by Ronald Malfi
“I thought maybe it was Ricky Codger, or one of his jerk-off friends. But then I think about it and wonder what the hell Ricky Codger would be doing stumbling around in my backyard. One night I left Gideon out there on the porch, tied to the railing.” Gideon was Dwight’s German shepherd. “He heard the noise too, and normally he would bark and chase away any trespassers. But that night I only heard him whining. The next morning when I went to get him, he’d bitten through his leash and was hiding under the porch. He’d been really frightened.”
“Of what?” Matthew said.
Dwight shook his head. “I don’t know. Do you hear things at night?”
“No.” It was the truth.
“Okay.”
“Are you trying to scare me?” he asked Dwight.
“No.”
“You swear it?”
Dwight Dandridge spit on the ground. “I swear. God’s honest truth.”
“Okay,” Matthew said.
Suddenly, Dwight did not look like he wanted to leave. Overhead, thunder rumbled. The boys looked up at the troubled, threatening sky. When Dwight’s eyes fell on Matthew again, they were sober and the color of motor oil. “Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
“Later.”
“Later.”
Dwight took off down the street, and Matthew watched him go. He was overtaken by the very adult realization that his friend was becoming sadly overweight. Not just chunky, as he’d always known Dwight Dandridge to be, but flat out fat.
Gutsville, Matthew thought, then immediately hated himself for thinking it.
He went around to the back of the house and saw his mother’s truck in the yard, home early from work. Glancing up at the house to make sure no one was watching, he hurried over to the truck and peered in the driver’s window, hoping to spy a discarded pack of cigarettes on the dashboard or in the console between the two front seats. Sometimes his mother was careless and left a pack unattended. Disappointingly, tonight was not one of those nights.
As he climbed the porch steps, a crooked finger of lightning lit up the sky, followed by a clash of thunder so frighteningly close it sounded like it had emanated straight up out of the earth. He accidentally slammed the screen door behind him as he entered the house then winced in anticipation of his mother’s reproving voice echoing out from the kitchen.
“Is that you, Mattie?” she called, right on schedule. He could smell the meal she was preparing, and could hear things sizzling in cooking oil on the stove. “I’ve told you a hundred times not to slam that door.”
“Sorry.”
He padded into the kitchen. His mother was at the sink washing lettuce and Brandy was setting the table. Brandy shot him a disapproving look—since she’d turned sixteen, all of Brandy’s looks had become disapproving—then she said, “Mom, he’s filthy.”
His mother glanced at him over her shoulder. “Oh, Matthew. Your hands are black as tar. What have you been doing?” She dried her own hands on a dish towel then yanked his T-shirt up over his shoulders to expose his frail bird’s chest and milk-white skin.
“Just hanging around with Dwight,” he said, moving toward the refrigerator, where he grabbed a can of Coke and popped the tab.
His mother balled up the T-shirt then carried it into the adjoining laundry room.
“You come back dumber every time you hang out with that kid,” Brandy said.
“Your face is dumb.”
She rolled her eyes.
Matthew appraised his sister from over the rim of his Coke can. When they were younger they had been close. They had even been friends. They would watch horror movies together and piece together jigsaw puzzles and catch toads down at the mud pit at the end of their street. The past year, however, had brought a change to Brandy Crawly’s personality, just as it had gradually brought a change to her appearance. Her legs had lengthened, her hands looked longer, and her whole body seemed to have graduated toward adulthood in one subtle and prolonged breath. Her face had changed, too, though Matthew wasn’t sure if that was due to chemistry or the makeup she’d begun applying last year. And while he had needed Dwight Dandridge to point out the fact that she had grown breasts—what Dwight called “lady-tadies”—the evidence of them had become undeniable.
Perhaps these physical changes wouldn’t have bothered Matthew all that much had Brandy not also turned into such a bitch.
“Why don’t you go wash up?” his mother said, coming back into the kitchen. She opened the oven and peered in at whatever was glowing in there. “We’ll be eating in five minutes.”
“Okay.”
He cut through the living room, where the television was flickering in front of an empty sofa, then bounded up the stairs to the hallway bathroom. Tugging on the water and finagling the bar of Ivory soap from the soap dish, he lathered his face and hands, scrubbed them clean. Then he dipped his head beneath the faucet to wet his hair, raking his fingers along his scalp to get all the dirt and grit out. Cold water sprayed down his back, causing him to shiver. His shorts were grimy too, so he climbed out of them and scurried like a rabbit into his bedroom where he pulled on a fresh pair of shorts and a Transformers T-shirt. Atop his bookcase was his entry in this year’s science fair—three plastic cups filled with soil in which various seeds germinated. An ultraviolet lamp shone directly above the first cup while the second received only natural light from his bedroom windows. The third cup sat prisoner beneath a shoebox, receiving no sunlight at all. He permitted himself to peek under the shoebox just once a day, and he did this now. Unlike the other two cups, there were no greening buds curling up out of the soil, and no spidery roots pressed against the underside of the cup. It had been an experiment he’d read about in one of his father’s science and nature books…
From his bedroom window, he could see the open door of the detached garage, the multitude of junk heaped within. That had been his father’s junk; what purpose it served, Matthew Crawly had no idea. He didn’t think his mother had any idea either, though she did not appear to be in much of a hurry to dispose of it. In fact, it looked as though she had relocated the items to the higher shelves in preparation for last week’s storm, just as his father used to do when he still lived there. Matthew remembered being young, watching his father from this very window as his old man milled about in the yard, his denim-colored postal uniform dark with sweat, the shirt partially unbuttoned. He had watched his father smoke cigarettes beneath the garage’s awning then hurry across the yard to the house for dinner. Hugh Crawly had done this almost every night: smoked on the far side of the garage, where he thought he was hidden from everyone in the house. He’d slam the screen door just like Matthew did, and Matthew’s mother would yell at him, and his father would laugh his big-bellied laugh and that would be the end of it.
It was the end, all right, Matthew thought now…and there was a part of him that was frightened by the depth of what that meant, and the maturity of the thought. Why had his father left? With all that big-bellied laughter, was he covering up for something? Had he just had too much and decided never to come back? Worse still, had it been something Matthew had done? Had it been his fault that his father had picked up in the middle of the night and disappeared? Matthew didn’t know. And quite often, like right now, he felt he didn’t want to know.
4
The dinner table was the only place the remainder of the Crawly family came together with any sort of regularity. It was a firm rule: no matter what your day and evening plans were, you had to be home for dinner. The only exception was when their mother had to work the dinner shift at the diner or if Brandy had an early babysitting gig. A few times Brandy had tried to weasel out of having dinner with the family so she could instead have dinner at a friend’s house or go to an early movie with some girls from school, but their mother had firmly put her foot down without so much as a discussion. “I don’t jockey around my shifts at the diner just to come home and have dinner at an empty table,” their mother was
fond of saying. Matthew was only eleven, but he was not stupid. The dining ritual had been instituted right around the same time Hugh Crawly crept out and left them behind in the night. It was his mother’s way of making sure the remaining members of the Crawly household stayed together. Even at his unworldly age, Matthew felt a sense of sad desperation in his mother in knowing this.
With a light rain pattering against the kitchen windows, the three of them sat at the table. A fourth chair remained at the table, loud as an explosion in its emptiness. A few times, when it was Matthew’s turn to set the table, he’d accidentally set a place for his father, too. Once, it had made his mother cry. She’d gone out on the porch to do it, but it was summer and all the windows had been open, and he had heard her sobbing in her muted, embarrassed way. It had hurt Matthew terribly to hear it and Brandy had called him an idiot as she cleared away the extra place setting.
Matthew’s mother looked at him from across the table. Her face was too thin, her eyes like lusterless stones. She was still in her powder-blue waitress uniform, her name tag on her breast. Matthew could remember a time when he’d thought she was pretty—beautiful, even, in that innocent and giddy way all young boys find their mothers beautiful—but she looked simply tired and drained now. “Why don’t you say it, honey?”
“I said it last night,” he groaned. “Make Brandy do it.”
“I set the table,” Brandy countered quickly, “so you have to say it.”
“Matthew,” his mother said. The exhaustion in her voice informed him that this was not the time to argue over something so trivial.
“Dear God, thank you for the food and for bringing us all together again. Amen.” He had considered throwing in a request—namely, that no one would come in and buy the vampire mask from Hogarth’s before he was able to get down there early tomorrow morning with his and Dwight’s money in tow—but decided to omit it in the end.
His mother shoveled peas onto her plate. “How was everyone’s day?”
“Aced my geography test,” Brandy said.
“Nice job.”
“Then Mrs. Oxland almost got run over by a school bus.”
Wendy Crawly gaped at her daughter. “What?”
“She was out in the parking lot after school, yelling at some kid, not watching where she was going, and a school bus nearly ran her over,” Brandy said. “She hopped back up on the curb at the last minute.”
“Lord,” Wendy muttered. Her eyes swung toward her son. “How about you?”
Matthew shrugged. “School was okay.”
“Do anything fun after school?”
“Dwight and I went down to the park and played some kickball with some other kids.” He could tell his mother was suddenly scrutinizing the grime beneath her son’s fingernails. “Dwight kicked a home run and won the game,” he added quickly, hoping more detail would make a believer out of his mom.
“Dwight’s a big kid,” his mother said.
“Fat, you mean,” Brandy added.
“Shut up,” Matthew barked.
“You guys didn’t go anywhere else today?” his mother asked.
“No, ma’am.” His face burned.
“Interesting.” His mother got up, went to the fridge, and returned to the table with a bottle of Budweiser. Unscrewing the cap, she said, “So I guess David Moore would be lying had he told me he saw you and Dwight crossing Route 40 down by the Narrows this afternoon?”
Matthew felt a sinking in his stomach. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” said his mother. “Oh.” She took a small sip of her beer then set the bottle on the table. Foam bubbled up the neck, reminding Matthew of the fully working model volcano Jimmy Ornswaith had made for science class last year. “You know you’re not supposed to play out there,” his mother went on. “I’ve told you not to cross that highway and to stay away from the Narrows.”
“I didn’t want to go. There was this stupid dead deer Dwight wanted to see. Billy Leary said it had been killed by a bear and we—”
“We’ve talked about this, Matthew. You could drown in that water. Especially after the storm we’ve had. That water gets out of control and can be very dangerous.”
“We weren’t in the water. We never go into it.”
“You could have fallen in. It’s dangerous. You’re too young to be out there.”
“It’s where they found that boy,” Brandy spoke up, and Matthew looked at her, recalling that Dwight had said a similar thing. “The police found him in Wills Creek.”
“That’s not dinner talk,” Wendy Crawly said in a small voice.
Brandy looked quickly down at her plate. “Sorry.”
“And I don’t want to have this discussion with you again, Matthew. Am I understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t appreciate being lied to, either.”
“Sorry,” he said…and felt his sister administer a swift kick to his shin underneath the table.
“All right, then,” said Wendy.
They ate the rest of their meal in silence.
5
That evening, as everyone else slept soundly in the Crawly house, young Matthew awoke with a scream ratcheting up his throat. He was tacky with sweat, the ghost-fingers of a retreating nightmare still tickling his spine. He sat up stiffly in bed, the twin windows across the room like eyes, seeming to blaze with moonlight.
In the dream, he had been back in the field staring up at the plastics factory. This time he was alone and it was nighttime—or at least the sky was dark enough to make it seem like nighttime, though he supposed it could have been dark with an oncoming storm. As he stared up at the building, dull flashes of light bled out from the gridded windows. He approached the building and attempted to climb on top of some fallen trees to peer in through the windows. But the windows were too high, and it seemed the higher he climbed, the farther up the side of the building the windows scaled. Then, from all around him, there came the sound of a thousand beating wings, the sound filling his ears like the drumbeat sound of rushing blood, and he was crippled and frozen by a shuddery disquiet.
In the half-light, he listened to the house creak and moan—house-speak, his father had called it on the nights when Matthew was younger, afraid to sleep alone in his room with all the noises of the house surrounding him. Just house-speak: talking to the wind, the moon, the stars. Nothing at all to be afraid of. As it often did, this memory caused his face to turn hot and his eyes to sting. Matthew hadn’t seen his father in over a year, and he’d spoken with him on the phone less than a half-dozen times. He was living now in someplace that had a strange and unfamiliar name. And while no one had ever directly confirmed this bit of information, he had surmised that he was living there with another woman. The few times he had summoned the courage to ask his mother for more details about his father’s disappearance, one look at Wendy Crawly’s worn and beaten face would cause him to change his mind. He did not want to talk about those things with his mother. She had cried enough on the porch by herself in the beginning, just barely within earshot, and that had been bad enough. Matthew didn’t think he could take it if she broke down in front of him. Or because of him. So he never asked questions.
He flipped the sweaty sheet off his body then climbed out of bed. Without turning on the bedroom light, he found the mound of his clothes at the foot of his bed. Snatching his shorts up off the floor, he carried them over to his small desk where his Superman lunchbox sat. He felt around in the pockets of his shorts for the money Dwight had given him, his panic rising when he found both pockets empty. He rechecked them, pulling them inside out, but there was no money in there.
He clicked the desk lamp on. Yellow light spilled out across the desk and half of the desk chair. Beneath the cone of light, Matthew again reexamined the pockets of his shorts. Then he went to the heap of clothes at the foot of his bed and sifted through each article of clothing—shirts, balled-up socks, another pair of shorts. There was no money anywhere.
Retrace your step
s, said a voice in his head. He thought of the story of Hansel and Gretel, how they’d left behind a trail of breadcrumbs in order to find their way back home. Stupidly, this made him think again of his father, who had left no trail of breadcrumbs and appeared to have no intention of ever coming back home.
Holding his breath, because he thought doing so would stop his heart from beating so loudly, he crept out of his bedroom and onto the second floor landing. Across the hall, the doors to his mother’s and Brandy’s bedrooms were closed, the doorknobs a shimmery blue in the moonlight coming in through the high front windows. He proceeded to descend the steps, avoiding from memory the risers that made the most noise. It was like sinking down into the belly of a great ship. Over summer vacation he’d read Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and not the dumbed-down version for children either. This had been the actual, honest-to-God novel. And while he did not fully understand everything he’d read, the glory and trepidation and horror of the adventure resonated with him more than any movie ever had. He thought of that book now, and how the underwater light shining through the portholes of Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, must have looked just like the swampy, blue-gelled moonlight coming through the windows of the front hall right now.
He’d hoped that thinking about this would alleviate his fears.
It hadn’t.
Around him, the house sounded alive. As he crossed from the front hall to the kitchen, a gust of wind bullied the house and made popping, groaning sounds within the walls. Matthew froze, his heart thudding with a series of pronounced hammer strikes within the frail wall of his chest. On the kitchen counter, silverware and drinking glasses gleamed in the moonlight coming through the window over the sink. Across the kitchen, the flimsy floral curtain that hung over the panel of glass in the upper section of the porch door seemed to radiate with a cool, lackadaisical light. His bare feet padding on the cold kitchen tiles, he went to the door, unlocked the dead bolt, and slid the slide lock to the unlocked position. It made a sound that echoed loudly in the empty, silent kitchen, causing Matthew to once again hold his breath.
