Wink (12 page)

Chapter 23
  From the Fence

Marty watched as they hauled his mother outside and then put her into the ambulance. Two paramedics worked on her, one with an IV in her arm, the other with an oxygen mask on her face.

He crouched in the bushes beside the fence until two of the officers got close and started calling out his name. As they neared him, Marty shuffled deeper into the pasture, and found a patch of bull nettles to hide behind. He waited until they stopped calling for him, and then made his way back to the fence and watched.

The ambulance was gone. So was his mother, at least as far as he could tell, and the two trooper cars had left the front of the house. The two sheriff cars were still in the driveway, and there was a new car backed into the carport. This one was white and long and in the distinct shape of a hearse. Marty had seen hearses but never up-close, and he had never seen one open from the back. On the side of the hearse were credentials for the county coroner, and behind it were Hernandez and a woman, both of them pushing a white-draped body into the back of the vehicle.

Marty recognized the sheet and he recognized the form beneath the sheet, and he thought of the words
Unmerciful
and
Unforgiving
.

After the hearse drove away, Sheriff Dansley and Officer Hernandez made another lap around the house. They stopped at the east side attic window and stood pointing for a minute, moved to the west side and repeated their act, both of them shaking their head, and then they walked to their cars and left.

Marty hadn’t realized how much light they had brought with them, with the flashing police lights and headlights. Now that they were gone, the pasture and the back yard were plunged into darkness, and he was suddenly aware of what things might be crawling around his feet. He considered going back into the house but decided better of it. He didn’t want to go into the lower part of the house, and he certainly wasn’t going through the attic at night.

That left only one place to go, and so Marty angled through the pasture and hopped the fence into the Marsh’s yard. When he knocked, Mrs. Marsh came to the door on whispering feet with a robe wrapped around her, hair messed and eyes wide. She opened the door and shooed him inside and looked around the carport before she closed the door and locked it.

Mrs. Marsh made up a couch in the living room and gave him a shirt to sleep in, and insisted he shower before he lay down, and brush his teeth with his finger and a dab of toothpaste, and wash his hair and ears and face and under his arms, and say a short prayer before he closed his eyes. Sadie prayed with them, and it was Sadie who added, “And thank you, Lord, for watching over us as we sleep.”

He was tired, and somehow he slept. The next morning, Mrs. Marsh washed Marty’s pants and socks as they ate breakfast, scrambled eggs with cheese and a piece of French toast. Mrs. Marsh squeezed oranges and grapefruit and strawberries and offered him the cocktail. He ate and drank with Sadie beside him, her stick-legs pulled up to her chin.

“Are you hurting?” Sadie asked.

“Not really.”

“You look hurt.”

“I ain’t.”

“I saw someone in your attic last night.”

Mrs. Marsh stopped washing a plate she had been scrubbing in the sink for quite some time. “What did you say, Sadie-love?”

“I saw someone last night, Momma. In their attic.”

“I know,” Marty said. “I heared him.”

“
Heard
him, Honey,” Mrs. Marsh corrected. “Not
heared
him.”

“I heard him,” Marty said. “I heard him all the time. He has boots.”

“That’s because he’s a man,” Sadie said. “I couldn’t see a face, but I think he’s a ghost-man. He looks real see-through. Have you ever seen black angels? Momma and I saw one.”

That got his attention more than the ghost-man, and Marty sucked down the last of his juice and stood. “You saw a black angel in the attic?”

“Sort of,” Sadie said. “One jumped off your roof when your mom beat you up.”

“Sadie,” Mrs. Marsh said with some admonishment, and Sadie looked down at her hands.

“It’s alright,” Marty said. “It had wings? With a bird-head?”

She looked up at Marty with those golden-green eyes and nodded.

“They ain’t black angels,” he said. “Uncle Cooper said they’re called Boogerbears. He said he could see them with his Dead-Eye, said they were like birds, and he could scare ’em off.”

“It was that wink, wasn’t it,” Mrs. Marsh said. It was not a question but a statement of epiphany, as if she had just solved a riddle.

“Yes, ma’am. He winked at them with his Dead-Eye. It scares off them Boogerbears.” Marty winked, but it didn’t carry the electric jolt that was the hallmark of Uncle Cooper’s Dead-Eye winks. “Thanks for the breakfast. It was real good.”

He didn’t know what else to say or do, and since Mrs. Marsh and Sadie were just staring at him, he turned and left through the back door.

There was a snake in the Marsh’s driveway, which Marty kicked with his boot. It flew into the air wrapping around itself, clanked into the hurricane fence, fell into the grass and disappeared.

Marty crept through his yard, into the carport, and up to the back door and stopped. He listened. When he heard nothing, he opened the door and moved into the kitchen, stopped, and listened. Hearing nothing, he checked his mother’s bedroom and the front bathroom, stuck his head into the living room, and forced himself to make a trip into Gerald’s room. Yellow police tape stretched across Gerald’s room. It read
Crime Scene Do Not Cross,
and below that
Escena de Crimen No Cruzar.
Gerald was gone, but the stench had sunk into the junk and walls like invisible paint, sunk into his flesh like the color of flesh itself.

Marty stared at the empty bed for quite some time. He thought he would cry but did not. It was so quiet without the chuff of the breathing machine, as if the heart of the house had been ripped out.

Grabbing a vise from the corner, Marty turned and fetched his knife and work tools from the dining room table and moved them all to the driveway. He cut the handle in half lengthwise, and then wedged the handle into the vise. As he cut the groove for the knife tang, he stopped for a moment, looked into the house and listened, and then went back to carving out his groove.

He drilled holes in the Bois D’Arc handle and cut it to length. Then he busted off the old fake-ivory handle from the Bowie knife, polished the tang, and used wood glue to fit the new handle in place.

When he finished, Marty swung the knife in front of him. It was heavier with the new handle and as long as a small sword. When he brushed it through the air, he felt ten feet tall. With the knife leading the way, Marty ran out of the yard, toward the traffic on I-10 and the trash dump on the other side.

On his way to the trash dump, Marty stopped at the
Jackson-Williams Cemetery. He angled behind Mr. Jessup’s house, who took care of the old cemetery, and hopped the wrought-iron fence along the tree line.

He touched the tombstones as he passed and watched where he put his feet. Marty didn’t want to step on a grave. Uncle Cooper had said that was a bad idea. “Calls up the Boogerbears when you step on someone’s grave, son.” In the places where Marty could not walk between the graves, he took long strides across them, as if he were crossing an invisible moat.

“Heya, Marty.”

Marty swung his head toward the voice and stumbled across a footstone,
Clarissa Mae Williams, 1910–1943, Beloved Wife and Daughter.
His foot landed on the grave and Marty yanked it back.

“You come to see your Uncle Cooper?” Marty located its source beneath a moss-enshrouded oak tree, in the corner of the graveyard away from the road.

Marty lifted a hand and waved at Mr. Jessup, who leaned on a rake. The arthritic knobs of his fingers released the rake’s handle and returned Marty’s wave.

“Yessir,” Marty said. “I wanted to show Uncle Cooper my new knife. It’s a Jim Bowie.”

“Well let’s have a look-see,” Mr. Jessup said. He leaned
the rake against a tombstone and wound his way through the graves, just as careful as Marty not to step on top of one.

They met near a broken-winged angel perched on top of a tombstone. Marty tugged the knife from his belt and handed it to Mr. Jessup, who held it shaking in his fingers.

“That’s one big knife,” Mr. Jessup said. “And ain’t it a shiny thing.” He said the words slowly and smacked every few syllables, re-seating his teeth onto his gums. “You carve up that handle with an owl, and what is that, a lizard?”

“Yessir,” Marty said.

“Real pretty, real pretty. I like lizards and owls. They eat up them bad critters, don’t they.” Mr. Jessup turned the knife over and handed it to Marty.

He ushered Marty toward the western edge of the cemetery where his uncle was buried. “Just got through sweeping up the leaves and sticks and whatnot off this side of the yard. Found me a turtle near your old uncle. Put him out yonder, near the pond so he could get his feet wet.”

Grass had grown over Uncle Cooper’s grave, but the mound of dirt still swelled beneath the grass on one-half of the plot. Uncle Cooper’s grave was not flat like Aunt Loretta’s. The dual-headed tombstone marked both graves and on the one side, on Uncle Cooper’s plot, the engraved end-date was still white and fresh-looking compared to all the other wording.

“Well, go on and show him,” Mr. Jessup said.

Mr. Jessup touched Marty between the shoulder blades and Marty wasn’t sure what else to say, and so he said, “Hey, Uncle Cooper. I bringed you a knife I made. I carved a handle off that tree in the pasture, the one the Indians used. Look.” Marty held the knife down to the dirt where his uncle’s head should be located six feet below, facing upward, shoulder-to-shoulder with Marty’s dead aunt. The dirt alone separated Marty and Uncle Cooper’s Dead-Eye.

As he spoke, Marty felt that same electric shock he usually felt when Uncle Cooper winked his Dead-Eye. It was a jolt in the base of his spine, near where his belt crossed his back, and it sped upward like a trail of many-legged creepies. Marty shook his shoulders.

“You feel that?” When Marty looked up at him, the man was smiling. “I feel that sometimes, too. Felt it just now, sure as I can feel the skin on my palms. Your old uncle, he was a one-of-a-kind sort. I get the jitters sometimes over here. It ain’t like me to get the jitters. I been doing this since I wasn’t much older than you. I put all sorts of folks in the ground. I buried killers and priests, and I buried babies and their mommas, and I ain’t never got the jitters for none of ’em. But this one, this grave, it’s one I always step around, even when I ain’t looking. You see that tree there?”

Mr. Jessup pointed at the oak tree in the corner, where he had left his rake. “After we brought your old uncle here, I seen a black bird up in that tree one evening. It was a big ’un, big like a condor or a eagle. It sat up there ah-watching me. I got nearer and it didn’t take off or nothing. It just faded away. I seen it one other time, too. You know where I seen it that other time?”

Marty shook his head and that made Mr. Jessup smile even bigger. “I seen it right about where you’re standing. Right there, ah-poking his head at the ground like he was digging for grub-worms.”

“You saw a Boogerbear?” Marty wrinkled his nose. “You
saw
one?”

Mr. Jessup didn’t speak for a moment. His smile melted as the skin slid back into place. He sucked his teeth, straight-faced and almost grim-looking. “What do you mean, Boogerbear?”

“That’s what they’re called. Boogerbears. Only you aren’t supposed to see them, that’s what Uncle Cooper said. I never seen one, but he said they were big black birds, about my size with a boy’s chest and arms, maybe a little bigger, like what you said. That’s what he saw with his Dead-Eye.”

Marty tapped his cheek below his eye and winked. “That scares them off. Did you wink at it?”

“Hell no, I didn’t wink at it,” Mr. Jessup said. He laughed then and put his back to Marty and started winding his way toward his abandoned rake. Over his shoulder, Mr. Jessup said, “Whatever it was, Boogerbear or whatnot, it just sunk off into the ground, sunk like a hog in the mud.”

He left Mr. Jessup to his raking and ran along the road to the dump. He saw Gus and Luke on the far side among the trash heaps. Luke tossed a bottle into the air, and Gus swung an aluminum baseball bat. The glass shattered and both boys ducked and screamed and laughed beneath the shrapnel.

Marty skirted the pile of trash nearest him and farthest away from Gus and Luke. Another bottle shattered as he kicked aside a pile of girly magazines someone had stacked beside a torn mattress.

Marty stooped and picked up a beaten teddy bear. The eyes were ripped out and the left arm looked to have been chewed off. “Won’t do,” Marty said. He tossed the bear aside and kept looking.

He found a busted Buzz Lightyear doll that he held onto until he finally found a better model, this one a naked and headless and armless Barbie doll. She had her legs, though, and that was all that mattered to Marty.

As he had been sifting through the trash, Marty hadn’t noticed the bottle-shattering had stopped, and when he heard Gus’s voice a few feet behind him, he nearly dropped the doll.

“What you got there, Sugar?” Gus asked.

Marty turned and took a step away from Gus, but the other boy had already seen the Barbie doll in Marty’s hand.

“You playing with dolls now, Sugar?” Gus laughed and looked at Luke, who began laughing when he saw Gus staring at him. Gus slapped the doll out of Marty’s hand and stomped on it with one dirty shoe. “Faggot.”

Marty didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say, not when Gus was up this close. He out-sized Marty by two-year’s growth and a fine set of heavy-boned genetics, and with Luke beside him, Marty could not out-run them anyway. Like a man standing between two growling dogs, Marty could only wait and see what would happen and hope he didn’t get bit.

Gus’s eyes swept down to Marty’s hip, and widened when they saw the Bowie knife in Marty’s belt. Gus’s mouth formed an
O
, and it would have been a comical face had Gus not at that moment lunged at Marty, threw him to the ground, and yanked the knife out of Marty’s belt.

Marty’s belt fell loose on his hips, severed in two as the knife came free, and he felt the thin burn of a cut along his left side.

“Look at this, Luke.” Gus slashed the air in front of Luke, and Luke jumped back, waving his arms to keep his balance.