Ryan Thomas - The Summer I Died

I looked away. I kept looking away, listening to Tooth’ groans of pain, hearing them from someplace else. A place from our past, from our future. Block it out, I thought, just block it out, go somewhere else. You’re not here, you’re wherever you want to be but you’re not here. And before long, there was Tooth and me stealing lawn ornaments, there was California with the waves crashing on the beach, there was us driving on Route 66 on our way out West, the purple sunset blanketing the dusty buttes. At some point, through my closed lids, I saw the light turn off. I heard the door open and the man go back upstairs, his cackling dying away into the night.

I kept my eyes closed and listened to Tooth cry for a long time, not knowing what to do, just feeling like a kid again, yearning for my parents’ bed. And always asking, like a skipping CD in Tooth’s Camaro, the same stupid question that wouldn’t go away: Why was this happening? Why wouldn’t I wake up?

Stress and fatigue finally took over, shut me down into a semiconscious state. It wasn’t exactly sleep, because I could still hear the choking sobs of my friend, but it removed me from the larger picture. I didn’t know it then, but those moments before the ember attack would be the last time Tooth would look like the friend I had grown up with.

Morning, or at least I thought it was because I could swear I heard birds chirping somewhere. I was leaning against the wall, the gag still tight in my mouth. My whole body ached like it had been steam rolled. On top of that, the bite on my leg was beginning to itch, a possible sign of infection. The room was pitch black, which meant the embers in the stove had burned out. Tooth was snoring. The rain had stopped.

I said a little prayer to God, feeling like a fair-weather fan, slinking back for acceptance from an establishment I’d eschewed. But still, it’s funny how you find God in such moments, almost instinctively, like a caterpillar on a strand of silk stretching for the first branch it sees, even if the tree is dead. Yeah, it may seem pointless, but at least it’s something. I even swore that if I survived I would go to church.

Church. Would I really? All those nights listening to Tooth’s dad preach about God and faith and Heaven. I thought he was just a sad old drunk, but the truth was that he was home tossing back a cold one and we were chained in some psycho’s basement. He was watching television; we were watching human dismemberment. Perhaps he wasn’t so crazy.

I wondered if he’d be smart enough to come look for us. In all the years I’d known Tooth his father had never seemed too concerned about his whereabouts. He’d let Tooth spend that weekend in jail, and Tooth’s mom rarely visited or called. She had a new life in New Jersey, or so Tooth said.

I remembered being at Tooth’s one night when his mother had come back for a brief stint, back when we were in junior high. We all had dinner in the living room while we watched sitcoms. Tooth’s dad had ordered a pizza. A commercial came on urging parents to get to know their kids better, you know, talk to your kids about drugs and sex and shit. Tooth’s parents kind of looked at us like they knew we’d started experimenting with drugs, but they didn’t say anything.

Tooth got this funny look on his face and he asked, “Hey, do you remember our password?”

At first I thought he was talking to me, but I didn’t know what password he meant. We had so many passwords for so many things they were hard to remember. Like, we had a fort in the woods behind his house and the password was pussylicker. (As with most kids, curse words were taboo to us and therefore used ad naseam in the absence of adults.) I thought maybe he was trying to get me to swear in front of his parents, who probably wouldn’t have minded, but I wasn’t going to test it.

His father answered, “Wasn’t it macaroni and cheese?”

“That’s it,” his mother said.

I thought, what the hell are they talking about? Macaroni and cheese? What fort did that get you into?

Tooth said, “Yeah, that’s a stupid password.”

After that, we all went back to watching sitcoms. I found out later what the password meant. It was in case anyone had tried to kidnap Tooth. If anyone had approached him when he was younger, he would have asked for the password that only his parents knew, and if the person didn’t know it, he’d have run away. It dawned on me that despite the dysfunction that overshadowed their family the majority of the time, there was still a modicum of love under it all.

My family never had a password.

I was thinking about this when the basement door opened and Skinny Man came in carrying something large in his arms. The sunlight from upstairs drifted down and backlit his frame. He was dressed in jeans and a button down and was wearing a baseball cap that said Mack Trucks on it. Butch was at his heels, running in circles as if he was about to get a juicy steak.

“Morning,” he said. “Roger, I want you to know you have a lovely house.”

My heart stopped and I couldn’t even swallow much less gasp.

He’d been to my house.

That’s when I realized the thing in his arms was a body. When he reached up and turned the bulb on I nearly fainted, because in his arms, slumped over like she was dead, was my sister Jamie.

Oh my God. There are no words. Breathing, focus, rational thought: they all locked.

What welled up inside me came from a deep place in my heart, a place so sacred I didn’t know it existed until that moment.

I wailed. I pleaded. I begged. Though none of it made much sense through the gag. He just laughed like the Joker and carried her to the door beside Tooth. He took out some keys and, still holding her, undid the lock and disappeared inside.

My desperate cries woke Tooth, who looked around as if he’d forgotten where he was. His entire mouth and cheeks were blistered red and black. The rag in his mouth was caked in crimson goo and pus. When he saw me, he remembered where he was and swiveled his head looking for our attacker. I motioned with my head toward the door on his other side and he looked over, but when he looked back at me he just shook his head. I think he was trying to tell me he couldn’t see anything.

It wasn’t long before Skinny Man came out and shut the door. In his hand he fooled with the dice he’d taken from me. “She’s nice,” he said, “just ripe enough for me. We’ll have to play with her a little later.” He gave Tooth a stinging smack in the mouth, pulled his hand away and wiped off the fresh blood. “Guess you won’t be talking for a bit, my friend.”

Butch was sniffing the wound on my leg, whimpering like he was waiting for an okay to take a bite. I hated that dog. I wanted to kill it just as slowly as I wanted to kill Skinny Man.

“I searched your car and found this,” he said to Tooth. He held up a pay stub. “Mervyn. What the fuck kind of name is that?” He balled it up and tossed it on the floor. Butch ran to it and sniffed it but sensing it wasn’t a fresh kill went and sat by his bowls.

It hit me that he must have moved the car. No park ranger would come looking for us now.

From the room behind us came a plea for help. Jamie was awake. Tooth recognized her voice and looked at me with bulging eyes. I wanted to call to her, to tell her to be quiet, but the gag filled my mouth and I didn’t want to piss off Skinny Man. Now more than ever I needed to get out of here before anything happened to Jamie.

He went up the stairs and returned with an armload of wood which he lit up in the stove. Like a Pavlovian dog, I started sweating, because the last time he did that he tried to cook the mystery woman, and now he had Jamie, and would he cook her right in front of me? After the logs were cracking and popping with flames, he took the shovel off the tool table and placed it back in the fire.