Ferocity Summer (5 page)

The Start of Summer

T
he first Saturday of summer, I awoke with a plan in my head. I walked into the kitchen, where my mother was highly engrossed in sorting out grocery store coupons. I stared at the top of her head as she bent over the table and noticed that her hair had begun to turn gray. This made me feel old.

“I need to borrow the car,” I said.

“
The
car? How about
my
car? And what the hell for?”

“To get a job?” I said.

I'd had my last final on Thursday and since then I'd been free, which meant my mother felt compelled to nag me about whether or not I intended to spend my entire summer goofing off.

“Fine,” she said. “You've got two hours. I need to go shopping later.”

My mom's white-trash-special was a nominally red Chevy Corsica. Red by all accounts should be a bright shining color, the sort of thing that catches the attention of onlookers and state troopers, but my mom's car is not this sort of red. Corvettes are red. Ferraris are red. The school janitor's pickup truck is red. My mom's car is the color of a T-shirt that had been washed too many times in generic laundry detergent. It's not really red at all. It's like the distant cousin of a supermodel who in a sense looks like her, but whose features aren't arranged quite right so that instead of drop-dead gorgeous she's undeniably ugly. My mom's car is undeniably ugly, but most of the time it works.

That thing about getting a job was something short of the absolute truth. My grand plan for the day didn't have much of anything to do with getting a job, but it did require the use of an automobile, and there wasn't any way I was going to secure one without this slight lie. By the time I reached the traffic light, I realized it would be a good idea to really get a job unless I wanted to face a summer of endless nagging. Thus I found myself turning into the convenience store parking lot and, with dragging feet, going inside.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no Johnny at Johnny's Quik Mart. The sad, trashy store is run by the gray-skinned, perpetually unhappy Gill Ecks.

“What do you want?” he asked when I disturbed him in his back-room office, only “asked” isn't really the right word; it was more like a phlegm-choked growl.

“I want a job,” I said, just as I had for the past two years.

“Fine,” Ecks said, as if this was some sort of strange bartering. “But if you're late or I catch you giving free stuff to your friends, you're fired.” This too was the same thing he had said for the past two years. We were both, apparently, creatures of habit. “You start Monday. Seven o'clock.”

I nodded, and as I turned to leave I heard him utter something under his breath about ungrateful kids. He was a bastard, but he was a predictable bastard.

Mission accomplished. I got back in the car and seriously thought about driving home, or maybe using the hour and fifty minutes of car time I had left to swing by Willow's, because I wasn't even sure why I was doing this thing that had seemed like such a good idea when I woke up.

I would just drive. I would go where the road led, and I would make up my mind or not when I got there.

Twenty minutes later, after many twists and sharp curves of the country roads, the houses turned from bi-levels and pseudo-Colonials to mini-estates with circular driveways made out of things other than standard-issue blacktop and garages bigger than my house. The problem was, I could not remember entirely how to get to my intended destination. I had been there only once before, and that was nearly a year ago. I had a vague idea, though, and relied on what little instinct I had.

Suddenly, there it was, an enormous Tudor house flanked by ancient oak trees with a perfectly manicured front lawn. I wondered if the Mexican laborers who did their landscaping ever found cause to wonder at the great dichotomy that existed between them and the mysterious creatures who lived within the walls of this house.

Some unwritten code of ethics demanded that I park the car in the street. It would somehow be entirely inappropriate to park Mom's white-trash-mobile on the paving stone driveway; maybe it would even cause some sort of violent chemical reaction, like mixing the wrong types of cleaning solvents together. I sat in the car for a while. I told myself that I was trying to tell whether anyone was home or not, but really I was just too nervous to get out. Now that I was here, my whole plan seemed completely absurd. What was any of this going to prove?

If I wasn't going to get out, then I might as well leave, because sooner or later they were going to call the cops to come investigate the dirty car casing their place. That would only make my situation far worse than it already was. I stepped out of the car and walked with short hesitant steps up the long driveway.

The front door was massive. I didn't remember it being this big before. Maybe we'd come in through a side door or some sort of servant's entrance around back. What must it have been like to be a kid in this house where everything seemed so huge? Did the kids at school look at you in awe because you lived in a veritable castle? But of course, where Tigue went to school everyone lived in castles. The people around here paid vast amounts of money to send their kids to schools named after people and saints rather than towns.

I stared up at the massive door knocker and wondered if my arm would be strong enough to lift it, but then I noticed the tiny glowing button to the side of the door and pressed it, saving myself from some sort of horrible faux pas. Is it a show of extravagant wealth to put a two-hundred-dollar door knocker up that is never intended to be used?

I waited for what felt like a long time and didn't hear anything on the other side of the door. Maybe no one was home. Maybe I could leave. I felt only a tad guilty about the relief that began to course through my veins. Then I heard the telltale click clack of locks being undone, and a second or two later, the door swung open.

A man in a pastel polo shirt and ridiculous plaid shorts opened the door. It was Mr. Anderson, Tigue's father. I'd met him only once before, under less-than-ideal circumstances. At that time, what stuck out in my memory was the dirty look he gave me—slit eyes, frowning lips. I think if he knew he could get away with it, he might have beaten me to death and enjoyed every minute of it. Or at least that was the impression I got. Now, though, his face was utterly blank. His hair looked a bit out of place and his eyes blinked a little in the bright morning sunlight coming in through the door. He looked as if he had just woken up from a short nap, and it was clear that he didn't recognize me and had no idea what I was doing there.

“Can I help you?” he asked. He glanced up at the road, where the Corsica sat marring the beautiful scenery. Perhaps he thought my car had a flat tire or had overheated, and he looked prepared to gallantly call his auto club.

“Is Tigue home?” I asked, in the steadiest voice I could manage.

That's when it happened. His face metamorphosed before my eyes. The blankness in his eyes turned to certain knowledge. The slight fleshiness in his cheeks turned suddenly hard. His lips turned downward into a grimace. Hate burst from his every pore and radiated toward my skin; it was as if someone had suddenly turned off the atmosphere and let deadly UV rays shoot down on me unhindered.

“No,” he said in a clipped voice. “He's not home. Don't come back here.” The door slammed in my face.

My initial feelings of shock and hurt wore off in a flash, and anger filled me. My gut reaction was to curse and scream at the closed door, at the house, at anyone who saw nothing wrong with treating another human being the way Mr. Anderson had treated me.

Fuck you!
I wanted to shout.
You're nothing to me! Nothing at all!

But to Mr. Anderson, I was nothing, and he would not hesitate to call the police on me. In this town, at this house, the truth would be whatever Mr. Anderson said it was, and who knew what that would be? I didn't need that just now. I walked back up the driveway with tears in my eyes that refused to come out. I drove home, ignoring the speed limits and the palatial homes that flew past the window. It had been a wasted morning, with nothing to show for my time but the same sucky job I'd held for the past two summers.

June

T
he summer's heat crept up on our small, northwestern New Jersey town like puberty on an unsuspecting adolescent. The devil's symbol, by some strange error in translation, became three H's instead of three sixes on the weather report. Dampness clung to everything and everyone, reminding all that the earth and our bodies are mostly water, and how could we have ever forgotten?

I was stuck working behind the counter at my home away from home, only slightly relieved to be inside the air-conditioned, no-name, third-rate convenience store on a day like this instead of sitting inside in the dark in front of the window fan in my sweltering bedroom, but that didn't stop me from counting down the hours until the day's shift in hell drew to a close. Three left. That was when he walked in.

Let's talk about him. He was neither trim nor overweight. He was a man of some mass who carried it well. Shrouded beneath his clothing was a generous amount of flesh that could either be tubbiness or firm and solid muscle. Masking this mystery mass were some of the loudest clothes I had laid eyes on all day, all summer. In fact, aside from campy movies, I don't think I'd ever seen someone dressed so absurdly. He wasn't wearing a T-shirt. He wasn't wearing jeans. Nor was the man wearing something that could be mistaken for business clothes. He wore a Hawaiian shirt—turquoise, green, and yellow swirled together in the pattern of palm trees and ocean waves. His pants were white. I was pretty confident I'd never seen a man wear white pants before, with the exception of the guys who pumped gas at Hess, but they didn't have much of a choice in the matter.

Whoever this man was, he was obviously lost.

He entered the store. He walked to the beverage case. I watched him not only because he was the only customer in the store, but because there was something not right about him. As if the clothes weren't enough, he refused to take his sunglasses off once inside, and there was also that way he carried himself. It made my stomach very uncomfortable. I slid my hand over to the little button underneath the counter, the button which would signal the local police force that something had gone horribly wrong at Johnny's Quik Mart.

Cold beads of sweat rolled down my armpits, despite the fact that my skin had broken out in a layer of goose bumps. My heart pounded loud and fast in my chest, like on one of those nights when I consume too much caffeine and am kept awake by every little noise I hear, when every little noise from the hum of the refrigerator to the wind blowing the trees outside signals that my worst nightmares have been brought to life. There was now two hours and fifty-seven minutes to go in my shift, but I wondered if I would ever see freedom. It seemed more likely that I would be brought down by a heart attack because some customer with poor fashion sense forgot to take off his sunglasses and couldn't decide what he wanted to drink. I was not being paid enough for this job.

Then, suddenly, a movement. He reached not for a gun, not for a machete, but for a bottle of iced tea. Well, what had I expected, after all? Had I expected him to take out a gun and start shooting up the beverage case? That would be ridiculous. What kind of whack job went around shooting up refrigerated beverage cases? No, the chances were better than good that if he was going to shoot up anything it was going to be me, and that it was going to be sometime after he asked me to hand over the money and was disappointed to learn that the entire contents of the cash register was a paltry $322.83. If I was lucky, he'd be a really bad shot, or have a tremor in his hand and the bullet would just graze my ear or take a chunk out of my shoulder.

I licked my lips and tried not to look nervous. Criminals could sense fear, couldn't they? Or was that dogs?

He placed his bottle of sweetened, no-lemon iced tea on the counter.

I picked it up, punched a few buttons on the register, and said, “A dollar twenty-nine.”

“Tell me, Priscilla, why is it that things are always something-nine cents?” he asked.

The bottle of sweetened, no-lemon iced tea plummeted from my hand to the linoleum floor where it shattered into a million and nine pieces, splashing iced tea just about everywhere, including on my shoes and bare legs. I couldn't move. I had never introduced myself. I wasn't wearing a name tag.

He didn't seem to mind about the spilled beverage nor about the fact that I seemed in some state of paralysis. He slapped $1.30 on the counter and walked out without getting his change, without getting his bottle of iced tea, shattered or otherwise.

People called Sherman “Cump” for short. Tecumseh was his real first name. When he was a kid, his dad died and his mom couldn't afford to take care of all the kids. So this rich family, the Ewings, adopted Sherman and then christened him William. A traveling preacher picked the name because the day of his christening was St. William's Day, and the Ewings said it sounded good to them. How fucked up is that? I don't think anyone ever called him William, at least no one who knew him.

“Look, maybe he's just some perv who walks into convenience stores and says weird shit to people,” Willow said as she smoked her cigarette. “People get off on the weirdest things. It's a sick world.”

“It wasn't what he said that was weird, it was that he knew my name,” I repeated, still a bit dazed and jumpy.

“So, like, maybe he's somebody's brother or uncle or something. I bet someone put him up to it. Shit, it was probably Randy. In fact, I'm sure it was. This is just his sort of sick humor.”

“Randy doesn't know anyone who owns a Hawaiian shirt.”

“You've been screwing my brother for how long, and you haven't caught on to the fact that he's got some really loopy friends? It's like he immerses himself in weirdos just so he can feel normal.”

“Thank you,” I said, chewing nervously on the inside of my lip.

“There's reasons you'll never be elected homecoming queen, but shit, it ain't like I'm in the running either,” Willow added.

“If it wasn't Randy, then who?” I asked anxiously.

“I'm telling you, it was Randy. It's got his name written all over it.”

As it turned out, Willow was right about Mr. Something-Nine Cents being saturated in Randy, but interestingly enough, Randy didn't know anyone who owned a Hawaiian shirt, let alone a pair of white pants.

“Since when don't you like chicken nuggets?” my mom asked.

“I said I'm just not hungry, all right?”

I rolled around the small balls of breaded processed chicken on my plate. I would not look up to meet my mother's gaze. If only she would just shut up and leave me alone, then I wouldn't have to feel more nauseated than I already did, but I knew that there was more chance of an eleven-foot iguana falling out of the sky and landing on my dinner plate than there was of my mother keeping her peace.

“Maybe you've been eating so many meals over at the Jenkinses' that you've lost your taste for low-brow cooking,” she said.

“They eat pizza and potato chips,” I said without looking up.

“What kind of potato chips?”

“Does it matter?”

“Look, you think because you're seventeen you can get away with pulling this attitude shit on me. Don't deny it. I know how your teenage mind works.”

“It's not an attitude,” I said looking up from my plate. I put down my fork. “I'm just not hungry. I don't feel so great!”

The last part came out as a shout, and I stood and left the room with haste, retreating to the seclusion of my bedroom where I could still hear my mother shouting at me.

“You think I don't know what it's like to be seventeen? You think you're the first teenager who ever lived? If you think you're gonna throw this teenage angst shit at me, then I got news for you!”

I flipped on the window fan and leaned in close, so that the breeze hit me in the face and the whirring noise blocked out my mother's shouting.