Not the End of the World (16 page)

Mother wanted to drive us, but I wanted to walk. I needed to be alone, to pull myself together after my dreams so I could pretend nothing was wrong when I went into Daddy’s booth and handed out candy and had to be polite to the whole town. I worried that they wouldn’t accept candy from me, that they’d come to the booth and wait for Daddy or Mother or Ruthie to give them a candy bar, that they’d turn up their noses at the Boobar I tried to thrust into their hands.

I walked along the beach as far as the lighthouse and then cut up to River Street, behind the coastguard complex, which was the cut-off point between the nice neighborhoods and the poor ones. To make sure everyone knew, there was a run-down trailer park right behind the coastguard property, filled with rusty old lopsided trailers.

From there, I followed the railroad tracks. A boy from Riverside fell and hit his head against a rail and bled to death, or so they said, but that didn’t keep me from taking the short cut. There were supposed to be hoboes living someplace between the tracks and the river, but I never saw any. The closest thing I ever saw to a hobo was George, the old man who came round on trash day with his little red kid’s wagon, looking through everyone’s garbage for hidden treasures. He was a nice man. He always had stories about being in the war, about being in jungles filled with bizarre animals
and golden temples and Japanese booby traps. “He’s making it up,” Grandmother would snarl, waving her hand in disgust, as if even talking to George would give me beriberi. “The closest he came to the war was
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.”

George had a wife or a girlfriend or something; every once in a while she’d come along with him, in her red polkadot dress and her silly blond wig, and they’d look through the trash, discussing the items as if they were shopping at Tiffany’s. I liked them, even if they were hoboes.

On the other side of Elm Street was the section of town where the houses were grey and chalky from the cement dust. It didn’t matter how hard the people worked on keeping their houses nice, they were constantly covered with a fine coating of grit. I only knew one person who lived there, a girl from McKinley named Polly Sanderson, who lived in one of the old Victorian houses that lined St. Joseph Avenue. Her house was directly across the street from the grimy little park that had once been the site of the French fort, but now all there was was a row of broken swings and a plaque.

Except for the cement, Polly’s house was wonderful—it had three storeys and an attic as big as Miss Child’s ballroom and all sorts of hidden staircases and secret rooms. I’d only been there once, because Polly was ashamed of her father, who had something wrong with him. He did weird things. He’d go out in the backyard and tie himself to the clothesline pole and pretend to be a scarecrow. He was an old man—Polly was the baby of eleven children—and he seemed more like a grandfather than a father. When I was there, he was sitting in the corner of the living room, in a big red armchair, just minding his own business and quietly singing “Over There.” “Maybe he’s got shellshock,” I suggested and Polly burst into tears and ran upstairs and never asked me over again.

I cut through the cement-plant property so I could walk
along the river to the Park. “Don’t swim in the river,” Mother always warned, reminding me about the boys who drowned in the whirlpools under the bridge to Canada. Every once in a while some suicide would jump off the bridge and their bodies wouldn’t be found for months; they’d end up stuck on a dock near Algonac and one even floated all the way to Detroit. No one who had jumped had ever survived and, in a way, I found that reassuring. If things ever got too horrible, there was always a sure way out.

After the cement plant there was another area of little cementy houses, which was where Thomas Edison’s house had been when he was in North Bay, blowing things up. After that, there was Inventor’s Park, which was surrounded by lovely old houses—huge, gabled houses built by the captains of the ships that sailed the Great Lakes. Some of them had towers and widow’s walks and I wished we could live in one of them; I’d love to have had the room at the top, in the tower, all glass with a porch all round it, where I could have gone out and watched the freighters or the baseball games in the Park or the summer dances on the observation deck next to the coastguard cutter.

Most of those houses were funeral parlors now. All along Main Street there was a string of them, and I wondered how they all stayed in business because it didn’t seem there would be enough dead people to go round.

Prudy Taylor lived in one. She and her family lived upstairs and the funeral parlor was downstairs; once she had a pyjama party and we all dared each other to go down into the mortuary, at midnight, without flashlights. Prudy’s house was beautiful but I didn’t think I’d like living in a place with a bunch of corpses downstairs and I wasn’t real keen on the idea of going down to visit them at midnight. But I’d never backed down on a dare in my life and I wasn’t going to start then.

Prudy got out her Ouija board and we sat in a circle in her bedroom, asking it whether ghosts would come out when we went downstairs. Y-E-S it spelled and we shrieked and huddled into each other. “Whose ghost?” Prudy asked and I lifted my fingers from the marker as if they’d been scorched. “I think it should be a surprise,” I said but everyone wanted to ask and I gave in. Prudy and I stared at each other across the board while the other girls read out the letters as the marker glided itself into them. Neither Prudy nor I looked at the board, not even once. “B!” the girls cried. “E! R! T! H! A!”

We were mystified. “Ask Bertha
who?”
Cindy demanded but the marker wouldn’t budge, even when I gave it a little shove. None of us knew any dead Berthas and we couldn’t even think of any famous ones, except Cindy said there was a movie with a Bertha in it, but she thought it might have been a cow.

We put on our slippers and silently made our way, single file, down the back steps to the mortuary. No one giggled. Prudy led the way, hunched over like some diabolical lab assistant in a horror movie, and we all did the same, making a little line of Igors, winding our way down to the lab-or-a-tory.

She led us to the basement door and opened it, switching on the light so we wouldn’t fall. From the top of the stairs I could see black caskets and a big old marble table and I wondered if this was such a good idea; maybe we should go back upstairs and play “Twister.”

Cindy was behind me, pushing. “Go
on
, scaredy-cat,” she hissed, “you’re holding up the line.”

Prudy was at the bottom of the stairs, waiting, with a sinister grin on her face. Growing up around dead people, I guessed you got used to them, just like a beekeeper’s kid wouldn’t be afraid of bees and a farm kid doesn’t mind the smell of horseshit.

It was cold down there, cold and stinky, like baby vomit. As soon as we were all downstairs, Prudy switched off the light and we were surrounded by darkness. Somebody grabbed my arm and I didn’t care who it was—her hand was warm and human and that was good enough.

“Oooooooo,” someone moaned and we all giggled.

Prudy led us to the big table and told us it was where her father prepared the corpses. Cindy wanted someone to get up on it and I shuddered with horror—what if they had planned this, what if they were going to “get” someone, what if they were going to shut someone up in a casket? What if it was going to be
me?

“Let’s go watch
Shock Theater,”
I suggested and Karen and Ginger thought that was a good idea, but whoever was holding me wouldn’t let go.

“Berrrr-tha,” Prudy called in a low voice, “Berrrr-tha. If you’re here, knock twice.”

Of course some idiot knocked twice and we all squealed.

“Berrrr-tha,” Prudy moaned, “who arrrre you?”

There was no answer, but I felt a cold wind across my face, even though there were no windows in the room. I didn’t care who was holding me, I was getting out of there and I didn’t care who called me a coward.

“I’m going to go watch the movie,” I said but just then Karen, who was standing near one of the caskets, started shivering and shaking like a fat woman on a vibrator-belt.

“Karen’s having a fit!” Cindy cried. “The ghost got her!”

On shut up, you dink, I wanted to say, but nothing would come out; all I could do was stare at the blue cigarette-like smoke coming from behind Karen.

“All right, who’s doing that?” Cindy demanded, in a voice so shaky I knew it hadn’t been her.

“Karen’s
possessed!”
Prudy shouted and we all made a dash
for the stairs, leaving poor Karen shaking and crying and saying, “I’m
not!
I’m
not
possessed!”

Prudy switched on the light and the smoke disappeared and Karen slumped down on the floor and sobbed. I thought it was a mean trick, but no one ever admitted to it and I never went back to Prudy’s after that. I went home and threw away all my horror comic books and that was when I started sleeping with the Bible under my pillow. Prudy must have been playing a trick, I’d tell myself as I tried to fall asleep, but I was secretly afraid she hadn’t, and that it had been a real evil spirit. Perhaps it had been looking for me and only hovered over Karen by mistake.

I still shuddered whenever I looked at Prudy’s house and I wouldn’t even walk on the sidewalk in front of it any more—I always crossed the street and walked through the Park, where I would be safe from Berthas.

O
N
the other side of the Park, downtown started with a huge old building that used to be the high school when my mother was a girl, but was now the home of the local radio station, WNBM. Once, our Brownie troop went to the station to watch Milky the Clown do a radio show, but I thought it was boring. He didn’t
do
anything—he just sat behind a glass window and talked into a microphone and didn’t do any tricks or anything. Cindy got chosen to go talk to him and I was so jealous I nearly pulled her cap off.

“Envy is the lowest of human emotions,” Mother always said but I thought it was the most common. You were never supposed to be envious of anyone else, but at the same time all the advertisements told you to go buy a new car so you could be the envy of your neighborhood, or to get a new washing machine so your neighbors would turn green with envy. It was stupid. You weren’t supposed to
feel
it, but you were supposed to make other people feel it, and everybody went around trying to pretend they never were jealous of anyone else.

I was jealous all the time. I was jealous of people who did better than me at school and jealous of people who had lots of friends, especially now that I didn’t have any left. I was jealous of girls who were pretty, because they’d grow up to be beautiful and I’d spend the rest of my life being “cute.” But most of all, I was jealous of people who were happy and had hope and looked forward to life, people who were kind and good-hearted naturally, not mean-spirited and nasty like me.

I cut behind the radio station and looped back down to the river, passing the coastguard cutter, sitting idle at the dock, waiting for winter when some freighter would get stuck in the ice. Past Miss Nolan’s white-pillared house overlooking the river and Park, past the medical center, to the YMCA.

On Friday nights, there were dances there for teenagers. Donald went to them and next year I could go, but I didn’t think I wanted to. I was terrified no one would ask me to dance and I couldn’t stand the idea of being a wallflower. But I loved to dance and I was pretty good at it. Ginger and I used to put on the soundtrack to
Bye Bye, Birdie
and make up wonderful, wild dances to “You’ve Got a Lot of Living to Do,” shaking our hips and kicking and swirling around her basement like Mexican jumping beans. Once, Marvin Peabody was spying on us through the basement window and afterwards, every time he saw us he’d start shaking his hips and puckering up his mouth and I could have murdered him. After that I only danced in private, in the Black Hole with the curtain drawn, just in case someone climbed up on the sunroom roof and looked in.

There was a big lawn in front of the YMCA and then, behind another big lawn, was the County Jail. The carnival people were busy setting up their booths and their rides and I thought it was mean, having the festival right next to the jail, where all the prisoners had to look out their windows
and watch everyone having fun. They’d look out through the bars and see the flashing colored lights and hear the loud music and watch people looping around on the ferris wheel, and I thought if I were a prisoner it would make me even more mean, watching all those people flaunting their happiness in my face, and I’d hope the roller coaster flew off into the river.

I used to be afraid of walking past the jail because the prisoners always shouted things from their windows, but one day I started shouting back and now we were friends. “Hey, Sweet Thing!” they’d call. “What’s doing?” and I thought it was kind of sad that the only people who thought I was sweet were convicts. I’d always shout, “What’re ya in for?” and that made them laugh like crazy. North Bay was a pretty safe town, most of our crime was committed by wayward youths and drunks, although we had a murder once. A girl from Millersville was attacked and killed and her body was left to rot in the huge dunes of cement gravel. They never solved the case and everyone thought the murderer must have been a drifter, because who in North Bay would do a thing like that?