The Witch (4 page)

The back door closed on us. Small as I was, the woven seat of the chair sagged beneath me. I still wasn't any good at sitting still and I kicked at the chair frame, trying to get something to break. There wasn't ever anything to do in the back yard. From the alley beyond the fence came occasionally interesting sounds of cars passing, garbage trucks, voices, but we never saw any of it. The weather had turned warm enough for flies and Kerry swatted them away. Mrs. Wojo fed him up so much, his face was getting round. He never saved cookies for me anymore. I said, “You look like a femmy girl.” He still hadn't gotten his hair cut.

“Shut up. You smell like pee.”

“I do not.” I didn't think I did. Then the back door opened and our father stood there, with Monica crowding up behind him.

We were so unprepared for the sight of them that we just sat there staring. “Hey there, guys,” our father said, jolly, but with an edge of annoyance. I guess we were supposed to rush toward him, overjoyed. “Whatsa matter with you, come here.”

We did get up then and allow ourselves to be embraced and patted. Both our father and Monica looked out of breath, keyed up. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail and was wearing a new pair of pinchy-looking shoes. Our father had shaved with so much care that his face was bright pink. They looked the way a photograph of people you know can look, familiar and strange at the same time.

One of the DCFS women came to the screen door and looked out at us. It was what they call a supervised visit.

They sat down in the extra lawn chairs and wobbled around, trying to get comfortable. Our father cursed mildly, the chair hurting his bad back. “Are we going home?” I asked. I was bouncing up and down, already gone.

“Ah, we have to work a few things out before that happens,” my father said, and though I wasn't a big cryer I did cry then, and Kerry did too, out of the kind of emotional hydraulics that can lead to a whole room full of crying children, once one of them starts up. “Oh come on now,” our father said, uselessly. “It's not so bad here, is it? You both look great, she must be taking great care of you.”

“She's a witch,” I said, and that got their attention, startled them, but I followed it up with, “She doesn't like me,” and that allowed them to relax, dismiss me.

“Of course she likes you, honey,” our father said. “She likes children, that's why she takes care of them.”

“She's got her a real nice house,” Monica said. “If I could stay in a house like this, I'd count my lucky stars.”

Kerry was still crying and our father was getting impatient with him. “Come on, buddy, turn off those waterworks. Let's take a look at you. Put on a little weight, have you?”

“She's fattening him up so she can sell him to the gypsies! She locks us in the basement!”

Our father and Monica put their lips together in a way that was both tolerant and disapproving, and I knew they didn't believe me, and that there was no point in telling them about the dreams I had every night where Frank tried to smother me and give me polio, so that every night I fought hard not to fall asleep and always lost.

But they should have listened to me. They really should have.

Just then the screen door opened and Mrs. Wojo came out, carrying a tray with glasses of lemonade and some packaged cookies set out on paper napkins. “I thought you all might like a refreshment,” she said, sweet as pie. She was wearing a dress made of some shiny navy blue fabric and when she lifted up her arms, you could see the white, baked-in rings of old deodorant and old sweat.

I helped myself to three of the cookies. Her eyes cut me an evil look but she didn't dare say anything in front of the others. When she had gone back inside, our father said, “See? She's real nice.” But he seemed to disbelieve himself even as he spoke, his shoulders sinking.

I said, “We could leave with you. We could run real fast, they won't catch us.”

“Actually, honey, you can't. It's a matter of the law now.” The idea of the law seemed to take something out of him, deflate him. He shifted his weight in the miserable chair.

Monica scrubbed the cookie crumbs from her mouth with the back of her hand, and our father asked her what was wrong with using a napkin. They had themselves a little fuss about it, back and forth, and finally Monica waved her hands around and said, “Well, why do we even have to be here? It's because these kids got themselves out of the car! Why did you do that, huh? You know you wasn't supposed to!”

Kerry said, “Jo got out first. It was her fault.”

The solid weight of the guilt landed on me. Everything had been my fault and always would be. I said, “I was trying to walk home.”

Monica said, “The whole way to North Halsted? That would have been some trick.”

“Keep your pants on, Monica. It's not like it matters now. Ah crap.” Our father was trying to get himself loose from the lawn chair.

Kerry and I cried some more when they were on their way out the front door. We saw the old maroon Chevy parked at the curb, and the sight of it pierced us, the wrongness of it driving away without us. “It's gonna be fine,” our father said, as we clung to his legs, wetting his knees with our tears. “Pretty soon school's gonna start, well, Ker's gonna have school. Think how smart you'll get!”

Then the door shut, and they were gone. Mrs. Wojo locked and bolted it after them. We stopped crying right away. It wouldn't do us any good.

Mrs. Wojo let the silence settle. Then she said, “So that's your father, is it? Well, that explains a few things.” Then she went off to undo and dispose of the remnants of her hospitality.

I wanted to call them back and explain things better. Because it was one of Mrs. Wojo's jokes that she was going to sell Kerry to the gypsies when he was fat enough—whatever a gypsy was—and after a while we understood it as a joke, the same way our father said teasing, unpleasant things. But she did lock us in the basement.

The entire time we'd been at Mrs. Wojo's, we hadn't left the house or back yard. Still, Mrs. Wojo had her needs, her grocery shopping, her life carried on outside her four walls. And when a need arose, she herded us into the basement and locked the door to the landing. The first time we were unsuspecting. After that we tried hiding from her, and once I kicked at her shins and missed, and she clamped both hands on my shoulders and put her big powdered face next to mine and breathed death at me. “Do you want to go to the juvenile home? Do you want to live
in a cell and take crazy pills? Hah? Get on down there.” She slammed the door on us and slid the lock into place.

The basement was where Mrs. Wojo did her laundry. There were two squat machines and a deep tub sink, and a clothesline where she hung different horrible items of clothing. Her underpants had cuffs around the leg holes, her bras were large and heroically reinforced, a triumph of elastic. The furnace was down there too, and an old coal chute, and some half-windows up high in the walls, barred over against burglars. In a part of it, where there were no windows, the concrete floor gave out and there was only bare earth. The basement seemed to be larger than the house itself, with side passages and cupboards and a workbench with buckets of calcified paint, old coffee cans filled with nails, knuckle-shaped metal parts of unknown use, old light switches. We poked around a little but the place scared us. We had been taken away from our father because he'd locked us in a car—this had been explained to us—and now Mrs. Wojo locked us in a basement and nobody wanted to believe me about it.

Then after a while, and I suppose it wasn't ever all that long, we'd hear her footsteps overhead, and the door opened and we were summoned upstairs, to help put away the groceries or some other chore. Once, as she was leaving, Kerry begged to go with her, and you could see her hesitate, wanting to, but sorting it out. “Not today, maybe some other time.”

“You suck,” I informed him, once we were locked in together. It was one of my father's sayings.

“I'm going to tell you said that.”

“Well I'm going to dig up worms and put them in your bed.” I was furious with him for his weakness, for abandoning me.

“I'll tell about that too.” He had a collaborator's smugness. I
hated him. I hated his fat face and his pretty hair and the look and smell of his alien, boy's body, and I imagine he hated me too for his own, interlocking set of reasons. But we had no choice in each other. The twoness of us was fixed for all time.

I didn't plan what happened to Mrs. Wojo, except in the sense that I had imagined a hundred different scenes of escaping her, a kid's imaginings in which I became a cowboy or a soldier or something else powerful and victorious. In the end, it came about because she forgot to secure us in the back yard while she did the laundry.

Because she always did that, kicked us out of the house when she had chores to do in the basement. I expect she didn't trust us to be alone and unsupervised in the house. We might steal food, or break something, or use the telephone to call long distance. We stayed in the yard until she was ready to let us back in, the door latched against us, and that was that.

Except for this particular day. I was thirsty, and impatient, and when I pulled at the handle of the door to rattle it, it opened. Kerry wasn't paying attention. He was sitting at the edge of the gravel, sorting the rocks. I went inside. I wasn't especially quiet about it, but the laundry machines were rolling and sudsing in the basement, and I guess they covered my noise. I went into the kitchen and reached up to the sink to fill a glass and drink. Then I went back to the landing and without any thought at all, I shut the basement door and slipped the bolt in place.

Nothing happened. I went back outside. I watched Kerry play with the rocks. After a while he looked up, squinting at me. “What were you doing?”

“I got a drink.”

“Well I want one too.”

“Go ahead,” I told him. He got up, watching me in a
mistrustful way, and we both stood on the back stairs. “See?” I said, presenting him with the fact of the open door.

I went in first and Kerry followed. He took a glass from the dish drainer, ran the tap, and drank. “Where is she?”

I pointed to the basement door. “Down there.” He didn't understand at first. I dragged a chair over to the cupboard where Mrs. Wojo kept the cookies, climbed up, and pulled them out. They weren't a good kind, some flavored wafer, dry as toast, but I took a handful and pushed the package at him. He didn't take any. I opened the refrigerator and poked around, but there was nothing I wanted, only a lot of little bowls hooded in plastic.

“What are you doing?” Kerry whispered, stricken. Understand, at that point I was only feeling clever about evading Mrs. Wojo for a little while. I just wanted to break some rules before she reappeared to punish me. It hadn't yet occurred to me that she couldn't get out.

But then she was at the top of the steps, pounding at the door and making it shudder. “UNDO THIS LOCK THIS INSTANT! I MEAN IT, YOU LITTLE SHITS!”

The swearing shocked us as much as anything. We stood together on the step above the landing while she worked the doorknob, uselessly, from the other side. “OPEN THIS DOOR! OR I WILL SKIN YOU ALIVE! YOU THINK I'M KIDDING?”

“We have to let her out,” Kerry said, still whispering. I shook my head, no. I didn't want to be skinned alive. “We have to,” he said again. “We can call the fire department, they'll let her out.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. New and wonderful ideas were swooping through my head like birds, like my head was a room with wide-open windows.

“DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH TROUBLE YOU'RE IN?
YOU ARE IN FOR A WORLD OF HURT! I WILL BEAT YOU DOWN! AND THEN YOU ARE GOING TO JAIL!”

Her big black pursey purse was on the kitchen table. I dumped it upside down. I wasn't even thinking of stealing from her. I just wanted to be bad. In the mess of old Kleenex and gum and powder, I saw her key ring. Kerry saw it too. He grabbed for it but I got it first.

“Give it to me!”

“No!”

The basement door was still shaking. I got up my nerve and hopped past it to the back door. “Come on,” I said to Kerry, but he just stood there.

“Kerry, honey?” Mrs. Wojo stopped beating on the door. “Are you there? I know you didn't do anything. I know it's not your fault.”

The giddiness went out of me and my stomach pitched. Mrs. Wojo went on. “I know you're a good boy. Why don't you open the door and I'll fix you some Kool-Aid, the purple kind you like.”

“She's lying,” I said, and I swear on my life I saw black specks fly out of the keyhole then, like a swarm of black bees, and the next instant they were gone, and when she spoke again there was more of an edge to it, like she couldn't concentrate on both things at once, hating me and coaxing him.

“If you let me out, we can go to a baseball game. I bet you've never seen one of those, have you? We can sit up front so you can catch the ball when it comes into the stands. You can have a hot dog. Two, if you want them.”

“If you let her out,” I said, “she'll give you polio, like she did Frank.”

She roared, and the door shook in its frame, and Kerry ran after me out to the yard.

I needed his help to unlock the gate, because it was just out of my reach, and it took a long time to find the right key and get it to turn. But we managed it, and then we were on the other side of the fence. The alley, now that we could see it for ourselves, was a place of marvels, rutted tire tracks, plastic bags blown against a fence, a lane of blue sky overhead.

We started running. It didn't matter what direction, since we were completely lost, and when we came to a street we slowed down. Nobody was following us. We walked a long time, and we probably looked pretty draggled when we walked up to a parked taxi, since we knew that taxis took people places, and asked the driver if he'd take us home. “We live on North Halsted,” I said. “We were with our dad, at the ball game, and we got lost in the crowd.”