The Cannibal Heart

1

About a hundred yards below the house, to the south, the woods began, and it was here that Luisa said the devils lived. Some of them were shut up in the old well, now gone to salt and useless, and covered with a concrete slab. The others lived in the swimming pool which had been boarded over so they wouldn’t escape.

Jessie tried to see the devils by lying on her stomach across the planks and peering through a knothole. Inside, there was nothing but blackness and a very faint rustling noise.

“I think I hear something,” Jessie said.

“That’s them.” Luisa hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on the planks with fierce delight. “If you don’t quit pestering me and following me around all the time I’ll let them loose. I’ll tell them to sneak into your room while you’re sleeping.”

“You wouldn’t dare.” But the protest was feeble. She knew Luisa would dare. She had, also, an uneasy feeling that if there were any devils in the woods, they belonged to Luisa and would obey her. Luisa wore a veil of mystery. Though she was only fifteen she was already different from other people, and Jessie respected this difference, and despised it, and was a little afraid of it, too. Luisa had wild dark eyes that she could roll up until only the whites were visible, like peeled grapes. She could turn her eyelids inside out by pressing them with her thumb, and when she combed her long black hair in the kitchen, it gave off sparks and made the music, coming from the radio, crackle and splutter. Luisa’s family was a little mysterious, too. Her mother, Carmelita, spoke nothing but Spanish — sometimes so fast and loud that Jessie’s ears twitched — and Luisa’s father, Mr. Roma, had skin as dark and creased as a walnut, and white kinky hair that he kept pressed down tight under a felt hat with two jay feathers stuck in the band.

“Luisa, are you really a Mexican?”

“Half.”

“What’s the other half?”

“As if you didn’t know.”

“I don’t.”

“You must be awfully ignorant for a child nearly nine.” Luisa got up, and stretched and yawned with a show of boredom, but Jessie could tell from her expression that Luisa was offended again. “There’s other nasty things in this woods you don’t know about, Jessie Banner.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t live here like me.”

“Now I do. We’re going to stay in California until school starts and...”

“You’re still only a renter. I’ve lived here ever since the house was built, practically before you were born. I know everything about it, and about Mrs. Wakefield, too.”

Jessie stirred, and sighed. Luisa was always doing that when she was offended, trapping her into asking questions and then leaving the questions half-answered, or not at all.

She had to ask, anyway; the trap was too tempting. “Who’s Mrs. Wakefield?”

“You’ll know soon enough. She’s coming to get some of her things she left behind. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. My father had a letter from her. She’s going to stay in Billy’s room.” Luisa put her hands on her hips in exaggerated disdain. “Now I suppose you’ll want to know who Billy is.”

Jessie shook her head and tried to look incurious. “I don’t care. Anyway, you’re only doing that.”

“Doing what, for goodness’ sake?”

“That. I know lots of Billys at school, anyway. Dozens.” This was true. Where she went to school, in New York, Billy was a very ordinary name. She didn’t understand how, when it came from Luisa’s mouth, it could sound so tantalizing. Spoken by Luisa, it was like one of the words that set off explosive giggling in the cloakrooms or on the playground.

Feigning indifference, she climbed down from the planks and began to pick the dirt out of her scraped knee. In just two weeks she had accumulated more scratches and cuts and bruises than she had in a year at home, and all over her legs and arms there were round red itchy patches that Mr. Roma said were fleabites. Evelyn, her mother, had been quite shocked at this and insisted they must be only mosquito bites, which seemed more respectable. But no, Mr. Roma said, there hadn’t been any mosquitoes for three years on account of the drought. Only fleas, small as pinheads and just as sharp and strong.

She dug her nails into one of the bites, until pain covered the itching. “What are the nasty things in the woods?”

“You’d be scared out of your skin, Jessie Banner.”

“I wouldn’t be.”

“You mustn’t tell a soul, promise on your brother’s blood.”

“I promise.”

“All right then. It’s a dead man.”

“Right here? Under the... the planks?”

“You really are ignorant. He’d rot under there. You just better go home to your mother and play with your dolls.”

“I hate dolls,” Jessie lied passionately. “I never play with dolls. Where’s the dead man?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.” Luisa rustled away through the fallen leaves, making a moaning eerie sound in the back of her throat.

“Luisa, wait for me! Luisa?”

But Luisa hid behind a tree and refused to answer to her name.

Jessie looked around carefully at the trees in the hope that she could spot a flutter of Luisa’s dress behind one of them, or find evidence of her presence in the sudden squawking of resentful jays, or the scuttling of lizards seeking cover in the brush.

Every tree stood bland, denying Luisa’s very existence. In the distance the sea muttered, and from under the planks that covered the dry pool came soft sounds like little unnamable things tittering in the dust below.

She put her hands over her ears and began to run. When she reached the edge of the cliff the muttering of the sea had swollen into a roar that drowned the other noises. She paused, gasping for breath and holding her arm tight against the stitch in her side.

From here she could see a thin grey ribbon of smoke rising from the kitchen chimney, and the barnlike garage on top of which Luisa lived in three rooms with her parents — quite exciting, not like other people who were forced to live in plain houses.

From a distance the big stone house seemed to be growing right out of the cliff like magic. She knew perfectly well it hadn’t grown, of course; it had been built, Luisa said, and Mrs. Wakefield had lived there with someone named Billy who wasn’t like the Billy Jessie knew at school.

She stooped and peered over the edge of the cliff so she could watch the shiny black cormorants swoop out from their nests in the holes of the cliff side and dive for fish. But she suddenly detested the big ravenous birds; and everything — the sea and the grey house, the fleabites on her legs and the woods pressing on her heels — seemed alien and monstrous. She wished she were back at home, walking in Central Park with one of her aunts, or riding jam-packed on the subway where there were so many people so very much alive that she couldn’t imagine dead ones. Her face squeezed up, as if it might, without asking her permission, begin to cry. She herself never cried, especially not if there was a chance that Luisa might be spying on her.

She rose and pushed her straight yellow hair back off her forehead. She began walking toward the house, whistling blithely and as loud as she could, in case Luisa was within earshot.