We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone by Ronald Malfi
“Come here!” I shout, but the girl—the angel—does not come. Instead, she pauses and faces me, giggles…and vanishes into the night.
I am bad with time. I have no idea how long I have been out here shouting. But soon I hear police sirens tearing up the street. Like a thief, I hustle back down Glad Street and disappear down an alley. I run harder, faster, and break through to the cobblestone semicircle that is Water Street. My fever is rising and my lungs are fit to burst. I can’t remember the last time I took a breath.
Two police cruisers sail past Water Street, their flashers on, their sirens blaring. I freeze in mid-stride. A sharp pain rips through my left hand and I taste blood. I am biting my hands again.
The little girl in the angel costume appears at the end of Water Street. She is staring right at me, waiting for me to see her, and when I do she turns and runs. I chase her, my legs pumping for all they’re worth, my breath harsh and abrasive burning up through my throat.
I cross the street in pursuit of the little girl and I am suddenly aware of police sirens and flashing lights all around me. I am burning up with fever and am not all here. I feel I am floating somewhere just above myself. Turning down another alley I slam into a chain-link fence and quickly scale it, rat-style. I drop down on the other side into an alley swollen with garbage. This does not slow me down. I run faster, my heart about to burst from my chest.
The alley is a dead end. I come face to face with a brick wall, eye level with a BELIEVE poster. I tear the poster down, wrap it around my face, then hunker down in the swill. The poster pressed against my face, my breath strikes it and echoes in my ears. My eyes are pressed shut. I am thinking of our old duplex and my father scooping gunk out of the gutters. I am thinking of my mother’s skin, brittle and yellow and like wax paper. I picture her now, at this very moment, searching for mayonnaise in the refrigerator.
I am suddenly aware of a presence beside me. I hear plastic trash bags shift and empty cans roll across the cement. I am not alone. Yet I do not remove the BELIEVE placard from my face. I hear the movement beside me and I feel my own hot breath against the cardboard. Mourning breath.
The girl, she giggles.
“What?” I whimper. And in my head I hear my father’s booming voice: Real men don’t whimper like little girls, Gideon.
More giggling. It’s suddenly all around me.
“What?” I manage again. And think: There’s no rest for the dead.
I tear the poster from my face and see the girl just a few feet from me, also hunkered down in the trash. She is forever young, her eyes wide and lost in innocence, and she is giggling behind a cupped hand.
“Stop,” I tell her.
“Trick-or-treat,” the angel whispers.
I reach out a hand to touch her but she quickly vanishes, and my hand goes right through the air, unobstructed. I touch the cold brick wall on the other side.
Police cars whiz by the mouth of the alley, and I pull the poster back over my face. My cheeks are burning. I can’t tell if I’m breathing.
I wait for the sirens to die. When I remove the poster from my face and look around again, I see that I am alone. I remain crouched in garbage, unmoving, unthinking, until the first rust colors of dawn blossom between the cracks in the tenements across the street. Daylight, and I feel wiped out, exhausted. I toss the placard aside—had I really held onto it all night?—and stare down at my hands. My palms are covered in blood. There is a hunk of skin peeled away from one of my fingers, unrolled like a party favor.
I get up and start moving back toward home, feeling grimy and cold and sick. There is a dull pain on either side of my stomach, and just below the waist of my jeans. The groin area. By the time I reach our building, the pain is sufficient enough to cause me to pause halfway up the apartment stairs.
It is fully daylight now. I enter the apartment quietly. The place seems empty. I move down the hallway toward my parents’ bedroom. I pause here and look at the framed pictures on the wall. There are two photographs in particular that attract my attention.
One, it’s my mother and sister and me at the kitchen table in our old home, a melting ice cream cake bristling with candles in the center of the table.
The other photograph is from last Halloween. Having grown out of the tradition, I am standing against the railing of our home, looking slightly annoyed, slightly bored. My sister, dressed in her angel costume, smiles a gap-toothed smile at the camera. The sun must have been facing us that day because the shadow of my father, who is taking the picture, covers half my face. Only my sister is in full view.
I turn away and continue down the hall toward my parents’ bedroom. My mother is there, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring out the window. My father is nowhere to be found.
“Ma,” I say, “where’s Dad?”
“Oh,” she says, turning to see me in the doorway, “Gideon. Is it breakfast already? What would you like, dear?”
“Ma,” I begin…but then say, “Eggs. Lots and lots of eggs. Do you think you can do that? I haven’t been eating.”
“Yes!” She says this with startling enthusiasm. “Yes, Gideon! I’ve been telling your father—that boy is not eating properly. That boy is getting too thin, just too thin, and he’ll never make the football team. What did you say?”
“Eggs,” I tell her.
She moves slowly off the bed and I stand in the doorway and watch. She pulls on her robe even though she is fully dressed and even though her skin is slick with sweat, then moves past me and out into the hall. When I hear pots and pans clanging from the kitchen, I cross the bedroom and open my father’s top dresser drawer. His handgun is hidden beneath some socks. Beside the gun is a small box of bullets. I remove both the gun and the bullets and sit on the edge of the bed. It occurs to me that I must look just as my father had that night, sitting here with this gun in my hands. Last Halloween, a group of teenagers—most of them younger than me—were raising a commotion along Glad Street while I chaperoned my sister’s trick-or-treating. City kids, they do things that even they can’t fully comprehend, so how can I? And things just happened so fast. I heard gunshots before I even knew what they were. And when I went to grab my sister’s hand, her hand was no longer there.
My sister. She was strewn across a pair of tenement steps, bleeding from the head.
Some many months later, after we’d moved from the duplex to this apartment, I walked in on my father sitting on the edge of this bed, turning this gun over and over in his hands. I watched in silence from the doorway, the heel of my right hand pressed firmly in my mouth, my teeth nervously biting down. I watched him without him knowing, and at one point I felt very certain he was going to do it—that he was going to put the gun to his head and end it.
But he didn’t. He put the gun away and just cried for a long time.
I hear my mother humming from the kitchen. Her headaches started around the time of my sister’s funeral. I think about that now as I load the gun. Before me, the single bedroom window looks out on a group of children playing in the street. Is there any hope for any of them?
Believe, I think. Believe in what?
I say nothing to my mother as I step out the front door. My belly cramping, my fever racing, it takes some effort to maneuver down the flights of stairs to the street. Outside, the sun is too bright and I wince. It hurts my eyes.
I carry the gun down the street, walking quickly for someone in such pain, and I think about my father shaving in his underwear. I think about his slow physical decline that started with my sister’s death and continued throughout his visits with me at rehab. See, I was arrested one night on Glad Street with a bag full of weed in my back pocket. But the call didn’t start out as a drug bust. The call started out as a disturbance. Apparently a number of people heard me shouting my sister’s name from their apartments that night and called the cops. The dope—well, that was just an added bonus, I guess.
The sun is hot and I’m burning up. When my eyes adjust to the light,
I start to laugh. It hurts my belly but I laugh anyway.
City kids—they’re all a bunch of hopeless animals when you get right down to it. The good ones are gunned down and the bad ones…well, the bad ones just grow weaker and weaker and smoke their lives away.
This is not a guilt thing.
Please don’t think that.
I cross over to Glad Street and find it teeming with young children playing in the street. If their lives meant anything—anything at all—would they be so easy to end?
A ripping, agonizing pain tearing through my gut, I raise my father’s handgun and begin shooting.
Under the Tutelage of Mr. Trueheart
It’s time, and I have secrets to tell, says Mr. Trueheart one sunny afternoon, still some months before Halloween night. I’ll tell them to you if you think you’re ready, Warren.
Warren does not have to think about it.
Warren is ready.
* * *
His mother said he looked pale but didn’t pay him much mind after that. This was before he put on the makeup, which was supposed to make him look pale, look like a ghost. It was white greasepaint, the stuff clowns used, and he’d bought it a few days earlier at Strumsky’s for ten bucks. It was expensive but he’d taken the money out of his mother’s purse, just as Mr. Trueheart had instructed.
That evening, he dressed first so he wouldn’t get greasepaint on his clothes, pulling the black sweatshirt over his head while staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
In the den, his mother was sprawled out on the loveseat watching some old black-and-white movie on the TV, the shiny white helmet of one knee poking from the parted curtain of her bathrobe. In her lap was Laddie, a thing of silken black-and-brown hair with moist, runny eyes and, whenever someone came to the door (which was infrequent), a shrill bark.
She kept the liquor bottles in the kitchen, a whole legion of them. Earlier that day, Warren had emptied his school backpack, and now he stood peering into the cupboard at the assortment of bottles. At ten years old, Warren Enck knew nothing about alcohol, so he selected a bottle of amber liquid because it had a bright red turkey on the label. It was as good as any. In the den, the TV was loud enough to cover the sound of the cupboard door squealing closed, followed by the zeeeet sound of his backpack zipper after he’d shoved the bottle inside. Would the backpack raise his mother’s suspicion? Who brings a backpack with them on Halloween? But no: she wouldn’t be that perceptive. She was dancing at the back of her mind tonight.
Before leaving the kitchen, he paused and gazed at the block of wood on the counter with the handles of long carving knives jutting up from it. He thought about taking one. She would never notice. Even on a good day, she would never notice.
In the den, a creaky voice on the TV said, “Morgan is a savage. I must apologize...”
The sound of a glass bottle followed, clinkity clinking into another, then the dull thud of its heavy bottom striking the carpeted floor. His mother made a sound of frustration. Laddie yipped.
“Oh hush, now,” said his mother.
He watched her for a time in the kitchen doorway, unobserved. He was small for his age, which accounted for the ease with which he could keep out of her periphery when he so desired, but tonight his stature had little to do with it. He watched her slouch forward, that ever-widening split in her robe exposing a flash of thick white thigh marbled with spidery veins and a patch of discoloration high up on the dimpled flesh. She groped for a bottle that spun in lazy revolutions on the carpet.
Laddie spotted him, let out a squeak.
His mother looked up sharply with a face comprised of right angles, her hair a spiky nest that fanned out like a peacock’s tail at the nape of her neck. It took a second for her eyes to settle on him. “What’s this?” she said, meaning his costume—the white greasepaint on his face, the black sweatshirt and cargo pants, no doubt the backpack strapped to his shoulders.
“It’s Halloween,” said Warren.
“Is that so? Is that what this is?”
He nodded.
“Where’s my Warren?”
“Right here,” he said.
She leveled an unsteady arm in his direction, finger pointing accusingly at him. “That,” she said, “could be a lie.”
“It’s not,” he said.
“It’s your trickery,” she said. “That’s why you’ve got your face covered up in that paint.”
“It’s a costume.”
“Yeah? What are you supposed to be?”
“The negative of myself,” he said.
His mother didn’t so much frown as her face seemed to tighten, all the parts pulling together as if by wires, forming creases along the rough contours. He had once heard a classmate’s mother refer to his own mother as “unsightly,” and then another mother responded with, “She has problems.” Warren knew she had problems. He knew better than most. He certainly knew better than his classmates’ mothers.
“Come here,” she said. She wasn’t an overly large woman, but she seemed twice as big when she was drunk, in the way her body seemed to move and reposition itself with great labored starts and stops: a car that kept stalling out in cold weather. Warren watched that single white knee roll like the pendulum of a clock, and he could see—or imagined he could see—from where he stood in the kitchen doorway the mad designs that made up her flesh, the permanent creases that reminded him of elephant hide, the shiny tautness of the knee that shimmered like a crystal ball in the TV’s light.
“Come,” she repeated.
He came to her, stood before her. Laddie spilled out of her lap and began scurrying in tight little circles on the floor. Yipping.
“You’re going to leave me alone tonight,” she said. It was not a question. She wore no makeup and her face looked like a mask made of latex, pulled taut over the angular bones of her skull. She smoothed a curl of hair behind his ear and said, “Do something nice for me before you go.”
So he went into the kitchen and fixed her another drink—vodka from the cupboard mixed with a fruit punch drink box that was supposed to be for his school lunch. He returned it to her and she accepted it with a dreamy smile, her eyes droopy lidded, enveloped in some unseen fog.
“Kiss kiss,” she said at him, her breath as eye-watering as turpentine.
He administered a swift peck to her right cheek. Her skin felt cold against his lips.
“Have fun with your friends,” she called to him as he went down the hall to the front door. A silly thing to say: they both knew he had no friends.
Outside, it had just begun to get dark. The faces of jack-o’-lanterns gaped at him from his neighbors’ porches, their eyes aglow with firelight. Young kids in dime store costumes were out with their parents, already going door to door. Warren knew his mother wouldn’t answer the door tonight. Probably a good thing.
He hurried along Calabasas Street, his sneakers scudding across the loose granules of sand that lay scattered like birdshot along the sidewalk. An autumn breeze whispered through the trees, and when Warren paused to listen and watch the boughs wave and sway and dance above the quaint little houses that lined his street, he caught high-pitched devil’s laughter trailing in the breeze’s wake.
When he crossed the intersection of Calabasas and Greenmont, the devil’s laughter grew louder. Warren glanced up and saw a group of older kids—sixth graders—crowded on the front steps of the house just ahead of him. They were dressed in raggedy clothes and were slapping each other with rubber monster masks. They all seemed to glance over and notice him the same moment he noticed them.
“Borin’ Warren,” chided one of the older boys, who either recognized him from school or the neighborhood.
“Fag,” quipped another, less playfully.
Warren kept his eyes on his sneakers as he picked up the pace.
“Hey,” one of the boys called to him. “Hey. He
Warren moved quickly. He refused to look at them—ignore everyone, had been Mr. Trueheart’s instruction—but he could see, from the periphery of his vision, that they were rising off the porch steps now. Some of them pulled their masks down over their faces. This troubled Warren deeply, as if some terrible act were about to take place, one the boys wished to execute anonymously.
“Hey!” the boy shouted, more urgently. “I’m talking to you, you piece of garbage!”
It was then that Warren felt something strike him, sharp as a kick, along his left shoulder blade. It was a rock, and it bounced down the sidewalk alongside him for a few steps, as if determined to trip him up. A second rock, much larger than the first, whizzed past his head.
Ignore them, Mr. Trueheart had instructed. Don’t let them goad you. Don’t let them suck you into their web. It’s what they want. It’s how they get you.
I know who you are, all of you, Warren thought. Briefly, he squeezed his eyes shut tight and willed the older kids away from him. I know what this is all about. I’m not stupid. I’m smart, very smart.
Warren’s pace quickened to a sprint. He worried briefly that the older boys might give chase, but they didn’t. Maybe it’s the white greasepaint. However, he didn’t slow down until he was several blocks away, standing in front of Mr. Trueheart’s house.
Some of the kids at Robert F. Kennedy Elementary School said Mr. Trueheart’s house was haunted. Indeed, it looked like something straight from a horror movie, with its siding overrun with leafy vines, its concave porch and slouching roof, its windows that were perpetually shuttered. There was a short wooden fence that surrounded the little postage-stamp lawn with its hip-high grass, PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING, and BEWARE OF DOG signs posted every few feet along the pickets.