Darkness Creeping (30 page)

“Look at that place!” said Garson as they walked down the street. “Is that a house or the city dump?”

“It’s
my
house,” said Lucinda, figuring the truth was less painful when delivered quickly.

“Oh,” replied Garson, his face turning red from the foot he had just put in his mouth. “I didn’t mean there was anything
wrong
with it—it just looks . . . lived in. Yeah, that’s right—lived in . . . in a homey sort of way.”

“Homely” is more like it,
thought Lucinda.

Out front there was a fifth rusty auto relic that still worked, parked by the curb. A pair of legs attached to black boots stuck out from underneath. As Garson and Lucinda approached, a boy of about sixteen crawled out from under the car, stood in their path, and flexed his muscles in a threatening way. He wore a black T-shirt that said DIE, and he had dirty-blond hair with streaks of age-old grease in it. His right arm was substantially more muscular than his left, the way crabs often have one claw much bigger than the other.

“Who’s this dweeb?” the filthy teenager said through a mouth full of teeth, none of which seemed to be growing in the same direction. He looked Garson up and down.

Lucinda sighed. “Garson, this is my brother, Ignatius.”

“My friends call me ‘Itchy’” (which didn’t mean much, since Ignatius had no friends). “You ain’t a nerd, are you?” Itchy asked the boy standing uncomfortably next to Lucinda.

“No, not recently,” Garson replied.

“Good. I hate nerds.” And with that, Itchy reached out his muscular right arm and shook Garson’s hand, practically shattering Garson’s finger bones. It was intentional.

“Hey, wanna help me chase the neighborhood cats into traffic?” Itchy asked. “It’s a blast!”

“No thanks,” said Garson. “I’m allergic to cats.”

Itchy shrugged. “Your loss,” he said, then returned to tormenting the fat tabby that was hiding under the car.

“What’s with him?” asked Garson as he and Lucinda made their way toward the house.

Lucinda rolled her eyes. “He’s been bored ever since he got expelled.”

What Lucinda neglected to say was how happy her brother was to be out of school. He’d planned on getting out ever since last summer when he’d gotten a job operating the Tilt-A-Whirl at the local carnival. It was that job which had given him his powerful right arm. Pull the lever, push the lever, press the button—if he worked at it hard enough, and practiced at home, Itchy was convinced operating the Tilt-A-Whirl could become a full-time career. With a future that bright, who needed school?

“Lucinda!” shouted Itchy, still under the car. “Mom and Dad are looking for you . . . and they’re mad.”

Lucinda shrugged. That was no news. They were always that way.

She turned to Garson. “You don’t have to come in,” she said, more in warning than anything else.

But Garson forced a smile. He was going to see this through to the end, no matter how horrible that end might be. And it was.

The inside of the Pudlinger home was no more inviting than the outside. It had curling wallpaper, brown carpet that had clearly started out as a different color, and faded furniture that would cause any respectable interior decorator to jump off a cliff.

Mr. Pudlinger was in his usual position on the recliner, with a beer in his hand, releasing belches of unusual magnitude. He stared at a TV with the colors set so everyone’s face was purple and their hair was green.

“Where have you been?” he growled at Lucinda.

“Field-hockey practice,” she answered flatly.

“You didn’t take out the trash this morning,” he said, grunting.

“Yes, I did.”

“Then how come it’s full again?”

Lucinda glanced over to see that the trash can was indeed full—full of the usual fast-food wrappers, beer cans, and unpaid bills.

“You take that trash out before dark, or no allowance!” her dad yelled from across the room. It must have slipped his mind that Lucinda didn’t get an allowance. Not that they couldn’t afford it—they weren’t poor. It was just that her mom and dad liked to “put money away for a rainy day.” Obviously they thought there was a drought.

Mr. Pudlinger shifted in his recliner and it let out a frightened squeak the way recliners do when holding someone of exceptional weight. It wasn’t that Lucinda’s dad was fat. It would have been perfectly all right if he was
just
fat. But the truth was, he was also . . . misshapen. He had a hefty beer gut, and somehow that beer gut had settled into strange, unexpected regions of his body, until he looked like some horrible reflection in a fun-house mirror.

“What does your father
do
?” Garson asked as they stepped over the living-room debris toward the kitchen.

“What he’s doing right now,” she replied. “That’s what he does.”

“No, I mean for a living,” Garson clarified.

“Like I said,
that’s
what he does.” Lucinda then went on to explain how her father was hurt on the job six years ago, and how he had been home ever since, receiving disability pay from the government. “He calls it ‘living off of Uncle Sam,’” said Lucinda. Of course, Mr. Pudlinger failed to tell Uncle Sam that he had completely recovered two weeks after the accident.

In the kitchen they ran into Lucinda’s mom, who Lucinda had also wanted to avoid. The woman had a cigarette permanently fixed to a scowl that was permanently planted on her mouth, which was permanently painted with more lipstick than Bozo the Clown.

Lucinda reluctantly introduced her to Garson.

“Garson?” she said through her frowning clown lips. “What kind of stupid name is that?” Cough, cough.

“I’m named after my father,” Garson replied.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” she said, and spat her gum into the sink, where it caught the lip of a dirty glass. “You wanna stay for dinner, Garson?” she asked, batting her eyes, showing off those caterpillar-like things she glued to her lashes.

“What are you having?” he asked.

“Leftovers,” she said flatly.

Garson grimaced. “Left over from what?”

Mrs. Pudlinger was stumped by that one. No one had ever asked that before. “Just leftovers,” she said. “You know, like from the refrigerator.”

“No thanks,” said Garson. Clearly his survival instinct had kicked in.

Lucinda was beginning to believe that Garson would soon leave, and she would be spared any further embarrassment. But then her father called him over to the recliner.

“Hey, kid, I wanna show you a magic trick,” Mr. Pudlinger said with a sly smile. Then he extended his index finger in Garson’s direction. “Pull my finger,” he said.

Garson did, and Mr. Pudlinger let one rip.

Lucinda watched tearfully as, moments later, Garson sprinted down the street, racing away from her horrible family. It was the last straw, the last time she would allow her family to humiliate her like this. Their reign of terror had to end.

Just as she turned to walk back into the house, a car swerved in the street, its tires screeching as it tried to avoid a cat. The cat, having missed being flattened, leaped into the arms of an elderly neighbor woman across the street. She turned a clouded eye at Itchy, who had just climbed out from under a parked car, laughing.

“You monster!” the old woman screamed, shaking her cane at him. “You horrible, evil boy!”

“Ah, shut yer trap, you old bat,” Itchy snarled.

“You’re trash!” the old woman shouted. “Every last one of you Pudlingers. The way you keep your house—the way you live your lives—
you’re all trash!
”

That’s when Mr. Pudlinger came out onto the porch. It was the first time Lucinda had seen him outside in months. He turned to Itchy, put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and as if speaking words of profound wisdom, said, “Don’t let anyone who’s not family call you trash.”

And then he went across the street and punched the old lady out.

When Lucinda’s salvation finally came, it came thundering out of nowhere at five in the morning. That’s when a mighty crash shook the house like an earthquake, waking everyone up.

Furious to have been shaken awake, Mr. Pudlinger shuffled out of the bedroom with Mrs. Pudlinger close behind, her face caked in some sort of green beauty mud that actually looked less offensive than her face.

“What’s going on around here?” bellowed Mr. Pudlinger. “Can’t a man get any sleep?”

Lucinda wandered out of her bedroom, and Itchy—a true coward when it came to anything other than cats and nerds—came out of his bedroom and hid right behind her.

Together the family shuffled to the front door and opened it to find yet another object on their front lawn—a Dumpster.

Dark green, with heavy ridges all around it, the huge metal trash container was one of those large ones they use in construction—eight feet high and twenty feet long. Yet it seemed like no Dumpster Lucinda had ever seen before.

“Cool,” said Itchy, who must have already been calculating a hundred awful ways the thing could be used.

Mr. Pudlinger scratched his flaking scalp. “Who sent a Dumpster to us?” he asked.

“Maybe the Home Shopping Network,” suggested Itchy.

“Naah,” said Mom. “I didn’t order a Dumpster.”

But it clearly was meant for them, because the name “Pudlinger” was stenciled on the side.

It’s like a puzzle,
thought Lucinda.
What’s wrong with this picture?

But there were already so many things wrong with the Pudlinger lawn that the Dumpster just blended right in. Slowly Lucinda went up to it. It looked so . . . heavy. More than heavy, it looked dense. She looked down to see a tiny hint of metal sticking out from underneath. The edge of a car muffler poked out like the Wicked Witch’s feet beneath Dorothy’s house.

Mrs. Pudlinger gasped. “Look!” she said. “It crushed the Volkswagen Itchy was born in!”

Mr. Pudlinger began to fume. “I’ll sue!” he shouted. And with that he stormed back into the house and began to flip through the yellow pages in search of a lawyer.

The Dumpster caught the sun and cast a dark shadow. As Lucinda left for school that day, she couldn’t help but stare at the thing as she walked around it to get to the street.

It’s just a Dumpster,
she tried to tell herself. The way she figured it, some neighbor—some
angry
neighbor—had taken it upon himself to provide a container large enough to haul away all the junk her family had accumulated over the years. But if that were so, then why didn’t they hear the truck that had brought it here?

Before Lucinda knew what she was doing, she had put down her books and was walking toward the gigantic green container. Slowly she began to touch it, brushing her fingers across the metal, then laying her hand flat against its cold, smooth surface. As she touched it, all thoughts seemed to empty from her mind. It was as if the Dumpster were hypnotizing her. She giggled to herself for thinking such a silly thought and stepped away from it.