Bury the Children in the Yard (3 page)

He started to ask her about Geneva when a round of bleating came from the low white cinderblock slaughterhouse.

“Grotesque,” Marcie mumbled under her breath.

“At least we don’t get the smell today.”

“Do you remember what dad used to tell us about the slaughterhouse, when we were too little to know it was a slaughterhouse?”

“Yeah. He said they made music in there and the sound of the cows dying was just some new music that wasn’t played on the radios or anything yet. He said it sounded like it came from a whole other land.”

“Yeah. It kind of made me want to go, like, look around in it or something. Only, when I got a little bit older and I knew what slaughterhouse meant I imagined they still played music in there only they used the ribs for a washboard, the eyeballs for castanets, and a bloated stomach as the drum.”

“Jesus. That’s sick, Marcie.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have thought all that stuff if Dad didn’t fill our heads with that music nonsense.”

“So it’s his fault you’re morbid.”

“Isn’t it always the father’s fault? Or the mother’s? Maybe both.”

She sat the notebook down in her lap and wiped some sweat away from her forehead with the small hand. Jakob was going to ask her about Geneva again but he remembered something he and his friend, Jeff, had seen the other night.

“Do you know if old Bussard’s taken up with Darla Minnow?”

“Who?”

“Darla Minnow. The really fat librarian. You know ... the one who’s like so fat she has to use canes to walk?”

“No. Why?”

“I was just wondering. The other night when me and Jeff were out here we saw her wandering into the slaughterhouse. Well, I wouldn’t really call it wandering. It was more like trundling.”

“That’s mean.”

“I know. But why would she be there? Why would she be going into the slaughterhouse?”

“So how much had you and Jeff smoked while you were out here?”

Jakob stood up. “That’s none of your business,” he said. “Besides, you know we don’t do that.”

“Well, all I’m saying is you would have to be high not to notice the sort of obvious facts you’ve overlooked.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure you’ll fill me in.”

“Okay. First, it’s a slaughterhouse. They slaughter cows and other assorted animals so they can sell them for food. Sometimes, people provide the animal. They don’t all come from Bussard’s backyard. And if someone supplies an animal to be slaughtered then it only stands to reason they would have to come back to collect said animal. And, since our lady Minnow is of an expansive proportion, it would only stand to reason that she likes to eat. Maybe she lives on a farm. Maybe she had one of her animals slaughtered so she can rest easy knowing she has like a year’s worth of hamburgers.”

“Yeah. I guess. It just seemed kind of late.”

“It’s probably not like either of them had anything else to do.”

“It’s hot. I’m going inside. Oh, by the way, you know your friend Geneva ...?”

“I knew there was a reason you were out here.”

A few days later, Jakob lay in his bed in a post-masturbatory near-slumber when someone knocked on his bedroom door. He hurriedly zipped himself up and threw the soiled paper towel under the bed before saying, “Enter.”

He propped himself up against the headboard. Marcie came in and sat on the far side of the bed.

“Why are you all sweaty?” she asked.

“Because it’s hot.”

“Oh, okay.”

He didn’t know why she had come in but she had a look of excitement in her eyes. Maybe she had finally asked Geneva about him. But she just sat there. She liked to do things like that. Like make him practically beg to get anything out of her.

“So why are you here?” he asked.

“Well ... remember what you said about Darla Minnow the other day?”

“Yeah. And I also remember how you debunked my small town-really-creepy-love-affair theory.”

“Maybe I was a bit hasty. You’re not going to believe this.”

Then she did it again. Just sat there on the edge of the bed with her lopsided hands clasped together, staring at him, waiting for him to ask her what it was he wasn’t going to believe.

“
And?
” he said.

“Okay, so I just came back from the library. They have this really great Hieronymus Bosch book I was going to try and steal and Darla Minnow was there behind the counter only at first I didn’t know it was her.”

She stopped again.

“Okay,” Jakob said. “If you keep making me pull the story out of you then I’m going to be too tired to pay attention by the time you’re actually finished.”

“I
could
just stop.”

“No. Don’t stop. Okay,
why
didn’t you know it was her?”

“When she went into the slaughterhouse the other day, was she fat?”

“Of course she was fat. I don’t know that I would have known it was her but for the girth and the canes.”

“You are
so
mean. Anyway, the Darla Minnow I saw at the library was not fat. In fact, she was very thin. Like model-thin. I had a stroke of conscientiousness brought on by my curiosity and decided to check the book out instead of stealing it outright so I took it up to the counter and she got up from behind her desk to come and help me ...”

“Did she have the canes?”

“No. No canes at all. She looked more like someone you would see dressed up as like the ‘dirty librarian’ in a
Playboy
spread or something.”

“How’s that possible?”

“That’s what I’ve been wondering. You want to know what I think?”

“You’re the brain.”

“I think something happened to her at the slaughterhouse.”

“That’s not possible.” But Jakob was already turning the possibilities over in his head.

“We should watch it tonight. See if anybody goes in. And see what they look like when they come out.”

“I don’t know. It just sounds crazy. I’ll call Jeff and see what he thinks.”

“Okay. Well, I’m going to keep an eye on it and you can listen to your stupid friends if you want to. By the way, Geneva said you don’t really have a chance. And she has a jealous boyfriend who may try and emasculate you if he sees you in public. I’m sure it’s all talk but ... well, he
is
pretty big.”

“Talking to you makes my head hurt,” Jakob said and reached for a music magazine on his bedside table, officially ending their conversation.

When she left, he picked up the cordless phone and called Jeff, hoping Jeff would be able to refute everything Marcie had told him. Instead, Jeff only agreed with her.

Jeff worked a part-time job at Bang’s supermarket. He said the manager of Bang’s was an older man with a limp. Until yesterday. Yesterday, he had come in looking twenty years younger without any trace of a limp. Jeff kept waiting for someone to ask about this sudden appearance change but the only thing anyone said was, “You’re looking good today, Mr. Castle.” Today, Jeff said, Mr. Castle had given Cynthia Raymond a “ride home,” but Jeff suspected something much more prurient was at play.

“So,” Jakob said, “you want to come and scout this place with me and my sister tonight.”

Jeff agreed, called Jakob a “gentleman and a scholar,” and hung up.

Disappointment washed the night. By two o’clock, Jakob was tired of being bitten by mosquitoes and he was ready for bed. The two boys’ sophomoric banter had frustrated Marcie about an hour ago and she had since retreated to the house.

“So, we done for the night?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah. I think so. This was stupid.”

“Not if you saw Mr. Castle.”

“That’s supposing he came here. We don’t know that he did.”

“Still, people don’t just transform overnight. Even if they have some kind of surgery, they have to have some healing time.”

“I guess. Maybe we could just go to the library and ask Minnow about it tomorrow.”

Jeff laughed. “Why? You just want to check her out?”

“Hardly.”

“I hear she’s pretty hot.”

They walked through the meadow, swatting at mosquitoes and gnats, the sound of peepers and cicadas providing a churning whir in the background.

“You know,” Jeff said. “Marcie’d be pretty hot if it wasn’t for her hand.”

“That’s my
sister
. Besides, the hand’s not so bad. I can imagine a pedophile taking a keen interest in her.”

“God, you’re sick.”

When they got up to the house Jakob asked Jeff if he was staying tonight.

“No. I can’t. I have to get up early and go to Bang’s. Maybe I’ll try and buddy up to Mr. Castle. See if I can get some kind of confession from him.”

“Meet back here tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

Jakob went back into the house and went to bed. Lying there, he thought about the slaughterhouse. The place had always unnerved him but he found himself now terrified of it. He didn’t know why exactly. If it was making people “beautiful” that should be a lot less terrifying than thinking of the slaughters it was normally used for. But he didn’t like the idea. In his German class, they had discussed Faust, and it seemed like there had to be something Faustian about this. One does not get something for nothing. Then he had another horrifying thought. The thought actually came to him in Jeff’s voice. It was what he had said when they were walking back from the field, “Marcie’d be pretty hot if it wasn’t for her hand.”

No, Jakob thought. Marcie wouldn’t even think about that. He knew she wasn’t a shallow person and he thought she had actually grown quite comfortable with the idea of her hand over time. If she had asked he could have told her the hands were like the
last
things guys looked at.

He couldn’t get the idea out of his head.

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get up and check on her. Act big brotherly for a change. He was the one who had brought the whole thing up to begin with. If something happened to her, he would be partially to blame. He didn’t want the guilt.

The wooden floor in his room squeaked as he walked across it. He opened his door and looked down the hall. Her room was at the end of the hall and he saw that her light was still on. Maybe she fell asleep with it on. She was never up this late and she had seemed pretty tired at the stakeout. He walked down the hall and gently knocked on the door. He didn’t hear any answer and just assumed she was asleep but decided to open the door and check on her anyway.

When he opened the door she wasn’t in her bed.

He looked at the walls of her room, all of her drawings and paintings hung up with masking tape as though she were still deciding which ones to keep there. Dominating the wall above her bed was a painting that did not alleviate his paranoid thoughts at all. It was on an open-hardback size canvas. There was something childlike about it. It looked like she had dipped her hands in paint—the left one in primary green and the right one, the small one, in primary red—and pressed them to the canvas. Scrawled all around the colorful hands in black ink were the words: MY SCHIZOPHRENIC HANDS. Over and over.

Jakob ran out of his house and out to the meadow. Maybe he could still catch her before it was too late.

The night was a buzzing swarm, matching some internal rant raging within Jakob. He reached the rusted fence separating his property from Old Man Bussard’s and clumsily made his way over the top. A dim light glowed from inside the slaughterhouse. Jakob didn’t want to go in. He had never been this close to it. He didn’t like it. It made his skin crawl. He slapped at a gnat that had kamikazed into his forehead.

And now he was going to go inside the slaughterhouse.

His stomach did a great turn. The smell increased as he drew closer. Standing at the rusted iron door between him and the mystery waiting inside, he wanted to be able to tell himself this was crazy so he could go back home and curl up in his bed, surrounded by air conditioning and a lack of insects. But Marcie might be in there.

No, he told himself. Marcie
had
to be in there. Where else would she be? He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the signs earlier. She had never been interested in creepy things like the slaughterhouse before. Then, after being presented with the alluring prospect of self-transformation, she had suddenly wanted to find an answer to all the mysteries.

Jakob grabbed the handle of the door and yanked it to his left. It slid into place with a clanking boom. The smell hit him, threatening to drop him to his knees. It was the worst thing he had ever smelled. Occasionally, a raccoon would get smashed on the road in front of the house and rot there for a few days until the park ranger removed it. That was enough of a deathsmell for Jakob. This was a hundred times worse. This smelled like what he imagined burying his nose in the roadkill raccoon might smell like.

His stomach tried to bolt up his spine but he managed to hold it down.

He looked frantically for Marcie but didn’t see her.

He didn’t see anything.

Of course not. He had himself all worked up over nothing. This was, after all, just a slaughterhouse. Crazy old Bussard had probably just left the light on accidentally. Whatever he had seen previously was probably not what he thought he had seen. Maybe Ms. Minnow
had
lost a bunch of weight and maybe the person he had seen entering the slaughterhouse the one night wasn’t Ms. Minnow. He doubted everything now. Maybe Jeff had made up the whole Mr. Castle scenario. Jeff had been known to tell wild stories until everyone believed him before telling his audience that it was a lie.

“Marcie?” he called out, just to be sure.

No one answered him.

Okay, he had served his big brotherly duty. Now he just wanted to get out. He turned around and saw Bussard standing in the doorway.

“Lookin for somethin?” Mr. Bussard said.

“No. I was just leaving. I’m sorry. I thought my sister was in here.” Surely the old man would understand that. He looked perfectly reasonable, just like he had always looked—a short man with bandy legs and a big gray mustache.

“You two playin games or somethin?”

“Yeah. Something like that. It was stupid of me to look for her in here. I’m gonna go now. Sorry if I bothered you.”