Bones of a Saint Page 4
I bend over out of sight behind the tub and grab one of the plastic bottles from the bag. Manny kicks me, and when I come back up three of his sisters have rounded the house and are heading for the screened porch. Two of them just keep going for the porch, but Theresa turns and walks at us, this big grin on her face. Her dark brown hair is razored bangs, not flared out like her wannabe disco sisters’.
“What are you guys doing?”
“Nothing.” I shrug.
“This area ain’t for girls,” Manny says.
She stops, but I think it’s more the smell and the sound of blood dripping than anything Manny says.
“I think it’s kinda cute,” she says.
“Cute?” Manny asks.
Theresa is about the last person who’d call a dead pig hanging from a tree dripping blood into a tub “cute.”
“Yeah. I think it’s cute the way you stand out here pretending you’re Nino-’n-Smitty. Ninito-y–little Smitty.” She turns, giggling, and heads for the house.
“We ain’t pretending nothing,” Manny calls.
I’m hypnotized by the way she walks and I can’t figure why I never noticed before the way her butt curves out like that, just below her bouncing ponytail.
“Why did you have to have a kid sister who is taller than us?”
“She’s only a year younger,” Manny says. “And no more than an inch taller. Anyway, it’s not her fault. Look at the flip side—it’s us who are shorter than her.”
“Now!” Manny elbows me. “No one is looking.”
I hold my breath and bend over the tub with the bottle. A couple of flies are sitting right on the scum. It’s kind of like scooping into a bowl of moldy red pudding. The scummy part sticks to my hands, and I almost gag as I stand up and take a breath. I bend down behind the tub and twist on the top. I don’t even bother to wipe off the bottle as I drop it in.
After the last bottle is filled, I shoulder the backpack and we beat it for the road, the bottles making thunking and swushing sounds.
With that high fog, there is no sunset. The light just kind of fades out and we’re walking along in the dark, not even knowing for how long. Then the fog starts to glow, like around the edges, and we know the full moon is creeping up over the hills.
“What’s the point of all this?” Manny asks. “Why the Blackjacks want to tag that old man’s house?”
“A warning, maybe.”
“Warning of what? What do you think they’ll do to him? . . . To us?”
“Don’t know.” I shrug. “Not even sure the Ace knows for sure. They’re just mean to be mean.”
“Yeah, I guess. But there’s got to be some kind of plan to it all.”
“I think this blood is more like a dog pissing to leave its mark. That old geeze has crossed some border with them. No more sense to it than that.”
“This is gonna sound weird, RJ, but I wish there was a plan to it. Then a guy knows what he’s up against.”
I don’t need a picture to know what the Blackjacks will do to us if we chicken out, but I’m seeing that old man’s red shriveled face and his hands twisted into claws. What will happen if he catches us?
“Let’s get Charley and get this over with.”
CHAPTER SIX
Creature
Manny is lugging the old backpack with the baby bottles filled with blood. The outline of his black tee bounces ahead of me almost like it’s day because the night is lunarnescent with the full moon shining through all that fog. I lug Charley.
We climb to the top of the hill and there it is. The lights are off and the windows stare up at us like bug eyes. All that fancy wood like on the porch and around the windows just sits there rotting like Tia Socorro’s teeth. Manny sets down the backpack. I set down Charley. All I can hear is our heavy breathing and the slosh of blood against plastic.
Manny stands there staring, so it’s up to me.
“Let’s do it.” I start down the hill. Charley can walk that far, at least. I don’t want his extra burden right then.
“So maybe the old man’s not asleep,” Manny whispers.
I don’t answer. The creature that opened the root cellar door on me didn’t look the type to sleep nights. I’m listening to the almost-sounds of that fog squeaking up under the warped shingles, sliding along the cracked paint, feeling up the oil casing on that broke-down tractor.
“This way.” I don’t like the idea, but the best way to sneak up to that house is between the root cellar and the outbuilding. We reach what’s supposed to be a barn. Sound drifts from somewhere on the other side. From that root cellar.
“What’s that?” Manny asks.
I stop at the corner. The noise is creepier than any fog. It’s the old man’s wobbly voice, about as cold and dry as that night is warm and wet. Some kind of chant or song. His voice cracking and wobbling and coughing. It’s not English or Spanish. The Church don’t do Latin no more, but that’s my guess. Then the sound stops.
I poke my head around the corner.
The cellar door is shut. The log is gone, replaced by a new latch with a big open padlock. Mumbling echoes inside the cellar. All a guy has to do is flick the latch back over the door and snap that lock. No problem. So why don’t I do it? Well, as long as he’s down there, maybe we don’t need to lock it. The only way to the house, though, is past that root cellar door.
“Manny, let me take the backpack.”
He’s glad to get rid of it.
We creep along, rubbing closer than the fog against that barn. What’s left of the paint flakes off against my shoulder. There’s this sweet scent coming from the cellar like from those gold things they swing around in church during slick, showtime Masses.
The chanting stops. We stop.
We creep around the far corner of the barn, facing the house. The front door is wide open, the fog sliding in and swirling around the front room. We creep up the front porch.
“Charley.” I kneel in front of him. He stares at me kind of droopy-eyed. “I want you to sit here on the porch and watch the corner of that barn. You can do that, can’t you?”
He nods.
“If anything comes around that corner, you ru . . . you move . . . as fast as you can into the house and tell us. I figure we can beat it out the back window. You can hop on my back, and we’ll outrun it. No problem.”
He sits on the edge of the porch, feet dangling, looking like a plaster angel set down there for decoration.
“Come on.” I lug the blood through the front door like it’s no big deal. Manny is close to breaking and I don’t want to show him I’m freaked, too. The furniture in the living room is big and old. Not lumpy-and-stained old. This is see-yourself-in-the-wood, antique, mucho dinero old. There’s fresh paint and varnish on the new stair rail and the hardwood. He must have paid a lot to have all this done, especially in such a short time. It’s like a whole amazing world built from that crumbling shell.
“Hurry, let’s get this over with,” I snap.
“I can’t do it,” Manny says.
“Don’t chicken out on me now.”
“No. I can’t.” He waves a bottle at me. “It ain’t coming out.”
I take a bottle. Squeeze. Nothing. “Shit. It’s gunky. Shake it.”
Finally, a little oozes out. And then it’s sort of squelching out in gooey threads.
Manny swirls his bottle in fast forward, waving it right where it’ll squirt blood across a Persian rug that must be worth more than we’ll see in our whole lives.
“What are you doing?” I hiss. “Squirt the wall.”
I start on a wall, making the sign as small as I figure would be a passing grade to the Ace. I don’t care how he’ll find out we’ve done the job, only that he will.
I hear the footsteps on the porch. It’s a klump-slide, klump-slide step, kind of like Charley�
��s. Only it’s something weighing a whole lot of Charleys.
I’m out the open back window, taking the screen with me. Manny is right behind. I’m halfway up the hill before it hits me that we ditched Charley. I stop, hands on knees, sucking air, Manny beside me.
“That old geeze, he’s got Charley. Shit, Manny, how could I chicken out like that?”
Manny is too winded to answer.
“I’m going back for my brother. You go on home. You done enough.” That’s all he needs to haul ass. And I don’t blame him.
I turn and walk back down the hill. The house is still dark. I sneak to a living room window and peek in. Charley lies curled up on the floor near the open front door. He looks dead. The old man sits on a chair, candlelight flickering across his face as he stares at my brother. He’s the oldest guy I ever seen. The skin is tight and thin and crinkled so that you don’t need X-rays to see his bones. I scope the claw hand. It really is a claw. Well, there are fingers and all, but they’re twisted just like a claw. He makes a funny whistling sound when he breathes. He wears a dark suit and tie. He just sits there watching poor Charley like he’s trying to decide, baked or fried?
Whatever this is, it’s more than some cranky-old-man-kid story. Time to grow up. So I stand, walk to the back door, and knock.
He opens the door.
“My name is Richard J. Armante,” I say in my in-your-face voice. “But guys just call me RJ.”
“John Leguin,” he says. “But you may call me Monsieur Leguin.”
He steps aside just like I’m dropping by for a Sanka. I step in, trying to look like that’s why I came, too. I’m making up a lame lie: Hey, mister, has my runaway brother come this way? Then that claw pinches my arm and leads me to a chair and I’m ready to spill my guts before the torture even gets to the part where he’ll rip off my fingernails. He sits down across from me with his cane across his lap like a shotgun. Charley just lies there.
“Your sentry fell asleep on the job.” He says it in a whispery whistle. “I believe you came back to save your brother.”
“Yeah.” I’m watching that blood drip down the wallpaper.
“That was a mistake,” he says.
“Didn’t have no choice,” I say.
“Indeed.” He presses the claws together in front of his lips, studying me real hard.
“How’d you know he was my brother?”
“Stands to reason.” His eyes are watery, like the blue is melting into the white.
“What now?” An old-people funk comes off that chair even over the fresh smells, so I sit on the edge.
“As a matter of fact, I had been about to ask you the same question.” The old man has an accent, like he speaks English too good for a normal person.
There’s that whistling again. It’s some kind of laugh. That makes me think of Mr. Sanders’s snorting. I feel ashamed, just thinking of what Mr. Sanders would have thought about what I’d done tonight. But if I clean it up, to the Ace it’ll be like I never done it.
“It’s got to be scrubbed down,” I say. “Then repainted, maybe. I won’t work at night.” Why am I saying this?
“Pull me up,” he says.
“What?”
“Give me your hand. Pull me up.”
I nearly puke as I reach out.
“Not my hand,” he says. “Grab my wrist.”
His hand grabs my wrist with hardly any squeeze, but there’s some power, so I can’t let go my grip. I pull him up real slow so that wrist won’t snap. It feels like the old broom handles with chicken skin hanging from them that Manny and me made for our haunted house a long time ago.
“Arthritis,” he says, still holding my wrist. “Tomorrow is not a school day?”
“Summer.”
“That’s fine. I will see you first thing.”
Finally, he lets go.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Claws
I’m kneeling on the hardwood, scrubbing and scrubbing, as the afternoon sun glows on the last of the blood. Leguin sits in his chair, the cane across his lap, melting blue eyes studying me. The Blackjacks will know I undone the tagging. They’ll make me pay as bad as if I never done it. I can’t think on that now.
“So, Mr. RJ Armante,” he says in that slick accent. “Does your mother know you’re here?”
“I’m way past caring what my mom thinks. Sort of.”
“Oh?”
“This is her day off, so she takes over the sibs. Lets me do what I want since I take care of them the rest of the time.”
“Take care of them?”
“Yeah, you know. Cook, change, clean.”
“Indeed.” The way he presses his fingers together in front of his lips, it’s like he’s doing that church-and-steeple rhyme.
Why would an old man who looks near dead gather all his stuff together and move to this lost valley? Into a broke-down farmhouse? In vampire movies, the creatures creep into a new village so they can find fresh blood to keep themselves alive. Well, the way Leguin is staring at me, I might be the fresh blood he’s hunting.
I wrap the scrub brush and rags in the drop cloth, all the time pretending I’m not watching as he grabs the armrests and sort of twists out of that chair like it’s a life-and-death thing.
I lug that gooey mess across the yard, feeling the old man staring at me from the porch. Finally, I’m around the back of the barn where he can’t see me. I dump the drop cloth beside the incinerator and sneak over to the root cellar. The door is padlocked, and there’s a red stain smeared against it. I walk back to the house like it’s no big deal. Leguin sits on the porch steps staring at me, his cane hooked over the rail, a wine bottle and two glasses next to him.
“Well, all done,” I say.
Leguin pats a spot on the steps, inviting me to sit, but I don’t.
“Young man, you owe me an explanation as to why you smeared pig’s blood in ungodly symbols across the walls of my home.”
How do I explain the Blackjacks?
“There ain’t no explaining what I did.” I try and give him the in-your-face look, but it won’t hold. I shrug. “It was just wrong. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, and you have atoned for your sin,” he says.
“Man, who are you to act like some priest hearing confession?”
“Who am I, indeed?”
I sit down on a lower step away from him.
“What are you waiting for?” He says. “Open the bottle. Pour the sherry.”
It’s cool the way he offers like it’s no big deal. Maybe I’ll just hang around for a sip. I pour us each a glass. Maybe Leguin is being what’s called tactful, having us sit out here. With all the blood on my clothes, he don’t want me sitting in that house.
“Cheers.” He can hardly hold the glass with his twisted fingers. He’s not so creepy in the sunlight, just a dried-up old man with a whole lot of pain eating away at him inside. But then, maybe it’s like that Jekyll-and-Hyde thing.
I take a sip, ready for fire. But that stuff is sickening sweet, like syrup.
He makes weird slurping sounds and then turns to me. “You have strong PMA, young man.”
“You would, too, if you’d been cleaning blood all day,” I say.
There’s that whistle laugh again. “PMA means positive mental attitude.”
“Yeah? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“A salesman must have a positive mental attitude in order to overcome the rejections.”
“Sounds like more than just salesmen need it,” I say.
“Indeed.”
“So, you were some kind of salesman, then?” Nothing in the house or in what he says gives anything away about him, so I figure I’ll sneak it out.
“I am . . . was . . . an insurance salesman.”
“You? An insurance salesman? Get outta here.”
“Don’t know about this vulgar, but selling insurance sounds cool.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Sort of living off your wits, if you know what I mean.”
“Indeed.” Leguin does that finger-steeple thing every time he says this.
“Yeah, I guess. What kind of insurance did you sell?” My clothes are stiff and sticky, and I’m mostly thinking about how to get out of here to get home and get them off and bury them for good.
“Life. I took great pride in that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. You must believe in a product in order to sell it effectively.” The old man hacks, and I wait for him to hock a loogie, but he’s too polite. “Life insurance is the one form of insurance that is guaranteed to pay off.” I’m not sure if he’s laughing or coughing. Either way, it sounds like it’ll kill him.
“That a joke?”
“Unfortunately, there is . . .” He sucks a couple deep breaths. “. . . there is one negative to being a life insurance salesman. One must inevitably dwell upon the morbid.” The longer he talks, the more that weird accent sneaks in, kind of like that funky black-and-white Dracula.
“Morbid?”
“You, child, will make a fine life insurance salesman.”
“Thanks . . .” I don’t know what to say. It’s not like being a fireman or an astronaut. “So, I suppose you learned about this PMA stuff from some book.”
“Why do you sneer, child? You don’t believe there’s anything to be learned from books?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m gonna write a book myself someday. Sort of a life story. Only I’ll put in lots of made-up stuff, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And I wouldn’t even feel bad about slipping in that made-up stuff, ’cause when it comes right down to it, made-up parts have the most for reals in them.”
“Perhaps you would like to practice.”
“What?”
“I would enjoy hearing one of these . . . tales. A childhood memoir, perhaps.”