The Witch (5 page)

Kerry stood gaping at me. It was the first big lie I ever told, but not the last.

The driver considered us, then talked into his radio, and got out to usher us into the back seat. He kept up a kindly, one-sided conversation as he drove. We didn't understand a word of it because of his accent. We kept our faces close to the windows, looking for our building.

And here it was, heaving up out of the vast strangeness of the city, and the maroon Chevy right in front! And our father standing over the Chevy's open trunk!

We set up a holler and the cab pulled over to the curb. We got out and ran to him, shouting. This time he was the one who didn't know what to make of us. “What's this?” he said. “Kids, how did you get here?”

“We took a cab,” Kerry said.

“We ran away,” I added.

“Wait here,” our father said, and he walked over to lean into the cab's window. He spent some time talking to the driver, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and finally he straightened up and the cab drove away with a friendly tap of its horn. “All right, you monkeys,” our father said. “Run along upstairs now.”

We scrambled up and burst through the open door, and then we stopped dead. The place was empty, except for the landlord's furniture, and some bulging plastic trash bags. Monica was sweeping the bare floor. She stopped when she saw us. “Wow.” She looked at the broom, then once more at us. “Wow.”

Our father came in after us. “Well isn't this a nice surprise. We were just on our way to see you.”

We didn't say anything. He said, “Now don't get all upset. We knew you were in a real good place, that was the A-number-one most important thing.”

“We aren't going back there,” I said, and Kerry started to speak, but I crowded into him and he kept silent.

Our father said, “Then I guess you're coming along for the ride. Are you up for it? It's gonna be a little crowded, what with the car all loaded up. I don't want to hear a peep out of you, understood?”

We forgave them. What choice did we have? We got in the car and we drove a long ways to a different city, where we lived with different names. Everything up until then was left behind us. And in this new place, in ways that were both slow and sudden, we grew up.

I don't see Kerry very often these days, and we don't talk much, and never about Mrs. Wojo. I had my own bad dreams and I imagine he had his. Did she manage to break a window,
call for help, get herself out? Was she even now out looking for us, picking up our trail? I worried about that for years and years. Or did she stay in that basement until somebody noticed her African violets all dead from neglect, her mail piling up, the bills unpaid? Sooner or later somebody would tap at the front windows, make calls, force the door. Sooner or later they'd find their way down to the basement and there she'd be, turned to leather and stench. Alive or dead, she was a vicious ghost.

Was it my fault for locking that door? For being bad and disobedient? For getting out of the car when we had been told to stay in? But why were we left in that car to begin with? Why was our father the way he was, or why was Monica? You might as well ask, why did Frank get polio and die? The world is made up of questions. Each of us has to live with our own answers.

It was the best hangover Royboy ever had. It was possible he was still drunk. He was lightheaded and lazy-limbed, with a grin he couldn't get rid of and an unfounded sense of wonderfulness. Where had it come from, and what, if anything, had he done to deserve it? He couldn't say.

Most of the last twelve hours was a little iffy. A great deal of it, he just couldn't say. There had been an excursion to a bar—perhaps two or three bars—with his roommates, an impromptu celebration of Royboy's inheritance. That is, his access to the funds set aside for him by the successful, aggressively prosecuted lawsuit in regards to a long-ago accident.

This accident had inflicted, on the ten-year-old Royboy, a grievous, expensive injury to his young brain. All that had since been patched up and made mostly right. Some residual stuff, sure, like these iffy moments. But each of his lost brain cells was like a tiny investment portfolio, paying off in a big, happy way.
He had turned twenty-two and that portion of the monies awarded for pain and suffering was now his.

“Pain and suffering!” Royboy and his friends drank to that, and drank again. The bartenders had been cheerful and obliging, and other customers looked on them fondly. There had been some girls. One of Royboy's friends saw a girl he knew, and that girl was there with her friends as well. The whole group had migrated from bar to bar and then back to the house of Royboy and associates. There had been music, and the kind of dancing that goes along with a lot of drinking, and at one point people had decided they were hungry, and started frying up eggs and bacon and potatoes. Everyone had been having such a good time. There had been some fun with a ketchup bottle.

Right about then, things had gone iffy.

Now it was morning, or at least, the sun was in the sky. Royboy sat in a recliner in the living room, in front of the big television screen. He appeared to be watching the television with great concentration, although the set was turned off. One of his roommates came in. He had just finished his shower, and he carried with him the perfumey smells of steam and shampoo and grooming products. His hair was slicked back in wet curls and he wore a T-shirt and athletic shorts. He watched Royboy watching the empty screen for a time. “Good show?” he offered.

“Hunh? No, it's that thing.” Royboy flapped his hand in the direction of the television. “You know, the whasis.”

“Shoe,” said the roommate, whose name was Mikey. “Well it sure is a nice one. How did it get on top of the TV?”

“I put it there,” Royboy said, but what he meant was, he put it there after he found it next to his bed.

“Why the shit-eating grin?”

“Because I'm happy.”

“About what?”

“I don't know,” Royboy confessed. Mikey nodded. They were all used to the spaces between things in Royboy's head.

“So this shoe . . .” Mikey began again.

“Yeah, I guess some girl was wearing it. I mean she was probably wearing another one just like it. You remember which girl?”

“I wasn't especially noticing footwear,” Mikey said. “What's the big deal?”

Before Royboy had a chance to explain, another of his roommates came in, eating milk and cereal from a bowl in his hand. His name was Dave D. There had been another Dave, Dave M., and Dave M. had moved out, but Dave D. was still Dave D. “You guys look like roadkill,” Dave D. said.

“Thanks. Hey, you recognize this shoe? The Boy wants to know.”

“It would be kind of a fashion risk for you, Royboy.”

“Screw you guys. I found it in my room this morning.”

His roommates made an ooooh sound. Dave D. said, “You sure there wasn't a foot inside it? You know, the coyote date where you chew your foot off so you can get away clean?”

“Screw you upside down and sideways.”

“Seriously, she was that good?”

“I don't exactly remember,” Royboy admitted.

“Dude. You got it in your sleep?”

Royboy shrugged. Let them think that. Maybe he had, in fact, been asleep, or maybe he was awake and just didn't remember it, maybe it had been the greatest sex in his life, over and done with except for its blissful echo. Or maybe there had been nothing of the sort. Just this mysterious joy.

Dave D. picked up the shoe and examined it. “Pretty,” he said. “What do you call this, Lucite?”

“Lucy Lucite. At least now we've got a name to go on.”

“You guys. Give me that.” Royboy hauled himself up from the recliner, a little wobbly in the knees, and snatched the shoe from Dave D. He liked the feel of the shoe in his hands, all smooth and cool. It was a dressy shoe with a high heel. It was made entirely of clear plastic except for the ankle strap, a line of silver beads. Just holding it reactivated the whole fizzy, grin-producing process.

The shoe was on the small side, though not tiny or elfin or anything like that. This was a relief. He didn't much care for little bitty women; they made him think of kittens and bunnies and other nonsexual things. Royboy tried to picture the foot that went inside the shoe, balancing on its icicle spike, and from there, the rest of the woman. He called up any existing girl-memories belonging to the night before, but these were only an agreeable, bright-colored femaleness, a kaleidoscope of bare legs and charm bracelets and pretty shoulders. He said, “So who was it knew them? The girls? How did they get here anyway?”

They thought it was probably due to another roommate, Lance, whose nickname was Lance the Pants. Lance was not available to answer questions. He had gone home with one of the girls, because that was just how he rolled. Mikey and Dave D. tried to remember if they had seen Royboy accompanying anyone in particular. They didn't think so.

“You were dancing by yourself with headphones on. I mean mostly by yourself. Every so often you sort of intersected with other people who were dancing, but it didn't seem like there was anything personal going on.”

“So things must have got personal later. Did you tell her you're rich?”

“I'm not rich rich,” Royboy said. “It's more like an income stream.” Although the amount of money was large and whoopee-inducing. He should probably invest it or something. But investing was an anxious notion. It meant your money went somewhere else and had adventures on its own. And maybe that turned out fine but not always. The money was meant to last him the rest of his life, in case he was unable to achieve his full financial potential. That had been the language of the lawsuit. But that meant he ought to divide the number of years he expected to be alive into the total sum, and that too was an anxious thing.

Anyway, if he'd told the mystery girl about his money, she hadn't stayed around to try to get her hands on it. She was no gold digger. He liked her even better.

“So we'll ask around,” Mikey said. “Do a little research. We can have another party and invite the same girls and see which one of them rings your bell. Okay?”

“I guess so.” But what if the girl had run off half-barefoot because she was disgusted with him, and with herself for having anything to do with him? Well, if that was the case, he'd still want to talk with her and find out why. “Sure, let's have another party.”

“We can fix the place up a little,” Dave D. said. “Have a bunch of fancy drinks ready, fruit drinks, and cupcakes, and olives on toothpicks, shit like that. Call it a Ladies' Night.” Dave D. had gone to school in marketing and thought in promotional terms.

“We'll take you shopping, Royboy. We'll dress you up fine.”

“I don't think I want to get dressed up.”

“No bow ties this time. Promise.”

“I'm going back to bed for a while,” Royboy said. His friends meant well, but they were making him nervous with all the things they had set in motion on his behalf.

He took the shoe back to his room and made a space for it among the piles of clothes that had never quite made it either into the dresser drawers or the laundry basket. He got into bed and rolled around in the sheets, sniffing at the pillows. No perceptible trace of girl. But he still felt a little of the shining, benevolent energy that had filled his head earlier.

It had either been a long time since he'd had a girlfriend, or else he had never had a girlfriend. It all depended on how you defined “girlfriend.” Girls sometimes gravitated his way, but they tended to take themselves off pretty fast. (Although never before had one escaped before he could even form a memory of her. That was a first.) He wasn't very good at conversation. They got tired of waiting for him to say something interesting. Lance the Pants tried to give him pointers. “Just ask them a question they can run with, like, does she have any pets, or any brothers or sisters.”

“Got it.” Royboy nodded. “Piece a cake.” The next time he and his buds were out for an evening, he spotted a likely girl at the end of the bar and ambled over to her. He said Hi. She said Hi. They smiled. Royboy asked her if she was having a good time tonight and she said pretty good so far. She seemed receptive. Her name was Sherry. She kept on smiling.

“So,” Royboy said, summoning up his nerve, “do your brothers and sisters have any pets?”

Would anything ever change? Was he doomed to klutzy lonesomeness? He still had hopes that somewhere out in the wide world was an attractive female person who would see past
his awkward surface and lack of vocabulary, down to the essential Royboy: a not-bad guy who wasn't inclined to cause problems, and who now had a little bit of money to spread around. She was out there somewhere, maybe even hobbling around on one shoe.

His roommates were as good as their word. They let it be known that there would be an actual, planned party, with food and drink and merriment. Royboy accompanied them to the liquor store and paid for the rum and mixers, the wine and beer, the bags of ice. At the grocery they bought a quantity of delicatessen items and bakery items, also supplies of hand soap and toilet paper. There was a debate about flowers versus no flowers and no flowers won, because they had never had such a thing as flowers in the house before and so didn't have vases. Vases were a bridge too far.

Mikey was put in charge of Royboy's hygiene and wardrobe. “Dress for success, dress to impress, dress not to be a mess,” he intoned. “Let me see your fingernails. Not good. Do you have a nail clipper? Never mind, I'll get you one.”

“Why can't I wear my normal clothes?” Royboy asked. He was wrapped in a bath towel and he felt unnaturally clean, like if somebody ran a finger down his arm, it would squeak.

“Because your normal clothes make you look like a farmer.” Mikey rummaged through Royboy's top dresser drawer. “I need to introduce you to the concept of date underwear.”

“I don't think I want to go to the party, Mikey.”

Mikey sat down on the opposite side of the bed from Royboy. “You're nervous, right? That's okay. That's just adrenaline. Adrenaline is like a power surge. It helps you stand your ground in a fight or jump out of an airplane.”

“I don't want to do either of those.”

“Or ask a girl to dance. You want to be able to do that, right? The girl of your dreams?”

“If she's the girl of my dreams, she asks me.”

“I'm gonna fix you a drink, kind of a pre-party thing. Chill you out. Then we'll go through everybody's closet and come up with your new,
GQ
look.” Mikey reached over the stacks of laundry to the high-heeled shoe and gave it to Royboy. “She's waiting for you, buddy. But you have to step up to the plate.”

The party blossomed. Girls, whole flocks of them, arrived and were provided with high-caliber alcohol in the form of rum and coconut, rum and pineapple, rum and orange juice, rum and rum. Dave D. was the bartender and he kept the drinks coming. Lance the Pants did his DJ routine. Mikey was the official host and greeter, steering the guests toward the bar and other hospitality venues. Royboy was installed on a sofa in the corner of the front room, and as each girl arrived, he sent a verdict to Mikey by way of head shakes or shrugs:
Nope. Nope. Maybe, no wait, I don't think so.

He was dressed up in his borrowed party clothes, a V-neck sweater with a T-shirt underneath, and jeans so tight that he kept shifting around, as discreetly as he could, to rearrange himself. The party picked up steam. It ebbed and crested around him. Some of their guy friends had come too, and Royboy watched them maneuver—effortlessly, it seemed—among the fluttering girls. He didn't think the girl with the shoe was here, though he couldn't have said why. He just didn't feel it.

Finally a girl came up to him, sent by Mikey, he suspected, and leaned over him to be heard above the music. Her breasts were so well framed and presented, they reminded him of the items on display in the bakery case. “Want to dance?”

“Sure.” He let her pull him off the couch and take him by the hand to where the dancing was going on. On those occasions when he danced with somebody rather than by himself, his strategy was to imitate whatever his partner was doing. This girl was moving up and down with a grinding shimmy, which just didn't work for him. He settled for doing what his roommates called his “monster dance,” bending forward with his arms extended while he trod out the beat. The girl kept sending her encouraging smiles his way. Her cleavage smiled at him too. It was confusing. The sweater made his arms itch. In an effort to focus, he watched the girl's feet, though he didn't recognize anything familiar about them.