If It Bleeds Read online

  The kitchen door opened. It was Grandma, back from Mrs. Stanley’s across the street. Grandma had taken her chicken soup because Mrs. Stanley was feeling poorly. So Grandma said anyway, but even at not quite eleven, Chuck had a good idea there was another reason. Mrs. Stanley knew all the neighborhood gossip (“She’s a yente, that one,” Grandpa said), and was always willing to share. Grandma poured all the news out to Grandpa, usually after inviting Chuck out of the room. But out of the room didn’t mean out of earshot.

  “Who was Henry Peterson, Grandpa?” Chuck asked.

  But Grandpa had heard his wife come in. He straightened up in his chair and put his can of Bud aside. “Look at that!” he cried in a passable imitation of sobriety (not that Grandma would be fooled). “The Sox have got the bases loaded!”

  3

  In the top of the eighth, Grandma sent Grandpa down to the Zoney’s Go-Mart at the bottom of the block to get milk for Chuck’s Apple Jacks in the morning. “And don’t even think of driving. The walk will sober you up.”

  Grandpa didn’t argue. With Grandma he rarely did, and when he gave it a try, the results weren’t good. When he was gone, Grandma—Bubbie—sat down next to Chuck on the couch and put an arm around him. Chuck put his head on her comfortably padded shoulder. “Was he blabbing to you about his ghosts? The ones that live in the cupola?”

  “Um, yeah.” There was no point in telling a lie; Grandma saw right through those. “Are there? Have you seen them?”

  Grandma snorted. “What do you think, hantel?” Later it would occur to Chuck that this wasn’t an answer. “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to Zaydee. He’s a good man, but sometimes he drinks a little too much. Then he rides his hobby horses. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”

  Chuck did. Nixon should have gone to jail; the faygelehs were taking over American culture and turning it pink; the Miss America pageant (which Grandma loved) was your basic meat-show. But he had never said anything about ghosts in the cupola before that night. At least to Chuck.

  “Bubbie, who was the Jefferies boy?”

  She sighed. “That was a very sad thing, boychuck.” (This was her little joke.) “He lived on the next block over and got hit by a drunk driver when he chased a ball into the street. It happened a long time ago. If your grandpa told you he saw it before it happened, he was mistaken. Or making it up for one of his jokes.”

  Grandma knew when Chuck was lying; on that night Chuck discovered that was a talent that could go both ways. It was all in the way she stopped looking at him and shifted her eyes to the television, as if what was going on there was interesting, when Chuck knew Grandma didn’t give a hang for baseball, not even the World Series.

  “He just drinks too much,” Grandma said, and that was the end of it.

  Maybe true. Probably true. But after that, Chuck was frightened of the cupola, with its locked door at the top of a short (six steps) flight of narrow stairs lit by a single bare bulb hanging on a black cord. But fascination is fear’s twin brother, and sometimes after that night, if both of his grandparents were out, he dared himself to climb them. He would touch the Yale padlock, wincing if it rattled (a sound that might disturb the ghosts pent up inside), then hurry back down the stairs, looking over his shoulder as he went. It was easy to imagine the lock popping open and dropping to the floor. The door creaking open on its unused hinges. If that happened, he guessed he might die of fright.

  4

  The cellar, on the other hand, wasn’t a bit scary. It was brightly lighted by fluorescents. After selling his shoe stores and retiring, Grandpa spent a lot of time down there doing woodwork. It always smelled sweetly of sawdust. In one corner, far from the planers and sanders and the bandsaw he was forbidden to touch, Chuck found a box of Grandpa’s old Hardy Boys books. They were old-timey but pretty good. He was reading The Sinister Signpost one day in the kitchen, waiting for Grandma to remove a batch of cookies from the oven, when she grabbed the book out of his hands.

  “You can do better than that,” she said. “Time to step up your game, boychuck. Wait right there.”

  “I was just getting to the good part,” Chuck said.

  She snorted, a sound to which only Jewish bubbies do true justice. “There are no good parts in these,” she said, and took the book away.

  What she came back with was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “Now this is a good mystery story,” she said. “No dummocks teenagers running around in jalopies. Consider this your introduction to actual writing.” She considered. “Okay, so not Saul Bellow, but not bad.”

  Chuck started the book just to please Grandma, and was soon lost. In his eleventh year he read almost two dozen Agatha Christies. He tried a couple about Miss Marple, but he was much fonder of Hercule Poirot with his fussy mustache and little gray cells. Poirot was one thinking cat. One day, during his summer vacation, Chuck was reading Murder on the Orient Express in the backyard hammock and happened to glance up at the window of the cupola far above. He wondered how Monsieur Poirot would go about investigating it.

  Aha, he thought. And then Voilà, which was better.

  The next time Grandma made blueberry muffins, Chuck asked if he could take some to Mrs. Stanley.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” Grandma said. “Why don’t you do that? Just remember to look both ways when you cross the street.” She always told him that when he was going somewhere. Now, with his little gray cells engaged, he wondered if she was thinking of the Jefferies boy.

  Grandma was plump (and getting plumper), but Mrs. Stanley was twice her size, a widow who wheezed like a leaky tire when she walked and always seemed to be dressed in the same pink silk wrapper. Chuck felt vaguely guilty about bringing her treats that would add to her girth, but he needed information.

  She thanked him for the muffins and asked—as he’d been pretty sure she would—if he would like to have one with her in the kitchen. “I could make tea!”

  “Thank you,” Chuck said. “I don’t drink tea, but I wouldn’t mind a glass of milk.”

  When they were seated at the little kitchen table in a flood of June sunshine, Mrs. Stanley asked how things were going with Albie and Sarah. Chuck, mindful that anything he said in this kitchen would be on the street before the day was out, said they were doing fine. But because Poirot said you had to give a little if you wanted to get a little, he added that Grandma was collecting clothes for the Lutheran homeless shelter.

  “Your gramma’s a saint,” Mrs. Stanley said, obviously disappointed there wasn’t more. “What about your granddad? Did he get that thing on his back looked at?”

  “Yeah,” Chuck said. He took a sip of milk. “The doctor took it off and had it tested. It wasn’t one of the bad ones.”

  “Thank God for that!”

  “Yes,” Chuck agreed. Having given, he now felt entitled to get. “He was talking with Grandma about someone named Henry Peterson. I guess he’s dead.”

  He was prepared for disappointment; she might have never heard of Henry Peterson. But Mrs. Stanley widened her eyes until Chuck was actually afraid they might fall out, and grasped her neck like she had a piece of blueberry muffin stuck in there. “Oh, that was so sad! So awful! He was the bookkeeper who did your father’s accounts, you know. Other companies, too.” She leaned forward, her wrapper giving Chuck a view of a bosom so large it seemed hallucinatory. She was still clutching her neck. “He killed himself,” she whispered. “Hung himself!”

  “Was he embezzling?” Chuck asked. There was a lot of embezzling in Agatha Christie books. Also blackmail.

  “What? God, no!” She pressed her lips together, as if to keep in something not fit for the ears of such a beardless youth as the one sitting across from her. If that was the case, her natural proclivity to tell everything (and to anyone) prevailed. “His wife ran away with a younger man! Hardly old enough to vote, and she was in her forties! What do you think of that?”

  The only reply Chuck could think of right off the bat was “Wow!” and that s
eemed to suffice.

  Back at home he pulled his notebook off the shelf and jotted, G. saw ghost of Jefferies boy not long before he died. Saw ghost of H. Peterson 4 or 5 YEARS before he died. Chuck stopped, chewing the end of his Bic, troubled. He didn’t want to write what was in his mind, but felt that as a good detective he had to.

  Sarah and the bread. DID HE SEE GRANDMA’S GHOST IN THE CUPOLA???

  The answer seemed obvious to him. Why else would Grandpa have talked about how hard the waiting was?

  Now I’m waiting, too, Chuck thought. And hoping that it’s all just a bunch of bullshit.

  5

  On the last day of sixth grade, Miss Richards—a sweet, hippy-dippyish young woman who had no command of discipline and would probably not last long in the public education system—tried to read Chuck’s class some verses of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It didn’t go well. The kids were rowdy and didn’t want poetry, only to escape into the months of summer stretching ahead. Chuck was the same, happy to throw spitballs or give Mike Enderby the finger when Miss Richards was looking down at her book, but one line clanged in his head and made him sit up straight.

  When the class was finally over and the kids set free, he lingered. Miss Richards sat at her desk and blew a strand of hair back from her forehead. When she saw Chuck still standing there, she gave him a weary smile. “That went well, don’t you think?”

  Chuck knew sarcasm when he heard it, even when the sarcasm was gentle and self-directed. He was Jewish, after all. Well, half.

  “What does that mean when he says ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’?”

  That made her smile perk up. She propped one small fist on her chin and looked at him with her pretty gray eyes. “What do you think it means?”

  “All the people he knows?” Chuck ventured.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “but maybe he means even more. Lean forward.”

  He leaned over her desk, where American Verse lay on top of her grade book. Very gently, she put her palms to his temples. They were cool. They felt so wonderful he had to suppress a shiver. “What’s in there between my hands? Just the people you know?”

  “More,” Chuck said. He was thinking of his mother and father and the baby he never got a chance to hold. Alyssa, sounds like rain. “Memories.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Everything you see. Everything you know. The world, Chucky. Planes in the sky, manhole covers in the street. Every year you live, that world inside your head will get bigger and brighter, more detailed and complex. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Chuck said. He was overwhelmed with the thought of a whole world inside the fragile bowl of his skull. He thought of the Jefferies boy, hit in the street. He thought of Henry Peterson, his father’s bookkeeper, dead at the end of a rope (he’d had nightmares about that). Their worlds going dark. Like a room when you turned out the light.

  Miss Richards took her hands away. She looked concerned. “Are you all right, Chucky?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then go on. You’re a good boy. I’ve enjoyed having you in class.”

  He went to the door, then turned back. “Miss Richards, do you believe in ghosts?”

  She considered this. “I believe memories are ghosts. But spooks flapping along the halls of musty castles? I think those only exist in books and movies.”

  And maybe in the cupola of Grandpa’s house, Chuck thought.

  “Enjoy your summer, Chucky.”

  6

  Chuck did enjoy his summer until August, when Grandma died. It happened down the street, in public, which was a little undignified, but at least it was the kind of death where people can safely say “Thank God she didn’t suffer” at the funeral. That other standby, “She had a long, full life” was in more of a gray area; Sarah Krantz had yet to reach her mid-sixties, although she was getting close.

  Once more the house on Pilchard Street was one of unadulterated sadness, only this time there was no trip to Disney World to mark the beginning of recovery. Chuck reverted to calling Grandma his bubbie, at least in his own head, and cried himself to sleep on many nights. He did it with his face in his pillow so he wouldn’t make Grandpa feel even worse. Sometimes he whispered, “Bubbie I miss you, Bubbie I love you,” until sleep finally took him.

  Grandpa wore his mourning band, and lost weight, and stopped telling his jokes, and began to look older than his seventy years, but Chuck also sensed (or thought he did) some relief in his grandpa. If so, Chuck could understand. When you lived with dread day in and day out, there had to be relief when the dreaded thing finally happened and was over. Didn’t there?

  He didn’t go up the steps to the cupola after she died, daring himself to touch the padlock, but he did go down to Zoney’s one day just before starting seventh grade at Acker Park Middle School. He bought a soda and a Kit Kat bar, then asked the clerk where the woman was when she had her stroke and died. The clerk, an over-tatted twentysomething with a lot of greased-back blond hair, gave an unpleasant laugh. “Kid, that’s a little creepy. Are you, I don’t know, brushing up on your serial-killer skills early?”

  “She was my grandma,” Chuck said. “My bubbie. I was at the community pool when it happened. I came back in the house calling for her and Grandpa told me she was dead.”

  That wiped the smile off the clerk’s face. “Oh, man. I’m sorry. It was over there. Third aisle.”

  Chuck went to the third aisle and looked, already knowing what he would see.

  “She was getting a loaf of bread,” the clerk said. “Pulled down almost everything on the shelf when she collapsed. Sorry if that’s too much information.”

  “No,” Chuck said, and thought, That’s information I already knew.

  7

  On his second day at Acker Park Middle, Chuck walked past the bulletin board by the main office, then doubled back. Among the posters for Pep Club, Band, and tryouts for the fall sports teams, there was one showing a boy and girl caught in mid-dance step, he holding his hand up so she could spin beneath. LEARN TO DANCE! it said above the smiling children, in rainbow letters. Below it: JOIN TWIRLERS AND SPINNERS! FALL FLING IS COMING! GET OUT ON THE FLOOR!

  An image of painful clarity came to Chuck as he looked at this: Grandma in the kitchen, holding her hands out. Snapping her fingers and saying, “Dance with me, Henry.”

  That afternoon he went down to the gymnasium, where he and nine hesitant others were greeted enthusiastically by Miss Rohrbacher, the girls’ phys ed teacher. Chuck was one of three boys. There were seven girls. All the girls were taller.

  One of the boys, Paul Mulford, tried to creep out as soon as he realized he was the smallest kid there, coming in at five-feet-nothing. Miss Rohrbacher chased him down and hauled him back, laughing cheerfully. “No-no-no,” said she, “you’re mine now.”

  So he was. So they all were. Miss Rohrbacher was the dance-monster, and none could stand in her way. She fired up her boombox and showed them the waltz (Chuck knew it), the cha-cha (Chuck knew it), the ball change (Chuck knew it), then the samba. Chuck didn’t know that one, but when Miss Rohrbacher put on “Tequila,” by the Champs, and showed them the basic moves, he got it at once and fell in love with it.

  He was by far the best dancer in the little club, so Miss Rohrbacher mostly put him with the girls who were clumsy. He understood she did it to make them better, and he was a good sport about it, but it was sort of boring.

  Near the end of their forty-five minutes, however, the dance-monster would show mercy and pair him with Cat McCoy, who was an eighth-grader and the best dancer of the girls. Chuck didn’t expect romance—Cat was not only gorgeous, she was four inches taller than he was—but he loved to dance with her, and the feeling was mutual. When they got together, they caught the rhythm and let it fill them. They looked into each other’s eyes (she had to look down, which was a bummer, but hey—it was what it was) and laughed for the joy of it.

  Before letting the kids go, Miss Rohrbacher paired them up (four
of the girls had to dance with each other) and told them to freestyle. As they lost their inhibitions and awkwardness, they all got pretty good at it, although most of them were never going to dance at the Copacabana.

  One day—this was in October, only a week or so before the Fall Fling—Miss Rohrbacher put on “Billie Jean.”

  “Watch this,” Chuck said, and did a very passable moonwalk. The kids oohed. Miss Rohrbacher’s mouth dropped open.

  “Oh my God,” Cat said. “Show me how you did that!”

  He did it again. Cat tried, but the illusion of walking backward just wasn’t there.

  “Kick off your shoes,” Chuck said. “Do it in your socks. Slide into it.”

  Cat did. It was much better, and they all applauded. Miss Rohrbacher had a go, then all of the others were moonwalking like crazy. Even Dylan Masterson, the clumsiest of them, got into it. Twirlers and Spinners let out half an hour later than usual that day.

  Chuck and Cat walked out together. “We should do it at the Fling,” she said.

  Chuck, who hadn’t been planning on going, stopped and looked at her with his eyebrows raised.

  “Not as a date or anything,” Cat hastened on, “I’m going out with Dougie Wentworth—” This Chuck knew. “—but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t show them some cool moves. I want to, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” Chuck said. “I’m a lot shorter. I think people would laugh.”

  “Got you covered,” Cat said. “My brother’s got a pair of Cuban heels, and I think they’d fit you. You’ve got big feet for a little kid.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” Chuck said.

  She laughed and gave him a sisterly hug.

  At the next meeting of Twirlers and Spinners, Cat McCoy brought her brother’s Cubans. Chuck, who had already endured slights to his manhood for being in the dance club, was prepared to hate them, but it was love at first sight. The heels were high, the toes were pointed, and they were as black as midnight in Moscow. They looked a lot like the ones Bo Diddley wore back in the day. So okay, they were a little big, but toilet paper stuffed into those pointy toes took care of that. Best of all… man, they were slick. During freestyle, when Miss Rohrbacher put on “Caribbean Queen,” the gym floor felt like ice.