Untitled (45 page)

  The woman lived with her husband in a house on the edge of the woods, not far from a small town. She had a little girl who was just barely old enough to go to school.

  One day, when the woman's little girl was at school and her husband was at work, the woman left the key to the house on the kitchen table and walked out, leaving the door wide open behind her. She walked along the trail that led into the woods. When she was deep in the woods, she left the trail and walked between the trees where there was no trail.

  She was far from the trail when it started to rain – gently at
rst, and then harder, raindrops hammering against her and soaking her shirt and her jeans. She looked for a place to take shelter and found a hollow log that was large enough to crawl inside.

  She crawled in on her belly. It was dry inside the log – snug and warm. She waited for the rain to stop, closing her eyes and listening to the water rattle against the leaves overhead, drip to the forest
oor, and trickle through dead leaves. Listening to the rain, she fell asleep.

  When she woke, she had changed. For the
rst time, she felt at home in her body. The smells around her were intense and inviting – the delicious scent of rotten leaves and grubs; the warm smell of the squirrel that lived in the tree overhead. As she listened to the squirrel in the branches, she could feel her ears moving to follow the sound. When she looked down at herself, she saw that her body was covered with fur. She nuzzled the long, bushy tail that curled around her paws.

  Somehow, as she slept, she had changed into a fox.

Fox shifted in the armchair, looking at me for the first time since she started telling the story. "That was my mother," she said. "I was the little girl."

  I was lying on the ground, drowsing as I listened to Fox's voice. Listening to the story, I had forgotten why Fox was telling it. I sat up, staring at Fox.

  "You're saying your mother turned into a fox?"

  She nodded. The sunlight still dappled her hair, but it no longer looked like jewels. She was a ragged girl sitting on a battered armchair, watching me with a strange intensity.

  I hesitated. Maybe she was joking. Maybe she was crazy. "That can't happen."

  She shrugged. "It did. I left one day to go to school. When I came back, my mother was gone."

  "Maybe she just went off somewhere. Why do you figure she turned into a fox?"

  Fox leaned her head against the frayed back of the chair. "The night she disappeared, my dad and I were sitting on the porch, and I saw a fox sneaking around the edge of the yard. I knew it was my mother."

  "How did you know?"

  "By the look in her eyes. I just knew. I asked my dad and he said that it was as good an explanation as any." She frowned, looking down at her hands. "Things weren't so great then. Dad was drinking and stuff." She looked up. "He's quit that since."

  I hesitated. Crazy story. Maybe talking about her dad was safer than talking about her mother. "What does your dad do, anyway. How come he's at home in the middle of the day?"

  "He writes stories and books. Mostly science fiction. Stuff with rockets on the cover, even when there aren't any rockets in the story. Sometimes . . ." Her voice dropped lower. "Sometimes he writes pornography. Real sexy stuff. He doesn't show me that, but I know the drawer where he keeps it. I've heard him say it pays better than science fiction."

  I was trying to absorb this information when Fox sat upright. "Listen," she said, her voice suddenly urgent.

  In the distance, I could hear voices – some boys talking and laughing. "We got to hide," Fox said, jumping out of the chair. I followed without question.

  From a hiding place in the bushes, I could see three boys – my brother and two strangers – walking down the path.

  "Most of the teachers are assholes," one of the strangers was saying. He was a stocky, blonde boy. "Get Miss Jackson for English, if you can. She's an easy grader."

  "Fuck, don't talk about it. I can't believe it's only two weeks until school starts," said the other boy. He was tall, and his brown hair was greasy. "Let's stop and smoke already."

  The blonde boy had just reached the edge of the clearing. "Hey, look at this." The blonde boy collapsed in the armchair. He pulled a plastic bag and papers out of his pocket and started rolling a joint. My brother was looking around at the shelves, the teapot, the dolls. "It looks like a little kid's fort."

  "Looks like a great place to party," said the dark-haired boy, sitting on the ground. "Bring some girls." He grinned. "No one would bother us out here."

  The blonde boy lit up and took a deep drag. From my hiding place, I could smell the dope. He passed the joint to the darkhaired boy.

"The girls around here like to party?" my brother asked.

  The blonde boy laughed. "Some of them are stuck up, but some are okay."

  The dark-haired boy passed the joint to my brother who inhaled deeply.

  I wondered where Fox was. The dark-haired guy was describing Christina, a girl who liked to party. "She's hot," he was saying. "Got a great body, and she knows how to use it."

  The blonde boy laughed. "Like you ever got close enough to find out."

  It was weird, crouching in the bushes watching the boys smoke and talk about school and girls. I felt invisible and strangely powerful. The boys didn't know I was there. My brother didn't know I was watching him smoke dope. They didn't know I was listening to them.

  "I gotta take a leak," the dark-haired boy said. Taking a step in my direction, he started to tug at his fly.

  "Hey, this is private property." On the other side of the clearing, Fox had stepped out of the trees. "You're trespassing."

  The boys all stared at her. The blonde boy grinned and the dark-haired boy laughed, his hand still on his fly. "Yeah, right. Well, I gotta pee, so I guess I'm going to keep on trespassing. Stick around, and you'll see something you've never seen before."

  Fox disappeared down the trail. The blonde boy was laughing now too. "I don't think she wants to see that, Jerry."

  "Shut up, Andrew."

  I backed off down the trail.

  "Hey, what's that," Jerry said, peering in my direction. "I think someone else is in there."

  A rock flew out of nowhere and smacked Jerry on the shoulder. Then I ran down the trail, remembering what Fox had said when I met her. "I can hide in the trees and nail a kid with a rock from thirty feet away."

  I heard Jerry crash into the bushes. I think he was chasing me, but I'm fast when I need to be. And he was too big to fit easily down the path. Somewhere Fox was whooping, and I heard my brother and the blonde boy cursing. The path I was on ran away from the living room, then back toward it. I scooped up some rocks from a pile by the trail. When I reached a spot close to the living room, I lobbed one at my brother. I think I hit him, but I didn't stay to watch – I was running again and there were crashing sounds in the bushes, then a sudden burst of cursing. Another rock had hit home.

  Fox was silent now. But I could hear crashing and cursing in the clearing. I slipped closer, moving quietly along the path. Through the bushes, I could see the boys. My brother's face and arms were covered with scratches; he was picking brambles out of his T-shirt. Andrew, the blonde boy, was bleeding from a cut on his head where a rock had hit. Jerry was pulling down the shelves in the tree. The teapot was shattered on the ground. That must have been the crash I had heard. "Fuck you, assholes," he was yelling at the trees. "Fuck you all."

  I heard footsteps behind me, and I shrank back into the bushes. Gus was coming down the path from the house.

  "Fuck," said Andrew. "Now you've done it." He started to run away, but Gus was fast. He had one hand on the back of Andrew's T-shirt and the other on my brother's shoulder. Jerry was gone, running down the path and into the woods.

  "Hey, let go," Andrew whined. "We weren't doing anything."

  Gus had looked scary when I met him, and he had been smiling then. He wasn't smiling now. He was looking at the shelves on the ground, the broken teapot, the plates and cups scattered in the weeds. "The evidence is against you, kid. Looks like you've been fucking with my daughter's stuff."

  "That was Jerry," Andrew said. "We didn't do anything."

  "I don't like kids fucking around on my property," Gus continued, as if Andrew hadn't said anything. "I think the cops might be interested to know about all this." His eyes were on the baggy of dope, abandoned on the armchair. "Maybe calling them would be the best way to make sure this doesn't happen again."

  The blonde boy was saying something else about how they hadn't been doing anything. I've never seen my brother look so pale and miserable, not even when my father was ragging on him.

  Reluctantly, I left the safety of the woods and returned to the clearing. "Hey, Gus," I said hesitantly.

  "You all right, Newt?"

  "Yeah. Um . . ." I jerked my head at Mark. "That's my brother Mark. Um . . ." I frowned, looking at Mark and then at Gus and then at the ground. "Maybe you could let him go?"

  "Your brother, huh?" He stared at Mark and then at Andrew. "Sarah, will you get your ass out here?" His tone had softened a little.

  Fox stepped out of the trees on the far side of the clearing.

  "What happened here?" Gus asked.

  "They were trespassing. When I told them to leave, that other kid said he was going to pee on my stuff. So I started throwing rocks at them."

  "We didn't know we were trespassing," Andrew said. "We were just taking a shortcut and . . ."

  "Do yourself a favor and shut up," Gus said.

  Andrew stopped talking. Mark didn't say anything.

  "That's better," Gus said in a conversational tone. "I don't like kids fucking with my daughter's stuff, and I don't like being lied to. I'd like to figure out how I can be sure that this won't ever happen again."

  "I won't ever come here again," Mark said.

  Gus nodded. "That sounds good. Your sister is all right, and that speaks well for you." He turned to Andrew. "How about you?"

  "We weren't doing anything really," he started saying. "We just . . ."

  I saw Gus's hand tighten its grip on Andrew's T-shirt, and Andrew stopped.

  "I won't ever come back here," he said.

  "All right," Gus said. "I believe you. Now before you leave, you're going to help me put these shelves back in the tree, okay?"

  Mark and Andrew nodded. Gus let them go. For a minute, I thought they were going to run, then my brother turned toward the tree. They helped Gus put the shelves back while Fox and I stayed at the edge of the clearing, watching.

  "All right," Gus said when they were done. "Now get the hell out of here."

  The boys walked to the edge of the clearing and then started running. Fox walked across the clearing to her dad's side; I stayed where I was, waiting for him to start the lecture that I knew was coming. We shouldn't have started trouble, we shouldn't have been throwing rocks. Everything we did was wrong.