Earthworm Soup: Chapter 9 Can I Get a Witness?

I needed to get clear on one thing.

“All of this—your brother, Jarrod, everything you’ve been telling me—it’s all got something to do with Eugene Henderson?”

“Everything does,” she said.

I don’t have a TV. Living alone like I do (I would say that I am “between men” but I don’t want to make it sound like more fun than I’m actually having), running a business, keeping up with everything on the internet—Facebook and Twitter and nowadays Google+ and blogging and what-all—it more than takes up any free time of an evening, most evenings, unless I stay late out in the shop, making something to sell. So I didn’t quite know what to do with Jeannie after supper, except listen to her talk.

Dark had fallen, the snow had not let up, and neither had she. “And now you,” she said. “He’ll be going after you, too.”

I scrubbed down the kitchen table with a wet sponge. “How do you mean?”

She chewed at the sleeve of my sweatshirt the way she always chewed at her gloves. I contemplated asking her politely not to, but—what the hell—I could always get another one. The message on it was something I needed to see right side out for a change, on her, not backwards in a mirror. This whole affair of hers was: Not. About. Me. Though my arm—the scar, where she’d kissed it—tingles to this day as I sit here at the computer, telling you about  it.

“You’ll see. He’ll get to you.” She was talking about Eugene Henderson, a boy not even out of high school. Seriously?

I watched the snow appearing out of nowhere, patting its fat paws against the windowpane in the kitchen. “Would you like something to drink?” I asked her. She was close enough to twenty-one. It wasn’t like we’d be out driving, getting in trouble of any kind.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said, as if I’d asked a totally different question. “You know how I said he sucks the life out of me? Well, you are now officially part of the Sewer Boy Fan Club, Vanessa, whether you choose to be or not. Let me tell you why: because I like you, because I care about you, because you—more than anybody else I choose to name at this particular moment in my life—you matter to me. I don’t say shit like this lightly, I think you know that. You’re kind of a big part of my life, Vanessa. I’ve been trying not to let you be, but you are. That makes you important to him.”

“Okay…” I said, taking down two glasses, wondering where this was going.

“He’s already started in on you.”

“You mean that thing about wanting to write a newspaper article?”

“Just be prepared. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Prepared for what?” I couldn’t fathom how her caring about me made me a member of somebody else’s fan club. “Can I just tell you, Jeannie? You’re not making a whole lot of sense to me right now.”

“No. I’m sure I’m not.” She looked pleased with herself, superior—arms crossed, smiling at the floor—but at the same time, bitter. She wouldn’t look at me.

“Could you try?” I took some ice down from the freezer and dropped it in the two glasses, hunted around and finally found the vodka under the sink behind the dish detergent after she had to move out of my way.

“See, I’ve never been able to get anyone else to see what he does. If I could just get a witness, just this one time, that’s all I ask. Even Jarrod never quite saw it for what it was.”

Now, you might can look at this from where you sit and see how she reeled me in, made me want to be special, smarter, more aware, more understanding, however you choose to look at it. I didn’t have the luxury of reading about it, though; I was in it, inside the snowglobe with her, if you get my meaning. It was a subtle business, the way she exhibited her pain, then concealed it, let the image of it flicker in and out like one of those holographic images where you look at it one way, it’s cuddly as a sad koala bear; but just you tilt it, ever so slightly, and it turns grisly on you. Her pain seemed to take her to a place just out of my reach, beyond a veil of either real mystery or bogus delusion–I couldn’t tell which from one minute to the next–though she did acknowledge my ability to understand it, to understand her.

But no, she’d only hinted at it, really; handn’t she? When she touched my scar, then kissed it—the way a child kisses a boo-boo, to make it all better—the pure, physical sensation of it tickled everything back to the front of my awareness—not just my own ancient pain but also, owing to an old desperation that had led me once, only that once, to try to—but to try to what, exactly?—to extinguish the pain of my own existence? or only to lance it, the way she did?—she drew to the surface a capacity in me to access something akin to, something in sympathy with, her private realm of anguish, rendering our common ground almost (but crazily) sacred, indecipherably ordinary yet mystical, too, our adjacent lonelinesses touching now, mine shocked awake by the intimacy of this other human being not just touching it, but kissing it. In a way that I did not yet grasp, she wanted to make us blood sisters. And I felt—but this must be how she got me, how she hooked me into her scheme of things—I felt like a mother superior, compared to her status of mere surface-scribing initiate.

“I look up to you, Vanessa, I really do. If I had your courage.” As she pointedly glanced at my left arm again, I felt the scar twang like a string improperly tuned—plucked hard, not bowed—and the harsh resonance of it shot to my gut, and deeper, straight down through me to my toes. “If I could just get there, I don’t think he could follow me. I think I could outrun him.” She took one of the glasses I held, filled with whatever kind of juice I had in the fridge—cranberry or cherry or pomegranate, I couldn’t begin to tell you—and set it down behind her. Her eyes sparkled with a crystalline light, darker than garnets.

“Now you’re really not making sense.” I drank from the glass still in my hand, not tasting what was in it. “Nobody on Earth wants to go there.”

“I do. I want to go there. I want to cross over to the other side.”

“You don’t know.”

“Show me, then. Teach me.”

“Teach you what? How to kill yourself?”

“See? That’s just it, though. You’re alive. I’m the one that’s dying.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not. You might be afraid to live is all.”

She slid her eyes off to one side, experimental as a razor. “I’ve tried that.”

“You have not!” I lectured. “Your problem is, you close yourself off to the world, to everybody and everything. If you want to live, you have to open yourself up first. To life, not death. Whatever this is, it’s not about Eugene, it’s about—”

“You, Jean?”

“Oh, puh-leeze!”

She looked at me hard, grinning, as if she had trumped me and anything I might say to contradict her, now or in the future.

“Look, you were a kid. You had some fucked-up, third-grade idea that you were responsible for another kid that got himself trapped in a storm sewer, and you want to blame your entire life on that? It’s ridiculous! You’re an adult now. You can think big girl thoughts. Idolizing me for no good reason, not for anything worthwhile I might have ever accomplished, not for helping anyone else out or for trying to build a business and a home and a life for myself, but just because I cut myself a little deeper than you did? That’s just so much fucking bu—”

“A little deeper?”

“I had my baby ripped out of my goddamn arms!” I screamed at her. Without even knowing it, I slammed my glass down on the counter, creating a minor Vesuvius, and balled my fists at my sides. I leaned in against her, rigid and enraged, my face within an inch of hers, spewing at her like a drill sergeant. ”I was fifteen years old and two thousand miles from anyone I ever knew in my entire life, with no one in the world except the man I thought I loved and a baby I had no fucking clue how to take care of! And they took him! They just took him! They took my baby! My flesh and my blood! And to this day, I have no idea where or why or what I did to deserve it! And you want to tell me you look up to me? What the fuck do you know, Jeannie Iverson? What the fuck do you know about me that makes you think I have it in me to give a fuck about you and your stupid-ass delusions of martyrdom in the first place? You want to try and kill yourself? Really kill yourself? You want to go deep?” I no longer knew what I was saying. I think I said, “Be my fucking guest!”

She grabbed my face between her hands, got her fingers hooked behind the hinges of my jawbone. “That’s more like it!” she snarled. And she pulled me in and kissed me, full on, on the mouth. I reared back, but she came with me, climbing on my feet to make herself taller than she was, leaning into me, bearing down and pressing and pulling at me and at the same time backing me up across the floor. “I want that! I want your pain!” she said, walking me backwards into the other room. “I want your anger! I want your venom, Vanessa! I need it! I want him to have to fight me for it this time! Fight me for you! Fight both of us! And that means I need you to know everything, I need you to see everything, I need you to understand, for once, exactly what’s at stake and where he gets it from and why.” I didn’t know the tears were leaking from my eyes until she started kissing them, sipping them from my cheeks, from both corners of my lips, my chin, my throat. “I want your fear,” she said, kissing at me, pushing me backwards, “I want your weakness,” manuevering me out of the kitchen, “I want your terror,” backing me up, unbuttoning me. “I want your strength, I want your love, I want your violence, Vanessa, I want your loneliness.”

She reached in and uncupped my breast, scraping my nipple to full attention with the tape on her bandage, and I won’t make any excuses, I won’t pretend I hadn’t seen it coming or didn’t know what was happening or that I hadn’t been so lonely for so long that any intimate human contact was enough to set me on the precipice, but I will say that as she lifted my other breast out and pressed her lips to it, sucking it hungrily, animalistically into her mouth, I gasped out a breath and a confession I did not know I had been holding. I winced. “Please!” and as I spoke it, the word broke in two pieces, meaning please don’t and please do, and by the time she had toppled me backwards over the arm of the sofa and came with me, lips kissing, teeth biting, tongue seeking and fingers finding, forcefully at first through my jeans and afterwards more softly insistent, and by the time she had finished with me and finished herself, too, I had curled and crumpled and pounded against the back of that sofa like the swells of an ocean storm, again and again and once again, until the two of us subsided together into an understanding that felt a little bit like peace.

I tucked a sweat-soaked strand of hair behind her temple. Still bewildered, knowing I’d have to find some way to incorporate what had just taken place into the way I had always before this laid out my thinking—or not always, but knowing I needed to coordinate it, just as I always intended to lay out what to wear the next morning so I wouldn’t have to think about it last minute—I said, “What comes next, I wonder?”

She looked at me with a knowing eye, as if such a question made perfect sense to her. “Exactly. It’s his move. You ready?”

“For what?” I pushed her shoulders back where I could look at her face. “What the everloving Jesus are you talking about?”

She sighed. “I guess I still haven’t told you everything you need to know, have I?”

Earthworm Soup: Chapter 8 The Tree House Exemption

Over supper, I said. “So he didn’t have anything in the car, your brother? Any drugs, I mean?”

She tore off a hunk of bread with a chuckle. “Next day, he invited me into his room. ‘I’m in a lot of trouble,’ he told me.

“ ‘Uh, yeah!’ I said.

“He waited for me to make another smart remark, but I kept still.

“He said, ‘I need a huge favor from you, Jeannie.’

“I knew it couldn’t be anything good.

“ ‘I need to get my suitcase back.’

“ ‘Your suitcase,’ I said.

“ ‘My clothes are in it.’

“ ‘Why do you carry all your clothes around like that? It doesn’t make sense.’

“He didn’t answer me except to say, ‘I need to get it back, and I can’t go over there. I can’t even leave the house. But you can.’

“ ‘That’s because I didn’t get myself arrested,’ I pointed out.

“ ‘I thought I was going away for good.’

“I wondered what it would be like with him gone for good. It might logically be an improvement, but I didn’t need to say so to his face.

“ ‘Will you get it for me, Jeannie? Please? I’ll get you a new set of headphones.’

“I told him he already owed me that, so next he said, ‘What do you want, then?’

“ I looked him straight in the eye. ‘In addition?’ I said.

“ ‘Yeah. Sure. Why not?’

“ ‘What I want is to be left alone by you. To be treated like I’m your sister, like you care whether I live or die. Like, what if it was the other way around? Would you even consider going and getting something back for me from one of my friends’ houses, if I needed you to? No.’

“ ‘You don’t have any friends.’

Jeannie closed her eyes and opened her mouth, reliving the conversation for me there in my kitchen. She let out a little burst of exasperation and told Billy, as if he sat there having soup with us, “ ‘You’re not helping your case one little bit.’

“ ‘I would,’ he said. ‘I would if you needed me to.’

“I hated his pleading. Hated the way it made me feel—not sorry for him, but cold inside. I soon learned, though, that inside that coldness sat a powerful little bitch. I scrutinized him.” Pointing her butter knife at me as if I, Vanessa, had been drafted to play the part of Billy. “ ‘If I need something from you—whatever it is—and nobody else on earth can do it, you will?’

“Yes.” That was me, Vanessa, speaking the part, agreeing to God knows what. Although, I need you to understand, it wasn’t quite that simple. What I thought I was saying was nothing but, “Yes? Go on. What next?” Yet she took it as me saying Billy’s line, channeling him.

“ ‘And you will never, ever, under any circumstances, raise your hand to me or kick me or do anything to me ever again?’

I wagged my head. And again, on the one hand, I only meant to express dismay at the way a boy had treated his little sister, at the predicament that gave rise to her need to wring such a promise out of him. At least, I tell myself that, because I have such hard time admitting that I felt—I don’t know what, exactly, but not  in control of my own body—as if some—

But see? If I say it outright like that, it sounds ridiculous. Nothing took possession of me, I just got caught up in her story and went on automatic for a split-second. Of course I would never raise a hand to her. What need had I ever given her to extract such a promise from me?

She eyed me, spooned her soup and held it level. “ ‘Well, okay,” he told me. ‘But let me ask you this: What if you deserve it?’

“I told him, ‘I don’t. I don’t ever do anything like that to you.’

“Because you can’t.”

I swear to God, I have played this over and over, trying to get it straight in my head, and to this day I can’t tell you who said that—not with any certainty—whether she did or I did or neither one of us.

She dropped her spoon in her bowl and stood, scraping her chair across the floor with the backs of her knees. “I got up to go,” she announced. “Negotiations were over, as far as I was concerned. But he grabbed me by the wrist.” She reached and grabbed me, demonstrating.

I stared at her, dumbfounded, caught up in her grip and in her story both, no longer sure what part I played.

“I just stared at his hand and I recalled the way Lori Leigh had handled him in the back yard that day, while I watched from up in the tree. I said, ‘I guess you don’t want your suitcase back.’

“ He let go.” (She dropped my spoon hand.)

“That was a start.

“ ‘I’ll be right back.’ In my room, unlike in his, I knew where to find things. I tore a sheet of paper out of my science notebook and brought it back with a pen. ‘Start writing,’ I told him. ‘I want everything you promise to do on paper with your signature, including the headphones and anything else you ever break of mine, paid for. I’ll have my attorney look it over before I agree to anything.’

“ ‘Who? Mom?’ he says. ‘You can’t tell Mom about this, Jeannie. You can’t tell anyone.’

“But I had never said Mom. ‘You can also stop accusing me of being a rat. Put that in there.’

“ ‘Who, then?’

“ ‘I don’t have an attorney,’ I said. ‘It’s a figure of speech.’

She sat down and resumed her supper, ignoring the soup spattered on the table all around her bowl. “So I ended up going over there and talking to Karyn Pendergraft about the suitcase. She said it was too heavy. There was no way I could carry it.

“ ‘Will you help me, then?’

“ ‘I guess I have to. I don’t want it around here when my parents get home. What is he, crippled?’

“ ‘Grounded.’

“ ‘You can tell him for me I said life’s a fucking bitch. Asshole. Everybody knows the cops were here last night. My folks are coming back early because of it, and my ass is in a bad enough sling without him leaving his suitcase like he was on vacation over here! Jesus! Like he thought he was moving in with me? What? My folks are fucking gonna freak the fuck out on me!’

“ ‘We can push it down this side of the creek, if you’ll help me drag it up the other.’

“So that’s what we did. ‘What’s he got in this thing?’ she kept asking, which I didn’t know. We got it as far as the back door of her house and down on the ground. It was an old suitcase from before the days when they started putting wheels on the bottoms and pull-out handles, but the outside had a hard, like, plastic coating, so it slid across the grass okay. Once we got it to the gate, all we had to do was let go, and it went sailing.

“ ‘Oh, shit!’ she said just before it went splushhhh! into what little water was left standing in the creek bottom. We ran after it and hauled it up onto the opposite bank.

“ ‘You think it’s all right?’

“ ‘It’s probably just got his clothes in it,’ I said. ‘I’m sure they need to get washed, anyway.’

“She looked at me funny. ‘His clothes? Really? What the fuck for?’

“I rolled my eyes and shook my head. How was I supposed to know?

“ ‘You think it’s all right, though? The suitcase?’ She couldn’t seem to make up her mind how she wanted to feel. ‘Not like I give a fuck. Really?’

“I said we could let it air dry once we got it up to our yard. So she helped me drag it uphill by the handle, while I got behind it and pushed.

“ ‘Is your mom at home?’

“I grunted.

“At the gate she said, ‘That’s as far as I go. I’m in enough trouble. Tell him to give me a call. He owes me.’

“I got the suitcase through the gate by myself and pushed it to a patch of sun between the house and the tree. Then I opened it up to see how much water had got inside and right away I saw why it was worth so much to him to get it back. His dirty clothes were all stuffed in one side behind a divider that snapped in place. In the other side, he had two heavy blankets folded up nice and tight with a space left in between where he packed his pipes and angle irons, several pairs of drumsticks beat to splinters, bells, wood blocks, everything. And sure enough, a plastic baggie with what I knew had to be weed, because there were two blunts rolled up and also an assortment of pills of various sizes, shapes and colors in a second bag tucked inside the first one.

“I knew it would nullify our agreement, in his mind, if he didn’t get back what he was looking for. I also knew that, realistically-speaking, he could sign his name in front of a congregation of notary publics; it didn’t mean he’d stick by what he said. I took the baggie out and closed up the suitcase—it hadn’t got all that wet inside, after all—and I left it beside the back porch while I took off on my bike with the baggie full of drugs stuffed in my jeans.

“I didn’t have a plan. All I knew was I’d been tricked, like in a movie. Conned into smuggling drugs for my dumb-ass brother. I stopped at the corner of Fair Meadow and Bruce to fish the baggie out of my jeans and toss it in the gutter. It rolled across the grate of the storm drain and got hung up between two of the bars, so I walked my bike backwards and lined up the front tire to roll over it and push it down in, but before I could do that, a gasp of wind sucked it and a whole slew of dried leaves straight down. Sssschloop! Gone.

“I rode back to the house and told him where he could find his suitcase, then I took off again. I needed to tell somebody what kind of an idiot I had for a brother and what I’d done about it and to get a second opinion. I didn’t want to admit it, but his remark about how I didn’t have any friends hurt. I needed to prove him wrong, so I decided to pay Jarrod a visit.”

“Jarrod,” I said and reached for a napkin. “You know he wants to buy Jiminy off of me?” I tried to sound casual about it. Don’t ask me why, but I felt like I could do with a change of subject. Jarrod felt normal.

She ignored me. “When I got there, nobody was home.”

Let me just summarize this part of her story, if you don’t mind.

She didn’t see Jarrod all the rest of that summer and she forgot all about Billy and the drugs until one day in October, when Jarrod was supposed to come over and tell her what he’d found out about Eugene’s last name—which at the time was still just “Doe”—and what it meant.

Jarrod’s step-dad drove him. The Hendersons, who’d bought the house on Fair Meadow more than a year ago, had finally moved in. Mr. McEarland said, “I’m curious to see what they’ve done with the old place.” Jeannie said he had a look in his eye when he said it, though—evasive and haunted—and she knew there was more to it than curiosity. The Hendersons had added onto the house in the back, building right over the spot where Jarrod’s mom had lain with her neck twisted under the extension ladder. Jeannie and Jarrod followed his step-dad at a distance, watching him as he crossed the lawn and knocked on the door. Eugene answered.

“That’s him,” Jeannie said. She and Jarrod hung back. Eugene appeared only for a moment before Mrs. Henderson replaced him at the door, smiling and inviting Mr. McEarland in. She waved to Jarrod and Jeannie, too. “You two, come on in!” she urged them, but Jarrod wagged his head and told Jeannie, “Let’s get out of here!” They had business to discuss.

They walked up Fair Meadow past Jeannie’s school to a place she called “Hidden Park” which occupied a city block between the highway on one side and the train tracks and grain elevators on the other. Along the way, Jarrod said, “He’s working things out in his own way.” His step-dad, he meant. It took Jeannie a minute to figure that out. “His therapist told him to let go of what had happened, not of my mom, and to stop blaming himself. And for me to stop blaming him, too.”

“I thought it was an accident.” Jeannie said.

They sat in the swings at the playground end of the park and didn’t swing. Jeannie asked if he had to go to the therapist, too.

He shrugged, said he’d gone a couple of times, then picked up a pebble and threw it, not at anything. “Dieter still goes.”

She didn’t know how to ask what she wanted to know. She started to say, “Is it working?” but thought better of it, thinking it might sound like an insult to Dieter, and she didn’t mean it that way. “Why don’t you still go?” she asked instead.

“Same reason.”

“As what?”

“I’m working things out in my own way.”

Jeannie said, “I get it.”

He said, “No, you don’t.”

When Jeannie related this to me, I could see in her eyes that it still hurt. She said to Jarrod, “Why? Cause I’m stupid?”

“Cause you still got your mom,” he told her.

She couldn’t argue with that.

He said, “No offense or anything.”

Even though it was October, it was still warm enough that day for short sleeves. Jeannie started kicking herself back and forth on the swing, watching her big toenail poke its head in and out of the hole in her plaid sneaker. She’d painted her toes a color called “Pearl Jam” after the band. It had an opalescence about it like the shell of a snare drum in the window of Manolo’s Music downtown that Billy wouldn’t shut up about. Her nail color was chipping and she didn’t care. Her legs, when she kicked them out straight to make herself go higher, were almost as brown as Jarrod’s arms. When he swung forward, the wind opened his shirt up between the buttons, and she saw that his tan was not just on his arms. She swung so high that the chain went slack and then jerked and twisted her sideways. She did it again so she could look at him without his knowing she was doing it on purpose.

I bit my tongue. In Jeannie’s mind, she was talking about an eleven-year-old boy, but I couldn’t get mine to unhitch itself from the back of a tow truck.

He stopped swinging, and so did she. He came over and started turning her around and around, so that her chains twisted up on each other. “I wish you’d move back,” she told him as he wound her up. “We could build another tree house, and your dad wouldn’t even know anything about it.” She said this without realizing at the time that, in her fantasy, his dad and Dieter did not move—only Jarrod did. And she moved with him into their tree house world and they both left their stupid brothers far, far behind. And the City of Keening, too. “Far, far behind,” she said with a dark ocean mist in her eye.

“We could build a treehouse anywhere in the world,” Jarrod said, caught up in her fantasy. Then he let go of her chains. She went spinning and spinning and shrieking with laughter, until he caught her and started twisting her in the other direction.

“So anyway,” he said later, as they walked back to her house, “I found out what D.O.E. stands for. Department of Engineering. That’s the people who are in charge of mowing the creek and of all the drainage pipes and manholes and of the waterworks and the sewage treatment plant and everything, basically, except the police and the fire department and, like, the mayor. They run everything else.”

“Oh, shit!” she said. “Shit, shit, shit!” Then she told him about the drugs she’d found in Billy’s suitcase and that she’d dropped them down in the storm drain.

“That’s okay,” Jarrod said. “They find stuff like that all the time down there. They must get a lot of money that way.”

“Drug money?”

“I didn’t even think of that. I just meant, people drop a lot of money, and it ends up down there. I bet those guys are secretly the richest people in town!”

Jeannie wrinkled her nose.

“Does he know?” Jarrod asked her. “Your brother?”

“That’s the funny thing about it. He never even mentioned it.”

Surprisingly, Billy had kept his end of the bargain with her. She wouldn’t say that he’d been nice to her, but he hadn’t been mean, either. The interesting thing, to her, was that he’d started going to Lori Leigh’s church, thinking that if he played his cards right, he could get back with her. Karyn Pendergraft went there, too. She and Leigh Ann were best friends, supposedly, and she was coaching Billy on the side. So who knew what was going on, really? She tried to explain all that to Jarrod—what she called, in the telling of it, the “comic-book politics” of the situation—but they didn’t read the same kind of comic books, evidently, and she had the feeling that what he heard was something totally different from what she said.

“I’m not ever going to get weird like that about a girl,” he told her. “Just so you know. Going to church and everything? I mean, if you believe in God, it’s one thing.”

“I don’t,” she said quickly. Then she regretted it, because she wasn’t sure.

“I didn’t mean like you,” he amended. He jutted his chin at the curb in front of her house, where his step-dad had parked their car. “He took off and left me.” It seemed not to surprise him.

They worked out a plan to take her bike halfway to his house, then she would turn around and come back, and he would continue on foot. He steered and pedaled; she sat sideways across the bar in front of him. In her mind, halfway meant the cable swing, but when he glided past it, she didn’t say anything, afraid that if she suggested he stop there, he would think she was manipulating him into pushing her on the cable swing, after they’d already spent all that time on the swing set at Hidden Park. Anything like that, she decided, would have to be his idea. He swooped in a wide arc around the corner onto Washington Street and kept pedaling. At his school, he said, “We came a little more than halfway.”

“That’s okay. You did all the work.”

They stood facing each other across the frame of her bike. Before he passed it to her, she said, “I might believe in God, but I wouldn’t ever make you go to church.”

He looked confused at first, then he nodded. “People who live in tree houses are exempt from church.”

“Right.”

He put out his hand, and they shook on it. (As she told me this part, the way she mooned at the palm of her own hand, as if he’d written her a goddamn love letter, made me want to channel Billy for real so I could slap the stupid out of her.)

When she got back to Fair Meadow Lane, she saw Eugene standing in the front yard of Jarrod’s old house, smiling. He waved at her as she sailed by. “Not like he expected me to wave back, though,” she said. “More as if to say, ‘Like it or not, Jeannie Iverson, I live here now.’ ”

The next day was a Sunday. Mr. Henderson and Eugene spent the afternoon measuring their back yard, driving wooden stakes into the ground and and stretching string from one to another. Jeannie watched from the creek, through their chain link fence. Todd Henderson waved. “We’re building a tree house,” he called. “Want to help?”

Furious, she stalked away, covering the ground between their back yard and hers in no time. She slammed the back door, making the kitchen floor dance.

“What’s the matter with you?” Billy said. He was still in his dress pants from church.

“I’d like to know how you can build a tree house in your back yard,” she demanded, “when you don’t even have a tree!”

Earthworm Soup: Chapter 7 Roundabout Angel

I hadn’t planned on company, but the snow fell so thick and stuck so to the window that I couldn’t see much of anything. Even standing with the door open, I couldn’t make out the shape of anything more than twenty, thirty yards from the house—the shop, the barn, nothing. “I might as well call back and cancel that tow truck,” I said. “Even if we do get Jiminy started, we’re not gonna make it into town in this. Not in one piece. Not unless it lets up here in the next few minutes.”

Jeannie shivered and rubbed her bare arms. “Whatever you think, Vanessa.”

“Oh! Sorry!” I shut the door.

I found her something in my closet to put on over her wife beater. Her own shirt had blood on the front of it. On my way by the bathroom I picked it off the floor to throw in the wash. “I wish I knew which garage they called.” As I handed her a sweatshirt—one with an angel on the front with the words, “It’s Around Me Not About me”—a movement in the front window caught my eye, nothing but a blur passing by like a ghost in the snow. “Nevermind,” I said. “Here they are.” I beat the guy to the door and had it open before he could knock.

Now, how do I say this? Because I don’t want to give you the wrong impression; I am no longer the most sought after thing in tight jeans, nor do I swing like a wrecking ball at a home show. Yet there is not a man in Keening County, eligible or not, whose head at one time or another (as I have passed him by or passed him over) has not pivoted at least enough to allow me to get a good look at his features. And this boy had a face that, had I been able to place it, I might have started with: on a pedestal, while I thought about where else it might look—oh, I don’t know—let’s just say, less appropriate. Fat flakes of snow clung to his hair and and melted and percolated through it, dark and wet like strong coffee, before the run-off plunged down his forehead, beads of it hanging up in his brow, so that he took a swipe at it with a gloved finger. A pair of eyes the color and scent, I swear, of cinnamon baking searched my face as his lips shaped my name in the form of a question.

“You’re new!” I informed him.

“Beg pardon?”

“I haven’t had you before.” I didn’t mean it to come out that way—I didn’t—but somebody’d hit the pause button on my brain and deactivated what few verbal filters I have. I failed to catch a single word that dribbled from my own tongue—until my mental replay pointed out to me, much too much later, what an everloving fool I’d made of myself. In the moment, all I could think out loud was, “Who sent you?”

He looked confused, like he must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. “Did you call about needing a jump, Ms. Cavendish?”

“I sure do. Why don’t you come on in?” I still blush to think what kind of psycho music must have been playing in his head, because there’s got to be a statute on the books against the way my eyes trespassed on his facial property. The rest of him, thank Jesus, was bundled up to the neck in insulated coveralls. I stepped back—not very far, I’m sure—to let him by, when I caught sight of Jeannie with my angel sweatshirt pulled halfway down over her head, nothing showing of her face except her Coca Cola-colored eyes, supersized, gulping at him over the crew collar.

He looked from one of us to the other and did not step through that door. “My boots are all mud,” he apologized.

When the timer function in my head began to blinking again, it struck me with the forlorn realization that, in all the years, tears and recriminations it had recorded since long before this boy learned to shave, I had built both a house and a reputation out of mud, and before I could smear that thought from the instruments by which I piloted my life, both before and since I touched down in Oklahoma for the second time, I had to know one thing: “What’s your daddy’s name?”

He looked at me hard for a second, then his eyes veered, looking behind me, following something from left to right. I didn’t register what they saw. (I realized later that he’d been watching Jeannie pass behind me—still hiding her face, most likely—but I was oblivious to her then.) When his eyes came back to rest on me, they had softened some. “My dad’s passed on,” he said. He looked confused.

“Oh. I’m sorry. Recently?”

“Going on six years. I doubt you knew him. Why?”

Which was all I really wanted to hear, but the mere fact that I needed to ask had banked my flaps, if you take my meaning. I laughed and told him not to mind me, I was being silly, then I lied and said he looked like someone I once knew. “I was fixing to call back and say nevermind.” I turned to Jeannie, but she wasn’t where I’d left her.  “Where’d she get to now? The thing is, I need to drop her off in town, but this storm came up so sudden. I just don’t think I want to take Jiminy out in this and get her stuck.” He struck me as a boy who minded his manners, and I felt like I needed to correct something about myself, so I said, “So suddenly, I mean,” and laughed.

I had to explain who Jiminy was, so of course he wanted to see her. We trudged out to the barn together, and I popped the hood. “Wow!” he said. I got jealous, the way he ran his eyes over her motor mounts.

“Something, ain’t she?”

“She still runs?”

“When she wants to.”

He clamped his cables to her battery posts and climbed in the cab. I gave him the keys and explained about the ignition switch on the floor. He shook his head and grinned at her antiquity.

Jiminy didn’t so much as click. He hit the wipers (which, I could’ve told him they run on vaccuum, not juice) then the headlights for good measure. “You’re not going anywhere today.”

“That’s what I figured. Darrel says I need a new voltage regulator?”

“I think you need a starter, too. I’ll have to take her in, but it might take us a day or two to find parts. We’ll have to go online to find out if anyone still makes them.”

I’d known this was coming and that I’d have to bite the bullet sooner or later, but I still argued. “She’s all I got for transportation.”

He laughed. “Then you don’t have any transportation. If your daughter needs a ride into town, I don’t mind taking her, I just can’t promise to get her back out here. At least not tonight.” I tried not to let his assumption get to me (my daughter, indeed!) while I thought about his offer. I don’t know what he read in my face, but he looked sheepish. “Probably not what a mother wants to hear, is it?”

“That’ll be her call, I guess.” I pointed my trigger finger right between his spice cabinet eyes and said, “You just be gentle with my girl!” I meant Jiminy. Right at that moment, I had too much on my mind to worry about what was going through his. Underage goddamn son of a prick! I wrapped my coat around my sorry chest and tramped back in the house.

Jeannie had climbed in my bed, crosswise, on her knees, with just the toes of her socks sticking out from under the covers.

“Excuse me?” I said.

She burrowed in deeper and started rocking forward and backward. Her toes disappeared. Whatever she said came out too muffled for me to make sense of it. I explained to her that she had the offer of a ride home if she wanted it, and she froze. Then she resumed rocking and began to chant, it sounded like, saying the same thing over and over.

I walked around the bed, peeled the covers back and lifted the pillow from her head. She kept rocking and repeating. “I can’t handle this, I can’t handle this, I can’t handle this…”

“I’ll take that as a no, thank you,” I said.

I didn’t mean to be such a bitch, though. I sat beside her and rested my hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. She felt hot to me. The rocking of my hand to and fro with her, as she rocked, soothed me if it did nothing for her. I said, “Honey, you don’t have to go anywhere right now, with anyone, if you don’t want to.”

And I thought, You stupid, stupid girl! Can I go in your place?

In the dimming light of a skyless winter afternoon, Jiminy, with her front end hiked up on the skids of the tow truck, looked like a beagle trying to mount a rotweiler. “I guess we’re just gonna stay put for now,” I told Adonis-in-coveralls. “I don’t have any idea how I’m gonna to come collect my pickup truck, though, if you take her.”

“I don’t mind coming back out to get you,” he said. “Or Darrel will, if I can’t. We’ll give you a call with the estimate, one way or the other. If I was you, though, I’d sell this old truck to me, for the right price, and get you something more reliable.”

“You’re not the first to say that.”

He smiled. “Maybe not the first, but I bet I’m the most sincere. I’d take good care of her for you, fix her up right.” Damn his eyes! It’s a wonder I didn’t scorch his paper when I signed my name. “Vanessa Cavendish,” I said out loud. “You have my number?” (I just wanted to make sure.)

It occurred to me I hadn’t got his name yet. I opened my mouth to ask him just as he turned and flipped up his collar. I didn’t think he heard me over the wind in his face and the sound of his motor, but he turned and waved before he climbed in his truck, and he shouted something. It sounded like “Semper fi!” It might have been his name or just “I gotta fly!” or “Lady, you must be high!” or who knew what?

I stood there longer than it took him and Jiminy to disappear through the slantwise veil of falling snow, still holding Jeannie’s bloody shirt balled up in my hands. God knows what kind of insane asylum he figured he’d managed to escaped from!

“Is he gone?” Jeannie asked the minute I stuck my head back in the bedroom.

“Yes,” I said and let it hang in the air like a question.

She peered out at me from under the covers. She still hadn’t pulled my sweatshirt down over the lower half of her face. “You sure?”

I had put up with enough. I said, “Jeannie—” but that was as far as I got in my attempt to find out what her problem was now.

The collar of my angel sweatshirt fell from her face and she seized up, mouth open, fingers splayed across her face as it contorted in a scream that would not come. She purpled, the veins stood out from her neck, from the backs of her hands, and she shook all over like an earthquake had struck. A low, shuddering moan started somewhere so far down, I swear I felt it come rumbling up from under the bed, building and building, until it clawed its way up her belly to her chest and shredded a hole through her vocal chords. Her back arched, her chest heaved, she hung suspended as if by the ragged shriek torn from her throat. When the scream released her, she collapsed and lay sobbing uncontrollably, her jaw sprung on its hinges as she tried to breathe, tears puddling, fingers clutching at the sheets.

I wrapped her up in my arms the best way I could, and this time I did the rocking, while she blubbered and hitched and tried to speak and couldn’t. I made shushing noises to the beat of her caterwauling and tried not to think about Jiminy and the smell of cinnamon. Eventually she calmed down enough to swallow and take a deep breath. Then she told me.

“That wah—wah—was Jarrod Frye!”

I think I said, “Oh.”

“You don’t understand.”

I told her she was right about that. I did not tell her that somewhere around about the time she crawled up under my blankets, I had given up trying.

“I haven’t seen him since tenth grade.”

I remained unenlightened. “So I guess you don’t really know what kind of driving record he has.”

She gave me a blank look. After a minute, though, the light dawned, and she said, “Very funny!” and pushed me away, but then luckily she snorted and started laughing, and so did I. Out of relief, probably, because, as jokes go, I hope I’ve told better.

“I think I slobbered on your shoulder,” she confessed.

“Nice.” She had. I took my shirt off and balled it up with hers and took them both to the back porch to drop them in the washing machine. She followed me and informed me that I had freckles even on my back. I said, “Yep,” and she hugged me from behind. Laid her cheek against my shoulder, wrapped her arms around me tight and just held me for a long minute.

“Thank you, Vanessa!”

I said, “You’re welcome.” Then I said, “It’s kinda chilly back here,” and she let me go. I made a bee line for my closet and put on a flannel shirt.

“I meant, for not making me explain.”

“No problem,” I said.

I had a chicken breast I’d baked the day before and a little broth left over, so we cut up some vegetables and boiled water for noodles, while she went back to her story and picked up where she’d left off, saying that the cop that came to their door that night long ago never actually charged her brother with anything, although he did handcuff Billy and make him sit in the back of the cruiser, while he and Mr. Iverson sat up front and talked the situation over. Billy still had on his jeans and a tee-shirt. He was the only member of the family that was dressed.

“Dad had on a robe, at least. Me and my mom stood on the front porch in our PJs, watching. After a while, my dad rolled down the window of the cruiser and called up to us that the cop was taking him and Billy to get the car. Then the cruiser pulled away from the curb.

“A long time later, Dad pulled into the driveway by himself, and my mom freaked. He locked all four doors by hand and checked each one individually before he came in the house. ‘Where’s the flashlight?’ he said. He was not happy.

“ ‘Where’s the flashlight?’ Mom said. ‘Where’s my son?’

“ ‘I need the flashlight.’

“ ‘You don’t need the flashlight right this minute.’

“ ‘Yes, I do, too.’

“ ‘No, you need to sit down and tell me what the hell is going on!’

“ ‘If he’s got drugs in the car, I need to find them. They were very goddamn lenient. Very goddamn lenient. Now, I need that flashlight, Maureen. I need that flashlight now.’

“ ‘Why don’t you just sit down and calm down and tell me what’s happened to my son first, and then I’ll help you find the flashlight. Will you do that much for me?’

“ ‘They took him down to the station.’ Dad spoke with his eyes closed, waving his hands in the air and touching his chest. I’d never seen him in such a state. ‘I’m going to go get him and bring him home in a minute, but first, before I can do that, I need to make sure that there are no drugs in the car, so that when I do go get him and bring him home, I can know whether to beat him within an inch of his life or within a half-inch of his life.’

“ ‘I am telling you one more time to sit down!” my mom commanded him. “I will get you the flashlight! Jeannie, Honey, you go on back to bed.’

“My dad did not sit down, I did not go back to bed, and she did not find the flashlight. We all three searched the car in our pajamas, using the overhead lights. We couldn’t see in the trunk too well, until I came up with the idea to park the car in the street, under the street lamp. We never did find any drugs.

“ ‘I can tell you this,’ Dad said. ‘They’re not gonna believe we didn’t find any.’

“ ‘Why do you have to say it like that? Aren’t you the least bit relieved?’

“ ‘They were going to impound the car. They still could. Yes, I’m relieved, but what are we gonna do if they don’t believe me?’ He shoved his hand into the crease between the passenger seat and the cushion and fished around in there for the umpteenth time.

“ ‘They’ll have to. If they don’t, we’ll deal with that in the morning.’

“Searching the car had been something to do, at least, while he let off steam. He spoke more calmly after that, more rationally. ‘I guess maybe we ought to get dressed before we drive downtown. What do you think, Jeannie?’

“I said, ‘I think we ought to go like this.’

“That made him laugh. Then he looked sad and worried again and he hugged me.  ‘I hope you don’t turn out like your brother.’

“ I agreed. ‘I hope I don’t, either.’ “

I stood with the chicken breast cut up in the cup of my hands and looked at her. “What did you turn out like, Jeannie?” I asked.

She cocked her eyebrows at me. They were the same color as her roots, just a shade lighter than the mascara streaked across her cheekbone. “Come here,” I said. I dumped the chicken in the broth with the vegetables and scrubbed my hands in the sink. Then I wiped her face with my wet thumb. She caught my hand and turned my wrist so she could study the scar. The tip of her middle finger felt like velvet, tracing the faint but still ugly squiggle up to the crease of my elbow. I wanted to pull back, but she gripped me, bowed her head and kissed the the most pronounced gnarl on inside of my forearm right where it always felt the numbest.

When she looked at me again, she smiled only barely and spoke to me in a voice so faint I had to strain to catch it, a whisper as transparent as glass. “What you get is what you see.”

Her eyes on me were so big and so wet, I saw nothing but my own reflection.

Earthworm Soup: Chapter 6 Roman Candle

Thought I'd share a little Roman Candle with you.

Jeannie had got off track. I intended to steer her back to the story about Eugene Henderson–which, I meant to look into that, do a little asking around on my own as soon as I got the chance–but it had begun to snow, and the wind had picked up some. I needed either to get her home or take her and get her cuts looked at.

“Let me go get Jiminy started, so she can warm up.” That’s what I call my ’49 GMC pickup truck—Jiminy Cricket. My grandma, who to my knowledge never drove a day in her life, left her to rot in the barn. When I come home to roost and rebuild, among the first of the projects I took on was I brought Jiminy back from the brink of ruination. She has yet to forgive me for it.

I grabbed my coat and patted the pockets to make sure I had my keys and my cell phone. “Be right back.”

Jeannie’s mom didn’t pick up, so I left a message to let her know that Jeannie’d had an accident, was the way I put it.  I didn’t say how, just that I was taking her to the emergency room but not to worry. I didn’t think she needed stitches, I just wanted someone to look at it, make sure it didn’t get infected, blah, blah, blah. I ended the call and commenced pounding my head on the steering wheel. “Shit, Vanessa! You idiot!” I knew perfectly well what would happen if I took her to the E.R. (assuming I could get her there in the first place). They’d find a reason to keep her, one way or another. Probably have to strap her down and put her on an eyeball watch, because she was bound to go off the hook. Any normal person would. But that’s the way I seem to make a decision: open my mouth and start talking. Whatever comes out, that’s what I figure I have to do, since I said I would.

Like I’m my own private Oracle of Delphi or some damn thing, right?

I turned the key in the switch and stepped on the ignition, which in a ’49 Jimmy is a push-button on the floor. I’d had the battery on the charger just yesterday, so the starter spun like hell, but the motor didn’t catch. I tried her again. She coughed once, sputtered and whined. I sat a minute longer, wondering how I intended to talk Jeannie into going peacefully to the E. R. with me before I tried the starter again. No go. I patted Jiminy on the dashboard and said, “You looking out for me, Girl? Trying to cover my ass?”

My ring tone went off, the one I use for people-in-general. I looked, and it was the number I had just called. Jeannie’s mom.

“Maureen?” I said. “Hi.”

We went through the whole rigamarole—how are you and I’m fine and how are you and is it snowing in town like it is here?—before she finally asked me how bad cut Jeannie was.

I backtracked. “Not bad. I might have over-reacted. She’s insisting she don’t need to go.” Which was not a complete lie.

“Is it just a surface cut?”

I said, “Yes, it really is.”

“On her wrist?”

I said, “Yes.”

On a cell phone, a sigh can come across like a hurricane. Finally, she said, “What set her off? Any idea?”

“I think it had something to do with a boy she knows.”

“Eugene. I know.”

“He came out here today on a field trip from the high school, and she wanted nothing to do with him, and then—”

She cut me off. “I wish I knew what to tell you. We’ve tried everything we know to do. I don’t mean we’ve given up, but I’m at my wit’s end with her. She won’t talk to anybody about it, you know. A professional or anything. Is she there with you?”

“She’s in the house. She don’t know I called you. I come out to get my truck started and thought I’d give you a holler first to let you know why she’s late getting home.”

Maureen didn’t say anything right away, so I told her to hold on while I tried Jiminy again. A whir and a whine and then nothing. “I might have to call Triple A,” I said. I thought I smelled smoke.

“I better let you go, then. Or do you need me to come get her?”

“No, that’s all right. But could you tell me one thing first?”

“If I can.”

“Did Eugene Henderson—” but I couldn’t think of a way to ask her what I wanted to know that didn’t sound ridiculous. So I said, “Was he adopted?”

“Oh, yes. Did she tell you about him?” I could feel her quicken—I don’t know how else to put it—the way she would haved stepped up closer to me if we stood talking in person. Too close. I felt myself literally leaning backwards, my shoulder blades pushing into the seat back, to give myself room to think.

“Jeannie says he was found abandoned.”

“And they took him in. That’s right. They have done wonders with that boy!” I could feel her breath on my face right through the phone. “I don’t know what her problem is.”

“Where was he—I mean, how was he found? Jeannie says—”

“What did she tell you?”

“That he was wandering around under the street, in the storm drain.”

“That part’s true.”

“All right,” I said. “What part isn’t true?”

“That depends on what she told you. If she’s saying she helped Jarrod Frye to put him down there, then that might give you a clue what we’re up against.”

When I didn’t say anything, she clarified. “That part’s not true.”

“Put him down there how?”

“With their minds. By mental telepathy. It varies. Some days she says they made him up, that he’s not even real. You can’t reason with her about it, so don’t even try. You’ll just set her off again, and she’ll do worse to herself if she thinks you don’t believe her.”

I told her we were on the same page, then, and that I’d give her a call back as soon as we were on our way. I sat and watched the windshield pile up with snow till I sat in a white coccoon, and Jiminy Cricket did nothing but click. I had to go in the house to get my Triple A card and make the call, but I felt overwhelmed suddenly. When I pushed the door open, the wind pushed back, and a sudden small flurry fluttered over the bench seat. A good two inches had fallen in the course of a five-minute conversation, seemed like, but I really had no idea how long I sat there, blanking out.

When I got in the house and found my card, I told the guy on the line from Triple A, I said, “Every tow truck in town knows where I live. Just tell them it’s Vanessa out at Repurpose Farm.” Of course he tried to upsell me on the Gold Card. “Y’all are so good to me,” I said. “Next year maybe I will.”

I positioned myself where I could watch out the window. “Where were you?” I said to Jeannie. I wanted to keep her talking. I had forgot all about trying to keep her on track with her story. Not that it mattered. We had a good forty-five minutes to kill.

“I was telling you about my brother and Lori Leigh Sprague.”

“Oh, right,” I said, watching it snow. “She’s Leigh Ann’s daughter, isn’t she?” Leigh Ann Bittle, used to be. Leigh Ann’s mother, Lori Leigh’s grandmother, had taught me seventh grade English. Don’t laugh. She did the best she could, considering what she had to work with.

“I guess so,” Jeannie said. “Two days later, after he chased me up the tree, Billy came and stood leaning in the door to my room. I had my headphones on and didn’t hear him the first time. I pulled one side away from my ear. ‘What?’

“He had his fingers in his pockets and his thumbs in his belt loops. His eyes looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. He wanted to be Elvis Presley or something, but the smirk up that one side of his face always looked to me like someone fish-hooked him. This time, though, he looked really, truly fragile.”

I glanced over and saw her imitating her brother, staring off in the distance, one nostril flared.

“He said, ‘Thanks a lot!’

“I just looked at him ,like, what’d I do this time, and he said, ‘Lori Leigh broke up with me. I figured you ought to be the first to know, since you’re the one that put her up to it.’

“I pulled my headphones all the way off and let them hang around my neck. ‘I did not.’

“He studied my ceiling, like Lori’s words were printed up there. ‘ “Even your own sister thinks you got issues,” ’ he quoted. ‘What did you say to her, I’d like to know?’

“ ‘I never said you had issues. I never said anything like that.’

“ ‘Tell you what. You stay out of my room from now on, you understand? You stay out of my life!’

“ ‘Fine with me.’ I put my headphones back on. ‘Your loser life ain’t my problem and it ain’t my fault, either.’

“He was on me like flies on stink. Jerked my headphones off and twisted them so the cord tightened around my throat and he slapped me across the top of my head three or four times and pushed me flat against the wall. I felt my headphones snap between my shoulderblades. On the way out of my room, he took a swipe at my shelf and knocked my collection of Matchbox cars off on the floor.”

I rolled my eyes out the window. Her story made me glad I never had a brother. I smiled and said, “You collected Matchbox cars?” I liked that about her.

She might have nodded, I don’t know. The snow fell heavier, wetter-looking, though the wind had let up some.

“Billy hung out with Tommy Isabel and his one other friend, whose real name was Ben Abercrombie III, better known as Crumb Number Three or just plain Crumb or sometimes Three. That summer their loose affiliation solidified around the fact that Three had bought himself a bass guitar in order to back up Iz on lead, and they needed a drummer. Billy took to beating on anything that made noise, including me, but more often a section of pipe or a piece of angle iron. He had a hub cap  for a cymbal that he either found or stole, a hollowed-out section of wood, some plastic tubs and pvc pipe that he cut to various lengths. He experimented with luggage, too, which he stuffed with his dirty clothes in order to muffle his thumping. They called themselves The Triumvirate and they practiced at all hours, usually in a quonset hut across the alley behind the John Deere dealership but also at each other’s houses sometimes.

“Iz and Crumb smoked anything they could get their hands on. Billy liked to brag that there wasn’t a substance on earth that one or the other of them had not inhaled, ingested or injected. ‘This is information,’ he imparted to me, pointing all four fingers at my chin, his eyes crackling with red. ‘You are not to divulge that under any circumstance, you value your life.’

“I had cards tacked all over my bulletin board and balloons tied to the four corners of my bed since yesterday morning. Billy had yet to wish me a happy birthday. ‘I’m ten years old,’ I said, which seemed like a lot at the time. ‘I’m not a rat.’

“ ‘Good thing. Good goddamn thing.’

“One night not long after that, as I lay asleep with my window open, a commotion erupted across the creek that woke me. I couldn’t see anything from my window, so I unlatched the screen and climbed out, dropped to the ground and crept real quiet across the back yard to where I could see huge yellow flames jumping between the cracks in the stockade fence around the Pendergrafts’ yard over on the other side of the creek. Someone must have poured something on the bonfire, because the flames suddenly leaped higher, and I heard the scraping sound of Iz on his guitar, the way he played. He switched to a chirping beat that also sounded familiar from the intro of a song the band had worked up, and sure enough, I heard Billy keeping time on his suitcase and Crumb thumping  away at his bass. They only had that one song to play and they were done—their entire repertoire used up in less than seven minutes. I knew precisely, because I had timed it for them. The flames sank back to normal size, girls’ voices carried across the divide, laughter, loud calls. I pushed open the back gate and sat high up on the creek bank on my side, concealed among a row of cypress trees that screened off the next-door neighbors’ back yard in lieu of a fence. From there, I could just make out the tops of people’s heads, their shadows thrown against the back of Kari Pendergraft’s house.

“I sat watching and wondering what would happen if I went over there, if I hopped over the creek and marched up the opposite bank, opened up that high wooden gate and walked in. Billy wouldn’t be happy about it, but what could he do? In front of everybody? Probably nothing.

“It surprised me, to tell the truth, that he had that many friends, outside of Izzy and Crumb, the other two corners of the Loser Triangle, ‘where IQ points vanish like blips on a radar screen.’ (I’d heard that one from Anna Henderson. It mortified me that the other kids at school had found out about The Triumvirate and knew how bad they sucked and that my brother was part of it.)

“Then all of a sudden came a loud crack! that split the night sky and showered the creek with sparks. I jumped to my feet. I didn’t know at first what it was, but I soon found out. Somebody had set off a bottle rocket. Another one went up. I saw the sizzle this time, like a meteor going the wrong direction. I followed its trajectory and bang! when it flashed, it still made me jump. A few minutes later, a whole string of Black Cats rattled and popped behind the Pendergrafts’ fence. I forgot how close around the corner it was to Fourth of July. More and more fireworks went off, including the quiet beauty of a Roman Candle. I love Roman Candles. One soft blossom of color after another. Just whump…whump…whump! So beautiful it hushed the voices at the party for a minute or two, so that when I first picked up on the rhythm of lights beating against the houses to either side of the Pendergrafts’, I assumed it was more fireworks.

“Then the back gate flew open. Out spilled a dozen teenagers down the creek fanning out everywhichway, five or six toward Palmer and two going the other direction, toward Mulberry, while one doubled back and climbed over the chain link fence into the Peerlesses’ yard. I recognized my brother’s long-legged lope across the creek and up the near bank in my direction. I scrambled and hid in the shadows between two cypress trees. If he saw me, he didn’t stop to ask what I was doing out of the house, he just bolted to the back door.

“A spotlight froze the gang of kids running in the direction of Palmer, and a voice over a loudspeaker told them to lie face down and spread their arms and legs. When they didn’t move, the voice yelled, ‘Get down now!’ and they all fell flat and stayed there.

“One flashlight beam circumnavigated the Pendergrafts’ back yard, while another one exited their gate and pointed out the two kids fleeing in the other direction to a third cruiser parked on the bridge at Mulberry with its lights out. It looked to me like Billy and the kid who jumped the fence into the Peerlesses’ yard were the only two to get away. I waited until everything went quiet again before I slipped back to the house and climbed through the window and back to bed, no one ever the wiser.

“I didn’t get much sleep that night. It was still dark when the police knocked on the door and asked for my dad by name. ‘Is there a tan Ford Galaxy registered to you, Mr. Iverson?’ He rattled off the plate number.

“I didn’t hear what my dad said, but the correct answer, of course, was yes. That was our car.

“ ‘Can you tell me where that vehicle is located at the present time?’ ”

Earthworm Soup: Chapter 5 Mississippi Mud

I can only imagine the look on my face.

I studied her a long time. Then I said, “Eugene? As in Eugene Henderson, the boy that was here today with Spider McCormick? That Eugene? Is that what  you’re telling me?”

Jeannie closed her eyes. “You don’t have to believe me, Vanessa. Why would you?”

“There’s got to be record of it,” I said cautiously, “if it happened.”

“Oh, nobody’s ever disputed that it actually happened. You can look it up if you want to. I don’t think you were living around here at the time, but it was all over the newspaper.”

I thought back. “You’re how old?” I said. “Nineteen?” That made her story eight, nine years old, a year or two after Nine-Eleven. I was away in Massachusetts still, putting my own life back in order.

I lost track of what she was saying, until she got to the part about the couple who bought the McEarlands’ house and how they didn’t move right in.

“They had work done first. A company came in with heavy equipment. I watched what went on. One machine called a Ditch Witch chewed a deep, straight trench clean around the foundation, then they came behind it with a bed of gravel and after that laid section after section of clay pipe. Terra cotta, like the color of your flower pots. I asked my dad about it. According to him, what they installed was called a French drain. ‘It’s tied into the street,’ he said. Not for some years did I understand what that entailed, although for some reason, I never forgot that phrase, ‘tied into the street.’

“Their name was the Hendersons. You know who they are, I’m sure. Gay and Todd Henderson. They moved from out-of-state. Tennessee maybe? But not for some time after the trenches had been filled back in and replacement shrubs planted, and new sod, and the roof shingles stripped and new ones laid, along with new vinyl gutters and replacement windows and downspouts and a coat of paint: white with a slate blue-color trim called ‘Thunderstorm’ on the can lids. I know because I snooped around. And still that house stood empty. Jarrod’s house. To my mind, it was always going to be Jarrod’s house, not theirs.

“After the first of the year, an entire new phase of construction took place in back of the house. You had to go down by the creek and back up and look through the chain link fence to see what they were up to back there. It looked like a basketball court at first, but with copper pipe sticking up out of it, covered in black foam and, looked like, electrical tape. By the end of two weeks that slab was caged in with two-by-fours that rose two stories tall, and soon they boxed all that in with plywood and covered it in Tyvek until, by and by, it became just more house, with its own roof and windows and a big sliding glass door. After that, a brick patio appeared and white gravel flower beds and more instant shrubbery. But still no people.

“Nobody made the connection—at least, not me, not right at first—but it had to be within two or three days after the Allied Moving van delivered a houseful of furniture and appliances and a steady stream of handtrucks stacked with identical cardboard boxes labeled this, that, and the other thing, that the sewer boy emerged as a matter of established fact and public record.

“The story made the headlines not just of The Keening Klarion but of The Oklahoma Times, too, and it appeared on WKY-TV. There it stood in the background, that house, all spruced up behind the reporter with the microphone and the wind-tossed hair. I no longer recognized it as Jarrod’s house.

“I’ll never forget that reporter, the way she stumbled over the story. She seemed so thrilled and excited to be telling everybody about it. Pointing me out as a liar to the whole school.”

Jeannie tossed her head and held up a pretend microphone to put on the air of a TV reporter. She did a good job of mimicking that tone of voice they use to try and split the difference between serious and sensational. “ ‘Authorities are saying very little about the case at this point. No one seems to have any clues to the identity of the little boy or his parents or how he ended up under, uh, in the underground storah—ah, storm drainage, uh, system in this quiet community. All we know so far is that he appears to be healthy, apart from some minor scratches and bruises, and that he is, uh, indeed, uh, a very lucky little boy even to be alive. This is Karen Overblown reporting for WKY-TV live from Keening.’ ”

I laughed. “You should be on TV,” I said.

“Yeah, right. Imagine? Meanwhile, back in the newsroom, the anchor couple went on and on, chit-chatting about the story, saying how the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation had been called in and that doctors at the Bass Hospital in Enid, where the boy had been taken, reported that he had ‘a good appetite.’

“So I thought, Good! Fine with me if Sewer Boy was to be kept in Enid and not here.

“It was all anybody talked about at school the next day, too. Even Mrs. Charles had to bring it up to say that she knew a lot of us kids considered the creek to be a playground, but that it was dangerous, and we didn’t belong down there. ‘A flash flood can come up before you even know it,’ she tried to tell us. She was so full of it! ‘And you certainly should not go near or play anywhere near any of the drains that empty into the creek. The city ought to be putting grates over those openings,’ according to her, ‘because how else did he get in there?’

“Everybody had questions. We never did get back to social studies.

“As for the Hendersons, once they physically moved in and started living in the house at the bottom end of the street, they invited us over to Sunday dinner. Billy, by that time, had his license and the use of the car on weekends and was seeing Lori Sprague every second of every day, in school and out, while I had no choice but to go with my parents.

“Not that I had no curiosity of my own about the Hendersons. I did. Plenty.

“From the moment Mr. Henderson answered the door and let us in, I could not stop trying to work out what they had done with Jarrod’s house, where they’d hidden it. Not just was nothing the same color or the same pattern, but none of the rooms were even in the same place. Most of the walls had gone AWOL , and what was left of them they had shifted around to such an extent that you couldn’t help but think that living there had to be like some kind of experiment involving rats in a maze, where everything changes from one day to the next, to see how smart they are under different kinds of stress. Because the thing about those houses—not just on Fair Meadow, but all of them in the entire neghborhood–each and every one of them was built around the same time, by the same developer, and they’re all laid out according to the same system. Some of them have the garage on the right instead of the left, but whichever side it is doesn’t matter; you’ll still find the kitchen situated directly behind it, out of the way, while the bedrooms occupy the opposite end of the house, across from the living and dining room. Which just made sense to me as a kid. You knew where to find the bathroom and the back porch and the built-in cabinets, even the fold-down ladder to the attic, everything.

“But nothing was the same anymore inside that house—the one that was always supposed to be Jarrod’s and Dieter’s house. Nothing, no matter how pretty.

“Now, I of course knew that houses existed with different floor plans in other parts of town and that, even in the section where we lived, some of the more expensive ones—the ones built on corner lots, usually—varied to a certain extent in their layout. Some of them had two-car garages and even an upstairs on one side or the other. That was to be expected. Not every detail had to be identical. But the variations followed a similar kind of logic.

“Not so in Henderson World.

“First off, the kitchen had been uprooted, turned sideways and levitated to the side of the house where Jarrod’s room used to be. It hovered three feet above the ground floor to set it off from the living/dining room, but it had not one wall, except the outside one, for cabinets. That and a stainless steel table. I couldn’t tell if it looked more like a stage or an operating room. And there stood Mrs. Henderson beaming down at us from on high in a spotless white apron like you might see in a restaurant and heels and a navy blue sheath underneath. Her fingernails gleamed like pearls. Her hands, arms and throat? Like porcelain.

“Where the kitchen ought to have been, they and their team of contractors, unbeknownst to any of us, had installed a den and lined the walls with expensive panelling and glass bookshelves that lit up from the inside. My mother gasped when she saw it. My dad, the original man of few words, said, ‘That’s neat, Todd! That’s real neat!’ and meant it. Dark shelves and panelling made of the exact same wood as Mr. Henderson’s desk—teak—which I knew about from seeing a film at school, with elephants that could wrap their trunks around whole trees and pick them up and carry them. The books on the shelves were all Bibles and Bible study books, Bible concordances and Bible geography books and devotionals.

“Are you a preacher?” I asked him.

“He laughed—you know how adults do sometimes?—as if I’d said something adorable but wrong. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘No. Merely a student of the scriptures,’ he said. ‘I am a Gideon, though.’

“ ‘What’s that?’ I had to ask. To me it sounded like an internal organ of some kind, one that not everyone probably had.

“ ‘We’re a laymen’s group dedicated to the work of the Lord. We provide copies of the Word to servicemen, hospitals, hotels and motels, wherever it’s needed. Would you like one, Jeannie?’ He reached in a drawer of his desk and slid out a New Testament.

“ ‘Oh,’ I said.

“When we saw the addition at the back of the house, where the bedrooms had gone to make room for the new kitchen, my mom asked the Hendersons whether they might be planning a family.

“ ‘We’ve left that in the Lord’s hands,’ Mrs. Henderson answered behind us.  She had a voice just as sweet as a Diet Pepsi.

“When her husband put in, ‘We’re doing our part,’ and gave my dad a wink, Mrs. Henderson pursed her lips in a way that caused her cheeks to dimple.

“ ‘Young ears, Todd!’ she scolded him.

“ ‘You don’t have to worry,’ I said. ‘I know the facts of life.’

“ ‘Oh! You do, do you? Why, wherever did you get so smart?’

“ ‘They teach us that in school,’ I said, just being helpful. ‘It’s called biology.’

“Mrs. Henderson nodded. She and her husband exchanged a look. ‘That’s the problem with public education, isn’t it? Anyway—’  She turned back to my mom. ‘When we had the addition put in, we thought we—well, we were pregnant, but­­—’

“ ‘Oh!’ said my mom. She touched the porcelain woman on the arm.

“ ‘No! No, it’s okay!’ Mrs. Henderson smiled so bright and shining in every aspect of her person—her teeth, her fingernails, and now her eyes—I swear, even her skin went all glimmery with the optimism of her outlook. ‘The Lord works things out as He sees fit. He really does! If we follow His guidance, He will not lead us astray.’ Although I have to say that, in spite of her smile, I couldn’t help thinking she looked mad. Not crazy, I mean. Just pissed off.

“ ‘There’s a reason for everything,’ my mom agreed.

“ ‘Why don’t you all come and sit down, and I’ll get dinner on the table.’

“Mr. Henderson brought up ‘the tragedy’ associated with their property and asked, ‘Were you friendly with the McEarland’s?’

“My mom leaned over her plate. She’d been expecting the question, I could tell, because there’s this way she gets when she means to speak from the heart, if you know what I mean.”

I had to smile. I know Jeannie’s mom. I could see the earnest look in her eye and feel the intensity of her emotion. When she wants to connect with you about something that’s important to her, she stands just one little hair too close. Most people don’t seem to notice.

“ ‘Amy was a dear!’ she said. ‘And you’re right; it was a tragedy, to happen the way it did. Tragedy is exactly the right word. I’m sure he torments himself over it every single day that he lives. How could he not? But we’re glad to see you make something of this place again. If it sat empty another minute, it would—well, it just reminded us all the time. But you’ve done such a wonderful job with it! It needed you! It really did!’

“ ‘How sweet of you to say that!’ Mrs. Henderson looked genuinely moved and confused at the same time. Her eyes pleaded for something. It wasn’t clear to me what, maybe just friendship. She squeezed my mom’s hand.

“The conversation turned to the story of the sewer boy, naturally. They had pulled him out of there directly in front of the Henderson’s new house, after all. Less than a month had passed, and not many of the questions that people’d been asking about him had been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. Not only how did he get there, but who did he belong to? Where did he come from?

“ ‘You mean, they still don’t know?’ Mrs. Henderson looked shocked.

“ ‘I haven’t heard anything. Have you, Don?’

“My dad said no, he hadn’t, and Gay Henderson turned to her husband and said, ‘The Lord has directed us to this place for a reason, Todd. I know He did.’ She did not take her eyes off him.

“They studied one another for a minute that stretched out to a mile, and at last Mr. Henderson said, ‘Let’s pray on it, Honey.’

“ ‘You were there at the time, weren’t you, Jean?’ my mom asked me. She never called me that. I’ve always been Jeannie. It was like she wanted to show off how mature I was for my age or something. ‘Did you hear anything or see anything? Did he look familiar to you?’

“I raised my eyebrows, but my eyes refused to look up from my plate. ‘He was gross!’ I said. ‘He stunk to high heaven!’

“ ‘But he didn’t say anything? Who his folks were or anything?’

“My mom knew the answers to her own questions. I’d already told her everything I knew. So she grilled me strictly for the Hendersons’ benefit. When I gave her a look to let her know I was onto her, she turned away and said, ‘All he’d give was his first name. Eugene.’

“ ‘No last name?’

“ ‘That’s not what he said,’ I interrupted. ‘He said, “I’m you, Jean.” ’

“ ‘Eugene,’ Gay Henderson repeated, nodding in the affirmative, like someone learning a new language.

“I gave up trying. I wasn’t going to convince anyone that what they’d already read in the newpaper and seen on TV—and what I myself had told them I saw with my own two eyes—was anything but the gods-honest truth, just because I still wanted so hard to believe that I myself had made it up. ‘Can we go home now?’ I said. ‘I don’t feel good.’

“ ‘Oh, you’re not gonna want to miss dessert, Honey! Have you ever tried Mississippi mud?’

“I tried not to look apalled. I honestly tried. ‘Did you say mud?’

“ ‘It’s the living end, if I do say so. You just have to try it.’

“ ‘Can I be excused, Mom? Really. I don’t feel good.’

“I cut across the lawns between their house and ours with my fists clenched, not watching where I was going. ‘People don’t invent other people!’ I scolded myself. ‘Not flesh and blood people! When are you about gonna learn to keep your moth shut, Jeannie Iverson? Because let me tell you one thing: he is not me. That sewer boy is not me! There’s no way he said, “I’m you, Jean!” because, one, he’s not. Duh! And two, there is no way that he could possibly have of knowing your name!’

“But he had said, ‘them two running buddies.’

“What was that supposed to mean, unless it was in reference to me and Jarrod that day?

“ ‘That’s ridiculous!’ I fumed.

“My doubts chased me across the yard and up onto the front porch. Jarrod must have called him out. Jarrod must have called the sewer boy up from the sewer. Not that he meant to, but I remembered the bounce of his voice under the Bruce Street bridge. ‘The vermin approach! A whole legion of them!’

“My feet ran faster, though I tried to make them not. When I tried the front door of our house, I found it locked. I had to scoot between the garage door and the front bumper of the car—it was parked way too close—in order to get around to the side of the house and let myself in the back. By that time I was only two percent as creeped out by the turn the conversation had taken between my folks and the Hendersons and ninety-eight percent pure pissed off. I slammed the back door behind me so hard it shook the kitchen cabinets and rattled the glasses. We never locked the front door. Ever. Especially not when we only went as far as the neighbors’ down the street for dinner.

“Then it occurred to me.

“Billy had the car. But yet, there it sat in the driveway. I went to his door and gave it a kick. ‘You’re home early, Dork Face!’ I pushed open his door and stuck my head in to say, ‘What’s the matter, your date with Bimbo Sprague not go as planned?’ But I heard a squeal like a little piglet and saw the covers of his bed fly up in the air and two heads—his dark one and another one, blonde—duck under quick. The words I meant to say, to my good fortune, never mad it past my lips.

“I stared at the frantic shapes under the bedspread. I’d already seen more than I wanted to, even though I hadn’t actually seen a blessed thing. I closed the door and left the house.

“When Billy came outdoors in his Levi’s and no shirt, I was already halfway up the big mimosa tree in the back yard, swaying in the evening breeze. Across the other side of the creek, the moon rode a jagged horizon composed of rooftops.

“ ‘Get down here!’ Billy bossed me. ‘I want to talk to you.’

“ ‘You can talk just fine. Your lips ain’t broken.’ If I came down, I knew I was in for it.

“He started climbing after me, barefoot. I climbed higher, up where I knew the branches wouldn’t support his weight. Skinny as he was, he stood nearly six foot tall and weighed more than twice what I did.

“He came on up, anyway. ‘I just want to talk, Jeannie. Jesus!’

“ ‘I ain’t climbing down. You can just forget it. You better get a shirt on and tell her to, too, because Mom and Dad are right behind me.’

“ ‘You little bitch!’ he called me, standing on a bigger branch, lower down, and shaking the one I was on, causing it to dip and bounce. I hung on for dear life.

“ ‘Billy!’ screamed Lori Leigh Sprague as she came zipping her cutoffs and pulling on her sandals. ‘Billy Iverson! Stop it!’

“ ‘I’ll get you yet, you little freak!’ he growled, but he stopped shaking the tree limb.

“ ‘That’s how you treat your own sister?’ Lori wanted to know. ‘You could kill her, doing her that way! What if she was to fall?’

“ ‘She ain’t gonna fall.’

“ ‘Go get dressed this instant! If you have one ounce of common sense, you will get down out of that tree and go put your clothes on before I call my dad and tell him to come get me.’

“ ‘And unlock the front door, Moron!’ I yelled down. ‘That’s a dead giveaway.’

“Lori looked up at me from the ground, when it was just the two of us. ‘You Okay? Why don’t you come on down?’’

“ ‘No way. I think I’ll just enjoy the peace and quiet from up here.’

“ ‘He won’t hurt you. Come on down. I’ll see to it.’

“She turned out to be a lot nicer than I expected. I said, ‘You sure you can’t do better than him?’

“She took her time answering. ‘Billy can be a decent guy, when he puts his mind to it. He just—he was thinking one way, and, well, you surprised him is all. I’m glad you did, if you want the truth.’

“ ‘Looked to me like you were thinking same way he was.’

“ ‘Nothing happened, though. You’re not gonna say anything to your folks, are you?’

“ ‘Why, if nothing happened?’

“ ‘Because nothing did.’

“ ‘I don’t want to get you in trouble. But I also don’t want to get chased up a tree like a dog does a cat, either.’

“ ‘He won’t. I’ll talk to him.’

“ ‘Can I just tell you something?’

“ ‘Sure.’

“ ‘It wasn’t the smartest idea.’

“ ‘I know. I know. Can I tell you something?’

“ ‘Go ahead.’

“ ‘You probably should knock and be invited in before you open your brother’s door, don’t  you think? I know. I have a brother, too.’

“ ‘Okay. Touche`.’

“Billy came back out with a shirt on and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He stood three heads taller than Lori Leigh Sprague and pointed his finger up at me in the tree. ‘One word,’ he threatened.

“ ‘Go start the car, Billy.’

“ ‘One word,’ he repeated.

“ ‘I’m capable of it,’ I warned him.

“ ‘You won’t be capable of much else.’

“Lori turned back to the house. ‘I’m calling my dad to come get me.’

“ ‘Wait a minute! No, you’re not!’ Billy caught up to her, but she slapped his hand away. ‘Come on, Lori Leigh! Now, don’t be like that! ’

“Lori stood her ground. ‘I’m not playing referee between the two of you. You go apologize to your sister and take me home, or I’m calling my dad. You don’t have but those two choices.’

“ ‘Why? What’re you gonna tell your dad? Nothing.’

“Lori Leigh impressed me that day, I have to tell you. She stood there with one hand on her hip and the other one on Billy’s chest, reaching up and patting him the way you do a horse, to ease its mind about the saddle. ‘Remember one thing for me, okay? I’m not afraid of my dad. You are.’

“Billy towered over her and listened to her. In a way that amazed me. I didn’t need to see his face. I saw it in the way his shirt just kind of settled onto his back. He took one small shuffle sideways and relaxed into a whole new attitude. It was a miracle, the way she handled him.

“ ‘Now, go apologize to your sister,’ she told him. ‘That’s step one.’ ”

Earthworm Soup: Chapter 4 Abnormal Growth

She tried to support the ladder with his weight on it.

“We saw his step-dad come around the side of their house, and Jarrod goes, ‘Hey, Dad!’” Jeannie waved her right hand—the one with the cut wrist—trailing a banner of bloody toilet paper. She wore a totally incongruous, happy-go-lucky expression for one split second. Then she dropped it. “He’d only recently started referring to him as his dad instead of his step-dad. Like they bonded over the whole tree house incident or something, but it still sounded weird to me. Mr. McEarland stood in their driveway and waved his arms, and the ambulance pulled over to the curb and stopped. The siren wound down like it suddenly just run out of juice. The lights kept going.

“ ‘Why’s it stopping at our house?’ Jarrod said. ‘Hey! Why’s it stopping at our house?’ Then he started running. I ran, too, but Jarrod ran fast.

“EMTs climbed out of the ambulance and opened the doors in the back and pulled out the gurney and let its landing gear snap into position, then wheeled it up the driveway toward Jarrod’s house. Mr. McEarland directed them around the side of the garage. When he saw Jarrod he grabbed him and held him and wouldn’t let him go. Another siren wailed from far off, coming closer, and soon their yard was full of firemen in those bulky pants and jackets and boots.

“I stayed across the street, not sure what else to do. After a long time, I watched the EMTs come back around the corner of the garage with Jarrod’s mom strapped to the gurney. They loaded her into the ambulance. She bawled out Jarrod’s name, but his step-dad wouldn’t let him go. Jarrod kept saying, ‘Let me go!’ but he wouldn’t.

“Mr. McEarland stayed real calm—like, deathly calm—and he talked real loud.  ‘We’re gonna get in the car. You, me and Dieter are gonna get in the car and follow. We’ll stay right behind the ambulance all the way. We are not gonna let her out of our sight.’

“The firemen climbed back into the fire truck and left. Mr. McEarland led Jarrod into the house and come back out with him and Dieter, who looked completely bewildered. The ambulance left, and they all got in their car and drove off after it. I went home and told my mom what had happened. She made some phone calls, but we didn’t find out what went wrong with Mrs. McEarland until later that evening. Over the next few days the story kept changing, getting revised and refined and swapped back and forth until it was pretty well established that Mrs. McEarland—or Amy Frye, as everyone still called her—had been holding an extension ladder steady for her husband, while he cleaned the gutters in the back of the house. Then, without warning, one leg of the ladder started to just sink right into the ground.   She tried supporting the ladder with his weight on it to keep him from getting injured, which she managed to do. But instead of him getting hurt, the ladder twisted around on her and flattened her into the ground. The way it caught her, it broke her neck. Not all the way through, they said at first. People kept saying it was fortunate that Amy Frye did not completely sever her spinal cord. That was the good thing about it, they said. That was a blessing, because she died on the operating table, not in the back yard where her boys would’ve seen.”

Jeannie fell silent and dug in her jacket for cigarettes. She slapped one out of the pack and fiddled with it a minute, then said, “Be right back.”

“Through the kitchen,” I said.

While she smoked out back, I tidied up in the bathroom, put away the antibiotic and the bandaids and rinsed the blood out of the sink. It occurred to me what I might have done with the gauze, so when she came back in, I bandaged her wrist properly.

I said, “It sounds like you had something special, you and that boy.”

“Who, Jarrod?” She gave a little shrug. “I didn’t see much of him for the rest of the summer. My stint as primary running buddy was up after less than a day. The other kids’ parents allowed them to play with him again, if they wanted to, but he wasn’t all that interested in organizing anything anymore. He started fifth grade that year, and I went into fourth. We walked home together, since we lived so close, but he just had less and less to say. He reverted to calling Mr. McEarland his step-father. Then, less than two months into the school year, a For Sale sign went up in their yard. They moved to a house in Kirkland School District.

“I could never remember exactly when it started, maybe late November or sometime after Christmas break, but word got around about the kid who lived in the storm sewer. I just dismissed it the first time I heard it, although I remember very clearly. Logan Reynolds told me. He sat behind me in Miss Vernier’s class. ‘Oh, yeah; right!’ I said and turned my pencil over to erase a stray mark on my math sheet. ‘I know all about it.’

“But it wasn’t just Logan talking about it. Anna Sylvester brought it up at lunch that same day. Her and her crowd of followers. They, like, navigated the halls as a single unit, like a school of fish or something, and they just wouldn’t let it go. Once I heard enough and tried to tell people I was the one who made that story up myself, Deanna Kilpatrick contradicted me. ‘No, really, Jean; it’s true.’

“ ‘It’s not! You can ask Jarrod. I told him about it as a, like a joke. Last summer.’

“ ‘Who?’

” ‘Jarrod.’

“ ‘Jarrod Frye? Oh, sure! He doesn’t even go to school here anymore,’ she said. And coming from her, that was enough to discredit Jeannie Iverson on the subject of the sewer boy forever. Even Sam Corwin, who’d been friendlier than just about any other girl in school up to that point, gave me a pained expression, and next day, sure enough, Logan passed a note to me, folded the way me and Sam always folded our notes to each other. Inside it said, ‘You allways think you know everything. You don’t.’ Underline, underline, underline.

“I marched straight through my back yard after school, out the back gate to the creek, and I kept on until I reached the bridge at Mulberry Street. It had just started to rain, but the creek was still dry. The bridge sheltered me from the cold and wet, and I didn’t care about rats, either. Even they were a figment of my imagination, although they were at least possible. I did not stick my head inside the drain pipe, the way Jarrod did under Bruce Street, but I stood there with my arms crossed over my chest and I yelled at the top of my lungs. ‘Hey, Sewer Boy! I don’t believe in you, just so you know! And I don’t care who does! You don’t exist! You got that? You don’t exist, Sewer Boy!’

“Satisfied when I didn’t get an answer back, I turned and climbed the creek bank back to my house.

“I skipped out of school after lunch the next day. I had to know where Jarrod lived, and the only way I could think of to find him was to wait outside his school. I’d ridden past Kirkland in the car before, so I knew that if I walked to the cable swing and kept going up Washington Street, I would come to it eventually. What I didn’t realize was that Kirkland had exits on three sides. I picked the one facing Beech Street and hoped for the best. When the bell finally rang, I kept my distance and watched in every direction except one, hoping that wasn’t the right one. Kids poured out everywhichway, paying no attention to me. The teachers came outside and stood at the doors to monitor, but none of them noticed that I wasn’t a Kirkland student. Finally, I caught sight of Dieter in a new red jacket. He looked older but still the same. I ran up to him.

“ ‘You go to school here now?’ he asked, looking confused.

“ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I have to see Jarrod.’

“ ‘He already left.’

“ ‘Did he go home?’

“ ‘Yeah, he has to. In case Dad needs him.’

“ ‘Oh. How’s your dad?’

“Dieter shrugged.

“ ‘I need to see Jarrod. It’s important.’

“ ‘What about?’ he asked, but I didn’t want to tell him. We walked together but we had to stop at a store called Major Mart so he could buy some candy. The lady behind the register knew him by name. Their house was a yellow bungalow on Cortland Street, next to a used car lot. Dieter sat on the porch to eat his candy. ‘Go on in,’ he said.

“I knocked first. Dieter acted put out, but he got up and opened the door. He called in a sing-song voice, ‘Hey Jarrod! A girrul is here to seeeeee you!’

“If Jarrod was either surprised or happy to see me, he masked it.

“We cut through the house to the back yard to get away from Dieter. On the way, Jarrod called out, ‘I’ll just be out back, Ray. Deet’s home.’

“Ray meant Mr. McEarland, who didn’t respond. I never laid eyes on him that day.

“We sat with our backs against the wall in a little space between the garage and the neighbors’ fence. It was warm. Jarrod rolled the sleeves of his tee-shirt up on his shoulders.

“ ‘Did you tell everybody about the sewer boy?’ I asked him point-blank.

“ ‘What?’

“ ‘Are you the one that started it?’

He looked at me like I had three heads.

“ ‘It’s spread to Murrow. Everyone’s talking about it, and I know it didn’t come from me.’

“He leaned his head back against the garage and puffed his cheeks. ‘Not just here and Murrow, Jeannie. It’s all over town.”

“ ‘Great,’ I said.

“ ‘It’s kinda taken a life of its own, if you ask me.’

“ ‘Tell me about it! I can’t convince a single person it ain’t real. They don’t believe we made it up.’

“ ‘What do you mean?’

“ ‘People think the sewer boy is real. They go around listening for him and calling down through the grates.’

“ ‘That was your idea.’

“ ‘He’s not real, though, and people think he is.’

“ ‘You know that for sure?’

“ ‘Yes, I do, Jarrod. We made him up! Remember?’

“Jarrod extended one arm out straight, holding up his index finger. ‘First Rule of Evidence,’ he said: ‘You cannot prove a negative. People have known that since ancient times.’

“ ‘Well, I want you to stop telling people about the sewer boy, Jarrod. It gives me the creeps. He’s not good, you know. He’s not normal, and he isn’t going to return to normal, because he isn’t ever going to get out, because he can’t, because he’s not real!’

“ ‘I’m not the one who told everybody. For your information, it was probably Dieter.’

“ ‘Dieter? You told Dieter?’

“Jarrod shrugged. ‘He’s my brother.’

“ ‘I thought you were never going to let him in on another secret, after the tree house.’

“He held up both palms as if warding me off. ‘Sorry!’ He didn’t sound it, though.  ‘I didn’t know it was such a secret.’

“ ‘Well, it was! It was between you and me. We were supposed to be running buddies, remember?’

“I wished I hadn’t mentioned that. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew better. I knew for a fact that he wouldn’t remember saying it. No more than I remembered it being my idea to go looking for Sewer Boy. My eyes stung. I got up and left. I wasn’t going to let him see me cry over not being his first choice of a running buddy. If he even had one. Needed one. Whatever. It was a long walk home. I avoided the cable swing.

“Every curb had its own sewer drain, though. I stopped at each and every corner to hock and spit. If there was a sewer boy, I wished he’d be there peering up at me, so I could get him smack in the eye.

“That night I started awake to find Jarrod crawling out of a mine shaft, sweating profusely, with a flashlight implanted in his forehead. ‘Abnormal growth,’ he remarked, posing as an old-time doctor with a mirror disk. ‘Say, ‘Ahhhh!’’ He studied the inside of my mouth. ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘Shit, shit, shit! He’s got your DNA. We need to excavate.’ Then I woke up for real.”

She looked at me hard then, Jeannie did, with a squint in her eye. Sizing me up. “This is where it gets weird, Vanessa,” she said. “I hope you’re ready.”

“Go on,” I said.

She nodded, picked something off her lip. “The school year was nearly over by the second time a horde of EMTs, cops, firefighters and onlookers swarmed the street in front of what used to be Jarrod’s house. Everybody concentrated their attention on the middle of the street, this time. A manhole cover had been flipped over. I edged in as close as I could get. Something in me knew what was coming. There was a part of me that didn’t need to think things through for the knowledge to function, to flow through me with lightning recognition and then go dark again. Poof! Gone. But still there, like you can turn the switch off all you want, right? But the light bulb is still going to exist.

“A fireman’s helmet appeared out of the middle of the street, then his face. Grim. And then another head, a child’s head with this very pronounced whorl pattern, bobbing against the fireman’s shoulder, though the kid’s hair hung lank and greasy-black, matted, dripping wet. The fireman’s big, gloved hand cradled these two thin, little naked buttocks. He passed the kid to another firefighter. I saw plainly, before the second one scooped the kid up in his arms and carried him to a gurney, where they wrapped a sheet around him, that it was a boy. I could see his little penis waggling—the sheathed kind. He kept his eyes squeezed tight against the bright sun. The cut and wrinkled skin of his face gleamed about as pale and puffy as a grub worm, though his body had a kind of stringy muscularity to it. His ribs worked in and out like the teeth of a trap or a—like a hair clasp.” She demonstrated with the fingers of both hands. “Opening and closing as he breathed. He had a network of scratches all over him, old and new, that decorated his arms, his legs, his back and all over his abdomen.

“ ‘What’s your name?’ asked the firefighter. He pushed the the sewer boy’s hair back from his face with a bare hand.

“Sewer Boy slit his eyes. I saw the black centers of them, wide, like two gaping drainpipes. Then they closed right up. If I’d been thinking, I might have realized he’d be blinded in broad sun, wouldn’t’ve seen a thing except shapes hovering. Just the same, when he spoke, he might as well have been pointing his finger straight at me.

“ ‘I’m Eugene,’ he said. Just like that, with the accent laid on thick. ‘I’m You, Jean!’ is what I heard.  Then he coughed up a wad of something half-digested, with remnants of fur in it, chewed-up stems of grass and leaves. The firefighter put a glove back on to pluck the glob of vomit from the sheet and toss it to the pavement.

“ ‘You been down there for a while, haven’t you, Eugene?’

“The boy tilted his head at the sound of the voice and scrunched up his face. His mouth opened wide, not in a grin but in a slit from ear to ear. His teeth were little and legion, with spaces of pink gum between them, specks of grit and Christ-if-I-know-what—some kind of vegetation. ‘I dunno,’ he croaked. ‘Ever since they put me there.’

“The firefighter glanced at a police woman who stepped up close to hear. The police woman’s hips were extra wide, owing to the equipment she carried on her duty belt. She blocked my view. ‘Who put you down there?’

“ ‘I dunno who. Them two kids,” he said.” Them running buddies.’ “

“What? Wait a minute!” I interrupted her. “He said that?”

“That’s exactly what he said, Vanessa. ‘Them two kids, them running buddies.’ Then he said, ‘But I got out now, ain’t I?’

“ ‘That’s right,’ said the cop in a sweet, comforting voice. ‘You’re out now. You’re out now, safe and sound.’ She  allowed the EMTs in close to examine him. ‘We’re gonna get you dressed and fed and get you where you’ll be safe, OK?’ She followed alongside the gurney and climbed into the back of the ambulance after they loaded him in.

“Last to leave the scene, not counting me, were two men in coveralls, who stayed to flip the cover back over the manhole. It gave a loud, iron ring. They climbed in a Department of Engineering truck and took off.

“And that look on your face right now, Vanessa? That was me. There I stood in the middle of the street, left all by myself to wonder what in the hell just happened?”

Earthworm Soup: Chapter 3 Running Buddies

Leader of the Rats, Pandora Skye. Click to go to deviantart.com

Jeannie sat on my sofa cross-legged, studying the blotch design her blood made as it soaked through the toilet paper cuff, like one of those psychology tests where you see what you want to see and disregard the rest. “You know in town where Bruce Street crosses over the creek?” she asked me.  “Up past Fair Meadow?”

I said I did.

“That’s where it started. I was nine, maybe ten years old.” She looked up, not at me but off to one side. “Coming out of third grade, anyway. We used to play down in the creek bed all the time, all us kids. It’s like community property back there. City takes care of it, mows the banks and everything, and us kids had the run of it.

“This particular day, it was me and Jarrod Frye. Just the two of us. He was grounded from playing with anybody else in the neighborhood except me because of an incident involving a certain construction project that went wrong. We took off together, the two of us, in search of a cable swing that he had heard about, on down the creek from where we lived. We got as far as that wide part of Bruce, where it splits and becomes divided highway. I stopped dead in my tracks. You could smell the stink of old muck and stagnant water in the tunnel under the bridge. I was wearing my pair of plaid Converses. I didn’t mind if they got wet, but I just—something I didn’t like about it under there. I heard the quiver in my own voice bouncing off the concrete ceiling when I said to Jarrod, ‘We never came this far before!’”

“Jarrod Frye, you said?” I tried to place the name.

“You might’ve known his mom, Amy Frye?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Or Amy McEarland was her married name. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, he was a born leader, Jarrod, like an organizer kind of kid. We all got in a lot of trouble, and it was kind of his fault most of the time. He never meant any harm, he just had a lot of sway over the rest of us. Especially me, I guess. I can still hear his big feet slapping against that wet, silt-on-concrete floor on up ahead of me. I balked. He just ignored me.

“I caught up to him and dug my fingers into his arm. That tunnel stretched on forever, and I was scared. I pulled him up short. ‘How much further is it? Do you even know?’ I wanted to turn back then and there, but according to neighborhood legend, there was a cable swing that hung off a prodigious oak tree up ahead. That was Jarrod’s word for it, prodigious. To this day, you say, “oak tree,” and I think, prodigious, because of him. That’s just how he was.

“‘It’s as tall as a skyscraper!’ he said. ‘If you was to climb to the top of it you might could touch the clouds, you know? Low ones, anyway.’

“ ‘Yeah, low ones,’ I said right back. ‘Like fog.’”

She grinned past my left ear, telling me her story. I listened as politely as I knew how, but she was lost to me, caught up in her own wayback machine. Her eyes turned a new color altogether, neither cold nor fearful but only distant, the color a wooded hillside goes in mid-winter, all its foliage gone and the light hanging on the edge of grief or promise, one.

“Point being,” she said, “you could swing out over the creek and dive in. He said there was a—kinda like a noose at the bottom. Like a stirrup, I mean. ‘You stand in it and swing out,’ he said. ‘You only dive if there’s water deep enough.’

“ ‘Which it ain’t,’ I said.

“ ‘Which no, it isn’t. But we can still check it out.’

“I pictured him hanging onto that cable one-handed, riding out into space, his free hand cupping his mouth and him yodeling like Tarzan of the Apes.

“He pried my fingers loose from his arm. ‘This looks inviting,’ he said. He turned and studied the side of the tunnel. ‘Maybe we could go this way.’ ” Jeannie squinted, evidently reliving the events she described to me. “All I could make out of him was his silhouette, but I recognized the familiar pose of Jarrod the Adventurer: his hands on his hips, his chin angled in the direction he meant to proceed. There before him, a couple of feet off the tunnel floor, gaped the round, black hole of a storm drain, big enough to stand up in, almost. Ancient run-off from the streets of Keening dribbled and glopped from the lower lip of it.

“ ‘How many miles into the belly of the earth you suppose this goes? Must be an entire labyrinth in there! Can you imagine? Every gutter of every street in town empties into this creek, and it’s all connected. It’s got to be. Can you just picture the extent of it?’

“What I pictured, though? For some reason, I pictured a little boy—younger than me but not by much—wandering from one grated shaft to another under the streets of Keening, hip-deep in cold earthworm soup, whimpering to the empty curbs up above. No one could hear him, though. He went lost and alone forever.

“Just then a truck grumbled over the Bruce Street bridge, clearing its throat as the driver shifted gears.

“Jarrod braced his hands on either side of the drain pipe and leaned in. His head and shoulders disappeared into another dimension. His voice dropped about thirteen octaves. ‘Hellowrrrrats!’ His echo rasped along that galvanized conduit and went slithering through all eternity before it banked and bounded back again, booming and hissing. I trained my ear for the skitter of little toes clawing their way forward inch by inch, making those high-pitched twitterings they make, twitching their whiskers, taking notice.

“Jarrod just cackled in a general kind of way, not at me but at his and my fear. At danger itself. His laughter overrode everything, even my fear. But as the sound of it died away, I could hear the rats again—or I thought I sure did: each little scrabble, kind of tentative, like they’d creep forward a little bit and wait, then creep forward again and wait, then on they come over the spongy muck in the bottom of the pipe. I could hear each liquid swivel of an eyeball in its furry little socket, each moist little nose that sniffed at the tunnel air, detecting the threat of human confidence in him. And on me, the sweat of human fear.

“His head rematerialized.  ‘The vermin approach,’ he announced. ‘About a million strong, in my estimation. Time to go.’ His big feet slapped the skim of water left standing since the last rain, a week ago. He went walking fast away.

“I bolted after him, my arms pumping, my eyes fixed on the slope of green grass and sunlight up ahead, my ears yearning for the sound of birdsong at the far end of the bridge.

“Jarrod was a year older than me. He was taller, he was stronger, and he was braver. And he knew just how to get all of us other kids to do things: to build a tree house, for one thing, in a certain cottonwood situated directly behind his house, down in the creek bed. There where Keening Creek runs behind the houses on that side. Our back gate opens onto it. It’s a steep slope there, from our place to the bottom, but Jarrod’s house—where he used to live—sits lower down, closer to flood levels. That’s where that tree stood. Still does. Huge. Maybe no prodigious oak, but enormous enough for me. For three days that summer, me and him and all the other kids in the neighborhood climbed up and down that tree like a tribe of ants, carrying sections of two-by-four, passing a hammer up and down and nailing the steps in place until they reached the perfect three-way fork to support a floor of longer two-by-fours and scraps of plywood that we hauled up hand-over-hand, by rope.  When the first stage of construction was completed, our tree house perched some fifty thousand feet up in the air, I shit you not, with a hole in the floor that you climbed up through and a half-wall on one side and railings on two others—so high up, at any rate, that you could feel the floor sway underfoot in a stiff breeze. Logan Reynolds went so far as to get seasick and hurled over the railing. His breakfast spattered the leaves and sprayed all over one side of the trunk, which, that attracted the Heinecke’s black-and-white cat, of course, but Logan and Jarrod chased it off for its own good with broken-off twigs and left-over nails. I climbed down and ran to my house to get the bottle of Pepto-Bismol and keep up there, just to have on hand.

“Our tree house had one very distinguishing feature. Along the side that didn’t have a railing, Jarrod sawed off a pair of upright  branches and he stretched a giant rubber band between them. He instructed the rest of us in how to make arrows from half- and quarter-inch dowel rods, which he requisitioned from his mother’s crafting supplies. We notched one end and fixed bits of broken glass to the other with airplane glue, wire, twine, whatever it took. Then he took and dumped a pile of birdseed out of his pocket in a corner of the floor. He meant to attract a robin for us to pluck and fletch the arrows. ‘We have to bring feed every day,’ he told us, ‘so they get used to us. Then we can catch them. Only two feathers per bird, though—one from each wing. That’s a rule. Otherwise, they might go off-balance and not be able to fly straight and crash into things.’ He laid a half-inch dowel across the two sawed-off branches to complete the crossbow. ‘One other thing,’ he said. ‘This weapon’s to be used for defensive purposes only. In case we’re attacked by rival factions. And for target practice.’

“ ‘What’s gonna be our target?’ I wanted to know.

“ ‘Dieter. He’s the smallest. Hardest to hit.’

“Dieter was his little brother. He looked alarmed. ‘Unh-uh!’ he said.

“ ‘Just kidding, Deets! Jeez-Marie!’

“That tree house lasted three weeks to the day, till Dieter stepped backwards through the access hole. Had he not been lucky enough to hit the next branch down pretty much square-on, and had he not possessed the reflexes quick enough to latch onto it and wrap himself around it, then, as Jarrod later pointed out, ‘Deets woulda hit terminal velocity. He’da been toast.’

“Jarrod climbed down to collect his brother in one arm and carry him down to safety, but Dieter told on us, anyway. After that, Jarrod vowed never to let Dieter in on another secret operation of his for as long as he lived.

“Their step-dad marched down to investigate us. Dieter come slinking along behind him, crying, wiping snot across the back of his arm. Mr. McEarland conducted an on-the-spot appraisal of the construction methods employed by the Keening Creek Tree House Consortium. His determination was not entirely favorable. He climbed down again with four of our homemade arrows in his fist.

“ ‘Shit,’ Jarrod whispered. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

Jeannie stood up on my sofa in order to approximate Mr. McEarland’s height. She scowled down at the floor and deepened her voice. “‘You kids out of your minds? Where’d you get all this lumber?’

“ ‘Just laying around,’ Jarrod said.

“ ‘Layin’ around, my ass! Laying around whose yard, I wonder?’

“ ‘Nobody’s.’

“ ‘I don’t even want to know. You understand what I’m saying? There better not be a tree house next time I come down here. I’m giving you two days.  I don’t want to see stick one of it left in that tree or anywhere nearby. You do that for me, Jarrod? You make it go away, and I’ll do my best to see that your mother don’t have a friggin’ heart attack. Kee-rist!’ he said. ‘We got a deal?’

“ ‘Yes, sir.’

“ ‘And what in the hell,’” (Jeannie pronounced it that way, with the long e in “the” imitating Mr. McEarland.) “‘What in the hell were you hunting from up there?’ He shook the arrows in his fist, like this, and said, ‘Rhi-fucking-noceroses?’

At that, Jeannie, standing on my sofa, having forgotten all about her self-inflicted wound and the bloody toilet paper bracelet she wore, at last looked me in the eye.

I snorted, and that got her going, and then we both about busted a gut.

“Rhi-fucking-noceroses!” I said and got her started all over again, and then she said it, and I tried several more times to say it but couldn’t, I couldn’t catch my breath, and then she said it one last time, and I lost it so bad I like to died.

I guess you had to be there.

When she got herself under control and situated back on the sofa, she continued with her story. “So when he said that, I giggled. I couldn’t help it.”

I kept a straight face and listened.

“Mr. McEarland looks at me and says, ‘What are you even doing here, little girl? You surely could find decenter company than these knuckleheads, couldn’t you?’

“I shook my head. I was so scared, it was like I had an electric motor in my skull that got stuck on stutter. I couldn’t stop shaking my head.

“ ‘Ya’ll kids get on home and don’t you dare forget what I said! I never want to see anything like this again.’

“We scattered. I turned around at the gate to my back yard and looked. Jarrod and Dieter and their step-dad stood talking for a long time under the tree house tree. Jarrod pointed up at the limb that broke Dieter’s fall. The three of them stood looking at it for a long time before Mr. McEarland raised his knee and cracked our arrows over it one by one and tossed them into the creek.

“That’s all there was to it. ‘Consortium’s been disbanded,’ Jarrod told me on the way to the cable swing. ‘Nobody else’s parents’ll let them hang out with me. My dad made me go around from one house to another and rat myself out. I’m never telling Dieter anything ever again, and don’t you, either.’

“ ‘I won’t,’ I said.

“ ‘Don’t tell him about the cable swing.’

“ ‘I won’t,’ I promised. After a minute, I said, ‘Your dad didn’t make you go to my mom and dad. They never said anything to me about I can’t hang around with you.’

“ ‘I don’t know,’ Jarrod answered, as if I’d posed a question. ‘You’re a girl, I guess.’

“I didn’t say anything.

“ ‘So it’s you and me, Jeannie. You’re my primary running buddy. For now, at least.’

“ ‘All right,’ I said. I liked the sound of that. I knew I was on kind of like a probationary status with him, since we weren’t even the same age, but he was Jarrod, you know? He was Jarrod Frye, and I was the only one on any kind of status with him. For now, at least. I felt bigger, being his primary running buddy and all.

“ ‘I can’t stop thinking about that little kid, though,’ I said, feeling older.

“ He said, ‘What little kid?’

“ ‘That kid.’ I forgot that I hadn’t mentioned him. The lost boy wandering the drainage system. I knew he was imaginary, but imaginary things can be like that—you know what I mean?—even more so than actual beings. You can’t get them out of your mind, because they have no other place to go. So I said, ‘You know. Down in the storm drain.’

“ ‘When was that?’

“I said, ‘Still down there, I guess.’

“ ‘Why? What’s he look like?’

“ ‘He don’t get much sun, that’s for sure!’

“But Jarrod was serious. ‘He lives down there?’

“So I got serious. I said, ‘Yep.’

“ ‘I don’t get it. Why?’

“ ‘Lost. Can’t find his way out.’

“ ‘Kee-rist!’  he said, just like his step-dad.

“ ‘I know, huh?’

“ ‘What’s he live on?’

“ ‘Rats. He catches and eats them.’

“ ‘That makes sense. You can live on rat meat.’

“ ‘He can’t cook them, though. He don’t have no matches or lighter fluid or anything or any firewood down there, so he just has to eat them raw.’

“Jarrod nodded, as if he had been thinking along the same lines. ‘Plenty water.’

“ ‘I don’t know what he does in the wintertime to keep warm. Must freeze half to death.’

“ ‘Unless it goes deep enough.  Like down in a cave you can keep warm, because it’s closer to the center of the Earth. Or a mine shaft.’

“ ‘Probably,’ I agreed.

“ ‘How’d he get down there, I wonder?’

“ ‘I guess he was an orphan. His parents put him out by the curb as a baby, and he just rolled over and fell down in.’

“ ‘No, the rats would’ve eaten him. He had to be older than a baby.’

“ ‘Yeah.’

“ ‘We’re almost there,’ he said. I looked up. I’d all but forgotten about the cable swing. ‘It’s straight ahead.’

“He went first. He wanted to conduct a test to make sure it was in safe condition before he let me go on it. What he called the stirrup was a loop of cable held in place by a clamp with two bolts. He made a show of jumping up and down in it as he swung out over the creek bed and back.

“ ‘I can’t afford any more accidents,’ he said. He stepped off onto the slope and held the cable for me to step into. That’s how he was. And that’s how I felt about him, you know? Protected.

“I held on with both hands, pressing my cheek against the steel cable, while he gave me a push in the small of the back. The wind rushed through my hair going forward, then pushed it in my face on the way back. He caught me by the waist, carried me backwards up the slope and ran forward, pushing faster and faster, so I had to catch my breath and close my eyes, afraid that if I opened them, I’d look down and see no water in the creek, just rocks and broken beer bottles and busted up concrete, and if my foot slipped out of the stirrup—

“I looked down. The ground blurred past going one direction, then hung still, and blurred again going backwards. Jarrod caught me and ran with me. This time I screamed, but a laughing kind of scream, and when I came to ground again and stepped out of the stirrup, I stumbled backwards and lay laughing and panting in the grass and let it be his turn.

“ ‘Aiyah-yaiyah!’ he bellowed, swinging.

“When we’d each swung twenty times, plus one for extra measure—Jarrod kept track with a stick in a patch of dirt—we called it quits and walked back overland (as opposed to under the bridges) toward our block of Fair Meadow. ‘I wish it’d rain!’ he said. ‘I wish it’d rain for about a week solid and swell the creek, so we could come back and dive. I’d do a jack-knife and slice clean through the water. No splash at all!’

“ ‘I’ll do a jack-knife, too!’ I offered.

“ ‘Like a whisper.’

“ ‘Yeah. Like a whisper.’

“ ‘I’ll swim right down and touch bottom.’

“ ‘Me, too,’ I said, even though all I could think about was broken glass and twisted rebar sticking out of the concrete somebody’d busted up and dumped off in the creek.

“ ‘I can hold my breath for ten minutes,’ Jarrod said. ‘My dad’s got a stopwatch.’

“We stopped at the corner of Vine Street and stood looking down through the grate of the storm drain. He kicked at the leaves that’d backed up in the gutter and watched them sift down into the dark.

” ‘I wonder if you could call down to him and tell him which way to go? We could lead him from one drain to the next until he got to the creek. Then he could just walk out into the fresh air and be like normal again.’

“ ‘We could try.’

“ ‘Good idea. Who even knows what part of town he’s in, though? He could be anywhere.’

“ ‘It would take a long time just to locate him,’ I agreed. I didn’t even want to locate him.

“A siren interrupted us. It sounded close, then it got closer. We saw the lights flashing all the way down at Mulberry.

“ ‘It’s coming this way,’ Jarrod said. ‘It’s an ambulance.’

“ ‘I wonder where it’s going? I don’t see any accident.’

“ ‘Could be a heart attack or something, though. That’s what it looks like.’

“ ‘How can you tell?’

“ ‘Look how slow it’s going,’ he said. ‘They always slow down when they know the person’s already dead.’ “

Earthworm Soup: Chapter 2 Naked as a Porcupine

I thought a little Porcupine Tree might go nice. Click on her to give a listen.

That must have been on a Friday, because when she showed up for work again on Monday, Jeannie had all the color stripped out of her hair. I don’t mean she went platinum. Not even bleach-blonde. We’re talking the color of splintered bone, her entire head frayed out like one big nerve-ending. And to go with it? Eggplant eye-shadow. Not to mention, her lips were chapped like the way you can antique finish a piece of furniture with that crackle glaze.

I said, “Girl, you don’t hold back, do you?”

She rewarded me with maybe a millimeter’s worth of a smile. Just a quick crease in the dimple at the corner of her mouth. Blink and you missed it.

Something about the dye job, or maybe it was the way she dressed that day, in jeans stitched so tight to her skin they looked to be the work of a tattoo artist. Or scrimshaw is more like it. Plus a tank top that left nothing much to guess-work from her collar bones down to the precise number of her ribs. It made her seem tough and, at the same time, frail. Like if you brushed too hard against her, something—a leg or, if you were lucky,  just a finger—might snap off or else disintegrate. Sift to the floorboards in a fine dust. And like, if it did, she wouldn’t give two shits about it. She’d still just as soon bite your head off as catch you staring.

She kept those fingerless knit gloves on all day, as usual, and we didn’t talk any more about her razor tricks. I had the very clear sense that the topic was off-limits unless she brought it up. Which she didn’t.

“Things slow down around here much in the wintertime?” she asked.

I said, “Not till after Christmas.” I worked the soil around the trunk of a potted fig tree, to aerate it. “People like their poinsettias. Why?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering if I need to look for another job.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

She nodded, once, as if that cleared the matter up sufficiently.

I’ll never know for sure—you can’t—but let me hazard a guess. She got her hair done in the city that weekend just the way she wanted it. Not so much because I might screw it up (always a possibility) but because there was maybe something too intimate in the idea of her boss washing and dyeing and rinsing her hair. I get that, but it wasn’t anything I could ask. She had already opened up about as much as she was liable to that day under the underpass. Now it seemed like she was either testing how anorexic sexy can get, or vice versa, or daring me to peer into her soul with my x-ray vision.

To me she looked every bit as naked as a porcupine.

Things went on pretty much that same way for the rest of the year. We did get closer just by virtue of working side by side and developing an understanding of one another’s rhythm and blues, I like to call it. But we weren’t yet close by any stretch. Not until after Christmas and before Easter, when business dwindled to a trickle and we could get some work done—not until that dead time of the year—did I discover just how deep underground the troubled waters in her run.

And I have to tell you: I was not prepared.

Along about February is typically when Spider McCormick, photographer in town who handles freelance work for the Highlander Pride, runs out of material and comes sniffing around my greenhouse for some local color to shoot. He always brings two or three students with him, usually just a boy and a girl for a tender memory to contrast with the carnage of the football stadium.

If you’re not from here, “The Highlanders” is the nickname or mascot or what-have-you of Keening High School, and The Pride is their senior yearbook. Spider’s been an adjunct fixture at the school since long before I dropped out, which, we’re talking more decades ago than we need to get into, you and me. He gets his name from the little pooch of a middle he’s got, about the size of a bowling ball, and the reach and angularity of his limbs. He does not, to my knowledge, shoot cables of silk from his veins, but I have seen him climb vertical walls with no discernible hand- or foothold and dangle from the scaffolding at a construction site by two fingers and a prayer, with his sockless ankle hooked around a pipe to stabilize his camera hand.

I would be remiss in my description if I failed to mention, one, that his wife died young and, two, that Spider had the shiniest, blackest skin in Keening County. So you can figure out what kind of spider they called him and why he always brought at least one male student along on his photo-excursions—two if the first one had any thickness to his lips or too broad a nose or went by the name of Jamal or Porter or even Ortiz.

That particular year, he brought two girls along to pose with my hothouse flowers—both of them with faces and minds as pure as marshmallow—and a boy I half-recognized.

“Hey, Spider,” I said. “Who’s this you got with you?”

“We have here Ms. Patricia Andrews and Ms. Angela Dunhoff.”

The taller of the two blonde girls revealed a stunning array of hardware, like a satellite station, when she smiled. “I love your shop!” she said.

I told her she hadn’t seen anything yet. I wasn’t bragging; she just hadn’t bothered to look around before she gushed, so she must have been coached to play up to me.

Ms. Angela Dunhoff, a shorter, more robust version of blonde-headedness, strode up to me and stuck out her hand. I shook it and we smiled at one another. She didn’t have much else to add.

The whole time they stayed, neither one of them wandered very far from the boy.

“I’m Eugene Henderson,” he informed me.

I said, “Henderson, that’s right!” I’d been trying to come up with his name. “I remember you from TV.”

“You watch Two Point Perspective?”

I didn’t think I had seen that program. “No, you were just about this high.” I put my hand out flat, estimating.

“Oh. Yeah, my folks had a show.”

“All about home-schooling, wasn’t it?”

“School at Home with Gay and Todd.” Eugene also had a full set of braces, though they made less of an impact than Patricia’s. What you noticed more was the Buddy Holly eyewear and that stylish kind of bedhead that kids do. He kept his hands in the pockets of his letter jacket. KHS.

“They must’ve had a change of heart.”

“My dad decided to run for School Board and work to change things from within the system.”

“I see.”

I turned to introduce my assistant, Jeannie Iverson, but she must have slipped out, either the back way or through the door to the greenhouse. Her winter jacket was still on the hook.

“Tulips are looking good,” I told Spider. “Lots of color. You have anything in mind you want to see?”

“Nothing in particular, Ms. Cavendish. I always know I’ll find something pleasing to the eye when I come out here.” He was like that, always playing it down the middle. He might not have been flirting with me, but in such a way that I couldn’t outright accuse him of it.

So I said, just to throw him off guard, “You know your way around, Spider? Cause if you do, you can have at it.”

He didn’t bite.

Jeannie and I each had a cup of tea going by the wood stove. Hers was getting cold. Several years back, I raised an entire field of echinacea, which, it was kind of a fad for a while. That’s a relative of the daisy family called a purple coneflower. The petals go backwards like a badminton birdie. What makes me think of it now is Spider first pointed that out to me, only the way he put it, he said it looked like a gamecock. And let me tell you, he has got a face as straight as a Kansas blacktop. He like to give me heat shimmers in the middle of February, that man.

Where was I?

Nice thing about echinacea is, what you grow that don’t sell you can dry it out and grind it up for tea. It don’t fly off the shelves like it used to, but I got a few die-hards that still come looking for it during flu season. I got to be honest, it don’t do a damn thing for a cold, but if you take it with local honey, it’s supposed to help with allergies and headaches and like that.

The woodstove was burning low, so I went out back to bring in an armload of firewood, and there sat Jeannie in her shirtsleeves, hunched against the wind, smoking a butt. I never rode her about smoking. It didn’t exactly mesh with the whole earthy-crunchy image that Repurpose Farm embraced, supposedly, but she said, “I don’t inflict my second-hand smoke on anyone,” and that was good enough for me.

I said, “Grab a couple logs when you come back in,” and stooped to pick a few up myself.

“After they go, I will.”

I straightened and looked at her. Her roots had grown back in by this time, color of wet chestnut. The way the wind caught, they stood out around her head like dark blazes, her eyes two pits of cold iron. I had no idea what I might have said or done or if it was me or Spider or what.

“They’re gonna be here most of the afternoon.”

I saw the panic hit like a clanger in a bell. “No way!”

“I’m afraid so. You know who Spider is, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“He comes out once a year to do a shoot for the yearbook.”

“And it takes all day?”

“Depends,” I said. “But yeah.” I hoped so.

“I gotta go.”

“Where? Home?”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Cavendish.”

I wouldn’t let her pedal her bicycle out here all winter long, and I couldn’t pay her enough that she could afford to buy a car, so on a day that she couldn’t find a ride—which wasn’t that often—she didn’t work. On days when she did work, I drove her home. That way, if I had any errands in town, I could run them at the end of the day. The situation was far from ideal, but that was how we worked it out.  She knew I couldn’t take off in the middle of the day.

“I can’t take you,” I said finally.

Her smoke stammered and shifted on the cold wind. “I’ll walk.”

“You out of your mind?”

She pulled on her cigarette so hard it glowed like a warning sign. She threw it down and ground it out. “I might be.” The words trickled out of her in a thin stream, the way we used to talk back in the day, when we were holding a toke.

I looked at her. “Something ain’t right. You want to tell me what it is?”

She expelled the last of her smoke in one long blast. “Nope.”

I hated to ask it. It just seemed to feed the wrong line of reasoning, a way of looking at things that I resisted on principle. But what was I supposed to do? Let something go because I didn’t want to be proven wrong about somebody? I had to ask. “Have you had some kind of problem with him before?”

I meant Spider.

I watched her clench her jaw. Her whole face seemed to close up. Darts appeared between her brows and around her mouth like she’d cinched her panties too tight.

“You can tell me,” I said.

Her head vibrated. The wind pushed her hair across her face in a white veil. I reached to pull it back from her cheek in order to see her better, but she turned her head away and hitched one shoulder to ward against me. When my fingers didn’t stop, she grabbed me by the wrist and stopped them for me. “Don’t!” she said.

“All right,” I decided. “I’m going to get you your jacket, at least, and you can sit out here and freeze your ass off if you want to or you can tell me what the problem is, and if it’s Spider, I’ll tell him he don’t need to be here.”

She looked at the ground and refused to say anything, so I went and got her jacket and brought it to her. I picked up a few extra logs and asked her to stack another one on top of what I had. She didn’t say boo or howdy or thank you until I turned to go back in. Then she said, “Vanessa?”

I think it was the first time she ever called me by my first name. I turned and looked at her. The wind tickled my hair across my face. I waited.

“It’s not Spider.”

I said, “Okay.”

When she didn’t say anything else, I said, “That’s a relief,” and I turned around again.

Soon as I had my back to her, she said, “It’s Eugene.”

This time, I didn’t turn to look at her, in case she had more to say. She didn’t, so I said, “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

I dropped the wood in the cradle by the stove and dug in my pocket for my keys. I keep the house locked up even when I’m on the premises, because you would not believe how often I get people thinking it’s no problem whatsoever to just go traipse through your living room without asking permission or being invited, because it’s “so unique!” My house, I think I told you, is built of cob. Mud, in other words. I’ve got a book in mind to write, all about how it got built, but I haven’t written it yet. I’m not sure I want to draw more attention to how and where I live. If I ever do, I’ll be sure and let you know.

When I gave Jeannie the keys and told her to go keep warm, she tried to pretend she hadn’t been crying. The day had turned bitter cold, though. The wind by itself can cause your eyes to tear up and give you the sniffles. She said, “Thank you.”

And I said, “We’re gonna talk, Jeannie, in a little while.  But I need to know right now what he did to you.”

“Nothing.”

“Has he ever touched you?” I fumbled for the right words. There ain’t any, really, so I settled on, “Inappropriately?”

She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her gloves. They were wearing out, unravelling around her knuckles. “He sucks the life out of me!”

Whatever that meant. I decided not to pursue it.

“You know where everything is. Make yourself comfortable. They might be a while.”

If she’d just given me something to go on, I could’ve taken Spider aside and said God-knows-what, but for all I knew, Jeannie just had a crush on the Henderson boy and was too shy to admit it or to know how to act around him. Maybe she felt on the outs, seeing him on a field trip with those other two in constant orbit around him. Or it might have been something worse. He might have verbally abused her at some point. Or physically. Or you name it.

Or nothing whatsoever. Maybe he talked too much to suit her and wouldn’t shut up. Sucks the life out of me.

Spider McCormick had always treated me right. If I’d asked him to leave and come back later, without that particular boy in tow, I believe he would’ve done it for me. But I had no leg to stand on. Part of what I got out of his annual visit to Repurpose Farm was a selection of photographs that I could use any way I liked. One of them always ended up in the yearbook for free, anyway, plus I always bought advertising space in the back, because I didn’t have to pay to use his photos, and The Pride always brought in a little extra come May and June. I couldn’t afford to be rude if I didn’t have to.

I don’t relish the thought, but I do have to tell you one thing. When for just a split second I thought it was Spider that made her so uncomfortable, like he’d flirted with her? Or worse, like something had actually passed between the two of them? I wanted to smack her. And I don’t mean to wake her up, either. I mean, I wanted to rip the tight, young skin off her face. That scrawny, haughty, seductive, I-know-you-want-to-hurt-me look.

As it turned out, they didn’t stay long.

“You get some nice shots, Spider?”

“Oh, yes, Ms. Cavendish! Some beauties!” He scrolled back through them on his camera, some with and some without his young models. “I’ll get the best ones printed up, so you can see them blown up. I think you’ll be very pleased with what I got to show you!”

They were halfway out the door when Eugene said. “This is a fascinating place, Miss Cavendish. All the different stuff you do!  I’m in the journalism club at school and I— ”

“He’s the president,” the tall girl interrupted. Patricia. She beamed her signals at him.

Eugene showed just the right smidgeon of embarrassment. “I’d like to do a story about Recluse Farm. It could go in the issue of the Highlander Post that comes out right before the prom.”

“It goes online, too,” Patricia put in. “It’s like a blog this year and everything. Eugene set it up on Typepad.”

“No kidding?” I said.

“I’d like to come out another time—at your convenience—and do an interview with you.”

“Let me think about that. How can I get in touch with you?” I was already thinking that I might schedule it for a day when I didn’t need Jeannie to work in the morning, so she wouldn’t freak out.

Eugene patted his jacket pocket. “I have your card. I’ll shoot you an email with a link to the Post’s blog.”

I studied him. He returned my gaze, direct and confident, his lips stretched across his braces in a grin that reassured me. “It’ll be great press.”

I wrinkled my nose at Spider. “Where’d you find this one?”

“Oh, he’s a mover and a shaker, all right. What he ain’t telling you is, half the time his stories get picked up by The Klarion, too. Hell, he gets me business!” The Keening Klarion, he was talking about. Local paper. I advertised there, too.

“All right, Eugene. You send me that email, and we’ll get together.”

Eugene back-pumped his fist at his hip to show me that he considered me a score, and they all took off together, his dark head flanked by the two blondes, one a little higher, one a little lower. In the back of my mind, I wondered, Sucks the life out of you, huh?

“We need to talk, Jeannie,” I said, busting through the front door with my mouth already running. “No, I take that back. You need to talk. Last thing on Earth I need is to come across as some kind of hard-ass boss to you, but I do have a business to run, and if you’re the one that’s gonna be helping me out around here, I need to know I can rely on you to ke—”

She sat in my old rocking chair, one of the ones my grandma left me, her feet planted on the floor, wearing nothing but her jeans, a wife-beater and a set of goose-bumps, shivering and clutching her arms across her chest with her face turned away.

“To what?” she said.

I held my breath, my train of thought derailed by a trickle of blood down her left bicep.

“Rely on me to what?”

“I don’t know,” I said carefully. “I don’t know where I was headed with that.”

She swung her head around slow and give me a look, her eyes sunk in her head like two small animals backed into a cave. “It’s not about you!” she growled. “It’s got nothing to do with you!”

I said, “Even still,” and left it at that. I knew better than to approach her. “How deep did you go?”

“Not deep.”

I hadn’t taken my coat off  yet. I’d known other girls besides just her and me who’d done things like this, and I’m no expert—I know you’re supposed to always take it seriously—but forgive me if you have to, I also did not want to get caught up in her  drama.  I suppose that sounds cold, don’t it?  I could spend all day justifying it, but I won’t. I said, “I’m gonna go close up the shop and bring the sign in. Please don’t get blood on anything that’s liable to stain.”

I needed to think.

Clearly, something was going on or had gone on—even if it was all just in Jeannie’s head—between her and that boy, Eugene. How much did I want to know? How much of it was my business to know? I counted out the bank, locked up the register and made a drop in the safe. Not but a few dollars. I wrote down what it was and figured I’d enter it in Quicken in the morning. I flipped the sign around in the front window, made sure the stove wouldn’t burn the joint down and the door to the greenhouse was sealed tight, then I took the dolly and headed down the driveway to fetch the sandwich board.

Here’s the thing: I felt played and I felt guilty. I don’t do well with people cutting up in my living room, do you? You’d have to know a little bit about my grandma, I suppose, to understand just how on edge that kind of shit could put me. Or maybe not. It’s a long story, anyway.

On the other hand, I did have a business, and this Eugene kid wanted to write it up in the newspaper. You can’t afford to say no to free advertising, I told myself. I knew that kid. I knew his parents and how well-regarded they were in town.

Curious thing about Todd Henderson. Here he’s got his own show, him and his wife, on local TV. All about home-schooling. And then he up and runs for School Board.

And wins! I reminded myself. And wins!

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I guess.

I felt guilty because I wanted that kid to interview me. I wanted him to rave about my little farm slash consignment shop slash floral emporium slash tourist attraction because—now, here’s the thing—I wanted revenge on his mother.

Another long story.

I bounced the sign along back to the shed and closed it up. One day I intended to sew a flag and stick a pole in the ground out by the road to let people know I was open for business. Be a lot easier than that heavy plywood to put up and take down.

I felt guilty, though, because wanting that interview meant:

a) asking Jeannie not to come to work one day, when she needed the money and I needed the help, I really did, and

b) having to go behind her back when I could see how much that kid upset her and

c) she’d find out about it sooner or later, anyway, when he put it in the paper.

Not necessarily.

Well, now, that’s true. She probably don’t read the paper. What teenager does?

She goes online, though.

So what? Are you going to let an employee dictate your advertising policy, Vanessa?

That was a laugh. Like I have an advertising policy!

Well, then, don’t you think it’s time you better get one?

So by the time I got back to the house, I had worked myslef up about it, when what I’d meant to do was just the opposite.

“Jeannie?” I said. I heard her running water.

“In here.”

I went and stood in the bathroom door. “There’s Band-Aids in the cabinet and some kind of antibiotic.”

“I’m sorry,” she said matter-of-factly. “It really isn’t about you, and it really isn’t a cry for help.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I think I might need some help.” I opened the cabinet, handed her the tube of antibiotic and opened the box (not of Band-Aids –I know you’re not supposed to put that in a story if it’s not Band-Aid brand band aids but just some generic store brand kind I bought) and I saw right away that  the strips I had were too small.

“Shit.”

I made her stand back while I looked under the sink, and while I was down there looking, I asked, “What kind of help do you need, Vanessa?” since she didn’t. And I answered, “Oh, I need help deciding whether to take this girl I know to the hospital or not, that’s what I need help deciding.”

“I don’t need the hospital.”

“You don’t need stitches, maybe.” I moved things around under the sink, not finding anything useful. I said, “Not physical stitches.”

“What? Mental stitches?”

I stood up. She had smeared antibiotic all around on her right wrist, getting blood mixed up in it and making a mess.

“Jesus!” I said.

“What? It stanches the flow.”

“Yeah, okay. Whatever. I got some gauze somewhere. Maybe it’s in the kitchen.”

“I don’t need it.” She took and unrolled a long strip of toilet paper and wrapped it several times around her wrist. “I really didn’t go that deep.”

“What did you use, one of my razors?”

She dug in her right pocket with her left hand and pulled out a little miniature switchblade. “I’m a Girl Scout.”

I thought, duh! I’d seen her use it a hundred times before, pruning.

“I’m sorry to put you through this.”

“Last thing I ever want, Jeannie, is an apology,” I told her. “That goes for if you screw up or you deliberately go out of your way to do whatever. Apologies don’t mean shit to me.”

She nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I don’t mean to be hard on you. That’s just the way I feel.”

“I hear you. Copy. No apologies.”

“What works a whole lot better, in my humble opinion, is a simple explanation of what you think you’re doing and why.”

“You say that.”

Something in the tone of her voice, the way she hitched her eyebrow maybe.

“Oh? What is this, Jeannie? Vanessa Can’t Handle the Truth? The tough girl act just went out the fucking window, in case you missed the memo. And don’t tell me it’s none of my business, because you brought it to me, and you own it, and you owe me some kind of a way of making sense of it, because let me tell you something, okay? That boy wants to come out here and interview me about the shop and write up an article for the school newspaper. Now, that might not mean much, but it’s free advertising, and before I turn my nose up at it, I need to know why.”

“Ah.”

“Ah?”

“Yeah, just ah. Just putting two and two together.”

“Good for you! Because I’m still waiting for clue number one.”

“It’s just—look, it’s how he operates.  And it’s my fault. Mine. I created him. He’s my monster, and I’ll deal with it.” She rolled her eyes and chuckled, low and easy, but there wasn’t any humor in it.  ”He’s gonna win you over, and I’m shit out of luck. Again. It’s just what he does. It’s not your problem, Ms. Cavendish. In fact, it’ll probably be good for you. It usually is.”

I looked at her. I watched her lips moving and the words tumbling out of her mouth and I waited until I made sure she was done before I spoke. I said, “I feel so played, Jeannie Iverson. You have no earthly idea. Played out like a deck of cards. But guess what? They’re all face down.”

I took her by the arm—I didn’t care if it was the good one or the one she’d carved on—and I set her down on the sofa in the living room. I  took my grandma’s rocker and I scooted it up close to her, facing her straight on. “Now, I’m gonna take those cards one by one and turn them over, and we’re gonna look at them together like you’re my fortune-teller or some goddamn thing, okay? And you’re gonna tell me what each one means. You got it?”

“Be careful what you ask for, Vanessa. That’s all.”

“Perfect,” I said. “That’s just what I want to hear. Let’s start with, he’s your monster and you created him. What does that mean?”

“That goes back a long way.”

“Take me there, why don’t you?”

She patted her toilet paper bandage and with her left hand she unlaced her boots and kicked them off to sit cross-legged, her right arm resting on her knee, palm facing up.

She launched into her story, which if you’re interested, I will tell you.

In fact, that’s the real reason I started this blog: one, to get it off my chest, and two, because if I told anyone around here about it, one way or another, they’d see to it I get locked up again.

So hold tight, and I’ll get to the good parts.

I’ll file them all under the category of Earthworm Soup. You’ll see next time, why.

Earthworm Soup: Chapter 1 Hiring Practices

She has since cleaned up some.

When Jeannie Iverson first come to me she looked like second-hand hell. Hair the color of a crow’s wing, eyes like sink holes and an attitude to go with it.  Which, I at first took her attitude for just another layer of make-up. You know what I mean?  Like Bruised Passion Fruit or Glitter of Ashes. But no. The more time I spent, the more you could drive a big rig through the gap in her soul. Now, we are all damaged goods–I’ll be the first to admit to that–but this girl? I don’t mean to call her evil—I truly never thought that way, not for a minute. More like, they ever come to Keening looking to shoot a remake of Zombie the Thirteenth and need extras, I’d make damn sure she got to the auditions.

Her eyes–just for instance. You know how a fountain Coke looks? Crushed ice in a paper cup, but after somebody’s sucked most of it down with a straw? Brown, but an icy brown. Now picture that cup tossed out by the side of the highway, and you got the way she moved, the way she talked, the way did anything–neither fast nor slow but just whichever speed and direction the wind happened to pick her up that day.

Way too much like I was at her age.

Like most kids, you might say.  But not really.

You might not know me, do you? My name is Vanessa Cavendish. I own and operate what begun as a nursury turned tourist attraction out south of town, called Repurpose Farm. I probably should’ve gone with my gut instinct and called it Recluse Farm, but my luck, it might only’ve compounded the mystique of it all and give me what they call a paradoxical result. I built my house and my shop and most of my outbuildings out of cob and straw bale and whatever else I could lay my hands on, because that’s what I could afford.

Nowadays folks show up by the busload, Sundays included, and as flabbergasted as I am by it all, I don’t have the heart to turn them away.

It has slowed down some since I took Jeannie Iverson on and put her in charge of customer relations. That’s what we call standing behind the register, chewing the yarn ends of a pair of fingerless gloves and staring at people with eel-like affection until they either buy something or don’t and get the hell out of Dodge. She don’t say boo to nobody that don’t speak to her first, and I have had to teach myself to stop coming to the rescue.

One time, when I did, she asked me–right to the face of a woman I thought was showing genuine interest in one of my welded cutlery windchimes, she said, “What’re you being so nice to her for, Vanessa? She ain’t buying, she’s just waiting to use the bathroom.”

The woman turned her walker right around and hauled ass back out to her son-in-law’s RV in the parking lot. It took her three tries to slam the door behind her.

I turned to Jeannie and said, “You’re not right.”

She’d already gone back to reading her book. She said, “I lost my sense of compassion a long time ago.”

“Jeannie,” I contradicted her, “a short time ago, you weren’t even born yet. How’d you get so jaded so quick?”

“You ought to fire me.” I long since lost count of the number of times she told me the same damn thing. “You ought to fire me. I’m not good for business.”

That might be true, but at least with her around I got a few things done. She rode her bike out every day in the beginning, rain or shine. My odometer tells me it’s seven miles to the Keening City Limits sign and another two point four to her door, the time or two she let me throw her beat-up Schwinn in the back of my pickup truck and drive her. One of those times, the rain blew so hard it felt and sounded like machine gun fire against my side of the cab, while the passenger-side window stayed bone dry. I stopped under the I-35 overpass and waited out the worst of the hail.

“I might not have made it home in this,” she admitted.

“You think?”

She peeled her sleeve back and picked at a scab on the inside of her wrist. When she caught me looking, she quick, pulled her long sleeve back down over the cuff of the glove. This was August.

“You never do take those things off, do you?” I said. “Is that why?”

“What?”

“Your gloves.”

She didn’t answer.

“You use a razor blade or what?”

She creased her brow and folded her arms with both of her hands shoved up deep in her armpits.

“I been there,” I told her. “Done the same damn thing.”

“I know,” she told me. If you know how to look, if you get the angle of the light just right, you can still make out the scar, like a drunk snail left his trail up the inside of my forearm in the form of a corkscrew. “You did it the right way, though,” she said.

Struck me funny. “Oh? Like there’s a right way and a wrong way!”

“There is. You meant it. I don’t.”

“I meant something different, maybe, from what you meant.”

She wagged her head, shrugged her mouth. “I don’t mean anything.”

We had time to kill. The rain showed no sign of easing up, so I cut the engine and kicked off my sandal, pulled my foot up on the seat between us and leaned against my door so I could look at the side of her face. “Blue’s almost gone out of your hair. We could do it again, if you want.”

She flinched, almost imperceptibly, then she rolled her eyes. “Why’re you being so nice to me? I’m not a good person, Ms. Cavendish. I don’t exactly invite human kindness. You ought to know that by now.”

“That don’t give you the right to stop me from being human. Or offering kindness, when I feel like it.”

“Go right on ahead, then,” she said, “and offer.”

“We could pick any color you choose. I like the blue—I do—but maybe you’re tired of it and want to go—I don’t know, magenta or something. Or is that too overdone?”

“Actually,” she furrowed her brow momentarily, keeping her eyes in her lap, “I was thinking yesterday. I might want to try white. Like an albino.”

“Oooh!” I wondered if they made pink contacts. I had to check my enthusiasm before I got carried away, though. I didn’t know how she’d take it if I came out with something like that.

“You think it would look stupid?”

I laughed. “You’re asking the wrong person. Most people around here think pretty much everything I do looks stupid.”

“Maybe that’s why I asked you. I kind of don’t want to do it if it don’t look stupid.”

“Thanks a lot!” I gave her a slap on the shoulder. “I know what you mean, though.”

“Well, because you’re an artist. That makes it different.”

“I am?” I had to think about that one. “‘Artist’ is just a word, though, like ‘nigger’. It might sound one way if I say it about myself but completely different if somebody else says it to me. Or about me.”

“It’s not an insult.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

She considered that. “Okay. But it could be, depending.”

“Name one thing that couldn’t.”

She took her sweet time. I could almost hear her mentally flipping backwards and forwards through the pages of the dictionary:

Television
Incense
Yellow
Courageous
Macadamia
Elopement

“Good point,” she said finally, and in the instant she said it, I fell in love with her.

Yes, I said that. And I do not use the term lightly.

And I certainly  don’t use it to mean the first thing that comes to mind. Let’s get clear about that, because I do have a reputation and I have been accused of corrupting an impressionable, wayward young girl. Or her, me, depending on how you look at it. Not that either she or I could give a rat’s ass. She was old enough to consent, and I’m not in the nursing home yet, but that. Is. Not. The way this particular story goes. Sorry to disappoint you, but if your mind’s already in the gutter, you can just flush it. I like men, and I can vouch for Jeannie Iverson; she does, too.

Here’s what I’m saying:

In that instant when she said, “Good point,” I felt validated in a way I hadn’t in a good long time, because I knew, young as she was, that she’d taken the time to think through what I said, not just rubber stamp it with the Good Housekeeping Seal of What Folks Think Other Folks Will Approve Or at Least Not Say Is Retarded. What she gave me back was her own quick recognition of an idea subjected to a swift and rigorous calculation that come up, for her at least, in the affirmative.

“Yep,” she said, still testing it. “Anything.”

“It’s just a matter of who you are when you say it, and where your head is.”

She smirked. Or maybe just grinned. “You might’ve just discovered the cure for irony.”

“See? Now, I might could take that as an insult.”

She looked at me for the first time ever in a way that allowed me to see the true color of her eyes—as warm and timid as two field mice, with centers softer and darker than the beat of a screech owl’s wing at midnight.