The Narrows(78)
“Trash needs to go out to the curb,” Patti said around the cigarette jutting from between her lips. “Your father’s probably gonna forget when he gets home. I’m going to bed.”
If he even makes it home tonight at all, Dwight thought, already scrambling to his feet while pawing the sleep from his eyes. There had been more than enough instances—where Delmo Dandridge, after a night of getting shit-faced down at Crossroads, had either fallen asleep in his car in the tavern’s parking lot (or on the side of the road) or been hauled into jail—for there to be more than an ounce of truth to Dwight’s musing. He shut the TV off and headed down the hall where his sneakers sat in a heap beside the front door, while his mother climbed the creaking stairs to go to bed. Gideon, the German shepherd, lifted his head up off his paws. The dog had been snoozing in the foyer and he looked now at Dwight with the sleepy disorientation Dwight himself had felt just a minute earlier when his mother’s toes had jabbed at his ribs.
“Good boy,” Dwight told the dog. Gideon rested his head back down on his front paws and narrowed his eyes to slits.
The house was cold and he assumed it was even colder outside, so he snagged a sweatshirt with a John Deere logo on it from the hall closet and tugged it on over his head before he stepped out onto the front porch.
Outside, the night was absolute. Insects and frogs exchanged heated dialogue in the long grass and the three-quarters moon looked sharp enough to cleave a wound in the sky. The trash cans were at the side of the house, and Dwight hurried down the porch steps now, not pausing to look around and survey the rest of the property. It was the same way he went down into the basement to retrieve tools for his old man when Delmo got what he called the “fixin’ bug”—a quick dash down the stairs, grab the item, and a quick dash back up. Slam the door, too, for good measure. (It was always on these dashes back up the stairs that he swore he heard a second pair of feet hurrying up right behind him, moving at the same speed as he was but just a half-second off.) Taking out the trash was no different…particularly since he’d been hearing someone moving around outside the house at night.
Those noises outside his window began roughly around the time the hairless boy’s body was found along the banks of Wills Creek. It might have been a week earlier, though he couldn’t remember exactly…though after the boy’s body was discovered, he recalled thinking about those noises he’d been hearing and wondering if whatever had gotten the hairless boy had also spent the previous week lurking outside the Dandridge house. Or…worse yet…he had wondered if those noises had been the boy himself. Had he been lost? Searching for help? He quickly realized it couldn’t have been the boy since the noises continued after the boy’s body was found. The boy was dead; the noises were made by someone or something else.
At the side of the house, Dwight found the two metal trash cans overflowing with bags of refuse. He tried to drag them both along at the same time but they were too heavy. Instead, he grabbed the handle of one in both hands and, sliding backward through the muddy lawn, pulled the first can around the side of the house and out to the curb. It was on his return trip back for the second can that he heard the noise.
Dwight’s feet skidded to a halt in the dirt. He jerked his head to the right, where overgrown foliage and bamboo stalks rose up over a rusted and bent chain-link fence like aboriginal spears. Suddenly, he was aware that his mouth had gone dry.
“Is someone there?” he croaked. The words practically stuck to the roof of his mouth like peanut butter. “Dad? You back there?” It wasn’t unusual for someone to drive Delmo home when he’d had too much to drink, and he often passed out in the yard until morning came to sober him up…
The foliage rustled but no answer came.
Dwight thought of Miss Sleet’s classroom, now with those two empty desks—Matthew’s and Billy Leary’s—as incontrovertible as craters made from bombs dropped from a great height. It was the loudest silence Dwight Dandridge had ever heard in his life.
He thought he saw some of the bamboo shoots separate.
His compulsion was to run back into the house and forget the other trash can. But then he thought of his father’s wrath when he sobered up the following afternoon and found the second trash can still overflowing against the side of the house, and for whatever ill-defined reason, Dwight found himself even more terrified of that scenario. So he dashed quickly back around the side of the house, grabbed the second trash can by the handle with both hands, and hurriedly hauled it across the lawn to the curb, too. When he’d finished, breathing heavily and prickling with perspiration under the John Deere sweatshirt, he staggered a few steps backward toward the front of the house, his eyes still trained on the bamboo shoots and the rustling, heavy foliage. There was definitely something back there.
He reached down and pried one of the walkway flagstones up out of the dirt. The thing was heavier than it looked and as cold as a thick sheet of ice. Like a discus thrower, Dwight heaved the large flagstone over the fence and into the bushes. The bushes rattled and some of the bamboo shoots bent out at awkward angles. There came a resounding thong! as the stone struck one of the galvanized fenceposts.
Frozen with fear, Dwight waited for whatever was back there to spring out and charge him.
But nothing happened. And when he regained mobility a moment later, he ran back into the house, certain that he heard footsteps chasing after him as he sprinted up the porch steps.