Mysterious Skin (5 page)

Downstairs, a tape player clicked on. Horror movie soundtrack music lifted through the air, a droning bass punctuated by a high, screechy violin’s staccato. I took my place in the smallest bedroom, grabbed a broom, and crouched in a musty corner. On the room’s opposite side, in front of the window, Breeze hung from a noose. She looked dead, in spite of the hidden sling around her shoulders and the foot she propped against the window. I waved the broom at her, and she winked back. She adjusted the rope. The candlelight glowed a pair of pink Vs against her face.

Lucas Black whistled from downstairs. Three seconds of silence. Outside, car doors slammed.

I listened as Deborah assembled some kids. “We’ll have tours every ten minutes,” she said in her regular voice. Pause. Then, gravelly, “Greetings to all. I hope you’re feeling brave. This house is haunted. The man who lived here was a cold-blooded murderer. One night he left the dinner table….” I closed my eyes and imagined a bundled-up, chickenhearted row of kids, their gazes fixed on the witch tour guide.

The rubber mask made my ears feel as if tiny hands were squeezing them. Slowly, the assembly began climbing the stairs. “The youngest daughter was the first to go,” Deborah hissed at the kids. “He brought her into this room,
where he told her to open her mouth and close her eyes. She thought she was getting a nice mouthful of candy corn or cinnamon bears for dessert, but boy, was she wrong.”

Downstairs, the horror film music crescendoed. Upstairs, a series of wails. The kids had stepped into the room where Marcy Hathaway lay sprawled across the floor, her face drenched with a caul of blood, a raw veal cutlet poised on her chest to simulate a sliced-off tongue.

The tour group returned to the hallway. As I squatted there, my heart drummed in my chest. My throat trapped each thin breath. At any second, tonight’s kids would burst into the bedroom.

The door creaked open. Breeze rolled her eyes into her head and lolled her tongue. “Go on inside,” Deborah told the kids, and they filed in. “He hung this daughter. Open your mouth and close your eyes. That’s what he said to all of them. He listened to the snap of this girl’s fifteen-year-old neck.” The kids surrounded the body, fascinated. A little boy with plastic fangs began to cry.

I waited. They spun around, ready to explore the next roomful of carnage. Then I sprang from the corner. They screamed as I swung the broom at them, careful not to touch their heads. They sprinted through the door. I laughed, and Deborah gave me the thumbs-up.

The tours sped by, one every fifteen minutes. After a while, Deborah lost her interest. I selected one member from each group to pick on, usually a girl or boy in a topnotch costume. It disappointed me that none were Martians or robotic aliens, so I wound up picking a favorite in the kid dressed as the Shroud of Turin. He or she wore a black body suit and headpiece, gilded head to toe to resemble the pre-Resurrection Jesus. I gave the “Shroud” a jab of my broom and soft pinches from my glued-on devil’s claws.

With the final tours, the crowd began to change. I had
recognized most kids from Sundays at Little River Lutheran, but now more unfamiliar faces drifted through the rooms. Most unrecognizables seemed older. “I think they’re from Hutchinson,” Breeze whispered. The door reopened, and her irises rolled back into her head.

A group of boys looked familiar to me. Six of them filed into the syrupy-smelling bedroom. They had ditched their tour guide. I watched them through the slits in my mask. One belched, his breath visible in the chilly air. He had a blond crew cut and a choker necklace made of minuscule white shells. Another wore overalls and a Reds baseball cap, his teeth gleaming with a row of braces. None of the boys had dressed in a costume.

I emerged from the shadow. Metal-mouth spun and started laughing. “Hey, it’s Lucifer.” The others turned and stared.

The boys surrounded me. I opened my mouth and choked out the word “boo.” All six laughed. Even Breeze Campbell laughed. Her body shook from its noose.

Then the crew cut boy with the shell necklace leaned forward. His green eyes stared into mine.

In that moment, I remembered. I’d known these boys a couple of years previous, during the summer of the missing time and the UFO, the summer I’d started Little League in Hutchinson. I had practiced with them; had listened to them yelling things like “four eyes” and “pansy” and “the only place for you is the bench.” Now, years later, this boy reached toward me, and the memories flooded back—how I hated baseball, how I never returned, even though my father had urged me on, had bragged of the game’s benefits.

Crew cut pushed me against the wall. “Really, unbelievably, incredibly frightening,” he said. His hand shot toward my Satan mask. He tore it from my head, tossing it to the floor.

I felt hairs rip from my scalp. I opened my eyes, and the world had slipped out of focus. My glasses had come off with my mask.

They were laughing, all of them. Breeze’s giggle blistered the air, shrill and pestering, like a blue jay’s screech above their tenors. She was showing off for them. I stepped toward their circle.

My right boot landed on the glasses. I heard the crack, felt them snap like potato chips. I bent to pick them up. Nothing but shards, as thin and sharp as the teeth in a monster’s mouth. I swept the pieces aside and grabbed my mask.

The boys watched me run from the room. I had made a fool of myself, just as I’d done again and again, summers ago. I remembered standing in right field, dropping a pop fly, the older boys taunting me. I staggered downstairs, and my foot slipped on a bloody stair, my arm knocking over the doll and her scissor-gouged face. I passed the hallway, where Deborah and the others stood talking. Without glasses, I could hardly see them. Deborah’s warty face was pressed against Lucas Black’s chest, smudging it with green makeup. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I still heard them upstairs, my old teammates. Their voices echoed bits of sentences: “the decapitated guy in the next room,” “one lousy dollar,” “waiting for us outside in the station wagon.”

Deborah held out her hand. “What’s the matter?”

I sped through the kitchen. It seemed as though the entire town were laughing now, and the noise echoed through the house. I slammed the screen door and ran across the porch, past the row of cars, into the trees.

Thirty minutes later, I sat with Deborah and Breeze in the Campbells’ car, riding back into Little River. I stared out the window, the black night rushing past, my eyes glazing
over. Something had happened to me when I left the Mansion, something I couldn’t quite remember.

I recall bits and pieces. When I sprinted from the house, I saw the moon, orange, almost electric, stalled between feathery clouds like a helium balloon, ready to burst into a million splinters. Without glasses, the world melted from focus. The house and trees seemed under water. I leaned against a tree and felt its knobby trunk pressing into my skin like a column of bones.

I put the mask back on. Behind me, the pipe organ music swelled, softened, swelled again. Most of the kids had gone home. “Let’s call it a night,” an adult said. I kept walking, trying not to cry. My scalp tingled from where the hair had ripped out, and my face pounded from the kid’s hand.

I remember passing the parked cars. Ahead, nothing but air so cold it snapped, and an arena of trees, the bordering saplings leading into towering, ancient cottonwoods and oaks. I wandered through them, their arms whispering and creaking in the wind. I looked up to their blurry branches, as lacy and fragile as spiderwebs.

Back at the house, Leaf roared, no doubt grabbing some kid’s shoulder. A chorus of wails. “Hey, Brian,” Deborah yelled. I was no longer part of that scene. I didn’t stop walking. The Little League boys are in the past, I told myself. Forget them.

In the distance I heard a creek’s murmur. I moved toward the sound, deeper into the trees. Thorns from bushes snagged my cape, oak leaves fell around me, and my galoshes oozed through mud puddles.

A stick cracked behind me. I remember it making that exact sound—
crack
.

Then I noticed how everything had altered to an unbelievable silence. The crickets, the creek, even the wind had ceased. The quiet made me think of that night on the side of
our hill; how I had stood staring up at the sky, a little scared but curiously peaceful, even happy, as the spacecraft hovered its carousel of blue lights above us.

The final thing I remember: In the center of the quiet, another branch snapped. And I turned.

Blur.

Neil McCormick was a scruffy, moody stick of a boy. I developed a crush the same day I set eyes on him. It didn’t take long to discover my crush was doomed: he was one of those queers.

The kids at Sherman Middle School realized this fact during an afternoon recess séance. It was September 1983; at twelve, I’d begun to slip into the antisocial skin I’ve never slipped out of. The trends my Hutchinson classmates followed seemed foolish: neon rubber bracelets, nicknames in iron-on lettering on T-shirt backs, or illegal lollipops made with tequila and an authentic, crystallized dead worm. But when some other sixth graders became interested in the occult, I joined them. “Finally,” I told Mom, “they’re into something cool.” Groups of us traipsed through graveyards on dares. We bought Tarot decks; magazines devoted to telekinesis or out-of-body experiences. We gathered at recess, waiting for some small miracle to happen.

My mom claimed she was observing a change in me. For my upcoming birthday, I’d requested albums by bands whose names sounded especially disturbing or violent: The Dead Boys, Suicide, Throbbing Gristle. I longed for the world that existed beyond Hutchinson, Kansas. “You,
Wendy Peterson, are looking for trouble with a capital T,” Mom had started to warn.

In my eyes, that trouble equalled Neil. I’d noticed him, but I doubted anyone else had. He always seemed to be alone. He was in fifth grade, not sixth, and he didn’t participate in the daily half-hour soccer games—two disqualifications from what most everyone considered cool.

That afternoon, though, he fearlessly broke the séance circle. Two popular girls, Vicky and Rochelle, were attempting to summon a blond TV star from the dead. Sebastian So-and-so’s BMW had recently crashed into a Hollywood brick wall, and my classmates were determined to disclose whatever heaven he now hovered through. “Aaahhhmmm,” the girls moaned. Hands levitated in midair, attempting to catch this or that spiritual vibration.

When Neil interrupted, his sneakered foot stomped squarely on a Ouija board someone had brought. “Watch it, fucker,” a séance attendee said.

“You shitheads know nothing about contacting ghosts,” Neil said. “What you need is a professional.” His voice sounded vaguely grandfatherlike, as if his brain were crowded with knowledge. Eyes opened, concentrations broke. Someone gasped.

A few tall boys’ heads blocked my view. I tried to peek above their shoulders; saw a mop of thick black hair. A breeze blew it. To touch it would be like touching corduroy.

Neil picked up the valentine-shaped beige plastic disk from the Ouija board. It looked like a tiny, three-legged table, a gold pin poking through its center. Sun glinted off the pinpoint. Only moments before, Vicky and Rochelle had placed their polished fingernails on the disk to ask about the coming apocalypse.

“My father’s a hypnotist,” Neil said. He waved the disk in front of his face like a Smith & Wesson. “He’s taught me
all the tricks. I could show you shitheads a fucking thing or two.” From Neil, all those
fucks
and
shits
were more than just throwaway cuss words. They adopted some special meaning.

Neil slipped off his shoes, sat on them, and pretzeled his legs into a configuration only someone that skinny could have managed. The crowd blocked the sun and shadowed Neil. The air felt chilly, and I wished I’d worn a jacket. From somewhere behind us, a teacher’s whistle shrieked. Some classmates chanted a brainless song, its words confused by the wind.

“Who wants to be first?” Neil asked. He excited me to no end. Maybe he’d expose their infinite foolishness.

Vicky volunteered. “No way,” Neil said. “Only a boy will work for the kind of hypnotizing I’m going to do.” Vicky pouted, planted her tequila pop back on her tongue, and stood aside.

Neil pointed toward Robert P., a kid whose last initial stuck because two other sixth graders shared the same first name. Robert P. could speak Spanish and sometimes wore an eye patch. I’d heard him bragging about his first wet dream. Some girls thought him “debonair.” Like most everyone else in school, he seemed stupid to me.

People made room, and my view improved. Under Neil’s direction, Robert lay on his back. Random hands smoothed the grass, sweeping aside pebbles and sandburs, and someone’s wadded-up windbreaker served as a pillow. Roly-poly bugs coiled into themselves. The more nervous kids stayed on the circle’s outer edge, watching for teachers, unsure of what would happen.

Neil sat beside his volunteer. He said, “Everyone, to their knees.” We obeyed. From where I knelt, I could see into Robert P.’s nostrils. His eyes were shut. His mouth had opened slightly, flaunting teeth that needed braces. I wished
for a spot at the opposite side of the circle. Being near Neil McCormick would have satisfied me.

Neil touched his middle and index fingers to Robert P.’s temples. “Breathe deeply.” The fingers rubbed and massaged. I would die, I thought, to be that volunteer. Neil’s voice lowered: “In your mind, begin counting backward. Start at one hundred. One hundred, ninety-nine. Keep going, counting backward, slowly.” Everyone else’s mouths moved in synch. Could he hypnotize an entire crowd?

“Eighty, seventy-nine, seventy-eight…” His voice softened, nearly a whisper. My eyes darted from Robert P.’s face to the back of Neil’s head. I was so close to him. “Sixty,” pause, “nine…”

By the time Neil reached sixty-two, Robert P. looked zombieish. His chest moved with each breath, but all else remained motionless. I figured he was faking it, but wondered what Neil would make him do or say. I hoped for something humiliating, like a piss on Miss Timmons’s shoes or a brick demolishing a school window.

A girl said “Wow,” which Neil seemed to take as a signal. He crawled atop Robert P., straddling his stomach. Belt buckles clicked together. “Fifty,” Neil said. Robert didn’t move. Neil gripped his wrists; pinned his hands above his head. The circle of kids tightened. I could feel fingers against my skin, shoulders brushing mine. I didn’t look at any of them. My gaze fixed on Robert and Neil, locked there as if I were stuck in a theater’s front row, its screen sparkling with some beautiful film.

Neil’s body flattened. He stretched out on Robert. The buckles clicked again.

Clouds crawled across the sun. For a few seconds, everything went dark. Another whistle blared. “Recess over,” Miss Timmons screamed, but no one budged. We couldn’t care less about the whistle. The silence grew, blooming like
a fleecy gray flower. A little voice inside me kept counting: thirty-three, thirty-two.

Then it happened. The lower half of Neil’s body began grinding into Robert’s. I watched Neil’s ass move against him. By that time in my life, I’d seen some R-rated movies, so I knew what fucking looked like. Only these were boys, and their clothes were on.

Neil positioned his face directly over his subject’s. Robert’s eyes opened. They blinked twice, as beady and inquisitive as a hen’s. A thick line of drool spilled from Neil’s mouth. It lingered there, glittered, then trailed between Robert’s lips. Robert coughed, swallowed, coughed again. Neil continued drooling, and as he did, he moved his face closer to Robert’s. At last their mouths touched.

Vicky screamed, and everyone jumped back. Kids shouted things like “gross” and “sick.” They sprinted for Miss Timmons and the classroom, their sneaker colors blurring together. I stood and stared at the separated pair of boys. Robert P. wriggled on the grass like a rattlesnake smashed by a semi. A chocolatey blob stuck to his chin: dirt, suffused with Neil’s spit.

One of Robert’s buddies kicked Neil’s ribs, then hustled away with the others. Neil didn’t wince, accepting the kick as he might accept a handshake.

“Queer,” Robert P. said, plus something in Spanish. He was crying. He kicked Neil, too, his foot connecting with the identical spot his friend had chosen. Then he ran for the school’s glass doors.

Neil sprawled there a while, smiling, his arms spread as if he’d been crucified to the earth. He struggled to get up. He and I were alone on the playground. I wanted to touch his arm, his shoulder, his face. I offered my hand, and he took it.

“That was great,” Neil said. He squeezed my fingers and shuffled toward the school.

Something important had happened, and I had witnessed it. And I had touched Neil McCormick. I waited until he departed earshot. Then I pretended I was a character in a movie. I said, “There’s no turning back now.” A small spit bubble lay on the dirt at my feet like a toad’s gleaming eye. I bent down and popped it. If I could make Neil my friend, I figured I wouldn’t need anyone else.

The séances vanished. By the end of that week, the kids who’d brought their Ouija boards and magic eight balls had jumped back to four-square and soccer. I watched them and wanted to scream. I longed to approach Neil again, this boy I saw as my doorway from the boredom I wanted to escape.

That Friday, a team of bullies gathered on the soccer field. They found Neil standing by a tree and cornered him. “You’re one of those queers,” a kid named Alastair yelled. Neil flew at him. A crowd formed, and I joined it. Arms and legs darted and windmilled, and the ivory crescent of Neil’s fingernail sliced Alastair’s chin. There were tears and a few drops of blood, all of which turned out to be Alastair’s. At twelve, I’d seen more tornadoes than blood. Its red looked magnificent and sacred, as if rubies had been shattered.

When the fight was history, Neil stood beside the same oak. He wore a hot rod T-shirt, a real leather coat with zippers like rows of teeth, and matching boots. Animals had died for those clothes, I thought. He would be perfect holding a switchblade in one hand, and me in the other.

I took a deep breath, collected the gumption, and tiptoed over. I tilted my head heavenward to look cool. The sun rebounded off the steel plates of Sherman Middle School to reveal the roof’s slant. It had been littered with toilet paper, a yellow ball some vandal had sliced from its tether, and random graffiti.
GO STRAIGHT TO HELL
was all someone could think to spray paint. I stared at the jagged red letters and
kept walking. Around me, brown five-pointed leaves fell like the severed hands of babies. I moved through them. Neil heard the crunch, crunch and glanced up.

I leaned against another tree, feigning nonchalance. “You
are
a queer, aren’t you?” I said the
Q
-word as if it were synonymous with
movie star
or
deity
. There was something wonderful about the word, something that set him apart from everyone else, something I wanted to identify with.

“Yeah,” said Neil.

I felt as if I were falling in love. Not so much with him, though, as with the aura of him. It didn’t matter that he was a year younger than me. It didn’t matter, all the distaste I detected in teachers’ voices when they called his name during recess. Neil McCormick, they barked, the fence is there for a reason, don’t cross it. Neil McCormick, put down that stick. I had eavesdropped on Miss Timmons in her office, as she whispered to the school nurse how she dreaded getting the McCormick boy in her class next year. “He’s simply evil,” etcetera.

To me, “evil” didn’t seem all that bad.

Neil’s long hair frayed in the breeze, as shiny black as the lenses in the spectacles of the creepy blind girl who sat behind me on the morning bus. His eyebrows met ominously in his forehead’s middle. Up close, I could smell him. The odor swelled, like something hot. If I weren’t so eager to touch him again, I would have shrunk from it.

I breathed again, as if it were something I did once a day. “But you’re a tough queer, right?”

“Yeah.” He examined the blood smear on the back of his hand. He made certain I was watching, then licked it off.

In my room, I fantasized miniature movies starring Neil and me. My parents had okayed my staying up to watch
Bonnie and Clyde
on the late-late, and in my Neil hallucina
tions I assumed bloodred lipstick and a platinum bob that swirled in the wind, à la Faye Dunaway. I clung to his side. We wielded guns the size of our arms. We blew away bank tellers and other boring innocents, their blood spattering the air in slow-mo. Newspapers tumbleweeded through deserted streets.
MCCORMICK AND PETERSON STRIKE AGAIN
, their headlines read.

In these dreams, we never kissed. I was content to stand beside him. Nights, I fell asleep with clenched fists.

Weeks passed. Neil spent most recesses just standing there, feeling everyone else’s fear. I wasn’t afraid, but I couldn’t approach him again. He was like the electric wire that separated my uncle’s farm from the neighbors’. Touch it, Wendy, my little brother Kurt would say. It won’t hurt. But I couldn’t move toward it. Surely a sliver of blue electricity would jet from the wire and strike me dead. I felt the same way about Neil: I didn’t dare go near him. Not yet.

Zelda Beringer, a girl who wore a headpiece attached to her braces and who wouldn’t remain my friend much longer, teased me about Neil. “How in the world can you think a queer is cute? I mean, you can tell he’s a freak. You can just tell.” I advised Zelda that if she didn’t shut up, I’d gouge out her eyes and force her to swallow them. The resulting look on her face wouldn’t leave my mind for days.

For Columbus Day the cafeteria cooks served the school’s favorite lunch. They fixed potato boats: a bologna slice fried until its edges curled, a scoop of mashed potatoes stuck in its center, watery cheese melted on top. They made home fries, and provided three squirt bottles of ketchup per table. For dessert, banana halves, rolled in a mucousy marriage of powdered gelatin and water.

Fifth graders sat on the cafeteria’s opposite end, but that day I was blessed with a great view of Neil. He scooped the boat into one hand and devoured it in a single bite. If
I’d had binoculars, I could have watched his puffy lips in close-up.

I remember that day as near perfect, and not just because of potato boats. The yearly sex-ed filmstrips arrived. All afternoon, teachers glanced at clocks and avoided our gazes. We knew what was happening. We’d been through it before. Now we could view those films again, together in the room with the virgin fifth graders. “We’re going to see cartoon tits and ass,” Alastair said, the slightest hint of a scratch still on his chin.