Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “That doesn’t mean he isn’t lying. That doesn’t mean he didn’t hit his head,” and then his father staring at him, just staring at him, and bitter secrets behind Martin Silvey’s eyes that Deke could see but wouldn’t even begin to understand for years, old secrets dressed up like resentment or disappointment.

  “You keep talking this way, Deacon, and they’re gonna start thinking you’re crazy. Do you know what that means, if they think you’re crazy?”

  “You’re scaring him. Jesus, what’s the point of scaring him when he’s already lying here in a hospital bed, and we don’t even know what’s wrong with him.”

  But his father not hearing her or not listening, leaning close now, faint smell of whiskey on his breath, and whatever Deacon had seen in his eyes before was gone, nothing left but a strange and serious concern.

  “I’m not trying to scare you, Deke. You don’t know what these people, what these doctors, will believe, and sometimes it’s better if we keep the things we think we know to ourselves. It won’t fix anything, telling them about the dog. It won’t change things so that those boys never killed it. They might even get the idea you had something to do with it.”

  His mother crying again, covering his swollen ankle, and she stepped out of the room, left him alone with his father, and Deacon knew he was going to cry, cry like his mother, cry like a girl, and he didn’t want his father to see. Wanted to go back to the black place that wasn’t a place, the place where nothing hurt and he didn’t have to think about why anyone would beat a puppy to death with a hammer or why his father was telling him he should pretend he hit his head or the doctors would think he was crazy.

  “The puppy will still be dead, Deke,” his father said. “I just want you to realize you can’t change that. I want you to think about that,” and Deacon rolled over, pushed his face deep into his pillow to hide the tears, muffle the sobs he couldn’t swallow, and in a few more minutes his father followed his mother out into the hallway and left him alone in the white room.

  Another week in the hospital, almost time for school to start again when they finally let him go home, a week of puzzled frowns from men and women in lab coats and still no explanation for his “seizure,” no matter how much blood they took from his arms or how many pictures they made of the inside of his head. And Deacon never told them about Davey Barber’s beagle.

  But the week after he started fourth grade, he pedaled his bicycle out past the high school, past the football stadium and the older kids at band practice, all the way to the field; tall grass and pollenyellow stalks of goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace and a scatter of oaks just far enough away that he couldn’t see anything from the road. Only an hour or so left until dark, but Deacon hid his bike in the grass and walked towards the trees, picked his way slow across the weedthick field, watching for copperheads and rattlesnakes. Standing finally in the long, uneasy shadows gathering below the limbs, and the puppy was right where he knew it would be, what was left of it after a month, anyway, a month of the summer sun and rain, crows and maggots working at its body. Deacon used a pair of pliers to pull the nail out of its skull, and then he buried the body in a sandy, barren place beneath the trees. No tears this time, just a sick and final feeling in his belly because he could never tell anyone, could never even tell Davey what had happened to his dog, and no way to know when it might happen all over again, no way to know what not to touch.

  On the other side of the field, one hundred yards and five years away, past chain-link fence to hold in the safer world of teenagers, illusions of a safer world perched on the slippery edge of growing up, the marching band began to play “Aura Lee,” trumpets and clarinets, flutes and snare-drum cadence, and Deacon Silvey followed the music back the way he’d come.

  Deacon is sitting alone on a candyblue plastic milk crate outside The Plaza, drawing circles in the dirt with a stick, circles within circles, and a little while ago Sadie left the bar, the door easing itself shut behind her, and she headed off towards Five Points without even looking at him. That quick, determined way she has of walking, eyes fixed on the ground straight ahead of her, dead ahead, and he probably couldn’t have gotten her attention if he wanted to; Sadie wrapped up snug and fretting in her sulky black cocoon until she’s ready to come out again. Deacon draws another circle, seventh from the outer rim, and this exercise he taught himself a long time ago, trapping the fury in smaller and smaller circles, concentric restraint, putting it all away where it can’t hurt anyone but him, and he usually has it coming.

  He tilts the crate back, all his weight resting against the wall of The Plaza, semicircle of glazed bricks the soft color of butter, odd semicircle of a building jutting out from under an old shopping center: a florist and an Indian restaurant up there, Western Supermarket and a video rental place, and The Plaza tucked neatly beneath. Not as hot now as when he first left the bar, a few clouds and maybe a thunderstorm on the way, car exhaust, hot asphalt and a spicy hint of curry in the air.

  The Plaza door opens again and this time it’s Sheryl, still wearing her beer-stained bar apron, lighting a cigarette as she walks towards him. She squats down in the gravel and dirt next to his crate and exhales a cloud of smoke, takes another drag off her Marlboro before she says anything. Bunky Tolbert hasn’t shown up, and Deacon wonders who’s watching the bar.

  “I asked Jess to watch after things for me while I took a break,” she says, reply to his unspoken question like a sideshow mind reader’s trick, and then Sheryl offers him a cigarette and Deacon says no, but thanks, and she shrugs, have-it-your-way shrug and slips the pack back into her apron pocket. “What’s that supposed to be?” she asks, pointing at Deacon’s circles with the smoldering tip of her cigarette.

  A quick, embarrassed swipe from one of his boots, and Deacon erases them all, nothing there now but bits of limestone and sand again, and “Just doodling,” he replies. “It wasn’t anything.” Sheryl nods and puffs her cigarette.

  “Look, I know you’re a smart guy, Deke,” she says, taps gray ash to the ground and looks up at him, squints at him through her own smoke. “So I’m not going to bother telling you what an asshole you can be. I figure you already know that part.” And Deacon nods once, tosses away his stick and leans forward on the blue milk crate, all four corners back down to earth again.

  “Then what are you gonna say, Sheryl?” he asks, not in the mood for guessing games, not really in the mood to listen to her or anyone else, for that matter.

  “That she’s just a kid, that’s all, Deke. And I know she can be a freaky little pain in the ass sometimes, but if I were you and wanted her to hang around, well . . . I’d take it just a little easier on her, cowboy.”

  Deacon kicks at the dirt, kicks away the smooth place his boot made of the circles, and “It’ll work itself out, Sheryl. It always does.” And Sheryl nods, thoughtful, sure, whatever-you-say sort of nod, one more drag off her cigarette and she crushes the butt out beneath the toe of a sneaker.

  “I just keep wondering if you’re pissed off at Sadie, or if you’re pissed off at Elise and it’s just a lot easier to hurt someone who isn’t dead.”

  Deacon swallows, wishing he had another beer or a bottle of gin, bottle of vodka, almost anything to wash away the dry. “That’s a hell of a shitty thing to say,” he mumbles, and Sheryl nods her head.

  “All I’m sayin’ is be careful, man,” and she gets up, glances at the darkening sky, the powdergray undersides of the thunderheads beginning to stack up above the city. “I gotta get back inside before Jessie decides to start handing out free martinis. If you see Bunky, kick his lazy ass for me,” and then she’s gone, and Deacon Silvey is alone, and there’s a sound like thunder off towards Red Mountain.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sadie

  SADIE Jasper stalks down the steep hill leading away from The Plaza, away from Deacon, her pointy black boots clock-clock-clocking loud on the asphalt, and never mind the sidewalk, half-overgrown with kudzu, anyway, so she’s walking down the
middle of the road; if anyone runs her down that’s their problem, a dent in their fender, their cracked windshield, an explanation they’ll have to come up with for the police. She imagines her body lying limp and broken beside the road, bloody rag doll held inside chalk-white lines, imagines little hairy bits of her scalp caught beneath the wiper blades of some asshole’s Saab or BMW, and that almost makes her smile. She kicks at an empty plastic bottle that once held brake fluid, and it bounces on ahead of her, finally comes to rest against the curb.

  No good pretending that Deacon would really give a shit. Hey, buddy, someone just ran over your girlfriend and now she’s dead. Man, now she’s fucking road pizza, and Sadie knows precisely the way he’d rub at his eyes for a moment or two, the dull and calculated squint towards the ceiling of that shitty little bar, before he’d shake his head and order a shot of whiskey. Something almost expensive, in her memory. One alcoholic tear for poor crumpled Sadie, if she was lucky, and so she glances around for something else to kick, something else that can’t kick back.

  The steep road intersecting with Twenty-first Street, and she turns right, turns north towards home, the tiny apartment she shares with Deacon, and Sadie spots an old Diet Coke can in the gutter. She starts to kick it, then pictures Chance Matthews’ face printed across the red-and-white aluminum and stomps it hard, instead. Much more satisfying to feel the soft metal fold and flatten out beneath the heel of her boot, delicious, ruined, scrunchy sound as she grinds it back and forth against the blacktop. And then a car rushes past, shinyblack blur and tires squealing, horn like a fucking banshee on crack, and some guy yelling at her to get out of the middle of the goddamn road, Get out of the middle of the road you fucking freak; sudden swoosh of air and exhaust fumes, and Sadie watches the car speed away, then stares down at the squashed Diet Coke can, and it doesn’t really look anything like Chance Matthews anymore.

  “Fucker,” she whispers and kicks it, sends it skittering and skipping away after the car that almost ran her down, and Sadie Jasper decides that maybe the sidewalk isn’t such a bad idea after all.

  Another block to the bank where she usually manages to keep just enough in checking that they don’t cancel her account or charge her fees for letting it sit empty. The teller smiles politely, requisite, insincere smile, and takes away the candygreen slip of paper with her mother’s signature, the deposit slip scarred by her own sprawling, unsteady handwriting, and gives her back a hundred and fifty in cash; the rest tucked away safe for now, and Sadie counts the money twice before stuffing it into her Bad Badtz-Maru billfold. “Thank you, Miss Jasper. You have a nice day now,” the teller says, but Sadie knows she doesn’t mean it any more than she means the plastic smile, that she’s probably only thinking about all the customers standing impatiently behind Sadie, or wondering how anyone could walk around in public dressed like a refugee from The Adams Family ; Sadie takes an extra few seconds to return her billfold to her purse, another second to snap the purse shut again, and then she glares at the woman behind the counter, not a smile but the distressed sort of face she might make if someone told her that she’d stepped in dog shit, maybe, and “You’re welcome,” she says.

  She leaves the bank, leaves the air-conditioning and carpetsmelling air, crosses Twentieth Street to the dusty, secondhand bookshop squeezed between a hardware store and a place that repairs bicycles. Cowbell jingle when she opens the door and no air conditioner here, just a couple of huge ceiling fans that must have been around at least since Eisenhower was president, rusty steel blades to move the stale, bookscented heat around and around, and the old man behind the counter smiles at her. But this is a genuine smile, his white beard that always makes Sadie think of the grandfathers she never knew, white eyebrows, and, “Good afternoon, Sadie,” the old man says.

  “Good afternoon, Jerome,” she says, returning the smile in her hard, uneasy way, and “I think I might have something for you today,” he says, reaches beneath the counter, and his hand comes back with a book, clothbound cover the color of antique ivory, title and author stamped in faded gold and art deco letters. Best Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood, and she lifts it carefully off the countertop, picks it up the way someone else might lift a diamond necklace or a sick kitten, and opens the book to the frontispiece and title page, black-and-white photo of the author in a dapper suit, sadkind eyes and his bow tie just a little crooked.

  “It’s an ex-library copy, I’m afraid,” Jerome says, and Sadie’s eyes drift from the author’s portrait to the word DISCARD stamped crimson and blockylarge just below the title, and PROPERTY OF NEWBURGH PUBLIC LIBRARY, NEWBURGH, NEW YORK, stamped underneath that in ink the color of blackberry juice. She sighs loud, frowns, something almost violent about marking a book that way, disrespectful and indelible inkbruises on paper gone yellowbrown around the edges.

  “I know,” Jerome says. “But it is the 1938 edition.”

  “You just saw me leaving the bank, didn’t you?” she asks the old man. He shrugs a guilty, unrepentant shrug while she flips carefully through the pages, past “The Willows” and “The Wendigo” and “Accessory Before the Fact,” thinks about the cheap, dog-eared Dover paperback she’s had for years, a rubber band around it so the loose pages don’t get lost.

  “Twelve fifty,” Jerome says. “Because it’s a discard, and because I know you’ll give it a good home.”

  Sadie closes the book and lays it gently on the counter, already nodding her head, no point pretending she’s going to leave the shop without the Blackwood and she doesn’t have the heart to haggle with Jerome when she knows he’s hardly making enough these days to keep the power bill paid; all his business swallowed up years ago by strip-mall megastores and now people buying their books off the Internet, so she smiles for him again, and Jerome says he’ll hold onto it if she wants to browse around a while. And that’s all she ever intended to do, of course, browse the shelves for an hour or two until she stopped feeling so pissed at Deke, crisp money in her purse, but she knows how to be a good girl and Jerome never fusses if she hangs around without buying anything.

  “How’s Deke these days?” Jerome asks. “Haven’t seen him around in weeks,” putting the book into a small brown paper bag, now, folding the bag neatly closed.

  “Maybe you better ask me that again a little later,” she says, smile fading, and Sadie slips away into the history section, past towering, overcrowded Civil War shelves, shelves for ancient Rome and Greece, shortest cut to the one narrow shelf labeled “Spiritualism and The Occult,” stuck way off by itself in the very back of the shop. Nothing too heavy or too spooky, a few beat-up, spinebroken copies of Aleiter Crowley and Eden Gray, Edgar Cayce and the prognostications of Nostradamus, various interchangeable manuals for the Tarot and I Ching; she’s halfway through Yeats’ A Vision, hoping that no one buys it before she’s finished. Her place marked with a movie ticket stub from her purse, and Sadie finds a wobbly stool, one leg an inch too short, finds Yeats still waiting where she left him tucked safe and secret behind a copy of The Book of Mormon. There’s a tin of Altoids in her purse, because Jerome won’t let her smoke in the shop, and she digs it out, puts one of the powderwhite peppermints under her tongue, slides a coverless, water-damaged Witchcraft in Old and New England under the crippled stool, and in a moment she’s lost in the soothing flow of words, concentration and focus to let her forget the argument with Deacon for a while.

  Almost three months since the first night that Sadie Jasper slept with Deacon Silvey, and the first time that’s all it was. She slept in his bed, lay very still and listened to his uneven breathing, the desperate sounds that people lost in nightmares make. Smelled his sweat and watched the restless flutter of his eyelids, wishing she could see, could know the images rolling wild through his head. She held him because that’s all he asked her to do, Hold me, Sadie, just fucking hold me tonight, okay? and somewhere near dawn he awoke suddenly, sat up straight, gulping air like a junky with a syringe full of adrenaline pouring into his heart, gasping lik
e a drowned man coming back to life. Sadie groggy, confused, trying to force herself awake, and What’s wrong, Deke? What’s wrong? but he was already out of bed, already across the room and the bathroom door squeaking open. Deacon? and no answer but the water gurgling from the faucet into the ruststained sink, staccato lampcord click and then a white, white light like rubbing alcohol in her eyes.

  Stumbling across the bedroom, stubborn shadows and her eyes trying to adjust to the light spilling out of the bathroom and she stubbed a toe against the edge of his chest of drawers. And then she was standing beside him, his face in the medicine cabinet mirror above the sink, face so pale, sickpale, scaredpale, cold water dripping from his chin and the end of his nose, dripping from his hair. No idea what to say to a face like that, what would comfort or console, and so she didn’t say anything at all. Stood silent beside him and waited while he stared into his own frightened eyes, his own green eyes gone mad, madman’s intensity in that stare, and “Fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck me, fuck me,” and when she touched his arm he flinched.

  “It’s just me, Deke,” but no sign that he understood, that he’d even heard her, and he turned away from the mirror, turned and stared at the big cast-iron bathtub, stared into the tub, and by then Sadie was staring, too, straining to see whatever could drain the last, stingy bit of color from Deacon’s face, bitterhard Deacon Silvey who never showed anything he didn’t want you to see. A sound from his lips a lost child might make, and he sank to his knees beside the tub and began to cry.

  “It’s Elise, isn’t it?” she whispered, fearful, tentative whisper, and for an answer he slammed both fists into the side of the tub, furious blows that should have shattered his knuckles, but only left his hands bruised and bleeding.