Edgar and Lucy Read online

  “I knew it.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a mark there.”

  Lucy leaned in as if she couldn’t see it. “Where?”

  “Where do you think? On my ear.”

  “Sorry,” said Lucy. “Hands of a surgeon usually.”

  “Well, don’t expect a tip.” Audrey brushed a snip of yellow hair off her lap. “I mean, you do a nice job, but half the time you seem very distracted.” She snagged Lucy’s eyes in the mirror. “And news flash, news flash, Ms. Fini—those scissors are sharp!”

  Lucy agreed. They were still in her hand; she pressed the cushion of her index finger against the tip. Very sharp, indeed. You could kill a person with these scissors. You really could.

  * * *

  As soon as Fenning left, Lucy checked her phone. There were no messages.

  Well, what did she expect? Men were men. They were slow, prideful; they had a thing about calling too soon. Often they were cruel. A man who chopped up animals for a living was certainly no exception.

  Yet, for all his evident aggressiveness, there was something tender, almost bashful, about the butcher’s eyes. She’d noticed that right away. Of course, it was possible he was hiding something. Bashful eyes were often indistinguishable from lying ones. Not that it mattered, either way. It was just sex. Still, there’d been a spark. And even though he’d declined to eat the breakfast she’d made, claiming an early meat delivery, the butcher had grabbed her as she was leaving. He’d brandished his unshaven face over hers, holding the threat for a delicious few seconds, before kissing her, point-blank, on the mouth.

  Well, Lucy knew how to take charge, too. She dialed his number, and with each ring tapped a cherry-red shoe against the linoleum.

  There was no answer. She hung up, pointed her toe, and improved her posture—a sort of advance guard to ward off despair. Maybe she should call him at the shop. Just to say hello. Or was it better to wait a few hours?

  Shit, her next appointment was already here. She waved at the oddly tilted Mrs. D’Angelo and held up a one-minute finger.

  She marched to the front desk, past Celeste, the owner. She pulled the phone book from the bottom left drawer, quickly paging through it to find the number. Q, R, S. Salvage Solutions, Salvation Army—and yes, there it was—Salvatore’s Meats, the listing in its own little box, demanding attention. “Best in NJ,” the ad proclaimed—the endorsement attributed to a former mayor who, if Lucy was remembering correctly, had been indicted on racketeering charges. Or perhaps this was that other politician, the one who’d slapped the black prostitute in Newark. Either way, it was a nice little ad. Above the name of the shop, like a garland, was a crudely sketched dangle of sausages. Fucking adorable. Lucy smiled, happy again, and punched the numbers into the phone.

  5

  Fat and Skinny

  From a perilously swaying branch, a squirrel looked down at Edgar, who was sitting on the ground in a small clearing. The animal blinked, cocked its head, and dashed to the end of the white oak’s arm. When a gust of wind swept through the upper air, the squirrel, as if lifted by wires, leapt to the arm of a neighboring tree—an astounding feat whose only cost was the loss of a single acorn.

  It landed at Edgar’s feet. He regarded it solemnly as another rush of air moved through the treetops. The congress of leaves shivered and rolled, a voluptuous tossing that culminated in a vigorous nodding, as if all the trees agreed on something. The decision was unanimous; the answer: yes.

  But what was the question?

  The world was speaking to Edgar in a language he did not fully understand. But he knew enough to take the fallen acorn and put it in his pocket. He liked acorns—chestnuts, too. It was only mid-September, but he already had a large collection of both, which he kept in separate brown grocery bags in a cubbyhole at the back of the garage. The nuts were irresistible—perfectly polished, wonderfully hard. They clacked like wampum whenever Edgar ran his hands through his stash. In terms of acorns, he was a millionaire.

  Edgar loved the woods. There was a good-sized forest—or so it seemed to Edgar—that he could enter just behind the Mark-O-Market, only to emerge, some time later, less than twenty paces from his own backyard. Somewhere along the route, he always forgot where he had come from and where he was going. Deep in the clutch of green the world stopped, and Edgar walked on a plain of breath and slatted light, above the crunch of his own footsteps. He had weight here—but no witnesses. It was a place where nothing happened and everything happened, the contradiction of nature. The handsome tree trunks standing apart, huddled but separate, like soldiers—and then, to look up and see the canopy, the great spreading and branched flowering of the leaves; and how, in the upper air, it was all one thing—the treetops messing into each other with an easy affection, the loosed dreams of the steady soldiers below.

  So unlike humans. Trees had perfect lives. They knew how to be alone and together at the same time, without sadness. Edgar sat in the clearing with no idea that he was lonely. He only knew that there was something between himself and other people; it was like a heavy curtain—all the more troubling for the fact that you could see through this curtain. His mother had told him that when he was a baby the doctor had thought he might be deaf, or even something worse. Apparently he’d rarely made eye contact, and often he didn’t look up when someone called his name. And, later, when he started to rock his body or hide at the back of his closet, his grandmother always tried to stop him—even though the rocking made him feel so much better.

  Closing his eyes, he fingered the acorn in his pocket. He thought of the spaceship again: a great silver mushroom cap with an iridescent underbelly like an electric jellyfish. The ship would come and he would go away with it. The door would open, and he’d walk up the mile-long plank, just like the boy in the movie. He would miss Gran, of course. He would miss his mother, too. Inside his head, as if in a fortune-teller’s crystal ball, he saw her, standing on the lawn in front of the house, calling his name. She was wearing her cherry dress, her cherry shoes. But it was too late. You live with us now, the aliens said, touching him gently with their praying-mantis fingers. Edgar pushed the acorn deeper into his pocket and caressed its smooth cheek. He laid his head on a flat rock and stretched out his legs. As the spaceship picked up speed, he ran his thumb over the acorn’s point to steady himself.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Oh my God, he’s jacking off!”

  Edgar’s heart leapt as he opened his eyes. Two boys had materialized in the clearing. Thomas Pittimore and Jarell Lester. They stood less than ten feet away, snickering like scruffy cartoon wolves. Thomas swung his nylon knapsack three times and then released it. Edgar watched it fly high into the air and then descend, alarmingly, in his direction. He flinched and covered his head. Thomas, in perfect timing with the bag’s landing (two inches from Edgar’s foot), produced the phlegmy sound of a great explosion. “Pkkkhhhuuulll!” And then, in a mechanical voice like a robot: “Kill the mas-tur-ba-tor!” Jarell, the lesser beast, only smiled, and scratched his knee through a hole in his jeans.

  Edgar’s face flushed, even though what Thomas had said wasn’t true. He wasn’t doing that; he’d never done it. In fact, he was a little cloudy as to what, precisely, it was. But he knew better than to deny the accusation. Denying it would only enflame his inquisitors and prolong the agony. Say nothing; that was always the best strategy.

  The boys moved closer. They were older, twelve or thirteen. Edgar had noticed them before, outside the Mark-O. They were often together, though they seemed to have no matching parts. Jarell was tall, and moved with an exaggerated but convincing swagger. He had black skin, but the blood that moved beneath the dark pigment made him seem almost purple—like an eggplant. Thomas, on the other hand, was pale like Edgar, but doughy; there was something vaguely wet about him, some mist that seemed to be the private weather of his corpulence. Edgar could smell him as he approached. For, in truth, it was Edgar who was the wolf. His tendency toward s
ilence enhanced his senses and gave him the eyes and the ears—and above all, the nose—of an animal. Thomas smelled like bread not yet baked, with a top note of ripe banana. Jarell had the scent of pennies.

  Thomas stared at Edgar, while Jarell looked down into his phone—the light from the display panel intermittently evident on the dark screen of the boy’s face. In one quick glance into Thomas’s eyes, Edgar saw everything: how this breathless, sweating boy was grossly unafraid, bent on the prospect of some perfect disaster. He was equally mesmerizing and repulsive, the human equivalent of a car accident.

  “What do you have in your pocket?” asked Thomas.

  Edgar shook his head, feeling the fear begin, as it always did, like a stream of octopus ink seeping into his belly. “Nuh-hee,” he said, inaudibly, from the back of his throat.

  Thomas squinted his eyes and grimaced. “What? Speak up.”

  “Nuh-theen,” Edgar said, in over-articulate compensation for his previous failure in communication. “An acorn.”

  “You sound like you’re from Australia.” The fat boy sneered. “Doesn’t he sound Australian?” He hit Jarell’s arm, causing his friend to drop the phone.

  “Hey, don’t be obnoxious. I’m texting Bethany.”

  “Breast-any,” Thomas said, pushing jauntily at his own mammaric protrusions.

  Jarell flashed his extraordinary teeth in a brief smile, and then retrieved the phone to resume his thumb-punching. Thomas, ignored, turned his attention back to Edgar.

  “You sure you’re not from Australia?” He seemed to be fixated on this concept. Edgar wondered if there was a secret meaning; if perhaps under the word lay an insult. Edgar was aware of his speech impediment. He had trouble with his Rs. An acorn became an a-cawn. A pearl was a peh-wol. The world, a wold—a treeless rolling plain that offered nowhere to hide. The northern New Jersey accent, which often lent a toughness to the voices of the locals, only served, in Edgar’s case, to exaggerate the preciousness of his speech.

  Edgar shook his head, denying any connection to the continent down under. He stood and held up his hand to signal that he was leaving. A twig snapped under his feet as he turned.

  “Where are you going?”

  It was Thomas, pretending to be friendly.

  “We know what you were doing.”

  Edgar bit his lip, which was the best way to stop oneself from crying.

  “It’s rude to stand with your back to someone,” Thomas said.

  Florence had told Edgar the same thing, and so he turned, biting his lip harder. He kept his eyes down. Thomas’s shoes were a dusty black, wrinkled in places like the skin of an elephant.

  “What are you staring at my feet for? Look at me. I’m not gonna do anything.”

  Edgar had succeeded in not crying, and bravely lifted his head.

  “Dude, gross—you got blood on your face.”

  Jarell glanced up from his phone.

  Edgar, confused, wiped at his cheek.

  “On your mouth,” Jarell said helpfully, and Edgar quickly licked it away.

  “Gross,” Thomas said again.

  “I only bit my lip,” the little boy ventured in his own defense.

  “Would you stop looking at my freaking feet? Come on, I want to show you something.” He turned to Jarell. “Give me your phone.” He pulled it from his friend’s grip.

  “Ass-wipe. Use your own.”

  “Battery’s dead. I’ll give it right back.”

  “I don’t want your paw prints all over it,” Jarell said.

  “Dude, just give me one second.” Thomas had moved away slightly and was now leaning against a tree, diligently typing something into the keypad. Jarell watched him impatiently, but did nothing. This was surprising to Edgar because Jarell was clearly the stronger of the two. He could have easily pounced on the fat boy and reclaimed his property. But he kept his distance, as if Thomas Pittimore possessed a power that had nothing to do with physical strength. Edgar could see it, too. Something about Thomas was foolish, but there was also something monstrous, something dangerous. He was the kind of boy who might pull out a gun in the school cafeteria. In fact, just two towns over, a boy had done exactly that. He’d shot down two teachers and six students, and three of them had died. Edgar had seen his picture on television. Like Thomas, the boy was fat—though how blubber was related to violence, Edgar wasn’t sure.

  “Tom,” Jarell said. “You’re gonna use up my charge.” He reached for the phone.

  “Wait wait wait,” Thomas said, laughing as he turned away. “I just want to find the right one.”

  Edgar felt relieved by the tension between the two boys, which afforded him his favorite status: invisibility. Slowly he made a move toward the trail.

  “Stay where you are, Egg-roll.” Thomas spoke without looking up from the phone.

  “Leave the kid alone,” Jarell said. “He’s like six years old.”

  Edgar blushed—partly from gratitude and partly from shame: Jarell’s infantilizing subtraction of two years from his age. Edgar accepted it, though, without injury; he knew he was a shrimp. He’d been born too early.

  Jarell knew all about this. His mother had helped Mrs. Fini when she was pregnant. Back then, that’s what his mother had done for money—help women deliver babies. In fact, Jarell had been at the Finis’ house when Edgar was born. So they had some history.

  Plus, being one of only two black kids at his school, Jarell sympathized with Edgar’s predicament. Even though the kid was white—he was so white it almost qualified as a different color.

  “Here, look, look.” Thomas bounced over to Jarell and showed him the phone.

  “Oh, man.” Jarell began to laugh. “You’re twisted.”

  The two friends stared into the machine, smiling. Suddenly, they both said, “Ohhhh,” at the same time, as if they’d jumped, hand in hand, into a pool of cold water.

  What were they watching? Edgar was curious now. Jarell’s mouth was wide open with a shocking lack of self-consciousness; he held back none of his teeth, which were large and gleamingly white. Thomas snickered, baring his much smaller endowment—pointy little things with too much space between them, the color of unpopped corn.

  Jarell sobered suddenly. “I better not have to pay for this shit.”

  “Don’t worry, dude, it’s free.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I watch them all the time. Okay, look at this. Watch watch watch!”

  “Ohhh,” the boys said again.

  Edgar could hear someone in pain, a small mouse of a sound, tinny, coming from the phone. Thomas and Jarell were locked in place. Their initial volatile excitement softened into a kind of dull fascination. They looked into the black device with the slack, expectant faces of infants. Edgar sometimes saw this expression on his grandmother at church, when she stared up at Jesus on the cross.

  The boys’ smiles rose and faded, their mouths twitched like dreaming dogs. Finally, Thomas snickered, a staccato sound like machine-gun fire that startled Jarell from his reverie. “Okay, that’s enough. You’re gonna kill my battery.”

  “One more minute. I wanna show him.”

  “Who? The kid?” Jarell guffawed. “No fucking way.”

  “Yes way.” Thomas turned to Edgar. “Come here, dickweed.”

  Another gust of wind blew through the treetops.

  Jarell was laughing so hard now he looked like he might pee his pants. “Shit,” he said. “Don’t show him.”

  Edgar both wanted and didn’t want to see. He could still hear the mouse in pain. But the boys were laughing—so how terrible could it be?

  What Edgar feared most was that it might have something to do with Faces of Death, a movie he’d overheard some boys talking about at school, in which you could watch people die in all sorts of horrible ways—car crashes and plane wrecks and mountain-climbing accidents. And it wasn’t fake; it was all real people who’d had the misfortune of having their final disfiguring moments caught on camera. Richie DiGenev
a had said that he’d stolen the DVD from his older brother’s room and that there was a “totally amazing scene of a man’s head being crushed by a freaked-out horse,” and Jason Zittle had replied that you didn’t need a DVD to see shit like that, you could see even better stuff online. Edgar was terrified that, were he ever to watch Faces of Death, he might see the face of his father.

  Thomas turned the shiny black rectangle and held the screen in front of Edgar’s nose. The image was so bright it was like a flashbulb going off. The boy blinked, and then focused. At first he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Some sort of natural disaster. Strangely moving hills and valleys, golden-colored, with a dark patch of heaving grass. As Edgar stepped back to better understand the tumult, he gasped. It was two women on top of each other, kissing! They were naked, tossing and turning, their fingers moving between each other’s legs. From their mouths came, stereophonically, the sound of the suffering mouse. Edgar, astonished, looked up at the boys, who were shrieking with laughter. It was safer to look at the screen, which was a window the women had failed to shut. Did they know someone was watching them? Their thighs were splayed terribly now—unabashedly, like toddlers. One of them had a beard between her legs; the other was bald. They both had ballooning chests that looked dangerously close to bursting. It didn’t seem wise, the way one of the women was pinching the tips of the other’s overblown mounds. Edgar braced for an explosion just as a man—golden-colored like the women—entered the scene. He stood in the doorway with a profound weight between his legs. His thing was nothing like Edgar’s. What hung from the man’s thighs was a thug, thick and powerful.

  “Look, he’s enjoying it. The little pervert.”

  Edgar was not, in fact, enjoying it; but he couldn’t turn away from the pretty women in pain and the man who’d come to—what?—rescue them? The writhing women were like drowning dolls, clutching each other to stay afloat; and the man, with his tanned skin and muscular body, did look like a lifeguard, albeit one who’d lost his trunks. When he approached the bed, his thug in tow, the mouse-women whined louder. It was clearly a cry for help. One of them reached out her hand and latched on to the growing rope between the man’s legs. Edgar felt something funny in his stomach. Is this what his mother did with the butcher?