Black House (17 page)

“A note,” she says, and gets up. She crosses the short length of floor between the rocker and the table like someone still in a dream. The note is a piece of paper, folded over. Written across the half she can see is Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. In college, just before meeting Dale, she had a boyfriend who used to call her that. She asked him to stop—it was annoying, sappy—and when he kept forgetting (on purpose, she suspected), she dropped him like a rock. Now here it is again, that stupid nickname, mocking her.

Judy turns on the sink tap without taking her eyes from the note, fills her cupped hand with cold water, and drinks. A few drops fall on Sweet Judy Blue Eyes and the name smears at once. Written in fountain-pen ink? How antique! Who writes with a fountain pen these days?

She reaches for the note, then draws back. The sound from inside the box is louder now. It’s a humming sound. It—

“It’s flies,” she says. Her throat has been refreshed by the water and her voice isn’t so croaky, but to herself, Judy still sounds like the Crow Gorg. “You know the sound of flies.”

Get the note.

Don’t want to.

Yes, but you NEED to! Now get it! What happened to your GUTS, you little chickenshit?

Good question.
Fucking
good question. Judy’s tongue comes out, slathers her upper lip and philtrum. Then she takes the note and unfolds it.

Sorry there is only one “kiddie-knee” (kindney). The other I fryed and ate. It was very good!

The Fisherman

The nerves in Judy Marshall’s fingers, palms, wrists, and forearms suddenly shut down. The color drops so completely from her face that the blue veins in her cheeks become visible. It’s surely a miracle that she doesn’t pass out. The note drops from her fingers and goes seesawing to the floor. Shrieking her son’s name over and over again, she throws back the lid of the fisherman’s creel.

Inside are shiny red coils of intestine, crawling with flies. There are the wrinkled sacs of lungs and the fist-sized pump that was a child’s heart. There is the thick purple pad of a liver . . . and one kidney. This mess of guts is crawling with flies and all the world is gorg, is gorg, is gorg.

In the sunny stillness of her kitchen Judy Marshall now begins to howl, and it is the sound of madness finally broken free of its flimsy cage, madness unbound.

Butch Yerxa intended to go in after a single smoke—there’s always a lot to do on Strawberry Fest! days (although kindhearted Butch doesn’t hate the little artificial holiday the way Pete Wexler does). Then Petra English, an orderly from Asphodel, wandered over and they started talking motorcycles, and before you know it twenty minutes have passed.

He tells Petra he has to go, she tells him to keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down, and Butch slips back in through the door to an unpleasant surprise. There is Charles Burnside, starkers, standing beside the desk with his hand on the rock Butch uses as a paperweight. (His son made it in camp last year—painted the words on it, anyway—and Butch thinks it’s cute as hell.) Butch has nothing against the residents—certainly he would give Pete Wexler a pasting if he knew about the thing with the cigarettes, never mind just reporting him—but he doesn’t like them touching his things. Especially this guy, who is fairly nasty when he has his few wits about him. Which he does now. Butch can see it in his eyes. The real Charles Burnside has come up for air, perhaps in honor of Strawberry Fest!

And speaking of strawberries, Burny has apparently been into them already. There are traces of red on his lips and tucked into the deep folds at the corners of his mouth.

Butch barely looks at this, though. There are other stains on Burny. Brown ones.

“Want to take your hand off that, Charles?” he asks.

“Off what?” Burny asks, then adds: “Asswipe.”

Butch doesn’t want to say
Off my pet rock,
that sounds stupid. “Off my paperweight.”

Burny looks down at the rock, which he has just replaced (there was a little blood and hair on it when he emerged from the toilet stall, but cleanup is what bathroom sinks are for). He drops his hand from it and just stands there. “Clean me up, bozo. I shit myself.”

“So I see. But first tell me if you’ve gone and spread your crap around the kitchen. And I know you’ve been down there, so don’t lie.”

“Warshed my hands first,” Burny says, and shows them. They are gnarled, but pink and clean for all that. Even the nails are clean. He certainly has washed them. He then adds: “Jackoff.”

“Come on down to the bathroom with me,” Butch says. “The jackoff asswipe will get you cleaned up.”

Burny snorts, but comes willingly enough.

“You ready for the dance this afternoon?” Butch asks him, just to be saying something. “Got your dancing shoes all polished, big boy?”

Burny, who can surprise you sometimes when he’s actually home, smiles, showing a few yellow teeth. Like his lips, they are stained with red. “Yowza, I’m ready to rock,” he says.

Although Ebbie’s face doesn’t show it, he listens with growing unease to T.J.’s story about Tyler Marshall’s abandoned bike and sneaker. Ronnie’s face, on the other hand, shows
plenty
of unease.

“So what’re we gonna do, Ebbie?” T.J. asks when he’s done. He’s finally getting his breath back from his rapid pedal up the hill.

“What do you mean, what’re we gonna do?” Ebbie says. “Same things we were gonna do anyway, go downstreet, see what we can find for returnable bottles. Go down the park and trade Magics.”

“But . . . but what if—”

“Shut your yap,” Ebbie says. He knows what two words T.J. is about to say, and he doesn’t want to hear them. His dad says it’s bad luck to toss a hat on the bed, and Ebbie never does it. If that’s bad luck, mentioning some freako killer’s name has got to be twice as bad.

But then that idiot Ronnie Metzger goes and says it anyway . . . sort of. “But Ebbie, what if it’s the Misherfun? What if Ty got grabbed by the—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Ebbie says, and draws back his fist as if to hit the damn mushmouth.

At that moment the raghead clerk pops out of the 7-Eleven like a turbaned jack out of his box. “I want none of that talk here!” he cries. “You go now, do your filthy-talk another place! Or I call police!”

Ebbie starts to pedal slowly away, in a direction that will take him farther from Queer Street (under his breath he mutters
dune coon,
another charming term he has learned from his father), and the other two boys follow him. When they have put a block between them and the 7-Eleven, Ebbie stops and faces the other two, both his gut and his jaw jutting.

“He rode off on his own half an hour ago,” he says.

“Huh?”
says T.J.

“Who did what?” says Ronnie.

“Ty Marshall. If anyone asks, he rode off on his own half an hour ago. When we were . . . ummm . . .” Ebbie casts his mind back, something that’s hard for him because he has had so little practice. In ordinary circumstances, the present is all Ebbie Wexler needs.

“When we were looking in the window of the Allsorts?” T.J. asks timidly, hoping he isn’t buying himself one of Ebbie’s ferocious Indian burns.

Ebbie looks at him blankly for a moment, then smiles. T.J. relaxes. Ronnie Metzger only goes on looking bewildered. With a baseball bat in his hands or a pair of hockey skates on his feet, Ronnie is prince of all he surveys. The rest of the time he’s pretty much at sea.

“That’s right,” Ebbie says, “yeah. We was lookin’ in the window of Schmitt’s, then that truck came along, the one playin’ the punk-ass music, and then Ty said he hadda split.”

“Where’d he have to go?” T.J. asks.

Ebbie isn’t bright, but he is possessed of what might be termed “low cunning.” He knows instinctively that the best story is a
short
story—the less there is, the smaller the chance that someone will trip you up with an inconsistency. “He didn’t tell us that. He just said he hadda go.”

“He didn’t go anywhere,” Ronnie says. “He just got behind because he’s a . . .” He pauses, arranging the word, and this time it comes out right. “Slowpoke.”

“You never mind that,” Ebbie says. “What if the . . . what if
that guy
got him, you dummocks? You want people sayin’ it was because he couldn’t keep up? That he got killed or somethin’ because we left him behind? You want people sayin’ it was our fault?”

“Gee,” Ronnie says. “You don’t really think the Misherfun
—Fisherman—
got Ty, do you?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Ebbie says, “but I don’t mind it that he’s gone. He was startin’ to piss me off.”

“Oh.” Ronnie contrives to look both vacant and satisfied.
What a dummocks he is,
Ebbie marvels.
What a total and complete dummocks.
And if you didn’t believe it, just think of how Ronnie, who’s as strong as a horse, allows Ebbie to give him Indian burn after Indian burn. A day will probably come when Ronnie realizes he doesn’t have to put up with that anymore, and on that day he may well pound Ebbie into the ground like a human tent peg, but Ebbie doesn’t worry about such things; he’s even worse at casting his mind forward than he is at casting it back.

“Ronnie,” Ebbie says.

“What?”

“Where were we when Tyler took off?”

“Um . . . Schmitt’s Allsorts?”

“Right. And where’d he go?”

“Didn’t say.”

Ebbie sees that for Ronnie this is already becoming the truth and is satisfied. He turns to T.J. “You got it?”

“I got it.”

“Then let’s go.”

They pedal off. The dummocks pulls a little ahead of Ebbie and T.J. as they roll along the tree-lined street, and Ebbie allows this. He swings his bike a little closer to T.J.’s and says: “You see anything else back there? Anybody? Like a guy?”

T.J. shakes his head. “Just his bike and his sneaker.” He pauses, remembering as hard as he can. “There were some leaves scattered around. From the hedge. And I think there might have been a feather. Like a crow feather?”

Ebbie dismisses this. He is grappling with the question of whether or not the Fisherman has actually come close to him this morning, close enough to snatch one of his buddies. There is a bloodthirsty part of him that likes the idea, that relishes the thought of some shadowy, no-face monster killing the increasingly annoying Ty Marshall and eating him for lunch. There is also a childish part of him that is terrified of the boogeyman (this part will be in charge tonight as he lies awake in his room, looking at shadows that seem to take form and slink ever closer around his bed). And there is the older-than-his-years part of him, which has taken instinctive and immediate measures to avoid the eye of authority, should Tyler’s disappearance turn into what Ebbie’s father calls “a fuckarow.”

But mostly, as with Dale Gilbertson and Ty’s father, Fred, there is a continent of fundamental disbelief inside of Ebbie Wexler. He simply cannot believe that anything
final
has happened to Tyler. Not even after Amy St. Pierre and Johnny Irkenham, who was carved into pieces and hung up in an old henhouse. These are kids of whom Ebbie has heard on the evening news, fictions from the Land of TV. He didn’t know Amy or Johnny, so they could have died, just as make-believe people were always dying in the movies and on TV. Ty is different. Ty was just here. He talked to Ebbie, Ebbie talked to him. In Ebbie’s mind, this equals immortality. Or
should.
If Ty could be snatched by the Fisherman, any kid could be snatched. Including him. Hence, like Dale and Fred, he just doesn’t believe it. His most secret and fundamental heart, the part of him that assures the rest of him that everything is fine on Planet Ebbie, denies the Fisherman and all his works.

T.J. says: “Ebbie, do you think—”

“Nah,” Ebbie says. “He’ll turn up. Come on, let’s go to the park. We can look for cans and bottles later.”

Fred Marshall has left his sport coat and tie in his office, rolled up his sleeves, and is helping Rod Tisbury unpack a new Hiler rototiller. It’s the first of the new Hiler line, and it’s a beaut.

“I’ve been waiting for a gadget like this twenty years or more,” Rod says. He expertly inserts the wide end of his crowbar at the top of the big crate, and one of the wooden sides falls to the concrete floor of the maintenance garage with a flat clap. Rod is Goltz’s chief mechanic, and out here in maintenance he is king. “It’s gonna work for the small farmer; it’s gonna work for the town gardener, as well. If you can’t sell a dozen of these by fall, you’re not doing your job.”

“I’ll sell twenty by the end of August,” Fred says with perfect confidence. All his worries have been temporarily swept away by this splendid little green machine, which can do a hell of a lot more than rototill; there are a number of sexy attachments that snap in and out as easily as the lining in a fall jacket. He wants to start it up, listen to it run. That two-cylinder engine looks pretty sweet.

“Fred?”

He looks around impatiently. It’s Ina Gaitskill, Ted Goltz’s secretary and the dealership receptionist. “What?”

“You’ve got a call on line one.” She points across the floor—alive with clanging machinery and the noisy whir of pneumatic screwdrivers loosening bolts on an old Case tractor—to the phone on the wall, where several lights are blinking.

“Can you take a message, Ina? I was going to help Rod get a battery in this little beast and then—”

“I think you should take the call. It’s a woman named Enid Purvis. A neighbor of yours?”

For a moment Fred blanks, and then his salesman’s mind, which stores up names compulsively, comes to his rescue. Enid Purvis. Wife of Deke. Corner of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. He saw Deke just this morning. They waved to each other.

At the same time, he becomes aware that Ina’s eyes are too big and her normally generous mouth is too small. She looks worried.

“What is it?” Dale asks. “Ina, what is it?”

“I don’t know.” Then, reluctantly: “Something about your wife.”

“Better take it, hoss,” Rod says, but Fred is already crossing the oil-stained concrete floor to the phone.

He arrives home ten minutes after leaving Goltz’s, peeling out of the employees’ parking lot and laying rubber like a teenager. The worst part had been Enid Purvis’s calm and careful delivery, how hard she’d been trying not to sound frightened.