Dove tapped the side of her nose. “And if they happened to have come from a warehouse in Taiwan I guess the tourists wouldn’t know the diff, huh?”
“Between you, me and the doorknob?” my uncle said. “No, they wouldn’t. You don’t believe in much of this, I take it?”
“Much of what?”
My uncle lifted his hand to his ear and spun it lazily at the wrist, a gesture that took in his shop and, quite possibly, the cosmos. “The spirit realm. The paranormal.”
“People can believe what they want,” Dove said. “It’s great to believe in something. But this guy”—she hooked her thumb at Billy—“believes in anything. Vampires and phantoms and elbow-witches, probably knee- and nose- and butthole- and every other kind of witch, too.”
“I thought you said it was okay to believe in something,” my uncle said.
“I do,” Dove said. “Something, not everything.”
With that, she turned to leave. Surprising myself, I said, “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know, bud. Just out.”
“You should all go,” my uncle said. “A beautiful day. Why waste it inside?”
Uncle C slipped around the counter to usher us out of the shop. Politely but firmly, he put his palm between my shoulder blades. The Bat Phone rang. He rushed his goodbyes to answer it, leaving the three of us on the sidewalk, where we found Lex Galbraith lounging outside So Beta! smoking a cigarette.
“Please don’t think Cal’s being impolite,” he said. “But when that phone rings, the earth stops. Or starts rotating backwards on its axis. Or is about to collapse from the sand-worm infestation seething under its crust.” Lex flapped his arms. “Lord have mercy, the Bat Phone’s ringing. Everybody stop everything and answer the Baaaaat Phone, or else the Lobstermen of Gamma Seven will enslave the human race.”
Lex pinched the heater off his cigarette, stashed the remaining half in the pocket of his turtleneck, nodded to us courteously and went back into So Beta!
“Is that guy always such a weirdo?” Dove said.
“Who, my uncle?” I said.
“Him too,” said Dove, “but I meant Turtleneck McGee there.”
“I never knew turtlenecks had pockets,” Billy remarked.
“Good ones don’t,” said Dove. “Check that. There’s no such thing as a good turtleneck.”
ii.
Clifton Hill swarmed with tourists. They infested the sidewalks and clogged up the shopfronts: a sunburnt, tube-socked, sun-visored horde.
We slalomed between the stalks of their pudgy legs. The smell of fried dough and caramel mingled with the coconut sweetness of Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil. Dove flipped out her tobacco puck and packed a pinch of Skol between her lip and gum. I found the fact that she dipped tobacco simultaneously gross and wonderful.
We passed Frankenstein’s House of Horrors and the Criminals’ Hall of Fame, where Dove paused to ape the sneer of the waxen Al Capone beside the ticket booth. We elbowed our way up to the viewing rail of the falls. Water tumbled over the lip in a blue sheet, booming into the basin to send up white curtains of mist.
We walked west. I spotted Percy Elkins and one of the Vreeland children, not Terry, kicking the token machine in the arcade at the bottom of Clifton Hill. He didn’t see us. A rainbow hovered over the head of the falls. It seemed to keep time with us, dogging our heels until we outdistanced it. Dove spat a stream of tobacco-juice into the gutter, pigeon-necking so it would fly even further. She wiped spittle off her chin.
“Still getting the hang of it.”
We rounded into a subdivision. The houses were attached one to the other to the other—they looked like boxcars with windows, all painted the same powder blue. Billy walked up to number 57, unlatched the gate leading into the yard and said, “Well, see ya.”
I stood stunned. “Yeah. Uh, bye.”
Dove set her hands on her hips. “Are you two kidding me? Billy, you don’t have a single friend in town. Kirk Garrow and Rudy Kitto aren’t showing up anytime soon, you know. What about you, Jake—got any friends?”
I squinted up at the sky and lied. “Uhh, I mean, a few.”
“Come in,” she said to me. “Have a glass of Kool-Aid.”
The Kool-Aid was cherry-flavoured. Dove poured it from a plastic jug into jelly jars. The kitchen was neat and clean, with moving boxes stacked in the corners.
We went out to the backyard, which was hemmed by a low chain-link fence. I could see all the way down the block, into every yard, with their vegetable patches and teeter-totters and frayed lawn furniture. The Yellowbirds’ yard was empty except for a Mister Turtle pool covered with a sheet of plywood.
“Might as well feed the moneymakers,” said Dove.
Billy and I trailed her over to the pool, where she shoved the plywood aside and spread her arms in a “voila” gesture.
There, under a few inches of algae-bloomed water, things moved. Torsional shapes, some flicking as if in reaction to the wash of sunlight, others resting perfectly still.
“Are those…?”
“Salamanders,” Billy told me.
“Correction, they are black gold,” said Dove. “Well, most but not all of them are black. I don’t want to generalize.”
It was hard to tell how many there were, as Dove had added a few plate-sized lily pads to the pool. Bulge-eyed salamander heads poked from the frilled rims of the succulents.
“I found two of them down along the river doing their mating dance,” Dove said. “And I said to myself, Hey, here’s a buck waiting to be made.”
“You must really like salamanders,” I said.
“These four-legged snot-logs? Take ’em or leave ’em. What I like’s money, and that pet shop up the hill, what’s its name?”
I said, “Pick of the Critter?”
“Right, those geniuses. They’re giving me ten bucks a pop. So far I’ve got”—squinting into the pool for a head count—“twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and more on the way.”
She directed my attention to the translucent sacs clustered like bunches of grapes at the sides of the pool. They had the consistency of bath beads, and I saw flagellate shapes squirming inside some of them.
Dove raised her arms above her head and did a dance on the sun-baked grass. “Money, money, money, money, moneeee-EEE-eee…”
It was the theme song for the Million Dollar Man—the most treacherous heel and greatest scourge in the entire WWF stable at that time.
“Everyone’s got a price, and everyone’s gonna pay,” she growled, “because the Million Dollar Woman always gets her way.” She followed up with a praiseworthy rich-millionaire’s laugh: “Ah-ah-HAH-HAH-HA—”
“You aiming to wake the dead, child?”
Turning at the sound of the unfamiliar voice, I set eyes on the most compressed human being I’d ever seen: compact, with delicate but foreshortened limbs.
“Did I wake you, Mamma?”
The only thing out of place on Mrs. Yellowbird was her hair, which stuck up in sleep-tousled sprigs. “You woke half the neighbourhood. You know I’m on nights this week.”
Dove slunk across the grass and sidled up to her mother.
“I’m sorry.” She spoke in a breathy baby voice: Eye sowwee. She rucked her head under her mother’s armpit until Mrs. Yellowbird lifted her arm reluctantly, then snuggled in close.
“Eye sowwee, Mah-mee.”
“You feeling okay, Dove?”
Mrs. Yellowbird’s voice was light but forced. Dove, who acted like she hadn’t heard, kept nuzzling into her mother. Mrs. Yellowbird looked at Billy—something molecular passing between their eyes—before tightening her arm around her daughter’s shoulder.
“Dove, baby, did you take your…”
Dove’s body went stiff. Her eyes flicked anxiously in my direction as though for the first time registering me as a person.
“Thank you for the reminder, Mamma. I’ll do so directly.”
Dove turned robotically and walked inside the house.
The limber sway of her limbs had vaporized: she moved like a person whose joints were wired to servos. Mrs. Yellowbird watched her go, then said to Billy, “Want some lunch?”
“Sure, Mom.”
Mrs. Yellowbird followed Dove into the house. I noticed that she walked with a limp. She spun on her heel at the doorway.
“Hey, you,” she said. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jake.”
“You a friend of Billy’s?”
“Maybe.”
Mrs. Yellowbird’s laugh sounded too robust for her frame. “I got bologna. You’ll eat a bologna sandwich?” Before I could answer, she said, “You strike me as a fellow who’ll eat just about anything. Hustle up, wash your hands.”
I followed Billy down the hall to the bathroom. The door was open, faucet running. Over Billy’s shoulder, Dove stood at the sink. Her hair was wet as if she’d dunked her head under the tap. A little orange bottle sat on the sink ledge. Dove stared fixedly into the mirror, the water pattering off the ends of her hair.
Billy shut the door. “There’s another bathroom upstairs.”
iii.
After lunch, Billy and I spent the afternoon touring my favourite spots. I took him to the condemned dog track, where we raced each other around the red dirt oval on our bikes. Billy beat me easily. I showed him the secret path behind Land of Oceans that led to a pen where the sick animals were quarantined. We saw a deer with a growth the size of a summer squash tethered to its head. The growth bounced against the deer’s skull like a Nerf ball.
As an apology for taking him to such a depressing spot, I used the buck-fifty I’d earned mowing my neighbour’s lawn to buy candy at the Avondale. A box of Mighty Gobstoppers, a box of Hot N Cool Nerds, red licorice tape, two El Bronco grape-flavoured gum cigars and Gold Rush gum, which came in a cloth sack with a drawstring. We took the haul to a skinny strip of land that jutted into the Niagara River a kilometre upstream of the falls. I used to be scared it would break off like a chunk of ice and carry me over the cataract, but that was half the attraction. It was a risk, taking Billy there. If he went the way of Percy Elkins and every other new kid in town, I’d have to find a new spot soon.
I spilled the contents of the paper bag onto a picnic table some enterprising soul had hauled to the end of the spit. Billy avoided looking at the haul, instead training his eyes on the water where it sucked at the edges of the land like a toothless mouth.
“Want some?” I said.
“It’s yours, you bought it.”
He couldn’t think that I’d invited him out there to watch me eat candy all by myself? I picked up the box of Gobstoppers, tore the cardboard along the perforation and shook a red one out. I rolled it off my palm into his.
“I owe you, Jake,” he said.
“It’s okay.”
“No, I owe you.”
“Okay.”
Billy had never eaten Nerds. I let him have the box and kept the Gobstoppers. We stuck our tongues out to inspect their shifting coloration: blue and red and gangrenous green. We halved the sack of Gold Rush gum, lined the nuggets up on the nicked wood, then chewed them with steely deliberation. We stuck the gum cigars in our pockets for later, and lay back, side by side, on the table while the sugar lit up our nervous systems like pinball machines.
“I heard about him, you know,” said Billy.
“About who?”
“Charles Fort. Your uncle said we wouldn’t know who he was, but I checked his book out at the library last year. It was called The Book of the Damned. Read lots of other books, too.”
“About what?”
“Strange happenings, stuff like that. Did you hear about the Philadelphia Experiment?” When I told him no, Billy said, “In World War Two, the government tried to cloak battleships to make them invisible. Scientists used electricity and magnets to bend the light around a ship, right? If you bend it the right way, you can trick the human eye. They used Tesla coils, which are machines to build up a ton of electricity, and Helmholtz coils, these big magnets. They tested the cloaking device on a battleship, the USS Eldridge. But something happened.”
I sat up. “What?”
“The battleship disappeared for thirty seconds. Vanished off radar, right? Then it showed up again, three hundred miles from where it had been. They found it off the coast of Montauk in Long Island. Some soldiers went out to it—the ship was floating in a weird green mist—but before their boats reached the battleship they heard the screams.”
Billy paused his story to blow a gum-bubble. When it popped, he said: “What they found was, uh, the crewmen all stuck in the ship.”
“You mean trapped?”
“Yeah, but not like how you think. Stuck in the ship. Their bodies were…I don’t know the word. It was like”—spreading the fingers on each hand, Billy linked them together and squeezed—“into the metal, you see?”
“You mean welded?”
“Sure, welded,” he said, putting his hands back by his sides and closing his eyes. “They were part of the ship. Stuck in doors and walls, their head and shoulders on one side and their chest and legs on the other. A lot of them were dead but some were still alive. Others weren’t there at all. Out of the fifty-five men who set sail, only thirty-seven were found. Twenty-three died, and the rest were stuck inside the ship.”
“So, what happened to them?”
“Some of the men died before rescuers could cut them out. Others survived but their brains were all gone to mush. Only three or four lived to talk about it.”
“What did they say?”
“That the ship had gone into a different place.”
“What kind of place?”
“Another world? The electricity and magnetic stuff opened a doorway. The Eldridge slipped through the door for thirty seconds, then came back. But something very bad happened in that other place.”
“What happened to the men who disappeared?”
Billy opened his eyes. Their convexity reflected the cloudless sky: a glittering, feverish blue. They looked a lot like my uncle’s eyes, right then. “The book I read said there were, um, sightings.”
“Sightings of what?”
Billy sat up. “Of men who looked just like the ones who had gone missing in that other place, right? Only this was thirty or forty years later. These men—the ones people reported seeing—looked the same as they had on the Eldridge. Same age, dressed in old sailor suits. Most times they looked only half there, like ghosts. People saw them around power conductors and dams, places that gave off a lot of electrical or magnetic energy. In dark, lonely places too.” Billy swallowed and said, “They were always screaming, or at least their mouths hung open like they were. Except no noise came out.”
We sat in silence as wavelets licked the shore.
“I guess your sister doesn’t believe in that stuff, huh?”
“Do you like her?”
I had to find somewhere else to look. My cheeks broiled. “No, I just…”
“She takes pills.”
When I looked back, Billy’s mouth was pinched shut. I got the sense he was upset at himself for divulging a family secret.
“I love my sister,” Billy said plainly. “But sometimes she—”
Curling his pointer finger around his thumb, Billy popped his thumb up to mimic flicking a switch.
“On, off. Off, on. She can’t control it. The pills make her…not happy, but not sad either. They make her less, yeah? Less Dove.” Billy shrugged. “My mom says Dove lives like a sun does. In this never-ending state of heat and light that would burn the rest of us up.”
Clouds worked across the sky. Ragged white, they were carried over the water, over Goat Island near the southern shore, giving us fleeting pockets of shade. Billy would find new friends once the summer ended. I understood that. I could even accept it. He was athletic and handsome and broody.
The tremor of the falls carried up the table legs and down my spine. The heartbeat of my city. I hoped Billy could feel it.
&nb
sp; When I got home, Mom was smoking a cigarette on the porch. She butted it out when she saw me rounding the corner, waving her hands as if to shoo a fly.
“I’m quitting,” she said as I walked my bike up the driveway. “Got to wean myself.”
We sat on the steps. She ran her fingers through my hair, brushing my bangs out of my eyes.
“You should wear it to the side, in a part. See more of your face.”
I brushed my hair back the way it was and parried her hands away when she tried to finger-comb it again.
“Switching subjects,” she said, giving up. “I talked to your uncle today. He said you’ve made some new friends. A girl, even.”
“Mom…”
“Only reporting what I’ve heard.”
“She chews tobacco.”
“Is that so.”
“It smells like cherries.”
“Not exactly ladylike.”
I thought about Billy asking if I liked Dove. How could I, a mere mortal, like Dove Yellowbird? Did mortal men like the goddess who lurked in the caldera of their island volcanoes? No, they worshipped those goddesses. If they dared to even think about touching, or kissing, or gazing directly upon the goddess, that goddess would incinerate them like flies in a bug zapper. And those fools would deserve no less.
iv.
I arrived for the first meeting of the Saturday Night Ghost Club at seven o’clock the following evening. Uncle C and Lex Galbraith were waiting inside the Occultorium.
“What did you tell your folks?” my uncle asked.
“I’m spending the night at your house. Watching movies.”
“Your father trusts my movie choices again?” he said hopefully.
Jake and Uncle C’s Monthly Movie Night had been a regular thing for years, until Uncle C made the mistake of screening The Mummy, an old Hammer Horror film. Any other kid would have howled at the cheesy effects and grinding organ soundtrack, but I was traumatized. Thus, Monthly Movie Night had met its abrupt cancellation. Recently my father had grudgingly allowed it to start again, so long as he chose the film.
I unzipped my backpack and showed Uncle C my copy of The Apple Dumpling Gang.
The Saturday Night Ghost Club: A Novel Page 6
