The Wait

by Frank Turner Hollon

  And then Bluto said, “Let’s go out to Onionhead.”

  The suggestion may have lingered and died, covered up by a new idea, but Jake immediately followed with, “Hell yeah, let’s go out to Onionhead.”

  We made a U-turn on Front Street and headed toward Dugger Road.

  “I’ve seen that big bastard,” Jake said. He was the best cusser amongst us. Jake’s cuss words seemed to fit in his sentences like they belonged. He took a drag from his cigar and held his arm out the window for the ash to blow away.

  We went further and further out of town. There were no streetlights and the houses were set back from the road, offering just a twinkle of light through the woods as we sped past. Jake turned down the radio when we pulled off on the dirt road. The van moved slowly and then we turned down another skinny dirt road. Jake switched off the headlights. I couldn’t see anything except the cherry ends of the cigars, like little Christmas lights inside the van.

  And then we stopped. I wondered if anyone else could hear my heartbeat. There was total silence. Bluto opened the passenger door and the dome light covered us in a dull yellow. We piled out of the van and closed the doors gently. My eyes adjusted to the darkness enough to see we were standing in a circle in front of the vehicle. We were only a few yards from the entrance gate to the graveyard.

  Jake whispered, “Follow me. And be quiet. Don’t talk until we get where we’re going.”

  Toad asked, “Where we going?”

  “You’ll know when we get there,” Jake said.

  In a line we walked through the gate. I could see the shapes and shadows of gravestones. There were no lights in any direction, just the moon. I was third in line, behind Bluto, who was behind Jake. I followed the big white t-shirt in front maybe fifty yards, until Bluto stopped. Toad bumped into me from the back.

  I heard Bluto whisper, “Jake? Jake?”

  He turned to me and said, “Where the hell’s Jake?”

  Nobody wanted to be the first to run.

  “Listen,” Toad said.

  We listened. There was a distant rustling of leaves. And then silence again. I was more afraid than the time in the drugstore, but not so afraid to be the first to run. The first person to run would hear about it the rest of their lives. They’d hear the story told over and over in class, at the football game, forever, about the time they ran.

  The silence was broken. The horn on the van blasted. I felt Bluto brush past me as he took off. I ran. There was the sound of footsteps all around. The horn continued to blare in the night. I expected to feel a hand grab my shoulder, a six-fingered hand, and pull me back to the cemetery. I expected to die.

  I passed Bluto and arrived at the van ahead of the others. The first thing I saw was Jake standing at the driver’s door, his arm inside the van on the horn, holding the bottle of schnapps with his other hand, laughing. I stopped and then felt the force of Toad’s body hit me from behind, knocking me to the ground face-first. He fell over the top of me, and the dome light in the van came on, shining a yellow light on Jake’s laughing face.

  It was quiet again.

  “Y’all are a bunch of titty-babies,” Jake said. “There ain’t no Onionhead. It’s all made up. My cousin made it up.”

  “How do you know?” Toad asked from the ground beside me.

  “There ain’t no tooth fairy either, Toad, or Santy Claus,” Jake explained.

  I stood up. Jake handed me the bottle of schnapps, and I took a swig. It was the first time I noticed I no longer held my cigar. I looked back the way we’d come to see if I could see the little red dot of light on the ground. There was nothing to see.

  We laughed. Knowing there was no Onionhead was almost disappointing. Bluto opened the other bottle of schnapps, and we lit up a new round of cigars.

  Overcoming the myth, rising above Onionhead, made me feel a little more like a man. It was a separation from all those kids at school who still talked about it like it was real. Those kids who lied about ever going to the cemetery in the first place.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Jake said.

  Even though I felt more like a man, and even though I was glad to shatter the Onionhead myth, I was ready to leave that place and go back to town.

  Jake continued, “Let’s go back and get Lori and her two friends. One of us will stay out here and hide. We’ll get the girls to walk out to the middle of the graveyard, and the guy can jump out of his hiding place and scare the holy crap outta the girls. It’ll be classic.”

  Jake liked Lori. I’d never met her two friends before. Jake said, “One of the girls is a year older, seventeen. She’s good lookin’. I don’t know about the other one. I think she’s a Fatty O’Patty.”

  Bluto asked the question, “Who’s gonna stay?”

  Jake answered, “I’d stay, but I’ve gotta drive the van. The rest of you can draw straws.”

  It was hard to argue with drawing straws. We each had a sixty-six percent chance of not having to stay. The odds were good I’d be sitting in the comfortable van for the ride back to town. Jake picked up little sticks and turned his back to measure two sticks the same size and one smaller. When he turned back around he held in his hand the tops of three sticks.“Who goes first?”

  Bluto grabbed one and held it up. “You’re safe,” Jake said.

  There was just me and Toad. It seemed right that Toad should be the one to stay. He was the runt of the litter.

  “You pick,” Toad said to me.

  I took a deep breath. It appeared fate would be on my side. Toad seemed destined to lose and stay in the graveyard.

  I pulled the stick on the right and held it up. It was short. Too short.

  Jake held up the third stick. He looked at me and said, “You’re short, big boy.”

  He handed me a bottle of schnapps and said, “Follow the same path y’all walked before. About twenty yards ahead of that spot, where you stopped last time, you’ll find a big headstone. It’s the biggest one out there. You can’t miss it. Sit behind it. We’ll be back in thirty minutes. When you see my lights flash, you’ll know we’re comin’. Wait until we get the girls all the way there before you jump out. And then scream.”

  Toad said, “This’ll be great. I bet Lori pees her pants.”

  I was slightly in shock. Somehow I’d forgotten Onionhead didn’t exist. I’d forgotten my newfound manhood. I just stood there while they piled in the van. The headlights kicked on and illuminated the cemetery. Far in the back I caught a glimpse of a big headstone. The van backed out, turned around, and left me alone in a graveyard. I stood still and listened to the van until I couldn’t hear the engine. I began to walk slowly in the direction of the big headstone, quiet with my steps, holding the bottle by the neck to use as a weapon if necessary. Every ten yards or so I’d stop and listen. I tried to imagine where the van might be. How close to town? How many more minutes until the headlights would be back at the gate?

  My heart pounded. I took deep breaths and held my eyes as open as they would go. I listened for any sound. Finally I could see the big headstone. It was as tall as my chest. Instead of getting behind it, I decided to sit down in front. I figured I’d have time to hide when the lights showed up down the dirt road.

  I squatted with my back against the stone. I could feel the coolness through my shirt. I set the bottle down next to me and wondered again where the van might be in the journey. What if they couldn’t find the girls? Maybe it was a joke. Maybe they weren’t coming back. My mind shot in quick circles, trying to decide what to do if they didn’t come back. Where to go? I sat there for what felt like a long time.

  And then I heard a sound. It was just sound. A noise where there had been none before. It could have been a bird on the ground, or a rabbit in the leaves. And then I heard it again. It was louder the second time. A footstep, and then another, off to my left. There was nothing to see. I looked down at my shirt and thanked God it was dark blue and not white, like Bluto’s t-shirt. The sound stopped. It stopped long enough for m
e to believe I had never really heard it in the first place. And then I heard it again. A step, and then another step. Someone else was in the graveyard. Someone was walking in my direction.

  My hand reached out and took hold of the neck of the bottle. I could run, I thought, but where would I run to? And what if I fell? I might run right into a gravestone, or a tree, or the fence.

  There was another step, and then another. To my left, moving closer, maybe thirty yards away, three first downs on a football field. I looked toward the front gate. How long had it been? My hand tightened on the neck of the bottle, still half-full. I lowered my head so my white face wouldn’t show in the darkness, my chin against my chest, eyes cutting hard to the left.

  Slowly, a figure appeared. At first it was nothing but a movement in the black dark. And then it was an outline. Ten yards to my left I saw a person appear. A very large person. Dark clothing with a white head. A large, bald, white head. He was looking toward the back of the graveyard, his profile etched in the black background. It was Onionhead. It was no myth. It was no concoction of teenage lies. It was a very large man with a very large head. A head like a big onion.

  To this day I can see the figure, the arms down at his sides, the milky-white hands at the ends of the sleeves, the enormous head resting like a glow-in-the dark ball on his broad shoulders.

  His head began to turn very slowly toward me. He seemed to be scanning the cemetery for anything out of place, anything disturbed. As he turned further, I could see something wasn’t right with him. Something was off-center, distorted. I was sure he could hear me breathing, or smell the cigar on my clothes or the peppermint from the bottle. If his face made a full turn, if his eyes met mine, I decided I would run. I would run toward the gates. Whatever happened would be better than feeling the hands of Onionhead upon my clothes. If he took one more step in my direction, I would go.

  The lights. Through the woods I saw the headlights of the van. Onionhead turned to the lights, and then turned to me. It was only two seconds, maybe three, that we looked at each other, but God knows it felt like eternity. I ran. I left the bottle and ran toward the gate like an arrow shot from a bow. I didn’t look back.

  The van turned the corner of the dirt road and stopped at the gate, the headlights like spotlights shining and showing the way. I didn’t care if anyone laughed. I didn’t care if the girls whispered at school about my blind run through the cemetery. I had seen Onionhead. I had come face-to-face with the legend of Onionhead and lived to remember it all. At least that’s how I felt as I ran in the direction of the gold van. But as I got closer I saw Jake, and Toad, and Bluto, and three girls climb out and stand next to the van. And the next thing I knew I was there with them. I recognized Lori, and the fat girl, but the other one, the seventeen-year-old, she was something else. She was different.

  And that’s how Kate first saw me. Running like a wild man out of the blackness of a midnight cemetery with my face contorted in pure fear. I turned around. There was nothing behind me. No gigantic white-headed man. No murderous Onionhead.

  “What the hell, man?” Jake said. “You were supposed to wait until we got ’em back there. Are you stupid?”

  To this day I can recall the feeling of not being able to take my eyes from Kate’s face. I just stared at her. There was something besides beauty. Something you had to look for. It took me years to figure it out. A brokenness underneath.

  six

  And so began the era of Kate Shepherd. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about her. With every lull, every blank space between normal thoughts, my mind clicked back to Kate like a mechanism. It was my first taste of love. Blind, convoluted, complicated, teenage love, from a safe distance, and yet it didn’t seem safe at all.

  I located her locker in fourth hall, inventing reasons to wander past and then running like hell back to first hall so I wouldn’t be late to class. I wrote notes, anonymous notes, written left-handed, or backward, so no one could identify the penmanship, but eventually threw them all into the trash instead of hurriedly shoving the papers through the vent-cracks of her metal locker door.

  I followed her home from school one day. She got a ride to a fast food restaurant, waited around a few minutes, and walked three or four blocks. I kept my car far behind until she turned down a driveway. I couldn’t see the house as I drove by. It was set back far in the woods. The dirt driveway and the section of town made me think it wasn’t the fanciest house. An old, short-haired dog stood guard at the entrance of the property near the end of the road. One of his ears was chewed clean off and the other stuck up to the sky.

  My sophomore year ended, and I spent the summer working construction. The alarm clock woke me up every morning at four-thirty. I had to be at Huey’s house by five. He was the foreman. I rode in the back of his brown pickup truck almost an hour to the job site. I’d lie with my back against the truckbed and watch the sky turn from black to gold. It was my first construction job. No place for the hardworking. Most guys exerted themselves as little as possible trying to maintain the appearance of working. I never really figured it out, I guess. I busted my ass in the summer sun from the moment I arrived until I climbed in the back of Huey’s truck at the end of the day. Even Huey told me once to slow down before I killed myself, but like I said, I never really figured it out. It seemed to me there wasn’t much point in working if you weren’t working hard. And it didn’t matter what anybody thought, including Huey. I didn’t compare myself to the other men. How hard I worked had nothing to do with them at all. Mostly they watched me and talked about how fast their cars would go or the size of their dicks.

  I worked construction off and on for years after that summer. I learned two things. I learned I worked harder than most people, and I sure as hell didn’t want to spend my life listening to some lazy hungover bastard talk about his pecker, or his car, or both. Huey and the boys did more to motivate me to go to college than anything else.

  It was harder to find opportunities to see Kate during the summer. On weekends I’d ride around in Jake’s van, inspired by the possibility of seeing her outside McDonald’s or in the car next to us at a red light. As the months passed, time began to lift Kate onto a pedestal, approaching mythical status, without a flaw. I’d see her, and she’d smile, and I’d wonder if she knew we’d end up together. And then I’d wonder if such a thing was possible. She seemed so far above me, but at the same time she seemed so vulnerable, and the vulnerability slowly took on the appearance of something else. Something romantic, exciting, even sexual.

  At the end of the summer, just a few weeks before school was set to start, I got my chance. A kid had a party. His parents were out of town. Jake knew the guy, sort of, and we showed up on Saturday night after a bottle of cinnamon schnapps and a pack of Jake’s mom’s cigarettes. We got there late, and the place was already out of control. Jake’s girlfriend, Lori, was there, and I hoped Kate had come with her.

  Lori was sitting on the swing. After a few minutes of conversation, I casually asked, “Is Kate here?”

  Lori smiled a drunken smile. “You like Kate, dontcha?” she asked.

  I took a swig of the warm schnapps and tried to think of an answer. Nothing came to me, so I just sat there like no question had been asked.

  Lori kissed Jake on his sweaty neck. She smiled again. “Kate’s in the car. She drank too much and got sick. We put her in the backseat.”

  I’d noticed Lori’s car parked out by the road. Now it was just a matter of separating without being noticed, slipping away and walking alone down the long driveway.

  A few minutes passed.

  I said convincingly, “I left the cigarettes in the damn van.”

  “You don’t even smoke,” Lori said.

  “I smoke when I feel like it, and I don’t smoke when I don’t feel like it. It’s not the cigarette’s decision.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” and I moved off slowly like a cow from the herd, easing down t
he path.

  The driveway was dark. I slowly passed Lori’s car, trying to see if Kate was sitting up in the backseat. From behind the car I lined up the back window with the front window and the lights in the house to catch a silhouette of her head. There was no silhouette, so I put my face to the window and tried to see. The outline of the shape of Kate’s body resting on the backseat slowly formed. I tapped lightly on the window, a bold move for me, but clouded in the warmth of the schnapps and Kate’s state of intoxication.

  There was no response. I tried the driver’s door and it was unlocked. The dome light came on, revealing Kate lying on the backseat, face up, eyes closed, asleep. Or at least she looked asleep. She very well could have been dead. Her hand rested on her stomach. Her fingers were small, with the nails chewed to the quick. I’d never noticed before. It struck me as strange. What would a person like Kate worry about?

  She was wearing shorts. The way one leg was lifted and the other was down on the floorboard, I could see the edge of her panties between her legs, white in the light from inside the car. I’d never looked at a girl so closely in all my life. The lines on her face. The tiny hairs where a mustache would be. The rise of her breasts beneath the thin red shirt, and the smooth skin of her belly between the edge of the bottom of the shirt and the top of the short pants.

  It was a glorious experience, and in the glory of the moment it occurred to me we were alone, and drunk, and she was so near. I closed the car door gently and caused the darkness.

  I waited a long time until my eyes readjusted. From my place in the front seat I looked down upon this girl who occupied nearly every minute of my mind. My hand was so close to her body. Just a move away from touching skin, or resting on the fabric of her shirt, or God knows, sliding my finger through the space left open to the warm panties underneath.

  I took a big breath. The air inside the car was hot and stagnant. For some reason I thought of the morning I stood next to Eddie in the drugstore, stolen candy bars in my pocket, waiting. Kate’s breathing was deep and consistent. I closed my eyes and tried to smell her. The clean, perfumed smell of a girl, even in a hot car, passed out drunk, rising above all else.