The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  Those smooth beige faceless garage doors—they seemed to capture something essential about the place, something about the suburbs’ loneliness, she thought. A big front porch brings you out into the world, but a garage door shuts you off from it.

  How had she ended up here, of all places?

  Her husband, that’s how. Henry had moved them to the house on Oakdale Lane, in this little city of Streamwood, one of Chicago’s many indistinct suburbs. This after a string of small two-bedroom apartments in various Midwestern agro-industrial outposts as Henry climbed the corporate ladder in his chosen field: prepackaged frozen meals. When they landed in Streamwood, Henry insisted it was their final move, scoring as he had a job good enough to stay for: associate vice president of R&D, Frozen Foods Division. The day they moved in, Faye said, “I guess this is it,” then turned to Samuel. “I guess this is where you’re going to be from.”

  Streamwood, she thought now. No streams, no woods.

  “The thing about garage doors…,” she said, and she turned around to find Samuel staring at the asphalt in front of him, concentrating hard on something. He hadn’t heard her.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  Samuel pulled the wagon, and its plastic wheels clacked on the street. Sometimes a pebble would lodge under one of the wheels and the wagon would stop moving and the jolt would almost knock him down. He felt, whenever this happened, like he was disappointing his mother. So he watched for any kind of debris and kicked away stones and pieces of mulch and bark, and when he kicked he was careful not to kick very hard for fear his shoe would get stubbed in a sidewalk crack and he’d go tumbling forward, tripping on nothing, just walking wrong, which he worried would also disappoint his mother. He was trying to keep up with her—since she might be disappointed if he fell behind and she had to wait for him—but he couldn’t go so fast that one of his eight toys might topple out of the wagon, which would be a clumsy thing she definitely would be disappointed by. So he had to achieve exactly the right pace to keep up with his mother but then slow down on the parts of the street that were cracked and uneven, and watch for debris and kick debris away without tripping, and if he could do all of this successfully then it might be a better day. He might salvage the day. He might be less of a disappointment. He might erase what happened earlier, which is that he was a giant stupid crybaby, again.

  He felt bad about this now. He felt that he certainly could have eaten the burger, that he just psyched himself out, and if he would have given it a chance he was sure the burger would have been a perfectly acceptable dinner. He felt guilty about the whole thing. The way his mother turned the car around and fetched him chicken nuggets seemed to him now so heroic and good. Good in a way he never could be. He felt selfish. The way his crying let him get whatever he wanted even though that was not his intention at all. And he was trying to figure out a way to tell his mother that if it were up to him he’d never cry again and she’d never have to spend hours calming him down or pandering to his inconsiderate and thoughtless needs.

  He wanted to say this. He was getting the words right in his head. His mother, meanwhile, was looking at the trees. One of the neighbor’s front-yard oaks. Like everything else, it was drooping and desiccated and sad, its branches listing to the ground. Leaves not really green but a scorched amber. There was no sound at all. No wind chimes, no birds, dogs were not barking, children were not laughing. His mother looked up at this tree. Samuel stopped and looked too.

  She said, “Do you see it?”

  Samuel didn’t know what he was supposed to be seeing. “The tree?” he said.

  “Up near the top branch. See?” She pointed. “All the way up. That leaf.”

  He followed her finger and saw a single leaf that did not look quite like the others. It was green, thick, it stood straight up and it was flopping around like a fish, twisting as if there were a swirling wind. It was the only leaf on the tree that was doing this. The rest hung quietly in the dead air. There was no wind on the block, and yet this leaf was a maniac.

  “Do you know what that is?” she said. “It’s a ghost.”

  “It is?” he said.

  “That leaf is haunted.”

  “A leaf can be haunted?”

  “Anything can be haunted. A ghost can live in a leaf as well as anywhere else.”

  He watched the leaf spin around as if it were attached to a kite.

  “Why is it doing that?” he said.

  “That’s the spirit of a person,” she said. “My father told me about this. One of his old stories. From Norway, from when he was a kid. It’s someone not good enough to go to heaven but not bad enough to go to hell. He’s in between.”

  Samuel had not considered this a possibility.

  “He’s restless,” she said. “He wants to move on. Maybe he was a good person who did one really bad thing. Or maybe he did lots of bad things but felt very sorry about them. Maybe he didn’t want to do bad things, but he couldn’t stop himself.”

  And at this, once again, Samuel cried. He felt his face crumple. The tears came so unstoppably quickly. Because he knew he did bad things over and over and over. Faye noticed and closed her eyes and rubbed her fingers hard at her temples and covered her face with her hand. He could tell this was about as much as she could tolerate today, how she’d met the limits of her patience, how the crying about bad things was itself another bad thing.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, “why are you crying?”

  He still wanted to tell her that what he desired more than anything else in the world was to stop crying. But he couldn’t say it. All he managed to do was to spit out something incoherent through the tears and mucus: “I don’t want to be a leaf!”

  “Why on earth would you think that?” she said.

  She took his hand and pulled him home and the only sound on the whole block was the clacking of the wagon wheels and his whimpering. She took him to his room and told him to put his toys away.

  “And I told you to bring nine toys,” she said. “You brought eight. Next time try to pay more attention.” And the disappointment in her voice made him cry even harder, so hard that he couldn’t talk, and thus he couldn’t tell her that he put eight toys in the wagon because the ninth toy was the wagon itself.

  2

  SAMUEL’S FATHER INSISTED that Sunday evenings be devoted to “family time,” and they’d have a mandatory dinner together, all of them sitting around the table while Henry tried valiantly to make conversation. They’d eat some of the packaged meals from his special office freezer, where the experimental and test-market foods were kept. These were usually more daring, more exotic—mango instead of baked apples, sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes, sweet-and-sour pork instead of pork chops, or things that would not at first glance seem ideal for freezing: lobster rolls, say, or grilled cheese, or tuna melts.

  “You know the interesting thing about frozen meals,” Henry said, “is that they weren’t popular until Swanson decided to call them ‘TV dinners.’ Frozen meals had been around for a decade when they changed the name to TV dinner and boom, sales exploded.”

  “Mm-hm,” Faye said as she stared straight down into her chicken cordon bleu.

  “It’s like people needed permission to eat in front of the television, you know? It’s like everyone wanted to eat in front of the TV already, but they were waiting for someone to endorse it.”

  “That’s super fascinating,” Faye said in a tone that made him shut right up.

  Then more silence before Henry asked what the family wanted to do tonight, and Faye suggesting he just go watch TV, and Henry asking if she wanted to join him, and Faye saying no, she had dishes to put away and cleaning to do and “you should go on ahead,” and Henry asking if she needed his help with the cleaning, and Faye saying no, he’d just get in the way, and Henry suggesting that maybe she should relax and he’d do the cleanup tonight, and Faye getting frustrated and standing up and saying “You don’t even know where anything goes,” and Henry looki
ng at her hard and seeming like he was on the verge of saying something but then ultimately not saying it.

  Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.

  “May I be excused?” Samuel said.

  Henry looked at him, wounded. “It’s family night,” he said.

  “You’re excused,” Faye said, and Samuel leaped off the chair and scurried outside. He felt that familiar desire to go hide. He felt this way whenever the tension in the house seemed to gather up inside him. He hid in the woods, a tiny patch of woods that grew along a sad creek that ran behind their subdivision. A few short trees sprouting out of the mud. A pond that was at best waist-deep. A creek that collected all the subdivision’s runoff so the water had this colorful oily film after it rained. It was really pathetic, these woods, as far as nature goes. But the trees were thick enough to conceal him. When he was down here, he was invisible.

  If anyone asked him what he was doing, he’d say “Playing,” which didn’t quite capture it. Could it really be called playing when he only sat there in the grass and mud, and hid in the leaves, and threw helicopter seeds into the air and watched them spin to the ground?

  It was Samuel’s intention to come down to the creek and hide for a couple of hours, at least until bedtime. And he was searching for a spot, a convenient depression in the ground that would give him maximum coverage. A spot where, if he put a few dead branches over him, a few leaves, he would be hidden. And he was collecting the twigs and branches he’d use to cover himself, and he was beneath this one particular oak tree digging among the dead leaves and acorns on the ground, when something cracked above him. A snapping of branches, a creaking of the tree, and he looked up in time to see someone jump down from the tree and land hard on the ground behind him. A boy, no older than Samuel, who stood up and stared fiercely at him with eyes sharp and green and almost feline. He was not larger than Samuel, nor taller, nor in any way physically special except in the certain intangible way he filled up space. His body had a presence. He stepped closer. His face was thin and angular and smeared, on his cheeks and forehead, with blood.

  Samuel dropped his twigs. He wanted to run. He told himself to run. The boy moved closer, and from behind his back he now produced a knife, a heavy silver butcher’s knife, the kind Samuel had seen his mother use when chopping things with bones.

  Samuel began to cry.

  Just stood there crying, rooted to the ground, waiting for whatever his fate was, succumbing to it. He vaulted right into a Category 3 slobbering wet helpless mess. He could feel his face constrict and his eyes bug out as if his skin were being stretched from behind. And the other boy stood directly before him now and Samuel could see the blood from close up, could see how it was still wet and shining in the sunlight and one drop dribbled down the boy’s cheek and under his chin and down his neck and under his shirt and Samuel didn’t even wonder where the blood came from so much as simply wail at the horrible fact of its presence. The boy had short reddish hair, eyes that seemed impenetrable and dead, freckles, something like an athlete’s sense of bodily control and self-possession and fluidity of movement as he slowly brought the knife over his head in the universal language for psychopathic murderous stabbing.

  “This is what we call a successful ambush,” the kid said. “If we were at war, you’d be dead right now.”

  And the cry Samuel let out summoned all his misery and channeled it in one wail, a great sad scream for help.

  “Holy shit,” the kid said. “You are ugly when you’re crying.” He lowered the knife. “It’s all right. Look. Just kidding?”

  But Samuel could not stop. The hysteria kept rolling over him.

  “It’s okay,” the kid said. “No problem. You don’t have to talk.”

  Samuel wiped his arm across his nose and came away with a long slick streak.

  “Come with me,” the kid said. “I want to show you something.”

  He led Samuel to the creek and then along the bank for several yards until he came to a place near the pond where a tree had tipped over, leaving a large depression between the roots and the earth.

  “Look,” the kid said. He pointed to a spot where he’d smoothed out all the mud into a makeshift bowl. And inside the bowl were several animals: a few frogs, a snake, a fish.

  “You see them?” he said. Samuel nodded. The snake, he could see now, was missing its head. The frogs had been slit open at the belly or stabbed in the back. There must have been eight or nine of them, all dead save for one, whose legs kicked, bicycling in the air. The fish were beheaded at the gills. They all rested in a bloody slime that gathered at the bottom of the bowl.

  “I’m thinking about blow-torching them,” the kid said. “You know, with insect spray and a lighter?”

  He pantomimed this: flicking the lighter, holding the spray up to it.

  “Sit down,” he said. Samuel did as he was told, and the boy reached two fingers into the blood.

  “We’re gonna have to toughen you up,” he said. He smeared the blood on Samuel’s face—two streaks under his eyes and one on his forehead.

  “There,” he said. “Now you’re initiated.” He stabbed the knife into the mud so it stood straight up. “Now you’re really alive.”

  3

  THE SUN WAS SETTING, the day’s heat lifting, mosquitoes buzzing forth in squadrons from the woods as two boys emerged from the tree line, muddy and wet. They’d been walking across terrain Samuel had never seen before, taking him away from his own neighborhood and into this other one: Venetian Village, it was called. The boys’ faces were shiny and moist from where they’d used pond water to clean off the smears of animal blood. Though they were the same height, and the same age, and roughly the same build—which is to say short and eleven years old and tightly skinny, like ropes pulled to maximum tolerances—it was obvious to anyone seeing them that one of the boys was in charge. His name was Bishop Fall—he was the tree leaper, the ambusher, the animal killer. He was explaining to Samuel how he would someday be a five-star general in the United States Army.

  “Duty, honor, country,” he said. “Taking the fight to the enemy. That’s my motto.”

  “What fight?” said Samuel, who was looking around at the houses of Venetian Village, houses larger than any he had ever seen.

  “Whatever fight there is,” Bishop said. “Hooah.”

  He was going to join the army as an officer after military college, then become a major, then a colonel, then finally, someday, a five-star general.

  “A five-star general has a higher security clearance than the president,” Bishop said. “I’m going to know all the secrets.”

  “Will you tell me?” Samuel said.

  “No. They’re classified.”

  “But I won’t tell anyone.”

  “National security. Sorry.”

  “Please?”

  “No way.”

  Samuel nodded. “You’re going to be good at this.”

  It turned out that Bishop would be joining Samuel in the sixth-grade class at the local public elementary school, having been recently expelled from his private school, Blessed Heart Academy, for, he said, “not taking any shit,” by which he meant listening to AC/DC on his Walkman and telling one of the nuns to “fuck off” and getting into fights with anyone who was willing, even high schoolers, even priests.

  Blessed Heart Academy was a Catholic K–12 prep school that was really the only local option if you wanted your kids to go to one of the elite East Coast universities. All of the parents of Venetian Village sent their children there. Samuel had never been in Venetian Village before, but sometimes on his longer bike rides he passed the front gate, which was copper and ten feet tall. The homes here were large Roman-style villas with flat roofs of terra-cotta tile, circular driveways curving around dramatic fountains. Houses were separated from each other by a distance at least as great as a soccer field. A swimming pool in every backyard. Exotic sports cars in the driveways, or g
olf carts, or both. Samuel imagined who could possibly live here: television stars, professional baseball players. But Bishop said it was mostly “boring office people.”

  “That guy,” Bishop said, pointing to one of the villas, “owns an insurance company. And that one,” he said, pointing to another, “he runs a bank or something.”

  Venetian Village had nineteen single-family units, each of them a standardized three stories with six bedrooms, four full baths, three powder rooms, marble kitchen countertops, 500-bottle wine cellar, private interior elevator, tornado-grade impact glass, exercise room, four-car garage, all of them an identical 5,295 square feet that, due to a specially treated glue used in construction, smelled lightly of cinnamon. The exact sameness of the houses was actually a selling point for families worried about not having the nicest house on the block. Realtors often said that in Venetian Village you didn’t have to “keep up with the Joneses,” even though every family who lived in Venetian Village had been “the Joneses” in whatever neighborhood they’d come from. And hierarchies quietly emerged in other ways. Various backyard additions of gazebos or screened-in two-story lanais or even a lit Har-Tru clay-surfaced tennis court. Each house was built from exactly the same mold but was uniquely accessorized.

  A backyard saltwater hot tub, for example, behind one of the villas that Bishop stopped in front of.

  “This is where the headmaster of Blessed Heart lives,” Bishop said. “He’s a fat fuck.”

  He made a show of grabbing his crotch and flipping his middle finger at the house, then grabbed a small rock that lay in the gutter.

  “Watch this,” he said, and he flung the rock toward the headmaster’s house. It seemed to happen before either of them could even think about it. Suddenly this rock was in the air, and they watched it fly and everything seemed to slow down for a moment as both boys realized that the rock was definitely going to hit the house and there was nothing they could do about this fact. The rock flew through the red-orange sky and it was only a matter of gravity now, and time. The rock arced downward and narrowly missed the forest-green Jaguar in the headmaster’s driveway, striking the aluminum garage just beyond the Jaguar with a percussive, reverberative thunk. The boys looked at each other in elation and terror, the sound of rock on garage door seeming to them the loudest thing in the world.