The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen Read online

  “Real as you are, Gene.”

  “You can’t be. Where are you?”

  “Everywhere, Gene. Everywhere and nowhere. Now let’s get down to business.”

  “I’m not going to believe in you,” I said. “I don’t have to believe in things if I don’t want to.”

  “Not true, Gene. The world wasn’t made to suit you. Whether you believe in me or not, I’m here. Now let’s stop this arguing. It’s rather unpleasant, don’t you think?”

  What was I going to do? Maybe I could make some kind of a deal with it. “What do you want?”

  “Ah, that’s more like it, Gene. We have to try to get along. Tell me, Gene, do you like your grampa?”

  Grampa? What did Grampa have to do with this? “What do you mean, do I like him?”

  “I mean, do you think he’s a nice person?”

  “Sure he’s a nice person. Mom and I would be stuck without him.” Mom had gone to secretarial school. She was a good typist and made a little money typing letters and reports for some businessmen—lawyers, real estate agents. But it wasn’t enough to keep us. We needed Grampa.

  “You get along with him then, Gene.”

  “Why do you care if I like him?”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  What was the voice driving at? “Sure I do. He likes baseball, same as me. He takes me to see the Cards when he can put a few dollars together.”

  “There are some things you ought to know about your grampa that might change your mind a little bit.”

  “What?”

  “Once upon a time, back when you were a little boy, your dear beloved grampa did something unforgivable. Something that got an innocent man killed. That’s the truth, Gene.”

  “Never,” I said. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying. Why should I believe anything you say?”

  “Find out for yourself, then. That little girlfriend of yours can help. What’s her name—Sam.”

  I felt myself blush. It was talking about Alice Samuels. “She isn’t my girlfriend. I don’t have a girlfriend. She’s just a friend.”

  It chuckled. “Either way,” it said. “However you want. She can help you to find out about your grampa.”

  “How? How can she?”

  “Think about it, Gene. Everybody around Magnolia has forgotten about it. But I haven’t, and I want to remind them. Oh, yes, we’re going to remind them, you and I, Gene.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “If you know, why don’t you tell me?”

  “Ah, that won’t do. You’d never believe me. You have to see it for yourself.”

  I thought some more. “If I do it, will you go away?”

  “That’s part of it. There are one or two other things we need to work out, Gene. Then I’ll go. Then you’ll be rid of me.”

  “What are they?” I said.

  “One thing at a time, Gene,” it said. “One thing at a time.” Then I noticed that the tightness in my chest was easing, and the movement inside was slowing down. In a moment it was gone.

  I stood there feeling kind of sick and shaky, as if a huge black bird were hovering over my head. What had I done wrong to deserve this? I must have done something, but what was it? Skipping groceries to play baseball sometimes? Not doing my homework here and there? Those weren’t big enough things to deserve this. What was it?

  And what was I going to do about it? How could Alice Samuels help me? It was true that she was a curious person, always wanting to know the truth behind things. You couldn’t make a simple remark to her without getting into a discussion about it. Couldn’t even say “It looks like rain,” for she wanted to know what looked like rain about it, and how could I tell and such. She got that from her dad, who was editor of the Magnolia Chronicle. Her dad used to be a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which Grampa always said was a very good newspaper. “A trained reporter has to question everything he’s told,” Sam always said.

  Then it occurred to me: maybe that was why the spirit, the voice, whatever it was, had said she could help me. Maybe whatever had happened back when I was little had come out in the Chronicle then. Sam would know how to get the back issues.

  Should I do it? It seemed like I had to if I was ever going to get rid of the voice. What kind of excuse could I give Sam? I’d have to think about it. So I walked on home trying to think of some story for Sam. When I got home it was a quarter to six, but Mom hadn’t put supper on. Instead, she and Grampa were sitting in the living room, Mom on the sofa, Grampa in his usual chair by the window. I was surprised. “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said.

  Then I noticed that Mom and Grampa were looking at me in a funny, quiet way. “Gene,” Mom said. “Sonny Hawkins’ dad had an accident this morning.”

  “He had an accident?”

  “Yes,” Grampa said. “He was working as a temp at the lumberyard. He had two or three days there, filling in for a fellow who was sick. He was up on the top platform handing down two-by-sixes. The man said that all of a sudden he walked off the platform into midair. Walked off like there was solid ground there. They said he might have survived, for it was only a fifteen-foot drop, but a lot of two-by-sixes followed him down and landed on him.”

  “Might have survived?” I gasped. “He’s dead?”

  There was a little silence. Then Mom said, “I’m afraid so, Gene. Mr. Hawkins is dead. I think you ought to go see Sonny after supper.”

  I felt sort of frozen. I never had much to do with Mr. Hawkins. He wasn’t around Sonny’s house a lot—gone fishing, picked up an odd job, I don’t know what. Nobody thought much of him in Magnolia. He wasn’t a drinker, didn’t hit his wife and children, nothing like that. People said he was bone lazy. Didn’t like to work a whole lot and was always thinking up schemes for easy money. “I can’t believe he’s dead,” I said finally.

  “It’s a shame,” Grampa said. “According to the fellows at the lumberyard, he just walked off that platform into midair.”

  “I think you ought to go see Sonny,” Mom said. “I’ll get supper on.”

  I didn’t much want to do it. I didn’t know what you said when someone died—or how to act, either. Were you supposed to act normal, or were you supposed to be sorrowful and say how much Sonny was going to miss his dad, when he probably wouldn’t miss him at all?

  But I saw I had to do it. Mom was going to make me, anyway, and she said she’d drive me over to River Road. It would only make it worse to have Mom along, so after supper I set off by myself. The Hawkins’ place was on the river, set back a couple hundred feet. Easy for Sonny and me to go skinny-dipping there in the summer. It wasn’t much of a place, halfway between a cabin and a real house, with a tin roof that sounded like thunder when it rained, a rickety front porch with an old car seat on it for sitting, kitchen, living room, back room, a couple of little bedrooms upstairs under the eaves. Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins had one bedroom, Sonny’s snotty little sisters had the other, so Sonny slept in a corner of the living room that had been closed off with a curtain. Had to do his homework on the kitchen table, which wasn’t easy because the radio was usually going and the snotty sisters fighting. Not that it mattered a whole lot, given the amount of homework Sonny was likely to do. No faucet water—pump by the kitchen sink. Grampa said that out there by the river the water wasn’t more than five feet down, which was why you couldn’t put a cellar under the houses. Soil was so sandy you could drive a three-inch pipe into the ground, screw a pump on the top of it, and you’d have water. If you wanted a bath at the Hawkins’ house you had to pump up a tub of water and heat it on the kitchen stove. Sonny didn’t take any more baths than he had to, but he managed.

  I walked out along River Road and then down the path that led to the Hawkins’ place. It was full dark by the time I got there, and there was a light in the kitchen window. I went up to the house, onto the porch, and knocked on the door. A woman’s voice I didn’t recognize said, “Who is it?”

  “Gene Richards,” I said. “I’m a frie
nd of Sonny.”

  The door opened and a strange woman looked out. “He’s not at home. They went up to the funeral home to pick out a coffin. Don’t know who’s going to pay for it. Won’t be me. I’m Mrs. Hawkins’ sister. I came to comfort the family.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well tell Sonny that Gene came by. Tell him I’m sorry about his dad. Tell him I’ll see him in school tomorrow. We can play ball if he feels like it.” Then I remembered my manners. “I mean, please tell him, ma’am.” I turned around and left.

  But Sonny wasn’t in school. I wasn’t surprised. He’d got a good excuse for skipping school and was taking advantage of it. I figured he’d work the opportunity for the rest of the week, if his mom didn’t get tired of having him around the house.

  Seeing as Sonny wasn’t likely to be in school for a while, I knew I’d better go around to see him. After school I walked out to River Road and then down to the Hawkins’ place. It was a nice sunny day. I probably should have gone to Snuffy’s to see if there were any deliveries, but I knew Mom wouldn’t say anything if she knew I’d gone to comfort Sonny instead.

  As I came around the corner of the house I found Sonny out front with an old worn-out bat, hitting rocks into the river. He swung and popped the rock straight upwards. “Pop up,” I said. “Infield fly rule.”

  “You startled me coming around the corner like that or I’d have creamed it.”

  Quickly, I said, “I’m sorry about your dad,” so as to get it over with.

  He looked at me and then looked away. “Listen, Yewgene, my aunt’s visiting. She smokes like a chimney. I’ll see if I can swipe a couple of ciggies. We can go down by the river and have a smoke.” He dropped the bat onto the sandy grass next to the pile of stones he’d collected and went into the house. In a couple of minutes he came out, grinning. “She left her pack by the sink. I got a bunch of ’em.”

  “You get matches?”

  “’Course I did. You think I’m a dope, Yewgene?”

  “Don’t be so confident of yourself,” I said. “You forgot last time.”

  We went through the sandy grass down to the river and turned downstream. A couple of hundred yards along, there was a big old willow tree hanging out over the river, its viny branches dangling into the water. Being as it was June, the willow was leafed out. It was a good place to smoke, for the tree trunk was wide enough for us both to rest our backs against, and in under the branches we were hard to spot from any direction. Kind of cozy in there, as a matter of fact.

  So we sat down with our backs against the tree and lit up. The day was near perfect. Warm, lots of blue sky with here and there a fluffy white cloud drifting along like a floating elephant. Close to the shore the water swirled and eddied, swinging leaves and twigs around in a rush. Farther out, there were bigger things on the surface: branches, maybe a tree trunk, a straw hat that blew off a boat, maybe even a chair. Always something to see in the river, even if it was only swirls and eddies flashing red and yellow in the sun. Once we even saw a goat standing on an upside-down table in between the legs, bleating away like sixty. Don’t know how it got there. We leaped up and raced along the riverbank, hoping we could capture the goat. Would have been fun to have had a goat to fool around with. But with the tangle of trees and roots along the bank we couldn’t make much time and the goat got away from us. We heard it bleating for a long while after.

  Lazy as we were feeling, there wasn’t much need for conversation, but you had to have at least a little, so I said, “Sonny, do you really like smoking? I know it’s supposed to be fun and all, and I like watching the smoke come out of my mouth, but for taste I’ll take a chocolate soda any day.”

  “Sure I like it,” Sonny said. “I wouldn’t smoke if I didn’t. It ain’t supposed to taste like a chocolate soda. It’s supposed to taste sort of rough and miserable, like brown shoe polish. That’s the value in it. Smoking wouldn’t have any value if it didn’t have that brown shoe polish taste to it.”

  That was Sonny—always seeing things other kids would have missed. But I wasn’t going to let him get away with being right all the time. “I don’t see what value there is in brown shoe polish taste.”

  “Be sensible, Yewgene. Smoking’s got to have some value or everybody wouldn’t do it, would they? You gotta admit that. What’s the value, then, if it ain’t that brown shoe polish taste?”

  “When was the last time you polished your shoes, much less ate any brown shoe polish, Hawkins?”

  “You forget, Richards, when I was little somebody got my dad a job as a shoe shine boy for a while, until he found some excuse to get out of it. He used to take me along sometimes because he figured I looked cute and would attract customers. I wasn’t more than four, and I ate some shoe polish. I figured it would taste like chocolate.”

  “It must have jolted you some when you got it in your mouth.”

  “Funny thing was, I kind of liked it. I wasn’t but four, remember. Finally Dad caught me at it. He said shoe polish was expensive. He couldn’t afford to let me eat any of it, for it took all the profit out of the business.”

  We stopped joking around there. The cloud of Sonny’s dad was suddenly hanging over us. I figured we had to get into it sometime. “Sonny, how’s your mom going to manage with your dad gone?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He wasn’t much use to us. Spent as much as he brought in, I reckon. What little we had to spend.”

  I turned my head to look at him. “You don’t miss him?”

  He looked back at me. “Well, how do you feel about your dad?”

  That was a hard question to answer. I couldn’t remember my dad. He was gone by the time I was two. Of course I’d asked Mom about him—what kind of guy was he, and such, but she didn’t want to talk about him. “That’s a subject better left alone, Gene,” she’d say. I think Grampa would have told me, but he didn’t want to go against Mom. So I’d dropped it. “I don’t know anything about my dad, Sonny.”

  “Didn’t you ask them?”

  “They won’t tell me. They don’t want to talk about it. So I can’t say if I miss him because I don’t know what to miss.” That wasn’t exactly true, however. I thought a lot about what it would be like to have a dad. Was that the same as missing him? “I can see where there might be some value in having a dad, though. Do things with you. But I have Grampa.”

  “Not the same as having a dad.”

  “I don’t see what the difference is.” This conversation was making me feel lonely.

  “It ain’t the same,” he said loudly. I was surprised that he was getting sore about it. “It ain’t the same. I’m telling you, Gene, it ain’t the same.” His fists were clenched and his eyelids were scrunched closed. “It ain’t the same.” Then he began to cry, sobbing away to beat the band, the tears running down his cheeks. He turned over on his face with his arms under his head and went on sobbing, his back going up and down until he was gasping for breath. He had a lot to cry about, I reckoned—his dad being dead, and not being much use when he’d been there.

  I touched him on his back. “It’s okay, Sonny.”

  “Go away,” he said. “Just go away, Gene.”

  I stood and walked up the river a ways. But I didn’t leave. Instead I crouched down there by the river, playing with a little stick in the dirt for a while, and then I went back to the willow tree.

  He was sitting up against the tree trunk, staring at the river, his eyes red. “You okay?” I said.

  “I guess so,” he said. “I guess it’s okay to cry when your dad dies, even if he wasn’t much use.”

  “Sure it is,” I said.

  “I didn’t think I was gonna blubber over it. It kind of took me by surprise.”

  “You weren’t prepared for him to die. It would have been different if he’d been old and sick.”

  “No, we wasn’t prepared for it.”

  I waited a minute and then my curiosity got too much for me. “What happened, exactly? Grampa said he might have jumped off t
hat lumber platform.”

  Sonny shook his head hard. “He didn’t. It wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t jump off there.”

  “He just missed his footing?”

  Sonny didn’t say anything for the longest while, and I kept my mouth shut and waited. Then he said, “He was hearing a voice. You’re not to tell anyone, Gene. Nobody knows it but me and Mom. The girls don’t know; my aunt don’t know.”

  “A voice?” I was getting the strangest feeling.

  “He didn’t like to talk about it, but it worried him a whole lot and sometimes it burst out of him.”

  “Where was the voice coming from?”

  “Inside of him,” he said. “Telling him to do things. He said he kept fighting the voice off, but it was a struggle.”

  I was scared to find out more, but I had to. “What was it saying?”

  “Crazy stuff. Once it told him to dive in front of a car. Once it told him to drink iodine. He’d nicked himself with his fishing knife cleaning a fish and was putting iodine on the cut. Suddenly the voice told him to drink the iodine. He was struggling against it and somehow he dropped the bottle and the iodine spilled out.”

  “What happened when the voice told him to dive in front of the car?”

  “He was all set to do it, he said. But luckily the driver saw him leaning out into the road and hit his brakes. The driver told him afterwards he thought he was drunk. But he wasn’t drunk. It was the voice. He said it was the hardest thing, fighting off that voice. He said he knew it was going to get him someday.”

  “Sonny, you think that voice told him to jump off the lumber platform?”

  “I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts on it, Gene. That voice told him to walk out into midair, and he couldn’t resist it no more. Out into midair he went.”

  Chapter 3

  I couldn’t sleep that night, but lay in bed staring at the streetlights flickering through the trees, thinking about it. I knew now that I wasn’t just hearing things. Something was out there trying to get me. A spirit, specter—I didn’t know what to call it. Whatever the name, it was real, for it had killed Mr. Hawkins.