A week later the three boys faced their lives alone.
Freddy
Freddy sat in his parents' converted basement, watching TV and growing bored in minutes despite cable. His round head rolling and lolling about, he searched the room's faux wood panelling and acoustic tile drop ceiling for excitement. Failing, he resorted to the never-ending entertainment possibilities of his pen knife.
Unclipping the knife from its belt chain, he opened the longest blade halfway. Only halfway, because with a snap of his wrist, the blade would quickly flick out, letting him pretend it was a switchblade. He'd only seen a real switchblade once. A few years before, a friend of his dad's came over during a particularly smutty summer evening of drinking beer and popping cans off the backyard fence with a pellet gun. It was a common pastime, though they and Freddy wished they could've used the higher-powered pistols his old man kept stashed in a box under his bed. One evening they used a .22 pistol, firing into a mattress on the opposite end of the backyard.
"I don't want to catch you doing this shit when I'm not around, Freddy," said his dad in paternal concern. Then he unloaded the pistol into the mattress. A firm plump sound came with each slug's impact, sending a flurry of mattress stuffing and dust into the air.
The evening progressed, and they emptied a single clip from a .45 into the mattress before a cop showed up, telling them the neighbor behind the fence called and bitched about the noise and the shattering of a clay planter on his deck, not knowing the difference between the sound of a bullet and pellet. Freddy watched as the officer told his father to tone it down a bit, a professional courtesy from cop to cop. Freddy never felt prouder of his old man.
When the cop left, his father's friend pulled out the switchblade, and they took turns throwing it into the mattress before his dad recovered his favorite targets from the garage. Freddy had seen them before, down at the shooting range—black running silhouettes topped by a rounded mound of hair and the outline of large lips, concentric rings radiating out from their hearts and heads. Freddy always laughed at these.
Tacking up the poster, the throwing began, and even Freddy was surprised when he landed the knife in the center of the head with a meaty thunk. Much laughter and a night still remembered fondly, especially when his dad figured he was old enough at 12 for his first beer. It was harder to remember when he destroyed the knife—a cheap piece of shit his dad's friend had picked up at a flea market, truthfully—on his twelfth throw throw, breaking it into three pieces. Cracking him one across the head, his dad wondered what the fuck was his problem that he couldn't respect other people's property. Freddy didn't know, but he was sure sorry, his head and chest throbbing with hurt.
He flicked open the knife again, stood and faced the farthest wall, and pinched the blade between his thumb and forefinger. With a quick thrust forward, he hurled it at the wall. Less satisfying than the switchblade with its sleek, balanced body, the pen knife simply collided with the wall and bounced to the floor.
"Shit!" said Freddy, knowing he'd have to walk all the way over there and retrieve the knife.
"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING DOWN THERE, FREDDY!?!" shouted his mother.
Freddy froze, then bent over to retrieve his knife with a slight huff and puff.
"YOU BETTER NOT BE THROWING THAT KNIFE AT THE WALL AGAIN, FREDDY!"
"I'm not!" Freddy replied, indignant. The wall, pocked and marked with 50 of 60 other tries attempted on other bored afternoons, said differently. He waked over and retrieved the knife. Then he threw it again. It was even louder this time.
"YOU WANT ME TO COME DOWN THERE, FREDDY!?! IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT!?!" He pictured his mom was still sitting at the kitchen table, smoking her cigarette and working on the bills. "YOU WANT ME TO TELL YOUR FATHER WHAT YOU'RE DOING DOWN THERE!?!"
No, he didn't want that.
He picked up the knife again, but before closing it, thought he'd try one last time.
With a quick wrist snap, he sent it flying toward the wall. It stuck an inch into the board, nestled between two previous successful throws. "Yeah!" said Freddy in his moment of triumph, forgetting he'd enter a world of pain that night if his dad saw the latest damage.
"I'm going out, mom!" Freddy shouted upstairs. The basement constricted him, and he wondered what Calvin was doing. Calvin always had something going on.
"YOU BETTER BE BACK IN TIME FOR DINNER, FREDDY!"
"I will, mom," he said, wiggling the knife free from the wood, then pushing its blade back into the handle. He found an umbrella and leaned it against the wall so it covered the scars. Maybe they'd think it was always like that.
"I LOVE YOU, SWEETIE! DON'T BE LATE!" yelled his mom.
"I won't be, Mom," and he sincerely meant to try, even if it didn't work out. Tonight he'd try harder to be on time. Freddy exited through the basement doorway, into the garage, opened the door with the automatic opener, then tried to outrace it as it closed. It took him three tries and at least one cry from his mother inquiring what the hell he was doing before he made it. He was on a hot streak.
Calvin
In secret, all alone, Cal was the King of the Cats. Sitting in his room in the semi-dark, red and black candles burning, he played at being evil. Casting cat's bones and black dice across a floor thick with goofer dust, soothsaying a future of evil, reviewing pornography, chopping up photographs of women and turning them into collages of limbs and cut-up faces. Calvin set fire to locks of hair in a brass brazier and called forth Old Gods and New Demons. Young females he seduced and enticed up to his room with promises of candied puppies, where he recorded each day's travesties on Betamax and sold it to rich perverts who paid him in gold coin, and when blood was spilled and dread sex acts invoked. Here Calvin sat on his skull throne and heard Christ weeping far away, cruelly pondering the evil he'd perform the next day, and the one after that.
At least that what he imagined Charles thought he did. Instead he was lying in bed again, smoking and staring at the ceiling.
Ah Charles, such good ideas you have. Then he sighed in white frustration.
Calvin smoked another cigarette and stared at the ceiling for a full hour, projecting images of naked witch women on the blank white ceiling. Masturbation became trite, so he occupied himself with increasing the level of holocausts and violations in his fantasies until he was sick of himself. Gradually, he lost all shame and became merely annoyed at his thoughtcrimes.
God, he was bored.
So very, very bored.
So all-the-time, deep-tissued, to the bone marrow bored; yet wanting nothing else to happen otherwise he'd find a new mountain of boredom to clamber up.
His room, his house, his town, his body, his soul—all bored the living and undead piss out of him. Struggling to persist, he sought out badness to feel more alive. Cal tried suicide twice. The first time nobody noticed. He swallowed a bottle of aspirin and laid down to die, but his body liked living more than he did and forced him to upchuck the whole mess onto his bed-sheets. It was a stupid way to die anyway. The way rats were exterminated. He felt more stupid than relieved, not being smart enough to calculate how many aspirins it took to bleed out.
The second time he was clever. Snapping a blade from a pencil sharpener to slash himself open and let all his Calvinness seep out. Deciding he didn't want to feminize his death, he forewent the warm water of the bathtub and did it in his bedroom. Beginning with thin cuts up and down his arms before committing to a long gouge into the left wrist artery. Leave it to his bitch sister to find him and complain. She even seemed concerned.
Lovely.
A hospital visit and a lot of fuzzy-headed medication later, he was living his life again, and pocketing and selling his drugs on the side. It was likely he would have to attend summer school in order to graduate on time. It was likely, if his mother was badly inspired, he'd have to go to a therapist or minister or both very soon. It was likely a teacher would try to reach out to him and try to make him be the best human he could be, very likely right after he burst into tears in his or her office and confessed that he WANTED to be better, really, so she'd shut up and leave him alone.
It was likely he really didn't give a shit. Sometimes it felt like a chunk of his brain was gone. The part that cared about anything. He had that going for him.
Calvin smoked another cigarette. His straw-blonde head was haloed by a pillowcase covered with pinhole burns. Maybe one night he'd fall asleep smoking, burn the house down, and crisp himself away. Wishful thinking.
I am not quite right., Calvin thought to himself. Not at all. Ever. In public, in town, the sensation that he made others uncomfortable never left him. His appearance invited stares and threats. On city trips he'd seen real freaks. Bad-smelling human peacocks. Damaged people. He wanted to fly off and join them. The suburbs were populated with lead weight and dead brains.
Charles.
What the hell did Charles want from him? What the hell was happening to Charles lately? Used to be he'd be in constant touch, second only to Freddy in seeking his approval. Used to be he watched and followed Calvin closely, so much so he had to tell him to fuck off and die. Twice.
I am not quite right. I am exotically deranged, and they're drunk on it.
Charles.
Charles seeks my magic.
"I'm not your fucking boogeyman!" Calvin shouted to no one, stabbing the air with his cigarette.
Calvin's eyes smarted from the smoke. An ashtray, modeled after a naked spread-eagled woman sat on the floor. Turning and dangling halfway over the bed, he reached and stubbed out the butt in her crotch. Reaching beneath his bed and taking up a notebook, he flipped it open to the second blank page, grabbed a pen, and pressed its tip between the two top blue lines.
The pen refused to move on, his mind becoming a thick block of white ice.
Calvin Day he printed after much pondering. Jumping to the next line, he wrote Calvin Day again, this time in cursive. Then again. Then he turned the page and wrote Anal Borer. Mrs. Anal Borer. Mrs. Anal T. Borer the THIRD of Boston, which made him giggle.
Abandoning literature, he began doodling a woman. It didn't look like a woman. It looked like scribbled blue lines, with scrawled breasts that resembled wide eyes with wet pupils. None of the subtle interplay of light and shadow in Charles' drawing. It angered him, but he immediately choked it back. Feeling angry showed a lack of control. Anger meant someone else was controlling him rather than vice versa. And that was his job on this earth. Pissing people off. This he knew.
And who told Charles he could draw like that?
Throwing the pad away, he took out another cigarette and struck a match.
"Cal! Are you smoking!?!" His mother's voice, outside the door he'd reinforced with a deadbolt he found in the garage. A pirate flag, skull and crossbones tattooed with obscenities attached with safety pins, covered the door on his side. It shook slightly as his mother tried to open it. "Are you smoking, Cal!?!"
"Yeah!" said Cal, feeling amused and impregnable. The door shook even more furiously.
"I know you're in there, Calvin! Are you smoking? Calvin!"
"Yeah, I'm smoking! Christ, yeah!" Calvin stuck the cigarette between his lips, letting it dangle as he made devil's horns with his hands. "Smoking! Fuck yeah! Smoking!"
The door stopped shaking, and he could hear her breathing like a large overheated mammal. What was she thinking? Never really caring before, his mother had lately become a curious thing. The previous year she found Jesus through a church he could tell was shady (well, more than others). This year she was drinking, but she'd only drink cooking sherry, the money left from the insurance payoff on his father's death winding down, and she had yet to find a new husband. Too bad. Calvin liked the good scotch when she could afford it.
"Well..." she said at last. "Well, use an ashtray." Then she strode off.
"I'm a good boy!" cried Calvin. He used to call her a bitch to her face. Her current nonentity status removed that pleasure.
Reaching beneath his bed and pulling out a folder, he found the picture he'd appropriated from Charles' sketchbook days before. He must have been in a wistful mood. thought Calvin. Unlike the sasquatch scene—a direct steal from Crumb, Calvin knew all along after looking into it—this sketch showed a blonde girl, stretched out, sleeping, and naked in a sun-dappled field, two dogs with slightly human faces standing in the background and staring at her with wonder. What the fuck is this? Calvin pondered again.
Who told Charles he could do this?
Things would need to be put into order again.
Flicking his cigarette to the side, Calvin completely missed the ashtray, and another scorch mark was added to the rug. Leaping off the bed he made for the door, intent on finding Charles.
Charles
Was it a worrying point, the way Frank's house had grown more familiar—as familiar as his own home? Charles thought on this as the key slid into the front door's knob, fluidly turning it open. Frank had oiled it again, his obsession with maintenance and order seeping into the house's smallest cracks. The key was one of forty others on the ring, and he was grateful for the foresight to ask Frank to mark it with black electrical tape.
Certainly, the place was homier and more familiar, and the murk it seemed steeped in on his first visit was dissipating. Stepping into the door, he dropped the keys onto the standing table inside the door. The first thing a person saw when he entered Frank's house was himself in a long Baroque wall mirror (not herself, for a very long time). It always gave Charles a start, his heart seizing up in the split second he saw himself looking back. He slammed the door shut. Twice if he included his reflection's action.
Why he was there was yet a mystery. Frank was on a camping trip, up in Wisconsin, with friends—so he said. Before he left he asked that Charles keep the lawn trim and watered—which he expected. When Frank handed over the keys and asked him to "look in on things" he was overwhelmed and confused. What "things" had Frank to look after? He had no dog or cat. His plants were all outside, with nary a fern or rubber tree to be found indoors. In an ironic counterpoint to all the literature he collected, he had no newspapers to bring in, and outside of junk mail he had no mail to collect. The minimal food in the fridge wasn't the kind to go bad, and if there was a single faulty appliance in Frank's house—a leaky pipe or overheating iron—Charles had yet to see it. The doorknob testified loudly, or rather softly, to the man's fastidiousness.
Not knowing what to do with himself or the house, Charles sat in the previously forbidden living room. The sofa squeaked and sighed as he plopped down on plastic wrapped cushions. He grabbed a detective magazine from a stack of others, flipped through it briefly to see Weegeesque shots of perps, corpses stuffed into steamer trunks, and women of the day described as beauties but who looked to Charles like men in drag. One woman on the cover fascinated him. She had dark hair, and wore stockings and a disheveled white slip. Sitting on a curb, she looked up with elegantly arched eyebrows about a face that was pretty but broken by a partial snarl. He fell in love with her, but upon doing the mental calculation he realized she'd be his grandmother by now. But he still wanted her. Was that sick?
Leaning his head back gently the plastic wrap softly crinkled. Tossing the magazine aside, he looked around and wondered more about the man who lived there.
A plant stand without a plant stood at his right, and he reached over and drew wriggly circles in the dust. Dust pervaded. Frank never dusted, or vacuumed, or seriously cleaned for that matter, as far as he could tell. Serving implements were either plastic or paper, thrown away after use. Sometimes the kitchen table got a wipe-down with a wet cloth, but no dusting. With each pile of recovered treasure, more dust got in. Dust painted everything in the book room especially. Whenever Charles borrowed a book, it needed a swipe from a rag first, otherwise the dust stuck to his hands and clothes. It smelled funny too. Funnier than the stink of oldness it carried already. Frank never understood why it was unpleasant to Charles. Probably because Frank no longer smelled it, being coated himself with dirt and grime, the grease beneath his fingernails never faded.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Huh? Where'd that come from? Charles thought. Well, I'm not cleaning it up.
Launching himself from the couch, he stood up to his full six feet and stretched, fingers within inches of the ceiling. So much growth this summer: his mother and father noted it, and now he saw and felt it. Linguini-thin arms, overlong for his body, but now wiry with muscle, brought about by duties at Frank's house. Clarity. That word recurred. Things seemed clearer to him.
Maybe I'm getting smarter. he thought. His mom frequently told him he didn't apply himself. But apply himself to what? The drawings, what he showed them, were praised but rarely encouraged, so he kept that to himself. They wanted better grades and club membership from him. Maybe a sport too, like baseball. Baseball is nice; or maybe tennis. Above all, they wanted to see less of Cal and Freddy, and he wasn't sure that was such a bad idea. Mom and Dad thought the drawing was just a cute pastime, but they saw he did it well. Cal and Freddy served no purpose but bad distraction. Cal. Cal hated his drawing, never missing an opportunity to put it down, and Freddy always ready to join in.
What a pair of stabbing pricks.
Standing with his hands against his hips, Charles looked at nothing. Why Cal's word still held truck was a wonder. In the early days Cal held a strange fascination; in more recent days he'd become an amazing monster. With Cal the hairy-headed scared feelings, the cold chill across the back he so loved, never left. Maybe he was right. Maybe Charles was just a poser and a fraud. But still, Cal inspired him.
And yet, he found it hard to care as much about Cal's opinion as he used to.
Frank was the new thing, displacing the creepy freaks with peculiarity mixed with comfort. An unintentional mentor, Frank hadn't spent much time in the world, except for fighting in a war and finding amazing junk in crazy old lady homes. But Frank never belittled him, ever. Not once. And that was a pleasant change from everyone.
Once upon a time they sat on the back porch, staring at the forest preserve, drinking lemonade and eating potato chips while Frank, in stumbling stutters, held forth on phonograph repair. Emboldened, Charles asked Frank if he'd read one of the books he'd given him. He said he had, but wanted to hear more about it. Charles pulled it out and showed him the cover.
"Maybe..." Frank said, "Maybe you could read that to me, Charley. The part you mentioned about that person crying over the grave..."
And Charles did.
"That sounds sad," said Frank, eyes closed. "That sounds real sad." The older man may have grown a little moist about the eyes, but Charles couldn't tell.
Afterwards, he brought out a stack of men's magazines he'd recovered from a VFW hall. The covers were crinkled and slick, glossy images of Nazi doctors conducting undefined sex experiments and vivisections on barely dressed brunettes. Charles couldn't have these, Frank told him. He needed them for a project, but he could look at them now. A grand afternoon it was.
Maybe it's time to share.
"Maybe I don't want to share," said Charles aloud to himself.
Well, maybe it's time for Frank to share? He looked at the staircase leading upstairs.
"Huh," said Charles, and he moved to the stairs to the second floor for the second time in his life with mounting excitement. A roaring in his ears.
The path was still familiar, even though his last trip upstairs seemed an eon ago. Carpet, protected with a plastic runner, ran up the stairs, a little dingier than before. Ascending, he saw that nothing had changed. Not a blessed thing. Same photos, same paint, same crack in the topmost corner... Pausing at the top, he let out a small, furtive, "Hello?" But this time nobody screamed at him to get the hell out. Soldiering on, he entered Mrs. Stadic's room unafraid.
Freshly painted and with sunlight streaming in from two windows, Mrs. Stadic's former room's brightness stung Charles' eyes. A pretty little room, decorated with little more than a bed, a desk, a night-stand, and a bureau covered with jewelry boxes and several small saint statuettes. One was St. Theresa, the others unidentifiable, a series of beatific nuns in black and white, blue, and brown habits. The room had no carpeting at all, the plush shag of the rest of the house stopped by a band of metal at the threshold. Where the rest of the house coated itself with must and dust and remained if not unfriendly than aloof or disinterested, this room invited one in.
Charles walked in and heard the floorboards creak. Moving closer to the bed where Mrs. Stadic had admonished him he saw the desk had a massive canvasbound book resting on it with a soup can of pens standing nearby. Journal read the cover in nicely curlicued silver ink calligraphy.
Too easy. Charles thought as he rushed forward. As he passed the bed, he accidentally kicked something square and heavy beneath it. the corner of a book, similar to the one on the desk, peeked out. Charles got down on his hands and knees and pulled aside the bedskirt like a curtain. Ten more of the same kind of journals rested underneath.
Oh, far, far too easy. Pulling aside the chair, he sat down, opened the book, and began to read.
"February 23
Today I wore the red flannel shirt with the blue overalls. I am wearing them because I have yet to wash the blue flannel shirt and my other overalls. If I wash the blue flannel shirt and overalls (the other overalls) I can wear them the next day, but not before. If I wear the red flannel shirt and it gets too hot, I will remove the shirt and wear only the yellow t-shirt, but only if it gets too hot."
Charles skipped a few pages.
"March 14
For lunch I ate an apple and cheese sandwich. I like apples and cheese sandwiches. I like American cheese. Not fancy foreign cheeses like cheddar"
Ye Gods. Charles at once felt fresh and exciting in his own lifestyle. He flipped ahead, hoping the plot would thicken, or at least come to exist.
"April 24
Wore new pants."
Yeah, too easy. thought Charles, slumping back in his chair. Sighing aloud, Charles looked up and saw himself in Mrs. Stadic's make-up mirror. Rarely did he check his reflection, but today he saw himself twice. Pretending to affect a cool and detached exterior came naturally to him, he though. Instead he saw, behind his overhanging bangs, a young man, more worried looking than far-removed. Something worked its way through Charles, starting in his heart, which suddenly felt too tight in his chest.
The onion is empty. Charles pondered, looking into his own eyes. Then another thought flashed into his head. When did he and Frank first meet?
Fingers wetted in his mouth, he dashed through several more pages to that particular May day.
"May 27
Wore the red shirt again.
Friend?"
A clatter and a sharp bang downstairs. Charles became afraid.
On a Friday morning? Afraid, he replaced the journal on the desk and hoped Frank wasn't anal enough to mark its exact location every night. Next he wondered if Frank returned early. No trust there. Why trust him? Mr. Privacy, all up in somebody else's business. Shame angrily burned in him, filling himself with self-hate, real hate. Then once again there was the clatter and bang.
A wooden cane rested against the wall—heavy piece of stained brown hickory with a rubber tip. Charles crept over and grabbed it with his right hand. It felt good and solid in his hands. Swinging it upwards he rested it on his shoulder and walked downstairs, soft as cat feet. Owing Frank for his broken confidence, he felt ready to crack skulls in his castle's defense.