Crooked Read online

  “You’re such a troglodyte, Crook,” Amos said in a tight, surprisingly high voice, and up front, Bruce’s brother hooted and Big Dave Pearse, who’d been twirling a basketball on his index finger, palmed the ball and turned around with an ear-to-ear grin. “A deep dent, Crook, my man. A very deep dent.”

  Bruce, grinning himself, said, “I wouldn’t know. So what does it mean, that I’m a troglodyte?”

  “It means the things you do are troglodytic,” Big Dave said, “and there’s not much, if anything, lower. I’d make him take it back if I were you, though thank God I’m not.”

  Amos was surprised how much he liked that idea. “You should, Crook. You should try to make me take it back.”

  “Tell me what it is and then I’ll probably have to.”

  Amos considered it. “A troglodyte is basically a cave dweller, a subhuman.”

  “And that’s the most decent sort of troglodyte,” said Big Dave over his shoulder. “That’s a troglodyte from the better part of town.”

  Bruce leaned back amiably. “Oh, well, I thought maybe it was something bad. One of those guys who wear rubber undies or something.”

  At the gym, Bruce and Amos played five or six pickup games, half-court, two on two or three on three. Bruce, who was a half foot taller than everyone else, still preferred to stay outside the lane, looking for opportunities to bring his feet close together, bend the knees, and collect his long, segmented body into the gentle coil that preceded his set shot. Bruce had a nice touch—a calm eye, clean release, perfect backspin—and he was an optimist. He would watch the long arc of the ball while taking a step or two back, as if there were no reason in the world to follow it to the basket for a possible rebound.

  Amos was the opposite. Though less hefty than Bruce, he liked working inside, and today, especially, he enjoyed the bumping and shoving that was going on beneath the basket. Amos felt a kind of meanness unfolding within him and was glad there was a way to use it. He leaned heavily into bigger opponents to screen them from the backboard; he crashed through screens that were set against him. It was a funny but good feeling, as if by playing hard enough, he could change the way the world felt about him. And after the last game, when it was just starting to get dark, it gave him a strange satisfaction to tell Crook he’d just walk home, that he didn’t feel much like riding along with him right now.

  7

  THIEVING

  Dusty’s Oldtowne Market was crowded with people in wet snow boots, but shopping by herself made Clara forget about Amos a little. Mrs. Harper’s list specified the cheapest brands, so Clara just looked for the bargains her mother usually chose.

  It was while comparing generic oatmeal with the happy Quaker that Clara became uneasily aware of the Tripp brothers. Everyone knew Eddie and Charles Tripp. Even in elementary school, they had been pale and scary, and somehow they had learned early on to enjoy how much they scared people. They shaved their heads and gave themselves tattoos. No one wanted to touch them when learning the Virginia reel in gym, and Eddie started to smoke cigarettes the same year Clara got a pink bicycle. Charles was the older one, the hulking, big-headed, leering one, whose shaven scalp was his one truly revolting physical feature. Its whiteness was mapped with swollen blue veins. It was worse than unpleasant. And yet one day, through the public library shelves, Clara had glimpsed Charles’s face from the forehead down and had been shocked at his rugged good looks. With the veiny scalp out of the picture, he looked almost like Patrick Swayze. So what was especially weird was that instead of letting his hair grow out to cover his grotesque scalp, Charles shaved it so that people would have to look at it. For Clara, who would’ve loved to disguise her crooked nose, this was beyond comprehension and made Charles seem not just scary but horrific.

  Eddie, the little brother, was a foot and a half shorter than Charles. Eddie was compact and muscular, with close-set eyes of a shade of blue that made Clara think of swimming pools. Clara didn’t think scariness came as naturally to Eddie, but he seemed willing to learn from his older brother. People said they both had high IQs, but they cut classes and repeated grades. Charles was a senior now, and Eddie was two years older than Clara but in her same grade. When they’d both been seventh graders at Melville, Eddie had started sitting behind Clara on the bus. He would be quiet for a long time. Then he would lean forward and say, “Are you a virgin?” Clara had stopped riding the bus.

  Now, in the aisle of Dusty’s Oldtowne Market, Clara turned slightly so that she could peer at the Tripp brothers over the oatmeal box. They both wore baggy military fatigues and expensive black Nikes. Eddie’s head wasn’t shaved anymore—he had tightly curled black hair. Charles’s scalp was shaved clean, so clean that Clara wondered how he’d done it without cutting any of its protruding blue veins. Charles was even bigger now than he was last summer, when he used to lounge with Eddie in the bleachers at the high school and watch cheerleading practice, girls’ track, and women pushing strollers, all the while making low comments audible only to Eddie, who would cackle with laughter.

  The shopping cart the Tripp brothers were pushing had only a few things in it—some catsup, several cans of Red Dog beer, a small log of salami—and Charles was evidently looking for something in his coat because he kept unzipping it and checking out the lining. It was then that Eddie saw Clara.

  Clara glanced away immediately, a sure giveaway that she’d been staring. While she pretended to study the oatmeal, she could see that the Tripps were moving out of her aisle, pushing the cart casually, and then they were gone.

  Clara didn’t give them another thought until she reached the checkout stand, where she realized that the two brothers were in the line to her left. What was strange was that none of the things she’d seen in their cart earlier were there now. Instead, there was only a bag of generic potato chips and a two-liter bottle of generic cola. Eddie had his wallet out and was studying its contents. Charles was turned toward Clara but not looking at her. He was staring in dull fascination at the rack with magazines and tabloids. As he leaned forward to pull out the Enquirer from the rack, his jacket fell open and Clara saw a bottle of catsup. From another pocket peered a can of Red Dog beer. Other pockets, too, seemed to be bulging, but her view was blocked when Charles spread open the tabloid in front of him.

  When Charles put the newspaper back, Eddie’s eyes fell on Clara. They were the same pale glassy blue that made him almost handsome. She had thought he was handsome, in fact, before he started asking if she was a virgin.

  “Hey, Clara,” he said now, moving so that he stood in front of his brother’s jacket. “Haven’t seen you much since your daddy started taking you to school.” He tried his best to smile.

  Clara didn’t know what to say. Eddie Tripp seemed creepy to her, but not completely creepy. She decided to try being nice. “That was a long time ago,” she said, shrugging and smiling. “So how do you like it at Melville? I hardly ever see you now.”

  Eddie grinned. “Yeah, well, you’re in those bright-child classes”—he grinned wider—“whereas the shrewd observers have got me pegged as the vocational type.”

  Charles, after throwing a quick look toward Clara, gave his little brother a sharp push from the back. Eddie put the generic cola and chips on the counter.

  In her aisle, the conveyor belt suddenly moved and her checker was talking. “How are you? Do you have a Dusty’s card? Cash, check, or credit? Paper or plastic?”

  When Clara next looked their way, Charles and Eddie Tripp were leaving. As Charles pushed and herded Eddie ahead of him, Eddie smiled back at Clara. It was a nice smile. “Maybe our paths will cross again, hey?”

  Clara, feeling color rise in her cheeks and thinking of her crooked nose, lowered her face and didn’t say anything. She supposed she hoped their paths would never cross again, but the way Eddie paid attention just now wasn’t so horrible. After a second or two, she glanced up and saw Charles departing, his pockets jammed, herding Eddie ahead of him. The doors, as if at Charles’s comma
nd, swung open before them.

  8

  SNOW PEOPLE

  Outside the high school gymnasium, Amos MacKenzie stood tugging his hooded sweatshirt tight against the cold. He snugged his black and blue ski cap over his hood, looked out at the warm yellow lights of houses coming to life in the early minutes of evening, and began to regret declining a ride home in Zeke’s car. It was cold.

  Amos began to run on the downhill descent and then just kept running. He ran and ran, easy loping strides, the cold biting deep into his lungs but his body sweating and warm. It was simple and easy, moving along like this, through the dusk, under the streetlights, the rhythmic squeak of his shoes on the packed snow, and pretty soon, everything in the world—not just running— seemed simple and easy. He would go home and write Clara Wilson a letter telling her he hadn’t been the one who’d called her this morning, that it had been his so-called friend Crookshank, who had perhaps been dropped as an infant but who in any case had certain mental deficiencies, and that he, Amos, hoped that...

  Up ahead, in the thick dusk, a solid clanking sound. Two dark moving forms, some low talk, and then another thunderous clank. Sometimes a porch light came on, but not until the two forms had moved on. Following behind in the shadowy light, Amos could see a crushed mailbox and, up ahead, another.

  Amos couldn’t help himself. He began to follow the dark forms, slowly and quietly, pulled along by a strange combination of fear and curiosity. Amos slowed and stopped. Something had changed. There was a new silence. The clanking had stopped.

  As they turned south on Adams Street, Amos’s street, the forms—one large and hulking, the other short and compact— seemed vaguely familiar to Amos. The bat that one of them carried was aluminum, and he began tapping it on anything metal—the parking signs, a fire hydrant, a light pole—but gently, making only a muted clink, as if stealth was now part of their strategy.

  Then, as the forms passed through the circle of yellow light, they became the two people Amos hoped they weren’t. They became Charles and Eddie Tripp.

  A queasy feeling rose in Amos. He knew the Tripp brothers, or at least he knew everything he needed to know. One day after school, Eddie Tripp had taken Amos and Bruce and some others to watch his brother feed their snake. When they got to the Tripp brothers’ house, a small crowd of boys was already clustered around a large glass terrarium. The snake was a boa constrictor. The food was a live kitten. Amos was never sure what made him despise the Tripp brothers more, the fact that they’d be merciless to a small live animal or the fact that they’d led the hoots and laughter when Amos and Bruce, seeing what was about to happen, walked away from the proceedings.

  Tonight, as they clinked and loitered along Adams Street, the Tripp brothers came to a stop and huddled. Their voices were hushed and tight. They were standing in front of the Goddard place, staring at a snowman with a scarf and a tennis racket on one side of a tennis net, and a snow woman with a racket and a scarf on the other side. The Goddards were childless, middle-aged, and, Amos thought, a little nutty. They were famous in the neighborhood for their elaborate snow scenes, and Amos’s father always liked to drive the family by the Goddards’ house after a snowfall to see what was new.

  Charles looked around, and Amos instinctively stepped back into shadow. “Okay, this is it,” Charles said in a hissing whisper that carried through the cold air. His smaller brother pushed open the gate and drew close to the snow people. Charles took something out of his jacket—Amos couldn’t see what—and went off looking around on the ground until he found what looked like a stick and then came back to the figures. He did something with whatever he found, and Eddie laughed, a sharp cackling laugh that, to Amos, sounded weirdly made up, the same way Eddie had laughed when Amos and Bruce had left the feeding of the snake. Charles walked around the figures again, this time closer, doing something Amos didn’t want to guess at, and Eddie laughed again, the same fake-sounding laughter. Charles laughed, too, but his laugh was deep and full, as if it came from his darkest center and was completely his own. “Off with their heads,” Charles said in a laughing voice, and Eddie stepped forward and cocked the bat behind his right shoulder.

  No was the word that popped into Amos’s head, but what popped out of his mouth wasn’t a word at all. It was more of a muffled, foolish-sounding grunt. It sounded a little like “numph.” It sounded nothing at all like his own voice.

  Still, it was enough.

  Charles, after stilling himself for half an instant, spun menacingly toward Amos, who stood frozen in his tracks. Before yelling, Amos had felt hidden and safe. Now, after opening his mouth and letting loose this funny, unfamiliar voice, he felt a sudden, complete, and paralyzing fear.

  Eddie, who seemed oblivious to Amos’s presence, swung the bat, decapitated the snow woman, and let out another harsh laugh.

  A porch light blazed on.

  Charles glanced wildly at Amos, then grabbed the bat, leaped up the steps of the Goddards’ porch, and knocked the light fixture into pieces. It was dark again. Amos heard footsteps crunching through the iced snow. They were growing louder. In the dark, Charles had again become a ghostly form, except now it was moving toward him. Amos again tried to yell, but this time nothing at all came out. He stood completely mute, frozen there, while, within his motionless body, his heart pounded furiously. The footsteps stopped. Amos’s heart kept pounding. The ghostly form drew close and stopped. For a moment, Amos thought Charles might turn away. Then he heard a peculiar whirring sound as the bat took flight toward him.

  9

  GOING

  There were no more requests for deliveries when Clara came home with fifteen dollars in pay that afternoon. This just barely paid for the stationery, and she’d forgotten to clean their own driveway, a fact she realized when she saw that her mother had dug out the car, stuck the shovel into a drift by the driveway, and left. Probably she’d been late and would be mad when she came home. Clara checked for messages from Gerri—none—then went in to set the ingredients for Thai food on the counter. If they all had a nice dinner, maybe her mom wouldn’t care about the shoveling.

  First Clara set the table with their best tablecloth and the good china. The pale pink tablecloth, still tagged with a Kaufmann’s label marked down three times, had to be ironed, and the china had been sitting so long in the cupboard that gnats had died in the cups.

  When all the dishes lay gleaming on the table, Clara built a fire that went out, then another, and when that also failed, she took Ham and the electric heater up to her room, where she stashed her money and stared at her old copies of Misty of Chincoteague and Stormy: Misty’s Foal, horse books she’d read at least five times each. Clara didn’t open them. In fact, her heart sunk a little just looking at them. When she’d first started at Melville, she’d brought these and similar books to school with her to read at free moments, but after a while, whenever she brought one of them out of her backpack, someone would make the low shuddery neighing sounds of a cartoon horse, which made everybody laugh. Then one afternoon, standing beside Clara’s locker, Gerri nodded at her horse books and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t bring those baby books to school anymore, you know?”

  Clara fell asleep, and when she woke up to the heater whirring into bright orange again, it was nearly five. Wasn’t her father supposed to be home by now? She went to the window and saw no car in the driveway, just wet pines and snow.

  The phone rang repeatedly after that, and later, when she thought of that day, she remembered the empty china plates and the sound of the phone, the extended, ominous ring that it had when the house was closed up against darkness and cold. The first call was from her father at the airport, very cheerful, saying he’d be home within the hour. “Just called to see if I should bring anything from the store,” he said. “Is your mother home yet?”

  “Not yet,” Clara said. “I bought everything for dinner, though. And the table’s all set.”

  “Good girl! We’ll have a great time. Have you got your hom
ework finished so we can go out for an ice cream afterward?”

  “I was just about to start,” Clara said.

  “Well, see how much you can do and I’ll help you while I cook. How’s that?”

  Clara had done six algebra problems when the phone rang again.

  “Clara?” a voice said. It was a boy, but Clara could tell, with a rise and then a plummet of hope, that it wasn’t Amos calling to apologize.

  “This is Bruce Crookshank,” he said. “Remember me?”

  “Sure do,” Clara said. Then there was a silence.

  “I’m calling on behalf of Amos MacKenzie,” Bruce said.

  “Then forget it,” Clara said. “I’m busy.”

  “Well, I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “Does it involve nudity?”

  “Nudity is something I—”

  Clara cut him off by hanging up and was surprised at how pleased it made her feel. It was like getting the last word, only better. She got some Oreos out of the pantry and sat back down to her algebra. She was drawing lines and exponents, x’s and division brackets when the telephone rang again.

  “May I speak to Clara Wilson?” an adult voice asked.

  “Speaking,” Clara said. Suddenly she was afraid that her father’s cab had spun off the road, or that her mother had been in an accident.

  “This is Butch MacKenzie, Amos’s father,” the voice said, and when Clara, a little uncertain of the voice she was hearing, said nothing, he continued: “I wouldn’t be calling except that there’s been an accident and I believe you could be of help.”

  “Accident?” Clara asked. She began to cough from swallowing an Oreo almost whole. “What kind of accident?”

  “A quite serious accident,” the voice said so gravely that Clara pictured Mr. MacKenzie with a pipe in his hand.

  “Was somebody hurt?” Clara asked. She had begun to feel like a movie character, and the question sounded false, almost eager, when in fact she felt a measure of panic, like she did whenever she heard an ambulance on the road.