,” she said.
I was already running for my bike, which I had spilled carelessly in the driveway.
“But!” she yelled, making me stop in my tracks. “You have to promise that if you or your brother get scared, you’ll come right home.”
“Okay!” I yelled. My muscles twitched, ready to run.
“And, you have to promise to tell Mrs. Hubert that you’re planning to be out there.”
Mrs. Hubert didn’t own the sand pits—they sat on lots that were long-ago reclaimed by the town—but she was considered the pit superintendent, as far as us kids were concerned. She was a retired teacher, whose house sat right on the edge of the lot. In a way, she was worse than a mother. She was the wicked witch of the pits. She would yell at us for stuff that Mom would never bother us about. I couldn’t let Mrs. Hubert catch me burn an anthill, chase a dog, or skin the bark off a tree. We all knew exactly which areas of the pits we could stick to without Mrs. Hubert seeing us, and no kid would willingly go talk with her on purpose.
Still, better to have the Mrs. Hubert condition than no permission at all.
“Okay,” I said.
“Promise,” she said.
“I promise.”
“Stay warm.”
I was off like a shot.
Inside, I tied my brother’s pack to mine and I wore them both. I had to lean forward to keep my balance, and biking like that was almost impossible. Every time I tried to pedal, the shift of the packs tried to drag me to one side or the other. Fortunately, the trip to the pits was completely downhill, and I could just coast.
When I got back down there, the guys were playing rocks and sticks.
I dumped the packs next to my bike and practically threw myself down to the ground.
My brother looked at me with cautious hope. “What did she say?”
“Doncha see those packs? What the hell do you think she said?”
My friends laughed. In our little gang, the only ones who didn’t laugh were my brother and his friend. They were too little to laugh at bad words.
“We have to get sandwiches then,” Jeremy said. He didn’t have to ask his parents for permission. Most summer nights, he slept at my house anyway. As long as he checked in the next morning, they wouldn’t know the difference.
“Forget that,” I said. “I think we should make a big fire and cook up hotdogs.”
“Yeah!” my brother said.
I only said that thing about hotdogs so I could lessen the impact of what I said next. “We have to talk to Mrs. Hubert though.”
There was only a ten-percent chance that my mother would follow up with Mrs. Hubert about the evening’s plans, but in case she did, it was imperative that I follow through. My mother was generally forgiving, but I had promised. If I broke a promise to my mother, punishment would be immediate and harsh.
My brother was shaking his head.
I looked to Jeremy. My friend Jeremy had famously jumped off of his garage roof with nothing but a skateboard and the lofty goal of “sticking the landing.” My friend Jeremy had once thrown a clod of dirt directly at the head of Eddie Deroille—the biggest bully in school. Even Jeremy was terrified to talk to Mrs. Hubert.
“Come on. It won’t be so bad,” I said.
My brother moaned like he did when he was constipated.
“Come on. We’ll get it over with right now.”
“You guys go,” my brother said. “Me and Peter will stay here and guard the stuff.”
I didn’t want to let my brother off the hook, but it was a solid plan. I was just old enough to get a little slack from Mrs. Hubert, but she would have never trusted my brother to stay out in the pits all night. She didn’t think my brother was old enough to tie his own shoes.
“Okay,” I said. “Just me an Jeremy will go. You guys get rocks for a fire pit. Set it up somewhere that she won’t see. Make sure it’s out of the wind, and don’t pick a low spot where it will get washed out if it starts to rain. And don’t set up too close to any of this dry…”
“Come on,” Jeremy said. He pulled me by my shirt. “If we have to do this, let’s just get it over with.”
“Yeah, okay.”
That was the way with me and Jeremy. A thing would be my idea and he would balk. Then, five minutes later, he would champion the idea by the time I was souring on it.
---- * ----
Mrs. Hubert had a rock wall around her yard. It was low enough that I could step right over it, but she hated that. Instead, we had to walk over to the gate and go precisely up the path. None of us kids ever knew what window she would be looking out.
“Did you hear about Mort?” Jeremy asked.
“What, that thing on his face?”
Some doctor had cut a big mole off of Morton’s face right after school ended. His parents didn’t let him outside to play for the whole first part of the summer because they didn’t want him to get a scar.
“Nope,” Jeremy said. “He broke his leg.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. He was going up to Ms. Hubert’s house from the front side—you know, up the front walk?—and he stepped off the stones. They say that as soon as his foot hit the grass, his leg just broke.”
I stopped. We were both standing right in the middle of the flagstones of the back walk. One false move, and we would be on the very grass he was describing as potentially deadly.
“That’s bull,” I said.
“No, seriously.”
“His parents just let him out of the house the other day. What was he doing all the way over here?”
“Salt-man saw him. He came over to get potpourri for his mom.”
That part of the story checked out. I had bought potpourri from Mrs. Hubert myself. It was the best birthday gift we could hope for—moms loved it, and it was cheap.
“And he broke his leg?”
Jeremy nodded and held up three fingers. His oath held no weight. He was always swearing to things and never apologized when they turned out to be false. This was the major problem—I lived two blocks away from everyone else. They all got gossip instantly, and I always had to wait a day or two before it filtered over to my side of the neighborhood.
“He has a cast and everything?”
“I didn’t see a cast,” Jeremy said. “But you can break your leg and not have a cast. It happened that way to Cindy Harmon.”
“She didn’t break her leg,” I said. “She sprained her ankle.”
“She had crutches for two weeks.”
“That doesn’t mean it was broken. Come on,” I said. I started up the path again. I could tell that Mrs. Hubert was already watching us through one of her windows. We could never tell which one, but she was always watching from one of them.
Jeremy came right up on the porch beside me as I knocked.
“We should h
ave gone around front,” Jeremy said.
I shot him a look—Jeremy was great at having an idea moments after it was of no use.
We stood there for one tense second before the door began to open. That was one of the creepy things about Mrs. Hubert—the door would open almost immediately. It was like she was standing right on the other side of the door, just waiting for someone to knock. Her house smelled like ginger snaps. On their best day, ginger snaps are the worst cookies. Any sweetness they have is masked by the medicine taste of the spice. Even a raisin cookie makes some attempt at being sweet.
“Boys?” she asked.
I had seen her call girls by their actual names. Boys were just boys. The only time she used a boy’s name was when she was ratting him out to his mother.
“Hello, Mrs. Hubert,” I said.
At the same time, Jeremy said, “Hi, Mrs. Hubert.”
“Yes?”
“We’re supposed to tell you. I mean, my mom wanted me to tell you that we’re going to camp in the pits tonight. If you see any lights or something, or hear us messing around…”
“We’ll be quiet,” Jeremy interjected.
“Yeah, but if you hear us, it’s just us. Okay?”
“There’s something you should know,” Mrs. Hubert said. She glanced over her shoulder, behind the door, like she had a special secret to share and wanted to ensure privacy. She leaned forward through the gap and became just a face between the door and jamb.
She waited for me to prompt her.
“Yeah?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. You fellows know about the animals out there in the woods, correct?”
“Animals?” Jeremy asked.
“They’re not about much during the day, but at night. I admit, I sometimes rush from my carport to the door when I pull in after dark. They’re especially active in the summer, for some reason. I suppose there’s more nocturnal prey running around in the summer. Do you think that’s it?”
“What kind of animals?” Jeremy asked.
“I’m no zoologist. I wouldn’t want to speak out of turn. Did you know that this part of our country was once home to the largest carnivores on the continent?”