“Right,” he said. “So, but, the bigger the pile got, the angrier I got. And the longer it took, the angrier I got. And finally it was just this huge pile. Huge. And it was like I’d just gathered all my anger into one place, and I just—her car was right there, and I just—well. Yeah. So that’s what happened. And then she called the cops.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Okay. Well. They didn’t arrest you, anyway.”
“No, that’s the thing: they talked to her for a half hour, and then they came over to me and said, ‘This bitch is fucking crazy. You just need to stay away from her. Don’t engage.’”
“Okay,” I said. “So they didn’t arrest you for the car. But they didn’t arrest her for the porch either.”
“They couldn’t,” Dad said. “If they’d arrested one of us, they’d have had to arrest both of us.”
This sounded to me like something they’d say if they’d told both Carmella and my dad the same thing about the other person being at fault, and then told them, in effect, to leave each other alone. But I let that one go by.
“So what now?” I asked.
“Now you just stay away from that crazy twat,” Dad said. “She’s dangerous. And watch out for those two redneck sons of hers, too.”
Carmella had two grown sons who stopped by occasionally. They seemed friendly enough, in that way that suggested I might find the bones of a few missing kids if I dug around under the foundation of their houses for a while. Avoiding them would be no problem. It had been on my to-do list anyway.
25
I steered clear of Carmella, just like I’d been told to. But I did spend a lot of time in the yards of our other neighbors. Our block had been laid out with a right-of-way for an alley down the middle, but the alley had never been graded or paved and the space had grown over. Some people let their yards encroach on it, but there was still a kind of winding track of unclaimed, unmaintained land that ran down the middle of the block. Generations of cats, dogs, and kids had cut trails through the wilderness, giving it the feeling of a secret passage of some kind. I liked those kinds of hidden trails, so I used the secret path to get to and from school some days.
One day, as I was on my way home, I saw that a neighbor about two doors down from our house had a live goat in his backyard. I paused when I saw it, worried that it might charge me the way Sean’s goats used to, but this goat was tied to a stake that was driven into the ground. And anyway, it didn’t seem like the charging type. It had long ears and those weird frog eyes that goats have, and it was chewing placidly while it stared at me.
I looked around and walked over to where the goat was tied up. When it didn’t react to my presence, I started scratching its forehead, until a man I didn’t recognize came out of the back door of the house.
“Oh!” he said, when he saw me. “Hello! Who are you?”
“I live down there,” I said, pointing at the back of my house. “My name’s Jason.”
“Ah. Jason. Good name. You like my goat?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s neat.”
“Yes,” said the man, coming closer and scratching the goat’s neck. I noticed he had a strange accent. “He’s a sweetie. Too bad he’s dinner tonight.”
I laughed shortly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”
“No,” said the man. “Really. I was just coming out to kill him so we can eat him tonight, for my father’s birthday party. I’m going to cook him. In that roaster, right over there.”
I looked where he was pointing and saw what looked like an oil drum lying sideways on a trailer in the driveway. It didn’t look like a roaster of any sort, but I thought it must be nice to be able to park a trailer in your driveway without having some crazy lady throw dog shit on your front porch. Then I looked back at the man and smiled.
“Sure,” I said.
“You don’t believe me?”
“Not really,” I said apologetically.
“Okay,” he said. “Come on. I show you.”
He untethered the goat and led it toward his open basement door. After he’d gone a few feet, he looked back at me expectantly.
I looked at my house, just a few hundred feet away, and back at the man with the goat. Everything about this situation was breaking some Very Important Rules that had been repeated to me for as long as I could remember: stay where lots of people can see you, don’t talk to strangers, don’t go into strangers’ houses. And those weren’t even the rules I’d get in the most trouble for breaking. The one I was really going to get busted for was the one my dad was going to say was so common sense it shouldn’t need to be said out loud: when you meet a strange man who starts a conversation by telling you he’s going to take a goat into a basement and kill it, don’t follow him into the basement. How many times had I yelled that at movie screens during horror movies?
On the other hand, I was still pretty sure this was all just some elaborate hoax, and I wanted to call his bluff. I got no danger vibe of any kind from the dark-skinned bald man with the mustache. Really, he looked a lot like a shorter, older version of my dad. It was a child’s conundrum: my intellectual understanding that not feeling endangered didn’t mean I was safe, versus my compulsive desire not to let someone prank me.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s see it.”
His basement was surprisingly bright, with sunlight coming in through some windows on the south side of the house. It was also extremely clean, with a smooth concrete floor and bare wooden beams supporting the house above us. There was no dirt on the floor, no cobwebs between the joists. The ceiling was about seven feet high. I thought it would have been a good shop space. Much better than the dirt basement at the Aloha Street house, where my dad used to refinish furniture.
As I looked around, I noticed a selection of long knives hanging from nails on one of the beams.
“Here,” said the man. “This is how you do it.”
He took a small, sharp-looking knife from one of the nails above his head. Then he knelt and whispered in the goat’s ear as he eased it down onto the floor. And down, and down. After a few seconds he had the goat lying on its side. It didn’t look especially comfortable, and I thought it would get up in a second, but the man reached around underneath it and cut its throat in one small, clean movement. He cut on the side that was facing the ground, and the dark red blood poured out across the concrete, washing down the metal drain in the floor. The goat barely moved, and the man continued to pat it and whisper.
“Shhhhhh,” he said. “You’re okay. Good boy. You’re okay.”
After a few seconds, the blood slowed, and then stopped.
“That’s it,” he said. “Gone.”
I looked at the goat. I looked at its eyes. It really didn’t seem that different. Its eyes weren’t any more empty. I didn’t see it breathing, but I hadn’t noticed it breathing before he cut its throat. What did it mean? That the difference between alive and dead might be … subtle.
“Now,” said the man, as if he were teaching a class. “We hang it up.”
Still using his small knife, he lifted one of the goat’s back legs and made a single cut behind its heel tendon. The fact that the goat didn’t react to that cut was as surprising as anything else I’d seen in the last three minutes—it seemed like the kind of thing that might bring an animal jolting back from the dead. Once the cut was made, the man lifted the goat by its foot and hung it from a sharp hook I hadn’t noticed before. It was screwed into the same beam that his knives hung from. The goat’s other back leg stuck out at an undignified angle.
“Now we take off the skin,” the man said, cutting a circle around the goat’s ankle just under the hook and running a long slit from the ankle to the haunch. Then he just worked his fingers in at the top of the cut and—pulled! The skin came off the leg like a tight sock. The man made a few more cuts and, within seconds, had completely skinned the goat. What was left was just a shiny, wet thing. I could see blue veins and white fat. Pink muscles.
“Af
ter this, I do the guts,” the man said. “You probably don’t want to see that part.”
“Okay,” I said quietly.
“Hey, you want to come by tonight for my father’s birthday, you come. Bring your parents. We would be happy to have you.”
I smiled.
“Thanks,” I said. But I already knew I wouldn’t come. I wouldn’t ask my dad if I could come. I wouldn’t invite him. He could never hear about this. He could never hear about anything that even alluded to it.
I said goodbye to the man in the basement and walked the rest of the way home in a daze, thinking about everything I’d just learned. And I didn’t tell my dad, or anyone else. Not for years and years.
26
I made fewer enemies in Ballard than I had on Capitol Hill, but I was still short of friends. I played with a kid named Danny because he lived across the street from me. He and his mom lived in an apartment building that was owned by his grandparents. Danny and I were both nine years old, but he was a good five inches shorter than I was. His mom’s nickname was Tiny, and Danny took after her. He was high-strung and insecure. Calliope hated him.
I met Gabe about halfway through my fourth grade year. He was the opposite of Danny; tall, pale, and big-boned, with a round face, wiry blond hair, thick lips, and sort of a potato nose. He always looked a little stoned, though I knew there was no chance of that. Gabe and I ended up standing next to each other for class pictures because we were the two tallest kids in our fourth grade class, and we got to talking about Star Wars, and our action figure collections. He asked if I wanted to come over to his apartment that night.
“You mean after school?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “My mom doesn’t get off work until later, so I have to go to day care until she’s home from work. Then I can walk home.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. So what time?”
“Five-thirty,” he said.
“See you then,” I said.
I walked away hoping I hadn’t let my surprise show. The idea that a school-age kid would be in day care had never occurred to me, ever, in my entire life. Pretty much every kid I’d ever met at school lived with one parent, and that one parent worked. After school, we all went home to empty houses, or went over to friends’ houses, or did something else, until our parents got home. People on TV had taken to calling us latchkey kids, but while it was a nice change of pace to have anything on TV relate to my life in any way, I’d always carried my key on a string around my neck. When I got my new bus pass, that got added to the string so I wouldn’t lose it. Dad said it would be a handy way of identifying me if I got hit by a car or something, so someone would call him and tell him to come pick up the body.
I went home after school and collected my favorite action figures and Star Wars–compatible spaceships. Then I watched cartoons until it was time to meet Gabe outside the day care. I left a note for my dad, telling him whose house I’d gone to and that I’d call if I was going to be out past seven. Then I turned off the lights, left the house, and checked to make sure the door locked behind me.
* * *
Gabe lived in a single-story apartment building a few blocks from our school. As soon as we walked in I was struck by how weirdly uninteresting his place was. This was something I’d noticed since coming to Ballard. Most of the apartments I’d been in were more like hotel rooms. No paintings or tapestries on the walls. No antiques. Most of their furniture wasn’t even made of wood. Gabe and his mom had a polyester-covered couch, a glass coffee table, and a bunch of other furniture that was made of particle board: a TV stand, and a few bookshelves. There was a picture of Gabe on the wall and a picture of Gabe and some grownups on one of the bookshelves, but that was really about it.
The smell of Gabe’s place was weird, too. It smelled really strongly of some kind of meat sauce. Or some weird mix of herbs. I couldn’t pin it down, but it had things in common with the smells of the other Ballard places I’d been in.
I realized I was standing just inside the doorway, sniffing the air like a rabbit. Gabe was looking at me with raised eyebrows.
“Nice place,” I said lamely.
“Hold on,” Gabe said. He disappeared through a doorway and came out a few minutes later with an action figure case shaped like Darth Vader’s head.
“Let’s do this,” he said, opening the case.
* * *
Gabe’s mom came home around six. She dressed like an office worker, in a beige skirt and sweater. She had short, light brown hair, large blue eyes, and a heart-shaped face. She was extremely thin. She didn’t look like a real mother. She looked like the sort of woman who would play a mother on TV. She introduced herself as Claire, rather than Ms. McAlister or Miss Anything-Else, which I thought was unusual among straights. I recognized her as one of the adults with Gabe in the bookshelf photo.
“Would you like to stay for dinner?” she asked me as she headed into the kitchenette in the corner of the living room.
I got excited, but I tried not to let it show. I’d eaten at other people’s houses plenty of times back in Eugene, but I hadn’t actually been invited to dinner at another kid’s house since we’d been in Seattle.
“Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Mm,” she said. “Polite.”
Claire turned on the oven and took a frozen pizza out of the freezer.
I watched her from the corner of my eye as Gabe and I played, and I wondered if this was how they ate all the time. My dad had inconsistent attitudes about instant food: he claimed not to believe in it, but he didn’t take time to cook very often. He bought instant food as “emergency food,” but then he’d end up cooking it six nights a week. Breakfast was always Raisin Bran, lunch was always Top Ramen, dinner was usually a homemade entrée with a side of macaroni and cheese. When he bothered to make an effort, it was usually for dinner. But he didn’t make an effort very often. In spite of that, frozen pizza, pop tarts—instant food I might enjoy—all that stuff was absolutely forbidden. I could eat Top Ramen until it was coming out of my ears, but Chef Boyardee or Eggo waffles were right out.
When the pizza was done, Claire called us to sit down at the stools around the counter that divided the kitchenette from the living room. She got three plates from a cabinet, cut the pizza into what looked to me like six equal slices, put two slices on each plate, and handed a plate each to me and Gabe.
Gabe burst into tears. It happened so fast I nearly jumped off my stool.
“What?” I yelped, looking around to see what had happened.
“His slices are bigger than mine!” Gabe sobbed to his mom.
“I … what?” I said, looking from my plate to his. They looked the same size to me.
“Gabe,” his mother said firmly. “Jason is our guest.”
“Uh, you can have mine,” I said, pushing my plate toward him.
He looked at his mom expectantly. She looked at me.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem. Really.”
“Okay,” she said. Gabe quickly switched our plates, and I waited a beat to see if anything else surprising was going to happen. Gabe picked up one of the slices and took a bite. I started eating, watching him warily as I did. I was momentarily distracted by how good the instant pizza wasn’t.
“Would you like some milk?” Claire asked.
“Yes, please,” Gabe said.
“Yes,” I said carefully. “Please.”
Other kids crying always left me rattled. My dad had kind of a reflexive hitting thing he did when I pitched a fit like that, where his hand would just leap out on its own and smack me on whatever part of my body was closest to him. It wasn’t like I never cried—according to Calliope I was the biggest fucking crybaby she’d ever met—but actual temper tantrums like the one Gabe had just staged were simply not done in my house. Or at least they weren’t often survived. When other kids had them in front of me, I always had a reflex to shush them before the smacking started.
Then, afterward, I felt like I wanted to be farther away from them, in sort of the same way I’d want to put some physical distance between me and someone who was about to be struck by lightning.
I called my dad around seven, and Gabe and I played until eight. When his mom said I had to go home he pitched another hissy, but I was ready for it this time and tried not to let it freak me out.
We hung out on the playground the next day, talking about movies. Then I went over to his house for a sleepover that weekend. He didn’t seem to think much of it one way or the other; I felt like I’d just won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse.
27
My cats always landed on their feet. I was fascinated by it. I didn’t understand how an object moving through the air—a cat—with nothing to push off of, could alter its own trajectory to land on its feet every time. Sometimes I would roll a cat off my lap, or pick one up and drop it from a height of a few feet, to see if I could spot how it controlled its fall. Every time, the cat would land upright. It looked like magic to me, but I knew it wasn’t. There was an explanation for it. I just didn’t understand what the explanation was.
One day in the late spring of my fourth grade year, during a fit of extreme boredom, I decided to try to figure it out.
We had a cat named Tom—because he was mostly black, but had a single white tuft on his chest. It looked like a tuxedo, so he started out as Tuxedo Tom. Then T-Tom. Then just Tom. He was the one I happened to lay hands on, and I started out picking him up and dropping him from shoulder height, to see if I could spot how he controlled his roll. Every time, he landed on his feet, glared at me indignantly, and waited to be picked up and dropped again.
I tried this nine or ten times before I realized it had something to do with how he could spin his body sideways. So I tried dropping him with a slight sideways spin of my own added to the equation, but he could always counter and correct.
Afterward, I could never say for sure why I did the thing I did next. Not being able to outspin him sideways, I wondered if I could spin him end over end. So I took his front paws in my hand, lifted him up, and kind of whipped him into the air.
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 14
