The Pricker Boy (4 page)

“I don’t like him out here alone!” I snap back, but I can feel my anger dissipating. I can never stay angry at the Cricket very long. I shake my head. I lift my fist, shake it back and forth, and then hook my index fingers and tug. NO … NOT ANGRY. I cross my arms and line up the
pinkies of both hands side by side. BROTHERS. I open my right hand and wiggle the middle finger toward my chest. COME TO ME.

The Cricket smiles, then skitters down the back of Whale’s Jaw. He leaps to the ground next to me, grabs my arm, and leans back, swinging off it from side to side. He makes a fist and taps it over his heart while making a sucking sound out of the side of his mouth.

“You’re forgiven,” I say aloud, and he covers my mouth to stop me talking.

Ronnie has walked up the path near the ridge. He looks like an ostrich wiggling its skinny neck to grab a glimpse of what lies beyond the Widow’s Stone.

“Ronnie?” I call.

He hops back down the path. “Still gives me the shivers,” he says, shaking his head back and forth.

The three of us leave the woods together.

R
onnie is sitting opposite me across the fire pit. The flames are level with his chin, and the waves of heat make his face appear to wriggle. He leans forward in his chair, taking a self-indulgent pause before he finishes his story. “Something new was out in the cornfields,” he says. “Now there were two scarecrows instead of just one. One was made of the farmer’s discarded clothes; the salesman had seen that one on his previous visit. But the other sent a cold shiver down his spine and caused him to hurry on down the road to the next house. ‘For a second there,’ he thought to himself, ‘I could have sworn that was the old lady herself!’”

Nobody speaks for a moment. Ronnie’s face goes limp and he stares into the fire. He’s putting on a cool front, but
it’s obvious that he’s waiting for our praise. It’s obvious to me anyway.

I let him have his moment briefly before jumping in. “So, anybody want to go up to Thorwall’s farm tonight and pinch some corn?” I say.

“I don’t eat corn,” Emily says, more to herself than anyone else.

“So did you like it?” Ronnie asks, almost whimpering, but it’s a fake. He knows all his stories are good. He’s never missed with any of them. I want to call him an arrogant ass, but I have to give credit where it’s due.

“Another good one, Ronnie,” I admit. “You tell a good story.” The Cricket is sitting on the ground next to my chair. He has a beach towel wrapped around his shoulders. He places his thumb to his chin and then slaps his open palm against his rump. GOOD TAIL.

“I don’t know what that means, Cricket, but I’ll assume you liked it,” Ronnie says.

I pick up a long stick and start moving the orange coals around, giving the darker coals air to breathe. The smoke from the embers is saturating my clothes, and the heat cups my face like a skintight mask. We’re not really supposed to have a fire out here, but our parents can’t see all the way to Whale’s Jaw from the cottages. Besides, we hike out buckets of water, just in case. No big deal.

Our friend Vivek Patel comes up the path from the road. We haven’t seen him since last September, but instead of saying hello, he just shakes his head. “You people
again.” He sighs. He stands there stiffly, not a crease of a smile. “Every spring I hope and I pray for a better summer, but then along comes June and it’s just you guys again. It’s a repeating nightmare that I live in—”

“Oh, please shut up,” my cousin Robin laughs.

He lifts his eyes to the star-pocked sky. “What have I done, Lord, to displease you so?”

Vivek’s parents are college professors who spend the summer reading and writing. Their cottage is always quiet, and they pretty much let Vivek take care of himself. Somewhere in that mix he learned to be a complete wiseass, and he’s pretty good at it. He gets us laughing most of the time. Most of the time.

I grab him a lawn chair and he takes a seat, saying hello to us all by passing his hand over the group in one wide wave. “You missed a great Ronnie Milkes story, destined to become a classic,” I say. “You should have gotten here twenty minutes ago.”

“Ronnie’s stories always become classics,” Vivek says gravely as he wipes the winter grunge off the seat of the chair. “He tells them three hundred times over. From my cottage I can hear his grandfather say, ‘Maw, this would be such a nice place to summer if we could just get that boy to shut up.’”

“Aw, I like the stories,” Robin says.

I cringe every time Robin opens her mouth.
Aw, I like the stories
. Who says that? A complete pain in the ass I suppose, a pain in the ass who comes and hangs around your
house all summer long. Every summer my Uncle Bill and Aunt Ellie pawn her off on us for at least a month, and sometimes right up until Labor Day. Tonight her hands are still wrinkly from helping my parents with the dishes. Late last summer I made the mistake of not smiling when my mother told me to do the dinner dishes, and she said, “Why can’t you be more like Robin?” She regretted it the instant it was out of her mouth. It was two days before I spoke to Mom again.

There is a long awkward silence between us. “So …,” Vivek says. “So …”

No one responds. I look at all of them, but no one is making eye contact. The only one willing to look at me is the Cricket. I ruffle his hair.

Vivek lowers his voice almost to a whisper. “I saw that their house is up for sale.”

No one jumps in to fill the silence that follows, so Vivek stumbles along further. “I just, you know, saw it on the drive in, and thought it was … I guess I was surprised. I mean, they’ve lived here since … forever. Didn’t Pete’s grandfather build that place?”

“You know what, Vivek?” I say. “How about you stop talking about something that you know nothing about?”

“Oh what, so we’re not going to talk about Pete all summer long?” he asks me.

I raise my voice, raise it loud enough to carry out into the woods. “Okay. Go ahead, Vivek. Tell me what you really think of Pete.”

“Hey, don’t do that! I didn’t mean to—”

Emily cuts in. “How about another story?” she asks Ronnie. “I always liked the one with the old lady on the steps. Or the one about the dog.”

Robin has been staring into the woods, but now she turns back to us. “A dog? There’s no story with a dog.”

Vivek is watching me over the fire. I glare back. He shakes his head and turns to Ronnie. “Perhaps it was an invisible dog,” he offers. “That’s why Robin doesn’t remember it.” It’s a weak joke, but at least he’s trying to smooth things over.

“There’s no dog story,” Robin says.

“Yes, there is one,” Emily states. She twists a long thin branch off a nearby maple and begins peeling the bark off.

“We just don’t know what
kind
of dog,” Vivek says, faking suspicion. “Ronnie, why won’t you ever tell us what kind of dog it is? It could be a slobbering dog, a fat dog, a three-legged dog, a dog possessed by the spirit of a Salem witch who was burned at the stake.”

Robin smiles. “Stop being silly,” she says. Next to me the Cricket has covered his mouth to stifle his laughter.

“No, seriously. A possessed German shepherd is one thing, but a possessed Mexican hairless really isn’t that scary at all. I’m dumb and I don’t have much of an imagination. Tell me what I’m supposed to picture in my head!”

Ronnie ignores him. “I know the one Emily’s talking about, but I don’t want to waste them all in one night.
Besides, it’s the first fire of the summer, so there’s one I have to tell.”

“It’s getting late for one of us, though,” I say as I stand up. “I have to take the Cricket in for bed.” The Cricket responds by screwing his face up into a scowl and throwing a slapstick punch in my direction. He crawls quickly over to Robin’s chair. “Come on,” I plead, but he holds tight to Robin’s leg. I make the sign with my thumb and pinkie, then with my index finger draw a crescent moon in the air. CRICKET BED.

The Cricket holds up his fist and shakes it back and forth. He hides his head under his towel. Robin puts her hand on his shoulder. “Let him stay for the story. Your parents won’t care.”

I hold back a few choice words, but only because my friends are here. “It’s time for bed; it’s not for you to decide—”

“Cousin,” she says firmly, “he’ll be fine for a few more minutes. So go sit yourself down and listen to Ronnie’s story.”

Sometimes Robin acts more like a grandmother than Nana does. I sit back down and start to poke at the fire again. The Cricket lifts the towel and smiles at me like a mouse that’s just escaped the claws of the cat. I stick out my tongue at him, and he ducks back under his towel.

Ronnie pauses, staring intently at the nearly full moon before turning his attention back to us. “I swear I did not make this one up. It’s the story of
him
.” Ronnie takes
another deliberate, drawn-out pause. “It’s the story of the Pricker Boy.”

“Oh,
him!
” Vivek says. “I thought you meant Neil Armstrong. Now there’s a story!”

Robin pulls the towel off the Cricket’s head. “Are you ready to be really scared?” Normally, the Cricket would scowl at anyone who talked to him in such a condescending way, but because it’s Robin and she’s a girl and she’s letting him stay up, he just acts shy and smiles back.

“How could he not have heard this before?” Vivek asks. “Ronnie tells it twice a day. Ladies and gentlemen, Ronnie Milkes will be having shows starting at seven and nine p.m. Tickets are on sale at the booth.”

“I don’t have to tell it if you guys are sick of it,” Ronnie says. He sighs and settles back in his chair.

“Oh, Ronnie, now don’t be that way,” Vivek chides him. “You tell your little Pricker Boy story, and then I’ll tell all about Neil Armstrong. He walked on the moon, you know. Neil, that is, not the Pricker Boy. Unless you’ve changed your story.”

For all I care, Vivek can take shots at Ronnie all night long. I don’t really want to hear the story.

Actually, that’s a lie. I do want to hear this year’s version. I want to find the little pieces of the story that Ronnie has added in over the winter. I want to try and spot the stones that he’s flipped over, and then watch the bugs come out.

“Please tell it,” Robin says, reaching out and touching his arm. “Vivek is just teasing you. Please tell it.” She rubs
Ronnie’s forearm, and being touched by a girl is all it takes to satisfy his ego.

“Okay. But you have to understand. This story is different. It’s not made up. This one is true. I researched it myself, saw a lot of the old newspaper clippings. This one is for real. So if anyone is going to get too scared, now is the time to leave.” Ronnie looks directly at the Cricket as he says this, and the Cricket responds by baring his teeth at him.

Just like he has hundreds of times before, Ronnie starts the story of the Pricker Boy. The first line has never changed. “He was a real kid once, just like any of us. He lived about a hundred years ago. There were no cottages on Tanner Pond back then. Only woods. His father was a trapper who took animals in these woods and then skinned them and sold their hides and meat. The boy’s mother had died many years before. He had never known her.”

As Ronnie speaks, I move the coals around with my fire stick, trying to get the best airflow through the logs. The fire begins to swell and glow, lapping at the dry wood.

“They ate the things that his father trapped, like muskrats and squirrels and opossum. The kid’s clothes were made from the hides that his father said were too ratty to sell. The other kids would make fun. The boy would skip school to avoid their teasing, only to be beaten by his father later in the day for skipping.”

I stab the poker into the coals. A burst of sparks rides the updraft. I watch them rise up through the branches and wink away when they hit the cool air twenty feet up. I can
hear the night bugs in the woods around us, and I wonder for a moment why night bugs always sound like they’re farther away than they actually are.

Ronnie leans forward so that the flames light his face. “The boy often felt like an animal in a trap. He was dimwitted, but he was eager to please. It was easy for the other kids to play him for a fool. They would coax him out onto the thin ice of a stream during winter, or convince him to play a trick on the teacher for which he would surely get caught. Too late, he would notice their snares. He would struggle to free himself, but finally he would give up and timidly await the consequences of his foolishness.”

That’s new. Ronnie didn’t use that part last year, that stuff about the boy being trapped like one of his father’s animals. I like it. It’s something that I never would have thought of. I get up and grab two more logs, throwing them both on top of the fire. The flames tear into them as Ronnie continues. “One day before school a group of kids cornered him. They told him that his mother was really alive. They said that his father kept her locked in one of his traps out in the woods. They said that he beat her and fed her raw meat every day. They said, ‘She begs to see you, but your father just laughs and beats her more.’ They told the boy that if he could find her by the pond, he might be able to save her and they could run away together.”