All American Boy (22 page)

She closes her eyes. The teakettle still whistles on the stove but it cannot obscure the music. It grows louder every second. Regina can see Samuel Horowitz dancing in the hopyard now, his white burial gown swaying around him, his thick white hair blowing in the darkness. He leaves no tracks in the newly fallen snow.

“Oh, please, no,” Regina cries, sitting down at the kitchen table, pressing her fingers into her temples. “Oh, why did Rocky have to go away and leave me?”

The vampire is getting closer. He floats over the snow, so white, so pure, all the way into town from the hopyard—down from the orchards, through the swampy neighborhoods of Dogtown, past St. John the Baptist Church, all the way down Main Street, past the Hebrew Home, past Henry's Diner, past the Palace Theater, up the block toward Regina's building …

“Stop it!” she screams at herself, but the music grows louder, a scratchy old tune, one she knows, one of her father's favorites, one of the songs that was always playing on the radio when he came into her room, his breath smelling of whiskey, Rocky crying in the next bed.

Leave her alone! Leave Regina alone!

The music—yes, the same—louder and louder—

And then the scratching at the window again, and this time it's no squirrel, it's a hand, an old hand, long gnarled fingers scratching to get in …

A vampire must be invited into the home
.

Regina backs up into the cupboard in the dark kitchen, staring at the scratch marks in the frost on the window over the sink. “No,” she whispers. “Please don't.”

The hand reappears at the window, scratching away more of the frost.

“You don't want me,” Regina cries. “I'm not what you think.”

But the music only gets louder. And when the face of old Samuel Horowitz appears at the window, grinning wide and baring his fangs, Regina screams with every last vestige of what she once was. She screams and screams, but when it's over and no one has come, she finally looks up at the window and says, “Yes. All right. You might as well come in.”

And she tears the Star of David from around her neck, tossing it across the kitchen floor, where it clatters for several seconds before finally settling among the dust beneath the Kelvinator.

Then the window over the sink slides open, a screech of icy metal against wood, just as, somewhere off in the building, the Goldsteins' pendulum clock begins to chime.

“Miss Gunderson?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Stanley Kowalski.” He grins. “No, not
that
Stanley Kowalski.”

But Rocky doesn't smile.

The man becomes serious. “I came inquiring about your sister.”

“Are you a friend?”

“I'd only just met her. We had lunch together on Thursday at Henry's Diner.”

Rocky's eyes are still puffy. “And how did she seem to you?”

“Oh, fine, my dear. Just fine.”

“Then you have no clue as to what happened?”

“No, I'm afraid I don't, Miss Gunderson.”

Rocky begins to cry. “I should never have left her.”

“There, there, my dear,” Stanley says, taking the young woman into his arms. He holds her in the doorway, stroking her hair.

Rocky looks up at him. “How did you know something happened?”

The man smiles uneasily. “I came by in the morning. I saw the ambulance …”

“Oh, please, don't mention it again. Mr. Otfinowski has already described what he found when he came here, just as the sun was coming up, to deliver the milk … Oh, I should have been here!”

“I'm sorry, dear. I didn't mean to upset you again.” Mr. Kowalski's eyes bear down on her. “Might I see her? You'll let me see her, won't you?”

“All right,” Rocky says, turning to walk back into the flat, leaving the door open for Mr. Kowalski to follow.

“My dear,” he calls after her graciously. “First you must invite me in.”

In her room, Regina has heard it all. She huddles under her blankets, her neck bandaged where Rocky said she had tried to slit her throat with the Star of David. Rocky talks nonsense. She babbles about sending Regina away somewhere. Aunt Selma and Uncle Axel were here, too, and they talked the same. But Regina paid them no mind. Whatever they talk about doesn't concern her anymore.

Oh, how the light burns her eyes now. Such will be the way from now on. That much she knows for certain. But for how long? Will old Samuel Horowitz come back for her tonight and kill her? Or will he, instead, make her wait, wait like he did, living only through sheer force of will, living only because she was afraid to die?

Regina Gunderson finally understands most everything else, but this is the one thing she still doesn't know.

13

JACKY TRICKY

The hospital's very bright, too much to bear. Wally squints his eyes under the hot white lights as they head down corridors that twist and turn like some Clive Barker nightmare journey. When he stops for water at the fountain, his mother wrings her hands.

“Oh, please, Walter,” she says. “Don't dawdle.”

“I'm not dawdling. I'm thirsty.”

The doctor, hands clasped, is waiting for them outside Uncle Axel's door.

“He won't make the day,” the doctor confides, shifting his knotty features into their sympathetic guise, something he probably does two, three times a week. Wally's mother nods, wrinkling her cheeks to feign sadness. Wally doesn't play their game.

Uncle Axel is ninety-seven years old. What's left of him is drying up in his hospital bed. The smell of the cleaning fluid overwhelms everything else, but underneath Wally can still smell urine. The odor hits him, an almost physical force, when they push open the door to the old man's room. They stand over his bed, saying nothing, just looking down at him.

“You never liked him either,” Wally says. “Admit it.”

His mother makes no reply. Uncle Axel's sheets are perfectly starched, crisp, white. Lying beneath them are his bones, wrapped loosely in yellow skin that looks like last year's maple leaves: flaking, with veins dried up in networks of brown. His ears are large, two withered leaves of cabbage stuck ungainly to the sides of his head. His eyes are closed; his mouth, a black hole, hangs open. His cheeks are sunken into his face, and his wispy hair is white, whiter even than the pillow behind his head.

They stand over him, looking down. The old man is a relic of a past Wally has done his best these last two decades to forget.

“He's all I have left,” Wally's mother says.

He looks over at her with contempt.
All she has left
. Uncle Axel is Mom's mother's sister's husband, and a nastier old man Wally never met. He was cruel to Wally, and cruel to his mother, too. She's told him the stories. But in the car on the ride over here, his mother had said that no one should have to die alone.

Fuck that. Wally
wants
Uncle Axel to die alone and full of misery, like a beast caught in a trap in the woods. He wants the old man to open his eyes, look around, see that he's alone, that no one cares. And then he wants him to die.

“All right,” Wally whispers, his lips nearly in his mother's ear. “We've seen him. We can leave. You can tell all the busybodies in town that you saw him on his deathbed.”

“Walter,” his mother says. “I know he wasn't a very pleasant man, but he's all the family I've got left. I just want to show him a little respect.”

“Respect?” Wally asks loudly, turning all at once to see if anyone has heard him. He lowers his voice again. “Don't talk to me about respect, Mother. Not while we're standing over this pile of shit.”

“Oh, Walter.”

They look down at him. The old man's eyes are open now, staring crookedly at his nose. Wally's mother covers her mouth with her hand, but neither of them say a word. The only sound in the room is the gurgling from Uncle Axel's throat. Wally freezes. His testicles tighten. He has the same feeling he had all those years ago.

It's as if Jacky Tricky is in the window, watching.

Aunt Selma was making dinner. Wally was bored, driving one of his Matchbox toy cars across the kitchen table, making an engine sound by swishing the spit back and forth in his mouth. He drove the car across the wax paper Aunt Selma had laid out for her pie and then over the bowl of fruit in the center of the table, a mountain of boulders. Apples and pears tumbled out of the bowl and bounced onto the floor. “Avalanche!” Wally shouted.

Aunt Selma smiled wearily.

Uncle Axel barged in, rubbing his oil-blackened hands together. His hair was gray, his eyes dark brown and very round. His face was weathered sandpaper, his ears large and very red with long, floppy lobes. He was a farmer, and his hands showed it: nails and knuckles permanently outlined in black, indelible grass stains on his fingertips. Sometimes Uncle Axel didn't wash his hands before dinner, despite Aunt Selma's urgings, and he'd leave greasy handprints on the tablecloth. He usually smelled like hay, sometimes manure, but now he smelled like oil. He'd been fixing the tractor.

Wally stopped playing the moment Uncle Axel came through the door. He watched the old man rub his hands on his dirty dungarees and grab for the fallen fruit. His round eyes narrowed. “Why is this kid inside?”

“He's playing with his cars, Axel,” Aunt Selma told him, her voice far away.

The old man's ears flushed. “Get that goddamn filthy car off the table!” He whacked the back of Wally's head with the palm of his hand, the smell of lubricating oil swirling around the boy's face. “You want to mess up your aunt's table? Why don't you play outside like other boys? You a sissy? Huh? You a sissy?”

Wally took his car and headed for the back door.

“Dinner will be ready in a few minutes,” Aunt Selma called after him.

Uncle Axel was grumbling, “Look at this bruised fruit. These apples were perfect. Now look at 'em.”

Wally pushed open the screen door, letting it bang—
whack!
—as Uncle Axel hollered, “And don't slam that goddamn door! Jesus, the kid don't have no manners.”

Uncle Axel and Aunt Selma lived on the far outskirts of Brown's Mill, where the woods were deep and the houses few. They raised chickens and pigs and grew corn. Walking out into the backyard, past bales of hay and old rotting tires, Wally breathed the air, pungent and cool, and heard Aunt Selma's voice carrying out behind him. “You really shouldn't hit him, Axel,” she was saying. “He isn't ours.”

The stench of cow manure hung thick out here. Wally kept walking, way up past the fence that surrounded the field. He plopped down finally under an old maple tree, leaning his back against the trunk. It was late summer. Most of the crop was gone and the yard was a jumble of tools and crates. Hens ran squawking through the grass. Baskets of corn Uncle Axel tried to sell by the roadside were starting to rot.

Television barely came in out here. The antenna on the roof was crooked and rusty, and though Aunt Selma kept asking Uncle Axel to fix it, he never did. Wally hated not getting to watch
Land of the Lost
on Saturday mornings. He found the little general store out here boring and inadequate, with outdated comic books and candy that had gone stale in its wrappers. He missed his friends, especially Freddie Piatrowski. All Wally had to keep himself occupied were his Matchbox cars. He couldn't wait to get back to school.

The color of the leaves was just starting to change, ever so slightly. A year before, Wally's parents had taken him on a trip in their big blue Buick, a trip up north to look at the leaves. It was the only time Wally could remember the three of them being happy—really happy, like the families on television, the Cunninghams or the Waltons or the Ingalls. They spent the night in a little rustic cabin and in the morning Mom made blueberry pancakes, while Dad took Wally into the woods to show him how to look for color changes in the leaves.

“You look first for the veins,” Dad said, pulling down a branch and holding a translucent leaf to the sun. “When they start to turn yellow, that means the blood of the tree is no longer flowing, and so the leaves begin to lose their color.”

“If its blood isn't flowing,” Wally surmised, “then it must be dead.”

His father nodded. “People say the trees look beautiful in autumn. Next time you hear that, you can tell 'em what they're really seeing is the leaves starting to die.”

Wally hadn't wanted to come here to Uncle Axel's farm. He'd begged and pleaded with his parents not to send him again, but he knew there was no choice. Even at eight, he realized Mom and Dad weren't very happy together. Dad was away so much of the time, and Mom would start to cry so easily. Then Wally's father would get angry, and sometimes he smashed things. That was when it was really bad, and Mom would call Aunt Selma and ask if Wally could stay with them for a few days. But a few days always turned into a few weeks, and now the summer was almost over.

“I don't want to go,” Wally cried as his mother helped him pack his things. “He's mean to me. Uncle Axel.”

“How is he mean to you?” his mother asked, folding a sweater into his suitcase.

“He tells me about Jacky Tricky.”

She let out a long sigh. “Oh, Walter,” she said, cupping his chin in her hand. “He used to tell me the same story. And it frightened me, too. I was lucky because I had my sister Rocky to tell me it wasn't real. Uncle Axel just likes to scare children. He always has. But Jacky Tricky isn't real. You're a big boy now, Walter. You won't be afraid of him anymore.”

The sun was going down over the trees. Shadows crept longer, fuller, closing in on him. The old maple was melting from its dull green to a heavy, forbidding blue. Crickets were chattering now, and a few mosquitoes sang at the boy's ears. Wally lay on his back and rolled the toy car over my stomach.

“Dinnertime.”