Ghoul (3 page)

“Man,” Timmy whispered. “We thought nobody knew about it.”

“They don't. Just me. Far as I know. And like I said, I won't tell. Left you boys a present. Didn't you wonder where the card table came from?”

He had, now that his grandfather mentioned it. Timmy had assumed that Barry or Doug rescued it from the town dump, another of their favorite hangouts. Unbeknownst to Timmy, they'd assumed the same thing about him. None of them had mentioned it, accepting the new addition with the disregard common to all twelve-year-old boys.

“Thanks, Grandpa! That's awesome.”

"Don't mention it. Though, if you don't mind, I might stop in from time to time and take a peek at those dirty magazines you boys keep in that box. The ladies never looked like that back in my day."

They both laughed at this, and when Timmy's mom came into the living room and asked them what was so funny, they laughed harder.

She walked away shaking her head.

“Listen,” his grandfather said. “Don't be too hard on your old man, He means well.”

Timmy frowned. “I know. But weeding the garden sucks.”

"It does, indeed. But I used to make him do the same thing when he was your age. He's just trying to do what he thinks is right.

Trying to be a father. That's hard work. And meanwhile, you're trying to be a boy, and do what you think is right. That 's hard work, too. And those two things, being a father and being a son, they never seem to agree. Certainly didn't when your father was twelve."

Timmy tried to imagine his father at his age, or his grandfather at his father's age, and found that he couldn't.

They watched Thundarr, Ookla, and Princess Ariel kick mutant butt, and both grinned.

Outside, they heard Elizabeth calling for Randy.

“Orwell was wrong,” his grandfather said.

“Who's that?”

"George Orwell. He was a famous writer. You'll probably learn about him when you get a little older. He wrote a book called 1984.

Took place now, but back then, it was the future, of course. Society was supposed to be a bad place by the year 1984. Not a good time to be alive. But he was wrong.

These are the best times of them all."

Ten minutes after Thundarr ended, there was a knock at the front door. Timmy answered it. Doug stood in the doorway, panting and out of breath. His white, mud-splattered BMX Mongoose bike lay on its side in the yard. At twelve, Doug had boobies, just like a girl, the result of too many Kit-Kat bars and bowls of Turkey Hill ice cream. They jiggled as he shuffled his feet. There were dark circles under the armpits of his T-shirt. His thick glasses were fogged, and his forehead covered with sweat. His freckle-covered face looked splotchy.

Doug held up a long, black plastic tube, waving it around with excitement.

“I finished it,” he gasped. “Worked on it all night long. You gotta see!”

“Well,” Timmy said, “take it out.”

Still trying to catch his breath, Doug shook his head. “At the Dugout. Let's get Barry and look at it there.”

Timmy glanced back inside. His grandfather was still on the couch, but there was no sign of his parents.

“I can't right now,” he whispered. “Dad says I've gotta weed the garden. He's already up there doing it. If I don't help, he's gonna be mad.”

“Go ahead,” his grandfather said. “This sounds more important. I'll handle your father.”

Timmy smiled. “Are you sure? I thought you said he was doing what he thought was best.”

His grandfather waved his hand. "Sure I'm sure. Just because he thinks it's for the best doesn't necessarily mean it is. Hell, it's the first day of summer vacation. Boys your age should be out playing and discovering.

You shouldn't be working. There'll be enough of that when you're older. You boys don't know it, but these are the happiest days of your lives. Enjoy them while you can."

He paused, coughed, and flexed his fingers as if his left hand had gone to sleep.

Shaking his head, he continued. His voice sounded weaker.

“And besides, your mom always says you should be outside anyway, instead of sitting in front of the television watching cartoons and playing Atari. Right?”

“Right!”

“Go on, now. You boys have fun. Later on, I'll whip your butts at Pitfall. I finally figured out how to get past those darn scorpions.”

“Thanks, Grandpa!” Timmy started out the door, and then, on impulse, he did something he didn't do much anymore since turning twelve. He turned around, ran over to his grandfather, and gave him a sudden, fierce hug. His grandfather groaned in mock surprise and squeezed back with one arm. He was still flexing his free hand.

“I love you, Grandpa.”

“I love you, too, kiddo.”

He kissed Timmy's forehead, and Timmy caught a whiff of pipe smoke--another one of Grandpa's secrets, since the doctor and Timmy's parents had forbidden him to smoke.

“Are you okay?” Timmy asked.

“Sure,” he wheezed. "Just a little short of breath this morning. Might lie down and take a nap while you boys are gone. Run on now, before your mom and dad come back inside. And make sure your dad don't see you leaving."

He ruffled his grandson's hair, which was cut just like Kevin Bacon's in Footloose, which Timmy and his family had seen just a few months before.

“Looks like a porcupine died on top of your head.”

“At least my hair is still brown instead of silver.”

“Wait till you're my age.” His grandfather flexed his hand again. He made a face like he had indigestion.

“You sure you're okay, Grandpa?”

“Positive. Now go on. Get out of here.”

“Love you,” Timmy called again over his shoulder.

“Love you, too.”

Timmy followed Doug outside into the front yard. Timmy's own BMX Mongoose was parked next to the sidewalk, its kickstand sinking into the grass. The boys hopped on their bikes and sped down the driveway.

“Did anybody else see it?” Timmy asked.

Doug shook his head. “My mom's still passed out.”

“Why are you so out of breath?”

“Catcher was waiting for me when I went by. He came flying out of the driveway and almost bit my ankle.”

Catcher, the bane of their existence (along with the occasional hazing from the neighborhood bullies Ronny, Jason and Steve), was a black Doberman pinscher that belonged to the Sawyer family. The Sawyers owned a dairy farm along the road between Doug 's house and Timmy's. Bowman's Woods bordered the other side of the road. The boys had to pass through Catcher 's territory any time they went to Doug's house or vice versa. The dog was usually near the farmhouse, but when they rode their bikes by, no matter how quietly, some sixth sense alerted him to their presence.

If he was untied --which was often--he'd charge down the driveway, barking and growling. Each of the boys had ripped sneakers and torn socks as a result, and Barry had a scar on his calf from when the dog had latched onto him almost two years ago.

It was one of the few scars on Barry of which the other boys could actually identify the source.

“I hate that dog,” Timmy mumbled as they reached the end of the driveway.

“Yeah. One of these days we'll teach him a lesson.”

Timmy nodded. Over the last few weeks, he'd been formulating a plan to do just that, but he hadn't yet told the other boys about it.

The Graco home, a one-story, three-bedroom rancher with two acres of land, was built on the side of a hill. The garden was at the rear of the property, near the top of the hill, bordering Barry's parent's home and Bill and Karen Wahl's house-- an elderly couple with no children left at home. Normally, Timmy and Doug would have just gone through the backyard and up the hill to Barry 's. But with Timmy's dad in the garden pulling weeds that Timmy was supposed to pull, they followed his grandfather's advice and took the long way around.

Pedaling out into the road, they turned right onto Anson Road, a narrow two-lane stretch of blacktop that cut through the countryside, giving drivers a back road shortcut from Route 516 to Route 116. They followed that to the edge of the Graco 's property, past the acre lot his father had turned into a hillside pasture, complete with a small, two-stall barn for their one cow and two sheep. To the left was Laughman Road, which led to Doug's house--if you made it past Catcher-- and on their right was a narrow strip of woods. “Our woods,” the boys called it, though technically, it belonged to the church. Passing these, they turned right again onto Golgotha Church Road, an even narrower road that went straight uphill. On their left stretched the cemetery. The bottom of the hill was filled with old graves and crumbling crypts from the 1800s. The upper portion of the hill and beyond was covered with newer, more durable monuments. On their right lay the woods and Timmy 's parents' property. The trees kept them hidden from Randy Graco's sight.

This was their playground-- the woods, the cemetery, the Dugout. Occasionally, they made an excursion to the town dump to find treasures or shoot at the rats with their BB guns, or went over into Bowman's Woods to catch minnows and crayfish in the creek and shoot water snakes, and once a week they rode their bikes into Spring Grove to buy comic books at Mr. Messinger 's newsstand (they left their BB guns at home, then), but for the most part, they were content to not stray from the cemetery and surrounding forest. Over the years, this area had served as everything from the Death Star to a pirate ship to Amazonian jungles -

complete with imaginary dinosaurs--to the battlefields of World War Two.

This was their world, and they ruled it; three kings who would never grow old, but remain twelve forever. Summer was just beginning, and the days were long and endless, and their cares and fears seemed like small things when cast against the backdrop of the deep blue sky overhead.

Doug wiped the sweat from his eyes. “You know the Frogger machine down at the Laundromat?”

“Yeah.”

“I got the high score yesterday. But then Ronny Nace unplugged it and erased everything.”

“Ronny's a dick.”

“Yeah. He was pissed because I played that new Toto song on the jukebox.”

They hopped off their bikes and walked them to the top of the hill. Timmy could have pedaled it, but Doug was obviously tired.

Their noses crinkled as they passed by a dead groundhog, its midsection ruptured by a car tire, its fly-infested innards exposed to the sunlight and open air. Maggots squirmed through rotten meat. Though it was a disgusting sight, neither one of them could help but study it closely.

“God,” Doug panted. “That stinks.”

They hurried past the road kill.

“You know what's weird?” Timmy fanned the air with his hand. "That's the only one we've seen in a week. Usually, there's two or three per day-- possums, skunks, groundhogs, squirrels, cats, snakes. Now, there aren 't any at all, other than that fresh one."

“Maybe the state is cleaning them up. Sending a road crew around or something.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

And though the boys wouldn't notice, the dead groundhog they'd just passed by would be missing the next day as well. Rotted and putrescent, it was food for something. Fodder.

“Glad my grandpa let us sneak out,” Timmy said.

“Your grandpa is so cool,” Doug said. “I wish mine was like that.”

“Isn't he?”

Doug made a sour face. "No. When we go to visit him, all he does is preach to us about the Bible and fart a lot. My dad used to say that's because he was full of hot air."

Timmy laughed obligingly.

Doug talked about his father all the time, and it made Timmy sad. Doug seemed to believe that his dad was coming back for him, any day now, and that they'd go live in California together. According to Doug, his father called or wrote to him every week, told him stories about Hollywood, how he 'd gotten a job as a stunt man, the movies he'd worked on, the famous actors he'd met, the things he'd seen; but none of it was true. Last fall, Barry and Timmy had discovered that their friend was lying. His mother had let it slip when she was drunk. Taunted Doug with it. There were no letters or long distance phone calls. They hadn 't heard from Doug's father since he'd left town. Too embarrassed for their friend, Timmy and Barry never brought it up, allowing the charade to continue. No sense confronting him with the truth. If it made Doug feel better to believe that his father had found a career as a stunt man and that he would one day return, then that was good enough for them.

Timmy was about to ask Doug if he'd gotten any new letters when something in the cemetery caught his attention. Near one of the cracked, mossy crypts, two of the older tombstones had sunken into the earth. Only their lichen-covered tops were sticking out. The ground around them was also depressed, as if a giant groundhog had burrowed under the grass.

Weird, he thought. Had they been like that yesterday? He didn't think so.

“I don't know,” Doug whispered. “Sometimes I think about what it would be like if my grandpa died, and when I do, I don't feel sad.”

“What do you feel?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. I don't feel anything. Is that weird?”

“Yeah, but that's okay, 'cause everybody knows you're weird anyway.”

Scowling, Doug punched Timmy in the arm. Timmy laughed.

As the road leveled out, they hopped back onto their bikes. The Golgotha Lutheran Church sat to their left, and Barry's house was on the right-- a redbrick, one-story home with a white garage off to one side and a rusted swing set in the backyard, facing Timmy's house on the hill below. The church parking lot served as its driveway. Barry 's father, Clark Smeltzer, was the church caretaker and groundskeeper for the cemetery.

“Besides,” Timmy continued, his laughter drying up, “at least your grandpa's not as bad as ...”

He didn't finish, and instead, just nodded his head in the direction of Barry's house.

“Yeah,” Doug agreed. “Nobody's as bad as that.”

They wheeled into the parking lot and dismounted, propping their bikes against the side of the Smeltzer's white garage. Doug still clutched the plastic tube. They approached the house, making sure to avoid the side of the garage closest to Timmy 's house, lest his father, still working in the garden, looked up over the hill and saw them.