Nobody even cares about the middle.
All along one side of town is the Quabbin Reservoir. It’s one of the biggest man-made bodies of water in New England. Most of the drinking water for the state comes from there. It’s pretty remote. No one ever gave a crap about the Quabbin, except for when it was closed to the public after 9/11. I was too young to care, but I guess the state thought that terrorists were going to put anthrax or something like that in the water, to ruin our drinking supply.
Then we could have called ourselves Poison Apple. That lame-ass joke has been making the rounds for years.
Above us is a nothing town called Hollowton, and beyond that, state forest. Below us is state forest, too, and tobacco farms. That’s where most of us work in the summer—in the tobacco fields. We’re eager hands for minimum wage. Besides, it’s the best way to store up some cash for the fall because no one wants to go out and work then.
People die.
For almost sixty years now there’ve been murders. There were murders when my grandparents were starting out and when my parents were kids. I used to hear my mom and dad whisper about the ones who are gone, but I remember their names just the same—Jenny Zaiken, Debbie Radcliffe, Coach Heffernen, Felicity Gifford, and her brother Jeffie. The list goes on and on.
When they happen, Chief Anderson investigates the murders just like his father did before him, but nothing ever comes of his investigations. Of course, there are theories as to why people are killed in Apple. Some people say the land is cursed because the early settlers stole it from the Indians. Other people say that people are killed in the fall because it’s the Devil’s time of year, and he always expects his due. There’s even a messed up idea that the local apple crop is tainted with some sort of mold that makes people do crazy things—like what happened during the witch trials in Salem.
I don’t hold much stock in superstitions or religious crap, and there’s nothing wrong with the apples in the orchards.
They’re all just excuses. People like excuses.
The truth is, we stay in Apple for the same reasons that folks stay in California even though there are earthquakes, or swimmers dip in the ocean where there are sharks that can bite you in two. Turning the other cheek is cake. Doing something about it sometimes seems too hard.
Creepy Father Tim seems to think that praying will make the murders stop. Most people in Apple agree, so church is usually packed on Sunday mornings. Still, the truth is, praying isn’t going to make things better. Murder just happens here—like teen pregnancy. In the end, someone always gets screwed—like the girl with no eyes.
She got royally screwed.
“How’s your dad, Annie?” Chief Anderson asks with a serious look on his face. She shifts uncomfortably in her seat and looks out the window. Annie’s dad hasn’t worked in a while, and everyone seems to know it. Her mom does check-out at Tenzar’s Market and manages to keep their house running, but only barely. Mr. Berg sits on the couch in his T-shirt and underwear and drinks beer. He’s been doing that forever. The Bergs have a television, but it only gets a few stations, so he watches whatever’s on and smokes cigarettes. Annie’s house is always filled with a faint haze that smells like dirty laundry and tobacco.
“He’s okay,” she says quietly, but she sounds painfully unconvincing. Newie glances over at her with a weird look on his face before continuing to gnaw on his nails.
“What about you, Jackson?” Chief Anderson says to me. I watch his sunglass-shades in the rearview mirror as they tilt in my direction. His sunglasses are so unfair. He can wear them and look anywhere, but no one knows exactly where.
My dad used to be friendly with Chief Anderson, but not so much anymore. They don’t go out of their way to avoid each other—they just don’t talk. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the chief’s girlfriend. I don’t think my father approves. Then again, my father doesn’t approve of much.
“What about me, what?” I say. It comes out ruder than I mean for it to sound.
“How’s your father?”
“Good,” I murmur. I try to think of something else to tell him, but I come up with nothing.
“Is he still woodworking?” he asks me.
For real? It seems like woodworking is all he ever does. I nod, hoping that the chief sees me through his mirrored lenses. I think he does, because he stops talking.
The cruiser finally pulls up to the gate in back of Glendale Middle School. It’s open because it’s soccer season, and there’s practice out on the fields behind the sixth grade classrooms. Some parents have their cars parked alongside the field, so they can watch the practice and make sure that nothing happens—so they can make sure their kids come home tonight.
We all get out of the car. Chief Anderson pulls a toothpick out of his shirt pocket and sticks it in the side of his mouth.
“Which way?” he says.
Newie looks at me and Annie, but we don’t budge. He sighs, slumps his shoulders, and moves down the back of the field toward the path. He doesn’t move fast. After all, what’s the rush?
The girl’s dead. She’s not going anywhere.
4
CHIEF ANDERSON’S talking on his phone to someone at the station.
“Christ. That makes three,” he says, as he looms over her body like a redwood tree. Next to him, the lifeless, eyeless girl seems doll-sized.
Newie watches what his dad’s doing. It’s his future he’s staring at—sooner rather than later. One day, Newie knows it will be him in the woods, standing over a corpse with its nose cut off or its insides scooped out. I wonder if he ever thinks he should be doing something else with his life.
Once again, I feel the tug of time yanking the last days of youth away from me. I don’t want to grow up if growing up means dealing with death. I just don’t.
Chief Anderson nods his head and says something else into his phone. After a few seconds, he covers the mouthpiece and yells over to us. “You kids know who she is?”
Silence.
None of us know what to say. We certainly don’t know her name. For Newie and Annie, she’s just that ugly girl with the bug eyes from history.
Newie says, “She’s from one of my classes.”
Chief Anderson nods and says something else into his phone. I hear him use the word “local” which sort of strikes me funny because everyone who’s murdered in Apple is local.
Eventually, more cops appear. One of them has a camera and is taking pictures of the body and the crime scene. Another one is stretching yellow tape around the trees. Soon, there are five men in blue, Officer Randy, and the chief—the sum total of Apple’s police force. The three of us start feeling awkward.
Chief Anderson notices and strides over to us.
“You guys go home,” he says. Newie nods, but his dad plops his massive paw on Newie’s shoulder and sticks his cigar-sized finger in his face. “Straight home, Newie. You feel me?” Then he looks at me and Annie. “You, too. Straight home.” We nod and gladly turn away from him.
When we walk home at the end of the day, we usually cut across the middle school parking lot and out the front gate. Then we meander down through High Garden Cemetery to Dunhill Road. Annie lives in one of the tenements there.
As far as cemeteries go, High Garden is beautiful. It’s terraced on a steep incline. Between every row of tombstones are rough brick stairs carved into the hard ground. Everyone calls them the Giant Steps, because most of them are oversized and lumpy. Annie and I have sat on those steps before and talked about some pretty serious things. She’s thought of leaving Apple more than once, but I’ve convinced her to stay. She’s talked about Boston and how things must be better out there, and I’ve reminded her that geography doesn’t change problems—it only moves them someplace else. She’s even cried in my arms while I’ve held her and stroked her hair and not aske
d why.
High Garden is a good place to cry. The sadness seems to soak into the roots of the old trees, helping the gnarled branches let loose their dead until the whole cemetery’s covered in leaf litter. All those severed oak and maple leaves are just another reminder that death is all around Apple.
You can never get away from it.
Newie, Annie, and I hop over the low stone fence at the top of the cemetery and begin weaving our way through the gravestones and down the Giant Steps.
“Her name is Claudia Fish,” Annie blurts out. It’s like her brain has been searching for the dead girl’s name since we found her, but up until now, it’s been looking for it in the wrong place.
“That’s right,” says Newie, pointing two fingers at her like a game show host. “I remember now.”
“I do, too,” I say to them. “Claudia Fish.” I also remember what they used to call her. I’m embarrassed and stare at my feet as we walk. “Crawdaddy Fish,” I say. “Remember in elementary school? Some of the kids used to call her that.”
“Because she had those weird eyes,” Annie says softly.
“Not anymore,” says Newie.
“That’s not funny,” Annie snaps. She’s right. It’s not funny at all.
I reach for Annie’s hand, but she pulls away. She’s all tense, which is totally understandable—not because of Claudia Fish, but because we’re getting close to the bottom of the cemetery. That means the beginning of Dunhill Road, where Annie lives.
Annie doesn’t like to go home. Her mother won’t be off work until seven, and her father will have been slowly brewing a bender since this morning. If she’s lucky, he’ll be asleep on the couch. If not, then Annie will shut down and go on autopilot. I don’t know what happens to her when she does that. I imagine she goes some place so deep inside herself that she has a hard time finding her way out. At best, she’ll hide in her room if she can, until her mom gets off work and comes home. If not, who knows?
I fucking hate Mr. Berg.
Newie’s not the brightest, but he can sense the tension building up around us. “Do you want to come to my house for dinner?” he asks her. The hair on the back of my neck bristles. Newie’s my boy, but I don’t want him alone with my girl. Not a chance. I wish I could bring her home to my house, but I can’t. Nobody comes to my house, and nobody ever asks.
Thankfully, Annie shakes her head. “My mom’s going to want me home tonight,” she says, her eyes turning wet like glass. “As soon as she hears what happened, she’s gonna want me home.”
We walk a little more in silence.
“I don’t have anyone to tell,” mumbles Newie. He says it for all of us. I don’t have anyone to tell, either. I’d probably be met with a funny look if I did. Or someone might remember Claudia’s horrible nickname and say it out loud.
I don’t want to hear her name out loud. All it will do is make me remember what I saw—empty eye sockets looking back at me—dark holes where holes shouldn’t be.
“Me neither,” says Annie. “It’s sad.”
I reach for her hand again, and this time she lets me take it. Her skin’s soft and warm. It’s alive. It’s not cold and hard and dead like the thing that used to be Claudia Fish.
Crawdaddy Fish.
On Dunhill Road, we all move slowly along the sidewalk, trying to stretch out the amount of time it takes us before we drop Annie off at home. Five houses, four houses, three houses. This is the part of town that most people consider “the other side of the tracks.” At one time, Apple was a mill town. There were factories here where they used to make all sorts of things for World War II. We all studied the history of Apple when we were in grade school. I remember writing a report once about the old soap factory. They mixed oils and fats in big cauldrons and combined them with chemicals and lye before pouring the mixture into blocks to cure. Soap was cut, wrapped, and sent overseas to men on the front lines who didn’t care about washing, anyway.
They only cared about killing.
Just like home.
The factories died out, but the housing for a lot of the workers was left behind. That’s where the Bergs live now—in old factory housing. Some of the attached row-homes surrounding them have been converted into apartments. They now house the Apple residents who don’t want, or can’t afford, better—the bikers and the tattoo-covered eighteen-year-olds who already have a baby or two on their hips.
Most of the houses have plastic Little Tikes furniture sitting in postage stamp-sized front lawns. It’s all throwaway stuff, picked out of sidewalk garbage on trash day or bought on layaway at the Walmart in Worcester. That’s the closest city to us—Worcester—and it’s still an hour away from Apple.
The funny thing is, there’s nothing between us and there. Even though Massachusetts is supposed to be one of the small states, it seems unfathomably large to me. No wonder we have murders in Apple, and no one cares. No one probably knows we’re here.
“Home again, home again, jiggity jig,” says Newie when we reach Annie’s house. She doesn’t say anything, but I can see sadness wash over her face. I pull her to me and run my hand through her dyed-red hair. It occurs to me that I like her much better as a blond, but I’m not stupid enough to say anything. She’d be pissed, and she’s fine as a redhead, too. She’s fine any way I look at her.
I kiss her softly and say, “Are you going to be okay?”
She shrugs. “I’m alive, so I guess I’m okay.” She stares at the front stoop of her house, with the crumbling cement stairs and the dirty flowered drapes in the window. There’s a lamp on in the living room. She grimaces.
Annie hugs me, punches Newie lightly in the arm, and trudges up to her doorway.
“Remember, you’re alive,” I call after her, but somehow, I’m not sure if Annie thinks that’s a good thing or not. She slides her key into the keyhole and turns the knob.
“Where the hell you get to?” we hear Mr. Berg bellow from inside, as Annie quickly slips through the door and closes it behind her. I can picture him, dirty and drunk, with spittle flying out of his mouth and his hand in his crotch.
Where the hell you been, Annie girl?
In Hell, I think. That’s where we’ve been. In Hell.
5
NEWIE AND I WALK in silence the rest of the way to Main Street. I don’t want to look at him, because I know he’s dying to say something about Mr. Berg. Finally, he can’t hold it in any longer.
“Don’t you want to fucking pound that guy’s head into the ground?” he says.
I spit onto the pitted sidewalk and keep walking. Of course I want to pound him into the ground, but I’m 5’8” and about 140 pounds—s oaking wet. Newie’s the walking hulk who hasn’t even hit his growth spurt yet.
We both live off Main Street about a half mile down the road. That means we have to walk by every single store and see all the people who are hurrying to finish their errands for the day, so that they can get home and have a locked door between them and autumn.
We pass the police station again and the doughnut place. We pass Francine’s Fire House, Zodiac Tattoo Parlor, and Three Penny’s. We cross over Carver Street—where Chief Anderson turned down when we took him to see the body of Claudia Fish—and continue walking.
There’s a bar there called The Gin Mill, with darkened windows and a bright yellow sign hanging over the doorway. When the sun disappears, the sign will light up and make this part of town look more seedy than it already is. Motorcycles will be parked out front, and big, fat hippies wearing leather vests will descend on the place like flies on dog shit.
There’s another bar next to The Gin Mill. It’s called Millie’s Café. Its name makes it sound like you can get apple pie and a chocolate milkshake there, but don’t let that fool you. Millie’s is even worse than The Gin Mill. Almost anyone can get in with a fake ID that’s marginally realis
tic. Ziggy Connor sells pills there—mostly Oxy and sometimes other stuff like Valium or Xanax. He also sells pre-rolled joints, too, but he usually wants a boatload for them, and no one wants to pay that kind of cash for skunk weed.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Yeah, what?”
“Yeah, I want to pound that fucking guy’s head into the ground. He’s such a douche.”
“No joke,” says Newie. “I don’t know how Annie does it.”
I shrug. I don’t know how she does it either, but then again, I’m sure Newie and Annie have had the same conversation about me and my house. I can hear them saying to each other, “I don’t know how Jackson does it.”
Beats the hell out of me—I just do. Besides, freedom is so close I can taste it. Next year, Annie and I can leave this freaking town. We can say up-yours to Apple and murders and death.
Next year we’re eighteen—adults. I don’t know what it is about that magic number, but somehow, when you turn eighteen, people don’t give a rat’s ass what you do anymore. No one cares about another waste-of-space from a low rent town, whose expected life’s trajectory includes knocking up his girlfriend, getting a misspelled tattoo on his chest, and applying for unemployment, because that’s his best shot at having cash in his pocket.
Not me. I’m getting out of Apple, if I can. Annie, too. We’re so gone.
I let that thought swirl around my head as we walk, but it slowly drifts away to the same place dreams go the moment you forget about them when you wake up in the morning.
Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves can seem so real. They seem so real, it’s sad.
“Asshole’s going to be home late tonight,” Newie says about the chief as we stop and look in the window at Nick’s Newsstand. Old Nick sells comics there. I’m waiting for the next edition of Dead A Lot to come out. It’s a zombie serial—kind of dumb—but I like stuff like that when I know it’s fake. The last issue, a poodle got eaten, so a whole bunch of animal rights activists from the PTA demanded that Old Nick stop selling Dead A Lot in his store, because it sends a bad message to kids.
Bloody Bloody Apple Page 2
