The Friendship Song (2 page)

“Over here,” I called.

He saw me and beckoned for me to come help. He and Gus were finally ready to move stuff in. I got up to go, and Rawnie said to me, quick, “Hey, you need anything, I'll be here.”

I just looked at her. Maybe she was trying to scare me because I had smart-mouthed at her. I mean, I wasn't happy about Gus, but I knew my dad wouldn't marry an ax murderer or anything.

Rawnie looked right back at me. “I mean it,” she said.

I said, “Sure,” and went back across the street to carry my boxes into Gus's house.

Gus went first and beckoned me after her, and I didn't feel anything strange sending me out of the yard this time when I walked across it to get to her front door. There was a knocker in the shape of a peace symbol on it. The inside of the house was as junked up as the outside, with all sorts of goofy things, like a brass bed instead of a sofa, and a porch swing in the living room hanging by chains from the ceiling, which was made of molded tin. And there was an old rusty plow blade done up to look like a sailing ship with copper-tubing masts. It sat in a huge bottle on the floor. Standing in a corner was some sort of metal chest with a big metal sunburst on its lid.

Gus saw me looking at it. “That's my coffin,” she explained.

“Ew!”

“I don't want anybody ever putting me in one of those funeral home Dracula boxes, see. So I built my own.”

“Well, shouldn't you keep it in the basement or something?”

“I like to look at it. Makes me humble. Reminds me where I'm headed.”

I didn't get to choose my bedroom after all, because she had already cleared one out for me. Otherwise I never would have gotten my stuff in. Gus kept every room in the house full, with just a little path through the middle for people to walk on. My room was nice, the biggest one except for the one she and Dad were going to share. And it faced the house across the street where what's her name—Rawnie—was still sitting on her front stoop, watching.

It was Saturday. I knew that sometime before Monday I ought to go over and find out what grade Rawnie was in and ask her if I could walk to school with her. Dad wanted to take me, but I'd been telling him no, thanks anyway, but I could handle it. I didn't want kids to see me getting brought to my new school my first day like a baby. If I didn't have somebody to walk with, though, I might chicken out yet, because everything was different. Where I lived before was way out in the country, so I just waited at the entrance of the trailer park and got on a bus to go to school. But now I was going to have to find my school in the middle of the city, and I wasn't looking forward to that, and I wasn't looking forward to being there once I found it.

Rawnie glanced up toward my room, and I stepped back from the window. I wasn't ready to wave at her yet or anything like that, and I didn't want her to see me standing there. Probably she couldn't see me anyway. There was a big circle of heavy lacework metal hanging in the window. In fact there was some kind of metal circle hanging in every window in the house. Downstairs too.

“Whadaya think, Groover?” It was Gus, standing in the doorway, wanting to know if I liked my new room. Her face was pink, and she didn't perm her hair or wear any kind of makeup, and she had kind of a big nose. Actually she was big all over. She had monster feet. Well, maybe it was just that the work boots she wore made them look big, but anyway she was not much to look at, especially not in her baseball cap. My dad had dated lots of women who were a whole lot better looking than she was.

“I think you've got dirt on your face,” I told her.

She just held up her hands, which were dirtier, and smiled, and came in. “C'mon. Do you like your room?”

“It's okay,” I admitted. “What are those things in the windows?”

“Old heat grates I polished up. You know, from old houses?”

I didn't know.

“They used to put a hole in the floor so the heat could get up from downstairs, and they'd cover the hole with a fancy cast-iron grate.”

“So what?” I sounded pretty rude, but I didn't care. Okay, so I wasn't going to fight with my dad about her, but that didn't mean I couldn't fight with
her
.

Gus didn't even blink, though. She pretended I was just asking a question, and said, “So what are they doing in the windows? Don't you think they look witchy? I like circles. Yang and yin and all that. But you can just say they're to keep what's outside out and what's inside in. There's magic in metal.”

Ordinarily I might not have paid much attention, but after what Rawnie had been telling me, you better believe I did. I think my eyes bugged, and I said, “You serious?”

I would have felt better if she'd laughed at me. Mad, but better. But she didn't laugh. She just let her smile curl up around that honker of hers and shrugged her big shoulders and went out to get some more of my stuff for me to unpack.

I stayed in my room for a long time, arranging my stuff, partly because I knew I would feel better once I got my room set up and partly because I didn't want to deal with Gus or her house more than I had to. But finally I had to go to the bathroom, which was at the back of the house, and while I was there I looked out the bathroom window, and my mouth came wide open because I was looking down at Gus's backyard.

It was huge. Here was this neighborhood all full of skinny brick row houses with no front yards and only skinny little backyards running between fences to skinny little alleys. And here in the middle of everything was this big square wooden house Gus had, and its yard stopped the alleys and stretched clear to the next street.

And every inch of the yard was full of some kind of junk.

What I'd seen out front was bad enough, but at least it seemed like it was arranged for people to look at. Besides the cactusy-looking thing and the hubcap tower there was a tall metal spindle out front with octopus arms on top, and there was a weird-looking metal deer with pipes for legs and antlers made out of old pitchforks. Kind of lawn-ornament stuff if you were really nutsoid. But the backyard was like a huge crazy playground made of sheer junk. In between big trees I saw the usual backyard trash, like old cars up on blocks and old washtubs, but also cockeyed street-lamps, and old steam radiators, and a cookstove, the kind with legs, and a ton of other things I couldn't figure out through the branches in my way. There were sheds down there too, and a creek with some little ponds strung along it like shiny beads on a shiny ribbon.

My room could wait a few minutes. I ran downstairs and out the back door. Forget wearing a jacket, because it was warm as summer out, even though it was only April. I found my way across the first part of the yard to the water. I say “found” because it took some doing. I mean there were about sixteen piles of stuff in my way. But I managed, and it was worth it. The ponds were way cool. They were made out of a car-top carrier, and a fuel oil tank cut in half, and a concrete septic ring, and an upside-down Volkswagen body, and just about anything big and hollow Gus could stick into the ground. Most of them had goldfish in them. Some of those goldfish were the size of bass, and besides being gold some of them were black and some were pinto-spotted.

Once I had seen the creek I was going to head back to my room, but then I got just a glimpse of something big and bright red up ahead. You know how it is when you're around something really bright nail-polish red. I had to go see what it was.

So I stepped across the creek. But on the other side of it the yard was like a maze, even worse than before. Not a mess, not like a garbage dump—in fact it was real neat. But also real confusing. Gus kept a lot of her stuff either stacked under trees or else in lines with aisles in between. The junk was piled up so high that most of the time I couldn't see out of whatever aisle I was in. I'd end up going the opposite direction from the one I wanted. Or, really, not knowing what direction I was headed at all.

And sometimes I got the feeling that something didn't want to let me in.

It wasn't like hands against my shoulders this time, it was just a thick feeling, like when you walk into a room full of people who don't care about you. Even though nothing had happened to me I started to feel scared. And then I thought about what's-his-face, the kid who said he was in this yard for two days. If he was pretty stupid, maybe he really could have gotten lost back here. But maybe it wasn't just that he got lost.

I'd had enough. I turned around and headed back the way I came, and then—you guessed it. I couldn't find my way out.

I told myself that it was just that I had got myself in a panic. I told myself to calm down and think straight, but it was no use. I couldn't calm down, and I couldn't even find my way back to the creek, where I maybe could have lived on raw goldfish for a week. I ran around that crazy maze for, I guess, ten minutes, but it felt like ten hours, until I was all hot and bothered and just about ready to cry.

“Groover?”

It was Gus, heading up one of the aisles toward me. I'd never been so glad to see anybody in my life, and also I just absolutely hated her.

She said, “Hey, you shouldn't run around like a goofball in this heat. You're all red. C'mon, let's go get some sun tea.”

Being scared makes me mad, and being mad made me open my mouth and tell her what I thought, especially since my dad wasn't anywhere around. I yelled, “I am not a goofball! This yard is weird, and so are you. I wish my dad had never met you.”

She just looked at me with foggy gray eyes and said, “I see.”

She couldn't see, not really, or she would be fighting back. I mean, to me this was war. I stopped yelling, but I meant what I said even more when I told her, “I don't like it here, and I don't like you.”

“I hear you.” She wasn't smiling, but she didn't seem angry either, which made me want to scream. I wanted her to be angry, but all she did was say, “Have you told your father any of this?”

“A little.” Very little.

“Maybe you should tell him. Don't expect me to do it. You can speak for yourself.” She smiled then, but not exactly at me. “Come on. Let's go cool off.”

She led the way back to the house, and I had to either stay out there by myself or follow, so I followed.

Supper was kind of quiet, because I wasn't talking any more than I had to. Speak for myself, huh. I'd never in a thousand years say hateful things to my dad the way I did to Gus, and especially not if she wanted me to. About the only thing I said at suppertime was that I was tired, which gave me an excuse to go to bed early. Which I did, around dusk. Before I got undressed I looked across the street at Rawnie's house, but I didn't see her anywhere. Not that I could really expect her to be still sitting on her stoop.

I really was tired, but for a long time I couldn't get to sleep, lying there in a strange room with my own yelling still echoing in my head and big stupid metal circles hanging in the windows. They threw weird shadows. I wanted to take them down, but I didn't quite dare, because I had the feeling there might really be something outside, and whatever it was I wanted it to stay there. I kept listening for noises. Sometimes I even half thought I heard something.

I did hear something.

Faint, very faint, like somebody playing a faraway radio, except—there was something about this music that wasn't like radio music at all. Something wild and wailing, something that made my spine chill. You couldn't put this music on a tape or in a radio or anything small. It wouldn't fit in that kind of box, and you couldn't catch it that way. I could barely hear it, but it scared me. I knew it was bigger than the world. I knew it was sending echoes as far as the stars.

I knew I had to be going crazy.

No. No, it wasn't me. It was this crazy place.

Next thing I was up out of bed, intent on tracking down—what? A wisp of sound, so soft my own breathing drowned it out. I couldn't hear it once I moved, but I had a feeling it would be there again as soon as I lay down.

Finally I turned on a light and hunted around in my boxes until I found my Walkman, and then I turned off the light again and tuned myself in. Or out. Whatever. I lay in bed with the headphones over my ears, hoping Neon Shadow would come on, and after a while they did, and it was “The Friendship Song.”

Friend, friend, friend
,

You're my father, you're my mother

You're my sister and my brother
.

Hey, what we've always been

Is what we're always gonna be
,

We're yang and yin
,

We're sun and wind
,

We're eternity
,

We're friends
.

What the heck were yang and yin? But I didn't care. The song made me feel that everything was going to be all right. I went to sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

The next day, Sunday, I just stayed in my room pretty much all day. I had a lot of boxes to unpack and arranging to do, right? Right. I saw Rawnie sitting on her stoop in the afternoon, but I was too busy to go over and ask her if I could walk to school with her. Especially since she might ask questions about how I was doing at Gus's house.

All day till dusk I was too busy to even think, which was the way I wanted it. But then, just about the time the sky started to turn gray, there it was again: guitar notes the same pale steel color as the sky, and sounding just about as far away.

It wasn't like any music I'd ever heard before. You know how sometimes a rockabilly guitar player can hit the strings just like ringing a bunch of bells? It was sort of like that, but sort of not like that at all. Really it was more like hearing a wildcat snarling in the dark. If it wasn't that it sounded so far away I probably would have crawled into bed. I wanted to. What I was hearing made me feel shivery and cold.

I listened for about half a minute, and then I barged out of my room, down the stairs, and out the front door, which I slammed, and I stomped across the street to Rawnie's place like it was all her fault. She wasn't on her steps, but her door was open and she was right inside it. She'd been watching TV, I guess, and heard me coming.