Stony River Read online

  Not that Mother was likely to seek out the Dobras. At dinner one night she’d said, “Just because she’s the only girl your age this side of the highway doesn’t mean you have to play with her; we don’t know anything about them.” Daddy suggested Mother walk over there and welcome them to the neighborhood, poke around in their garbage can. Mother didn’t, of course.

  Tereza pulled a rusty crowbar from the log. “How’d that get there?” Linda didn’t like the idea of Tereza visiting The Island on her own and putting stuff in the log without her agreement.

  “I found it back of my house, hiding in the grass.”

  Tereza lived in an apartment building and what she called grass was more like weeds, but Linda didn’t correct her.

  They crept along the riverbank, approaching Crazy Haggerty’s from the back, stepping around mounds of dog poop. “I never saw him walk that dog,” Linda said.

  A small stack of firewood rested against a wall by the back door. “The door’s locked,” Tereza said. “I tried it already. I could’ve busted in but I waited for you.” Padlocked shutters covered the windows on the outside. “I can smash ’em open, easy.”

  “If you do, I’m not staying. I won’t tell, but I won’t stay.”

  “Look up there,” Tereza said. She pointed to a small window close to the corner of the house too high to reach without a ladder; its shutter hanging by a hinge. “I broke that shutter because it‘s harder for the cops to spot. I jimmied the window and propped it open with a rock.”

  “When?”

  “Last week, at night. It was too dark to see inside.” She monkeyed up the drainpipe, leaned so far over Linda thought she’d fall and peered inside the window.

  Linda’s heart thumped at the fear of getting caught, but she was too curious to leave.

  “The kitchen,” Tereza said when she got back down. “Nothing in it except a wood stove. No table, no chairs.”

  “They must have eaten in the dining room.”

  “Or not at all. They could be zombies from outer space.”

  Linda sighed in exasperation. “Zombies are already dead. Crazy Haggerty wouldn’t have died of natural causes if he was a zombie.” Then she noticed two small basement windows barred but not shuttered. Kneeling on a piece of wood so she wouldn’t get her knees dirty, she peered into one. The light was dim but she could make out two white pillars with black drapes hanging between them.

  “I see a robe on a hook,” Tereza called out from the other window.

  Linda scooted over to look.

  “The guys at the store say Crazy Haggerty worshiped the devil,” Tereza said. “They say he had snake fangs, rat tails and porcupine quills in his pockets when he died. I think the old man kept her as a slave, and sicced the dog on her if she didn’t do everything he wanted. Too bad I didn’t move here sooner. I would’ve sprung her.”

  “How?”

  “I would’ve figured a way.”

  “Maybe Miranda was a lunatic that Haggerty saved from the horrors of an asylum,” Linda said. “They tie you up and turn hoses on you, you know, attach wires to your head and cook your brain.” She’d learned about asylums from a comic book passed around the school playground. She wanted to believe Haggerty had been protecting Miranda from that or something worse.

  Tereza snorted. “The horrors? La-di-dah, Miss Dictionary.”

  Linda stomped home alone.

  At dinner, she asked, “Did Mr. Haggerty’s daughter have a garage?”

  “What an interesting question,” Daddy said.

  Linda related what Tereza had said.

  Mother looked at her plate.

  Daddy said, “You and your mother need to have a chat.”

  That night a huge black bug climbed onto Linda’s back. It was so big and heavy she couldn’t breathe. She must have screamed because Mother came into her room and rubbed her back. “Hush, angel,” she said. “It was only a dream.”

  SIX WEEKS LATER Mother disappeared into the hospital for what Daddy called a female thing. “Take care of your father,” she said. “He has no idea what to do with a stove.”

  Linda rummaged in her brain for everything she knew about being a wife: keep your hands out of the wringer washer; start with the collar of the shirt when you iron, then the yoke, then the sleeves; skim the cream off the top of the milk for his coffee; make sure all evidence of your housework is out of sight by the time he gets home.

  Tereza was no help. She didn’t want to help dust or vacuum or wash floors. “I’m never getting married,” she said. “If I have to clean somebody’s house I’d better get paid for it.” When Linda was stuck at home cooking and cleaning, she suspected Tereza was with the greasy-haired boys who prowled the neighborhood in a pack.

  Sometimes women from church dropped off a meatloaf, cabbage rolls or even a chocolate cake, but you couldn’t count on it. Linda could scramble eggs and dissolve Jell-O. She could open cans of soup: Daddy’s favorite was Manhattan clam chowder. She’d sit outside with him after dinner while he talked about his secretary, his boss and the vital role of the cost accountant at Bartz Chemicals. He’d help her with the dishes before their nightly hospital visits. While he was at work, she ate jars of expensive Queen Anne cherries Mother had hidden in the pantry behind a broken toaster. She sat at Mother’s mahogany dressing table and smeared her face with Pond’s—as cool and creamy as junket pudding. She licked two fingers as she’d seen Mother do and moistened the tiny brush before dipping it into the little red mascara box. She washed her hair by herself for the first time and needed every bobby pin in the house to set it. Without a mother, did Miranda know to brush her hair a hundred strokes a night?

  Driving with Daddy to the hospital a week after Mother went in, Linda asked, “How come nobody knew Mr. Haggerty had a daughter?” She was in the front where Mother usually sat and got to watch Daddy shift gears. The seat cushion still held Mother’s lemony scent.

  “People were scared of him. Your mother went over there once to collect for the Red Cross and he greeted her on the porch with a shotgun.”

  “Do you suppose his daughter went to school somewhere?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Poor Miranda. Linda liked almost everything about school: getting escorted across the highway by a police officer, waiting on the playground for the bell to ring, learning about the solar system, using the pencil sharpener. “Why wouldn’t her father have let her go?”

  “No idea.” He reached over and patted Linda’s leg. “If only we’d known. Everybody just thought he was eccentric. We left him alone.”

  “Where did he work?”

  “He didn’t as far as anybody knew. If you asked, he’d tell you he had a ‘condition’ and ‘scraped by’ on his ‘ma’s meager charity.’ I had an inkling he was smarter than he let on. During the war he did his bit patrolling the neighborhood. After that, he kept to himself.” Daddy slowly shook his head. “How long ago that was. To think of a little girl in there all that time.”

  Daddy had never talked to Linda so confidentially. The regret in his voice emboldened her to confess in a quiet voice, “I used to call him Crazy Haggerty.”

  “You weren’t the only one.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “You said he had strange stuff in his pockets when he died on the train.”

  “Did I? Why are you so interested in Mr. Haggerty?”

  “I want to know, that’s all.” “Well, kiddo, there are some things we’re just not meant to know.”

  AUGUST 24, 1955: Linda’s twelfth birthday and Mother wouldn’t be home from the hospital. Linda was trying to be grown up about it. Daddy said he’d take care of dinner and the three of them would celebrate later that night at the hospital, wouldn’t that be fun? But Daddy didn’t know how to make Baked Alaska. Linda considered trying it on her own, but the effort it took on Mother’s part was what she liked best.

  “Forget housework,” Daddy said at breakfast. “Spend the day with your little friend.”


  Tereza showed up at The Island wearing dungarees that didn’t fit. “Somebody gave ’em to Allen but they ain’t his size.”

  “They’re too big in the waist for you.”

  “Yeah, and they cut into my crotch. I feel sorry for guys. Ever seen a dick?”

  “A what?”

  “A penis. A guy’s pee-pee.”

  Linda’s face got hot. “I don’t think so.”

  “Some are stubby like punks. Others are kinda worm-like.”

  “How many have you seen?”

  “Well, my brother’s, natch, but that don’t count. Let’s see …” She added on her fingers: “Richie, Vinnie, Paul, Vlad”—the greasy-haired boys who blocked the sidewalk and said “all that meat and no potatoes” whenever Linda tried to walk by.

  “They smoke cigs,” Tereza said, “and they let me take drags if I kiss ’em.”

  Linda was horrified. “Kiss their penises?”

  “No, genius, their mouths.”

  “Can you taste what they’ve been eating?”

  “Natch.”

  “How nauseating.” Nauseating was Linda’s favorite new word, but Daddy wouldn’t allow her to say it at the dinner table. “Don’t your folks mind you going with them?”

  “They don’t ask and I don’t tell.”

  Linda didn’t want to hear any more about the greasy-haired boys. She suggested they play Swiss Family Robinson. Tereza said she wasn’t going to pretend anymore until she became a Broadway or Hollywood star. Linda thought about mentioning it was her birthday, but she didn’t want Tereza to play out of pity. She went home and looked up penis in Webster’s Unabridged and then the words in the definition she didn’t understand. Eventually she got to “intercourse” and “impregnate” and began to think about Miranda and Crazy Haggerty.

  It made her stomach hurt.

  She paged through medical books in the house she’d had no interest in before, searching for the rules of intercourse—reassurance that what happened to Miranda was out of the ordinary, something she didn’t have to be afraid of. From Mother’s bottom bureau drawer she retrieved a booklet called Growing Up and Liking It. Earlier that year the school nurse had sent the sixth-grade girls home with it along with a sanitary napkin, a belt and instructions to discuss it with their mothers. Mother had said, “We won’t need this for at least another year.” The booklet was silent on the subject of intercourse. Maybe the child wasn’t Crazy Haggerty’s. Maybe he’d kept Miranda inside that house because she was like Tereza, wandering off whenever she wanted, kissing boys and looking at their penises.

  Daddy brought home a pizza and let Linda have as much as she wanted. At the hospital, Mother held out her arms and said “Here’s my birthday girl,” but she didn’t look in a party mood. Leaning over to hug her, Linda caught a whiff of talcum.

  “We were together twelve years ago in this very hospital,” Mother said in a way that made Linda sad. “The windows were blacked out because of the war.”

  Daddy patted Mother’s hand. “I remember.” Then to Linda, “Here you go, kiddo, open your present.” He’d brought it in a shopping bag. “Madge wrapped it.” Madge Bryson was Daddy’s secretary. Linda had seen her only the one time she’d ever been in Daddy’s office. To Linda, Madge was heavily rouged cheeks and a smile that made you feel special. She had used pink paper sprinkled with black polka dots for Linda’s present. Underneath the paper: a Brownie Hawkeye camera with a flash attachment and a box of bulbs.

  Linda had asked for a portable radio.

  “It’s all loaded up, ready to go,” Daddy said.

  Linda made a show of looking through the instruction manual. “It’s swell.”

  Mother said, “Don’t take my picture, I look a fright.” Linda hadn’t intended to.

  Madge had sent along three cupcakes with chocolate icing, paper plates, napkins, plastic forks and three candles. Daddy set the plates and cupcakes on Mother’s dinner tray, placed the tray on the bed and lit the candles. He and Mother sang Happy Birthday in a whisper so they wouldn’t disturb the other sick people. Linda forced herself to think about all the orphans in the world with nobody to sing to them; she thought about Miranda.

  “My cupcake is dry,” Mother said.

  Daddy laughed and said, “It would be, wouldn’t it?” He pulled up the only chair beside Mother’s bed, sat and patted his knee for Linda. She pictured his boxer shorts holding something worm-like and said, “I think I’ll go down to the maternity ward and look at the babies.”

  FOUR

  OCTOBER 28, 1955. The moon was out by the time Chevy Man dumped Tereza back at Tony’s Garage at the corner of Route 1 and Grove, a block from her apartment building. She hustled down the sidewalk, pimply cold in tight white shorts and a Dubble Bubble– pink sweater. She was too busy cooking up the story she’d give Ma and Jimmy to notice Linda on her front stoop across the street. Linda called out but Tereza didn’t slow down.

  Linda stumbled after her. “Hey, wait up!”

  “Beat it!” Tereza hurled the words over her shoulder. Miss Goody Two-Shoes probably wanted to brag about having her weekend homework done already. Tereza should’ve been in eighth grade, not seventh with Linda, but she’d missed too much. Whenever a school snooped into her injuries, Jimmy would find different work and they’d move.

  “What were you doing at Tony’s?”

  Tereza turned just short of her porch steps. “You seen me?”

  “Yeah, after school, getting into a car.”

  “You rat on me, I swear I’ll kill you.”

  “Rat on you about what?”

  In work pants and undershirt, Jimmy exploded onto the porch, a long belt wound around his hand. “Get up here, you little whore. I know what you been doing.”

  Tereza backed up and Jimmy ran down the stairs. Tereza shoved Linda out of the way as Jimmy let loose with the belt, flicking it like a whip.

  “Go ahead, you piece of shit,” Tereza said, dancing around. “The worst you can do is kill me. Do it and make me happy. I dare you.”

  Linda dashed back to her house, screaming “Daddy!”

  Tereza led Jimmy in circles down the middle of the street. He lashed the pavement with the belt, looking more and more pathetic as she zigged and zagged out of his reach.

  “Ooh, big brave man,” she taunted. “Takin’ on a girl.”

  Linda’s old man appeared at his front door and stood like a mummy. Linda ran into the street, waving her chubby arms, yelling at Jimmy to stop. It distracted him long enough for Tereza to scuttle to the end of the street, turn left and run like spit along the edge of the highway. Jimmy wouldn’t hurt Linda. Even so, Tereza owed her one.

  The ground burned under Tereza’s thin-soled shoes and her lungs nearly blasted through her ribs but she didn’t look behind her until she made it to the White Castle a few blocks away. Jimmy hadn’t followed. Winded or too lazy, she didn’t care which. She bent over and clutched her knees, panting. Waited to catch her breath before opening the door to the smell of cigs and steamed onions. Richie, the beanpole, and blubbery Vlad perched on stools at the counter with a new guy, coffee cups and a choked ashtray spread out before them.

  “Hey, Teeze,” Vlad said, moving his hand like he was jerking off. “Here to suck my dick?”

  “Got five bucks?” she asked, still breathing hard. That was what Chevy Man had given her. Enough for fifty Castle burgers.

  Vlad and Richie laughed like they thought she was joking.

  “You’re nibbing out,” Richie said, copping a feel of her left tit as she slid onto the stool beside him. He had a pencil behind his ear, as usual. A doodler: spaceships and ray guns mostly, sometimes the Green Giant with a hard-on.

  “Asshole,” she said, slapping his hand away, but she wasn’t cheesed off at him. Vlad either. Talking dirty was their way of showing they liked her. She only ever let them stick their tongues in her mouth and flash their dicks at her. Guys were so impressed with their dicks.

  “My cousin Buddy
from Linden,” Richie said, nodding toward the new guy, two stools away, next to Vlad. “His grandma is my mom’s aunt.” Buddy spun slowly toward her and nodded. Pouty lower lip, sleepy eyes, slicked-back hair blonder than Richie’s. Under his black leather jacket, a white T-shirt strained against his muscles.

  “You a bodybuilder?” Tereza asked.

  Buddy smiled at her with half a mouth and cracked his knuckles.

  Richie smirked. “The next Charles Atlas.”

  Buddy spun off his stool and swaggered toward Tereza, his pointy-toed black boots scraping the floor and his shiny black pants squeezing his thighs. He shrugged off his jacket and draped it around her shoulders. “Turning frosty out there,” he said, not letting his gaze slide down to her chest like most guys.

  Something stirred between her legs. “Thanks,” she said, slipping her arms into the sleeves still warm from his body. The jacket weighed her shoulders down. “The name’s Tereza, not Teeze.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Tereza,” Buddy said. He cupped one of her hands in both of his, as you might a wounded bird. He released it seconds later, turned his small, high ass to her and strutted back to his seat.

  “What’s with your eyes, Ter-eese-a?” Richie asked. “Your old man try to punch your lights out again?”

  She fished around in her pocketbook and pulled out a small mirror. “Mascara,” she said, licking a finger and swiping at the black streaks. Her eyes must have leaked doing Chevy Man. She lifted Richie’s cig from the ashtray and took a long drag that went to her head. “He’s not my old man,” she said. “My real father speaks three languages.” She paused to pick tobacco off her tongue. “Jimmy only speaks caveman. Ugga, ugga.”

  Richie slapped his thigh and hooted. Vlad’s laugh was more like a wheeze.

  “He tried to belt-whip me but I got away.”

  “Want me to take care of him?” Buddy asked.

  She snorted. Who was this guy?

  “Don’t laugh, Teeze,” Richie said. “He can rip a phone book in half and hold me over his head with one arm. Show her, Buddy.”