Edgar and Lucy Read online

  “What part are you at?”

  The boys were still there. It was Thomas speaking. Edgar didn’t know where to turn. There was a tremendous heat on his face, and he looked up to see a sun that wasn’t there. The woods had fallen into shadow.

  “What’s the matter?” Jarell said. “Are you cold?”

  Edgar’s teeth were chattering. His hands were shaking, as well. Thomas pulled back the phone and turned the screen to his own face. “Oh, this is the part where she blows him.”

  Jarell feigned indifference but allowed his eyes to wander back to the movie. There was a shifting of cloth in his pants. He made a quick adjustment before snatching the phone from Thomas and pressing a rigid finger into the device, ending the transmission. “I’ve seen this shit before,” he said.

  “It’s better on a big screen anyway,” Thomas said. He turned to Edgar and smiled, raising his eyebrows. “Now you have something to think about next time you jack off.” He laughed in his mirthless way, and then leaned forward to let a long drool of spit fall from his mouth. It landed on Edgar’s sneaker.

  Edgar said nothing, wishing he could bash a rock against the fat boy’s popcorn teeth. Or, even better: to unleash vengeance without lifting a finger. Using telekinesis, he would levitate Thomas into the air and make him spin like a rag doll until blood flew from his bulging eyeballs. As a rule, Edgar abhorred violence, but with boys like Thomas it was different. When a villain was destroyed, stabbed through the heart or crushed by a boulder, there was a kind of joy that bubbled up inside you. Edgar had experienced the feeling in dozens of movies—the thrill of power, as if he had killed the villain himself. Here in the woods, though, Edgar could see no way of prevailing. His great success, for which he gave himself no credit, was that he didn’t run or cry.

  Thomas, of course, had hoped for tears; was, in fact, hungry for them. It was a taste for which he’d developed an addiction—having consumed them for so long, at the cost of smaller boys. Over the years he’d made lots of little faggots cry; it was easy, it was fun.

  But Edgar remained mum—and his martial silence made the fat boy nervous.

  Thomas reached for his knapsack, unzipped it, and pulled out a pen. He took hold of Edgar’s arm, gripping it with some violence. He uncapped the pen with his mouth and, as Edgar squirmed, began to write on the boy’s forearm.

  “Don’t hurt him,” Jarell said from the shadows.

  “I’m not hurting him.” And then, ferociously, to Edgar: “Stop moving or I’ll jab you with this fucking pen.”

  Edgar froze as Thomas completed his scrawl, pressing with unnecessary force. The little boy moaned—not only in pain, but with a horrible sense that something like this had been done to him before. Someone with a pen, or maybe a knife. A long time ago, when he was a baby.

  “Okay, all done.” Thomas tossed away Edgar’s skinny limb as if it were something distasteful.

  Despite a rush of vertigo, Edgar’s curiosity took him straight to his stinging arm. Supersluts.com was written there, in large letters that traveled from elbow to wrist.

  “Just in case you get the urge,” said Thomas.

  Edgar was confused.

  “The website, dickweed. For the naked chicks.”

  “Come on,” Jarell said. “Leave him alone.”

  “Buh-bye,” Thomas said, waving maniacally in a parody of sweetness.

  Edgar watched the boys move off into the trees. Jarell glanced back with a face that was not unkind—and though he made a gesture with his hand, it was too small to mean anything.

  Edgar could no longer see the boys now; he could only hear the murmur of their voices, the fading crunch of their footsteps.

  Then there was silence—and into the silence fell the sounds of birds and wind-jostled leaves. The end of human voices was a comfort. Edgar kneeled in the clearing. The sun was setting, and the trees were leaking long tarry shadows—a surreptitious doubling that was vaguely sinister. He should get up, go home; his grandmother would be worried. Yet he didn’t move. The little blue wheels of thought were turning—but in slow motion now, vexed by the weight of some profound human gravity. Golden bodies and their strangely ecstatic sufferings. When the man and the mouse-women had moaned, it was not without pleasure. Edgar recalled something his grandmother had told him about Jesus; that Jesus wanted to suffer.

  Maybe normal people wanted to suffer, too. Why else would his mother date a butcher, or his grandmother collect dead people in a drawer? Why else would a person with telekinetic superpowers not stand up to a bully?

  Edgar felt confused. He wanted a cookie, the forgetfulness of sugar. Perhaps Jarell will come back, he thought. Without Thomas to fox him, Jarell might sit beside Edgar and patiently explain any number of things—his purple lips pausing now and then to make sure Edgar had understood. Life was complicated, and dangerous. Edgar needed a teacher. Someone, like the aliens, who could extend long fingers into his brain and adjust the dials, rearrange the chaos of dots until the picture was marvelous and clear, and with no effort at all you would understand why you’d been born in a place where the rain of information never ceased, and where every person was a baffling conceit.

  Edgar looked down at the tip of his sneaker where Thomas had spit; a slug trail of wetness still glistened. It made no sense. What was the point of a boy like Thomas Pittimore—and what was he doing in Edgar’s story? The fat boy suddenly seemed, to Edgar, more than simply an unpleasant bully. Thomas Pittimore was a dragon, a foul-smelling beast—a challenge Edgar had to either engage or decline.

  Maybe the man in the green truck could help.

  Gun control is hitting your target.

  As the boy curled up on the ground, some other words came to mind, something useful that someone—maybe the man in the closet—had taught him a long time ago.

  Fat and Skinny had a race

  all around the United States.

  Fat fell down and broke his face

  and Skinny won the race.

  As Edgar recited the poem—his voice barely a whisper—the squirrel (who had by now safely ensconced himself in the crook of another white oak) looked down. He watched the boy’s moving lips, and—being a creature of supreme hunger—misunderstood, and wondered only what the boy might be eating. Before Edgar had finished his incantation, the squirrel had made his way to the bottom of the trunk and was moving toward the small human, in search of crumbs.

  6

  Pinocchio

  When Edgar walked in the door, his grandmother let out a sharp yelp. The boy was startled but had enough presence of mind to hide his tattooed arm. Though he’d tried to rub off Thomas’s savage engraving with some damp leaves, the text was still flagrantly legible. Why had he worn short sleeves in September? Stupid!

  “Where have you been? I almost called the police.”

  Edgar saw the clock in the hallway. He was two hours late.

  Florence had been frantic. Not only had the boy been kidnapped (she was sure of it), but, to add insult to injury, that wandering mother of his still hadn’t telephoned. This wasn’t the first time Lucy had stayed out all night, but at least she should have had the common courtesy to call—even if it was only to lie, say her car had broken down, she’d slept at a friend’s. Florence just wanted to be sure the girl wasn’t in some kind of trouble. With the boy, it was even worse. He was defenseless, a bit of butter under a hot sun.

  “It’s almost five o’clock.” The bandana on the old woman’s head was dark blue, with a scattering of pink and yellow daisies—a happy concoction of Chagall-like exuberance that undermined the distress in her eyes.

  “I was in the woods,” Edgar said—immediately wishing he’d fibbed.

  “I told you, I don’t want you walking in there. What if you get lost?”

  “I wouldn’t get lost.”

  “Or something could bite you. You don’t know.”

  “There’s nothing to—”

  “Animals,” the grandmother said with a scolding severity, before reac
hing out to draw the boy into her bosom.

  “I have to pee,” he said, slipping away and dashing up the stairs.

  Florence watched his effortless flight, the flash of his white head, his pale shirt. Her heart raced. He was too fast sometimes. A little Speedy Gonzales, just like Frank.

  “I have to ‘go to the bathroom,’” she called after him, correcting his manners. How many times had she told the child that pee was not a word polite people used; pee was something that came out of your privates, not out of your mouth. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, shaking her head. Not home two seconds, and already he’s gone. She needed him by her side today, not flitting off into the woods.

  During the long afternoon alone in the house, an old fear had stabbed at Florence’s heart: that it was Lucy who’d kidnapped the child. Scooped him up and driven off, God knows where, in that zippy little coupe of hers. It was something Florence used to worry about when Edgar was an infant. All day she’d had the sense that she must prepare for something terrible. It had started as soon as she opened her eyes this morning, when she’d felt the presence of Frank, a subtle turbulence stirring the edges of her room. Ever since then, nothing had been right.

  “Edgar Allan!” she called out. What was he doing up there? There was a perfectly fine powder room downstairs. She should have kept him home from school today. Without the boy, the day had passed too slowly. Each corner of the house, each piece of furniture, every object, seemed strained by its own history. Frank’s birthday was always a difficult day. The day one’s dead son was born: it seemed a kind of complicated math, a riddle Florence felt she was required to solve—though each attempt only raised more questions.

  In years past, she would bake a cake and give Edgar a little present, without offering any explanation to the child. If he asked the reason for the cake, the present, Florence would simply reply that she was in the mood for a party. When the boy was five, Lucy (who’d spent the afternoon commemorating her dead husband’s birthday with a flask in a parking lot) had come home earlier than usual and found Edgar and Florence in party hats. The girl had made a big stink about it. She’d dragged the old woman into the hallway and told her that if she ever did anything like that again, she’d have Florence committed. Of course, that was hogwash; but Florence chose to respect the wishes of the boy’s mother (the girl had been absolutely livid with rage), and for the last three years there’d been no party, no cake.

  Now she was alone with it—and today, for some reason, had been worse than last year. She’d moved around the house in a bleary torpor. She’d made a ham sandwich for lunch and then sat before it, immobile, for nearly forty-five minutes. When her consciousness had returned to the food, it appeared vile, the ham dangling from the edges of the bread. She’d sniffed it and decided it’d gone bad. After she’d tossed the sandwich in the garbage, she took the rest of the ham from the refrigerator and discarded that as well—not remembering that she’d purchased it only the day before.

  And earlier, when she’d gone into the yard to water her tomatoes, the spastic girl next door had been playing near the fence. Well, she wasn’t a spastic exactly—but she moved erratically and was soft in the head. Florence didn’t like the girl. A hairy beast who always had something in her mouth. Today she was chewing on a small piece of paper as she marched around a tree in some sort of demented trance. She was chanting, too, saying the same words over and over. At first, Florence couldn’t make out what the child was saying—but then it struck her, clear as a bell.

  “Nel-ly Tor-tell-i, Nel-ly Tor-tell-i.”

  Florence had dropped her watering can and nearly fallen into the tomatoes. She’d clutched her chest, fearing she might be dying. Just this morning she’d thought of her childhood friend—and now the spastic girl was chanting Nelly’s name like a mob about to burn down a building.

  When Toni-Ann had finally stopped her mad circuit around the tree, she’d turned to Florence and smiled, her huge teeth the color of violets. The old woman, aghast, had gone back into the house, sweating. And though she’d tried to forget, the name of the dead girl had stayed with her, stitching a black thread across her mind.

  * * *

  Edgar flicked on the bathroom light and locked the door. He looked down at his forearm. Thomas had pressed so hard that the lines of black ink were now dimensional, rising on red ridges of irritation. The boy felt stung, branded. He turned on the hot water, soaped up his arm, and scrubbed—first with his hand and then with a small towel. When he rinsed the suds away, he could still see the letters. A pang of anxiety shot through him. What if he could never wash it off? What if Supersluts.com remained on his skin for the rest of his life, like the eagle on his grandfather’s shoulder? Supposedly someone had needled it onto the old man’s skin when he was twenty, and it was still there on the day he died. Edgar had never liked the eagle—a deranged-looking bird that lurked behind the brush of the old man’s arm hair. As for the creature’s persistence unto his grandfather’s final day, Edgar knew this for a fact. It was Edgar who’d found the lifeless old man in the bathtub, a forbidden cigar floating in the gray water.

  Edgar scrubbed again. After three scourings, he accomplished only to blur the black ink, making the letters appear even larger; and now his entire forearm was bright red. His grandmother was sure to notice.

  When he came downstairs wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt, she asked if he was cold. “A little,” he said, and she felt his forehead.

  “You feel fine.”

  “I am,” he insisted. “I’m fine.” A lie that struck with jarring force against its polar opposite, the raw sadness that filled his lungs. He felt the rush of tears behind his eyes. But his mother would be home soon, and he didn’t want her to see him like that, a baby crying in his grandmother’s arms. His mother, the stomper, didn’t care for such displays. Tears—Florence’s or Edgar’s—always sent her straight to the porch with a pack of cigarettes. Where she went with her own tears, if she had any, the boy didn’t know.

  A funny smell drifted from the kitchen, a burning odor that seemed a perfect way to change the subject. “Are you cooking, Gramma?”

  “Oh!” she said with a stagey slap to her forehead. Edgar followed her into the kitchen; watched as she turned down the sauce and wiped up the smoking ooze that had bubbled over. “Just in the nick of time. What would I do without your sniffer?” She tapped the boy’s nose. Having him near again changed everything. She could actually feel something like a small flame warming the inside of her chest. Edgar felt something similar in his own body.

  “Are you making meatballs, Gramma?”

  “I told you I was, didn’t I?”

  “We have leftover Chinese,” Edgar reminded her.

  “I threw it out. Stinky the next day—and gloopy. Uccch.” His grandmother made a face of supreme disgust that encouraged the boy to smile.

  All the lights were on in the kitchen, and it was warm and bright. Darkness had already begun to creep up outside the window, like a beggar. They would not let him in. The room was fragrant with mint and oregano, nutmeg and garlic, and these things belonged to them. Edgar stuck his nose into a pile of chopped parsley on the cutting board and inhaled the clippings of a freshly mown lawn. With a little bit of dish soap, his grandmother twisted off her rings—her wedding band and engagement ring—and set them on the counter. She washed and dried her hands, then tossed the tiny leaves and grated cheese into the bowl of meat, added the nutmeg and the garlic and the stale bread, twirled the black pepper, pinched the salt, broke the single egg on top of it all, before plunging her fingers into the mix, gently pressing and turning the ingredients until the various became the singular.

  As Edgar watched her work, he reached for the wet rings on the counter. So big! Like the rings of a giant. He could see the places where the jeweler had cut the shanks and added flat bars, spacers to accommodate the old woman’s swollen fingers. As he slipped them onto one of his own thin digits, they jangled together. He shook his hand and listened to
the sound of metal against metal. His grandmother didn’t mind.

  You couldn’t break a diamond anyway. A diamond was harder than a brick, harder than glass. And if you did break it, it wouldn’t come apart in pieces that would fall to the floor; it would come apart in bits of light that would fly about the room, ghost bugs of various color, the shattered nest of a prism. Edgar watched his grandmother cook while, distractedly, he moved the rings up and down his finger like an abacus.

  “I worry,” she said, as if the cooking were only a dream and now she was awake. “That’s all.”

  Edgar touched the bowl, which was the same as touching her. Sometimes she seemed to need something from him, but it wasn’t anything you could find in your pocket or in a shop. It was more like a promise, or a kidney. “I’m home,” he said. And he was.

  The old woman nodded, satisfied, and with a light humming began to call back the dream, which hadn’t strayed far.

  But Edgar couldn’t fall into it again. As his grandmother resumed her preparations—filling the large pasta pot with water, pouring the golden oil into the skillet, removing a bunch of broccoli rabe from the refrigerator (an alien bouquet of green stalks held together with a hot-pink rubber band)—the boy looked to the window, which was much blacker now, and much hungrier. It was a wonder the darkness didn’t just smash itself into the kitchen. Black was tricky. Like a diamond, it wasn’t one thing, one color, but many. Thomas Pittimore was out there in the darkness. The man in the rusty green truck was there, along with tomorrow’s math test. Then came the butcher, the stolen prayer card, Toni-Ann’s purple mouth. At the edges of the darkness, most obscured—but clearly the ringleader—was Edgar’s father. It was too much—too many people, too many questions.