Easier said than done. His dad was right. Everything in Eddie said turn away, and he did and they slid across the back lot, time after time. But eventually Eddie got the hang of it, and finally his dad hit the brakes and Eddie turned into it and lo and behold the pickup straightened out. To Eddie it seemed like saying “yes” while shaking his head no, but there was a free feeling to it, like he’d tricked the universe, or at least discovered one of its minor secrets, which, in fact, he had.
That is the feeling Eddie now seeks, and the voice is telling him to go in exactly the wrong direction to make things right.
He feels his way along the wall to the kitchen, slowly past the table, the stove, the fridge, to the closed door to the stairway leading to the cold, unfinished basement. He steps through, pulls it shut, grips the handrail like a lifeline, and moves slowly into the pitch black.
It’s been weeks since Eddie first saw me dead, and he is sick to death of being scared; so sick he’s willing to give up and die to escape the dread, or at least thinks he is. At the bottom of the stairs he releases the handrail, moves to the middle of the room, and sits on the cold concrete. If you’re coming for me, Billy B., he thinks, just do it. He hears himself sobbing, but he will sit here in the middle of the basement floor in pitch black until something gets him or until he’s not scared anymore. He trembles and sobs, and he waits, past the embarrassment of being newly fourteen and crying like a baby, past the belief that the universe hates him and is killing off those most important to him, past the awful emptiness of his loss. This is what I loved about my friend when I was alive. He’s a skinny little guy who can run like the wind, but at some point he turns and stands his ground. If I weighed more than twenty-one grams I’d grab his hand and lead him up the stairs.
I’m turning into the slide, he thinks over and over and over.
Eddie doesn’t know how much time passes, but finally his heartbeats slow and he realizes nothing bad is happening. He hasn’t seen my face once. His tears dry. He stands, chilly in just his pajama bottoms and bare feet. He works his way slowly back to the steps. I’m gonna be okay, he thinks. I beat it.
And a mouse runs across his foot.
He screams so loud his voice would be hoarse for two days if he were using it and dashes toward the closed door, slipping twice, cracking his forehead on a stair. He kicks the basement door open, then the kitchen door, then the back porch door and is suddenly screaming down the street. Unaware until later of the throbbing in his forehead or the freezing pavement beneath his feet or the wind whistling in the trees around him, he runs. All of Bear Creek is dark; not a streetlight shines, not a car moves. He runs past the station, past the Mercantile and Woody’s Grocery, gouging his bare feet in the gravel intersections, feeling nothing. For days afterward, people will talk of the awful shrieking that pierced the black of that night, though no one will know its source.
Exhausted and terrorized, Eddie crawls in under the low branches of a tall pine tree on the courthouse lawn, eight blocks from his house. In the fraction of a second between his feeling of terror and that of safety, I see a window and swoosh through. “What are you doing here?”
He glances around, sees nothing.
“Does the combination of lightning and a tall tree concern you at all?”
“Who’s there?” he says.
I lose him.
“Who’s there?”
Another quick window. “What would be a good next move?”
When Mrs. Proffit arrives home from church, she finds Eddie sitting in the middle of the living room, soaking wet and out of breath beneath the blazing lights, staring at a blank TV screen.
4
SORTING OUT
There were two separate voices. One told Eddie to turn into the slide, and the other asked him what he was doing sitting under a tall tree in a thunderstorm. He knows the turn-into-the-slide voice wasn’t real. He hears that voice all the time; it’s just memory. You hear something that works at one point in your life, and then it comes back at another point in your life when you need it. That’s the voice of reason, of common sense.
The other one, however, was a voice. When he was running through the streets tearing up his feet, there was not a soul in sight; all of Bear Creek was like a ghost town. And yet there under the tree he heard it. His eardrums rattled. Now he sits, dried off in his well-lighted room with the voice from under the tree adding to his fears. Have I gone stark raving nuts?
I’d help him, but all his windows are slammed, and painted shut, and nailed.
Eddie hears breathing in his doorway, looks up, and guess who’s filling it? Well, not filling, because he’s only five-six.
“Your mother tells me you’re in some distress,” Tarter says.
Eddie looks behind Tarter for his mother. She’s not there.
“She thought it might be the kind of problem I could be of help with, though it was my idea to come to your room,” Tarter says. “I seize opportunities as they present themselves.”
Freaked as he is, Eddie’s bouncing brain adds this to his list of bad things about not talking: You can’t tell your mother to keep her friends out of your room. He looks directly, and inoffensively, at Tarter, displaying no emotion.
“This selective mute thing is not serving you well,” Tarter says.
Oh, but it is. Eddie raises his inoffensive eyebrows.
“Do you have any idea what this is doing to your mother?”
Eddie sighs. Technically, that’s not talking.
“She blames herself,” Tarter says. “She thinks there is something she hasn’t done as a parent that is contributing to this. She must endure the loss of her eternal mate and this, too. I think it’s time you gave her some respite.”
Eddie’s look softens, letting Tarter know he heard. But if he were talking, he’d tell him that if his dad was her eternal mate, then she hasn’t lost him, has she? He misses his dad as much as his mother does, literally aches when he thinks of him.
“About that distress. Your mother says she found you in quite a state of agitation when she came home this evening. You might have avoided that had you accompanied her to church, but of course that’s your choice. At any rate, she believes you’re having unsettling dreams, that you’re roaming the house at night. She also says she’s heard what she calls whimpers of agony out of your sleep.”
Eddie does not like his mother telling Reverend Tarter private things about him, and he does not like the term “whimpers of agony.” He’s fourteen, for crying out loud. He gives the reverend more eyebrows.
Tarter sits on the end of his bed. “May I?” It ends in a question mark, but it isn’t a question. “I’m aware many of your friends and classmates have already been baptized,” he says. “For some reason you haven’t taken that step.”
That reason would be Eddie’s dad, who did not believe that symbolically cleansing your soul by getting dunked in a toga in Arling hot springs has much to do with truly cleansing your soul. Those were Mr. Proffit’s words. Also, at one time or another during the year, half the kids in town peed in the hot springs; Eddie knew it for a fact—he used to be one of them—so even if your soul does get cleansed, there’s your body to consider. Swimming there is one thing, cleaning up for eternity quite another.
“I believe God is sending you an important message with these terrors,” Tarter says.
Terrors? Eddie thinks. A minute ago they were unsettling dreams. But he perks up. What message would God send with terrors? As much as he is not a fan of the reverend, if there’s a message, he’d like to hear it so he could tell God he got it and maybe strike a deal. Eddie doesn’t know yet that the universe doesn’t deal.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Tarter continues, “and I’ve pondered your situation extensively. It may very well be the heavenly father is telling you if you turn your life over to him, these fears will subside. A lot has happened to you this year, Eddie. Do you know the story of Job?”
Yeah, Eddie thinks, I know the sto
ry of Job. Job is the guy in the Bible who ate it big-time. God brought plague and pestilence down on him. God offed his whole family. When Job didn’t complain, God gave him another one and made everything okay. It was a story he used to hear in Sunday school. Eddie got in big trouble when he aired his concerns about that first test family. God threw one whole family away just to see if he could make Job crack? If he were talking, he’d tell the reverend he thought God did a job on Job.
But right this minute, Eddie’s thinking, Is he saying God is trying to scare me to test me? Whoa! It seems like that would be a job for the devil.
“It’s something to think about,” Tarter says.
The reverend doesn’t understand that Eddie is not talking because it’s one of the few things he can control when everything else is out of control, and it feels good not to be sticking his foot in his mouth all the time, like he’s done pretty much every day of his life since he can remember. Eddie feels the need for focus…. I need to understand what’s happening to me. I need to understand how the world works, how people can just be there and then not be there, which means I need to keep right on shutting up and watching. And I need to know WHY MY BEST FRIEND BILLY BARTHOLOMEW IS STALKING ME!
“In our church you are required to testify before the congregation prior to your baptism. I have to say that, until you decided to cease all oral communication, you were the most articulate young man your age I’ve encountered. Along with Billy, of course. I have taken the liberty, with your mother’s permission, of going back into your elementary-school files to see some of your previous schoolwork. Though your records reflect to the contrary, I believe you were working three to five years ahead of your grade, when you bothered to finish what you started. I expect that, were you to put your mind to it, you could testify rather handily. Once you do that, and accept the Lord into your life, I guarantee you’ll begin to understand.”
Eddie takes a deep breath. He likes it when people know how smart he really is. He spent much time in elementary school when that wasn’t true. Most people who looked at his records didn’t bother to see what he wrote; they just noticed he never finished anything.
Tarter says, “I’ll be having dinner here night after tomorrow, thanks to your mother’s generosity. I want you to decide by then. I think your life would be much easier. And I think your mother’s life would be easier, too. You owe her that.”
Mr. Tarter’s words irritate Eddie. He’s living up to his reputation; telling you what he wants and just expecting you to do it. But it would be so nice to believe him. If all Eddie had to do was testify and get baptized to get rid of this awful torment, he’d be standing by the side of Arling hot springs with his nose plugs. But to go along with Tarter seems like a betrayal of his father and a betrayal of me. We actually looked forward to Tarter’s class as sort of a quest, a proving ground. Tarter was famous among kids for never losing, and we were going to beat him. It wasn’t about his religion—we weren’t up for messing with God—it was about his harsh discipline. As for his dad, well, Mr. Proffit told Eddie constantly, “Understanding is the key. When something seems mysterious and magical, it’s because we don’t have enough information.” When Eddie would ask if that meant there was no God, Mr. Proffit would say, “Not at all. All that knowledge has to come from somewhere, right, buddy?” It seemed so simple (and it is, but that’s because I know what I know). My friend Eddie Proffit, who always asks the best questions, is so tired of being scared, and so isolated without the backing of his father or his best friend, that he is considering giving in just to see if the terror goes away. He could tolerate it if he were only sad. He could tolerate it if he were only scared. But he can’t tolerate both.
“One more thing,” Tarter says. Eddie’s thoughts have been skipping through his mind like a flat rock across a smooth lake. He thought Tarter had left the room. “I know your father had some pretty interesting ideas. They were wrong, but they were interesting. And I know the two of you were close. I truly believe if he had lived, he would have come to understand the truth about God; he was too smart to have missed it. I hope his premature death won’t keep you stuck with his old ideas.”
Eddie feels a stab in his chest. It seems wrong for Tarter to get a leg up on his father after his father’s gone. But what if Tarter is right? What if his dad didn’t have all the information about God?
“I’ll leave you with your thoughts,” Tarter says, and moments later Eddie looks up, and he’s gone.
Leaving Eddie alone with his thoughts right now is like leaving him in a loud, crowded haunted house near the end of a Stephen King novel, but he’s glad to have one fewer person in it. He is a mess. His feet are leaking blood all over his bottom sheet now from the gravel cuts, his time-honored strategy of turning into the slide has failed him in a big way, and he knows he heard a real voice out there under the tree, just as well as he knows there was nobody out there in the night but him.
He sits in the light of his room with a towel wrapped around his feet and the drapes pulled and chairs propped tight against the closet doors, determined to figure this out. But his brain has a different idea, and before he knows it, he’s hopping from Tarter placing a white cloth over his face and laying him back in the hot springs to his father and him gazing through what Mr. Proffit called their “backyard Hubble” at the Milky Way, to actually eating a Milky Way. His head nods a couple of times and his eyes half close and his mind settles on the sledding hill.
That’s my cue.
Here’s the deal. I can’t interfere. It’s not like some fancy rule or anything, I just can’t, as in couldn’t if I wanted to. All I can do is wise him up, help Eddie remember what he already knows, make connections between his world and this one. I can bump him, and I will, because the one thing that is as true out here as it is in the Earthgame is connection. Connection is love. Staying connected with Eddie Proffit is as good for me as it is for him, because love is as true on earth as it is in the farthest reaches of the universe.
So I do it.
“Okay if I go down with you?” We’re at the top of Summer’s Hill—the sledding hill. It’s the first snowfall of the year, and half the Bear Creek population under the age of sixteen crowds the hill with sleds, saucers, old car hoods, and inner tubes.
“I thought you were dead,” Eddie says.
“I am. Okay if I go down with you?”
“If you’re dead, what are you doing here?”
“I’m going sledding, dummy,” I say, “if you’ll let me go down with you.”
“Didn’t you bring your sled?”
“I’m dead. Dead kids don’t have sleds.”
There are two ways to sled double. Both riders can sit, with the smaller person in front and the back person’s feet on the guider, or they can lay on their stomachs, one on top of the other. Given that Summer’s Hill dumps onto a road not blocked off for sledders, the second option is safest because you can guide better with your hands than with your feet (though getting run over by a car is of no consequence to me). The top guy pushes to get you going, then jumps on. We have a bit of a problem because dead kids can’t guide, but neither can they push, at least not in this Twilight Zone of Eddie’s. I’m in his territory, his dream state. I was pushier under the tree because he was in a bit of a crisis situation, but in this case I’m following his lead. So I lay on top of him, and he gets us going, using his hands like ski poles. I don’t say anything till we get to the bottom.
“That was fun. Let’s do it again.”
“You ever see my dad?” he asks.
“No. Want me to look for him?”
He looks at me funny, sensing this is the same voice he heard under the tree, and he pops awake. No more snow, no more sled, no more sledding hill. No more me. The overhead light still burns bright; the chairs are propped tightly under the knobs of both closet doors. The drapes are pulled. The house is quiet as a tomb, and Eddie is sweating so profusely he’s about to slip off the bed.
He takes three or four d
eep breaths and pads quietly from his bed to the door, peers out into the dark hall, takes two quick giant steps to the bathroom and flips on the light. His feet sting like crazy, so he places another towel under them and sits on the toilet. Man, I am going over to the Red Brick Church first thing in the morning to tell Tarter to get the gospel singers ready and skim off Arling hot springs and get me on the fast track to salvation. I have been creeped out one time too many on this day, and I am ending it.
All right then. Done. Decided. He’ll go down early in the morning and talk like they’re beating the bottoms of his feet with sticks. He reviews the bad trade-offs—he’ll be adding three evenings to his All Tarter channel for baptism and confirmation classes, and he’ll have to talk to him, which means he’ll have to get the way he talks under control because Tarter does not have tolerance for high-speed randomness. He scoffs at the betrayal of me, because he considers I’m betraying him by trying to scare him into the next decade. No matter. If he doesn’t get the craziness out of his life soon, like tomorrow, he’ll be strumming his lips with his fingers in Orofino, at State Hospital North. One problem: Within his silence he has found his only safety.
5
BLACK LIKE CAIN