As I Die Lying (5 page)

"You can still tell me. I remember that I
looked at his pockets and they were empty. I don't know what he did
with the wrench. I was afraid he might hit me with it. But he just
stood there holding me and grinding his teeth.

"Then he let go and I ran into the woods and
looked back at him. He was staring at me, wiping his hands on the
rag. The spaceship was just an old black car again, rusty around
the edges, and he was just an oily old man in dirty clothes. Then
somebody called him from around the front of the garage. He shook
his fist at me and I slipped into the trees. That's the last time I
played over there."

"Does the man still work there?" Sally
asked, maybe wanting to see what he looked like.

"I haven't seen him at the garage lately.
But the people who work there don't seem to stay very long. I guess
they get tired of the gasoline smell or something. But I'm still
scared to play in the cars. That's why I come in through the back
of the fence to get here, so they won't see me from the
garage."

"This is a secret place, all right. It looks
just like a big bunch of weeds from the outside. So, were you
scared about that man?"

"I don't know. Sometimes I dream that he's
coming to get me, that he's in my bedroom. He's got on his greasy
clothes and he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wrench and
he tightens it around my arm and I can't get away and he's turning
the wrench and my arm turns around and around and he keeps rubbing
my hair and he smells like gasoline and he's got on a spaceman
helmet and then he leans over on me and I can't breathe and I wake
up and I'm kicking my legs against the blankets and it's morning.
Then I go to the window and look at the Ford to make sure it hasn't
blasted off in the night."

"That sounds like a scary dream."

"Dreams aren't scary.
They're just dreams. That's not as bad as him
really
coming after me."

"Grownups are strange. I don't know if I
want to be in love like grownups after all."

"But you said we were in love. And you have
to tell me the secrets. You promised."

"You mean you still want to be in love? It's
already been almost a whole day."

I was confused. "I thought you said love was
forever."

"I didn't cross my heart and hope to
die."

She saw the pain in my eyes. It didn't seem
to bother her. Her blue eyes were as cold as the garage man's had
been. Now that I think about it, she probably smiled. Or maybe I’m
remembering wrong, or lying again, or one of my headmates has taken
over the keyboard.

"But it's okay, we can still play," she
said, seeing the fallen look on my face. Did I still have to love
her because I'd crossed my heart, even if she didn't love me?

"I'll tell you some
secrets, then," she said. "Here's the best thing about love: You
can still
pretend
like we're in love, the way grownups pretend."

CHAPTER FIVE

Sally and I sat cross-legged on the warped
plywood floor of the doghouse. The sun was falling into late
afternoon, shining through the gap in the roof like electric
light.

"What’s this about grown-ups pretending to
love?" I asked.

"If they loved each other the way people on
TV do, they wouldn't hit each other or yell at each other."

"I thought they loved each other because
they had to, because they were married."

"But
we
loved each other because we wanted
to."

I noticed she said “loved.” Past tense. My
heart fluttered like a house bird let out of a cage, discovering
its wings only to slam into window glass and fall dead. Or maybe
peck at its own reflection. When you’re that young, you can’t come
up with clever metaphors, which is why you save your autobiography
until you’re older and need money. Or someone has a gun to your
head.

"But love also has to do with the squeaky
bedsprings," she said. "You've heard them, haven't you? How they
squeak over and over and over and sometimes you can hear your
parents yelling like they're hurting each other, but they don't
sound mad?"

I nodded. Just another of night's mysterious
noises, along with faraway trains and the wind rustling through the
cornfields and mice gnawing behind the walls and monsters breathing
under the bed and a little person inside your skull. So the
squeaking had something to do with love?

She continued, spreading out secrets like
grape jelly on white bread. "You ever notice how your parents are
happy the morning after the bedsprings squeak? Mine at least get
through breakfast before they get mad at each other again. Because
sometimes my mom burns the eggs or Daddy has a headache from
drinking too much. Or Mom says she needs grocery money and then
asks if he wants to have fun tonight."

I nodded again. I was remembering the
bedsprings and how they used to squeak a lot back when I was
younger, almost every night it seemed. But now the bedsprings only
worked every week or so, mostly on Friday nights.

"And that's got something to do with what's
between people's legs?" I asked.

She sighed and looked at me like I was a
third grader. "Haven't you seen your parents naked?"

My mind flashed back to when I was very
young, when Mother would take me into the bathtub with her. She
would rub soap in my hair and laugh and splash water on my back.
When she stood up to towel off, I saw a patch of black hair between
her legs, frothed with white soap bubbles. I only knew it was a
dark, secret place, one that had parts that didn't show. A place
you knew was wrong to think about.

And walking down the hall and passing by the
bathroom, seeing Father out of the corner of my eye standing over
the toilet. And my eyes, despite my trying to look away,
automatically going down to his hand that held the big red thing. I
had something that hung down, too, but Father's must have hurt, it
looked so monstrous and swollen and angry.

"I’ve seen naked people," I said. She wasn’t
the only one who could pretend to know everything.

"Well, men have what they call a
‘babymaker.’ Like what you've got, except you've got a little boy
thing. It's called a pee-pee now, but it'll grow up to be a
babymaker, too."

My head was spinning, and my invisible
friend was rattling the closet doors in the Bone House, looking for
a place to hide. How did Sally know all these things? And did I
really want a big red babymaker? If I didn't, was there any way to
stop it from happening?

Sally went on, smug with the knowledge of
grown-up secrets. "And women have muff pies. That's where the man
puts his babymaker and then seeds crawl out of his babymaker into
the pie and then little babies grow. And they have a hard time
squeezing the babymaker into the pie, because it's so big, at least
my daddy's is. And that's what makes the bedsprings squeak, because
they have to fight to get those baby seeds planted."

My mouth hung open, airing out the base of
my brain where this new information was settling. Babymakers and
bedsprings, and all this somehow tied in with love. This stuff just
got scarier and scarier. "But that means they would have a baby
every time the bedsprings squeak."

"No, because of the blood. Haven't you ever
seen the blood between your mother's legs?"

I hadn't, but I had seen little paper wads
in the toilet, with streaks of blood running from them and down the
inside of the toilet. Sometimes after the squeaking, now that I
thought about it.

Sally said, "Because the blood washes away
the baby."

I was struck with the image of a hundred
bloody, tiny babies floating around in the toilet bowl. Then I was
wondering if the babymaker was so big that it hurt the muff pie and
that's what made women bleed. But I didn't dare ask Sally about it.
She already thought I was stupid. Better to learn all I could while
she was still willing to share her secrets.

At least now I understood the reason she
didn't want to love me. She probably thought I was going to grow a
babymaker and hurt her. She probably thought I was going to make
her bleed.

And, even worse, I saw why Mother was afraid
of Father. As if his boots weren't bad enough, he had other weapons
he could use on her.

"So you have to be in love to try to make
babies?" I asked.

She laughed at me, peeling my skin as if I
were an apple, then cutting to the core. "Of course not. Babies are
mistakes. Who wants to carry a baby around in their belly?"

I marveled at Sally, sitting there rich with
exotic wisdom, her thin legs crossed in a pretzel of white hose,
clutching Angel Baby, her coppery pigtails bobbing with delight as
she ridiculed me. She was beautiful.

"But you have to be married to have babies,
don't you? Or to make the bedsprings squeak?" I asked.

More laughter. "You silly boy. Remember that
day your father called in sick to work, and your mother went
downtown to do the shopping? She asked my mom if she wanted to come
along, but my mom said she had housework to do. I didn't see you
around anywhere."

Of course not. I wasn't going to stay in the
apartment all day with Father, though he was too sick to put his
boots on. I came to the nest with a couple of comic books. When it
came down to Batman or a possible beating, even a dumbbell like me
made the smart choice.

"Well, your mother was gone all morning, and
your father came over to our place. He gave me a whole dollar to go
buy some candy. Then I knew something was up. Has he ever given you
a dollar?"

"Are you kidding?"

"So I snuck around the back of the apartment,
outside my mom's bedroom, and I heard the bedsprings squeaking. And
my daddy was at work down at the plant, so I know it wasn't
him."

I shuddered at the thought of Father
squeezing his big babymaker inside Sally's scrawny mother. It must
have hurt her a lot.

"How come your mother let him hurt her? She
didn't have to let him, since they weren't married," I said. Or
maybe she hadn't let him. Father had ways of getting what he
wanted.

Sally sliced me again with
the knife edge of her laughter. "It doesn't
hurt
, stupid. It feels good. That's
what love's about. It doesn't have anything to do with being
married. It's about sharing secrets and holding hands and kissing
and then playing babymaking.”

My hand went to the spot on my cheek Sally
had kissed the night before. I tingled with the memory. A leaf fell
from somewhere above, from one of the big straight hickory trees
that bordered the junkyard. It feathered through the hole in the
roof, landing on the back of Sally's neck. She reached up, thinking
it was a bug, and batted it away.

While she was leaning back, I glanced between
her crossed legs at the shadow under her dress.

"How come you kissed me last night?" I
asked.

"Because I loved you."

"Like boyfriend and girlfriend."

"Yes. Real love, like grown-ups."

"But now you don't love me?"

"Not anymore. I just wanted to see if I could
get you to love me. I did it all the time back in Pittsburgh. I had
a different boyfriend every week."

How could somebody love so many people so
fast?

"Did you kiss them all?" I asked, not sure if
I wanted to know the answer. I wanted my kiss to be special.

"Of course. That's why all the boys wanted to
love me."

"Did you...do anything else?" I tried to
picture her naked, in bed with a boy, making the bedsprings squeak.
I could only picture her with a big patch of soapy black hair
between her legs.

Her voice dropped to a sneaky whisper. "I
Frenched them."

"Frenched?" I was picturing Napoleon, whom I
had read about, trying to put his babymaker into Sally, his big
pointy hat falling down over his face.

"It's a kind of kiss. Come here and I'll show
you."

I slid over beside her, my heart beating
faster than squeaking bedsprings. I closed my eyes. I felt her warm
breath inches from my face.

"Wait," I said, opening my eyes. Her eyes
were closed and her dark eyelashes twitched like dying butterflies.
Her lips were curled up like Angel Baby's and were shining with
saliva.

"What is it?" she asked impatiently.

"If you don't love me anymore, why do you
want to French me?"

"Because it's fun. It feels like something
I'm not supposed to do. And it makes me tingle. And that's what
grown-up love is all about."

"What if I don't want to be Frenched?" Now I
was afraid of kissing her. I had already braced myself for the
horrifying thought of loving Sally, like boyfriend and girlfriend,
and I had run through a hundred dead-end hallways of the Bone House
to get to the one thing I knew. That it felt good to be loved, even
if it was scary. And now she was taking it back.

"You crossed your heart, remember?" Her voice
was high and squeaky as bedsprings, she was so angry. "So you have
to love me or hope to die."

"But you just said kissing didn't have
anything to do with love."

"You're getting kissing mixed up with
babymaking. And if you don't kiss me, I'm going to tell your
parents about this place."

She nodded at the doghouse walls, her
pigtails bobbing. The sun had sunk lower in the sky, the orange
sunset lighting up the honeysuckle blossoms. The flowers glowed
like Christmas lights on the vines that crawled down from the roof.
Their sweet smell hung thick in the air. The world was candy.

I wondered if she was cruel enough to tell on
me, and I decided she was. I thought of my father, bringing his
boots down on the flimsy rotten walls until the outside world
poured in like rain. I thought of my mother, her face lined with
worry because her son was hiding out with a girl and probably doing
bad things that made Jesus sad. But mostly, I wanted to feel that
tingle again.