Bones of a Saint

by Grant Farley

  We pass the camp and as I get closer I see where the trunk of that huge tree was hit by lightning a long time ago. Two smaller trunks grow out of that black stump. At the bottom the trunks look okay, but then they start twisting with these black sort of veins running through them, like the bad part is creeping into the new. The guys kicking back near that shade are the oldest and meanest yet. My back is so slick with sweat now that Charley is choking me just trying to keep from sliding off. I stop at the edge of the shade. Charley slides down.

  “Don’t go in there,” Manny says.

  I glance at Charley and squint my eyes, hoping he’ll catch the signal and do his invisible thing, but he’s too scared.

  I feel my feet stepping into the shadows. It’s dead quiet. The air don’t move at all so that it feels all stuffy and even hotter than out in the sun. No one dared nail a platform to this tree. There’s one of those rattan chairs with the fan backs set deep in the shade between the roots. The Ace has one leg of his old jeans over the arm of the chair with his cracked and muddy cowboy boot just dangling. His elbow is on the other arm of the chair, with his chin resting on his fist. He’s wearing a torn T-shirt and a Raiders cap. He don’t look any real age, but stories have the Ace as twenty-one. The way he just sits there, he almost looks like an old puppet waiting for someone to pull on the strings.

  Most of the other older boys I’ve seen somewhere over the years in this valley, like at school or working some nothing job or just hanging out. But I’ve never laid eyes on this guy. Still, I got this feeling like I should know him.

  “I thought you’d be bigger,” the Ace says.

  “Yeah, me too,” I say.

  His lip goes up in a kind of jagged grin. “How old are you, RJ?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Don’t jerk me. You’re fifteen.”

  “If you know so much, how come you asked?”

  His eyelid twitches. It’s the only thing that moves, but it’s a tell that says, You’ll pay for every smart-ass thing you say. So I shut up.

  “Fifteen and already you got a rep.” He just sits there like he expects me to thank him or something.

  A guy sits on each side of him, each with long, stringy hair wrapped in bandana headbands. The one on the left has gray hair like an old man, except he’s no more than twenty. They wear the same boots and jeans and all that, but they for sure don’t own the Ace’s power.

  He pulls off the Raiders cap. His head is just freckles and stubble and sweat, which he rubs away with his hand. He wipes the sweat off on his jeans and puts back the cap. His eyes drill into me. “You know how long there’s been Blackjacks?”

  I shrug.

  “Always.”

  So what can I say to that?

  “This was Coyote Jack’s hideout,” he says.

  Even though I’ve heard all this before, I sure don’t interrupt. The Blackjacks might have all this lame poker stuff in their names, but the real guy Coyote Jack goes back way before any of that.

  “There’s been Blackjacks on this here spot for over a hundred years. The posse tracked Coyote and his riders after they slaughtered those people at the mission for their forty-niner gold. They trapped him right where you’re standing and hung the old half-breed from this tree.”

  I’d heard that, too. Who hadn’t? I’d even heard the stories of his gold buried around here.

  “Let me tell you something.” He leans forward like he’s telling a secret, but that’s just for show ’cause he wants the others to hear, too. “Ol’ Coyote Jack, he ain’t never left here.”

  The eye twitches. I wait for him to flip one last card. “That freak is moving into the old Miller place. Even as we sit here, moving trucks are unloading some of the sweetest antiques you ever saw. Like he thinks that place is his. Can you believe that? Hell, what kind of an outsider, an old geeze, would want to move here? That place is ours. No one takes from the Blackjacks. No one. That old man owes us. We got plans for him. And you’re gonna be part of the plans.”

  He takes the hat off and rubs his head. It’s a regular habit. He picks up a stick and draws something that looks kind of like a star.

  “Study it. It’s a pentagram.” It don’t take a whole lot of studying, but I got practice from school making a pretend study face, so I go along with it. “You will make that sign three times, at midnight, inside that old man’s house. Make them big, real big.”

  Sounds kind of lame, so I just nod.

  “And these other two, they go with you.”

  Any arguing now will just make it worse.

  “What do I make the sign with?”

  “Blood.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Windowpane

  I’m washing the dishes and staring through the porthole of our Silverstream trailer and imagining I’m in a spaceship and that those moonlit fields are some alien lunarscape. I feel the walls trembling and the Silverstream rising and hovering, and then blasting off for a universe without Blackjacks. Yeah, right. After I clean the kitchenette, the teak glows and the chrome shines.

  Mom has the swing shift tonight. Peanut is already asleep in the bedroom she shares with her, which was originally the living room. I squeeze past the bathroom to the other end of the trailer, where Amy and the twins share the one for real bedroom. Everything inside the trailer is pull-down or built-in.

  They are already curled in their beds waiting for my story. Amy has the built-in bed with the dresser drawers beneath it. Across from her, StevieandSuzy get the bunks. I’m working up a story so scary that they’ll end up scrunched against the wall so that no monsters will claw their toes. Amy stares at me, ready for any tale I throw at her, while her cat Peabody purrs beside her. I don’t even feel guilty because my scary stories are make-believe. They help them escape the for real scary. A whole flying saucer full of bloodsucking aliens is nothing compared to a single Blackjack.

  “Where was I?” I ask them. They’re wide-eyed and don’t answer. “Oh yeah. So, these hairy, spidery humanoids scuttled out of their caves and crept down into the little kingdom. Now, the old wizard knew of these poisonous creatures, and he summoned the boy . . .” As the story builds, the twins curl into the shadows at the back of their bunks. “The wizard casts a spell on the boy, granting him the power to fly . . .”

  They’re asleep before I get to the part with the zombie peasants. Except for Peabody. His green eyes stare through me. That cat and me go way back.

  I step out the rounded door that is the Silverstream’s entrance, and down into the wood-framed room that runs along the side of the trailer. This room is a combination living room and boys’ bedroom. Charley and me sleep on pull-out sofas. I don’t pull mine out because the cushions are more comfortable, especially now that they’re worn down to the shape of my body and they cup around me like a cloud. I pull one of Peanut’s plastic baby bottles from under a cushion and sit down.

  Charley is lying under his Snoopy blanket and watching the late-night news, which usually puts him to sleep. For real stories don’t scare him. The television flashes a view of the front of a courthouse, people everywhere. Then a newscaster’s voice announces that Son of Sam has been sentenced. Twenty-five years for each of the six known murders.

  “That’s one hundred and fifty years, Charley, which about covers it. Math don’t lie.”

  Charley nods, but it’s because he’s about to fall asleep.

  “He had millions of people in New York hiding their toes at night, but he didn’t make one difference here, in this valley. Evil is sort of like a piece of gum. The farther you stretch it, the thinner it gets.”

  Charley don’t answer.

  “What happened to Harvey, you think?”

  “Who’s Harvey?” Charley mumbles.

  “During the trial, the Son of Sam said his neighbor’s dog, Harvey, ordered him to do all the murders. I wonder about that dog.”


  The newscasters don’t say nothing about Harvey. Instead, there’s a closing story about Christa Tybus of London setting a world record of twenty-four and a half hours for the hula-hoop, and as the newscasters chuckle over that, I punch off the tube.

  Charley is asleep.

  I can’t sleep, so I get up, kicking the baby bottle, and I’m out the door and into the warm night.

  I flop down in my beach chair, bathing in the blue glow of that neon arch humming cante bury. It’s where I go to get answers. Or not. The chair sits on the empty slab that once held Mr. Sanders’s trailer. No one slaps a trailer down here no more because renters say the place is haunted. But it’s not ghost haunted, and I should know. I wish it really was ghost haunted. Wish I could hear his voice on the breeze, howling at me for letting his sign go, but then forgiving me. And then telling me what I should do tomorrow.

  I take out the Hohner harmonica, which is all that Dad left me. I suck in the warm air and blow out, notes rattling the night. His dress uniform hangs in Mom’s cubby closet and his triangled flag lies under her bed. He could at least have left me something cool, like a bayonet or an unloaded pistol. Even some war medals. I blow sound out and snap it back like bubblegum.

  Nino-’n-Smitty say war killed my dad. I don’t know how that’s true because he came home after, and he married Mom and they had me and he lived until I was three. When I was almost old enough, they also told me that he had been killed by Windowpane, which is LSD, and I thought there must be a window somewhere where I could see my dad on the other side. Father Speckler tried to con me into thinking that was heaven, but I don’t buy it. I never seen such a for real window. So my dad couldn’t have died in war. But Mr. Sanders, he said there are all kinds of ways war kills people.

  No tune. Just in and out. The taste of metal. Pentagrams, that’s what the Ace ordered. In and out. Clicking my tongue on the wood slats. Blood.

  That old man at the Miller place is beyond creepy, and I don’t want to get caught by him, but how bad could he hurt the rest of my family? Why did he even come here? Is he like one of those old elephants on Wild Kingdom that go off somewhere far away to die? That’s about all he’s got left to do. Die. That and maybe kill people and bury them in his cellar.

  The Blackjacks, on the other hand, could crush everyone I love. Laughing the whole time. I will be doing a bad thing tagging those pentagrams. If I get busted, then I’ll get sentenced to a million summers of juvie camp digging fire breaks. But that don’t compare to a single day of atonement to the Blackjacks if I don’t do it.

  The lesser of two evils. We can sneak in there, tag the walls, get out. A one-time thing. I don’t know how the Blackjacks will know we’ve done it, but they have their ways. Younger boys as lookouts, maybe. So it’s not a queston of if. It’s how. How to get enough blood. How to carry that blood. How to carry all the brushes or stuff to spread the blood. How to get out again without getting caught.

  I watch our trailer sitting there in the dark, the sibs safe and fast asleep. I should be weaning Peanut off the plastic bottles and onto juice cups, but I’m too lazy. Then the answer hits me. The how. And once I see the first how, the rest start to fall into place. I snap out one last note and then suck it back in, and then put the Hohner in my pocket.

  Maybe. Just maybe I really can do this.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Barf Vader

  It’s still two hours to sunset, but the light is already fading behind the high, snotty fog. Plastic clunks from inside my backpack. Manny’s front porch is empty of any sisters, which is a good sign for what we got to do.

  I round the corner to the back. A dead pig hangs from the killing tree. It’s Barf Vader, the mean pig from the dark side. Blood drips from his throat into the clawed bathtub. Nino-’n-Smitty are standing around that tub drinking Buds like it was a campfire.

  I hop up the back steps and onto the screened porch. There’s a table made out of two big doors on sawhorses that takes up half the room. It seems there’s always someone at that eating table, and half the time it’s people I don’t even know. But today it’s only Manny. The porch is dark and cool.

  “You’re a little short for a storm trooper,” he says.

  “It’s the uniform,” I answer.

  We saber-swoosh, but our hearts aren’t in it no more.

  “You missed ’Buelita sticking the pig,” Manny says.

  “No, I didn’t miss it,” I say.

  He starts to say something but then looks at me and shuts up. Manny is wearing black jeans and a black tee just like me. “So, where’s Charley?”

  “We’ll pick him up on the way.” The backpack makes plastic thunks as I drop it and take a Fresca from the old fridge. “It’s too much of a pain having to haul blood and him at the same time.”

  “Why don’t we just leave him out of this,” Manny says.

  “The Ace said all three of us.” I pop the can and chugalug half. “Anyway, no better lookout than Charley.”

  “But what if we gotta run for it . . .” His voice trails off.

  “We could ride the Stingrays,” I say.

  “No way,” he says.

  “Why not?” I know why not, and I feel mean even as I’m saying it. “We ain’t going near the Banzai.”

  Manny squints at the backpack. “That don’t sound like paintbrushes.”

  “Ain’t.” I crush the empty can and toss it at the trash bag in the corner, glad to get the Stingray problem out of the way. “I got a better idea.”

  “Oh man,” he groans. “I don’t even wanna hear it.”

  “Baby bottles,” I say.

  “Baby bottles?”

  “Baby bottles.”

  “That’s your better idea.”

  “Think about it. We just scoop the blood into these plastic baby bottles, see. We can carry it in the backpack so no one would even know. When we get into the old man’s house, we just pull out the bottles, squirt the walls, and we’re gonzo. We don’t mess up furniture or nothing.”

  “I won’t even ask where you got the bottles.”

  “Man, they’re popping out of furniture all over the trailer, and Peanut won’t need them no more.”

  I stare out back. A yellow light bulb hangs by an extension cord from the tree, throwing a creepy light around that pig. I can see Nino’s green tattoo slithering up his arm. That tattoo would swallow up most arms whole, but it’s just a snake on him. His huge bare chest is slick with sweat. He wears his jeans low under his beer belly, so in back you can see the scars and the top of his crack. The jeans hang down like an empty bag. He has a low, hoarse kind of voice, but it carries over the others.

  Abuelita carries a tray from the kitchen. She drops plates in front of us with homemade sausages the size of pancakes. One whiff says they could burn a hole through your tongue. Manny digs in. I stare out at that pig, then down at my plate. Then back at that pig. Abuelita just wipes her hands on the apron and watches me. I don’t make a move at that sausage.

  “Your brother, you still do the care of his feet as I taught you?” she asks.

  “Yeah . . . well, sometimes . . . sort of,” I lie.

  I look away from her stare. Whenever that memory comes at me, it’s the smells I remember first . . . Charley’s scabs oozing a stench kind of like an anthill. Then the warm water in the plastic tub a swirl of salt and baking soda and rosemary and other stuff.

  “You take the time and dry and rub as I show you?”

  “Sort of . . .” No point lying to her. “But what’s the use? Those toes ain’t never the same. They swell, they melt together, they rub his shoes in different spots so he’s always got new blisters. Nothing helps.”

  “Does he like?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  She picks up the plate of sausage.

  “Tiene los dedos de un santo.” She turns and walks back to
the kitchen.

  “Manny, what did she say?”

  “She said he has . . . uh . . . he has the toes of a saint.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Manny just shrugs.

  Smitty laughs at something Nino said. I look out through the screen and even clear across the yard I see Smitty’s Adam’s apple jump. If a giant took Nino and rolled him long and skinny like a piece of clay, that’s Smitty. He looks like he’s wearing a shirt even though he’s not. His arms are sort of mud brown, but where the shirt should start he’s so white, like Nino says, you need sunglasses to look at him. Smitty’s got the same tattoo, except it covers his whole arm. Nino-’n-Smitty have been best buddies since grade school, through ’Nam, through being bikers, to now, when they share a house even though Smitty is married.

  “I’ll bet Nino-’n-Smitty could kick ass on the Blackjacks.” I say it like it’s no big deal, but I look close at Manny. A part of me is hoping that all we got to do is tell Nino-’n-Smitty about how the Blackjacks are messing with us. Then, Nino-’n-Smitty, they’ll march straight up that hill to that tree and kick butt on all of them.

  “Maybe.” Manny shrugs and stuffs his face with a tamal. Manny thinks Nino-’n-Smitty can do most anything, but the way he says maybe and shrugs, I know that one thing he don’t think they can do is kick ass on the Blackjacks.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I say, the air sort of going out of me, leaving a sick, empty feeling. I know we won’t tell about our connection to the Blackjacks to nobody we like. We don’t want them to try and help and then get hurt.

  Nino-’n-Smitty head for their truck. I grab the pack and we wander out back like we got nothing better to do. We come at that tub in a roundabout way like they say. We move to the far side and I let the backpack slide behind it out of sight.

  Flies are already swarming, big hairy bluebottles. Manny waves at them without touching the pig. This thick, coppery sort of smell seeps up at me, and I try not to take big whiffs.

  “You be lookout,” I say. Barf Vader hangs between me and the house, but we’re still out in the open. There’s a fly crawling right across the eyeball.