Something Stirs, page 6
“Yeah, I guess.”
He pushed away from the lamppost and they walked hand-in-hand to the rear of the diner where a municipal parking lot ran the width of the block. A fence and narrowly-spaced poplars blocked the houses behind. Any store could be reached from back here, but hardly anyone used the rear entrances. They walked through the alleys to the street. Habit, he figured.
“Take you home?” she said.
“Sure, why not?”
“You want to drive?”
“Right.” He stood at the passenger door of a mile-long car and made a face at over the roof. “And your old man sees me, takes me to that clinic, does medical experiments on me, and I’m never heard of again.”
“He’s a doctor, not a scientist,” she said. “Not a bad idea, though. It would keep you in line.”
“Jesus, now you sound like my mother.”
She laughed, and on the way to the South End, turned on the radio, trying to find an oldies station. There was too much static, for which Joey was grateful. He didn’t think he could stand to hear that music now, not after last night, not for a while.
“Laine?”
She lifted her chin—go ahead, I’m listening.
Listen, Eddie was going nuts, y’know? Something was bugging him the last couple of weeks, maybe it had something to do with what happened. Nuts, really nuts. I mean, you never saw the looks on his face, he never showed them to anyone but me. How the hell should I know why? He just did. But it was spooky, man, spooky as hell, worse than Byrns’s store dummies. He was scared, Laine. The guy was scared shitless.
“Nothing,” he said, and waved her attention back to the road. “Nothing.”
Katie Ealton lay in her bed, blankets to her chin, hands clasped tightly across her stomach. She wanted to go to the Starlite, wanted it desperately, but her grandmother had insisted that she needed help tonight, her arthritis was acting up, she couldn’t be left alone, couldn’t climb the stairs or open a bottle, and besides it was only Wednesday, a school night, no time for a young girl to be out running around with killers on the loose. They had yelled. No. Katie had yelled, and her grandmother had just sat there, infinitely patient, until the tantrum was over.
Then Katie had gone to her room and watched a movie, but it scared her. Not fun scared. Really scared.
For the first time in a long time, one of those giant animal movies scared her because she believed it could happen, so she went to bed and prayed for no nightmares and wondered if anyone else had heard the screaming last night.
Chapter Five
“Joey, I have told you a hundred times I am not going to do it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, it’s sacrilegious or something.”
“Bull.”
“Okay, so maybe it isn’t, but it doesn’t feel right, okay?”
He tossed a stone at one of the geese, missing it by ten feet, and she rolled her eyes, sighed without sound, shook her head in slow despair. She hated it when he got this way. Hated it. It made him look just like her kid brother, and that snotty little brat was the world’s most complete total pain when he wasn’t tearing her heart out.
Today, Joey Costello was running a close second.
Today was the third day the Pack had no leader.
Joey threw another stone and barely reached the water.
“C’mon, Joey, knock it off, huh? You’re going to hit somebody.”
“Yeah,” he said disgustedly. “You wish.”
They were on the east side of the pond, sitting on the grass above the benches. School had closed early, just before the first lunch period, the principal on the P.A. all solemn and squeaky telling them that if they needed counseling or just wanted to talk to someone about the recent tragedy—he never mentioned Eddie’s name, the geek, never mentioned him once—people would be available. Great. Three days after the fact, and on a Friday yet, they finally figured out that the students might have cared about someone like Eddie Roman. But that wouldn’t bring Eddie back, and hardly anyone stuck around.
Joey met her and the others out front. Not one of them, however, could think of anything to do, didn’t much care to do anything, and so had drifted away. One by one. Bloodshot eyes, hitching breath, muttering about maybe getting together tomorrow, see you around.
Joey had other ideas.
As soon as they were alone, he got this dumb grin on his face and asked again, for the millionth time, if she could borrow her mother’s car so they could drive into New York, screw around in Times Square, maybe go up to Central Park. It was only a half-hour to the Lincoln Tunnel, for god’s sake, what’s the problem? He had been after her all morning, from practically the second she’d walked into homeroom, but she hadn’t yet been able to make him understand that she wasn’t up to it, not now. She had tried to prove it by wearing jeans that fit instead of strangling her legs and barely reaching her ankles, and a blouse she bought at the mall last month instead of the white shirt she had swiped from her father’s closet. She had even left her leather jacket at home.
It didn’t seem right, wearing that stuff, now that Eddie was gone.
Maybe the worst part was, there wasn’t even going to be a funeral, or even some kind of memorial service. According to her father, who heard it from a cop friend, some Pennsylvania relatives were going to have the bodies flown to Pittsburgh as soon as the police were done. It was like, one day Eddie was there, and Mr. Roman was in his classroom, and the next day it was like they never existed. Except for the headlines. And the rumors.
Joey scooted down until he was in front of her, hands on his thighs. His motorcycle jacket was open, his T-shirt white and tight, his hair gleaming in the sunlight, duck-tailed and slick. “Okay,” he said, giving her a half-smile.
Here it comes, she thought.
“A deal.”
I knew it. Every time.
“We go in, okay? And I swear I’ll do your trig for the rest of the year.”
She giggled, covered her mouth, waved her free hand when he reared back with a scowl.
“What the hell’s the matter with that?”
“Joey, Thanksgiving’s next week, three weeks after that is Christmas vacation.”
“So?”
“So with all the assemblies, half-days, stuff like that, how much work do you think we’re going to have?”
“So I’ll help you study. God, Laine, why are you making this so hard?”
She hugged her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them as she smiled her answer. A brat maybe, but he was her brat.
Making sure she could see how thoroughly disgusted he was, Joey rolled to his feet and stalked off down the slope, slapping one leg, looking around at everything, pointedly, but her. She watched him, but didn’t get up, didn’t follow. That would be a mistake, it’s exactly what he hoped for; besides, she liked to look at his ass and that slight bowlegged walk he had when he was trying to be macho cool. Look out, you suckers, Joseph Costello is on the move. In time, every time, get in my way I’ll blow you away.
The black leather was all wrong, she realized then; he should be in a duster, with six-guns, and riding a horse.
Joey the Kid, something like that.
What he was now, however, was Eddie’s doing. But he and James Dean were dead.
A breeze ruffled her hair, and she swiped at it angrily.
If he really did get rid of those clothes, she thought, the first thing she would do is cut off her damn bangs. She hated them. They looked stupid. She hated the poodle skirts Fern Bellard had made for her and Tang; she hated saddle oxfords; she hated toreador pants and ratty clam-diggers; and she definitely hated popping bubble gum in class.
She looked down at an ant crawling over her foot, thought about squashing it, brushed it away with a finger.
Oh, and painted toenails too.
The weird part was—she hadn’t hated any of it before. None of them had. The hate had begun when she had opened her closet this morning and automatically reached for that damn pleated skirt. When she touched it, her fingers had curled back as if they’d brushed something slimy. That was when she really cried. That was when she knew there was something terribly wrong.
But how could it be wrong?
Why was it so terrible?
It had begun as a goof and had ended up a way of life.
Now one life was over, and so were the Fifties.
She let her face slide until her forehead settled on her knees, pinched a small fold of skin until she shifted and the sting ended.
“Oh, lord!” her father had said that first night, when she’d pranced into the living room, hair redone, fluffy mohair sweater, Fern’s skirt, the folded-down white socks, and saddle shoes. He stood in the kitchen doorway, glasses dangling from one hand, the other pinching his nose. “Please, God, don’t make me go back, please don’t make me go!”
She laughed.
He threw her a kiss and told her that she looked just like her mother when her mother was sixteen.
That’s when her mother had leaned over the banister and said, “Just as long as you don’t wear penny loafers. You wear penny loafers, Laine, and I’m disowning you on the spot.”
The penny loafers had arrived sometime in September, when Eddie, Joey, and Pancho found a place to buy their own loafers, with tassels and cleats.
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” her father would say each time. “Eddie Roman’s idea, right?”
Of course.
It was all Eddie’s idea.
And oh Jesus, it was fun.
So why was it terrible, the clothes and the records and the picture of Fabian on her wall?
She stared at the grass, closed her eyes, and listened to the park—the little kids by the water, someone calling someone else, two guys down at the southern end playing acoustic guitars, cases open at their feet for donations; bicycle tires and skateboards rattling on the paths below and behind her, the squeak of a stroller, the squeak and bounce of a baby carriage; traffic on the surrounding streets; a jetliner overhead, coming down into Newark from someplace not here.
Joey thumping on the ground at her feet.
Indian summer, though the trees looked like death.
She raised her head just enough to peer at him over her knees.
“Okay,” he said in resigned surrender. “Okay, so we don’t go to New York. So what do you want to do?”
She was glad her legs hid the smile. “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
Growling, he showed her a mock fist and shifted until he was beside her, leaning back on his elbows. “Y’know, I been thinking about getting a haircut.”
“Okay.”
“Not a lot, you know, just a little.” A look; a shrug. “I don’t know, but it feels like I’m wearing a helmet, you know? It’ll get Ma off my back, you know what I mean?” Then he sat up and pulled off his jacket, slammed it on the ground. “God!” He lay back. “God, that thing’s hot!”
They watched a man and a woman arguing on the nearest bench; Joey laughed at a short black bum who wandered out of the trees across the way and plopped down above the path, began feeding the ducks that came right to him when he snapped his fingers. Laine recognized him, the one they called Blade, the one Scottie knew. A woman in a turban walked over to him, said something to him, walked away so stiff and formal Laine closed her eyes to keep from laughing. That was another one. The Queen of Foxriver, according to Fern.
A police siren startled them.
“I miss Eddie,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he answered after almost too long. “They ought to fry the bastard who did it.”
Blindly she reached out her hand. He took it, and squeezed.
“I tried to call Katie again today,” she said.
Joey shrugged his indifference.
“Joey, come on, she hasn’t been in school all week. I went over yesterday, I couldn’t get in, her grandmother wouldn’t let me. I swear that woman’s crazy.” She bit on her lower lip. “What if there’s something the matter?”
“The matter is,” Joey said, obviously not giving a damn, “is that she had the hots for Eddie, that’s what the matter is.”
She shook her head, hard.
“Christ, Laine, you don’t know everything, y’know. Why do you think she stayed, huh? Didn’t you ever notice that if Eddie wasn’t around, she took off, or didn’t even show?” He dug the ground again with a heel.
“Jerk. She’s probably crying herself to death.”
The ducks fled when a spaniel charged into the water, returned on the other side and huddled, quacking softly.
The Queen of Foxriver slipped into the trees.
Laine tried to think of a way to tell him he was wrong, that she would have known something like that, you couldn’t hide it from everyone. Just like you couldn’t hide the other thing, the thing Joey knew and wouldn’t talk about.
“Joey,” she said, “what was wrong with Eddie?”
He didn’t answer for the longest while; she had to look at him to be sure he hadn’t fallen asleep.
“Joey, please.”
“I don’t know,” he said at last, his free arm draped across his eyes. “He … I don’t know.”
“He what?”
“I told you I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
His arm slipped to the grass; he opened one eye. “Just leave it, Laine, okay?”
“Leave what?”
“Eddie. He was … crazy. Acting crazy.”
“I know that,” she snapped. “Damn, we all knew that. I want to know why.”
He shook his head. “Crazy stuff,” he muttered. “Kid stuff, crazy.” His chest rose and fell “I don’t know. He’s gone, Laine, just leave it. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
The spaniel bounded up to them, sniffed at Laine’s toes until she giggled and swiped playfully at its muzzle. It barked, wagged its tail, ran off to chase the ducks again.
“I had a nightmare last night.”
He grunted.
“I was sleeping—in my dream, I mean—and I could hear somebody knocking on my window. Like with a stick or a pencil. It woke me up and I couldn’t get out of bed.”
“You were naked, that’s why.”
She dug a nail into his hand.
“Hey!” A moment later: “Sorry.”
She let her gaze follow the gander circling the center of the pond, but she didn’t really see it, just the white and its wake.
“At first I thought it was you doing a Romeo or something, but it couldn’t be. My room’s on the second floor and there’s no roof or trellis, anything like that. So then I thought it was a tree branch, but there’s no tree out there either. And it just kept on, all that tapping. Real quick, too, then real slow. Finally, I got up, I don’t know why, I was so scared, and I went to the window and opened the curtains.”
She held her breath.
The gander charged his mate, wings spread, neck straight, bill aiming for her side.
“Well?” He turned his head. “Well, what did you see?”
The goose dodged easily, and the gander settled down to preen as if nothing had happened.
“I didn’t see anything. There wasn’t anything out there.”
“Ha.”
“But there was something in my closet, and when it came out, I woke up.”
Relbeth’s Market wasn’t large and didn’t have to be. It catered primarily to the basics, and for last-minute shopping when people were too rushed to drive to the larger chain stores. What kept it most successful, however, was its butcher shop, and though Scott didn’t mind working there most days, he could no longer stand to watch Mr. Relbeth work on the slabs of meat dragged out from the freezer. When the meat thawed, there was blood.
Because his leg was bothering him, his boss let him take the register as soon as he walked in directly from school, and he was glad for a chance to sit on the padded stool and watch the customers come and go. It was the first time he’d been back to work since Tuesday, and though many of the people knew him, knew Eddie had been his friend, they didn’t ask many questions. He was grateful. He didn’t think he’d know how to answer. Not that Mr. Relbeth would have let them take up his time anyway. He was in a mood today, complaining about the big chains trying to sabotage his store, complaining about the weather, complaining not very subtly about customers who always came in at the last minute, demanding they be able to reserve the best cuts, the fattest turkeys, when a sign had been in the window for weeks, warning that the last date for holiday meat reservations had been last Monday.
“They think they own you,” the man said, dropping into a wobbly wicker chair he kept behind the counter for his frequent cigarette breaks. “Scott, you don’t get into this business unless you want people to think they own you.”
Scott rang up a purchase, bagged it, handed it over to a woman who glared at the owner and huffed out.
Relbeth pointed a bony finger at her back. “Worst one,” he sneered none too quietly. “Husband wins the damn lottery, not even a million dollars, and she thinks she owns me. She should move to the Heights, she wants to own something.”
Scott grinned. “She’ll give her money to somebody else then.”
“Bah! Let her, the old witch. Who needs it? Who needs the aggravation?”
Scott turned on the stool and batted away a cloud of the worst-smelling tobacco smoke he’d ever known.
Thomas Relbeth smoked Turkish cigarettes, and if the stench was any indication, the man would be dead before he reached sixty. As it was, he looked damn near that age—his face and hands were spotted, his pate nearly bare, the flesh of a once-proud nose sagging into a hook. With dark pouches under his eyes, a slouch, and his slow speech, he seemed continually exhausted. But Scott had never seen him any other way, even when he threw parties for his employees, which he did every excuse he could find.
The pay was lousy, but the work was almost fun.
Relbeth scratched his skull with a long yellowed fingernail. “They never caught the guy, did they?”
