Myra was another story. I hadn’t heard her laugh since we’d left the house, and normally she enjoyed Halloween even more than I did. She hadn’t even said anything when Mrs. Jessup dropped a whole handful of peanut butter logs into her bag, and those were her favorites. Sometimes she didn’t even go up to a house—she just waited for me back on the sidewalk. She clutched Grandma’s broom with the tips of her fingers, letting as little of her skin as possible touch the handle. Holding it like that must have hurt her arm something awful. She walked stiffly, like she was in pain. Several of our friends complimented her on her costume, but she didn’t say anything. Maybe because they all said the broom was the best part, that it looked like a real witch’s broom. I was beginning to feel sorry I’d ever made her take it along.
“Hey, witchy!” someone shouted in the dark behind us, and jerked Grandma’s broom backwards out of Myra’s hand. I spun around. It was Billy Abrahms, the biggest jackass I knew.
“Give it back,” I said, lowering my voice so maybe he wouldn’t know who I was under the costume.
“So shoot me with that vacuum cleaner!” he cackled. Then he took off down the sidewalk, straddling the broom like a stick-horse.
“Let him go,” Myra said.
“Do you want to lose Grandma’s broom?” I took off after him. After a moment I heard her following at a broken run. Until then I hadn’t thought about actually returning Grandma’s broom, actually having to go back to that place. Until then I hadn’t realized I was scared not to return it.
Billy was older and bigger. After removing the broom from between his legs he was rapidly pulling away from us. Far enough away, in fact, that he felt he could play. He held the broom horizontally like Little John’s staff, forcing every kid ahead of him to abandon the sidewalk. Now and then he would veer just enough to take a swing at some jack-o’-lanterns, sending their glowing faces tumbling into darkness.
This went on for several blocks, and now some adults were chasing Billy too. Maybe people whose pumpkins he had destroyed or whose kids he’d pushed out of the way. But Billy kept laughing and hooting, leaping up with the broom now and then as though he were preparing to take off.
And, I swear, just for a moment, he did. Suddenly Billy cried out and I saw him clutch at the broom. The broom rose with a hop, taking Billy a couple of feet off the ground, then back down again.
“Jeezus!” Billy yelled, staring at the broom. The rest of us just stopped where we were. The adults, I knew, were already working out logical explanations in their heads, how Billy had just jumped and seemed to hang there for a moment, and how good athletes—high jumpers, maybe—seemed to be able to do that, too. It was all just an illusion. A couple of them yelled at Billy about how his parents were going to hear about this, then they went back home.
They weren’t there when the broom suddenly seemed to bend in Billy’s hand, then ripple into a W-shape like a snake with a huge flat head. Like a cobra, maybe. The other kids ran away. Guess they’d had enough of Halloween for the time being. Myra and I just watched, hoping Billy would let go of the broom, but not sure what we’d do if he did. He stood frozen as the broom slid over his chest and curled over one shoulder, the tip bobbing around his head as if to kiss him. Myra was crying a little. I guess Billy would have, too, if he hadn’t been so scared.
Suddenly the broom straightened out again with a loud crack, twisting Billy’s hand and whacking him on the side of the head with the hard bristle-end. Billy yowled and jumped out of the way. The broom lay dormant on the sidewalk between us.
I waited for Myra to pick it up. I think she was waiting for me.
Billy snapped out of his shock and howled with a rage fueled, no doubt, by absolute terror. He started frantically kicking fallen leaves on top of the broom, then picking up great hands full and dumping them on the pile. I thought he’d gone crazy. Once he’d completely buried the broom he ran over to Johnsons’ porch and stuffed his hand into the back of the jack-o’-lantern. I couldn’t figure it. I had this mental picture of Billy dancing around with this big, glowing jack-o’-lantern over his fist like some demented ventriloquist’s dummy. Then the candle inside tipping over, the pumpkin beginning to burn, Billy’s hand on fire and Billy continuing to dance …
“Billy!” I screamed.
But Billy wasn’t in trouble at all. Billy was walking over to the pile of leaves with the candle in his hand. Before I could reach him the pile was already blazing, the dry leaves going up in a series of pops and cracks like gunshots. He stood back, his face glowing from the fire.
The pile rose up a few times, just three or four inches, and occasionally something twisted, even groaned, inside. Like a man dying under a burning blanket. After the leaves burned away the broom looked like charcoal arranged into a broom shape.
Brooms know what Death dreams about, Grandma used to say.
The day after Halloween I got up early and spent most of the morning in the garage. What remained of Grandma’s broom was leaning up against the wall. Myra and I had gotten some rags from a trash can and wrapped the broom in that. We were afraid of getting whatever it was inside the broom on our skin. After wiping it down good with those same rags it didn’t look much better—most of the bristles had fallen out, the stitching had burned away, and the blackened stick had chunks missing here and there as if something dark and mean had been taking bites out of it.
I’d sneaked Mom’s good broom out of the house with the thought that maybe I could snip some of the bristles out of it for replacements. And maybe a good solid branch could replace the stick. Obviously, neither was going to do much good. The broom looked like an old lady retrieved from her cremation, black and flat chested.
My broom …
I looked around. I’d left the garage door open a foot or so to allow extra light in. But there was no trace of her feet in the opening. If Myra was playing tricks I was going to kill her.
My broom …
I twisted back; my spine suddenly felt electric. I stared past the destroyed broom to the back wall where Dad kept his tools. A small window was set into the middle of the wall, surrounded by heavy framing. But no face there.
Brooms are Death’s only friends. Brooms know the dust of millions.
Twin crescents of shiny emerald grabbed my attention. Two dusty green bottles full of nails sat precariously on a two-by- four to the left of the window. Her eyes. Sagging diagonally above these were several rusted strands of chain. Her hair. And below: the twin rows of wrenches of varied sizes, hanging from a shiny steel rack. Her enormous, uneven teeth.
I backed away, feeling the skin on my arms tightening, beginning to itch. Then my arms, my hands began to shake. I tried to make myself look at her face in our garage wall but my neck stiffened and fought me. I thought I was going to throw up.
Does your father know you are a thief?
I wanted to say it was Myra’s idea. I wanted to say it was all Myra’s fault, that she had planned the whole thing. But I knew I could not.
Did you know your father might have to pay for your thievery?
“No! I …” I glanced over at the destroyed broom, desperately wondering if I could still offer to fix the thing.
That broom is dead. That broom is no more.
“No! I can fix it! There’s still something here to fix.” I walked over to the black shape of the broom. But there was no broom anymore. Just a dark stripe of shadow and dust balls scattered around my feet. The air smelled like charcoal.
Brooms welcome the dust. Dust welcomes the broom.
“I’m sorry.” It was all I could think of to say.
Brooms value neither psychology nor apology.
“It’s all my fault. My dad and mom, and Myra, too—they didn’t have anything to do with it. I stole it. Me.”
A dry chuckle moved rapidly through the dust that filled the garage. Brave little man.
“What are you gonna do with me?”
Why, I still require a broom. And I cannot go there myself.
>
“There? What do you …”
Poor Town. Jay Street. There is a man by the name of Johannsen.
“But how do I …”
You cannot buy or ask for a broom. It must be taken. You are the little thief, so you know how to go about it. Johannsen is poor. He knows what it means to be robbed. So do not feel so bad.
The dust closed in around me. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I fell to my knees and slid under the garage door, slamming it shut behind me. The metal handle was warm to the touch. Loose roof shingles rattled beneath the sudden warm breeze.
Brooms know what it means to be left alone, Grandma used to say.
My initial plan had been to keep Myra out of it this time. But she’d seen how upset I was as I prepared to leave the house, and I guess I needed to have someone verify that I hadn’t gone off the deep end, and of course she was the only one who could. So I told her everything that had happened in the garage. She nodded here and there, calmly, as if it had been the most normal thing in the world. But of course she hadn’t had a conversation with a set of talking wrenches. Maybe I was wrong; maybe I was being a coward. But she certainly seemed as able as I to handle whatever was to come. Besides, this quest of Grandma’s might require two.
“Poor Town” wasn’t really the poorest section of town anymore. Traditionally, it was the place the immigrants lived when they first moved here, before they’d started climbing that American ladder of success that was to take them to more pleasant, upwardly-mobile neighborhoods. But there were always a few who stayed and kept their money there—although there might not be any evidence that they ever spent any of it. Each successive wave therefore left its own particular layer of silt, until the area was quite a hodgepodge of the arcane and the eccentric. Not well-to-do, certainly, but no slum area either.
Of course, I didn’t understand any of this at that age. All I knew was that the area was strange, and a lot of adults said it was outright dangerous. Later I would recognize this for the unreasoning prejudice it was. Back then, however, I wouldn’t have been surprised to come face to face with Satan himself in Poor Town.
It took Myra and me a long time to find Jay Street. We had a city street map we’d lifted from Dad’s desk (I couldn’t help wondering if I had, in fact, become nothing better than a common thief, so perhaps I deserved facing Hell in Poor Town). But Jay Street wasn’t on the map. We had to ask.
“You pick somebody,” I told Myra. She looked at me, puzzled. “I don’t trust myself.”
The first person she tried to ask was a bearded man in long flowing robes. He was singing in another language. When Myra spoke to him he sang louder and walked on past.
She had a little better luck with the next fellow: an old white-haired man in shorts and knee socks. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t look cold. He spent several minutes explaining in broken English how to get to Jay Street from where we were, bowed to us both, and then went on his way. We looked at each other, not having understood a word.
Then a lady in a tall fur hat stopped and asked us, in good English with a slight accent, if we needed anything. She wrote down a few simple directions on the back of a card and handed it to Myra. It took us only a few minutes to get there, even stopping now and then to gaze at the odd architecture—gingerbread and colonial and even log all jammed one wall against the other.
Jay Street turned out to be only one block long, wedged between two virtually empty streets. One side was filled by a solid wall made up of several different kinds of brick and stone: the backs of the buildings that faced the next street over. But no windows anywhere in the wall. On the other side was another, shorter wall, with a gate in the middle. Through the ornamental iron we could see a small cottage surrounded by trees. The perspective seemed to be slightly off, as if the tiny house were very far away.
“Good thing there’s only the one house,” Myra said, “since she didn’t give you any house address for this fellow.” She pushed ahead to open the gate, which was fine with me.
The area inside the wall was lush with all kinds of vegetation, including some varieties I’d never seen before. Of course, I hadn’t been anywhere yet. Except for Grandma’s.
We made our way to the sides so as not to approach the little house head-on. As we got closer, we could see that, as well-kept as the vegetation seemed to be, the house looked terrible. One outside wall was discolored with a reddish-brown stain. If the house had been metal I might have thought it was rust. Part of the roof was gone. The windows had been replaced with some sort of plastic. And the door was broken, held to the jamb by a graying loop of rope and a huge nail.
And, as we got closer, there was the distinct odor of garbage—rotting fruit, soured milk, decayed meat—and, I realized, of excrement.
A thin brown shape bobbed around the corner. We dived behind a bush. Myra moaned; she’d scraped herself on a sharp piece of discarded can. Blood welled up under the shaved pieces of skin. She bit back the tears.
I stared at the little brown man. He was ill shaven and showed his ribs through a tight red shirt. His khaki shorts were so much too big for him that I waited for them to fall down. He had long arms out of proportion to his torso and legs.
And he had sores. At first I thought they might be large moles or liver spots. But when the light hit them just right I could see them for what they were. Dozens of them on his arms, legs, face and hands. Small red ovals with a subtle halo of blue discoloration around each one.
Brooms know about suffering, Grandma used to say.
After he went inside, I pulled Myra up to a crouch. “He came from somewhere behind the house,” I whispered, and we moved slowly in that direction.
The thick carpet of vegetation cracked like eggshells beneath our feet. It seemed to be a spongy green surface layer over dead or dying plants underneath.
As we rounded the house we came to a miniature forest: hundreds of thin, more-or-less straight saplings planted only a foot or so apart. With small, straw-like heads. No fruit or flowers on any of them.
“What are they?” I asked. Myra put her finger to my lips and pointed to the house. I could hear the front door knock against the jamb. The little man was coming back. We squeezed between the short trees, back into the shadows.
He was rubbing his arm with a towel, his face constricted in pain. Tears squeezed out of his eyes and settled on his prominent cheekbones. He walked up to one of the trees ahead of us. I found myself leaning further back into the shadows, afraid he was going to see me. Myra clutched my arm so tightly I thought I was going to cry.
The little man removed the towel from his arm. I held my breath. The small circular wounds on the uncovered arm looked fresher. Several held drops of bright blood on their surfaces. He pulled out a short, trough-shaped knife, like an apple-corer, and dug it into one of the old wounds. Then he held the bleeding wound up to the top of one of the trees and pressed it firmly against the wood, which was golden in the sunlight. The little man winced, and then his face relaxed. I could see the blood dribbling down the length of the tree-shaft, soaking into the wood. As he bled, his face appeared to be slowly carved, fatigue gradually adding narrow dark lines to his face, one at a time, his color fading, until he began to look like a cardboard cutout, a black and white sketch hanging from the tree, waiting for the wind to blow it away.
“Brooms. They’re brooms,” Myra said into my ear.
Brooms offer themselves as Christmas trees for the poor.
One of the man’s eyes opened and stared right at me. I was shocked by the bright green of it against the black and white of the roughly sketched face. He removed his arm from the tree—from the broom—still bleeding, and backed away. The broom swayed toward him as he left, its bristles suddenly alive and restless. The rest of the broom heads in the miniature forest likewise began to sway.
“We won’t hurt you,” I said, stepping out from between the brooms. “Grandma sent us. For a broom.”
The little man nodded. Then reached behind him. He
held up an axe with his bleeding hand. Myra screamed.
I stepped back. Without changing expression the little man dropped the axe at my feet. I picked it up immediately in case he decided to attack. But he didn’t move. Just stared at us.
“Believe me,” I said nervously. “We just want a broom. Well, not that we really want the broom. We just have to get one for Grandma. Or something terrible may happen to us, or our mom and dad.”
The little man lay down at my feet and closed his eyes.
“I think he thinks you’re going to kill him,” Myra said.
“No, no,” I said in exasperation. The little man remained motionless on the ground. “Hell!” I said, turning. I swung the axe at the base of one of the brooms with all my might.
It split off with a shriek, trickling a little pink fluid into the ground. The other brooms shook madly, releasing their bristles into the air like porcupines. I dropped the axe and grabbed the broom, which was still somewhat slick with the fluid.
“The little man …” Myra said softly. She had bent over him. She tried to lift one of his arms, but it was hard and stiff. “He’s dead,” she said.
Brooms are headstones for the poor.
The broom started to move in my hand. Its head swung back and forth, the bristles loose and slapping me in the face. With my free hand I grabbed Myra’s arm and pulled her toward me. She, too, took hold of the broom. It snaked and beat, spun and rippled, but still we held on.
Its bristles grew suddenly longer, wrapping around both our shoulders. The stick grew fatter, longer, and pieces of it shot out, became arms, legs. I kept turning my head, trying to get the bristles out of my face. Suddenly I was staring into small red and black eyes, pig eyes, Grandma’s eyes. “Myra! Get away!” I shouted.
But we were already off the ground, vaulting the wall. Turned upside down I could see the rooftops of Poor Town beneath us, spinning away like tossed playing cards. I held on to Myra as tightly as I could and we both held on to the hideous rocketing mass of flesh and straw and wood and noise the broom had become.
Entire treetops were thrown past us in a sudden flurry of leaves. The cold air ripped through my clothes. My arms were so numb I could no longer feel myself holding Myra, and when I tried to call out her name my voice was torn from me and thrown away.
City Fishing Page 18
