In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

  “It’s a new thing!” I tried to explain.

  “Yes,” she replied, arching a brow. “They’ve got to have the crème de la crème over there.” She’d never forgiven Felicia’s mother for buying a blue fur couch and armchair. Not fur like a real animal, but fur like a stuffed animal.

  Right now the smoke and the crying have irritated Felicia’s eyes to the point where she has to switch to glasses, turning her into an earlier horn-rimmed version of herself. She immediately resumes the unconscious habit of wrinkling her nose upward to reset the heavy glasses when they slip down.

  “Here comes the witch of witcherton,” she says, staring at herself in the hall mirror. Actually, if one of us is good looking, it’s her. She’s tall and elegant, green eyed, although her teeth are slightly out of order, and she isn’t particularly neat.

  I, on the other hand, am neat, but that’s about it. The body is wrong, scrawny; the face is pale and nondescript under its suntan. I talk with a faint sibilance that people think comes from the gap between my front teeth but that actually comes from me trying to be like Dee Jurgenmeyer, a girl from my childhood who had a real lisp. Once I started it, I couldn’t stop, even when they sent us both to speech therapy and Dee was cured. The hair is the best feature, limp but long and silky. I don’t particularly like having nice hair, though, because it gives people the wrong impression about me.

  It’s like a mysterious stranger I saw in a movie once, who everyone thought was a beautiful lost child in a red cape. From a distance all you could see besides the swirling cape was a head of lustrous hair. A man finally grabbed the child by the hood and turned it around and it was a leering dwarf; the man screamed, and everyone at the movie screamed too. That’s why I mostly wear my hair in braids.

  In fact, my mother does finally return to work, after taking it upon herself to leave her phone number and a note of explanation on the kitchen table. She also put the kids down for naps, something we never even bothered trying before.

  “That’s a good way to get a fire started,” Felicia says as they troop upstairs.

  As soon as my mother’s gone, we tear up her note and the phone number. One by one the children drift back downstairs to stare at us.

  “That lady was mean,” Wanda says admiringly.

  Dale is staring out the window. Suddenly he bolts for the back door. “Here come the cops!” he shrieks. “Here come the cops!”

  The children disperse like vapor, all but Miles, who clings to my leg, sobbing.

  There’s a cop on the front porch, fitted out with a gun and holster. Felicia and I open the door together; Miles goes limp and lets me lift him off my leg and onto my hip.

  “Who’s in charge here?” the cop asks.

  “The parents are, but they aren’t home,” Felicia says in a whisper. “We’re here right now, but her mother was in charge.” She gestures toward me and quickly retreats behind her hair, the straw curtain.

  “She stepped out,” I lie. Felicia nods vigorously at the floor.

  “So, you the babysitters?” he asks.

  “We were, we aren’t sure now,” Felicia says evasively. She looks steadfastly past the barbered edges of his head. Behind him, next to the door, is a round leaded-glass window with a number of BBs lodged in it.

  “You didn’t call the fire department when you had a fire,” the cop states, as though he’s reading it off a police report. “Out of ‘embarrassment,’ that right?”

  “No,” I say. “We did call.” He’s slightly fat and has got several things swinging from his waistline, including a radio, a leather nightstick, a long-handled flashlight, and a pair of handcuffs.

  “Well, next time keep in mind,” he says, “you could end up literally dying of embarrassment.”

  “We called!” Felicia insists, looking at him directly for the first time. In fact, glaring. “How else do you think the firemen got here?”

  He stares at us, chewing a thin strand of gum, one hand resting on the knob of his nightstick. We stare back for a while and then give up and look off to the side. “I need to talk to the boy who started the blaze,” he says finally.

  “We don’t know where he is,” I tell the cop. “Nobody knows.”

  A voice comes ringing down from above. “He’s at Victor’s!” Renee calls out. A moment later she appears on the landing, wearing a swimsuit and a pair of boots. “He thinks the whole house is burned down.”

  “Well, I’ll be sure and let him know,” the cop says generously, “if you tell me where Victor lives.”

  She stares down at us, scratching at her leg inside the rubber boot. The cop looks at me.

  “Tell him, Renee,” I order her.

  She turns and runs up again, into the farthest reaches of the ruined house.

  Felicia sighs and heads outside the back way; Miles puts his hands on my cheeks and turns my face toward his. “Cah?” he asks moistly.

  “Cop,” I tell him, and then feel confused. Is that wrong, to say cop? “Policeman,” I clarify.

  Felicia returns in half a minute with Stewart; she’s got his arm twisted behind his back so he has to walk sideways up the front steps.

  “Okay, I don’t like to see that,” the cop tells her. She lets him go.

  Stewart’s face is streaked with tears, and his white hair is pressed against his pale pink head. His shorts are a size too small. He tugs at the front of them.

  “Let me ask you, pal,” the cop says to Stewart. He moves closer and then tries to crouch, but his gear rides up on him. He puts a knee down to steady himself. “Can you tell me where Victor lives?”

  Stewart nods.

  Normally, right before the parents get home we do all the housework we were supposed to be doing during the day, dividing up the tasks and either bribing or forcing any of the kids we can get our hands on to help us. Today all we can do in the final hour is walk around in circles, eating the last of the bag of chocolate chips.

  “Them are for cookies,” Wanda says, appearing in the doorway of the kitchen.

  “Here,” Felicia says. Wanda holds out her hand and receives a pile.

  “Mr. Vandevoort wants to talk to you,” Wanda says, putting all of them in her mouth at once and then holding out her hand for more.

  “Why?” I ask her.

  She holds out the hand insistently.

  Felicia and I go into the backyard, pick our way barefoot across the glass-strewn lawn and over to the driveway, where Mr. Vandevoort is standing in his work clothes—a short-sleeved shirt and a narrow necktie—staring at the upper stories of the Kozak house.

  “I got glass everywhere,” he informs us. “It’s clear out on the street.”

  We don’t know what to say.

  “Those kids said there was a fire,” he goes on. “Normally I wouldn’t believe it, but I see where all the windows are knocked out up there.”

  We turn around obediently and look along with him. The third floor is gaping.

  “There’s liable to be slivers where I parked my car,” he says, shaking his head. “And I don’t know what was done in my yard—I hope nothing—but I see over there where somebody has left some empty aquariums under the picnic table.”

  We follow him over and sure enough: empty aquariums under the picnic table. The wire mesh has been pushed aside.

  “What are empty aquariums doing under my picnic table?” he asks.

  He’s got to be crazy if he thinks either one of us is answering that question. We remain silent, watching our bare feet carefully as we lug the aquariums into the Kozaks’ garage and throw a tarp over them. The tarantula cage is nowhere to be found, but then we find it. The tarantula is sitting on his Styrofoam boulder as usual, waiting for someone to feed him flies.

  The kids have scattered, all except Miles, who is right where I left him, clasping the porch railing. He climbs onto my lap when I sit down on the steps. I rest my chin on his head and try not to think about how all this looks—the sopping, blackened bathroom, the mound of smoky sheets that we
re peeled off the beds and kicked downstairs, the grimy rags hanging from the banisters and doorknobs, the skyline of dirty dishes stacked along the kitchen counter.

  “This is all Derek’s fault,” I say tentatively, trying it out.

  “Maybe,” Felicia says uncertainly. The problem is, since Derek hasn’t been spotted since before the fire was even reported, he seems somehow the least guilty of all of us.

  Lurch staggers to his feet and teeters across the yard, his tail waving. We listen. Off in the distance is the angry buzz of an unmufflered motorcycle.

  “That’s my dad’s hog,” Renee calls down from the third floor.

  Both parents arrive at the same time, and the children materialize at the curb, talking and shoving. Chuck and Yvonne, climbing off their bikes and unfastening their helmets, ignore them. Yvonne shakes her flattened hair and then pauses.

  “What?” she says, grabbing Renee by the shirt.

  Renee is instantly struck dumb.

  Yvonne makes her way toward us, her dark-circled eyes scanning the front of the house, the porch, me, and then past me, to Felicia. “You,” she says. “Explain.”

  As Felicia talks, the rest of the world gets quieter and quieter. Next door, Mr. Vandevoort stands holding a broom, his back to us, listening. Wherever Mrs. Vandevoort is, she’s listening too. Matches, Derek, toilet paper, smoke, her mother— their eyes flicker to me, and my mouth goes as dry as kindling—firemen, hose, glass.

  A long pause. Mr. Vandevoort resumes sweeping.

  Yvonne looks at Dale. “You,” she says. “Get my cigarettes.”

  Dale races from the porch to her motorcycle and flings open the saddlebag, races back with a pack of Old Golds and a lighter. He’s panting.

  Chuck has been standing silently, staring two burn holes into Felicia. He suddenly glances over at Wanda. “You,” he says. “Get my gun.”

  Wanda edges uncertainly toward the house, her eyes on Yvonne’s face. “Should I?” she asks.

  Chuck barks out an unpleasant laugh, and the children begin sidling away. Yvonne lights a cigarette on her way into the house, letting the door slam sharply.

  “It’s not our fault Derek won’t mind,” Felicia says suddenly, loudly, to the porch.

  Chuck stares at her in disbelief, unfolding his arms. Suddenly he stops, glaring past us.

  “Cah,” Miles says, turning my face toward the street.

  The patrol car glides to a stop in front of the house, lights whirling. The siren burps once, summoning all the neighbors to their front windows.

  “You got the law on me?” Chuck asks, his voice low and poisonous. He hesitates for just a second and then walks slowly toward the cop, who is pulling Derek out of the backseat.

  Inside the house, Yvonne has dumped the sheets down the basement steps and then gone upstairs to change. She comes back down wearing cutoffs and a halter top. Her hair has been raked back into a rubber band and it looks like she’s crying a little.

  “He stinks,” she says to me, nodding at Miles, who is still on my hip.

  I go upstairs with Miles while Felicia goes to the basement with the sheets. Even though it isn’t a bad one, I linger over the diaper change, peering out the bedroom window to the curb, where the cop is talking to Derek, whose head is down, and Chuck, who is staring into the distance and nodding. Miles points to the soiled diaper, to the clean diaper, to the powder, and to me.

  “Me,” he says.

  I can’t tell whether we’re fired or not, but I’m starting to hope we are. Down in the living room, Yvonne is smoking and watching out the window. When the cop climbs into his squad car again and Chuck turns Derek toward the house with a hand on the back of his neck, we all scramble to the kitchen. Yvonne lights a cigarette off the one she has going and then gets a can of beer out of the fridge. From the back hall comes the rustling of children, quietly congregating like birds on a telephone wire.

  The front door slams and Miles clings more tightly to my neck, like a baby monkey. A jostling from the back stairs, a sniff, and then silence.

  Derek enters the kitchen first, landing against the far wall like a discarded boot. He remains hunched there, head down, hands in his pockets.

  “Is this the one you can’t make mind?” Chuck thunders at Felicia.

  She glares at Chuck, her hands balled into fists at her side, refusing to answer. He never even glances at me—one of the benefits of being a sidekick—but snaps his fingers at Yvonne, who opens the refrigerator and sets another beer on the table. He pops the top, takes a leisurely swig, and stares at Derek’s bowed head.

  “Com’ere, you little turd,” Chuck says.

  Derek shakes his head no.

  We’ve always thought of Derek as a large, overbearing kid who shouts out words we’ve only seen in spray paint. A shin kicker, an arm twister, a worm flinger. In fact, we see now, he’s a lot smaller than we are, a narrow-shouldered boy with a big head and Yvonne’s dark circles under his eyes.

  “Com’ere,” Chuck says again.

  From the back stairs, Renee’s voice: “Dad, no!” she cries.

  Back when I was eight, a tall, skinny girl in my gym class named Alma Rupes flung herself into a cartwheel and landed right on top of me. It was like being whacked in the side of the head by the long wooden paddles of a windmill—I was stunned, literally, and for an hour or so afterward everything I looked at was in high relief, like a 3-D movie. I kept saying to the school nurse, “Everything looks funny,” my voice hollow and loud, as though someone had their hands over my ears.

  That’s what’s happening now; the kitchen has become distant and silent, more like grainy footage of a kitchen. Stark, depressing details are suddenly visible: the window propped open with a Pepsi bottle, the light switch surrounded by a black halo of grime, the crumb-filled toaster with a Wonder bread wrapper melted to its flank. Everything. I swing Miles around to the front so he’s facing me, and I’m seeing it all through the blond fuzz of his staticky hair.

  Chuck takes one step, grabs Derek by the upper arm and lifts him off the floor like a stick. Derek is stiff and resistant, and his eyes are closed.

  “You don’t know how to make this one mind?” Chuck asks Felicia.

  The evening sun has moved down a notch, glinting off the metal edge of the counter, the sweating can of beer, Felicia’s glasses. She thrusts them back up where they belong and continues glaring at Chuck.

  He drags Derek by the wrist over to the stove and turns the burner on.

  “Don’t!” Felicia cries.

  Yvonne turns her back on the scene, opens the freezer and takes out an ice tray.

  Chuck yanks Derek’s hand over the flame and holds it there while the boy struggles, like a worm on a hook.

  “Stop it,” Felicia gasps, crying helplessly.

  The boy’s face is twisted into a breathless grimace; he kicks at his father’s legs and Chuck plunges the hand into the blue part of the flame. Derek starts shrieking.

  In the flame.

  The hand is cooking.

  Still in the flame.

  The screams are like sharp blasts from a horn.

  Suddenly, there is a fuming, scorched smell in the kitchen, and Derek collapses on the floor. Chuck strides out of the house. When the door closes behind him, a chorus of crying starts up in the back hall.

  Yvonne cracks the ice tray and empties it into a dish towel. A motorcycle roars to life and Felicia stumbles out of the room. Yvonne claps her hands once, summoning Miles out of my arms.

  Derek is slumped on the linoleum, the dish towel in his lap, staring at the hand—brick red up to the wrist and strangely tight looking, like an inflated rubber glove.

  Yvonne claps again, sharply, and holds out her hands, but Miles grips my waist and won’t let go. She pulls him away, like taffy, as he fights to hang on.

  “Me!” he cries out in desperation, searching my face. “Me!”

  I peel his fingers from my neck, one by one.

  His cries, hollow and lonely, follo
w me as I join my friend outside and walk quickly away, past Lurch, who stands trembling next to his doghouse, past Mrs. Vandevoort in her white socks and pruning gloves, and past the blond snake, waiting in the green crew-cut grass at her feet.

  We live in a factory town, Zanesville, Illinois, the farm implement capital of the world. This means nothing to Felicia and me; we care only about our own neighborhood, everything between our two houses, a handful of potholed streets and alleys lined with two-story homes and one-car garages. We have a couple of busy intersections with four-way stop signs, a red brick barbershop, a corner tavern, a taxidermist, a family who paved their backyard and painted it green, and a house where the garage has been turned into a tap-dance studio. Otherwise, it’s all the same, every block, through our neighborhood and the neighborhoods beyond.

  My mother can’t stand the tap-dance teacher, who wears her hair in a tall unstable beehive and has a daughter named Shelley who was in my class all during elementary school, a tiny, dazzling creature with kinky tresses and an overwrought personality. During our early years, Shelley had wild, seizurelike temper tantrums—she would utter a series of sharp shrieks and then for three minutes became a blur of hair ribbons and pistoning Mary Janes. Everyone adored her because she was out of the ordinary, but nevertheless she was sent away at some point, to a distant grandmother.

  “They sent that little girl to live on a farm,” my mother said at the time, not to me but to someone on the telephone.

  Shelley’s mom’s studio is where Felicia and I part company to go to our separate houses. Felicia’s route is stepping through a hedge and sliding down a steep terrace; mine is a scurry along someone’s back walk, past their windows, eyes averted, and down their front steps.

  Over on my block, the semi-interesting people include a woman who comes outside and washes her dog’s face with a dishcloth every hour or so, and a widowed man who is so gigantic he needs a kitchen chair to get to his car, alternating between using it as a walker and sitting on it to rest. He calls himself Pudgy, and we call him that too. One coincidence: we also have a neighbor named Fudgy, or Uncle Fudge, a barber with no hair of his own. Next door is Old Milly, whose middle-aged drunken nephews come over and make trouble at her house. My sister and I, from our upstairs bedroom, can look down at night into Old Milly’s kitchen and watch what’s going on, the staggering and shoving. Once very late at night we saw her niece, a stout, red-faced nurse named Shorty, kissing a man in a way that made us sick.