Paula looked down the street, at a half dozen abandoned homes on either side and the row of stores farther down. “What is this place?”
I pushed away a shiver and took hold of this golden opportunity to gain her undivided attention. “It’s Old Town Billington,” I told her. “Unluckiest place in the country.” I sat on a tree stump as I wove the tale for her. “It started with a storm, about twenty years ago. A tornado ripped through the woods and took out a few houses—you can still see the path it cut.” I pointed to the thin part of the woods. “Then, while people were still cleaning up, a bunch of ’em got the flu real bad. Some even died from it. That same year, when a blight started eating through the trees, people just gave up. I guess some got superstitious, and others couldn’t stand the bad memories. Anyway, people moved to other parts of town, and when the bridge that led from here to the highway got washed out, there was no reason to rebuild it.”
I looked around, trying to spot the old barn that Grant had mentioned. Even though the place seemed deserted, I was terrified he might be around, that he might see me flaunting my glove in front of Paula. I had to keep reminding myself that I never really promised him anything. Just because he asked me to keep it secret didn’t mean I had to. Still, I slipped the glove underneath my shirt to keep it out of sight.
“So it’s a real live ghost town,” said Paula as we walked down the silent street. “In my old neighborhood, you don’t get deserted houses. If a place gets deserted, they tear it down and build a strip mall. This is so strange.”
Funny, but I never really thought of Old Town as being strange. I usually didn’t think about it at all. It was kind of like that blind spot at the side of your eye. It’s there, but who cares?
Like your appendix, I thought, but pushed that one out of my mind real quick.
“It’s nothing special,” I explained. “I mean, it wasn’t exactly a center of activity. There’s only this one street—then around the bend the homes thin out. There’s only maybe thirty buildings in all.”
“Do you ever come here, like, with friends, to hang out?” she asked.
“When I was a kid,” I said, “Wesley and I used to come here when we got bored. We’d throw rocks at the windows and stuff.” I didn’t tell Paula why we stopped coming here. The truth is, my father found out about it. It was the only time I ever saw him furious, the only time he ever hit me. A real old-fashioned spanking. Being that I was nine, and way too old for that sort of thing, I thought it would only hurt my pride, but, man, was there power in that palm. It hurt like you couldn’t believe. From what I heard, Wesley got even worse from his dad. The whole thing felt so crazy that I thought the world was falling apart. So now, although being out of line was my favored mode of operation, there were just some things I didn’t do. Like hang out in Old Town.
I never thought to question why it upset my father so much. I never thought to question a lot of things.
When I glanced up at Paula, she was looking down the sharp bulge in my shirt. The glove was out of sight, but definitely not out of mind for either of us.
“You didn’t get it at a store, did you?” Paula said. She wasn’t asking a question. She was stating a fact.
“I guess it’s not exactly something you’ll find at Walmart,” I answered.
I thought she was going to keep asking questions, but this time she chose not to—the same way I chose not to ask where Grant had gotten it from. That path of questioning led to a place I didn’t want to go. Much better to stay grounded in things that were easy to explain. Like Old Town.
Up ahead was a house that was once painted green, but little of that paint remained. A broken swing adorned the porch, which overlooked a dead willow in the front yard. The door was swung open wide.
“Wanna check it out?” asked Paula.
No, I didn’t. “Sure,” I said.
The house had only been like this for twenty years, but as we stepped inside, it seemed to me that it could have been this way for a hundred. Peeling wallpaper, fallen shelves, a moldering sofa, and a busted TV still plugged in to a dead outlet. The floor was littered with broken glass and abandoned knickknacks. We stepped carefully, exploring with the care of archaeologists.
“The people who lived here probably just moved to another part of town,” I offered.
“Or they died,” Paula replied. “Live people usually don’t leave this much stuff behind.”
I nodded and casually glanced back at the front door, just to make sure it was still open. Something about being in Old Town made me feel much younger than almost-fifteen. I didn’t like the feeling.
I was the one who noticed the message.
Paula had opened the pantry door to reveal the age-old baking soda and a rat-gnawed box of cornflakes, when I caught the writing on the back of the door and swung it open wider.
It wasn’t just writing—it was gouged into the wood, scratched as if someone had used one of the many kitchen utensils scattered on the floor to leave the message.
GOD HELP US
Paula shuddered.
“Dying people do weird things,” I offered. “They could have been delirious—drunk—or maybe it was written by a bum—I’ll bet this place gets full of them in the winter. . . .” I kept on talking and talking, making excuses and explanations, warding off that undeniable feeling that the people who died here might not have died from the flu. What a miserable time to discover my intuition.
Paula turned to look at me, and it seemed to me that she grew pale.
“Jason . . . ,” she said. I didn’t like the tone of her voice. It lacked her usual confidence. “You want to be spooked, Jason?”
I didn’t think it was possible to be any more spooked than I already was. “Sure,” I said.
“Then turn around.”
Then I realized that she wasn’t looking at me—she was looking past me. I didn’t make a move at first, not daring to consider what she might be seeing, but I couldn’t stand like that forever. I turned slowly, trying to prepare myself for whatever horror was behind me . . . but there was nothing there—just the empty, dirty kitchen.
And a crooked picture hanging on the wall.
It was your generic sort of school picture that had graced the family home since the invention of the camera. Unremarkable, except for the face.
The hair was longer and wilder, and the clothes were a hideous mix of colors that clashed like a traffic accident in polyester. But the face—
“My God,” I said, “it’s Billy Chambers.”
It wasn’t his father; it wasn’t a cousin—it was him. There was no denying that ugly mug.
I reached over and pulled the picture from its broken frame. Flipping it over, I found a faded date written on the back. June 1976. Years before any of us were even born.
“But Billy’s our age,” I said. “This can’t be right.” Apparently there was more to Billy Chambers than a horsey face and a pitching arm.
Paula took my hand. Not in a boyfriend-girlfriend sort of way, but in the way you have to when two suddenly feels safer than one.
“Jason,” she said with a forced calm to her voice, “are there any BB’s left in that glove of yours?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Then put it on, and let’s get out of here.”
–4–
SHOT NIGHT
I woke up the next morning with more energy than I usually have—as if the weirdness of the weekend had pumped me full of a high-grade fuel you can’t normally find in Billington. I was in high spirits, in spite of the gloomy specter of my shots, which I’d have to take that afternoon.
If I had been spooked the day before, that feeling had now resolved into a charge of excitement. A weapon of exotic design, a desperate message carved on a pantry door, a picture that couldn’t possibly be what it appeared—and all this from a town that had always been about as interesting as a test pattern.
At the time, I felt sure that the answers wouldn’t be half as good as the questions, so I
was in no great hurry to figure them out.
I sat with Wesley during lunch that day, eating cafeteria hamburgers that tasted like fried carpet lint, and talked about my eventful weekend. Well, I didn’t really talk—I taunted. I wasn’t about to go telling any of it to Wesley, since Wesley was known to broadcast his short-term memory over a wide band of frequencies. In fact, Wesley often promised to give away secrets he had not yet received, leaving him in a permanent state of gossip debt.
Still, he was my best friend, so I felt obliged to tell him something, even if that something turned out to be nothing.
“Yesterday me and somebody who shall remain nameless found some weird things in a location I can’t divulge,” I debriefed him. “Oh, and on Saturday somebody gave me something incredible that I shouldn’t discuss.”
Wesley considered this over a big bite of his lint-burger. Then he said, “Do you want your pickle?”
The whole episode could have ended there, if Paula hadn’t come over to sit next to me.
“I’m going to check back issues of the Billington Bugle this afternoon, to find out about that epidemic,” she announced. “And then I’m going to try and find out who owned that house. You want to come?”
Wesley smirked. “Is this the somebody-who-shall-remain-nameless?”
Paula glanced at his grinning face, then turned to me. “Did I miss something?”
“I can’t go with you,” I told her, effectively side-stepping Wesley’s proud moment of discovery. “I have to get my . . . you-know-whats today,” I told her, pointing to my upper arm.
She looked at me, not catching my meaning. “Excuse me?”
I began to shift uncomfortably. This wasn’t exactly something one talked about in the school cafeteria. “You know . . . ,” I whispered. “I have to go get my . . . monthlies.”
“Monthly whats?” she said, way too loud. Wesley did that leaning-away-like-he-didn’t-know-us thing. I sighed, wondering if she were trying to embarrass me or just trying to show me that it was silly to feel embarrassed about it. The fact was, the monthly trip to the doctor was never something people mentioned aloud. It was a personal, private thing you didn’t talk about. Anyway, that’s the way I was raised.
“My shots,” I finally said, turning beet red. “My monthly shots. There, I said it—are you happy?”
At the very mention of them, Wesley giggled like a little kid—but Paula just looked at me as if she were waiting for more.
“You mean allergy shots?” she said. Wesley snickered with his mouth closed, and pickle fragments flew out his nose. She gave him that ten-foot-pole look that people often gave Wesley. “What’s so funny?”
I was a microsecond away from saying, “Never mind,” and forcing myself to forget this particular circus of pain—but then it occurred to me, however improbable it might sound, that she didn’t know.
“You get them too right?” I asked.
“No,” she answered.
Hearing that sobered Wesley up. “Oh, give me a break,” he said. “Everybody gets them. . . . Don’t they?”
I looked at both of them, and my brain began to get that eggbeater feeling again. “You mean you really don’t get them?”
Paula shrugged. “Sorry.”
“Is it a religious thing?” asked Wesley. “That you can’t have shots?”
She gave him that ten-foot-pole look again.
There was an uncomfortable silence then. And for the first time I began to feel that the gap between us was far more profound than the distance between here and New Jersey.
The bell rang, and she got up. “I’ll see you in class,” she said. But our eyes didn’t meet for the rest of the day.
That afternoon, my brain-beater feeling evolved into something new. I felt this giddy sense of being off-balance—not physically, but emotionally, as if my mental center of gravity was no longer inside me, but was somewhere off to the side. It was like being on a carnival tilt-a-whirl—I didn’t know whether to yell for joy, or to throw up.
And later, as I felt Doc Fuller inject the stinging pink solution into the flesh of my arm, I found myself, oddly enough, thinking of Copernicus and wondering if he got that tilt-a-whirl feeling when he plotted the movement of the earth and discovered that the center of the universe was anywhere but here.
That night after my shots, I stayed in my room, shivering under my covers, as I listened to the wind wailing outside.
Dad stayed in his room too, door closed, riding out the fever from his shots in a private, personal way. Mom, wisely, always scheduled her shots on a different day from Dad and I.
She came into my room somewhere between my chills and hot flashes. “Hungry?” she asked. She sat on my bed, handing me a bowl of homemade vanilla ice cream. It was a family tradition on shot night.
As I slowly let its sweet blandness soothe my swollen throat, I watched her busy herself tidying up the pigsty of my room. Shot night was the only time she picked up after me, and, I have to admit, I took advantage of it by neglecting my room for several days before.
Maybe I was just half delirious, but there was something I noticed as I watched her clean up. She was meticulous—but it went beyond mere neatness. She didn’t just toss my clothes into the hamper—she would feel their texture. She wouldn’t just close the window—she would first take a deep breath, smelling the aroma of the trees. She wouldn’t just shut my closet door—she would listen to the creaking sound it made.
As I thought about it, I realized that my father was much the same way. It had to do with the way he felt the wood that he carved. The way he savored even the most unimpressive of home-cooked meals. The way he enjoyed TV—from a football game to the most horrifically bad sitcom. The both lived their lives as if every moment, no matter how trivial, was a privilege. They derived such joy from just being.
How very sad it must be, I thought, to be absorbed by the commonplace.
I wasn’t like that. My tastes—my needs—stretched far beyond vanilla ice cream and a clean room.
Before my mom left the room, I dared to tell her something that had been rattling around in my head for most of the day.
“I’m worried about this girl in school,” I said. “She says she doesn’t get shots.”
Mom didn’t miss a beat—although I noticed she folded the same shirt twice. “Really,” she said. “That’s unusual.”
“Is it?” I sat up in bed, feeling my bones creak. “Do you think there are other kids in school who don’t get them?”
Mom, a whiz when it came to nonanswers, bounced skillfully over the question. “Their business is their business,” she said. Her answer did tell me something. It told me that the shots weren’t mandatory, that they weren’t just another part of everyone’s life as I was always led to assume. Maybe there were lots of kids at school who didn’t get them.
“What do the shots do?” I asked. “What do they keep us from getting?”
She reached down and took the empty ice-cream bowl from my hands.
“Appendicitis,” she said, then left me alone to wrestle with her answer.
By the next day, Paula had already discovered that (a) the town library had no information on what happened twenty years ago, (b) the Billington Bugle was missing several key months out of its own archives, and (c) it would take a psychic and a team of bloodhounds sniffing through paperwork to uncover the owners of those decaying homes in Old Town.
Paula and I spent our lunch alone in the computer lab, which could have fulfilled a certain dream of mine, except we actually used the computer.
In spite of its relative obscurity, Billington did in fact have its own on-ramp to the information superhighway, and our school, like any other, had Internet access. It was one of those cruelties of the town—providing us with all the information we’d ever need about places we’d probably never see.
That day, however, we discovered that the information system in Billington was not designed for finding things inside the town. With the world at our fingertips
, finding anything about Billington was like trying to scratch your own back.
“What’s taking so long?” Paula asked impatiently. I was running us through a haystack of databases, in search of electronic needles.
“It’s cross-referencing about a zillion different things,” I told her. “Give it a second or two.”
Clearly this whole business was frustrating Paula, but where she felt frustration, I felt anticipation. It was like opening a present to find another gift-wrapped box inside.
The screen went blank, and the search engine spit out a pathetically small list of possibilities.
“That’s it?” said Paula.
I had gone fishing for Billington flu epidemics, but the closest I came was finding an outbreak of measles in Biloxi.
“Well, if it happened, word didn’t spread out of this town,” I offered.
“It wasn’t exactly the dark ages,” snapped Paula. “There would have been doctors sent out—experts. There would be blood tests and all sorts of medical records.”
I shrugged. “Apparently not.”
The possibility of some sort of cover-up in Billington really tickled me. I tried to imagine Mom, Dad, and their goofy circle of friends in some absurd conspiracy. Ha! They couldn’t conspire up a surprise party.
I suppose my grin didn’t mesh with Paula’s frustration, because she rapped me lightly on the arm. Problem was, she hit the wrong arm. A pulse of pain shot from my shoulder to my fingertips, reminding me of my shot the day before. My fever, of course, had gone. It was gone when I woke up that morning, replaced by the heightened sense of well-being that always followed the injection. Mom had served waffles, and Dad had announced the thrilling highlights from the morning paper. It was as if it had never happened. It was always that way the morning after the shots. It was, in its own way, a conspiracy of silence that I was a part of.