Malus Domestica (6 page)

Their steel-blue Subaru already sat in the gravel driveway, in front of the U-Haul; Leon had brought it down before the move. They took a break to run to town in the car for hamburgers at Wendy’s, and they came back to failing light as the evening came over the trees to the east.

“Damn, I hate to bug anybody this late. These rednecks givin me weird looks,” said Leon, unlocking and opening the U-Haul. “But I’d really like to get this truck back as soon as possible. I guess we’ll finish tomorrow afternoon.”

“Hey,” said a husky voice behind them.

A chubby white kid with brush-cut hair was making his way up the driveway, his hands buried in his hoodie’s pockets. He seemed to be about Wayne’s age, if several inches taller. Wayne thought he looked like Pugsley Addams gone mainstream, or maybe the older brother from
Home
Alone.

“Hey,” said Leon.

Pugsley’s voice was the high-pitched rasp of a boy accustomed to shouting. “You guys movin in?”

“Yep.”

“Cool.”

A weird silence settled over them. “Nice to meet you,” Leon offered, smiling. “Anything we can help you with?”

Pugsley seemed to snap out of a trance. “Oh! I, uhh, I wanted to say hi, and…maybe see if you needed any help. But it looks like you’re pretty much finished.” He stepped forward and held out a stubby pink hand. “I’m Pete.” Pointing across the street at the trailer park, he added, “Pete Maynard. I live over there. With my mom. I go to school over in Blackfield. Fifth grade.”

Leon visibly relaxed, shaking the offered hand. “Nice to meet you, Pete. Leon Parkin. This here’s my son Wayne.”

Pugsley-Pete shook Wayne’s hand and said to his father, “Welcome to Slade. Anybody ever told you you look like War Machine from
Iron Man?
What’s his name—”

“Don Cheadle?” Leon had memorized his answer.

“Yeah. That’s it.”

“Only once a week.” Leon stuck his hands in his pockets. “Well. I reckon since we got you here, you can help if you want.”

“Sure.”

With much grunting and swearing, the three of them got the sofa down out of the U-Haul, up the front stairs, and into the den. To get it out of the foyer and through the den door, they had to turn it sideways and angle the armrests around the doorframe. Wayne mashed a finger and Leon got pinned against the wall, but they finally managed it.

Once they’d gotten it into the room, screwed the feet back onto the bottom of it, and pushed it against the back wall, the boys sat on it to rest. “So what are you guys doin out here?” asked Pete, watching Wayne buff his glasses with his shirt. “I don’t think I know anybody that dresses up to go to work.”

Leon had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. “I took a teaching position at Blackfield High School.”

“Yeah?”

“Gonna teach Literature.”

“That’s cool. Maybe I’ll be in your class one day. I like to read.”

“Maybe. That’s good. More kids your age should read. Hey, you had dinner?” Leon took the tie off. “I got us ice cream for when we got done with everything.”

“No,” said Pete, “but I don’t eat dinner most days.”

Wayne’s head tilted. “Why not?”

“Just…not really hungry. My mom says I eat like a bird.”

He couldn’t imagine that. “Birds eat their own body weight in food every day. That’s what
I
heard, anyway.” Pete’s hoodie was straining at the sides under his love handles, and he had two chins. The slope-shouldered boy was taller than the short, gangly Wayne by several inches and outweighed him by a dozen pounds.

The ice began to settle again.

Wayne broke it. “You like
Call of Duty?”

Pete rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know. I guess it depends on which one you’re talkin about. I only have the first one for the Xbox. I haven’t, uhh—haven’t really played any of the new ones.”

“Sounds like you guys have your evening figured out,” said Leon, standing up. “Pete, does your mom know you’re over here?”

“Oh
yeah. Yeah—she’s cool.”

Leon rolled up his tie like a giant tongue, giving Pete the teacher stink-eye. “That sounds suspiciously like a
no.”

“She knows I came over here. She doesn’t really care when I come back, as long as she knows where I went and I stay out of trouble.” Pete sounded non-committal, lax. Wayne got the feeling he was accustomed to being autonomous. “And I’m not like my dad. I stay out of trouble.” He jerked up straight all of a sudden and put up his hands as if to ward off a blow. “Oh, I can head out of here if you guys—”

“Oh
no,
no-no, you’re
fine,
man.” Leon picked up his suit-jacket and beat the dust out of it, laying it over his arm like a sommelier with a towel. “You look like a good kid to me. And Wayne needs friends. He’s the F-in’ New Guy, remember?”

Pete smirked, but Wayne gave his father the side-eye.

“So yeah, hell. Hang out, by all means, this creepy-ass house is gonna need some cheerin up anyway. Me and him, we can’t fill it up all by ourselves. We’re from Chicago, we’re not used to this kind of quiet, you know?”

“Okay,” said Pete, in obvious gratitude.

Leon pointed at Wayne. “Why don’t you head upstairs and start on putting your clothes up and make your bed? When you get done with that, feel free to play Playstation to your heart’s content.”

Wayne feigned belligerence. “Do I gotta?”

“How are you gonna sleep in a bed if you ain’t made it? At least make the bed. We’ll worry about unpacking when that’s out of the way.”

The two boys got up and left, creaking and crackling up the stairs to the second landing. They sounded like two colonial Redcoats marching across bubble wrap. “I can hook up the TV and Playstation while you make your bed and stuff, if you want,” offered Pete.

“You got a deal.”

Wayne led his new friend down the landing. When he opened the closet door to reveal the steep second set of stairs, Pete seemed impressed, if confused. “Wait, your dad’s got you in the tower?”

“Yeah. It’s the only other bedroom in the house. If you can call it a bedroom.” They started up the almost ladder-like stairs. “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothin,
man, nothin. I think it’s freakin awesome. I’m surprised, is all.”

With the dressers and the bed in it, the cupola was a lot less spacious. Wayne and Pete had just enough room to sit on the floor between the bed and the television, a modest flatscreen set up on one of the windowsills. There weren’t any power outlets in the cupola, so his father had bought a dropcord on their dinner trip and run it up from an outlet on the landing. The cord draped down the stairs for now, but they’d use nails to pin it out of the way later.

A lamp was plugged into it. Wayne turned it on.

To get them out of the way, he had already pinned up his posters on the narrow strips of wall between each of the cupola’s windows.

One of them was a movie poster for a
Friday the 13
^th
movie, with a full-body shot of the hockey-masked Jason Voorhees coming at you with a machete. Another depicted the cast of the TV show
The Walking Dead,
with the character Rick standing on top of a schoolbus aiming his giant revolver. Romero’s original black-and-white
Night of the Living Dead.
The popular zombie game
Left4Dead 2.

The mattress was naked and had four cardboard boxes on it. Wayne opened a box and found it full of clothes. The next one had the videogames in it: a Playstation 3, a tangle of wires, and a handful of disc cases. “Here we are.”

Pete carried the box over next to the TV and went to work on untangling the adapter and video cords. Wayne opened another box to find his bedclothes.

He was on his hands and knees trying to pull the fitted sheet over a mattress-corner when something occurred to him. “Hey,” he said over his shoulder. Pete looked up. “Uhm. Do you know if this house is…. Do you know if it’s haunted?”

Pete stared at Wayne as if he hadn’t said anything. His eyes were flat in the arcane honey-glow of the lamp, but he slowly reached up and rubbed his cheek as though he had a toothache. The gesture seemed self-comforting, as if he were petting his face.

It took him a full seven seconds to answer. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in here. But some people say it is.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well.” Pete got to his feet and pulled the TV cart out, examining the connection jacks on the back. “You really want me to tell you?”

Wayne’s curiosity was a bonfire in him, straining for secrets. “Are you serious? Of course I want you to tell me.” He turned over and flopped down on his butt at the edge of the bed, the sheets forgotten. “Let me guess—what is it, there’s an Indian burial ground under the house? ‘They never moved the bodies!
They never moved the bodies!’”

“No, there’s—”

“A serial killer used to live here?” The more he talked, the more animated he became. He was clenching his fists in anticipation. “And he buried his victims in the basement?” That made him wonder if they even
had
a basement, and what it looked like. He made a mental note to go check in the morning.

“No, dude, somebody
died
in this house.”

“Is that all? Man,
tch
…people die in houses all the time. Somebody died in the apartment next to ours back in Chicago. If people dying in a place made it haunted, nobody would be able to go into a hospital because of all the ghosts.”

Pete grinned a creepy grin. “Why do you think hospitals creep people out so much?”

Wayne deadpanned at him and went back to making his bed.

“Anyway, this one, people say she was a witch.”

“A
witch.”
Wayne was incredulous. “You’re
shitting
me.”

Both boys looked down the stairwell to listen for Mr. Parkin, then Pete continued. “No shittin.” He sat down on one of the thin-cushioned windowsill seats. “The cops and the newspaper said it was an accident at the time, but I hear she was pushed down the stairs by her husband.”

“A witch with a husband?”

Pete shrugged.

Wayne made a face. “I didn’t even know witches could
have
husbands. Anyway, maybe it
was
an accident. Maybe he didn’t mean to push her. I can’t
believe
Dad didn’t tell me about this.”

“I don’t know,” said Pete, going back to untangling the controller cables. “My mom says he used to beat her and her daughter.”

“So what happened to the husband?”

“He died a few months later in prison.”

“What killed him?”

“Nobody knows. I heard it looked like tubber—ta-bulkyer—”

“Tuberculosis?” Wayne asked helpfully.

“—Yeah, that. But they never could find anything. What’s this?” Pete held up the tangle of cords so he could see underneath them. He laid the tangle down on the floor and reached into the box, lifting out a Nike shoebox. Wayne abandoned what he was doing and politely took the shoebox, putting it on the bed.

“It’s, ahh…just some old stuff.”

Inside was a pile of photographs, a bottle of perfume, a gold ring with a simple ball-chain through it, the kind of necklace that usually has dog-tags on it. Wayne took out the ring and reverently lowered the chain around his neck, letting the wedding band rest on his chest.

“Nice ring, Mr. Frodo.”

Wayne looked up. “It was my mom’s.” He picked up the photographs and shuffled through them with delicate hands.

The photos depicted separate events and locations—one seemed to be a very young Wayne celebrating a birthday in a dark kitchen, everything washed out by camera-flash, his face underlit by the feverish glow of a birthday cake; another was an older but still juvenile Wayne with his father and a pretty, small-framed woman. She was in all of the photographs, always smiling, always touching, embracing, or pressing against her son.

Presently Pete came out of the funk and went back to pulling at the knot of cables. “What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“She died a couple years ago. In Chicago. Cancer. Throat cancer, I think. It wasn’t really the cancer that did it. Dad said, like, ‘complications’ or something. I don’t really know what that means. Something got infected.”

Wayne lifted the ring to his eye as if it were a monocle and gazed through it, the gold clicking against his right eyeglasses lens. “A couple of months ago, Dad was like ‘man eff this shit, we need to get out of here, there’s too many memories here, we need a change of scenery,’ so he got a job down here and we packed up and left.”

“Damn, dude. I’m sorry.”

The eye inside the ring twitched toward Pete. Suddenly the soft brown eye seemed a decade older. “When I miss her, I like to look through the ring like it’s a peephole in a door. I pretend that if I look through it I can see into a—uhh….”

“Another time? World?
Dimension?”

“Another world, yeah.” Wayne tucked the ring into his shirt-collar and took off his glasses, buffing a smudge with his shirt. Emotion etched a sudden sour knot at the base of his skull. “I feel like I can see into another world where she’s still alive. You know, like Alice in Wonderland, lookin’ through the lookin’-glass.”

Pete seemed as if he were about to say something, but cut himself off before it could get out of him. Wayne thought he knew what he was about to say. He had thought it himself before, hundreds of times.

What if you look through that ring one day and she actually
is
there? What
then,
wise guy?

3

R
OY
WAS
OUT
GASSING
ant-hills when the sun went down. He slipped a Maglite out of the pocket of his jeans and took a knee, watching the gasoline soak into the grainy pile. Hundreds of ants percolated up from the tunnels, scrambling over each other in the pale blue-white glow of the flashlight beam.

They had found a grasshopper somewhere and dragged it back to the nest, and they had been in the process of cutting it into pieces and pulling it down into the dirt when he’d interrupted them. He liked to imagine the jackboot tromping of their tiny feet, the sound of a klaxon going off as the gasoline washed down into the corridors of the nest, little panicked ant-people running to strengthen levees, hauling children to safety, swept away by the stinking flood into dark confines.