At Home in the Dark Page 13

  Before I bring a set of bones to the attic, I bleach them to a delicate yellow-white in a warm bath of hydrogen peroxide and water. Later, I set them outside, beneath a kind of protective cage to further bleach them in the sun. Only the skulls turn out truly white. I don’t know why.

  Seen all together, the bones are magnificent, like an ancient shrine.

  The boy screams for Skyla, his tinny screeching filling the attic. He’s such a little boy, with such little bones. When he tries to run past me, I grab him. He pushes at me with his hands, and butts me with his unbandaged head.

  “Skyla! Skyla!”

  I curse myself for feeding this boy, and letting him play and sleep in my house. I curse my mother for making me the way I am.

  As he struggles, trying to bite and kick me, it’s my rage that makes me strong and keeps me from harm. Finally, I’m able to get my hands around his throat.

  I cry out when someone—surely Skyla—hits me with something hard, on my shoulder. The momentum forces me against the boy, but also forces me to let go of him.

  Painfully righting myself, I turn to face her. Even in the weak amber light I can see the hate—not fear, but truly hate—in her eyes. I’m so drawn to them, to the newness of this emotion I see, that I almost miss the movement of the claw hammer coming at me again. As I feint left, the blow glances off my ear. I lunge for Skyla, but she’s too quick, and I stumble and almost fall as I chase her to the stairs. It’s her plan to draw me away from the boy, and I almost stop and return to him in spite, but it’s her I have to deal with now. By the time I reach the stairs, she is halfway down, looking over her shoulder to see that I’m following. I pause to reach for the rail because safety first. My right foot has just come an inch off the floor when I feel two small hands at my back. It’s not a strong shove, but strong enough to pitch me forward so that the stairs rush at me. The skin of my right cheek tears as it meets an exposed nail on a loose tread, and I fold at the waist, my legs and arms jamming against the wall and stairs at impossible angles. When my body finally comes to a tortured kind of rest, I can do nothing. My face and back burn with pain as though I were on fire.

  “Witch!” the boy screams down at me.

  I close my eyes. I don’t want to see.

  Skyla’s breath comes in low, almost masculine grunts as she brings the hammer down again again again again again. The blows come, each one its own exquisite universe of pain, until I no longer feel anything at all. But I can still hear Skyla’s breathing. It rises, louder and louder, until it becomes the breath of hundreds, perhaps thousands, filling my ears with a roar so great that I can finally lose myself inside it.

  The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team

  Joe R. Lansdale

  The bus ride can be all right, if everyone talks and cuts up, sings the school fight song, and keeps a positive attitude. It keeps your mind off what’s to come. Oh, you don’t want to not think about it at all, or you won’t be ready, you won’t have your grit built up. You need that, but you can’t think about it all the time, or you start to worry too much.

  You got to believe all the training and team preparation will carry you through, even if sometimes it doesn’t. I started in Junior High, so I’m an old pro now. This is my last year on the team, and my last event, and if I’m careful, and maybe a little lucky, I’ll graduate and move on. It’s all about the survivors.

  I was thinking about Ronnie. She was full of life and energy and as good as any of us, but she’s not with us anymore. She got replaced by a new girl that isn’t fit to tie Ronnie’s war shoes, which her parents bronzed and keep in their living room on a table next to the ashes of Ronnie’s pet shih tzu. I saw the shoes there during the memorial. The dog had been there for at least three years before Ronnie died. It bit me once. Maybe that’s why it died. Poisoned. I remembered too that it slept a lot and snored in little stutters, like an old lawn mower starting.

  Ronnie has a gold plaque on the wall back at the gym, alongside some others, and if you were to break that plaque apart, behind it you’d find a little slot, and in that slot is her bayonet and her ashes in an urn. I guess that’s something. Her name is on the plaque, of course. Her years on the team, and her death year is listed too.

  There have been a lot of plaques put in the gym over the years, but it still feels special and sacred to see them. You kind of want to end up there when you’re feeling the passion, and the rest of the time that’s just what you don’t want.

  Ronnie also has a nice photo of her in her uniform, holding her bayonet, over in Cumshaw Hall, which is named after the girl they think was the greatest player of all, Margret Cumshaw. Cumshaw Hall is also known as the Hall of Fame.

  To be in both spots is unique, so I guess Ronnie has that going for her, though it occurs to me more than now and again, that she hasn’t any idea that this is so. I’m not one that believes in the big stadium in the sky. I figure dead is dead, but because of that, I guess you got to look at the honor of it all and know it matters. Without that plaque, photo, ten years from now, who’s to know she existed at all?

  Sometimes, though, the bus ride can be a pain in the ass, and not just because you might get your mind on what’s to come and not be able to lose your thoughts in talk and such, but as of late, we got to put up with Clarisse.

  Clarisse thinks she’s something swell, but she’s not the only one with scars, and she’s not the only one who’s killed someone. And though she sometimes acts like it, she’s not the team captain. Not legitimately, anyway.

  It’s gotten so it’s a chore to ride with her on the bus to a game. She never shuts up, and all she talks about is herself. She acts like we need a blow by blow of her achievements, like the rest of us weren’t there to perform as well. Like we didn’t see what she did.

  She remembers her own deeds perfectly, but the rest of us, well, she finds it hard to remember where we were and what we did, and how there have been a few of us that haven’t come back. She scoots over the detail about how our teammates’ bodies, as is the rule of the game, become the property of the other team if we aren’t able to rescue them before the buzzer. You’d think she saved everyone, to hear her rattle on. She hasn’t. We haven’t.

  We managed a save with Ronnie’s body, but we’ve lost a few. That’s tough to think about. The whole ritual when you lose a team member to the other side. The ceremony of the body being hooked up to a harness that the other team takes hold of so they can drag the body around the playing field three or four times, like it’s Hector being pulled about the walls of Troy by Achilles in his chariot. And then there’s the whole thing of the other team hacking up the body with bayonets when the dragging is done, having to stand there and watch and salute those bastards. That happens, the dead teammate still gets a plaque, but there’s nothing behind it but bricks.

  When we end up dragging one of theirs and hacking on it, well, I enjoy that part immensely. I put my all into it and think of teammates we’ve lost. We yell their names as we pull and then hack.

  Thing was, Clarisse’s bullshit wasn’t boosting me up, it was bringing me down, cause all I could think about were the dead comrades and how it could be me, and here it was my last game, and all I had to do was make it through this one and I was graduating and home free.

  A number of us were in that position, on the edge of graduation. I think it made half the team solemn. Some of the girls don’t want it to end. Me, I can’t wait to get out. There’s a saying in the squad. First game. Last game. They’re the ones that are most likely to get you killed.

  First time out you’re too full of piss and vinegar to be as cautious as you should be, last time out you’re overly cautious, and that could end up just as bad.

  Clarisse thinks she’s immortal and can do no wrong, but sometimes you go left when you should go right, or the girl on the other team is stronger or swifter than you. Things can change in a heartbeat.

  Clarisse, for all her skill, hasn’t learned that. For her, every day is Clarisse Day, even
though that was just one special day of recognition she got some six months back. It was on account of her having a wonderful moment on the field, so wonderful she was honored with a parade and flowers and one of the boys from the bus repair pool; the usual ritual. Me, I have always played well, and I’m what they call dependable. But I’ve never had my own day, a parade, flowers, and a boy toy. I’ve never had that honor. That’s okay. I used to think about it, but now the only honor I want is to graduate and not embarrass my team in the process, try to make sure no one gets killed on my side of the field. Especially me.

  We may be the state champions, but the position can change in one game. More experienced players you lose on the team, through graduation or death, less likely you’ll make State Championship. You can train new girls, bring up the bench team. But it’s not the same. They haven’t been working together with us the same way. They don’t move as one, the way the rest of us do. They’re lumps in the gravy. They would need to survive several games before they were like a part of us.

  Of course, listening to Clarisse you’d think she was the team all by herself. I’ve heard of some teams who would leave one of their members to the blades, for whatever reason. Maybe haughty teammates not unlike Clarisse. But no matter how annoying she is, that’s not the way we play. That’s not team work. We stick with her, like her or not. She’s a hell of a player, but she’s not the official team captain. But with Janey in the hospital they’ve given her the team for a while, so I guess, like it or not, she does have that position, but I just can’t quite see her that way, as a true leader.

  Our coach is around, of course, but she rides in a separate car when we go on a trip to a game. She says us having to deal with one another forces comradery. But I think the coach just likes to ride in a car and not hear our bullshit.

  She’s had a lot of winning teams, but this year, I figure she’s done. She knows we know our stuff, and there’s not much she can do. Just have us run our drills and give us a pep talk now and again. She was a great champion before she was a famous coach. She has fifty kills to her credit. Only Margret Cumshaw and Ronnie have more than that. But for all practical purposes, she’s out of the picture.

  “Thing you got to remember,” Clarisse said, turning in the bus seat, looking back at us, “is you can’t hesitate. Can’t do like Millicent last time out. You have the moment, you take it.”

  Hearing my name mentioned made my ears burn. I hadn’t hesitated. Things went a little wrong is all, and in the end, no one died and we won easily.

  “Yeah. We know how it works,” Bundy says.

  Clarisse gave Bundy a glance, but it wasn’t a strong one. We all knew Bundy was vital to our success. Clarisse was too, but nobody liked her the way they liked Bundy, though Bundy can connive a little herself, always wanted to be a team captain, end up a coach.

  Bundy was one of our corners. She made things look easy. She wasn’t fast like me or some of the other girls, but she was strong and taller than the rest. She had taken on two at a time more than once, and won, leaving them dead in her wake. She had her own parade day, twice, and she also had the scars across her cheeks and chin to prove her moments under the lights. Everyone said it made her look like a warrior, and that’s true, but they were still scars. Bundy had been pretty once.

  Me, I’ve done okay in that department. I have a scar on my left side, just below the rib cage, some small ones here and there, but I’ve come out all right, so far. At least I got both eyes. Bundy has a black pirate patch over her left one.

  “I’m merely doing my job,” Clarisse says.

  “Sounds to me, like you’re trying to do all our jobs,” I say, and that sets her off a little, but not in words. She just gives me the look. That burning look she usually saves for when we’re on the field, the one she has for the girls on the other team. It’s the look she wanted to give Bundy but didn’t, so I’m getting it double-time.

  “As Team Captain,” Clarisse says, “I—”

  “Temporary Team Captain,” I say.

  Now that look from her was stronger. Me and her, we’ve always rubbed each other the wrong way, even back when we were in grade school, when we first started training with wooden bayonets and swatting dummies full of candy at each other’s birthday parties.

  The dummies were always dressed up in drill team colors from other schools. It was a way of starting to think right about what we wanted to grow up and become. Me and her, we made the team, way we dreamed we would, and though we were a bit at each other all through school, we mostly got along. Guess you could say more than that. That we were close, like competitive sisters. Lately it was nothing but snide remarks and go to hell stares, grins like sharks. Only thing that held us together was the team.

  “Just think,” says the new girl, Remington, sitting beside me, fidgety, “tonight, all over the country, stadiums will light up, and teams will go inside, and the crowds will grow, and we’ll play beneath the lights.”

  I turn to look at her. “The lights will go up and the teams will march out and look up into the crowd, and you’ll be sitting on the bench, maybe getting us some water when we change out.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Remington says, turning red, making me feel a bit like an asshole.

  Remington was a little thing, just barely made the team, but the roster was thin for new troops this year, so she was the best of the worst. “But I’m on the team. That means something, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure,” I say. “We all start that way, asses on the bench. But eventually you’ll get your shot. You’ll be all right.”

  I didn’t really think that. I figured first time she was on the field, after she got through the performance, the ritual, she’d hit the turf running and end up with a bayonet through her throat. I’d seen it happen more than once. The real Rah-rahs, as I called them, often didn’t make it out of their first game without being badly wounded or dead, sometimes carried away by the other team for that drag and hack business.

  I told myself, she got in the game, she went down, I’d do my best to save her body from the other side, but I’d only go so far. I didn’t know her like I knew the others. The loss wouldn’t be the same. I kind of felt the same way about Clarisse, and we were long time teammates, but at some point, you draw the line on risk. And tonight, I had drawn that line.

  If I lived to get on the bus to go home, I would have had all I ever wanted of red, wet grass and cheering crowds. I could probably get an endorsement deal or two if I played my cards right.

  But when I, if I, stepped off that field tonight, from that point on I was a happily bored civilian.

  “All I ever wanted to be,” says Remington, “is on the team, to wear the white and purple.”

  “You haven’t made it yet,” I say. “You have on the colors, and you can say you’re on the team, but until you’re on the field facing those who want to stab you, and you need to stab them, and you’ve played through, then you can truly say you’re one of us. Not before.”

  She practically glowed there in the thin inner lights of the bus. “I’ll get there.”

  Maybe.

  “It’s about our school,” she says. “It’s about our tribe, isn’t it? Nothing really matters but our group, right or wrong.”

  I thought the problem was just that. The way the tribe takes over logic. The way other girls on other teams are the same. Them against us, us against them. But I say what I was expected to say, what I had to say, “Yeah, sure, girl. That’s it.”

  The bus slowed at a light, adjusted with a whining sound which meant it might need some overhaul or something, and then it moved forward again without dying or going to pieces. It just might get us there.

  I thought of something my mother said, that they used to have an actual driver up there, in the seat, and it was always a cranky old fart. She said she missed cars and buses that you drove, but me, I can’t imagine such a thing. I was cranky enough tonight without having a cranky bus driver. I looked at Clarisse sitting up front, and I�
��m thinking there was a time when we gave our dolls swords, and each held one and made them fight one another. We got our fingers banged a lot. Lot of girls that wanted to make the team did that, but I didn’t know any started as early as we did. We would sleep over at my house, or me at hers, and we’d talk. I couldn’t figure it sometimes. How we went from what we were then to what we were now. It’s like someone had cast a spell on us. We had a whole new set of friends outside the Team, and now me and her only talked when we had to, when we needed to for the games.

  Sometimes it hurt me to think about what had been.

  I looked out the window as we passed a field full of corn. There were lights in the field, and you could see the corn standing high, and beyond the field it was as dark as the space between the stars. I remembered once my mother, who had been quite a team champion herself, told me that when people came here, that was the part that was terraformed first. That very spot.

  “Once, it was barren, and there was a dome,” she said. “Right there is the heart of our beginning.”

  That was hard to imagine.

  “Remington.” It was Clarisse’s voice cutting through my moment of silence, and I had so been enjoying it. “I think we might pull you off the bench tonight, you know, let you play first, be up front to feel things out.”

  “What the hell,” I say. “She doesn’t know her ass from her elbow.”

  “She’s got about three seconds after they blow the whistle,” Bundy says. “Then her dead ass will be taking a tour around the arena.”

  “Two seconds,” I say.

  “She’s been trained,” Clarisse says.

  “That’s right,” Remington says. “I’m on the team. I’m honored to have the chance, Captain.”

  “Temporary Captain,” I say.