The Girl Next Door (7 page)

Authors: Jack Ketchum

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction

BOOK: The Girl Next Door

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“I’m taking these boys out for a Mister Softee over at the fair, Meggie. You take care of your sister and keep yourself out of the icebox. Don’t want you getting fat on us.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ruth turned to me.

“David,” she said, “you know what you ought to do? You ought to go say hi to Susan. You never met and it’s not polite.”

“Sure. Okay.”

Meg led the way down the hallway ahead of me.

Their door was to the left opposite the bathroom, the boys’ room straight on. I could hear soft radio music coming from behind the door. Tommy Edwards singing “It’s All In the Game.” Meg opened the door and we went inside.

When you’re twelve, little kids are little kids and that’s about it. You’re not even supposed to notice them, really. They’re like bugs or birds or squirrels or somebody’s roving housecat—part of the landscape but so what. Unless of course it’s somebody like Woofer you can’t
help
but notice.

I’d have noticed Susan though.

I knew that the girl on the bed looking up at me from her copy of
Screen Stories
was nine years old—Meg had told me that—but she looked a whole lot younger. I was glad she had the covers up so I couldn’t see the casts on her hips and legs. She seemed frail enough as it was without my having to think about all those broken bones. I was aware of her wrists, though, and the long thin fingers holding the magazine.

Is this what an accident does to you? I wondered.

Except for the bright green eyes it was almost like meeting Meg’s opposite. Where Meg was all health and strength and vitality, this one was a shadow. Her skin so pale under the reading lamp it looked translucent.

Donny’d said she still took pills every day for fever, antibiotics, and that she wasn’t healing right, that walking was still pretty painful.

I thought of the Hans Christian Andersen story about the little mermaid whose legs had hurt her too. In the book I had the illustration even looked like Susan. The same long silky blond hair and soft delicate features, the same look of sad longtime vulnerability. Like someone cast ashore.

“You’re David,” she said.

I nodded and said hi.

The green eyes studied me. The eyes were intelligent. Warm too. And now she seemed both younger and older than nine.

“Meg says you’re nice,” she said.

Smiled.

She looked at me a moment more and smiled back at me and then went back to the magazine. On the radio Alan Freed played the Elegants’ “Little Star.”

Meg stood watching from the doorway. I didn’t know what to say.

I walked back down the hall. The others were waiting.

I could feel Ruth’s eyes on me. I looked down at the carpet.

“There you go,” she said. “Now you know each other.”

Chapter Eight

Two nights after Karnival a bunch of us slept out together.

The older guys on the block—Lou Morino, Glen Knott, and Harry Gray—had been in the habit for years now of camping out on warm summer nights at the old water tower in the woods behind the Little League diamond with a couple of six-packs between them and cigarettes stolen from Murphy’s store.

We were all still too young for that, with the water tower all the way over on the other side of town. But that hadn’t stopped us from envying them aloud and frequently until finally our parents said it would be okay if we camped out too as long as it was under supervision—meaning, in somebody’s backyard. So that was what we did.

I had a tent and Tony Morino had his brother Lou’s when he wasn’t using it so it was always my backyard or his.

Personally, I preferred my own. Tony’s was all right—but what you wanted to do was to get back as far away from the house as possible in order to have the illusion of really being out there on your own and Tony’s yard wasn’t really suited to that. It tapered down over a hill with just some scrub and a field behind it. The scrub and field were boring and you were resting all night on an incline. Whereas my yard ran straight back into thick deep woods, spooky and dark at night with the shadows of elm, birch and maple trees and wild with sounds of crickets and frogs from the brook. It was flat and a lot more comfortable.

Not that we did much sleeping.

At least that night we didn’t.

Since dusk we’d been lying there telling Sick Jokes and Shaddap Jokes (“Mommy, mommy! Billie just vomited into a pan on the stove!” “Shaddap and eat your stew.”), the six of us laughing, crunched into a tent that was built for four—me, Donny, Willie, Tony Morino, Kenny Robertson and Eddie.

Woofer was being punished for playing with his plastic soldiers in the wire-mesh incinerator in the yard again—otherwise he might have whined long enough and loud enough to make us take him too. But Woofer had this habit. He’d hang his knights and soldiers from the mesh of the incinerator and watch their arms and legs burn slowly along with the trash, imagining God knows what, the plastic fire dripping, the soldiers curling, the black smoke pluming up.

Ruth hated it when he did that. The toys were expensive and they made a mess all over her incinerator.

There wasn’t any beer but we had canteens and Thermoses full of Kool-Aid so that was all right. Eddie had half a pack of his father’s Kool unfiltereds and we’d close the tent flaps and pass one around now and then. We’d wave away the smoke. Then we’d open the flaps again just in case my mom came out to check on us—though she never did.

Donny rolled over beside me and you could hear a Tasty-Cake wrapper crush beneath his bulk.

That evening when the truck came by we’d all gone out to the street to stock up.

Now, no matter who moved, something crackled.

Donny had a joke. “So this kid’s in school, right? He’s just a little kid, sitting at his desk and this nice old lady schoolteacher looks at him and notices he looks real sad and says, what’s wrong? And he says, waaa! I didn’t get no breakfast! You poor little guy, says the teacher. Well, don’t worry, no big deal, she says, it’s almost lunchtime. You’ll get something to eat then, right? So now let’s return to our geography lessons. Where’s the Italian border?”

“In bed, fucking my mother, says the little kid. That’s how come I didn’t get no fucking breakfast!”

We laughed.

“I heard that one,” said Eddie. “Or maybe I read it in
Playboy.”

“Sure,” said Willie. Willie was on the other side of me over against the tent. I could smell his hair wax and, occasionally and unpleasantly, his bad teeth. “Sure,” he said, “you read it in
Playboy.
Like I fucked Debra Paget. Right.”

Eddie shrugged. It was dangerous to contradict him but Donny was lying between them and Donny outweighed him by fifteen pounds.

“My old man buys it,” he said. “Buys it every month. So I hock it off him outa his drawer, read the jokes, check the broads, and put it back again. He never knows. No sweat.”

“You better hope he never knows,” said Tony.

Eddie looked at him. Tony lived across the street from him and we all knew that Tony knew that Eddie’s dad beat him.

“No shit,” said Eddie. There was warning in his voice.

You could almost feel Tony edge away. He was just a skinny little Italian guy but he had some status with us because he already had the downy dark beginnings of a mustache.

“You get to see
all
of ’em?” asked Kenny Robertson. “Jeez. I hear there was one with Jayne Mansfield.”

“Not all of ’em,” said Eddie.

He lit a cigarette so I closed the flaps again.

“I saw that one, though,” he said.

“Honest?”

“Sure did.”

He took a drag on the cigarette, being very Mister Cool about it. Willie sat up next to me and I could feel his big flabby belly press softly into my back. He wanted the cigarette but Eddie wasn’t passing just yet.

“Biggest tits I ever seen,” he said.

“Bigger than Julie London’s? Bigger than June Wilkdnson’s?”

“Shit! Bigger than
Willie’s,”
he said. Then he and Donny and Tony cracked up laughing—though actually it shouldn’t have been all that funny for Donny because Donny was getting them too. Small fatty pouches where the muscle should be. Kenny Robertson, I guess, was too scared to laugh. And Willie was right there beside me so I wasn’t saying anything.

“Har-dee-har-har,” said Willie. “So fucking funny I forgot to laugh.” ...- w .

“Oh that’s cool,” said Eddie. “What are you, in the third grade?”

“Eat me,” said Willie.

“I’d have to push your mother away, spaz.”

“Hey,” said Kenny. “Tell us about Jayne Mansfield. You see her nips?”

“Sure you do. She’s got this great body and these little juicy pointy nips and these great big tits and this great ass. But her legs are skinny.”

“Fuck her legs!” said Donny.

“You fuck ’em,” said Eddie. “I’ll fuck the rest of her.”

“You got it!” said Kenny. “God. Nips and
everything!
Amazing.”

Eddie passed him the cigarette. He took a quick drag and then passed it on to Donny.

“The thing is,” Kenny said, “she’s a movie star. You got to wonder why she’d do that kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing?” Donny asked.

“Show her tits that way in a magazine.”

We thought about it.

“Well, she’s not really a movie star,” Donny said. “I mean, Natalie Wood’s a movie star. Jayne Mansfield’s just sort of in some movies.”

“A starlet,” said Kenny.

“Naw,” said Donny. “She’s too fucking old to be a starlet. Dolores Hart’s a starlet. You see
Loving You
? I love that scene in the graveyard, man.”

“Me too.”

“That scene’s with Lizabeth Scott,” said Willie. “So what?”

“I like the scene in the soda shop,” said Kenny. “Where he sings and beats the shit outa the guy.”

“Great,” said Eddie.

“Really great,” said Willie.

“Really.”

“Anyway, you got to figure
Playboy’s
not just a magazine, either,” said Donny. “You know, it’s
Playboy
. I mean, Marilyn Monroe was in there. It’s the greatest magazine ever.”

“You think? Better than Mad?” Kenny sounded skeptical.

“Shit, yes. I mean,
Mad’s
casual. But it’s just for kids, you know?”

“What about
Famous Monsters?”
asked Tony.

That was a tough one.
Famous Monsters
had just appeared and all of us were crazy for it.

“Sure,” said Donny. He took a drag on the cigarette and smiled. The smile was all knowing. “Does
Famous Monsters of Filmland
show tits?” he said.

We all laughed. The logic was irrefutable.

He passed the smoke to Eddie, who took a final drag and stubbed it out on the grass, then flipped the butt into the woods.

There was one of those silences where nobody had anything to say, we were all off alone there somewhere.

Then Kenny looked at Donny. “You ever really see it?” he said.

“See what?”

“Tit.”

“Real tit?”

“Yeah.”

Donny laughed. “Eddie’s sister.”

That got another laugh because everybody had.

“I mean on a woman.”

“Nah.”

“Anybody?” He looked around.

“My mother,” said Tony. You could tell he was shy about it.

“I walked in one time, into her bathroom, and she was putting her bra on. For a minute I saw.”

“A
minute?”
Kenny was really into this.

“No. A second.”

“Jeez. What was it like?”

“What do you mean what was it like? It was my mother, for chrissake! Madonn’! You little pervert.”

“Hey, no offense, man.”

“Yeah. Okay. None taken.”

But all of us were thinking of Mrs. Morino now. She was a thick-waisted, short-legged Sicilian woman with a lot more mustache than Tony had but her breasts were pretty big. It was at once difficult and interesting and slightly repulsive to try to picture her that way.

“I’ll bet Meg’s are nice,” said Willie.

It just hung there for a moment. But I doubt that any of us were thinking about Mrs. Morino anymore.

Donny looked at his brother.

“Meg’s?”

“Yeah.”

You could see the wheels turning. But Willie acted as though Donny hadn’t understood. Trying to score points on him.