Order of the Dead (27 page)

70

Jack and Sasha were sitting in bed leafing through some crude sketches that Faith
Crabtree had given them to play with. Years ago, Senna and Alan, who’d started
to become concerned that the minds of New Crozet’s children were trapped within
the confines of their town box, had done their best to put together an art
program, getting the kids drawing and telling and retelling stories and playing
new games, and the sketching Jack and Sasha did together was an outgrowth of
that line of projects.

To Senna and Alan, it was a way of
finding some needed relief, a means of going beyond the fence, if only in
spirit, and doing something besides farming and reinforcing the fence. To the
kids, it was good old fun.

A shiver shook its way through Sasha’s
body, and Jack jumped off the bed, took a spare blanket down from a shelf in
his closet, went back to the bed, and threw the blanket clumsily around her shoulders.
He climbed back up and resumed his post next to her, and saw that she’d moved
several sketches ahead while he was getting the blanket.

A light thump came from downstairs,
carrying up through the old floorboards. It was Larry Knapp’s metal cup falling
from the table. He’d passed out some minutes ago, and his sleeping arm, in its
drunken restlessness, had crept upward and the cup was knocked off and set to
rolling happily on the carpet until it found a table leg to settle against. Knapp
would wake up again in a few minutes and be none too pleased about it, but not
yet.

Sasha and Jack both pretended not to
have noticed the sound, but Jack looked down at the worn floor and frowned. He got
up again and walked to the open window—it was a cool night but the fresh air
was pleasant—and the hum of insects washed over him like a breeze.

It was a comforting sound, a constant
reminder that there was an outside world, a place beyond the fence that could
one day be alright to go to again. He turned around and walked back to the bed,
looked at Sasha, turned around again and went back to the window, then returned
to the bed. He was already developing a pacing habit, just like Alan, and he
was getting in some good practice now.

The insects were out in full force
tonight, and their chatter gusted about the bedroom, touching the chipped and
peeling walls, laughing at the overwrought crown molding, and finally settling
on the timeworn, wooden floorboards and the flaking ceiling. The insect hum
loved those places—the horizontal ones—and why it preferred those would remain
a mystery. If the floor and ceiling were the places it wanted to make a home,
who would we be to question it?

Sasha stopped flipping through the
jumble of papers. “This one,” she said, her voice a bit whiny. “I
wanna
trace
this
one.”

Jack looked at the sketch, which was a
neat pencil-work of a bridge, then over at her.

“Please,” she said.

It was a partial bridge, really.
Two-thirds of it were obscured in fog, and when you looked at it, you could
follow it as if you were walking on it until it became muddled in haze and
disappeared. There was no way to tell if the bridge went on, or if it ended in
a sudden drop. It seemed like it was at the same time a bridge to nowhere and a
bridge to the only place there was left to go. But that was a silly thing to
think.

Sasha sneezed, losing her grip on the
papers, which ended up scattering slightly on the blankets like an unfolding
deck of cards. She sniffled loudly, giving voice to the cold she’d had for
days.

If only she could imagine the power
one of those sneezes would have tomorrow: the power to alter the course of a
great many lives. But, then again, the sneeze would be just one of many
dominos, each of which had to be in its proper place for the show to go on. And
the show
must
go on. It would likely have found another way, if not for her
cold, but you play the dominos you’re dealt.

“I broke it,” she said. “Sorry, Jack.”

It
was the pencil she’d been holding behind the clutter of
sketches. When she’d sneezed, she’d broken off its tip.

Jack thought she looked like she might
tear up, but it was just her cold.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Give it to me.”

She handed it to him.

“I’ll sharpen it,” he said. “Now drink
your soup.”

A cup of corn and potato soup was
cooling on the bed table beside her. He’d made it for her, hoping it would make
her feel better, but she’d only had a few sips before declaring that it was too
hot and she didn’t like corn that much anyway. Who didn’t like corn?

“It’s too hot,” she said.

“How do you know it still is?”

“Look,” she said, pointing to the
steam rising from the cup.

He frowned, got a pencil sharpener,
and turned the pencil in it until the point had been regained. Sasha watched
him do it.

“I’m sorry I broke it,” she said.

He shrugged. “It’s okay. Not a big
deal. There’s plenty of lead left in this one. And there’s plenty of other
pencils, too.”

“Okay,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Stop being sorry,” he said, grinning.
“It’s fine.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “Here,” he said,
handing her the pencil. “Good as new.”

She took it and began to draw. Jack
watched her. He felt uneasy about something, but if you asked him what it was,
he’d have no clue. He usually found the scratching of her pencil comforting. He
liked to watch his half-sister draw, or, attempt to, as the case was. He
couldn’t wait for her to start drawing things on her own. She already did that,
sometimes, but usually she just liked to trace Faith Crabtree’s pencil
drawings, and once in a while to try to recreate them from memory on clean
sheets of paper.

Once in a longer while, Sasha would
make things up to draw. Those were the best of her drawings, and because she didn’t
stay at the house every night—she didn’t really live in any particular place
these days—he kept them for her, stashed away in the bed table.

He’d used to worry that his dad would
get mad about her staying there so often, Knapp still hated her for some
reason, but he didn’t seem to care much these days. He didn’t seem to care much
about anything now except that stuff he drank, chugging it down, and making
more of it. Jack had tried it once, and so had Sasha. The taste wasn’t for
them, and they’d spat until their mouths were dry to get the flavor out.

Sasha stopped her tracing. Briefly,
she thought about how Knapp had been more kind to her recently, and she almost
smiled.

“I’m tired,” she said. “I wanna go to
sleep.”

“Okay,” Jack said.

He got up from the bed and put on the
nightlight. Then he reached to turn out the lamp, and he was just about to do
it and get back in bed when he saw what Sasha was doing and froze like a
red-haired, freckled statue.

71

Sasha was playing with a wooden toy crocodile that was sanded in places where
it had started to splinter. Knapp had done the sanding years ago, and now other
parts of the animal were starting to crack and peel and would need their own sanding
fix soon, but they wouldn’t get the tender love and care they needed, not soon
or ever.

Jack was staring into the indentation
that was the wooden beast’s left eye, entranced. He understood then, for the
first time—he’d had the toy for as long as he could remember—that the eye, that
reptilian eye that was nothing more than a pockmark in wood, was unmistakably
sinister. It stood for evil of the worst kind, and he suddenly wanted nothing
more in the world than to be rid of the eye and the coldblooded wooden body in
which it lived.

There was something about crocodiles
playing in the back of his mind, some spotty tape that had begun to play when
he saw Sasha waddling the thing back and forth on the blanket, something the
adults sometimes spoke of but he didn’t quite understand, something…bad, very,
very bad.

She kept on walking the croc back and
forth, and she was talking to it,
talking to it,
and having it talk
back, not only to her, but to the hairless stuffed animals of yesteryear that
he’d stockpiled for her, a rabbit with both ears torn off, a teddy bear with a
leg missing, a goat with no eyes, and all missing what had passed for fur when
the toys were new.

He was gripped by an urge to snatch it
away from his half-sister and throw the bad—no,
evil,
he was sure now
that was what it was—thing out the window, except that wouldn’t be enough. More
had to be done to it.

It had to be maimed and hidden from
sight. It had to be put somewhere it couldn’t raise its ugly, scratched, wooden
snout again, and the snout wasn’t ugly because of the scrapes and scuffs on it
that marked its age, no, it was ugly because of its very nature, for the purest
reason of all, that it was a malevolent force, and had been so from the moment
it had come to exist in the mind of whatever man or woman had carved it.

But Sasha looked so happy, and Jack
couldn’t stand how he felt right now. He needed to get the thing away from her,
but he couldn’t take it away while she was playing her game. She and the croc
and the injured bunny and bear and goat—they were called Hoppity, Roary, and
Duncan—were having a full on conversation about how Duncan had got his name.
He’d been named by Sasha of course, and it was a very good name for a blind
goat indeed, or any goat, for that matter.

Duncan got up and walked over to the
edge of the bed, with Sasha’s gentle help. She’d put the croc down for the
moment. Duncan looked up at Jack.

“Hello, Jack,” the goat said through
Sasha’s lips, which she was hiding behind her hand. “Baaaa!”

Jack couldn’t help but smile. “Hello,
Duncan.” He patted the little goat’s head and Sasha pushed its head into Jack’s
hand, giving him a friendly head-butt. “I think you mean ‘maaaa!’”

Sasha laughed.

“Maaaa!” Duncan said, and began to
trot back and forth along the edge of the mattress. “Maaaa!”

Jack’s smile deepened and he bleated
back at the sightless goat, which began to canter with increasing delight.
Sasha was still bleating for Duncan, but she’d taken her hand away from her
mouth and was giggling uncontrollably between goat noises.

After a time Duncan stopped and said,
“Come to bed, Jack. Maaaa!” So Jack did, turning off the light and taking the
croc toy away without drawing attention to it.

He would hide it later, and then he’d
take it apart and go out and bury the pieces in a lot of different holes so
there was no chance of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men putting the
evil croc back together again. He could tell Sasha that he’d lost it. As much
as he didn’t want to take it away from her because she enjoyed it, it was more
important that no one, especially Sasha, ever play with the croc again.

72

Jack put the old crocodile toy down on the floor on his side of the bed and lay
down next to his half-sister, careful to stay on his side of the mattress, but
not so close to the edge that he would fall off in the middle of a dream,
probably one involving flamethrowers if this night’s film reel didn’t stray too
far from the norm.

Burning the croc, he thought, I hope I
dream about that.

He closed his eyes and began to drift
off. He was a quarter of the way to dreamland when a noise from downstairs
startled him wide awake. It was the sound of something being overturned,
probably a chair. He glanced over at Sasha. She was breathing steadily, her
chest rising and falling ever-so-slightly, but her eyes were still opening and
closing, so she wasn’t asleep.

A curse—voiced with no effort at all
to muffle or restrain it—shot up through the floor. Jack heard it clearly.

Larry had snapped off a ‘Fuck-all and
all be fucked,’ which was one of his trademark sayings. He snapped off one more
such salute and Jack glanced over at Sasha, growing more nervous that she wouldn’t
get any sleep any time soon. She sometimes cried when Larry got to cursing, and
Jack just wished she could sleep through the night.

To his relief, she seemed not to have
heard, or maybe she just didn’t care anymore. For a few moments, Jack waited
with bated breath for the next bit of foul language, but none came.

There would probably be more later,
but by that point Larry would be more drunk, and he’d be quieter, more
emotional and inside his own head. The cursing got Jack to thinking about their
relationship—the whole triangle whose points were Sasha, Larry, and himself.
His mother and Sasha’s real father were somewhere too, but their points were
dim and blinking, like they were off in another dimension.

If the lines were all connected, it
would be called a pentagon, although it would be a bent one. Jack knew that and
the pride in his remembering the term almost made him happy, but then he
remembered his anxiety about Larry’s drinking games downstairs waking Sasha up,
and that awful crocodile toy he needed to dispose of.

Larry was getting better though, Jack
told himself. He was getting better, yeah, he was, and maybe…maybe sometime
soon, they could all do things together. It was a lot to hope for, so Jack just
considered it, and didn’t let it get into the hope chest in his mind. For now,
he would just recount the facts and let the case build itself.

Lately, Sasha had been staying here,
in Jack’s room, more often. It was Larry’s house, and he’d never liked the idea
of her staying there, but it seemed that she’d grown on him over the last few
months, or all the wheat beer he drank was making him softer all of a sudden,
or wiser, or perhaps it was all of those things.

Sasha didn’t think he quite hated her
anymore—he never threw things at her or yelled at her now—but he wasn’t
friendly with her either. These days he looked at her like a person with better
things to do might look at a stinkbug on a ceiling, and that was a solid
improvement.

The bug was there, but not worth the
effort of squashing or chasing out, because Knapp had much in the way of
business to attend to, so long as said business was limited to downing every
last drop of beer as quickly as he could make the stuff and get it to his
always-parched lips. It was a matter of thirst-quenching after all, a basic
life function that needed no explanation. His vitals depended on the yeasted
goodness.

As she drifted toward dreamland, Sasha
was trying to think of a way to make Knapp not just not quite hate her, but not
hate her at all. She loved Jack and the other townspeople, and they were all
nice to her, so why wasn’t Knapp? She didn’t understand what she was doing
wrong. It had to be her. What was she doing wrong?

Then she looked at Jack and the
thought was gone.

Now she was thinking about how as
recently as the spring, Jack had been worried about her staying in his room
because he said that might make Larry—Jack called their father Larry, while
Sasha always thought of him as Knapp…maybe that was because he was not really
her father—angry and maybe violent. Jack had still let her stay there, though,
because Sasha was always having nightmares then, and he took it upon himself to
protect her from their father if the need arose, so that she wouldn’t have to
wake up from a bad dream in the middle of the night and be alone or in some
other person’s house without Jack.

She’d stayed with Senna and Alan a
good amount, and some with Nell and Rad, and with the Klefekers, and with Betty
Jane Oswalt, but she felt best with Jack, and, for some reason, in the home
that, though it had been broken, had once been her mother’s. She knew that she
wouldn’t be around had her mother not made a fool out of Knapp, whatever that
meant, but then her mother might still be alive, and maybe, she thought, just
maybe that would’ve been for the best.

That way, her mother and her real
father might still be alive, and Knapp wouldn’t be quite as mean, of course she
wouldn’t have been born, but that would be four people alive versus the current
three, two of whom were children, and the third of whom was almost entirely
useless to New Crozet. Was this all Sasha’s fault? Could she fix it? She really
didn’t know how.

She brushed a stray tear from her
cheek and reached out to Jack and proceeded to fix the floppy mop of red hair
on his head, combing it to one side with her fingers.

He waited patiently for her to finish,
then tousled her work.

“It was better the other way,” she
said. Her inflection was slightly exasperated, but the corners of her lips were
curling upward in a happy, sleepy smile.

“I like it better this way.” Then,
thinking of a cleverer retort, he added, “My hair, my rules.”

“You’re hopeless,” she said, imitating
the phrase she’d heard Senna say to Alan, usually after he’d mis-buttoned one
of his shirts, the tricky things. “Night.”

“Night.”

She tried to get her own hair under
control, which, though it wasn’t red, was almost as unruly as Jack’s.

There was more than enough moonlight
coming in through the window to ward off the darkest of the shadows, so Jack
turned out the nightlight, and this apparently excited the insects because
their cries flew up as if in a crescendo plea, and the rising breaths of their
muttering filled the room. Sasha adjusted herself, rising up from the bed a few
inches before settling back down and resting her head with decided force on
Jack’s discolored pillow. Jack took a look at his spare pillow, a flatter, more
tattered—flatter and tatter, but what did that matter?—version of what Sasha
was lying on, and got up.

“What’s wrong?” she murmured.

He only shook his head.

“Jack?”

“Nothing. Just not that tired. Sleep.”

“Okay.” She was too tired to worry or
wonder about anything anymore, and was asleep within moments.