The Pricker Boy (2 page)

“What’s up with Boris?” I ask. I stroke the dog between the ears. His growl rolls around in his belly. The hair on his back bristles.

“How the hell should I know?” Pete says. From the top of Whale’s Jaw, it looks like you’re perched on the snout of a breaching whale, and you get a decent view of the woods.
Pete stands and looks up the path that leads to the stone wall. “I don’t see anything,” Pete says. He tosses a pebble down at Boris. “Go get ’em, fleabag. Go up there and roust ’em out!”

Boris doesn’t even look at Pete. “What is it, Boris?” I ask. Boris looks up at me, flaps his tail, and whines softly.

“Crazy dog,” Pete declares. “What do you smell, crazy dog?”

Whatever is up the path, it’s concealed in the thorns and brush just past the stone wall at the crest of the hill. Boris can smell it, and he doesn’t like what he smells. I have seen him chase after just about everything. He’ll gallop happily after a squirrel or rabbit, or romp fearless and stupid after a skunk. Boris isn’t smart enough to be scared of any living thing that I know of, but something up the path is scaring him now.

“Probably just a chipmunk,” Pete says. “That dog’s a stink bomb, and he’s dumb as a bag of hammers.” He looks me over, smiles at the dirt on my arms and the pine needles in my hair. “Damn, you look like I feel. But at least you’re wearing pajama bottoms. Remember that time you woke up in the yard in your underwear? Man, that was funny as hell.”

“Yeah,” I say, “but this is the first time that I’ve ever left the yard. I’ve never crossed the road before.”

“Congratulations! You’re getting better and better with each passing year!” Pete laughs. “You know, I do smell something. Can you smell it?”

“No.”

“Soap or something. Too strong. Stinks.” He takes a cigarette out of his pocket. He lights up, then waves the cigarette around until he’s surrounded by the smoke. He breathes deep. “That’s better.” He smiles, then takes a drag.

The threat in the thorns must have moved on, because Boris stops growling. He grunts, slaps his tongue against his teeth, drops his ass down into the spot where I slept last night, and thumps his tail in the dirt. I pat his side and praise him for being a good dog.

“Does it freak you out waking up out here?” Pete asks. “Hey, if there
is
something out there, you think that hiding on top of this rock will save you?” Pete smirks and waits for my response, but I don’t offer one. “What is it that Ronnie says about the thorns and the mist?” Pete lets the cigarette in his hand dangle limply when he says Ronnie’s name. As he quotes Ronnie, he lisps, which isn’t fair because Ronnie doesn’t lisp. “‘On cold mornings, the fog rises from the center of Tanner Pond and makes its way up over the road and into the woods, drifting past Whale’s Jaw and on up into the dark places near the Hawthorn Trees, only to find itself shredded to strands on the thorns of the backwoods.’” Pete holds his cigarette still so that a thin line of smoke actually does drift away toward the path up the hill. “‘The strands of mist wriggle like worms in a puddle before they just disappear altogether, dissolving into the ground and never finding their way back down to the pond.’” Pete chuckles. “What a wuss.”

“Ronnie doesn’t talk like that,” I say, but I make sure to chuckle along with Pete when I say it so it doesn’t really sound like I’m correcting him.

“He might as well talk like that,” Pete replies.

“What are you doing out here anyway?” I guess I must sound like I’m accusing him of something, because he glares at me.

“It beats being at home.” Then Pete uses some words that no one should ever use to describe their father, all the time sucking on his cigarette and squinting. “You should be happy with the parents you’ve got, Stucks. Be happy with your whole family. You Cumberlands may be crazy, and you may all have crazy nicknames for each other. Hell, sometimes I wonder if you even know what your real names are. But you’re all okay. You won the lottery when you were born into that house.”

Pete flicks cigarette ash down onto Whale’s Jaw. “You know, Stucks, these woods are our woods. Yours and mine, year-round. No one else’s. We made every path here, you and me, with our bare feet. We know every tree, know where the poison ivy is, know the names of every bug. Those summer kids, they’ve been around and all, and I used to think they were pretty good kids. But they don’t know anything. They can’t tell poison ivy from creeping Jennie. They’re used to sidewalks and streetlights. They get scared out here as soon as the sun goes down. And all those stories … they’re just stupid. Those townies, they’re stupid. They believe anything that Ronnie says. They want to
believe it. I’m never hanging around with those idiots again.”

Pete takes another dramatic drag on his cigarette. He’s trying too hard. He wants to look like he’s smoking a cigarette more than he wants to smoke a cigarette. I’d probably be annoyed with him if he weren’t my friend. I want to tell him to give it up, but it’s tough to tell Pete to do anything.

“What about you? Are you an idiot? You think there’s a bogeyman back there?” he asks me from his perch on Whale’s Jaw.

“You tell me,” I say.

“I’ve seen it all, Stucks. Seen more than Ronnie has seen anyway.” Pete stares at me quietly for a full thirty seconds, long enough to make me squirm under the weight of his eyes. “And that pond …” Pete gestures with his cigarette toward the path that leads back to the houses and the water. “There’s something nasty about that pond, for sure. That’s what you need to watch out for. That pond’s a tomb. There’s zombies down the bottom just waiting to grab your ankles.”

Now I know he’s teasing. I laugh, and Pete laughs with me. “I should make up my own story,” he chuckles. “The Tanner Pond Zombies! I could put Ronnie out of business!”

Boris looks at me and barks. He seems to have forgotten all about whatever was bothering him. “I’m going back home,” I say to Pete. “You coming?”

“Nah.” Pete snuffs out his cigarette on the top of the rock.

“Okay,” I say. I don’t know what else to say. I stand there awkwardly for a few moments. I feel like a stupid kid.

“So … I’ll see you later, okay?” I offer. Pete waves me off. Boris and I take off down the path back to the house.

I don’t know what to make of what Pete has told me. That happens a lot. Last summer he told me that it had gotten too noisy around, but I still don’t understand what he meant by that. I rarely even hear a car, just birds and bugs and the wind. Pete said that all he could hear was noise, and that the only time he ever heard real quiet was when he swam out into the pond and floated on his back and let the water fill his ears. Even then, he said, the quiet never lasted very long.

Nana says that if you row out to the center of the pond on Memorial Day and drop a rock over the side, you’ll hear it hit bottom on the day of the first frost. Of course, she winks when she says it. One thing’s for sure: the pond is as deep as it is quiet. When we were little, we were warned not to swim out too far, but of course we pushed it, stretching the limit a little bit more each year.

But our parents never warned us about the thorns. They didn’t have to. We know the rules back there, and we’ve always known never to test them. Pete was only half right when he said the woods belong to us. Part of them isn’t ours. But we know the difference. We know where the line is. We know where not to go.

The truth about Tanner Pond and the thorns of the backwoods is a tricky thing to nail down. Ronnie Milkes says that from each and every thornbush a hundred branches grow, and a thousand thorns cover each branch.
He says that if you walk beyond the stone wall alone, you might feel the thorn branches twist like studded fingers around your ankles and wrists. You could try to scream, but you’d be on the other side of the line then. On the other side, the thorns only answer to one voice, and that voice is not yours.

But Pete says that’s all bullshit made up by a summer townie.

So many people say so many different things. But there’s one thing that most all of us agree on. Anyone who knows anything stays out of the woods beyond the Widow’s Stone. Some say it’s because of the thorns, others because of the poison ivy, and still others because of what may live back there.

Boris and I walk out of the woods and cross the dirt road to my house. I look briefly at the
FOR SALE
sign in front of Pete’s house next door. So far, no one has come to look at the place. No one ever comes around here until the weather gets warm.

But this morning is the first real day of summer. And that means that people will be coming. The usual kids, in from the cities for the summer, coming in with their parents and cleaning up their cottages for the season. A lot of old friends are coming today. I give Boris a friendly slap on the back and leave him to nap in the morning sun.

A
large willow tree droops over the edge of the pond, its branches skimming the water’s surface. A rope swing dangles from one of the tree’s highest perches. The willow’s roots cling desperately to a rounded clump of earth at the shoreline. Each summer, the tree seems to lean a little closer to the pond, like a shaggy-haired giant slowly laying its head down to rest.

My mother calls through the back window, “Stucks, keep an eye on Nana, please?”

“Yeah, Mom,” I call back, taking Nana’s arms as she tenderly steps over the roots in the path under the pines.

“Keep an eye on Nana! Keep an eye on Nana!” Nana sings to me as she steps to the edge of the pond. “Stucks is a good boy. He’ll watch out for Nana.” Nana throws her towel on the ground and stretches a black rubber swimming cap
over her hair. “Hello, Stanley,” she says with a smile, waving at my little brother, the Cricket, with her left hand—the hand that has been missing its index finger since before I was born.

Some days Nana has no idea who the Cricket is. I guess he reminds her of Dad when he was young, which is why she calls him Stanley, which is Dad’s first name. The Cricket doesn’t mind being called Stanley. He doesn’t mind being called anything except Stephen, which is his real name. He hates that name. Even the teachers at school pass the warning to each other from grade to grade: “Call him the Cricket, and if you can’t bring yourself to call him the Cricket, call him Stanley. But you’ll have your hands full if you call him Stephen.”

Today, he has a metal bucket with him, and he’s scooping up slime from the shallow water near the reeds. He brings it up to where I’m sitting in the grass and begins construction on a mud fortress. I stick my hand in to help him. The mud is cold. The pond hasn’t given up its winter yet, and I tell the Cricket so. I draw my five fingers together in a point, bring them to my chin, and then pull them downward, drawing an imaginary icicle just like one that we once saw on the chin of a character in a Christmas cartoon. COLD.

The Cricket responds by placing his thumb to his temple and twisting the rest of his fist up and down. I KNOW.

“Nana, it may be too cold to go in,” I warn.

“It’s never too cold. Your grandfather and I once went
in at midnight on New Year’s Eve.” She sticks one foot into the water, and her face spreads into a wide grin. “We were buck naked, just like the Baby New Year. It was wonderful. If that darling man hadn’t kicked the bucket, I’d make him go again this year!”

The Cricket dumps another handful of sludge onto the pile, and I watch as he walks down to the water’s edge to gather more. He and I look a lot alike. His hair is slightly blonder, but apart from that he’s a clone of me when I was his age. When I was about eight, the old folks used to tell me how cute I was, and now they say the same thing about the Cricket. Nana steps past him, pausing to gently pat him on the head before going out into the deeper water. When the water reaches her waist, she stops and drags her fingertips in circles across its surface. Her smile widens. “It’s wonderful! Stanley, come join Nana in the water.” The Cricket looks at me, and I raise my eyebrows. He lifts his fist and shakes it back and forth. I translate.

“It’s still a bit cold for us, Nana.” Up the hill, I can hear Mrs. Milkes start up the vacuum cleaner to remove the winter webs from their cottage. In the backyard, Mr. Milkes is hosing down the white patio furniture that no one ever sits in. They fuss over their cottage like insects. Or mice maybe. Gathering and dusting and cleaning and primping and trying to make their home as comfortable as possible. Or, more likely, they’re trying to make their home as sterile as possible, comfort be damned.

“You should invite that Emily down for dinner. You should have a soda with her,” Nana says from the water.

“Nana, please don’t bring this up again,” I plead, though I know it will do little good.

The Cricket’s mouth curls into a grin. He traces his finger from his ear to his collarbone and flutters his fingers in my direction. A tiny giggle burps out of him.

This morning, after I came inside from talking to Pete out at Whale’s Jaw, my friend Emily Haber stopped by. My mother had just laid out a plateful of wheat pancakes and turkey bacon, which she claims are just as good as white-flour pancakes and actual bacon. Emily sat down at our breakfast table, helped herself to a stack of pancakes, and started talking about all the work it was going to take to get their cottage ready, including crawling around underneath in the cobwebs to find the water shutoffs. I offered to help. Emily responded by turning the syrup bottle upside down and squeezing it until the last drop blurted out of the bottle. She looked down the bottle spout, and satisfied that the last drop had indeed made it to her plate, she placed the empty bottle back on the table.