In Zanesville (3 page)

We follow him over and sure enough: empty aquariums under the picnic table. The wire mesh has been pushed aside.

“What are empty aquariums doing under my picnic table?” he asks.

He’s got to be crazy if he thinks either one of us is answering that question. We remain silent, watching our bare feet carefully
as we lug the aquariums into the Kozaks’ garage and
throw a tarp over them. The tarantula cage is nowhere to be found, but then we find it. The tarantula is sitting on his Styrofoam
boulder as usual, waiting for someone to feed him flies.

The kids have scattered, all except Miles, who is right where I left him, clasping the porch railing. He climbs onto my lap
when I sit down on the steps. I rest my chin on his head and try not to think about how all this looks—the sopping, blackened
bathroom, the mound of smoky sheets that were peeled off the beds and kicked downstairs, the grimy rags hanging from the banisters
and doorknobs, the skyline of dirty dishes stacked along the kitchen counter.

“This is all Derek’s fault,” I say tentatively, trying it out.

“Maybe,” Felicia says uncertainly. The problem is, since Derek hasn’t been spotted since before the fire was even reported,
he seems somehow the least guilty of all of us.

Lurch staggers to his feet and teeters across the yard, his tail waving. We listen. Off in the distance is the angry buzz
of an unmufflered motorcycle.

“That’s my dad’s hog,” Renee calls down from the third floor.

Both parents arrive at the same time, and the children materialize at the curb, talking and shoving. Chuck and Yvonne, climbing
off their bikes and unfastening their helmets, ignore them. Yvonne shakes her flattened hair and then pauses.

“What?” she says, grabbing Renee by the shirt.

Renee is instantly struck dumb.

Yvonne makes her way toward us, her dark-circled eyes
scanning the front of the house, the porch, me, and then past me, to Felicia. “You,” she says. “Explain.”

As Felicia talks, the rest of the world gets quieter and quieter. Next door, Mr. Vandevoort stands holding a broom, his back
to us, listening. Wherever Mrs. Vandevoort is, she’s listening too.
Matches, Derek, toilet paper, smoke, her mother—
their eyes flicker to me, and my mouth goes as dry as kindling—
firemen, hose, glass.

A long pause. Mr. Vandevoort resumes sweeping.

Yvonne looks at Dale. “You,” she says. “Get my cigarettes.”

Dale races from the porch to her motorcycle and flings open the saddlebag, races back with a pack of Old Golds and a lighter.
He’s panting.

Chuck has been standing silently, staring two burn holes into Felicia. He suddenly glances over at Wanda. “You,” he says.
“Get my gun.”

Wanda edges uncertainly toward the house, her eyes on Yvonne’s face. “Should I?” she asks.

Chuck barks out an unpleasant laugh, and the children begin sidling away. Yvonne lights a cigarette on her way into the house,
letting the door slam sharply.

“It’s not our fault Derek won’t mind,” Felicia says suddenly, loudly, to the porch.

Chuck stares at her in disbelief, unfolding his arms. Suddenly he stops, glaring past us.

“Cah,” Miles says, turning my face toward the street.

The patrol car glides to a stop in front of the house, lights whirling. The siren burps once, summoning all the neighbors
to their front windows.

“You got the law on me?” Chuck asks, his voice low and
poisonous. He hesitates for just a second and then walks slowly toward the cop, who is pulling Derek out of the backseat.

Inside the house, Yvonne has dumped the sheets down the basement steps and then gone upstairs to change. She comes back down
wearing cutoffs and a halter top. Her hair has been raked back into a rubber band and it looks like she’s crying a little.

“He stinks,” she says to me, nodding at Miles, who is still on my hip.

I go upstairs with Miles while Felicia goes to the basement with the sheets. Even though it isn’t a bad one, I linger over
the diaper change, peering out the bedroom window to the curb, where the cop is talking to Derek, whose head is down, and
Chuck, who is staring into the distance and nodding. Miles points to the soiled diaper, to the clean diaper, to the powder,
and to me.

“Me,” he says.

I can’t tell whether we’re fired or not, but I’m starting to hope we are. Down in the living room, Yvonne is smoking and watching
out the window. When the cop climbs into his squad car again and Chuck turns Derek toward the house with a hand on the back
of his neck, we all scramble to the kitchen. Yvonne lights a cigarette off the one she has going and then gets a can of beer
out of the fridge. From the back hall comes the rustling of children, quietly congregating like birds on a telephone wire.

The front door slams and Miles clings more tightly to my neck, like a baby monkey. A jostling from the back stairs, a sniff,
and then silence.

Derek enters the kitchen first, landing against the far wall like a discarded boot. He remains hunched there, head down, hands
in his pockets.

“Is this the one you can’t make mind?” Chuck thunders at Felicia.

She glares at Chuck, her hands balled into fists at her side, refusing to answer. He never even glances at me—one of the benefits
of being a sidekick—but snaps his fingers at Yvonne, who opens the refrigerator and sets another beer on the table. He pops
the top, takes a leisurely swig, and stares at Derek’s bowed head.

“Com’ere, you little turd,” Chuck says.

Derek shakes his head no.

We’ve always thought of Derek as a large, overbearing kid who shouts out words we’ve only seen in spray paint. A shin kicker,
an arm twister, a worm flinger. In fact, we see now, he’s a lot smaller than we are, a narrow-shouldered boy with a big head
and Yvonne’s dark circles under his eyes.

“Com’ere,”
Chuck says again.

From the back stairs, Renee’s voice: “Dad, no!” she cries.

Back when I was eight, a tall, skinny girl in my gym class named Alma Rupes flung herself into a cartwheel and landed right
on top of me. It was like being whacked in the side of the head by the long wooden paddles of a windmill—I was stunned, literally,
and for an hour or so afterward everything I looked at was in high relief, like a 3-D movie. I kept saying to the school nurse,
“Everything looks funny,” my voice hollow and loud, as though someone had their hands over my ears.

That’s what’s happening now; the kitchen has become distant and silent, more like grainy footage of a kitchen. Stark,
depressing details are suddenly visible: the window propped open with a Pepsi bottle, the light switch surrounded by a black
halo of grime, the crumb-filled toaster with a Wonder bread wrapper melted to its flank. Everything. I swing Miles around
to the front so he’s facing me, and I’m seeing it all through the blond fuzz of his staticky hair.

Chuck takes one step, grabs Derek by the upper arm and lifts him off the floor like a stick. Derek is stiff and resistant,
and his eyes are closed.

“You don’t know how to make this one mind?” Chuck asks Felicia.

The evening sun has moved down a notch, glinting off the metal edge of the counter, the sweating can of beer, Felicia’s glasses.
She thrusts them back up where they belong and continues glaring at Chuck.

He drags Derek by the wrist over to the stove and turns the burner on.

“Don’t!” Felicia cries.

Yvonne turns her back on the scene, opens the freezer and takes out an ice tray.

Chuck yanks Derek’s hand over the flame and holds it there while the boy struggles, like a worm on a hook.

“Stop it,” Felicia gasps, crying helplessly.

The boy’s face is twisted into a breathless grimace; he kicks at his father’s legs and Chuck plunges the hand into the blue
part of the flame. Derek starts shrieking.

In the flame.

The hand is cooking.

Still in the flame.

The screams are like sharp blasts from a horn.

Suddenly, there is a fuming, scorched smell in the kitchen, and Derek collapses on the floor. Chuck strides out of the house.
When the door closes behind him, a chorus of crying starts up in the back hall.

Yvonne cracks the ice tray and empties it into a dish towel. A motorcycle roars to life and Felicia stumbles out of the room.
Yvonne claps her hands once, summoning Miles out of my arms.

Derek is slumped on the linoleum, the dish towel in his lap, staring at the hand—brick red up to the wrist and strangely tight
looking, like an inflated rubber glove.

Yvonne claps again, sharply, and holds out her hands, but Miles grips my waist and won’t let go. She pulls him away, like
taffy, as he fights to hang on.

“Me!” he cries out in desperation, searching my face. “Me!”

I peel his fingers from my neck, one by one.

His cries, hollow and lonely, follow me as I join my friend outside and walk quickly away, past Lurch, who stands trembling
next to his doghouse, past Mrs. Vandevoort in her white socks and pruning gloves, and past the blond snake, waiting in the
green crew-cut grass at her feet.

We live in a factory town, Zanesville, Illinois, the farm implement capital of the world. This means nothing to Felicia and
me; we care only about our own neighborhood, everything between our two houses, a handful of potholed streets and alleys lined
with two-story homes and one-car garages. We have a couple of busy intersections with four-way stop signs, a red brick barbershop,
a corner tavern, a taxidermist, a family who paved their backyard and painted it green, and a
house where the garage has been turned into a tap-dance studio. Otherwise, it’s all the same, every block, through our neighborhood
and the neighborhoods beyond.

My mother can’t stand the tap-dance teacher, who wears her hair in a tall unstable beehive and has a daughter named Shelley
who was in my class all during elementary school, a tiny, dazzling creature with kinky tresses and an overwrought personality.
During our early years, Shelley had wild, seizurelike temper tantrums—she would utter a series of sharp shrieks and then for
three minutes became a blur of hair ribbons and pistoning Mary Janes. Everyone adored her because she was out of the ordinary,
but nevertheless she was sent away at some point, to a distant grandmother.

“They sent that little girl to live on a farm,” my mother said at the time, not to me but to someone on the telephone.

Shelley’s mom’s studio is where Felicia and I part company to go to our separate houses. Felicia’s route is stepping through
a hedge and sliding down a steep terrace; mine is a scurry along someone’s back walk, past their windows, eyes averted, and
down their front steps.

Over on my block, the semi-interesting people include a woman who comes outside and washes her dog’s face with a dishcloth
every hour or so, and a widowed man who is so gigantic he needs a kitchen chair to get to his car, alternating between using
it as a walker and sitting on it to rest. He calls himself Pudgy, and we call him that too. One coincidence: we also have
a neighbor named Fudgy, or Uncle Fudge, a barber with no hair of his own. Next door is Old Milly, whose middle-aged drunken
nephews come over and make trouble at her house. My sister and I, from our upstairs bedroom, can look
down at night into Old Milly’s kitchen and watch what’s going on, the staggering and shoving. Once very late at night we saw
her niece, a stout, red-faced nurse named Shorty, kissing a man in a way that made us sick.

Otherwise, not much fascinating. A lot of dogs: the clean-faced Jeffy; a white dog with a blue eye named Chief; a black toy
poodle named Trinket; our own dog, Tammy, a rat terrier who bites when cornered; and Curly, Old Milly’s thick-shouldered,
bowlegged, and unpredictable dog. All the dogs in the neighborhood are tied out, so there’s a lot of ambient barking and animals
on their hind legs at the end of chains, staring at back doors. Curly is the only one who never gets to come inside. He’s
pumpkin colored with a gnarled head, and he lives in a four-foot dirt circle underneath an apple tree, with a lean-to for
cover. Old Milly is the only one who goes near him, feeding him every morning from a rusty cake pan. A few times each winter,
if it’s going to get thirty or forty below, she’ll snap a leash on his collar and drag him to the cellar door and push him
down there for the night. That’s his entire life, twelve years and counting.

He lifts his orange face as I go up the back walk, and then settles it back on his paws. Our dog, Tammy, is inside, tethered
to the basement door, up on her hind legs watching everyone eat dinner. She runs immediately under the table when I unclip
her leash.

Dinner is fried chicken, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, hot rolls, et cetera. My dad is sober, it looks like. He’s wearing
lawn-mowing clothes, listening to my mother tell him about the fire. She stops, chicken leg in hand, when she sees my face.
“Now they’ve had
you
crying?”

“No,” I say. My older sister, Meg, looks me over briefly and
then goes back to her book and her sculpted tower of mashed potatoes. My brother has a full plate but is eating from a bowl
of cornflakes and milk. Tammy has stationed herself underneath him so he can pass things down to her—a dinner roll, a glob
of potatoes, and a leaf of iceberg lettuce, which she is standing on.

“You should’ve seen this crew,” my mother tells my dad. “Kids running loose everywhere. Boy, she must be a real doll, that
woman.”

“Uh-oh,” he says.

My dad is a door-to-door siding salesman. He is tall and tanned, with the haunted brown eyes of someone who does something
terrible for a living. Some days he can’t even bring himself to leave the house, but sits at the kitchen table clearing his
throat and making notes on a clipboard that he keeps pushing back and forth, lining it up with different edges of the table.

“Don’t ever be afraid to call the fire department,” my father says to me. “It’s those guys’ job, they don’t mind.”

“Firemen can do kung fu,” my brother, Raymond, says. He is seven and has a light brown forelock and the same warm, shattered
eyes as my father.