I knew how Mr Minton had died: he’d placed the barrel of the shotgun beneath his chin and pulled the trigger with his big toe. They found him in the bedroom upstairs, most of his head blown off. They found his wife’s body in the cistern in the cellar where he’d tried to hide her. “Do you think we should go upstairs?” Mary Lou asked, worried. Her fingers felt cold; but I could see tiny sweat beads on her forehead. Her mother had braided her hair in one thick clumsy braid, the way she wore it most of the summer, but the bands of hair were loosening. “No,” I said, frightened. “I don’t know.” We hesitated at the bottom of the stairs – just stood there for a long time. “Maybe not,” Mary Lou said. “Damn stairs’d fall in on us.”
In the parlor there were bloodstains on the floor and on the wall – I could see them. Mary Lou said in derision, “They’re just waterstains, dummy.”
I could hear the voices overhead, or was it a single droning persistent voice. I waited for Mary Lou to hear it but she never did.
Now we were safe, now we were retreating, Mary Lou said as if repentant, “Yeah – this house is special.”
We looked through the debris in the kitchen hoping to find something of value but there wasn’t anything – just smashed china-ware, old battered pots and pans, more old yellowed newspaper. But through the window we saw a garter snake sunning itself on a rusted water tank, stretched out to a length of two feet. It was a lovely coppery color, the scales gleaming like perspiration on a man’s arm; it seemed to be asleep. Neither one of us screamed, or wanted to throw something – we just stood there watching it for the longest time.
Mary Lou didn’t have a boyfriend any longer; Hans had stopped coming around. We saw him driving the old Ford now and then but he didn’t seem to see us. Mr Siskin had found out about him and Mary Lou and he’d been upset – acting like a damn crazy man Mary Lou said, asking her every kind of nasty question then interrupting her and not believing her anyway, then he’d put her to terrible shame by going over to see Hans and carrying on with him. “I hate them all,” Mary Lou said, her face darkening with blood. “I wish—”
We rode our bicycles over to the Minton farm, or tramped through the fields to get there. It was the place we liked best. Sometimes we brought things to eat, cookies, bananas, candy bars; sitting on the broken stone steps out front, as if we lived in the house really, we were sisters who lived here having a picnic lunch out front. There were bees, flies, mosquitoes, but we brushed them away. We had to sit in the shade because the sun was so fierce and direct, a whitish heat pouring down from overhead.
“Would you ever like to run away from home?” Mary Lou said. “I don’t know,” I said uneasily. Mary Lou wiped at her mouth and gave me a mean narrow look. “ ‘I don’t know,’” she said in a falsetto voice, mimicking me. At an upstairs window someone was watching us – was it a man or was it a woman – someone stood there listening hard and I couldn’t move feeling so slow and dreamy in the heat like a fly caught on a sticky petal that’s going to fold in on itself and swallow him up. Mary Lou crumpled up some wax paper and threw it into the weeds. She was dreamy too, slow and yawning. She said, “Shit – they’d just find me. Then everything would be worse.”
I was covered in a thin film of sweat but I’d begun to shiver. Goose bumps were raised on my arms. I could see us sitting on the stone steps the way we’d look from the second floor of the house, Mary Lou sprawled with her legs apart, her braided hair slung over her shoulder, me sitting with my arms hugging my knees my backbone tight and straight knowing I was being watched. Mary Lou said, lowering her voice, “Did you ever touch yourself in a certain place, Melissa?” “No,” I said, pretending I didn’t know what she meant. “Hans wanted to do that,” Mary Lou said. She sounded disgusted. Then she started to giggle. “I wouldn’t let him, then he wanted to do something else – started unbuttoning his pants – wanted me to touch him. And . . .”
I wanted to hush her, to clap my hand over her mouth. But she just went on and I never said a word until we both started giggling together and couldn’t stop. Afterward I didn’t remember most of it or why I’d been so excited my face burning and my eyes seared as if I’d been staring into the sun.
On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.
A few days later I came back by myself. Through the ravaged cornfield: the stalks dried and broken, the tassels burnt, that rustling whispering sound of the wind I can hear now if I listen closely. My head was aching with excitement. I was telling myself a story that we’d made plans to run away and live in the Minton house. I was carrying a willow switch I’d found on the ground, fallen from a tree but still green and springy, slapping at things with it as if it were a whip. Talking to myself. Laughing aloud. Wondering was I being watched.
I climbed in the house through the back window and brushed my hands on my jeans. My hair was sticking to the back of my neck.
At the foot of the stairs I called up, “Who’s here?” in a voice meant to show it was all play; I knew I was alone.
My heart was beating hard and quick, like a bird caught in the hand. It was lonely without Mary Lou so I walked heavy to let them know I was there and wasn’t afraid. I started singing, I started whistling. Talking to myself and slapping at things with the willow switch. Laughing aloud, a little angry. Why was I angry, well I didn’t know, someone was whispering telling me to come upstairs, to walk on the inside of the stairs so the steps wouldn’t collapse.
The house was beautiful inside if you had the right eyes to see it. If you didn’t mind the smell. Glass underfoot, broken plaster, stained wallpaper hanging in shreds. Tall narrow windows looking out onto wild weedy patches of green. I heard something in one of the rooms but when I looked I saw nothing much more than an easy chair lying on its side. Vandals had ripped stuffing out of it and tried to set it afire. The material was filthy but I could see that it had been pretty once – a floral design – tiny yellow flowers and green ivy. A woman used to sit in the chair, a big woman with sly staring eyes. Knitting in her lap but she wasn’t knitting just staring out the window watching to see who might be coming to visit.
Upstairs the rooms were airless and so hot I felt my skin prickle like shivering. I wasn’t afraid! – I slapped at the walls with my springy willow switch. In one of the rooms high in a corner wasps buzzed around a fat wasp’s nest. In another room I looked out the window leaning out the window to breathe thinking this was my window, I’d come to live here. She was telling me I had better lie down and rest because I was in danger of heatstroke and I pretended not to know what heatstroke was but she knew I knew because hadn’t a cousin of mine collapsed haying just last summer, they said his face had gone blotched and red and he’d begun breathing faster and faster not getting enough oxygen until he collapsed. I was looking out at the overgrown apple orchard, I could smell the rot, a sweet winey smell, the sky was hazy like something you can’t get clear in your vision, pressing in close and warm. A half mile away Elk Creek glittered through a screen of willow trees moving slow glittering with scales like winking.