Devil House(99)
My parents divorced when I was five, and my mom remarried and we moved away, south of San Francisco; and that, until recently, was the end of those times for me.
2.
OUR HOUSE IN MILPITAS was a duplex. One of its rooms had an electric fireplace, with a plastic log that glowed orange when you flipped a wall switch. Inside the log was some rotating element to give the illusion of the movement of flame, but the entire apparatus was for mood: it didn’t generate any actual heat. On the day we moved in, I was thrilled by its novelty; I remember my mother and stepfather exchanging glances of pity over my excitement at this chintzy feature of the best place they’d been able to afford.
Gage’s letters arrived about once a month for the first year of my two-year tenure in Milpitas. It is a strange feature of the partial amnesia that blots out stray spans of time in my memory that I remember nothing about my sixth birthday except a card from Gage. I’d made new friends in town; there must have been a party, my mother was a natural at kids’ parties. But the whole day, in my memory now, exists only for the remembering of Gage’s reports from home.
He always talked about a time when we’d meet again, when we’d be able to compare notes on our lives: which TV shows were cool (the Planet of the Apes weekly series) and which weren’t, no matter who said otherwise (Emergency!); what candies were keepers (Fun Dip, also known as Lik-M-Aid; Wacky Wafers) and which ones you traded for the keepers because some people had bad taste (Jolly Ranchers, excepting, occasionally, the cinnamon and watermelon flavors). I would write back, hoping my life seemed more exotic than it was.
I lacked Gage’s gift for the through line, but I scored a few points here and there. The monster movie being filmed in town, about a creature who ate all the garbage cans (The Milpitas Monster); the 45 rpm record of its theme song that I played on my small stand-alone record player. My orders from the Scholastic Book Club, always aspiring a grade or two above my actual comprehension. The small black-and-white TV that my mother and stepfather allowed me to keep in my bedroom after they bought a color TV for the living room.
The TV was a big deal. I considered myself a book person, but every kid in the seventies knew all the action was on TV. I wrote Gage about the obscure pleasures of staying up late with the sound down low, discovering movies like The Crawling Eye and Twisted Brain; he told me about Ellery Queen Mysteries and Night Gallery. After a year, a month between letters became six weeks, and then eight. We kept our connection alive, but childhood is a busy place, and my new town had stories of its own to tell.
* * *
I MET DARLA when she was even newer to the block than me; she lived in the duplex opposite mine. Her father was in the military, or had been; I have only the vaguest visual memory of him, standing in front of their unit on a sunny day, his hair neatly cropped. Most of the grown-up men in my orbit looked like professors or hippies. For me, Darla’s dad stood out.
We walked to and from school together sometimes. She loved to tell stories, tall tales in which everybody or almost everybody died. I remember most vividly one in which a curse, or possibly a ghost, ended up causing a woman’s leg to swell to twenty or thirty times its natural size—a woman who’d heard one day of the curse, or the ghost, and said aloud to all who cared to hear that she didn’t believe in it.
The next morning, she was found dead, her gigantic leg having broken down the door to her house from the inside. That was all there was to it—the rumor of the hex, and its effect; Darla’s stories tended to orbit one or two gruesome details, and she insisted that this one was local, a woman who’d lived down the street.
“That’s not true,” I said on the morning she told me this tale. “That thing with her leg, that didn’t happen.”
“All my stories are true!” she said in response, making sure I saw the fierce determination in her eyes; this is among my most vivid recollections of Milpitas, of its sidewalks and rounded curbs in grey concrete, the secluded feel of its neighborhoods imparting just the right air for wondering whether a thing had happened this way, or that way, or some third way not yet imagined, or perhaps not at all.
* * *
OUR HOUSE GREW CHAOTIC; not all houses are built to protect the people inside them. For a season we lived with my father in San Luis Obispo again, weighing our options. I was old enough to get an allowance—a quarter—which I spent on two-cent candies and packages of stickers or trading cards. Wacky Packages were new and hot. Any boy whose bike didn’t sport several stickers was out of touch.
Gage even had the big poster, the one you could get by saving up twelve wrappers and sending in two dollars; I admired it the first time I saw it after moving back to town.
“I know,” he said, “but they had something even cooler than Wacky Packages a while ago. Check it out.” He dug around in a bulging box of old toys and Super Balls until he found a repurposed Band-Aid tin. Inside were cards with scenes from horror movies—vampires, mad scientists—captioned by Borscht Belt one-liners (“Look Ma, no fillings,” a vampire’s mouth agape, her fangs dripping blood). There was a woozy gravity in the moment. I’d been away for almost two years, but we were still the same boys who used to play “Frankenstein’s Revenge” in the driveway—a game in which one plays the monster, pulling at imaginary chains that bind him to the garage door, while the other plays the scientist or his misshapen assistant, mocking and tormenting the creature until all hell breaks loose.