Authors: Henry Turner
Then you go right ahead, I said.
She got up. But before she left I said, You told Ricky yet?
Yes, she said.
What’s he say?
Says he loves me, she said.
Me, I’m thinking he damn well better, ’cause if that boy plays round with my sister I’ll set fire to his ass ’fore he can take a piss to put it out.
There’s one thing else, she said. I can’t stay here. Not with the baby coming. I can’t do that to you and Daddy.
Why not? Leezie, you got to stay.
She shook her head. You got enough trouble on your hands.
What you gonna do? I said.
Try living with Ricky, she said, her voice quiet. He got a house all his own, him and his brothers.
He gonna let you?
She looked at me. Do he got a choice? she said, and I damn near laughed at how hard she sounded.
He knows I gotta move in, she said, a little softer. We already talked about it.
He’s a wild boy, Leezie. I wouldn’t do it.
He’s different with me, Billy. He promised me he’ll change his ways.
I shook my head at that. In my mind, ain’t nothing gonna make that boy simmer down.
It would have happened anyway, she said, even if we weren’t losing the house. I love him, Billy. You get older you’ll understand.
I smiled a little. I didn’t have to get no older to know that maybe some ways she was just thinkin’ the best thing now was to get with someone else or start livin’ somewhere else. I’d known something had been on her mind a while, maybe this was it.
He gonna treat you nice?
I can handle him. He’ll do anything I say.
She was talking big but I knew him better in a lot of ways. I was worried, I’ll tell you. I hoped she wouldn’t really do it.
She waits a sec, then she says real quiet, Billy, maybe you, well, they got extra rooms, and if—
I smiled bigger. So it was that, too. Finding me a place, like it’s her way of looking after me. Well, it was nice’f her to think of getting me somewhere to live, though I couldn’t see myself livin’ with Bad-Ass—no fuckin’ way. But I didn’t say nothing.
Well, I ain’t gave up on this house yet, Leezie, I said. And Daddy, he got this idea for us having a fruit stand? I figure that’s something I want too, so I best stick around.
She looks at me and touches my hand. I can’t help with that, Billy, she says. And she’s sad sayin’ it.
She stepped away. I wait till she’s at the door and then I say, I bet you gonna have a sweet little girl.
Hall light on her face, she said, I don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy, Billy. I ain’t seen the doctor yet.
No, I said. It’s a girl. I
know
it.
How?
I sort’f sat up on my shoulders, elbows, I mean.
’Cause this world don’t need another Bad-Ass Ricky, I said.
Billy!
she said. And then she went out my room.
Chapter Sixteen
Not too much news came my way for the next month or so. I saw Sam a couple times when he was out on his paper route. He hadn’t managed to see Skugger yet. I told him to hurry his ass up, but he said he’d asked around a bit and learned Skugger had gone away on vacation with his parents, somewhere down Mexico, Sam said, and wouldn’t be back till the end of the month. Twice I seen that car drive by with the man in it, but I always ducked away fast ’cause it seemed too damn risky to try’n follow him. Going around I kept both eyes open, ’cause since that day at the dark house it’s like I was feeling watched everywhere I went. I never looked to see if the chip bag was still in the car, just didn’t seem safe. And the weeks kept passin’, with our day to get out the house coming up fast, and me with nothing like the sort’f money we needed to stay there.
I kept up working all the same, mowing lawns and doing house jobs and going round with Marvin and Richie all through June and July. Just so you know, working all them days I made twenty-three hundred dollars. Ain’t forty-eight thousand, that’s for damn sure. I was real unhappy about coming up short. Most days after I’d finished work I’d sit on a curb thinking it over, what to do with all that money, I mean. I even prayed, even though it might not do no good, me bein’ me and all.
One thing I remembered was how I used to help out selling stuff at this weekend market them nuns do downtown at school, and I remembered all that cash stuffed in my pockets by noontime. So I was thinking maybe to ask Richie to help me think of something to buy and sell, and sign the permit to do it, ’cause I ain’t old enough, and you gotta have one, permit, I mean, taped to your table elsewise them police gonna shut you down. And I kept thinking too ’bout what my daddy said about the fruit stand and I tell you, more’n more I come to think it was a damn good idea. I ain’t never been much at school, why not start working right now?
I went’n talked to Daddy about it. He was in the hallway downstairs, and he smiled and said he was glad I was askin’, and seemed to come alive a little. He talked some about how my mother always said she wanted us to work together someday, but then he shook his head and said what I got ain’t enough. Need at least ten thousand stake to start up, he said, that’s what the man at the fish store told’m, so I had to go back a step, and keep thinking ’bout what to buy and sell with Richie Harrigan.
But God damn. Twenty-three hundred dollars. Can you beat that? Any other summer I’d’f been clicking my heels, ’cause keeping it all for myself I could’f bought a goddamn
car
if I wanted. Used one, I mean.
I knew by now I couldn’t make the mortgage. But I still kept up mowing lawns and asking around at houses. Figured at least I could pay a couple months’ apartment rent when the house was gone. And anyway I liked working and feeling that money in my pocket.
Roundabout the end of July I was mowing a lawn, Old Man Highdale’s over on Oakley Drive, and he was paying forty dollars for front and back ’cause his yard’s so goddamn big. It’s a push mower and I was pushing, sweat coming all down my face and feeling the heat, when I hear a voice say, Hey, Billy! I look up and see Sam Tate coming at me from crost the street, a big smile on his face like he finally got something to tell me. So I stop a sec and say, Hiya, Sam, and when he gets to me he says real loud,
I saw Skugger and the man’s name is
—
I grab his arm and say, Hold up! Don’t go talking out here! Walk a ways with me.
Sam, he looks confused, but still holding his arm I take’m round back where Highdale got one of them metal sheds, sort you buy down HomeWorld and build yourself for storing your rakes and clippers in.
I shut the door and it’s dark in there ’cept for what’s creeping in the seams where it’s bolted, and it’s sort’f damp and way too warm and smells like them bags of potters’ soil Highdale uses in ’s garden. Sam, he still looks a little uncertain of what I’m up to, so I let go his arm and say real soft, I just don’t want nobody to hear, might think I’m nosy. So tell me what you got.
Sam says, His name is Hodsworth. Peter Hodsworth.
Where’s he from? I ask.
I don’t know. Skugger didn’t say.
Where’s he live?
He didn’t say that either. But when we all got together—
You got
together?!
Yeah, Sam said. He smiled. Wasn’t I supposed to?
Well, yeah, but . . . How’s Skugger know’m?
He didn’t say that, either.
What the hell
did
he say?
Well, we went to the park.
What park?
Robert E. Lee, Sam said.
Now, I know you know Robert E. Lee Park. That’s the big park with the lake, and railroad tracks and rock cliffs, and so many trees and winding paths you can hide yourself so nobody’ll ever find you. Lots’f boys go there to party, ain’t no secret.
Okay, Robert E. Lee. And what he say?
They just joked a lot and didn’t say much of anything, Sam said, his face now getting sort’f pinched-looking realizing how little he’d learned.
I said, Did they say anything about Jimmy Brest?
No, Sam said. But I did. I talked about how scary it was, all these kids getting taken, and what sort of things probably happen to the kids, and how great it would be to bring one of them back alive. Skugger thought so too.
I looked at him steady and there didn’t seem to be nothing else on his mind about it, I mean he didn’t suspect Hodsworth of anything, and hadn’t felt no danger.
I asked, This man Hodsworth say anything about Brest?
No, Sam said. He just sat there smoking a jay. They were so high everything seemed funny. And when Hodsworth went off to go to the bathroom Skugger said he gets pot and pills from people downtown. Said he thinks he maybe works at a hospital, or knows people who do, because the pills are always in those orange bottles.
Vials, I say.
Yeah, vials, Sam says.
Hmm, Peter Hodsworth, I said, like saying the name out loud might mean something to me. But it didn’t.
It all seemed so empty to me I felt angry and all I wanted was to get back to mowin’ Highdale’s yard. So we went out over the lawn back to the mower. Sam said bye and was going to the street, but when he was at the sidewalk he turned to me.
There’s one thing, he said. His car.
What about it? I said.
You know, I never saw it parked on the street. But I know where he parks it.
Where at?
You know that hill over Church Lane? Where the woods begin?
I know it, I said.
That’s where, Sam said. Maybe he lives around there.
And he walked on.
After I got done at Highdale’s I got the forty and went home. Was getting close to curfew so I walked fast, all the while tryin’ to grab hold the thoughts runnin’ through my head. What Sam had said didn’t mean jack shit to me, or didn’t seem to. I kept thinking there’s something I oughta remember but I can’t, something I’d seen or heard. But the more I tried the further it went, so after a while I gave up, hoping it was just gonna pop on out without me even trying. Course I felt bad Sam got in the man’s car, Hodsworth’s car. That seemed risky and it worried me—and when you get right down to it, I was the only one to blame for his having gone and done it in the first place.
Daddy was back in the kitchen working at a crossword with dim lamplight on’m, didn’t seem to give a damn we was losing the house in four weeks. I got a little to eat, larder stuff, peanut butter and crackers, and some of that log cheese. Leezie weren’t home, she was out with Bad-Ass, that’s what Daddy said, and I felt pretty bad about that. Then I went up to my room.
I sat there thinking, but there was nothing to think.
What Sam said didn’t sound just right to me. I had the notion that if it’d been me sittin’ there with’m, I’d’f seen something he hadn’t noticed, but I couldn’t say what it was.
So what the hell was I doing? What was I looking for?
Who was this Hodsworth? Why’s he living in that dark house, or at least going in it, moving the boxes and such? He drives boys around, smoking dope with’m so they forget themselves and leave things in his car, and I knew one of them boys was Jimmy Brest.
I had an idea of what I was thinking. Just was afraid of saying it to myself. I got the idea when I first saw the boxes and the boys’ clothes on the floor. Got it harder when I seen the same boxes in Miss Gurpy’s house and wondered why they was there. Got it hardest of all seeing that man sneaking around his yard with the lights off so nobody sees him, ’cept for me ’cause I’m the one up in the tree fort watchin’m. Did he know Miss Gurpy? And what if he did? I couldn’t figure nothing he was doing, and it bothered me good, even taking my mind off losing the house and Leezie getting herself into a mess with Bad-Ass. And since I’d seen Sam and learned the man’s name, it was coming even stronger.
But I still couldn’t say it. It’d be like just saying anything off the top of your head when the nun prods you, and you know beforehand it gonna be wrong.
’Cause I always had the wrong answers. Just said anything to get it all the hell over with.
But this time I had to be
right.
So I went through it, again and again, trying to answer it.
’Cause there was another man too. A man killing boys like Tommy Evans, and Tuckie Brenner who was cut up in Florida.
So I couldn’t help thinking.
Was they the
same
man?
I had to find out.
Didn’t do me much good thinking that way, ’cause there was nothing I could do about it.
’Cept maybe one thing.
Scary thing, and I tried not to think about it.
But then I thought,
Why the hell not?
I got my ass out’f bed and went to the window. Was dark out there. Curfew was up and I had to be careful, so I went out the window and over the roof, then down the wood stairs back of my house, same as how I used to sneak out nights. Went through the yard and when I got to the alley, I ran.
I got to Church Lane in maybe ten minutes, runnin’ through backyards all the way. It was real dark up there, and I climbed the hill. When I get up top I climb a tree. Looking over, I see I’m just level with Miss Gurpy’s attic, where I cleaned the gutters, me being high on the hill now and in the tree. Below me is where the woods start and the wood trail ends, just where Sam Tate tells me this man Hodsworth parks his car.
I needed answers and this was all I could think to do to get’m. I weren’t sure what I was doing, but just tryin’ to add up something stuck in the back of my mind.
It must’f added up good, though, ’cause after ’bout five minutes I hear a car coming, tires crackling over the sticks and bramble on the trail, and it stops just there below me, no headlights on so’s nothing shining on the trees.
I held my goddamn breath and watched. The door opens and there he comes, the man, Peter Hodsworth. He’s alone, ain’t got Skugger with’m. What he does is lock his car and go to the edge of the hill, where old rotty stairs come up from Miss Gurpy’s. He goes down those stairs and I can hardly see’m and then I can’t see’m at all, darkness like a pool ’cause she ain’t got no outside house lights. But I hear’m get to her backyard porch and in he goes, and I know now he got his own key.