Good morning.
You have not slept well. Don’t open your eyes. Stick out your tongue. Search for the little sore above your upper lip. Pray that it healed in the night.
No luck. Still there, rough to the tongue, and though it’s very small, not even the diameter of a pencil eraser, it feels much larger. Your mother says it’s a harmless fungal infection, and she pities you less for it than she should.
A tiny hamburger is what the fungus resembles, cracked and brown and perfectly centered in the little fluted area between your septum and upper lip. Yesterday, in the cafeteria, Josh Mohorn pointed out the similarity before a table of your friends. A painful thing, considering how much you would like to be Josh Mohorn. He turned to you and said, “Hey, Yancy, do me a favor.”
“What’s up?” you said, excited by the rare pleasure of Josh’s attention.
“Could you take that seat down there?” he said, gesturing toward the far end of the table. “I can’t eat my lunch with your fucking burger in my face.”
Even you had to admire the succinct poetry of the line, which launched an instant craze of everyone jeering and calling you Burger King, or Patty, or All Beef, the name that stuck for the rest of the day and that will surely greet you this morning at school. You are eleven years old, the age that our essences begin revealing themselves, irremediably, to us and to the world. Just as Josh Mohorn is irremediably a soccer ace and a clothes ace, with feathered hair and white bucks, you are irremediably a fungus man.
Don’t go to school today. Play sick.
Your mother comes in to wake you. Around the house, she wears paint-spattered jeans and old T-shirts, through whose slack sleeves you often catch sight of her underarm hair. But this morning she is dressed for work in a blue sateen blouse and tight white slacks, clothes that speak of a secret life. “I don’t feel good,” you tell your mother.
“Where? In your stomach?”
“Yeah,” you say.
“Oh, God,” she says. “I hope it’s not that thing that’s been going around.”
“I don’t know what it is,” you say, panting shallowly. “It just really hurts.”
She puts her hand on your forehead and holds it there. Her palm is dry and cool. You have always admired her hands—long, thin fingers and clean, ridged nails that never need polish. On her right index-finger knuckle is a perfect red dot, like a stamp of quality from the manufacturer. She slips her fingers down to your chest. Your skin is slick with sweat. You slept in your school clothes, jeans and a windbreaker, as you always do, amid the rustling mess of books and magazines piled in drifts on your bed. You will be twelve next year, but you usually still enjoy the solid, imperturbable sleep of a small child. You could get eight hours of good rest in a crate.
Your mother’s fingers graze your sternum, and this makes you uncomfortable. A spray of large and painful pimples recently sprouted there. They throb with humiliated awareness when your mother touches them. This area of your body is a source of worry, in part because, years ago, a babysitter told you that all boys in their teen-age years develop a soft spot in their chests, like a baby’s fontanel, and that you could kill somebody by punching him in that place. The babysitter was quite a liar, you realize now, even worse than you. He told you that in Florida there lived a race of murderous clowns who carried kitchen knives and who would come after you if you committed a sin. He also said that doctors performed abortions by delivering the baby and then putting it in a bucket and letting it cry to death. Still, you are not sure whether the babysitter was lying about the soft spot. The idea of it intrigues you. You writhe away from your mother’s hand.
“What, you want to stay home?”
Swallow again. Close your eyes. “I don’t know. I guess.”
“O.K.”
She kisses you and stands, ducking her head so as not to bash it on the top bunk, which is heaped with old blankets and boxes of your mother’s stuff. She is right to be careful. Not long ago, you hit your head on it so forcefully that a hard white light went on behind your eyes. In your fury, you attacked the bed with your survival knife, inflicting minor, unsatisfying wounds. The little chips and gouges in the frame are a dispiriting reminder of the pointless assault.
On the shelf behind your head sits the tape deck your father bought you for your tenth birthday. You have stacks of cassettes full of your favorite songs, recorded off the radio, so all of them start a few seconds in, but you don’t mind. You’d like to listen to your tapes, but you can hear your stepfather moving around in the kitchen. He is raising a din of clanking pots and clumsy feet, so loud you figure he must be doing it on purpose. You don’t touch the tape deck, because you don’t want him to know you’re awake.
He and your mother live on twenty acres in thick woods. Your stepfather fancies himself a kind of socialist frontiersman, and he doesn’t have a normal job. He is too busy tending the three large gardens on the property, and splitting logs for the wood-burning furnace he persuaded your mother to buy. He values hard work above everything, and every time you turn around your stepfather is there, putting a broom in your hand, or giving you a load of wet laundry to hang up, or telling you to fetch firewood, or scrub the sink, or dig a hole. “I have a job for you” is your stepfather’s catchphrase, and you sometimes imitate it to make your mother laugh.
You rub your thumb along the soft white flesh of your forearm, which is still discolored from a job you had to do last summer. Your stepfather made you clear about an acre of honeysuckle, scrub, and vine where he wanted to put a shed. Halfway through, when he and your mother were away, you doused the jungle with paint stripper and set it on fire. You were careful to keep the hose handy, and the blaze didn’t get out of control. You knocked out three days of work in one hour of fire. But the smoke covered you, and two days later you had poison ivy in a monstrous way. Blisters popped out on your hands, neck, and eyelids. Then they broke and crusted over into a multitude of little brown jewels. The doctor said it could have killed you if you had breathed the smoke. When you heard that, you were sorry you hadn’t taken a lungful or two—not enough to do you in, but you liked the idea of having to spend some time in an oxygen tent because of a job your stepfather made you do.
If you say no to your stepfather, this is known as “lip.” “I’m sick of your lip,” he says, or “I’ve had it with your fucking lip.” He is a thin, delicate man with wire-frame glasses, but neither his slightness nor his way of talking like a corny Hollywood thug makes you any less afraid of him. He has slapped you a few times. Not long ago, your father stopped by to pick you up, and your stepfather argued with him. He pushed your father down, and then he picked up a stone the size of a football and made like he was going to throw it at your father’s head. But he just tossed it away and laughed. For years to come, whenever you think of your father, the image of him cowering on the lawn, his hands clutching his skull in forlorn defense against the crushing stone, will be part of the picture. You are counting the days until you turn sixteen, which you’ve arbitrarily chosen as the age at which you’ll be able to take your stepfather in a fight.
At twelve-thirty, you hear the front door creak and slap, and then the hornetish whine of your stepfather’s leaf grinder starting up. He is making mulch again, a substance he seems to prize over food or money. Now it is safe to get out of bed. You go into the kitchen and pour yourself a large bowl of cornflakes. Take it into your mother and stepdad’s bedroom, which contains the only television in the house. You are delighted to find “I Dream of Jeannie” on one of the U channels. Jeannie is miffed because, as an engagement present, Major Nelson’s friends have crammed the house with the art work of a terrible genius, sculptures that gurgle with digestion sounds. Barbara Eden’s belly excites you enormously. You grope into your underwear. Almost immediately, you hear the leaf grinder power down. You turn off the TV, run into the kitchen, and arrange yourself at the table. Your stepfather comes in, trailing a rich vegetable aroma. Bits of leaf and bark cling to his glistening arms and chest. “Feeling better?” he asks.
“Not really,” you say.
He claps a rough hand to your forehead. His hand smells deliciously of gasoline. “You don’t feel hot to me.”
“It’s my stomach that hurts.”
“You puke?”
“No,” you admit.
“You must be feeling better or you wouldn’t be having that milk. If you’re ready for milk, you must be getting better.”
You don’t see what milk has to do with anything, but you don’t want to argue with him.
“I’ve got a headache,” you say. “I thought I should eat something is all.”
He sneers suspiciously and snorts through his nose. As a young liar, you can generally get pretty far on the assumption that adults have more important things to worry about than catching out a kid for every little fraud he tries to pull. But your stepfather seems to have plenty of time to study and doubt everything that comes out of your mouth. He will spend days gathering evidence to prove that those are your teeth marks on a pen you said you hadn’t chewed. Your hatred of your stepfather is all-consuming and unceasing, but this is only because your world is still small, and your stepfather assumes an outsized significance in the story of your life. That your stepfather seems to dislike you with an energy and a relentlessness to match your own seems proof that your mother is married to a petty and dangerous child.
“You should get some fresh air,” your stepfather says. “How about you go get the mail?”
This is not fair. The driveway is a half mile of rutted gravel that takes fifteen minutes to walk, and, as far as your stepfather knows, you’re sick.
“Why? Mom’ll get it when she comes back for lunch.”
“You go get it,” your stepfather says. “The air’ll be good for you.”
“Actually, I’m still a little dizzy.”
“I’ll bet a hot-fudge sundae you survive.”
You set off across the lawn in bare feet. The earth under your toes is plush with mole tunnels. It is a hot autumn day. The clarity of the sky makes the trees look like television props with a blue screen behind them. You’ve already lost your summer calluses, and the driveway gravel is sharp, causing you to walk with a jouncing, high-elbowed gait, like a bird trying to take flight. You blame your stepfather for the unpleasantness of the gravel, and every few feet you pick up a handful and fling it into the woods, hoping that those handfuls will cost a lot of money to replace.
You pass the woodpiles and the chicken house. Past the stretch of woods where you once built a handsome lean-to encircling the bottom of an oak tree. It was a pretty good one, made of windfall limbs peeled smooth with a drawknife and thatched with pine straw. One day, a boy from the new neighborhood on the far side of the woods showed up, and you had words. The next day, you found the lean-to’s ribs scattered across the clearing and your cache of untempting snacks—raw cashews, banana chips—emptied in the dirt. You mentioned the vandalism to your stepfather, and on a Sunday morning, when the boy and his family were at church, the two of you hiked through the woods and destroyed the expensive tree house on the boy’s parents’ property. Your stepfather tore off the roof tin and smashed the ladder with a crowbar. You broke the glass windows with stones, and you ached with the power of it—the two of you together in the same wild, righteous tribe.
You open the mailbox. It’s crammed solid with magazines, bills, catalogues, and advertising circulars displaying red galleries of grocery-store beef, the sight of which makes the sore on your lip pulse. There must be fifteen pounds of mail, a sliding load that no sick person should have to carry. On the top of the heap, something catches your eye. It is a handmade flyer with a Xeroxed photograph of what appears to be a leopard. “Lost Pet,” reads the flyer, with a phone number below. A breeze starts down your neck. You turn and look into the woods, though the leaves have not yet fallen and you can’t see twenty feet. You turn back to the flyer. The leopard looks scrawny and unfearsome, but your heart beats a little harder knowing that it might be out there, moving in the dull pine wastes near your home, its spotted paws treading silently over the tree roots, the pine needles, and the leaf-covered troves of ancient beer cans and patent-medicine bottles. With the leopard out there, the woods seem famous now.
Far up the driveway, you can once again hear the whine of the leaf grinder starting up, a noise of startling crudeness and stupidity, an insult to the tickings and subtle movements of the living forest all around you. If this leopard is out here somewhere, it is surely offended by your stepfather’s desecration of the silence. It would be no trouble for a leopard to sneak up behind him and carry him off, leaving no trace.
It is nearly one o’clock, the hour that your mother comes home for lunch. You do not want to be alone in the house with your stepfather. It still angers you that he has sent you down the driveway on your sick day, your special day of rest. You take a dozen steps, and then a plan suggests itself. Very carefully, you litter the mail in a haphazard fan on the driveway gravel so that it looks as though it were dumped there suddenly. You ease yourself down into a tire rut, splaying your arms and legs in the attitude of someone stricken by a fainting spell. When your mother’s car swings into the drive, she will find you there. She may have to stand on the brakes to keep from running you over, but you are far enough up the driveway that you don’t think she could hit you by mistake. She’ll come to you crying and concerned. You’ll let her coax it out of you, the story of how your stepfather made you get the mail.
Don’t move. Don’t mind the gravel digging into your cheek. Don’t spoil the scene. She might not buy it anyway. Already, she halfway believes what your stepfather has been telling her about you: that you are a junior con man who can’t open his mouth without a lie coming out.
An insect, probably a harmless black ant, troops up the back of your leg. Many minutes go by. As time passes, the giddy elation you felt at first, at the brilliance of your stratagem, begins eroding into shame. You decide you will wait until ten cars have rushed past on the blacktop road, and if your mother hasn’t arrived by then you will get up and walk back to the house.
It is the sixth car that you hear brake suddenly, reverse, and then roll into the drive. It is not your mother’s car. It is a car with a large, smoothly whirring engine. Maybe it’s UPS or someone turning around. Be still.
A door opens, and your tongue thickens hotly with alarm. You keep your eyes shut tight. Shoes with hard soles crunch toward you on the gravel. Someone leans over you.
“Whoa, buddy—hey, hey.” It is a man’s voice, high and nervous. A hand nudges your shoulder. “Come on, now, pal.”
The man draws halting breaths. It startles you when warm fingers find the side of your neck, searching for your pulse. Allow your eyes to open, taking care to flutter them as movie actors do when waking from a swoon. What first fills your vision is a shoe of gleaming black leather, possibly plastic, mounting to a gray trouser leg of synthetic fabric so clean and sharply creased it could have been cast in a mold. You glimpse the man’s belt, where a large black pistol sits in a holster, and then up to the chrome badge on his clean gray shirt. He is young, his eyes bulging from a large, doughy face bracketed by blond sideburns that haven’t filled in.
“Take it easy, now,” he says. “Let’s just take it easy.”
If anyone needs to take it easy, it is not you but the policeman. His thick neck shifts in his collar, assessing the condition of your body with the edgy scrutiny of a rooster tracking a beetle. “You O.K.?” he asks. “You in pain? You bleeding anywhere?”
“I—I don’t think so.”
“You live up there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” you say. You sit up. The policeman puts his hand on your shoulder.
“Easy.” He rubs his eye. “Jesus. You gave me a hell of a scare, buddy. I saw you and then that mail all scattered around. I thought, Oh, God damn. I thought maybe I had a drive-by shooting on my hands, or at least a hit-and-run. Look at this,” he says, presenting his hip to show that he’s undone the little holster snap that keeps his pistol in place. He seems too young and nervous to be trusted with a gun.
He asks how you’re feeling and whether you’ve had fainting spells before.
“No, I’m fine,” you tell him, getting up. “But thanks and everything.” Begin gathering the mail. With any luck, he’ll get back in his idling cruiser and leave. Your mother will be returning any minute. There isn’t much time to jog up to the bend in the driveway, out of sight of the road, and reassemble the spectacle.
The policeman puts a thick hand on your arm. “Come on. Come on in the car and get cool.”
With the policeman’s help, you gather up the envelopes and catalogues. He ushers you into the passenger’s side of the cruiser and slants each of the dashboard vents so that they are all blowing at you. He races the engine. The breeze pouring on you is sumptuously cold and laced with a faint smell of medicine, like the waiting room of a dentist’s office. Nothing your mother owns smells bright and clean like this.
Jutting up from the dash is a shotgun in a metal brace. Scattered on the bench seat are other police tools—a big black flashlight, a notepad in a vaguely martial leather case. Somehow these things are more genuine and frightening than the shotgun, whose exact resemblance to what you’ve seen in movies makes it seem unreal.
“You feeling O.K.?” he asks again. “Not dizzy or nothing?”
“No,” you say. “I’m fine now. Totally.”
“What’s this thing here?” he asks, pointing at his lip to indicate the hamburger.
“I had that before. It’s just a fungus.”
The policeman looks at you for a moment. His nostrils hoist in distaste. Then he unhitches his radio. “Two-oh-five, two-oh-five,” he says. “You can kill that call to Rogers Road. It’s just a kid who got a little dizzy and passed out. It’s copacetic now,” he says, winking at you, though you are not sure why. It occurs to you that you despise him a little for being so easily fooled.
The policeman goes on talking to you. “Tell you one thing,” he says. “I won’t need my coffee break this afternoon. After seeing you lying there like that, I’ll be keyed up all day. I mean, damn, I was sure we had another dead kid on our hands.”
Your ears prick up at that word: “another.” Last spring, Samantha Mealey, a nine-year-old girl from your elementary school, was found naked in a maple tree on the public golf course, a length of clothesline around her neck. In fact, you’d met her at the bus stop just a few weeks before she died. She’d been a brassy, fearless little girl with a raucous laugh. On that afternoon, much to the chagrin of her older brother, she’d been trying to pull some boy’s pants down and cussing out loud for fun. She was an exciting girl.
You have not had your first kiss, but you are already worried about sex. Just two grades ahead of you, kids are having it already. When you learned that the man who killed Samantha Mealey had raped her before he tied the noose around her neck, what occurred to you was this: At least she didn’t die a virgin—a thought you cannot share with even your wickedest friends.
You feel a manic impulse to start talking, to keep yourself from being alone with thoughts of Samantha Mealey’s murder. You show the leopard flyer to the policeman. “Have you heard about this?” you say. “There’s a leopard running around out there.”
He accepts the sheet and looks it over.
“Somebody had it for a pet,” you say.
“See, I do not know who would have this thing at their residence, but I’ll tell you one thing for sure: they’re probably a dangerous element.”
“Drug lords,” you say.
“Could be bikers, maybe,” the policeman says. “I swear, this whole area’s changing. You just don’t know anymore. Used to be this was a nice little town. Now it’s turning into one of these places where anything can happen.”
He passes the flyer back to you. You reach for the door. “So, thanks,” you tell the policeman. “I should probably get going. My dad’s probably wondering where I am.” You pull the door handle. It’s locked.
“Oh, you ain’t walking anywhere, buddy,” he tells you with a stern fondness that makes you uneasy. “I’ll drive you. You keel over again and knock your head, I’m in real trouble.”
He puts the cruiser into drive, and the car rolls forward. Untrimmed thorns and sapling limbs clutch at the car with intermittent shrieks that embarrass you.
“Thanks,” you tell the policeman once the house comes into view. “Thanks for the lift and everything.”
He turns in the direction of the leaf grinder, where your stepfather stands with his back turned. “That your dad?” he asks. “Probably ought to talk to him.” You don’t want him to, but there is nothing you can do.
Together, you and the policeman walk across the lawn to your stepfather. The lawn is choked with a special weed that explodes seeds when you touch it. Little clouds detonate around the policeman’s shiny shoes and land in his trouser cuffs. Your stepfather keeps feeding leaves into his grinder until the policeman is about three feet away. Then he turns. He narrows his eyes at the policeman, and then at you. The sweat is pouring off him, curling the hair on his bare chest into dozens of dark whorls. He turns the grinder off, looking hostile and put out.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“Officer Behrends, sir. I was driving past and I found your son lying in the driveway. He gave me a real scare.”
“Hmm.” Your stepfather turns to you. The muscles around his eyes are tense. “What were you doing lying in the driveway?”
“I don’t know,” you say. “I just got dizzy and then I woke up. I guess I passed out.”
“That mail was all scattered around, and he was lying on his face,” the policeman says. “I didn’t know what had happened to him. He gave me a scare. I was thinking maybe he’d been shot.”
“Maybe you sat down and then you fell asleep,” your stepfather says after a moment. “That’s probably what happened.”
“I didn’t sit down,” you say. It is just like him to question your story, even with an officer of the law beside you, corroborating it. “I fell.”
Your stepfather walks toward you. He takes your chin in his thumb and forefinger, and turns your face back and forth, as though it were a piece of merchandise he was thinking about buying.
“You must have fallen pretty easy,” he says. “When you faint, you go down hard. You don’t have any cuts.”
“I don’t know how I fell,” you say. “I wasn’t there watching.”
“All right. Go inside now,” your stepfather says.
But you don’t move. You don’t want to. The sun slips behind a cloud. Something—you don’t know what—is about to happen. You feel it, and you stand there, holding the mail, scraping the sharp edge of a magazine against your chin, out of which a single precious hair has lately dared to curl.
“Hell of a lucky thing that I saw him when I did,” the policeman says. He seems to be angling for a handshake or words of gratitude from your stepfather, and you pity him for that. “Who knows? Somebody could have pulled in quick and run him over. It’s a lucky thing.”
“Yeah, pretty lucky,” your stepfather says. Then he turns to you. “Go on inside. Wait for your mother.”
But you stay where you are. Then, off in the trees behind the clothesline, you hear a branch snap and the sound of something big tussling in the wooded shade. Your breathing goes quick and shallow. You close your eyes. Picture it, the leopard, its shoulders rising and falling as it lopes across the lawn.
“Hey,” your stepfather says, lightly slapping your cheek. “What’s the matter with you? Blacking out again?”
Don’t answer. Listen. Be still. ♦