Uncle Trenton was no fun anymore and wouldn’t read to her. Mommy said Uncle Trenton was dead and then they went to the hospital to see him and he was white and he wouldn’t get up or talk. But then he did get up, but he still didn’t talk very much.
Amy was glad they had come to Grandpa’s house. She wished she could talk to Grandpa in the Garden of Forever and ask whether all the people from the book were there.
The house was full of white fluff stuff. Mommy said cottonseed. Amy collected it all and placed it in a cup in her room.
It looked just like snow.
SANDRA
Like the world’s worst case of constipation: that’s what the basement is like. Like stopped-up bowels and a fat case of gas.
It’s even worse now that we’ve got an intruder. Small as she is, she doesn’t belong. It feels like I’m trying to get my stomach around a whole Thanksgiving turkey. I wish I could digest her and spit her right back out where she came from.
The new ghost likes the basement, God knows why. Rolled-up carpets, dismantled televisions and old radios, cartons and cartons of books, and the old boiler: it’s all down there. The piano like a kidney stone we can never quite manage to piss out. Burned-out lights and Christmas ornaments. The Walkers have been home for three days now, and even Minna hasn’t braved the basement.
And of all places—out of all the dozens of rooms in the house—the basement is where Trenton’s got it in his head to kill himself.
My question is: Where’d he get the rope?
I knew a hanger once. Christina Duboise: everyone called her Cissy. She was over six feet tall and so skinny her ribs and cheekbones looked like they were trying to bust out of her skin. I liked Cissy. She was two years older, but we were friends. She was pretty much my only friend in school. Everyone ignored me because of where I lived and how I had a fag for a father. I don’t blame them, really. I would have hated me, too, if I’d been someone else.
It took me a long time to realize that Cissy was only nice to me because she had no friends, either. In some ways she was even more hard up than I was, even though her stepdad owned three sporting-goods stores and was probably the richest person in town. No one knew anything about her real dad, but I had the idea he’d died tragically when Cissy was young, probably because she seemed tragic—big eyed and stoop shouldered, like she was always waiting for disaster to strike. I found out later it wasn’t true, that her dad lived a few counties over with a new wife and a new daughter, and I was never sure why I’d always imagined him getting flattened by an oncoming train or slowly wasting to bones in a hospital bed.
Her mom seemed like she belonged in Hollywood: thin and blond with a smile so big I always worried her mouth would split open. She wore about a half pound of makeup and had a habit of wearing high heels everywhere as though she was expecting to be photographed. I knew she didn’t like me, but I didn’t give two shakes of a rat’s ass for her, either.
Cissy lived in a nice big house in the white part of town. Everything her parents owned—the carpets, the sofas, the dining room chairs, the curtains—was white, like they wanted to be sure there could be no mistake about whose side they were on. You had to take your shoes off in the house. I’d never even heard of that before I met Cissy. Every time Cissy went home she had the desperate look of a dog trying not to piss on someone’s carpet, and you could just tell she was dead afraid she might spill or smudge something.
They had a housekeeper, an old black woman who came daily to clean and cook. Her name was Zulime, and she had moved from Louisiana and still talked with a heavy Creole accent and, Cissy claimed, practiced voodoo on the side. Her hands were like bits of gnarled wood. I remember how she slathered me in mud one time when my arms were blown up like balloons from poison oak. It worked, too.
Sometimes Cissy came around every day, and on weekends I’d find her leaning against the front door, squinting in the sun, looking like an oversized grasshopper. For weeks she’d trail me like a dog on a scent, babbling about this and that, making plans, daring me to knock on Billy Iversen’s door and give him a kiss or to skinny-dip in the creek. (That one I did and came out with a leech practically sucking off my nipple; I had to burn it off with a cigarette.)
Then she would disappear. She’d skip school for days at a time and wouldn’t come to the phone when I called. Her mom would turn me away at the door with a voice like sugar in the throat of a vulture: “Cissy’s not feeling well, sweetie. I’ll have her give you a call when her strength’s up.” I’ll always remember: her long red fingernails on the door, a Virginia Slim smoking in a crystal ashtray behind her, and Zulime moving silently along with the vacuum, refusing to meet my eye.
The summer after freshman year was when Cissy first showed me her spiders. It was June, still those early days of summer when the flowers were in riot and the clouds puffed up and full of themselves, before the heat caused everything to wilt and droop. By the end of the summer, all of Georgia was like a bad watercolor: melting pavement, melting tires sizzling on the streets, and even the sun crawling its way up the sky in agony, as if it couldn’t stand the effort.
Cissy said she wanted to show me something down by the old train tracks and I was hoping she’d scored some beer or found a cache of money like Dirk Lamb had the summer before, a whole sack of old coins stashed underneath some rotting floorboards of an abandoned house.
Instead she took me to the Barnaby Estate, an old wreck beyond the swamp that was supposed to be haunted, leaning so far to the left it looked like a drunk trying to keep on his feet. I hadn’t been there since the time when I was seven or eight, and this girl Carol Ann dared me to cross the swamp and put my hand on the front door for a full five seconds. I did it, too. I remember the suck of my shoes in the mud and the smell of wood rot and an old icebox on the porch, brown with rust. I stood there with my palm on the wood frame, fear vibrating through me, imagining I heard the creak, creak of footsteps inside the house . . . imagining I saw a ghost moving like a shadow beyond the screen . . .
And then I did see a shadow—a grinning shadow, with teeth like carved ivory.
Before I had time to scream, Old Joe Higgins, resident crazy, stepped into the light: trouserless, grinning, his dick wagging between his legs like a pale fish.
After that I didn’t believe in ghosts anymore.
So when Cissy took me back there I wasn’t scared, just disappointed and maybe a little curious. She led me down into the basement. I had to duck and Cissy was practically doubled over. A little sunlight came trickling in from a broken window high in the wall, and I saw she’d stocked the place with flashlights, an old beach chair, and some moldy-looking books stacked on a rotting shelf. And jars. Dozens of jars, plus glass terrariums like they had at pet shops for the lizards and snakes. At first I thought they were empty.