“I hate Forrest Gump!” Douglas Taylor said, and kicked a rock down the steep grade of the hillside to watch it plunk into the creek.
“Awe, come on,” said Rusty Sheridan. He nudged a bigger rock with his toe to loosen it, then shoved it off to dive in behind Douglas’s. “It’s like one of the best movies ever … that part where he’s on the shrimp boat and he sees Lieutenant Dan on the dock and he just—”
“I didn’t say I hated the movie. I said I hated Forrest Gump — the guy, the character.”
Rusty knew Douglas didn’t really hate the movie or the character. He hated the character’s haircut — and that was certainly understandable! That haircut had made Douglas Taylor the laughing stock of Carlisle Middle School. Well, not just the haircut. Douglas already had a couple of strikes against him. He was — what was it Rusty’d heard Fish call Mrs. Gillespie that time Fish was mostly sober? Rotund. That was Douglas alright — rotund, with rosy, round cheeks. And his totally clueless mother actually called him “Dougie” in public. At school! She engaged in a lot of public affection, too, which landed Douglas the nicknames Huggie Dougie and the Hugable Dougable. Rusty’s mom had said Douglas’s mother was “half a bubble off plumb” and Rusty’d told himself to remember that phrase so he could use it to describe his friends when they acted stupid. Douglas’s mother was more than just stupid, though. The way she acted about Douglas, wouldn’t let him play in the mud, for crying out loud, or drink out of a water hose, said she was protecting “her baby” from germs. That time he and Douglas had climbed a tree and she called the fire department to get Douglas down — the look in her panicked eyes, Rusty believed that day that she was genuinely crazy.
But even if the woman was only clueless, she’d outdone herself in cluelessness a couple of months ago. Rusty was sure it qualified as some form of child abuse. After she saw the movie, Claire Taylor had told the barber to cut little Dougie’s hair “just like Forrest Gump’s.”
Rusty stopped, felt like he’d been kicked in the belly. How long would it be before the reality of J-Day was no longer shocking? How long would it take before it was just ho-hum: “Yeah, that’s the way life used to be but not anymore, we’re stuck here — bummer.” Well, it would take longer than two weeks for Rusty Sheridan to stop feeling nauseous every time he thought about it! And he thought about it a lot, because it changed everything.
It didn’t matter anymore how Douglas wore his hair, or if his mother hugged him in public or if … nothing like that mattered now that he and the rest of the kids in Nowhere County couldn’t go back to school in Beaufort County in the fall. Not as long as the Jabberwock stood in their way. And how long would that be?
“I think Forrest Gump is a … a … jackass,” Douglas continued, and was right pleased with himself for being able/willing to use the word. Rusty tried to act suitably impressed. Douglas was only ten and didn’t have a really firm grasp on profanity, its nature and its uses. He only knew he wasn’t supposed to say certain words and so, duh, those were the words he tried to drop into any and every conversation.
At twelve, Rusty was far more advanced in the skill of cursing. When his mother, Sam, was out making her rounds all over the county as a home health nurse, Rusty used to stand in front of the bathroom mirror and practice dropping cuss words in between the syllables of regular words — so it sounded smooth and natural when he did it around his friends, like he talked that way all the time. He didn’t, of course, and in point of fact neither did any of them. Boy talk at home and boy talk among friends was—
Friends. He wouldn’t be seeing his Beaufort County friends until … unless—
The Jabberwock.
He shivered and tuned back in to Douglas’s prattle, which was more or less nonstop, a background noise that Rusty mostly ignored.
“— time to grow out by then.” Douglas grabbed a hunk of his blond hair — the part that was long enough to grab.
Forrest Gump was a great movie and all that — and Rusty would watch Tom Hanks take a dump! — but surely no one would dispute that his haircut was nightmare material. Shaved down to like an eighteenth of an inch from his ears halfway to the top of his head. The hair on the top was hardly long enough to need combing. Well, except for the two years when Forrest was running back and forth across the country — didn’t cut his hair and grew a beard.
In the beard department … Rusty had found two black hairs on his upper lip last fall and had been so excited he’d named them. But so far, none of their friends had shown up to join the party. He checked every morning in his mother’s magnifying makeup mirror.
Rusty’s hair wasn’t as long as Forrest’s had gotten then, either, but it was thick — and curly, which he hated! At least his mother let him wear it long-ish, down into his collar. It wasn’t red anymore — thank you, Lord! — like it had been when he was a toddler. That’s when he’d become “Rusty.” First name Russell, red hair — Rusty was inevitable. Gratefully, his hair color had darkened as he got older and now it was just brown, though in bright sunlight you could still see red in it.
Oh, he thought his mother’s red hair was gorgeous. She looked beautiful with it hanging down smooth around her face. But she was a girl. Red hair was fine for girls. If it was real. Douglas’s mother dyed her hair a shade of red Rusty’s mother called “a Sears color” — meaning it wasn’t a color found in nature. It’d been blonde when she and Douglas lived across the street from Rusty in the Ridge, with her husband — what was his name? Rusty couldn’t remember. He’d been the second one while they lived in that house and now she’d married somebody else altogether and had moved in with him. Which was why Rusty’s mother had to bring him out into the boonies past Twig this morning to spend time with Douglas. It’d been her idea and Rusty knew why. She felt bad that his life had pretty much fallen apart, but things were tough for everybody now. She thought she had been neglecting him ever since …
The Jabberwock.
It was out here somewhere. The Beaufort County line was only about half a mile away. Which was why Douglas’s mother had strictly forbidden him to play in this part of the woods. Which, of course, was why Douglas had demanded they play here — you got your little victories wherever you could. Douglas had wanted to go see the Jabberwock, but Rusty put the kibosh on that, told him you couldn’t see “a mirage” in the trees — which wasn’t strictly true. You could if you knew what to look for. Rusty knew. He’d seen it lots of times. But more important, he’d seen what it could do lots of times, had been with his mother at the clinic in the Middle of Nowhere when they had an “incoming.” Somebody who had accidentally stumbled into it — he supposed things like that happened. It was more likely, though, that they’d decided to make a break for it. But it really didn’t matter what their reason for challenging the Jabberwock was, the result was always the same — the just-shoot-me experience of projectile vomiting in front of people. Or maybe just suffering the mother of all nosebleeds. Or going blind and deaf. There were lots of menu items. But the single worst thing Rusty could imagine was throwing up with an audience. He would rather die.
What if he was sitting on the bench in the bus shelter up-chucking on his brand new Air Jordans and Whitney Malone was there and she had to leap out of the way so the puke wouldn’t splatter on her? He was picturing the horror of that when he heard the sound. The rattle. But by then it was too late. The rattlesnake had already struck.