Fragile Beasts (9 page)

I’m really starting to hate all this phoniness. Most people are always pretending to be something they’re not, and I don’t understand why. If you’re going to pretend to be one way, then you must think that’s the right way to be so why not just be that way to begin with?

But then there are certain people who are so great and make you so happy that you don’t care about all the jerks. It’s really amazing that a couple decent people can protect you from millions of idiots. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like not to have any good people in your life at all, not even one. I think that’s how psychos are made.

Klint and I are supposed to leave with Mom the day after tomorrow. She rented a little U-Haul trailer we’re hitching to her car, and she said this is our only chance to take our stuff with us. Whatever we leave behind will be gone for good. Bill is going to take care of Dad’s personal effects and sell the furniture and the TV and microwave and give the money to us. Aunt Jen has volunteered to help.

Part of me wants to leave everything behind and try to forget that the first fourteen years of my life ever happened, but another part of me knows I’ll go crazy without my stuff and my memories. Still, I haven’t packed anything. Neither has Klint.

Klint’s actually pushing in the other direction. Instead of condensing his possessions into the empty boxes from Bi-Lo Aunt Jen dropped off for us, he’s spreading out. He’s left clothes and dirty dishes in the living room. He even set a pair of reeking gym socks and a jock strap right in the middle of the coffee table next to the twisted chrome remains of the antlers from Dad’s grill: a definite
statement if I’ve ever seen one, except I don’t know who he’s trying to impress. It’s only us now.

None of this seems real. Tomorrow will be my last day of school at Centresburg High, and I only just started here a couple weeks ago. I asked Mom if our transcripts should be sent to another school, and she said we’d take care of it when we got to Arizona. I didn’t like the sound of that. I don’t want to miss too much school. I don’t want to fall behind in my classes and mess up my grades.

It’s not that I’m a teacher’s wet dream or anything like that. I’m no Honor Society geek or an ass-kisser. I get good grades because I can’t help myself. I happen to be smart. Plus I kind of like school. I’d never tell anyone, especially not Klint who hates school except for baseball, or my friends who hate school except for lunch and wood shop, or Dad who hated school when he was in it except for baseball, or Mom who hated it, too, except for the boys who played baseball and one particular math teacher who she never had for class because he taught the advanced students but apparently he was good-looking and she and Aunt Jen both dated him. (This would definitely get him canned nowadays but to hear them talk, it was pretty common back then.)

The simple truth is I like to learn things. I admit most classes are boring and most teachers don’t teach well, but sometimes when I least expect it, I encounter a new idea or a historical event or a scientific fact that blows me away.

Unfortunately for me, though, doing well in school is not something that’s admired by the people I live with. Everyone I know equates being smart with being stuck-up.

I used to hide my report cards from my parents not because they were bad but because they were good and I knew I’d get teased and accused of thinking I was better than everybody else. It also gave them an excuse to start reminiscing about their own failed school careers, things like how Dad showed that son of a bitch Mr. Hickey how much he hated him by ditching the final and flunking his class and having to take it over the next year and how Mom got a D in English because it was during eighth period and she always skipped it to go smoke with her friends and she had to go to summer school because of it.

I was always troubled by the glee and pride in their voices that accompanied these tales. I couldn’t understand how making their lives more difficult and limiting their futures could be considered a triumph.

Eventually I figured out that the reason they seemed pleased about being screwups and disappointed in me for doing well was because it was easier to make people who do something better than you feel bad about themselves than it is to admit there’s something wrong with you and maybe you should try and fix it.

But realizing this didn’t change anything for me. I just became more committed to hiding myself.

Klint still insists he’s not going with Mom. He says unless she’s developed a really good right hook, there’s no way she’s getting him into that car. He already has a part-time job after school working at Hamilton’s Dairy. He says if Bill will let him bunk with him for the time being, he should be able to make enough money to pay for his food and chip in some rent, and if Mom causes him any problems like involving cops or social services, he’ll run away and no one will ever hear from him again.

He doesn’t include me in his plans, but he also never talks about me leaving with Mom, either. I think he’s giving me the power to make my own choice, and I appreciate this because he’s never treated me like an adult before. The problem is, he’s given me an impossible choice. If I go with Mom, he’ll never speak to me again. If I stay here, we’re going to end up running away and Klint’s going to screw up his chance to keep playing ball. Mom would never let us live with Bill or anyone else. It’s gone well beyond maternal concern at this point. She and Klint are out for each other’s blood.

Shelby has a plan. It’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard, but since nothing seems real right now, I figure why not try one more thing that can’t possibly work out? Besides, there’s a home-cooked meal involved and the chance to hang out with Shelby.

The plan itself sort of creeps me out. She wants Klint and me to live with her aunt. Now even if I can pretend that there’s any way in hell to get Klint to agree to this, I’ve heard enough strange things about Candace Jack to make me not so keen on the idea myself.

She’s old and mean and lives all by herself in a huge mansion and hardly ever goes out because she hates just about everybody. She’s never been married or had kids and people say it’s because no man would ever go near her because she’s hideously ugly.

She’s filthy rich. Her nephew is Cam Jack, Shelby’s dad, the guy who owns J&P Coal, and he’s not exactly popular around here. There have been a lot of
accidents in his mines. When I was a little kid, there was an explosion in Beverly that killed eighteen men, and a couple years ago five miners were trapped in Josephine near Jolly Mount. They were rescued and were pretty famous for a while. There were rumors they were going to sue him, but they didn’t end up doing it. Nobody seems to know exactly why, but everyone seems pretty sure it’s because Cam Jack did something sleazy that only a rich person with a ton of lawyers could get away with.

Lorelei, the J&P mine in our town, closed a long time ago. Dad worked in it for a couple years. Bill worked in it until he messed up his leg. It was the biggest source of employment around here and things have been really depressed since it closed, but I’m still relieved it did. It means guys have to leave when they get out of school and go find jobs somewhere else, but at least they’re jobs that don’t kill or cripple them.

That’s what I know about Candace Jack, that and the rumors about her bull.

Some people say she’s had the same bull for fifty years. Other people say that’s not possible and she just gets a new one whenever the old one dies. Other people say he’s a demon bull she conjured up with the help of Satan. He’s gigantic, black as coal, and has killed lots of kids who have crawled over her fence and tried to cross her land. Nobody knows who these kids are. Mostly they’re supposed to be from other towns. No one ever finds their bodies because after the bull kills them, Candace Jack plucks them off the ends of his bloody horns and takes them back to her house where she eats them and then throws their bones in a pit in her cellar.

But tonight Shelby says we’re having chicken.

We’ve borrowed Bill’s pickup for the occasion. Dad and Klint had both been saving money to get Klint his own truck. Dad had a special savings account with several thousand dollars in it, but now that he’s dead we’ve been told we can’t get the money because Dad died without a will. Now the government gets hold of all his bank accounts first (the savings account and a checking account with $524.66 in it), takes out a bunch of taxes, and then decides what Klint and I get.

He had a retirement plan with Burke Pharmaceuticals but since he died at forty instead of retiring at sixty-five, Burke gets to keep all the money. Besides a will, he also didn’t have life insurance or mortgage insurance on the house. I guess those things seemed like a waste of money to him while he was alive.

Klint hasn’t said a word for the entire drive. I haven’t either. I’m gloating in silence. I was able to do the impossible and convince him to have dinner with Shelby and her aunt. I told him I knew he didn’t want to go because he was afraid of her because he believed all those stories about her eating kids.

At first he just denied it and tried to ignore me, but the more I ragged on him about it, the angrier he got and before long he smacked me and I smacked him back and we got into it pretty good.

In the end I think he agreed to go mostly for the same reason I did: it’s something bizarre and totally unexpected that gets us out of our depressing house for a night and distracts us from thinking about our impending doom.

Candace Jack’s house turns out to be as huge as everyone says it is, but it’s nothing like I imagined. I thought it might be like a movie star’s mansion with everything polished and glittering, or maybe a cold sinister stone castle like they have in England, or a haunted house with turrets and gargoyles and tons of dark windows.

Instead it’s red brick with white trim like a lot of houses around here and even though it’s bigger than my elementary school, there’s nothing fancy about it. I get the feeling the guy who built it was only interested in impressing himself, not anybody else.

It sits on a hillside about a mile off the main road at the end of a white gravel driveway that seems to go on forever beneath a tunnel of gigantic trees.

There’s a red barn a little ways off behind the house. I think it might be the first barn I’ve ever seen that doesn’t have peeling paint or a hole in it somewhere.

Shelby’s sports car is red, too, but a flashier shade. It’s parked in front of the house: small, scarlet, shiny, and rounded like a drop of new blood.

Back by the barn I spy a beat-up Dodge Ram pickup and an old Jeep with no top. I point it out to Klint and tell him maybe we should park back there.

We do. As we’re getting out of Bill’s truck I notice one side of the Jeep is completely dented in and has ragged holes in it like it’s been stabbed with a spear or blasted with a shotgun.

We’re on our way to the house, walking as slow as we can without going backward, when a tall, skinny, old man comes walking toward us in a John Deere ball cap and a checked Woolrich coat carrying a rifle at his side.

“We’re not trespassing,” I volunteer without being asked, and Klint gives me a disgusted look.

“Good, then I won’t have to shoot you,” he says without any sign of humor on his leathery, lined face.

“You the Hayes boys?” he asks.

We nod.

“Knew your dad,” he says. “My condolences,” he adds while taking a quick tug at the bill of his cap.

This is exactly the kind of guy I needed to run into: the kind of guy who’s never going to ask someone how he’s doing.

“You knew Dad?” Klint asks.

“Saw him around town. In the bars. Exchanged a few words now and then.”

He extends his hand.

“I’m Jerry.”

Klint takes it first. Then me.

“Where are you going with the gun?” I ask, and Klint gives me another dirty look.

“There’s a doe been spotted ’bout five miles up the road from here. Got an arrow in her neck. Bleeding out. Some idiot with a crossbow. I’m gonna go put her out of her misery.”

“Are you with the park service?”

“Nope. It’s on Miss Jack’s land so I’m gonna take care of it for her.”

“Five miles from here? How much land is hers?”

He turns slowly in a full circle looking out toward the mountains, then at the fields and forest behind the house and barn, then at the trees lining the driveway.

“Pretty much all of it,” he says.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“What happened to your Jeep?”

He looks briefly at the damaged door.

“Bull,” he says simply.

“Kyle! Klint!” I hear Shelby call out.

She’s standing on the porch waving at us.

“There’s little Miss Jack,” Jerry comments. “You better get going.”

I don’t need to be told twice.

Shelby’s beaming. Her face is always pretty, even when she’s frowning, but when she’s happy, she’s almost too pretty to look at. She’s like the sun.

She has on a blue dress made out of some kind of gauzy material that sort of floats around her as she hurries down the porch steps to meet us. The bottom of her dress is sprinkled with sparkly beads and her bare toes in a pair of sandals peek out from underneath the hem. Her toenails are painted blue, too.

She told me that Klint and I should “dress nicely.” We’ve responded by wearing jeans without grass stains, gym shoes without rips down the sides, our cleanest flannel shirts over T-shirts without curse words or beer slogans on them, and ball caps without grease, mud, blood, or paint spattered on them.

She doesn’t look very pleased by our outfits. Her smile falters for a moment as her eyes travel from the tips of my shoes up to the top of my cap.

She doesn’t give Klint the same thorough going-over. She can only manage a glance at him while he looks away from her, and she blushes. Same old shit.

“You look nice,” I tell her.

“Thanks. You look … better than usual.”

Her smile returns, and I relax a little.

“So this is the place, huh? Where’s the bull?”

“Ventisco? He’s out there somewhere.”

“Ventisco?” I repeat.