I looked down at my own tray of soggy fish sticks and fries. Joan reached out and put her hand over mine where it lay upon the table. “Bug Town is beautiful, Nance,” she said, and a wave of sorrow washed through me. “Come with me,” she said. “We can be free.”
But she was wrong about that. Mostly, anyway.
Johnny showed up at my doorstep Saturday around six. I heard the unmistakable rumble of the Merc’s engine as he pulled up to the curb, and when my father—over my objections—sent me to the door to meet him, I saw the car for myself. It might have been a convertible fresh off the assembly line, that’s how neatly the thing had been done, but the car had been mutilated all the same. Shorn of its roof, with its lavender dash laid bare to the October sky and those ridiculous flames licking at the hood and fenders, it had been exposed as a broken toy, the empty vanity of a man who was more boy than man. He didn’t even measure up to the title Mr. Hayden had ascribed to him. Johnny Fabriano was no cheap hood. No, Johnny Fabriano was a selfish child whose experience of the world didn’t extend much beyond Red’s Billiards Parlor, and as he walked up the sidewalk to meet me, he seemed every bit as maimed as his car, stripped of whatever aura of menace he had once possessed, like a kid playing dress-up in his brother’s leather jacket and motorcycle boots—a kid who hadn’t slept in a week, pale and tired (drawn, my mother would have said), with his trademark duck’s ass in disarray.
“How’s your mother?” I asked, before he could even start up the stairs.
“My mother?”
“Yeah. You know, your mother. You told Joan about her. How’s she doing?”
Johnny hesitated. “She’s fine,” he said. “I—”
“You what? Hold her hand when she’s hurting? Buy her medicine? What?”
Johnny didn’t reply.
I sat down on the top step. “I don’t doubt that you live with your mother, but I figure the caretaking probably goes in the other direction. She probably gives you spending money. After all, you can’t make that much shooting pool.” I leaned forward, crossing my arms around my knees. “This is your fault, Johnny. Joan told me what happened in the car.”
“Nothing happened,” he said. “We were just sitting there talking, and this monster, I don’t even know where he comes from, he’s just there all of a sudden, and he tears the lid right off the top of my car like that.”
“The monster’s name is Sam.”
“I don’t care what his name is. He’s a bug, isn’t he?” Johnny shrugged. “Maybe he was jealous or something. Who knows what bugs think. I tried to save her, Nance. I came at him with a tire iron, but he was too quick. He just snatched her up and carried her off into the night.”
And maybe he believed this. Maybe he thought he was innocent, courageous, whatever. Maybe he’d convinced himself that his lie was true. People do it all the time. People want to be blameless. People want to be brave.
Still, I couldn’t help laughing—a bitter, joyless laugh. “Not the way I heard it, Johnny. You’re lucky he didn’t wrap that tire iron around your neck.” I stood, brushing off my skirt. “This is your fault. You’re the one that tried to rape her.” He rocked back a little at that, like he’d taken a punch. “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you. I wish he had. I don’t have anything else to say to you.”
I was halfway to the door when he said, “I’m going to Bug Town, Nancy. I’m going to go get her.”
I kept my back to him. “Let Mr. Hayden handle it.”
Johnny snorted. “That old bastard’s not going to do anything.”
He was right, of course. Mr. Hayden was done with Joan. She’d spent a week away from home by then—nights a man of his mind could interpret in only one way. As far as he was concerned, Joan had sacrificed her virtue—and when it came to women, virtue was all that mattered. Joan had shamed him, and if there was anything Frank Hayden would not abide, it was being shamed. She might as well have been dead.
“And what are you going to do with her, bring her home?”
“No, Nancy,” he said. “You are.”
And God help me, I turned around.
I missed her, that’s all. She’d been my closest friend—my only real friend—for almost a decade, and I didn’t know how I was going to go on without her. Aside from my parents, Joan was the only person I had ever loved. And so, without even talking to my father, I followed Johnny Fabriano down the walk to his mangled car. I went to Bug Town with good intentions. I went with love in my heart. And that was our undoing.
Passing through the outskirts of Bug Town was like passing through any other dying neighborhood. Worse, maybe. A few human families lingered, but most of the houses stood untenanted, their paint peeling, weathered FOR SALE signs jutting up from their unkempt lawns. But as we drove on, the signs dwindled and we began to see evidence of renovations in progress—skeletal networks of scaffolding, stacks of lumber and cinder block in dusty lawns. Though still recognizably human, the houses troubled the eye. At first glance, you couldn’t quite say why. At second, you realized that everything was subtly out of proportion. The lintels of the doors had been jacked up to accommodate seven-foot frames, the rise of each porch stair modified to reflect a lengthier alien stride. Even the angles were almost imperceptibly—disturbingly—out of true. The houses seemed to lean toward the street with an all but sentient vigilance.
We began to see dusky yellow ground cover that you might have mistaken for knee-high weeds had each meaty stalk not sprung to alertness as we passed, and turned watchfully to the street. Pale violet shrubs choked out the familiar autumnal trees, their sinuous branches drifting like seaweed in the still air. Squat, plump cylinders of washed-out orange quickened with breath. Aliens began to appear, striding down sidewalks or rocking in the shade of front porches as the October evening set in. They turned their heads to watch us as we crept by.
With each passing block, the streets became increasingly unearthly. Entire homes had been buried under thick, undulating vines, succulent and smooth. They coiled around windows and doors and slithered out across the lawns to envelop street signs and lampposts. Fleshy, tentacled trees—I have no other word—shouldered up to the sidewalk and intertwined their limbs in a dense, rippling canopy that blocked out the sky. And in that swimming underwater dim, everything pulsed with soft colors—pinks and pale yellows and blues—as if a single heartbeat throbbed in every living molecule. And everything smelled ripe and rich as gardenias just before they go to rot. And everything sang.
I sometimes hear it still, that soft, arrhythmic music, ethereal, and eerie as the tones of a theremin. It got under my skin somehow. It got inside my head, like an itch I couldn’t reach to scratch. There was something beautiful about it, and something peaceful, and something utterly cruel. If you listened to it too long, I thought, you might never want to hear anything else again. I wondered if this was what Joan meant when she told me that we could be free, because it didn’t sound like freedom to me. It sounded like the worst kind of bondage. It sounded like slavery.
“How come it didn’t get you too?” I asked.
Johnny shook his head. “I turned on the radio. I kept my eyes on the road.”
“And Joan?”
“Joan looked.”
I reached over and switched on the radio, turned it up loud so I couldn’t hear that music chiming in my head.
“How are we going to find her?”
“I have no idea,” he said.
But in the end it didn’t matter. She found us.
She was waiting on the porch of a house—or what had been a house—midway down the next street over. She stood tall and unafraid at the top step, the one unmoving point in that undulant landscape, her face softly illumined by the slow-pulsing colors. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders, and those succulent vines twined around her calves, like snakes tasting of the air. She looked serene, like a goddess or a saint, indifferent to mere human affairs. Yet she smiled when the Merc coasted to a stop at the curb. She smiled when she saw me, and the smile was her old smile, welcoming and warm and faintly mischievous. Just looking at it, I felt a surge of hope that she might yet be saved.