The Narrows(11)

Gutsville, Matthew thought, then immediately hated himself for thinking it.

He went around to the back of the house and saw his mother’s truck in the yard, home early from work. Glancing up at the house to make sure no one was watching, he hurried over to the truck and peered in the driver’s window, hoping to spy a discarded pack of cigarettes on the dashboard or in the console between the two front seats. Sometimes his mother was careless and left a pack unattended. Disappointingly, tonight was not one of those nights.

As he climbed the porch steps, a crooked finger of lightning lit up the sky, followed by a clash of thunder so frighteningly close it sounded like it had emanated straight up out of the earth. He accidentally slammed the screen door behind him as he entered the house then winced in anticipation of his mother’s reproving voice echoing out from the kitchen.

“Is that you, Mattie?” she called, right on schedule. He could smell the meal she was preparing, and could hear things sizzling in cooking oil on the stove. “I’ve told you a hundred times not to slam that door.”

“Sorry.”

He padded into the kitchen. His mother was at the sink washing lettuce and Brandy was setting the table. Brandy shot him a disapproving look—since she’d turned sixteen, all of Brandy’s looks had become disapproving—then she said, “Mom, he’s filthy.”

His mother glanced at him over her shoulder. “Oh, Matthew. Your hands are black as tar. What have you been doing?” She dried her own hands on a dish towel then yanked his T-shirt up over his shoulders to expose his frail bird’s chest and milk-white skin.

“Just hanging around with Dwight,” he said, moving toward the refrigerator, where he grabbed a can of Coke and popped the tab.

His mother balled up the T-shirt then carried it into the adjoining laundry room.

“You come back dumber every time you hang out with that kid,” Brandy said.

“Your face is dumb.”

She rolled her eyes.

Matthew appraised his sister from over the rim of his Coke can. When they were younger they had been close. They had even been friends. They would watch horror movies together and piece together jigsaw puzzles and catch toads down at the mud pit at the end of their street. The past year, however, had brought a change to Brandy Crawly’s personality, just as it had gradually brought a change to her appearance. Her legs had lengthened, her hands looked longer, and her whole body seemed to have graduated toward adulthood in one subtle and prolonged breath. Her face had changed, too, though Matthew wasn’t sure if that was due to chemistry or the makeup she’d begun applying last year. And while he had needed Dwight Dandridge to point out the fact that she had grown breasts—what Dwight called “lady-tadies”—the evidence of them had become undeniable.

Perhaps these physical changes wouldn’t have bothered Matthew all that much had Brandy not also turned into such a bitch.

“Why don’t you go wash up?” his mother said, coming back into the kitchen. She opened the oven and peered in at whatever was glowing in there. “We’ll be eating in five minutes.”

“Okay.”

He cut through the living room, where the television was flickering in front of an empty sofa, then bounded up the stairs to the hallway bathroom. Tugging on the water and finagling the bar of Ivory soap from the soap dish, he lathered his face and hands, scrubbed them clean. Then he dipped his head beneath the faucet to wet his hair, raking his fingers along his scalp to get all the dirt and grit out. Cold water sprayed down his back, causing him to shiver. His shorts were grimy too, so he climbed out of them and scurried like a rabbit into his bedroom where he pulled on a fresh pair of shorts and a Transformers T-shirt. Atop his bookcase was his entry in this year’s science fair—three plastic cups filled with soil in which various seeds germinated. An ultraviolet lamp shone directly above the first cup while the second received only natural light from his bedroom windows. The third cup sat prisoner beneath a shoebox, receiving no sunlight at all. He permitted himself to peek under the shoebox just once a day, and he did this now. Unlike the other two cups, there were no greening buds curling up out of the soil, and no spidery roots pressed against the underside of the cup. It had been an experiment he’d read about in one of his father’s science and nature books…

From his bedroom window, he could see the open door of the detached garage, the multitude of junk heaped within. That had been his father’s junk; what purpose it served, Matthew Crawly had no idea. He didn’t think his mother had any idea either, though she did not appear to be in much of a hurry to dispose of it. In fact, it looked as though she had relocated the items to the higher shelves in preparation for last week’s storm, just as his father used to do when he still lived there. Matthew remembered being young, watching his father from this very window as his old man milled about in the yard, his denim-colored postal uniform dark with sweat, the shirt partially unbuttoned. He had watched his father smoke cigarettes beneath the garage’s awning then hurry across the yard to the house for dinner. Hugh Crawly had done this almost every night: smoked on the far side of the garage, where he thought he was hidden from everyone in the house. He’d slam the screen door just like Matthew did, and Matthew’s mother would yell at him, and his father would laugh his big-bellied laugh and that would be the end of it.

It was the end, all right, Matthew thought now…and there was a part of him that was frightened by the depth of what that meant, and the maturity of the thought. Why had his father left? With all that big-bellied laughter, was he covering up for something? Had he just had too much and decided never to come back? Worse still, had it been something Matthew had done? Had it been his fault that his father had picked up in the middle of the night and disappeared? Matthew didn’t know. And quite often, like right now, he felt he didn’t want to know.