Chapter 5
Russell drove, Pete rode shotgun, and Michelle sat in the back. She wasn’t too happy about this arrangement either. In her opinion, Pete should have at least offered her the passenger’s seat. But after thinking about it further, she considered herself fortunate that Russell’s truck even had a backseat. Otherwise, she would be riding bitch between the two, and the thought of bumping hips with Pete Oscowitz didn’t appeal to her at all. It’s not that he grossed her out physically; she just held a low-grade resentment toward the guy. Kid thought he knew everything.
Before leaving, Pete had pulled her and Russell aside to explain that if Huey was in fact infected, then he more than likely wouldn’t be able to transmit the virus yet and some other dog had killed the rabbit, or rabbits—if there were even rabbits to begin with. When she’d asked why he thought Huey incapable of infecting her, his reply had been a huffy "Because he’s not foaming yet." It was more the everybody-knows-that tone of his voice than his smug expression that set her off. She had held back her ire, had managed to force it down her gullet like a poison pill—but only barely. And the only reason she’d hadn’t ripped him a new one right there was because he was Russell’s friend. Then so were Mike O’Brien and Hector Graham, when she thought about it.
She twisted in her seat and looked out the rear panel. In the bed of the truck, Mike’s dirty-blonde hair streamed in the wind. Huey’s ears similarly flopped behind his head. They both leaned over the side—Huey on the left, Mike on the right—catching the wind with their open mouths. Yeah, it could be a lot worse, Michelle thought. Those two could be in here with me.
They headed down Oldham Road, a long, curving thoroughfare that ran through Riley proper, intersecting Main Street at an oblique angle and continuing out to the boonies. She had insisted on coming along, even after Russell and Pete had explicated (ad nauseam) the dangers of a rabid dog.
She didn’t believe Mike’s story one bit, but the minuscule chance of glimpsing the inside of his house brought her along for the ride. There were a gazillion different rumors about what O’Brien’s inner sanctum looked like, ranging from the absurd to the not-quite-impossible. On more than one occasion it had occurred to her that most of these rumors would simply disappear if he were to fix the damn foundation. All the house really needed was a few dozen cinder blocks jammed under its sinking floor. She knew he was poor, but come on. How much do cinder blocks cost? They’re cheap and every hardware store sells them. The O’Briens were lazy. Plain and simple.
She might not have believed most of them, but the rumors floating around about the O’Briens, mainly Mike, were still entertaining in a twisted can-you-believe-that? sort of way. By far, the best one had come from Abby Myers. Even if the details were reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s "Psycho," it was still a good one. And it did explain why no one ever saw Mrs. O’Brien. She had asked Russell about this one after her lesson one day, and he’d told her that Mike’s mom had left Mike’s dad and was now shacking up with some loser in Mobile. With that rumor squashed, there were still others—lots of them—that needed to be verified or, at the very least, explored.
In the front of the truck, Pete and Russell sat in silence, apparently content to keep it that way. Michelle could never figure guys out. Even the special ones like Russell had no problem going long stretches without talking. It never seemed to bother them. She, on the other hand, wanted to scream Somebody say something!!! It was probably chromosomal, an innate need for all males to quietly contemplate their universes, their situations, their plans of action. Or maybe they just used their quiet time to visualize plump, ethereal titties floating in the air in front of them, just beyond their reach.
Finally, Pete spoke. "We should really wait for Price on this."
Russell pushed a stray lock behind his ear and said, "You worried, Pete? I thought you said there wasn’t anything rabid out there."
"No," Pete corrected, "I said Huey wasn’t rabid. And he isn’t, so I’m right."
Russell nodded. "Well, we don’t know that for sure, do we? And besides, Sheriff Price is away for the weekend, deep-sea fishing in the Gulf. We can’t wait till Monday to—"
"We still need to contact the authorities, Rusty." Pete interrupted. "This isn’t our place to get involved. You said so yourself."
"Fuck the authorities."
There was indignation in his voice, and for a brief, eerie moment, Russell had sounded exactly like Hector Graham.
"We don’t need them now, anyway," Russell went on. "I’ve got a hoe in the back in case we stumble across anything dangerous.”
"A hoe?" Pete asked lamely.
"Yeah, a hoe. What? Do you want me to turn around so you can grab your little archery set?"
Pete rapped his knuckles on the door handle, buying time to word his response. "First of all, it’s a Matthews compound bow. And second, we’re not going to need it because Mike was lying his skinny ass off back at your house. Why can’t you see that?"
Before Russell could respond, Michelle blurted out, "What the hell are you doing with a hunting bow, Pete? You’ve never killed anything in your life."
Pete started to turn around but decided not to. Looking out the windshield, he said flatly, "It was a gift from my dad, Michelle. From a long time ago. I still shoot it sometimes."
"Oh."
On Peach Street, all the sad, tiny houses were just as Russell had left them less than twenty-four hours prior. In full daylight, they appeared vacant and condemned, but O’Brien’s was by far the shabbiest one of them all. Russell parked under the creeping arms of the giant oak and killed the engine.
In the truck bed, Mike sang a seldom-sung verse of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Russell pegged the tune right away, knowing it would take the others longer to figure out. When all three turned to look at the goof, they saw that he sang to his dog.
"Dog owners," Pete mumbled.
Michelle’s head perked. "What’s that, Pete?"
"Nothing." Pete said, opening the door, getting out. He walked around the hood to where Russell already stood with his hands on his hips, waiting.
Michelle lingered in the cab, gazing through the panel at the kid and his dog. Mike sat on the wheel bump, cradling Huey in his arms like a baby. He was attempting, she assumed, to lull the bulldog to sleep. Even if he wasn’t a total idiot, Mike O’Brien sure looked like one. A couple of months ago, Russell had told her that at one point Mike had been tested for all kinds of mental disorders, but according to the experts, he was of perfectly sound mind. Hard to believe when you looked at the kid holding his dog that way—nestling it—almost as if it were more than just a dog. When you added up all the nutty things about him, the sum of Michael O’Brien fell short of a complete human being. She hated thinking that way, but it was the truth. He wasn’t complete—far from it. He was broken in so many ways, a fragile dish that had been carelessly dropped on a hard floor long before she had met him. He may be able to turn his craziness on and off, like Russell and Pete say, but when he was in crazy mode, like he was now, Michelle feared him.
"Mike, get your scrawny ass down here," Russell called out from the front of the truck.
They’re scared of him, too, Michelle thought. That’s why they’re standing so far away. Or maybe they’re just scared of Huey.
O’Brien stopped singing and lowered the dozing Huey onto the corrugated metal bed. He then went to the ledge of the tailgate and jumped off, disappearing from Michelle’s line of sight. He landed with a crunch on the oyster shell driveway. For a second, she thought maybe he had injured himself, but then, like a puppet, O’Brien’s head and torso popped up over the tailgate. He reached into the bed, wrapped his hands around the dog’s rib cage, hauled him out, and placed him on the ground, rousing him to life.
While O’Brien and Huey played in the yard, Russell went to the truck bed and pulled out a rubber-handled garden hoe. Michelle couldn’t believe how ridiculously cautious Russell was being. Even she wasn’t afraid of that stupid dog.
Am I afraid? she thought. She didn’t know for sure. If she could be afraid of Mike (Only when he’s crazy, though. The rest of the time, I’m definitely not afraid of him), then she guessed it was possible that maybe—make that a big maybe—she could be a teensy-weensy bit afraid of Huey as well. After all, Huey was his dog; he had raised the ugly thing.
No one knows for sure if he has rabies. Not even Rusty, and he has a way of knowing things—impossible-to-know things—before anyone else does. But he senses something. And so do I. Something ain’t right here. Not by a long shot is this place right.
A low-grade queasiness stirred in the pit of Michelle’s stomach, and as she got out of the truck and dropped her size eight Chuck Taylors onto packed oyster shell, that queasiness bloomed to full-blown nausea. She knew she couldn’t blame it on the heat. Not entirely.
Something definitely isn’t right here. This whole situation is fucked up.