Toybox

by Al Sarrantonio

  “Alfred,” I said slowly, quietly, completing for him what he was trying so hard to say. He shook his head from side to side, his eyes never leaving my face.

  “Yes, Father, it is I. Are you surprised?”

  He was puffing hard, and I lowered my ear (as I had done so long ago for my dear mute mother!) to hear him say, “Go...back.”

  I laughed. I pulled my head back and spat laughter, and then I put my face close to his.

  “I don't think so, Father.”

  Again he was straining.

  “Must,” he said.

  “Why? To keep me away from you? Don't you want me by your living side?” I lowered my wide eyes just inches from his, and brought the blade up close to his straining, yellow nostrils. “Would you rather I didn't speak? Would you rather I cut my own tongue out, make myself mute like my mother?”

  His eyes went very wide and he shook his head violently from side to side.

  “What, Father? What is it you want to say?”

  I pulled him up by the shoulders, a little frightened by how light and frail he was, and pressed his lips to my ear.

  “No . . .” he said.

  “Speak, damn you!”

  “Did it...herself ...”

  “Did what?”

  “Cut her...own...tongue out....”

  I pushed him back down into his pile of silken pillows. “Liar!” I said, raising my fist to strike him.

  “No!” he said, suddenly finding his voice from somewhere down deep before it cracked off into a whisper again. “True....”

  Calming abruptly, or rather moving off beyond rage to a calmer, more clear, more vicious place, I once again lowered my ear to his lips. “Why did you leave, Father?”

  There was a gurgle in his throat, and then, “...her...house...”

  “What do you mean, 'Her house'?”

  “...kept me there. Gave me everything to keep me silent. Made me....”

  “Made you what?” My voice was regaining its edge.

  “Made me....” He was breathing very unevenly, and said with great effort, with what a fool could have taken to be pleading in his eyes, “You.”

  My voice was very calm now, and I made sure he could see me drawing the blade through my fingers, letting it glint off the weak light from the amber reading lamp.

  “You're lying,” I said. “You're lying like you always have to me. Your life is a lie from beginning to this, the end. You twisted my mind from as early as I can remember. It's a sewer now, Father. It always will be. I am scared to death just to be outside that mansion. Just coming here made me tremble and sweat. My life is a catalog of unnamable things, sick things, tics and neuroses that I can't escape. I fear everything. Except you.” I brought the blade down slowly, delicately toward his old man's chicken neck.

  “Did it for you, go back,” he croaked, looking at my eyes, not at the blade. “Hybrid. She...hated you. Only way to keep you alive. Statue,” he said, his face suddenly getting very red, blood pumping into it from the ruptured machine in his chest and making his eyes nearly pop out of his face. His voice became, for a moment, very loud and clear. “Alfred! She was from the woods, not like us! Go back, save your life!” He grabbed at me with his spindly arms, his twiglike fingers. He tried to pull himself up, tried to clasp his vile body to mine. “...back....”

  His grasp loosened then, and he slipped, like a flat rock into a pool of water, down into death.

  I sat up, panting, and looked down at him; the blade felt sharp in my hand and I entertained for a moment the notion of carving him up anyway, of taking the pound of flesh I had come for and at least giving to my mother the sacrifice I had vowed. But instead I lowered it into my coat and stood up. He was pitifully dead, and in death he appeared much less the object of hate; the soul had left, leaving only meat behind.

  It was then, when I was leaving his bedroom and passing the massive, gilded mirror over the dresser by the doorway, that I saw something that made me stop.

  My skin had turned red. I thought immediately of the meat I had eaten in the past months, of the bounteous meat I had eaten in the past days in the City. I shook my head to clear it, turned on the bright lamp on the dresser and once again my color was correct. I smiled knowingly at myself; for a chilly moment my teeth looked yellow and I thought of all the oranges I had eaten—the back of my throat became uncontrollably dry and it felt as though something tiny was ticking around back there—but then this passed too.

  “Fool,” I said, and left the apartment in haste, throwing a fleeting glance at the statue in the foyer before passing on.

  Everything outside was blue.

  Overhead, there was a fat full moon, and as I looked up at it, it turned indigo and my head began to ache, giving me trouble in lowering it.

  I sat down on a bus and then a train, and my feet went numb.

  I now felt, inside me, the movement of my organs and the gathering of bread crusts as they pressed out through my ribs, hernialike.

  Somehow, I made it back to the grounds of the manse. I think a servant found me outside the front gates in the morning, curled up like a gnarled root, my face pointed at the killing sky. I don't know how he recognized me, since as they carried me in I passed a looking glass and saw that the features of my face had rearranged themselves, grotesquely mimicking that funny face my father had made at me so long ago.

  They placed me in my father's old bedroom; the dour doctor came and went, and from the look on his dour face I knew that he would not return from the woods from which he was summoned.

  I don't know what color I am now—red, black, blue, green, bone white. I do know that the pulp-ants are active this morning and that therefore my teeth must be a particular shade of yellow. Lemon yellow, perhaps. My genitals have retracted into my body. My head feels as though it will shortly fall off my shoulders.

  I have had the statue of my mother moved into my new bedroom and placed in my line of sight. The arrow in her bow points directly at my forehead and I now see a look of lust and self-loathing on her features that I didn't see before. I want to look at that statue; I want to look at it hard and long.

  I think often of my father.

  I know that soon my tear ducts will rob the liquid they need so desperately from my eyeballs, turning them into crackly paper orbs, and that, naturally, I will go blind.

  CHILDREN OF CAIN

  Tonight I killed my mother in her bed.

  Because:

  ~ * ~

  Hank and I hit it off right away when he started school. It was late in the second semester, but they let him into the sixth grade anyway. He was a foster kid. I'd never met anyone like him before—he was always smiling and he always had good ideas for things to do. After classes we'd play wiffle ball, or check out the magazines at the drug store, or sit under the drooping umbrella of the weeping willow in my backyard and make believe we were trapped in a force field. We did everything together. He said I was like a brother to him.

  “I've always wanted a brother,” he smiled.

  “You've got one,” I smiled back.

  One day near the end of April, a kid name Porky Kolhausen brought a one-pound bullfrog into school in his lunchbox and shoved it so far into our faces that we had to all but eat it. “Got it out of Cooper's Pond,” he bragged, knowing we'd be impressed with the feat. “Bet you guys couldn't do that.”

  I said, “Bet there's bigger frogs than that in Cooper's Pond.”

  “Bet we could catch one of 'ern,” Hank quickly added.

  “Bet you couldn't,” Porky challenged, and that same afternoon after school found Hank and I outside the Cooper property.

  We found the hole in Cooper's fence, and crawled along the concrete foundation of his tool shed. We stopped at the edge. Forty yards away was the pond, a cool oval of blue reflective water dotted with lily pads, water-flowers, banked by moss and close-cut grass. There was supposed to be bass in that pond, and Porky had bragged he had caught a bluegill but had no evidence since he claim
ed Cooper had started yelling at him from the house and he'd had to drop his net and run. That one we were allowed to doubt.

  “Think we can make it?” Hank smiled.

  I was more nervous. “I don't know—”

  “Come on.” And then he was gone ahead of me, crouched like a commando, moving past a green enameled metal table and chairs and into the open.

  I followed, and swore I heard Cooper yell after us. But I looked back to see the flat white face of the back of his house, and no one in sight. The screened porch was empty. A hammock blew lazily between the two elms shading the porch.

  “Come on!”

  I hurried to catch up. Hank was already nearing the edge of the pond, squatting on a rock speckled with duck crap that jutted out boldly into the water.

  “The old man's going to catch us, I know it.”

  “Don't worry about it,” Hank said, stretching out to look into the water. The calmness in his face was reflected back at us.

  There was nothing to see, just water and weeds, the drift of silt and last autumn's caught leaves at the bottom of the pond—and then I saw vague movement. “There,” Hank said, pointing to a spot a yard out to our right. I saw nothing, then Hank added, “Keep watching.” Something separated itself from the drift of pure water: a lashing tail, the lazy wave of tiny fins.

  “A bluegill!” I said.

  “It's a small bass,” Hank corrected. His eyes were wide with concentrated pleasure. I saw him lower his hand like a snake charmer toward the water, then suddenly his arm dived in and he came up with the fish. It tried to slide out of his grip, throwing its small head from side to side, but Hank quickly backed off the rock and laid fish out on the mossy lawn. It began to flop toward the water, drawn like a magnet. Hank dug the toe of his sneaker under it and flipped it away from the water another yard.

  “Great. Let's see what else we've got.”

  I eyed the bass, which curled tentatively and then lay still, and followed Hank around the bank toward the treed side of the pond.

  “Where are you going?” I asked anxiously, my mind still on the house and Cooper.

  “This is where the bullfrogs would be.”

  He dipped into the deep shade, back away from the water. For a moment I lost sight of him.

  “Here.”

  He had reemerged in a tiny clearing surrounded by tightly wound branches dose to the lapping shore. There seemed barely enough room for two. I kneeled close by.

  My hand fell on something long and machined and I pulled it up from the tangle of weeds.

  “Hey, Hank, it's Porky's net!”

  Hank stood staring at the water. “We don't need it.”

  “But—”

  “Be quiet,” he whispered.

  This time his hand shot sideways, on the bank, and he brought up something green and fat with long legs. I hadn't even seen it.

  Hank smiled. “They hide in with the grass and water weeds,” he explained. “He was there all the time, watching us.” He lowered the frog into Porky's net and took the handle from me. “Let's go back”

  He turned into the woods and wound toward the spot where we had left the bass. “Happy?” he smiled, and I nodded. He presented me with the fish, which seemed to pant in my hand and tried once to flip away from my grasp. Soon we were back at the hole in Cooper's fence and making our way to the back of the rubbled lot next door.

  “Now comes the fun part,” Hank said.

  “Aren’t we going to take them home?”

  Hank smiled at me, his head tilted a little sideways. “Nah.”

  “But we've got Porky's net for evidence—”

  “Screw Porky,” Hank said, continuing to look at me that way. I had never seen him look like that before.

  I was going to argue, but he turned away from me to the tall concrete wall at the back of the lot. The wall was topped by a ragged stretch of rusted barbed wire; behind it was a junked car lot and the barbed wire kept nobody out because there was a hole in the concrete wall, a chipped circle two foot high gouged out over many years by kids with crowbars and screwdrivers and old hammers.

  “Come on.”

  Hank wormed through the hole and waited for me. On the other side, surrounded by the cool shadows cast by rusted semis, he took the frog out of the webbing and tossed the net back among the truck parts.

  “Hey.”

  “Never mind the net. Watch this,” he said.

  I watched the bullfrog. It had been quiet till now, quiescent in its captivity. Hank held it before him with both hands, like a barbarian holding a sword, and felt down with his fingers to a place on the frog's belly. “Now.” He squeezed, and the frog began to croak, a low, belching sound. I laughed.

  “Now keep watching,” Hank said.

  He pressed harder on the frog's belly. It emitted another croak, lower and huskier than the first, and then its mouth opened wide and its eyes widened and its tongue drew out as if it had been blown up like a tiny balloon.

  Hank kept pressing as he turreted toward the concrete wall. The entire front of the frog now looked like an inflated balloon.

  “What—” I started to say but Hank shrugged me off with a laugh as his hands closed suddenly around the frog's middle. There was a squishing sound and the frog's eyes exploded outward and its head split wide. Its tongue, along with much of its gut, flew out of its mouth and hit the wall like a projectile.

  “Jesus!” I said and turned away from the red raw splotch of frog guts on the wall. “How could you do that?”

  I looked at Hank. I thought he would have a retching look on his face, or would start laughing like some kids do when they see gross stuff, but his face was flushed red. When he dropped the remains of the frog he looked perfectly happy.

  “Now you,” he said.

  “Are you crazy?”

  I looked at the bass in my hand. It was nearly dead; already I could feel the scales around its middle where I'd been holding it beginning to dry out and peel away. Even if I had rushed it back to the pond or to other fresh water it would die. But that wasn't the point.

  “I don't want to do that,” I said.

  Hank didn't do what I thought he would. He didn't say, “Are you chicken?” or laugh the whole thing off. He just kept staring at me expectantly.

  “I don't want to,” I repeated.

  And then I did. Convulsively, I turned to the wall and choked the bass just behind the head, feeling its brain and upper guts fly out like a squeezed pimple. The head split off from the body and hit the cement wall whole, falling to the ground.

  I stood watching it, and then I dropped the rest of the bass and ran, shimmying through the hole in the wall and running through the empty lot to the street. My legs pumped and tears filled my eyes as I jumped the curb and crossed the lawn of my house and ran into the garage and up to my room. I closed the door behind me and blocked it with a chair.

  I threw myself on the bed and cried. When my mother came to call me for dinner I was still crying because I knew that I had killed that bass because I wanted to.

  I didn't see Hank for a while after that. There were a hundred excuses, but he didn't push me. We were in the same homeroom, and the same Math class, but I managed to not even pass him in the hallway. Once when we did bump into each other I looked at his face but didn't look into his eyes.

  I spent a lot of time in my room. My Mom began to ask me if I was all right, so I had to fake her out, tell her I was going to the library, then go out to the garage to be by myself, or tell her I was going to play ball in the park and then sit behind the grandstand with my knees up and my head down.

  I kept seeing Hank's expectant smile. It was as if he'd known I would do what I did to that fish, as if he'd known that, suddenly, a door had opened in my mind that had nothing to do with fish or frogs but something much more horrible. All the frogs and fish that had ever died were just the first grains at the beginning of a beach leading to the largest ocean in the world.

  I hadn't wanted to kill that
fish. I had.

  I was afraid of Hank, and of myself.

  It was four weeks after the day at Cooper's Pond that Hank came for me again. I had begun to think that he had forgotten about me, that maybe he had found someone else to hang around with, or perhaps had decided to leave me alone. I had dreamed about some of the things that Hank might do, and always the dreams ended with Hank's smile, his happy, knowing smile, hovering over me, detached, like a scythe.

  But after a month even the dreams had started to go away. It was the end of spring, the beginning of summer, and soon school would be over. I would be going away to camp, I had projects to finish before classes ended, and I had begun to forget, at least as much as I would, that day and what Hank and I had done.

  I was up in my room. I remember the late spring breeze blowing in the curtains, bringing into the room the particular odor that late spring flowers have, a heavy pollen scent that smells like living things themselves. I was putting the last of my British Museum dinosaur models into a diorama I was building for the Science Fair at school, lowering a stegosaurus into its spot in the midst of HO model vegetation at the base of a papier-mâché volcano, and when I heard the doorbell downstairs ring and then heard my mother call up to me I knew that it was Hank.

  I dropped the model. I wanted to cry all of a sudden. I sat rocking myself, my eyes blurring with tears, my face growing hot, and then I clutched my hands into fists and buried my face in my lap and began to hit myself on the sides of the legs hard.

  “No! No!” I sobbed, muffling my angry voice so my mother wouldn't hear.

  “Rudy, you hear me?” my mother called. “I said Hank is here. Should I send him up?”

  I must have made a noise in answer, because a moment later I heard a shuffle on the stairs and the door to my room opened and he was there.

  “Hi, Rudy.” The smile hadn't changed. Nothing about him had. He was still the same Hank I had known for two months, hit fungoes to, flipped baseball cards with, hunted for frogs