“I’ll have to take a look at that,” Uncle Ricky said, mostly to himself. “All you gotta do is nod and smile and be impressed with everything they say. And don’t call my mother anything except Grandmother—not Granny, not Grandmama especially. She’d hate that. She needs everything a certain way.”

  “Okay.”

  He studied me closely, frowning a bit at my faded sweater and jeans. He took off his army jacket and hung it on the hook. Underneath, he’d dressed in a black sweater and slacks, instant formality. He glanced down at his cowboy boots and meticulously wiped mud from the tips with a napkin. He patted down his ’fro. Then he took a breath, jouncing his shoulders like he was about to run out on a football field.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  Uncle Ricky pushed past the wooden swinging door from the kitchen and we followed the music and laughter down a narrow, wood-paneled hall. For the first time I noticed his limp, how he slightly favored one leg.

  The lodge was more impressive inside because of the decorations on the wall: rows of signed old photographs, some of them with Grandmother as a young woman in a ball gown posing with other well-dressed people, some close-ups of almost every famous person I could think of. Duke Ellington. Bob Hope. Lena Horne. I stopped in front of Diahann Carroll’s photo: her head thrown back, smile wide and full of joy. I wanted to cry again.

  “Well, there he is!” a woman’s voice said ahead, and I realized that Uncle Ricky had left me alone in the hall.

  The laughter stopped. Someone turned the music down.

  “Goodness gracious, what have you done with your hair?” the same woman said.

  “That’s how they wear it now, ma’am.”

  “Well, if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you jump off behind them? Imagine if we’d been running around with these bushes on our heads.”

  I was glad that Mom had trimmed my hair short before the trip. I took a few tentative steps and saw Uncle Ricky face-to-face with Grandmother: she was tall for a woman, reaching his nose, in a sequined dress that could be in one of the photos. Her hair was black and straight, hanging loose in a girlish fashion, but the dark color looked like dye. Grandmother was in her seventies, although you couldn’t tell from her smooth brown skin. I’d never seen anyone so thin, and I wondered if she was sick. Those same long, long fingernails sparkled in the room’s light.

  Uncle Ricky looked like he might want to hug her, but Grandmother wouldn’t come close enough. “Sadie’s boy is here,” Uncle Ricky said instead, motioning to me.

  The living room was elegant, with a white baby grand near the double door and a lively fireplace big enough to warm the house. Three other people were there: one man and two women, all of them Grandmother’s age or a bit younger. The man was husky, sitting in a chair as wide as he was. His face was familiar, but I couldn’t place it right off. The women were fashionably dressed, one in a fur wrap, but Grandmother was the queen of the room.

  I walked toward the queen, trying to remember to smile. I don’t know why I was so nervous with everyone looking at me, but I could barely keep my head raised. She took a small step back, so I stopped short of her like Uncle Ricky had.

  Grandmother did not smile at me. “Spitting image,” she said to the room instead.

  “Isn’t it spooky?” one of the women agreed.

  “Where’s your mama, boy?” the man called out.

  “Had to work,” I mumbled, then I raised my voice to project it like Mom was always telling me. “Grading papers. She teaches English in high school.”

  The others seemed impressed, but Grandmother frowned. “She’ll barely make a living on a teacher’s wages. I told her to keep up her voice lessons. I could have given that girl the world.”

  Grandmother suddenly glared at me like I was everything that had let her down in life, her eyes so angry that my skin prickled. Then her face softened to a mask: not a smile, but less severe. The transformation was so fast and convincing that I had to remind myself that Grandmother had been a famous actress, after all. Her eyes were as flat as the settled snow.

  “How old are you now?” Grandmother said. “Ten? Eleven?”

  I winced, insulted. “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen! You’re small for your age. Your mother needs to put some meat on your bones. And I’ll bet she coddles you like mad. We’ll have to get to know each other, Johnny. I need to teach you a few things about the world.”

  Uncle Ricky’s hand landed firmly on my shoulder. It felt like a prompt, so I said, “I’d like that, Grandmother.”

  “I’ll be getting to know him too,” Uncle Ricky said. “Out in the cabin.”

  “No, I don’t want him out with you in that drafty cabin,” Grandmother said, floating away toward her friends gathered on the plush twin sofas near the fireplace. “You stay out there and smoke. He’ll stay in the main house. My old powder room has a bed.”

  I glanced up at Uncle Ricky. He looked actually scared. But he didn’t say a word.

  “Ain’t you gonna come over, or you too grown now?” the man teased Uncle Ricky.

  “Nah, Uncle Joe. You’re lookin’ good, man.”

  The fear was gone from Uncle Ricky’s face and his voice. But it was too late: I’d seen it.

  Someone had one of the new Polaroid cameras that took color photos on the spot, so I posed with everyone in the room like I was long-lost family. Uncle Ricky called all of Grandmother’s friends “Aunt” this or “Uncle” that. I learned later that “Uncle Joe” was the legendary boxer Joe Louis, so that photo would become one of my most prized mementos on the days when I could forget about the rest.

  But I didn’t know who he was yet. And in my only photo with him, I wasn’t smiling.

  “You need anything, I’m right across the way,” Uncle Ricky said, pointing vaguely as he walked me to my room. “Right outside. Head out the kitchen door and keep walking straight.”

  I couldn’t imagine anything that would tempt me to walk past that snow pile beside the steps, especially at night, but I nodded.

  Uncle Ricky handed me a heavy flashlight. “For seeing in the dark,” he said. “True dark. Trust me, you don’t know nothin’ about that.”

  The closed door at the end of the hall was Grandmother’s room, he told me. The narrow powder room door, also closed, was at a right angle. A small silver star shined from a nail.

  “If there ain’t enough room in here, lemme know and I’ll see what I can do.”

  The main light switch didn’t work, so he stepped in and flipped on the lights on the mirror and vanity table that took up most of the space. This room was all tile instead of wood, so the bright mirror lights made the room look like noontime. Three or four of the bulbs were missing, leaving a few darkened spots in the reflection. I saw myself standing there puny beside Uncle Ricky, my face lost in a shadow.

  “Not much of a bed,” Uncle Ricky said. He quickly began hauling piles of fashion magazines to the vanity table, uncovering folded blankets and a cot underneath. “We used to have to sleep in here if we were on punishment. It’s a little claustrophobic, but it’s all right. Mostly it was the idea of being on punishment that made it bad. Know what I mean?”

  The windowless space looked more like a cell than a bedroom: Of course it was a punishment room. It was only slightly larger than a walk-in closet in a slight L shape, leading to a second closed door painted white.

  “Where does that go?” I said.

  “That’s her bathroom,” he said. “Don’t go in there. You need to pee in the night, run to that other little bathroom at the end of the hall. When you need a bath, use the one upstairs.”

  The idea of being that close to where my grandmother would be sitting on a toilet—or taking a bath!—made me want to puke. “Can’t I sleep in the cabin?”

  “Lady’s house, lady’s rules. Remember what I said about how to find me. Use your flashlight instead of turning on a bunch of lights. She don’t like you burning up her electricity.”

  When he turned to go, he was already patting his pocket for his lighter. If the car ride was any indication, he couldn’t wait to light up another joint. And now he would have the cabin to himself. When he hugged me good night, I could see how relieved he was to go.

  As soon as I was alone, I wanted to cry again. The lodge didn’t have a telephone, so I couldn’t even talk to Mom. Uncle Ricky had promised to drive me to town to talk to her sometime, but my real life already seemed far away and long ago. Mom always said action made her feel better, so I dug into my backpack for my stack of comics and my cassette player from Christmas, my survival plan. Six new comic books, most of my best cassettes, and headphones to make my music my own business.

  The cot was stiff even with three blankets beneath me, but I managed to get comfortable enough. I turned off the bright lights and read my comics by flashlight with “ABC” playing on my headphones. Soon I forgot where I was, lost in Peter Parker’s adventures.

  When the vanity lights flared on, I gasped and nearly fell out of my cot. Craggy tree branches were only Grandmother’s nails before she snatched the headphones from my head.

  “Get some sleep, Johnny,” she said in a honeyed voice. “You have these turned up so loud, you didn’t hear me knocking. You’ll hurt your ears. Rest up so you’ll be fresh tomorrow.”

  I was stunned, but I thought fast enough to push stop so the music wouldn’t come blaring into the room when she yanked the headphone cord free, because then she would have taken the cassette player, too. And maybe the cassettes. It was clear on sight that no one was supposed to have any fun in this room. I nudged my flashlight under the blanket so she would forget about it now that the too-bright vanity lights were screaming.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, mimicking Uncle Ricky. “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you.”

  The flashlight made a tiny click when I turned it off. I hoped she hadn’t heard it.

  “Don’t forget your prayers,” Grandmother said.

  When she turned off the light and closed the door behind her, I realized my earlobe was stinging from where her nail had caught my skin.

  When I touched it, I felt a spot of damp blood.

  I woke in a tomb. My room was cold despite the blankets, and the darkness made it impossible to tell what time it was even though my glow-in-the-dark Timex said it was seven-thirty in the morning.

  But my watch was wrong, I realized when I crept into the hallway from my room. The sun had barely risen outside, casting gray light. It took a couple of sleepy, confused moments to remember that Colorado was in a different time zone, an hour behind. The quiet house was a mercy, freedom I hadn’t expected. I rushed to dress, ate leftover peach cobbler from the kitchen counter for breakfast, and ran out of the kitchen door. The cold slapped my face and made me miss the down jacket Mom had bought me, but I didn’t dare go back inside.

  The snow piled near the steps looked different in new light. Ordinary. Light snowfall had buried any signs of the original mound I’d seen, and evidence of movement. I even poked at the spot with a stick. Nothing. Feeling silly, I tossed the stick away.

  I surveyed the property, which was easier to see in rising daylight. The fence ring seemed huge at the time, but her property wasn’t much more than five acres. The main house sat at the end of a snow-covered driveway, and three small cabins lay beyond it, blending in with the stand of fir trees. The two rear cabins looked like shacks, with boarded-up windows and part of one roof under a tarp. But the closest cabin looked okay, with a shiny axe standing beside the door and a nearby pile of wood that looked freshly chopped. I admit I tried to peek into that cabin’s window, but the thick curtains were pulled closed except for a tiny slit that revealed only a small wooden table with Uncle Ricky’s thermos.

  Still, I knew where he was now. And compared to the powder room, Uncle Ricky’s cabin looked like a palace. I wondered if I could get on Grandmother’s good side so she would let me sleep there, but my sore ear told me she might not be the type to change her mind.

  I tried not to let my sneakers sink too deeply into snow as I walked inside the fence, reveling in the sight of small animal tracks and frozen spider webs and knotted tree trunks shaped like open mouths. At the end of the driveway, I came back to that large metal insignia, The Lazy M, nearly as tall as I was, leaning on the fence. It was now obvious that this had once been posted on the driveway gate, but maybe it had fallen. Maybe that was one more thing Uncle Ricky would need to fix.

  I didn’t notice the red droplets on the snow just beyond the Lazy M sign until I saw the dead thing. Actually, it was a dead thing’s head.

  I was so startled that I fell backwards, landing on my butt in the snow. But I jumped right back up again to get a better look at the matted fur, open black eye, and bloody mess where its head had once been attached to its now-severed neck. Maybe it was a raccoon, but hardly enough was left to tell, especially to a boy from Liberty City.

  But I knew it was dead. And I noticed from a pinkish trail in the snow that it had been dragged to that spot. Parts of the trail had been covered by snow and sometimes disappeared, but I kept following until it took me back to the kitchen steps, beside the Caddy. A sound like shifting sand behind me spun me around fast, panting like I’d been running. My eyes looked for movement everywhere, and finally I saw something under the snow slither around a tree trunk, out of my sight except for a few loose flakes spraying away. Fast. I ran to where I thought I’d seen it, but all of the snow was flat again. The one mound I kicked was only a buried tree trunk.

  I went back to the Caddy. The trail didn’t originate exactly where I thought I’d first seen the snow move, but close enough. I picked up the stick I’d thrown away and scattered the snow beside the steps until I uncovered a blood-soaked center, maybe as big as a car tire. The blood spot was almost purple.

  The way I stood there staring, I might have been frozen solid. I wasn’t sure myself.

  A thump on the kitchen window made me look up. Grandmother was standing there, her hair covered by a bonnet, which made her seem much older. She cracked open the kitchen door.

  “Johnny, come inside!” she said. “Get out of that cold without a coat. What’s wrong with you? You’ll catch your death out there.”

  That was something Mom said a lot too, so now I knew where’s she’d gotten the saying: You’ll catch your death. But that was the first time it sounded real. I threw my stick away and hurried to do as I’d been told. But as I walked back to those kitchen steps, I was sure something was slithering under the snow behind me. On my heels.

  Tracking me.

  “What kind of animals move under the snow?” I asked Uncle Ricky when I cornered him to myself. I’d spent most of the day like a mascot for the ongoing party, answering prying questions about Mom and Dad I was pretty sure Mom would not have wanted me discussing with Joe Louis or his wife or anyone else. (I figured out that part of the rift between Mom and Grandmother had to do with Mom having a baby—me.) The rest of the time I’d sat stiffly trying to pretend I wasn’t bored, since I was afraid Grandmother would confiscate my comic book if she saw me reading one. I was deep in my head, wondering about what I’d seen outside.

  Uncle Ricky reeked of grass when he finally emerged from his cabin. He gave me a red-eyed stare. “Oh, like mice?” Uncle Ricky said. “That’s all that was. You’ll see all kinds of mouse tunnels out there. That’s how they hide from foxes and such.”

  “Bigger than a mouse.”

  “Foxes, too,” he said, and my heart sped up. “They’ll sleep in the snow sometimes.”

  I was both intrigued and relieved. Now it was making sense. But I wanted to be sure.

  “Did you . . .”—I lowered my voice—“. . . chop off a racoon’s head with your axe?”

  I was sorry as soon as I asked, since he looked at me like I was smoking grass too. I went on: “So . . . that was probably a fox, then. Right? Hunting under the snow? Moving like a snake?”

  Uncle Ricky shook his head. “That’s not how foxes hunt. They leap up and dive—”

  Laughter swallowed whatever he’d been about to say. The group was moving toward the card table in the corner. “Come on over here, Ricky,” called a woman whose name I still don’t remember, but she was an opera singer. “You be on my team so Joe and Martha don’t clean our asses out.” She winked at me. “’Scuse my French, Johnny.”

  “Two people you never wanted to play cards with . . .” Grandmother began, and everyone fell silent, eager for one of Grandmother’s stories. “Billie Holiday, rest her troubled soul. And Clark Gable, that cheap SOB. I had to tell him, ‘You know you’re getting paid more for this picture than I am, don’t you?’” Everyone laughed, so I did too.

  “Were y’all just playing cards?” the opera singer teased, and Grandmother swatted her.

  “You should write a book, M,” Joe Louis’s wife said. “We keep telling you. You should have your own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It’s long overdue.”

  Grandmother made a motion to dismiss the thought, but her eyes twinkled with pleasure.

  “Spades or bid whist?” Uncle Ricky said.

  An argument ensued over which game to play while Grandmother fussed with her stereo console, fanning through a pile of records. Seeing her with her music reminded me that she’d taken my headphones. I sidled behind Uncle Ricky and whispered in his ear, “Can you ask her to give me my headphones back?”

  “She’ll give ’em back when she’s ready.” He sounded sorry, but not enough to help.

  I glanced up at Grandmother to see if she’d heard us, and she was staring right at me. Smiling, for a change. Her smile was cruelty, not comfort. Oh yes, she had heard.

  “How about Sam Cooke?” she called out. “I can’t stand this new music today. Just sounds like plain old noise.”

  Her friends agreed that Sam Cooke would be a wonderful choice. While Cooke sang “A Change is Gonna’ Come” and the card game was in full swing, I escaped to my room.

  The powder room wasn’t big enough to pace in, so I explored. Uncle Ricky had warned me not to open Grandmother’s bathroom door, but he hadn’t told me not to open the cabinet built into the wall under the vanity table. The tiny door was paint stuck, so I had to tug on it for a couple of minutes before it gave way and opened with a belch of musty air. Even the vanity lights couldn’t brighten it, so I grabbed my flashlight, crawling halfway in, which was as far as I could get. Three large filing crates were piled on each other, filled with yellowing pages. I skated my flashlight beam past those, looking for something more promising.

 

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