The Pricker Boy

by Reade Scott Whinnem

  But today more than anything I can feel that stone wall and the border that it marks between the woods that we know and the woods that we never cross over into. It’s not good to go back there alone. I should wait for Ronnie, but I can’t. The Cricket doesn’t always understand borders, and I have to make sure that he hasn’t gone back there.

  I walk up the ridge toward the marker at the break in the stone wall. We call that marker the Widow’s Stone, though I don’t remember why. It’s a tall stone, like a square post stuck in the ground that rests flush against the right side of the break in the wall. The top is flat and broad enough to stretch your hand upon. We used to dare each other to go up there alone and slap the top of it when we were the Cricket’s age.

  I’m almost at the Widow’s Stone when I hear Ronnie’s voice.

  “There he is!” he calls from behind me. I take four steps backward and turn around. There, sitting on top of Whale’s Jaw, is the Cricket. He claps his hands, points up the path at me, and laughs silently into his open palm, slapping his knee with his other hand. I march down the path. Goose pimples rise on my back. I rub my thumb across the pads of the fingers of my right hand. STUCKS. I curl my two index fingers together and tug. ANGRY AT. I curl the three middle fingers of my right hand toward the palm and wiggle my thumb and pinkie. CRICKET.

  The Cricket pouts, lifts his fist, bends it at the wrist, and cocks it back and forth. I immediately lift mine and nod it up and down. I fold my arms, glaring at him. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of Ronnie. “He didn’t mean anything,” Ronnie says quietly.

  “I don’t like him out here alone!” I snap back, but I can feel my anger dissipating. I can never stay angry at the Cricket very long. I shake my head. I lift my fist, shake it back and forth, and then hook my index fingers and tug. NO … NOT ANGRY. I cross my arms and line up the pinkies of both hands side by side. BROTHERS. I open my right hand and wiggle the middle finger toward my chest. COME TO ME.

  The Cricket smiles, then skitters down the back of Whale’s Jaw. He leaps to the ground next to me, grabs my arm, and leans back, swinging off it from side to side. He makes a fist and taps it over his heart while making a sucking sound out of the side of his mouth.

  “You’re forgiven,” I say aloud, and he covers my mouth to stop me talking.

  Ronnie has walked up the path near the ridge. He looks like an ostrich wiggling its skinny neck to grab a glimpse of what lies beyond the Widow’s Stone.

  “Ronnie?” I call.

  He hops back down the path. “Still gives me the shivers,” he says, shaking his head back and forth.

  The three of us leave the woods together.

  Ronnie is sitting opposite me across the fire pit. The flames are level with his chin, and the waves of heat make his face appear to wriggle. He leans forward in his chair, taking a self-indulgent pause before he finishes his story. “Something new was out in the cornfields,” he says. “Now there were two scarecrows instead of just one. One was made of the farmer’s discarded clothes; the salesman had seen that one on his previous visit. But the other sent a cold shiver down his spine and caused him to hurry on down the road to the next house. ‘For a second there,’ he thought to himself, ‘I could have sworn that was the old lady herself!’”

  Nobody speaks for a moment. Ronnie’s face goes limp and he stares into the fire. He’s putting on a cool front, but it’s obvious that he’s waiting for our praise. It’s obvious to me anyway.

  I let him have his moment briefly before jumping in. “So, anybody want to go up to Thorwall’s farm tonight and pinch some corn?” I say.

  “I don’t eat corn,” Emily says, more to herself than anyone else.

  “So did you like it?” Ronnie asks, almost whimpering, but it’s a fake. He knows all his stories are good. He’s never missed with any of them. I want to call him an arrogant ass, but I have to give credit where it’s due.

  “Another good one, Ronnie,” I admit. “You tell a good story.” The Cricket is sitting on the ground next to my chair. He has a beach towel wrapped around his shoulders. He places his thumb to his chin and then slaps his open palm against his rump. GOOD TAIL.

  “I don’t know what that means, Cricket, but I’ll assume you liked it,” Ronnie says.

  I pick up a long stick and start moving the orange coals around, giving the darker coals air to breathe. The smoke from the embers is saturating my clothes, and the heat cups my face like a skintight mask. We’re not really supposed to have a fire out here, but our parents can’t see all the way to Whale’s Jaw from the cottages. Besides, we hike out buckets of water, just in case. No big deal.

  Our friend Vivek Patel comes up the path from the road. We haven’t seen him since last September, but instead of saying hello, he just shakes his head. “You people again.” He sighs. He stands there stiffly, not a crease of a smile. “Every spring I hope and I pray for a better summer, but then along comes June and it’s just you guys again. It’s a repeating nightmare that I live in—”

  “Oh, please shut up,” my cousin Robin laughs.

  He lifts his eyes to the star-pocked sky. “What have I done, Lord, to displease you so?”

  Vivek’s parents are college professors who spend the summer reading and writing. Their cottage is always quiet, and they pretty much let Vivek take care of himself. Somewhere in that mix he learned to be a complete wiseass, and he’s pretty good at it. He gets us laughing most of the time. Most of the time.

  I grab him a lawn chair and he takes a seat, saying hello to us all by passing his hand over the group in one wide wave. “You missed a great Ronnie Milkes story, destined to become a classic,” I say. “You should have gotten here twenty minutes ago.”

  “Ronnie’s stories always become classics,” Vivek says gravely as he wipes the winter grunge off the seat of the chair. “He tells them three hundred times over. From my cottage I can hear his grandfather say, ‘Maw, this would be such a nice place to summer if we could just get that boy to shut up.’”

  “Aw, I like the stories,” Robin says.

  I cringe every time Robin opens her mouth. Aw, I like the stories. Who says that? A complete pain in the ass I suppose, a pain in the ass who comes and hangs around your house all summer long. Every summer my Uncle Bill and Aunt Ellie pawn her off on us for at least a month, and sometimes right up until Labor Day. Tonight her hands are still wrinkly from helping my parents with the dishes. Late last summer I made the mistake of not smiling when my mother told me to do the dinner dishes, and she said, “Why can’t you be more like Robin?” She regretted it the instant it was out of her mouth. It was two days before I spoke to Mom again.

  There is a long awkward silence between us. “So …,” Vivek says. “So …”

  No one responds. I look at all of them, but no one is making eye contact. The only one willing to look at me is the Cricket. I ruffle his hair.

  Vivek lowers his voice almost to a whisper. “I saw that their house is up for sale.”

  No one jumps in to fill the silence that follows, so Vivek stumbles along further. “I just, you know, saw it on the drive in, and thought it was … I guess I was surprised. I mean, they’ve lived here since … forever. Didn’t Pete’s grandfather build that place?”

  “You know what, Vivek?” I say. “How about you stop talking about something that you know nothing about?”

  “Oh what, so we’re not going to talk about Pete all summer long?” he asks me.

  I raise my voice, raise it loud enough to carry out into the woods. “Okay. Go ahead, Vivek. Tell me what you really think of Pete.”

  “Hey, don’t do that! I didn’t mean to—”

  Emily cuts in. “How about another story?” she asks Ronnie. “I always liked the one with the old lady on the steps. Or the one about the dog.”

  Robin has been staring into the woods, but now she turns back to us. “A dog? There’s no story with a dog.”

  Vivek is watching me over the fire. I glare back. He shakes his head and t
urns to Ronnie. “Perhaps it was an invisible dog,” he offers. “That’s why Robin doesn’t remember it.” It’s a weak joke, but at least he’s trying to smooth things over.

  “There’s no dog story,” Robin says.

  “Yes, there is one,” Emily states. She twists a long thin branch off a nearby maple and begins peeling the bark off.

  “We just don’t know what kind of dog,” Vivek says, faking suspicion. “Ronnie, why won’t you ever tell us what kind of dog it is? It could be a slobbering dog, a fat dog, a three-legged dog, a dog possessed by the spirit of a Salem witch who was burned at the stake.”

  Robin smiles. “Stop being silly,” she says. Next to me the Cricket has covered his mouth to stifle his laughter.

  “No, seriously. A possessed German shepherd is one thing, but a possessed Mexican hairless really isn’t that scary at all. I’m dumb and I don’t have much of an imagination. Tell me what I’m supposed to picture in my head!”

  Ronnie ignores him. “I know the one Emily’s talking about, but I don’t want to waste them all in one night. Besides, it’s the first fire of the summer, so there’s one I have to tell.”

  “It’s getting late for one of us, though,” I say as I stand up. “I have to take the Cricket in for bed.” The Cricket responds by screwing his face up into a scowl and throwing a slapstick punch in my direction. He crawls quickly over to Robin’s chair. “Come on,” I plead, but he holds tight to Robin’s leg. I make the sign with my thumb and pinkie, then with my index finger draw a crescent moon in the air. CRICKET BED.

  The Cricket holds up his fist and shakes it back and forth. He hides his head under his towel. Robin puts her hand on his shoulder. “Let him stay for the story. Your parents won’t care.”

  I hold back a few choice words, but only because my friends are here. “It’s time for bed; it’s not for you to decide—”

  “Cousin,” she says firmly, “he’ll be fine for a few more minutes. So go sit yourself down and listen to Ronnie’s story.”

  Sometimes Robin acts more like a grandmother than Nana does. I sit back down and start to poke at the fire again. The Cricket lifts the towel and smiles at me like a mouse that’s just escaped the claws of the cat. I stick out my tongue at him, and he ducks back under his towel.

  Ronnie pauses, staring intently at the nearly full moon before turning his attention back to us. “I swear I did not make this one up. It’s the story of him.” Ronnie takes another deliberate, drawn-out pause. “It’s the story of the Pricker Boy.”

  “Oh, him!” Vivek says. “I thought you meant Neil Armstrong. Now there’s a story!”

  Robin pulls the towel off the Cricket’s head. “Are you ready to be really scared?” Normally, the Cricket would scowl at anyone who talked to him in such a condescending way, but because it’s Robin and she’s a girl and she’s letting him stay up, he just acts shy and smiles back.

  “How could he not have heard this before?” Vivek asks. “Ronnie tells it twice a day. Ladies and gentlemen, Ronnie Milkes will be having shows starting at seven and nine p.m. Tickets are on sale at the booth.”

  “I don’t have to tell it if you guys are sick of it,” Ronnie says. He sighs and settles back in his chair.

  “Oh, Ronnie, now don’t be that way,” Vivek chides him. “You tell your little Pricker Boy story, and then I’ll tell all about Neil Armstrong. He walked on the moon, you know. Neil, that is, not the Pricker Boy. Unless you’ve changed your story.”

  For all I care, Vivek can take shots at Ronnie all night long. I don’t really want to hear the story.

  Actually, that’s a lie. I do want to hear this year’s version. I want to find the little pieces of the story that Ronnie has added in over the winter. I want to try and spot the stones that he’s flipped over, and then watch the bugs come out.

  “Please tell it,” Robin says, reaching out and touching his arm. “Vivek is just teasing you. Please tell it.” She rubs Ronnie’s forearm, and being touched by a girl is all it takes to satisfy his ego.

  “Okay. But you have to understand. This story is different. It’s not made up. This one is true. I researched it myself, saw a lot of the old newspaper clippings. This one is for real. So if anyone is going to get too scared, now is the time to leave.” Ronnie looks directly at the Cricket as he says this, and the Cricket responds by baring his teeth at him.

  Just like he has hundreds of times before, Ronnie starts the story of the Pricker Boy. The first line has never changed. “He was a real kid once, just like any of us. He lived about a hundred years ago. There were no cottages on Tanner Pond back then. Only woods. His father was a trapper who took animals in these woods and then skinned them and sold their hides and meat. The boy’s mother had died many years before. He had never known her.”

  As Ronnie speaks, I move the coals around with my fire stick, trying to get the best airflow through the logs. The fire begins to swell and glow, lapping at the dry wood.

  “They ate the things that his father trapped, like muskrats and squirrels and opossum. The kid’s clothes were made from the hides that his father said were too ratty to sell. The other kids would make fun. The boy would skip school to avoid their teasing, only to be beaten by his father later in the day for skipping.”

  I stab the poker into the coals. A burst of sparks rides the updraft. I watch them rise up through the branches and wink away when they hit the cool air twenty feet up. I can hear the night bugs in the woods around us, and I wonder for a moment why night bugs always sound like they’re farther away than they actually are.

  Ronnie leans forward so that the flames light his face. “The boy often felt like an animal in a trap. He was dimwitted, but he was eager to please. It was easy for the other kids to play him for a fool. They would coax him out onto the thin ice of a stream during winter, or convince him to play a trick on the teacher for which he would surely get caught. Too late, he would notice their snares. He would struggle to free himself, but finally he would give up and timidly await the consequences of his foolishness.”

  That’s new. Ronnie didn’t use that part last year, that stuff about the boy being trapped like one of his father’s animals. I like it. It’s something that I never would have thought of. I get up and grab two more logs, throwing them both on top of the fire. The flames tear into them as Ronnie continues. “One day before school a group of kids cornered him. They told him that his mother was really alive. They said that his father kept her locked in one of his traps out in the woods. They said that he beat her and fed her raw meat every day. They said, ‘She begs to see you, but your father just laughs and beats her more.’ They told the boy that if he could find her by the pond, he might be able to save her and they could run away together.”

  That’s new too, and I see Robin flinch at the thought of the woman locked up and beaten like an animal. I hope she’s thinking that the Cricket should have gone to bed like I said. But through the flames I can see the look on the Cricket’s face, and he’s not scared. He and I have watched a lot of old horror movies together, so spooky stories don’t easily scare him. He’s just happy to be up past bedtime, sitting by the fire with the big kids.

  “The boy ran off into the woods. Near the Hawthorn Trees that stand beyond the Widow’s Stone, he found his father. Hoping that his father would eventually lead him to his mother, the boy crawled through the brush and followed his father as he moved from trap to trap. Unaware that he was being watched, the father went about his work and returned home at the end of the day.

  “But the boy didn’t come home that night. The father became worried, and he asked in town after his son. The teacher said that the boy had once again not shown up for school. The father got angry and returned home, thinking, ‘Fine, let him spend the night alone in the woods. It will serve him right.’ None of the schoolchildren said a word, afraid of what might happen to them.”

  Robin shifts in her chair. I can see her eyeing the height of the fire, but she won’t say anything. She wanted the Cric
ket to stay up with her, and he’s staying up. She’s chosen her battle for the night and won. She isn’t about to challenge me again.

  Somewhere far away I hear thunder roll. Ronnie loves the thunder. He smiles a bit, like he thinks that God Himself is sending the storm to be the sound track to his masterpiece.

  “That night was bitter, bitter cold. When morning came, the father became frightened and asked the local constables for help. The children in town still said nothing, fearing that they would get into trouble. The father did not go into the woods that day, but stayed at home waiting for the boy. Any animal that had gotten caught in his traps the night before would have to suffer for another day.”

  “Watch those flames,” Emily warns, though she isn’t even looking at the fire. She has almost stripped the bark completely off her branch.

  “It’s cool,” I say.

  “I’m feeling like a rack of ribs over here,” Vivek says, waving his hand at the fire.

  I don’t know why, but I grab another log and throw it on. I see Robin shake her head, but she says nothing. Ronnie looks ticked off at being interrupted, and before we can say more he starts in again. “The next night was so cold that by morning a thin layer of ice had covered the pond. Still the boy did not return. The third night was colder yet, and several farmers in town lost livestock in the freeze. That night, the father had a terrifying nightmare of his boy caught in a trap and struggling to free himself as he slowly froze to death. He awoke in the morning and took off into the woods, desperate to check each and every trap before nightfall.”

  Robin pulls the Cricket closer to her, probably more for her sake than for his. She glances nervously out through the pines. I adjust a few of the lower logs, and more oxygen pours through the heart of the fire. “The trapper did not find his son. But he did find something, and he never enjoyed a decent night’s sleep again.”