“Dolly’s Dollhouse,” Vernell shouted, loudly enough that it might have carried through the thin aluminum walls of the mobile home and out across the trailer park. Not that anyone would be shocked at the latest knock-down battle royale. There weren’t many secrets in a trailer park.
Bobby knew what Dolly’s was, of course. No kid could reach the eighth grade of Titusville Middle without hearing about the local boob joint. A few of the kids claimed to have witnessed exotic exposure of the flesh there, but Bobby was inclined to doubt the tales. He was less able to dismiss the thought that his dad had paid a visit there, since a not-so-secret stack of magazines in the tool shed gave testament to the man’s taste for naked women.
“Jeff gave me those,” Elmer said, mushy and growly enough to display some fight. “The pilot light went out on the gas grill when we were grilling dogs last week.”
“Oh, yeah? Then how come none of the matches is struck? The book’s full.”
Nice one, Mom. Colombo would be proud of your deductive reasoning, though you’d look fruity in a trench coat.
Bobby pulled his ear away from the door. There was no need to eavesdrop now. The armies had sounded their trumpets and the cavalry had charged, and now the sides were fully engaged. His brother Jerrell was lucky enough to have a part-time gig at Taco Bell, and though his clothes stank of beans and that weird yellow goo that squirted from big caulking guns labeled “cheese food product,” at least the job offered some escape from home. Bobby, meanwhile, had only school and football practice as an excuse to be gone.
The boys shared a room, with Jerrell taking the top bunk, which meant those oily bean farts oozed down during the night much like Bobby imagined chlorine gas drifted over the trenches during World War I. But what Jerrell lacked in fragrance, he made up for in generosity, having proclaimed his comic collection “kid’s stuff” and passing it down to little bro’ for nothing more than a well-placed lie or two when Jerrell felt like cruising or playing hooky. Jerrell could have turned some decent coin on eBay with the collection, which included complete runs of obscure curios like Jonah Hex and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery. Now they belonged to Bobby, who had read them all at least twice before sealing them back in their archival-quality, acid-free plastic sleeves.
If only he could stow away his real life as easily, or close the pages when the cartoon got weird.
“So what if I did go to Dolly’s?” his dad shouted in the living room. “It’s not like I see much skin around here lately.”
“Bastard,” Mom responded, the word she went to when Daddy either drove home a valid point or she’d run the gamut of put-downs and had reached the bottom of the barrel. “How much did you throw at them whores?”
“Nothing. I just sat there and had a few.”
Bobby knew from experience that “a few” probably meant a dozen. The way Daddy was slurring his words, he was lucky to wheel the pick-up home without getting blue-lighted for a DWI. Daddy had been caught a couple of years ago, giving Mom the opportunity to rag him about high insurance premiums and having to haul his sorry fat ass around while his license was revoked. She hammered him on money despite the fact that she preferred to be unemployed and complain that Mexicans had taken all the good jobs.
“You probably pissed away a month’s work of paychecks,” Mom yelled, a quaver in her voice that was almost gleeful.
“I got more coming from the Collins job,” Daddy said. He got defensive when his role as provider was challenged.
“You know Bobby’s going to need some braces,” she said, not dropping her volume despite Daddy’s apparent surrender. She’d landed the right cross square on the jaw and they both knew it, but this dance was old. Daddy still needed to dangle on the ropes and take a few before he dropped to the canvas.
Bobby resented being dragged into the ring. Sure, he was self-conscious about his crooked teeth, especially when Karen Greene or Andrea Hill smiled at him in algebra and he couldn’t smile back. All he could do was grimace a little, afraid his lips would pop open and advertise his white-trash status. If you wanted to see class division in action, you didn’t study genealogy trees or stock portfolios. A visual dental inspection was all it took to separate the Haves from the Have-nots.
“I told you, I’ll have the Collins job finished next week,” Daddy continued, his voice raising just a notch. “The weasel-eyed son of a bitch put in a change order for half-inch PVC and that threw my bid off. Plus the carpenters put a wall in wrong and I’ve got to rearrange the fixtures in the master bath. Fucking David Day, he couldn’t nail Christ to the cross with an air gun.”
“Blame blame blame. Always somebody else’s fault.”
Bobby knew some of the mistakes Daddy made were Mom’s fault, and once in a while Daddy screwed up all by himself, but Bobby had a feeling Elmer Eldreth had made the decision to go to the skin joint all on his own. Well, the tag team of Anheuser and Busch probably had a little to do with it, too.
A flurry of verbal counterpunches followed. Then the television switched on, which meant there were two possible outcomes for tonight’s battle. Either they’d sit in silence through a couple of hours of canned laughter, Mom going to bed early and Daddy polishing off a few more to guarantee a raging hangover in the morning, or Mom would scream over the TV and hostilities would escalate.
Bobby studied the latest graphic novel from Boom Studios, wondering if it was already under option for motion picture development. This one was about weird zombie astronauts and the vampire space pirates that hunted them down, which meant it was just stupid and cool enough to pass for “high concept” in an era when the lamest remake was heralded as “an instant classic.”
Mom yelled over a toothpaste commercial and, for the first time ever, Bobby grasped the idea of entertainment as escapism. If a vampire space pirate had at that moment driven a titanium-tipped rocket through the spit-and-tin wall of the mobile home, Bobby would gladly have climbed the gangplank and set sail for the Andromeda Galaxy.
“Bobby’s teeth are going to cost six grand,” Mom said, “How many beers and titties does that add up to, Mr. Genius?”
“If you don’t shut up about teeth, I’m going to knock some of yours right down your throat.”
Daddy had never hit Mom, as far as Bobby knew, but volcanoes sometimes smoked and gurgled for years before they finally blew. The sparring continued, though it dropped down to mix with the sitcom dialogue so that Bobby could no longer keep score.
Bobby went to the window and turned the cheap crank, letting cool autumn air into the room. The screen had long since been ripped from the frame, and in the summer when the room got stuffy and Jerrell’s anal expulsions reached critical mass, Bobby was faced with the choice of asphyxiation or exsanguination by hordes of mosquitoes. For some reason, the little vampires weren’t the least bit repelled by Jerrell’s personal brand of “Off.” But cool weather sent them to wherever bloodsuckers went to die.
A 100-gallon oil drum stood on short metal stilts below the window. It made for easy escape, but getting back in was a lot harder. Bobby rolled his sleeping bag like a lumpy burrito and covered it with blankets on the lower bunk. The spontaneous effigy would pass inspection if one of his parents happened to glance in and check on him, but wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of a caring guardian. Luckily, his parents were too wrapped up in their own civil war to notice an empty seat in the audience.
He slipped on jeans over his dorky boy-briefs, crawled across the desk, and skinnied out the window. He scraped his shin then he was perched on top of the barrel, squinting past the streetlights and their swirling moths to the faint stars beyond. The October air was crisp, tinged with distant wood smoke and the exhaust from the sputtering muscle car Ned Dieters was tuning a few trailers down. Dieters changed spark plugs like he changed girlfriends, tossing them at the first sign of fouling.
Bobby scooted off the barrel and hit the ground running. The menu of destinations was limited. He could hop his bicycle and pedal to the mall, but
it would be closing in half an hour and his pocketful of coins would barely get him one round in the game arcade. Planet Zero Comics would probably let him hang around until closing time since he frequently traded there, but it was a good three miles away and he’d have to ride the railroad tracks in the dark. He could go to the shed and get some of Daddy’s magazines and go play with himself in the strip of woods that separated the trailer park from the highway, but the thought of naked breasts made his stomach hurt.
Maybe Vernon Ray’s awake and up for an adventure.
The Davises lived four trailers down, their mobile home set at the end of the park, turned perpendicular to the two rows of trailers that lined the gravel drive. Vernon Ray’s folks acted like what Daddy called “the High Lord and Lady of Manufactured Housing.” Theirs was a double-wide modular home, built on the spot, which gave it a slight cache over the ones that had been wheeled in, and it had a fake brick skirt on the bottom. Mrs. Davis put a lot of energy into a flower garden out front, but stray dogs and poor soil made for a losing proposition.
Bobby made his way around the back ends of the trailers, eager to talk with Vernon Ray about what had happened in the Hole. His memory of the events had taken on a surreal quality, as if they’d been CGI tricks of the Dreamworks film team: the nicotine rush of the cigarette, the adrenaline jolt of the cop chase, the shock of gunshots, and those weird few moments hiding in the Hole that had somehow felt like days. He rubbed his arms as he recalled the way the darkness had covered his skin as if he were submerged in oil, grateful that the mountaintop was hidden in the night.
The lights were on in the Davis house, and both cars were parked in front, the Jeep Wagoneer closest to the low porch. A flagpole on the railing sported the famous Confederate battle flag, a symbol of either heritage or hate, depending on which political or social wind seemed to blow most favorably at any given moment. Elmer stuck a Rebel flag decal in his window just to piss off armchair liberals, but Vernon Ray said most Appalachian Mountain families had been Union loyalists because the Confederacy had conscripted soldiers against their will. As much as mountain settlers hated the idea of licking dust from boots that had walked in from Washington, D.C., they resented it even more when the bossing came from their own neighbors.
Bobby didn’t think it was that simple, and even if it was, it sure as heck didn’t matter beans in the Twenty-First Century, when half the residents of Pickett County had New York accents or Florida license plates, and a good portion of the rest sported green cards and brown skin.
Vernon Ray gave such matters grave import, as if he’d memorized his dad’s lectures or history books. When all the normal kids at school were reading Sports Illustrated, Teen, Spiderman, or Harry Potter, Vernon Ray had his nose in books by Bruce Caton or Ken Burns. Bobby wondered for the hundredth time why he had to pick the weirdest possible kid for a best friend, but maybe best friends, like premeditated murders, had more to do with motive and opportunity than free will.
The scrubby stretch of forest came nearly to the back of the Davis home, providing superb cover. Vernon Ray’s light was on, which didn’t mean much, since he slept with his light on. Bobby climbed a familiar young dogwood and peeked through Vernon Ray’s window.
There the dweeb was, belly-down on his bed, thumbing through a thick book. Vernon Ray had a cell phone, another one of the Davis status symbols, but Bobby couldn’t text him because the Eldreth computer was right next to the television and currently part of a free-fire zone.
Bobby climbed back down and chucked a pine cone against the glass. He tossed two more before the window opened.
“What are you doing here?” Vernon Ray whispered.
“What does it look like? I’m standing in the woods throwing pine cones.”
“Smartass. You know what I mean.”
“Can you get out?”
“I don’t know. My dad’s pretty pissed at me.”
“That’s a switch.”
“You’re sure funny tonight. Your dad must be pissed, too.”
Bobby shrugged, even though he wasn’t sure the motion was visible in the shadow of the trees. “I was just restless. I mean, this is our lives, ticking away second by second. Before you know it, we’ll wake up one day and be eleventh graders, with jobs and SAT tests and girlfri—I mean, whatever—and the good times will be over.”
“Saturday night fever. Yeah, I know.”
“So, you coming or not?”
“I don’t think I can get permission. It’s after curfew.”
“Christ, you didn’t enlist, you were born to him. And last I heard, the War Between the States settled that little issue of slavery.”
Vernon Ray looked around, mostly at his bedroom door, and then nodded. “Okay, but if I get busted you owe me your Fantastic Four movie poster.”
“Sure. That one was lame anyway.”
“Comic-book movies are always lame because they treat them like kids’ stuff instead of serious art.”
“Whatever, Bookworm. Save it for your term paper. Now come on.”
Vernon Ray’s screen was intact but could be removed from the inside. Bobby stood under the window so Vernon Ray could straddle his shoulders and prop the screen back in place. Once they were safely moving through the woods, Bobby raised his voice to a normal level and said, “Did you put a dummy in your bed?”
“Nothing as dumb as the one that usually sleeps there, but I’ve got a good one. The life-sized inflatable vampire my parents got me last Halloween.”
Bobby stopped. “Wouldn’t it be cool if vampires were real and one stopped by your bed to suck your blood but then found it was an inflatable vampire?”
“That, my friend, is the very definition of ‘irony.’”
“Yeah. Blood is irony. Get it?”
“Put that pun on the scrap heap.”
“Hey, that was a good one.”
“Okay, two points for trying. So, what do you want to do?”
They had been pushing through the trees, the soft night glow of Titusville casting its suffused light around them. Bobby noted that, with neither of them saying anything, their feet were carrying them toward the creek that skirted the highway.
Running alongside Norman Creek was the dead railroad and then the trail that wound up Mulatto Mountain. The Jangling Hole was too far to reach without flashlights, and Bobby was pretty sure he didn’t want to go there ever again, much less when midnight was lurking and the woods would be full of mysterious chattering and fluttering.
“Looks like something is summoning us to the Hole,” Vernon Ray said.
“I thought we agreed not to talk about it.”
They came out of the woods but followed the shadows so headlights of passing cars wouldn’t sweep over them. Motorists were unlikely to pull over, but the local cops might be on the lookout for kids wanted for questioning in a shooting. Not that anybody had actually been shot, as far as Bobby could tell. The TV news hadn’t mentioned it, and his mom was part of the trailer-park party line that helped good news travel fast and bad news travel faster.
“You think Dex ratted us out?” Vernon Ray said as they came to a concrete pipe that carried the narrow creek under the highway.
“No, he’s golden,” Bobby said, and adopting a James Cagney wise-guy accent, he added out one side of his clenched mouth, “He’s a tough nut to crack, shee, and the cops ain’t got no nuts.”
“I wouldn’t know what to tell the cops, anyway,” Vernon Ray said.
Bobby imagined his friend in a small concrete holding cell, the harsh light on his face, deputies hitting him with the Good Cop-Bad Cop routine. He could easily see Vernon Ray breaking down, weeping, wetting his pants, confessing to the murders of Jimmy Hoffa and JFK and Anna Nicole Smith and whatever other crimes had gone unsolved during the last century.
And after all the cold cases were closed, the coldest of all would come up. Some kindly, paternal plainclothes detective would put his hand on Vernon Ray’s shoulder and say, “Okay, kid, now tell us what
happened at the Hole.”
Bobby had a feeling the truth wouldn’t be good enough, because it would sound like a kid making up goofy stories to bug the cops. Bobby hopped into the drainage pipe and straddled the water that sluiced through it. “You know where we’re headed, right?”
Vernon followed, his voice echoing above the soft lapping of the creek. “Into hell?”
They stooped to keep from banging their heads, then duck-walked into the black depths of the pipe.
“Going to ask the devil for a match,” Bobby said.
“Shh, I heard something,” Vernon Ray said.
“Hell-oooooooooo,” came a disguised voice from the other end, the word reverberating through the tube. A flashlight switched on, blinding them, and Bobby raised his elbow over his eyes.
“You girls going somewhere without me?” the voice added.
“Dex!” Bobby said. “Who let the monkey out of its cage?”
“I’m clean, no thanks to you two losers,” Dex said, dipping the beam down so that it sent yellow snakes of light up the creek.
“We were afraid the cops got you,” Vernon Ray said. “Or shot you.”
“I can tell you’re in mourning, V-Ray. I bet you’re wearing your black dress and everything.”
“Something freaky happened at the Hole,” Bobby said.
“Yeah,” Dex said, beckoning with the light. “Just wait until you hear what happened after you chickens ran like your heads were cut off.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hardy put down the portrait when Pearl entered the bedroom. He thought about shoving it under the stack of farm bulletins on the night stand, but Pearl didn’t miss much and would make a bigger deal out of the face than it deserved. Besides, memories were one of the few salves of age, a balm when tendons creaked and eyesight was failed and the years shrank like the skin around clouded eyes.
Looking at an old family portrait is normal, especially when you’re as old as Methuselah’s grave dirt yourself. But what happens when the memories go, too? When it’s nothing but adult diapers and horse pills? What’s the measure of a man then?
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