by Strand, Jeff
Three young people sat in a silver Ford Focus Sedan SE parked across the pot-holed road from the house. The rain was loud inside the car as they stared silently at the house––Randy Satifoy at the wheel, his girlfriend Liz Poole in the passenger seat, and Kirk Mundy behind her. Kirk was stretched over the backseat, his nose to the glass on the other side. They were each 17 years old. They had grown up there in Anderson, and since they were small children, they had heard stories about creepy old Mrs. Kobylka, that she was a witch who had lived in that run-down house for over a hundred years.
When they were kids, it had been customary to see who was brave enough to egg Mrs. Kobylka’s house each Halloween and risk falling under her evil spell. The old woman had been there when Kirk’s dad was a boy, and kids had told the same stories about her back then. One story in particular had stood out, a story about a dead dog. It was passed down from generation to generation of children who rode their bikes up the hill to see the run-down old house, who dared each other to go up and knock on the door. Sometimes they spotted her coming out to get her mail from the rusted old box on the crooked post in front of her house. They watched from hidden vantage points as she shuffled through the weeds that grew up between the cracks in the concrete walk that led to the gate––a plump, slightly hunched old woman with a wild tangle of white hair, always in a simple housedress with a shawl across her shoulders. Sometimes she drove into town in her old pickup truck and was seen at the post office or drugstore, and the whispering children kept a healthy distance from her as she went about her business.
Kirk’s dad had told him more than once to stay away from Mrs. Kobylka’s place. He’d said she was a crazy old woman and she shouldn’t be bothered. It had done no good, of course.
In the Focus, Randy spoke just loud enough to be heard above the sound of the rain: “Are you sure you want to do this, Kirk?”
“Yes.” There was no hesitation in his response.
Liz said, “You guys do what you want, but I’m staying here.” She ran a brush through her short strawberry-blonde hair. She was a pretty girl with a small round face, tense now as she looked at Randy. She’d been crying earlier, after the news about Natalie, and her blue eyes were puffy. “There’s no fuckin’ way I’m going in there.”
“I’ll go alone, I don’t care,” Kirk said. He sat up in the backseat and opened the door.
“Wait,” Randy said, “don’t you want me to go with you?”
“If you want. You don’t have to. But I’ve got to do it now, before I lose my nerve.” He got out of the car and closed the door.
“All right, I’m coming, I’m coming,” Randy said as he got out.
“Leave the keys,” Liz said. “If you don’t come out in ten or fifteen minutes, I’m getting the hell out of here.”
“They’re in the ignition,” Randy said as turned up the collar of his denim jacket. “But don’t leave, we’ll be right back.”
“I’m glad you’re so sure,” she said.
Randy closed the door as Kirk came around the rear of the car and started across the road, hands in the pockets of his down jacket, head down and shoulders hunched against the rain. Randy hurried to catch up.
Kirk was handsome in a sad way––everything about him was sad lately––tall and slender and subtly muscled, an avid swimmer, with short dark brown hair. But he seemed to have shrunk somehow since the accident. He was pale and drawn from lack of sleep. He limped slightly––his only injury from the accident had been a badly bruised knee. Randy was a little shorter, stockier, with a mop of blond hair, a round face, and wire-framed glasses. They were quickly soaked by the rain as they crossed the road.
“Do you know what you’re gonna say to her?” Randy asked as they hurried through the gate, which stood open crookedly, one hinge broken.
“Not really,” Kirk said. “I guess I’ll just tell her what I want. She’ll either help me or she won’t.”
They went up the walk and paused at the bottom of the porch steps.
“It’s about ten-thirty,” Randy said. “What if she’s asleep?”
“We’ll wake her,” Kirk said.
“What if everything we’ve heard about her is bullshit?”
“Then I’ll apologize and we’ll go.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing, unless you want to.”
Kirk went up the steps and into the small cave formed by the ivy-covered arch, out of the rain, and Randy followed. On the other side of a rickety old screen door, the front door had a square window in the top with white curtains, the glass smudged. He knocked on the frame of the screen and it rattled noisily. A dog barked loudly inside, and Kirk could hear a television playing. The dog sounded big and vicious. The television’s volume was high and sounded like the news. There was movement, then footsteps came toward the door.
“She’s coming,” Randy whispered. “Our last chance to haul ass outta here.”
One of the white curtains in the window was tugged aside and a wide, rheumy, deep-set eye peered out at them.
“Who are you?” she asked in a dry, cracked voice. “What you want?” Even though she’d lived there for what seemed like forever, she still spoke with a heavy eastern-European accent: Vot you vant?
“My name is Kirk Mundy, Mrs. Kobylka. This is my friend Randy. Can I talk to you, please?”
“Mundy, eh? What you want to talk about?”
“I want to ask you something.”
She dropped the curtain and fumbled with locks, muttering to herself. The door opened and she stood before them, a squat, backlit silhouette. She flipped a switch on the wall and the naked yellow bulb in a socket above the door blinked on. “You come to egg my house?” she said. “Halloween’s over. It’s Christmas time.” A couple of her upper front teeth were the only teeth remaining in her head and her wrinkled cheeks and lower lip sunk loosely into her mouth. Her face resembled a decaying old Jack-o-lantern.
Kirk said, “I’ve come to ask for your help.”
“My help? What is this, some kinda charity drive?” Vot ith dith, thome kynt uff choddity drife?
“No, ma’am,” Kirk said. “It’s a… a personal favor.”
Her eyes darted back and forth between them several times, then she stared at Kirk for a long moment. She wore a pale green housedress, slippers, and a dark shawl on her shoulders. Somewhere behind her the dog continued to bark. “Mundy. You come for Mrs. Kobylka’s help, eh?” she said, looking Kirk up and down. “What you want that I should help you with?”
“Would it be all right if we came in?” Kirk said.
“Why should I let you in?”
“So I can tell you what I want.”
Kirk watched her as she thought it over. She was stout, short, and hunched, and her face was impossibly lined and creased. Her bleary right eye was wide, her left a narrow slit. Her white hair was long and tangled and went in every direction, like Medusa’s snakes. Standing before him in the yellow glow of the porch light, she looked more pathetic than frightening, and it seemed impossible that she was the woman feared by children all over town.
She shrugged one of her round shoulders and said, “Okay. But when I say you go, you go.”
“Sure,” Kirk said.
They stepped back as she pushed the screen door open, then went inside.
The house was dark and smelled of cooked cabbage. On the left, a small, messy kitchen was lit only by a fluorescent light over a counter, beneath a bank of cupboards. Straight ahead was a dark hallway. On the right was a cluttered living room with a wood stove. At the couch’s end nearest them, a lamp with a red shade glowed on an endtable. In the shadowy corner at the other end of the couch stood a large round cage, tall and fat, and inside on a perch was an enormous dark bird. The bird barked in throaty bursts, like a large dog. A small black-and-white TV with rabbit-ears stood on a TV tray in front of the couch playing the news with the volume high. The heat in the house was smothering.
Mrs. Kobylka led them in
to the living room, where she clapped her hands and shouted, “Baltazar! Stop!”
The bird stopped barking, meowed like a cat once, then fell silent.
“What you want with Mrs. Kobylka?” she said, turning to them.
“Um, it’s my girlfriend,” Kirk said. “Her name is… was … Natalie Gilbert.”
Mrs. Kobylka went to the end of the sagging old couch by the lamp and grunted as she lowered herself onto the flattened cushion. She leaned forward and turned down the television’s volume. She had been crocheting when they knocked––the skein of yarn, the crocheting hook, and what looked like the beginning of an afghan lay beside her. She did not invite them to sit.
“What she got to do with me?” she said.
Kirk said, “She… died tonight.”
Mrs. Kobylka’s thick white eyebrow rose high above her wide eye.
“We were on our way to a Christmas party last night,” Kirk said, “and we had a car accident.” He thought he’d cried all the tears he had to shed, but more burned his throat. He swallowed a couple times before continuing. “I… I was driving. We were hit by a drunk driver. He ran a stop sign. I was wearing a seatbelt, but… she wasn’t.”
Baltazar the dark, hulking bird in the cage shouted, “Stumbling bumblefucks!” in what sounded like the voice of an old man.
Kirk’s eyes had adjusted to the dull red-tinted light in the room and could see the bird in more detail. He had thought, at first, that it was a parrot of some kind, but it looked like no parrot he had ever seen. It was black, all the way down to its legs and wicked talons, except for red crescents beneath its black eyes, a curved, blood-red blade of a beak, and a patch of crimson feathers on its back and tail. But those seemed to be the only feathers on the bird. It didn’t even have feathers on its wings. Instead, its wings seemed to be folds of leathery black flesh. Almost like a bat’s wings. But that couldn’t be––what kind of bird had wings like a bat?
“Stumbling bumblefucks!” the bird shouted again.
“Hush, Balty,” Mrs. Kobylka said. She looked up at Kirk. “You hurt?”
“I got a bump on the knee,” Kirk said. “Natalie was… she went into a coma. She had internal injuries. And tonight, she…” He clenched his teeth and took a deep breath. “She died. Just a little while ago. In the hospital.”
“Too bad. Mrs. Kobylka feel sad for you. But what this got to do with me?”
“We’ve… heard things about you,” Kirk said, glancing at Randy.
Randy’s eyes widened and he spread his arms slightly, as if to say, What’re you looking at me for?
Mrs. Kobylka’s frown deepened. “Heard things? We? You two?”
Eye’s still wide, Randy looked down at her and nodded.
“Yes,” Kirk said. “Since we were kids. We’ve heard stories about you.”
The black-and-red bird giggled in a child’s voice, and the sound gave Kirk a chill.
Smirking, Mrs. Kobylka ignored the bird and said, “Stories? What kind of stories?”
Kirk cleared his throat, shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Um, well, since we were kids, people have said that you’re… that you can do things.”
Mrs. Kobylka sat as far forward as she could and rolls of fat pressed against her housedress. “Spit it out, boy, it’s late.”
“There’s a story about a dog,” Kirk said. “According to the, um, the story, years ago a boy’s dog got sick and died, and he brought it to you, and you, uh… well, according to the story, you… brought it back.” Kirk heard his own words and was suddenly embarrassed. He bowed his head a moment, then looked at her again. “Is that true, Mrs. Kobylka?”
“True?” Her laugh sounded like dry leaves being crushed. “What you saying?”
“Is it true that…” He took another deep breath, then let the words tumble out of him. “Is it true that you’re a witch and you can bring back dead things?”
She laughed again as she stood. She stepped in front of Kirk and cocked her head to the left, looked up at him with her round, watery eye. “You come here for my magic?” she whispered, smiling.
“It’s… it’s true, then?” Kirk said.
“Why you want I should help you bring this girl back?”
“Because… I love her. And I feel responsible for what happened. I should’ve told her to put her seatbelt on, I should have… I…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “We’ve known each other since we were in first grade. I can’t… live… without her. I love her.” He pressed his lips together hard and blinked back tears.
“Love,” she said as she turned away and left the living room. She waved a gnarled, liver-spotted hand in the air and said, “Love messes up your head. Scrambles the brains like eggs.” She flipped a switch on the wall and turned on the overhead fluorescent in the kitchen, then turned to Kirk and Randy again. “You want I should do my magic for you. Can you pay the price?”
Kirk said, “I don’t have much money, but––”
“I’m not talking about money. What about you two?” She pointed at them with the first two fingers of her right hand. “What you gonna do for me, I do this for you? Kids in this town––they egg my house, call me names, leave dog shit on my porch. And I should do this for you?”
Kirk went to her and said, “We’ll try to get the kids to leave you alone.”
“You can do that?”
“We can do that. I’ve got a little brother, and Randy, here, has a younger brother and sister. They have lots of friends. We can tell them to leave you alone. We’ll get the word out.”
“You tell them stay away from Mrs. Kobylka or I cut them up and feed them to Baltazar,” she said with a mischievous smile. Her laugh became a phlegmy cough.
The bird wailed like a baby crying at the top of its lungs.
“Baltazar, stop showing off!” Mrs. Kobylka crossed her small kitchen. “You know what you getting into, boy?” She opened a cupboard and removed a couple jars, put them on the counter.
“What do you mean?” Kirk said.
She closed the cupboard and came to him, stood close. He smelled her sour breath as she said, “This girl, she will be your responsibility, not mine. No one else’s. Just yours. And once it is done… there is no undoing it. You understand? She comes back, she is yours.”
“She was mine when she died,” he said.
“Not like this. That story you hear, what happen to that dog?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“Your girlfriend… she’s no dog. I do this for you, boy, it is on your head. Whatever happens, you must live with it the rest of your life.”
Kirk suddenly felt impatient. He hadn’t slept the night before and his nerves felt raw. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“I do this for you, but I don’t know if it is helping or not.” She went back to the kitchen counter and unscrewed the lid off one of the jars. “I come here when I was just a girl, younger than you, I think. I live here ever since. My husband die. My baby die. I been alone since then.” She took the lid off the other jar. Leaning an arm on the edge of the counter, she bent down and opened a cupboard, and used both hands to lift out a stone mortar and pestle, which she put on the counter. “All this town ever give me was shit.” She looked at Kirk again. “I do this for you, but you remember––you ask for it.” Her thin, frayed lips peeled back over her few yellow teeth, and she laughed.
The bird shouted, “Stumbling bumblefucks!”
2.
Their first time together was on a hot summer afternoon under a small bridge near their homes. They lived only four houses apart on River Valley Drive, a rural area just outside Anderson’s city limits. The bridge was only three yards long and so low they had to duck when they walked under it. It passed over a small creek that ran all year long and sometimes flooded during the rainier winters.
It had been Natalie’s idea to come, and she had brought lunch in a brown grocery bag with the top rolled up. They found a sandy patch among all the rocks and she took a rolled-up
towel from the bag and spread it out. They sat cross-legged facing each other with the bag between them.
Looking at her there in the shade of the bridge, it was hard for Kirk to believe she was the same girl who had climbed on the monkeybars with him when they were children. In second grade, he had dropped a live frog down the back of her dress and laughed hysterically as she danced around to get rid of it. In fourth grade, he’d put earthworms in her Power Rangers lunchbox and laughed at her shrieks.
But now they were both 15––his birthday had been the day before, hers a few months ago––and nothing about Natalie made him laugh. Smile, yes, but not laugh the way he used to. They’d been 13 when, as if overnight, Natalie had changed, and as a result, it seemed, so had Kirk. One day, he’d looked at her and had been unable to take his eyes off her ever since. Her smiles made his stomach flutter, and when she held his hand, he was unable to feel the ground beneath his feet. The two had been inseparable since then, and after two years, she could still make him clumsy and weak-kneed and stuttery.
Just an inch shorter than Kirk, she had long, thick hair so black it sometimes looked purple in the sun. It was early August and she had a golden tan. Her round breasts pushed gently against the tanktop she wore, her narrow midriff bare above a pair of white shorts, legs long and silky. When he looked at her now, he saw a young woman, not a girl––and yet, when he was around her, he still felt like a boy. They had been together for two years, and yet everything they did together felt new. And they did almost everything together. Except for one thing––until that summer afternoon.
