“I want to see it,” Dwight said.
“I can’t. I’m not allowed out that far.”
“Says who?”
“Says my mom.”
“Goddamn it, Crawly. Why are you such a chickenshit?”
“I’m not a chickenshit,” Matthew said, shifting his backpack from one shoulder to the other. His sneakers squished in the mud. “What do I want to go all the way out there for, anyway? It’s just a stupid deer.”
“Billy Leary said it looked like some monster tore it to pieces.”
“It’s probably gone by now anyway.”
“Gone where?” Dwight asked, still swinging at the air with the birch branch. “It just got up and walked away?”
Matthew shrugged. He was still thinking about the bat. After the bell had rung and the hallways had flooded with students anxious to begin their weekend, Matthew had gathered his books from his desk, stuffed them in his backpack, and was about to join Dwight out in the hallway when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. Startled, he had turned around to see Mr. Pulaski towering over him, the oversized wrench still clenched in one thick-knuckled hand. “Shouldn’t be cavalier with bats, son,” Mr. Pulaski had warned him. (While Matthew had not known what the word
cavalier
meant, the heart of the statement was not lost on him.) “Sometimes they’s dangerous. Sometimes.”
“Man, I just
gotta
see this thing,” Dwight droned on. “Billy Leary said it might have even been attacked by a bear. Can you believe it?”
No, Matthew couldn’t believe it. Billy Leary was a crusty-faced half-wit who spent most of the school day in the remedial classroom by the gymnasium with four or five other students. Matthew did not put much stock in anything Billy Leary said.
“It probably just got hit by a car crossing Route 40.”
“Either way, let’s
go,”
Dwight insisted. Frustrated, he snapped the birch branch in half then tossed both pieces over the cemetery fence. “We’ll be home before supper. I promise.”
“Okay. But I want to stop by Hogarth’s first.”
Dwight moaned. Unlike Matthew, whose slight frame and baby-blond hair made him look even younger than he was, Dwight Dandridge was a meaty, solid block of flesh in a striped polo shirt. According to Dwight’s father (who was a drunkard, if the one-sided conversations Matthew had overheard when his mother was on the telephone were at all reliable), his son was rapidly on his way to Gutsville. If that meant Dwight was on his way to becoming fat, Matthew surmised that Mr. Dandridge had been living in Gutsville for most of his adult life, and could probably run for mayor.
“Hogarth’s is on the other side of town, dummy,” Dwight groaned. His hands were stuffed into the overly tight pockets of his jeans and he was kicking rocks as he walked. Matthew glanced at him and found his friend’s profile, with his upturned nose and protruding front teeth, piggish and off-putting.
“I’ll go with you to the Narrows if you come with me to Hogarth’s first,” Matthew said.
“It’s still there, you know,” Dwight assured him. “You don’t have to keep checking up on it. No one’s buying it.”
“Someone might.”
“Everyone else has already got their Halloween costumes picked out, dummy. You’re the only holdout.”
“That’s not true.”
“Of course it’s true. Halloween’s two weeks away. What do you think everyone’s waiting for?”
“So what are you gonna be?”
“A fuckin’ cool space alien.” Dwight licked his lips in his excitement. “I got these big rubbery gloves with claws on the ends and this mask, such a freaky mask. You gotta see it! It’s got this fishy green skin and eyes like swimming goggles.” He was nearly out of breath talking about it.
“Cool,” Matthew said.
“Do you even have enough money to buy it yet?”
“No.”
“Give it up. You should just be a homicidal serial killer,” Dwight suggested. “Wear some ripped up clothes, put some fake blood all over your face and hands, and walk around with a butcher’s knife. It’s easy.”
“That’s stupid.”
“You’re
stupid. Homicidal serial killer’s a fuckin’ awesome idea.”
“Then you can be the stupid serial killer and I’ll wear your alien mask.”
“No way, dummy.”
They veered off Cemetery Road and headed across town. Even at this hour, the streets were mostly empty, and many of the shops along Hamilton Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, were dark and vacant, their plate-glass windows soaped over and their doors boarded up. Matthew imagined that he heard the autumn wind whistling through the ranks of empty storefronts as if through a system of caves. The arcade was gone now, along with the old pizza joint and the video store. The ice cream parlor where Brandy, Matthew’s sister, had worked two summers ago was gone as well; all that remained of it was a hollowed-out shell on the corner of Hamilton and Rapunzel, like something out of a movie about nuclear warfare.
Those stores that were still open and thriving had their front stoops ornamented with sandbag barricades. Muddy debris cluttered the sidewalk and, every once in a while, the boys had to step over fallen tree limbs rattling their brown, crunchy leaves in the wind. The last time Stillwater had flooded this badly, Matthew was five years old. His father had shored up the foundation of the house with sandbags and moved all his tools and equipment in the garage to the higher shelves. He had plugged up the exhaust pipes of the pickup truck and the old Dodge with tennis balls and wrapped them over with electrical tape. The water came, simmering at first in the street out in front of the Crawly house, the surface alive with dancing raindrops, the water itself oily and black like ink. Soon enough, the Narrows flooded and a torrent came gushing down the street and across the opposite field. From the living room windows, Matthew and Brandy had watched as the muddy water rose against the framework of the house.
Things
had been in that water. Brandy had readily pointed them out to him at the time—the bobbing head of a passing snake, the arched and moss-slickened back of an enormous turtle, someone’s cat clinging to an iceberg of Styrofoam. Plastic lawn furniture had washed across their backyard. To this day, Matthew could still recall the loud pop just before the power had blown out.
He wondered now if it flooded like that where his father was…
The traffic light at the intersection of Hamilton and Susquehanna—which was the only traffic light in Stillwater, unless you counted the blinking-yellow yield lights where Paxton Street merged with Route 40 on the far side of Haystack Mountain—was dark. Both boys darted across the street to Hogarth’s, the scalloped edging of the drugstore’s green-and-white canvas awning flapping in the wind. There were more sandbags here, along with overturned trash cans and mounds of sodden leaves, glittery and blackish-brown, smashed up against the front of the building. Some of the windows in the nearby shops boasted long spidery cracks, probably from items having been scooped up by the torrent and thrown against the glass. That mildew smell was here too, just as it was back home, and just as it had been all week at school. It seemed the air was clogged with rot.
Matthew stood before the drugstore’s front window in reverential silence. Dwight came up beside him, their mismatched reflections like two ghosts standing side by side in the smoked glass. Scraps of paper whipped against their shins and a single Styrofoam cup cartwheeled down the sidewalk toward them.
“See?” Dwight said.
Matthew stared longingly at the intricately detailed Dracula mask in the window, complete with realistic hair as dark and smooth as raven feathers. The vampire’s mouth was a ragged, fang-ringed hole from which exclamations of fake blood streamed in perfect ribbons. Its pallid skin looked as colorless as dough, the blackened pits of its eyes seeming to contain infinite space.
“Yeah. It’s still there,” Matthew said.
“I told you it would be.” Dwight sounded bored. “You can probably get it for cheap after Halloween.”
“Yeah,” Matthew said, disappointment evident in his voice. It meant nothing, having the Dracula mask
after
Halloween. What good would that do him?
“Hey,” said Dwight, suddenly perking up. “You think that was a vampire bat back in Miss Sleet’s classroom?”
“No. It was just a fruit bat or something.”
“A bat that eats fruit?”
“Or maybe it ate bugs.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. I just know.”
“Vampires,” Dwight said…and the eyes of his ghostly counterpart suddenly lit up in the reflection of the drugstore window. “Maybe that’s what got that hairless boy.”
Matthew said nothing. He didn’t want to think about the hairless boy. In fact, he’d had nightmares about the boy since some kids in school had told him about it.
“How much are you short, anyway?” Dwight asked.
Matthew did the quick math in his head—he had a Superman lunchbox back in his bedroom where he kept his meager savings—and said, “Only about seven dollars.”
“That’s not so bad.”
“My allowance is three bucks a week.”
“Ask for an advance,” Dwight said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s when you get money before you do the work. My dad does it all the time at the shop.”
“That sounds like a rip. Who would do that?”
“I just said my dad does it at work.”
Matthew did not think his mother would give him an advance. Moreover, the fact that getting an advance was something Dwight’s father did, confirmed that it sounded like a rip-off. He stared at the mask in the drugstore’s window and thought about how cool it would be to have that mask for Halloween, to wear it with a black cape and the star-shaped pendant he’d already made out of cardboard covered in tinfoil, which was also salted away in his Superman lunchbox.
“Okay,” Dwight said in a huff. “We came and we saw the stupid mask. Can we go down to the Narrows now? You promised.”
The eyeholes in the mask were gaping black pits; the pronged maw of its mouth looked like some sort of trap set deep in the woods to catch bears. Matthew only looked away from it when he felt Dwight tugging at the hem of his shirt.
“Dude,” Dwight moaned, “you
promised.”
Matthew sighed. “Okay. Let’s go. But we gotta hurry.”
“Sure.”
They headed back toward Cemetery Road, then crossed into the undisciplined swell of forestry that comprised the foothills of Haystack Mountain. Beyond, the Cumberland landscape, with all its swells and slaloms, looked like there was something enormous just beneath the earth trying to push its way out. In the summer, the trees surrounding the base of the mountain were full and green, obscuring the curving blacktop of Route 40 and the roiling gray water of the Narrows beyond. Now, in autumn, the trees were bare and the curl of asphalt could be glimpsed though the meshwork of ash-colored branches.
Despite his labored respiration, Dwight Dandridge moved quickly ahead of Matthew, crossing through the trees and out onto a plain of sun-bleached reeds like some pioneer straight out of a history textbook. There was a darkened triangle of sweat at the back of Dwight’s striped polo shirt, and Matthew could hear his friend’s wheezing exhalations—
heee, heee—
as clear as day.
Matthew was still thinking about the Dracula mask as they slowed down to an airy trot at the cusp of Route 40, the winding whip-crack of highway that cut through the mountains. Matthew’s mother didn’t allow him to travel this far from town, and she had on more than one occasion forbidden him from crossing Route 40. Although it was typically within the boy’s nature to adhere to his mother’s mandates, Dwight Dandridge’s influence over him was greater than any other force in his life, as is customarily the way with young boys and their friends. Often, his mother would employ the old adage, suggesting that, if Dwight jumped off the Highland Street Bridge, she had no doubt her easily-manipulated yet good-hearted son would readily follow. This comment always reminded Matthew of the time Dwight had tied a bunch of kites to his back, arms, and legs, and contemplated jumping off the highest point of the bridge to see if he could fly. Somehow Matthew had talked him out of it.
“Come on,” Dwight urged, making Matthew aware that he was lagging behind. “Don’t chicken out on me now.”
“I’m not chickening out.”
“Bok bok bok bok bok!”
“Cut it out, jerk.”
Dwight waved a hand at him as he crossed the highway. “Come on!”
After checking for traffic, Matthew crossed the highway toward the steep embankment on the other side that led down into the cold, black waters of the Narrows. Dwight was already peering down the embankment, no doubt assessing the tribulations of traversing the rocky decline down toward the flume of water. White stones burst out of the hillside, looking like the tops of skulls rising from their graves, and Matthew could see tentacular tree limbs and nests of brambles sprouting from the earth, ready to snatch them up and trip them down the side of the mountain and into the Narrows. Some random garbage was strewn about as well, remnants of the storm. People’s lives had been uprooted and swept away, the leftover bits scattered like flotsam and jetsam throughout the wooded mountainside.
Dwight began descending the hillside, pausing halfway down to peer over his shoulder at Matthew, who remained standing at the cusp of the highway. “You coming?”