Wait Until Twilight (3 page)

“What do you mean baby things?”

“Those three freaky babies on the sofa.”

“Ah, that. I don’t know. I think David shot that. Pretty weird, huh?”

“Yeah, they looked so real. I don’t see how they did it.”

“Me, neither.” Just the thought of them makes me nauseous and
creeped out. I grab the tapes and go back up to the kitchen, where I fix myself a hot dog, hoping to settle my stomach. I walk outside with my food. Will and his parents are standing around in their pebble-strewn garden next to where they park their cars.

“How’ve you been, Samuel?”

“Good, Miss Williamson. Just busy with school.”

“How’s that film coming along?”

“Almost finished. I’ll have to see what there’s to see in the editing room.”

Will’s big brother comes out of the house with a shotgun and an easel. “I’m goin’ huntin’. Anybody wanna come along?”

“No thanks, I’m tired,” says Will. He does look tired. “I think I might be coming down with something.”

“Will, you get inside and get some rest. We don’t need two sick boys walking around here,” says his mom.

“I don’t feel sick anymore. I’m too good to be sick,” boasts Will’s big brother, and then he walks into the woods alone to paint one of his pastoral paintings. I finish my hot dog and go home. I never did ask him why he took that shotgun with him. Maybe he really was going hunting.

I
SKIP TWO DAYS OF
school and stay on the art class computer trying to make the video I shot look like the dream. Editing is the easy part because I can do it alone and on my own time. All I have to do is cut and paste. The problem is it doesn’t look right. It looks too plain. It isn’t until I remember those Impressionist paintings sitting in Will’s basement that I can fix the problem. I manipulate the colors of the video using a program on the computer to make them look as if they’re water-colored. It deepens everything and gives it the dreamy look I want. The blue of the sky bleeds into the yellow of the sun and wheat.
The red of the shirts the rebels are wearing show out like blood. It’s like everything has its own aura. Most of the running time of the film consists of the machete-wielding rebels frantically running around in the wheat getting hunted down and picked off by the gun-toting soldiers. After I give the orders and the rebels duck down into the wheat to hide from the soldiers, I come running out of the wheat to cover the dictator’s big gun with the black tarp. Using a little camera trickery, namely turning the camera off and then on while keeping everyone standing still, I turn the big gun into a camera, which suddenly becomes the point of view of the film. The dictator and the soldiers run, and the rebels win the battle without violence. As soon as I finish I show the ten-minute film to Mr. Peck in his office.

“Looks good.”

“Thanks.”

“Is this your final exam project?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Well, just try to look busy until the end of the year, then,” he tells me.

I
GET SUSPENDED BECAUSE OF THOSE TWO DAYS
I skipped while working on my video art project. And as punishment I’m put in “lockdown” for a day. There’s a trailer behind the school next to the Dumpster for that. I get there early in the morning because if you’re late just one minute you get another day. David’s already there for getting caught smoking back behind the school. All the teachers know about the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket but usually don’t say anything because, though he’s sixteen, David supports himself and his mother as an auto mechanic and the occasional small-time loan shark. He has this constant worn-out look about him. I don’t think he sleeps much.

The other two in lockdown that day are the Japanese exchange student, Yoshi, and a skinny little black kid whose name I’m not sure of. Once you got in there, you have to stay in your cubicle facing the
wall and keep your mouth shut the entire day. If you speak, you get another day. That’s the punishment for everything: you get another day. Mrs. Smith, who I think is two hundred and two years old, sits all hunched over behind a desk at the head of the trailer, making sure we all stay quiet. Mrs. Smith’s this old lady who sometimes works as a substitute teacher. She’s real strict and always has a scowl on her face. I spend the morning catching up on homework and readings from the classes I’ve missed. When lunchtime comes, Mrs. Smith has to go get the food and bring it to us. We don’t get the regular lunch. Instead, we get a brown bag of a peanut butter jelly sandwich, chips, an apple, and milk. At least we get it delivered to us, though. “No talking, no laughing, no nothing,” she orders at us before she leaves to get our lunches. As soon as she goes I speak up from my cubicle.

“Hey, Yoshi. Did you really get in a fight, like everyone’s saying?” I ask. I’ve never talked to him, but in lockdown everyone seems like a comrade.

“A black tried to throw a rock at me. So I kicked him,” he says.

“Who was it?”

“He is here,” Yoshi says.

“Why’d you throw a rock at him?” I say from my cubicle. There’s no answer. “How long you in for?”

“One day,” says David.

“Two days,” says Yoshi.

After a moment of silence, “Fo’,” says an unfamiliar voice from the far rear cubicle.

Mrs. Smith suddenly comes through the door and we get quiet. “Who was talking?” she asks as soon as she comes in. No one says anything. “I heard talking.” There’s only silence. “In about three seconds, depending on a turn of events, you’ll either get more lockdown or back to business as usual.”

“Why?”

“Who said that?”

“Why are you such a Nazi?” I say from my cubicle.

“Whut? Who said that?”

I stand up. “We didn’t do anything to you. So what if we exchanged a few words? What do you expect? My God, even prisoners can talk.”

“I want to know who talked,” she says.

“It was me. I talked.”

“You just earned yourself another day, mister.”

“Good for you.”

“Keep talking and you’ll get more.”

“I love it here. It’s nice and quiet so I can get my studying done. I even get my lunch delivered by a Nazi.” She looks at me with this look of utter horror on her face, like I slapped her or something, and then walks out. The heads of everyone slowly come up over their cubicle walls.

“You crazy!” says the black kid. I’m not sure if he means it as a question or a general statement. I head for the door.

“Where will you go?” asks Yoshi.

“I don’t know, but I think she’s bringing reinforcements. And I really want to get the hell out of here,” I say. This must be the exhilaration convicts get when they break out because it does feel damn good.

“It looks like it’s going to be that kind of day,” says David, who stalks out, taking out a cigarette.

“You crazy, too. You gonna get us all in trouble,” says the black kid.

“I was just gonna go outside for a smoke, man,” says David.

“Everyone goes, then I go, too,” says Yoshi. I’m already out of the trailer when Yoshi comes hopping out with his spiky black hair. He smiles and stretches out his arms into a Y and then takes a deep breath like he’s going to start doing some stretching exercises or something. I wonder if he even knows we’re getting into a heap more trouble.

With a cigarette in his mouth, David stops at the door of the trailer and looks back in. “We’re an equal-opportunity breakout,” he says. I hear a muffled answer from inside the trailer. “Suit yourself. You can tell them whatever you want.”

Yoshi comes up to me and says, “By coming to America I miss my Japanese anime the most.”

“Anime? No anime here, man,” I say. “Just old Nazis and cruddy peanut butter jelly. Peanut butter jelly! Peanut butter jelly,” I sing. David joins in. “Peanut butter jelly! Peanut butter jelly!” Then Yoshi, too. “Peanut butter jelly!”

It keeps going then like that until David stops us. “My house is just up the street from school. C’mon, before old Nancy Battleaxe comes back.”

The black kid finally comes out with an angry look on his face. “Shoot! I feel stupid in there alone.”

We all take a path through the practice field and head around the gym to the west parking lot. Once we climb over the chain-link fence at the end of the lot, we’re free. Just two streets down we make a right into a suburb to David’s house, which is a small duplex-style suburban home. “Come on in. Make yourself at home.” He leads us into the kitchen. “I don’t know about you fellas, but I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.” David cooks bacon. I fry the eggs, and the black kid toasts bread. Yoshi watches us cook and asks questions like, “You like to cook? What is your favorite food?” We’re making egg and bacon sandwiches and eating them almost as fast as they’re being made. When David’s mom shows up, we’re in the middle of our feeding frenzy.

“Hey, boys! What’s this?” she asks loudly. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you around, Samuel.” She gives me a hug. Her big boobs push up against me, and I can smell the sour alcohol breath on her. She doesn’t even mention the fact that we’re not at school.

“I was over here last week,” I say.

She stares into my eyes with her tired brown-glazed eyes that seem to be measuring me into a shot glass. “Oh yeah, that’s right. How could I forget a cute face like yours?”

“At least you look better than your head is,” I say, trying to be funny.

She laughs and slaps me on the back. “I’ve heard that before, kid. Here, hold this for me,” she says, handing me a metal flask, and then she grabs a grocery bag. It reeks of alcohol. “It’s the good stuff,” she says, and with that begins restocking the fridge with beer and a variety of other alcoholic beverages. She’s organizing them into sections while quietly talking to herself. Along with all the alcohol she’s bought a couple loaves of bread, which is funny because there’s a stack of toast on the counter that the black kid has made. I get a couple slices and make another sandwich and then offer David’s mother one of the wine coolers I’m drinking. She laughs. “You think I want to end up in the gutter like you fellas. Hell no.” She bends over into the fridge, sticking out a large quasi-shapely butt. “Just a joke. Don’t get your feelings all hurt. Just finish high school.” With that she takes her drink into the living room.

After cleaning up in the kitchen, we go into David’s room. “When do you gotta go in to work?” I ask David.

“Not till four thirty. I told them I was suspended and that I wouldn’t get out of school till four, so I got all day.” He slowly leans back in his bed and groans.

The black kid, whose name we finally find out to be Cornelius, asks Yoshi, “Why’d you come here, anyhow?”

“You mean America?”

“Yeah, I mean America.”

“I came here to learn English and about American thinking. Everybody in Japan must learn English. People who speak English and
understand Western culture get good jobs. I was real bad at English, but then something bad happened to me to make me study harder.”

“What happened?” asks David.

“When I was in sixth grade, I living in Singapore. I sitting by a pool with my younger brother one day when a Westerner spoke to us. Unfortunately, I can’t understand that much English then, so I just smile at him, though I had no idea what he saying. He kept talking, and I could sense he was getting more and more pissed off at me. I kept smiling at him, hoping it would calm him down. But no, it didn’t. He blew up and suddenly grab my legs. He swung me around like it was hammer-throw event in the Olympics, you know? I ended up in the pool. I wish I learned English better then so I could respond and he wouldn’t throw me in the pool. I still wonder what he was talking about.”

“That’s crazy,” Cornelius says. “If somebody tried to do that to me and my brother, he be dead.”

“Ah, he was just playing,” I say. “If he was really mad, he wouldn’t have thrown you in the pool.”

“Yeah, us Americans like to punch when we’re angry,” David says with a laugh.

“Ohh! This anime was very popular in Japan five years ago!” Yoshi says. He points at the television on a dresser. There’s some cartoon about robots that turned into werewolves and vampires. I’ve never seen it before but it looks ‘crazy,’ as Cornelius likes to put it. “It was first a manga—a very famous comic book in Japan. It’s a video game, too.”

“I thought I saw it somewhere,” says Cornelius. “I played that at my cousin’s. He got that game for Christmas. We played that all day.”

“Oh yes, very fun. In Japan little high school girls love it!”

“High school girls? Damn!”

We spend the last hour before school officially ends lying around on the floor listening to hippy-sounding country rock and roll by a group called the Flying Burrito Brothers.

“Are you serious?” I ask when he tells us the name of the band.

“Yeah, and the slide guitarist, his name was Sneaky Pete. He invented Gumby,” David says.

“Who the hell’s Gumby?” ask Yoshi and Cornelius.

David looks at the two and says, “Forget it. Just listen.” I’m not much into hippy-sounding rock, but it doesn’t sound half bad. It’s sure easy to listen to. I even nod off a couple times, it’s so damn relaxing.

“Any of you ever hear of some monster babies?” I ask.

“Monster babies?” asks Yoshi.

“Yeah, some people say there’re these freakish babies somewhere in Sugweepo. I heard they were out heading south, past the swamps somewhere.”

“I heard about them babies. My little brother said something about that one time,” says Cornelius. “He said some kids been talking about like it’s real.”

“They are real. I saw them,” I say. “We saw them. Me and David.”

“You’re lyin’,” says Cornelius.

“No man. We went to their house and saw them. They had these big jug heads.”

“Bigger than David? Ha-ha!” says Cornelius.

“I’m serious. And their eyeballs were like…one big as a silver dollar and the other as small as a penny. Everything was out of whack. One arm or a leg was just a little stump with some fingernails on it and then another almost normal. The only thing one hundred percent normal were their mouths.”

“Their mouths?” asks Yoshi.

“Yeah. They had these normal mouths.”

“I wish I could of seen it,” adds Cornelius.

“No you don’t. They were nasty.”

“Maybe they’re not real,” suggests Yoshi.

“When I first saw them I wasn’t so sure myself. But the way they were squirming around…Jesus…I don’t even want to think about it…”

“They were real, all right,” adds David. “Enough to make Samuel puke.”

“You puked? Damn!” says Cornelius.

“What’s puke?” asks Yoshi.

“Like this, Blahhhh!” Cornelius put a finger in his mouth and fake-barfs.

“Hey hey! If you live twice, you’ll never see something like that,” I say. “Just be glad you didn’t have to see what we saw.”

“Only me and Samuel know for sure, so don’t be telling everybody. Mrs. Greenan doesn’t want people snooping around making rumors and all that,” says David. “My mom’s friends with Mrs. Greenan’s sister, and I don’t want any trouble.”

“Yoshi can tell his friends back in Japan. They won’t bother her, right?” I say.

“Yeah, Yoshi, when you go back, tell everyone about the alien babies in Sugweepo,” says Cornelius. “You be a hero.”

“Nobody believe me anyway.”

W
HEN THREE O’CLOCK COMES AROUND
I sneak back into the student parking lot and drive back around to David’s so I can give Yoshi and Cornelius a ride home. Cornelius doesn’t live too far from David. His house is on the other side of the highway on a dirt road that I didn’t even know about, even though I had driven around that area hundreds of times.
Turns out there’s an entire community of low-income houses. They look kind of like shacks, with blue tin roofs and dirt front yards. And they’re built directly on the ground with no real foundation, except for some cinder blocks.

“Right up there,” directs Cornelius.

We pull up in front of some chicken wire that serves as a fence to a front yard of dirt. His house is like the rest of them. It seems to be built on stilts, and in the windows I can see some white eyes peering out at us from the dark. “Hey, thanks for breaking out with us,” I say.

“Yeah, man, but we gonna be in some serious shit tomorrow.”

“It was worth it,” I say.

“Sho’ was.”

“Good-bye, Cornelius,” says Yoshi.

“Later,” Cornelius says, and then pauses. “Yo, sorry about the rock.”

“No, don’t worry. I’ve had much, much worse. Thrown in pool, remember!”

Next I take Yoshi to his host family’s house. On the way I take the back roads, making sure to go through Underwood and pass by Mrs. Greenan’s house. “Yoshi, that’s where the babies live.”

“In there?”

“Yeah, but remember, don’t tell anyone except your friends back in Japan.”

“Okay,” he says. I slow down so he can get a good look, but I get a bad feeling, and for just a second I think I can hear a door slam from inside the place. “Looks kind of scary.”

“I know.” I speed up on past and take Yoshi home. I pull up the driveway to what looks like a small mansion. His host family is rich.