Charles Grant - The Pet

He slipped his hands into his jeans pockets and rolled his shoulder under the black denim jacket and grey sweatshirt.

His light brown hair fell in strands over his forehead, curled back of his ears, curled up at the nape. He was slender, not tall, his face almost but not quite touched by a line here and there that made him appear somewhat older than he was.

Within moments the parents and their children were gone.

“Hey, Boyd, playing Story Hour again?”

He looked across the pond and grinned self-consciously. Three boys walked around the pond toward him, grinned back, and roughed him a bit when they joined him, then pushed him in their midst and herded him laughing toward the bike stand just inside the south gate.

“You should’ve been there, Donny,” Fleet Robinson told him, leaning close with a freckled hand on Don’s arm. “Chris Snowden was there.” He rolled his eyes heavenward as the other boys whistled. “God, how she can see that keyboard with those gazongas is a miracle.”

“Hey, you’d better not say stuff like that in front of Donny the Duck,” said Brian Pratt solemnly. Then he winked broadly, and not kindly. “You know he doesn’t believe in that kind of talk. It’s sexist, don’t you guys know that? It’s demeaning to the broads who jerk him off on the porch.”

“Drop dead, Brian,” Don said quietly.

Pratt ignored him. With a sharp slap to Robinson’s side he jumped ahead of the others and walked arrogantly backward, his cut-off T-shirt and soccer shorts both an electric red and defiant of the night’s early autumn chill. “But if you want to talk about gazongas, you crude bastards, if you’re really gonna get down in the gutter, then let me tell you about Trace tonight. Christ! I mean, you want to talk excellent development? Jesus, I could smother, you know what I mean? And she was waiting for it, just waiting for it, y’know? I mean, you could see it in her eyes! Christ, she was fucking asking for it right there on the stage! Oh, my god, I wish to hell her old man wasn’t there, he should’ve been on duty or something. Soon as she put down that stupid flute I’d’ve planked her so damned fast … oh god, I think I’m dying!”

Robinson’s hand tightened when he felt the muscle beneath it tense. “Don’t listen to him, Don. In the first place, Tracey hasn’t talked to him since the first day of kindergarten except to tell him to get the hell out of her way, and in the second place, he don’t know nothing he don’t see in a magazine.”

“Magazine, shit,” scoffed Jeff Lichter. “The man can’t even read, for god’s sake.”

“Read?” Pratt said, wide-eyed. “What the hell’s that?”

“Reading,” explained Tar Boston, “is what you do when you open a book.” He paused and put his hands on his hips. “You remember books, Brian. They’re those things you got growing mold on in your locker.”

Pratt sneered and lifted his middle finger. Robinson and Boston, both heavy set and both wearing football jackets over light sweaters, took off after him, hollering, windmilling their arms as though they were plummeting down a hill.

Ahead was the south gate, and beyond it the lights of Parkside Boulevard.

Jeff stayed behind. He was the shortest of the group, and the only one wearing glasses, his brown hair reaching almost to his shoulders. “Nice guys.”

Don shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

They walked from dark to light to dark again as the lampposts marked the edge of the pathway. Jeffs tapped heels smacked on the pavement; Don’s sneakers sounded solid, as if they were made of hard rubber.

“How’d you get stuck with that?” Lichter asked with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder.

“What, the story stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t get stuck with it. Mrs. Klass asked me if I’d watch Cheryl for a while. Said she’d give me a couple of bucks to keep her out of her hair. Next thing I knew I had a gang.”

“Yeah, story of your life, I think.”

Don looked but saw nothing on his friend’s face to indicate sarcasm, or pity.

“She pay you?”

“I’ll get it tomorrow, at school.”

“Like I said — story of your life.”

At the bike stand they paused, staring through the high stone pillars to the empty street beyond. Pratt and the others were gone, and there was little traffic left to break the park’s silence.

“That creep got away with another one, you know,” Jeff said then, looking nervously back over his shoulder at the trees. “The Howler, I mean.”

“I heard.” He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to talk about some nut over in New York who went around tearing up kids with his bare hands and howling like a wolf when he was done. Five or six by now , he thought; once a month since last spring, and now it was five or six dead. And the worst part was, nobody even knew what he looked like. He could be an old man, or a woman who hates kids, or … or even a kid.

“Well, if he comes here,” Lichter said, glaring menacingly at the shadows, his hair wind-fanned over his eyes, “I’ll kick his balls right up to his teeth. Or get Tracey’s old man to arrest him for unlawful mutilation.”

Don laughed. “What? You mean there’s such a thing as lawful mutilation?”

“Sure. Ain’t you never seen the dumb clothes Chris wears? Like she was a nun sometimes? That’s mutilation, brother, and she ought to be arrested for it.”

They laughed quietly, shaking their heads, sharing the common belief that Chris Snowden’s figure was more explosive than dynamite, more powerful than a speeding bullet, more likely to cause heart attacks in every senior class male than failing to make graduation.

Lichter took off his glasses and polished them on his jacket. “I’ll tell you, she’s enough to make me wish I was a virgin again.”

This time Don’s laugh was strained, but he nodded just the same. He wasn’t a prude; he didn’t mind talk about sex and women, but he wished the other guys would quit their damned bragging, or their lying. If they kept it up, one of these days he was going to slip and get found out.

“So, you start studying for the bio test next week?” Lichter asked, his sly tone indicating he already knew the answer.

“Yeah, a little,” he admitted with an embarrassed grin. “Should be a snap.”

“Right. A snap. And if it isn’t, you and I will be standing outside when graduation comes around,” He sighed loudly and looked up at the stars. “Oh, god, only eight more months and the torture is over.”

The wind kicked up dust and made them turn their heads away.

“School,” Jeff said then, with a slap to his arm.

“Yeah. School.”

Lichter nodded, left waving at a slow trot, veering sharply right and vanishing. Don knelt to work the combination of the lock he had placed on the tire chain, then straddled the seat and gripped the arched handlebars. They were upright, cranked out of their racing position less than ten minutes after he had brought it home from the store. He didn’t like hunching over, feeling somehow out of control and forever toppling unless he could straighten his back. He pushed off, then stopped as soon as he was on the sidewalk. To the right, far down the street, were the hazed neon lights of Ashford’s long shopping district; directly opposite was the narrow island of trees and grass that separated the wide boulevard into its east and west lanes; to the left the street poked into a large residential area whose houses began as clean brick and tidy clapboard and eventually deteriorated into rundown brownstone and aluminum siding that had long since faded past its guarantee.

He glanced behind him and smiled suddenly.

On the path, just this side of the last lamppost, was a feather. A crow’s feather twice as long as a grown man’s hand. It shimmered almost blue, was caught by the wind, and tumbled toward him.