Juliet Was a Surprise Read online

  I’d finished building my base of balled paper, tepee of kindling and medium sticks girdering that, with a little wick of paper poking out in wait of a match. Danny walked past, widened his eyes as if in awe and then snorted. I was tempted to kick it down, join the sandbox mentality. I had them figured out now. These two were childish and fretful and competitive with nothing at stake, mostly just irritating, and this was the reason for their clique of just two. I lit the fire, twisted open my wine and tried to drink from the bottle with dignity. I was going to relax and enjoy my birthday. I would drink and have a good time despite them. I’d drink and have their good time for them.

  The fire was having trouble so I knelt to blow into its smouldering base. Cake shouted from the riverbank, calling my name, then again louder. Eyeing my almost-fire I edged away to join them. Cake and Danny stood there taking in the sunset. It was a good one, no question—a glorious wall of orange and purple, with little ruptures that looked like balconies, from which shot rays of sacred light, behind which God made vast, heart-breaking decisions. Because they were so still, I glanced at the two friends’ faces. Cake’s expression was complex, for once. He seemed chastised by the sunset, humbled. But in his look there was also hope that what it was telling him might be wrong. Anyway, that’s what I imagined I saw. As for Danny, his take on the beauty was simpler—he sneered. He was basically daring it.

  We returned to my fire, which flickered perfectly. We took spots on the encircling logs as its audience. I saw there would not be much else to do here. I offered my wine bottle to Cake, who shook his head but grabbed and popped open another beer, though only for my sake, because I never saw him take a drink. Danny took a cosmetic sip of his rum.

  As darkness took over, awkwardness grew around the fire. Not only was there no guffawing, no snapping of cans, but this campfire lacked the meditative stare that took art or wisdom from the embers. Mostly it felt like a raw kind of pause, broken by occasional mumbles. Cake flicked twigs into the flames, and Danny stood toeing the dirt, looking at the river impatiently. No one had said anything but I wondered if they were waiting for those girlfriends. I doubted it. Shirtless, jittery Danny looked like he’d been dragged through a pipe, was angry from the experience and unwilling to talk about it. Cake looked more settled, the kind of body that could happily play the same video game for a year. At one point Danny spent some time sitting on a log, but he faced away from the fire. In a way they resembled a married couple used to each other’s silence. They seemed sad. Or at work on an endless puzzle. They wanted something to be hugely better. They would’ve destroyed things to get that, but there was just too much to destroy, and where did you start?

  I was into my own little reveries when Cake, who looked especially retarded in the firelight but had apparently just read my mind, turned to me and asked, “So you even have friends?” The question was completely judgmental and didn’t expect an answer.

  I’d just been invited into their nasty little team, though I didn’t know it at the time. It felt only sideways, a challenge.

  “Never,” I said, a kind of joke. Then added, macho, “Only girlfriends.”

  I was over being nervous with these two, and it wasn’t just the wine. I was bored. Cake didn’t respond, so I asked him, hadn’t he said something about girlfriends?

  “Never know, eh?” he said, inscrutable, gazing at the fire.

  Danny snorted. Which made Cake shake his head.

  Smiling falsely, I asked, “What?” I’d just suffered a sudden vision of a grotesque gay come-on, some really ugly bullying.

  But Cake threw a twig at Danny, who let it hit his cheek. “We’re thinking maybe mine likes him more. And also they hate each other.”

  Danny added, “And they lack a car. And they don’t know where the fuck we even are.”

  “Doesn’t look good,” said Cake.

  “Not for romance, anyway.”

  I threw in, “Nope.”

  Cake said, “I don’t think they’re exactly even a girlfriend …”

  Considering this, Danny mumbled something about the larger scheme of things, and then said, louder, with a mirthless smile, “Talk about getting all worked up over nothing.”

  “So let’s go”—Cake threw a bigger twig this time, which Danny dodged—“grab something to eat.”

  Danny closed his eyes and swore but got up anyway. He pulled on his red T-shirt and grabbed a flashlight, its beam so dim it was next to useless.

  They disappeared down a near-invisible trail heading inland from the river. I hustled after them, following their noise, the moon barely showing me the trail. When I caught up, Danny said without turning around, “We got a chicken here last year. A huge one.”

  I fell back a few paces. There was no store for miles. Even if there was, it was probably midnight. We were about to have the kind of adventure I didn’t want.

  As if to taunt me, Cake said, “Me hungry.”

  “I am made of hunger,” added Danny.

  There was a pause where I was supposed to offer a stupid something of my own. I said I wasn’t all that hungry, really, and that I totally could go either way. One last pull on my wine bottle emptied it. I let it drop on the trail.

  CAKE TURNED OFF the flashlight when we reached a main path, a chip trail from the feel of it, and a farmhouse wasn’t more than a hundred yards farther along. At our approach a dog barked but then, strangely, stopped. We stayed in the shadow of the woods as we made our way around a small fenced field. In the air the pissy sting of manure. Cake was lifting the wooden latch of a crude gate. I found myself tagging along with them. I didn’t want to be ridiculed for hanging back, afraid. I had also decided that it was indeed my twenty-first birthday.

  Walking in mud we made it to the back of a large, windowless shed that stank of something uniquely sour. Its door had the gate’s same crude wooden latch, which Danny lifted. We all three crept in, Danny flicked on the weak light, and a shed full of roosting chickens, rows and rows of them, looked at us, clucking what sounded like frightened questions—then they all went crazy when Cake lurched and got one by the neck. They screamed, flapped, ran, fell, and though chickens supposedly can’t fly, a dozen charged blindly into the ceiling and our faces.

  Cake was trying to break the thing’s neck right there in the shed, but Danny grabbed his shirt and pulled. A floodlight came on as soon as we left the shelter of the shed. It was hard to look at, so we must have been lit up bright. Cake had trouble running with the bird flapping against his direction, a kind of hysterical umbrella. He stopped to try a new grip on the neck. The chickens were still screaming. At the house a door banged open and after taking in our fleeing threesome a man spoke casually, it seemed, to someone inside. His voice was scarier than if he’d been yelling, because it sounded like the voice of someone who’d easily catch up and run beside us on the trail without us knowing it, and then when he killed us, one by one, he wouldn’t talk at all.

  TO MAKE SURE we hadn’t been followed, we hid in the woods for maybe fifteen minutes and watched our dwindling fire from afar. It was an eerie sight, a minimalist painting about something interrupted or wrong: empty clearing, lone tent with a round hole in its roof, single full beer balanced on a log. I was glad I couldn’t see Cake finally kill the bird; the noises were bad enough. I knew he’d swung the chicken baseball bat– style, trying to hit its head on trees. From the sounds, I think what worked was him simply holding it down and stomping. He may have tried biting it, because later at the fire a few feathers clung to his cheek, and Danny mumbled something about Ozzy Osbourne.

  I took a big slug of Danny’s rum, and another, then worked at getting the fire back to a blaze. We’d had time to catch our breath and settle down. Cake was quiet as he sat with his forearms on his knees, the dead chicken resting in his hands. When the fire hit its peak, he simply tossed the chicken in. Doing so, he said, “Last year was disgusting. This’ll be better.”

  The feathers that touched flame shrank instantly brown, then blac
k, smoke billowed, and a stink came at us. I didn’t want to know what last year was like. Danny asked me if I had any of that wine left, and I took it for a fine-dining quip and didn’t answer. I watched as the beak opened on its own. Then it gaped impossibly. The one eye I could see was sizzling. Smoke came off the head darker, a reddish brown.

  “We should flip it,” said Cake. The wings had almost burned off, but the mound of belly or chest that had ridden above the flame was still white.

  Danny grunted but didn’t move. He looked ready to sleep.

  The two policemen were so quiet on their feet, they were suddenly just there, standing at the fire.

  Danny jerked back and hissed, “Jesus.”

  “Morning, gentlemen,” said one.

  “Hiya doin’,” said Danny. I grunted something through a squeezed throat. Cake was silent. Those little white fucking feathers on his cheek.

  They were identically tall. They even looked a bit alike. Their uniforms seemed suited to a campsite, like park rangers or Boy Scouts or security guards—any brotherhood that keeps tabs on the wild. It was like they emitted the opposite of smell. They looked humourless and tired.

  “You boys know anything about some chickens?”

  No one spoke. The cops stood staring right into the fire at a bird that smoked and stank. They both carried head-bashing flashlights maybe two feet long. The timing grotesque, the sizzling eye went pip and now was an empty black smoking socket.

  “Nothin’ much,” said Danny.

  “Seen any kids running around?”

  “Nobody.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. At the time, I didn’t know that I was seeing the second thing science could not explain.

  “Pretty quiet night, then,” said the same cop.

  Danny said, “Wanna warm light beer?” Smiling hopefully, he flicked a finger at Cake’s three remaining beer, still in their plastic rings.

  Mumbling “No thanks” under his breath, a cop found the beer cans with his flashlight beam. He aimed it to hunt in the shadows at our feet, then back to illuminate the open door of the tent, and finally shone it into the fire, right at the chicken. He let the light linger on it, and I swear I could feel his loathing.

  “Okay, then,” said the cop. “Have a good one.”

  The other cop flicked on his light and they both turned away. But as they did, the first cop swung back and shone his light full in my face.

  “How old are you?”

  I squinted and looked down. I’ve always looked young for my years. It was late, I’d had gollops more rum and I actually stumbled on the question, but before I could answer, Cake chirped, brightening because he had occasion to remember again, “He’s twenty-one today! Yesterday!” As he grinned at them, a feather fell off his cheek.

  The two cops disappeared up the hidden trail toward the farm.

  “Gotta fucking flip it,” Cake said, standing up. “Need a stick.”

  We could hear him stumbling around on the river gravel, swearing. He snapped a branch.

  I asked Danny what the hell had just happened.

  Staring into the fire, Danny yelled at Cake, “What’d they see?”

  Cake yelled back, “Pillow.”

  Danny said to me, “They saw a burned pillow, I think.”

  “What?”

  “He can do that. Make you see stuff. He has to be angry. Or nervous or something, I don’t fucking know.”

  Cake walked into the firelight. “Grammy’s ratty old couch cushion.”

  “What?” Laughing, I looked back and forth at the two of them. They seemed serious. “No way.”

  Cake said to Danny, “What they really won’t see is the fucking car.”

  Danny looked skyward and whistled in relief.

  “No way,” I said again.

  “He made the dog stop barking,” Danny said. He turned to Cake. “Right?”

  Cake murmured, “Whatever.” He tried to flip the chicken with the stick, more a club. It kept falling back on its flat, burned side.

  “Show me. Do it again,” I said.

  Cake fake lunged at me with a clawed hand. “Booga!”

  I asked him seriously to prove it and he told me to fuck off. He applied himself again to the chicken, and got it to turn over and stay.

  We watched the remaining white feathers burn.

  “Isn’t there something in there,” Cake asked, almost rhetorically, jutting his chin at it, “a ‘gizzard’ or something? Suppose to be poisonous?”

  Danny said if we found it we could eat around it.

  PEOPLE HAVE TRIED explaining to me the science of the first one, the glowing sphere that shot past my parents’ car, saying it had to be what’s called ball lightning. When I tell them there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, they look at me like they don’t believe me now. Without clouds, their science is ruined and what I saw was impossible. But I know it wasn’t lightning. It wasn’t electric-white furious, it was a shining gold bubble. This second one, too, causes looks. People tell me the cops were obviously being ironic, wickedly straight-faced, asking about a stolen chicken even while staring at one, daring to share our crime in a way. Then laughing their heads off back in the squad car. But I saw their faces. It was the middle of the night and they’d hiked in to find nothing—no chicken, no dope, no booze to dump, not even noise to quell. They were sour bureaucrats. They saw a smouldering cushion and they hated the three miscreants who would defile a proper campfire by burning such a thing.

  Anyway, I sat there on the log, and to my surprise I found I had grown hungry for the bird we’d cooked in the fire I’d built.

  Eventually the black, charred thing got teased out with sticks and shoved onto a flat rock to cool.

  What other explanation was there? Cake wasn’t smart enough to be that good an actor; neither was Danny. And something in their boredom seemed to prove it all. So I’d just seen a guy use a wild power. One he maybe couldn’t quite control. He just wasn’t smart enough to do something bigger with it. To get a girl to see him as sexy. To make the world see things his way.

  Danny didn’t want his rum, so I kept drinking it, suffering the shudders that bring your shoulders to your ears. Though I didn’t have it in words yet, I had learned a third unexplainable thing, which is that even if what we call magic is all around us, we’ll never be able to prove it.

  There they were, sitting in firelight, these two friends. Danny, twitching and distracted again already. Cake, pudgy, stupid and unreadable. But I saw now that—not even counting what Cake could do—these two were as rare as anyone. They were brave enough to steal cars and chickens, a route of wisdom I didn’t have, and still don’t. They took on sunsets.

  Cake was mad because I kept staring. At one point my hair stood on end because of a sudden fancy—those weren’t two cops at all. I’d been made to see cops. But I decided that was stupid—why make me see cops? Then, when I next looked at Cake, I saw a sort of bear-face instead of Cake, and at that point I just tried to forget the whole thing. And anyway it was time to eat the chicken.

  We passed it around, all charred feathers and skin and the burned-off nubs of feet and head. Passing it, we got black to the wrists with greasy char. These two guys in their red SuperSlice shirts. I learned by watching them eat, and when my turn came I pulled at the black until some flesh followed, pieces of chicken that I recognized as parts of breast or thigh. Turning the hunk to my face, I used teeth and tongue to pull away pieces of perfectly delicious meat.

  Cake watched me. “Chicken chicken,” he said, smiling wisely, cheeks greasy black, eyes reflecting the idiot fire.

  Any Forest Seen from Orbit

  Ihave been asked to “explain things.” Can I say simply that I’m an animal, with urges? It’s the only explanation, truly.

  I didn’t plan anything. I didn’t intend a massacre, as it were. But—as they say—when weapons exist, they will be et cetera. This time, a chainsaw. I’m glad more people weren’t hurt.

  Yes, her name was Juliet,
hard as that is to believe. Though not overly pretty, she was as sexy as sexy gets, in my opinion, and I suggest in her opinion too, which of course added to the allure. There’s something about a woman aware of her own pheromones—it’s not unlike a queen watching you as she bathes in milk.

  It wasn’t her beauty but more her imperfections I found carnal—her smallish eyes hungry and her slightly bucking teeth pushing her lips a little apart, keeping everything ready, as it were. She seemed always on the green verge of ripeness. Her humour seemed part of it too, though I can’t even begin to “explain” that. But what can we make of a sexy woman who meets an average-looking man standing filthy at her door with a shovel and, wide-eyed, singsongs, “And who have we here?”

  Let me declare again how average I look. In the mixed vegetation of humanity, I am a blade of grass in a scrubby field. In the war of looks—it’s very much a war and you know it—I understand that I am fodder. It’s hard to lose count of certain things, and I’ll explain that exactly three times in my life I’ve been called a “twerp.” So I suppose I resemble a “twerp.” I’m small, my build is soft. My face deserves some sculpting and a thinner nose. Plus, I’ve come to realize there’s fear in my eyes and I always glance away. But my looks are no excuse for how this went with Juliet. Nor will I use as an excuse the very basic fact that I have not had any other chances in life to plant my humble seed—I’ll just hand you that earthy nugget on its twerpy platter, and leave it.

  All I really need to say is: Juliet was a surprise.

  There I stood at her door, with my shovel. Seeing her, I became aware of my jeans swollen with mud and grass clippings, my aroma of dog waste and chlorophyll. For protection I wore my work glasses, the big old aviator style, which these days possibly look demented. Good God, and they’re tinted yellow. Nonetheless, after singing at me, Juliet held my eye,

  fiercely, as she called upstairs, “Troy, the man’s here.”