Specters of Fort Scott 11.25.24

Under Sissy’s bed, I find what’s left of Bugs Bunny. His gray fur’s beened turned brown and red, and when I pull him out by his cotton tail, he’s already stiff as a board. He don’t got no eyes left in his head at all, just holes where things wriggle around in the dark. I can taste the smell of him. Sour. Like milk what’d goned bad a long time ago.

There ain’t hardly nothin’ left of the room Sissy and I shared, ‘cept for her pink blanket all tangled in beams and planks. When I was just a little kid once, my daddy’d took me up the Mississippi, and we’d goned hunting for beavers. I’d seened their houses in the river, like piles of snapped up toothpicks. You couldn’t hardly see them unless you knowed what you were looking for. I wanted to jump right in the river and join them, and live in one, too. That was four years ago, and I was only seven. Now I ain’t so sure living in one would be so good after all.

It’d beened about a week since the tornado came through Fort Scott, but nobody’d done much for it yet. Just left everythin' where it was, except for the bodies, which folks was still findin' bits and pieces of. Clearin' away. People what got smushed by buildin’s and trees, buried and all, or torned up. Arms and legs. My buddy Billy found somebody’s head—just a head. He reckoned it was our math teacher, Mr. Wilcox, but when he showed me, I weren’t so sure.

But Mr. Wilcox was old, and Bugs was just a baby still. He’d beened Sissy’s birthday present from Momma last year, so that weren’t hardly fair at all, that he was just a baby and he’d got smooshed, too.

I hold my breath and kiss his soft little head, and I put him back on Sissy’s blanket, wishin’ I could’ve said bye to him, and thinkin’ I don’t wanna tell Sissy when I see her. Boy, I know she’ll just cry something awful. So maybe I’ll tell her Bugs runned away instead. Sissy ain’t nothin’ but a baby, neither. She’s only eight, so, so long as she don’t see him, I guess she won’t know.

“God, grant to the livin', grace; to the departed, rest; to the… to the country? Peace and…” shit, I don’t 'member the rest. I look down at Bugs, but my head’s itchin’ too bad for me to think. I touch the cross ‘round my neck what had once been’d my daddy’s, and I try to remember what folks was sayin’ when they stuck him in the ground. Somethin' about…

“Can you guide us with light, and… help us. And blessin's. Amen.” Then I kiss the cross, ‘cause it feels like the right thing to do, and I wonder why He’d done it to us in the first place. I mean, sure. He gotta make tornados, I guess. I would if I could, just to see’em spinnin’. But He coulda sent it somewhere else - like Mission Hills. They probably coulda afforded it and all.

I saw a girl got picked up and pulled through the air like she weren’t nothing but a yoyo on a string. Only she didn’t go back down like a yoyo. She got pulled right outta her momma’s hand. I figured she weren’t any older’n Sissy was. Her momma screamed and screamed, only I couldn’t hear her at all, I could just see her. Then she got yanked away, too.

I don’t feel like I got nothin’ else to say, so I leave Bugs on the bed and start walkin’. Folks ain’t out anymore, and the ones that is is just standin’ where they’s porches used to be, lookin’ ‘round, but not really seein’ much of anythin’, not even me. They’d gived up lookin' for things and friends and family. If they ain’t showed up yet, mostly folks figured they probably never would. So they just stand there, waitin' for someone to tell’em what to do. Like when your momma tells you to clean your room, but there’s just so much you don’t even know where to start.

It’s still cold, even though it’s April already, and the wind sounds like someone moanin’, and there’s windchimes in the trees tinklin’ like little bells, the sorts you see on trees at Christmas. Even though I’m shiverin’, the wind feels good in my hair, makes it not itch so much, and for a minute I just wanna stand there in the cold and close my eyes and not move at all, maybe forever.

Pop!

My head shoots up and I look. Listenin'. Quiet. Windchimes. None of the other folks seem to have even heard it, ain’t nobody lookin’. They just stand there, like photographs, and I think, well, maybe I just imagined it. But.

Pop, thump!

I start runnin', my heart bangin' so hard in my chest I can feel it all the way in my toes.

Pop, thump!

“Duke!” My feet start goin' faster, faster, faster. So fast I might just take right off and stretch my arms out and start flyin’. Hopin’, just hopin' to God, just prayin' he’s there. That it’s him. “Duke!”

I turn a corner, and there he is. Standin' tall right in the middle of everythin', right in the road, but I don’t think there ain’t no car in the world what could run him down, not even if it tried. He ain’t got no shirt on, and his shoulder blades stick out like wings off his back, like he’s a dragon, with scales sparklin’ in the sun, white and sweaty. Blue veins cover his chest like cracked glass, and his red hair is so short I can see his scalp.

His pellet gun is up by his eye, and you can’t even tell where the brown eye ends and the black middle begins, and he turns, slow, ‘til the barrel’s pointed right between my eyes. For a second, he just looks at me. And I can see every white capped bump on his cheeks and his chin, and every freckle on his shoulders. Then he lowers it. And he grins, suckin' on a lip full of dip.

“Jesus. How it do, Louis Bloom?”

Duke Wilton’s lived a few blocks away from me long as I can remember. He’s almost a grown-up, he’s already seventeen, but he don’t mind that I’m younger. He says I got a lot of sense for a kid—a lot more sense’n a lot of older boys, even—so he don’t mind me hangin’ out with him. Which is real nice, ‘cause it ain’t easy to be somebody he likes, to tell the truth. I don’t know nobody else what has managed it—he’s pretty picky.

“Duke! Chrissake, Duke! Jesus—you scared the hell outta me!” I run to him, not even seein’ if I’m steppin’ on glass or cuttin’ my feet, just goin’ fast as I can. Climbin’ and trippin' and grabbin' and pullin' myself towards him. I half want to just throw my arms ‘round him, just to hold him and make sure he’s really there, and he’s really real. But Duke Wilton ain’t somebody you hold just to make sure he’s real—you just gotta take him at his word.

“Jesus! I thought you was dead! You ain’t beened at the Community Center—you just—God! What the hell you doin’?”

He slings his gun over his shoulders like he’s Jesus on the cross, and he points a finger over to where he’d beened shootin'. The way he does it, you’d think he was doin’ me a great favor just by takin’ the time to show me. There’s a animal layin' there, where he’s pointin’, still as anythin’. It’d been’d shot.

“How come you done that?”

“Too many cats,” he says with a shrug. “Been fuckin’ now that there ain’t no one to lock’em inside.”

He walks over, stompin' his old Chippewa boots, bends down and picks the kitty up by its tail. It’s orange, like him, its belly all swolled up. She’s a momma soon to be sure enough, her nipples pokin' out.

“Folks’ll pay for a bag of dead cats—extra for the babies.”

I’d saw a dead possum on the roadside on my way to school once. Its head crushed, it’s tongue floppin’ out like a big pink worm. Its stomach was split open, and there’d beened all these smooshed up grey and pink things around it, like little sausages. It’d smelled like Bugs. Sour. I’d thought the smooshed up bits was guts what had come out when it’d got hit, but then I saw the tails, and I knewed it was all her babies, borned after she was already dead and cold. They’d gone crawlin’ out, looking for they’s momma, but they couldn’t see, and all they’d found was black rubber tires.

But maybe that just happens with possums.

He unbuckles his brown leather belt and runs it through the kitty’s pink bell collar, so she hangs from his Levi’s, then he sits down right on the double yellow line with a kinda huff.

“C’mere, little bastard,” he says, so I sit next to him. He throws a arm round my shoulder, pullin’ me against his side and diggin’ his cold fingers in my hair. His skin is all damp, and he smells like onions, but it feels so nice to get my head scratched that I don’t say nothin’. I just look at his arm, what’s almost as skinny as mine, and looks like blue cheese. Spotted and marked up with little bruises and weepin' red spots like bug bites.

“So where you beened?” I ask him. “You and your momma?”

He gives me a smile—a smile like nobody else’s, showin' his top and his bottom teeth all at once.

“We been stayin' at Aunt Gracie’s,” he says, and he pushes his chin up with a big sniff. I can see snot dribblin’ down his nose, and his tongue darts out and licks it away.

“She the one with the daughter?”

“Yessir, that’s the one. Alice. Mmm-mmm!” He laughs like a fox, squeaky and high, his shoulders shakin’, then he tweaks my nose, and his fingers feel just like icicles.

“Stop,” I push his hand away. “I ain’t a baby.” But he just snorts and tugs on my earlobe, pullin’ my head off him.

“Okay, big man.” He stands up again, and stretches his spotty arms way, way up to the sky, fingers flexed and shiverin’, and all of him shivers, and he whines, face screwin’ up, and I wonder if he’s hurt. But he just keeps talkin’. “Alice… Jeez. She’s somethin’. Hey—how come you ain’t got a girl yet, huh, Lou? You gay or somethin'?”

“No,” I say.

“You sure? Shit, when I was your age, there weren’t no keepin' me off of girls, they was all I ever thought about. You been with one though, ain’t you? You seen a pussy, right?”

“Course.”

“And?”

“It’s okay.”

“Ha! You lyin' shit!” He slaps his thigh. “I bet you ain’t never even sucked a titty, except your momma’s.”

“Shut up,” I tell him, feelin’ like someone’s lit a fire over my ears.

“C’mon, just find a cute one, ask her for a feel, it’s easy. Just don’t go start bein' her boyfriend or nothin'. Girls ain’t nothin' but liars, Lou—remember that.”

I nod.

Girls ain’t nothin’ but liars, remember that. 

So I will. Duke probably knows what he’s talkin' about, I figure, but I also know a few girls what I don’t think is liars—Sissy, for one. I don’t think Sissy’s ever lied about nothin' in her life. But I guess she still has time—there really ain’t much you gotta lie about when you’re only eight.

“C’mon,” he says, walkin' over to a little purple bike what’s tossed on the side of the road.

“Ain’t that a girl’s bike?”

“Nah.” He picks it up. It’s only up to his thigh, and he leans his crotch against the torned up seat and rolls along, draggin' the tops of his boots against the road. A playin' card stuck to his wheel goes click, click, click. “It’s my bike. Say somethin' about it.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Found it. Imma paint it black. How’s the community center?”

I itch my head. My scalp moves under my fingers. Little bumps what squirm and crawl and bite and nip and bleed.

Last night, Momma gived me a shower. It was in a big room with a bunch of other kids—boys, and even some girls what I tried not to look at. The light made us look like we was all dead. It stung my eyes. Momma scrubbed my hair, and behind my ears, and my legs, and everywhere, until I was pink all over and it hurt to put on clothes. I just about wanted the shower drain to open up and swallow me whole I was so embarrassed. The soap was rose, but I couldn’t smell it over the stinking black water.

“It’s okay.”

“Yeah?” He looks at me, and his mouth turns down, and his eyes go squinty. They’re all leaky, like he’s been crying, but I know he ain’t, ‘cause he don’t cry. It’s just like his nose. Runny.

“We could jist sleep out here, y’know?” he says, “you and me? Be kinda fun - like we was campin'. You wanna do that?”

“Ain’t you scared of bums?”

“Me? You kidding? Here.”

He stops walkin', and he looks over his shoulders, leanin' into me so close I can smell his onion smell, and hear him breathin', and feel my heart start bump-bumpin'. I can see a secret on his lips, clawing to get out, and I swear to God that if he tells me, I ain’t gonna tell nobody ‘til the day I die. Not if he don’t want me to. He could tell me anythin' at all, and I wouldn’t tell a soul.

“Take a look,” he whispers, tongue pokin’ out between his teeth like a snake. His eyes move back and forth, peerin’ around, then he reaches down, stickin’ his hand in the front of his pants.“Zang!”

The knife comes out like a viper, fast as anythin’, stealin’ the air right out of my lungs. It sparkles high in the air.

“See a bum try and touch me! I’d cut their fuckin' dicks off and feed it to ‘em!” He waves it around, swoosh, swoosh… Big old swings what would take somebody’s arm off, then wish! He sticks it right under my nose, and it’s cold, and for a second, I can just about feel it cuttin' all the way from my lips down to my hips and openin’ me up like a jacket.

“See if I don’t. I could skin you like a rabbit, boy.” He says it so quiet I almost can’t hear him. And then he don’t say nothin’, and I can hear the windchimes, and he looks at me for years. Just lookin’ at me. Then he lunges forward, and I ain’t got time to move before he’s pullin' me in a headlock, and I feel cold sharpness on my forehead.

“C’mon, Lou! Fight! You wanna get scalped? Cowboys and Indians!”

“Cut the crap Duke!”

He hooks a ankle round mine and pushes my legs far apart as they can go, bendin' me forward, squeezin' and squeezin' my neck forever until the sun turns too bright and I think my head’s gonna burst. Only then does he holler, and he let’s go, and he throws his hips against mine and knocks me over. I sprawl out on the gravel, what digs into my knees and my palms, coughin', just tryin' to breathe again.

“Too damn easy! Jesus! What’s the matter with you? Where’s the rest of you, huh? When’d you get so skinny? You gotta eat more.”

He’s sayin’ it in a song, his voice going up and down with a melody only he can hear. I pull myself up, rubbin' my burnin' throat, and he pushes my chest, but not hard enough to knock me down again.

“Look at them little chicken legs. There ain’t nothing left! Tell you what, give it a week and…”

Not long ago, I’d goned to see him. Just for no reason at all other than to see him, to have someone to listen to. I hadn’t called him up or nothin'. Just walked over, and when I got to his house, what was leaning over with a yellow door that didn’t close all the way, I heard his momma cryin'. I crept up to a window that didn’t have no glass - they was in the kitchen.

“Duke!” his momma’d been sayin', and I don’t figure I’ll ever forget the way she gurgled. You woulda thought she was drownin’. “God Almighty, baby! What’s the matter with you? Why are you doin' this to me!”

She was hittin' his chest and his ears when she weren’t claspin' her hands in prayer, or shakin’ them up at the ceiling.

“Lord help my baby, there ain’t nothin left! Lord, please, help my baby!”

But Duke just stood, leaned in a doorway, lookin' like he really weren’t there at all even. Like he couldn’t hear her, even though she was right there yellin’. His mouth open. His head kept droppin' to his chest, then pickin' up, then droppin', until he bent backward, backward, backward, and finally just fell right over like a dead man. I thought maybe he was one.

“…Then you’re gonna be glad I’d got these cats, no kiddin'.”

“Huh?”

“Huh?” He reaches over and tugs my earlobe again. “Get them big ears checked, boy. I was sayin' you’re gonna be glad for these cats when folks start lookin' at each other like big strips of bacon.”

“They ain’t gonna do that, we ain’t animals—we’re Americans. They ain’t gonna let us starve.”

“Yeah? Whose they?”

I gotta think about this a minute. I wanna say the President, but for some reason that sounds like somethin’ a little kid would say, so I don’t.

I say, “The people.”

“The people? Ha! Jesus! The people? Jesus, the people. Yeah, okay. The People.” He shakes his head, runnin’ a hand over his head. “We ain’t Americans, Lou—not  no more. We’re ghosts.”

Then he turns his face and spits up a loogie that’s thick and green and brown with dip, then picks up his girl bike again. Click, click, click. Click, click, click.

“Hey - what’s the matter?” he asks.

“Nothin'.”

“How come your face went like that?”

“It didn’t go like nothing. Just good luck gettin' Sissy to eat a kitty, that’s all.”

“Hell Lou, just tell her its chicken or somethin', she don’t know the difference. Better’n her starvin’, ain’t it? How is she, anyhow?”

Duke, as a rule, don’t like girls because he says they don’t care about nothin’ but themselves, and he don’t like kids because he says they’re too loud and they cry too much, except for me most of the time. But he likes Sissy, even though she’s a kid and she’s a girl, because there ain’t nobody what can help likin’ Sissy. Honest to God. She’s cleverer than most of the folks what I know, even the grown-ups. I don’t even mind hangin' out with her, even though she’s my sister. Sometimes, I even like hangin' out with her better than the boys from school. ‘Cause she’s the kinda kid what you can talk to, and she’ll know what you’re sayin'. You ain’t gotta explain yourself. She just gets things.

But you can also just sit with her, and she don’t need to talk. She ain’t one of them real chatty girls that drives you crazy. She don’t mind just sittin’ with you and holdin’ your hand if you’re sad, and she won’t even ask you what’s wrong. She’ll just wait for you to say it, if you want to.

When I found my Daddy hangin’ in our garage, I didn’t want to say nothin’ to nobody. Not for a long, long time. There weren’t nobody I wanted to see. After the funeral, when Momma tried to give me his cross, I took it and threw it far as I could in the field behind the house, and I went in my room, and I didn’t come out. I didn’t think I ever would. Until a long time later—I guessed it must’ve been days, but it maybe was only a few hours—when I heard a little knock on my door. When I opened it, there she was. Her knees was green from crawlin’ in the grass, and she had my necklace in her hand. She didn’t say nothin’, just gived it to me.

“She’s okay.” I put my hands in my pockets. “I found her bunny, though. He got smooshed.”

“Bugs? Shoot. She ain’t gonna like that. Tell her it runned away. You didn’t show her, did you?”

“Nah. I ain’t seened her since last week. I beened out lookin' for her, I found Bugs, but she ain’t showed up yet.”

It’s like someone turned off the volume of everythin’, ‘cause the world goes quiet. Awful quiet. The trees, the houses, Duke, they’re all holding their breath. The wind hushes up, and the air turns thick, so thick I coulda swum through it, like I was Bugs Bunny smellin' a pie. I hear them chimes again, and I look ‘round for them, wondering whose got chimes out and wishing they’d put them away. Only it ain’t chimes at all.

I see ‘em now. It ain’t chimes, it’s jewlery hangin' in the trees, all these necklaces and bracelets what nobody’d comed and got yet. And what nobody ever would. Blue and green and red and silver stones, all catchin’ the light and makin’ colors dance on the gray and the brown. Like church windows.

“Lou,” Duke says, and my name hangs between us. He reaches forward, takin’ my cross between his forefinger and thumb, and there’s deep lines in his face. He looks me in my eyes. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t’ve looked away. But I don’t want to. I want him to say somethin’ so bad it hurts, like he ain’t just reached for my cross, but right into my chest and squeezed my heart. He opens his mouth, and then he starts squealin'.

A shiver goes up my back, and my whole body turns stiff. For a wild second, I think, Jesus. He’s been shot. Or stabbed. Some bum’s come up behind him. But it ain’t nothin' like that. It’s the kitty on his belt. It’s movin’.

Duke’s hoppin' around like a madman, almost dancin', hittin' at it.

“What the fuck!” Duke yowls. But I can’t do nothin’ but stand there and see this little head poke out between the kitty’s hindlegs, and hear it start cryin'. Just a little cry. Then a body. Then it just drops and swings there by a little string, like a hung man.

“Fuck!” Duke screams, and this time I think maybe he really is cryin’, “Get it off! Get it off, Lou!”

I try to grab at it, to hold it, but it’s too slick, and it slips between my fingers like it ain’t nothin’ but smoke. It just won’t stop movin', and I want so badly just to hold it, because it’s so little, and it’s just a baby, and really Duke shouldn’t be scared of it at all. But I can’t grab it. I can’t hold on.

Duke pulls at his belt, and it comes undone, and slips out of the kitty’s collar. She makes a thump noise when she hits the ground, landin’ on top of her baby, and then there aren’t no mews at all no more, and everythin' is quiet again, ‘cept the necklaces in the trees, and the sound of Duke breathin'.

“Is it dead?” he says. Only now he’s gone quiet, and he’s tremblin’. I crouch down.

It ain’t stiff like Bugs. It don’t even stink yet. I run my finger along it’s tail, and it’s still soft as anythin’, still warm. The wind makes its fur ripple like grass. But there ain’t no breaths. Ain’t no rise, and ain’t no fall.

“Jesus. Get away from it, Lou. Shit might be rabid.” He grabs my shoulder and pulls me back against his chest, lookin’ at the kitty in case she wants to jump up again, and maybe start clawin’ out our eyes for killin’ her baby. I don’t think I’d mind if she did. I probably woulda did the same thing, if I was a kitty, and it was my baby.

Then we’re walkin’ down the road again, and the sun settin’ is kissing the back of my neck, and the tallest things left standin’ ain’t the buildings or the trees, but the people still stuck looking for somethin’ I can’t see.

“What’re you doin’, Lou?”

I pull the chain off my neck. It’s heavy in my hands. Even though I’ve worn it every day for years, I don’t think it’s ever been as heavy as it is now. The cross is still cold from Duke’s fingers. For a moment I close my hand around it, feeling the metal stealin’ my heat. Then I turn towards the trees, and the jewelry, and that moanin’ janglin’ noise, and hard as I can, I throw it. Duke watches it, but I don’t. I don’t look to see if it catches in the branches. I just start walkin’, leavin’ Duke Wilton standin’ shiverin’ in the road.