Untitled (44 page)

  I felt my face getting hot. "Sorry. I just. . . ."

  "You think you can come poking around anywhere?"

  "I said I was sorry. . . ."

  "You kids from the development think you own everything."

  "I didn't mean. . . ."

"Why don't you just go back where you came from?"

  "That would be fine with me," I managed to say, just before my voice broke. I turned away, feeling tears on my face, and immediately tripped over a rock and fell hard, catching myself on my hands and one knee. When I scrambled to my feet, the girl was standing beside me.

  "Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?" I snarled at her, trying to cover my tears with anger. "I wasn't doing anything wrong."

  She was studying me, her head cocked to one side. "You haven't been here before, have you?" she asked, her voice calmer.

  I shook my head. "My family just moved to this lousy neighborhood."

  "Your knee is bleeding," she said. "So's your hand. Come on and sit down. I've got band-aids."

  I sat in the armchair, and she washed my cuts with water from the creek, carried in the china cup. She took a box of band-aids from one of her shelves. While she dabbed at my scraped knee with a wet bandana, she explained that some kids had been there a few days back and messed with all her stuff, pulling down the shelves and tipping over the chair. "There are some really mean kids around here," she said. "You're lucky I didn't just start throwing rocks at you. I can hide in the trees and nail a kid with a rock from thirty feet away."

  She sat back on her heels, studying my bandaged knee. "Well, I guess you'll be okay now." She met my eyes with a steady gaze. "You asked who I am, so I guess I better tell you. I'm the queen of the foxes."

  "The queen of the foxes," I repeated.

  "That's right – the queen of all the foxes." Suddenly she was on her feet. "Come on. I'll show you something cool."

  No time for any more questions. She was running away through the trees, and I followed.

  She led me to a place by the creek where you could catch orange and black newts with thoughtful eyes. The queen of the foxes caught one and handed it to me. It felt like cold rubber on my hand. It didn't struggle to escape. Instead, it blinked at me and then started walking with high, slow steps, as if it were still moving through water.

  At first, I stayed on the bank of the creek. When I said I'd be in trouble if I got my clothes dirty, the queen of the foxes pointed out that my bleeding hand had already left smears of blood and mud on my shorts. Since I was already in trouble, I might as well have all the fun I could. So I got into the creek too, freed the newt that she had caught for me, and caught another.

  Then we sat on the bank and dried out. While we were there, she painted my face with clay from the bank. War paint, she called it. She showed me how to make a squawking noise with a blade of grass. A couple of blue jays sat in the tree and scolded us for making such a racket.

  "Hey, what's your name, anyway?" I asked her.

  "My name? She leaned back and looked up at the branches of the trees. "You can call me Fox."

  "That's not a name."

  She shrugged. "Why not?"

  "I can't tell my mother that your name is Fox. She won't believe it."

  "Why do you have to tell her anything?"

  "She'll ask."

  She shrugged. "So make up something she'll like better. You call me Fox, and I'll call you Mouse."

  "No you won't."

  "Then what should I call you?"

  "Call me Newt," I said, thinking of the slow-moving amphibians with their thoughtful eyes. "That would be good."

  Somehow or other, the afternoon went away, and I realized that I was hungry and the sun was low in the sky. "Hey, I've got to get going," I said. "My mother will be really pissed."

  "Ah," she said, lying back in the grass. "I don't have to worry about that. I don't have a mother."

  "Yeah?" I squinted at her, but her eyes were closed and she didn't notice. As I tried to figure out what to say, I heard a man's voice calling in the distance. "Sarah! Sarah, are you there?"

  She frowned. "That's my dad," she muttered. "I better go talk to him." She ran off through the trees toward the voice. After a minute, I followed.

  The path led to an old white house on the edge of the woods. It wasn't like any house I'd ever seen before – there was no driveway, no yard. A dirt road ended in front of the house, where a battered old sedan was parked beside an enormous motorcycle. Weeds grew in the flowerbed beside the front steps, and there was all kinds of junk near the door: a cast-iron bathtub half filled with water, a barbecue built from an oil drum, a pile of hubcaps. The paint on the house was peeling.

  Fox stood on the front porch, talking to a burly man wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt with the sleeves torn off. They looked up and saw me standing on the edge of the woods. "This is Newt," Fox said. "Newt, this is Gus. He's my dad."

  He didn't look like anybody's father. He didn't have a beard, but he needed a shave. He had three silver studs in his left ear. His dark hair was tied back with a rubber band. On his right arm, there was a tattoo, an elaborate pattern of spiraling black lines.

  "How's it going, Newt?" Gus didn't seem at all startled at my strange new name. "Where did you come from?"

  "My family just moved here, mister uh. . . ."

  "Just call me Gus," he said. "I don't answer to mister."

  I nodded uncomfortably. He didn't look like anyone's dad, but it still seemed strange to call him by his first name.

  "I found her in the woods," Fox said. "Showed her where the newts live."

  "That's good. I'm glad you found your way here." He seemed genuinely pleased. "Be nice for Sarah to have some company."

  I kept looking at the tattoo. I had never met anyone with a tattoo before.

  He walked down from the porch and sat on the bottom step. "You interested in tattoos? Take a look." I studied his arm. "You can touch it if you like. It's okay."

  Gingerly, I traced one of the spiraling lines with a finger.

  "Got it in New Zealand from a Maori fellow. It's supposed to attract good fortune. Seems to work. Right after I got it, I sold my first short story."

  There was a little too much implied by all that for me to absorb, but I nodded as if I understood.

  After a minute, he stood up and said, "You want to join us for dinner? Nothing fancy – just canned chili."

  "No, thanks," I said. "I'd better go home."

  "Don't forget to wash your face," he suggested.

  Fox and I washed up with the hose outside the house, and then I headed home.

  I got home just when my father got back from work. He was telling my brother that he shouldn't just be sitting around watching trash on TV. My mother was complaining about the cost of fixing the air conditioner. I snuck up to my room and changed before anyone noticed my muddy clothes and wet shoes.

  When I got downstairs, I set the table, and we had dinner.

  My mother and father did not like one another much. Dinner was just about the only time they sat down together. A vague sense of tension hung over the table, centering on my father. He was always angry – not about anything in particular, but about everything, all the time. But he pretended he wasn't angry. He was always joking, but the jokes weren't very funny.

  "I see you've decided that meat is better if it's black around the edges," he said to my mother that night. The London broil was well-done, though far from black. "That's an interesting theory."

  My mother laughed at my father's comment, pretending that he was just joking.

  He glanced at me. "Your mother thinks that charcoal is good for the digestion," he said.

  I smiled and didn't say anything. My own strategy for dealing with my father was to say as little as possible.

  My father turned to my brother. "What educational shows did you watch on TV today? I'm sure you can learn a great deal from watching 'The Price is Right.' "

  "I didn't watch TV all day," my brother said sullenly.

  "Mark explored the neighborhood this afternoon," my mother said.

  "I see – out looking for trouble. I'm sure there are just as many young hoodlums in this town as there were in Connecticut. I'm confident you'll find them." Once, in Connecticut, the police had brought Mark home; he'd been with some boys who had been caught shoplifting.

  "I met some kids down the block," Mark said. "They all belong to the country club. Can we join the country club so I can go swimming with them?" This last question was directed to my mother.

  "Swimming at the country club?" my father said. "Now isn't that nice? Maybe we need to get you a job so that you don't have so much time weighing heavy on your hands."

  Mark didn't say anything. My father was talking about how young he had been when he had his first job. I noticed that Mark was staring at me, and I could feel it coming. He was going to say something to get my father off his case and onto mine. When my father paused, Mark said, "Hey, Joan, how come you always hold onto your glass when you eat? It looks really stupid."

  I looked down at my hands. My left hand was gripping my glass of milk tightly.

  "You look like you're afraid that someone's going to try to steal your milk from you," my father said, chuckling. "Just relax. You're not living in a den of wild animals."

The next day, I went back to Fox's place in the woods. When my mother asked where I was going, I told her that I was going to play with a girl I had met. I told her I was going to have lunch with my new friend. Just when my mother was starting to ask a bunch of questions I didn't want to answer, the phone rang. It was one of my mother's friends from the city. I stood there for a minute, like I was waiting for my mother's attention, until she impatiently waved me out the door – which is what I had really been waiting for.

  I found Fox curled up in the armchair under the trees, reading a book. "It's too bad there aren't any hedgehogs around here," she said, as if she were continuing a conversation that we'd begun much earlier. "They have hedgehogs in England." She tapped her finger on the book, and I looked over her shoulder at the picture.

  "It's cute," I said hesitantly.

  "Foxes eat 'em," she said, grinning.

  I gave her a dubious look.

  "Let's go." She was out of the chair and leading me off into the woods to show me where a branch of the stream ran into a culvert, a concrete tunnel that was so big that when I was standing in the stream I could barely reach the top with my outstretched arm. We waded in the stream and went into the culvert, walking through the algae-scented darkness until the mouth of the tunnel was a tiny spot of light in the distance.

  "Isn't this great?" Fox's voice echoed from the culvert walls. "Even in the middle of the afternoon, it's cool in here. It's a great place to hide."

  I looked into the darkness, black and velvety, silent except for the delicate music of trickling water. It was simultaneously terrifying and inviting.

  "I wonder where it goes," Fox said. "One of these days, I'm going to bring a flashlight and keep going."

  I glanced toward the glimmer of light at the mouth of the culvert, then stared into the darkness again and shivered. "Okay," I said. "We could do that."

  "Great. Come on – I'll show you some secrets." She splashed in the direction of the opening, and I followed, returning to the heat and the light of the day.

  She showed me a maze of tiny paths that ran through the underbrush around the clearing. They were just big enough for us, no bigger. She had stacked stones at places where the paths intersected – "for throwing at intruders," she told me. Then she touched my arm. "Tag," she said, "you're it."

  She ran away into the maze, and I chased her, ducking under a branch, running around a corner, always staying on the path because plunging through the underbrush was painful and scratchy. I tagged her, and then she chased me, whooping and shouting as she ran. Around and around, up this path and down that. Sometimes, I caught a glimpse of the clearing with the armchair, the place I had started thinking of as Fox's living room. And sometimes I was deep in the bushes, concealed from the world. Around and around until I knew that the path by the broken branch led back to the living room and that the one by a pile of rocks led back to the place where the newts lived and so on.

  Fox was chasing me, and she had fallen silent. I didn't know where she was. I crept quietly back toward the living room. I was almost there when I heard a sound behind me. Fox dropped from the branch of a walnut tree and tagged me from behind. "You're it," she said. "Let's have lunch."

  We went back to her living room in the clearing for lunch – it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to eat peanut butter on crackers under the trees.

  "Are there really foxes around here?" I asked her.

  "Sure," she said. "But you never see them during the day."

  "How did you get to be queen of the foxes?"

  She was sitting in the armchair and the light shining through the leaves of the walnut trees dappled her hair. I squinted my eyes in the lazy afternoon heat, and the bright spots of sunlight looked like jewels; the battered chair, like a throne. She tipped her head back regally, looking up into the leaves. "It started a long time ago," she said slowly. "Back when I was a little girl."

  Then she told me this story.

Once there was a woman who did not like who she was. She felt uneasy with herself, as if she did not
t inside her own body. When she looked in the mirror, she did not recognize herself. Was that her nose? Were those her eyes? They didn't seem quite right, though she could not have told you what the right nose or eyes would be.