Naked, on the Edge (17 page)

On July 2nd David's dog got away from us. Usually the dog, as round and short-legged as a footstool, never went far when he tired of our attentions. He'd just trot a few paces then role over on the gravel. This time, though, he must have smelled or heard something enticing, because he dashed down the sidewalk, cutting catty-corner across to the other side, never looking back, his tail sticking straight out like the flag the crossing guard holds when we walk to school.

"Buddy!" called David.

Buddy kept on running.

"You better catch him before he gets hit by a car," Marla said.

"Damn stupid dog," I said.

"Ah, Annie, you cussed!" said Jena.

"It's not cussing if you're not saying it to somebody."

"Oh, yeah, it is," said Jena.

 
"Buddy!" shouted Marla.

"Buddy!" David called again.

After a good full minute of calling, David kicked at a discarded Mountain Dew bottle and said, "Ya'll coming with me?"

"Not my dog," I said.

"Yeah, but…"

"Yeah, but what?"

"But if he went, you know."

"What?"

"Near that woman's house."

"What woman?"

"You know. Miss Dowdy." He whispered it so softly I really only read his lips.

"You mean the witch?" asked Marla.

"Shh!"

"She's not a witch," I said, though the word chased a chill down the back of my t-shirt. "That's baby talk."

"Then you get Buddy since you aren't scared," said Marla.
"I said already, it's not my dog."

"Then you are scared," said David. "And if you don't come with me, I'll tell your mama you cussed and you'll get a spanking like last time."

And I knew he would do it. He and my sister had gotten me several spankings in the last few weeks.

I cursed again, this time under my breath. Then I took a deep breath and puffed out my cheeks until they stung. I was scared, but as the oldest, I couldn't show it.

Clenching my fists, I marched off after Buddy. Jena, David, and Marla tagged behind, a nervous, chittering parade. My heart felt like a water balloon being squeezed in and out, in and out, so hard it might pop. Down the sidewalk we went, scuffing the hopscotch chalk and avoiding cracks so as not to break our moms' backs. Trees heavy with mid-summer foliage shaded our footsteps. Little kids behind chain link fences wanted to know where we were going.

The road turned and dipped; we turned and dipped with it. Then we stopped. There was Miss Dowdy's house, tucked up in her yard, grass grown tall and tangled, the pine trees next to it pressed so tightly they seemed to be holding it so it wouldn't collapse. The porch roof hung down like a droopy eyelid.

I heard David's sharp intake of breath. Buddy was in the old woman's yard, sniffing at a dead cardinal.

"Buddy!" he whispered. "C'mere, boy!"

The dog looked over but then continued to sniff.

"Buddy!"

Marla grabbed David's arm. In any other circumstance, he would have shaken her off or shoved her away. But this time I think he was glad for the touch. "Let's go. Buddy'll come back when he's ready."

I'd never really looked closely at Miss Dowdy's house before; I'd never really wanted to. When our family went shopping, we always drove the other way. On the rare occasion we did travel in this direction, like when we went out of town to visit Mom's sister, we went by fast enough that it didn't really register. As I stood on the sidewalk with my sister and friends, my teeth set hard against each other, I wondered if the old woman was on her porch. It was hard to tell; the shadows were deep, near black. Yet I detected what looked like the outline of a glider or porch swing moving slowly back and forth.

"Let's go," urged Jena.

I took a small step forward, right to the edge of her yard, tilting my head, looking at the porch but not really wanting to see.

And then she coughed.

David, Jena, and Marla squealed and ran. I wanted to, but for some reason, my legs had other ideas. I held my ground.

Buddy had heard the cough, too. He looked up, shook his head, and then waded through the weeds to the porch. I wanted to call him back but was afraid that if I spoke, the witch would suck up my soul.

Miss Dowdy coughed again, then said something I couldn't hear but that Buddy clearly could. He stopped at the foot of the porch steps and stared. And then he climbed up the steps and vanished into the shadows.

Buddy…you're done for now!

I went home. There was no way I was going to ask for the dog back.

But it didn't seem to matter. Because when I found David, Marla, and Jena in our tree house, trying to see who could throw pieces of bark the farthest, and I told David what Buddy had done, he stopped flicking bark and said, "Who's Buddy?"

I let out an exasperated grunt. "Don't play stupid with me."

"Don't call me stupid, stupid!"

 
"You don't care what happened to your dog, then fine. I don't care, either."

"I don't have a dog, you moron!"

"Yes, you do, you dumb shit!"

"I'm telling you mama!" squawked David.

I wanted to punch him, but knew it would only make things worse for myself so I gritted my teeth. One of these days, I thought, just you wait!

Jena dropped her pieces of bark and looked at me with genuine, seven-year-old seriousness. "He doesn't have a dog, Annie, why are you saying that?"

"So," I insisted, "what's that doghouse doing in your backyard?"

"I don't have a doghouse in my backyard!"

"We'll see about that!" I stomped across the street to David's house, around to the back where Buddy's homemade hovel was nestled against the tool shed.

But it was not there.

David's Mom was watering her rose-of-Sharon, sunglasses slipping on her nose. "Mrs. Hirst, where is Buddy's doghouse?"

Mrs. Hirst gave me an odd look. "Who is Buddy?"

That night, I stared at the ceiling long after Jena had drifted to sleep. At dinner I had asked Mom if I could have a dog like Buddy. She said she didn't know what I was talking about.

Buddy was gone, sucked into the witch's house and forgotten.

I had to know if it was real or if I was just going crazy from the summer sun, like my grandmother warned would happen to kids who didn't wear sunhats.

Marla had a hamster, Hitty-Pitty. We liked to take it outside to run in the grass and then we would catch it. The morning after Buddy became a non-dog, I borrowed Hitty-Pitty. None of us locked our doors, and we knew each other's homes almost as well as we knew our own. Marla was playing with Jena in the tree house and Marla's Mom was sunbathing in the hammock outside. I sneaked in, collected the hamster in a paper bag, and went down the alley so as not to be spotted. In the pocket of my shorts was a roll of masking tape. Under my arm were six cardboard tubes that had held wrapping paper an hour earlier. The paper was now crammed in my closet. I'd put cotton balls in my ears so I wouldn't hear Miss Dowdy if she coughed or spoke.

When I was several houses from my own, I skirted back up to the street and continued down to Miss Dowdy's. The hamster rattled about in the bag.

I sat behind a big oak and taped the cardboard tubes together, creating a tunnel about eighteen feet long, long enough to reach from the sidewalk to the first porch step. Then I got up and stood before the little house. Carefully, I slid the tubes across the yard and onto the bottom step. Then I sent in Hitty-Pitty.

At first she went in a few inches then sat there, like she suspected my motives. Then I blew on her and she vanished into the depths. A moment later, she emerged from the other end of the tube on Miss Dowdy's porch step.

I swallowed, the sound loud in my skull. I began to hum in case the cotton wasn't good at keeping out witch sounds. The humming worked, or the witch had decided to be silent. Hitty-Pitty sniffed the step, then hauled her little furry body up to the next step, then to the next, and she was on the porch. She scurried into the darkness, and that was that.

Withdrawing the tube I immediately crumpled it, avoiding the end that had touched the porch step, then threw it into a trash barrel in the alley. I caught up with Marla and Jena, who had tired of the tree house and had flooded a hole in our front yard with the garden hose. "We're making soup," Jena said.

"Can we play with Hitty-Pitty?" I asked Marla.

"Hitty-Pitty?" Marla blinked.

"Your hamster."

"Shut up, Annie."

"Shut up why?"

"You know my mom won't let me have a pet. You're rubbing it in."

My blood went cold. "Jena, do you know what I'm talking about?"

"No, and be quiet." She was sprinkling bits of dandelion into the mud hole. "I have to get the soup right or the queen will be mad."

Hitty-Pitty. Gone to the witch and forgotten.

"You want to play?" Marla asked.

I shook my head then went to the tree house and climbed up alone. I broke off a thin, dry branch and snapped it into tiny pieces. Tossing the handful of broken branch bits into the air, I watched as they spun in a breeze then fell to the ground. Why was I the only one who remembered Buddy and Hitty-Pitty? Miss Dowdy's house was creepy, but this was the creepiest thing of all.

I avoided Jena and the others for the next few days. Mom wondered why I was moping around, looking at television but not really watching it, spinning my fork in my food but not really eating it, cradling my Breyer horse models but not really playing with them. She said if I didn't quit it she'd make me go to the doctor's and get a shot.

I began to really wonder what Miss Dowdy looked liked. I wondered what it was like inside her house. I wondered if she had baked Buddy and Hitty-Pitty in a pie. I wondered what would happen if a person wandered into her yard and onto her porch. Would they be forgotten just like the pets? Had it already happened but those people were forgotten?

I wondered if I could kill her.

There were no guns in the house; Dad had taken those. Jena had a wooden bow and arrow set but it didn't shoot very well. I'd have to drive the arrow right into the witch's heart if that was my weapon of choice. I wondered if witches even had hearts.

There was powdered poison in the basement that Mom used to kill mice. All I needed to do was poison something Miss Dowdy liked to eat and somehow get her to eat it. What did witches like to eat?

I figured everybody likes cookies. We had a pack of Oreos in the kitchen, partly eaten, held shut with a clothespin. I took the Oreo pack to the basement, dumped in some poison and shook it up. Back in the kitchen, I put five cookies on a plastic plate, covered it in plastic wrap and taped the wrap securely. Next, I secured cotton balls in my ears. Then, making sure Jena, Marla, and David weren't spying on me so they could then tell on me, I took the plate down the street, over the chalk marks, past the kids in their wading pool behind the chain link fence, and around to Miss Dowdy's house.

Nothing had changed. The shadows that held the porch hostage were as deep as before, as if the sun didn't dare challenge the will of the witch. But the distance from the sidewalk was too far to toss the plate.

The only option was to run to the porch without touching it or the steps, and run back. It wasn't until Buddy or Hitty-Pitty touched the porch that the trouble began.

Inhaling deeply and then holding it so I wouldn't breathe Miss Dowdy's foul air, I dashed across the yard. Four feet from the porch, I hurled the plastic plate at the top step. Then my foot struck an overturned birdbath base hidden in the tall weeds, and I went down. My head hit the edge of the porch, driving stars clear through my brain.

"Are you all right?" The voice sounded far away.

Head pounding, I pushed myself into a sitting position. The world wobbled.

"I said, are you all right?"

I touched my forehead. It wasn't bleeding, but it stung like blazes and there was going to be a huge bruise.

"Take out that cotton so you can hear me better."

I glanced at the porch and saw something move in the shadows. "No!" I managed.

The movement shifted, developing a shape, coming closer to the top step. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see. But the voice said, "Look at me, it's all right."

I looked back at the street and the sidewalk, which continued to waver.

"It's all right."

I looked. She was on the top step now, a small woman in a pale blue dress and white sneakers. Her gray hair was in two braids that were coiled and pinned to her head. Her skin was nearly as white as her shoes, but she bore no horns, no warts that I could see, no claws or fangs.

"They're all scared of me, I know, but not you."

Oh, yes I am! I thought.

"You're my first real visitor in a long time. Won't you come in?"

No! I know what happened to Hansel and Gretel!

"I know you remember the dog. The hamster. If you come in, I will tell you the truth."