“Bitch! You fucking shit-brain!” Tony caught the slick wood of the handle, the sporadic splinters, but the teacher threw out her foot and caught Tony in the shoulder, knocking her away. Tony lost her breath, caught it, skidding in the needle-sharp straw. The teacher grinned, the flickering fire-glow twisting her face into myriad subhuman shapes. She raised the ax and stepped forward.
Tony scooted back on the floor, head reeling. “Don’t kill me, you goddamn bitch! Teachers don’t kill kids!” The teacher smiled. Tony shoved herself to her feet, ducking just in time to miss the blade as it swung at her head.
The teacher stumbled then, the blow connecting with nothing but air, and she took several weird, skipping steps forward. Air hissed through her teeth with the sound of a car radiator about to blow. Tony shouted, “Ha!” and threw the whole of her weight against the woman. Tony and the teacher sprawled to the floor, Tony on top of the woman, the woman cracking into a stall door. Tony dove for the ax handle, her fingers catching it and locking tightly. She yanked with all her strength, knees bearing down in the straw, body throwing itself back. But the teacher’s grasp didn’t loosen. She yelped, planted her foot on Tony’s chest, and kicked her away. She then sat up and waved the ax.
“Stop it!” Tony cried. “Crazy ass shit!”
Still seated, the teacher swung the ax in evenly measured side sweeps, like a farmer wielding a scythe. Back and forth, swoosh, swoosh, daring Tony to step up and loose her feet from the rest of her body. As the ax kept up its steady sweeps, the teacher braced herself against the stall door and pushed herself, slowly and steadily, to her feet.
“Back off!” screamed Tony. She looked behind her, her eyes probing the darkness for the pitchfork, the saw, something. Something to kill the teacher. Something to save herself.
Baby Doll. Tony saw the little girl lying on the floor, her head cradled in the balled-up sweatshirt. Baby Doll!
Tony scooted around the fire-bearing wheelbarrow and dropped down by the child. She picked her up and held her to her chest. So I catch what she’s got, Tony thought. Small price.
The teacher was fully on her feet now, turning like a Disney animatron toward Tony and Baby Doll. She strode forward, and stopped. The ax held position over her head.
“Kill me, kill us both,” said Tony simply.
“Let her go,” the teacher growled.
“Kill me, kill us both.”
Baby Doll opened her eyes. She squinted at Tony, then into the shadows beyond the teacher. “Mama had a baby,” she whispered.
The teacher stared.
“Put it the fuck down,” said Tony.
“I — ” began the teacher.
“I ain’t letting her go, bitch.”
The teacher tilted her head, shut her eyes, opened them, and said, “What?”
“Huh?” echoed Baby Doll.
Tony said nothing. She counted. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven….
The teacher looked at Baby Doll, then Tony, then her own upraised arms and the ax handle she clutched. “I…?”
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen….
A strange gasping sound from the teacher. Her mouth opening, snapping shut. The body wavering slightly, the muscles of the arms twitching within the flesh.
Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven….
“Ah,” said the teacher. Her tongue appearing briefly at the front of her mouth, disappearing. The ax, still in place overhead, a deadly torch in the hands of a mad Lady Liberty.
There was a rustling sound to Tony’s right. She glanced over the same moment the teacher did. There were wide, iridescent eyes in the dark, a crouched body in the straw.
The teacher whooped, spun on her toe, and brought the ax down in a powerful strike. The blade connected, cut through, slammed to a stop in the floor.
The cat’s head rolled lazily through the straw and came to stop against Tony’s boot.
Baby Doll stared at it. She reached out one clammy hand to touch the furry ears, the glistening eyes.
And for the first time on the entire, nightmarish trip, the little girl screamed.
53
She remembered.
There was a train track running behind the brick apartment building they lived in when they were in Kentucky. It passed behind the apartment’s playground, separated from the children by a tall, chain link fence and a steep embankment. The train didn’t come by often, several times a week, and it was a slow-moving thing most of the time. Once, when Mistie had been in the playground with Mama and Valerie, Mama had watched the train go by and said, “That thing moves like a old man who crapped his drawers!” She’d laughed. Mistie, who had been five at the time, had laughed. Little Valerie, who was two and a half, had giggled shrill and loud.
There were a lot of children at the apartment building, three stories’ worth of them, and in the summer time the playground was crawling with them because nobody had air-conditioning in their apartments. Mistie didn’t remember the names of any of the children who were there, but she remembered the faces, dark and light, chubby and thin, smiling and somber. Every morning of the summer they were there, clustering on the sliding board and cluttered atop the spin-around like Japanese beetles on a rose. They played in the baking-hot sandbox and threw balls at each other until someone finally cried and the mothers told them to be good or they’d have to go inside.
Nobody had any money, much. The mothers and older sisters who sat in the shade of the single tree in the playground were always saying something like that to each other.
“Wish I could get a new car. Not a new one, but a different one. Got a busted transmission in mine and I can’t afford a cab to work.”
“School’s comin’ up next month. You ever see a kid with bigger feet than Justin’s? Bought him new shoes in June and now he’s needin’ ‘em again for school.”
“Randolphs got a window air unit. Gonna run their ‘lectric bill up but damn, I wish it was me!”
“Me, too, sister, me, too.”
And on it went.
It was mid-August, and after suppertime. Some of the kids had come back down to play while others were settled in their living rooms in front of their televisions. From the playground the blue glows of the sets were visible through the open windows.
Mistie’s Mama was lying down on her bed because she just found out she was going to have another baby and wasn’t happy about it. She told Daddy she was going to get her tubes tied after this one was born. Mistie didn’t know what that meant but it sounded bad because Mama had said it through her teeth. Daddy was pissed off and went riding in their Buick. Mama sent Mistie and Valerie out the play on the playground for a while.
“You stay in there and don’t go no-wheres else,” said Mama from her bed. Mistie and Valerie were standing in the doorway to her bedroom, each holding a fruit roll-up left over from supper. “I can trust you to do what I say, can’t I, Mistie?”
Mistie nodded. “Yeah, Mama,” she said.
“When I call you out this window you come runnin’, you hear me? Anybody bother you, you come right back up here, you and Valerie, you hear me?”
“Yeah, Mama, okay.”
“Okay, then.” Mama smiled a little and said, “You’re my girls. Watch that slide now, you know how hot it gets in the sun. Burn the skin off the back of your legs you aren’t careful.”
“Okay, Mama.”
Mistie took Valerie by the hand and led her down to the first floor and then back through the hallway to the rear door of the building. Flies loved the back hall of the first floor because just outside the door was where the residents put their bags and cans of garbage when the Dumpsters where full. The Dumpsters were usually full.