Agnes Mallory (5 page)

I relented, squatted next to her. ‘So, like, you made these?'

She nodded. Grimly. Working her witchy work.

‘Out of cookie dough, huh?'

Another solemn nod. ‘You glaze them. And bake them in the oven,' she said. And with another sorcerous glance my way: ‘That's what turns them real.'

‘Uh huh.' I saw what she meant. They did have a quality about them. Shiny, pliant-looking; made you want to touch them. ‘I'm no good at art. If I made them, they would all just be …' Doody with arms, I wanted to say, but I was a gentleman. ‘Lumps with arms,' I said.

At that, she surprised me by letting out your standard issue giggle – and then immediately kneaded her grin back into the wrinkled mask.

I plucked up courage, reached for the soldier. ‘Can I see one?' She didn't stop me. I picked it up. Examined it appreciatively. No gun, mind you, but a very promising barbarity about the mouth and eyes. ‘Man, you could sell these,' I said. ‘You just gonna let that one float away?' Actually, the girl figure was caught now in the roots under the bank a short way down. ‘It looked good.'

‘It was good,' she said softly. ‘I told you. It was my sister. Lena.'

‘Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm an only child.'

Slowly, she turned her spectral gaze downstream. ‘So am I.'

Right. That called for another reassuring glance upriver at the big folks. Uncomfortably enough, the light seemed to have faded some around them since my last look. They were dappled shapes now, gesturing at each other against the grainy vista of naked trees and burbling water. Their faces, in-leaning, were laced with branch shadows, and Mrs Sole had one of Dad's hands clapped in both of hers – as if she were trying to slow him down so she could get a word in.

‘I thought you said you had a sister,' I said to the girl again. I handed back the soldier. She took it from me with tiny girl fingers that brushed against mine. She lay it in the basket. Picked the others from the earth and bedded them down too.

‘I do,' she said.

‘Well, what is she, like, imaginary?'

‘No. She's not imaginary.' More eyes, half-whispers, sorcery. ‘She's a ghost!' And back she went to the figures in her basket with much mysterious maneuvering, voodoo passes of her hand. ‘She died before I was even born. She's a ghost now.'

Well, I reckoned it was getting late: just about time for me to run screaming for my life. With a casual grunt, I stood out of my squat. Stretched. ‘Yeah, well, you know, ghosts aren't real. Or anything,' I told her. ‘There aren't really any ghosts.'

I do believe she'd been saving this last glance of hers. It was something out of a horror movie. She turned it up at me from where she knelt. Blasted me with a couple of campfire eyes, a grand smile of insane knowing. ‘That doesn't mean you don't see them,' she told me. ‘You
have
to see them. Ghosts. They're like the sky. The sky isn't real. There
is
no sky. It's just particles that make us see the blue in the light.'

‘Yeah. So?' I said. ‘I knew that.'

‘But you have to see it. It's not like other things, other things that aren't there. Like dragons or … or monsters or something. You can't just say it's not there and stop seeing it. You
have
to see it. So it
is
there. Like ghosts.'

‘Well, yeah, but … I mean, you could go up through the sky with a rocket, so it isn't there really,' I said desperately.

‘Yes,' she answered, ‘yes.' And she finally got that face off me, turning back, motherly, to her basket of creatures. ‘Yes. That's what makes it so strange.'

Whatever else I was going to say, I swallowed it, glug. Things were spooky enough already. It made me feel dizzy, in fact, this sky notion. Made me feel light on my soles, adrift. A sky's the sort of thing you want nice and solid. Climb up your ziggurat of an evening, give her a rap. Yessir, screwed on tight. For a second there, I lost that sense of it. I had a sense instead of being in a shoebox tableau with the lid suddenly pulled off and everything floating free. Trees, earth, grownups floating. Stream floating up in gouts and droplets. Everything around me spreading thin like smoke, parting like the fabric of smoke and atomizing in twilit space. A bizarre glitch in the general proceedings.

I tried to steady myself with a wet-dog shake. Tried to anchor myself again on Dad and Mrs Sole. She was appealing to him now, eyes upturned into a stray gleam of sunlight. He was running one hand through his thinning hair, the other on his hip, pushing his jacket back to show his paunch.

‘Is that your Dad?' Without warning, the girl was standing next to me. Holding her basket placidly in front of her jumper. And oddly, it was a look at her that righted things for me. The sight of her worried brown nugget of a face brought me down with a clunk.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘Yeah. Is that your Mom? Mrs Sole?'

She nodded. ‘She's your Dad's client. He's nice, your Dad.'

There was a delay before I heard this. I was still busy looking at her. Feeling earth, trees, water, feet sucked back into place. I looked at her so long I had to say something finally. ‘My name's Harry, by the way,' I said.

And flash, there was her smile, ordinary, like her giggle, like any girl's.

‘Hi,' she said. ‘I'm Agnes.'

My father saw the two of us coming toward him and spoke up quickly, ‘Okay, Harry? Ready to go?' Cut Mrs Sole off in mid-sentence. She whipped around quickly with a bright smile for us.

‘All done?' she asked her daughter.

‘Yes,' Agnes said.

Mrs Sole waggled her fingers at me. ‘Well, then, bye, Harry. Nice to meet you.' And at Dad, ‘Thanks, Michael, we'll talk about it again.'

‘Right-ho,' said Dad.

And he and I stood side by side a moment, as mother and daughter walked away from us along the shadowy bank.

‘Agnes is a nice girl, isn't she?' my father asked, as we climbed out of the trees and started across the grass to the street. The light had gone here now too. It was dusk.

‘I guess so,' I said. ‘The figures she makes are pretty good.'

‘Her mother, you know, is a client of mine. We're discussing some business. A piece of property back there …'

‘Yeah, you told me already.'

‘Oh. Did I? Right.'

He was quiet after that. I was glad. I wanted quiet. There was something going on, in me, as I walked beside him. I wanted to check it out. I felt peculiarly alert; I guess that's what it was. Historians may disagree whether this was technically the first of my legendary Walks Home From Agnes's, celebrated in song and/or story from generation to generation. I mean, I only walked over the lawn to my father's car that day. But the formative principle was there, no question. That weird, cool feeling of transparency, the light wandering through me; of permeability, me waxing subatomic and the whole scene buzzing in and out of the interstices. Which just comes down, really, to an odd, inhabitive awareness of the assembling crickets and their calls and to the worsted texture of the graying day, to blade of grass on sneaker tip, and to the one-dimensional look that houses get just at that hour, as if they were cardboard cutouts raised against the sky. And the sky, just at that hour … What a bizarro girl, I thought suddenly, and I suddenly goose-pimpled under my jacket sleeves – because the sky at nightfall, I discovered then, actually
does
lose its solidity. It becomes granular and vertiginous and deep.

I was glad, I don't mind saying, to find that it was a momentary thing. When I wrapped my hand around the cold metal handle of the Caddy door and raised my eyes one last time suspiciously, I could see that the order of the sky's distance and substantiality had been re-established, thank you very much, by the gradual appearance overhead of Vega in Lyra, the night's first star.

For each of three Fridays thereafter you could find me, just before dusk, Shwinning down Piccadilly, clean out of my way. Not confessing it, but looking for her. Just passing by, you understand, but secretly calculating the proper hour for voodoo ghost-sister drownings – on the chance it might be a regular sort of thing with her, you see. I would lay my bike down on a lawn and wander in there, in among the trees behind the houses. Peek in at the stream, do a quick study up and down of the sun-pocked strand. Just popped in to guzzle some serenity, I'd tell myself, searching the snarled branches for her and the shade under the budding leaves. Just here for an aftertaste of the transcendental blast, nothing to do with monkey-face. Oh, but I was undeniably intrigued. Well, I had no overview of it, no perspective on that alchemic pinch of zen she'd dropped in my nine-year-old pudding. Nine years old; Jesus – I hadn't even grasped the truths that would later crumble around me. I hadn't seen her deflated corpse at the roiling river's edge, or sleep-walked into corruption day by dreamy day like anyone. I didn't know I
was
like anyone, like everyone. I had the strangest feeling that all this, this life business, was happening specifically to
me
.

Anyhow, she never showed. I biked home each Friday, secretly disappointed, secretly relieved. And the only new wrinkle in the Harry universe I can remember was the occasional laying aside of a daydream or so during the walk to school those weeks; a stern, forced, philosophical converse or two with the heavens as I tried to recover that weird, vivid sensation that had hit me that twilight after our first talk. Then I'd drop it, start to dream again – dreaming about this purge of mine. Wondering: wouldn't it be more interesting if when the population came before King Harry to be judged, they were naked? The women especially. If they had to parade up to me like the girls in Freddy's father's magazines. Naked and pink and trembling …

Just a thought, you understand. And on I'd bounce up Bunker Hill.

The next week I gave up the search and – wouldn't you know it – bumped right into her. I was pedaling home from a ballgame down Plymouth Road, where she shouldn't have been. But there, in fact, she was, walking along on the sidewalk up ahead of me. Marching behind her chin like any stuck-up schoolgirl, her braids going tick-tock behind her neck. It gave me quite a start to realize that it was she.

Coolly, nevertheless, I continued to bike up the street. I rattled past her – then faked a double-take and put on the brakes.

‘Hey, aren't you that girl who makes figures?' I asked as she reached me. I pretended to search my memory. ‘Agnes, right?'

‘Oh yes,' she chirped primly. ‘I remember you. You're Harry, Mr Bernard's son. I have to get home by sundown,' she added, to explain why she kept on walking.

I pedaled along beside her slowly, wrestling the handlebars as my front wheel wobbled. ‘Are you, like, religious or something?'

‘No. Well, we light the candles. But then only my father goes to temple. He says I can decide for myself when I grow up.'

I nodded – and conversation lagged. This wasn't the sort of talk I wanted to hear from her, and I couldn't think of anything to add to it. I considered telling her how I'd overheard my mother say religion was all hooey, but that didn't seem very polite …

‘Uh …' I said.

Agnes began to sing. ‘“Oh, Mary Mac, Mac, Mac, with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back, back …'” She eyed me sidelong. ‘That's a jump-rope song. I was jumping rope with Jessica. She's my friend. I was over her house today. That's why I'm coming back in this direction. “She jumped so high, high, high, she touched the sky, sky, sky, she didn't come back, back, back, till the fourth of…” You don't go to JFK, do you?'

‘Uh … No … Bunker Hill.'

‘Oh. Jessica and I go to JFK. I like it there. I'm in third grade.'

A car coursed by and my front wheel switchbacked. Agnes pulled ahead of me as I righted myself. This gave me a moment to consider. What was going on here? I felt like I'd taken a cold douse in the kisser. I mean, here I was, talking to a girl about a jump-rope song, for crying out loud. Talking about her friend Jessica. With a girl younger than me. And with her braids clocking. And with her prissy nose in the air.
He came for witchcraft, he left with cooties
– I could see the headlines now. What a let-down this was turning out to be.

I pulled up alongside her again just as we reached the corner of Piccadilly. I wanted some answers here. Where was the eerie girl I'd met by the stream? How come she was so different now?

‘Uh …' I said.

‘Well,' said Agnes. ‘I have to go. Bye.'

‘Bye,' I managed to get out.

She turned off, marched away. I pedaled up to speed and got the heck out of there.

So that was the end of my plaintive pining streamside. No more hankering after Agnes either. It definitely was a let-down, but not the worst surely. I couldn't even recall exactly what it had been, down there by the water; what she'd been like exactly that day that had put the spook into me so. By now, my soulful converse with grass blades on sneaker tips etcetera had more or less rotted away to the purely philosophical. Illusion, reality, the reality of illusion – who can say when you're nine years old? And after that, who gives a damn?