Baby teeth, p.2
Baby Teeth, page 2
Here is the thing to understand—I was sort of expecting this. This did not seem to me a surprising event, or not exactly. How many tens of thousands of pages of this exact story had I read, a boy plucked from obscurity to realize his true destiny? Aren’t most of us on some level anticipating someone will someday leap out and tell us we’re special?
“There’s a town registry,” I said, “but they won’t let me check it out.”
“No?”
“No. They’ll be in the local history section, it’s behind the desk. They don’t let you take it out of the library.”
“Can you make a copy?”
“For five cents a sheet.”
He handed me two crumpled fives. It was the first time I had ever seen a money clip.
* * *
I came back half an hour later. He looked at the papers long enough to make sure they were what he wanted, then shoved them into the glove compartment and drove me back to my house.
“How do I get in touch with you?” I asked.
“Why would you need to get in touch with me?”
“If I found something out.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something about who killed Penny.”
“What killed Penny.”
“Who’s on first?”
He didn’t get it and I blushed in shame.
“I’ll find you if I need you,” he said.
“Shouldn’t I at least know your name?”
He smiled very rarely, and never with much kindness. “You think you’ll forget who I am?”
But then he told me it was Hercules.
* * *
I did not believe him at the time. I suppose it occurred to me that there might still be Greek people named Hercules as there are Spanish people named Jesus and Arab people named Mohammed, but whatever he was, Hercules was no Greek. It was his real name, however, I mean I never saw a birth certificate or anything but I’m sure it was. Hercules was not honest, but he never lied.
3
“Are you doing all right, Graham?” asked Mr. Adams.
Mr. Adams was my Algebra II teacher. It was his room we played Dungeons & Dragons in. He was short and thin and had less hair than he had the year before, when he had taught me Algebra I. On his desk were a Donatello action figure and a hacky sack he had earlier that day confiscated from Sam Wright, after he had thrown it at Donald’s head during a pop quiz.
“I’m fine, Mr. Adams,” I said.
“You’ve been quiet in class lately.”
“Yeah?”
“A lot of students are having trouble dealing with Penny’s passing,” Mr. Adams said. There was dandruff in the tonsure of fuzz that remained to him.
“Yes,” I said.
“Penny’s death is a tragedy. But death is a part of life, Graham. A terrible part of life, but one we have to accept. Bad things can happen to any of us, we have to make the most of our time on earth.”
“Bad things can happen to anyone,” I agreed.
* * *
After school Donald and I went to Barry’s house to spend the night. We always went to Barry’s house because Donald’s parents didn’t like having people over and I didn’t have the space. Barry’s mom had rented us copies of Predator and Predator II. I liked Barry’s mom. She would ask me questions about things and then the next time I saw her she would ask questions about the answers I’d given her to those questions. She would get us three different pizzas because I could not stand onions and Donald didn’t like anything but cheese. If I had lived in Barry’s house I’d have been fat as a pig, but Barry and his sister and his parents were trim and fit and always smiling.
We watched Predator II first, out of order because we wanted to save the good one with Arnold and Jesse the Body for later, and then we went back to exploring the Black Fort.
“From the window you can look out over the landscape below,” said Donald. “The zombie horde has only grown larger, as if all the sons and daughters born and died beneath the lich’s sway, generation after generation, have come to besiege you.”
Barry yawned. It was after midnight, and we were sluggish on starch and processed sugar. “Too bad Erica’s not here.”
“If you imagine a seventh-level ranger would be of any avail against so vast an army, I can assure you that—”
“You’re such a loser, Donald,” said Barry. “All you can think about is D&D.”
“You’re playing D&D,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but I do other things. All you guys do is roll dice and jack off.”
“I’m in a band,” I said.
“You’re in band,” Barry corrected, “it’s not the same thing. Anyway, I don’t want Erica here so she can help me chop up some zombies—it would just be a nice break from this sausage party.”
Barry had Frenched Jane Causwell on the fall trip to Hersheypark a few weeks earlier, and it had spurred in him the sort of pride which primitive man reserved for killing woolly mammoths.
“I will admit, she does seem fertile,” said Donald, eating a cold mozzarella stick.
“Yeah, she’s got a decent set. Not as nice as a Melanie Brewster, but…” Barry made as to squeeze Erica’s breasts, or maybe Melanie Brewster’s.
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” I said. “Erica’s our friend.”
“You know you’re only a Paladin in the game,” Barry said.
“What does being her friend have to do with it?” Donald asked. “Males are programmed to sexually desire females—it’s part of our evolutionary imperative.” He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Now, can we get back to the game?”
* * *
Donald slept on the couch and I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag, and the next day Barry’s mother made us pancakes and drove Barry and I to driver’s ed class (Donald’s parents wouldn’t let him take it yet). We studied a diagram of a stick shift and watched a short film suggesting not to overtake tractor trailers. I turned sixteen in three months but had only a few hours of driving practice; even when our Volvo was working Mom didn’t have much energy to take me out. That night she tried to get me to watch the late movie and the next morning she tried to get me to go to church but I did neither and now regret both.
Late Sunday afternoon I looked outside my window and saw his car idling across the street.
“Going out?” my mother asked when I went to grab my coat.
“I’m going to bike over to Barry’s, we’re going to watch Predator.”
“I thought you watched it.”
“We’re going to watch it again.”
“Oh,” she said. “Have fun.”
* * *
We drove to a diner a few miles down the highway, Hercules silent until we were in a back booth and the waitress came by to take our order.
“Coffee,” he said, “and whatever the kid wants.”
I knew it would be cooler if I just ordered a coffee but it was kind of a treat for me to eat out in any restaurant that wasn’t fast food and so I ordered a bacon cheeseburger and French fries. I restrained myself from ordering a milkshake, however.
When the waitress left, Hercules unfolded three crumpled sheets of paper from his pocket and set them on the table. “It’s happened before,” he said.
The first sheet listed the town’s deaths from the fall of 1919. Three names were circled on it: Erin Smith, 17; Joyce Burns, 17; Sarah Araf, 15.
“Lots of dead bodies for one October,” said Hercules.
“These don’t mean anything. This was 1919.”
“So?
“So, 1919 there was this terrible flu—the Spanish flu, they called it—and it killed more people than died in all of World War I.”
He moved to the next sheet, 1955: Sally Matthews, 16; Jean Fallows, 18; Jane Anderson, 19.
“Was there a Spanish flu in 1955?”
“Not that I know of.”
He put another down: Elizabeth Smith, 15; Ida Fitzgerald, 19; Sarah Willoughby, 20.
“1978?”
“No,” I said. I was very, very excited.
“Thirty years, give or take,” said Hercules,
The waitress came back with our orders. The ketchup bottle was mostly empty, and I had to smack at the glass bottom to get anything onto my cheeseburger. “A month up to feed, and then it goes back to sleep,” Hercules said.
“Like cicadas.”
“Penny was the first. They’ll be two more—or there won’t be.”
“What happens now?” I asked.
“We wait. We watch. We try and figure out who the next one is. He likes them young. Teenagers or a bit older. Keep an eye out for any of your schoolmates getting sick or acting strange.”
“Strange like how?”
“Strange like strange,” said Hercules. Mostly I did not seem to annoy Hercules the way I often did other people, but not always. I realized I had gotten ketchup on the printouts. “Finish your food,” he said, and got up to pay.
* * *
“Have you done this a lot?” I asked as we drove home.
“How much is a lot?”
“Have you done this before?”
“Done what?”
“Kill vampires.”
He smirked but didn’t answer. When we got to my house he handed me the copies of the records I had made him. “Keep them,” he said. “Look at the names. Think about if they mean anything.”
I shoved them into my backpack. I hadn’t unpacked it since going to Barry’s, and it was still full of campaign books.
“What are those?”
“Books.”
I am not very good at getting angry. It takes me a great long while to talk myself into it; I have to walk around and rant and rave and even then it goes away almost as soon as it comes. For Hercules it was like letting up a few inches of a window shade, or something rattling at the bars of a cage. “You think I don’t know what a book is?”
“It’s not a normal book,” I explained quickly, “it’s a game book—you take the mechanics and the characters and ideas inside, and then you use them to create your own stories.”
“What kind of stories?” He reached into my bag and pulled out the Monster Manual. I’d gotten it for Christmas the year before and a lot of the pages had come loose from the binding.
“Any kind you want. In our campaign right now, we’re trying to break the curse of the Demilich Seran, whose poison has infested the land. We were fighting to ascend to the top of the Black Fort, but we got caught in a pocket nightmare universe that we have to fight free of first.”
Hercules had the hardbound book open on his lap and he didn’t seem to be listening. He wasn’t reading the text—the light was off in the car—just looking at the pictures, running his blunt thumb against gray-green tentacles and ravening maws. “Who’s we?”
“Me, Erica, Barry. Donald’s our Dungeon Master. That means he makes up the story, basically, and then we all play characters.”
“Who are you?”
“In the game? I’m a paladin.”
“What’s a paladin?”
“It’s like a holy knight. They have special powers against evil, but they’re held to a higher moral standard than other classes.” I said this rather loftily.
“Moral standards?”
“We obey a special code of honor: honesty, righteousness, piety.”
“You a hero then, huh?”
“Why not? If there are monsters, there have to be heroes to fight them.”
You could tell by the way he snapped the book shut what he thought of that, and I have already told you I did not like his laugh.
4
You will ask how I remember all of this, conversations and small details of events that happened decades ago. The answer is that though it was only after this last visit to Dr. Gold’s that I thought to actually write it down, I have been telling myself this story again and again for the last thirty years, taking it apart and unpacking it, examining each detail as I gather brokenhearted lovers do, though I have never had my heart broken and only rarely been a lover. You will say that remembering a story is not the same as remembering the thing itself. That, I do not have an answer for. Perhaps I am wrong about things. It would not surprise me.
* * *
There was another death. It was in the local paper the next week. Her name was Margaret Byer. I did not know her. Logan was a small town but not so small that a person couldn’t die in it without you knowing them. His car was parked outside my house that evening. I had grown used to checking the windows several times an hour, waking up in the middle of the night to peek through the blinds.
My mother had fallen asleep in front of Cheers, and I left a note saying I’d biked to the 7-Eleven for Doritos.
“Did you know her?” Hercules asked.
“No.”
“Know anything about her?”
“Not really. She worked at a bar by the plant.” I had read this in the paper.
“I know where she worked,” said Hercules. “Did she have anything to do with Penny?”
“Nothing I know about.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do that,” he said.
I was hoping we’d go to the diner, but he just took me around the block a few times and then dropped me back off. My mother was still asleep, and so I threw my note into the trash. It only then occurred to me that the Margaret Byer who I did not know was going to be buried the next morning, and so Hercules was then en route to the same bitter midnight vigil he had overseen for Penny Anderson.
* * *
I had to skip lunch the next day to retake an Algebra quiz I had failed. People often assumed I was good at math, but I was not. I was not good at anything particularly, not even English, despite all the books I read. Most of the teachers didn’t let you retake quizzes as a sophomore, but Mr. Adams did, he was nice like that. I know what they said later on, but back then people liked Mr. Adams.
The quiz was only a page long and he graded it while I waited.
“B-,” he said, “not so bad. You just need to bone up on your fractions, you’ll be OK for the test next week.”
“Thanks, Mr. Adams.”
“How you doing otherwise?”
“OK,” I said.
“You know, you can always come up to eat your lunch here, if the cafeteria gets too much for you.”
“Thanks.”
“I can remember what it was like, being in high school,” Mr. Adams said. I believed him; he still seemed somehow half-formed. “It’s tough to be a sensitive young man, in a world like this.”
“Why did he pick Penny?” I asked Hercules when I saw him that night.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“There must have been something about her, right? Something that drew his attention?”
Hercules never gave an unconsidered answer; if you said something and he thought it was worth thinking about he’d think about it as long as he needed, and you’d let him, sitting quietly until he was finished.
“Like a wolf, I guess,” said Hercules. “He could just smell her.”
* * *
After he dropped me back home I set aside the barbarian I was rolling up and made a list of everyone in town I thought might have known Penny and the waitress who had died. It was slow going. I did not really know very much about Peggy. She was on the cheerleading team. She might have had a part-time job. About the waitress I knew even less. After half an hour I realized I was just drawing doodles on graph paper and gave up. In a drawer beneath a trade paperback of Watchmen was a folder with the ketchup-stained printouts I had made for Hercules, to which I added my useless notes.
My mother was in her usual position on the sofa.
“Hey, hon.”
“Hi.”
“How’s your homework?”
“Fine. I was wondering—did anyone ever die when you were in high school?”
“Still thinking about Penny, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“There was a car accident my Senior year. Bradley … Bradley Murrow? Marrow? Horrible thing.”
“What about Sarah Willoughby?”
“How did you know about that?”
“I heard something about it at school.”
“It was a sad business,” my mother said. She picked at the thread of her blanket. “Their parents owned the pharmacy that Mr. Struthers owns now. They moved away after.”
“What happened?”
“She got sick and died. I don’t think I ever knew what it was. If I did, I can’t remember.”
“Anything else?”
“It was a long time ago. I didn’t know Sarah well, she was a little older than me. Her sister, Victoria, was in my grade, a nice girl, very pretty, we were in Scouts together. Once—you won’t believe this, but her and your father and some boy she was going with decided we would sneak into the old hospital. Not the old hospital, the old-old hospital, the one out by the Kmart, you know? Anyway, your father, he said we should … Graham? Are you listening?”
“Sorry, I got distracted.”
But by then the commercial was over. “That’s fine.”
* * *
“What if he can only feed from certain people?”
“He only feeds from women,” Hercules said. “Young women.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, what if there’s something else, something that connects Penny and the waitress?”
“Like what?”
“What if they’re related? There was another Anderson on that list, remember?”
“A lot of white people named Anderson,” Hercules said.
“Maybe it’s like a curse. I have a comic book where a magician put a curse on a boy’s grandfather, and it turned the boy into this sort of berserk demon anytime he got angry, and so they had to send him to be trained at a—”
“If the girls are related,” Hercules interrupted, “maybe we can figure out who the next one will be.”
“The library won’t have marriage records, but town hall might. I’ll go by at lunch and see what I can find. We can meet tomorrow afternoon.”
“There’s a town registry,” I said, “but they won’t let me check it out.”
“No?”
“No. They’ll be in the local history section, it’s behind the desk. They don’t let you take it out of the library.”
“Can you make a copy?”
“For five cents a sheet.”
He handed me two crumpled fives. It was the first time I had ever seen a money clip.
* * *
I came back half an hour later. He looked at the papers long enough to make sure they were what he wanted, then shoved them into the glove compartment and drove me back to my house.
“How do I get in touch with you?” I asked.
“Why would you need to get in touch with me?”
“If I found something out.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something about who killed Penny.”
“What killed Penny.”
“Who’s on first?”
He didn’t get it and I blushed in shame.
“I’ll find you if I need you,” he said.
“Shouldn’t I at least know your name?”
He smiled very rarely, and never with much kindness. “You think you’ll forget who I am?”
But then he told me it was Hercules.
* * *
I did not believe him at the time. I suppose it occurred to me that there might still be Greek people named Hercules as there are Spanish people named Jesus and Arab people named Mohammed, but whatever he was, Hercules was no Greek. It was his real name, however, I mean I never saw a birth certificate or anything but I’m sure it was. Hercules was not honest, but he never lied.
3
“Are you doing all right, Graham?” asked Mr. Adams.
Mr. Adams was my Algebra II teacher. It was his room we played Dungeons & Dragons in. He was short and thin and had less hair than he had the year before, when he had taught me Algebra I. On his desk were a Donatello action figure and a hacky sack he had earlier that day confiscated from Sam Wright, after he had thrown it at Donald’s head during a pop quiz.
“I’m fine, Mr. Adams,” I said.
“You’ve been quiet in class lately.”
“Yeah?”
“A lot of students are having trouble dealing with Penny’s passing,” Mr. Adams said. There was dandruff in the tonsure of fuzz that remained to him.
“Yes,” I said.
“Penny’s death is a tragedy. But death is a part of life, Graham. A terrible part of life, but one we have to accept. Bad things can happen to any of us, we have to make the most of our time on earth.”
“Bad things can happen to anyone,” I agreed.
* * *
After school Donald and I went to Barry’s house to spend the night. We always went to Barry’s house because Donald’s parents didn’t like having people over and I didn’t have the space. Barry’s mom had rented us copies of Predator and Predator II. I liked Barry’s mom. She would ask me questions about things and then the next time I saw her she would ask questions about the answers I’d given her to those questions. She would get us three different pizzas because I could not stand onions and Donald didn’t like anything but cheese. If I had lived in Barry’s house I’d have been fat as a pig, but Barry and his sister and his parents were trim and fit and always smiling.
We watched Predator II first, out of order because we wanted to save the good one with Arnold and Jesse the Body for later, and then we went back to exploring the Black Fort.
“From the window you can look out over the landscape below,” said Donald. “The zombie horde has only grown larger, as if all the sons and daughters born and died beneath the lich’s sway, generation after generation, have come to besiege you.”
Barry yawned. It was after midnight, and we were sluggish on starch and processed sugar. “Too bad Erica’s not here.”
“If you imagine a seventh-level ranger would be of any avail against so vast an army, I can assure you that—”
“You’re such a loser, Donald,” said Barry. “All you can think about is D&D.”
“You’re playing D&D,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but I do other things. All you guys do is roll dice and jack off.”
“I’m in a band,” I said.
“You’re in band,” Barry corrected, “it’s not the same thing. Anyway, I don’t want Erica here so she can help me chop up some zombies—it would just be a nice break from this sausage party.”
Barry had Frenched Jane Causwell on the fall trip to Hersheypark a few weeks earlier, and it had spurred in him the sort of pride which primitive man reserved for killing woolly mammoths.
“I will admit, she does seem fertile,” said Donald, eating a cold mozzarella stick.
“Yeah, she’s got a decent set. Not as nice as a Melanie Brewster, but…” Barry made as to squeeze Erica’s breasts, or maybe Melanie Brewster’s.
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” I said. “Erica’s our friend.”
“You know you’re only a Paladin in the game,” Barry said.
“What does being her friend have to do with it?” Donald asked. “Males are programmed to sexually desire females—it’s part of our evolutionary imperative.” He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Now, can we get back to the game?”
* * *
Donald slept on the couch and I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag, and the next day Barry’s mother made us pancakes and drove Barry and I to driver’s ed class (Donald’s parents wouldn’t let him take it yet). We studied a diagram of a stick shift and watched a short film suggesting not to overtake tractor trailers. I turned sixteen in three months but had only a few hours of driving practice; even when our Volvo was working Mom didn’t have much energy to take me out. That night she tried to get me to watch the late movie and the next morning she tried to get me to go to church but I did neither and now regret both.
Late Sunday afternoon I looked outside my window and saw his car idling across the street.
“Going out?” my mother asked when I went to grab my coat.
“I’m going to bike over to Barry’s, we’re going to watch Predator.”
“I thought you watched it.”
“We’re going to watch it again.”
“Oh,” she said. “Have fun.”
* * *
We drove to a diner a few miles down the highway, Hercules silent until we were in a back booth and the waitress came by to take our order.
“Coffee,” he said, “and whatever the kid wants.”
I knew it would be cooler if I just ordered a coffee but it was kind of a treat for me to eat out in any restaurant that wasn’t fast food and so I ordered a bacon cheeseburger and French fries. I restrained myself from ordering a milkshake, however.
When the waitress left, Hercules unfolded three crumpled sheets of paper from his pocket and set them on the table. “It’s happened before,” he said.
The first sheet listed the town’s deaths from the fall of 1919. Three names were circled on it: Erin Smith, 17; Joyce Burns, 17; Sarah Araf, 15.
“Lots of dead bodies for one October,” said Hercules.
“These don’t mean anything. This was 1919.”
“So?
“So, 1919 there was this terrible flu—the Spanish flu, they called it—and it killed more people than died in all of World War I.”
He moved to the next sheet, 1955: Sally Matthews, 16; Jean Fallows, 18; Jane Anderson, 19.
“Was there a Spanish flu in 1955?”
“Not that I know of.”
He put another down: Elizabeth Smith, 15; Ida Fitzgerald, 19; Sarah Willoughby, 20.
“1978?”
“No,” I said. I was very, very excited.
“Thirty years, give or take,” said Hercules,
The waitress came back with our orders. The ketchup bottle was mostly empty, and I had to smack at the glass bottom to get anything onto my cheeseburger. “A month up to feed, and then it goes back to sleep,” Hercules said.
“Like cicadas.”
“Penny was the first. They’ll be two more—or there won’t be.”
“What happens now?” I asked.
“We wait. We watch. We try and figure out who the next one is. He likes them young. Teenagers or a bit older. Keep an eye out for any of your schoolmates getting sick or acting strange.”
“Strange like how?”
“Strange like strange,” said Hercules. Mostly I did not seem to annoy Hercules the way I often did other people, but not always. I realized I had gotten ketchup on the printouts. “Finish your food,” he said, and got up to pay.
* * *
“Have you done this a lot?” I asked as we drove home.
“How much is a lot?”
“Have you done this before?”
“Done what?”
“Kill vampires.”
He smirked but didn’t answer. When we got to my house he handed me the copies of the records I had made him. “Keep them,” he said. “Look at the names. Think about if they mean anything.”
I shoved them into my backpack. I hadn’t unpacked it since going to Barry’s, and it was still full of campaign books.
“What are those?”
“Books.”
I am not very good at getting angry. It takes me a great long while to talk myself into it; I have to walk around and rant and rave and even then it goes away almost as soon as it comes. For Hercules it was like letting up a few inches of a window shade, or something rattling at the bars of a cage. “You think I don’t know what a book is?”
“It’s not a normal book,” I explained quickly, “it’s a game book—you take the mechanics and the characters and ideas inside, and then you use them to create your own stories.”
“What kind of stories?” He reached into my bag and pulled out the Monster Manual. I’d gotten it for Christmas the year before and a lot of the pages had come loose from the binding.
“Any kind you want. In our campaign right now, we’re trying to break the curse of the Demilich Seran, whose poison has infested the land. We were fighting to ascend to the top of the Black Fort, but we got caught in a pocket nightmare universe that we have to fight free of first.”
Hercules had the hardbound book open on his lap and he didn’t seem to be listening. He wasn’t reading the text—the light was off in the car—just looking at the pictures, running his blunt thumb against gray-green tentacles and ravening maws. “Who’s we?”
“Me, Erica, Barry. Donald’s our Dungeon Master. That means he makes up the story, basically, and then we all play characters.”
“Who are you?”
“In the game? I’m a paladin.”
“What’s a paladin?”
“It’s like a holy knight. They have special powers against evil, but they’re held to a higher moral standard than other classes.” I said this rather loftily.
“Moral standards?”
“We obey a special code of honor: honesty, righteousness, piety.”
“You a hero then, huh?”
“Why not? If there are monsters, there have to be heroes to fight them.”
You could tell by the way he snapped the book shut what he thought of that, and I have already told you I did not like his laugh.
4
You will ask how I remember all of this, conversations and small details of events that happened decades ago. The answer is that though it was only after this last visit to Dr. Gold’s that I thought to actually write it down, I have been telling myself this story again and again for the last thirty years, taking it apart and unpacking it, examining each detail as I gather brokenhearted lovers do, though I have never had my heart broken and only rarely been a lover. You will say that remembering a story is not the same as remembering the thing itself. That, I do not have an answer for. Perhaps I am wrong about things. It would not surprise me.
* * *
There was another death. It was in the local paper the next week. Her name was Margaret Byer. I did not know her. Logan was a small town but not so small that a person couldn’t die in it without you knowing them. His car was parked outside my house that evening. I had grown used to checking the windows several times an hour, waking up in the middle of the night to peek through the blinds.
My mother had fallen asleep in front of Cheers, and I left a note saying I’d biked to the 7-Eleven for Doritos.
“Did you know her?” Hercules asked.
“No.”
“Know anything about her?”
“Not really. She worked at a bar by the plant.” I had read this in the paper.
“I know where she worked,” said Hercules. “Did she have anything to do with Penny?”
“Nothing I know about.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do that,” he said.
I was hoping we’d go to the diner, but he just took me around the block a few times and then dropped me back off. My mother was still asleep, and so I threw my note into the trash. It only then occurred to me that the Margaret Byer who I did not know was going to be buried the next morning, and so Hercules was then en route to the same bitter midnight vigil he had overseen for Penny Anderson.
* * *
I had to skip lunch the next day to retake an Algebra quiz I had failed. People often assumed I was good at math, but I was not. I was not good at anything particularly, not even English, despite all the books I read. Most of the teachers didn’t let you retake quizzes as a sophomore, but Mr. Adams did, he was nice like that. I know what they said later on, but back then people liked Mr. Adams.
The quiz was only a page long and he graded it while I waited.
“B-,” he said, “not so bad. You just need to bone up on your fractions, you’ll be OK for the test next week.”
“Thanks, Mr. Adams.”
“How you doing otherwise?”
“OK,” I said.
“You know, you can always come up to eat your lunch here, if the cafeteria gets too much for you.”
“Thanks.”
“I can remember what it was like, being in high school,” Mr. Adams said. I believed him; he still seemed somehow half-formed. “It’s tough to be a sensitive young man, in a world like this.”
“Why did he pick Penny?” I asked Hercules when I saw him that night.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“There must have been something about her, right? Something that drew his attention?”
Hercules never gave an unconsidered answer; if you said something and he thought it was worth thinking about he’d think about it as long as he needed, and you’d let him, sitting quietly until he was finished.
“Like a wolf, I guess,” said Hercules. “He could just smell her.”
* * *
After he dropped me back home I set aside the barbarian I was rolling up and made a list of everyone in town I thought might have known Penny and the waitress who had died. It was slow going. I did not really know very much about Peggy. She was on the cheerleading team. She might have had a part-time job. About the waitress I knew even less. After half an hour I realized I was just drawing doodles on graph paper and gave up. In a drawer beneath a trade paperback of Watchmen was a folder with the ketchup-stained printouts I had made for Hercules, to which I added my useless notes.
My mother was in her usual position on the sofa.
“Hey, hon.”
“Hi.”
“How’s your homework?”
“Fine. I was wondering—did anyone ever die when you were in high school?”
“Still thinking about Penny, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“There was a car accident my Senior year. Bradley … Bradley Murrow? Marrow? Horrible thing.”
“What about Sarah Willoughby?”
“How did you know about that?”
“I heard something about it at school.”
“It was a sad business,” my mother said. She picked at the thread of her blanket. “Their parents owned the pharmacy that Mr. Struthers owns now. They moved away after.”
“What happened?”
“She got sick and died. I don’t think I ever knew what it was. If I did, I can’t remember.”
“Anything else?”
“It was a long time ago. I didn’t know Sarah well, she was a little older than me. Her sister, Victoria, was in my grade, a nice girl, very pretty, we were in Scouts together. Once—you won’t believe this, but her and your father and some boy she was going with decided we would sneak into the old hospital. Not the old hospital, the old-old hospital, the one out by the Kmart, you know? Anyway, your father, he said we should … Graham? Are you listening?”
“Sorry, I got distracted.”
But by then the commercial was over. “That’s fine.”
* * *
“What if he can only feed from certain people?”
“He only feeds from women,” Hercules said. “Young women.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, what if there’s something else, something that connects Penny and the waitress?”
“Like what?”
“What if they’re related? There was another Anderson on that list, remember?”
“A lot of white people named Anderson,” Hercules said.
“Maybe it’s like a curse. I have a comic book where a magician put a curse on a boy’s grandfather, and it turned the boy into this sort of berserk demon anytime he got angry, and so they had to send him to be trained at a—”
“If the girls are related,” Hercules interrupted, “maybe we can figure out who the next one will be.”
“The library won’t have marriage records, but town hall might. I’ll go by at lunch and see what I can find. We can meet tomorrow afternoon.”
