Shiny glared at them, shaking her head. “All puffed up like they own the place. They wouldn’t act so big if their friends could’ve seen them a minute ago, practically running down the road, they were in such a hurry to get away.”
Rae waved a bored little hand. “They’re just sassing around, trying to make Eric Fisher think they’re pretty.”
“Fisher?” I said, and my voice sounded all wrong, not just because my throat was hoarse, but because the word itself was so tight and shrill and unnatural.
Shiny glared at Rae and shook her head. “Do not even talk to me about Eric Fisher.”
“Who is he?” I said, studying the pack of boys.
“Just a plain jackass, with a fancy old witch of a grandma who runs every organization and charity club and town meeting.”
I’d been worried I wouldn’t know him. That now that my eyes were open, I could pass him in the street without a clue, but it was easy to see the one she meant.
He was standing with his back to us, not all that much bigger or taller than most of the others, but with a way of carrying himself that made him seem like he owned everything around him.
The evening was still hot, and his undershirt was damp enough that through it, the ghost of a tattoo showed. It started at the bottom of his spine and traveled up to where his hair curled against his neck. The shape was narrow and mysterious, like a black snake creeping up his back. The longer I stared, the harder it was to tell what the picture was supposed to be.
“What’s so bad about him?”
Rae gave me a kind look. “He keeps a few too many of his secrets . . . well, secret, for Shiny’s tastes.”
Shiny tossed her head so that her hair flew around her shoulders, all fading sunlight and dust. “And what makes him so special that he doesn’t have to mind what anyone says or does around here?”
Rae shrugged mildly, rummaging in her bag. “Well, he is special.”
I stood shading my eyes, looking after him. “Special how?”
Rae fished out a lipstick and snapped the bag shut. Her face was cool and blank and didn’t give away a single trick. “He has a particular skill with living things.”
Shiny made a scoffing noise. “Maybe with some of them. Not so much with people.”
It wasn’t the truth, though. All the other boys seemed to flock to him, ready to laugh at whatever he said, all looking to him for his opinion as soon as they opened their mouths.
Rae twisted up the lipstick and dotted it on. “Let’s say he’s got a skill with living things, but the boy doesn’t like to advertise.”
Shiny’s scowl deepened. “If he was from the Willows, people’d be calling him every kind of crooked and hellbilly just like the rest of us, just for walking down the street, but get raised by Isola Fisher, and everyone treats him like a prince!”
Rae shook her head. “You know that’s not the truth. If he didn’t pretend so hard that his blood was straight, they’d be after him in a heartbeat. He’d have it just as rough as you, so don’t go around acting hard done-by. You could lay low too if you wanted, but you don’t, and you can’t have it both ways.”
Shiny gave an ugly snort, but didn’t answer.
“All I’m saying is, if you want to get after someone for keeping their head down and making nice, then get after me.”
But Shiny only laughed and slung her arm around Rae’s shoulders. “Naw, you’re my little witch-girl. You know that. Besides, if you didn’t make nice, we’d never sell a single trick.”
On the other side of the square, Fisher was telling some sort of joke or story. He looked very tanned and kind of wild in the evening light, with his head tipped back and his grin wide, and I told myself that the only reason I was paying him any mind at all was because you were supposed to thank people. You were supposed to show your gratitude when they’d done you something nice.
I stepped down off the curb. “Well, I’m going over there to say hello.”
Shiny grabbed my arm. Her breath smelled like warm bread and bubblegum, but under that was a tight, perilous smell, like the air of a stormy afternoon, right before the lightning starts. “Excuse me, you what? Did you not just have the pleasure of meeting Mike Faraday?”
“Fisher dug me out of that cellar and brought me home to you. Without him, I’d still be down there. I don’t know how you were raised, but I was raised to say thank you.”
“Do what you want then,” Shiny said, letting me go. “But I am not going over there to stand around with him and play neighbors.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
Already, something in me was finding it a struggle not to turn and look. It was hard to keep my back to him for very long.
The air around Shiny had gone hot as blazes and her eyes were flickering. “Then I guess what you’re saying is you can find your own way home?”
Rae didn’t say anything, only cut her gaze at me. Her expression was mild, but her opinion was clear. No matter how evenhanded she might be, she did not think much of Eric Fisher.
There was something more to it than thanking him, though. A nagging whisper had taken hold of me, like the closer I got to him, the less frantic my heart might feel. It was there in my chest all at once, tugging me across the street, telling me I wanted to stand near him.
When I came up to the pack of boys, I was careful to keep well away from Mike Faraday, who eyed me with his lip stuck out and his hat pulled low.
The rest of them, I didn’t mind so much. I knew half their faces in blurry ways, and some of them had changed so little in the time I’d been gone that I could even put names to them. I saw Matthew Allen and Tony Watts, who had a crooked tooth and a dent in his chin, and Brandon O’Radley, whose hair was just as red and as curly as his sister’s. The rest were strangers, but the kind of strangers who had only to offer a name or a shared recollection and then you would know them again.
Two were gangly and blond and looked fair enough alike. I wasn’t sure, but I pegged them for the Maddox brothers, who’d wanted to leave me in the cellar. I was entirely sure a minute later, when they caught sight of me and both flinched like I’d tried to bite them.
Fisher still had his back to me. He was watching the men from the public works crew raise the walls of the bandstand and didn’t turn or look in my direction, but I was fairly certain he knew that I was there. That he could feel my very presence with the same insistent, nagging itch that I could feel his.
I reached out, barely brushing his arm. “Hello.”
When he turned to face me, he did it slowly. His eyes were a dirty shade of hazel, too light to be called brown, but not quite gray or green either, and he had a hard-boned face, with flat cheekbones and a square jaw. His hair was shaggy and almost black, but his complexion was fairish, burnt, and freckled. He was a whole mess of almosts, of mismatched pieces.
The other boys all watched me without a word. I could feel them looking, and maybe Shiny hadn’t been able to do much about my matted curls, but I was very glad to be clean of soot at least, and wearing my new bra.
Fisher stared down at me. His hair fell over his forehead, hanging in his eyes. “What do you want?”
The way he said it was so rude that I had to wrestle with an urge to step back. “I wanted to say hello. I thought I should let you know that I was grateful to you for coming out to the Willows this morning and finding me. But maybe I just shouldn’t bother explaining friendly gestures to you, seeing as you’re not friendly.”
“That’s ’cause I’m not your friend,” he said. “I don’t even know you.”
I stood looking up at him, no idea what to say. It seemed impossible that someone could do the best thing anyone had done for me in a long time and then tell me not to count them as a friend.
Around us, the other boys all stared daggers at me but didn’t say a word. Mike Faraday stood against a streetlamp, w
ith a lump of tobacco in his cheek and his arm hooked around Tony’s neck, watching me. There was a black mark on the collar of his T-shirt where Shiny had scorched him.
I was beginning to understand, deeper than I ever had, that the crooked side of things could be a hard place to live. Shiny got along by flash and hellfire, and Rae by dimples and smiles and making nice, but neither of those seemed to fit quite right with my own disposition. I didn’t know which way was mine, but I knew I’d have to find it soon enough.
“You must have had some good reason to come calling for me,” I said to Fisher, talking up at him like there was no one else around. “I mean, since we’re not friends and all.”
He raised his eyebrows and didn’t look at any of the other boys, but I could almost feel him weighing their opinions, like everything he said, he was saying it for them. “That’s a little bold, assuming that I came for you.”
“I’m not assuming, I’m just saying. After all, if you weren’t there for me, then what were you doing in my house?”
He laughed, but it was dry and not at all friendly. “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s no house out there to be in.”
I was quiet a minute, trying to decide what new, grown-up Clementine did when someone was short with her. I felt relatively sure that she did not put up with it and so I stepped closer. “I don’t know if you know this, but that is not an answer.”
He turned away so that his hair hid his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he wouldn’t look at me because he found me not worth looking at or if he was worried I might see something he didn’t feel like showing.
“Do you not want to talk about this in front of your friends?” I said, trying to sort out what was happening on his face.
“Get away from her, Fisher,” said one of the Maddox brothers suddenly, like he’d only just now worked up the courage. “Get away if you don’t want her to hex you in a minute. You saw how she was down there—all stitched and shut away. She’s got to be crooked as they come.”
Fisher stood with his hands in his pockets. His shoulders were hard and the look he gave the rest of them was unimpressed. “I didn’t see shit but a dirty little redneck girl that had got stuck down in a caved-in cellar hole, and we pulled her out. So don’t go blowing this up into some kind of thing.”
It was the second time that evening that someone had lied for me, and I wasn’t at all sure why he was bothering. Rae was my friend—it only made sense that she should try to help me—but Fisher had been very clear that he was not. All at once, I didn’t believe him.
The way he was watching me was a bit too fixed, and I could feel the flush hit my cheeks, but I didn’t look away. My mother had always told me never to be bashful or drop my eyes, and so I stared back at him. When I squinted, I could almost see the blur of light that had shone around him in the cellar, and I thought that no matter how steadily he looked at me, the truth was, I scared him a little. Just maybe not the same way I scared the Maddox boys.
The moment thudded between us like a heartbeat and I had an idea that any dare or challenge I gave him, he would take it. Maybe he’d do it to prove something to his friends, maybe just to make them nervous or think that he was brave. I didn’t care.
“I’m going down to that zoo on Crooked Mile,” I said. “Do you want to come?”
For once, he didn’t have anything smart to say. He shook his head, looking disgusted. “What do you want to go someplace like that for? It’s completely cruel.”
“I know. I’m going to go let the badger out.”
He raked his hair out of his face and squinted. “Serious?”
“Do I look like I’m lying?”
His eyes were softer now. When he smiled, the shape of his mouth made my blood go hot.
He glanced back at the other boys, who watched us with their hats pulled low and their hands shoved deep in their pockets, gumming on their chaw and spitting brown streams of it onto the sidewalk.
Across the street, Shiny and Rae were looking at me with their heads cocked and their arms folded, but I was out in the world now. I could find my own way home. The night was coming on, and I was ready to do something wild.
When Fisher smiled again, it was sharp and fierce. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, let’s go.”
THE ZOO
CHAPTER SEVEN
I’d thought we might be going to walk, since that was how Shiny and I had come into town, but Fisher paused at the corner of Main and Chester and steered me across the street.
It was just starting to come down dark, and the streetlamps were flickering on. His car was sitting by the curb, nearly glowing in the light that shone above it.
When he’d driven me out to Myloria’s, the car had sounded so loud and vicious I’d had an idea that it wanted to pull loose from the road and tear up the whole world. So I’d known what to expect, and still, I had not expected it. It was jewel-blue with a white stripe, all long shark’s nose and hungry body and a saucy little flip at the tail. The words TRANS AM were printed across the back, tiny flowers of rust flaking around the edges.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked, marveling that someone my same age could own something so fancy.
“Used to be my dad’s,” he said, throwing himself into the driver’s seat. “Now it’s mine.”
I got in on the passenger side. “Oh. Did something happen to him?”
Fisher didn’t look at me, just shrugged and jammed the key into the switch. “If disappearing in the middle of the night when I was five counts as something happening.”
He said it like it didn’t matter, but when I blinked, I could see the strange trails of light again, shining around him in the dusk.
Under me, the vinyl seat was smudged with ash and dirt, and it was peculiar knowing it had come from my own bare legs—that just a few hours ago, I’d been sitting in the same seat, with my eyes stitched shut, feeling the sun and the air on my face for the first time in years.
Then Fisher turned the key and it was hard to think about anything at all. The engine roared as we swung away from the curb, aiming down Chester Street and out of town.
We drove with the windows down, dust flying up around us, and the back end of the Trans Am squirreling on the gravel whenever Fisher put his boot on the gas.
We stayed quiet, not because there was nothing to say, but because the road was loud and the night was mysterious and electric. Then we turned out onto County Road 5, toward the Willows, and Fisher killed the engine and the lights.
“The zoo’s farther down,” I said in the sudden quiet, squinting through the windshield at the road.
He nodded, coasting onto the shoulder and setting the brake. “I don’t know about you, but I see no reason to go announcing ourselves to the whole neighborhood right before we start turning the animals loose.”
Then he got out and shut the door, and I got out and followed him.
* * *
At the zoo, nothing was moving. The sky had darkened to an inky shade of blue and the packed dirt yard was sunk in shadow. Up at the house, all the lights were out.
“Are they in bed already?” I whispered, mindful of what Shiny had said about Greg Heintz shooting at us. Growing up in the Willows had instilled in me an understanding that if there was one thing you weren’t supposed to do, it was walk right up into someone else’s yard without being invited. And it was probably worse if you were planning to steal their badger.
Fisher shook his head. “It’s early, still. They’re probably in town, watching the tents go up like everyone else.”
We let ourselves in through the gate and followed the long, weedy driveway up to the house. We walked without talking, but now and then, Fisher lost his footing on one of the hard ruts or slid a little on the gravel. I had an idea that maybe he couldn’t see in the dark as well as I could, but I didn’t know if that was because his eyes were bad in the dark, or bec
ause mine were very good. I thought I might just be more used to it than most people.
We crossed the yard to the low chain-link fence that wrapped around the zoo, and Fisher reached over the top of the little gate and unlatched it.
Inside, the rows of cages went on and on. As we picked our way along, we passed something with a huge humped back that looked like a raccoon, or maybe a groundhog. It was sitting with its face turned to the corner so all that I could make out was a mass of thick brown fur.
Fisher stood in the middle of the zoo with his shoulders set, like he was about to explode at any second. His mouth was hard, but as soon as he saw me looking at him, his face went blank again.
When I kept looking, he glanced away. “This place is sick.”
“Why does he do it?” I whispered. “Keep them like this?”
Fisher shrugged. “It’s just how he is, collecting anything he can get his hands on, storing it up, selling shit to people who need it.”
“Like what? Animals, you mean?”
Fisher shook his head. “Other stuff. Moonshine, guns with no numbers on them, stuff you don’t need to know about. Living things, though—I guess he likes to keep those for himself.”
I was a little offended that he should be telling me what I did and did not need to know about, but the list he’d given me was all kinds of unlawful, dangerous in ways I didn’t even fully understand, and so I just nodded.
We wound our way through the zoo, past the cages of ducks and possums and rabbits. I was headed straight for the badger, but Fisher stopped at one of the dove coops, looking in through the mesh. “These guys could come out too, if they want.”
There was a metal bolt on one side of the door, but even just running my fingers over it, I could tell it was useless. Rusted shut. Whoever was in charge of the doves just poured the feed in through a slot at the front and changed out the watering tray from time to time. Looking at the scum of feathers floating on top, it seemed to have been awhile.