The Nose from Jupiter (9 page)

Bad Omen

Next morning after breakfast I checked around the house. Sure enough, there was a set of strange footprints in the garden. They were human footprints and they were smaller than mine…about Prudence’s size. One of the shrubs was knocked over, probably when she ran away. Of course it could have been one of the plants Victor and I trampled last week, playing football. I’m no Sherlock Holmes.

“Alan, what are you doing in the garden? You’re getting your shoes all dirty.” Mom was on the front step, frowning as she buttoned her coat over her new greeny-brown suit. Gee, this was only yesterday. Yesterday morning. It seems like a lifetime ago.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I told you to keep those shoes clean. Your father will want you to look nice for the hockey game this weekend. He’s always complaining that you dress like a tramp.”

Thanks, Dad. “We’re not going to the hockey game,” I said. “Don’t you remember? Dad phoned to say he can’t make it.”

Mom swore. I hate it when she does that because it’s usually something to do with Dad. She slammed the car door and drove away, and I stopped trying to rub dirt off my desert boots.

I would have taken a lift with her except that her work is in the opposite direction from the school. I would have asked for a lift except that… I couldn’t. If she said yes, I’d feel I was being a bother, and if she said no, I’d feel awful. It was better not to ask.

I walked to school very carefully. I didn’t like the idea of Prudence in my neighborhood, watching my house. My house. (I thought of Cecil and his dirty pants.) I didn’t like her standing in my garden, still as still, as the night came down. I didn’t like her spying into my living room. My living room. I felt that something had been taken away from me. My life wasn’t mine anymore.

I didn’t see her – though I couldn’t help feeling that someone was watching me, all the way to school. Once I looked over my shoulder and saw, or thought I saw, a shadow dart behind a tree. My heart did a somersault, and as I was about to scream and run away as fast as I could, a crow paced out from behind the tree and began,
idly, to pull apart a piece of garbage with its sharp yellow beak.

Miss Scathely gave me my intramural championship ribbon in homeroom. Everyone applauded and I stuck it in my history textbook. Walking down the hall a few periods later, I ran into Prudence, who noticed the dangling ribbon and pulled it out.

“Very nice,” she said tonelessly.

I thanked her.

“You could put it on the mantel in your living room,” she said, “between that ugly horse statue and the clock that’s five minutes slow.” She handed back the ribbon and walked away.

I stared after her. She
had
been there. She knew what our living room looked like. My skin crawled as I imagined her standing in the garden, peering in through the window, noticing the carved, metal horse I’d bought my parents with allowance money, noticing that the mantel clock kept bad time. Who knew what else she’d seen?

But what could I do about it? I couldn’t scare her away – I didn’t think Dracula himself could scare Prudence. I sure couldn’t intimidate her. Tell, no,
ask
her to stop spying on me? Great, and then I could run away, or stand there while she laughed at me or beat me to a pulp with or without the help of her friends. Not good options.

Miss Scathely couldn’t help me – a teacher couldn’t tell Prudence to stay out of my garden. Only the police could
do that, and they wouldn’t listen to a thirteen-year-old kid complaining about another thirteen-year-old kid.

I didn’t get a chance to talk to Miranda until just before lunch, when we made our weekly visit to the school library. I started to tell her about Prudence, but she interrupted.

“I’m sorry for the way I sounded last night on the phone,” she whispered. “Talking about you as if you were crazy. I hope you didn’t take it too seriously. I was upset.”

She took my hand. I said I understood. “Sh!” said the school librarian.

The janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets. I caught his eye by chance, and smiled politely. He stopped what he was doing and stared at me. I buried my head in my book.

“Something wrong?” asked Miranda in a whisper.

“Nothing.”

After a long minute, the janitor shook his head and left. I drew a long breath.

“Why was Mr. Keenan staring at you?” Miranda asked.

I shook my head and turned a page of my book. Heaven knows what it was about. I hadn’t read a word.

After the final bell I said good-bye to Miranda, who was waiting for her mom to drive her to a dentist’s appointment. Saying good-bye must have taken longer than I realized because by the time I got to my locker, the usual crowd in the upstairs hall was thinning out. A knot of kids went by talking hockey. Another group went by talking hairstyles. Guys and girls. The girls couldn’t decide whether
the Avalanche were a better team than the Flyers. The guys agreed that a buzz cut was preferable to a skinhead – quite right too. Skinhead makes you look like a real jerk. I spun the combination lock on my locker to the right and stopped, to the left and stopped.

The sound of a toilet flushing echoed loud and long in the now empty hallway. The BOYS bathroom was two rooms away. For some reason, maybe remembering yesterday, I was suddenly filled with alarm. I hurried with the last number of my combination and couldn’t get the lock to open. I took a deep breath and made sure the last number was right, but the lock still wouldn’t open. I tugged and tugged, and then decided to start again.

I bent my head and spun the lock, but now everything I did seemed to be in slow motion, the way things happen in nightmares. Once around to the right and stop at –

Too late. The bathroom door opened and Victor came out.

“Hi!” I said in a too loud voice. I was probably more relieved than he was. My locker opened easily this time.

Victor looked up and down the hall before joining me. I asked if he wanted to walk home with me and he flinched, as if I’d offered him a live tarantula.

“No way,” he whispered, hurrying into his coat. His eyes were wild.

“Why not?”

At that point the air near us was shattered by a resounding release of gas. Thunder on the right was a bad omen in
ancient Rome, and also, it seemed, in present-day Ontario. Mary waddled up to us and stopped to stare at me for a moment.

I put on my coat and dumped my math homework into my knapsack. There are people who do badly in math because they never open the textbook. Not me. I manage to work hard
and
do badly.

Mary stared and stared. Her eyes – I’d never noticed before because I’d never been curious and close enough – were a pale blue, almost colorless. They regarded me with no apparent concern. I might have been a piece of meat on a slab. I might have been a booger on the end of her fingernail.

“There you are, Dingwall,” she said. “We were wondering.” I didn’t reply. Mary turned and walked slowly down the hall, taking her own sweet…well, taking her own time. We watched her around the corner.

Victor shivered.

“Gotta go,” he muttered. He patted my arm without looking at me, and hurried away in the opposite direction from Mary. Poor Victor. His head was bent forward. The bottom of his coat fit tightly across his rear end.

Falling

The Cougars were playing catch near the north entrance. They all turned to stare at me when I came out of the school. Prudence wasn’t with them, I noticed. Mary smiled when she saw me. I sneezed, and she laughed. Then she threw the football at Larry, hard and low. He dropped it. She laughed again. I joined the tail end of the stragglers who were leaving by the other gate.

I felt ashamed. I don’t know why. I’d have left by the south gate normally.

I walked home alone. It was a cool and gray afternoon. The leaves had mostly fallen but were not raked up yet. They drifted about the front yards in clusters of red and gold. They clung to the moist pavement, making it slippery and colorful.

At the bottom of Forth Street, I turned right onto King. This part of town has some nice older houses, mostly falling down, and a few places that will fix your vacuum cleaner or your roof. Also a lumberyard and the newspaper offices and the water treatment plant. A mixed neighborhood, I guess you’d say. The few cars I saw in the parking lots were old and rusted. The sidewalks were empty.

I know the area well. I walk through it most school days. It’s not so bad. Not friendly, exactly, but I’m used to it. You know how that is. You might not like the weird kid who lives on your block – the one who’s always setting fires or teasing animals – but you’re used to her.

Well, this afternoon, for some reason I found myself hurrying along King Street. I was scared. I wanted to get past the overgrown front lawns and boarded-up windows and rut-puddled driveways. I wanted to get to the other side of the river, where the houses start to get nicer and people are out walking. I didn’t run, exactly, but I didn’t waste any time. I didn’t daydream either. I looked ahead, looked around, looked over my shoulder.

I didn’t see anything strange, but I couldn’t help the feeling that something was hovering nearby, waiting to leap out at me or drop out of the sky. Prudence in a black cape, maybe. I tried to laugh at myself but I wasn’t feeling very funny.

I slipped on the pavement, went down on my backside, and scrambled up in a panic. No one was around. I was trembling. My heart was beating fast. Then I heard the
noise – behind me. I turned. An old black car with a noisy muffler backed out of a beat-up driveway and turned to follow me.

I ran. I pumped my arms and legs and raced along the slippery sidewalk; my knapsack flapping heavily against my back. I wished I hadn’t taken home my math book.

The car accelerated. It sounded like an airplane taking off. I ran harder. The bridge was over the next hill. I ran harder, harder, my shoes flapping, and the car got closer and closer and closer, and then it was too late.

The car caught up to me and passed. There was an old lady in the driver’s seat; two hands on the steering wheel and a cigarette bobbing in the middle of her face. She smiled at me and took one hand off the wheel to wave. The car roared away.

I stopped running. Nothing had happened, except that I was sweaty.

“Norbert,” I said. “I think I’m going crazy.” He didn’t answer right away. “Norbert, are you there?” After a minute he sneezed.

–
Excuse me. Of course I’m here. Where else would I be?

“I feel a bit low. I might be getting a cold.”

–
Take it from me. You are getting a cold.

Your nose knows. “Miranda is going to ask her mom if I can come over for dinner tomorrow night.”

–
She’s at the dentist’s, isn’t she? She’ll be able to pick some blossoms for the table setting.

“What blossoms?”

–
From the dentist-tree of course. We have them on Jupiter too. What an evocative smell. Crisp and minty. Now, Alan, what makes you think you’re going crazy?

“Oh, I don’t know. But talking to you isn’t helping any.”

The King Street bridge is nothing special – two lanes with a raised sidewalk and a tube-metal railing about chest high. Variety store and water treatment plant on one side of the water, nice houses on the other. In the summer the river is calm here, gentle crinkles of water between grassy banks. Shade trees lean over, dropping leaves to float downstream in slow and graceful eddies. You can count the stones in the riverbed, or watch the weeds waving a mournful good-bye to bubbles and ripples on their way downstream. I stopped in the middle of the bridge to catch my breath. The river was high and brown and busy; water churned past like a sinewy brown express train. Hard to believe it was just yesterday afternoon.

I crossed the bridge and was just about to push on when I saw the dog.

I’m sorry, my memory is getting faint here. I know there was a collie dog – the same one I had seen earlier at my house? Maybe. I can’t say for sure. I have a picture of a tail wagging as the dog came running toward me – mouth open, tongue hanging out. I remember Norbert getting excited, yelling at the dog, telling me to get away; but the dog ran toward me, jumping up, barking wildly, and there was nowhere to go. I remember the dog leaping, and the river rushing by underneath the bridge. And then. And then.

And then I looked up. I saw the sky. I know I did.

Wait. It’s coming back. The sky was moving fast, like the river, only the river was brown and the sky was gray with patches of blue. The river is getting closer, in my mind. I’m looking up at the sky but the river is getting closer. Behind me, the sound of the barking dog fades like music from inside a passing car.

I was falling. Is that why I looked up? I have a picture of the water coming up to meet me. Brown rushing water. And I remember a sensation of utter horror before I blacked out.

But it wasn’t the water I was afraid of. I probably should have been afraid of it. Every year some kid falls into the river and drowns. They post signs and issue warnings on radio stations. We all get told in school to stay away from creeks and rivers when the water is high. I should have been afraid of drowning, of being swept away by the power of the water.

But I wasn’t. There was something else. It was a voice. That’s right, a voice right in my ear as I was falling. A voice I must have been expecting because I didn’t feel surprise along with the horror. It gave a horrible little laugh, right in my ear, and I thought, ’Of course. Of course.’ And I went under.

“Gotcha,” it said, while I choked on dirty roaring water. “Gotcha now, Dingwall.”

Prudence’s voice.