Читать книгу Alice Close Your Eyes - Averil Dean - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

There was a boy in my third-grade class named Danny Kukal. When they lined us up for the yearbook photo, he was at the tall end, while I brought up the rear as the smallest in class. He ran with a pack of unruly boys with chapped lips and cowlicked hair, easily dominating even the fifth-graders on the playground. Every recess they took over the tetherball courts and the coveted red rubber balls, merciless and loud and endlessly annoying.

I felt myself somewhat protected from the worst of their behavior. I was a girl. A pretty girl, apparently. But as the school year went on and the boys settled on their targets, my distaste for them grew. Danny Kukal was the worst. I resented his popularity, his quick cruelty toward the smaller kids, his arrogance. I detested his wide yellow teeth, too big for his face, and the swaggering upturn of his butt under the school corduroys. Quietly my disgust swelled into a hatred too big to contain. I began to offer a snarky counterpunch to his taunts, under my breath at first, then bolder as others heard and appreciated my childish wit. I felt my power. The power of words, of mind over might.

Danny heard, too, and didn’t know what to do about me. I could see the struggle play out on his face and in his attempts at bluster. I was an unfamiliar target. A girl. Even a kid as charmless as Danny Kukal knew it was unacceptable to punch me in the nose or call me out after school.

In the spring, he came upon a solution at last.

“I heard about your mom,” he told me. “A little prostitute, that’s what I heard.”

Looking back, I can see the word was as foreign to him as it was to me, but neither of us was too young to understand an insult when we heard one. He’d picked up some ammunition and was set to deploy it.

“Should’ve kept her knees together.”

Baffling. But accompanied by howls of appreciation from the boys, along with other words I did understand.

“Slut.”

“Whore.”

“Trailer trash.”

My wit deserted me. I ran sobbing to the girls’ room and sat in crumpled agony for the rest of the day, trying to make sense of what was clearly a monumental insult. When I got home that afternoon, I told Nana all about it.

I had never seen her so angry. Usually Nana’s temper was quick and loud, easily triggered and quickly forgotten. This anger was different. This was slow, deliberate, maternal fury. Her face hardened and flushed a plummy red.

She folded up the dishcloth and sat next to me at the wobbly Formica table. Pulled my chair around slightly to face her.

“Did you start this?” she said.

I opened my face to her, tried to hold my eyes steady. “No, he started it, he—”

She held up a hand.

“I see.”

We sat that way for a minute or two.

“Lovey,” she said, “when someone insults your mum, when they use that kind of language, you mustn’t let it pass. There are some words that... There are things that require a response. You understand?”

I nodded.

“If you were a boy, I would tell you to knock the piss out of him. But you can’t very well do that, can you? You’ll have to think of something different. You’re a clever girl, Alice. Learn to use what you have.”

She dismissed me after that, but called to me as I left the room.

“Don’t mention any of this to your mother,” she said.

The next day, and the days after that, I worried over the problem of Danny Kukal. He was the large centerpiece of a straggling army, and I was a loner, now more than ever. I had no ally, no rebuttal to what he’d gleefully hit upon as a successful series of taunts that the group repeated now and then, with gradual loss of interest, as at a joke that has played out. I kept my face still and thought about what Nana had said.

On my way home from school about a week later, I stopped in front of the Kukals’ double-wide. The family dog came rushing up to edge of his pen, broken teeth bared, snapping and growling as he did every day. He was junkyard ugly, a bad-tempered nuisance with a grizzled brown coat and one missing ear. All the neighborhood kids hated and feared Schultzie. Everyone but Danny Kukal. He was proud to be the only one the dog didn’t bite.

“Hey, Schultz,” he would croon, tossing down his backpack after school. “Hey, Schultzie, I saved you a cookie.”

Danny really loved that dog.

That afternoon, most of the boys were at baseball practice, so the house stood empty. No car in the driveway, no bikes in the street.

Learn to use what you have, Alice.

I went around the side of the dog pen and sat down in the grass with my back to the fence. The dog made repeated runs at me, barking dementedly, snarling with his muzzle stuck through the chain links. For several minutes I sat quietly, braiding strands of grass like hair, and let him carry on. When the barking turned to grumbling, I took out what was left of my ham sandwich, broke off a piece and fed it to him carefully, keeping my fingers out of reach and avoiding his filmy eye. He devoured it with grunts and wet snorts, slapping his nose with his wide pink tongue. A bite at a time I fed him all I had, followed by a few leftover chips I was saving for an after-school snack.

He ate it all, thinking he’d made a friend.

That night, after my mother and Nana went to bed, I snuck into the laundry room and found Nana’s rat poison. I mixed it with a gob of peanut butter, made a sandwich and stowed it in my backpack.

I thought about the sandwich all day. Several times when the teacher spoke to me I didn’t hear her, and during the morning’s math test I thought I would be sick and had to run without permission to the girls’ room, where I stayed until the teacher came to get me.

At lunch I took the sandwich out and looked at it. Sniffed it. Turned it over in my hands.

“You should eat that,” Danny called from across the cafeteria. “Maybe you’ll get fat. Maybe you’ll get boobs like your mom.” And then, “Would take a lot of sandwiches, though.”

The boys hooted and carried on, chanting. Eat it, eat it. I didn’t look up. Just kept turning the sandwich over in my hands. Eat it, eat it, eat it.

After school I walked alone to the Kukals’ house and sat down at the far end of Schultzie’s pen. This time the dog didn’t bark as much. He put his muzzle through the pen and flapped his tongue at me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I rolled up the sandwich and stuffed it through the chain-link fence.

The poison didn’t take effect immediately the way I thought it would. At first the horrible old mutt rolled his eyes almost comically, nipped and growled at his stomach as though he was angry at whatever was happening inside him. He was so ridiculous about it that I began to smile, with the beginnings of a sort of relieved remorse bubbling in my chest. The stupid dog was too tough and mean to die. This was a lame attempt on my part. I’d let it go and find some other way to get even with Danny Kukal.

But then Schultzie began to cry. The comical expression on his face became a grimace, freakishly exaggerated with the whites of his eyes unnaturally wide. He limped in circles, tearing at the skin of his flanks, stretching it, letting go, biting again, drawing blood. He flopped to the ground like a fish, stiffly one way, then the other, crying. Crying. At last his body flexed so far sideways that it stuck that way. He didn’t roll then, he simply lay there, strangling, a string of sandwich-flecked foam oozing out the side of his mouth.

The filmy eye rolled back and locked on me, and the life dimmed from him like a flame sinking into wax.

I walked into the woods, sat down on a stump and rocked forward and back, one arm clamped around my stomach, the heel of my hand shoved into my mouth. My teeth dug small blue trenches into my skin, then drew blood.

My mother came in that night and said she’d heard the Kukal’s dog had been poisoned.

“Poor old guy,” she said. “How could someone do a thing like that? They’ve had that dog since he was a puppy. I remember when they brought him home from the pound.”

Nana was in her chair, watching TV and working on a crossword puzzle. She looked up slowly, looked right at me, and winked.

* * *

The gray house sits like a stump in the grass at the end of a long suburban street on the south side of the island, slightly apart from its neighbors and surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence and a tangle of weed-choked shrubs. The miniblinds in the front window are dented; the tumble of bricks in the side yard has not been moved. The house looks the same today as it did when my mother and I moved in a dozen years ago.

In the park across the street, I sit alone in a rubber swing, rocking idly forward and back, forward and back, an exhausted pendulum.

Sometimes I leave the park and walk through the neighborhood, past the small elementary school where Danny and his friends used to torment me, past the salon where my mom and I once got the two most awful haircuts, to the corner where the ice cream shop used to be. Ice cream was our Saturday ritual after my soccer practice. My mom liked to get a scoop of butterscotch and one of bubble gum, which seemed like an odd combination to me. But she always laughed and gnawed on the rock-hard nuggets of gum and said, “Don’t judge.” And she would dot the tip of my nose with ice cream and kiss it clean.

The ice cream shop was bought by Starbucks a few years ago, its pink candy-striped awnings replaced with ubiquitous green. On rainy days, I go inside and sit at the window with a caramel macchiato, which tastes a little like butterscotch if you try hard enough.

Sometimes, when no one’s home, I go up to the gray house and peek in the windows. The blinds are always closed. There is nothing to see. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.

The house didn’t feel so sinister when my mother lived there. True, it broke our hearts to leave Nana’s trailer after she died, but my mom had a new boyfriend who had invited us to live with him.

“I need the help, Alice,” she said. “If we stay here, I’ll have to go off-island to get a second job. And who will be with you?”

“I can stay by myself.”

“You’re nine. What if something happened?”

“I could go to Sarah’s...”

“Sarah’s mom hates me,” she said.

“But—”

She sat down on my bed. Her factory uniform was rumpled, name badge askew. The freckles across the bridge of her nose stood out so clearly against her pale skin that they looked as if they’d been stamped on, one by one.

“Trust me. This is going to work out, I promise. There’s a school right down the street, and Ray has a good job. You like him, right?”

Wrong, I thought. I didn’t like him at all. He was ugly and big, with hard, rough hands and a laugh so loud it hurt my ears. He left tracks in the toilet and distressing smells in the air.

“Sure,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.

We moved in with Ray the next week.

A Honda pulls up now at the gray house, and behind it a small U-Haul truck, which ambles past, angling, then reverses and backs slowly into the driveway. The door opens and a man climbs out. He zips up his jacket and waits in the driveway.

A woman gets out of the car, then two young girls. They line up along the fence, looking at the house. The older girl says something to her mother, receives a kiss on the top of her head. She takes her sister’s hand and the two of them cross the street to the park where I sit watching, while the man in the driveway opens the moving van and starts to unload it.

As the girls get closer, the younger one, a mop-headed bundle of about three, makes a beeline for the swings, careening forward on stubby legs with her sister in tow.

“Sissy, swing me,” she says. Her voice is a bell, chiming in the stillness.

The bucket seat is a stretch for the older girl, who is maybe nine or ten. She wraps a skinny arm around the toddler’s middle and tries to lift her into the swing.

I toss away my cigarette. “Want a hand?”

The girls blink up at me with fawnlike eyes, trailing garlands of golden hair that cling to their eyelashes and the matted fleece collars of their coats.

“These seats are really hard to get into,” I say, and my throat is unexpectedly tight.

Without waiting for permission, I scoop up the little one and slide her into the swing. Her chubby stockinged legs poke out the holes in the seat and she curls her hands around the chains.

“Swing me,” she says imperiously.

This time my smile feels more natural. I give her a nudge.

“Do you want me to push her, so you can swing, too?” I say to the older girl.

Soon both swings are in motion, squeaking gently, sending up rhythmic swirls of cool spring air as they pass. The sun peeks through the clouds and warms our faces. With my eyes closed, the park sounds like it did when I was a kid. Bird calls and rustling leaves underneath, bubbling with children’s voices on top.

And my mother, laughing, her eyes full of sky.

After a few minutes, the older girl lets her sneakers skid along the ground. She comes to a gradual stop, spins in place a few times by twisting the chains together and then letting go. The swing gains momentum and carries her hair like a banner in the sunshine.

Little sister thinks this is hilarious. She giggles and chortles, snorts, then breaks into a full-bellied baby laugh until I can’t help but join in. It feels strange to laugh, as if I’m tempting the gods. I stop laughing and listen to them instead.

Finally their amusement plays out and they go off to the slide. I resume my spot on the swing, shake out another cigarette and watch them while I smoke it. Big sister is pushing the little one up the slide. They keep tumbling down and having to start over.

When the girls get tired, they amble back across the street and go inside the house. The man comes out and stands in the driveway, hands on his hips. He’s looking at me.

I look back, rocking.