Invisible Fences (9 page)

I placed my adult foot next to the curved niche, as if to follow that fictional boy in his foolhardy dash across the street. I thought of the sounds I’d heard while inside. The screech of tires on asphalt, followed by a scrape of metal. 

Then a thump. Like a body hitting the road. 

Was it possible, beneath the high-pitched squeal of tires…Was it possible I’d heard a child scream? 

I could smell it now, stronger than the spoiled food from the opened garbage bag: the bitter, smoky reek of burnt rubber.  

I aimed the flashlight over the road. No tire marks, that I could notice. But a stain of faded liquid darkened part of the street. The stain appeared at a familiar angle and distance from the niche near my foot. Years ago, my younger self observed the exact same shape in a road many miles away.  

The outline of a boy. 

My body shook at the thought, maybe a suppressed shiver from the November chill. I imagined an answering vibration from the street, the rumble of an approaching vehicle.  

Nothing was there, in either direction, but I hesitated to step closer. The warning of my father’s story held me back, just as his raised arm had once blocked my path into the road. I swept the flashlight’s beam over the stain. Had my father painted it there, dripped oil to soak into the asphalt, outlining the shape I remembered: splayed legs, head twisted flat against the right shoulder? 

A tremor went through me again, and the flashlight rattled in my hand. Its beam faded to a dim glow. 

And the dark shape in the road started to move. 

An arm first, unbending at the elbow then reaching up. Then the head, an inky smear that bubbled up over the flattened body. The other arm broke from the surface and swelled like a flexed muscle. Both arms pressed flat against the street, pulling the torso up with the faint wet sound of a scab peeled too early from a wound.  

The shadow crawled forward on its hands, dragging the legs out of the road behind it. 

Crawling toward me.  

It paused about a body’s length away. I stood there, transfixed and terrified. I could smell it: an awful mix of tar and burnt rubber, oil and blood. 

Its head swung from one shoulder to the other with the click of a cracked neck, and it struggled to stand. The shadow’s legs shifted, unsteady, and its arms swayed to maintain balance. Ripples flowed over its surface as it moved, a shaken mass of black gelatin.  

When the motions settled, I tried to distinguish features in its face. Thick bubbles rose to the surface, hinting at the placement of an eye or nose, or popping with the sound of faintly parted lips. 

Its right arm raised, a finger extended. It pointed at me. 

Then the entire shadow burst, its image washing over me in a shower of black oil. 

• • • 

Heavy liquid poured over me. I tried to shake it off my hands, then pushed my fingers under my glasses to wipe syrupy blackness away from my eyes. An ashen sludge pressed against the corners of my mouth, threatening to force its way inside. 

Dear God, what’s happening? 

Then it was completely gone.  

No thick, smothering liquid. Only a light sheen of nervous sweat on my forehead and at the back of my neck. 

I still held the flashlight in my right hand, its beam dim but resilient. My hand was pink from where I’d held it beneath the hot water; the small scratches and needle pricks looked clean. 

Perhaps I’d had some weird reaction to the hypodermics. A hallucination.  

The shape in the road…I passed the weak light over the shadowy outline. It was still there, but flat against the ground and less definite in shape. Unthreatening. Except I was still too afraid to step next to it in the road. And my right arm trembled so much that I’d gripped it with my left hand to keep the flashlight steady.  

My scratched wrist itched beneath the cuff, and I pushed the sleeve further up my arm. Again I saw that pinched sunburnt look to the skin, held too long under hot water.  

The wrist was white where I’d gripped it. The impression was smaller than my hand, though, like a child had grabbed and twisted the sensitive skin. 

Enough. It’s as if I was trying to work myself into another panic. My breaths came in heavy rasps, and I almost didn’t trust my strength to carry me back inside the house. I sat down on the curb, a safe distance from the shape in the road and a few feet from the row of garbage bags. Rotten odors from the opened bag lingered strongest near the mailbox. The wind hung still, but drifts of the smell still carried to where I sat.  

I cupped my left hand over my nose and mouth, and my breaths washed warm over my palm in heavy exhalations. The sound echoed deep and frantic, and I concentrated on slowing the breaths, softening the nervous tremors. 

As I tried to calm myself, my breathing grew more irregular. A rattle and gurgle rose in my throat, then a strange flapping rasp added a new, desperate rhythm. To shut out the noise, I pinched my eyes tight and held my breath. 

The flapping rasp continued over the expected silence.  

A heavy weight shifted in the garbage bag closest to me.  

• • • 

The bag bulged at the center. I aimed the flashlight, casting a white spotlight with an irregular yellow center, like a firefly. The light transformed slick plastic into a curved mirror that reflected the curb and street and trees behind me, my face distorted and open-mouthed in surprise.  

But it wasn’t my face. A head was pressed against the bag from the inside. The fleshy tip of a nose strained against the bag, pushing the plastic outward in a small rounded cone. The flapping rasp scraped out from a taught oval stretched over the open mouth. Plastic whistled with each failed breath. 

Someone inside the bag. Suffocating. 

My reaction was instinctive. I didn’t think,
How did that person get in there?
Or devise a vague yet plausible sequence of events: some conflation of my previously-imagined mischievous children and mean-spirited teenagers, with the older boys stuffing a kid from the first group in the bag and sealing it up, that child (yes, the head was small, like a child’s, like—I didn’t dare tell myself—the head of the awful threatening shadow that rose from the road just moments before), that child unconscious and unmoving until a terrified, gasping awakening.  

My only thought:
I’ve got to get that kid out of there.
This was no hallucination: I saw a wrinkled forehead, brows raised in panic; saw the agonized expression of the child’s open mouth, and could practically count the rows of teeth fighting against the stretched bag.  

I leaned over the bag and fumbled with the plastic tie. The bag’s opening was twisted into a firm rope, the locking tie pulled to its tightest available notch. I dropped the flashlight to the ground so I could use both hands, trying to curl the flat yellow wedges and thread them back through the tie’s small opening. But the tie was designed to be much easier to seal than to remove, and I didn’t have enough room to maneuver my fingers. 

Desperate rasps urged me to act as the plastic swelled out then sucked in over the child’s gasping mouth.  

Break the seal. Let some air in.  

I reached beneath the tie and grasped a loose fold of the bag. The plastic stretched as I pulled it apart with both hands, but it refused to break.  

The bag remained rooted to the ground, heavy with the weight of the trapped child.  

My knuckles whitened with tension, and the scratches on my right palm flared up in renewed pain. I tried to push my thumbs through the stretched fold, but the plastic wasn’t taut enough beneath my nails.  

More rustles and squeaking rasps of plastic over the child’s mouth. My own breathing grew more desperate, my throat constricting in helpless sympathy. Time was running out. 

Over the mouth. That’s where the plastic was stretched to its limit. It might be taut enough. 

I dropped to my knees, my hands finding the shape of the head and grasping it on each side to hold it steady. The texture of hair fluttered beneath my fingertips; an open jaw pressed against the heels of my palms. The child’s face felt like skin instead of slick plastic. 

Leaning close, I whispered towards one of the ears: “Don’t be afraid. I’m trying to help.” 

And I plunged both thumbs into the taut area over the mouth.  

The plastic stretched back, my thumbs warm as they passed over a wriggling tongue. The child’s jaw tensed beneath my palms and I pushed my hands closer together to keep the joint from snapping shut. “Don’t close your mouth,” I whispered, afraid of being bitten—and also afraid my hands would press together too hard, crushing the child’s head.  

My thumbs pressed deeper. I held the head steady to keep it from pulling back.  

Deeper.  

Plastic stretched, and my thumbs hit a hard surface at the back of the child’s throat. 

The head shook beneath my hands in quick surges. Gag reflex. 

Nowhere else to go, I pushed my thumbs together and pressed against the tongue, forcing my thumbs down the throat. 

Deeper.  

The head tried to shake some more. I held it steady, but the face felt brittle like an eggshell. 

Deeper. The stretch of plastic. 

Then a pop, and the shrill whistle of escaping air.  

With it, an incredibly foul smell: musty and brackish, the scent of disease and death. 

And, carried in the gasping expelled breath, a whisper.  

A whisper of my name. 

• • • 

My hands pulled away, and I fell backward onto the lawn.  

The bag shifted. The rattle of bones.  

Then more of the bags shifted. More of the suck and release of stretched plastic over anxious mouths.  

Faces pressed out from each of the bags, as if staring at me through a curtained window. 

Too many to save. 

Then a series of soft cracks, like the rude snap of chewing gun. Musty odor forced its way through tiny holes. Each bag acted as a bellows of foul air, squeezed to expel syllables over diseased vocal chords.  

“Nathan,” they called. 

I pushed my hands over my ears and clamored back toward the house. 

• • • 

“What time is it?” Pam was too groggy to register anger, at least for the moment. Her voice drifted lazily from the speaker. I leaned forward and spoke into the recessed panel in the recliner’s armrest.  

“Late. I’m sorry.”  

Next I heard the rustle of bed sheets, a blind hand groping for the clock on the end table. “You’re still at the house?”  

“Yeah.” A dim light shone from the hallway behind me. I’d lowered the living-room shades and closed the curtains. “Something’s happened.” I wasn’t able to disguise the fear in my voice.  

“What’s wrong now?” A faint hint of impatience, or maybe disbelief—as if Pam already decided nothing more could go wrong. Even so, the familiarity of her voice offered comfort.  

“I think Dad got worse after Mom died, worse than we’d realized. He kept even more stuff: newspapers, junk mail, spoiled food—with brand-new storage bins he never bothered to fill with anything. Instead, he stuffed wood scraps and rags up under the back porch. And remember those dog houses I told you about?” 

“Sure.” 

“Five of them on that raised hill at the back of the yard. All of them packed to the brim with garbage. The biggest one was filled with a bunch of those plastic grocery bags, tied shut at the handles. I reached in and pulled one out, and my hand and arm got all scratched. Several bags were filled with hypodermic needles.” 

“Jeez.” 

“Like Mom’s story about drug fiends in the woods, back in Maryland. Except these were from Dad’s insulin shots. He used the needles, bagged them up, then stored them in one of the dog houses.” 

“More trouble than actually throwing things out the normal way.” 

“Exactly. He had some odd reasons for what he did, some weird logic.” 

“I’ve always thought that.” 

“No, Pam. Something more. At the funeral home, I didn’t mention all the details about Dad’s last story. It was about me as a boy, and it was really gruesome. In the story, I cut off my finger—on purpose, okay—then wrapped it up in a box and hid it in the house. Dad was disoriented before and after, but as he told the story he was completely lucid. Like the old days. He’d summoned the strength of mind for a specific purpose, as if he needed to tell me this particular story. But the story didn’t make any sense. Unless he was simply trying to creep me out—back then, and even now as I’m cleaning the house. I swear, Pam, it’s like I spent the whole day half-expecting to discover severed body parts in a shoebox.”  

“You always put too much faith in Dad’s stories.” 

“Listen. I came up with this analogy a while back. You know those invisible fence gadgets they sell for dog owners? The animal comes too close to a radio signal near the edge of the property, and it triggers an electric shock in the dog’s collar. The stories were warnings to keep us in line, and that’s how they worked for me. If I got too close to the Big Street, for instance, it’s like something zapped me in the head. Reflex. Classic Pavlovian conditioning.”