Dismember

THIRTEEN

Davy had been there for just over a week, and he’d almost gotten used to the little windowless room. The two-gallon bucket in the corner stank of his potty big and potty little. Sometimes, if he laid flat against the ground, the woodsy smell of the floorboards almost covered up the bad potty smell. Almost.

His bed was actually a pile of four blankets, the topmost a heavy bedspread he covered himself up with at night while he slept. It provided enough padding that he didn’t wake up too sore in the mornings, but it was so much worse than the race-car bed he had at home, which was marshmallow soft and covered with comfy pillows.

His pillow here was not much thicker than a folded-up t-shirt, and it had yellow and brown stains and no pillowcase. Davy lay in the dark with his head on the pillow and tried not to think about it.

At home, he had a dozen different pairs of jammies to choose from. His favorites were the blue footsie pajamas with the button-up hatch in the back his mommy and daddy had gotten him the year before for Christmas.

He had no jammies here, had to sleep in his day clothes, or in his undies if it got too hot, which it did sometimes without air-conditioning or a fan or even a cool breeze from a window.

Davy missed his bedroom windows. They looked out onto the back yard where Manny liked to play, where his and Georgie’s swing set waited for them to use it again and again. He missed watching his daddy push the lawnmower all around back there, missed the scent of the cut grass and even the smell of his daddy’s sweaty armpits after he finally finished and came inside.

His daddy was dead now. They were all dead.

As dark as the room was, Davy’s eyes had still opened up wide enough to see a little. He stared at the ceiling overhead, which dripped sometimes when it rained real hard. In the light, the ceiling was white with little bumps, cottage cheesy, but right now it looked like nothing, just a big gray shadow that might have been eight feet away or a billion miles.

Sometimes he wished he were dead, too. It might be better that way. Maybe, wherever his family was, he could be with them. But dying was scary. What if he didn’t get to be with his family? What if he just died and everything was dark and cold and empty?

He heard boot-steps coming down the hall. The man who always wore flannel shirts also always wore boots. Big clunky boots caked with mud and rocks, boots that Davy could barely pick up with both hands, although he’d only tried once.

The boot-steps stopped outside Davy’s door. The knob rattled, and then—

clack click.

Davy rolled onto his side and shut his eyes tight. Sometimes, at home, he pretended to sleep when it was time for school or church, but whether Mommy or Daddy came to get him, they always knew if he was faking, always yanked off his blankets and tickled him on his sides and told him to Get up, silly goose.

Mr. Boots didn’t always know. Sometimes Davy faked him out. Except for with his mommy and daddy, Davy had always been good at pretending.

He lay very still, facing the wall, seeing only the insides of his eyelids and trying to breathe the way a sleeping boy would: slow, steady.

Mr. Boots’s real name was Simon, but Davy never called him that, never called him anything but Sir. Except in his head, where he was always Mr. Boots.

Davy sensed him standing there, smelled the stink of his sweat, which was the opposite of his daddy’s lawn-mowing sweat, and heard the sound of air coming in and going out of his nose, a sound that was a little bit like Darth Vader but a little bit more like a rodeo bull.

Davy didn’t know what time it was, didn’t know for sure if it was night or day. He hadn’t been in the room for the whole seven days, but he’d been there for most of it, and time had gotten funny, the way it did in school when they were learning about math and the teacher said it had been an hour but it seemed closer to a month and a half.

If it was daytime, Mr. Boots might think he was taking a nap. Davy continued his sleep-breathing and waited.

Mr. Boots stood there for a long time, stinking and breathing—maybe waiting for his eyes to adjust the way Davy’s had—the floorboards sometimes creaking beneath him. He stood there until Davy wanted to scream and finally took one heavy boot-step toward him.

Smack.

Davy stopped breathing now, knowing it was a mistake but unable to control himself.

Smack smack.

Davy tensed the way somebody must do when he’s about to get punched in the mouth or shot up by the firing squad, but what he got instead were a pair of slimy lips worse than two wet slugs on the very tip of his exposed ear.

The smack of the kiss was louder than an exploding bomb, or at least louder than the bombs on TV, and the moment Mr. Boots’s mouth was gone, Davy wanted to reach up with both hands and rub at the slime it had left behind until his skin came off.

Hardly moving, he forced himself to take a few more slow breaths, though less steadily than he might have hoped, and though the smell of Mr. Boots up close was even worse than the stink coming out of his bucket right after he went potty big.

Mr. Boots chuffed in a way that reminded Davy of Manny, a sound Davy had always thought sounded funny coming from the dog but was just a disgusting, hacking cough from Mr. Boots.

Breathe. Slow. Steady. Don’t gag.

Davy sensed the man backing away from his makeshift bed, his boots, for whatever reason, sounding much quieter in reverse. He remained tensed, his muscles almost quivering like he’d stayed out in the snow too long. But he didn’t feel a bit cold, was actually almost sweating.

Mr. Boots stood at the doorway again. After a minute, there came another loud smack, and Davy’s scream was so close that he actually felt it in his throat. But there was only that one step, and then finally Mr. Boots turned out of the room and closed the door behind him.

Davy’s hand shot up to his ear and rubbed until he thought he really had taken off a layer of skin. He waited for the clacking sound of the door’s lock, but it didn’t come. For a week, Davy had heard the same two sounds: click (the door latching) and clack (the lock). They always came paired together, like Bert and Ernie or ice cream and hot fudge. Click clack or clack click, depending on whether Mr. Boots was coming or going. Only this time there had been only the click, and that was wrong.

Davy rolled onto his other side, facing the door and still rubbing at his ear.

Maybe it was a trick. Maybe Mr. Boots was standing on the other side of the door with his doubled-up belt in his hand, ready to spank Davy’s bottom till it bled, grinning through those slug-like lips of his. Or maybe he really believed Davy was asleep and didn’t think it mattered if the door was locked or not, that Davy would never know the difference.

Davy pushed himself up on his hands and knees, listening. He heard only the blankets rustling beneath him and the thunderstorm that was his heartbeat.

He didn’t stand up but crawled to the door instead, a trickle of sweat running down his spine until the waistband of his shorts soaked it up, his hands and knees slapping softly against the hardwood. When he got to the door, he dropped flat and tried looking out through the slim space beneath.

It was dark in the room, a little brighter in the hall, and if someone had been standing outside the door, Davy thought he’d have seen him. Especially if his boots were as big and dirty as a dinosaur’s feet.

He watched for another minute or two anyway, as if Mr. Boots might suddenly appear from out of nowhere.

Pushed against the wall beside the door was a metal bowl that Davy had eaten tomato soup from earlier. Beside it, resting in a congealed puddle of that soup, was a giant metal spoon that had been too big for Davy’s mouth but that he’d finally managed to sip from the way a grown-up might have sipped from a shovel blade. The bowl didn’t look like any soup bowl Davy had ever seen. To Davy, it looked like the dish they used for dog food back home. It was heavy, its bottom weighted to keep it from tipping over. Davy picked it up, leaving the spoon where it was, and swung it through the air. It whooshed, and Davy smiled just a little.

If Mr. Boots was on the other side of the door, at least Davy would have something to use as a shield, or maybe even a weapon. He hefted the bowl and took a deep breath.

Davy reached for the doorknob still expecting a trick, a trap, half assuming he would be electrocuted when his fingers wrapped around the metal, but the doorknob felt cool in his hand. The room in general was hot, and the knob shouldn’t have been any different, but it was. Davy twisted it slowly, hearing the creaking from within, the click when the door unlatched from the frame and swung toward him.

The hinges creaked. Davy grimaced and waited for the pounding boot-steps to come down the hall, for Mr. Boots to discover and punish him.

No boot-steps. No Mr. Boots.

He retightened his grip on the bowl and swung the door in fast, thinking one quick squeak was better than a whole bunch of little ones. He kept hold of the door so it wouldn’t slam into the bedroom wall and took his first quiet step into the hallway.

His bare feet padded across the floor. His sneakers were somewhere else in the house. Mr. Boots had allowed him to wear them once, when the two of them had gone into the back yard to chop firewood, which had seemed to a sweating Davy like the most unnecessary chore ever, but then he’d taken them away again and left Davy barefoot.

Davy padded farther into the hall, looking back over his shoulder, then forward, and then back again so fast he almost lost his balance and fell. The bathroom—the real bathroom with the running water and the toilet paper and the sink, which he had still not been allowed to use—was behind him. Mr. Boots’s bedroom was ahead on the right, his door closed and no light coming from underneath.

Davy almost tiptoed. He walked with his arms held up in the air at his sides the way he’d seen cat burglars do in the cartoons.

The bowl was too heavy to lift for long, and once Davy had passed the dark bedroom door, he lowered his arms and continued. The bowl brushed once against his knee and felt popsicle cold.

Now that he had left his room, he could tell it was night. The single hallway window, which had no curtains or shades or blinds or anything, might as well have been painted black. If Davy hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the whole house was buried way down deep in the ground, like one of those nuclear bunkers movie people sometimes used to hide away from whatever war they happened to be in. But it wasn’t totally dark. A light shone somewhere on the other side of the house, in the kitchen or the dining room maybe, and Davy could just make out the floor ahead of him and the few pictures hanging on the hallway walls to either side.

The place wasn’t huge. Besides the two bedrooms and the bathroom, there was only a small kitchen, a dining room (not much bigger than the breakfast nook they had back home and nowhere near the size of their dining room), and a living room with a sofa and a couple of stinky old armchairs that might have come from a dump or the side of the road.

There was no television set and no telephone. The fridge was a rusty thing similar to one his grandma and grandpa had, what they called an icebox, and must not have kept food very cold. At least, nothing Mr. Boots had ever served Davy had been any colder than room temperature, and he had yet to find a single piece of ice in his water, which was the only thing he’d had to drink since being brought here.

He missed soda, missed milk, even missed the tomato juice his daddy sometimes drank, though Davy thought it tasted like drinking metal. If he got out of here, the first thing he’d do was get a great big bottle of Dr. Pepper and suck it down to the very last drop.

He moved through the shadowy living room and into the dining room, which was almost filled by a warped wooden table and a pair of chairs that weren’t anything close to matching. The light came from the kitchen, through a doorway on the other side of the table, but Davy didn’t go that way.

Still holding the bowl, holding it more out of habit now than out of any fear he might need to use it in a fight for his life, Davy headed for the back door. It was the door he’d gone through when they’d chopped wood that day, a door with a whole mess of glass all separated into teensy panes by crooked, chipped strips of wood. Davy would have rushed right out into the dark night, although he couldn’t see through the glass in the door until he’d practically pressed his nose up against it, but before he could let himself out, something on the floor caught his attention.

He bent down, placed the bowl softly on the linoleum so it wouldn’t make a sound, and picked the thing up. A flashlight. He flicked the switch to see if it worked and was almost blinded by the dazzling ray of light that shot into his face.

He squeezed his eyes shut and blindly flipped off the light, but for a long time afterward, bolts of purple lightning streaked across his vision like something out of a science fiction rainstorm. Stupid, Davy thought, knowing he should have been prepared for the shock of the light after so much time in the dark and that he should at least have pointed the flashlight away from himself before turning it on. He blinked his watering eyes and waited until the lightning storm died down.

Okay, Davy thought. He left the bowl on the floor, deciding he probably wouldn’t need it anymore, and kept the flashlight instead. It seemed a little strange, Mr. Boots leaving the flashlight on the floor that way, where it could get kicked and maybe broken, but Davy guessed Mr. Boots wasn’t any sort of normal. He let himself out of the house, a rectangle of light and his own long shadow beating him through the doorway.

Since the car crash, Davy’s back had been a little sore when he twisted it too much or tried to move too fast. The wood chopping, which for Davy had actually consisted mostly of carrying armload after armload of quartered logs from the chopping block to the wood pile along the side of the house, and endless hours spent lying on the skimpily covered floors probably hadn’t helped. As he moved through the back yard, Davy felt the twinge just above his bottom and tried to ignore it.

He stepped out of the pooled light and into the darkness, flipping on the flashlight again, not looking directly at the beam this time, pointing it ahead of him, into the woods. The ax jutted out from the tree stump where Mr. Boots had left it. Beyond stood a wheelbarrow that might not have been used in a million years, its front tire flat and almost completely hidden by the grass grown up tall around it. Davy passed these things without a second thought and hurried into the trees. Whenever his beam of light found a sharp rock or a pointy-looking stick on the ground, he moved carefully around it, mindful of his bare feet.

He hadn’t paid much attention when they’d come to the house for the first time, had been worrying more about the stranger with the wormy lips than about which direction was which or where they’d left the truck. Now, hurrying deeper into the woods, Davy wasn’t really sure where he was going, but it didn’t matter. Even if he’d known where the truck was, he couldn’t drive it. He was just a kid, with legs so short they wouldn’t have reached to the pedals, and he didn’t know the first thing about driving except that it was something mommies and daddies did. Not little kids. He’d never planned on heading for the truck. The first thing to do was get himself far far away from Mr. Boots. Then he’d worry about roads and directions.

He stepped up onto a fallen tree. The crumbling bark shifted beneath his feet, and for a second, it almost felt like walking through sand at the beach, until he stepped off again and onto hard dirt, pine needles, fallen leaves, and low-growing brush. His flashlight danced in his hands, shining from tree trunks to the ground ahead, from the limbs above to those low-hanging ones that tried to smack him in the face.

Once, he thought he saw a pair of glowing eyes tracking him from the shadows, but when he turned his flashlight in that direction, the eyes were gone and he told himself they’d probably never been there at all. He heard some sounds he knew, hooting owls and croaking frogs, and others he didn’t.

It was August, almost Davy’s birthday, as a matter of fact, and although it had been warm inside the house, it was a little nippy out here in the mountain breeze. Davy wished he’d changed into a pair of pants and maybe a long-sleeved shirt, but he hadn’t exactly had a lot of planning time. And if he was wishing for things, he might as well wish for a pair of shoes too, and hey, why not a laser gun and a team of trained tigers so he could run at the house instead of away from it and shoot Mr. Boots into a thousand little screaming pieces of tiger food?

The flashlight shone on the white trunk of a gnarled birch, and for a second Davy thought he was looking at a ghost. He flinched away and stepped on something sharp that cut the heel of his foot. He slid to a stop, flicked the flashlight’s beam to the white tree again to be sure it really wasn’t a ghost, set the flashlight down on the ground, and rubbed at his stinging foot.

If he hadn’t stopped just then, he might never have found the clearing, might have kept on running until either some dark woods monster got him or he found someone to help him and bring him away to safety.

After rubbing at his sole enough to cake dirt into the wound and stop the bleeding, he let go and stepped down. The foot throbbed a little, but Davy thought he’d be able to go on. He reached for the flashlight but didn’t pick it up right away. The beam shone just past the birch and into the empty space beyond.

Davy stared.

He guessed these woods probably had a lot of clearings, although he hadn’t really thought about it until just that moment, had pictured himself wandering deeper and deeper into the forest with endless trees stretching out in every direction except behind, where Mr. Boots slept in his sprung cage.

Davy would have picked up the light and continued his escape, except he thought he saw something there beyond the ghostly birch, something unnaturally shiny. He grabbed the flashlight and pointed it in that direction. The light came back to him from the many shattered pieces of what first appeared to be a broken mirror.

Davy moved closer, the flashlight poked out in front of him like a gun or a sword, his cut foot burning with every step. Not until he’d passed the twisted, white tree did he realize what was really out there in that otherwise empty space, and by then it was too late to unsee it.

The station wagon had taken quite a beating during its run in with the moose and the roadside trees, so much so that it hardly looked like a car anymore. Davy had gone with his mommy once to an art show at the college downtown and looked at a room full of things she’d called apstract sculpsure, or something close to that, things that had looked trashy to Davy but that he’d pretended to be interested in because she’d brought him down there without Daddy or Georgie for a fun mommy-son day. The station wagon looked like one of those pieces of art to Davy, something somebody might have made out of a bunch of broken pieces of washing machines and toasters and lawnmowers.

He stood looking at the car for a long time, wanting to go over and peek inside but wanting at the same time to run away as fast as he could. Eventually, curiosity won out, and Davy limped across the clearing.

Overhead, the moon shone out from behind a bank of wispy clouds. It was just a thin thing, pale, a fingernail clipping. Without the canopy overhead, Davy could almost see without the flashlight, but he left it on just the same and watched his reflection swim across the surface of the station wagon’s intact windows.

They were all inside. Davy swung the beam from the front seat to the back, then to the ground, and he threw up his tomato soup. The vomit was red, bloody looking; Davy wiped away the last dangling strand and dared another look into the car.

More windows were missing than were left, and the smell from inside was worse than the potty bucket and Mr. Boots’s armpits combined. If Davy hadn’t thrown up before gagging on the horrendous stench, he certainly would have after.

Daddy. Mommy. Georgie. Manny was in there too, his bloated head twisted to the side and his tongue sticking out from between his teeth, so thick and gray it might have been a piece of uncooked sausage. Davy’s stomach twisted again, but there was nothing left inside to come out, and he ended up coughing hard and spitting up nothing more than a mouthful of saliva.

Mommy and Daddy sat in the same seats they had during the crash, their bodies strapped in place by their seatbelts, but both leaning inward so that Mommy’s puffy head almost touched the empty bowl where Daddy’s brain used to be. One of Mommy’s eyes was twice the size of the other and about to pop out, and although Davy tried not to look at it, he couldn’t seem to turn away.

This was his mommy, the same mommy who’d taken him to the apstract sculpsure show, the same mommy who tickled him when he pretended to sleep and called him a silly goose. He retched again, but his mouth had gone completely dry, and this time he spat out nothing but stinky air.

He shone the trembling light into the back seat across the bodies of his brother and his dog. Manny lay up against the backrest, his too-big head and sausage tongue in Georgie’s lap. Georgie, his mouth open wide and full of flies and wriggling maggots. Georgie, whose t-shirt and flesh punched out in the middle of his tummy where he’d been pinned to the tree that rainy night a week ago.

Spread throughout the car were the remains of their camping supplies: a sleeping bag (the one he’d peed in?), a skillet, torn clothing and toiletries—everything covered in blood and mud and insects.

Davy hadn’t realized he was crying until the sopping neck of his shirt slid down his chest. He dropped into a sitting position, pressed his back against the car’s wrinkled back door, pulled his knees to his chest, and sobbed.

His family. All gone. Left in the car to rot, all gross smelling and icky looking and dead.

Dead.

And Davy knew what worms-for-lips, gap-toothed, boots-wearing monster had left them there. He slammed his fist into the ground beside him and wiped his eyes and running nose with his shirtsleeve.

He thought about the things he’d lost: his family, his real life, his freedom.

Except…no, he hadn’t lost that last one. Not yet. He’d gotten his freedom back, hadn’t he? He’d escaped.

Davy, still crying but gaining control of himself, pushed away from the car and up onto his feet. He walked away from the station wagon without looking back. The moon above him disappeared for a second behind an especially thick cloud, then reappeared and shone its sputtering candle’s light.

Davy had almost re-entered the woods when the beam from his flashlight arced across the birch once more, showing him again the ghost’s face he’d thought he’d seen earlier. Except this time the face wasn’t in the tree, it was in front of it, and it wasn’t a ghost at all.

Mr. Boots uncrossed his arms and smiled.

Davy wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there and watching, and he guessed it didn’t really matter. He couldn’t run away now, barefoot and still feeling sick to his stomach; he wouldn’t get twenty feet.

The flashlight. He realized too late that it had given him away, that he might as well have been running through the forest shouting at the top of his lungs and covered in glow-in-the-dark paint. He could try turning it off, or throwing it in one direction and then running in the other, but he didn’t think that would fool Mr. Boots for very long, and probably not at all.

Instead, he gave up. Mr. Boots was a grown-up, and Davy was just little. He didn’t know how he’d thought he could get away in the first place. He walked to the man with his head hung low and handed over the flashlight.

Mr. Boots took the light and tapped it against his pants leg like maybe he was thinking about something—maybe about smacking Davy in the head. Mr. Boots stared, the light swinging back and forth across his leather footwear, reflecting off the mud in a way that almost made the boots look like they were on fire.

Davy waited, half ready to pull back if a punch was thrown, half wanting to stand there and take it like the man he wasn’t. Maybe the punch would kill him, and he could be with his family after all.

Mr. Boots finally made a strange clicking sound in his mouth and stopped tapping the flashlight. He said, “Well, I guess I’d of done the same thing.” Then he nodded, as if happy with what he’d said, and motioned for Davy to lead the way back toward the house.

Davy did so, but not before taking one last look at the station wagon.

He knew that someday he would become a man very unlike Mr. Boots, and when that day came, it would be his responsibility to fix what had been wronged. His responsibility.

When the time was right, Davy would be ready.

He walked through the woods without bothering to dodge the sharp rocks and sticks, and by the time they reached the house, the bottoms of his feet were just about slimier and grosser than Mr. Boots’s cracked lips.