It was big news in Apple for a day or two—until Ruby died.
I can see from the window that the next edition isn’t on the shelves yet. Last month’s offense is still facing forward, with its colorful cover montage of dead bodies and carnage. Old Nick’s posted a sign next to it that says, Poodles—you can’t eat just one.
I guess he thinks that’s funny. It sort of is.
“Wanna go in?” asks Newie.
“Nah,” I say, even though I know he’s only stalling because he doesn’t want to go home at all—not after what happened today.
“What about Mary Jane?” I ask him. Mary Jane is Chief Anderson’s girlfriend. It’s sort of a big deal in town that he’s dating her, because she dances at the Magic Lantern out on Boston Road. That—and she’s a smoking-hot twenty-five-year-old.
Life’s cruel to Newie that way. How is it fair that his dad is banging a Penthouse babe in the next bedroom over, while Newie’s lying in bed with his dick in his hand? It’s like he lives in a weird corner of Purgatory reserved for horny teens with blue balls, and the Devil is Chief Anderson.
“She’s working,” he mutters.
“She’s working something,” I joke. “Besides, you heard what your dad said.” I point my finger up into Newie’s dark, brooding face. “Straight home, Newie. You feel me?”
“Shut the hell up,” he says, as he slaps my finger away and grabs me in a headlock. My backpack falls to the ground, and we wrestle there on the sidewalk for a minute, like it’s any season other than autumn, and there isn’t a foreboding sense of dread that’s permeating everything around us.
“I can take you, ass-wipe,” I squeal as he practically lifts me upside down to deposit me flat on my head on the cold concrete.
“Who you calling ass-wipe, ass-wipe,” he laughs. Then we’re both laughing, until the door of Nick’s Newsstand opens and Old Nick, looking older than death, limps outside to yell at Newie.
“You let him go, Newton Anderson. You let him go right now, or I’ll tell your father.”
Newie, still laughing, deposits me back on my feet and brushes off my shirt as if he’s soiled it in some way.
“Aw, Nick,” I say. “I was beating the crap out of him.”
“You can both beat the crap out of each other for all I care,” says Old Nick, as the wrinkles on his forehead crease down deep into his mottled skin. “Just do it someplace else. I know your parents, too, Jackson Gill. Don’t think I don’t.”
I scoop up my backpack and punch Newie in the arm. Old Nick hobbles back into the Newsstand, and we continue to head toward home.
“I’d come over if I could,” I tell him, as our footsteps fall in line again.
“I’m fine,” he says, but he doesn’t sound very convincing. “I hate it when shit like this happens. Asshole’s going to be out until late, and when he comes home, he’s going to have all the pictures that were taken at the crime scene, and you know what he’s going to do?”
“No,” I say, but I do know. He does it every time.
“He’s going to spread them all over the kitchen table and stare at them for hours. Before I go to bed tonight, he’s going to call me downstairs and ask me to look at them to see what I think. How the fuck am I supposed to know? I’m not a cop.”
“Well, isn’t that what you’re going to be?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “What if I want to do something else? What if I want to go into the army or go to culinary school or be a paramedic?”
“Culinary school?” I snort.
“You know what I mean.”
I throw my hands up in the air. “Hey, by all means. Feel free to have a heart to heart with the chief and tell him that you don’t want to follow in his footsteps. Great idea. Then we’ll have four murders in town instead of three.”
Newie kicks at the ground as we walk. “You’re not helping.”
Across the street, a little boy, all alone, peddles his bike the other way. “Hey,” I yell out to the kid. “Go home. Somebody else was just killed.”
I want to tell him to lock his bike up in his parents’ garage, go into his house, shut his bedroom door, and hide underneath his bed. At least it’s safe there.
The kid flips us the bird and keeps going. Great—another white-trash, Apple victim-in-the-making.
I turn to say something snarky to Newie about the kid, but it turns out I don’t have to. I can tell he’s thinking roughly the same thing as me. His eyes look sad and a little scared. I don’t blame him one bit.
“I’d have you over to my place . . .” I start, but then trail off.
“I don’t think so,” says Newie. “No offense, but I’m already freaked enough.”
“None taken,” I say, mostly because I don’t have anything I can say. You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.
If you could, I certainly drew the short straw.
6
NEWIE AND I LIVE on Vanguard Lane. My parents have an old two-family that my great grandparents built a million years ago. We’re on the first floor, and my grandfather lives upstairs. There are two staircases that lead to the second floor—one in the living room and one in the back of the house, behind the kitchen. The doors upstairs are usually open, in case my grandfather needs us. It’s easier that way, because he hasn’t been doing so hot for the past few years—ever since my grandmother was—ever since my grandmother died.
The Andersons live diagonally across the street from us in an old Victorian that the chief bought when Newie and I were little.
When they moved in, we became fast friends, mostly because we were the only boys our age on the street. Vanguard Lane is short. There are only about twenty houses before the dead end, some woods, and the railroad tracks. Newie and I used to go back there and put pennies on the rails and collect them the next day. They would be flattened by the trains that go whizzing by like clockwork. President Lincoln’s head would be gone—smoothed out by tons of metal.
Newie’s mother got sick and died before he had a chance to remember her. She had that thing that people name in whispers when they talk about it—cancer—as it barely leaves their lips in conversation—cancer—cancer.
Apple has a cancer.
We don’t talk about that either.
As we walk down the sidewalk, Newie hikes his backpack over one shoulder and straightens his back. I can’t imagine what it must be like to come home every day to an empty home. I can’t image what it’s like to come home to peace and quiet. Sometimes I wish that it was like that at my house. I would bask in the silence. I would walk around naked. I’d fart when I want to—but I can’t do any of those things at my house.
It’s a different sort of place.
“You okay?” I ask Newie as I begin to cross the street to our two-family. The trees tower over us like giants and their multi-colored dandruff washes down on the sidewalk. Fall is such a funny time of year. It makes death so pretty.
He doesn’t answer me, so I turn and look at him and realize that Newie looks like a man, not a boy. He’s going to go home and pull something frozen out of the freezer. It’s either leftover Chinese food, or worse, something Mary Jane concocted.
I know that Newie should be happy that his dad’s found someone. It’s just that he doesn’t want another mother right now, especially one that looks like Mary Jane. I think it would be worse if Mary Jane officially lived with them, so it’s a good thing she doesn’t. Still, Newie has to put up with her when she’s around. He has to eat her food, which he says tastes like something bad made in Life Skills.
Life Skills is for the stupid kids—the ones who drop out senior year and can’t even find work in garages or on street crews. They end up living in Annie’s neighborhood and breeding more mental giants just like them. That’s where Mary Jane’s from. She’s a Life Skills drop
out with big tits and a killer ass, who grew up in the tenements below High Garden.
I doubt Chief Anderson and Mary Jane have the kind of relationship where they do a lot of deep talking. I think he just uses her—and she likes it.
“I’m cool,” Newie says. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
I watch him go. Part of me wants to follow him right up his front walk, climb the stairs, and go directly in his front door. It would be better than going home to my house. Almost anything would be better than going home to my house, but I begrudgingly turn and face the old two-family.
My parents have tried to spruce it up a little, but old is old. There’s fairly new white vinyl siding on it that was put on about three years ago. They’ve updated the windows and added a new front door, with a fancy glass cutout and a gold crucifix sandwiched between the panes.
Still, beneath it all, it’s an old two-family house in the very core of Apple, Massachusetts.
I trudge across the street, my mind rehashing the last few hours and wondering how they could have played out differently. Newie didn’t have football practice this afternoon. Coach Nickerson was out today, so Newie blew off laps around the track so we could hang. If he hadn’t been around, Annie and I might have found a quiet corner some place in school to fool around for a while. We do that a lot. I’d like to think it’s because she’s really into me, but sometimes I think it’s because Annie doesn’t like to go home.
We might have even walked down to the reservoir and found some place really quiet where we could do whatever we wanted. I know it’s not smart to go off by ourselves in the fall, but it’s really beautiful this time of year, when it isn’t too cold, but the leaves have started to change color.
On days when the sky is robin’s-egg blue and the wind isn’t blowing, the surface of the reservoir looks like a mirror with a double set of multi-colored trees lining the shores—one that stretches toward the sky and one, upside down, that reaches into the depths.
Annie likes it by the reservoir. It’s away from town and Dunhill Road and everything else. When we’re there, sometimes we talk about where we’re going to go next year when there’s no place for us to go. High school will be over. The invisible shackles that chain us to Apple will be gone.
I suppose it’s funny how we never talk in terms of us going someplace together, but we talk about our dreams just the same. Annie says she wants to go to Boston. I want to travel. I want to get out of this town and out of Massachusetts. I want to see what else is out there, like that mountain with all the presidents’ faces carved on it or the Grand Canyon or maybe the Crystal Caves in Pennsylvania.
I have a cousin who lives down there whom I talk to online every once in a while. She says that the Crystal Caves are caverns that seem to go on forever. She says you can get lost in them, and it makes me wonder what it would be like to be lost in the cold, hard earth surrounded by nothing but darkness.
That’s what’s going to happen to Claudia Fish. She’s going to be lost in the cold, hard earth forever, and she’s going to be surrounded by nothing but inky blackness for comfort.
I take a deep breath as I reach the other side of the street and open the gate to my front yard. Without Newie to distract me, my mind doubles back and lands squarely on an image of the dead body we found. Behind my eyes, I see her deep, empty sockets boring into me, accusing me of never noticing her. Bile begins to rise in my throat, but I can’t tell if it’s because of the memory of her dead body or because I have to walk inside my house.
Finding Claudia Fish is one kind of horror. Walking into my house is another.
I sigh and hop up the short flight of steps to the front porch. My mother has a rusted, old antique crib filled with dead potted plants sitting up against the left-hand railing. There was a time when bright red and orange flowers were crammed into the crib this time of year. My mother would count her pennies and save all summer to buy fall mums. My father would yell at her for spending the cash, though they were only something like three for ten dollars at Bilton’s Farm Stand at the edge of town.
Mom loved the way they looked. I remember she used to buy funny-looking gourds, too, and a few medium-sized pumpkins. For a split second, I imagine what it would be like to carve a jack-o’-lantern again, but it only makes me think of the person who carved great, gaping holes where Claudia’s eyeballs used to be.
I’m not going to sleep much tonight. Empty faces are going to dance around my mind. They’re going to stare at me with dark, hollow sockets and blame me for murders that I have no way of stopping.
I pull my key out of my front pocket and reach for the screen door. We never keep our door unlocked. In a place like Apple no one keeps their doors unlocked—not even the rest of the year, when the only thing bad that happens is that someone gets hauled in for drunk driving or beating on his wife and kids. The key slides into the lock, and I turn it as quietly as I can, but it doesn’t matter.
The screaming starts as soon as the tumbler clicks.
7
IGNORING THE INCESSANT, never-ending noise is like ignoring a dead body in the woods. You want to make believe it’s not there, but you can’t. You want not to listen, but something compels you to—no matter how horrible what you hear may be. It slices through you like millions of tiny razors, leaving you in tattered ribbons, but still intact.
I drop my backpack at the door and hang my jacket on the coat rack that my father made out of an old post and some rusted hooks he found at the Haddonville Flea Market. My dad’s handy like that. He likes to make things—like a carpenter.
He used to have a workshop in the basement, but he doesn’t work down there anymore. He has a workshop out in the garage, and he spends all of his free time there. It’s his sanctuary. No one goes in there but him.
For a while now, my father’s been making crucifixes. I suppose there’s something comforting to him in making them. He uses all different types of wood—some hard and some soft. He even gets lucky sometimes and scores pieces of spalted maple or scrap ebony.
His crucifixes are all over the house. They cover the free spaces on the walls, hanging between pictures and hiding the dingy patterned wallpaper.
I’ve lost count of how many crucifixes we have. They seem to multiply like mice. If you’ve seen one, then you know there are ten—if you’ve seen ten, you know there are a hundred. That’s what the crucifixes are to me—vermin infesting the house.
I hear cackling from beneath my feet, then another scream. I just close my eyes, tilt my head from left to right, and pop the tight vertebrae in my neck. I take a deep breath and walk through the living room into the kitchen.
My mother’s there. She’s sitting and smoking a cigarette, although she’s promised everyone that she’s going to quit them all together. Her promises are only words. I know that now, so I don’t blame her for lying. Her dark hair is tangled and matted and in desperate need of a brush. The bags under her eyes are terrible and bloated. She’s wearing a pair of sweats and one of my dad’s old T-shirts. I’m sure she hasn’t taken a shower today. Instead, she’s spent hours listening to the cacophony of sound as it assaults her ears, probably grinding her teeth without knowing that she’s doing it.
“Hi, Mom,” I say as I kiss her head, then go to the refrigerator and grab a carton of milk. I make sure to turn it around in my hands so I can check the date. I always have to check the date on the groceries in the refrigerator. Things go bad here.
Things have been going bad here for a while.
My mom doesn’t say anything to me. She sucks on her cigarette again and stares into the air as if it’s a tangible thing. The date on the milk is expired. I pinch open the top and smell it. The all-too-familiar stench of something sour fills my nose, so I pour it down the sink then go back to the refrigerator again and look for something else to drink. There aren’t many choices, so I pull out a bottle of soda
and pour myself a glass. I sip at it, knowing that the fizz is long gone, but that’s okay. I’ll sip it slowly. It will give me time to prepare myself.
My mother’s cigarette is burning between her fingers. The ash at the end is about as long as the eraser on a pencil. I pull out one of the green vinyl kitchen chairs and sit down next to her. The kitchen set is old, like everything else in the house. There are small rips in the vinyl, and little tufts of dirty white stuffing bleed out of the gashes.
My mother doesn’t move. She continues to stare at nothing. I hate when she gets like this. My grandfather’s going to want his dinner soon, and my dad isn’t home from work yet, so I pull the cigarette out from between her fingers and drop it in a juice glass that’s sitting on the table. She’s been using it as an ash tray.
Taking her cigarette away seems to wake her up a little.
“How was school?” she whispers in the hoarse voice of someone who hasn’t used their mouth to speak for the whole day. She swallows and clears her throat. “How was school?” she asks again.
I don’t want to tell her about Claudia Fish—not when she’s like this. I smile and say, “It was good. I like school.”
Another scream, prolonged and painful, cuts through the house, but my mother doesn’t blink. She brings her fingers to her mouth again, as if the cigarette is still between them. After a moment, she realizes that it’s not there and puts her hands down on her lap instead.
“What time is it?” she asks me.
I look at the clock over the range. The oven is fairly new, so the display is digital. The glowing green numbers look out of place in our kitchen with its stained walls and old deep double sink filled with dishes.
“A little after five,” I say. She nods and licks her lips. They’re so chapped and dry. “We’re going to have tuna noodle casserole for dinner. Is that okay?”
Bloody Bloody Apple Page 3
