As the rain continued to fall, those boxes from my old life stacked in the garage nagged at me. I didn’t want Aunt Charlotte to think I was at loose ends. If she found me hanging about, she might worry she wasn’t doing enough for me and start feeling guilty and then the guilt would turn into resentment. I had watched my mom fight this progression in herself after we had moved from Forsterville to the mountains and had been cooped up for too long in our miserable upstairs apartment in Jewel while our life went from bad to worse.
Mom and I had always shared a bedroom and a bed. I had never given this a second thought until the day I brought Wheezer to our apartment back in Forsterville. It was a far better apartment than the one we were to have in Jewel, but there was only the single bedroom. I invited him home with me reluctantly—it was much nicer to go to his house, where he had his own room and his grandmother, who ran the household, made us special treats. His father traveled around the state selling Forster’s furniture, and his mother—they had long been “estranged”—lived in Palm Beach, organizing women’s golf tournaments. Wheezer had confided to me that he had been “an accident.” His mother had been eager for his big brother, Drew, to leave for college, “but then when Drew turned eighteen, she and Daddy messed up and I was the result.” Drew, who worked for an accounting firm in Charlotte, was old enough to be Wheezer’s father. He came home frequently on weekends, tanning himself in the backyard if it was warm enough and shut up in his bedroom listening to jazz and blues except for mealtimes. He treated Wheezer and me with a grumpy, bemused forbearance.
Wheezer was fascinated by my closeness with my mom. He was also curious—perhaps too curious—about the “socioeconomic” differences between us. It would be safer, I thought, for him to go on romanticizing my home life as frugal but noble, like the homes of the poor in Dickens. But he persisted in digging for details about how we lived until Mom said to ask him over one Saturday when she wasn’t working at the furniture factory. She would go out and get pizza for our lunch. (This was to be the first time her going out to get pizza would precede a disaster.) She said it was only right that we return his hospitality when I spent so much time at his grandmother’s house. How different our life might have been if I had not invited Wheezer over that Saturday!
“Wait a minute,” he said when I was showing him our bedroom. “You sleep in the same bed with your mom?” “Where else would I sleep?” I flashed back. “Some poor families sleep four to a bed.” That shut him up until I made the fatal mistake of showing him the picture of a man I was never supposed to show anyone. Mom kept this small framed photo in a tin box at the bottom of a drawer, and said she would tell me more about him when the time was right. But after Wheezer’s remark about our sleeping arrangements, I was desperate to divert him with a new mystery. Without a word, I walked over to the bureau, opened the bottom drawer, opened the tin box, and took out the photograph. “This is my real dad,” I said, “but you can’t tell anyone. He’s dead now, but when I’m older she’s going to explain everything.” In his eagerness, he snatched the photograph out of my hand. He examined it, turned it sideways, shook it in its frame, scrutinized it some more, and then handed it back to me. “This is something that’s been cut out of a book,” he said, giving me a hostile look. “This person could be anybody. You and your mom are both crazy. I need to leave.” Those were the last words he ever spoke directly to me. By the time Mom got back to our apartment with the pizza, he was gone. I told her he’d felt an asthma attack coming on and rushed home for his medication.
At recess on Monday he had waited until I was in hearing range and then announced to the other boys. “Guess what? Marcus sleeps with his mom. He’s his mother’s own little husband.”
And then I did go crazy. I grabbed a hunk of his beautiful salon-cut hair and banged his head backward against a rock wall until there was blood on the wall. The asthmatic boy gasped and gagged and then stopped breathing altogether. Everyone including me thought he had died. But I went on punching that neat little face until others pulled me away. He almost lost the sight in one eye. Mom gave up her job, and as soon as my sessions with the psychiatrist came to an end we moved away. I had felt thankful when I heard the eye was out of danger. But deep down, below the level where right and wrong stayed separate, I was awed at myself for being able to summon such wrath.
When the psychiatrist had asked what I had felt when I was attacking Wheezer, I said I had “blanked out.” But even as I lied I knew that to bloody Wheezer’s head and crush his face and stop his breathing had been my supreme task. And as I saw this being accomplished before my eyes I was filled with elation. I felt that I was driving out the badness from my life through my fists and feet. But I had been wise enough to keep this from the psychiatrist. He would have judged that anyone admitting to such things needed to be in an institution. Yet I had also been able to tell him, in all truth, that I had been sickened and appalled when I heard how badly my friend had been hurt. It was as though Wheezer had been in a terrible accident and I was hearing about it afterward.
Aunt Charlotte had not mentioned the boxes again, but as the rain hadn’t let up I got the first one from the garage and carried it to my room. After a quick glance inside, I fetched a black trash bag from the pantry. The slow-cooker could stay; I could impress Aunt Charlotte with my pulled pork. The rest—aspirin, Q-tips, even our old toothbrushes, for God’s sake, and two pathetic chipped mugs—into the black bag. Some social worker-in-training had probably packed these boxes. “This boy lost his mother and had to go into foster care,” the supervisor would have said. “Pack everything even if it seems worthless. There are always lawsuits to consider.”
VI.
During the rainy spell I dreamed that the sunburnt man picked me up on a motorcycle. The dump truck was in the shop, he said, so our job was to ride up and down the beach on the motorcycle and check the levels of the yellow trash cans. Riding behind him felt wonderful. I was the one who had to hop off and inspect each can. He laughed so hard I could feel his back shaking when I said, leaning against him as we rode straight into the wind: “Yuck, you wouldn’t want to know what was in that last can.” When we got to the trash can in front of Grief Cottage, I said, “I guess we won’t need to check that one.”
“Why not?”
“Because. Nobody has been in there since Hurricane Hazel.”
“That’s what you think,” he said. “I’ll check this one out myself.”
“Just as I expected,” he said when he returned. “Remember what I told you, Marcus. Do not go in that house.”
“But what was in the can?”
“I could tell you,” he said, laughing, “but then I’d have to kill you.”