The Shark Curtain

by Chris Scofield

  “Mom?” Lauren calls out. “Lily’s—”

  “Use your flashlights if you need them,” she interrupts.

  The dirt trail is soft and dusty, and except for the picnic basket bumping against Mom’s leg, Dad’s crinkly star charts, and Lauren’s heavy breathing (Mom says she needs her adenoids out), it’s a quiet walk through Crawford Woods.

  Up ahead is the basalt quarry, the bombed-out crater, the hole all the way to China. Up ahead is the giant mouth of the pit and the meteor-filled sky.

  The path narrows and widens, narrows and widens, like the giant walk-through lung at the science museum. Where the trees disappear, the woods become a wall of black. I want to be brave like the Indians on TV, to ride into battle screaming my head off and eat the hearts of my enemies. I want to stop walking and look into the shadows where the shark curtain lives but I’m afraid. I’m afraid of places like the blurry landscapes in Mom’s art book, where angry elves keep escaped circus bears as slaves, or gargoyles sit in the bushes watching me stumble by.

  My fingers twitch as I “pretend type” a prayer on Frieda’s typewriter. God bless Aunt Jamie and Mrs. Wiggins and . . .

  The trail gets narrower, pressing against us. “How much longer?” I ask.

  “Not long,” Dad answers. He directs us to turn off our flashlights and “trust the stars, your eyes will adjust.” For three or four minutes (it could be longer; I don’t have my watch) Dad whistles the theme song to The Andy Griffith Show.

  The woods smell like the sweet-and-sour soup they give you before the good stuff at Ming’s Chinese Garden. “Smell the musk?” Mom asks. “It’s nettles. Be careful, they’ll sting.”

  I stop and sniff. The smell is strong and getting closer.

  Nettles and soup, but more than that too. Something familiar that isn’t the raccoon poop in Mom’s flower bed; isn’t Dad’s wool army coat, dog chow, or the cold cement floor in the garage. Something else is in the air. A whole lot of something elses. I hurry a little and accidentally step on the heel of Lauren’s shoes.

  “Dummy,” she mumbles.

  Suddenly, a huge bird darts over our heads and Lauren gasps. “An owl!” Mom shouts and, pretending to be scared, hurries to Dad’s side. I read that owls are warnings, sometimes of death, sometimes of danger.

  The others walk on, but I stop, then take three short breaths and inhale deeply. Exhale. Repeat. Three short breaths (for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; for Mom, Dad, and Lauren) and inhale deeply. Exhale. Repeat.

  The scent is some combination of familiar and unfamiliar, but sticky sweet and wet too. I open my arms like crucified Jesus, stretching my fingers and bugging my eyes, and make myself into a smell antenna.

  The scent is coming toward us: the closer it gets, the more it fills my lungs . . . The more it fills my lungs, the more the ground vibrates under my feet . . . The more the ground vibrates under my feet the more the smell vines up my legs like a pea plant until the stink and sound and vibration slip through my ears and nostrils, filling me up, inflating me like a rubber balloon, or Jiffy Pop. Will I explode before it gets here?

  “Mommmm!” Lauren flips on her flashlight and walks back to me. “Lily’s being weird again.”

  Listen, can’t you hear them . . . ? Dozens of snapping sounds and growls, panting breaths, high-pitched barks, and finally the smell—I recognize it—the warm dusty smell of dry soft dirt, a cloud of it pushed ahead of their thrumming, drumming feet.

  How close? I fall to my knees and press my ear to the ground.

  “Lily! For God’s sake, stand up.” It’s Mom. I see the toes of her dusty white deck shoes. They’ll be washed and sitting in the morning sun by the time I get up tomorrow. “Lily!” I feel her warm worried hands on my shoulders. “Paul!” she calls.

  “I’m okay,” I say, or try to say. But dogs don’t talk.

  I smell their hot sour breath and wet fur as we race through Crawford Woods together, their thick muscular bodies brushing mine as we run side by side, feeling the tendons in my legs stretch and contract as I run—only I’m big and slow and sick and I fall behind the pack . . . behind . . . slowing . . . slowing . . .

  Then find a burst of energy and rejoin them. My face is wet with the saliva that flies off the tips of their long speckled tongues. Their fur brushes my face, their musk fills my nose. When the hair on my arms stands up, they recognize me. I’m one of them. In a blur of dust and dirt, claws and fur, we nip at each other, yip, and bark.

  “Lily!” It’s Dad. “Can’t we do one simple family thing together without you . . .”

  On my knees in the starlit woods I see what Mrs. Wiggins sees with her tired milky eyes; flying over stones and potholes, struggling to focus through the cloud of soft thundering dirt while dry prickly brush whips her face, she keeps going, putting on even more speed when she sees her family, us, up ahead on the trail.

  The others will fly past us before she does, but somewhere up the trail the dogs will slow down. Then. Finally. Stop. They’re only pets, after all, out-of-shape purebreds and mutts, not feral dogs, wolves, coyotes, or (their distant cousins) bears; no T-Rexes or Thunderbirds. Finally, they’ll wander home (Mrs. Nelson is calling Offie right now), exhausted.

  But proud they didn’t forget: they were wild once.

  They’re nearing us! The heat of the pack, the yelping, the dust—

  Suddenly Dad cries, “Off the path! Now!” And my family jumps, making startled complaining sounds when we land in the brush, seconds before the dusty snarling dogs race by.

  I raise my head and watch Mrs. Wiggins lift off the ground. Floating above the others, she looks back at me with her milky eyes, and her warm cancerous breath heats my face.

  “Thanks,” she says in Pig Latin.

  * * *

  “Everybody okay?” Dad calls. His flashlight bleaches the trail. It finds Lauren. “Lima Bean?”

  Lauren nods. She looks scared and confused. Her freckles spring on and off her face like Mexican jumping beans.

  “Lily?”

  The muscles in my legs relax as I pull sticks and vines out of my hair. The thick callous pads on my feet dissolve. I’m still panting from the run, and chilled by sweat I stand up in the bushes and press my hand to my burning chest.

  “Okay?” he repeats.

  Yes. No. “Okay,” I say, clearing my throat.

  “Kit?” Dad shines the light on Mom, curled around him. “There you are,” he jokes, kissing the top of her curly auburn head. They found each other first; they always do.

  Mom laughs too, then reaches for the picnic basket and says, “Whew! That was wild! Where’d they come from?”

  I know. My eyes are good at night. I recognized some of them, dogs from the neighborhood: the German shepherd from Sherwood Court, two yellow labs, the old boxer, the chubby beagle, the short-legged Lassie.

  At the entrance to the quarry, Dad unhooks the chain gate with the No Trespassing sign and gestures us through. “Bet the dogs passed here hours ago,” he laughs.

  Mom smiles, but Lauren and I don’t. We glance at each other. The dogs were cool but it’s wrong to break the law like Dad is.

  We follow our parents into the starlit open sky. The trees stand back from the big hole, silhouetted against the clear night sky like rows of spears. The heat of the day still clings to the barren ground. It’s a weird place, like the surface of the moon in comic books. Lauren slips her hand in mine. She looks around for the Flintstones’ steam shovels, but they’re nowhere to be seen.

  “Don’t forget what I told you about . . .” Mom peers at the sky. “Look! There’s one!” She points at the twinkling star mass. “How beautiful! There, did you see it? Stars, meteors, everywhere!”

  Meteors fall around us without touching the ground; they hang in the trees and shine in Lauren’s red hair.

  When Mom calls the stars “kisses from angels,” Dad grabs her and kisses her on the lips.

  “Girls?” Mom starts again. “You remember what we discussed abou
t the pit, right?”

  Lauren puts her flashlight beam under her chin. “Do I look like a jack o’ lantern, Mom?”

  “I take that as a yes then?”

  “Stay away from the pit,” I answer for us both.

  “Is that your jump rope?”

  “It’s my lucky charm,” Lauren explains as we lay out our blankets. My sister doesn’t go anywhere without her jump rope. Sometimes she loops it over her bicycle handles or wears it as a belt; tonight she carries it in her afghan.

  Lauren jumps rope, chews gum, sucks her thumb, and throws up because of anxiety, bad ears, and motion sickness. When Mom told Dr. Goodnight that Lauren was a “nervous child, a perfect candidate for ulcers,” he smiled and wrote Mom a prescription for more happy pills.

  “A rabbit’s foot would be smaller,” Mom said to her.

  I got in trouble for burning my rabbit’s foot, even when I explained that it was the only way the foot and rabbit could be reunited. I read about it in Aboriginal Tales.

  “Ladies!” Dad barks. “Can we please be quiet and watch the stars? Isn’t that what we came for?”

  That’s not a real question; neither one of them are.

  Lauren and I don’t get close to the pit. Okay, maybe just a little. On top of Gramma Frieda’s afghans we pretend to be astronauts; the starlit white rim of the pit is the outline of the moon. My blanket is a flying carpet, a floating island where I sit and walk my fingers across the sky, leaping over meteors.

  Mrs. Wiggins loves the sky. When it’s a full moon, I don’t have to look outside, check the tide chart, or The Old Farmer’s Almanac, because Mrs. Wiggins jumps on my bed and stares out the window, so I know it’s full. Now that she’s sick and old, she pees a little when she jumps, so Mom covers my bed with old towels.

  I wish I could read Mrs. Wiggins’s mind. I tried her on a Ouija board once—shoved it under her nose and waited for her to nudge a series of letters that would spell out something—but she didn’t like it. She’s private, like me. After school one day, I found its chewed-up pieces in her dog bed.

  When we finish our picnic, Lauren and I lay back, counting meteors out loud and laughing. After a while, we hear our parents whisper and Lauren shines her flashlight on them.

  “I knew four flashlights were too many,” Dad says, turning his back to the beam. Mom lies beside him. He gives her a noisy kiss.

  “Oh, Pablo,” Mom giggles. She calls him Pablo when they’re kissy.

  “Oh, Pablo,” Lauren mimics, making loud smoochie sounds on her arm.

  “Girls!” Dad snaps.

  With my index finger I connect a series of stationary stars, and draw Mrs. Wiggins’s outline in the twinkling sky. A new constellation: Canis Wiggins.

  “Lily, do the dogs run through the woods every night?”

  I shrug but Lauren isn’t looking. I guess she asks me questions I can’t answer because I’m older than she is. Plus, our parents are making out, so she can’t ask them either.

  “Mommy and Dad-dy, sitting in a tree,” she sings as she jumps rope. I smell the dust kicked up with every twirl. The ground thumps when her feet land together. “K-I-S-S . . .”

  In the dark, on another flying blanket far away, Mom giggles.

  “First comes love, then comes marriage,” Lauren continues.

  Mrs. Wiggins’s water dish is in the stars too. And a cartoon bubble over her big square head that reads, STAY AWAY FROM THE—

  Suddenly there’s a skid, and the rope stops turning. A thump. A moan.

  Lauren! I jump to my feet.

  “Lily?” she whispers.

  “Lauren?” I whisper back.

  “Girls?”

  “Mrs. Asher, please!” Dad is being silly. “Your lips, the stars. Your lips, the stars.”

  “For God’s sake, Paul, let go!” Mom flips on the flashlight and hurries toward us. I’m blinded by the glare. She quickly puts it down, and turning the beam away illuminates the gray scraped wall on the opposite side of the quarry.

  “What’s going . . . Where’s . . . Lily, what are you doing?”

  On my stomach.

  Hanging my head and arms over the lip of the big black hole.

  Reaching for my little sister.

  My body flexes and stretches, the muscles lengthen, tighten, and grow strong; I smell the dogs’ musk, and feel their deep excited growls in my throat. Somehow I have one end of her jump rope. When I tug at it, Lauren looks up. She’s easy to see under a sky of bright stars that light her pink barrettes and the shiny tip of her sun-blistered nose. She stands on a tiny shelf, just out of arm’s reach, and clutching her end of the jump rope leans against the quarry wall, breathing heavily.

  “Lauren!” Mom gasps as she kneels beside me. “Oh, Jesus!”

  Dad turns his flashlight beam on Lauren, who blinks and closes her eyes. “It’s okay, Kit, we’ll get her out. She’s right here on a ledge, only a couple of feet away. She’s fine.” He clicks off the flashlight and hands it to Mom. “Daddy’s here, Lima Bean. I gotcha.”

  He straddles me and wraps his hands around mine.

  Doesn’t he see me? I’m not invisible.

  “Lily, let me do it. I’ll pull her up.”

  Lauren’s eyes shine with tears. “I’m scared,” she says quietly.

  “I know,” I tell her. “When you feel me pull the rope, hold on real tight, okay?” Lauren doesn’t answer. “Lean against the rock and I’ll pull you up. If you feel another ledge, step up on it.”

  I can do this. We can do this. I feel Mrs. Wiggins crouch beside me; I smell her hot rank breath.

  “Lily,” Dad says sternly, “give me the rope. Let it go slowly.”

  I ignore him. “Lean against the rocky wall, Lauren,” I say. “I’ll pull you up.”

  “But it’s dirty.” Lauren hates being dirty.

  “I know, but you can take a bath when we get home.” Mrs. Wiggins’s wet nose smudges my leg. Her toenails scratch the dirt. Somehow she’s behind me, ready to pull with me. “Just hold on really, really tight.”

  “Lily,” Mom says, “let Daddy do it. He’s stronger than you.”

  “No.”

  “This is no time to be stubborn!”

  “NO!”

  “Please, Lily! Lauren’s in danger!”

  “I am?”

  “Lily!” Dad barks.

  “NO!” I yell at them both. “Go back to your stupid kissing!” I don’t take my eyes off Lauren. “I won’t let you fall,” I tell her quietly. “Promise.”

  I scoot backward and pull on the jump rope. The dirt and gravel scratch my stomach and then I do it, we do it, somehow we pull her up—Mrs. Wiggins, and maybe Dad and Mom, but mostly me—and Lauren slides up over the edge, out of the pit, flat on her belly, dirty and scared and whimpering.

  Mom hugs Lauren to her big soft boobs. “Are you all right?” she asks while looking her over with the flashlight. Finally she looks at me. “Why must you always challenge us, Lily? Why can’t you do what we ask? The rope could have slipped from your hands, and then what? If your father hadn’t been there to pull her up . . .” Mom starts crying all over again. When Dad pats her shoulder, she lets go of Lauren and grabs his hand. “Oh God, Paul.”

  Shouldn’t my sister be more scared than Mom?

  Lauren climbs out of her lap.

  “If you won’t listen to your father, Lily, then listen to me. We can’t protect you if you don’t do as we ask.”

  “But you were kissing,” Lauren says. She twirls the jump rope, walking instead of jumping, stepping over it when it stops at her feet.

  “Lauren! Put that damn thing down!” Mom says. “You’re the older sister, Lily. How many times have I told you—”

  “Yeah.” When Mom yells at me, my voice gets small.

  “Yeah? What the hell kind of answer is that?” Mom sniffs. “We’re your parents. If you don’t listen to us here, how can I trust you at Peace Lake?”

  Peace Lake is our favorite family vacation spot. It’s also wher
e Aunt Jamie swims. And me. And sometimes the whole swim club, the one thing I do with kids my age besides go to school. I’m a good swimmer, one of the best on our team; there’s a competition next month, but even if I win no one will care. No one talks to me at school or on the swim bus. Lauren says it’s because I’m a “weirdo.”

  “Lily!”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  Dad carries Lauren on his shoulders as we walk out of Crawford Woods. She’s ten years old and “too big,” but he does it anyway. She carries the unopened star charts and every once in a while looks back at me. The jump rope is draped over her shoulders. “Dummy,” she says with a smile.

  “Dummy,” I smile back.

  The night air is thick and stuffy. Humid, Mom calls it.

  The woods are throwing us out. They’ve had enough, they want us to go. We embarrass them with our clumsy, weirdo, pill-popping, gambling stuff. When Dad says, “I’ll bet each one of you a Hostess Cupcake it’s after two a.m.,” Mom throws a dirt clod at him. He pushes a button on his wristwatch and announces, “It’s two thirty.”

  That’s one hundred and fifty minutes past midnight.

  Back home, drawers stick out and closet doors stand open.

  We should hurry. Things get out if you’re not careful, things get in.

  * * *

  What I wish had happened next:

  “Let’s all sleep in,” Mom suggests. Then, “Waffles with whipped cream and strawberries at ten!”

  Mom talks a lot when she’s tired. Or scared. Or excited. She talks a lot on our way out of Crawford Woods that night. Mom talks about being nearly trampled by a pack of dogs. She calls me her “hero” for rescuing Lauren, and sings, “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo . . .” I blush, but I like her singing. She talks about school starting in three weeks, and how Lauren and I need new coats.

  “Let’s go shopping tomorrow,” she says.

  “Yippee!” Lauren yells. She loves to shop.

  I hate shopping, but maybe I’ll go this time.

  Minutes later, with Mom in the lead, we sing “Kumbaya” as loudly as we can. She balances the picnic basket on her head, like one of the African women in her paintings, while comets fly through the trees.