Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  He prayed and prayed when this vision would come to him, for he knew the wolf was bad and he didn’t want to let the wolf out.

  He felt a curious strength seep into him as he imagined taking Cuff and Boo and tossing them up and down in the air, just as they did the baby; or scratching their eyes out until there was nothing but blackened holes there; or putting them in boiling water and drinking them down like soup once their flesh had separated from their bones.

  He hated these visions. These sensations. He didn’t know where the wolf in him came from, but he knew it was there.

  And he knew, at a very tender age, that he must do everything in his power to keep the wolf at the door and not let it through.

  6

  Chet Dillinger—he had to take on the name of what had become an accursed family for him, yet he never stopped thinking of himself as an orphan—grew to a height of six feet by the time he was fourteen years old. He stood like a marker of some greatness against the small huskiness of the other Dillinger boys, who never seemed to grow beyond their twelfth year. Still, they remained formidable with the speed of their lunges, and what had developed into muscle-bound bodies for teenage boys. The Big Boys had become the bullies of the area, and Chet found himself more often than not apologizing to his classmates when one of his older foster brothers stole lunch money or ended an otherwise normal discussion with a swing of the fist.

  But there was more to Chet than the Dillingers.

  He had discovered baseball in sixth grade, mainly because it was the first year the school gave him a glove and a bat. While most of the kids were afraid of the baseball hitting them, Chet had been handling the rocks thrown at him by the Big Boys over the past few years; a Softball heading his way seemed minor. The bat felt good in his hands, and he felt a wild kind of anger come out when he swung it. The ball heading toward him felt like it was something else—not a ball, but some thing that he didn’t want in his life. So, when he swung the bat, he did it hard and with meaning. The ball needed to be far from him. He didn’t want it around as he ran base by base, often making a homer.

  He liked hearing the crack of the bat. One of the old women at church gave him his first pair of cleats when he was in eighth grade—they didn’t fit perfectly, but he wore them constantly, to the point that they stank and turned gray, and eventually holes began sprouting along the edges of the shoes.

  By ninth grade, he was back to wearing sneakers but knew that he’d somehow get cleats again. He wore his baseball cap everywhere but to church; he even organized a charity game at church and got the preacher to play a little baseball, too. Even his asthma didn’t kick up in the dust of the baseball diamond, or as he ran around the bases.

  The summers were his favorite baseball season; he delivered the local newspaper to earn some money, and in the summer this went into overdrive when he mowed lawns and even did some work down at the docks, where the fishing boats came in. But every day, after work, he gathered a few of the guys and one or two of the girls together and got a game going.

  Baseball became the thing (besides doing some work at church) that got him away from the Dillingers and Rustic Acres—at least in his mind. It had begun as a sandlot game, although the sandlots in St. Chris tended to be either swampy or so sandy it was hard to run around the bases. The smell in the air was either fish or truck fumes, but it all seemed like heaven to that kid as he slammed the bat against the ball and felt, in that moment, that life could be good. That it had possibilities.

  By the time he was in ninth grade, Chet knew everything there was to know about the Baltimore Orioles, his favorite team. He was up on every game of the American League Eastern Division and knew the stats on the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, and even the Toronto Blue Jays. His idol was Cal Ripkin, Jr., the starting third baseman and designated hitter for the Orioles. Chet could not get enough of Ripkin. He knew that Ripkin was from a town not more than a couple of hours from St. Chris—Aberdeen, Maryland. Ripkin had a long career in baseball, since he’d been playing with the Orioles since the early 1980s. Chet knew every record that Cal Ripkin, Jr., had ever held; and Chet read every magazine or newspaper at the local library that had even a mention of Ripkin.

  Chet found that he himself had a small talent with the baseball bat—he could thwack a modest homer out of the makeshift diamond, and sometimes the ball would be lost for days from his hit. He imagined himself completely surrounded by a major league team; and one of the coaches at high school told him that if he practiced enough, he might make it to the minor leagues when he got older. “You’ve got some charm with that bat,” the coach had said, patting him on the shoulder. “Year or two from now, I bet you’re going to make varsity.”

  He found that, with practice, he could outrun most of his classmates, too. This helped with the few obvious bullies in school, and it never hurt to be considered a bit of an athlete when it came to girls. On the baseball diamond at school, the kids began calling him “Charmin’ Chet,” mostly as a joke, and mainly because he always had a Charm’s Pop lollipop in his mouth while he pitched. But the truth was, the words just went together, “Charmin’ Chet,” and, with the exception of the Dillinger family, most of the kids and a few of the teachers liked having Chet around. His asthma came up sometimes when he ran bases, in great gusts of coughs and hacks, but he didn’t care—he let his lungs expand and expel and his nose run and just went with it. Sometimes he paid for this later on, and had to lie in bed at night practically nursing his inhaler (“That thing costs us a small fortune,” the Big Woman would say. “You need to get better and get over this weakness of yours.”)

  The Dillingers were outside his charm. Things went on in the house that seemed darker to him than a long night without stars or moon. The Big Woman was getting sad all the time, and let her hair go all messy and matted; she wore sweatpants and too-small white T-shirts; she didn’t wash much, either. The Big Boys played their usual pranks on him and each other.

  The baby had died when it had arrived at its fourth year, having expired, Chet believed, from not wanting to grow up a Dillinger. Chet himself had tried to exhaust himself to death in what the Big Woman called Good Works. Saturdays, he worked cleaning the church he attended every Sunday, and after school, if he didn’t scare up an informal baseball game among his compadres, he often worked on some of the other trailers in the park. The people who lived there were nice and liked him, and would often let him stay for dinner if the Big Woman didn’t mind. They never mentioned the death of the baby, and Chet didn’t like to think about it too much. Chet often thought of the poor creature, whose name had never been clear beyond “Baby.” The child had never had much of a chance in a house of such darkness as the Dillinger home.

  Chet continued to dream of his mother, and of her words (“The wolfs at the door”), but she had taken on the quality of a story told to him innumerable times so he was never sure if he had ever really met her or even suckled from her breast beyond the first ten minutes of his life, and he decided one day that he had to run away from the Dillinger clan and get out on his own.

  So, one night, he stole an extra pair of shoes from the largest Dillinger boy’s stash, grabbed two of his favorite T-shirts, slipped on a pair of ill-fitting jeans, and took off for parts unknown from a particular Chesapeake awfulness called St. Chris and the realm of darkness within it known as Rustic Acres.

  7

  The night he left—sneaking like a thief (as the Big Woman no doubt characterized his departure later on)—he sat down and pulled up a spiral notebook and tore a page out of it.

  He had begun to fancy himself a bit of a writer, because it was the one area in school—aside from baseball—in which he excelled. He had fallen in love with the stories of Ray Bradbury and of Jack London, and he’d even begun to read a novel called Moby Dick that would take him more than a year to finish, but he held the story within, close to his heart. So, when he wrote his farewell note, he decided to make it his first literary achievement. His going away
note, he felt sure, would become mythic in Rustic Acres, if not in all of St. Chris. He wrote:

  Dearest Dillingers, I really truly have enjoyed these years living in your house and carrying your name even though it is not really mine. I will miss the tantrums. I will miss the nightly fights over the remote control. I will think a lot about how Cuff used to fart in the middle of dinner and then make out that one of his brothers had done it. And how the rain came through the bathroom because no one would fix it. And how the dog went crazy from all the nastiness, because even a hound could not stay sane with the bones from your house. I will remember knowing that the milk was always sour and the eggs always stank. I will miss church, but not for the reasons you may think (especially since you believe in all your heart that I am somehow the spawn of the devil). I will miss church because it was the one place where I didn’t have to believe that the whole world was about you and Rustic Acres. You put clothes on my back and food in my stomach, and I will be forever grateful. Yeah, I know I’m a bastard and my mother was some kind of whore and my father was probably the Devil himself. I deserve much worse than what you gave me during these years. And I know that there were times when I felt that we were all real close and could somehow get along and get through things. Those times were like the hurricanes out on the shore. They came sometimes. They threatened to come. They didn’t always arrive like clockwork. You can’t depend on a hurricane, I guess. So now I’m out of your lives. If you come looking for me, you won’t find me because I won’t come back to this. I won’t ever be someone’s servant again unless it’s a servant of God or someone so special they’re worth serving. I doubt any of you will shed a tear over this. I don’t blame you. I am completely a bastard and should be disowned. No doubt you will continue to live in Rustic Acres and say harsh things about me, and you may be on the mark with those things. I will be fine. Don’t worry about me, although I know you won’t. I will probably miss the baby most of all, but I’m willing to bet he’s in a better place than Rustic Acres, that’s for sure. Sincerely, Chet P.S. If you come looking for me, I will make you sorry. I mean it. I thank you for every good thing you’ve done for me. But not for the bad stuff.

  8

  This last part, his postscript, seemed to him particularly nasty, but he felt he had to write it. The Big Woman had begun to get moodier over the past two years, and she’d slapped him a few times in a way that made him worry about what else she might do. She definitely scared him by the time he was ready to get out of that place. He was more scared because of the wolf that was somewhere lurking inside him than he was of her slaps, but just the same, he didn’t want to stick around and find out what would come of it all.

  He left a second note for the preacher at church, and his wife. All he said was:

  Thanks for your kindness. I’m leaving. I’m going to find her, someday. Keep saying prayers for me because I definitely need them even if I am a sinner. If I could, I’d spend my whole life sitting on the dock with you and telling Bible stories and eating Oreos, but I know that childhood is in the past now. I have to be a man. If I could’ve had any parents, I would’ve wanted them to be you both, even though I am not a very good Christian and I probably will come to a no-good end full of Hellfire and without hope of Deliverance. I have too much wolf in me and not enough lamb. Chet Goodfellow Although Dillinger was his adopted name, he signed it with his mother’s name, and he knew Preacher would understand.

  Chet left behind the legends of his mother’s harlotry and addictions, and the vague notion that to have a mother, one must also have a father. But as all the men in St. Chris seemed to look so alike—one to the other—Chet would be hard-pressed to know where his dimples had come from, where his brown hair had arrived from on his head, and from whence his sharp nose—unless all the men in town had taken turns with his mother, which the Big Woman had always told him was exactly what had happened.

  The night he escaped his bonds, he took off first for the shoreline and found a trucker on the highway willing to give him a lift as far north as Baltimore. He spent the night trying to entertain the trucker with tales of St. Chris, all of which were true, none of which the trucker—a man with a long face named Daw, whose breath was afire with whiskey—seemed to believe. His first night in Baltimore was bleak; he managed to find a church with an open window. He slept on the pews and tried not to think that God might be angry with him for behaving so badly to the Dillingers (who had, as the Big Woman had always told him, put the clothes on his back and the food on his table). When he awoke, a woman dressed in black came to him and told him that he needed to go home.

  He took her order to heart and went in search of his mother, for she was not dead, nor had she vanished. She lived somewhere to the north, in the Yankee land, and he intended to find her. Before he got much farther than Baltimore, he was captured again, and somewhere between Baltimore and Philadelphia he ended up in what they called a group home, which seemed as hellish as the Dillinger place, and if it weren’t for the fact he’d been sent to a therapist, he would never have known about his real talent.

  9

  “Some people call this telekinesis,” the therapist said, as if it were like any other malaise.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s moving things. With your mind.”

  “It doesn’t happen much.”

  “When you’re angry. I’d guess. When you really want it to happen,” the woman said. She was pretty and small and had eyes that were so round and beautiful that he thought he was talking to God. So he knew then that God was a black woman with round eyes and a narrow forehead. He wanted to tell her about how he was sure he saw God in people, but he also knew that this was information best kept to himself.

  “You think I’m making it up,” Chet said. He felt that she could look right through him. “But you know, don’t you?” He wanted to add: because you look like God to me. But that sounded crazy, and even thinking it, he knew it was crazy, and probably a result of having been brought up too much in a church. Still, no one in the little church near Rustic Acres would have ever thought that God would be one of the disciples of Freud and Jung.

  “I think you believe you have this power.” the therapist said.

  “I really do. First time I noticed it was with the baby. Then, once, when I was twelve, I made a cherry bomb explode in Cuff Dillinger’s hand.”

  “When we play with fireworks, sometimes they blow up. It wasn’t you. But you take the blame, don’t you?”

  “No,” he said. Chet thought about what she was saving and shook his head. “No, I really did it. I imagined the fire in the bomb and I let it go. And the baby really floated. Just for a couple of seconds, but he really did. My stepbrothers saw it, too.”

  ‘There are people who have claimed this kind of ability. But I doubt it has ever existed,” the woman said. Her eyes were pure darkness, and he liked looking into them when she spoke. She must be knowledgeable, he knew, because she had all kinds of diplomas on the wall and because she was a therapist for a lot of the boys. Especially the ones who got in trouble—as he had—for throwing his bed against the wall.

  “You lifted the bed how?” she asked.

  “I didn’t lift the bed. Not really.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “I was so angry at ... one of the counselors ... I just looked around for something to throw. There wasn’t anything in my room to throw. I mean, nothing. Not even a pencil. Maybe a lamp, but I didn’t want to break anything. So I looked at the bed and then it just happened.” He didn’t want to tell her the rest, about the wolf. The wolf was inside him and was trying to get out. He had fought it as much as he could, but something gave—it was like a wilderness had just opened up inside him. But he couldn’t tell the therapist all that. She would’ve thought he was completely insane.

  “You picked up the bed and—”

  “No,” he said. “I was across the room. I stood there. Something’s getting stronger about what’s inside me. It
really flew across the room.” Then he sighed. “It broke the lamp anyway. I wouldn’t have broke that lamp.”

  The therapist he had begun to think of as God also sighed. She watched him for a minute without saying anything. Then, “You told me last time about your mother.”

  He nodded. “Her name is Roselle. She lives in New York City. I think.”

  “Do you know her last name?”

  “It was Goodfellow. But I think she changed it.”

  “Why do you think the Dillingers don’t want you back?”

  He let out a laugh. “They’re chicken. Cuff almost lost two fingers when the cherry bomb exploded, and maybe you don’t believe me, but he knows how it happened. The Big Woman—Mrs. Dillinger—hates me, but she’s scared of me, too. They think I’m from the Devil.”

  “Do you want to talk about your anger?” the therapist asked.

  “Anger?”

  “Well, your anger at your foster mother. You know in fairy tales, the stepmothers were often considered terrifying and deceitful. If your foster mother was like that, it would be perfectly normal for you to be angry at her.”

  “I’m not angry at them. Not really. I feel bad for them.”

  “Why?”

  “I got out. They’re stuck. They’re still in it.”

  “And you’re not angry at all?”

  “Maybe because of the baby. I don’t know anything for sure, but the Big Woman was never going to let that baby grow up right.”

  “Do you think she killed it?”

  “No.”

  Chet was silent for a while and closed his eyes, not wanting to

  see the faces that came at him through memory. The faces of the Dillingers, but most especially the baby.