“I dunno,” I said, but I remembered the landlord telling Dad the house was nearly a hundred and fifty years old. And hasn’t had a lick of work since, I’d heard Dad mutter under his breath.
Jeremy reached for one of the skewers and I felt a little bubble of emotion press against the bottom of my throat. He turned the thing over in his hands and let it drop to the floor. “Beats the hell out of me,” he said.
“You’re not gonna tell Mom, are you?”
“Nah.” He seemed to think a moment. “Course I might use that scalpel to dissect Mr Fuzzy.” He gazed at me balefully, and then he slapped my shoulder again. “Better treat me right, kid.”
A moment later I heard the basement door slam behind me.
I’d been clutching the fork so tightly that it had turned hot in my hand. My knuckles grinned up at me, four bloodless white crescents. I felt so strange that I just let it tumble to the floor. Then I rewrapped the bundle, and shoved it back under the furnace.
By the time I’d gotten upstairs, I’d put the whole thing out of my mind. Except I hadn’t, not really. I wasn’t thinking about it, not consciously, but it was there all the same, the way all the furniture in a room is still there when you turn out the lights, and you can sense it there in the dark. Or the way pain is always there. Even when they give you something to smooth it out a little, it’s always there, a deep-down ache like jagged rocks under a swift-moving current. It never goes away, pain. It’s like a stone in your pocket.
The bundle weighed on me in the same way, through the long night after Jeremy finally fell asleep, and the next day, and the night after that as well. So I guess I wasn’t surprised, not really, when I found myself creeping down the basement stairs the next afternoon. Nobody saw me steal up to my room with the bundle. Nobody saw me tuck it under my bed. Mom had cried herself to sleep in front of the TV (she pretended she wasn’t crying, but I knew better) and Dad was already at work. Who knew where Jeremy was?
Then school started and Mom didn’t cry as often, or she did it when we weren’t around. But neither one of our parents talked very much, except at dinner Dad always asked Jeremy how freshman football was going. And most nights, just as a joke, Jeremy would start up with one of those crazy stories of his, the minute we turned out the light. He’d pretend there was a vampire in the room or something and he’d thrash around so that I could hear him over the narrow space between our beds. “Ahhh,” he’d say, “Arrggh,” and, in a strangled gasp, “When it finishes with me, Si, it’s coming for you.” I’d hug Mr Fuzzy tight and tell him not to be afraid, and then Jeremy would unleash that nutty mad-scientist laugh.
“C’mon, Si, you know I’m only kidding.”
One night, he said, “Do you believe in ghosts, Si? Because as old as this house is, I bet a whole shitload of people have died in it.”
I didn’t answer, but I thought about it a lot over the next few days. We’d been in school a couple of weeks at this point. Jeremy had already made a lot of friends. He talked to them on the phone at night. I had a lot of time to think.
I even asked Dad about it. “Try not to be dense, Si,” he told me. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, everybody knows that. Now chill out, will you, I’m trying to explain something to your brother.”
So the answer was, no, I didn’t believe in ghosts. But I also thought it might be more complicated than that, that maybe they were like characters in a good book. You aren’t going to run into them at the Wal-Mart, but they seem real all the same. I figured ghosts might be something like that. The way I figured it, they had to be really desperate for something they hadn’t gotten enough of while they were alive, like they were jealous or hungry or something. Otherwise why would they stick around some crummy old cemetery when they could go on to Heaven or whatever? So that’s what I ended up telling Jeremy a few nights later, after I’d finished sorting it all out inside my head.
“Hungry?” he said. “Christ, Si, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” He started thrashing around in his bed and making these dumb ghost noises. “Oooooooh,” he said, and, “Ooooooooh, I’m a ghost, give me a steak. Ooooooooh, I want a bowl of Cheerios.”
I tried to explain that that wasn’t what I meant, but I couldn’t find the words. I was just a kid, after all.
“Christ, Si,” Jeremy said, “don’t tell anybody anything that stupid. It’s like that stupid bear you drag around everywhere, it makes me ashamed to be your brother.”
I knew he didn’t mean anything by that — Jeremy was always joking around — but it hurt Mr Fuzzy’s feelings all the same. “Don’t cry, Mr Fuzzy,” I whispered. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”
A few days later, Jeremy came home looking troubled. I didn’t think anything about it at first because it hadn’t been a very good day from the start. When Jeremy and I went down to breakfast, we overheard Dad saying he was taking Mom’s car in that afternoon, the way they had planned. Mom said something so low that neither one of us could make it out, and then Dad said, “For Christ’s sake, Mariam, there’s plenty of one-car families in the world.” He slammed his way out of the house, and a few seconds later we heard Mom shut the bedroom door with a click. Neither one of us said anything after that except when Jeremy snapped at me because I was so slow getting my lunch. So I knew he was upset and it didn’t surprise me when he came home from football practice that day looking a bit down in the mouth.
It turned out to be something totally different, though, because as soon as we turned out the light that night, and he knew we were really alone, Jeremy said, “What happened to that bundle of tools, Si?”
“What bundle of tools?” I asked.
“That weird-looking shit you found in the basement last summer,” he said.
That was when I remembered that I’d put the bundle under my bed. What a crazy thing to do, I thought, and I was about to say I’d taken them — but Mr Fuzzy kind of punched me. He was so sensitive, I don’t think he’d really forgiven Jeremy yet.
I thought it over, and then I said, “Beats me.”
“Well, I went down the basement this afternoon,” Jeremy said, “and they were gone.”, “So?”
“It makes me uncomfortable, that’s all.”
“Why?”
Jeremy didn’t say anything for a long time. A car went by outside, and the headlights lit everything up for a minute. The shadow of the crap-apple danced on the ceiling like a man made out of bones, and then the night swallowed him up. That one little moment of light made it seem darker than ever.
“I met this kid at school today,” Jeremy said, “and when I told him where I lived he said, ‘No way, Mad Dog Mueller’s house?’ ‘Mad Dog who?’ I said. ‘Mueller,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows who Mad Dog Mueller is.’“
“I don’t,” I said.
“Well, neither did I,” Jeremy said, “but this kid, he told me the whole story. ‘You ever notice there aren’t any kids that live out that end of town?’ he asked, and the more I thought about it, Si, the more right he seemed. There aren’t any kids.”
The thing was, he was right. That’s when I figured it out, the thing about the kids. It was like one of those puzzles with a picture hidden inside all these little blots of color and you stare at it and you stare at it and you don’t see a thing, and then you happen to catch it from just the right angle and — Bang! — there the hidden picture is. And once you’ve seen it, you can never unsee it. I thought about the neighbors, this scrawny guy who was always tinkering with the dead El Camino and his fat wife — neither one of them really old, but neither one of them a day under thirty, either. I remember how they stood out front watching us move in, and Mom asking them if they had any kids, her voice kind of hopeful. But they’d just laughed, like who would bring kids to a place like this?