The Pricker Boy Read online

  So many people say so many different things. But there’s one thing that most all of us agree on. Anyone who knows anything stays out of the woods beyond the Widow’s Stone. Some say it’s because of the thorns, others because of the poison ivy, and still others because of what may live back there.

  Boris and I walk out of the woods and cross the dirt road to my house. I look briefly at the FOR SALE sign in front of Pete’s house next door. So far, no one has come to look at the place. No one ever comes around here until the weather gets warm.

  But this morning is the first real day of summer. And that means that people will be coming. The usual kids, in from the cities for the summer, coming in with their parents and cleaning up their cottages for the season. A lot of old friends are coming today. I give Boris a friendly slap on the back and leave him to nap in the morning sun.

  A large willow tree droops over the edge of the pond, its branches skimming the water’s surface. A rope swing dangles from one of the tree’s highest perches. The willow’s roots cling desperately to a rounded clump of earth at the shoreline. Each summer, the tree seems to lean a little closer to the pond, like a shaggy-haired giant slowly laying its head down to rest.

  My mother calls through the back window, “Stucks, keep an eye on Nana, please?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” I call back, taking Nana’s arms as she tenderly steps over the roots in the path under the pines.

  “Keep an eye on Nana! Keep an eye on Nana!” Nana sings to me as she steps to the edge of the pond. “Stucks is a good boy. He’ll watch out for Nana.” Nana throws her towel on the ground and stretches a black rubber swimming cap over her hair. “Hello, Stanley,” she says with a smile, waving at my little brother, the Cricket, with her left hand—the hand that has been missing its index finger since before I was born.

  Some days Nana has no idea who the Cricket is. I guess he reminds her of Dad when he was young, which is why she calls him Stanley, which is Dad’s first name. The Cricket doesn’t mind being called Stanley. He doesn’t mind being called anything except Stephen, which is his real name. He hates that name. Even the teachers at school pass the warning to each other from grade to grade: “Call him the Cricket, and if you can’t bring yourself to call him the Cricket, call him Stanley. But you’ll have your hands full if you call him Stephen.”

  Today, he has a metal bucket with him, and he’s scooping up slime from the shallow water near the reeds. He brings it up to where I’m sitting in the grass and begins construction on a mud fortress. I stick my hand in to help him. The mud is cold. The pond hasn’t given up its winter yet, and I tell the Cricket so. I draw my five fingers together in a point, bring them to my chin, and then pull them downward, drawing an imaginary icicle just like one that we once saw on the chin of a character in a Christmas cartoon. COLD.

  The Cricket responds by placing his thumb to his temple and twisting the rest of his fist up and down. I KNOW.

  “Nana, it may be too cold to go in,” I warn.

  “It’s never too cold. Your grandfather and I once went in at midnight on New Year’s Eve.” She sticks one foot into the water, and her face spreads into a wide grin. “We were buck naked, just like the Baby New Year. It was wonderful. If that darling man hadn’t kicked the bucket, I’d make him go again this year!”

  The Cricket dumps another handful of sludge onto the pile, and I watch as he walks down to the water’s edge to gather more. He and I look a lot alike. His hair is slightly blonder, but apart from that he’s a clone of me when I was his age. When I was about eight, the old folks used to tell me how cute I was, and now they say the same thing about the Cricket. Nana steps past him, pausing to gently pat him on the head before going out into the deeper water. When the water reaches her waist, she stops and drags her fingertips in circles across its surface. Her smile widens. “It’s wonderful! Stanley, come join Nana in the water.” The Cricket looks at me, and I raise my eyebrows. He lifts his fist and shakes it back and forth. I translate.

  “It’s still a bit cold for us, Nana.” Up the hill, I can hear Mrs. Milkes start up the vacuum cleaner to remove the winter webs from their cottage. In the backyard, Mr. Milkes is hosing down the white patio furniture that no one ever sits in. They fuss over their cottage like insects. Or mice maybe. Gathering and dusting and cleaning and primping and trying to make their home as comfortable as possible. Or, more likely, they’re trying to make their home as sterile as possible, comfort be damned.

  “You should invite that Emily down for dinner. You should have a soda with her,” Nana says from the water.

  “Nana, please don’t bring this up again,” I plead, though I know it will do little good.

  The Cricket’s mouth curls into a grin. He traces his finger from his ear to his collarbone and flutters his fingers in my direction. A tiny giggle burps out of him.

  This morning, after I came inside from talking to Pete out at Whale’s Jaw, my friend Emily Haber stopped by. My mother had just laid out a plateful of wheat pancakes and turkey bacon, which she claims are just as good as white-flour pancakes and actual bacon. Emily sat down at our breakfast table, helped herself to a stack of pancakes, and started talking about all the work it was going to take to get their cottage ready, including crawling around underneath in the cobwebs to find the water shutoffs. I offered to help. Emily responded by turning the syrup bottle upside down and squeezing it until the last drop blurted out of the bottle. She looked down the bottle spout, and satisfied that the last drop had indeed made it to her plate, she placed the empty bottle back on the table.

  The puddle of syrup coated the bottom pancake in the stack. My father reached over her and placed a fresh bottle on the table. I guess he figured she’d probably want more.

  I told her I wouldn’t mind crawling underneath the cottage, even with the spiders. That I actually kinda like spiders. When she didn’t respond, I said it again. That made the Cricket burst out laughing. Nana threw him a scolding look and stared at Emily and me intently.

  Emily said she’d be fine without my help. She said she had little interest in spiders, so she took no notice of them. She assured me that if she ever did “cultivate an interest,” she would come back and we could “converse for hours about our favorite arachnids.”

  The teasing started after she left, and it hasn’t let up. The Cricket keeps making our sign for Emily, tracing his finger from his ear to his collarbone, and fluttering his fingers. He pretends to swoon, then falls over himself, laughing and pointing at me. Nana keeps giving me dating suggestions that would be perfect if it were 1945. I try to ignore them both, but they’re beginning to get under my skin.

  The Cricket puts on his serious face. He’s probably just gathering himself for another wave of mockery. Then I hear a soft meow from the bushes behind us, and some rustling.

  “How long have you been there?” I bark toward the bushes.

  I hear some more rustling, then a voice whispering, “Shoo, shoo, go back to the cottage.” Above that rises the sound of a loud purr.

  “Well?” I call, almost shouting. “How long have you been there?”

  “Long enough,” the voice responds.

  “Right,” I reply. I grab some mud from the Cricket’s bucket and assist in the building of the great fortress. I wink at the Cricket, motion at the bushes with my thumb, and then wiggle my earlobe with my index finger. The Cricket smiles at me, lifts his fist, and nods it in agreement.

  Ronnie Milkes jumps out of the bushes. “What did that mean?” he asks. His shirt catches on a branch, and he almost trips as he tries to untangle himself. A large orange calico cat follows him, purring and rubbing up against Ronnie’s pant leg.

  I smile as he stumbles, but I don’t make eye contact with him. “You mean you don’t know everything?”

  Ronnie adjusts his shirt. His hair is neatly combed, held in place by a light coat of shiny gel. His pants are creased down the legs, and his shirt has a button-down collar. He stands near us, being careful not to get too close
to the mud. “Darn cat,” he says, then gives in, bends over, and scratches Morangie behind the ears. The cat meows and purrs louder.

  “Don’t you have a cottage to clean?” I ask him.

  “My grandparents, uh, they don’t let me help out,” he mumbles. He squinches and unsquinches his nose several times as if something is itching it from the inside. “So, uh, fire tonight, huh?”

  I pause just long enough for Ronnie to think that I’m not going to answer him. “Yeah, sometime after dinner,” I admit, plucking a piece of rock from the Cricket’s mud sculpture and tossing it into the pond.

  “So, uh … what’s the Cricket laughing at you for?” Ronnie asks.

  “Do you have to know everything?” I snap at him.

  “No,” he mutters. I know he wants to change the tone in my voice, wants to get the summer going on a good foot, but he shouldn’t have started things off by snooping in the bushes.

  Nana splashes up to the edge of the water, singing, “Emily and Stucks, sittin’ in a tree …”

  “Nana!” I shout. “You’re as bad as the Cricket!”

  “What cricket? Where?” Nana asks, extending her hand to me.

  “I mean Stanley,” I explain, reaching to help her out of the water. She towels off, smiles with crooked teeth at Ronnie, and then walks up the path under the pines, singing, “Emily and Stucks, sittin’ in a tree …”

  Ronnie is smirking. The Cricket slaps a huge handful of oozing mud onto his sculpture. Brown gunk splashes toward Ronnie. A bit gets Morangie, but the old cat doesn’t leap out of the way. She just glares at the Cricket, almost challenging him to do it again. Ronnie reaches down to brush off his pants.

  “He didn’t even get you,” I tell him.

  “Cricket, you are one goofy kid,” Ronnie grumbles, and I am about to point out that at least he doesn’t lurk around in people’s bushes, when the Cricket lifts his fist, bends it at the wrist, and nods it in agreement with Ronnie. Ronnie repeats the Cricket’s hand gesture back to him. “I don’t know what this means,” he tells him. He turns to me. “What’s this all about?”

  “He’s just agreeing with you,” I explain.

  “So why not just say so?”

  “It’s our new thing. It’s how we … talk,” I explain.

  “You two are bizarre,” Ronnie protests. “You know how to talk. He’s not deaf. And that’s not even real sign language.” The Cricket takes a handful of mud and plops it on his own head. He snorts at Ronnie and bares his teeth like an angry lion. He hasn’t spoken a word in months. The Cricket’s “speech” has become all pantomime, all cartoon buffoonery, all exaggerated, silly gestures. I told my parents it was because of a game we were playing. I told them we’d seen it in a Marx Brothers movie. We couldn’t stop laughing at Harpo and Chico trying to talk to each other. I told them and I convinced them, and my parents are pretty hands-off kinds of people, preferring to “let the boys find their own way.” I’m sure my mother, a true hippie with the dirt under her nails to prove it, read that phrase in a new-age parenting book somewhere. “Just so long as he’s ‘talking’ to you,” she said to me back in the spring.

  When he feels like it, the Cricket’ll start talking again. Until then, he and I have plenty of fun making up our own language. We build on it day by day. Like Mom said, we don’t have to worry so long as he keeps talking to me. I won’t worry.

  But Ronnie doesn’t need to know about family stuff that started in the winter.

  “Will you teach me how to ‘talk’ like that?” Ronnie asks the Cricket, making quotation marks in the air with his fingers when he says the word “talk.” The Cricket scowls as he looks back and forth at Ronnie’s hands hanging in the air. He lifts his fist, bends it at the wrist, and shakes it back and forth, then pretends to open an invisible tin can with a can opener. NO CAN DO.

  “I give up,” Ronnie sighs. His nose is still itching. It’s twitching and skipping around on his face like it’s trying to fly away from his cheeks. He sneezes, and his nose settles down. “I think I’ve got a new story all worked out. I was thinking of telling it tonight at the fire.” He reaches into his pocket and produces a white handkerchief. I catch sight of a patch of discolored skin on his right wrist, and an ugly memory twists my stomach. Ronnie wipes his nose. “I also got some fireworks this winter …,” he continues, then pauses. He sees me staring at the scar and tucks his arm down to his hip where I can’t see it. His eyes flinch, and I look away.

  “My grandparents and I, uh, went down south,” he says, “and I got a whole brick of regular fireworks and some whistling bottle rockets. I got a lot of stuff. I could probably give you some, if you wanted. We have to be careful, though. I’m not supposed to light them off without my grandfather around.”

  I feel the urge to be nice to him, to let him know that he’s okay. “I’ve still got some left over from last year,” I offer. “Want to light off a few now? We could try to sink some rocks—”

  Suddenly the hair on Morangie’s back stands straight up, and her back arches like a tiny camel’s hump. Her teeth protrude from curling lips, and she lets out a hiss that sends Ronnie leaping toward the water. Boris steps out of the bushes, the wag in his tail starting just behind his neck and warbling outward until his whole rear end is wobbling back and forth. He’s smiling—as close to smiling as a dog can get anyway. Smiling and drooling, drooling and smiling.

  “Hey, boy,” I say to him, and he starts walking toward me. He freezes, the wag stopping dead in the air. Boris’s whole body becomes as stiff as a dart, and he points his quivering nose directly at Morangie.

  I know exactly what he’s thinking. He won’t hurt Morangie, but he desperately wants to sniff her. He wants to inch closer and closer until he can stick his dribbling nose right up to her tail and suck in a good solid whiff. But I also know Morangie. Mrs. Milkes’s cat has paid her dues in life, and she doesn’t care how big the dog is. No one is going to stick their nose where no nose should be stuck.

  It’s over in about two seconds. Boris is too stupid to keep his distance, and Morangie catches him with every claw of her right front paw. Catches him a good one too, slicing hard enough to draw blood. Boris leaps back, tail between his legs, yelping in pain, and runs to my side. I pat the dog on his head. “It’s okay, boy,” I reassure him. “They say we learn something new every day.”

  Morangie could make a break for it, but she holds her ground, staring at Boris. She waits a second, then rushes forward, swiping again with her claws. Ronnie and I jump out of the way, scrambling down toward the water and almost taking out the Cricket’s mud sculpture in the process. Boris runs for the road with his tail between his legs, Morangie screeching along after him.

  “Stucks!” a voice calls to me from the house.

  “What, Ma?”

  “Is the Cricket with you?”

  “Yeah, he’s—”

  I look around. He’s gone. The bucket of mud is still there, but the Cricket is gone. “He was right here,” I say to Ronnie. “Where could he have gone so fast?”

  “Stucks?”

  “Hold on, Ma! He was right here a minute ago.”

  Ronnie wipes his nose again, and I rip the handkerchief from him and chuck it into the water.

  “Put that down and help me find him,” I say.

  I check the shoreline, being careful not to let my feet touch the water. He didn’t go in the water, and if he had, it wouldn’t be a problem. The Cricket can swim better than I can. That’s how he got his nickname. He could kick so well in the water as a toddler that Dad said, “Boy, you swim just like a little cricket.” And from that day on he was the Cricket. Just like when I was potty training and jackknifed into the toilet and got stuck. Up until that day my name had been Davey, but I’ve been Stucks ever since. Thanks, Dad.

  “Cricket!” I yell again.

  Ronnie starts checking among the pine trees. “He’s just playing, right? Doesn’t he do this all the time?”

  Ronnie and I check around the house
and then up the driveway. We enter the woods beyond the road and start walking the path.

  “Ooh,” Ronnie chuckles as we enter the woods. “A kid disappears. Just like Amanda Yearling.”

  I whirl on Ronnie and my hand comes up. He jumps back and covers himself. “Don’t you ever do that,” I say. “Don’t ever compare him to—just don’t.” My hand is open as if I’m going to slap him. I don’t want to hit him, but I don’t know that I won’t.

  “Okay, Stucks,” Ronnie says, stepping back. “I was just kidding. It’s just a story.”

  I feel my hand in the air and it embarrasses me. I pull it away. “Okay. But … don’t. Don’t you ever try and put him in one of your stories.”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  I nod, which is the closest thing to an apology that I can give him.

  We walk to the spot where the first paths split off. “Check out those and meet me at Whale’s Jaw. If you find him, shout to me.”

  “Isn’t he just playing?”

  “What’s your point, Ronnie?” I say.

  “Nothing. It’s just … you seem really mad.”

  “Are you telling me how to treat my brother?” I glare at him. He holds up his hands in defeat, then starts down one of the side paths.

  “Cricket!” he calls, his voice calm and gentle. “Hey, Cricket, if you come out I’ll give you a whole pack of bottle rockets! I’ll even help you light them!”

  I don’t waste my time calling out. The Cricket’s never going to call back, regardless of what bribes we offer. The game, the hiding, is always more fun than anything anyone has to offer. I run past the old fort and the twin climbing trees. The ground under my feet is damp and pretty cold, and it makes me think of winter and ice and the skin of snow that had covered everything for months. But underneath the canopy of trees the air is humid. I can feel it when I draw breath. Finally, Whale’s Jaw looms in front of me. I trot up to it, allowing my hand to drift across its rough surface. I pass beyond the granite slabs, step around the fire pit. All around me I can feel the woods. I know the roots and stones that’ll trip you if you’re not paying attention, know the hole on the far side of Whale’s Jaw where the chipmunks live, know the poison ivy that grows along the left side of the stone wall at the top of the hill. I can feel all the years that we’ve played out here layered one on top of another.