Dad shook his head, left the room. Mom paused in the doorway, flipped off the light. “Just a bad dream, honey. Back to bed. It’s late.” A few minutes later, the TV downstairs silenced, and I heard my parents’ bedroom door at the end of the hall softly close. Then came faint music from their radio, masking the random sounds of night from their room. Sometime later, the screams started again, faint, muffled. I wrapped the pillow around my head and began to hum.
The following night, nothing banged against my walls, but the screams began as Carson set into his monologue.
I called for my parents, but only Mom came. She sat on my bedside, listened for a few moments, then lay her palm against my forehead. “Is something bothering you, Kevin? You need to talk to somebody?”
Great. She thought I was a nut case. Next stop, the base psychiatrist, one of those convenient military freebies. Dad, a Navy machinist, had three years left before retirement, and Mom was determined to use any service she didn’t have to pay for. I was glad I’d kept my mouth shut about the slaps against the wall. She tucked me in and left me lying in a pale, steel-gray shaft of moonlight. A quarter-hour passed; another. Then screams. The television audience cackled.
Every night, anguished shrieks echoed across the pond. Mom and Dad could not hear them, secured in their bedroom at the front of the house, the radio playing softly within. I would sink deeper under the covers, wrapping my pillow around my head until sleep finally overtook me.
The following week, Dad shipped out on the Lexington for a month’s sea duty. The night he left, a rapid slapping circled the walls of my room, ending with a bang against my door. Mom shouted from downstairs, “Kevin! Go to sleep!” Then came the screams, more anguished than ever. Gooseflesh waltzed up my neck. I threw off the covers, stomped downstairs, grabbed Mom’s hand and pulled her toward my room, ignoring her demands of “What’s going on?”
“Listen,” I said as we entered.
“Is this about…?”
“Mom, please, just listen”
With a reluctant sigh, she leaned out the window beside me. Nothing. She pulled back in, shaking her head sadly. Poor boy, her eyes said. Abruptly, her expression changed. She snapped around, her mouth unhinged. Nightmarish shrills snaked through pines and oaks. She glared across the pond at the Baker house. A moment later, she fled to her room to call the police.
She hung up, came into my doorway, slipping on a windbreaker. “I’m going over to the Bakers’, Kevin. You stay here.”
As soon as I heard the car door slam shut, I yanked on my jeans and tennis shoes, slipped out of the house, circled the pond and skirted through Mrs. Baker’s back yard. A police car pulled into the front yard, followed by Mom’s car. I crept up to the only lighted window and peeked in, gasping as my gaze briefly met Carl Baker’s. Something stirred behind those dilated, milky pools, a sense of relief, of gratefulness.
His room door swung open. A tall, uniformed policeman stepped in, his expression sickening. Mrs. Baker pushed by, placing herself between him and her son. Beyond the officer, Mom waited in the hallway. The policeman turned away, and I heard him mutter that he’d radio for an ambulance. Mom backed away from the door as Mrs. Baker knelt beside the bed and began to stroke the sweating brow of her son. His head rolled side to side, tongue waggling between his lips. Mrs. Baker began to cry, pressing her cheek to his shoulder.
I crouched below the windowsill until the ambulance arrived. I rose cautiously as two attendants situated a stretcher beside the bed, positioning themselves at Carl’s head and feet to transfer him. They threw off the yellow spotted sheet, both pausing momentarily, eyes widening at the cadaverous chest heaving gray and crinkled, skin sinking between ribs with every struggled breath. Cloth strips bound Carl’s thin and brittle wrists and ankles to the bedposts. Scabbing flesh clung to the catheter running from his penis into the urine bag at the foot of the bed.
One attendant narrowed his eyes, swallowed, then transferred the urine bag to the gurney while the other untied Carl’s bindings. The man at Carl’s head slipped his hands under Carl’s shoulders as the other lifted Carl’s knees.
Mrs. Baker cried, “He belongs here!” The policeman held her gently back as the attendants lifted her son. Carl shrieked mindlessly during the brief instant he floated from bed to gurney, bottom sheet stuck to his backside.
My mother’s face turned ashen. She spun away and vomited.
The attendants dropped Carl, causing him to writhe and shriek as thousands of tiny roaches skittered from underneath him to race down the gurney’s legs. Carl flailed his arms and legs helplessly as the roaches burrowed out from folds of sheet and skin. His back and buttocks had become a massive bed sore, developing and healing repeatedly until the bottom sheet had grown into his skin. The policeman glared in disbelief and disgust at the bed where Carl had lain unmoved for months. A thick mass of tiny roaches scurried in fear of the light.
I spun away in a tripping, tumbling run home, scratching my hands, ripping my jeans. I entered through the garage and made it to my bedroom window as the ambulance pulled out of Mrs. Baker’s yard. Mom’s car was the next to leave, and, finally, the policeman’s. I tried to shake Carl’s tormented image from my mind, but could only soften it by thinking of Carl’s eyes, the way they had somehow thanked me.
I undressed quickly and was in bed by the time Mom came upstairs. She opened my door, and I knew she was looking in at me, probably wondering how a mother could subject her son to such horror, but love can be far more cruel than hatred. She closed the door softly, and, a few minutes later, I heard her retching in the bathroom.
She woke me as dawn slivered through the trees and bathed the pond in gray iciness. She sat on my bedside, looking frail, drained. She reached back, took my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Poor, poor man”
The state placed Carl in a long-term convalescent home, his care VA funded. As for Mrs. Baker, she stayed in her house. No charges were filed, but, in the long run, it didn’t matter. In June, the same policeman who’d answered Mom’s call about the screams found Mrs. Baker dead.
Twelve years later, lung cancer killed my dad. And last summer, a drunk murdered Mom in a head-on crash. I moved back to this house last October. The Baker place across the pond is still standing, but kids have shattered all the windows, and termites have weakened the structure so that it sags in the middle.
After that terrible night, I tried to forget Carl, but, lately, I can’t get him off my mind. Maybe it’s because I see that old house every day; maybe not. In any case, I’m sure he’s still alive, although I have no idea where he’s living. I must find out. And soon.
Last night, frenzied knocking rattled the outer wall of my old bedroom.
THE SHABBIE PEOPLE
by Jeffrey Osier
I
Their skin was smooth and colorless, so translucent that it looked like a liquid held in place by a thin, glutinous membrane. The long, loose threads along the edges of their shapeless garments seemed to wave in synchronized patterns, like cilia or some delicate reef-dwelling invertebrate. Even now I believe the Shabbies were human beings, although it seems as time goes on, that I base this conviction more and more on a desperate hope that has less to do with them—or even her—than it does with the way I cling to the notion of my own humanity.
I had a job in those days. Five days a week I rode the “L” train downtown, where I immediately took a narrow set of stairs down to Lower Wacker Driver, a bleak dust-blanketed stretch of road that ran directly beneath Wacker Drive proper and alongside the Chicago River. It was not a short cut—in fact, it added a good five minutes to my walk—and the only practical excuse I had for preferring it to a shorter, street level route was that it was cooler in summer and warmer (because of the heating vents from the buildings) in winter. But I walked Lower Wacker for a different reason entirely—for the darkness, the solitude. At street level I would have been no better than the rest of the office workers and clerks: in a hurry to get to work or to their trains, all milling and colliding and seething beneath the screeching elevated trains.