wattle:
1. a structure of interwoven sticks and twigs used as material for fences, walls, etc. 2. a red fleshy fold of skin hanging from the head or throat of certain birds, as the turkey.
The outside walls were no more than boards nailed together. The roof was corrugated steel. Outside, there was an old cooler that said COCA-COLA, the kind of thing that used to hold sodas back when they came in glass bottles. I rushed over and opened it. There was nothing in it but a hammer, a crowbar, and a community of spiders.
I slammed the lid down. Attached to the wall was a pay phone. I grabbed the receiver. There was actually a dial tone. I tried to remember my phone number. I’d always had a good head for numbers—I kept the accounts for our store, and I aced math, even though I don’t enjoy it, certainly not compared to English. But now, standing in the sweltering heat of what I assumed was Texas, I couldn’t remember my own phone number.
It didn’t matter. I didn’t have any money.
I looked at my watch again. 6:23. Why, if time was going to freeze, could it not have frozen weeks ago, before we left on the trip? Why couldn’t our car have died, or one of us have gotten food poisoning? Anything not to have let us leave home.
If Mom had been here, she would have blamed her death on George Bush, or the “House of Bush,” as she called the father and son who seemed so careless about sending other people’s children to war. There wouldn’t have been a peace vigil. There would not have needed to be one.
The door to the shed was secured with a rusted padlock. Still, like an idiot, I knocked, as if someone would come out and invite me to tea.
No one answered. I went back to the cooler, hoping that an ice-cold Coke had magically appeared.
The crowbar. It was as if someone had left a key. But what would I find in the shed, even if I got in? A four-course meal? A nice warm bed? Shade? At least there was that. Maybe water.
The crowbar could have easily pried off the rusted lock, but I didn’t pry. I swung at the lock. I battered it. And when it dropped to the ground, I whacked at it there in the dust like a maniac.
We’d broken into places a couple of times in eighth grade, me and Cory and Jacks and Bud, at that age when we were aching for something, anything to happen: for our bodies to grow to match our sudden, fiendish sexuality, for the world to notice our shining talents.
Instead, we stumbled pale-legged and scrawny through gym class, tried to hide ourselves when we showered, looked ten while the girls looked twenty, had acne and creaking voices. It was not pretty.
To compensate, we committed little crimes. We made dummies out of old clothes and hung them from the Mt. Hope Bridge, then laughed ourselves hoarse when it was reported as vandalism in the local paper. We climbed into the window of an abandoned house, spending an hour hoisting ourselves up and prying off the frame, only to find, once we were inside, that the house was missing the entire back wall, and we could have just wandered in from behind.
Cory raided his dad’s liquor cabinet, his mom’s stash of candy, and his brother’s cigarette cartons; then we snuck into the cemetery and drank, ate, and smoked until we were sick. Bud wanted to switch all the flowers on the graves, but Cory and I couldn’t bring ourselves to do something that mean.
We thought our restlessness could only be cured with something monumental.
In high school, Bud and Jacks started doing drugs and moving with a different crowd, but Cory and I settled down. I wrestled and worked more hours at the bookstore. Cory joined the jazz band and started working at his dad’s car lot. Our bodies grew to match the girls’. Our voices stopped cracking and we needed to shave. We started having a social life. We played volleyball at the beach in the summer and snowboarded in the winter. Everything was cool, except one night, I remember, our sophomore year, when Cory got upset in the car.
Cory was a year older, and he had his license. He had scored his brother’s car. We had gone to a party in Tiverton. Most of the night, Cory stood around next to the sliding glass door, but I got into a game of cards with some girls and had a pretty good time.
“That was cool,” I commented on the drive home.
“Cool for you,” Cory sniped.
“You should’ve played cards with us.”
“No one asked me.”
“I did.”
“The chicks didn’t.”
He sounded so pissed, I didn’t say anything.
“You make me sick. Babes always go for you.”
“No they don’t,” I argued.
“You’re just too big a moron to realize it. Like that chick Lauren at the party. She looks like a model, and she was all over you.”
“She was just playing around, trying to see my cards. We were wrestling.”
He rolled his eyes. “It was her way of having sex with you. Ever read Freud?”
“She practically broke my arm!”
“Look, you’re tall and good-looking. That’s all chicks care about. Look at me. I’m five-four, skinny, and ugly. I was born this way, and there ain’t nothing I can do about it. Do you know how hard it is to be a short guy?”
I didn’t.
“It’s like being a fat girl,” he said. “Nobody takes you seriously. But at least a fat girl can lose weight.”
“I don’t think girls are like that,” I said. “They don’t just care about the surface.”
“Trust me. They do. A guy like me, they think, ‘Cool, he can be my pal.’ If one more girl tells me what a great friend I am, I’m gonna deck her. I might as well be gay.”
“Come on.”
“Well, there’s one other thing chicks dig, and that I can do something about.”
“What?”
“Money. I’m gonna take me to law school and be a corporate lawyer or some shit, get rich, and drive a BMW.”
“I guess you better start going to your classes,” I told him.
“Yeah. No shit.”
Cory was like that. He had a quick temper, but as quickly as he got mad, he laughed it off.
I left the battered lock and went to the door. It creaked as I pushed it open. Trespassing. Breaking and entering. Why the hell not?
I blinked to adjust my eyes, but compared with the light outside, it was pitch-dark. I slid inside. My lungs clenched up like a fist from the dust.
I knew there probably wouldn’t be electricity in an abandoned shack, but I reached for a light switch anyway. A couple of splinters shot into my hand, but then I felt the switch. I flipped it, and nearly had a heart attack to join the asthma attack.
There, in the light, were eyes, about a hundred of them: wide and startled, marble, beady, and accusing.
I stood there, frozen, waiting for the bodies that held them to rise up and swoop for me, an avalanche of flapping wings and pecking beaks.
It took me at least a minute to figure out that the birds perched along the rows of tree branches were frozen in time and space, were not among the living.
I raised my eyes to the peeling sign above them, red paint on black: TAXIDERMY.