When he entered the adjoining town of Dutton, he reached into his breast pocket to stare again at a photograph he had taken from the file. A fading Polaroid, it was of three boys, one of whom was the subject of this visit. The three were shirtless, their arms around each other, smiling somewhere out in the woods. A notation on the back identified the boy on the left as Lawrence Miller, the one on the right as James Thompson. Miller had black hair and wore thick glasses and braces on his teeth. This now dead boy was the only one of the three mugging for the camera.
From the file, the man knew the Miller boy had been killed at some point during the Grantham event, though there was no evidence the two were related. The man smirked to suddenly realize this was the report’s subtle way of saying the kid had stayed dead. It went on to say the boy’s body had been found by a hunter somewhere in the woods after an apparent fall from a tower, and what remained of the Miller family had moved to Maine.
Turning his gaze away from him, the man looked at the boy on the right. A visit with this boy was the reason behind the blond man’s trip on this beautiful summer day.
He had a short haircut that spiked up in front as though he’d been swimming. The man noted again he had an impish grin on his face and a mysterious twinkle in his eyes. Beneath those eyes were what might have been the fading remnants of nasty shiners, though they could just as easily have been a result of the photo fading. At any rate, James Thompson and his family had all survived the event and had since moved to the neighboring town of Dutton. He took one last look before putting the photo back in his pocket.
After double-checking his directions, he took a right off Route 135 and drove down a narrow side street toward the boy’s new address. He slowed some while passing an elementary school, where he saw a shirtless, toe-headed boy in long cutoffs shooting baskets by himself. He pulled over and watched the boy long enough to conclude he was not a natural athlete, but what he lacked in an elegant jump shot he seemed to make up for in raw tenacity.
Shutting off the car, the man got out and walked up a low, sloping hill that led to the chain link fence surrounding the court. Though he was certain the boy saw him approach, he seemed to take no notice. The sound of his dribbling echoed in the summertime air, followed by the occasional clatter of the ball going through a chain hoop.
“Nice shot,” the man said by way of introduction.
The boy glanced over but said nothing. After he watched the boy take a few more shots, the man tried again.
“You James Thompson?” he asked, just as the boy pulled up to take one from downtown. The ball missed the rim entirely and went clanking against the backboard before bouncing off to the left. The boy chased it down and turned to take another shot.
“You James Thompson?” the man asked again.
The ball sailed through the air and this time found nothing but hoop. Retrieving the ball, the boy fought off an invisible defender before pulling up to take another shot. The ball bounced around the rim a few times before finding the net.
“You a pervert?” the boy asked.
The man smiled and answered. “Nope. Just wanna talk to you about something is all.” When the boy kept on shooting, he added, “It’s about Grantham. What happened there.”
The boy took another shot. Air ball. After letting the ball bounce all the way to the fence, he finally turned to face the man. Putting fisted hands on his hips, he wiped the sweat from his face with his bare shoulders before replying.
“It was in all the papers,” he said. “A toxic chemical truck hit a haytruck. It exploded. It happened the same night the train derailed. They say it was one in a million. It was in all the papers,” he said again, then asked, “Don’t you read the papers?”
Turning, he walked to a corner of the fence and picked up his jersey. He used it to wipe his face before putting it on.
“That’s not what happened there,” the man said. “And we both know it. So don’t be a smartass.” His voice took a softer tone when he added, “I won’t take too much of your time. I promise.”
The boy picked up his basketball and walked through the narrow opening in the fence. When he began walking away, the man shouted at his back.
“That’s okay. There’re other folks I can ask. What was her name again? Andrea Rourke, was it? I’ve got her address too.”
The boy went only a few more steps before he stopped. The man figured that’d get a rise out of him. The girl had been the Dugan kid’s girlfriend. He wrote about her a lot in his last journal.
The boy kept his head down while turning around to walk slowly back toward the man. “Leave her out of it,” he muttered. “She’s been through enough.”
He came to where the man stood and sat down on the hill with the basketball tucked between his legs. The man sat down beside him.
“Nice day, isn’t it?” he asked. The boy barely nodded his assent.
The man thought a moment about the right question to begin with before deciding to start with a softball. “Tell me about it,” he asked, closely monitoring the boy’s face for any telltale clues. He was not disappointed.
The boy’s face turned haunted for a moment. A closer look revealed deep clefts beneath his eyes that had no business being anywhere near a face so young. The rhythmic throbbing in his jaw revealed he was clenching his teeth while struggling to answer the question before just shaking his head.
“I can’t help you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The man believed him. “All right, then,” he said. “How about this. What can you tell me about Scott?”
The boy stiffened visibly, and the man feared he had overplayed his hand. He braced himself for the boy to get up and walk away again, and so was shocked to see the boy break into a silly grin and shake his head as if the man had said something stupid.
“What is it,” he asked.
Still grinning, the boy turned to him and answered. “Nothing really, I guess,” he said. “It’s just that we didn’t call him that. Scott, I mean. Nobody did. Not often, anyway. Sometimes, maybe if we needed to get his attention, we might use it.” He raised his head to look somewhere far off into the distance. “But to us, he was always just Dugan.”
The man watched and waited. Now that he had started, the man got the impression the boy was eager to talk about his friend. He seemed to struggle to find the right words, and after he did, he stared at the ground and spoke in a monotone. The man watched his hands turn white as he clutched the basketball like some sort of talisman.
“He was the first of all of us to see it start happening,” he began. “He had a paper route. Did you know that?”
The boy looked at him. The man nodded. Jimmy looked away again before going on.
“Anyway, it was the dogs that seemed to go first, and after that it was his customers. Dugan and me, well, we kind of noticed it was happening at the same time. But he really didn’t believe it at first. Course, neither did I. Not really, I mean . . . how could you? Anyway, then he started seeing things. He used to sometimes be able to kind of just touch certain things and be able to see stuff. I don’t understand myself exactly how he done it. But there was a group of us . . .”
He paused a moment and bit his lip like he might be saying too much, or betraying some kind of trust. But to the man, it also seemed like the boy wanted to talk about it, needed to talk about it, outside of whatever circle of folks had gone through the hell that must have been Grantham in those macabre days. But mostly, the man knew, it would have been the nights. Jimmy finally went on.
“. . . a group of us got together and decided to do something about it. Course Dugan would never believe it, but we couldn’t of done any of it without him. He even blamed himself for it all, for everything that happened. Can you believe that? But he was the one who . . . well, he brought us all together. And it was him who found out where most of ‘em were hiding.”
The boy shook his head once and looked off into the distance. His voice took on a tone of deep bitterness as he went on.
“He had to be a hero, though, had to try and do it all himself as some kind of penance for all the other crap he was always blaming himself for that wasn’t his fault neither. He was always beating himself up about something or other. He never once saw any of the good that was in him.”
His voice caught. The man watched a single tear appear suddenly in the boy’s left eye and fall to the ground. That was all, though. Just the one. He looked away to give the boy whatever time he needed. When he thought enough time had passed, he turned to look again and saw the boy turned toward him. There was what might have been a strange kind of hopefulness in his eyes.
“He’s still alive, isn’t he?” Jimmy said. It wasn’t really a question. He went on, his voice firm. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Has to be. You wouldn’t even be here if he weren’t still alive.”
Despite himself, though the boy stared straight at him, the man smiled before answering. “Now, you know that’s not true,” he said. “You of all people know that’s not true.”
The harsh words let all the air out of whatever temporary hope the boy might have harbored. He looked away bitterly and nodded.
The two sat in silence a while. The man was often satisfied to just pass the time with someone who had known his prey. You never knew just what they might blurt out. Despite the agency’s rigorous interrogation methods, the boy’s uncle had been less than cooperative. Aside from a few small tidbits here and there, it seemed that avenue would be a dead end. Anyway, he had already gotten quite a bit out of today’s meeting. After a few more moments of silence, the boy glanced at his watch.
“Well, I got some chores to do,” he said. “My father is . . . I got chores to do is all.”
He stood up and started to walk away, taking only a few steps before the man called out to him. The boy stopped and turned around. The man reached into his breast pocket and removed something. Standing, he walked over and handed it to the boy.
“Here. Take this,” he said.
The boy looked down at the photograph of himself with his two lost friends. A flood of memories seemed to sweep through his face. Tears welled up again in his eyes, but he turned away before letting the man see them fall. “Thanks,” he said, turning to start once again toward home.
The man stood there long after the boy was out of sight. He stayed there until he could no longer hear the fading echo of a basketball bouncing on asphalt, and after that, he stayed a few minutes more.
6
While Dugan stood on a milk crate with his arms held out beside him, Mary went to work with common pins. The old costume needed more than a little work. The pants were about two inches too long, and so were the sleeves of the elegant white shirt. The waist of the black pants needed taking in by more than a few inches. Even the cape needed cropping so it wouldn’t drag on the floor. She pulled his pantlegs up and tugged his shirtsleeves down while her eight-year-old daughter Emma laughed and laughed from her small bed across the trailer. Beautiful and precocious, Emma was curious about everything and everyone, but tonight, she couldn’t stop giggling at Dugan’s obvious discomfort. Neither Dugan nor Mary had the heart to tell her to hush. Despite himself, Dugan had to stifle his own smile in reaction to her glee.
At one point during the fitting, Mary grabbed hold of his wrist and they both smiled at the blue spark of electricity that passed between them. But the touch brought Dugan hazy images from her past. He saw a drab dormitory where groups chanted and hugged, then watched a paler version of Mary selling flowers to strangers on the street. A strong-willed man held some kind of power over her. He wanted the girls to sell more than just flowers. Dugan felt the bitterness of dashed hopes and a dawning recognition of the true nature of what she had involved herself with. There was a ruse to make contact with the daughter they had separated her from, and a daring nighttime escape through a window. For one scary moment, then two-year-old Emma began to cry. Mary hated herself to this day for what she did to make her stop. Dugan looked across at the giggling Emma and knew that she was none the worse for wear.
After Mary let him go, Dugan looked in her eyes and smiled. He could put up with this mild indignity.
When he awoke the next evening, his costume was ready. He saw the black garment bag waiting for him above the place where he slept. The black shoes placed beside his sleep chamber were polished to a bright sheen. Because tonight was showtime.
While putting on the elegant ruffled shirt, he felt a brief but horrific stabbing pain that almost brought him to his knees. Forced to sit for a moment, he looked down at the shirt and saw an almost invisible stitched repair where the pain had been. He waited a moment, but the pain did not return. Standing, he went to a small table and put some grease in his hair. He grabbed a brush and slicked it back before picking up a powder puff and dabbing his face white in the way Lois had shown him. He glanced into the mirror out of some forgotten habit, almost smiling to remember it would be no help to him at all. He figured it didn’t matter anyway. Lois and Agnes and the others would help him.
Before draping himself with the cape, there was a knock upon his door. He opened it to see Gunther, smiling and hiding something behind his back. When Gunther saw him dressed in his costume he shrank back for a moment, until something that might have been recognition appeared in his eyes. He smiled wider.
“Gunther . . . Scott . . . friends?” he asked.
“Course we are, Gunther!” Dugan answered. “I wouldn’t even be here without your help. You know that. Now whaddya got there for me?”
It wasn’t any real surprise. Dugan had heard the squeals from the feral cat even before he heard the knock upon the door. Gunther brought his hands from behind his back and held the creature out to him by its tail. As tempted as he was, Dugan felt something like the buzzing of an angry hornets nest going on inside him. He just wasn’t hungry.
“Tell you what, Gunther,” he said. “Let’s say we let this one go for now.” Gunther nodded before lowering the reprieved creature to the ground and letting it scurry away.
When Dugan finished dressing, the two walked together to the House of Freaks. As they approached the long trailer, Dugan saw a new mural hanging beside the others. The character in the faded mural wore the same clothes as he, but the boy — whoever he was — looked nothing like him. The one on the mural had long black hair dangling below his shoulders, and two good ears sticking out from both sides of his head. They had gotten the teeth right though.
His mouth was open. His fangs dripped with blood. Dugan had a faint recollection of his own transformation, of the pain he’d felt as those foreign objects began making themselves in his own mouth, two new sets of razor sharp teeth piercing the sensitive tissue of his newly grown palates. He shuddered to recall it had been more painful than even the expelling of his own internal organs.
Turning to look at Gunther, he saw him staring at the mural with something like pain in his eyes. He waited a moment before asking the question. “Is that him?” He remembered his friends saying Gunther and the one like him had been good friends. After a moment, Gunther nodded.
“What was his name?” Dugan asked.
Gunther didn’t miss a beat. “Will-ee-um,” he answered. William. Dugan nodded, and the two started walking again toward the trailer.
To keep things at their creepiest, the freak show didn’t start until 10:30 and ran until two most evenings. Inside the trailer, Dugan walked past Lois’s mermaid tank, then past Wolf Boy’s cage with its paper mache scenery and yellow full moon. He stopped outside Alice’s cage and his heart sank to see she had taken to her bed. Made up to look like a little girl’s bedroom, it had bright pink walls with fairy princess murals. Stuffed animals and dolls lay on the bed and on the floor beside it.
He walked in and saw her eyes were closed. Pulling up a pink stool, he sat down beside her and took her hand in his. He was comforted to feel a slow, but steady heartbeat. When she opened her eyes and saw it was him, she smiled. A brief spasm of coughing overtook h
er before she was able to talk.
“Look at you!” she said. “Don’t you look the part.” Using her other hand, she reached down beneath her covers and pulled out some Kleenex. “C’mere. Lean closer.”
He did as he was told. Her tiny hand reached up to wipe away excess powder from his nose and earlobe.
“There, that’s better. But make sure that Lois gets a good look at you before you go on. I can’t hardly see anything anyway.”
As another brief spasm went through her, he held her hand tight. When she was finished, he asked, “Is that bothering you?”
He was referring to the sound of hammering coming from the cage a few doors down, workmen putting on finishing touches to the new exhibit. She shook her head and smiled.
“Now, don’t you be nervous, boy,” she said. “And remember, it takes some time to find out what works and what doesn’t. But it’ll all come natural after a while. Just play the part, give the folks what they come for, and you can’t go wrong, right?”
He nodded and smiled, though he wasn’t really sure what she was talking about. What did the people want?
“You best get going now,” she said. “No reason at all for you to be spending your time with an old lady. Go on back there and have a drink and a few laughs for me, willya?” He smiled and squeezed her hand, but stayed another minute.
Before going to the lounge, he stopped outside the new cage the workmen were finishing up. On the right, a black casket sat upon two sawhorses draped in black. The paper mache rear wall looked like ancient stonework. Heavy steel bars crisscrossed the faux window high above where rays of painted moonlight drifted in. Turning away, he headed for the lounge to find that curiously, the door was closed. When he opened it, he found out why.
Applewood (Book 2): Fledge Page 10
