To Becky, Jenny, and Brandon

  Ring around the Rosie

  Heath

  Far as Moms go, she isn’t the worst. She tells me and Baby Milo a goodnight prayer. Tells us to sleep good for the first day of school tomorrow. Tells us she knows we’ll act right in class. She closes the bedroom door and the dark swoops in real fast like a ninja. I’m antsy and I’m buzzing. Antsy and buzzing since I’m getting the hell out of here right quick to find my brother, Bunkie.

  Baby Milo is a wuss who gets the runs from creamed corn. I can’t take him with me. Not because of the runs but since he’ll slow me down by being a wuss and all. Today he’s got sniffles and hack-ups. I’ve got them coming soon, I can tell. The house is creaky and ornery that way. Rumbles come from the basement pipes. “The basement is the house’s tummy and sometimes it makes silly noises” is what Mom tells Baby Milo so he don’t shit himself about ghosts. She really isn’t the worst. Probably there’s no one better. But she don’t have ice cream. Not in the freezer upstairs or the freezer downstairs. No trampoline either. Except the main thing she don’t have is Bunkie. That’s my brother. He’ll be so proud of me.

  I change out of my jammies and put on jeans and sneakers, a sweatshirt and a hoodie. The window slides open real easy. It’s cool out, just a little rainy. So what? I’m about to leave and Baby Milo sits up in bed.

  “Tell her you didn’t see nothing.”

  “Whatcha doing, Heath?”

  “Going for a gallon of vanilla.”

  “Can I have some?”

  “I’m not coming back.”

  “Without you I’m scared of the dark.”

  “The dark is the same even if I’m gone.”

  “But the basement—”

  “Be tough, Milo.”

  He’s crying hard now. Sucking in air like he could just die from crying. He turns the green nightlight on, and his tears are green pus like his eyes are all wrong and might need scooping out. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll be better. I promise I won’t ask so many questions. I promise I won’t talk so much—”

  “It’s not your fault at all but if you wake up the house and she comes in right now, I’m gonna be a ghost. I’m gonna be a ghost and I’m gonna haunt you in the dark every night.”

  He keeps crying and nodding. Sometimes he’s like that, a robot built just to cry and nod.

  “Wait a second,” he says. “I wanna give you something.”

  He hands me a playing card from his baby games. The wizard on the card wears a big dopey wizard hat and looks like a true dipshit. “He’s worth five hundred quibbles.”

  “Holy shit, five hundred?”

  “He’s the best one.”

  “You better keep it, then.”

  “No, take it. Really, where you going?”

  “To find Bunkie. I gotta tell him a story.”

  “What story?”

  “Best story anybody’s ever heard.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “Shut up and don’t wake nobody.”

  “But what about all the monsters?”

  “Oh, Milo. I’m no wuss.”

  He won’t take his card back and it’s time to leave, so I tuck it in my pocket and slug him on the shoulder and throw my hoodie’s hood up over my head and I’m gone out the window.

  Too bad Baby Milo didn’t have a hat to give me instead. Rain streams down harder than it looked to be streaming back in the bedroom. My clothes weigh ten thousand pounds. My fingers are all rubbery and slick and cold inside the pouch of my hoodie. It’s slow-going even when I run. I don’t like leaving places with something I don’t really need, except I keep checking to make sure the dipshit wizard hasn’t slipped out of my pocket.

  At the far edge of town is the church where Mom would take us, and we’d have to be quiet until afterward so we could go to the diner. Baby Milo would pretend he couldn’t decide between milk and orange juice so Mom would get him a glass of each. He isn’t the dumbest. Past the church is the long forest road out to Bunkie’s grandma’s house ten miles away. Kids have been saying that since she did her time over the meth and whatnot, he lives with her again. Hanging with him will be good fun because he’s the king. I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen him steal from an antique store. Seen him chase chickens and throw rocks at traffic lights and give the finger to that woman in a floppy hat who looked down her fat nose at us. Bunkie is the king. That’s my brother.

  Tomorrow, bright and early. I’ll see my brother tomorrow. The front steps of the church aren’t covered. Except there’s a little scoop of an awning over the belltower door and since there’s rain it’s better to sleep here by the church than out in the woods. So long as I’m up and gone before Mom sees that I ran off on her. Because she might get to shining flashlights down alleyways. She might get to calling around the neighborhood and calling the police and calling Liz from the big brick building in Brainerd. Liz has got a neat little nose and brown eyes that are the color of dead grass. She chews peppermint gum and I wish she’d breathe on me more, only she don’t even come around her desk. I wish she’d be Mom. Even if it’s just for a bit. Liz loves ice cream.

  I’m asleep before I even get a chance to pray Mom don’t find me.

  It’s morning when I wake up sucking screws down my throat. All everything is wet and cold. Some ancient lady in a polka dot dress pokes me in the chest with the knob of her cane. Parents must’ve been lizards. Her wrinkles have wrinkles. Plus, her tongue’s doing too much like she might lick her own eyeballs at any moment. One of those kimono dragons.

  Kimono says, “You coming in for rehearsal?”

  “Huh?”

  “Must be you’re joining the choir. Wait, you’re one of Jessica’s fosters, aren’t you?!”

  “Nope.”

  “You are! I’ve seen you at service before. Come on in with me, warm up. I’ll give her a call in a bit. I used to babysit her, believe it or not. Hector?”

  “What?”

  “Heath. That’s it. Heath.”

  She holds out her scaly hand. A limp fish. She weighs less than I do. Not a chance she could help me up and anyway I’d rather not turn limp-fish too.

  “I don’t wanna get sick.”

  “That’s sweet of you, honey,” she says.

  She slinks away toward the front door. Her purse is as big as she is. Start running and she won’t catch me even if she had another hundred years to live. But Bunkie though, he might see if she’s got something I can eat.

  “Say, you got any food?”

  Kimono has a little scaly trigger finger that welcomes me to follow.

  There’s a kitchen in the basement. She makes coffee and sets out some stale chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk. Then she slinks up the staircase. A slinker, this Kimono. The heater ticks. The fridge hums. Upstairs pastor moans a song. One time I caught him chewing tobacco in his office and he gave me some to keep me quiet about it. The kitchen air is cool and dead-still and ready to strike. This is how murders begin.

  Her and pastor could come downstairs at any moment. I scarf all the cookies and drink all the milk and empty out her purse on the countertop. Coins jangle and roll along the floor. In the cupboards are the goodies. Screw-top glass bottles of juice and plastic bags full of church crackers. I fold her purse inside out. It’s hard to do because the purse is made of some type of leather like maybe the skin of Kimono’s sister or something. I have to put my foot inside and pull on the straps with both hands. I fill it with goodies and sling it over my shoulder. I’m about to sprint out of there but then I get to thinking.

  In one of the drawers is all the knives a boy could ever want. I take the biggest one. Something you’d use for slicing watermelon. I put it in the purse. Just in case. Because when it’s all done and I’m a man someday, I’ll bring old Kimono her purse back and she won’t even recognize me because I’ll be a monster-killer. A monster-killer is what I’ll be. Like Uncle Bob. A monster-killer.

  Soon there are the woods and I slip in deep to where there’s cover. Fuck the wood ticks and ivy and shit and squirrels. Fuck all the scratchy branches and fuck the itches. I’m on fire. Then there’s a four-wheeler trail that creeps along the ditch of the road to Bunkie’s Grandma’s. I’m safe from town now. A few cars pass by here and there. Mostly it’s just me and the sun hating on me. My neck is hate-burning and the church juice is warm and goofy and I eat half the bag of Pastor Mudtooth’s crispies. Real warm and real goofy, that church juice, so it must be that God isn’t just a story but more of a buzzing in your brain and in your heart and in your stomach. That’s the whole duh of it. God is the good buzz. The best juice there ever was.

  Then suddenly there they are. Monsters, three of them. They circle around me at the edge of the woods. They’re tall as road signs and strong as wolves. No more good buzz. No more God. I know what type of air dead boys breathe, see, since it’s what I’m breathing now.

  Two girls and one boy. Siblings, probably. They sit on mountain bikes and drink energy drinks out of cans. Their bones sweat through their shirts, three skeletons the color of damp. The taller girl stands between her brother and sister. She has a scar on her cheek that is the shape of a fishhook and she’s the prettiest thing the woods have ever had.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “Marvin,” I lie.

  “How

come you’re not in school?”

  “I don’t go to school around here.”

  “We’re ditching out,” the other girl says.

  Scar-girl glares at her and looks at me and says, “How come you got a purse? Tampons?” They laugh at me. “Marvin, you got any cigarettes?”

  I shake my head no. “There’s juice, though. Maybe if you like it—”

  “Maybe if we like it what?”

  “You guys won’t try nothing, will you? To hurt me?”

  “Why would we?” the boy asks. His bangs are glued to his pink forehead. His eyes are real blue and almost closed. Maybe they don’t get more open than that. They look at me like there’s a good answer if only I could find it.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Then everyone is forever passing the juice and eating cookies and riding bikes around and around this mountain-bike track in the woods and jumping off ramps made of packed dirt and flying high, almost to the branches of ginormous pines. It’s muggy out here. I put my sweatshirt and hoodie by the purse. Two bikes have baseball cards in the spokes but the boy’s bike don’t. I give him the wizard card and he ties it to his spoke with one of his shoelaces and then his bike revs when he rides too. The good buzz comes back and everyone laughs and everyone jumps higher and higher and everyone wants ice cream.

  Scar-girl sends her little sister back to their house for a gallon tub of Neapolitan. The girl is gone for a thousand loops around the track. Then the boy starts puking all over a patch of moss. He’s crying as he runs off where his sister went with her bike. It’s just me and Scar-girl now. After many more loops she stops and rests her arms on her handlebars, then her head on her arms, where there are purple welts.

  “Dad must not have gone to work. I better go back. See you later.”

  “But what about the Neapolitan?” I had my hopes up.

  “Won’t be any today.”

  “And Baby Milo’s card?”

  “What the hell’s a Baby Milo?”

  She walks away with both bikes.

  “I don’t care about the scar,” I yell after her. “I think you’re real pretty.”

  She acts like she didn’t hear me. Maybe I didn’t yell loud enough. Sometimes I do that. Maybe I didn’t yell at all. Only whispered to myself kind of. Sometimes I do that too.

  I leave Kimono’s purse by a dirt ramp and start after her. I need that card. If Baby Milo was here I might wanna smack him once good because I don’t wanna go on without it. It’s all I have until I get to Bunkie.

  She’s out of sight by the time I make it through the woods. But there’s only one trailer there, with lilac bushes on the side. In the lawn there’s enough toys and tools and dirt bikes and four-wheelers for a garage sale. Them friends of mine aren’t around nowhere. Must be inside. But nothing happens when I go up onto the front steps and knock on the door. Dead-quiet inside and out.

  Then a man behind me says, “You the one got my kids sauced?”

  I turn. I’m on the steps and he’s on the ground but he’s still taller. He’s a strong beast. Hunched over. Twisted up. Snarled. Two maul heads for fists. A monster in tight black jeans and cowboy boots. His yellow hair goes down to his shoulders and there’s an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. His eyes got no whites to them. Only dirty pinks. He pulls the cigarette from his mouth like it’s a toothpick and spits on the ground. He’s got a toolbelt on. Hammer in the holster. If he wanted to he’d bash my brains right through the door.

  “Fuck you want?”

  “My card.”

  “Speak up!”

  “My card!”

  “How about you get your scrawny ass off my property, or I’ll thump you?”

  “You use the hammer?”

  “Huh?”

  “And the wrench?”

  “What do you mean? I use everything.”

  “But it’s your own daughter.”

  He don’t understand the question. He’s not real sharp, this turd.

  “You got about three seconds, kid.”

  “Getting my card first.”

  “What card?”

  “In the spokes.”

  The bikes were right by me the whole time. They’re leaning up against the lilacs on the side of the trailer. When I follow him over there his snakey back muscles wriggle. I could save them friends of mine. Save Scar-girl and take her with me and we’d be together for always. If only I wasn’t a dumbass who left my knife in the woods. He goes right to the bike with the card and unties the shoelace and pulls the card out right quick like he put it there himself.

  His pink eyes got more dirt in them now. He rips the card up once, twice, three times and holds it out to me.

  I take the paper shreds and leave. A man like this, see, you don’t gotta listen, but you do gotta hear. Someday. Someday I’ll be a killer of monsters.

  I go back for the purse. A few miles down the highway there’s an ash tree with chubby roots. My stomach sloshes around in my head and my eyes water until I blow chunks all over them roots. I stumble to the next tree and sprawl out and think of what Bunkie would do if he was me. Because he wouldn’t just die here, I know that.

  So I keep walking along the ditch with the purse. All the cookies are gone. Another drop of juice would kill me. When I don’t cry from it all I sing Alanis because she’s the greatest. Clouds cover up the sun. Then the sun hacks back through the clouds. There’s a breeze for a while. Then it’s quiet. My shoes crunch along the dead leaves in the ditch. Here and there a driver going down the highway waves. Then the sun sets behind me and my shadow stretches out long. It’s like an alien has taken over my body.

  A row of buildings comes up out of the distance and I just know it’s special before I even get close enough to see it all. Bunkie’s gotta be nearby.

  There’s a restaurant and a gas station and a liquor store and whatnot else. I go into the bathroom to rinse my mouth out and drink as much water out of the sink as I can. There’s a dumpster behind the restaurant. A buffet. I eat half a hamburger and half a fish sandwich and some fries. Then I’m real tired. There’s also a big plastic bucket full of heater butts. A couple on top of the rest are still smoking out. I bring a dying one back to life with a few drags and smoke as many butts as I can one after another, down to the filter. Then I take out all the pieces of Baby Milo’s card and set them out on one of the stone walkway blocks and make sure they’re all there. That turd ripped both the wizard’s ears off.

  He’s no different than Murphy. Murphy. His room was up in the attic where he did his pills and whatnot else. A trick he’d pull sometimes, his eyes rolling back in his head like they just might stay white forever. Got a demon taking over his body. Murphy. Always walking around with his shirt off and his chest out. Naked and skinny-strong and scarred up from evil he’d done and a tattoo of a Jesus cross. Black stencil on his grown-man boob. He’d get so mad there were purple veins in his forehead and neck, bulging out like fat worms. Didn’t matter that I did nothing to him either. Every chance he got he spat in my food. In my cereal. In my macaroni and cheese. Even my ice cream.

  Then I’d wake up to him yelling at me and slugging me in the nuts and pulling me out of bed and pushing my head against the bedroom window like the glass could shatter and I’d fly out onto the roof and roll down into the lawn. And he’d chew cinnamon gum and stink from sweat and cigarettes and his girlfriend. He’d make me smell his fingers covered in sour swamp. Fuck him and those smelly fingers. He’d laugh and want me to cry but I wouldn’t since that meant I’d lose. I couldn’t lose. Not to Murphy. Because that meant I was a baby. A real wussy baby.

  That’s the whole thing of why I need to see Bunkie. Last time I saw him at our old Mom’s place, he was the one running off and I was crying, and he said, “Don’t be scared.”

  “But I am.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re tough.”

  So, he’ll be proud of me when I tell him how I beat Murphy. Pounded him to nothing with Uncle Bob’s help.

  Bunkie’s my brother. He loves me and I love him.

  ***

  I wake up on the scratchy doormat behind the liquor store. Not sure if it’s late in the day or early in the morning. I swallow a bunch of times trying to pop my ears because it feels like I’m underwater. Except every time I swallow, a hundred bees sting my throat. The door behind me is open. A man inside laughs. He didn’t wake me up on the way in so he can’t be the worst. Boys have been kicked hard for less than that.

 

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