chapter 37

CYLIN

TENNESSEE was hot, hotter than anything I had ever felt in my life. Once we got all moved in to our new house, even our cat couldn’t take the heat and just laid on the floor in front of the air conditioner. The house was bigger and nicer than our house back home, with wall-to-wall carpet and two new bathrooms, but we hardly had neighbors and we were miles from the nearest store. The first morning we woke up in the new house, we were on the floor in the living room in our sleeping bags. Mom had gotten us a few things at the grocery store, so we had cereal out of the mugs that had been unpacked and used plastic spoons. While Mom and Dad tried to organize the house, Eric, Shawn, and I went out to see if there were any other kids around. On our right side was a big open pasture owned by someone way down the road—there wasn’t a house or a barn or anything, just acres of open field. To the left lived an older couple who didn’t seem to have any kids. Directly across the street was another farm, but their house was set back far from the road down a long dirt drive, closed off with a white fence. You couldn’t see enough of their yard to tell if they had a swing set or any other signs that kids lived there.

About midmorning, a guy in a white pickup truck pulled into our driveway and asked to speak to our parents. He had a strong Southern accent, like everyone else in town, and we could hardly understand him. He called me a “young’un.”

“Young’un, your ma and pa around?” At first I thought he was talking about grandparents; then I got what he meant and got my parents from the house. When they came out, the guy introduced himself as Mr. Carter and welcomed us to the neighborhood. Then he asked if we’d like to lease our pasture. “Cattle’s done chewed ours down to the nub,” he explained. He took off his hat when he met my mom, and I saw that he had really thick black hair, combed back with something greasy in it. His face was tanned a dark brown and had a lot of deep wrinkles. He looked like a piece of beef jerky—all brown and dried out.

Mom looked over at Dad. “What do you think? Want to lease the pasture?” Dad nodded his approval. Mr. Carter didn’t seem to notice that Mom did all the talking, or at least he didn’t ask about it.

In a few hours, Mr. Carter was back with a huge truck full of black and white cows and a couple of younger guys to help him. Dad also helped to back the truck up alongside the barn. One guy went up into the truck and started yelling at the cows and swatting them to get them to move out, which they did slowly, walking down the big metal ramp at the back of the truck. They wandered around in the field and started eating the grass at their feet.

There were two old bathtubs half buried in the dirt alongside the barn, and we used a hose to fill them up for the cows to drink from. The farmer also brought along a big white square that was about the size of a shoe box that he put down on the ground between the bathtubs. When I asked him what it was, he told me it was a salt lick for the cows. “If you don’t care to keep these tubs full for those cows,” he said, “I’ll pay you five dollars when I come back.” I couldn’t really follow his Southern way of talking—if I didn’t “care” to? But I understood that he was asking me to keep the tubs full, and I told him that I would.

“Do you have any kids?” Shawn asked Mr. Carter as he walked back to his truck.

“Naw, they’re all grown,” he said. He was chewing a big wad of tobacco and had a rusty can with him that he kept spitting brown liquid into.

“Are there any other kids on this street?” I asked.

“Well, let’s see,” he said. “There used to be a little girl over here at this place.” He pointed to the house next door to us on the left. “But that was a long time ago. Prettiest girl you ever saw; she went to New York City to be a model and got the depression. Killed herself. Her ma hasn’t come out of the house since.”

I looked over at the white house next door. The curtains were all drawn; there was no car in the driveway. “Why did she kill herself?” I asked.

Mr. Carter shrugged and spit into his can. “Who can say? It’s the damnedest thing.” He shook his head. “Sure was a pretty girl.”

“Any other kids around?” Eric asked.

“There’s the Simmons twins down the road a few miles,” he said. “Ya’ll just head on down to the holler and you’ll meet ‘em.” He spat in his can again. “I’ll be back in a couple days for them cows,” he said, then climbed into his truck and drove off.

After he was gone, I stood in the shade of the barn and watched the cows. There were about fifty of them, all black and white, and all eating the grass in the pasture very slowly. I watched them for a while, and they didn’t do very much, just stood and chewed grass. None of them came over to drink from the bathtub or lick the salt block. When it got too hot, I went inside. Dad said he would take us to the mall for a little while just to stay out of the heat and to get something to eat. Maybe we could meet some other kids there.

We hung out at the video arcade while my parents shopped for new towels and sheets at JCPenney. Eric and Shawn ended up talking to a couple of guys playing a race-car game who looked about their age, but there weren’t a lot of girls in the arcade. I decided to head over to the bookstore next door to see if I could meet anyone and to look for a new book. I passed a group of girls on the way over who didn’t seem much bigger than me, but they had lots of makeup on, fancy skirts, and feathered hair, so I assumed they were older. It didn’t matter, since they didn’t even look at me.

The next day I got up and checked the tubs up by the barn first thing. It was already about 90 degrees out, and the tubs were only half-full. I got out the hose and filled them up again, then watched the cows for a little bit. They had eaten the long grass down in some spots to where you could see the red dirt below it. Then they would just move on to a new spot and keep eating. I went into the barn and looked up in the loft for the two cats that lived there, and I found Mitzi. I sat and petted her for a while, and she started to purr and fall asleep. The loft of the barn was so hot, you couldn’t really move around in there. It was okay if you just sat still, but even then the sweat would run down my back under my T-shirt and along the sides of my face.

I thought about the girls I’d seen at the mall yesterday. What if all the girls around here looked like that? No one was going to want to be my friend, with my skinny body, no makeup, and my long straight hair. I wished that the pretty girl Mr. Carter had told us about still lived next door. Maybe she could give me a makeover, like in the magazines. She had been a model after all. I wished that she hadn’t killed herself; maybe we could have been friends.

That night I started writing a letter to Amelia. Mom said that when we had a few letters that we wanted to mail back home she would put them all into a big envelope and send them to Aunt Jackie in North Carolina. Then Aunt Jackie would put them all into a new envelope and send them to the police department in Falmouth. Then Dad’s friends on the force would mail the letters from there. “It might take a while for your friends to get your letters, and for you to get their letters back, but you will get them, okay?” Mom explained. Mom also said that she wanted to look over the letters before we mailed them, just to double check that we didn’t say anything that we weren’t supposed to by accident. “Can I tell Amelia that it’s really hot here?” I asked her.

Mom thought about it for a moment. “Better not.”

“What about the barn, can I tell her that we have a barn?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “John, what do you think?” We both looked over at Dad. He shook his head no.

I stared down at the blank page. I couldn’t tell Amelia anything. Then I decided to write about the beautiful girl who used to live next door. That would probably be okay, and it was a really good story.

I had to use a few pieces of my new stationery to get the story just right and not include any information that I wasn’t allowed to, so by the time I was done with my letter, it was almost bedtime. I took the letter into the living room where my parents were trying to set up the TV and the stereo with Eric and Shawn.

As I walked into the room, car lights flashed across the wall and a car pulled into the driveway. Dad looked out the bay windows at the front of the house—we didn’t have any curtains up yet.

“Who’s that?” Mom said. She sounded scared. Dad stood still, watching the car for a moment, but it didn’t move. The engine was still running. “Maybe they’re just looking at the ‘For Sale’ sign?” Mom asked. We hadn’t taken down the sign in front of the house yet.

Dad turned and moved quickly down the hallway, into their bedroom, and came out about two seconds later with his .357 and a box of ammo. He was trying to say something, but I couldn’t understand him through his wired-shut jaw. He motioned to the cellar door frantically and pulled Mom by the arm.

“Okay,” Mom said, pushing us to the cellar door. “Dad thinks we should go downstairs.” I saw Dad turn off the light in the living room and crouch by the base of the window, cocking his gun as we went down the stairs.

We stood on the staircase and Mom used the deadbolt inside the door to lock us in. “Do you think it’s them?” Shawn asked Eric.

Eric shook his head, but he looked scared.

There was silence for a few minutes; we just listened to our breathing and waited. Then someone turned the cellar doorknob and pulled the door, but the lock caught it. “Who’s that?” Mom yelled.

We could hear Dad’s muffled voice on the other side of the door, but we had no idea what he was trying to say. “Stay here,” Mom told us, and she opened the door. But it was just Dad standing there, so we all came up the stairs.

Dad went over to the kitchen table and grabbed my stationery. He wrote Mom a note with my purple pen. “Someone lost, was looking at a map in car, false alarm.”

“Okay.” Mom sighed. “It’s late anyhow, time for you guys to be in bed.” Dad had set his gun down on the kitchen table and started to pace the room, back and forth. He was sweating under his arms and down his face even though the air conditioner was on. I went to the front window and looked out. Our street was dark; there weren’t any streetlights this far out in the country. The only light came from the farmhouse across the way, and that was far. There was no car in the driveway anymore.

“Bed,” Mom said again, coming up behind me to look out the window. “It’s late, let’s go.”

I brushed my teeth and got into bed, thinking about my letter to Amelia. I had to remember to show it to Mom in the morning so we could get it sent off soon. As I lay in the dark, in my new room with its bare walls and boxes piled in one corner, I started to think about the pretty girl who used to live next door. I wondered if she had killed herself in her house or when she was in New York—Mr. Carter didn’t say. It was creepy to think that we lived next door to a house where someone might have killed herself. When I got to thinking about it, I couldn’t sleep. After a long time, I got up to get some water. When I crossed the living room, I saw a figure sitting in front of the window and stopped. Then I realized that it was Dad. He had moved one of the kitchen chairs into the living room and was sitting right in front of the window; his gun was in his right hand, balanced on his knee. He looked over at me for a second and then looked away.

I went into the kitchen and got a drink, standing over the sink. I looked out the kitchen window at the house across the way, the house where a pretty girl had once lived and maybe died. The street was pitch black now; it was so late, even the neighbor’s porch light had been turned out. I thought about our old house on the Cape, our little red house, and the new girl who might move in there, who would have my room. Maybe someday someone would tell her a story about me.