Skeleton Crew

  The Dodge backed out of the driveway and paused while his mother looked both ways, although nothing would be coming; nothing ever was. His mother would have a two-mile ride over washboards and ruts before she even got to tar, and it was nineteen miles to Lewiston after that.

  She backed all the way out and drove away. For a moment dust hung in the bright October afternoon air, and then it began to settle.

  He was alone in the house.

  With Gramma.

  He swallowed.

  Hey! Negative perspiration! Just lay chilly, right?

  "Right," George said in a low voice, and walked across the small, sunwashed kitchen. He was a towheaded, good-looking boy with a spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks and a look of good humor in his darkish gray eyes.

  Buddy's accident had occurred while he had been playing in the Pony League championship game this October 5th. George's Pee Wee League team, the Tigers, had been knocked out of their tournament on the first day, two Saturdays ago (What a bunch of babies! Buddy had exulted as George walked tearfully off the field. What a bunch of PUSSIES!) ... and now Buddy had broken his leg. If Mom wasn't so worried and scared, George would have been almost happy.

  There was a phone on the wall, and next to it was a note-minder board with a grease pencil hanging beside it. In the upper comer of the board was a cheerful country Gramma, her cheeks rosy, her white hair done up in a bun; a cartoon Gramma who was pointing at the board. There was a comic-strip balloon coming out of the cheerful country Gramma's mouth and she was saying, "REMEMBER THIS, SONNY!" Written on the board in his mother's sprawling hand was Dr. Arlinder, 681-4330. Mom hadn't written the number there just today, because she had to go to Buddy; it had been there almost three weeks now, because Gramma was having her "bad spells" again.

  George picked up the phone and listened.

  "--so I told her, I said, 'Mabel, if he treats you like that--'

  He put it down again. Henrietta Dodd. Henrietta was always on the phone, and if it was in the afternoon you could always hear the soap opera stories going on in the background. One night after she had a glass of wine with Gramma (since she started having the "bad spells" again, Dr. Arlinder said Gramma couldn't have the wine with her supper, so Mom didn't either--George was sorry, because the wine made Mom sort of giggly and she would tell stories about her girlhood), Mom had said that every time Henrietta Dodd opened her mouth, all her guts fell out. Buddy and George laughed wildly, and Mom put a hand to her mouth and said Don't you EVER tell anyone I said that, and then she began to laugh too, all three of them sitting at the supper table laughing, and at last the racket had awakened Gramma, who slept more and more, and she began to cry Ruth! Ruth! ROO-OOOTH! in that high, querulous voice of hers, and Mom had stopped laughing and went into her room.

  Today Henrietta Dodd could talk all she wanted, as far as George was concerned. He just wanted to make sure the phone was working. Two weeks ago there had been a bad storm, and since then it went out sometimes.

  He found himself looking at the cheery cartoon Gramma again, and wondered what it would be like to have a Gramma like that. His Gramma was huge and fat and blind; the hypertension had made her senile as well. Sometimes, when she had her "bad spells," she would (as Mom put it) "act out the Tartar," calling for people who weren't there, holding conversations with total emptiness, mumbling strange words that made no sense. On one occasion when she was doing this last, Mom had turned white and had gone in and told her to shut up, shut up, shut up! George remembered that occasion very well, not only because it was the only time Mom had ever actually yelled at Gramma, but because it was the next day that someone discovered that the Birches cemetery out on the Maple Sugar Road had been vandalized--gravestones knocked over, the old nineteenth-century gates pulled down, and one or two of the graves actually dug up--or something. Desecrated was the word Mr. Burdon, the principal, had used the next day when he convened all eight grades for Assembly and lectured the whole school on Malicious Mischief and how some things Just Weren't Funny. Going home that night, George had asked Buddy what desecrated meant, and Buddy said it meant digging up graves and pissing on the coffins, but George didn't believe that ... unless it was late. And dark.

  Gramma was noisy when she had her "bad spells," but mostly she just lay in the bed she had taken to three years before, a fat slug wearing rubber pants and diapers under her flannel nightgown, her face runneled with cracks and wrinkles, her eyes empty and Mind--faded blue irises floating atop yellowed corneas.

  At first Gramma hadn't been totally blind. But she had been going blind, and she had to have a person at each elbow to help her totter from her white vinyl egg-and-baby-powder-smelling chair to her bed or the bathroom. In those days, five years ago, Gramma had weighed well over two hundred pounds.

  She had held out her arms and Buddy, then eight, had gone to her. George had hung back. And cried.

  But I'm not scared now, he told himself, moving across the kitchen in his Keds. Not a bit. She's just an old lady who has "bad spells" sometimes.

  He filled the teakettle with water and put it on a cold burner. He got a teacup and put one of Gramma's special herb tea bags into it. In case she should wake up and want a cup. He hoped like mad that she wouldn't, because then he would have to crank up the hospital bed and sit next to her and give her the tea a sip at a time, watching the toothless mouth fold itself over the rim of the cup, and listen to the slurping sounds as she took the tea into her dank, dying guts. Sometimes she slipped sideways on the bed and you had to pull her back over and her flesh was soft, kind of jiggly, as if it was filled with hot water, and her blind eyes would look at you . . .

  George licked his lips and walked toward the kitchen table again. His last cookie and half a glass of Quik still stood there, but he didn't want them anymore. He looked at his schoolbooks, covered with Castle Rock Cougars bookcovers, without enthusiasm.

  He ought to go in and check on her.

  He didn't want to.

  He swallowed and his throat still felt as if it was lined with mittenwool.

  I'm not afraid of Gramma, he thought. If she held out her arms I'd go right to her and let her hug me because she's just an old lady. She's senile and that's why she has "bad spells." That's all. Let her hug me and not cry. Just like Buddy.

  He crossed the short entryway to Gramma's room, face set as if for bad medicine, lips pressed together so tightly they were white. He looked in, and there lay Gramma, her yellow-white hair spread around her in a corona, sleeping, her toothless mouth hung open, chest rising under the coverlet so slowly you almost couldn't see it, so slowly that you had to look at her for a while just to make sure she wasn't dead.

  Oh God, what if she dies on me while Mom's up to the hospital?

  She won't. She won't.

  Yeah, but what if she does?

  She won't, so stop being a pussy.

  One of Gramma's yellow, melted-looking hands moved slowly on the coverlet: her long nails dragged across the sheet and made a minute scratching sound. George drew back quickly, his heart pounding.

  Cool as a moose, numbhead, see? Laying chilly.

  He went back into the kitchen to see if his mother had been gone only an hour, or perhaps an hour and a half--if the latter, he could start reasonably waiting for her to come back. He looked at the clock and was astounded to see that not even twenty minutes had passed. Mom wouldn't even be into the city yet, let alone on her way back out of it! He stood still, listening to the silence. Faintly, he could hear the hum of the refrigerator and the electric clock. The snuffle of the afternoon breeze around the corners of the little house. And then--at the very edge of audibility--the faint, rasping susurrus of skin over cloth . . . Gramma's wrinkled, tallowy hand moving on the coverlet.

  He prayed in a single gust of mental breath:

  PleaseGoddon'tletherwakeupuntilMomcomeshomeforJesus'sakeAmen.

  He sat down and finished his cookie, drank his Quik. He thought of turning on the TV and watching someth
ing, but he was afraid the sound would wake up Gramma and that high, querulous, not-to-be-denied voice would begin calling Roo-OOTH! RUTH! BRING ME M'TEA! TEA! ROOO-OOOOOTH!

  He slicked his dry tongue over his drier lips and told himself not to be such a pussy. She was an old lady stuck in bed, it wasn't as if she could get up and hurt him, and she was eighty-three years old, she wasn't going to die this afternoon.

  George walked over and picked up the phone again.

  "--that same day! And she even knew he was married! Gorry, I hate these cheap little corner-walkers that think they're so smart! So at Grange I said--"

  George guessed that Henrietta was on the phone with Cora Simard. Henrietta hung on the phone most afternoons from one until six with first Ryan's Hope and then One Life to Live and then All My Children and then As the World Turns and then Search for Tomorrow and then God knew what other ones playing in the background, and Cora Simard was one of her most faithful telephone correspondents, and a lot of what they talked about was 1) who was going to be having a Tupperware party or an Amway party and what the refreshments were apt to be, 2) cheap little corner-walkers, and 3) what they had said to various people at 3-a) the Grange, 3-b) the monthly church fair, or 3-c) K of P Hall Beano.

  "--that if I ever saw her up that way again, I guess I could be a good citizen and call--"

  He put the phone back in its cradle. He and Buddy made fun of Cora when they went past her house just like all the other kids--she was fat and sloppy and gossipy and they would chant, Cora-Cora from Bora-Bora, ate a dog turd and wanted more-a! and Mom would have killed them both if she had known that, but now George was glad she and Henrietta Dodd were on the phone. They could talk all afternoon, for all George cared. He didn't mind Cora, anyway. Once he had fallen down in front of her house and scraped his knee--Buddy had been chasing him--and Cora had put a Band-Aid on the scrape and gave them each a cookie, talking all the time. George had felt ashamed for all the times he had said the rhyme about the dog turd and the rest of it.

  George crossed to the sideboard and took down his reading book. He held it for a moment, then put it back. He had read all the stories in it already, although school had only been going a month. He read better than Buddy, although Buddy was better at sports. Won't be better for a while, he thought with momentary good cheer, not with a broken leg.

  He took down his history book, sat down at the kitchen table, and began to read about how Cornwallis had surrendered up his sword at Yorktown. His thoughts wouldn't stay on it. He got up, went through the entryway again. The yellow hand was still. Gramma slept, her face a gray, sagging circle against the pillow, a dying sun surrounded by the wild yellowish-white corona of her hair. To George she didn't look anything like people who were old and getting ready to die were supposed to look. She didn't look peaceful, like a sunset. She looked crazy, and ...

  (and dangerous)

  ... yes, okay, and dangerous--like an ancient she-bear that might have one more good swipe left in her claws.

  George remembered well enough how they had come to Castle Rock to take care of Gramma when Granpa died. Until then Mom had been working in the Stratford Laundry in Stratford, Connecticut. Granpa was three or four years younger than Gramma, a carpenter by trade, and he had worked right up until the day of his death. It had been a heart attack.

  Even then Gramma had been getting senile, having her "bad spells." She had always been a trial to her family, Gramma had. She was a volcanic woman who had taught school for fifteen years, between having babies and getting in fights with the Congregational Church she and Granpa and their nine children went to. Mom said that Granpa and Gramma quit the Congregational Church in Scarborough at the same time Gramma decided to quit teaching, but once, about a year ago, when Aunt Flo was up for a visit from her home in Salt Lake City, George and Buddy, listening at the register as Mom and her sister sat up late, talking, heard quite a different story. Granpa and Gramma had been kicked out of the church and Gramma had been fired off her job because she did something wrong. It was something about books. Why or how someone could get fired from their job and kicked out of the church just because of books, George didn't understand, and when he and Buddy crawled back into their twin beds under the eave, George asked.

  There's all kinds of books, Senor El-Stupido, Buddy whispered.

  Yeah, but what kind?

  How should I know? Go to sleep!

  Silence. George thought it through.

  Buddy?

  What! An irritated hiss.

  Why did Mom tell us Gramma quit the church and her job?

  Because it's a skeleton in the closet, that's why! Now go to sleep!

  But he hadn't gone to sleep, not for a long time. His eyes kept straying to the closet door, dimly outlined in moonlight, and he kept wondering what he would do if the door swung open, revealing a skeleton inside, all grinning tombstone teeth and cistern eye sockets and parrot-cage ribs; white moonlight skating delirious and almost blue on whiter bone. Would he scream? What had Buddy meant, a skeleton in the closet? What did skeletons have to do with books? At last he had slipped into sleep without even knowing it and had dreamed he was six again, and Gramma was holding out her arms, her blind eyes searching for him; Gramma's reedy, querulous voice was saying, Where's the little one, Ruth? Why's he crying? I only want to put him in the closet . . . with the skeleton.

  George had puzzled over these matters long and long, and finally, about a month after Aunt Flo had departed, he went to his mother and told her he had heard her and Aunt Flo talking. He knew what a skeleton in the closet meant by then, because he had asked Mrs. Redenbacher at school. She said it meant having a scandal in the family, and a scandal was something that made people talk a lot. Like Cora Simard talks a lot? George had asked Mrs. Redenbacher, and Mrs. Redenbacher's face had worked strangely and her lips had quivered and she had said, That's not nice, George, but ... yes, something like that.

  When he asked Mom, her face had gotten very still, and her hands had paused over the solitaire clockface of cards she had been laying out.

  Do you think that's a good thing for you to be doing, Georgie? Do you and your brother make a habit of eavesdropping over the register?

  George, then only nine, had hung his head.

  We like Aunt Flo, Mom. We wanted to listen to her a little longer.

  This was the truth.

  Was it Buddy's idea?

  It had been, but George wasn't going to tell her that. He didn't want to go walking around with his head on backwards, which might happen if Buddy found out he had tattled.

  No, mine.

  Mom had sat silent for a long time, and then she slowly began laying her cards out again. Maybe it's time you did know, she had said. Lying's worse than eavesdropping, I guess, and we all lie to our children about Gramma. And we lie to ourselves too, I guess. Most of the time, we do. And then she spoke with a sudden, vicious bitterness that was like acid squirting out between her front teeth--he felt that her words were so hot they would have burned his face if he hadn't recoiled. Except for me. I have to live with her, and I can no longer afford the luxury of lies.

  So his Mom told him that after Granpa and Gramma had gotten married, they had had a baby that was born dead, and a year later they had another baby, and that was born dead too, and the doctor told Gramma she would never be able to carry a child to term and all she could do was keep on having babies that were dead or babies that died as soon as they sucked air. That would go on, he said, until one of them died inside her too long before her body could shove it out and it would rot in there and kill her, too.

  The doctor told her that.

  Not long after, the books began.

  Books about how to have babies?

  But Mom didn't--or wouldn't--say what kind of books they were, or where Gramma got them, or how she knew to get them. Gramma got pregnant again, and this time the baby wasn't born dead and the baby didn't die after a breath or two; this time the baby was fine, and that was George's Uncle
Larson. And after that, Gramma kept getting pregnant and having babies. Once, Mom said, Granpa had tried to make her get rid of the books to see if they could do it without them (or even if they couldn't, maybe Granpa figured they had enough yowwens by then so it wouldn't matter) and Gramma wouldn't. George asked his mother why and she said: "I think that by then having the books was as important to her as having the babies."

  "I don't get it," George said.

  "Well," George's mother said, "I'm not sure I do, either

  ... I was very small, remember. All I know for sure is that those books got a hold over her. She said there would be no more talk about it and there wasn't, either. Because Gramma wore the pants in our family."

  George closed his history book with a snap. He looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly five o'clock. His stomach was grumbling softly. He realized suddenly, and with something very like horror, that if Mom wasn't home by six or so, Gramma would wake up and start hollering for her supper. Mom had forgotten to give him instructions about that, probably because she was so upset about Buddy's leg. He supposed he could make Gramma one of her special frozen dinners. They were special because Gramma was on a saltfree diet. She also had about a thousand different kinds of pills.

  As for himself, he could heat up what was left of last night's macaroni and cheese. If he poured a lot of catsup on it, it would be pretty good.

  He got the macaroni and cheese out of the fridge, spooned it into a pan, and put the pan on the burner next to the teakettle, which was still waiting in case Gramma woke up and wanted what she sometimes called "a cuppa cheer." George started to get himself a glass of milk, paused, and picked up the telephone again.

  "--and I couldn't even believe my eyes when... " Henrietta Dodd's voice broke off and then rose shrilly: "Who keeps listening in on this line, I'd like to know!"

  George put the phone back on the hook in a hurry, his face burning.

  She doesn't know it's you, stupe. There's six parties on the line!

  All the same, it was wrong to eavesdrop, even if it was just to hear another voice when you were alone in the house, alone except for Gramma, the fat thing sleeping in the hospital bed in the other room; even when it seemed almost necessary to hear another human voice because your Mom was in Lewiston and it was going to be dark soon and Gramma was in the other room and Gramma looked like