The Narrows(4)

“No way, dummy.”

They veered off Cemetery Road and headed across town. Even at this hour, the streets were mostly empty, and many of the shops along Hamilton Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, were dark and vacant, their plate-glass windows soaped over and their doors boarded up. Matthew imagined that he heard the autumn wind whistling through the ranks of empty storefronts as if through a system of caves. The arcade was gone now, along with the old pizza joint and the video store. The ice cream parlor where Brandy, Matthew’s sister, had worked two summers ago was gone as well; all that remained of it was a hollowed-out shell on the corner of Hamilton and Rapunzel, like something out of a movie about nuclear warfare.

Those stores that were still open and thriving had their front stoops ornamented with sandbag barricades. Muddy debris cluttered the sidewalk and, every once in a while, the boys had to step over fallen tree limbs rattling their brown, crunchy leaves in the wind. The last time Stillwater had flooded this badly, Matthew was five years old. His father had shored up the foundation of the house with sandbags and moved all his tools and equipment in the garage to the higher shelves. He had plugged up the exhaust pipes of the pickup truck and the old Dodge with tennis balls and wrapped them over with electrical tape. The water came, simmering at first in the street out in front of the Crawly house, the surface alive with dancing raindrops, the water itself oily and black like ink. Soon enough, the Narrows flooded and a torrent came gushing down the street and across the opposite field. From the living room windows, Matthew and Brandy had watched as the muddy water rose against the framework of the house. Things had been in that water. Brandy had readily pointed them out to him at the time—the bobbing head of a passing snake, the arched and moss-slickened back of an enormous turtle, someone’s cat clinging to an iceberg of Styrofoam. Plastic lawn furniture had washed across their backyard. To this day, Matthew could still recall the loud pop just before the power had blown out.

He wondered now if it flooded like that where his father was…

The traffic light at the intersection of Hamilton and Susquehanna—which was the only traffic light in Stillwater, unless you counted the blinking-yellow yield lights where Paxton Street merged with Route 40 on the far side of Haystack Mountain—was dark. Both boys darted across the street to Hogarth’s, the scalloped edging of the drugstore’s green-and-white canvas awning flapping in the wind. There were more sandbags here, along with overturned trash cans and mounds of sodden leaves, glittery and blackish-brown, smashed up against the front of the building. Some of the windows in the nearby shops boasted long spidery cracks, probably from items having been scooped up by the torrent and thrown against the glass. That mildew smell was here too, just as it was back home, and just as it had been all week at school. It seemed the air was clogged with rot.

Matthew stood before the drugstore’s front window in reverential silence. Dwight came up beside him, their mismatched reflections like two ghosts standing side by side in the smoked glass. Scraps of paper whipped against their shins and a single Styrofoam cup cartwheeled down the sidewalk toward them.

“See?” Dwight said.

Matthew stared longingly at the intricately detailed Dracula mask in the window, complete with realistic hair as dark and smooth as raven feathers. The vampire’s mouth was a ragged, fang-ringed hole from which exclamations of fake blood streamed in perfect ribbons. Its pallid skin looked as colorless as dough, the blackened pits of its eyes seeming to contain infinite space.

“Yeah. It’s still there,” Matthew said.

“I told you it would be.” Dwight sounded bored. “You can probably get it for cheap after Halloween.”

“Yeah,” Matthew said, disappointment evident in his voice. It meant nothing, having the Dracula mask after Halloween. What good would that do him?

“Hey,” said Dwight, suddenly perking up. “You think that was a vampire bat back in Miss Sleet’s classroom?”

“No. It was just a fruit bat or something.”

“A bat that eats fruit?”

“Or maybe it ate bugs.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know. I just know.”

“Vampires,” Dwight said…and the eyes of his ghostly counterpart suddenly lit up in the reflection of the drugstore window. “Maybe that’s what got that hairless boy.”

Matthew said nothing. He didn’t want to think about the hairless boy. In fact, he’d had nightmares about the boy since some kids in school had told him about it.

“How much are you short, anyway?” Dwight asked.

Matthew did the quick math in his head—he had a Superman lunchbox back in his bedroom where he kept his meager savings—and said, “Only about seven dollars.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“My allowance is three bucks a week.”

“Ask for an advance,” Dwight said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you get money before you do the work. My dad does it all the time at the shop.”

“That sounds like a rip. Who would do that?”

“I just said my dad does it at work.”

Matthew did not think his mother would give him an advance. Moreover, the fact that getting an advance was something Dwight’s father did, confirmed that it sounded like a rip-off. He stared at the mask in the drugstore’s window and thought about how cool it would be to have that mask for Halloween, to wear it with a black cape and the star-shaped pendant he’d already made out of cardboard covered in tinfoil, which was also salted away in his Superman lunchbox.