As I Die Lying (6 page)

"Okay," I said, and then her lips were on
mine, her tongue sliding into my mouth like a fat earthworm. I put
my tongue up to stop hers, and it tangled briefly in the steel
wires of her braces, and I imagined us locked together as the sun
went down and then our parents finding us like that. I frantically
worked my tongue free and she pressed her palms against my chest,
pushing me onto my back.

She straddled me, on her knees with one leg
on each side of me like a ten-gallon cowboy riding bronco on a
half-pint pony in a clown's rodeo. I quit struggling, letting my
tongue lie still as she explored my teeth. Her dress rode up to her
waist, and she was rubbing her white-stockinged thighs against me
in a familiar rhythm.

The rhythm of bedsprings.

I was helpless against the attack. My stomach
clenched like one of Father's fists, but inside the tightness
erupted a small hot fire. My mouth tickled where her slick tongue
probed like a snail poking out of its shell. She was moaning like
the garage man had when he had leaned on me. Love, or kissing, or
babymaking, or whatever this was, was like ejecting from a rocket
ship.

I felt a tingling down in my pee-pee and I
was afraid it was about to grow into a big red babymaker.

I tried to push Sally away, because she was
putting her muff pie down near my pee-pee that was trying to be a
babymaker. My chest was tight and vomit tickled the back of my
throat. I didn't want to have a babymaker and I didn't want it to
make Sally bleed. I didn't want to have to love her anymore.

But she wasn't letting me up. Her eyes were
closed and she rocked back and forth, just like those old people
did on the porch down the street, except they sat in chairs and she
was sitting on my belly. And her tongue flickered as if trying to
find butterscotch candy down my throat.

And the more I thought about my pee-pee and
trying to make it not turn into a babymaker, the more it tingled.
Sally was rubbing over and over and over and I felt something was
about to happen, something as mysterious as the early stars that I
could see through the hole in the roof. Something as dangerous as
the boots. Something as weird as the junkyard incident. Something
I'd remember the rest of my life.

Something...something...

"Richard!" my mother called, from somewhere
just a few yards outside the nest.

CHAPTER SIX

Sally froze, locked above me like a TV
wrestler waiting for the referee to count to three. I was lying on
my back looking up at her, afraid to breathe. My pee-pee didn't
feel like it wanted to be a babymaker anymore. It felt like it
wanted to crawl into a cold dark refrigerator and wait for halftime
of a football game.

Mother called my name again.

I strained my ears, listening for her
footsteps and the swish of weeds as she discovered the nest and
looked inside. The blanket of night had almost completely covered
the sky, giving me a small hope of not being found.

"Richard, I know you're out here. It's way
past dinnertime, honey."

Sally leaned her mouth to my
ear and one of her pigtails tickled my nose. "I thought this place
was a
secret
," she
hissed.

"Sssh," I said, but I knew it wouldn't be our
voices that gave us away. It would be the pounding heart, spilling
out and carrying like the beat of voodoo drums across a black
jungle. Or maybe the scarring screech of a jet plane crash landing.
The fifty-megaton explosion between my legs. Something like
that.

Mother shouted my name again, this time
farther away.

Sally relaxed over me as if her bones had
failed, her body sagging onto mine like a water balloon. Our pulses
raced each other, working faster than bedsprings in the dead of
night. I had found yet another way that love could be scary.

Sally rolled off me and smoothed her dress.
She picked up Angel Baby and all I could see of their faces was the
outline, twin shadows against a darker background. The feeble moon
was trying to rise, but it must have been as tired and drained as
we were.

"I tore the knee of my stocking," she said,
her voice as cold and faraway as the dull stars or dead fish on a
beach or a mole in a winter cornfield.

"Sally..." I searched the
night for words.
I still love you? Want to
know a secret? Will you climb on me again?

"Tell your mother you tripped over a tree
root and fell," I finished.

Her soft sobs filled the doghouse. Had I hurt
her? I don't think I had used my babymaker on her.

"Are you bleeding?" My tongue was as dry and
thick as an old board.

She snorted, blowing bubbles of laughter out
of her nose. "Richard, you're such an idiot."

She was stomping with words. They hurt worse
than boots. And I wish, sitting here typing, I could walk through
the years and stomp back. After all, I’m the one who gets to tell
how it really happened. But even now, this seems the best way to
remember it. Yes, this will do.

"I'm going home now," she said, and I could
sense her pout even if I couldn't see it clearly. Her voice dropped
and her words slithered out like snakes. "This is a secret."

I could still try to be brave. "I won't tell
anything.”

"Cross your heart and hope to die," she said,
and she was telling me, not asking.

But I wasn't falling for that trick again. No
more hoping to die, no matter what. She waited in the silent night
that poured as smothering and heavy as maple syrup. Or blood from a
savior’s palms. Or maybe just plain old smothering silence, the
kind you hear in your head if you stop and really listen and
everyone in the Bone House is asleep and not snoring.

"I never even loved you at all," she said. "I
was lying. I just wanted to make you kiss me. Like I did all those
other boys."

And I still had to love her, at least until I
could figure out a way to uncross my heart. If love was going to be
such a hot-and-cold ball of confusion, a strange mix of pain and
pleasure, a tangle of limbs and tongues, then I didn't want to love
anyone again for a long time.

But suddenly I was beyond the reach of her
sharp weapons of hate, weapons that stabbed places even the boots
hadn't touched. I was shrinking into the dark place in my head,
hiding from this new kind of pain. She could not longer touch me, I
was safe in a dark hall of the Bone House, looking through the eyes
of my secret little friend, the secret that no external love would
ever make me reveal.

“
Wait,” you must be
thinking, “how come you’re telling me this now?”

I’ll let
you
in on the secret, if not her,
because I can tell you’re starting to trust me despite my warning.
We’re in this together, so you might as well have all the facts.
Besides, I think I’m starting to love you.

Sally crawled out of the doghouse toward the
weed-choked hole in the fence, her knees making crackling sounds on
the crusty ground. My little friend sat alone in the dark, alone
but not alone, because I was there with him. We were bound together
more tightly than any lover's knot or hangman's noose or those
silly contortions newlyweds do over the wedding cake when they’re
trying to toast their future divorce.

"I've been away too long," my friend said. "I
should have come sooner. I let you get hurt."

My body scooted across the rough plywood
floor and followed Sally out of the hole. My nose took in the crisp
aroma of crushed flowers and torn grass, the perfume of
honeysuckle, and the smell of early dew. My ears heard a sleepy
meadowlark spinning a lullaby. My hands stung from the sharp prick
of fallen thorns as my body crawled. It was my flesh, but not
me.

My head was poking out of the hole in the
fence when my eyes saw a white slipper in the moonlight. And from
the slipper, a long familiar leg rose up into the night sky.

Mother's shoe.

Mother's leg.

Mother.

My body stood, with the help of her hand
lifting it by my shirt collar. My eyes looked around, adjusting to
the brighter light of this outside world. Sally was hugging Mrs.
Bakken over by the hickory trees, pressing her face into her
mother's chest, and now the sound of Sally's wild crying reached my
ears, drowning out the meadowlark's song.

"What's going on here, young man?" Mother
asked my body, her voice a wedge of ice driven into my ears.

"Here?" my voice said, the strange muscles in
my throat vibrating. Where was “here”? I thought I was in the Bone
House.

"He
made
me, Mommy," Sally shrieked. "He
made me do bad things."

Bad things? What bad things? Oh.

Those.

Sally squealed, her wet whimpers carrying
across the apartment's backyard and into the night. My eyes saw
lights blinking on across the back wall of the apartment building,
my ears heard windows sliding open, my nose smelled cigarette smoke
as heads stuck out to see if what was going on outside was better
than their television shows.

"He made me go in there,
then he made me
kiss
him. I tried to get away, but he kept grabbing me," Sally
said. "And he wouldn't let me go."

She wailed like an air-raid siren, and was as
well-rehearsed. Mother looked into my eyes as if she knew who I was
and shook my shoulders. "Richard, what do you have to say for
yourself?"

Richard? Yes, that was me. Yet not me. My
head nodded, flopping up and down like a wet mop’s. Just the way my
friend made it.

Mrs. Bakken stroked the top of Sally's head
as if she were petting a rabbit. "There, there, honey, it will be
okay. Did he hurt you?" Mrs. Bakken said, looking over at Mother
and my borrowed flesh.

"N-no, Mommy." Sally
sniffled extra loudly in case someone in the apartment windows
hadn't heard the first time. "But he tried to. He tried to lift up
my dress and was talking crazy things like putting his pee-pee in
me and making me bleed. And I was so
scared
."

She mixed the last word with a half-moan that
yawned out through the trees and across the junkyard. My body was
standing on legs that felt like wobbly stacks of tin cans.

"I'm so sorry," Mother said to Sally. "I
swear, I don't know where he gets his meanness from."

Then, to me, "Lord, wait till your father
hears about this." Then, to Sally, "You sure you're okay,
honey?"

Sally nodded, bouncing her pigtails for
emphasis, and wiped her eyes on her mother's shirt. "I've got a
hole in my stocking, Mommy.”

"It's not your fault,” Mrs. Bakken said, and
she looked all the way through my little friend into the dark place
where I was hiding. Now I knew where Sally had learned to cut with
invisible knives. It ran in the family.

And she’d learned the lesson we all get to
eventually: it’s not whether you’re right or wrong, good or bad,
true or false—it’s whether you have someone to blame.

I looked back down the long dark hall at Mrs.
Bakken's face, cheeks paler than moonlight, her skin stretched as
tight as panty hose over the steep bone of her head. Her eyes were
as black as crow's wings, eyes that shot secrets out of the sky.
And she saw that I saw.

"While the cat's away, the mice will splay,"
my little friend said to Mrs. Bakken, using my voice.

"What are you talking about?" Mrs. Bakken’s
voice was a pitch-perfect imitation of her screeching daughter's.
"Anne, he's gone crazy, that boy has."

"Tell us about Father and the bedsprings," I
heard my voice say.

"What's this foolishness, Richard? I've never
heard the like in all my days," Mother said.

"Did Father's babymaker hurt you?" my
imaginary friend said, using my mouth. The words were nails,
hammered into the coffin of the night.

"That's the kind of crazy
things he was saying to
me
, Mommy," Sally said, finding fresh
tears and straining to squeeze them into rivers. "All this stuff
about babymakers and how I had to love him or he would hurt me. But
he said if he loved me, then he'd have to hurt me with his
babymaker, whatever that is."

Mother's hand struck my cheek, sparking a red
burst of fire and pain. But the pain was brief, flickering and
dying in an instant. My friend and I knew how to douse the flames
of pain. This Bone House would never burn.

"Did it hurt you? Or did
you
like
Father's
babymaker?" we said.

Mrs. Bakken's eyes searched the trees,
sneaking into the night sky, seeking escape. Mother let go of my
shirt collar, her face blank beneath her curly mass of brown
hair.

"You
must
have liked it, the way the two
of you made the bedsprings squeak over and over and over, Mrs.
Bakken,” we said. "Just like people who love each other. Just
like
married
people."

"What's he talking about, Rita?" Mother asked
Mrs. Bakken.

Mrs. Bakken's shiny China face cracked as she
joined Sally in tears.

"Richard, what are you talking about?" Mother
asked my body when she realized Mrs. Bakken was not going to
answer.

"You'll have to ask Sally. She's the one who
got the dollar's worth of candy," we said. "She's the one who knows
all about love."

Sally and her mother huddled together, crying
in the night, as two dozen prying eyes watched from the windows and
a dozen tongues started wagging.

I went to bed that night without supper, my
body tucking itself in, my mouth offering no prayers to Jesus. I
was safely under the blankets when my little friend let me have my
flesh back, then I was swimming toward the dark waters of sleep.
Just as I dozed off, as bright colors flashed and tried to form
dreams, I heard Mother and Father in the living room.