The Witch Read online

  Kerry and I cried some more when they were on their way out the front door. We saw the old maroon Chevy parked at the curb, and the sight of it pierced us, the wrongness of it driving away without us. “It’s gonna be fine,” our father said, as we clung to his legs, wetting his knees with our tears. “Pretty soon school’s gonna start, well, Ker’s gonna have school. Think how smart you’ll get!”

  Then the door shut, and they were gone. Mrs. Wojo locked and bolted it after them. We stopped crying right away. It wouldn’t do us any good.

  Mrs. Wojo let the silence settle. Then she said, “So that’s your father, is it? Well, that explains a few things.” Then she went off to undo and dispose of the remnants of her hospitality.

  I wanted to call them back and explain things better. Because it was one of Mrs. Wojo’s jokes that she was going to sell Kerry to the gypsies when he was fat enough—whatever a gypsy was—and after a while we understood it as a joke, the same way our father said teasing, unpleasant things. But she did lock us in the basement.

  The entire time we’d been at Mrs. Wojo’s, we hadn’t left the house or back yard. Still, Mrs. Wojo had her needs, her grocery shopping, her life carried on outside her four walls. And when a need arose, she herded us into the basement and locked the door to the landing. The first time we were unsuspecting. After that we tried hiding from her, and once I kicked at her shins and missed, and she clamped both hands on my shoulders and put her big powdered face next to mine and breathed death at me. “Do you want to go to the juvenile home? Do you want to live in a cell and take crazy pills? Hah? Get on down there.” She slammed the door on us and slid the lock into place.

  The basement was where Mrs. Wojo did her laundry. There were two squat machines and a deep tub sink, and a clothesline where she hung different horrible items of clothing. Her underpants had cuffs around the leg holes, her bras were large and heroically reinforced, a triumph of elastic. The furnace was down there too, and an old coal chute, and some half-windows up high in the walls, barred over against burglars. In a part of it, where there were no windows, the concrete floor gave out and there was only bare earth. The basement seemed to be larger than the house itself, with side passages and cupboards and a workbench with buckets of calcified paint, old coffee cans filled with nails, knuckle-shaped metal parts of unknown use, old light switches. We poked around a little but the place scared us. We had been taken away from our father because he’d locked us in a car—this had been explained to us—and now Mrs. Wojo locked us in a basement and nobody wanted to believe me about it.

  Then after a while, and I suppose it wasn’t ever all that long, we’d hear her footsteps overhead, and the door opened and we were summoned upstairs, to help put away the groceries or some other chore. Once, as she was leaving, Kerry begged to go with her, and you could see her hesitate, wanting to, but sorting it out. “Not today, maybe some other time.”

  “You suck,” I informed him, once we were locked in together. It was one of my father’s sayings.

  “I’m going to tell you said that.”

  “Well I’m going to dig up worms and put them in your bed.” I was furious with him for his weakness, for abandoning me.

  “I’ll tell about that too.” He had a collaborator’s smugness. I hated him. I hated his fat face and his pretty hair and the look and smell of his alien, boy’s body, and I imagine he hated me too for his own, interlocking set of reasons. But we had no choice in each other. The twoness of us was fixed for all time.

  I didn’t plan what happened to Mrs. Wojo, except in the sense that I had imagined a hundred different scenes of escaping her, a kid’s imaginings in which I became a cowboy or a soldier or something else powerful and victorious. In the end, it came about because she forgot to secure us in the back yard while she did the laundry.

  Because she always did that, kicked us out of the house when she had chores to do in the basement. I expect she didn’t trust us to be alone and unsupervised in the house. We might steal food, or break something, or use the telephone to call long distance. We stayed in the yard until she was ready to let us back in, the door latched against us, and that was that.

  Except for this particular day. I was thirsty, and impatient, and when I pulled at the handle of the door to rattle it, it opened. Kerry wasn’t paying attention. He was sitting at the edge of the gravel, sorting the rocks. I went inside. I wasn’t especially quiet about it, but the laundry machines were rolling and sudsing in the basement, and I guess they covered my noise. I went into the kitchen and reached up to the sink to fill a glass and drink. Then I went back to the landing and without any thought at all, I shut the basement door and slipped the bolt in place.

  Nothing happened. I went back outside. I watched Kerry play with the rocks. After a while he looked up, squinting at me. “What were you doing?”

  “I got a drink.”

  “Well I want one too.”

  “Go ahead,” I told him. He got up, watching me in a mistrustful way, and we both stood on the back stairs. “See?” I said, presenting him with the fact of the open door.

  I went in first and Kerry followed. He took a glass from the dish drainer, ran the tap, and drank. “Where is she?”

  I pointed to the basement door. “Down there.” He didn’t understand at first. I dragged a chair over to the cupboard where Mrs. Wojo kept the cookies, climbed up, and pulled them out. They weren’t a good kind, some flavored wafer, dry as toast, but I took a handful and pushed the package at him. He didn’t take any. I opened the refrigerator and poked around, but there was nothing I wanted, only a lot of little bowls hooded in plastic.

  “What are you doing?” Kerry whispered, stricken. Understand, at that point I was only feeling clever about evading Mrs. Wojo for a little while. I just wanted to break some rules before she reappeared to punish me. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that she couldn’t get out.

  But then she was at the top of the steps, pounding at the door and making it shudder. “UNDO THIS LOCK THIS INSTANT! I MEAN IT, YOU LITTLE SHITS!”

  The swearing shocked us as much as anything. We stood together on the step above the landing while she worked the doorknob, uselessly, from the other side. “OPEN THIS DOOR! OR I WILL SKIN YOU ALIVE! YOU THINK I’M KIDDING?”

  “We have to let her out,” Kerry said, still whispering. I shook my head, no. I didn’t want to be skinned alive. “We have to,” he said again. “We can call the fire department, they’ll let her out.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. New and wonderful ideas were swooping through my head like birds, like my head was a room with wide-open windows.

  “DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH TROUBLE YOU’RE IN? YOU ARE IN FOR A WORLD OF HURT! I WILL BEAT YOU DOWN! AND THEN YOU ARE GOING TO JAIL!”

  Her big black pursey purse was on the kitchen table. I dumped it upside down. I wasn’t even thinking of stealing from her. I just wanted to be bad. In the mess of old Kleenex and gum and powder, I saw her key ring. Kerry saw it too. He grabbed for it but I got it first.

  “Give it to me!”

  “No!”

  The basement door was still shaking. I got up my nerve and hopped past it to the back door. “Come on,” I said to Kerry, but he just stood there.

  “Kerry, honey?” Mrs. Wojo stopped beating on the door. “Are you there? I know you didn’t do anything. I know it’s not your fault.”

  The giddiness went out of me and my stomach pitched. Mrs. Wojo went on. “I know you’re a good boy. Why don’t you open the door and I’ll fix you some Kool-Aid, the purple kind you like.”

  “She’s lying,” I said, and I swear on my life I saw black specks fly out of the keyhole then, like a swarm of black bees, and the next instant they were gone, and when she spoke again there was more of an edge to it, like she couldn’t concentrate on both things at once, hating me and coaxing him.

  “If you let me out, we can go to a baseball game. I bet you’
ve never seen one of those, have you? We can sit up front so you can catch the ball when it comes into the stands. You can have a hot dog. Two, if you want them.”

  “If you let her out,” I said, “she’ll give you polio, like she did Frank.”

  She roared, and the door shook in its frame, and Kerry ran after me out to the yard.

  I needed his help to unlock the gate, because it was just out of my reach, and it took a long time to find the right key and get it to turn. But we managed it, and then we were on the other side of the fence. The alley, now that we could see it for ourselves, was a place of marvels, rutted tire tracks, plastic bags blown against a fence, a lane of blue sky overhead.

  We started running. It didn’t matter what direction, since we were completely lost, and when we came to a street we slowed down. Nobody was following us. We walked a long time, and we probably looked pretty draggled when we walked up to a parked taxi, since we knew that taxis took people places, and asked the driver if he’d take us home. “We live on North Halsted,” I said. “We were with our dad, at the ball game, and we got lost in the crowd.”

  Kerry stood gaping at me. It was the first big lie I ever told, but not the last.

  The driver considered us, then talked into his radio, and got out to usher us into the back seat. He kept up a kindly, one-sided conversation as he drove. We didn’t understand a word of it because of his accent. We kept our faces close to the windows, looking for our building.

  And here it was, heaving up out of the vast strangeness of the city, and the maroon Chevy right in front! And our father standing over the Chevy’s open trunk!

  We set up a holler and the cab pulled over to the curb. We got out and ran to him, shouting. This time he was the one who didn’t know what to make of us. “What’s this?” he said. “Kids, how did you get here?”

  “We took a cab,” Kerry said.

  “We ran away,” I added.

  “Wait here,” our father said, and he walked over to lean into the cab’s window. He spent some time talking to the driver, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and finally he straightened up and the cab drove away with a friendly tap of its horn. “All right, you monkeys,” our father said. “Run along upstairs now.”

  We scrambled up and burst through the open door, and then we stopped dead. The place was empty, except for the landlord’s furniture, and some bulging plastic trash bags. Monica was sweeping the bare floor. She stopped when she saw us. “Wow.” She looked at the broom, then once more at us. “Wow.”

  Our father came in after us. “Well isn’t this a nice surprise. We were just on our way to see you.”

  We didn’t say anything. He said, “Now don’t get all upset. We knew you were in a real good place, that was the A-number-one most important thing.”

  “We aren’t going back there,” I said, and Kerry started to speak, but I crowded into him and he kept silent.

  Our father said, “Then I guess you’re coming along for the ride. Are you up for it? It’s gonna be a little crowded, what with the car all loaded up. I don’t want to hear a peep out of you, understood?”

  We forgave them. What choice did we have? We got in the car and we drove a long ways to a different city, where we lived with different names. Everything up until then was left behind us. And in this new place, in ways that were both slow and sudden, we grew up.

  I don’t see Kerry very often these days, and we don’t talk much, and never about Mrs. Wojo. I had my own bad dreams and I imagine he had his. Did she manage to break a window, call for help, get herself out? Was she even now out looking for us, picking up our trail? I worried about that for years and years. Or did she stay in that basement until somebody noticed her African violets all dead from neglect, her mail piling up, the bills unpaid? Sooner or later somebody would tap at the front windows, make calls, force the door. Sooner or later they’d find their way down to the basement and there she’d be, turned to leather and stench. Alive or dead, she was a vicious ghost.

  Was it my fault for locking that door? For being bad and disobedient? For getting out of the car when we had been told to stay in? But why were we left in that car to begin with? Why was our father the way he was, or why was Monica? You might as well ask, why did Frank get polio and die? The world is made up of questions. Each of us has to live with our own answers.

  INAMORATA

  It was the best hangover Royboy ever had. It was possible he was still drunk. He was lightheaded and lazy-limbed, with a grin he couldn’t get rid of and an unfounded sense of wonderfulness. Where had it come from, and what, if anything, had he done to deserve it? He couldn’t say.

  Most of the last twelve hours was a little iffy. A great deal of it, he just couldn’t say. There had been an excursion to a bar—perhaps two or three bars—with his roommates, an impromptu celebration of Royboy’s inheritance. That is, his access to the funds set aside for him by the successful, aggressively prosecuted lawsuit in regards to a long-ago accident.

  This accident had inflicted, on the ten-year-old Royboy, a grievous, expensive injury to his young brain. All that had since been patched up and made mostly right. Some residual stuff, sure, like these iffy moments. But each of his lost brain cells was like a tiny investment portfolio, paying off in a big, happy way. He had turned twenty-two and that portion of the monies awarded for pain and suffering was now his.

  “Pain and suffering!” Royboy and his friends drank to that, and drank again. The bartenders had been cheerful and obliging, and other customers looked on them fondly. There had been some girls. One of Royboy’s friends saw a girl he knew, and that girl was there with her friends as well. The whole group had migrated from bar to bar and then back to the house of Royboy and associates. There had been music, and the kind of dancing that goes along with a lot of drinking, and at one point people had decided they were hungry, and started frying up eggs and bacon and potatoes. Everyone had been having such a good time. There had been some fun with a ketchup bottle.

  Right about then, things had gone iffy.

  Now it was morning, or at least, the sun was in the sky. Royboy sat in a recliner in the living room, in front of the big television screen. He appeared to be watching the television with great concentration, although the set was turned off. One of his roommates came in. He had just finished his shower, and he carried with him the perfumey smells of steam and shampoo and grooming products. His hair was slicked back in wet curls and he wore a T-shirt and athletic shorts. He watched Royboy watching the empty screen for a time. “Good show?” he offered.

  “Hunh? No, it’s that thing.” Royboy flapped his hand in the direction of the television. “You know, the whasis.”

  “Shoe,” said the roommate, whose name was Mikey. “Well it sure is a nice one. How did it get on top of the TV?”

  “I put it there,” Royboy said, but what he meant was, he put it there after he found it next to his bed.

  “Why the shit-eating grin?”

  “Because I’m happy.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know,” Royboy confessed. Mikey nodded. They were all used to the spaces between things in Royboy’s head.

  “So this shoe . . .” Mikey began again.

  “Yeah, I guess some girl was wearing it. I mean she was probably wearing another one just like it. You remember which girl?”

  “I wasn’t especially noticing footwear,” Mikey said. “What’s the big deal?”

  Before Royboy had a chance to explain, another of his roommates came in, eating milk and cereal from a bowl in his hand. His name was Dave D. There had been another Dave, Dave M., and Dave M. had moved out, but Dave D. was still Dave D. “You guys look like roadkill,” Dave D. said.

  “Thanks. Hey, you recognize this shoe? The Boy wants to know.”

  “It would be kind of a fashion risk for you, Royboy.”

  “Screw you guys. I foun
d it in my room this morning.”

  His roommates made an ooooh sound. Dave D. said, “You sure there wasn’t a foot inside it? You know, the coyote date where you chew your foot off so you can get away clean?”

  “Screw you upside down and sideways.”

  “Seriously, she was that good?”

  “I don’t exactly remember,” Royboy admitted.

  “Dude. You got it in your sleep?”

  Royboy shrugged. Let them think that. Maybe he had, in fact, been asleep, or maybe he was awake and just didn’t remember it, maybe it had been the greatest sex in his life, over and done with except for its blissful echo. Or maybe there had been nothing of the sort. Just this mysterious joy.

  Dave D. picked up the shoe and examined it. “Pretty,” he said. “What do you call this, Lucite?”

  “Lucy Lucite. At least now we’ve got a name to go on.”

  “You guys. Give me that.” Royboy hauled himself up from the recliner, a little wobbly in the knees, and snatched the shoe from Dave D. He liked the feel of the shoe in his hands, all smooth and cool. It was a dressy shoe with a high heel. It was made entirely of clear plastic except for the ankle strap, a line of silver beads. Just holding it reactivated the whole fizzy, grin-producing process.

  The shoe was on the small side, though not tiny or elfin or anything like that. This was a relief. He didn’t much care for little bitty women; they made him think of kittens and bunnies and other nonsexual things. Royboy tried to picture the foot that went inside the shoe, balancing on its icicle spike, and from there, the rest of the woman. He called up any existing girl-memories belonging to the night before, but these were only an agreeable, bright-colored femaleness, a kaleidoscope of bare legs and charm bracelets and pretty shoulders. He said, “So who was it knew them? The girls? How did they get here anyway?”

  They thought it was probably due to another roommate, Lance, whose nickname was Lance the Pants. Lance was not available to answer questions. He had gone home with one of the girls, because that was just how he rolled. Mikey and Dave D. tried to remember if they had seen Royboy accompanying anyone in particular. They didn’t think so.