When she was pregnant with Chet, she didn’t let up on her smoking and drinking and the wildness of her ways. Even the landlady, Mrs. Poole, chided her for her wantonness with the words,
“You’re gonna kill your child before he’s got a chance to breathe.” To which his mother would reply, “If the lad can survive me, he can survive anything. And shut your pie hole.”
But Chet came out with all his toes and fingers intact, and a slight overlap of skin across his face. The labor was fast and easy, and Chefs mother was mostly unconscious for the few hours it took to deliver him into the world.
“What the hell’s that?” his mother asked, her words slurring from the bite of whiskey. “That crap on his face? Is he some kind of freak?”
“A caul,” the nurse said. “It means he’s special.”
The next thing Roselle knew, she was holding the baby in her arms and he was all bloody. She felt a warmth course through her that had less to do with the maternal instinct—of which she had none—than the feeling of her body burning up from some fever. “Somebody should love this baby,” she said. “Ain’t gonna be me. Somebody should.”
He still hadn’t been named, but he was a Chester if there ever was one, that’s what the doctor said, and where there’s a Chester, there’s a Chet, and seeing as how the doc was a big fan of Chet Baker—the doctor kept the old LPs in his bedroom to listen to the sweet sound of trumpet before he went to bed—so Chet was named by the whiskey-soaked doctor who had delivered him into the world, screaming and coughing and looking like he was going to be the ugliest baby in all creation.
As the doctor had another glass of the fine brown burning liquid, he practically christened the newborn with the Jack Daniels.
In fact, everything about Chet's world was whiskey-soaked, right down to his diaper.
2
His first memories were just patches of visions: He saw the woman who was skinny and long as a straw with a head as small as a green apple, and she smiled at him a lot and sometimes picked him up. He thought of her, years later, as Green Apple Lady. She had eyes that were like little holes, and teeth that were barely more than yellow corn. He thought she was God (once he knew what God was), and he remembered God cooing to him and telling him all kinds of sweet things, and bringing him a big tit, drawn from beneath the buttons of her shirt. On some instinctive level, he knew this was not his natural mother, although he would never be able to know why he knew this. He saw the flying things over his head. He didn’t know what they were, but they seemed to be clowns and birds, all tied together with strings. Only later did he know to call this a mobile.
He remembered learning that the top of the place where the Green Apple Lady cooked him his slushies, as he liked to call breakfast, was very, very hot. When he was old enough to speak, he tried to say, “Burn,” the way the Green Apple Lady did, only nothing came from his lips like it did for the Lunkheads (so Chet had named them in his mind, although never aloud). The Lunkheads all lived in the house at the end of the lane with Chet and the Green Apple Lady, and Chet never thought of them as his brother and sisters because they pinched him and rolled him around the floor when he was too young to fight back or to even know that what they were doing was not the way the world was supposed to work.
He began coughing with the Green Apple Lady, and maybe that’s why she didn’t keep him. It might’ve been the cats. The Green Apple Lady had nearly twelve cats, and although, as a very young child, Chet adored the scurvy little creatures with their breath fresh from sampling the recent catch down at the docks and their haughty but affectionate airs, he found that he coughed more when around them. He never knew why for sure, but the coughing became constant (asthma, he’d hear the word a year or so later), and the Green Apple Lady and the Lunkheads didn’t want him around. He learned later that he had never been officially adopted by the Green Apple Lady and her Lunkheads, but only borrowed, according to the doctor who had delivered him; it was from this same doctor that he learned that his mother had taken off for parts unknown. “New York or somewhere,” the doctor had told him on one of his yearly visits for some horribly painful shot.
As he grew up, the Green Apple Lady and the Lunkheads faded away. The cats did, too, which troubled him, since he had become smitten with their antics and personalities; yet they were no longer part of his life. He probably didn’t know about how the Lunkheads—two girls and a very fart-filled boy—had left him in a shopping cart at the Gas ‘N’ Go off the main highway just when he’d turned four, or why he had ended up with the Dillinger family in Rustic Acres, but it was all a blur once the fights began.
And it was one of the early fights that brought out something inside Chet that he could never quite put back in.
3
Rustic Acres was the name given to the trailer park that was situated between the bay and the sea, so perfectly set in a flat land of farms and emptiness that it seemed as if St. Chris were a hundred miles away, even though it was only a twenty-minute drive to town.
Some pine trees added scant scenery around the trailers, which were uniformly pale green. The Dillingers owned the park, which, to Chet’s mind, meant they owned the known world, although, apparently, it also meant that there was never any money for new shoes or trousers when the first day of school came ‘round. It also meant (according to the Big Woman) that Chet would have to be cautious with his coughing lest the medical bills run up too high.
The Big Woman tried to get him to become a Christian Scientist just to avoid the whole medical bill situation, but since the Big Woman herself was of another church (the St. Chris Jesus & Bible Church), she didn’t push him too far. Jesus apparently shared space in the trailer, for the Big Woman was always telling him that Jesus was sitting there in the corner with him whenever he’d been bad (and he was bad a lot, for he grew to know the corner and the invisible Jesus quite well as time went on).
They lived in what could kindly be called a cottage just at the edge of the highway, at the front of all the trailers. The joke about Rustic Acres, as it was said in St. Chris, was that it existed at all.
Chet prayed that as he got older, these memories would fade: of the metal mailbox stuffed with the Big Woman’s contest prizes and coupon books; of the snarling, snapping dog that Chet had loved at first until the Big Boys had gone after it enough with rocks and sticks that the dog was permanently trying to bite anyone within four feet of its tethered world; the smell of rain that came off the bay that Chet dreaded because it meant a storm, and a storm meant days on end inside Rustic Acres with a family he had come to think of as his punishment for being so ordinary.
Mrs. Dillinger became known to Chet as the Big Woman, just as her husband was called the Big Man. The Big Man was a fisherman, some guessed; others believed he worked on one of the local farms; some even believed that Mrs. Dillinger had murdered him and buried him under one of the trailers of Rustic Acres, for, after all, he hadn’t been seen in nearly a year. All Chet knew was that he’d never seen the Big Man since he first arrived.
Chet became a Dillinger almost immediately. The Big Woman was a God-fearing woman who hustled Chet down to the St. Chris Jesus & Bible Church, a congregation of twelve souls stuffed into a one-room apartment near the strip mall. On Sunday, Preacher raised Chet up by the armpits and plunged him into the bathtub, all the while casting out Satan and baptizing him to be born again. Preacher was a good soul—Chet could tell right away—despite his wanting to go on and on about the Fires of Hell and the Death Everlasting.
Preacher was a fatherly kind of man and had a face like a chubby angel but with gray hair and a mustache and a twinkle in his eye whenever Oreos or Lorna Doones were mentioned. Sometimes he’d tell Chet Bible stories and share cookies with him, down along the shore in late summer, and ask him to tell the Bible stories back to him. which Chet did with some alarming imitations of Preacher, too.
Chet began to read the Bible as often as he could from there on, because he realized that since he had been born into t
his religion anew, he should probably understand just what sort of people he’d be praying to. His favorite parts of the Good Book tended to be about guys being thrown into lion’s dens, and a really dirty story (so he thought) called Song of Songs, but he read a lot of it, and then pondered on as much of it as he could bear. His mother, of course, had been a godless woman—a fallen woman, Preacher told him—but her sin did not need to fall on him, as well. Preacher had his good side and would tell Chet that he met his mother twice—once at the Kroger's, when they were both shopping for breakfast cereal. His mother, Preacher told him, was attractive and fine in many ways, although she was not a churchgoer and she had not accepted Jesus as her savior. The second time Preacher met Chet’s mother was one night down at the docks, when Preacher went down to think about how Our Lord had walked on the water. He had seen Chet’s mother, Roselle Goodfellow, out in the waves “naked as the day she was born, laughing and dancing, and I’d be one to say she had the Devil in her, only she looked beautiful and happy and she was with some friends, and I will never damn someone to hell for being happy in God’s ocean,” Preacher had told Chet with a wink of his eye.
Chet knew, though, that he had a lot to make up for. He could accept Jesus as his savior and get on with life. That was how Chet saw it as he turned five. He was smart enough to understand that a little bit of Christian fervor would get him through some awful nights in the Dillinger home.
The Dillinger boys were, in many ways, his own personal devils.
Let’s call them by their nicknames, though, because, since arriving in the Dillinger household at the age of four, Chet wasn’t sure they had any other names. There was Stash and Cuff and Boo, all of them slovenly and large and tow-headed. Stash was the oldest and biggest. He was nearly fourteen, and he had a haircut that was perfectly round on the sides because his mother put a big bowl on his head and used it as a guideline to trim his white locks. Stash was actually nicer than either Cuff or Boo, and he seemed to always be happy or dreamy to Chet—when he wasn’t mean mad as a bull—and how was Chet to know this was the influence of weed? Stash smoked it whenever he could, out back in the woods, and had started Cuff on it, too. Cuff was eleven, and the meanest of the bunch. Chet once watched him cut the head off a chicken and laugh when the body kept running around in the dirt. Cuff then turned to Chet and warned him that if he didn’t “keep it in your pants and do what you’re told,” that he, too, would get his head cut off. Chet didn’t like thinking about his headless body running around for a minute after his head rolled off. Boo was pretty mean, too, but was only two years older than Chet, and this gave Chet a great fondness for Boo, despite Boo’s temperament. And then there was the baby, which, as far as Chet knew, had no name. He didn’t even think it was for sure Mrs. Dillinger’s baby because it looked different from all the other Dillingers.
And then there was Mrs. Dillinger, which is what Chet was supposed to call her except when the social worker came ‘round, and then he was supposed to call her Mama. Once, when the social worker dropped in unexpectedly, the mud was all over the linoleum in the living room, and bowls of food were still out from two nights previous, and Chet heard the social worker cry out that the baby was lying in its own filth.
And Chet forgot to call the Big Woman Mama, and he knew that was why she was so sad after the social worker left. The Big Woman pointed at him with her stubby finger with the chewed-up fingernail that almost wasn’t there anymore, and said, “You are not doing this right, Shit.” She called him “Shit” instead of “Chet” sometimes, although when he asked her about it, she told him something was wrong with his hearing; and the boys would chuckle and nod. Because the social worker was going to come back the next day, Chet had to help the Big Boys clean the place up.
“I don’t like this weather,” the Big Woman said. “This weather makes me sad. Don’t it make you sad?” She drew Chet up on her lap. He heard the baby crying in the TV room but decided it was smartest not to say anything. “It makes me sad to see the rain. And winters coming. I can feel it. I get this hurting in my bones. It’s a lot of pain.” She squeezed him a little too tight, but Chet knew that this was an okay squeeze. She treated him the way he treated his teddy bear when the Big Woman was feeling good. “You know? I love children. I love little children. They are the joy of life,” she whispered, nuzzling his ear, kissing him gently. “I’m sorry you got a cough, Chet. Some say that children who cough are gonna be angels and that’s a good sign. So you’re my little coughing angel, Chetty Chet Chet.” After she’d fallen asleep in the chair, Chet slipped from her lap and went to the kitchen to warm up the bottle for the baby, who was still crying.
When he arrived in the bedroom that he shared with the baby, he saw why it had been crying.
Cuff had it in the air and was swinging it around.
4
“No!” Chet cried out and ran over to try to rescue the baby from Cuffs twisting arm, but out of nowhere, a big beefy arm swung down and whapped him under the chin, so that he was thrown off-balance. Chet fell into a pile of dirty clothes in the corner of the room; he started his coughing, but ignored it. He thought he heard a dog barking out along the dusty road beyond the window. He tried to stand up—the baby was still in the air, and Cuff swung it back and forth near the tall lamp with the torn shade. “Please,” Chet said, finally managing to overcome his wobbly feet. He lunged for Cuff and the baby, hoping that he’d catch the baby before Cuff could drop it.
And then, the baby flew out of Cuffs hands. It seemed to go in slow motion, like the baby was floating underwater and not in the air. Chet felt something surge through him—like an electric shock—and he was sure that every hair on his body stood on end. The dogs out on the road had begun howling and he remembered that the wolf was always at the door, always howling—
And the baby floated in midair, only it wasn’t in slow motion, and by all the rights of the laws of gravity and nature and God, that baby should’ve hit the far wall, hard, its head smashing. Instead, the baby just floated, and Cuff stared, not at the baby, but at Chet himself, who stood there, his mouth open, a howl coming from within him, a keening wail that was unlike anything human.
This only lasted a few seconds, and in that time, Chet got to the baby and grabbed it where it floated, and brought it down to his own bed as if it were a balloon that had gotten loose. The baby screamed louder than he’d ever heard him, and Chet was relieved, but had no idea that he was the reason the baby had not died that day.
Cuff, rather than thank his lucky stars for this brief miracle, began to wail, and went running to the Big Woman to come quick because Chetty was some kind of baby-killer and was about to hurt the runt of the litter.
Chet didn’t mind. He was glowing from the feeling of the baby in his arms, pressed against his own small chest. He had never been much of a crier, but tears poured from his eyes as he held the baby, and he didn’t want to let it go when the Big Woman came in and made a grab for it. Finally, he let her have the baby, but only because he was afraid she’d hurt it if she kept tugging it from his arms. She slapped him some before taking him down to where the dogs lived beneath the trailer, and making him think about the evil Godless thing he had done.
Chet didn’t know if he'd done it, or if it was a miracle from God, or if the baby had just suddenly learned how to float. He didn’t care. He slept that afternoon in the damp chill with the trailer dogs and found that he didn’t even mind that the Big Woman kept him out there until three o’clock in the morning. She walked back and forth and renounced him as a spawn of hell and begged him to repent and to accept the Lord as his Savior. Being a good boy who liked God, Chet renounced anything he was asked. He fell asleep saying the 23rd Psalm, remembering each part of it with his ten fingers, although he kept forgetting the line about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
He knew then that the wolf was truly at the door.
Chet felt the wolf sometimes, too.
Not outside, but inside.
Within his
own flesh.
5
Sometimes when the Big Woman punished Chet, she made him sleep with the dogs outside, or in the Stow-It hamper, even when he was seven or eight, smushed down with the dirty laundry and covered with the smell of mildew and pee. He remained there, wanting to get out but sure that the Big Woman waited on the other side, ready to push him back down into the filth. During those times, he would feel the wolf stirring inside him.
The wolf made him think ugly, awful thoughts. In the darkness of whatever punishment had been handed him, he imagined the wolf coming through into his mouth and hands and ripping at the Big Woman’s meaty neck, tearing it open. He could smell the blood within the bread of her flesh, and he wanted to tear at it and gnaw at her bones right down to the marrow. Then the wolf would spring for Cuff and slice him up with its claws, from his steamy belly right up to his chinny-chin-chin, and the wolf would gobble down the boy’s heart while it was still beating. The visions within him were hellish and horrible, and Chet longed to think prettier thoughts, but sometimes he could not. Those were nasty times for him, and there was no God that could save him when the wolf tried to break free of its tether. It took everything he had to keep it at bay, and even then, the howls within his mind were terrible.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 36
