Witch Boy Read online

  Chuck takes a couple of tentative steps toward me. He feels it too. He needs to be with me out there. God, this is stupid, needing my dog with me the first time…

  “Chuck,” Eleanor snaps.

  Finally he turns, walks toward her, looking over his shoulder every couple of steps. He skulks into the house, and Eleanor disappears like a vapor.

  Jules starts pulling me away before I can prove my mother wrong by making a stupid decision.

  “You have a great mom, Marcus, do you know that?”

  “I do. Pretty good dog too.”

  Jules laughs. When Jules laughs I could cry. I could fall at her feet, I could dissolve into a pool of liquid, I could burst into flame. Even if I didn’t mean to be funny. I am holding her hand as tightly as I can. Because I don’t ever want to let her go.

  “You know,” I say, “one of the great things about Eleanor is she wants whatever makes me happy.”

  She matches my hand squeeze for squeeze.

  “You make me happy,” I say. “She’d let you come.”

  “And my folks,” she says, oddly brightly, “would put up only token resistance.”

  I fairly jump. Even have to stop myself, as I feel the leg muscles twitch for a small hop. Now it’s a celebration. That sounded like a deal finalized, there. Didn’t it sound like a deal?

  “Is that bag going to be big enough for both of us?” she asks.

  A deal. With every stride now, we are deeper into a fabulous, fantastical place.

  “Yup. It’s a double. Used to let Chuck come in with me when we would camp out here.”

  She is laughing, again, even though I’m not joking, again. But I don’t half notice. I am looking up, through blurry, teary, sweat-stippled eyes at the shimmery fairy-light sky. As we enter the woods.

  Every step brings us farther into darkness. At first the strong moon and spangly stars continue peeking through the branches, but steadily the woods grow denser. Eventually it is hard to see much of anything, and we navigate purely by my intimate knowledge of the place. It feels more and more like I have to tug on Jules to get her to stay with me. Not because of reluctance, but because of the blindness I ask her to follow me into.

  “You okay?” I ask softly.

  “Yeah,” she says. “A little spooked, though.”

  “Not to worry. I won’t let you put a foot wrong.”

  “Okay,” she says, and I can tell she means it. She squeezes my hand a little harder, but she is pulling back less.

  “I meant it, that I wanted to show you something out here, Jules.” And I do, I do. This is it. The truly intimate act that I want to share with her. “Something you probably won’t even believe after you’ve seen it.”

  “But I won’t see it. I can’t see anything out here.”

  “You’ll be able to see, when I take you up a certain tree.”

  I feel her tugging a bit once again.

  “How freaky is this all going to get, Marcus? I don’t know if I want to…”

  I pull her up close, and I stop. I can barely make out her face, though it is right in front of me. “Fairly freaky,” I say. “But not like there’s anything to worry about. You never have anything to worry about as long as you’re with me, Jules. Never, ever.”

  I kiss her, both as softly as I can and as fully as I can. I stop, try to look at her, can’t see much. I begin moving all around her face with my face, cheek brushing cheek, nose brushing lips, lips brushing eyes. Reading her features like Braille. I kiss her again. Then I kiss her again and by the third time she is kissing me back, and it would not matter what kind of lighting we had because my eyes feel like they are rolling back in my head.

  “You can show me later,” she whispers.

  The sleeping bag is down, and I am kicking it flat with my feet while not letting go of Jules. I feel clothes, her airy fabrics, falling away a piece at a time, and I am squeezing her harder and harder, like I am holding on to life itself, life’s own slim hips in my hands.

  We are on our knees, and I am needing help. Help with a belt buckle, help with a twisted T-shirt, and I get help. We are in the sleeping bag, and it is pulled up tight around us, zippered safely against the snakes and the world, and whatever small spaces are not completely filled by down and polyester are filled by every bit of Jules and me.

  I feel pain, but I figure you are supposed to feel pain. How would I know, and if I did know, what would I care? My head is hammering. All my joints are suddenly shot through with something like arthritis, slowing my movements, and punishing me for every one.

  And every single one is worth it.

  Jules gets softer. The parts of her I know so well, lovely as they are, lovely soft as they have always been, are nothing compared to the newness of her now. Her cheek, the underside of her chin, her neck I kiss a thousand times and will be back for a thousand more, but I cannot fathom, as I touch her breast, her belly, her back, how flesh so soft can hold together without melting. I close my eyes, open them again to feel the difference. I turn my head back and forth, to brush my lips over and over Jules’s damp, honeyed navel.

  I close my eyes once more and I freeze. I breathe into Jules. Her abdomen rises and falls gently, greeting me, withdrawing, greeting me. I turn my head, place my ear to her, and listen to the soft thump of my heart. I want every sense there is of Jules. Sound, taste and touch, scent and sight.

  “What?” she says.

  Startled, I raise my head, matted with sweat. I don’t know how long I was there. Thirty seconds? Thirty minutes?

  “I didn’t say anything,” I say, and make my way slowly back up to her face. I kiss every square inch of skin on my way.

  “Oh,” she says, sounding as fuzzy as me.

  Her hands are on me, feeling me, and I am feeling me because of it. My ribs push out. My chest, under her hands, is tight, solid. Stomach muscles bang through the skin, pronounced and articulated. I have things I never had before, or never noticed. I feel hard, and very, very strong. Rivulets of sweat slalom down over me and make their way to Jules like streams to the bay.

  I cannot make enough contact with her skin. My face, my lips, move over hers. My arms travel the length of her, my fingertips searching for any square inch of her where they have not touched. Our stomachs are flattened together, and for a time that is all I can feel, and all I need to feel. I cannot imagine beyond this.

  Jules has my hair in her hands. Then she is on top of me. I still cannot see her, but the picture is clear. I am knowing her in the way I know the woods, which I could do without any eyes at all.

  “What?” she breathes it more than speaks it. “No, don’t say that.”

  We roll. I am on top of her now, her arms stretched out over her head, my fingers twined with hers. “I didn’t say anything.”

  She doesn’t get the chance to say anything else, as I descend for the longest, loveliest kiss that brings us, finally as far into each other as it is possible to get. We don’t want to let it go, and for the longest time we don’t. We lie there, mouth-to-mouth, motionless.

  Then, suddenly, we are no longer motionless. Jules is biting my top lip. Then she is biting it hard. I groan. She is biting me very hard. I yank my head away.

  I lift myself some, trying to get a look at her. “Jules?” I say.

  “Marcus?” she sounds worried. I still cannot see her.

  But then I can. As if someone has come along with a spotlight and bang, lighted Jules, and only Jules, for me. Only no, she is not being lighted. She is light. It is coming up from her. I cannot see my own hand, but Jules is luminous.

  And she is so, so fine, so exquisite, that I try to speak but cannot. She doesn’t even attempt to speak. In fact she looks as if she couldn’t. She looks as if there is no life in her, like one of those perfectly preserved, suspended beauties under glass, under a spell. Sleeping Beauty with eyes wide open.

  “Jules?” I manage to beg. “Jules?”

  “Marcus?” I hear, but her lips don’t even move.


  I lower myself and cling to her, but she’s not responding. I back off again to look.

  And it isn’t Jules.

  It isn’t Jules.

  A desperate small moan-cry comes out of me, like I’m an animal caught in a trap, as I struggle, trying to get up, up off this man I am lying on. The arthritis has now seized me totally, and I am paralyzed.

  “Marcus?” Jules’s voice is calling me ever more desperately now; she is right here, but I cannot see her.

  The man does nothing but stare at me, and then he takes my hands, twines our fingers just the way Jules and I had done. Feels like he’s got a coating of warm motor oil on his hands, but it is blood. His hands, now my hands, are coated in blood.

  I try to push off him, to get some distance, I am pushing him, shoving, banging, clawing him.

  “Marcus!” Jules is screaming now, crying. I can only hear her. I have to get to her, I have to, but the man will not let me go.

  He has got me now by the back of the neck, the back hairs, and he is pulling. He is powerful, much stronger than me, and I know I cannot hold him off for long. He is bringing my face down on him, digging into my neck with his nails.

  For the first time I take in the face. I know this face. Who the hell is this?

  “Marcus!”

  The face is not a horror. It is sad and desperate and needy.

  And I don’t care.

  I grab his hair with both of my hands, and I begin to hammer his head against the ground.

  But he does not stop. His face, familiar face, pathetic, insistent creepy old face, waits while his overwhelming strength brings me down, down, down to him. I pull at his scalp with everything I have. He locks onto my eyes with his…

  With his mismatched, green, gray eyes.

  “Marcus!” Jules’s voice calls, and everything freezes. Her voice is distant. More distant still as she calls once more, getting farther and farther away from me.

  The lights go out.

  Quick as it all came on, it is gone again. I am sitting upright and naked, and alone. Half inside, half outside the sleeping bag. I can’t see anything.

  “Jules?” I call softly, panting, wheezing.

  No response.

  Shit! I jump. I am bitten. There is a snake in the bag. I topple over, squirm around on the ground. Shit, I am bitten again, on the leg, and again, on the stomach, before I can roll outside the bag and then grab it by the neck, squeezing until it lets go of the soft flesh at my navel. Screaming, I throw the evil bitch as far as I can. I hear it thud, off in the distance.

  I grab at the sleeping bag beneath me and find that it is drenched at the top, where our heads would have been. I dare not even imagine with what. I raise my hand to my face to wipe away sweat and whatever else is running into my eyes, and find strands of hair tangled in my fingers. I bring the hand close to my nose.

  Honeysuckle.

  I am stumbling, falling, banging into trees in these woods I know so well I don’t need eyes. “Jules!” I call, and get no answer. “Jules, Jules,” I keep calling.

  I cannot imagine what’s going on.

  Was it a dream? Was he a dream? Is this a dream? Why am I here? Why is Jules not?

  “Jules, Jules,” I keep calling.

  Was it the beer? Must be the beer. I shouldn’t drink beer. I drank the beer and went home and crashed and got up and walked into the woods without knowing and…

  “Jules, Jules.”

  Even a dream…even a dream…why such a dream? You gotta be melted in the head to even dream like this.

  Where is Jules? Where is Jules? I am running so hard, harder with the thinking, I am banging like a pinball off trees. If this is all a dream, Jules should be here; if the dream is over, Jules should be here; whatever it is, Jules should be here, we were going to stay together. Have I lost my Jules, lost my bearings, lost my mind?

  Sirens. Sirens of every kind are screaming in the distance. I vaguely wonder why before I catch the root of a tree with my unlaced shoe and hit the ground hard.

  I am crying real tears as I get back to my feet and negotiate the last bits of trail out of my woods.

  As I emerge into the moonlight, I stop dead in the middle of the road. The sirens are still blowing, and you can feel it, the action of the town. There is yelling, there is screaming, there is motion of every kind. There is no music, there is no party.

  I have been dragging my sleeping bag behind me like a little lost boy with his blanket. I look at it now, reluctantly, and find what I did not want to find. It is blood. Soaked, as if the end had been in a blood vat. I look in my right hand, which is still clutching the hair. Jules’s thick, chocolate-brown hair.

  CHAPTER 3

  I run. I run for home. I run flat out, the sleeping bag tangling in my legs until I sling the bloody mess over my shoulder and run harder, harder, crying, sweating in the sweltering sticky night, my shoes flopping, my belt dangling, my snakebites stinging, and my brain bouncing off the walls of my skull.

  I hit the front porch running, then freeze.

  On the other side of the screen door Chuck is planted, like a granite dog with suddenly green, fair, living, comprehending eyes. He is staring deep into me, knowing me unfairly. Like he shouldn’t be. Like no creature should be knowing another.

  “Stop it,” I say.

  He does not.

  “What did I do, Chuck?” I whisper desperately. She was begging me to stop.

  He stares at me, as if to burn something into me, for a few seconds more. Then his eyes go back, from this strange green to their usual murky brown. He backs away from the door. I am about to rush in; then I stop, jump off the side of the porch, and jam the sleeping bag into a small, Chuck-dug space under the latticework under the stairs. Then I go into the house.

  I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what I’ll do. I suck it up and do what I do when I don’t know what to do. I go to Eleanor’s door.

  Eleanor is gone. She is leaned all the way back in her multiposition orthopedic office chair, eyes tight, with the computer and a bottle of hearty Italian red singing her a lullaby. She sleeps there as often as she does in the bed.

  At a loss, I turn and find Chuck. Chuck turns and heads for the bathroom. I follow, not because I think that he knows what to do, but because I cannot possibly decide for myself. Every step feels strange, every piece of floor foreign, like at any moment I will set a foot wrong and tumble through to someplace absolutely evil, someplace even worse than where I am.

  I look in the bathroom mirror….

  I jump away, gasping. The face in the mirror is not mine. It’s his.

  If he’s a dream, he’s a goddamn potent dream.

  I remain pinned to the cool tile wall. I close my eyes, open them, rub them. I look down and find Chuck still there, still with me, serene as Buddha. Slowly I approach the mirror.

  I find me there. But it is scarcely relief that I feel. Black sockets set in electric-white skin, blood freckles splashed diagonally from right temple to left cheek.

  I fairly dive into the basin, scrubbing my face, hands, arms until I have probably removed the top three layers of skin. I touch lightly at the four puncture marks, angry red and weepy, around my belly button. They burn. If I’d had Chuck with me, that’d be one dead snake…I knew I should have…I knew….

  I look down, and Chuck is gone again. I panic, running from room to room to finally locate him lying on the striped cotton throw rug in front of my dresser.

  I change quickly, hide the old bloodstained clothes in the packed-for-moving box in the closet, and follow Chuck, out of the room, down the hall, out the front door.

  As the air hits my face it triggers my response. “Jules,” I say meekly into the motionless wet atmosphere. “Jules?”

  She does not answer, and Chuck does not wait. He is off. It’s clear he knows where he is going from the start. All I can do is follow, and pray that where he leads is where I want to be. Where I will find my Jules, my sanity, and peace. Where I will find th
e explanation. Something in the universe owes me an explanation.

  Chuck leads me to where the entire party has moved. To where the entire fire department and all the rescue services of the town have moved. We are on the banks of the river, beneath the town’s one huge suspension bridge. The sirens have stopped crying, but the lights are all whirring away, throwing mad staccato psychedelia on the bridge, the water, and the dripping, mangled Hummer being hauled out of the fast-moving current (with some difficulty) by two tow trucks.

  There’s only one Humvee anywhere around here. And it belongs to Doone’s family. It was sitting in the driveway when the party was on. Who took the Humvee?

  I don’t know how long I am frozen to the spot, but I am staring and immobilized even after I become aware that I want to be moving. Slowly, like a patient relearning how to walk, I lift and drop one foot after another, moving through the hysterical crowd.

  Police are interviewing just about anybody who was at the party who can speak. And that’s not a lot of people. The girls are sobbing, hugging each other, and the guys are making tighter and tighter circles among themselves, kicking at the ground, pacing off toward the water and then retreating to the safety of their numbers.

  I, as usual, move through the scene like a spirit, all but unnoticed. Jules is not in the first or second or third cluster of girls I see. She is not with any of the silent packs of guys. She is not with a policeman; she is not in either of the two ambulances, which I half crawl into as I search for her.

  “Come out of there please, sir,” a paramedic says, taking a gentle but firm grip of my shirt. Once I am out I get gently nudged aside as the wail goes up, announcing the arrival of Doone Howe.

  I am within three feet of the stretcher as Doone’s bruised, puffy, beautiful face glides past me. He looks more like he’s been on the losing end of a minor scuffle than the losing end of a hundred-foot drop. His mouth and the top of his head appear to be well bloodied, but he doesn’t look mangled.

  He also doesn’t look very lifelike.

  Police and medical guys are busy over him, pushing things into him, talking to him, rubbing his hands, arms, legs, trying to pull whatever bits of life are there at the center of him out into the rest of his body. The stretcher hits the tailgate of the waiting ambulance like a cannonball being shoved into a cannon, and before they can even get the doors completely closed, they are speeding off toward the hospital.