52
The teacher arced the ax over and down with a grunt, and as the whistling of the dull blade reached Tony’s ears, Tony threw herself backward in a violent tumble, over the sagging straw bale and to the shadowed floor behind. The ax-head bit into the straw, a solid whack that split the top half in two.
“Shit!” Tony rolled to her side, scrambled to her feet. The teacher shook the ax like a rabid dog with a groundhog, and pulled it out of the straw. She lifted it up again, both her sweating torso and the old blade catching firelight briefly. The eyes again, cold and terrible.
“Back off!” screamed Tony.
The teacher walked around the straw bale, her footsteps rhythmic, robot-like. The ax held position over her head. Tony scrabbled back, slipping in the loose straw, her hands going before her face. “No!”
The teacher’s lips opened and closed, speaking something Tony couldn’t hear, and then the ax came down again. Tony flopped to the right and the ax struck dead center of the straw where she’d been. Tony scooted away on her knees, panting, snatching for the ax handle before the teacher could wrench it free of the floor.
“Bitch! You fucking shit-brain!” Tony caught the slick wood of the handle, the sporadic splinters, but the teacher threw out her foot and caught Tony in the shoulder, knocking her away. Tony lost her breath, caught it, skidding in the needle-sharp straw. The teacher grinned, the flickering fire-glow twisting her face into myriad subhuman shapes. She raised the ax and stepped forward.
Tony scooted back on the floor, head reeling. “Don’t kill me, you goddamn bitch! Teachers don’t kill kids!” The teacher smiled. Tony shoved herself to her feet, ducking just in time to miss the blade as it swung at her head.
The teacher stumbled then, the blow connecting with nothing but air, and she took several weird, skipping steps forward. Air hissed through her teeth with the sound of a car radiator about to blow. Tony shouted, “Ha!” and threw the whole of her weight against the woman. Tony and the teacher sprawled to the floor, Tony on top of the woman, the woman cracking into a stall door. Tony dove for the ax handle, her fingers catching it and locking tightly. She yanked with all her strength, knees bearing down in the straw, body throwing itself back. But the teacher’s grasp didn’t loosen. She yelped, planted her foot on Tony’s chest, and kicked her away. She then sat up and waved the ax.
“Stop it!” Tony cried. “Crazy ass shit!”
Still seated, the teacher swung the ax in evenly measured side sweeps, like a farmer wielding a scythe. Back and forth, swoosh, swoosh, daring Tony to step up and loose her feet from the rest of her body. As the ax kept up its steady sweeps, the teacher braced herself against the stall door and pushed herself, slowly and steadily, to her feet.
“Back off!” screamed Tony. She looked behind her, her eyes probing the darkness for the pitchfork, the saw, something. Something to kill the teacher. Something to save herself.
Baby Doll. Tony saw the little girl lying on the floor, her head cradled in the balled-up sweatshirt. Baby Doll!
Tony scooted around the fire-bearing wheelbarrow and dropped down by the child. She picked her up and held her to her chest. So I catch what she’s got, Tony thought. Small price.
The teacher was fully on her feet now, turning like a Disney animatron toward Tony and Baby Doll. She strode forward, and stopped. The ax held position over her head.
“Kill me, kill us both,” said Tony simply.
“Let her go,” the teacher growled.
“Kill me, kill us both.”
Baby Doll opened her eyes. She squinted at Tony, then into the shadows beyond the teacher. “Mama had a baby,” she whispered.
The teacher stared.
“Put it the fuck down,” said Tony.
“I – ” began the teacher.
“I ain’t letting her go, bitch.”
The teacher tilted her head, shut her eyes, opened them, and said, “What?”
“Huh?” echoed Baby Doll.
Tony said nothing. She counted. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven….
The teacher looked at Baby Doll, then Tony, then her own upraised arms and the ax handle she clutched. “I…?”
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen….
A strange gasping sound from the teacher. Her mouth opening, snapping shut. The body wavering slightly, the muscles of the arms twitching within the flesh.
Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven….
“Ah,” said the teacher. Her tongue appearing briefly at the front of her mouth, disappearing. The ax, still in place overhead, a deadly torch in the hands of a mad Lady Liberty.
There was a rustling sound to Tony’s right. She glanced over the same moment the teacher did. There were wide, iridescent eyes in the dark, a crouched body in the straw.
The teacher whooped, spun on her toe, and brought the ax down in a powerful strike. The blade connected, cut through, slammed to a stop in the floor.
The cat’s head rolled lazily through the straw and came to stop against Tony’s boot.
Baby Doll stared at it. She reached out one clammy hand to touch the furry ears, the glistening eyes.
And for the first time on the entire, nightmarish trip, the little girl screamed.
53
She remembered.
There was a train track running behind the brick apartment building they lived in when they were in Kentucky. It passed behind the apartment’s playground, separated from the children by a tall, chain link fence and a steep embankment. The train didn’t come by often, several times a week, and it was a slow-moving thing most of the time. Once, when Mistie had been in the playground with Mama and Valerie, Mama had watched the train go by and said, “That thing moves like a old man who crapped his drawers!” She’d laughed. Mistie, who had been five at the time, had laughed. Little Valerie, who was two and a half, had giggled shrill and loud.
There were a lot of children at the apartment building, three stories’ worth of them, and in the summer time the playground was crawling with them because nobody had air-conditioning in their apartments. Mistie didn’t remember the names of any of the children who were there, but she remembered the faces, dark and light, chubby and thin, smiling and somber. Every morning of the summer they were there, clustering on the sliding board and cluttered atop the spin-around like Japanese beetles on a rose. They played in the baking-hot sandbox and threw balls at each other until someone finally cried and the mothers told them to be good or they’d have to go inside.
Nobody had any money, much. The mothers and older sisters who sat in the shade of the single tree in the playground were always saying something like that to each other.
“Wish I could get a new car. Not a new one, but a different one. Got a busted transmission in mine and I can’t afford a cab to work.”
“School’s comin’ up next month. You ever see a kid with bigger feet than Justin’s? Bought him new shoes in June and now he’s needin’ ‘em again for school.”
“Randolphs got a window air unit. Gonna run their ‘lectric bill up but damn, I wish it was me!”
“Me, too, sister, me, too.”
And on it went.
It was mid-August, and after suppertime. Some of the kids had come back down to play while others were settled in their living rooms in front of their televisions. From the playground the blue glows of the sets were visible through the open windows.
Mistie’s Mama was lying down on her bed because she just found out she was going to have another baby and wasn’t happy about it. She told Daddy she was going to get her tubes tied after this one was born. Mistie didn’t know what that meant but it sounded bad because Mama had said it through her teeth. Daddy was pissed off and went riding in their Buick. Mama sent Mistie and Valerie out the play on the playground for a while.
“You stay in there and don’t go no-wheres else,” said Mama from her bed. Mistie and Valerie were standing in the doorway to her bedroom, each holding a fruit roll-up left over from supper. “I can trust you to do what I say, can’t I, Mistie?”
Mistie nodded. “Yeah, Mama,” she said.
“When I call you out this window you come runnin’, you hear me? Anybody bother you, you come right back up here, you and Valerie, you hear me?”
“Yeah, Mama, okay.”
“Okay, then.” Mama smiled a little and said, “You’re my girls. Watch that slide now, you know how hot it gets in the sun. Burn the skin off the back of your legs you aren’t careful.”
“Okay, Mama.”
Mistie took Valerie by the hand and led her down to the first floor and then back through the hallway to the rear door of the building. Flies loved the back hall of the first floor because just outside the door was where the residents put their bags and cans of garbage when the Dumpsters where full. The Dumpsters were usually full.
Valerie giggled as several flies found her eyelashes.
“Hey, flies!” demanded Mistie. She flicked her hand at Valerie’s face, sending them in a whirl. Mama had spray she could put on the kids to keep the flies and bugs off, but she had forgotten, and Mistie knew it wasn’t time to go back and ask for it.
Outside, it wasn’t quite as hot as it had been in the afternoon. It was still light, and the sun was visible beyond the railroad track, sitting atop a distant warehouse like a cat on a fence post.
Mistie put Valerie on the spin-around and pushed it slowly in a circle. Valerie giggled and tried to stand up, but flopped over and laughed again. Then Mistie pushed off and jumped aboard, and the sisters went round and round, looking up at the clouds, watching them spin, too.
The garbage truck came up beside the playground with a hiss and a sound of scraping metal. Some of the little boys stopped to watch, but Mistie only looked at it, then back at Valerie, who was heading for the sliding board.
“Hot, Valerie!” Mistie warned. “Don’t burn your legs!”
The garbage truck’s steel arms lifted the three Dumpsters in turn, the contents dropping into the huge maw on its back. Then the driver climbed out and opened the gate to the playground and strode to the back door where the extra bags and cans were strewn. He complained loud enough for everyone to hear, though it didn’t seem like anyone cared much.
“Put the trash where it belongs next time! I don’t get paid extra to lug this stinking crap to my truck!”
One of the teenaged baby-sitters, under the tree with a boyfriend, said loud enough for the trash man to hear, “You come when you’re supposed to it wouldn’t get all overflowing like that!”
No more words were exchanged. The garbage truck wheezed and thumped, then drove away.
Mistie went to the sand box while Valerie sat on the bottom of the slide and tried to catch a fly. The sand box was fun, except when one of the stray cats of the neighborhood used it as a litter box. Mistie found a cracked plastic shovel and she began to make a castle. The sand at the top was dry and didn’t stick together, but the sand underneath was damp from old rains and stuck together really good. Mistie dug up the wet sand and used her hands to claw all around to make the castle moat. She’d seen a T.V. show where a queen lived in a castle and the castle had a moat around it, full of snakes and snapping turtles and other things with teeth. It was a funny show, a cartoon, and the prince was so clumsy he kept falling into the moat and the queen kept pulling him out with her silk curtains. After the moat, Mistie formed the castle. A bucket would have been good to use, one little girl who played in the sand box a lot had a bucket but she’d taken it in. Mistie had to use her hands. But patiently she scooped and patted, pausing on occasion to pick a stone from outside the sand box to decorate the walls. Some dandelions grew in a grassy path by the sandbox; Mistie popped off the yellow blossoms and covered the top of the castle with them. She sat back on her heels and smiled.
“Valerie, look!” she said, turning toward the slide.
Valerie was not on the bottom of the slide. Mistie hopped to her feet, brushed sand off her knees and her bottom, and glanced around. She didn’t see Valerie.
“Valerie?”
She trotted over to the slide and looked at the ladder, but her sister wasn’t there, neither was she sitting in the shade beneath the slide.
Mistie stomped her foot. “Valerie, quit hiding from me!”
Up the bank behind the playground, a lazy freight train ambled by, clacking and clicking. Mistie called over the noise to the baby-sitter under the tree.
“Have you seen Valerie?”
The baby-sitter waved her over, unable to hear over the noise. “What did you say?” said the girl, squinting in the sun. Her boyfriend had his arm around her waist.
Mistie felt funny now. Her mouth was dry and her chest felt like someone was jumping up and down on it. “Have you seen Valerie?”
The baby-sitter took a drag on her cigarette and passed it to her boyfriend. “Valerie? That little girl with hair like yours? No.”
“She’s my sister.”
“So?” said the boyfriend around the smoke. “You lose your sister, that’s your problem, not ours.”
The baby-sitter shrugged like she agreed with the boyfriend. Mistie spun on her toe and looked at all four corners of the playground. Amid the few other children, there was no Valerie.
Then she saw the open gate. The garbage man had come for the trash, but had left the chain-link gate wide open. Mistie ran for the gate, laced her fingers through the wire and stared at the lot where the Dumpsters and the cars were parked. “Valerie!” she called. “You get yourself back here or we’re gonna get a whippin’!”
Valerie didn’t jump up, laughing, from behind a car. She didn’t peer, grinning and giggling, from behind a Dumpster. Mistie went out in the lot, her heart pounding now so hard she could hear it in her ears and feel it in her neck. The lot was hot, still steaming from the afternoon sun; starlings pecked at the dust and squawked at each other.
“Valerie, damn it, come here!” Mistie used her Daddy’s word. Daddy could get Valerie to behave when nobody else could. But Valerie didn’t come.
Mistie walked across the lot to the grassy embankment. The train had gone on, leaving only its echo. Mistie grabbed hold of brittle bank-side chicory and pulled herself to the track. “Valerie!” She was sweating, and her hair was flat against her neck, but under her skin she felt a quick, passing chill, like the ones she got the moment she hopped out of her evening bath.
Up the line there was a curve where the track rounded to the right behind a five-story cold storage building. Down the line it ran straight for a pretty long ways between rows of other apartment buildings toward the center of the city. Mistie walked up the center of the track, trying to pace her steps with the awkwardly-spaced wooden slats. She’d never seen things from this vantage point before; the playground seemed smaller, its grass more spotty and brown. At the bottom of the other side of the embankment, a stream trickled over rocks and broken glass. There were small houses on that side, each with their own fenced yards, clotheslines, doghouses.
“Valerie!”
Mistie held her arms out for balance and walked toward the curve in the track. Mama was not just going to spank them, she was going to take away T.V. for a long time, and Daddy was going to yell really loud and maybe jerk Mistie’s hair like he did before. Maybe Daddy would call the police to come put the two girls in jail. Daddy said police did that to bad little girls who didn’t do what they were told. Mistie’s eyes welled up at the thought of jail.
She heard a child giggle, and she stopped in her tracks to look down in the direction of the sound. It was a little boy in his backyard, teasing his puppy with a stick. Mistie said, “Shut up!” to the boy.
“You shut up!” called the boy.
Rounding the curve, Mistie could see the track stretching straight again, reaching out to the end of the city. The embankment was taller here, sloping sharply a good twenty-five feet, and covered with gravel instead of grass. The rear lot of the cold storage building was littered with cans and papers and what looked like little balloons. Rusted trash barrels stood upright and lay on their sides. The building’s windows were cracked and some were missing the glass entirely. A pile of old clothes lay against one of the upright barrels near the foot of the embankment.
Mistie lost her footing on the slats and stumbled, then caught herself before slipping on the edge of the embankment. She wiped her nose then sneezed in a sudden whirlwind of dust. “Valerie! Mama’s gonna be so mad! Where are you?”
She walked a few more yards down the track and stopped. She turned about, hands on hips, staring down both sides of the embankment. The little boy was still playing with his puppy.
“Hey!” yelled Mistie. “You see a little girl?”
“No!” called the boy. “And I said shut up!”
Mistie looked down at the trash barrels in the back lot of the cold storage building. Maybe Valerie was hiding inside one of the ones that was lying on its side. Back in the apartment, Valerie was always getting into the lower cabinets when Mama left them unlatched. Sitting on her butt, Mistie slid down the gravel with her hands pressed into the gravel so she would slide too fast. Her palms were cut on jagged pieces of the rock, and at the bottom she paused to spit on them and wipe the off. There were little bits of skin peeled up and little red lines of blood. It hurt, but not as bad as the whipping if she couldn’t find Valerie. Her shorts were traced in oil and tar.
“Valerie!” Her voice was wobbly now. She knew she was going to cry and didn’t want to. What she wanted was for her bratty baby sister to quit being a baby and hiding when she knew it was time to be home.
Mistie squatted down and peered inside one of the rusted barrels. There was nothing in there but spiders’ webs and a rat’s nest. She looked in another and found the same. “Yuck!” she said, shivering. She hated spiders.
She looked at the pile of old discarded clothes over by one of the upright barrels. Who would leave their clothes here? Daddy said some boys and girls did a dirty thing where people couldn’t see them. The dirty thing meant they took off their clothes. Maybe boys and girls took off their clothes here. But they would get spiders on them, Mistie thought. And the people on the train could look down and see them.
She walked over, her feet slowing as she got closer, because something was odd, something was wrong. Something was familiar.
There were jeans, yes, big old jeans from some man maybe, and a torn blouse and boys’ underpants. There was a blanket that was crusted with months’ worth of dried, dirty rain. And there was something else, lumped up, twisted and crumpled, a white shirt drenched in red; a pair of blue shorts.
Mistie began to breathe through her mouth, short, puffy breaths that hurt her throat and her lungs. She couldn’t blink. Her arms stung with dread.
Ah, no no….
She stopped at the pile and knelt. She touched the back of the tee-shirt and found there to be a body within, and the body was warm. She reached over for the little arms that protruded from the sleeves, and rolled the body over. Legs flopped like little rubber dog toys, and one of the sandals was gone from the foot. The arms and legs were raked with scratches.
Mistie stared. The air around her went dark and poisonous. She put her hands to her mouth, trying to cry, trying to speak, trying to shout to Valerie to get up get up now quit playing this stupid game with me!
Valerie wasn’t getting up. Her head was gone.
Mistie found the head in some brush near the embankment. The eyes were open; the neck was ripped and ragged. Mistie cradled it in her arm and crawled back up to the tracks. She took it home, hoping Mama could fix it. Mama could put it back. Mama could make it right. And that Mama wouldn’t spank too very hard.