Wild Things Read online

  “So?”

  “You gamble?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Everybody gambles.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Like when you used to cut people open, you always knew exactly how everything was going to work out.”

  Henry started to say something but then stopped and said, “Point taken.”

  “So, is it a bet?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Come on. Where’s your sense of adventure?” I asked, climbing up two shelves to get the box of tissues with yellow butterflies on it.

  Henry plucked me down, set me on the floor, snatched the box from my hand, and put it in the cart. “Do you ever let anybody do anything for you?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I depend on myself, that’s why,” I said, “and don’t change the subject. I won five hundred dollars at the track before I was seven.”

  “What track?”

  “The racetrack. When I was living in New York with Mama and Manny. Manny said I knew how to pick ’em. I won nearly two thousand dollars total, the trifecta twice. Course, Manny had to place the bets for me, ’cause I wasn’t old enough.”

  “Or tall enough to reach the window,” he said. “So tell me, have you had kids yet?”

  “I’m waiting till I’m married.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “So, is it a bet?”

  “What did you do with all your money?”

  “Spent it.”

  “On what?”

  “Things,” I told him. Most of my winnings had gone to pay past-due bills and rent on places one step up from a dump. Not to mention what Mama and her friends had “borrowed” from me before I’d learned to hide my winnings better. “I’ve always paid my own way, so don’t worry.”

  Henry stared at me as if he was trying unsuccessfully to add me up on his mental calculator. “You said this fifty-dollar cat is a he. How do you know?”

  “Double or nothin’?”

  “How?” he insisted.

  “You don’t need to get close. Just like you don’t need to get close to a man or a woman to tell which is which.”

  “I’ve been fooled on occasion.” He lifted his eyebrows and made a you-wouldn’t-believe-some-of-the-things-I’ve-seen face, and I had to chuckle.

  Our conversation had attracted the attention of other shoppers. A good-sized crowd had gathered at one end of the aisle. They were craning around the canned goods, whispering to each other. The pitying way they looked at me was familiar, but I had the impression from how they looked at Henry that they didn’t know what to make of him at all.

  “Why are they staring at us like that?” I whispered.

  “Small town,” Henry said. “Fred usually does the shopping.”

  “Who’s Fred?”

  “You’ll meet him tomorrow. He helps me take care of things around the place.”

  I turned to the people at the end of the aisle and shouted, “Y’all don’t have to worry. He’s not dangerous during the day.”

  For the first time since I’d met Henry Royster, he smiled, showing a gap between his two front teeth exactly like mine.

  “I’ll be,” I said, staring at it. “We really are related.”

  The other shoppers looked away or wandered off, their invisible tails between their legs, except for one old lady in a black-and-white-striped dress who stood her ground, skunk-like.

  Henry swore under his breath, full serious again.

  I made a U-turn and headed for the detergents, Henry hard behind. “Extra strength,” I said, looking at his nasty jeans.

  He reached absently for an orange plastic bottle on the middle shelf, but I whispered, “They test on animals. Blue bottle,” and pointed to a brand on a lower shelf. Henry obliged.

  “You like animals,” he said, some warmer.

  “Their love’s purer,” I said.

  “Than?”

  “People’s. That’s what Mrs. King used to say.”

  “Mrs. King?”

  “She’s who taught me to read and write, and other things too, till her heart gave out. Lived next door to me and Lester.”

  “Lester?”

  “Lester’s who took care of me and Mama before Manny. I’m writing it all down in my memoir.”

  “Aren’t you a little young to write your life story?”

  “A lot’s happened to me! Besides, I used to read them all the time to Charlie’s mama. She was blind. Mrs. King taught me reading, but Charlie’s mama was how I got good at it. Memoirs and murder mysteries were her favorites. She said her life was dull as red dirt and she lived life through people in books.”

  “Who’s Charlie?”

  “Charlie mowed people’s yards. He was Mama’s boyfriend between Manny and Harlan, who was her next to last. Harlan fixed cars and taught me to drive, stick, standard, and column. Want me to drive home? I’m good at it.”

  “Next to last?” Henry asked.

  “Before Ray. Ray was Mama’s last boyfriend. My keeper before you.”

  Henry frowned at Ray’s name. Ray had that effect on people, especially me. I was glad Henry didn’t ask any more.

  We came out of the aisle and saw the other shoppers gabbing near the checkout. Skunk Woman stood in front. Madame Buttinsky, I thought, Nosy Parker Club President.

  “Everything all right, Doctor?” she said crisply, emphasis on the word Doctor. “It’s been some time since we’ve seen you in town.” She studied us up and down the way a mean mama would look at her kids. “We’re all sorry for your loss, dear,” she went on, shifting her disapproval to me and not sounding sorry one bit.

  “Mrs. Wilson,” Henry said stiffly. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “This is my niece, Zoë. She’s come to live with me.”

  Mrs. Wilson looked as though she thought this an extremely questionable idea.

  “Nice of him, too,” I told her, “seeing how I’ve served hard time.”

  Henry squeezed my shoulder till it hurt, but I didn’t let on. I wouldn’t have given him or Skunk Woman the satisfaction.

  “I see that mendacity and smart tongues run deep in the Royster family,” said Mrs. Wilson, “alongside promiscuity and godless ways.”

  I could’ve spit fire. “I know what those words mean, you cussed old—” I said, fixing to tell her where she could stick her opinions, but Henry cut me off.

  “We’ll be going now, Mrs. Wilson. My regards to Dr. Wilson,” he said, scooping me up under one stinky armpit and rushing me and the cart toward the checkout.

  “You gonna take that from her?” I shouted. “She called us tramps and liars!”

  “Zip it,” was all he said.

  Make me, would’ve been the next words out of my mouth, but his sharp tone seemed like the fuse on a stick of dynamite I didn’t want to light.

  We rode back to Henry’s without talking, both of us stewing. I was too mad and tired to care which of his bad moods Henry was in or why. He had to be the moodiest person I’d ever met, Mama and her friends included.

  I thought about all the Mrs. Wilsons I’d known, all the busy-bodies who’d wanted to say who was fit to raise me and who wasn’t, always turning up their noses at me and my life. If Henry held such views, at least he kept them to himself. He slipped a CD in the dash—a slow, suffering kind of music with no singing. He turned it up loud.

  I took the hint and looked out the truck window, taking in Sugar Hill in all its squalor, no sweetness in sight. Mama and I’d lived in a dozen towns just like it, towns that except for a couple of fast-food places or a car dealership didn’t look like part of the twenty-first century. Block after block, storefronts stood empty, with dusty For Rent signs hanging crooked in the windows or doors. Here and there, a laundromat or pawnshop or liquor store struggled between the ramshackle houses and dusty yards of the dirt poor and always tired. There were little markets or tiendas with handwritten specials in the windows. Kids ra
n through sprinklers to keep cool or played in the street after the cars passed, and older folks gathered on corners or porches waiting for the sun to go down and take the heat with it. More than a few people smiled and waved happily at the sight of Henry, but Henry was too inside his own head to see. Put out as I was at Henry, I liked that he was friendly with the have-not side of town.

  We passed the lawyers’ offices that divided the poor and rich neighborhoods. Beyond them, bigger houses had shady patios and screened porches. Flowers spilled from hanging baskets, and the shrubbery was shorn into perfect rounds or squares. A mile later we were in the country, headed back to Henry’s.

  Thank the Lord the phone rang as we were putting away the groceries, and Henry stormed down the hall to his study to answer it. I climbed the kitchen stepladder and took down two bowls, then filled one with cat food and one with water. I slipped an aluminum pie plate under my arm like a Frisbee and carried it and the bowls outside. The heavy summer darkness oozed over the yard like molasses. I welcomed the end of this particular day.

  I set the bowls on the stoop and filled the pie plate with water from the spigot on the house. I carried it carefully to a low, wooden crate I’d set sideways at the edge of the yard and put it inside. Then I went back for the two bowls and placed the food bowl inside the pie plate the way Mrs. King had taught me. The water in the pie plate made a moat around the food bowl and kept the ants out.

  “If you don’t like that kind, I’ll get you something else,” I said in the direction of the weeds. “Just don’t eat it and I’ll know.” I kept my voice soft and moved slowly. If I spooked or startled him now, he might never trust me. I felt him watching me, but I couldn’t pick him out in the darkness. “You’re a good hider. That’s important.”

  “Zoë!”

  Henry’s heavy boots clomped on the porch floorboards. The porch bulb snapped on, flooding the yard with light. Henry Royster, one-man herd of rhinos. He stood on the steps, hands on his hips, shouting that there were sandwiches in the refrigerator. I adjusted my eyes to the glaring brightness, then stepped into the light, waving both arms over my head so he’d know I was all right. I didn’t want him thundering out here, scaring the wildlife for twenty miles. The phone rang again, and I was glad he headed back inside.

  “Don’t worry, I’m working on him,” I whispered to the weeds, and walked back to the house to turn off that obnoxious light.

  I flipped the switch, and the night came back, soft and restful. Once my eyes readjusted to the dark, I looked up to see stars burning bright overhead. Stargazing would be one good thing about living out here in the country with Henry, I thought, imagining Orion buckling on his sparkly belt before the night’s hunt and the big and little bear swimming together around the planets.

  As I came in, I heard Henry talking on the phone in his study.

  “She’s outside taking food to an imaginary cat she bet me fifty dollars is living out there in the grass…. Don’t you think I’d know if a cat was living out there? … What do you mean by that?… Well, Fred, I never knew you thought I was such a dimwitted old fool….”

  I smiled at this as I climbed the stairs, catching a glimpse of Henry surrounded by a desk littered with papers and floor-to-ceiling walls of books. Next to animals, I loved books more than anything, and for a minute I imagined myself staying in this place, so big and different from the stuffy apartments, cramped houses, and tin-can trailers I’d lived in before. I imagined having my very own room instead of a sleeping bag or a made-up sofa, a book I could keep longer than two weeks if I wanted, and a grown-up smarter than I was in the house. I imagined having all that for a whole minute before I remembered what it felt like to hope for things I’d never get. I pushed the wanting away as hard as I could.

  “Night, Uncle Henry,” I called.

  I got into my new bed with my clothes on, too tired to undress. I took my spiral notebook from the table drawer and made a few notes for my memoir. Too weary for fine words, I wrote, “Uncle Henry’s got a big bug up his butt, but it’s a more interesting bug than most.”

  A second later, Henry knocked.

  “Come on in,” I called, slipping the notebook under the covers. It was strange to have my very own door and a grown-up, however bad-tempered, with the manners to knock.

  “I came to say good night,” he said from the doorway. I recognized the heaviness in his voice. Weight crept into all their voices once they’d had a taste of parenting and got to thinking how much work and responsibility a kid was, how much of their precious time I was going to suck up, how I’d hold them back, mess up their plans, how I didn’t have an off switch they could flip every time they wanted to get on with their screwed-up lives. Usually the heaviness took a week or so to seep in, but our meeting in a mental ward, burying Mama, and running into Skunk Woman had made the last two days more trying than most.

  “Night, Uncle Henry,” I said again.

  “I have to see to a few things tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be leaving well before you’re up and late coming back.”

  My heart fluttered. I breathed deep and tried to calm it, but when the heart knows the truth there’s no telling it lies. That was just the kind of thing they all said before takeoff, stage one in the ditch-the-kid countdown. Three: The lame excuse announcing the all-day or all-night errand. Two: The weeklong trip to help a needy friend or tend a dying relation. One: The job out of state that would take as long as it took. Then blastoff.

  “It can’t be helped,” Henry said, looking out my window at the night.

  Can’t look me in the eye, I thought, another telling sign. “Whatever,” I said.

  “Fred’ll come as soon as he can get here in the morning. He and his wife, Bessie, live up the road, and he helps me around here. I’ll leave his phone number on the kitchen table.”

  Sure you will, I thought.

  Henry stood in the doorway, backlit by the hall light. He seemed to be trying to think of something else to say, something to make both of us feel easier about things.

  “I’m used to it,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “To people coming and going,” I said. “To being on my own. Been on my own pretty much my whole life. After a while, you get used to it, even get to liking it.”

  Another long silence. Henry bowed his head and I heard his breathing, felt him turning over what I’d said in his mind.

  “Bull,” he said, and shut the door behind him.

  2

  I woke up early the next morning, but not early enough. I raced to the landing windows overlooking the front yard. The sun barely haloed the treetops, but Henry’s pickup was already gone.

  I headed downstairs in the humid near-dark wearing the clothes I’d slept in. The stairs dipped in the middle with the wear of years, and I closed my eyes and thought about their history. Henry’s mama and daddy had lived here, and more of our kin before that. I pictured generations of my relations climbing up and down: young and old, red-haired, gap-toothed, and pigheaded.

  In the kitchen I filled a big mug halfway with coffee, lifted the chipped lid off the sugar bowl, and put in my customary eight spoonfuls. Then I filled the cup the rest of the way with milk. Henry had set a place for me with a bowl and spoon, a box of raisin bran, and—wonder of wonders—a note with Fred’s phone number. Back tonight, it said. He’d signed his whole name, Henry Royster, and then he’d crossed out Royster and wedged Uncle in front of Henry.

  I found my turkey sandwich from the night before in the refrigerator, wrapped it in a napkin, and took it with my coffee to look around. There’d been no time for exploring yet. You can tell a lot about people by studying how they live, and today I aimed to nose around in case Henry came back.

  Unlike other places I’d lived, Henry’s house had lots of windows and good light. Mama’d lived in the dark, like a mole. When she wasn’t in the hospital or working some scrape-by job, she’d kept to her bedroom during the day with the shades drawn and the door locked. Once in a while I
honestly forgot she was there. I’d be reading or drawing in whatever corner of the place was mine, and suddenly she’d shuffle by, thin and pale and red-eyed in her dirty nightgown and bedroom slippers, her hair mashed flat on one side and her dark roots showing. A few minutes later she’d shuffle back the other way, ghostlike, which is how I came to think of her. She’d whisper “Hey, baby” as she passed, if she noticed me at all. The only times she’d put on a little makeup and come to life was at night or between boyfriends. Once she’d snagged a man, she bothered less and less till he was gone.

  Lester was the first live-in I remember, though I have hazy memories of other suckers before that. He worked hard, sometimes ten and twelve hours a day, but the center of his at-home universe was a recliner and a color TV ringed with overflowing ashtrays, a twelve-pack or more of crumpled beer cans, and assorted bags of pretzels, popcorn, and corn chips—his idea of a high time.

  The only thing bigger than Manny’s TV were his stereo speakers. Our neighbors in the apartments on either side were always banging on our walls and yelling for him to pipe down, which he did, but only to make bets or order pizza. Every inch of the living room was papered in sports sections and racing forms, balled up or torn to confetti when he lost, which was most of the time.

  Harlan and Charlie were champion sleepers, twelve to fourteen hours a day if they could manage it, which was the only way anybody could spend quality time with Mama. Ray was a shedder. Everything lay exactly where he took it off or tired of it, like a snake slithering out of its skin.

  But Henry’s house was clean and airy, with none of the trash I was used to and no TV in sight. Bedsheets covered the sofa, chairs, tables, lamps, and cardboard boxes in the closed-off front room.

  The front hallway told me that a working man lived here. A sledgehammer leaned against the wall at the foot of the stairs with a cardboard box of nuts and bolts beside it. Grimy work clothes hung on pegs, and a line of scuffed and muddy boots sat underneath, all smelling of grease and sweat, the smell of every man who’d cared for me since I was a tiny child. But Henry’s likeness to them stopped there. The sun was up by now, and I went back up the stairs, studying the pictures that lined the walls and thinking Henry was like no working man I’d ever known.