Excerpt from Interlocking Monsters
From Chapter One
From where I am now I see everything. I see the bone bits in the barn ash and the blood stains on the ceiling and the body in the cistern of the yellow house, and I can crawl into the heads of the missing boys, and into the head of the monster who took them, and tell you every detail, down to the mustard smear on the pronto pup and the dew drop on the grass blade. But the summer the first boy, Billy Bell, disappeared I was ten years old and knew nothing.
That summer I dug my own grave down by the lake. I wanted to see what it felt like to be dead. I took Dad’s shovel and dug and dug till I couldn’t dig anymore, then lay in the hole and watched the blue rectangle above. One white cloud passed over, an ant crawled on my cheek, a purple thunderhead hovered, then it started to rain, so I got out of my grave and washed off with a swim in the lake, but I’ve always been like that, drawn to the dark side. Dracula slept in our basement skirt box, an old man crouched in our bedroom closet and a witch lived in our living room mirror.
That same summer a kid across the street sold his whole plastic monster collection, yellow fangs, reaching claws, dripping blood. I got two for a quarter as a joke, took them home and put them on top of my dresser. Very funny ha-ha! But when I turned off the light they were not funny. In the dark, Frankenstein and Wolfman became every moonbeam, drive-in movie scream and campfire nightmare condensed like blood in a woodtick. I turned on the lamp, kicked off the covers and swept the monsters into my third drawer down. They stayed shut in all summer, among erasers, notebooks and Barbie-dolls, tangled like dancers in love or wrestlers grappling. Each time I opened the drawer I felt their malevolence, the brute-rage of Frankenstein, the flesh hunger of Wolfman. Shut up like that their powers festered.
Then came the danger point. One afternoon in August. No one home but Dad and me. All the others off at work, school or Vietnam, and I felt something bad about to happen, some dark undoable, told myself be brave Cat, gathered my courage and opened the third drawer down. There were my monsters locked in their death-dance like some future snapshot of Dad and Uncle Ned. I grabbed them up, ran to the garage, opened the trash can, threw them atop our flattened spaghetti boxes and squished milk cartons and pressed the lid tight.
GOOD RIDDANCE!
Then the first boy disappeared. I didn’t know about Billy Bell till seven years later, in the Bicentennial summer I turned seventeen, and by then it was way too late to throw away the real monsters, but from where I am now, I see that night clearly, just as if I was atop the Ferris wheel looking down…
The Ferris wheel lights of the 1969 Iowa State Fair began to glow.
Balloons bobbed and sank. Sleepy heads in strollers bobbed and sank. Families headed home dragging sticky kids clutching stuffed elephants. Big boys clustered off to the side to pose and smoke. Big girls flocked across spitting popcorn through pink lip gloss. The Tilt-a-Whirl, Rock an’ Roller Coaster and Wall of Death spun circular blurs of red-yellow-blue. Barkers’ voices rose as the sun sank. “Five throws for a quarter!” “Win a Bunny!” “Everybody wins!” A child yowled. A firecracker popped off, then four in a row. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! The Merry-Go-Round attendant slapped a mosquito on his cheek. His hand came away bloody. A little girl in a blue sundress got sick at his feet. The temperature dropped. The twilight gave off scents of cotton candy, onions, sizzling oil.
A barefoot boy in overalls stepped up to the Pronto Pup stand.
He held a dollar in his fist.
He snapped the bill flat—
One whole dollar!
His sister Becky, two years older, one foot taller, snatched at his hand.
“No more Billy! You’re gonna bust if you eat another pronto pup!”
Billy tugged back, “Mine!”
The bill ripped in two.
“Look what you did!” Becky dug her fingers in. “Give!”
Billy tightened his grip, “Fat chance, lard-ass!”
Billy jerked away, dodging behind the Pronto Pup stand—