 The
Dead Kid
Gillian King
nominated for 2008
Pushcart Prize
Frankie Thomas was a kid we all
knew, a kid we all picked on at recess because he was slow
and fat and lousy at kickball. He lived on the same street
as me and my very best friend Jean. Our street was like
this: my house, the mean boys’, the Thomas’s, Jean’s.
The mean
boys were Jimmer and Ted, eleven and thirteen. They were
the kind of kids who always looked dirty. They smoked,
swore, shot bottle rockets at me and Jean, and always tried
to look up our skirts and down our shirts, even before there
was anything to see. I pretended I wasn’t afraid of them,
but Jean and I made wide arches to the other side of the
street when we went back and forth between our houses, that
was if we could keep ourselves from breaking into a sprint.
Jimmer and Ted chased people sometimes, and when they wanted
to catch someone, they did.
They always
caught Frankie.
—
In fifth grade, Frankie
disappeared. His body was found about a year later in the
town dump. This was back before our town had curb-side
trash pick-up, before we even had curbs in most places. The
dump was an adventure. There were no rules about what could
be thrown away and what couldn’t. There was no recycling,
no eco-awareness, just two big holes in the ground: one for
things that would burn and one for things that wouldn’t.
Mr. Dunbar
was the dump keeper. He always wore the same pair of denim
coveralls. They were the color of summer thunderheads from
grit and the soot of burning garbage. His face had pocks,
craters, and dark permanent ripples of wrinkles, and looked
like it had been left out in the sun too long and picked at
by crows. A face that couldn’t smile. Kids said Mr. Dunbar
stayed out all night on the porch of his leany shack,
sleeping with his eyes open and his shotgun cocked, to guard
the dump from trespassers. Whatever he saw, wild dogs or
bear or drunk teenagers, he shot and threw into the fire
pit.
Jean and I
could make it to the dump in twenty minutes when we took the
path through the woods. Ten minutes if we were running away
from our mothers or the mean boys.
If we got to
the dump early enough, we’d get to see Mr. Dunbar start the
trash fires with gasoline. This was my favorite part: the
rush and whoosh of the first fire ball, the hot blast
reddening my cheeks and blowing back my hair, the black
garbage bags being licked open by flame, the wavy swirls of
heat and smoke flying up past the garbage, over the
treetops, to heaven.
Sometimes
Mr. Dunbar singed himself—got too close and came away with
blacker sleeves and shorter char-tipped hair. He’d climb
out of the fires, eyes cold and coaly, coveralls smoking,
and he’d cuss, “Hot shit.” Jean and I would scurry out of
his way.
Six to four
the dump was like a flea market without tables. There were
treasures around the pits you could take if you paid old
Dunbar a dollar a haul. I found one roller-skate and Jean
found a bike without a seat. She had to ride it standing
up, but it was a good bike. There were other good things
there too, like board games and jigsaw puzzles with most all
their pieces, and doll parts: heads and limbs and torsos
that sometimes fit together right like the pretty new dolls
in shop windows, the kind me and Jean were saving up to
get. Once we found a shoebox full of kittens, still blind
and hairless. Jean and I gave them all names and warm milk.
We longed for the time when their hair would grow in, when
they’d look like real cats we could hold and brush and
love. But they died during the night and my parents made me
take them back to the dump.
—
Everyone thought Frankie’d been
kidnapped by some child-rapist, or eaten by a pack of dogs,
or just wandered away somewhere and didn’t have sense enough
to come home. People combed the woods and sent rescue
divers to the bottoms of all the lakes around town, and the
Ben Franklin on Main Street sold out of blue ribbons—blue
was Frankie’s favorite color—because everyone wanted to show
their support for the Thomas family.
And even
though our parents were paranoid about curfews and stray
dogs and white vans, they were extra nice to us for a while
too: talking sweeter, hugging tighter, buying more ice
cream.
The Thomas
family kind of fell apart without Frankie. He was their
only child, and they loved him even if he was fat and slow
and lousy at kickball. For weeks, Mrs. Thomas stopped going
to her job and stopped leaving the house for fear her baby
would come home and she wouldn’t be there to wrap her arms
around him and feed him cookies and assure him he’d been
missed. She was constantly baking batches and batches of
oatmeal raisin cookies, one pan after another, from the time
Frankie went missing to well after his funeral. And no one
was allowed to eat the cookies. Frankie’s cookies. But
Jean and I could smell them baking from the street when Mrs.
Thomas opened up her kitchen windows and the breeze blew
right.
Mr. Thomas
spent as much time out of the house as he could, wandering
around town with rumpled clothes, wet eyes, and quivering
lips, asking everyone he passed, “You seen Frankie? You seen
my boy?” Most people tried to avoid him after the first
couple weeks when the searches were called off and it was
widely assumed Frankie was dead.
—
Frankie had been gone maybe
four months, and his blue ribbons were fading to gray on the
trees around town. Jean and I were playing in the stretch
of street between our houses. We decided to put Frankie’s
ribbons to better use and gathered them up from every yard
except the Thomas’s to decorate Jean’s seatless bike.
“We’ll be
princesses,” Jean said.
“We’ll be
older,” I said, “like seventeen.” So we laced ribbons
through the spokes and tied ribbons to the handlebars so
they’d fly out like streamers when we rode. We tied bows to
the bike’s steel stump where the seat should have been. We
braided ribbons into each other’s hair. Then we were all
dolled-up and ready to ride.
The bike was
beautiful. And we were beautiful, too.
I sat on the
bike’s handlebars, Jean peddled standing up, and we paraded
around waving the cupped-hand stiff-wristed wave of county
fair queens.
We didn’t
think anyone was watching, but Mrs. Thomas was watching.
She was always watching, waiting for Frankie. We heard her
front door open and slam shut and we heard her crunching up
the gravel driveway. She was running at us. Jean tried to
push back on the foot brakes and stop the bike. I tried not
to fall off the handlebars.
Mrs. Thomas wore a pink robe and a pair of her husband’s
slip-on loafers. Her red hair was matted up in piles on her
head. She came up on us quick. Jean couldn’t stop the
bike. We couldn’t get away from Mrs. Thomas and we couldn’t
go around her. She sidestepped us, grabbed onto our
shoulders, and pushed. I fell off the handlebars. The road
rushed up and jarred against me. Jean was pinned to the
pavement, half on and half under the bike. Then, Mrs.
Thomas was on us. Scratching, slapping, tearing, trying to
rip the ribbons off bike and bodies, out of hair and
spokes.
“These are
Frankie’s ribbons,” she said. She seemed to have more than
two hands. She was hurting me everywhere, but I didn’t try
to stop her. I just squeezed my eyes shut and lay there in
the road. Jean was crying somewhere behind me. Mrs. Thomas
was screaming over us. “Frankie’s going to see these and
come home.”
She stopped
clawing and stood up. I opened my eyes. Mrs. Thomas
blotted out the world. She was huge, pink, and heaving.
Her hands were filled with hair and ribbons. She turned and
left us whimpering on the pavement.
—
Mr. Dunbar is the one who found
the body. He was at the dump digging around in the pit—the
one where things weren’t burned—looking for scrap-metal he
could use or sell. He found Frankie in an old
refrigerator. Frankie must have crawled in not knowing the
door would latch. Not knowing he wouldn’t be able to crawl
out. There were no signs of struggle or foul play, just
dead decaying little Frankie curled up, thumb in mouth,
waiting to be found.
We played together when we were
babies, Frankie and me, before it mattered who was friends
with who. I’d like to say that I stuck up for him, that I
was brave when he couldn’t be and helped him when he
couldn’t help himself or, at the very least, that I left him
alone. I didn’t.
I made fun
of him, too. I tripped him sometimes and flicked his pink
earlobes when it was cold out, and laughed when other people
laughed at him.
I wasn’t
proud. I wasn’t fast or pretty or rich, either. And I
didn’t have many friends except Jean. It could have been me
who got beat up and pushed down all the time, who most days
went hungry because bullies stole my change, who pissed in
my pants so I wouldn't have to face whoever was waiting for
me in the bathroom. But it wasn’t me, because it was
Frankie.
—
There was a dare, after Frankie
was out of the dump and in the ground, in his coffin that
was so much like his refrigerator I wanted to put magnets on
it at the funeral, after his mom and dad moved away because
they couldn’t bear being called ‘the dead kid’s parents’,
after every K through twelver in town found out how he
suffocated alone in the dark in the pit in the Kenmore 500
Koolmark T.
This dare
couldn’t be done in Frankie’s particular refrigerator. That
one was thrown into the fire pit. All the men, all the
fathers in town gathered to watch, and when all that could
be burned had burned away, they pulled the refrigerator’s
metal carcass out of the pit and let Frankie’s dad beat it
with a sledgehammer. Mr. Thomas’s hands were blistered and
bloody. He screamed at the refrigerator, not in any kind of
words, just in pain, until somebody dragged him away and
took him to the tavern to drink, to forget for awhile, and,
hopefully, to pass out. Mr. Dunbar had the pieces of
Frankie’s refrigerator hauled off to some other town’s dump
to be buried with some other people’s garbage.
This was the
dare: get to the dump at night, the later the better, find a
refrigerator, a stove was okay too, depending on what had
recently been thrown away, leave your friends outside, close
yourself in, and give yourself over, temporarily, to death.
—
We were tent-camping one night
in Jean’s backyard. The bonfire had gone out so we curled
up in our sleeping bags and tried to pretend the night
noises and the darkness pushing in around the yellow circles
of our flashlights didn’t scare us. We thought about
Frankie and talked about ghosts.
“They suck
out your breath when you’re asleep,” Jean said. “They
sucked out my cousin Sandy’s breath when she was eighteen
months old.” Jean hunkered down lower in her sleeping bag
so she was just a strip of pale skin and two shining yellow
eyes. She never was so brave, unless there were boys around
to impress.
“You lie,” I
said.
“She died in
her playpen. They got her.” Jean’s voice was muffled by the
sleeping bag. I covered my mouth and nose up, too.
Something
scraped against our canvas roof, with that hissing noise of
fingernails against fabric. Jean must have heard it too
because she’d turtled herself up in her sleeping bag. I
couldn’t hide though. I wanted to see what it was. My
breath seemed raspy and louder than it had ever been, and I
had to go to the bathroom, but I waited for the sound to
come again.
Something
banged against the tent’s zipped-flap front door and the
wall bowed in toward us.
“It’s
Frankie,” Jean yelled. “He’s come back to kill us!” I was
scared. Maybe it was Frankie. Maybe it was something
worse. The door banged and banged again. I had to know. I
reached out to the shaking wall and grabbed the door’s
zipper. I looked back at Jean.
“No,” she said. I turned away and unzipped the zipper, one
metal tooth at a time. Jean covered her eyes. Halfway to
the top the zipper shot away from me up its metal track and
the flaps snapped open.
There was nothing outside, nothing but darkness.
But then the
darkness came alive, jumped at me, tackled me, and pushed me
onto the tent floor. I thought it was Frankie coming for
me, maybe for taking his ribbons, maybe for nothing at all.
I kicked and
punched my way out from under the thing, and when I got free
I realized the thing was Ted and just outside the tent,
laughing his butt off, was Jimmer.
“Jerks,” I
said. My muscles were all tight and my heart was going too
fast and I think I peed a little when I thought a ghost was
mauling me, but I couldn’t let them see that. I wasn’t cute
like Jean, so I had to be tough. Jean heard my voice, knew
I wasn’t dead, and came out of hiding. Now she wanted to be
brave, too.
Scaring us
must have been Jimmer’s plan, everything always was. Ted
was the muscle of the two, the stout silent threatening mass
of thirteen-year-old, who did his younger brother’s bidding,
punched when Jimmer said punch, scared when Jimmer said
scare. Ted had huge round eyes that seemed to take in
everything, but understand nothing. Understanding was
Jimmer’s job.
Jimmer was
short and thick and fast. He had blonde hair, blue eyes,
and reminded me of these kids I saw in a history book, the
Hitler Youth, but by way of Middle America. Most of all the
brothers were mean. Ted was mean because he didn’t have
sense not to be. But Jimmer had sense; he was mean because
he liked it.
They rolled
on the ground laughing. Jean and I still trembled, but
tried not to show it, not in front of the boys. They were
unpredictable. I never knew if they were going to try to
hit us or kiss us, and I couldn’t decide which was worse.
Which I wanted.
Jimmer
crawled into the tent and wiggled up to Jean. He fluttered
his eyelashes, puckered his lips, and spoke in a high girly
voice.
“It’s
Frankie. It’s Frankie. Oh, help.”
Ted grabbed
my flashlight, held it under his chin, and made a gurgley
choking noise at Jean. She giggled a flirty giggle. Jimmer
stretched out across the middle of the tent and drew a long
breath to get our attention back from Ted.
“Do you know
about the dare?” Jimmer said. I looked at Jean. She
examined the strings of her sleeping bag. We couldn’t
not know about the dare. “We’re going,” Jimmer said.
“To the
dump,” Ted said.
“Now,”
Jimmer said. He took my flashlight away from Ted and shined
it in my eyes. “You coming?” He scooted up next to me,
close enough I could feel his words hiss out and hit my
face. He was paying attention to me now, not Jean, and I
liked it. “Or are you scared?”
I was
scared. Jean was scared. I bet Jimmer and Ted were scared,
too. But it was a daree. What was I supposed to say?
I’m afraid of the dark. I’m afraid of the dead kid. I want
to be punched instead of kissed for the rest of my life.
I couldn’t say those things. I said this:
“Let’s go.”
Don’t
tell,” I said. Then I zipped the zipper shut..
—
Jimmer took
us to the edge of the pit where things weren’t burned, then
he took us past it, down below the last safe ledge that Mr.
Dunbar always yelled at us to back our asses away from. We
slid down through the sand and junk to the bottom, but there
was no solid ground here. We were standing on and
surrounded by garbage.
It didn’t
smell like I thought it would. The rotten food, the soiled
diapers, the dead pets parents said they were going to bury
in the back yard, all those things could be and were burned
in the fire pit. This pit smelled like rust and garage sale
and grandparent’s attics and fumes I couldn’t really place
but knew I shouldn’t breathe in..
“There,”
Jimmer said. But we all saw it at the same time. White
like the moon and the smoke against the grays and browns and
blacks of the rest of the night. A rectangle, jutting out
of the clutter of the pit, slightly rounded at the corners,
a latching handle on one side. A Koolmark T. Just like
Frankie’s.
The
refrigerator door came open quietly. No screaming creeks of
rusted hinges like in the movies. Jimmer reached in and
slid out the metal racks so there would be room to sit.
Then we
stood there, staring at the empty inside of the
refrigerator, and the refrigerator seemed to be staring
back, like it had been waiting for us, like it wanted to be
filled.
I could
already feel the air squeezing out of my lungs and the total
black closing in around me. “Ted,” Jimmer said, “you go
first.” I sighed and breathed again. Ted looked at Jimmer
like a puppy who’d been kicked in the head, but he didn’t
say no. He nodded. Jimmer pointed the flashlight into the
refrigerator. Ted followed the beam and crouched down
inside. “Shut the door,” Jimmer said. So I locked Ted in.
Jimmer and I stared at the closed door and waited. The moon
glared down on us like a giant pupilless eye.
—
“How long’s he supposed to be
in there?” I said.
Jimmer
shrugged. “Don’t know.” There was a faint sound from
inside the refrigerator. Ted was knocking.
“Can we let
him out now?” I said. Jimmer’s lips curled up at the sides.
“Wait,” he
said. It had been a long time, I thought. I didn’t really
know, though. But it seemed like hours. It seemed too
long.
“I’m opening
the door,” I said. I reached for the handle. Jimmer shoved
me out of the way, opened the door himself, and shined the
flashlight on his brother.
Ted was
huddled up, his arms clutching his chest, his eyes clenched
shut. He gasped when he realized the door was open and
half-fell, half-crawled out. He laughed and spit and looked
up at us. He was shaking.
“That wasn’t
so bad,” he said. Now Jimmer turned the flashlight on me.
“Your turn,”
Jimmer said. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to be back with
Jean, safe in my sleeping bag, but I had to pretend to be
brave. I wanted the boys to like me.
“Get in,”
Ted said. I sucked my last breath of free air, stepped in,
and crouched down like Ted had. The inside of the
refrigerator was smooth painted metal. The tracks from the
shelves dug into my back. I looked out at Jimmer and Ted.
They looked down at me, laughed, and closed the door.
—
I was completely alone in
complete darkness.
I knew if I
reached my arms out, I should have been able to touch the
walls of the refrigerator. But the emptiness around me was
so thick. I didn’t want to try for walls and find nothing.
And I didn’t
want to think about Frankie. I thought about the food
people used to put in this refrigerator. I was sitting
where milk had sat, eggs, shaved thin slices of deli ham,
pickles. Not Frankie. Cheese, orange juice, pie someone’s
mom had baked. No. Not Frankie. Butter, macaroni salad,
that other salad with the marshmallows that’s not really
salad at all, mustard, bacon. Not Frankie. Not Frankie. Not
Frankie.
Something
soft and warm and wrinkly rubbed against my leg. My stomach
caved in on itself. More warm things wriggled around me.
They climbed up my sweatshirt. I closed my eyes and opened
them and shut them again until I couldn’t tell what
blackness was which. The things had tiny claws, not for
scratching, but for gripping, holding on. One of them made
it to my neck and licked and nuzzled. I craned my neck away
until my forehead pressed against the back wall of the
refrigerator. I heard the things meowing.
The meowing
was drowned out by something like giggling. I think I
opened my eyes then, or maybe they’d been open the whole
time, but I saw through the dark. I saw my dead pet
kittens. And I saw doll heads smiling painted white smiles
through molded plastic lips. Floating around me were
plastic legs, arms, and torsos with smooth round nippleless
breasts. The pieces tried to put themselves back together,
but thighs were where heads should have been, arms were in
leg holes. Heads were just bobbing and laughing at the
confusion of parts. Nothing fit right.
And a baby
was at my face, gripping my ears with tiny fists. Small
lips on my lips. The baby breathed in and in and in and
in. Never out. My lungs deflated, dried out, crumbled
away.
Then there
was Frankie. Curling up next to me. His cheeks were pink,
his eyes blurry with sleep. His chubby hand found mine and
he squeezed tight.
“Rest with
me here,” Frankie said. “Hide with me here.” I didn’t care
anymore that I wasn’t breathing, that I couldn’t get away
from the darkness. I was warm and comfortable. “We’re safe
here,” Frankie said. So I leaned against him and I slept.
—
Mr. Dunbar was the one who found me. Much sooner than he
found Frankie; I wasn’t quite dead. “Just in time,” he said
later. He’d heard noises and taken his shotgun to
investigate. He shot twice in the air to flush any
intruders out. Jimmer and Ted scrambled up from the pit.
Jimmer and Ted left me down there. But Jimmer and Ted got
caught and told Mr. Dunbar about the dare and the
refrigerator and the girl they’d accidentally left inside.
Light came
in and air came in and Mr. Dunbar was standing over me.
Frankie was gone.
“Good
Christ,” Mr. Dunbar said. He lifted me out of the
refrigerator. “You fucking kids.”
Jimmer still
had my flashlight. He led Ted and Mr. Dunbar through the
woods and back to our street. I was in and out, between
waking and dreaming, but I remember Mr. Dunbar carrying me
in his arms, keeping me tight against his chest. He smelled
like fire. He was looking straight ahead over Ted and
Jimmer and kept stepping on Ted’s heels. He said over and
over, “fucking kids, stupid fucking kids.” And there were
tears in his eyes. They twinkled when the moonlight caught
them, but never spilled out or down his cheeks.
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