The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

  “Why bother with him?” It was my job to ask the uncomfortable questions between us. Serena Jane merely shrugged and averted her eyes. It was her job to keep her mouth shut, but this time, she didn’t. Instead, she guided me over to Amanda’s kitchen table and told me a story.

  Two weeks ago, she said, she’d finally gone on a date with Bob Bob. She’d wanted to see Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, but Bob Bob took her to a party in Hansen instead, where drunken boys lurched up and down the porch steps and tried to grab her hips. Bob Bob punched one of them in the ribs, making the boy go purple in the face, so they’d had to leave, scampering down the sidewalk to his car like rats on the run.

  He drove my sister to a diner, where he insisted she order a vanilla milkshake and watched while she drank it—slowly, because she hated vanilla, although only I knew that. When she finished, he wiped her upper lip with the corner of his napkin, as if she were a messy child, then folded her hand inside his long fingers. In the diner’s lurid light, I could imagine that his eyes were shining yellow and that his teeth and chin looked particularly pointy, giving him the semblance of a hairless wolf. If it had been me, I would have pulled my hand away, but Serena Jane didn’t get that chance because Bob Bob locked his fingers around her wrist, resting his thumb just over her pulse so their blood swam together. Bob Bob didn’t know it, but under her blouse, Serena Jane’s heart was flapping like a panicked bird. Bob Bob pressed the pad of his thumb deeper into the lattice of veins on Serena Jane’s wrist.

  He leaned forward. “If my number came up, and I ran across the border, would you come with me?” All over America, young men were on the move—some of them in corroded vans heading north, some of them corralled in the steel bellies of military planes, white-faced and waiting to be dropped into the swampy mire of war. And right there was an opening Serena Jane could have taken but didn’t. I would have snapped something along the lines of preferring gunfire in the jungle to a wolf in the forest, but I suppose it’s not fair to impose those standards on Serena Jane. She never had to learn to say anything ugly.

  Serena Jane snatched her wrist back, tucking it close to her body as if she had been scalded. She pushed the dregs of the milkshake away from her. “I thought you had a deferment. I thought you were safe because you were going to go to medical school.”

  Bob Bob studied his glass. “I am, but still, you never know. Johnny’s going. And so is Marcus.”

  Serena Jane lifted her watery eyes. “Really? Marcus?” Poor Marcus, she thought, which weren’t exactly the same words I’d used when I’d found out that he’d enlisted.

  “You idiot!” I’d shrieked when he told me. “What the hell were you thinking? Do you know how dangerous it is over there? You’ll last about a week.”

  In the past ten years, Marcus had come along in terms of his appearance. His blue eyes and hair had morphed into handsome features—but he was still by far the tiniest student in the class. For a joke, every Valentine’s Day, Bob Bob always cornered me outside the school and wouldn’t let me go until I agreed to kiss Marcus. Until just last year, he’d still had to step on the rock in the yard to reach my lips, but recently he’d had a late growth spurt, inspiring his mother to buy him all new trousers, even though she still had to hem them. Marcus was terribly proud of them.

  “I’m sorry,” I always whispered right before his mouth met mine, and he always muttered, “I’m not,” before I closed my eyes and tasted the surprising salt of him. He was good-natured almost to a fault, decent, and you could always count on him to volunteer to do the right thing, which was exactly the reason he’d offered himself up to the military.

  The afternoon he told me about his enlistment, we were on the road out to the Dyerson farm. He stepped closer to me and took my hand. Ever since our last Valentine kiss, I’d been letting him walk me home, his fingers entwined with mine. Amelia somehow always managed to go on ahead of us. That afternoon, the air had a bitter bite to it that would haunt me in years to come. “Come on, Truly. Don’t be like this. I’m strong enough. You watched me bench-press my own body weight. I’ve been practicing in the garage, using Dukey’s old weights.” Dukey, his elder brother by ten years, had missed the draft and was celebrating by living at home, losing one job after another, and drinking his own body weight. “Besides, it’s for our country.”

  “Actually, it’s their country,” I snapped, but I didn’t pull my hand out of his. “And anyway, what about me?”

  Marcus blinked and took a step closer, his boots squeaking in the last of the season’s snow. “You’re the thing I’m fighting for,” he whispered. Then he squeezed my hand and headed back toward town before I could tell him that I was a battle he’d already won. I watched him go, marveling that while he was so hog confident of victory, all I could feel, pressed into my chest like a heavy, treaded boot, was crushing worry.

  “Poor Marcus,” Serena Jane said out loud now, interrupting her story, her voice a bell of woe in Amanda’s kitchen. “He’ll get killed before the plane’s even landed.”

  I clenched my teeth and willed myself not to think about it. “So what did Bob Bob have to say about that piece of news?”

  Serena Jane sighed. “He said he wouldn’t go.”

  “But what about his family?” You couldn’t grow up in Aberdeen and not know about the Morgan men and war. They excelled at it. Among the four Dr. Morgans, they had enough medals and uniforms to outfit their own private army.

  Serena Jane shrugged. “Bob Bob said that his great-great-grandfather was a Civil War deserter. That’s how he got here. He walked up from the South. I guess he didn’t think war was so great.”

  “But he served. He went.”

  “Only to walk away from it and find this place. Where the hell would Bob Bob go in Vietnam?”

  I said nothing. I was picturing Bob Bob hacking his way through a South Asian jungle, his skin tinged green, mud flecking his hair. Lush vines twined around his arms and neck, coiling tight as exotic snakes and squeezing until he turned blue, then purple, then a sooty black. Until he knew how it felt to be teased all the time.

  What can I say about the events that followed that evening between Bob Bob and my sister? Only that Serena Jane always did want a starring role in something, and she finally got it. Bob Bob drove her home slowly, his arm crouching on the seat behind her neck, his fingers outstretched like spiders. Thinking about all of this—even now—is like watching a movie for me. There’s that urge to scream at the person on the screen, to warn them, but, of course, doing so only results in a sore throat and nasty looks from everyone else around you.

  She expected him to drive her to the Pickertons’, where Reverend Pickerton would be waiting for her, the living room light pooling over his newspaper, but Bob Bob pulled his car up in front of Aberdeen’s ragged cemetery gate instead. Serena Jane crossed her arms in front of her chest, making a mummy of herself. “What are we doing here? This is creepy.” She reached for the door handle.

  “Wait.” Bob Bob snatched at the hem of her dress. “You could say thank you for the nice evening. Most girls would.” In the dark, I knew, my sister’s hair glowed like a mermaid’s. When we were very young, I used to use it as a kind of night-light, turning my head toward her to see the reflection of the moon and streetlamps spread out across her pillow. With hair like that, it was impossible not to want to own it somehow, and that’s just what Bob Bob longed for—to bury his nose in it and inhale the salt of Serena Jane, making his tongue into a fish that could swim through the mysterious hollows of her flesh.

  Serena Jane tried to say no, but the sickly taste of vanilla coated her throat. She clawed at the door but managed only to brush the window crank with her fingers before Bob Bob was on her, his knee wedged between her thighs, his impatient hands plucking at the ribbons on her blouse. His breath rasped out of him in ragged intervals, squeezing between the gaps of his clenched teeth. Under him, Serena Jane twisted and bucked, but he held on, his skinny fingers pinching her narrow shoulders and
neck like a savage lobster until he felt the sinews of her relax, until her tendons went slack, and her eyes closed, and she tilted her head back languorously, offering herself up to him just as he’d always dreamed, as he’d always craved. Afterward, he gave her his T-shirt to wipe herself up, ignoring the streak of blood she left on it.

  “Forget it,” he growled when she offered it back to him. He was feeling expansive—generous, even. Outside the car windows, the night had stretched itself out like a bride. A gust of wind combed through the trees above the car, dropping pellets of snow on the roof. Bob Bob grinned. This was his night. The night.

  Serena Jane let him drive her home—a sensible choice because it was better than walking through the muddy slush and gravestones, and besides, by that point it was too late to do much else. She kept her face pointed to the passenger window and tried as hard as she could to ignore the ghostly twin of herself floating morosely in the glass, and in that one gesture, the moment I’d longed for my whole life came true. Serena Jane finally felt what it was like to be me. As she got out of the car, without her underwear or a single word to Bob Bob, she felt as if she had somehow switched places with her reflection and become that other version of herself—translucent, wavering, forever trapped in a small square of black.

  As I watched her finish binding her hair up in its towel over the Pickertons’ sink now, I could tell she still hadn’t forgotten. She leaned forward toward the window above the sink and blew a foggy circle onto one of its panes, evidence that she was still there, filled with blood, and air, and not about to dissolve. That was one thing I always knew Serena Jane envied about me. She thought I never had to worry that there wasn’t enough of me to go around, but she finally found out she’d been completely wrong.

  Chapter Nine

  After his encounter with Serena Jane, Bob Bob found himself dreaming more and more often of my sister. This wasn’t unusual—she’d populated his dreams for years—but the intensity of the dreams had changed. This new, nocturnal Serena Jane was no longer a dimpled teen queen, but a banshee with glowing eyes. It was a facet of Serena Jane that only I knew existed—wild, primal, utterly unforgiving—and he was shocked to make its acquaintance.

  Bob Bob always woke from these dreams violently, the tube of his throat tensed, but with the sound still stuck inside of it. Sometimes the moon would be pouring its gauzy light into his window, and he would rub his eye sockets with the heels of his hands and blink up at the ceiling, wondering what his nightmares meant. The stuff in the jungle was easy, he figured. Every day, more and more boys were coming home zipped into the never-ending darkness of body bags. The TV and newspapers, magazines—even comic books—were crawling with the lush horror of Vietnam. When it came to the war, Bob Bob wasn’t the only one with night sweats.

  But the other dreams, the ones where he was just going about his business only to be blindsided by a snarling and unfamiliar Serena Jane, well, those visitations had him stumped. At school, I watched him watch her, but to him, she didn’t appear any different. Her nose still tilted with the charm of Tinker Bell’s. Her chin still had a dimple right in its center. And every day, she looked right through him, just as she always had, just as people looked through me.

  Then one night, Serena Jane came to him as a crow with a stuttering beak. She perched on his shoulder, gripping his flesh with scaly talons, and clacked her bill in his ear, tweaking the lobe when she was finished as if to admonish him. He twisted toward her in indignation and saw that the crow was holding a small looking glass, the oval of it swaying and glittering like a jewel. He peered into its frame and was surprised to see the wan face of an infant peering back at him, its sloe eyes wet, its tiny fists pummeling the air, as if fighting for breath.

  Bob Bob woke from the dream sweating. His room was cold, but his mother had snuck in and covered him with the family quilt that normally hung on the parlor wall downstairs, scalloping him in folds of heat until he almost couldn’t breathe. He hated the thing. It was enormous—embroidered in a riot of flowers and vines by Tabitha Morgan, his great-great-grandmother, who everyone said was a witch. Waking up under Tabitha’s quilt, Bob Bob could understand why. His skin felt as if it were crawling with sets of bony fingers.

  It was the beginning of April, but he could see out his window that a freak snowstorm had blanketed the world, cosseting all its hard edges into sterile white mounds. In the upper corner of his window, the moon was full, reflecting itself ghoulishly against all the white.

  It was the same light he’d found in the little county morgue that he’d visited a week ago with his father in preparation for medical college, the kind that left little room for nuance or shadow. The kind of light that belonged to the dead. His father was verifying some last minute work on the autopsy of one of his patients—an old woman from town Bob Bob hardly knew. On the slab in the morgue, her cronelike body was covered with a dingy sheet, but her feet were sticking out, scaly and gnarled as a chicken’s. Probably they had looked much the same in life, as had her few pieces of hair and the gummy line of her mouth. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about death, it’s that it merely enhances what was already there before it.

  “Come here,” Bob Bob’s father instructed him, putting his hands on his son’s shoulders. “Don’t be afraid. I want you to see.”

  Bob Bob shrugged him off. He wasn’t afraid—he wasn’t even impressed. As far as he was concerned, the old woman was like the dried-up beetle shells that appeared on the garage floor at the end of every summer, their withered legs tucked up into their bellies, their wings desiccated and blown to dust. If he ground his sneaker over the top of her, he bet, she would crunch and crumble, and that would be the end of it. Bob Bob remained as still as he could, counting the woman’s waxen wrinkles, until his father deemed he’d seen enough and pulled the sheet back up over the woman’s face. He turned toward Bob Bob. “Well?” The question was a fishhook hanging in the air.

  Bob Bob shrugged. “It’s not that bad.” Overhead, one of the room’s pallid bulbs flickered, irritating his eyes. He blinked, hating this one weakness.

  Dr. Morgan squeezed his son’s shoulder. “It gets easier,” he reassured him. “Why, after you go through anatomy, death will be like second nature.”

  Bob Bob didn’t say anything, but he thought he might already be way ahead of his father. For the most part, he liked the morgue. It was pleasantly temperate, no one would spend hours yakking your ear off about some stupid problem, and everything was in its place. As far as he could figure, death was no big deal. After all, you had it coming to you whether you liked it or not, and the sooner you got comfortable with that, the better. Really, he thought, it was nothing to worry about.

  He followed his father outside again to the car, blinking in the brilliant spring sunlight, brushing a few seasonal midges away from the vicinity of his nose, scowling at a pair of wilted daffodil heads leaning on their spent stalks. Surreptitiously, he flattened them under his sneaker when his father wasn’t looking. Death wasn’t that bad, but the process of dying was tedious—a feeling I happen to share. He felt the flower bulbs crunch and climbed in the car beside his father, relieved when they pulled away. Bob Bob closed his eyes and decided that it was best to deal with either the living or the dead. Ushering people from one state to the other held very little interest for him.

  When he was alone in his room, however, freshly woken from his crow dream of Serena Jane, the hard skin of Bob Bob’s carefully cultivated emotional detachment began to crack. Confronted with the unreliable moonlight flooding his walls, he suddenly found himself infused with an unfamiliar melancholic longing—as if homesick for a distant shore or the long-absent arms of a lover. He shook his head and turned away from the window, settling the bulk of the quilt over him. It was the unseasonable snow making him turn foolish, he decided, or the drop in barometric pressure. There were no such things as half-truths, or bird-women, or spells. And love was the most ridiculous trick of all. My sister had taught him that. In the end
, underneath all the layers of hair and clothes, she had been just like any other girl—an arrangement of skin, and bones, tongue, and teeth. A warm sack of flesh. Nothing more than a little voice he was trying to ignore in the dark.

  In contrast, Marcus never got the chance to see that Aberdeen spring. In March he had left for Vietnam with underwhelming fanfare, except for a special trip out to the Dyerson farm to see me. We stood miserably together under the half-rotten windmill, which spun only under the duress of a hard winter wind.

  “Why are you doing this?” I demanded again. “You don’t have to do this. Just go across the border. Lots of boys are doing it. Or go to college. Maybe the army will give you a cushy job. Like behind a desk or something.”

  Marcus tucked his chin down against his neck. “Nope. I don’t want to do things that way.”

  “No offense or anything, but how are you going to manage? I mean, how come the army even took you in the first place?”

  Marcus scuffed his toe in the dirt and snorted. “C’mon, Truly. I’m small, but I’m not deformed or anything.”

  I took a wounded step back from him. “You mean like me.”

  “No, no, I didn’t meant it like that.” He rubbed one of his hands through his thick black hair. “What I mean is, the army’s taking everybody these days. Big, little, they don’t really care, just as long as you can shoot straight.”

  “And what makes you think you can?”

  Marcus took another step toward me. “Don’t be like this now.” But I knew how enraptured Marcus was by the conflict overseas. His childhood obsessions with Russian space animals and the intricate anatomy of insects had been replaced by a hunger to know all the obscure details of modern weaponry.

  “The newest grenade is the M61,” he told me, pointing out a mention of it in the newspaper while we shared a float at Hinkleman’s. He dug a pen and pencil out of his backpack and drew an oblong shape. “See how it’s shaped like a lemon?” He added a squiggle inside. “And this thing here is a notched steel coil. When you pull the pin, the coil explodes into high-velocity fragments. It’s lethal.”