It didn’t do him any good, though. Janie felt the heat in her arm before his hand got to it. She made a fist, and there was a tearing sound, and then Mr. Swayze howled, and the last bit of bloody gristle went snap! and his ear came clean off. Mr. Swayze stumbled backward, holding onto his head and squealing like a pig.
Without thinking, Janie pushed the ear into her mouth. It was crunchy, like a chicken knee, and it tasted a little bitter on account of the ear wax. She got it down in two gulps, and as she swallowed, her stomach stopped complaining.
The fire went out of Mr. Swayze’s eye then, and he turned and tried to run from her, but she wasn’t going to let him go. She kicked out, and caught him in the small of the back — and when he fell, she stood over him and kicked down, like she had on the canoe. She heard the crack of another couple of ribs breaking — these ones in Mr. Swayze’s chest and not in the canoe. Her stomach didn’t give her any trouble about breaking these ribs, though, or about breaking the skin on the next kick.
If anything, she thought it might be egging her on.
Janie kicked him once more in the head, and with that, Mr. Swayze’s neck cricked all funny and he stopped moving. For a moment, she thought about bending down and opening her mouth wide, and just finishing him that way.
Instead, she stepped back and sealed her lips.
Yum-tum, said her stomach as she moved over to the bookshelf. She pulled down the copy of ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD.
Janie ran her finger along the book-cover’s feather-bumps. They were pretty good feathers. She wondered for a minute whether they might have used a real feather to make it — some complicated thing where you pressed the paper on top of the feather with a steam iron, so the real thing would be there in the book. Maybe the book people had come out here, and rubbed it off the stone up the hill.
Janie opened up the book.
“Pro-log-oo,” she said. “Oh. I get it. Prologue.”
Yum-tum. There were other smells too — more exquisite in their way, coming off of Mr. Swayze’s cooling corpse by the kitchen door. Janie could imagine burying her face in that fresh meat, lapping up the blood like it was a fine liquor.
“The — the—” Janie concentrated on the next word. “Laughing,” she finally said, and laughed herself. “The laughing man stood on the side of the dirt road and — and…”
…and watched the storm boil in from the west. It was going to be bad, he knew; twisters like claws from some ancient beast would scour the lands and lift the things of those lands high into the sky. The storm would ride this place — ride it, and devour it. Nothing would be left in its wake but ruin and sadness. The laughing man thought about that. It would leave the land exposed. And that would be bad for the ones who were left. Because they would be easy pickings, he knew.
Easy pickings for It.
Behind her, glass cracked as the wind outside grew, and flung something at the house — no doubt to get Janie’s attention. She hunched over the book — let her mind go to the words inside it, the way the wind — the Wen-digo — wanted her mind to go to it.
Mr. Swayze’s book didn’t say it yet, but Janie had a pretty good idea what “It” was. In the book, it was more than likely that DEAD BIRD from the cover.
Janie closed ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD and put it back on the shelf. There had been a photograph underneath the author biography at the back of the book, but it wasn’t Mr. Swayze’s. They’d taken a picture of a bearded man — hair down to his shoulders, up near to his eyes. Might have even been the funny man. Or maybe the Laughing Man? Laughing and funny: the words meant just about the same thing, as Janie thought about it.
“Yum-tum,” she said.
The wind outside wasn’t letting up — if anything, it was getting worse. Frothing the waters; scouring the land; exposing those that remained… Making them easy pickings.
Easy pickings for Janie.
That was just how it was going to be.
That wind was calling to her, it was time to move on, and somehow she knew she wouldn’t be able to stay put anywhere for very long now. She ran her tongue along her sharpening teeth. Good thing she hadn’t holed that canoe, else she’d be swimming.
Night of the Tar Baby
A nasty breeze caught the fumes off the still-bubbling tar pot and brought them along the shortest route it could find into Shelly’s nostrils. It was the foulest thing that Shelly had ever smelled; tar fumes stank like distilled pain, a kick in the gut or a smack across the ear, and they made her cough when they reached down into her lungs. At the sound she made, her brother Blaine punched her hard in the side.
“Shut up!” he hissed. “We’re gonna get caught!”
“You shut up!” said Shelly. It was a struggle to keep her voice from quavering — Blaine was thirteen, three years older than her, and he was starting to get his man-arm. He’d hit her harder than he knew, maybe, and her ribs ached from it.
“Quiet, both of you.” Their dad crouched beside them, behind the highway sign that announced a new Petro-Canada service centre was coming here by October. His arms were crossed on the washbasin he’d brought with them. The trowel dangling in his hand cut through the air to emphasize what he said. “This is just what I was talking about back at the house. This is why we’re here tonight. Time to stop all the fighting.”
“Whatever,” said Blaine. “This won’t land you back in jail, will it?”
“This,” said Dad, “will keep all of us from jail, for the rest of our lives.”
“Then why are you stealing tar, not paying for it down at the hardware?”
“Got to be filched,” said Dad. “That’s part of the magic.”
“Whatever.” Blaine rolled his eyes.
It was pretty clear that Blaine didn’t buy any of this — and Shelly knew she should probably defer to her brother’s judgement. After all, the last time their dad had been home for any length of time, Shelly was just five years old; Blaine, at eight, had known their father that much longer — lived through five more years of Dad’s promises and schemes, aftermaths of his barroom fights and late-night visits from angry OPP patrolmen; Lord knew how many three-day benders with his former buddy Mark Hollins; and maybe one or two more solemn pledges to improve himself, and turn all their lives around.
Maybe Mom was right, and Dad was just full of shit.
Dad started down from the sign, and into the midst of the construction site. The workers had laid foundations for the garage in a huge cinderblock rectangle; there were more bricks stacked over by the trees, along with some lumber, and there was a yellow digging machine that Dad figured was to hollow out a place for the big tanks underneath the pumps.
But Dad didn’t care about the digging machine, or where the tanks would go or anything else. He was after the tar pot, which had been left simmering through the night. Dad figured they had about half an hour from the time the work crew left, to the time the night watchman arrived — and that would be plenty of time to do what they needed to do.
Dad set the basin down beside the tar pot, making the bent-up twigs and wire rattle.
“Get the turpentine ready,” he said. “Blaine, you listening?”
“I’m listening.” Blaine reached into his pack, and pulled out the shoebox-sized tin of turpentine they’d brought along. “It’s here,” he said.
“All right.” Dad set the trowel down a moment and rubbed his hands together. He reached into the breast pocket of his jean jacket, and pulled out a little brown plastic bottle Shelly recognized as one of Mom’s old painkiller prescriptions. He pushed on the safety lid, twisted it open, and held it over the pot. After a couple of seconds, something thick and white like condensed milk dripped out, made a long, snotty line between bottle and pot. Dad held it there until the last was poured out, then threw the empty bottle behind him.