Boy's Life (10 page)

     “
Tom! Over here! For God’s sake, are you blind?
”

     In the whole wide world there was only one person who would holler like a bull moose in church.

     He was standing up, waving his arms over the milling hats. I could feel my mother cringe, and my dad put his arm around her as if to steady her from falling down of shame. Granddaddy Jaybird always did something to, as Dad said when he thought I wasn’t listening, “show his butt,” and today would be no exception.

     “
We saved you seats!
” my grandfather bellowed, and he caused the Glasses to falter, one to go sharp and the other flat. “
Come on before somebody steals ’em!
”

     Grand Austin and Nana Alice were in the same row, too. Grand Austin was wearing a seersucker suit that looked as if the rain had drawn it up two sizes, his wrinkled neck clenched by a starched white collar and a blue bow tie, his thin white hair slicked back and his eyes full of misery as he sat with his wooden leg stuck out straight below the pew in front of him. He was sitting beside Granddaddy Jaybird, which had compounded his agitation: the two got along like mud and biscuits. Nana Alice, however, was a vision of happiness. She was wearing a hat covered with small white flowers, her gloves white and her dress the glossy green of a sunlit sea. Her lovely oval face was radiant; she was sitting beside Grandmomma Sarah, and they got along like daisies in the same bouquet. Right now, though, Grandmomma Sarah was tugging at Granddaddy Jaybird’s suit jacket—the same black suit he wore rain or shine, Easter or funeral—to try to get him to sit down and stop directing traffic. He was telling people in the rows to move in tighter and then he would holler, “
Room for two more over here!
”

     “Sit down, Jay! Sit down!” She had to resort to pinching his bony butt, and then he scowled at her and took his seat.

     My parents and I squenched in. Grand Austin said to Dad, “Good to see you, Tom,” and they shook hands. “That is, if I
could
see you.” His spectacles were fogged up, and he took them off and cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief. “I’d say this is the biggest crowd in a half-dozen Eas—”

     “Place is packed as the whorehouse on payday, ain’t it, Tom?” Granddaddy Jaybird interrupted, and Grandmomma Sarah elbowed him in the ribs so hard his false teeth clicked.

     “I sure wish you’d let me finish a single sentence,” Grand Austin told him, the red rising in his cheeks. “Ever since I’ve been sittin’ here, I’ve yet to get a word in edgewi—”

     “Boy, you’re lookin’ good!” Granddaddy Jaybird plowed on, and he reached across Grand Austin to slap my knee. “Rebecca, you feedin’ this boy his meat, ain’t you? You know, a growin’ boy’s got to have meat for his muscles!”

     “Can’t you hear?” Grand Austin asked him, the red now pulsing in his cheeks.

     “Hear what?” Granddaddy Jaybird retorted.

     “Turn up your hearin’ aid, Jay,” Grandmomma Sarah said.

     “
What?
” he asked her.

     “
Hearin’ aid!
” she shouted, at her rope’s end. “
Turn it up!
”

     It was going to be an Easter to remember.

     Everybody said hello to everybody, and still wet people were coming into the church as rain started to hammer on the roof. Granddaddy Jaybird, his face long and gaunt and his hair a white bristle-brush, wanted to talk to Dad about the murder, but Dad shook his head and wouldn’t go into it. Grandmomma Sarah asked me if I was playing baseball this year, and I said I was. She had a fat-cheeked, kind face and pale blue eyes in nests of wrinkles, but I knew that oftentimes Granddaddy Jaybird’s ways made her spit with anger.

     Because of the rain, the windows were shut tight and the air was really getting muggy. The floorboards were wet, the walls leaked, and the fans groaned as they turned. The church smelled of a hundred different kinds of perfume, shaving lotion, and hair tonic, plus the sweet aromas of blossoms adorning lapels and hats. The choir filed in, wearing their purple robes. Before the first song was finished, I was sweating under my shirt. We stood up, sang a hymn, and sat down. Two overstuffed women—Mrs. Garrison and Mrs. Prathmore—came up to the front to talk about the donation fund for the poverty-stricken families of Adams Valley. Then we stood up, sang another hymn, and sat down. Both of my grandfathers had voices like bullfrogs battling in a swamp pond.

     Plump, round-faced Reverend Richmond Lovoy stepped behind the pulpit and began to talk about what a glorious day it was, with Jesus risen from the dead and all. Reverend Lovoy had a comma of brown hair over his left eye, the sides of his hair gone gray, and every Sunday without fail his brushed-back hair pulled loose from its shellacked moorings and slid down over his face like a brown flood as he preached and gestured. His wife was named Esther, their three children Matthew, Luke, and Joni.

     As Reverend Lovoy spoke, his voice competing with the thunder of heaven, I realized who was sitting directly in front of me.

     The Demon.

     She could read minds. That much was an accepted fact. And just as it dawned on me that she was there, her head swiveled and she stared at me with those black eyes that could freeze a witch at midnight. The Demon’s name was Brenda Sutley. She was ten years old, and she had stringy red hair and a pallid face splashed with brown freckles. Her eyebrows were as thick as caterpillars, and the untidy arrangement of her features looked like somebody had tried to beat out a fire on her face with the flat side of a shovel. Her right eye looked larger than the left, her nose was a beak with two gaping holes in it, and her thin-lipped mouth seemed to wander from one side of her face to the other. She couldn’t help her heritage, though; her mother was a fire hydrant with red hair and a brown mustache, and her red-bearded father would’ve made a fence post look brawny. With all those red kinks in her background, it was no wonder Brenda Sutley was spooky.

     The Demon had earned her name because she had once drawn a picture of her father with horns and a forked tail in art class, and had told Mrs. Dixon, the art teacher, and her classmates that her pappy kept at the back of his closet a big stack of magazines that showed boy demons sticking their tails in the holes of girl demons. But the Demon did more than spill her family’s closeted secrets: she had brought a dead cat to school in a shoebox with pennies taped to its eyeballs for show-and-tell; she had made a graveyard out of green and white Play-Doh for her art class project, with the names of her classmates and the dates of their deaths on the headstones, which caused more than one child to go into hysterics when they realized they would not live to see sixteen; she had a fondness for bizarre practical jokes that involved dog manure pressed between sandwich bread; and it was widely rumored that she was behind the explosion of pipes in the girls’ bathroom at Zephyr Elementary last November, when every toilet was clogged with notebook paper.

     She was, in a word, weird.

     And now her royal weirdness was staring at
me
.

     A slow smile spread across her crooked mouth. I couldn’t look away from those piercing black eyes, and I thought
She’s got me
. The thing about adults is, when you want them to pay attention to you and intervene, their minds are worlds away; when you want them to be worlds away, they’re sitting on the back of your neck. I wanted my dad or mom or anybody to tell Brenda Sutley to turn around and listen to Reverend Lovoy, but of course it was as if the Demon had willed herself to be invisible. No one could see her but me, her victim of the moment.

     Her right hand rose up like the head of a small white snake with dirty fangs. Slowly, with evil grace, she extended the index finger and aimed it toward one of her gaping nose holes. The finger winnowed deep into that nostril, and I thought she was going to keep pushing it in until her whole finger was gone. Then the finger was withdrawn, and on the tip of it was a glistening green mass as big as a corn kernel.

     Her black eyes were unblinking. Her mouth began to open.

    
No
, I begged her, mind to mind.
No, please don’t do it!

     The Demon slid her green-capped finger toward her wet pink tongue.

     I could do nothing but stare as my stomach drew up into a hard little knot.

     Green against pink. Dirty fingernail. A sticky strand, hanging down.

     The Demon licked her finger, where the green thing had been. I think I must’ve squirmed violently, because Dad gripped my knee and whispered, “Pay attention!” but of course he never saw the invisible Demon or her act of prickly torment. The Demon smiled at me, her black eyes sated, and then she turned her head away and the ordeal was over. Her mother lifted up a hand with hairy knuckles and stroked the Demon’s fiery locks as if she were the sweetest little girl who ever drew God’s breath.

     Reverend Lovoy asked everyone to pray. I lowered my head and squeezed my eyes shut.

     And about five seconds into the prayer, something thumped hard against the back of my skull.

     I looked around.

     Horror choked me. Sitting directly behind me, their pewter-colored eyes the hue of sharpened blades, were Gotha and Gordo Branlin. On either side of them, their parents were deep in prayer. I imagined they prayed for deliverance from their brood. Both Branlin boys wore dark blue suits, white shirts, and their ties were similar except Gotha’s had black stripes on white and Gordo’s had red. Gotha, the oldest by one year, had the whitest hair; Gordo’s was a little on the yellow side. Their faces looked like mean carvings in brown rock, and even their bones—lower jaws jutting forward, cheekbones about to tear through flesh, foreheads like slabs of granite—suggested coiled rage. In the fleeting seconds that I dared to look upon those cunning visages, Gordo thrust an upraised middle finger in my face and Gotha loaded a straw with another hard black-eyed pea.

     “Cory, turn around!” my mother whispered, and she tugged at me. “Close your eyes and pray!”

     I did. The second pea bounced off the back of my head. Those things could sting the whine out of you. All during the rest of that prayer, I could hear the Branlins back there, whispering and giggling like evil trolls. My head was their target for the day.

     After the prayer was over, we sang another hymn. Announcements were made, and visitors welcomed. The offering plate was passed around. I put in the dollar Dad had given me for this purpose. The choir sang, with the Glasses playing piano and organ. Behind me, the Branlins giggled. Then Reverend Lovoy stood up again to deliver his Easter sermon, and that was when the wasp landed on my hand.

     My hand was resting on my knee. I didn’t move it, even as fear shot up my spine like a lightning bolt. The wasp wedged itself between my first and second fingers and sat there, its blue-black stinger twitching.

     Now let me say a few things about wasps.

     They are not like bees. Bees are fat and happy and they float around from flower to flower without a care for human flesh. Yellowjackets are curious and have mood swings, but they, too, are usually predictable and can be avoided. A wasp, however, particularly the dark, slim kind of wasp that looks like a dagger with a head on it, was born to plunge that stinger into mortal epidermis and draw forth a scream like a connoisseur uncorking a vintage wine. Brushing your head against a wasps’ nest can result in a sensation akin to, as I have heard, being peppered with shotgun pellets. I have seen the face of a boy who was stung on the lips and eyelids when he explored an old house in the middle of summer; such a swollen torture I wouldn’t even wish on the Branlins. Wasps are insane; they have no rhyme or reason to their stingings. They would sting you to the marrow of your bones if they could drive their stingers in that deeply. They are full of rage, like the Branlins. If the devil indeed ever had a familiar, it was not a black cat or monkey or leather-skinned lizard; it was, and always will be, the wasp.

     A third pea got me in the back of the head. It hurt a lot. But I stared at the wasp wedged between my first and second fingers, my heart beating hard, my skin crawling. Something flew past my face, and I looked up to watch a second wasp circle the Demon’s head and land on her crown. The Demon must’ve felt a tickle. She reached back and flicked the wasp off without knowing what she was flicking, and the wasp rose up with an angry whir of black wings. I thought sure the Demon was about to be stung, but the wasp must’ve sensed its brethren because it flew on up to the ceiling.

     Reverend Lovoy was really preaching now, about crucified Jesus and weeping Mary and the stone that had been rolled away.

     I looked up at the church’s ceiling.

     Near one of the revolving fans was a small hole, no bigger than a quarter. As I watched, three wasps emerged from it and descended down into the congregation. A few seconds later, two more came out and swirled in the muggy, saccharine air.

     Thunder boomed over the church. The noise of the rain almost drowned out Reverend Lovoy’s rising and falling voice. What he was saying I didn’t know; I looked at the wasp between my fingers again, then back to the hole in the ceiling.