The dark looked back
Mom drove Alvin and me from Atlanta to my aunt’s house in North Carolina. Really she was Mom’s cousin, but we called her Aunt Susan. She’d married an ex-con and reformed skinhead and they lived with their three kids — one each by a previous marriage and one together — in the foothills of Old Appalachia. The whole way in the car, I knew something was wrong. But Mom’s early 2000s Chevy Cavalier had a loud, rattling engine and no air conditioning, which meant the windows were down and it was impossible to do anything other than yell simple sentences to each other.
“Are we there yet?”
“I have to pee.”
Before we left, I’d heard my mother say something about Auntie Marie and Aunt Zelda coming up from Rose Hill with their families, so I thought we were going for a family reunion. And sure enough, as we pulled up the gravel drive, there was all the evidence of a party. There were more cars parked than could fit in the driveway and a couple kids I vaguely recognized running between them and shooting each other with water guns.
Mom was nervous. I could tell. So that made me nervous, too. Alvin wasn’t even speaking. He hadn’t said much at all since the drive-by a couple nights before. Mom and I were both worried.
We got out and I stretched my legs. My stomach growled at the smell of grill smoke. The parents rounded up all the kids and everyone gathered in the living room. Alvin and I were reintroduced to our cousins, which was good. I didn’t remember any of their names.
Then my Aunt Susan asked Alvin if he had a bag and if he wanted to take it upstairs. He looked to my mom, and she nodded. He went back to the car. I looked to Mom as well. I hadn’t brought a bag. I hadn’t been told to.
I got angry when I realized what that meant. Alvin wasn’t coming back with us.
We got the quick tour of the place, after which my uncle explained that he had a possum under the house that he hadn’t been able to clear. Not only was it getting into the trash, which was hassle enough, it was damaging the plastic lining that kept the water out of the foundation. He said he wanted everyone to know, especially us kids, that the pellets lying around the house were poison and that we should stay away from them. Not even touch them, in fact. And we should keep all food in the house, so as not to feed the creature with our crumbs, and we should restrict our play to the front yard.
To my juvenile brain, this seemed like the perfect occupation. When I was older, I escaped my cousins by helping the adults in any way I was allowed — with cooking, with dishes, with errands to the store. But this trip, I had nothing. I was fourteen and angry. The last thing I wanted was to be around kids, the oldest of which was three years younger than me. I needed to sulk. I convinced myself the poor animal under the house was nesting, which meant it probably had young, and that there wasn’t another person there who cared an ounce for any living thing they couldn’t shoot and/or eat, and that if anyone was going to save it — and its helpless babies — from painful and pointless death, it would have to be me.
It helped, I’m sure, that my aunt’s place was ripe for exploration. They had an old trailer out front and two cars with no wheels, and my uncle had a collection of barbecues, lawn mowers, and motorcycles, none of which were usable, that nearly filled the dilapidated barn in the back. Beyond it, there was a gully and a stream and a big corn field behind a row of border trees.
I excused myself to the bathroom, and when I came back, the younger kids were already out front. I took a plastic grocery bag from under the sink and used it like a glove, picking up all the poison from the sides and back of the house and putting it in the trash. Then I gathered some chicken wire and some sticks from my aunt’s garden supplies under the porch and took them to the back, away from the other children. I made a curved container I assumed would be large enough to hold an opossum, although I had never actually seen one in the flesh and in hindsight I’m sure it was half too small.
All I needed was bait, which meant risking a return to the house. Looking back, I can see that my Aunt Susan wasn’t rich by any definition, but they were without a doubt the wealthiest people I knew. There was all kinds of food. I had pulled pork and corn and stuffed my cheeks with sausages and slaw and put a few links on a paper plate and turned for the back door where my plump Aunt Susan stopped me and reminded me sternly that I wasn’t to take food outside, per my uncle’s orders. She took my plate and replaced it with her hand and led me to the front, where the younger boys were playing with action figures. My aunt convinced them to do something more to my liking, like dodge ball, and we played a few games in a patch of high weeds. Alvin got hit in the face, but he liked it. He smiled at me. And suddenly I didn’t feel so bad. Maybe Mom was right. Maybe it was better he stayed there.
Maybe I wanted to stay, too.
After a while, it started to get dark and I remembered the poor opossum and the unset trap I had left in the back yard. My cousin Shawn had some candy and I asked for a piece. I think my idea was that animals were always hungry — that’s how you always saw them on TV, chasing desperately for food — and all I had to do was put food inside my little trap and wait, out of sight, behind a stretch of leaning fence that ran along one side of the yard, until the opossum came to feed. Then I would pounce on it. How I planned to cover the twenty or so yards from the fence to the trap before the animal fled back under the house, I have no idea. But I remember I wanted to release it in the “big” woods on the other side of the corn field, which seemed like a right long ways away.
But when I went round to the back, my trap was gone. I looked all over. But I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe one of the adults had picked it up. Adults were always taking things and putting them away before you were done with them. I was about to walk back to the porch to see if there were more materials I could use to make a replacement — perhaps even one with a trigger mechanism — when a light clicked on. It was high on a pole that rose over the cluster of trees and shrubs that separated the lawn from the corn field. The whole crop had died over an unusually hot summer, and the brown stalks rustled in the breeze. A tractor path — just two dirt grooves dug through long use — ran from the yard to a work shed near the electric pole. The door of the shed creaked slowly open.
I thought that was unusual. I seemed to remember it was always locked, especially when family was over, because that was where my uncle and my cousins kept their guns. But it swung wide and rested against the outside wall. There was no voice. No shuffling feet. No calls to the house that so-and-so couldn’t find what they were looking for and where was it again? No one was there. But it swung open all the same. And resting right in the middle of the shed was my discarded trap. It was just sitting there, lit by the light cast across the floor by the open door. It was blue-dusk then, right after the sun disappears over the horizon but right before total dark, which meant I could still see the workbench and the gun rack and the tools and the lawn mower and the old motorcycle covered in a tarp, but only in silhouette.
I stared. I thought about the opossum. And the babies I’m sure were silently hungry under the house. The logical part of my brain suggested that my uncle must have figured out what that odd bundle of sticks and wire was supposed to be, and he had thrown it in the shed, where he kept all the things he didn’t want folks to find — my cousins had suggested during dodgeball that there was pornography in there — and that he didn’t want me to save the opossum.
I started down the tractor path toward the shed. The only sound was the fading cackle of the adults inside the house and the crunch of dirt under my feet. If I had been from the country, that might have been a warning — that there weren’t any crickets or cicadas or anything. But I wasn’t from the country. I was from the city, where a cricket’s chirp was a hidden nuisance and not a lullaby.
I stopped about ten feet from the door. I don’t think I even knew why. Just that the little hairs on the back of my neck were tingling. Like that feeling you get when you’re being watched.
I looked at my trap. I looked at the dark gap of the door, between the hinges.
And the dark gap looked back.
I was sure of it.
It was looking right at me.
What was wrong, it seemed to be asking. Did I not want my trap? I had worked so hard on it. Would I not take just a few more steps to retrieve it?
I stayed locked in that gaze for a tiny eternity, until my mother’s booming voice fell over the lawn. She was screaming at my uncle from the back porch. He’d left the door to the shed wide open. How could he, after what had just happened in Atlanta? Guns were the whole reason we’d fled.
He denied it, of course, and all the children were quickly gathered and there was a small inquisition in the living room. But no one would admit to anything. My trap was tossed back under the porch. The door to the shed was closed and locked. And we all had cake and ice cream. I hadn’t had cake in . . . well, a long damned time. I ate so much I felt sick after and slept the whole way home. And when I woke up, I’d forgotten all about the thousand eyes I thought I’d seen blinking behind the door of that dumb shed. That was kid’s stuff anyway.
A few days later, my uncle called our house. Mom set the phone aside and asked me sternly if I had put the poison in the trash. I was certain I was going to be in trouble. I had been told not to touch it.
I said no, which angered her. So I got angry back.
“Yeah, so what? What’s he need to kill that animal for anyway?”
Mom spoke briefly to my uncle. Then she hung up and told me my uncle wasn’t mad at all. In fact, I had solved the man’s problem for him. The opossum had completely ignored the pellets on the lawn, but by putting them in the trash, I made sure it sampled them on its next midnight raid. The animal was gone, and my uncle never thought higher of me than at that moment. From then on, I got a reputation in my family as being a very clever boy.
Two weeks later, we got another call. Mom collapsed when they told her Alvin was dead.
I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.
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The next chapter is: (not yet posted)
cover image by Tahra
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