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We trick or treat for a while, trekking from house to house. It isn’t even dark yet and I am bored out of my mind. Just as it is getting fun, Tim stops me, his hands on my shoulders, weighing me down. My feet keep moving but he kind of holds me in place.
“Chris.” He sounds tired.
“What?”
“You can’t keep saying that.”
“Saying what?”
“When we go to someone’s door and they ask Jessie which TeleTubby she is, you can’t keep saying ‘the gay one.’ It’s not P.C.”
“What’s P.C.?
“Just don’t do it.”
I laugh.
“Or you’ll be in big trouble,” he adds.
“I’m so scared,” I said. “What are you gonna do, chop off my head?”
“Yeah, maybe.” He is joking of course, I tell myself, even though he sounds serious.
When we finally get home, it is barely twilight, not a very terrifying time if you ask me. Tim has been trying to scare me the whole time, but failing miserably. We stand there on the porch step, all squished together, while Tim digs in his pockets for the key. He is talking to himself, cursing, while Jessie stares at him in awe.
“What’s the problem?” I snap.
“Will you relax, I can’t find the key . . . .”
“You’re such a liar Tim. Just open the door. Things are eating me. Jessie’s overheating.” It has turned sunny and is hot for a fall day, especially when you’re six and tramping around in a felt TeleTubby costume. I pat her on the head and she moves her sweaty hand from Tim’s into mine. Tim leans over and peers through the dark window. “I think I left them on the dining room table. Crap.”
I look across the street. “We can just go to your house and wait until my mom comes home.”
“No. My step dad’s there. I’ll just go around the back and get the extra key. It’s still under the plastic frog, right?”
“No. The frog broke. Mom stepped on it.”
“So, where is it?” He is aggravated, sweaty.
I shrug. “I don’t know. Under the mat?”
“Fine. I’ll find it. Just stay here.” He puts his hand out in the stay command he uses with his dog. We stay. And wait. But he doesn’t come back. I sigh. We sit down on the porch. We keep waiting. Finally, I stand up. “Jessie, I’m gonna get Tim. I’ll be right back. Stay here.”
She doesn’t say anything, but she won’t let go of my hand, either. Maybe little kids are like dogs, that they can sense danger. I try to explain to her why I have to go and she has to stay. I try to pry her hand loose. But nothing works, so finally I kick her in the leg. Not hard, just enough to get her to unglue her hand from mine. Let her know I mean business, as my dad sometimes says. She fake cries for a minute and, when she stops to breathe, I put my hands on her bird-like shoulders, pushing her back down so she is sitting again, and leave her there, pouting, in her stupid TeleTubby costume.
I make my way into the tangle of our backyard, through the gate which is practically glued shut with overgrown ivy. Tim is there, sitting in the swing tied to our huge oak tree, leaning his head against the coarse rope. I don’t know what he is doing, figuring he is just being stupid like he always is. I don’t understand what is happening yet. I am stuck in the old reality.
“Tim, did you find the key?” I yell.
He doesn’t answer. “God damn Tim, did you find the key or not?”
I grin as I get closer. “My mom’s gonna kill you,” I say.
But my mom can’t kill him because, by the time she gets home, he will already be dead. Mostly, the blood is coming from his chest and the side of his head. I can see him breathing, heavily, making gurgling, rasping noises every time he inhales. The long, rough gashes along his face bleed slowly, the blood easing down the side of his face, staining his mouth.
“Tim, are you okay?” This is not the smartest thing to ask since the answer is pretty obvious. He laughs, or tries to. It is more of a heaving. The sound my old dog made when he got hit by a car. Then it turns into a moaning, a bubble of blood forming between his lips. I just stand there, stupidly, waiting for him to get up and be Tim again. But instead I wake up, realizing that Tim is like that because someone, someone near, did that to him. Took a sharp object and hacked him up. And I don’t want my eyes bulging like that, blood spurting from my chest, making sounds that barely sound human. So I leave him there and run like hell. I only get so far, about ten steps, before I run into someone. Someone who drifts out of the darkness and wraps his sticky, denim arms around me.
“Fuck!” I scream and a whole lot of other stuff that doesn’t make any sense. Things about Tim and blood, and death, and my dog who had gotten hit by a car. And I struggle, closing my eyes, trying to cause pain but knowing I won’t. All I can see are his arms, when I open my eyes, just for a second, just so I can know this is really happening.
“Get off me, get off me,” I keep yelling. I am so out of my mind screaming that at first I don’t notice he is talking too, quietly, his voice a deep rumbling that comes from deep in his chest.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he keeps saying. “What, you think I’m gonna hurt you? I heard a commotion, a commotion. So I came.” He lets go of me with one arm to gesture. “I’m from the street behind you. You think I did this? You think I did this?” He gestures at Tim. The dying Tim. I stop struggling. His grip loosens so it is more like a hug, but he doesn’t let me go. I look around as much as I can from where I am, trying to make out the hulking shapes against the fading sky. I avoid looking toward the swing set.
“So, where is he?” I can hear the panic in my voice, the rising fear. “He’s still here . . . I don’t think he left . . . where is he?”
“He’s gone little boy. Gone, gone. It’s all okay now.” I think my heart might explode. The tips of my fingers tingle, I am panting.
“Do you know what I do to little boys?
Cut off their hands to make into toys;
To give to my cat who at home does lie;
That’s why this little boy has to die.”
He says this more to himself than to me even though his face is close to mine. I can feel the scratch of stubble and smell his disgusting peppermint breath. It seems odd that a killer would have such minty fresh breath. My body is freaking out but my mind is suddenly calm, clear. ‘Yeah’ I thought to myself, ‘This guy is an asshole.’ So I do what Jessie does when she’s really mad. Like when I took her Barbie and baked it in her Easy Bake Oven. I bite him. Right in the arm. And then I run. But I know that by the time I reach the gate, he will catch me and I can’t climb over the fence because it is one of those high wooden ones with points on the top. So I decide to go under it. There is a shallow hole my dog had dug when he was still alive and I dive for it even as I feel his hands clutching at the back of my t-shirt, the extra cloth of my baggy jeans.
I squirm under the fence, groping at the dirt, as the fence posts claw into my back, splitting my flesh open so that my t-shirt clings to my back with blood. Tears, and whatever is coming out of my nose, runs down my face and into my mouth. I taste salt. My breath comes in shuddering gasps, the kind that Jessie makes when she has a tantrum.
I make it to the other side of the fence, my t-shirt and pants streaked with dirt and blood, my hands scraped and burning, and am shocked at how quiet it is over there, on the other side of the fence. I am in someone’s back yard; they don’t mow their grass very often. And then it dawns on me that I am in the backyard of Lance Jones, the wife killer. I hesitate for a second before running towards the wife killer’s house. I bang on the back door because I don’t see a doorbell, pounding until the palms of my hands sting even more. I am whimpering, freaking out, standing on tip toes trying to peer into the mottled glass square in the top of the door. The door finally opens slowly, stingily. Opens only about a crack, an inch. Lance Jones sticks his pale, overly shaved face out so I can just see a brown eye, cracked puffy lips, and a huge nose that I want to grab and try to pull off, like a Mr. Potato Head nose. If I could pull it off, I would stick it on the top of his head. Like a hat.
“Yes?” His voice is high and smooth. And casual, like I am selling Girl Scout cookies. Which I had to do once with my cousin.
“I’m bleeding,” I say.
“You are, aren’t you? Are you alright?”
No, I want to say. What do you think, you psycho bitch Wife Killer? “Can I just come in and use your phone to call the cops?” I can’t help turning around and staring towards the fence.
“He’s right behind me . . . I think he’s right behind me.”
“You can come in.” He turns around and walks away from the door. I follow, closing the door behind me and turning the lock.
He looks over his shoulder at me and smiles. “We can watch Jeopardy. I never know the answers but I still have to watch it. Because he tells me to.”
“Who?”
“The devil.”
I stop in my tracks. He stops, too.
“Can I just use your phone? I left my sister . . .” My sister. Shit.
“Through that door.” It is dark with a lot of heavy massive furniture. I flick the light switch but nothing happens. I pick up the receiver and press nine but when I go to dial one I see it is missing. That it had been gouged out and covered over with heavy duty masking tape. The kind my dad would put over my mouth when he thought I was talking too much. I slam down the receiver. “Shit.”
“Loud noises make me very angry,” Wife Killer yells from the other room.
Stupidly, I look around for another phone. Instead, I see the books. Mostly those self help books. How to Lose Weight. How to Find Love. Things like that. But there are three copies of each book. There is nothing really bad about it; there is no law that says you can’t buy three copies of the same book. It is just weird, makse my heart pound. Could Wife Killer be the one who murdered Tim? I would have said ‘hell yes’ but it is impossible, he was at home, probably watching Jeopardy, while Tim was being hacked to death.
But I get the fuck out of there anyway ‘cause I’m not taking any chances. Running across Wife Killer’s front lawn, I see Jessie still sitting on the front porch talking to some guy. So, I run faster, my chest aching, to try to save my little sister. But I trip on a large stick and fall on my face. I thought it was a stick because it’s a normal thing to trip over a stick, especially if you’re me. It is not normal to trip over an arm. An arm with no body attached. But there isn’t any time to freak out or gag from the harsh acrid smell of blood ‘cause the guy Jessie is talking to is leading her to his car. I scramble up from the ground, run over to them and kick that bitch in the back of the knees. I’ve heard that’s how hit men do it. But what no one ever told me is that kicking someone in the knees doesn’t always stop them from pulling a knife on you.
Which is exactly what he does.
Puts one arm across my throat till everything I see has white snow falling in front of it, like a TV with bad reception. He holds the knife with his other hand and drags it down the side of my face, from above my eyebrow to beneath my chin. I barely feel it though, not ‘till after. Jessie is shrieking, of course, and kicking at the guy, which doesn’t help at all. He doesn’t seem to want to hurt her though, just keeps saying, “It’s okay baby, don’t cry. It won’t hurt him; he ain’t your real brother anyway. Don’t you want him to dance with the angels?”
“Hell no, I don’t want to dance with no angels,” I scream. Or at least I try to scream it, his arm is so tight. Sirens blare in my head but I can’t tell if they are real or not. If they are real, I think, they’ve come too damn late.
“You took her away from me,” he keeps saying, “You all took her away from me. She doesn’t have a brother, never had no fucking brother.”
“He is too my brother,” Jessie screams. And then, I pass out. The rest of what happened I got told in bits and pieces, after I got out of the hospital.
Right after I passed out, my mom pulled up, she had come home early because she “sensed something bad was happening to her babies.” She’s always thought she is psychic. Anyway, she sees this guy trying to kill me so, instead of running to the neighbors, she gets out of the car and starts whaling on him with The Club. Heard she hit him pretty hard, too. She kept that up until the police came and arrested both of them ‘til they could figure out what was going on. Turns out, she knew this guy, had been having an affair with him, I found out, and Jessie’s his daughter. Our dad never knew, none of us ever knew. My dad’s gone, left when he found out about the whole thing. Fine with me; Jessie misses him though. Jessie’s real dad is in a psychiatric ward where he belongs. And me, well, nothing’s really changed with me, except that I have some cool looking scars on my face. Tim’s girlfriend says they make me look sexy in a dangerous kind of way. Tim is dead. Was dead when the police got there. It was his arm I tripped over, Jessie’s dad had hacked it off with a blunt hatchet that was found in our bushes along with his bloody jean jacket.
I still visit Tim’s parents. I don’t want to be him anymore, ‘cause he’s dead. But his parents are cool. They’re sad, but I make them laugh. Sometimes they even call me Tim by mistake. I don’t correct them, I like it. I go there practically every day, sometimes even stay for dinner. His dog follows me everywhere, like he used to with Tim. I think I’m kind of starting to look more like him; I try to imitate the way his mouth curved down when he was worried. They gave me his old varsity jacket, said one day I might play football. I don’t know. All I know is everything is weird on the other side of the fence.
To Be Continued...
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