Stony River. Tricia Dower
fingered the lump of bone where her jaw had healed and imagined the shellacking she’d get if she went home now, Ma standing with her back against the wall and her hand on her throat, whimpering, “Oh, Jimmy,” Allen hiding under the bed. Tereza could take the blows. Worse would be looking up at that King Tut expression on his face after he decked her. Ma said Tereza was too stubborn for her own good but sometimes stubborn was all you had.
To the left of the john was a room with nothing in it except a mattress on the floor with dark stains reaching out like bloody fingers. It gave her the shivers. Across from that room was another with a four-poster bed still made up. Against one wall stood an antique desk with a bookcase and four big drawers. The desk and bookcase were locked. She could’ve busted into them easy but Linda would’ve said whoever boarded up the place left everything inside because Miranda was coming back and deserved better than busted stuff.
A bathrobe, workpants and shirt, so worn out she could see Haggerty’s shape in them, hung in a tall, dark sour-smelling wardrobe. On shelves: underwear, snot rags and socks. Wearing a dead geezer’s clothes gave her the creeps but warmth was warmth. The green plaid shirt came below her knees and the maroon bathrobe fell to the floor, its sleeves flopping over her hands like Dopey’s. Something in the pocket bumped her leg: a silver flask etched with a harp. She unscrewed it. Sniffed. Took a swig. It burned her throat in a good way and tasted like smoke.
Lighter and bolder, she heigh-hoed down the hall and came to a room with a rumpled bed and a tall narrow dresser. Off the room was an alcove with a crib and a pail of stiff, moldy diapers. Beside Miranda’s bed—it had to be hers—was a pot of turds. Tereza took another nip from the flask. The heat the house had sucked from her slowly returned.
A door off the alcove led to narrow stairs. Up she climbed, one hand beaming the flashlight, the other on the wall, feeling the way. A long, unfinished room with a small window waited up top, the window not boarded. Bands of sun from it lit up a bunch of crap on the wooden floor—dust balls, shredded insulation, mouse turds. Tereza swiped off a spot by the window with a sleeve of Haggerty’s bathrobe and knelt. She lifted her face to the autumn sun’s stingy warmth then looked down. From this perch Miranda could have eyeballed her and Linda on their way to smoke punks.
She looked for chains. Why Miranda hadn’t escaped bamboozled her. Maybe Haggerty had worshiped the devil. It would be swell if she and Miranda could live here together someday, close to Ma but safe from Jimmy. They’d tear down the plywood and shutters, push the drapes aside and let sun, like melted butter, pour into every room.
2 pm. Had Allen gotten to the movies? Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy was supposed to be on. He loved Abbot and Costello. After Tereza brought Allen back from the movies she’d usually hook up with Richie, Vlad, Vinnie and whoever else was at the White Castle, maybe play ball with them in the empty lot beside Vinnie’s house. It was October now and ball was over. She tipped the flask back.
3:40 pm. Downstairs again, carrying a blanket from Miranda’s room for later. In a closet under the staircase, hard to see in the dim light, she found a gun nearly as tall as her, with a long, skinny nose and a polished wood butt padded in red rubber. She managed to heft its weight and rest the rubber pad against her shoulder. Pretending Jimmy was at the front door, she aimed and said, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”
6:10 pm. Dark enough to risk stepping outside. She unblocked the door, took the bucket from the sink and dashed to the Ma and Pa Kettle pump in the sharp cold air. The handle squeaked when she lifted it. She pumped hard and fast until water gushed and splashed her feet, lugged the full bucket inside, dipped a cup into it, took a drink and waited to croak or at least double over in agony. When she didn’t, she filled every glass and cup in the house for later. Washed herself with the rest, toted the dirty water up to the bathroom and flushed away the reeking evidence of herself. Then back down the stairs to hurl the oozing potatoes toward the river and refill the bucket.
The booze had worn a hungry hole in her stomach. She opened the green beans and peas and set the cans on the coffee table in Dracula’s room. She lit the candles on the tall holders with wooden matches from a tin box on the mantle. Spectacular! A movie set, with candles as spotlights. In the dim mirror of the picture window, she watched herself eat, then cross the room in that dumbass outfit to check out the records beside the old phonograph. She cranked up the machine and put a record on the turntable. It wobbled slightly as a man sang, “Yes, we have no bananas” like he was in a tunnel. She mugged it up for the spotlights, turning her hand into a megaphone and wah-wahing to the tune through her nose. She pretended Miranda was watching, laughing and saying, “You fracture me, Tez.”
Tez sang and drank from the flask. Before long the room did a dance, her insides swayed and her ears felt full of water. She sat down heavily on the couch and stared at the drunken flickers of candlelight until her head fell onto Buddy’s jacket. She pulled Miranda’s blanket over her and drew her legs up to her chest like the babies in jars at the State Fair last year. Embryos that didn’t make it, Ma had said when Tereza got agitated, not poor little bastards nobody wanted.
• • •
She dreamed about a TV wedding. When the preacher said, “forsaking all others,” the realization Ma had been forsaking her for Jimmy since she was four years old smacked her clear across the face. She woke to a throbbing head and a mouth crusted with drool, her whole body pissed off as she trudged to the kitchen. She couldn’t stand this cold, dark prison any longer. If she had a boat, she’d row down the river all the way to the ocean and let herself get swallowed by a whale.
Leaning against the sink, chugging glass after glass of water with shaky hands, she spotted a door on the landing at the bottom of the kitchen stairs, went down to it and turned the knob.
Locked.
She got the crowbar. Linda wouldn’t have approved but Linda wasn’t there. If Tereza left without seeing what was behind the door she’d always wonder. So what if it was something that killed her? She didn’t exactly have great plans for the future.
She broke open the door, fired up the flashlight and started down another set of stairs, swiping at cobwebs. The air smelled like a wet mop. A mouse scurried in front of her and disappeared into shadows. The basement was long and narrow, one half filled with crap, the other set up for some kind of meeting. On the crap side, dried-up plants hung from a clothesline strung beside a boiler. The boiler looked like a dead bug with four pipe legs reaching up into nowhere. She’d check out the boxes of junk cluttering the floor later. The other half of the room was squawking for attention.
A harp, like the one on the flask, leaned against a black-draped table in front of the black curtain and white pillars she and Linda had seen. The black hooded robe still dangled from a hook. Pinned to the curtain was a hand-drawn picture that looked like the one-celled creature Mr. Boynton had shown them under a microscope. Weird objects sat on the table just so. A metal goblet wearing a necklace of acorns and seashells. A creepy animal horn. A tall white candle. A wooden stick. A long piece of knotted yarn. A black-handled knife. Three jingle bells on a string. The stick, polished and tapered at the end, looked like a wand. Tereza picked it up, tapped the air and said, “Bibbidy bobbidi boo,” but she was still there, still pond-scum ugly. She lifted the knife and blew the dust off it. Its double-edged blade, six or seven inches long, fit in her pocketbook.
Ma claimed Tereza had ESP because she always knew when it was safe to come home. What if Miranda and Tereza were tuned to the same frequency? It would explain why Miranda had looked across to where Linda and Tereza were hiding the day the cops took her away and why Tereza had known she’d hole up in this house one day. The voice calling her yesterday could’ve been Miranda’s, the objects on the table a coded message.
Tereza had to break into the desk now. Miranda would want her to.
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