And then what? What was I going to tell him? That I was afraid a cruel man with tattoos had engineered a fire and a power outage so he could take Polaroids of a senile old woman? Let me tell you how that would look: like a fat kid with a headful of horror movies getting hysterical because of a little thunder and lightning.
I wondered if I could just stay home. I don’t like admitting that, but it crossed my mind that Mr. Beukes would never really know if I’d walked over to watch his wife. Yeah, sure, in a couple of hours he would get back from his gym and I wouldn’t be there. But I could always bullshit him, say I’d only gone home for a minute to get my pillow and was coming right back.
The idea briefly filled me with a shameful throb of relief. I could stay home, and if the Phoenician came and did something to Shelly—something awful—I wouldn’t be in the way and wouldn’t have to know. I was only thirteen, and no one could expect me to try to protect a mentally crippled old woman from a sadistic freak with a mile of ink on his body.
I was afraid to go—but in the end I was even more afraid to stay. I envisioned Mr. Beukes coming home and finding Shelly toppled out of bed, her neck snapped, head turned halfway around to look back between her shoulder blades. When I closed my eyes, I could see it: her lips wrinkled in a grimace of terror and anguish, her stiffening corpse surrounded by hundreds of Polaroid snapshots. If the Phoenician visited her while I cowered at home, I might be able to lie my way out of it with Mr. Beukes. But I could not lie my way out of it with myself. The guilt would be too much. It would rot my insides and spoil every good thing in my life. Worst of all, I felt that my dad would somehow intuit my cowardice and I’d never be able to look him in the eye again. He would know I hadn’t really gone to watch Mrs. Beukes. I’d never been any good at lying to him, not about anything that mattered.
One idea got me into my pants and out the door. I thought maybe I could just creep up to the house and peek in the windows. If Mrs. Beukes was alone and asleep in her bed—if all was clear—I could park myself in the kitchen with a knife in one hand and my party gun in the other, next to the back door, ready to run and scream like hell if anyone tried to force his way into the house. I still thought, in the late-day gloom, that the party gun might make someone hesitate for a moment. And if it didn’t fool anyone, I could always throw it.
Before I left, I sat down at the kitchen table to write a note for my father. I wanted to put into it all the things I might never have a chance to say to him if the Phoenician turned up. I wanted to let him know how much I loved him and that I’d had a pretty good time on earth right up until I was butchered like a steer.
At the same time, I didn’t want to make myself cry writing the thing. I also didn’t want to scrawl anything terminally embarrassing if I wound up spending the night doing crosswords at Mrs. Beukes’s kitchen table and nothing happened. In the end I wrote:
I’M OKAY. MR. BEUKES ASKED ME TO SIT WITH SHELLY. THEY HAD A FIRE AT HIS GYM. WOW, HAS HIS DAY BIT THE BAG. LOVE YOU. THE PANAMA THRILL WAS GREAT.
8
WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR, the wind hit me with a shove, a guest banging past me and reeling drunkenly into the house. I had to back my way out, hunching my shoulders against the gale.
But when I got around the corner and was on my way up to the Beukes house, I had the wind at my back. The gusts ran at me, turning my light Windbreaker into a sail and carrying me along at a trot. A house on the corner was on the market, and as I went by, the real-estate agent’s metal sign, which was pitching back and forth, snapped free and soared twenty feet before doing a meat cleaver—whap!—into the soft dirt of someone’s front yard. I did not feel I was walking to Shelly’s house so much as I was being blown there.
A fat, warm drop of water splatted the side of my face, just like a mouthful of spit. The wind surged, and a burst of rain, barely a dozen drops, struck the blacktop ahead of me, producing the smell that is one of the finest odors in the world, the fragrance of hot asphalt in a summer shower.
A sound began to build behind me, a thunderous rattle that I could feel in my teeth. It was the sound of torrential downpour driving into trees and against tar-paper roofs and parked cars: a mindless, continuous roar.
I picked up my pace, but what was coming couldn’t be outrun, and in three more steps it caught me. It came down so hard that the rain bounced when it hit the road, creating a shivering, knee-high billow of spray. Water began to pour into storm drains in a brown, foaming flood. It was amazing how quickly it happened. It seemed like I ran fewer than ten steps before I was splashing ankle-deep. A plastic pink flamingo rushed past, carried by the tide.
Lightning popped, and the world became an X-ray photograph of itself.
I forgot my plan. Did I even have a plan? You couldn’t think in a storm like that.
I fled through pelting water, cut across the yard of the house next to Shelly’s. Only the lawn was melting. It came apart under my heels, long runners of grass peeling up to reveal the waterlogged earth beneath. I fell, went down on one knee, caught myself with my hands, and came up filthy and wet.
I staggered on, across the Beukeses’ driveway, which was a wide and shallow canal by then, and around to the back of the house. I scrabbled at the screen door and leapt inside as if I were on the run from wild dogs. The door banged behind me, only slightly less loud than a crack of thunder, which was when I remembered I’d been aiming for stealth.
Water dripped off me, off the party gun. My clothes were sopping.
The kitchen was still and shadowed. I had sat there plenty of times in the past, munching Shelly Beukes’s date cookies and sipping tea, and it had always been a place of pleasant smells and reassuring order. Now, though, there were dirty plates in the sink. The garbage can overflowed, flies crawling on heaped paper towels and plastic bottles.
I listened but couldn’t hear anything except the rain rumbling on the roof. It sounded like a train going by.
The screen door opened behind me and slammed again, and I choked on a scream. I spun, ready to drop to my knees and begin begging, but there was no one there. Just wind. I pulled the screen door tight—and almost immediately a fresh gust overpowered the old latch and sucked the screen open once more, then thumped it shut. I didn’t bother to secure it again.
My insides squirmed at the thought of going any farther into the house. I felt strongly that the Phoenician was already there, had heard me coming in and was patiently waiting for me somewhere in the gloom, down the hall and around the corner. I opened my mouth to call hello, then thought better of it.
What finally got me moving wasn’t courage but manners. A puddle was forming under my feet. I snatched a dish towel and wiped up. It gave me a way to stall going any farther into the house. I liked it close by the screen door, where I could get outside in two steps.