11.
The teacher tugged her dark-red sweater nervously, and with a lot of hemming and hawing and clearing her throat, she spoke with Mom about how I was a nice boy, but I’d been confused and disturbed lately. They talked as if I weren’t there. All the other kids had already gone into the classroom, and from the hallway I could hear they were running riot, but this wasn’t why she was so tense.
“Ma’am, I know this is a difficult time for you after… after you’ve been left alone with the children… I don’t know what I’d do in your place… Really, it can’t be easy—”
“A person grows accustomed,” Mom interrupted her. Since the night I tried to throw Dejan into the river, she’d become much calmer. She wasn’t crying anymore, but she also never laughed, even when saying something funny, and she didn’t justify herself to anybody. “You can tell me, I see there’s a problem with Matija.”
“Well, you see, he’s… I know he and Dejan Kunčec wandered off a few weeks ago…”
“They ran away from home. No point in beating around the bush. Everybody knows it by now.”
“Well, that doesn’t matter—they’re children after all, as I always say. The problem’s this: Matija is not socializing with the other kids anymore. He’s alone most of the time.”
“So what? Other kids keep to themselves. Might just be their stinky feet.”
The teacher was thrown by this.
“Well… yesterday he came in all smeared with mud, bloody, in tears. Did you know that?”
“I did. On his way to school, he stopped by his granny’s and slipped and fell into the mud by the pigsty. He was scared of coming home like that, so he went on to school instead. That’s what I know.”
“Something’s going on with your boy. I’ve heard it said in the village that he threw a rock at an elderly gentleman, that he’s been crying and yelling for no reason, that he talks to himself… Somebody just this morning said two little kittens were killed and thrown into your neighbor’s garden… and then what happened with Dejan… Have you talked with him about his… dad?”
When I heard this I thought the teacher was going to ask Mom whether she’d confessed to me that they’d lied, that Dad would be back soon, that I hadn’t killed him after all.
“Yep… but I figure he… he ain’t made peace with that as of yet… He told me… Matija, why don’t you be off to the classroom?”
“Yes, Matija, time to join the class…”
I didn’t hear what else they said. The classroom was a terrible mess, which was a relief because nobody even looked at me.
I told Krunek that Dad and I had flown a plane. I told him Dad had been a helicopter pilot, but in Germany his friends at the airport let him fly a plane. I reckoned that adding “in Germany” was smart, because none of the kids had ever been there but me. That day Krunek began speaking again after a full two weeks of silence, and his first words were to Goran Brezovec and the others that I was lying because I’d said my father could carry a whole tree on his back, and then everybody laughed at me.
That evening we were eating our bread spread with pork lard for supper, and Mom said I’d be spending more time with my uncle now—he was probably the strongest person in the world after my dad. He’d take me to the soccer game on Sunday. And, she said, a man and a lady would be coming from Čakovec to ask me how school was going and if there was anything I was scared of. As soon as she said that, I knew exactly what I couldn’t tell them. Whenever I said what I was really thinking, people looked as if they were frightened or angry. I decided to pretend that everything was fine.
From then on, I asked Mom to lower the blinds all the way to the windowsill at night, so I didn’t see Bacawk and Chickichee, but I could hear them breathing and leaning against the glass clear as a bell.
The Miners played a good game, I could tell because the ref wasn’t a jerk quite as often. The men and their sons stood on the embankment because it was too wet to sit in the grass. And I was there among them with my uncle, he with his beer, me with my soda. Dejan said hi, but nothing more. The men talked about the prospect of a water pipeline for the village, artificial fertilizer, and paving the roads, and they cussed a lot. They talked about a man whose name was Natz. From what I heard I gathered that Natz drank a lot, never shaved, lived with his old mother, and fought a lot—and well. One of Uncle’s neighbors said a few days ago he and Natz had gotten drunk at a bar in the next village over and caused a ruckus.
“We sure did tie one on, like we never done before,” he boasted. Their harmless banter with three Slovenes from across the Mura who happened to be sitting at the next table turned into shoving and fighting, and knives were even drawn. The fight turned into a proper pounding—bottles, chairs, and bodies flying—and at one point Natz pulled a knife from the shoulder of one of the Slovenes, examined it, and then put it right back in, as if into a human ikebana. An ambulance had to come from Čakovec. When they asked him why he’d done that, he answered, dead serious, that it wasn’t his knife, so he put it back where he’d found it.
“Well, it weren’t my knife,” the men chorused, then laughed, clapped, and cussed. Uncle’s neighbor said how Natz had been lurching out of the bar, drunk as a skunk, at the very moment the police pulled up. Staggering, he barely managed to find his old rust bucket Fićo and struggled, in vain, to unlock the door. The police came over, slowly, and one said he mustn’t drive drunk. In his deep, sodden voice, Natz replied, intending to reassure them, “You just help me open her up, I’ll do the rest myself.” And they all laughed again, pounding their knees. I could see Uncle admired Natz. Having a friend like that would be nice, nobody would dare touch me. He’d be able to take on Bacawk and Chickichee with his knife and turn them into ikebanas. I sank into myself imagining this, and everything around me died away. When I heard “Honest t’ God, honest t’ God, damn-blasted old Natz,” and right after that, “That ornery old son of a bitch!” I turned to see where this Natz fellow was. I thought I saw a fat man with a beard and curly hair walking slowly, arms loose and swinging, along the dirt road toward the grassy embankment. Somebody scored a goal, which I missed, and the ref was a vile old jerk. As the game wound down, the men cussed more, and the burning in my belly got worse because I knew I’d have to go home where the darkness of my horror was waiting for me. When we were passing the graveyard, we saw my mom and sister by Dad’s grave. Uncle stopped the car, and Mom called to him to leave me at home and said she’d be back soon.
I pretended there was something I needed to talk about, and asked him about excavators, but when we reached my house, Uncle hurried me out of the car and left. Dusk had settled on the yard, erasing any sunshine or puffy white clouds, leaving only ghastly fiends. I stared at the ground, hurried to the door, and looked for the key. We usually left it under the mat or on the windowsill on the side of the house. I turned because I had a twitchy feeling on my back that somebody was watching. Nothing. The key wasn’t where it was supposed to be, so I looked under the potted plant on the front step. I turned again and this time saw Bacawk behind me. He’d taken off his overcoat, and for the first time I could see his dark-brown body. He was made up of tubelike, curving bones and a row of ribs that extended into claws. There was a crunching and a crackling as this immense spiderlike creature reared over me. My jaw dropped, and I closed my eyes, hoping it would disappear by the time I opened them again. I keeled over backward onto my mom’s potted plant. When I looked again I saw Chickichee popping up from behind the giant bug with a hoe and swinging it at me. It was clear he aimed to smash me on the head, and so, soundless with terror, I flung myself out of the way. He whacked me hard twice on the shoulder with the dull side of the hoe and once on the knee. On the next swing the hoe slipped from his grip. I leaped to my feet and lunged, pushing my way between them. I shoved Chickichee aside and felt a sharp stab in my back, just below my head. Everything went black from the pain, but I kept running. I ducked around the corner of the house and sprinted toward the neighbor’s fence. For the first time in my life, I leaped over it—I have no idea how—and hid behind an old wooden outhouse the neighbors no longer used. It began to look as if dawn might be breaking, even though, in fact, dusk was just settling in. I was breathless and thought the whole world could hear me gasping for air, so I pressed one hand firmly over my mouth. I ran my other hand across the back of my neck and felt the swelling and dampness where I’d been stabbed. My hand was red with blood and dark with grime from the claw. Just when I thought the danger had passed and they’d gone away, Laddie, the neighbor’s little dog, came trotting around the corner. At first he just looked at me and wagged his tail. I gestured to him to come over, so Bacawk and Chickichee wouldn’t see his fanciful tail waving in the twilight. His fur was white, and they could easily have seen him. He stayed where he was, wagging his tail, and started barking. He wanted to play, I knew the bark. I made a face—as if that would have quieted him—and laid my finger across my lips. Laddie, of course, didn’t understand. He barked again, louder. I threw myself onto him, hugged him close, pulled him to me behind the wooden outhouse, and lay on top of him.