Raising Stony Mayhall Page 3

  It was the number-one commandment in the list that had been in effect his entire life: Hide. Never leave the farm, never answer the phone, and never let a visitor see you. Only the Cho family was exempt. His mother had told him about the disease he was born with. She told him how some ignorant people would say he was dead, even though he obviously wasn’t, and think he was contagious, even though he definitely, definitely wasn’t, and that’s why he had to stay hidden.

  When Junie, Stony, and Kwang walked out the back door, Chelsea quickly closed the magazine she was reading and placed it facedown on her lap. Then she noticed the arrow sticking out of her brother’s chest. “What did you do?”

  “It was an accident,” Stony said. The old family joke.

  Chelsea put the magazine away in her hemp purse, then made him sit down. Wincing, she put her fingers to the hole in his T-shirt.

  “Don’t rip it,” Stony said. It was his number 14 Ernie Banks shirt.

  “You are such a doofus,” she said. She lifted the shirt up over the shaft and pushed the cloth under his chin. There was no blood—he’d never bled in his life—but she still made a disgusted face. The shaft was buried in him like a reed in the mud.

  “Should we pull it out?” Junie asked.

  “No! That would make it worse.”

  “Well, you can’t just leave it in there,” Kwang said. Wrong move. The girls turned on him, telling him it was his fault—which was mostly true—and finally drove him from the house. Then they started yelling at Stony.

  Chelsea said, “Geez, Stony, he shot you in the heart. You could have died.” This caused Junie to burst into tears.

  “It’s okay, Junie,” Stony said. “It doesn’t hurt.” Though that was weird, come to think of it. Shouldn’t something like that be a little painful? Mom said his disease made him different from everybody else, and he could do things other people couldn’t. But still, the heart was kind of important, wasn’t it?

  “We need Alice,” Chelsea said. Alice was always the one who stitched and repaired him. But she was working at the Tastee-Freeze in Easterly and wouldn’t be home until supper, the same time as Mom.

  “Let’s just snip it off,” Stony said. “I’ll hide it until Alice can get it out.”

  They retrieved their father’s big metal toolbox from the barn. Ervin Mayhall had enough tools to fix anything, except maybe cancer. From the pile of formidable instruments they chose a pair of pliers that looked like hedge clippers. Stony lay on the dirt floor holding on to the base of the shaft near his chest, while Chelsea clamped down and twisted the pliers. He could feel the arrow tip twisting inside him but didn’t want to tell her to stop. Eventually she managed to gnaw through the fiberglass shaft. The remaining stub still made a pup tent of his shirt.

  “We can’t cut any more or we won’t be able to pull it out,” Chelsea said. She was dripping with sweat. The air in the barn was stifling.

  “Maybe you could wear a coat to the dinner table,” Junie said.

  “No, tell her I’m eating at Kwang’s,” Stony said. “I’ll hide out here until you can get Alice.”

  That became their plan. At 4:30, a half hour before Mom’s usual arrival time, he went back to the barn, scattering the near-feral barn cats. Only a few minutes into his exile, Junie came out with a stack of Hardy Boys from his room. She was nine; he was five years old but looked and acted ten. She both mothered him and looked up to him. Though she wasn’t a reader herself, she approved of his appetite for books. Stony didn’t think there was much to admire there. He was a boy who didn’t sleep, in a house in which no TV was allowed. What else was he going to do with all that time?

  “Anything else, Brother John?” she asked.

  He thought about telling her that he’d read the Hardy Boys at least two times each, but he didn’t want her to feel bad. She was just trying to be nice. “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Okay then.” She kissed him on the forehead, in the same way that their mother kissed all of them, and hurried out.

  For a while he flipped through The Secret of the Old Mill, looking at the illustrations, and then he remembered the magazine that Chelsea was reading on the back porch—the one she’d been so careful to hide from the little kids. That had to be more interesting than Frank and Joe tracking down counterfeiters. He snuck out of the barn, keeping low so he wouldn’t be seen from his mother’s bedroom window, and ran, crouched, for the back of the house. Chelsea’s multi-colored purse was still on the porch next to the rocking chair. If he stood up he’d be in direct view of the kitchen window. He dropped to elbows and knees and commando-crawled across the lawn: the Unstoppable, evading Agents of Hydra. When he reached the porch he slipped a hand through the slats and pulled her purse to him. The magazine was folded up inside. He took it out, a Time magazine with a gray photo of a battlefield on the front, and stuck it into his back pocket. Mission accomplished!

  He started to crawl back, then decided to risk a peek inside the kitchen. He slowly rose, head tilted back, until his nose cleared the railing and he could look into the window. His mother and sisters were at the table, just starting to pass around the baked spaghetti. He hated to miss dinner. Not the meal, that was just food—no, foodstuff, a word he’d picked up from a box of Commander Calhoun FishStix. He could taste food, but he had no taste: he never knew what dishes were good or bad until his sisters or Kwang pronounced judgment. Delicious, spicy, yummy were colored toothpicks he stuck into whatever appeared on his plate and remembered for next time. Chocolate, according to Chelsea, was the best food ever invented. Mrs. Cho’s kimchi was the worst ever, unless you ate with Mr. Cho and heard him grunt happily through a plateful. Stony didn’t want to offend Mom or Mrs. Cho, so he decided early on that he should really like everything put in front of him, and the way you proved you really liked something was to chow down. He taught himself to chew chew chew, letting his gut fill up like a lawn mower bag, and then later he’d slip out to the bathroom and throw everything up. He’d long since stopped thinking of this process as weird—it couldn’t possibly be weirder than pushing poop out your butt—but it was time-consuming. He kept up the pantomime because he loved sitting around the table with his sisters and hearing them talk about best friends and former best friends and the biology teacher with Jack Lord’s hair, and he loved the way his mother smiled to herself when he told her he liked the burnt spaghetti noodles at the edge of the casserole dish.

  Junie suddenly glanced out the window and saw him. He froze, and then Junie turned back to the table and announced at the top of her voice, “We forgot to say grace! Everybody close your eyes.”

  He ducked down, laughing silently, and then crept back to the barn with his prize.

  Kwang somehow figured out that Stony was in the barn. A little after five, he sneaked through the big doors and climbed up the ladder to the loft.

  “Hey, are you okay?” he said. “Did they get it out?”

  Stony sat with his back against an ancient bag of seed, staring straight ahead at nothing, the Time magazine open on his lap.

  “Look, I’m sorry I shot you, okay? I promise I won’t do that again.”

  Stony seemed to focus on him for the first time. “I—I think I’m …”

  “What? Is it hurting?”

  Stony handed him the magazine. On the cover was a black-and-white photo of a field full of bodies. In red letters it said, “The Fifth Anniversary.” Then in black letters below that: “Can It Happen Again?”

  “Look at the pictures.”

  Kwang flipped through some of the pages, and stopped at the two-page spread that showed a grassy field full of corpses. Men were tossing bodies into a huge bonfire. “Wow, there were a lot of ’em.”

  “Zombies,” Stony said. He’d never said the word aloud before, didn’t really know what it meant. “A lot of zombies.”

  He took the magazine from Kwang and flipped to another page. “There were thousands and thousands of them. They were all over New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania
and some other places. They killed tons of people. They didn’t tell you about how big this was in school?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. In social studies we haven’t even gotten to the Korean War yet.” Kwang said nobody knew about Korea. All the kids at school thought he was from Vietnam. “So what’s the deal? There were a lot of dead people.”

  “Kwang, they killed them all. Every one of them that had the disease.”

  “I thought they sent them to a hospital or something.”

  “That’s what I thought. That’s what Mom told me. But there never was a hospital. They just rounded them up and shot them and burned them.”

  “Geez,” Kwang said. Together they looked through the pictures again. Then Kwang said, “Does your mom know?”

  Stony stared at him. “Of course she does—they all do. My sisters, your family. Everyone’s been hiding this from me my whole life.”

  “It’s not like you’re very old.”

  “Shut up.” Stony got up from the floor and walked to the loft door, which was slightly ajar. He could see his mother’s station wagon in the lane, and the beater pickup that Alice drove. The Hardy Boys would call it a jalopy. “If the police found me, they’d kill me.”

  “They can’t kill you,” Kwang said. “You’re the Unstoppable.” Stony made a disgusted noise and Kwang said, “No, this is what you’re training for! When they come for you, you’ll be ready.”

  “Stop it. This isn’t a joke.”

  “Look, they only killed those other guys because they went crazy and ate people. You don’t want to eat people, do you?”

  “Not you. You probably taste like spiced cabbage.”

  “See, then nobody has to be careful around you.”

  “Careful?” Stony said. “Who told you you had to be careful around me?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody! My dad maybe.”

  “What? When?”

  “He used to say it all the time. Mother made him stop.”

  Stony felt sick. “I thought your dad liked me. He lets me watch him work on the cars.”

  “He doesn’t like anybody, why would he like you?”

  “Okay, fine! Just—get out, okay?”

  “Come on, Stony.”

  “Get out!” Stony spun and shoved Kwang in the chest, knocking him backward onto the floorboards. The magazine flew out of his hands.

  “Don’t you get it? They’re hunting me.” Stony picked up the copy of Time, then stepped to the edge of the loft. “And when they find me, they’ll kill me.”

  He stepped off the edge. Twelve feet of air, then the hard smack as his feet struck the packed dirt. He felt no pain, but the shaft in his chest vibrated like a tuning fork.

  He ran.

  Once they started looking, it didn’t take them long to find him; they just followed the trail that connected the Mayhalls’ grassy, overgrown fields to the Chos’ faltering corn rows, a dirt highway Stony and Kwang had scraped out for Tonka trucks and army tanks. Stony was holed up in the windbreak of trees that marked the border of the farms, a strip of woods where two summers ago he and Kwang had built a fort out of discarded plywood and Sheetrock. Stony heard his sisters’ voices in the distance, then looked out to see the beam of the flashlight jerking toward him. He placed the magazine against the wall and covered it with a square of cardboard.

  Since leaving the barn he’d decided to run away, then decided to stay, changing his mind a dozen times. His family had lied to him. They’d treated him like a baby. He obviously couldn’t trust them. And wasn’t he the Unstoppable? He could run all night, hide during the day, and cover hundreds of miles without tiring. The only thing that kept him from running away was the complete lack of a destination.

  The flashlight beam played across his face. Alice knelt down in front of the fort, Junie behind her. “Don’t be scared,” Junie said.

  “I’m fine,” Stony said.

  Alice shined the light on his chest, and prompted him to lift his shirt. “What the hell?” she said. “You were shooting real arrows?”

  “Just at me,” Stony said.

  “Well, that’s okay then.” She studied the wound. “I could probably pull that right out. But then we might tear something internally. We need to stitch you up, kid.”

  “All right. Whatever you say.” She’d fixed him up a dozen times before. He didn’t know what he’d do when she left for college. In a few days she’d be gone to Iowa City. Who’d repair him then? Not Chelsea, that’s for sure. She was too squeamish. Probably why she didn’t come out with them tonight. “Can we do it out here?”

  “Uh, no. We’ve got to sew you up from the inside out. We’re going to need lots of light. And Mom’s going to have to do it.”

  “What? No!”

  “Sorry. Let’s go.”

  He didn’t try to argue further. Once Alice decided something, she couldn’t be budged. As they crossed the field together he asked, “Alice? I’m dead, right?”

  “You’re not dead, John.”

  “But I’m not alive.”

  “Of course you’re alive. You’re running around and hiding in ditches, aren’t you?”

  “Stop talking to me that way! You know what I mean.”

  Alice stopped walking. “You should have this conversation with Mom.”

  “She’s just going to tell me the same things she always does—I’m very special and God loves me and please don’t go outside. I need someone to tell me the truth.”

  She looked out into the dark fields, lips pursed. Moonlight and shadow carved her angular face into something ancient and severe, an Egyptian sculpture. Mom said Chelsea was the pretty one, but it was Alice whose face he studied, that he loved most.

  “Here’s the truth, John,” she said finally. “We don’t know what you are. Those people from the outbreak are nothing like you. They wanted to attack and kill people, and you wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Maybe that’s because Mom found me so early.”

  “That’s another thing—I’m pretty sure the living dead aren’t supposed to grow. They don’t start out as babies and turn into kids.”

  “Really?”

  “Pretty sure. So whatever it is you are, you’re not one of them.”

  He didn’t know if this made him feel better or worse.

  “So does that mean I can die?”

  “Kid, you just took an arrow to the heart.” She gripped his hand and started walking. “If you can die, I’m highly confident you won’t be checking out tonight.”

  “Where is it?” his mother said under her breath.

  Alice leaned forward, tilting her head to stay out of the path of light. She held a set of tweezers in each hand, keeping the wound open while their mother worked on the internal tissue.

  “Where’s what?” Stony said. They’d already removed the arrowhead, so it couldn’t be that. He lay on his back on a beach towel spread on the kitchen floor. He felt pressure when his mother poked and tugged inside him, but he was otherwise comfortable. Only the bright light bothered his eyes.

  “Nothing,” his mom said. “Lie still.” She’d been furious with him, of course. Stony didn’t mention that his sisters had conspired to hide the wound from her, and in return they didn’t mention that Stony had allowed Kwang to shoot at him. It was, they said, an accident.

  Alice said, “It’s like … meat. Solid meat, all the way down.”

  “Wait a minute,” Stony said. “You can’t find my heart?”

  “I’m sure it’s in here somewhere,” his mother said. “How do you feel, John?”

  “I’d feel better if you could find my heart.”

  “He’s fine,” Alice said. “He’s always fine.”

  His mother sighed. “Well, it’s not like it’s ever pumped or anything. All right then, let’s get the fishing line and close up. Are there any of the old wounds we should fix up while we’re here?”

  His wounds never healed. In fact, they only grew larger as he grew.
Stitches popped, even those made from the high-test line his mother used. They repaired him like a rag doll with too much sentimental value to throw out.

  He closed his eyes and let them tug and cinch and fasten him back into shape.

  Later, he would think of the next few months as the Summer of Terror. He didn’t tell his mother or sisters that he’d seen the Time article, but he thought of it constantly. No matter what Alice said, he knew he’d die someday. And he knew how. The police would find him, and then they would shoot him, and then they would burn him.

  While his mother and sisters slept, he walked the house. Occasionally he would lie down, impersonating a normal person, but his mind would thrash and root, his thoughts tangling into each other like blackberry vines. Sometimes he’d try to distract himself with the Little Big game: He’d stare up into the dark and convince himself that the ceiling was impossibly far away, that he was a speck, an ant in the middle of a huge bed. And then, abruptly, he was gigantic, a mountain range under a dark sky, and the floor was miles away below him. If he relaxed into it he could keep the scales flipping for minutes at a time. Years later, when he picked up a novel titled Little, Big, he thought, Hey, somebody else knows about this! But of course the book turned out to be about something else entirely.

  One morning his mother asked him why he looked so tense. Did he look different? He tried to remember what his face felt like before he understood that the world was trying to kill him. He told her nothing was wrong and she let it go for the moment, but he could tell she was studying him. Then one night she came out of her bedroom at two or three in the morning and found him sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room, staring out the picture window. He was watching for flashing lights, listening for sirens. He started when he noticed her standing there.