Simon Clark - Stranger

Only this beach ball pumped living blood all over me and all over the wall in thick, juicy red squirts.

Chunk had a head of solid bone. He was back at school after Christmas. The upside was he didn’t touch me, or even make eye contact again. The down side? There has to be one, doesn’t there? His mother and father were big shits in a lawyer’s practice. They might as well have nailed that assault charge to my head. They couldn’t have made it stick there any more tightly.

I got probation as well as newspaper headlines with my photograph hollering loud and clear IS THIS THE MOST EVIL TEENAGER IN TOWN? Well , words to that effect. In a formal way, all nicely legal, I was thrown out of school. Neighbors and co-workers crucified my mother in that nice, civilized way responsible adults employ on former friends. They stopped talking to her. She was no longer invited for coffee. Some kids beat up my sister. She was seven years old. Other stuff, too. Dog turd smeared in the mailbox. The kid across the road fired his air gun at the kitchen window. Someone ran a screwdriver down the side of our car to achieve that nice customized scratched-to-hell look.

You know the sort of thing, don’t you? Really neighborly stuff. Christ.

And then there was the Halloween that followed the ruckus with Chunk. It wound up trick-or-treat night for us, all right, with OUT, OUT OUT! aerosoled across the garage door. Mom wept. I mean really wept: Her tears left big damp splotches on her sweater and her eyes were puffy and sore for days afterward.

You think I’m angry? You bet I’m angry. She didn’t deserve that. Or the fact that the guy she was seeing dumped her because of all this. Yeah, but what’s new about this kind of crap? This stuff happens in every street. Every neighborhood. Every town. Happens damn well everywhere.

I wound up writing about Chunk and all that shit because I was angry about what happened the day I delivered wood in the truck and Crowther tried to crack open my skull with a log I’d just taken the trouble to saw the day before.

No. I’d set out to write everything properly. Everything with a beginning, a middle and an end. Instead, I found myself jumping ’round, describing stuff when I was fourteen, then going back to when Crowther battered me with the log. Like that pile of rocks I was building as a memorial to my mom and my sister, I intended this as a kind of memorial. A great pile of words in a book that would, somehow, all neatly fit together to tell you what happened and what it was like to live in a world that had gone head over tip.

But to write a book? How do you start? When I sat down that night of the Crowther attack I began. There I was, in the cabin by the lake, trying to write the first line. The right-hand side of my face was a mess of reds and purples where the log had gone about making a big impression. A scab the size of a quarter clung to my forehead. One eye was closed. My neck ached like sin itself. But I was determined to crack this thing open.

No words would come. Instead there were these brilliant images. They didn’t just sidle into my head, they crashed, exploded, BOOMED like bombs inside my mind. There was no order to them. I saw them as clearly as the day we saw it all on TV. When they took the White House and burned it to the ground. There were thousands of bread bandits running over the lawn. A guy with hair that somehow made me think of ice cream, all white and wavy, came out to talk to them. The reporter said he was some senator who once helped those guys who were now trashing the place. He stood there with his hands outstretched like he was trying to halt a tidal wave. But the bread bandits just dove on him. They had no weapons, so they ripped him apart with their bare hands. One even tore off the senator’s scalp and tossed it into a tree. His white hair hung there from a branch in one piece. That image returns to me a lot.

Here comes another memory bomb. Pow! It’s completely out of chronological order. Boom! Here’s the image exploding inside my head right now. I remember killing the first stranger. He turned up in town, totally normal-looking. But instinctively I knew he was lousy with Jumpy. I grabbed a wrench and, well, there I go again. Hitting you with this helter-skelter of images. Yes, I killed him. A guy with a thick black mustache. He had a mole on his left cheek like a brown thumb print. And he wore a leather belt with a dog’s head buckle. On his feet, neat shoes with a Cuban heel. And he had this red-checked shirt with a button badge that said SMILE. I’M A FRIEND. Yeah, it all comes back. Every detail.

So I sat there with my beat-up face, just gazing out the window not really knowing how to begin. Across the lake squatted the remains of Lewis. They say when you’re writing a book you shouldn’t use flashbacks. But what the hell? Here’s a flashback for you, because I can’t get it out of my head. I remember the first time I walked into Lewis. I saw burnt buildings; wrecked cars littering the streets; a dog starved down to its ribs turning over a human skull with its paw, searching for a mouthful of brain fresh enough to keep body and soul together. Like some ghost, I saw myself gliding through the shattered window of a KFC, where I found a box of ketchup packets. Was I hungry? Jesus Christ, I’d run out of belt holes. I had the waist of a starved wasp. That’s how hungry I was. Sitting there on a fallen cash register, I oooohhh ed and aaaaaah ed as I tore away the foil corner and squirted blob after blob of spicy red ketchup into my mouth. Shit. In my mind’s eye I can travel in time, too. I can see myself roaming the town, breaking into any garage that was still in one piece. At last I’d found a car with air in its tires and enough gas in the tank to drive back the fifty miles or so to pick up my mom and sister where they’d hidden in a church. Both were sick then, only I didn’t know how sick.

With my forehead buzzing, the grazes stiffening my face into a mask, I pictured myself gliding back across the water to Lewis again. Past the cinema with its heap of human bones in the foyer. With spiders in the popcorn maker. Bats have colonized the projection room. Woolworth’s is burnt to the foundations. Wal-Mart survived as a structure, but it’s been cleaned of everything. Not a single can of beans, not a bottle of beer remains.

I can glide through the deserted houses. There’s a mess of something in the bathtub where Grandma fell and broke her hip when the rumpus began. And no one came to pull her out. Some dogs ate babies before they starved. Swimming pools are slick with pond slime. And as for the local high school? Boy, oh, boy, there are tombs noisier than those classrooms now.

I reeled my mind’s eye back in. I saw myself gliding past the ruined stores, across the road, through the ruined ferry station, down along the quay… faster, faster, faster… then I’m flying out across the water to Sullivan. It’s evening; townspeople quietly going about their business like they’ve always done. Mrs. Hatchard is giving a piano recital at Brown’s Hotel in the square. A bunch of kids are hurrying down Central Way to where the Millennium cinema sits in the center of town.

Whoa! And there I am sitting in the cabin (well out of town, I should stress. Welluvva way from the good people of Sullivan). Still sitting there with a pencil in your hand, Valdiva? Still figuring out how to say it? Where to begin?

Well… where do you begin, Valdiva?

At the beginning, chirps the clever tyke that lives in the back of your head. The one always ready with the smart cracks that never help you one little bit. OK, wise guy. I’ll try at the beginning. Right at the beginning of what I remember. So, what is my earliest memory? Well, that one’s easy.

My mom driving me to get my hair cut. I must have been three years old. And the last place I wanted to go was the barbershop. I hated it so much I’d scream the place down. I hated the way the barber would push my head forward, then backward, then sideways as he cut my hair. I hated the way he’d stare at my hair like there was a circus show taking place among the follicles More than anything, I hated the hair clippings that would creep down inside my shirt and prickle my skin, making me itch like crazy.