Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (6 page)

On a Sunday in March, Heidi received a new bicycle for my eleventh birthday, and my bike was finally restored to its rightful owner. M and I celebrated by riding downtown. We passed the theater, and on a whim I detoured down the alley to perform my periodic check on the Creature’s courtyard. When M realized where I was headed, he wasn’t happy. I parked my bike and climbed the trash cans. M refused to get off his bike and remained poised to shoot out of the alley at the slightest provocation.

“Relax. She left a long time ago.”

“Then why are you checking, man?”

“I don’t know. Just habit.” I pulled myself over the fence and looked down into the courtyard. The catalog of debris appeared unchanged. God had neither added to its plagues nor taken away from its shares in the tree of life. I was almost back on my bike when I realized that one slight change had indeed occurred. A refrigerator box sat where the washing machine box used to be. I gasped, and M was halfway down the alley before I threw down the bike and returned to the courtyard. I crept to the opening of the box, which faced the gap between the buildings, as before. Inside, a faded red blanket and the familiar stench greeted me. Outside, a few fresh gin bottles were scattered about. The Creature had returned.

CHAPTER SIX
The return of the Creature filled me with a sense of excitement and dread. My insatiable curiosity about her life was almost unbearable. I sensed a connection between her and the pharmacological utopia of the flower children, a mystical, magical, and menacing parallel universe intertwined with my world but never touching it—except when I talked with the Creature. She was a looking glass through which I could see darkly an incomprehensible alternate reality. A fascinating but frightening reality.

As is often the case, the same element provided both the fascination and the fear. The world of the flower children and the Creature appeared to be devoid of the boundaries that circumscribed my existence. There was no list of do’s and don’ts, no foundation, no absolute. Anything seemed to be possible: incredible flights of fancy, wild deliriums of ecstasy, improbable exchanges of senses and even reality.

With the boundaries removed, one could fly to the zenith of experience. Or plunge to the depths of torment. But who could say which direction the journey would take? The available information indicated that the path one took did indeed make all the difference, but also that it was completely out of one’s control. Those who trampled the barriers exchanged their future for a pair of dice.

I avoided the courtyard for weeks but was ultimately unable to stay away. March closed with three days of drizzle and an unexpected freeze. The Saturday morning of April 1 dawned cold but clear. I resolved to visit the Creature. At first M thought my proposal was an April Fool’s joke. When he realized I was serious, he refused to accompany me but agreed to keep my secret.

I walked downtown and approached from the street rather than the alley so I could see into the opening of the box. I peered around the corner and saw a dark shape in the shadow of the interior but nothing more. I walked into the courtyard with bold but quiet deliberation and stopped five yards from the box, waiting. There was no reaction from within. I stepped closer and peered inside.

The Creature was there, twisted inside the red blanket, shaking violently as if she were being electrocuted.

“Hello?” I said, tentatively. There was no reaction. “Hello?” I repeated, louder. Still nothing. I hit the side of the box with no effect. I bent down and touched the blanket. It was cold and damp. The Creature’s head was hidden in darkness, too far inside the box for me to see her face. There was no reaction to the pressure of my hand on the blanket other than a slight moan wheezing through the jagged breaths that accompanied the shivering.

I jumped up and ran from the courtyard, almost knocking down M as I emerged onto the sidewalk. He was lurking there, too afraid to come into the courtyard and too afraid to leave me alone. A brief consultation apprised him of events, and we raced back to our respective houses. We procured an old dress his mother used when doing chores, one of Dad’s old robes, two faded but serviceable blankets, a jar of Vicks VapoRub, a jar of NyQuil, and a bottle of aspirin—all without attracting attention. These items were placed in two paper bags, and we returned to the courtyard.

M stood guard on the sidewalk while I threaded the gap and approached the Creature. Nothing had changed in the hour we had been gone. I spread a blanket on the ground before the opening of the box and knelt on the edge of the cardboard. Grabbing the bottom of the red blanket, I lifted it and pulled her out like a corpse in a drawer at the morgue.

Even though she was shivering with a vengeance, she appeared to be unconscious of what was happening. Her eyes were closed, her face ashen, the birthmark standing out in relief in the bright sunlight, an angry purple. Her brown hair, longer than last year, was wet and plastered against her head and face. She was surprisingly light, and I had little trouble getting her onto the dry blanket.

It was more difficult to pry the wet blanket from her grasp and pull it from her body. When I pulled the blanket from her fists, the Bible tumbled out. I picked it up. Most of the gold leaf was gone, but the name Pauline Jordan was still legible. I opened it up. On the inside an inscription read, “To Pauline on her sixteenth birthday. Love, Mom and Dad.” I closed the Bible and threw it into the back corner of the box.

Next came the step I had been dreading from the moment I had realized it would be necessary. I opened M’s pocketknife and cut away the damp dress from the Creature, focusing on the knife and cloth. I was relieved to discover she was wearing a slip under the thin, ragged dress. She shivered beneath the point of the blade. It took a lot longer than I expected due to having to cut the length of both sleeves and the extreme care I had to exercise not to cut her skin, which was cold and clammy.

By rolling her first one way, then the other, I was able to completely remove the wet dress and blanket. The task was simple to do single-handedly because she was distressingly light. The slip, though wet, I chose to leave intact. I was shocked at how emaciated she was. The chain with the strange symbol still hung from her neck.

I quickly draped Dad’s robe over her. Before I wrapped the dry blanket around her, I rubbed the Vicks on her chest and neck. Then I climbed into the box, grabbed the blanket, and dragged her in after me. Through a delicate bit of straddling I escaped from the box and pushed her the rest of the way in.

I then collapsed on the ground, exhausted from the emotional strain. I sat there for a long time, staring into the gloom of the box and the darker shape in the blanket. For some reason, M’s words came back to me: “
Sometimes you pray for something, something good, but it never happens. Sometimes you pray for something bad to quit, but it doesn’t.
”

I thought about my life. Although I felt like it was filled with events and even crises—the constant bouncing around from one school to another, the aborted friendships, the sudden spotlight of being a PK—nothing had ever happened that moved me to such desperation that I felt the imperative of turning to God for intervention. I had never asked M what things had moved him to that extreme. None of my business, most likely.

I was feeling something. I wondered if it was what M felt when he prayed. I thought about the Creature. She had a name, didn’t she? Why did I always think of her as the Creature? I glanced at the sky and then looked back into the depths of the box.

“God,” I muttered under my breath. “I think that’s Pauline in there. Don’t let her die.”

I got up and spread the second blanket over Pauline, who seemed to be shivering less than before. I placed the aspirin, the NyQuil, and Mrs. Marshall’s dress in the box next to her. I spread the wet blanket over the oil drum and tossed the old dress over the fence.

I joined M in the gap, gave him his knife, and we walked back home in silence.

That night I realized that Pauline needed more than warm clothes and medicine. She needed food. After everyone was in bed, I sneaked down and lifted a can opener and several cans of soup from the pantry, making sure to take only things Mom had two of. Sunday after church I returned to the courtyard without M.

I approached the box as before, stopping just short of the opening. The bottle of NyQuil was lying empty at my feet; the top, a few feet away.

I called out, “Hello?” I saw the blanket jerk. I crouched down and looked into the box. Pauline stared blankly past her shoes at me. I made a mental note to bring socks next time. “Hey, it’s me, Mark.”

“Mark. I have the Mark.” Her voice was an exhausted whisper with no emotion or comprehension, an automatic echo reverberating from her subconscious. Her hand moved slowly up to her face as if on its own and stroked the birthmark.

“I brought you some food,” I said, even though I didn’t think she realized who I was or even that I was there at all. I grabbed the blanket and pulled her out.

She stared at me without any indication of recognition. “I have the Mark,” she whispered hoarsely. “The Mark.”

I sat on the transmission housing and opened a can of soup. Then I knelt next to her and tried to get her to drink it right from the can. It ran down the side of her face, but some of it went in her mouth, and I saw her throat pulse as she swallowed. I looked around, found the aspirin, poured out four, and pushed them into her mouth. Then, very slowly, I fed her the entire can of soup and returned to the transmission.

I watched her for awhile, but she seemed to be asleep. She was wearing the robe under the blanket. The dress was crumpled in a back corner of the box. I shoved all the cans of soup except one into the box next to the dress. I then went through the awkward ritual of returning Pauline to the box, opened the remaining can, and placed it with the opener next to her head in the box.

As I was leaving the courtyard, I saw an old milk jug. On an impulse I took it to the front of the shop where I found a water hose. I cleaned out the jug as best I could, filled it with water, and left it next to the box.

“Good-bye, Pauline,” I whispered, and left.

When I returned Monday afternoon, Pauline was still asleep. An empty soup can lay outside the box, and the jug was half empty. I put socks on her feet, opened another can of soup, and left. I couldn’t stay gone long on a weekday. This process was repeated for the rest of the week, supplemented with more soup from M’s pantry. Each time I came, Pauline was there, asleep or semiconscious. Sometimes she would repeat my name when I said hello.

Friday I went downtown a little before sunset, Mom under the impression I would be playing with M until after dark. When I emerged from the gap, I saw Pauline sitting on the transmission. She was wearing the dress, the faded red blanket draped over her shoulders. I stopped abruptly, surprised to see her up. At the noise of my feet scraping the gravel, her head jerked toward me. She squinted at me and whispered, “The Mark.”

“Hi,” I called from the edge of the gap. “You’re up.” I looked down to see the Bible was in her lap. “You’re Pauline Jordan, aren’t you?”

She didn’t acknowledge my comment. “Yer the Mark.” Her green eyes burned weakly, but burned all the same, with the light I had seen the first time we met.

“Well, people usually just call me Mark, not ‘The Mark,’” I joked lamely.

“Yer the one what’s been bringin’ me food,” she said, looking at the soup can in my hand. “And this dress,” she said, looking down at the skirt.

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“What’s yer game?”

It had been months since I had first heard this question. This time I was ready for it. “No game. Don’t have one.”

“What do yer want?” She jerked her face back up at me, eyes turning hard. Her face had more color, the birthmark no longer as starkly contrasted against it.

I looked directly into her eyes. “At first I wanted to know about you, but now I guess the main thing that I want is to know you’re going to be OK.”

She dropped her eyes to her hands and said nothing, leaning her head so that her hair hung over the birthmark. Suddenly she grabbed the Bible, pulled the blanket around her, and shuffled to the box, crawling in. “I’m goin’ to be OK,” she whispered huskily from the darkness of the box.

I came forward and sat on the transmission, facing the box. “I brought you another can of soup,” I leaned forward and placed it on the edge of the cardboard. She was sitting cross-legged just inside the opening, looking down, her hair hiding her face.

“What do yer want ta know?”

“Are you Pauline Jordan?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Why do you live in a box? Sometimes,” I added, remembering she had disappeared during the winter.

“I didn’t mean to. I mean, I didn’t start out meanin’ ta live in a box.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“I ran out of money. I couldn’t stay at the shelter when . . . if . . .” She cleared her throat. “I couldn’t stay at the shelter. And the box ain’t so bad. Nobody bothers me here. ’Cept you.”

“Why do you keep that Bible?”

She made a noise that was either a laugh or a cry, I couldn’t tell which. “My parents give it to me. Daddy was . . . is . . . a preacher.”

“A preacher?”

“Scandalous, ain’t it?” She laughed, but a tear dropped to the Bible in her hands. She wiped it away. “Yeah, he was a welder down in Mansfield. That’s in Texas.” She looked up at me, her eyes shining from the darkness in the box. “Yer from Texas, ain’t ye?”