The Boy Page 3
Jake doesn’t look back. Eventually, she stops calling him, or else he is too far away to hear her.
He turns left and realises he is at Luann’s trailer, as if his feet have unconsciously carried him here. It is a moment before he realises Luann is outside, sitting on her steps, smoking a cigarette. She looks up as he rounds the corner. Jake feels himself slow.
“Hey,” she says.
He nods. “Hello.”
She inhales, the tip burns brightly. Her face, like everything else, is palely lit by the moonlight. “Out for a midnight stroll?”
Jake scratches the back of his neck. “Guess so.”
She looks him over, quietly appraises him while she smokes. “I know you.”
Jake doesn’t know what to say so he shrugs.
“We go to the same school, right?”
“Uh, yeah – yeah, I think we do.”
“You look familiar.”
“Yeah, you too.”
Jake steps closer, intent to remain engaged in conversation with her.
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“Sure.”
She hands him one. He purses it between his lips and lights it from the tip of hers. Their faces are close, their foreheads almost touch.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Jake stifles a cough then blows smoke rings, hoping to impress her, but she doesn’t notice. She’s not looking. “Nice night,” he says.
“Yeah, it’s real clear, ain’t it.”
“Lot of stars.”
She looks up as if she hadn’t noticed. “To be honest, I just want to go to bed.”
“Oh.” He’s not sure if that is a hint for him to go. “What’s stopping you?”
“My parents snore. They snore really fucking loud.”
She’s grinning, so Jake grins too. He is surprised that her parents are home, but he talks to her as if he knows nothing about her, or them. “So…what? They keep you awake every night?”
She shakes her head. “Most nights they go out. I’m asleep before they get back. Tonight they surprised me. Tonight they came back early, they beat me to bed.” She shrugs. “They drink a lot, and – I dunno. Maybe that’s what makes it so loud, you think?”
“Could be. My dad drinks a lot, and he snores pretty loud when he’s passed out on the sofa.”
“Then you know what I’m talkin about. He snoring right now, that why you’re out here?”
“Yeah, somethin like that.”
“What’s your name?”
“It’s Jake.”
“Jake.” She repeats it, tries it out. “I’m Luann.”
“Luann.” He repeats it as if he’s hearing it, saying it, for the very first time.
“Smoking buddy,” she says.
He smiles. “That’s me.”
“Don’t you usually hang out with those two guys –” She clicks her fingers, remembering. “– one of them’s really tall, got real bad acne. I don’t know their names. The other one never takes off his fuckin beanie.”
“Ray and Glenn. Ray’s the tall one.”
“Yeah, yeah – I can picture you now. Skater boys?”
“We skate.”
“Ah, but that doesn’t define your existence, right?”
“What?”
She laughs. “Nothin. I’m just messin with you.”
“Oh. Right.”
Luann opens her mouth then stops, looks to the right. She grins. Jake looks. A dark shape stumbles through the distant gloom, sticking to the shadows of the trailers where the light of the moon cannot touch it. The shape trips and falls, mumbles a curse, crawls back to its feet using a nearby truck, then continues on its way, gets closer.
“I think he’s drunk,” Luann says.
“Yeah.”
The man finally steps into the light, gets close enough to see. He wears black, head to toe. The skin of his face is pulled tight, his features almost skeletal, his eyes hidden in two black pools under his brow. The man sees them, halts, gives a start. His head turns from Luann to Jake, looks at them each in turn. “You scared me,” he says.
Luann shrugs one shoulder. “Sorry.”
“What’re you doin out here at this time?”
“Sittin. Smokin.”
“You scared me,” he repeats.
“We didn’t know you were going to come along.”
“Sittin there like a coupla fuckin ghouls.”
“Ghosts.”
“Huh?”
“Maybe we’re ghosts.”
“What?”
“Maybe you’re a ghost.”
“Girl, stop talkin trash. The two of you oughta get yourselves inside, get to bed. It’s damn late out.”
“That’s so, but all I know is, I wouldn’t wanna piss off a couple of ghosts, just sat mindin their own business. I’d be awful concerned they’d maybe follow me home and give me trouble for bein so fucking rude.”
The man says nothing, his thin lips pinched tight, then he continues on his way without another word. Luann turns to Jake, laughs. “Are you in a rush to get home?”
“No,” he says, maybe too fast.
“Why don’t you take a seat? We’ll have another cigarette. I’ve got plenty.”
7
Jake doesn’t ride his skateboard. It is too loud. He walks briskly through the night, leaves the trailer park and goes into town, goes to the street where his mother lives.
She left Harry when Jake was six. She left him, too. She left him behind. He kept waiting for her to come back, to take him with her, but she never did.
She never came back.
She left him behind.
With Harry.
She lives in a house now, not a trailer. It’s a big house. In the back yard there is a trampoline. Jake doesn’t know what her husband does for a living, but he wears a suit.
Jake stands at the bottom of their driveway. The windows at the front of the house are all dark. He looks round and grabs a stone from the road, uses it to scratch the doors on the driver’s side of the parked car. He writes BITCH on her bonnet. He throws the stone at the car so it dents a back panel, then he spits on the sidewalk and he leaves.
8
The television is on. It airs a game show. A single man competes against a married couple. If he wins, he takes the wife on three dates, during which time she has no contact with her husband. If the couple are victorious they get an all-expenses trip to the capital. It is a general knowledge quiz. Jake has seen the show a couple of times before. Sometimes single women come on, and they can win the husband. Sometimes the singleton is a homosexual.
The singles are outcasts. They always are. Too thin, too fat, too tall, too small, geeky and bookish, misshapen and malformed. The man tonight is thin and balding, wears black rimmed glasses with lenses as thick as the bottoms of milk jugs. Dwarfed by the too-large suit he’s worn for the taping, he is sweating profusely and keeps wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His voice is a nasal whine. He sniffs a lot. He isn’t very smart, either. The married couple, some Ken and Barbie doppelgangers, are winning easily and you can see they know they are going to leave the studio and head straight to the airport, can see it in their laid-back, smug smiles.
It is called ‘Indecent Proposals’. Jake does not think he will watch much more of it. He is passing time while his father and Maggie prepare to go out. Maggie is already dressed. She wears the outfit from the night Jake first met her. Fresh on, it is a better fit. It covers her breasts and goes down to her knees. Jake feels his eyes still drawn to it, though, especially when her back is turned and the fabric is pulled tight across her ass.
Whenever she turns he stares hard at the television screen, at the ageing host that was once upon a time a comedian, though Jake has never heard of him. If Maggie knows he is looking she doesn’t seem to mind. She just smiles.
“Your daddy’ll be ready soon,” she says. “Then we’ll be out your hair.”
Jake nods. “Okay.”
/> “Got anything planned?”
Jake shakes his head. “No.”
Maggie pulls on her heels, and Jake feels like he should try to make conversation, offer something more than a monosyllabic grunt. “Where you going?”
“Just to the bar. Nowhere fancy.”
“Okay. Is that where the two of you met?”
Maggie smiles. “I was sittin with a coupla girlfriends, and your daddy slides right up next to me and says ‘How d’you do?’ Didn’t care my friends were there, he wasn’t goin anywhere. You know how he can be.”
“Sure.”
Harry exits the bedroom, brings with him an overwhelming stink of cologne liberally applied. Jake turns up his nose but Maggie doesn’t seem to mind. “Right, we’re out of here. What’re your plans for this fine evenin?”
“I don’t have any.”
Harry nods at the television. “You gonna watch that shit all night?”
“No.”
“Good. But no parties either, y’hear?” His face splits into a grin.
“Okay.”
“You need to lighten up, boy.”
“Okay.”
Harry pulls on his boots. “Hell, have a damn party, if you can drag enough people in.” He wears jeans and a shirt with the top three buttons undone and too much chest hair showing. “Don’t wait up.” He winks.
Maggie pauses in the door on her way out. “Goodnight, Jacob.” She wriggles her fingers in a wave, and then they’re gone.
Jake stands, goes to the window, watches them walk away. They link arms. When they are out of sight he turns off the television. The singleton was wiping under his eyes with one finger, trying to pretend the moisture there is sweat. Jake goes to his father’s room.
The bed is made, and though the air is still thick with cologne under that it does not smell like it used to of stale sweat and beer belches. He notices the window is open to let in fresh air.
Maggie is not living out of a suitcase. Her clothes have been put away. He hunts through the wardrobe and in drawers, sees that she has been designated her own section for her garments. He finds her underwear. He thinks about her in the dress, closes his eyes and remembers the way her breasts spilled from it that first night. He takes a pair of her underwear, turquoise with a little bow on the front, balls it up in his fist and goes to the bathroom, presses it to his nose and mouth and breathes it in while he masturbates.
9
The closest Ray and Glenn will get to the trailer park is the woods.
They find a clearing and sit on dead logs, gather round the remnants of a long-dead fire, dried grass and twigs scorched black. Jake thinks about Maggie, about her dress and her underwear. He thinks about Luann, about the taste of her cigarettes.
“I went to see Kelly, after the other day –” Glenn begins.
Ray interrupts. “Who?”
“Kelly – from the diner.”
“Brace-face?”
Glenn grimaces. “She wears a brace, yes, if that’s what you mean. Anyway, I went to see her.”
“Where at?”
“Her place. I called her first, I mean I didn’t just turn up. I’m not a fuckin stalker, y’know?”
Ray rolls his eyes. “Sure.”
Glenn hits him on the arm. “You gonna let me tell this fuckin story, or what?”
“What happened – did she suck your dick?”
Glen’s eyes gleam.
“Fuck off – no she didn’t.”
“No, she didn’t, you’re right. I wouldn’t let her – those braces? She’d cut the poor guy to shreds. She gave me a handjob.”
“Bullshit.”
“Hey, you don’t have to believe me. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Jake runs one hand back through his hair, looks through the trees and bushes. He can hear birds above. A figure moves between tree trunks. He thinks it is a man, dressed in furs and sporting wild hair, a long beard. He peers at them from around bark, but he does not come any closer. Jake does not alert the others to his presence.
“We went for a walk, and she started giving me all this soppy shit about how she thought I was really crude in the diner and that hurt her feelings because she thought we had something special and she’d been trying to talk to me since her parents’ party and yadda-yadda-yadda, but basically she wants to do the whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing.”
“And she grabbed your dick to prove that.”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re full of it.”
Glenn holds out his hands. “You’ll see. If I’m lyin I’m dyin. The whole thing’s gonna be pretty official soon.”
“So she’s your girlfriend.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Jake, you hearing this?”
The man in the trees is gone.
“Jake?”
“What?”
They both look at him. “What’re you lookin at?” Glenn says.
Jake shrugs. “Nothing. Just thinking. We used to come here a lot more when we were kids.”
“Kinda changing the subject there, Jake,” Glenn says
“I’m just thinking out loud.”
Ray nods. “We used to play fight, remember that? We’d jump outta the trees onto each other.”
Glenn points at Ray. “You were a rough motherfucker. You would chase us with the biggest fuckin stick you could find. You bust my mouth up a couple times.”
“Must be why you’ve got such a pretty smile.”
“I remember when we found the bird,” Jake says.
They look at him.
“I don’t know what kind of bird it was. It was a long time ago, we were maybe eight, I can’t remember. But it was brown. It wasn’t big and it wasn’t small. Glenn spotted it first. It was trying to fly but it couldn’t. One of its wings was all busted up. It would flap really hard with its good wing but it would only get a few inches off the ground, then it would start cawing like it was shouting at itself.”
Neither of them say anything.
“You tried to pick it up.” He talks to Ray. “But it pecked you, and that made you mad so you threw it down, then when it was dazed you picked it back up, and you tore it apart. You grabbed each wing, and you pulled until it burst.”
Ray speaks quietly. “That didn’t happen.”
“It did. I remember it. I think about it every time I come into the woods. You dropped it, but it wasn’t dead. So you stepped on its head, and Glenn said it was a mercy killing.” He turns to Glenn. “Then you dipped your fingers in its blood, and you put the blood on your cheeks, like warpaint. Then you painted Ray’s face with the blood, then you did mine, and you plucked out some of the feathers and we wore them in our hair, behind our ears.”
When he finishes, no one says anything. They sit in silence. Ray and Glenn look at him with dark faces.
Finally, Ray speaks. “That didn’t happen, Jake.”
“It did.”
“I never killed any bird.”
“You tore it apart, then you crushed its head.”
“Maybe you were with someone else,” Glenn says.
Jake shakes his head. He looks through the trees. In the distance he can see the man again, still hiding, still watching, but further away, like he’s backtracking. “No,” he says. “I was with you.”
10
It is night. Jake changes into dark clothes and leaves the trailer, makes his way through the park. He is cautious. He takes his time. The moon and the stars are clouded over, their light snuffed. When Luann’s trailer is in view he slows to a stop.
He will look in on her. Or he will smoke with her. They will attempt to recapture that night they shared, cigarettes and conversation until the early hours, until the sun begins to rise.
But she is not outside. She is not smoking. Ricky’s truck is outside. Ricky is inside, with her.
Jake looks to Carlson’s windows, checks them over, extra-vigilant so as not to be caught again. Satisfied that they are empty, that no one appears to be home, he ta
kes a creeping step forward then halts. Someone is already at her trailer.
Jake watches. A round blob of a man presses himself against the panels, slides along and peers in every window. There is something in his hands. He lifts it to his face, then lowers it, looks at it, then lifts it to his face again.
Jake steps into the darkest shadows, gets closer. The fat man has a camera. He is taking pictures. Jake doesn’t know what to do. The fat man looks familiar to him, but he does not know why.
The fat man goes stiff. His shoulders hunch up like he can feel Jake’s eyes upon him. He spins quick. Their eyes meet. Jake holds out his hands, feels his jaw go slack. He wants to say it is all right, he is leaving, there is no need to worry, but then the fat man panics and makes to run, but he trips over a mooring and stumbles into the trailer, hits it hard, but he doesn’t fall. He recovers himself, rolls against it, and takes off at a sprint down the back of the trailer, shockingly fast for a man so large.
The trailer door swings open. Light spills out, bathes the side of the parked truck. Ricky emerges, topless, his jeans look like they’ve been pulled on in a hurry – the belt is loose and the buttons are undone.
Jake stands very still, but it doesn’t make a difference. Ricky’s head snaps angrily from side to side, searching for the noise-making culprit, then settles on him. Jake knows he should run, knows he has to run, but his legs won’t listen, and it is not until Ricky has jumped down the steps and is already pounding barefoot in his direction, issuing a guttural “Hey!” do his feet take heed and he spins, tries to run, but he can hear those heavy footfalls catching up, then they are right on top of him and he feels like a gazelle chased down by a lion, and Ricky tackles him to the ground. They roll, Jake ends up flat on his stomach, shards of grass between his teeth and dirt on his tongue. Ricky pulls his arm back, wrenches on it, pushes the side of his face into the ground.
“What the fuck d’you think you’re doin, creep?” Ricky spits the words. “You watchin us, motherfucker? That gettin you off?” He wrenches harder on the arm and Jake cries out.
“It wasn’t me! It wasn’t –”
Ricky doesn’t listen. “Where’s the camera? You were takin pictures, weren’t you? I knew I saw somethin!”