“How do you see so much?” demands Miss Bosch from her bed.
Mel Herman shrugs. “I just keep my stupid eyes open.”
Mel tells Miss Bosch about the violence he sees and hears about all over town. She responds that it is an odd thing that the summer ended up so bloody. Spring is the season of birth, she says, and that’s a naturally violent thing; autumn is the season of slaughter and death. Not this year, says Mel.
Every day he tries to find something to tell her, either overheard from one of his odd-job employers or memorized from the police blotter, lately his favorite section of the local paper—which he reads now instead of throws. Mel Herman tells these things to Miss Bosch because he likes her wicked smiles and thirsty, mean-spirited cackles.
These are the things Mel Herman tells her: In late July, four kids make a pipe bomb in a backyard and it blows up while still in some kid’s lap, and he loses four fingers and the hair from the top of his head. For weeks afterward, kids marvel at the resulting stain and wonder to one another why no one has bothered to clean it.
A grown-up shoots a hole through his own hand with a hunting rifle. A teenager hooks his eyebrow with a fishing lure while out on Grayson Lake. A curious little girl sticks her tongue inside a metal soda can and the can must be cut away by surgeons. A woman falls down in the local movie theater and on the dark, sticky floor there is blood but no one can see where it comes from. A head wound? Busted lip? Or maybe from somewhere inside? And everything in between is worse this year, too—Mel can attest to it. Skinned knees are skinned wider, bloody noses gush harder, cuts are deeper, scrapes nastier, puncture wounds so severe that it takes almost a minute for the blood to well and push its way out from the hole.
“They don’t trust anyone who doesn’t bleed suitably,” says Miss Bosch, barely audible beneath the clanging of that rusty old fan. Mel thinks she is referring to herself, dying slowly but with nothing at all to prove it: no wounds, no blood, no plastic tubes in her nose like his father. Each day Mel spends more and more time at Miss Bosch’s bedside, scrutinizing her rising and falling torso and wondering if each breath he witnesses is her last.
“Paint for me,” she says one day.
She knows about his painting. He doesn’t remember how, but somehow over the summer she has dragged the information from him. He says no. No, thank you. But the request sets fire to his insides. No one has made such a request from him since his brother asked him to paint all those album covers.
Anyway, Mel knows Miss Bosch doesn’t really want him to paint for her, she’s just being polite. Once she saw his work, Mel is certain that she would ignore it like his brother, or misunderstand it like Mr. “Bud” Camper. No, thank you, ma’am.
Mel doesn’t know what to do about Mr. Camper, who one blistering day around lunchtime catches Mel slouching down the street. Mr. Camper tells him he has been calling Mel’s home for days but no one answers, and when Mr. Camper drove to Mel’s house last Friday, no one came to the door. Mr. Camper, beneath his unkempt beard and long hair and ruffled clothing, is excited. There’s an arts academy in the city, he says. A scholarship you’re being offered, he says. He has pamphlets and information and he tries to show them to Mel right there in the middle of the road. Mel’s heart beats so hard that the veins in his throat squeeze off his air. He takes the pamphlets from Mr. Camper without looking at them and hurries away, feeling cold sweat trickle down the middle of his back. Mr. Camper hollers that Mel must call him, and soon, because the academy’s application deadline is just ten days away—there isn’t much time! Mel mumbles, thank you Mr. Camper, and Mr. Camper hollers back, please, Mel, call me Bud.
Mel goes home and tosses the paperwork in the garbage.
Later that week, when Mel returns home from his daily roaming with a handful of money collected from Miss Bosch, Mr. and Mrs. Huron, Ms. Daisy, Mr. Cole-man, and several others, his father is waiting for him in the living room, clutching paper in a skeleton fist. Mel is frozen. There in his father’s hand are the pamphlets and application forms from Mr. Camper, only wrinkled and dappled with tomato sauce, coffee grounds, and bacon grease. His father shakes the papers; some of them flutter to the floor. His father is upset. He’s always upset, but this time it is different. He screams so loudly saliva swings from his chin. Mel stands there like a boxer taking punches.
His father yells for hours, and afterward Mel still is not sure why. His father does not say he wants Mel to put the papers back in the trash. His father also does not say he wants Mel to go to a special arts academy in the city. He only rattles his blue oxygen tank and roars about being left alone to die. Hacking and spluttering and coughing, tears of incredulity leaking from his red eyes, Mel’s father demands his bath. Mel disconnects the oxygen tank and helps his father move slowly to the tub, then removes his father’s clothes and lifts him into the lukewarm water.
His father seems to weigh less than the weapon that presses against Mel’s chest.
With his father splashing safely in the tub, Mel goes to his bedroom and shuts the door. He peels off his filthy black shirt. Then, as he does every night, he gingerly removes the object that he has carried next to his heart all summer: his brother’s knife, what the high schoolers call a switchblade, and he unfolds it and watches how the dull light from the ceiling’s bulb transforms into white shimmers when it strikes the clean, sharp blade.
When his father calls to be removed from the tub, Mel clenches his weapon. The knife is a way out, he knows this, a better way out than any worthless arts academy, any meaningless scholarship.
Now the phone rings almost every night. Mel answered it the first time, but it was Mr. Camper, and Mel hung up without saying a word.
“You have no business taking a scholarship,” says Miss Bosch when she hears of it. Mel didn’t mean to tell her about Mr. Camper’s offer, but somehow it just came out. “Isn’t that right?” she asks. Mel shrugs. Miss Bosch looks thinner and weaker than ever. She is dying, as sure as Mel’s father is dying, but instead of flailing like a drowning man she is sinking straight down like a brick.
Miss Bosch laughs, a raspy, crackling chuckle. “No academy would ever want someone like you,” she says. “Isn’t that right?”
She then demands that he paint for her, as she does now every day. But Mel has made a decision: no more painting, not ever. If he just stops that foolishness, right here, right now, the distress it causes in everyone—his father, Miss Bosch, Mr. Camper, himself—will go away.
One evening as he fixes his father’s bedtime poached eggs and toast, the newly coined cusswords of “scholarship” and “academy” still sputtering from his father’s lips, Mel hears a sound from the doorstep. Mel leaves the stove and peeks from behind the curtain, afraid that he will see Mr. Camper.
Instead, he sees a kid from school named Reggie Fielder, and a pile of school paintings stacked beneath a heavy rock. Instantly he remembers Reggie standing outside his garage a couple weeks ago, with that kid James Wahl and that one-armed Willie Van Allen, and the way Reggie held that baseball bat like he was going to start swinging. Mel doesn’t even think about it: he grabs his brother’s switchblade and his heart leaves his body, he is capable of anything. He is at the door, the knife is brandished. He is breathless.
But the weight of the weapon drags down his hand. Reggie Fielder leaves. When Mel goes out later to inspect Reggie’s delivery more closely, the rock looks like a grave marker. Beneath the marker, Mel’s paintings are dead.
Later that night, a resurrection: Mel Herman decides to make one final painting.
Reggie’s house is even smaller than Mel’s. The new painting, his final one, Mel leaves at Reggie’s doorstep, killed dead beneath another rock. Even Mel is not sure what the painting is supposed to say to Reggie. It could be a warning. It could also be an invitation. Mel has a strange urge not to terrorize Reggie with his knife, but to show him the blade, show him how the spring-release works.
“Paint for me,” demands Miss Bosch a few hours later. Her voice is a thin piece of paper, perhaps an application to an arts academy, fluttering away too fast in the wind.
Mel remembers Miss Bosch complaining that the townspeople “don’t trust anyone who doesn’t bleed suitably.” Maybe Miss Bosch had not been talking about herself after all. Maybe she had been speaking about Greg Johnson or Willie Van Allen. Clean crime scenes are suspicious—where is the blood, aside from reproduced somewhere in one of Mel’s paintings? Death, Mel thinks, is the most suspicious thing of all, for once the bodies are gone, how can you be sure they ever existed? Mel’s brother is gone but that does not necessarily mean he is dead; so a marble marker reading “Gregory Johnson” does not, in fact, prove anything.
As he continues his odd jobs, Mel finds further evidence that he is right: he can sense the dawning disbelief in the hit-and-run killer in everything the grown-ups say and do. There is blood all around them, yes—that they can plainly see. But a murder? When? Says who? A murder without a victim or assailant is not a murder, it is daily life.
“Chew your food,” Mr. and Mrs. Huron warn their children. Mel smoothes down the new dining room linoleum and watches the bored, too-safe Huron family grind their jaws until their food is a flavorless mash impossible to choke on. Mel has seen these children so bored at night that they touch stove burners and fondle broken glass, practically dying for danger. Mel watches the children drag their feet inside at eight o’clock. Television schedules are fought over. Board games are dusted off. Tiny plastic playing pieces go missing and paper money is doled out. A banker is elected. Free Parking rules are irritably debated. None of the Hurons is happy.
“This curfew,” sighs Ms. Daisy into her phone as Mel mops up another kitchen flood. She sips her tea and chats to someone on the other end about the Van Allens, who continue to have a rough time, or at least that’s the current gossip. Mr. Van Allen has been out of work now for what seems like forever, and Mrs. Van Allen has been seen laughing too loudly in the cereal aisle and standing in front of playgrounds, crying into her hand. “This is the bed we’ve made ourselves,” Ms. Daisy whispers into the phone as Mel slips out the back door to dump the foul water.
“Sleep tight,” says Mr. Coleman, checking on his tucked-in kids. Mel stands quietly, awaiting payment and listening to Mr. Coleman chew the ice from his second or third stiff drink. Mr. Coleman clears his throat and speaks about being a child himself, about his own childhood injuries and accidents, as well as some things that were not accidents at all. “Being a kid has never been a very safe thing,” Mr. Coleman tells Mel with a shrug.
All of this means less to Mel Herman now that his painting has ceased. He still hears everything but no longer has any reason to remember it. “Doing nothing is death, too,” snaps Miss Bosch, straining her dry eyes through the arid current of the metal fan. Mel feels the weight of his switchblade and wonders if using it on Miss Bosch would be merciful or cruel. “Doing nothing, Mel Herman, is a more gradual death than that by truck,” Miss Bosch continues from where she lies, sunk deep down in her bed. “But every parent has warned their child against standing still in the middle of the road. You know why?”
Miss Bosch smiles that wicked smile.
“If you want to live, you’ve got to move.“