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Written by Sarah Morgan
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There was a summer once when we lived like trees. We stepped into the
woods behind our house and felt our bodies disappear. Our arms became
limbs, our fingers leaves. When we crunched along, fallen twigs snapped
like bones beneath our feet. With our bark-ears we listened to the
knotty language of the pines and the sycamores when they bent toward us
and confessed the secrets they kept.
Ricky was the oldest. The
boss. He had his own room in the back with a snake in a glass case. We
watched Ricky feed the snake. We saw the mouse, a tiny puff of fur,
white as sunlight, sniff about. The snake, long and black, approached
the mouse, licking at it with its tongue. We turned away, throats dry.
When we turned back, the mouse was gone, a telltale lump still
twitching inside the snake’s slender form.
He was always
coming home with broken televisions and VCR’s cracked open so their
guts hung out. He poked at them with screwdrivers, piecing them
together until they made a whole. Nearly every day we begged him to
take us into town when he went to work at the TV repair. Once he
brought some of us along—the day Jarvis broke his foot and left Ricky
in charge. We sat at different posts, perched atop the towers of
electronics, our eyes big as dinner dishes as we watched the gray-blue
shadows flickering throughout the darkened shop. The noise from
cartoons, action movies and game shows scattered and reverberated from
wall to wall. In the middle sat Ricky with his legs propped on a desk,
a grin smeared across his face. Oh how we wished to return.
Ricky
had knives, too. Hunting knives, long and sleek. We took them with us
into the woods. We slashed away tangles of brush, carved our names into
the flesh of trees.
Once Ricky found a muddy toad in a puddle.
He scooped it up and carried it back to the trailer in his palm. We
followed and watched as he held it by its back legs and then tied the
toad’s legs together. He grabbed a stick and slid its legs over it. The
toad wiggled and croaked but Ricky held its legs in place with his
thumb. He walked across the road to the Steggman’s electric fence,
stick held out before him like an offering. We stood behind him as he
knelt down to the electric wire that ran beneath the fence and saw him
dangle the toad above it. Ricky removed his thumb and lowered the toad
over the wire. We stepped back and watched the animal sizzle and turn
black. We didn’t look away.
He slung the charred little body at the Steggman’s door and it hit with a thwap.
First
a gray, hard-backed suitcase in a clearing beyond the stream. Its
contents spilled out like entrails over the leafy ground. A man’s
clothes, a toothbrush, aftershave, a pocket watch. The watch we kept,
slipping it into our pants pocket where it glowed, beating and pulsing
like a tick-tock heart. The suitcase too. We dumped its contents to the
ground, clothing scattering like bodies. A sleeve here, a pant leg
there.
When Carrot came over, or when we weren’t in the woods,
we would drive the old van back and forth to town, the seat pulled all
the way up so we could reach the pedals. The van had no doors and we
moved along slowly. Ricky would fling his legs out the door and the
town would be filled with the sound of his shoes scrapping the asphalt,
the white rubber sole of his sneakers wearing down to a sliver, thin
like tissue.
In the van, Carrot would tie her arms around
Ricky’s neck and her fire-hair would fly in the breeze. She made him
buy her sour straws and Lik-A-Sticks. She sucked at the candies, dipped
her fingers in the sugar and looked straight at us with her green
flashing eyes.
She’d trot up on sunny days, pigeon-toed, dirt-kneed, and stand in our driveway, suck a lolly and call for him.
We don’t like her, we told Ricky, don’t like her always coming ‘round.
She’s just a girl, Ricky told us. She’s a girl, but we are brothers.
And then we didn’t care if she came around no more.
On
the Fourth of July we loaded up the van with Black Cats and Roman
Candles. Some of us had lost an eye, some had burned a finger off, shot
off a toe. But every year we stood statue-tall in the middle of the
street holding a Roman candle in each hand as the colored balls of fire
arched into the air with a shhhht and a whine as they fizzled. Carrot
stood in the ditch, knobby fingers in her ears, and Ricky lowered his
Roman candle, set the sizzling tip in her direction. A burst of red.
We
littered the streets with fire cracker carcasses, polka-dotted lawns
with burnt patches of grass, lit things on fire and watched them
explode.
Momma brought men home with her most nights. They
would lumber through the house, towering above us, their voices deep
and wide like rivers. Some were old and some were young, some came with
beards, others were clean-shaven. Some gave us a smile, others a slap.
One came with a guitar in a ratty case and played music all night long.
At first we danced, threw our heads back and howled. Soon we grew tired
and begged for sleep but the man would not be quiet and our heads
rattled against one another with the noise. Another man carried a watch
that dangled from a chain. He waved it before our eyes and we watched
it sway and shine before Momma pushed us out the door.
That
was how we grew, one more of us now, one more of us a year later. Four,
Five, Six. When Momma didn’t bring anybody home, we slept inside on the
bunk beds, on the sofa, on the floor. When she did, we slept in the
truck bed, on the roof, or we didn’t sleep at all. We counted stars
that felt real close and real far away at the same time. Some of us
cried when we slept outdoors, but most of us didn’t think about it much
anymore.
Every morning Momma took the bucket outside to the
neighbor’s house and filled it up with fresh water. Then she’d take the
bucket back inside and set it next to the sink and cover it with a gray
towel. When we were thirsty we’d dip our hands in the bucket and bring
them up to our lips. And we were always thirsty, always parched no
matter how much water we dribbled down our open throats. We licked the
rivulets of water as it plummeted down our arms. Sucked at our dampened
fingers until they were red with the blood beating just beneath the
sheath of skin.
If we forgot to cover the bucket again with the
gray towel, Momma would yell, she would tremble, swoop her arms through
the air toward us like a helicopter and we would run.
We would
run to the back of the house where the floor disappeared. We’d wriggle
through, dropping to the dampness below and crawl away from Momma’s
voice, from Momma’s open smacking palms.
Next there was a
guitar. We found it on that muddy day, air dirt-scented like before the
rain. First we noticed the case, its black plastic surface wild-animal
scratched. We drug the case out by its neck. We pried it open with our
tiny fingers and gazed at the battered guitar inside. Strumming it as
it lay inside its coffin, we closed our eyes to the flat, out-of-tune
cries. We dragged it home, carving a trail into the ground, and propped
it up in the corner of our closet, lifeless behind a pile of blankets.
There was more—books, clothes, shoes, a preacher’s uniform, a tiny silver crucifix. Now it all belonged to us.
Sister
Shelly was 18. Every afternoon she sat in the bed of the old,
broke-down pick-up truck in our gravel drive. She said she’d been saved
by the Lord ever since Momma took us to the Pentecostal church up the
road that one day and they screamed at us about devils. Sounded to us
like they were the ones possessed. But Shelly took to it. Now she wore
her hair in a single braid that hung like an animal skinned and drying
down the middle of her back. She wore skirts to the ground and appeared
to float like a ghost wherever she went. Shelly sat in the pick-up
playing Jesus music loud from her small portable radio. She stared us
down when we walked past. Sometimes she called us over and told us
about her god, begged us to be good.
Then not too long ago,
Momma brought home the Pentecostal preacher. We remembered his face,
all angles and shadow, his khaki pants and white shirt, the tiny silver
crucifix he wore around his neck. When he left, the whites of our eyes
shone on him like spotlight as we watched him head toward his car in
the dark. We saw through his skin to his bones lean and clacking, saw
all the way through to the organs, pulsing and live like a circus.
The
next day Shelly sat in the truck bed, her radio silent. She motioned us
over to her post. The sun was out and bleaching everything a bright,
bright white and we could barely make out her shadowy form. She said we
should come inside the house. Said she had something to show us.
She
stood in front of the flower-print sofa where Momma brought her men.
Then Shelly pulled her shirt up and over her head. We saw her breasts
hanging heavy and full in her white cotton bra. We saw her reach around
with a fleshy hand and undo the clasp before she let it drop.
Some of us turned to leave, but some of us stayed behind.
It
was about that time that Ricky started talking to us about leaving. He
didn’t come out with us to the woods any more. He didn’t come with us
when we drove around in the van.
Without Ricky, the woods
changed. Days passed and there were no treasures found. The trees
folded in on one another, rolled up their branches, clustered together
against us.
Momma had been missing a few days by then.
Whenever Momma went away, she came back with boxes of food and toys.
Her way of making it up to us, we supposed.
But Momma had been
gone for a real long time. Just as we were starting to feel a true
sense of freedom, just as we were starting to feel like men with no
mother to answer to, we saw Ricky heading toward the highway, backpack
slung over his shoulder.
Where you going, we asked. Take us with you, we said.
But Ricky just kept on walking, his shape growing smaller as we pelted him with rocks.
Go on and go then, we yelled. Go on and go.
Just before he disappeared from sight, he told us to go out to the clearing in the woods.
We
ran for it. We panted and pushed, tugging at our clothes, arguing over
who would take Ricky’s room now. Who would be in charge with him and
Momma both gone.
When we got to the clearing, we broke through
the circle of trees like a drowning man breaks the water’s surface. But
the smell hit us immediately. Something rancid, like a dead dog.
Something like skin melting off of bone. The air was black with flies,
a loud buzzing filled our ears and we swatted blindly. We ran through
the clearing still pushing each other, smacking against one another,
skin on skin. And then we fell, almost as one, tripping over our own
feet. But no, not our feet. We tripped over something else entirely. We
fell to the ground and came face to face with Momma for the last time,
stiff among the autumn leaves.
Shelly said she saw him that
night, the night before he left, coming in from the woods. She said he
was always out there. The police set out to look for Ricky, but they
never found him. There were others there too, out in those woods. Bones
and bits of hair. They blamed Ricky, but we blamed the trees.
That’s
the day they took us away, piled us into a police van one by one. Some
of us clutched a toy, some bit and kicked. We huddled together in the
van, a live squirming pile of boys. Watching the only home we ever had
recede farther into the distance made us clutch even tighter at one
another, elbow to throat, knee to chin. We dug our fingernails into our
flesh and cried out.
But just before our house dropped out of
sight, I reached my hand up from the huddle and felt the cold sleek
handle of the sliding metal door. I slid the van door open and threw my
right leg out over the edge. Dragging my shoe along, I felt the heat
from the friction rise up through my leg, up through my whole body and
into my core where it stayed, glowing warm and solid just beneath the
surface.
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