Black Chuck Read online

  Shaun had been wasted. Not as bad as Alex, but bad enough. They had settled down as the fire began to die, Alex staring blankly into the embers, not noticing his ass getting wet in the sand. The last of the bottle hung in his hand, catching firelight between his knees.

  Shaun had come to find her again, to wrap himself around her. His low laugh into her hair, rough chin across her cheek.

  “You’re too drunk to drive,” Evie had said, still mad about her lip.

  But he’d only laughed and pushed her away. “I’m fine. Stop being such a suck.”

  She’d known it was stupid, that it might have killed her, but she’d let Shaun drive her home that night anyway. And he’d been careful, he’d gone slow. They all knew the roads so well, every curve, every turn—God, even the potholes were familiar. She’d always known just when to brace herself.

  In the car, he’d reached over and taken her hand, pressing it flat against his thigh, laying his own down over top to keep her there. She could hear the grin in his voice without even looking at him.

  “Hey, if we crash, at least we’ll die together, right, babe?”

  She’d only laughed at him. “So, live fast, die young. Is that your big plan?”

  And he’d turned to her, grin hanging ear to ear like a string of Christmas lights, just one finger on the wheel. Letting the road go on below them without even looking at it. “Beats havin’ to grow up, I guess.”

  15

  R

  Black Chuck was Ré’s mother’s family. Great-uncle to his mother’s grandmother or something. He was young in the only photo Ré’d ever seen of him, wearing a funny, old suit made for a different man, a taller one, so that the high, old-fashioned collar rubbed the underside of his chin, and the cuffs fell nearly to his knuckles in the dim, gray light of a grainy old black-and-white.

  His hair was parted above his left brow and combed to the side, though it looked too thick to stay that way. It made an unruly wedge of black on top of his head, and Ré’s would do the same if he ever grew it long enough to get a comb through it. The hairstyle of a white man. It didn’t suit Chuck, and it wouldn’t suit Réal.

  When he was little, his mother’s sisters had told him the story. How, in the dead of winter, Black Chuck had eaten his only daughter. The knives he’d used to carve her up. Soft parts boiling in a black pot. Fire simmering fat and flesh. Mouth sucking at the old clay bowl.

  His aunties’ words had dug under his skin like little ticks. Made him afraid to fall asleep. Sleep only brought dreams, like a door left ajar.

  And when sleep did catch him, he always woke screaming, clawing anyone who tried to comfort him, fearing Chuck’s hands on his skinny arms, making a meal of him next.

  He’d grown up ashamed of himself, pissing the bed over some stupid story that probably wasn’t even true. Just some old boogeyman his silly aunties had made up to scare him.

  But still.

  There was something real in Chuck’s black-and-white eyes. Something wild and scared, just the same as Ré’s after waking.

  He should have known. You can’t outrun the things you dream for.

  Ré sat in his car, seat pushed nearly flat back, arms crossed over his chest. He looked out at the dark, empty field, the wedge of night sky above, with eyes that only opened halfway. He’d thought those dreams had ended a long time ago, when he’d decided to just be a man about it. When he’d buried all those fears deep inside.

  But ever since Shaun, since their fight, they’d come again.

  He knew well what it was. He didn’t need a Midewikwe to tell him that. It had been coming for him all his life. He was almost glad it was finally here. He just prayed that Mark could tell him how to stop it before anyone else got hurt.

  A ticking clock. No, that wasn’t it. A tapping. Ré opened his eyes one at a time and blinked through the darkened window. Evie stood beside his car, brown hair tipped toward the glass, shading her face. Ré groaned at the sight of her. More dreams, he thought. He pressed his eyes closed again, squeezing his arms tighter against his chest.

  “Ré!” she said.

  And he was awake.

  “Câlisse,” he muttered, sucking air and sitting up. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Uh, really?” she said, stepping back and rolling her eyes. “I live here, obviously. What are you doing out here?”

  “I saw the lights off,” he said. “I thought you were asleep.”

  He snapped the driver’s seat upright. He nearly reached for the keys dangling from the ignition, but then he stopped. He was already opening the car door before the words were out of his mouth. “Evie, what happened to you?”

  The Buick’s interior light shone a pale little pool over her. She looked down, turning her leg to see the thin red lines snaking down to her ankle.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I cut myself climbing.”

  “The fuck were you climbing, girl? A pile of glass?”

  “No, just that stone wall at the cemetery.” She gestured behind her vaguely.

  He lifted a foot out of the car and raised his hand as if he meant to grab her, but she took another step away.

  “Come on, let me look at it,” he said.

  She stared at him for a second, then stepped into his reach. He tucked his fingers lightly into the cove behind her knee and rubbed his thumb over her skin. It was a dry and jagged cut, at least an hour old, and her shoes were filthy with mud.

  “Ostie,” he hissed. “Where have you been, Evie?”

  She shrugged. “I was out with Sunny, and then I went to see Shaun.”

  He lifted his fingers without a word. His brain was reaching for the keys, but his body wouldn’t move, half in, half out of the car.

  “Seriously, Ré, what are you doing here?”

  He stared at her filthy shoes. He had a hundred million things to say, but none that he could speak out loud. “I couldn’t sleep,” he finally said, because it was true. “I thought maybe it would be easier here.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “Do you want to come in?”

  “No!” he answered, a little too fast. And then, “I mean, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  He glanced up, catching the look in her eye—curious, confused.

  Then she started walking backward again, and he thought for one second, No, not yet! as all his insides reached for her. But she was only going around the back end of the Buick to climb in on the passenger side, which was maybe just as bad as leaving.

  She sat and stared at him for a long time, big blue eyes, blood-red mouth. He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just said, “Nice lipstick,” and she smiled.

  “It tastes like cake,” she said.

  Fuck.

  He looked away, out the windshield, teeth working on his bottom lip, breath caught at the very top of his lungs.

  Then he looked back at her and, despite all the sense God gave him, said, “Cake, huh?”

  And she just smiled some more.

  He wanted to fold himself up into origami. He wanted to press his thumbs to her bleeding skin. He wanted to slide across the damn seat and shake her into little pieces.

  His breath burst from his lungs. “Goddammit, Evie Hawley, you are a suffering demon.”

  She just laughed, pleased with herself, no doubt, and looked away at last.

  After a while she said, “Réal?”

  “Yeah, Ev?”

  “Is something going on with you and Sunny?”

  And the floor fell right out of the Buick, Ré’s ass hitting gravel. He gaped at her, but she was still out in that empty field somewhere.

  A zillion answers to her question flew through his head, but none both good and true. He looked down at where his thumbs hooked onto the steering wheel and said, “I can’t answer that right now, Evie.”

  She said nothing. He looked at the crescent moon her turned cheek made in the dim light. Willing her to look at him so he could see what kind of man he was in those eyes now. But she st
ayed out of reach, out in that field. A fist full of claws dug through him.

  He sighed, looking away. “Could you—I mean, someday, when things are not so messed up—could you maybe ask me that again?”

  He expected her to laugh at him, or shout, or get out of the car and slam the door on him in a hail of curses, but she did nothing. Just kept staring out the window at the dark.

  And then her fingers slid right through his ribs and took everything they found in there. “Okay,” she said.

  He stared at her.

  Her voice was light. Not angry. Not judging. Not jealous. Just Okay.

  And then at last she turned to look at him, blue eyes big and round, red lips curving in a Mona Lisa, knocking his lungs out.

  “Good night, Ré,” she said. “I hope you get some sleep.”

  She opened the door of the Buick and got out, careful not to slam it behind her. She didn’t glance back as she crossed the road and went in her front door, but Ré watched her the entire way in case she did.

  E

  Evie leaned against the front door as soon as she was on the other side, and she breathed for what felt like the first time in her life. She closed her eyes and felt Ré’s fingers on the back of her knee, soft and light, though they were so often clenched into fists. This could not be happening. Him, outside her house, in the middle of the night. Not throwing stones to be let in, not twisting her arm into staying out.

  Not asking for anything at all.

  Just trying to get some sleep.

  She opened her eyes and smiled.

  It was the very last thing she should do, but she couldn’t stop it. A strange, bright, bursting feeling exploded inside her. A million colored lights at once. And she couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t not feel it if she tried.

  No, this could not be happening.

  She pushed off the door and climbed upstairs to the attic, kicking her filthy shoes aside. Everything had changed, somehow, the moment that Buick had come into view. Her step had slowed when she saw that car, but her heart—it had stopped.

  Ré. Parked outside her door. Asleep.

  All the things she’d just confessed to Sunny. The gross truth about Shaun. Everything she’d tried so hard not to feel, smashed lips and small bruises, they were all gone. She was free.

  I don’t think you know him as well as you think you do, Sunny had said. She was right. He was so much more than the toughest boy Evie knew.

  She crossed the bedroom to the gable window, pulling the curtain aside.

  The Buick was still there, dark and rusty blue in dull moonlight, the driver’s side window half down. Ré had put the seat flat again. She could just see his bare arm, the sleeve of the black T-shirt he wore, the dark shape of his tilted head. He was still. Maybe already asleep. She smiled again, lifting her fingers to the glass, touching from a distance.

  An anchor in the water.

  Not going anywhere.

  R

  Ré dreams. Wet cake pressed against the roof of his mouth, juice slipping from the seam of his lips, tart and sweet and boozy. Like cherry liqueur. Like the stuff his aunties drink at Christmas. It makes a warm spot at the bottom of his belly, makes his lips and fingers tingle.

  The cake is rich and heavy, so good it can’t be real. It’s devil’s food. It makes him so happy, he feels like a little kid again, stealing his mamie’s tarte au sucre and stuffing his face behind the kitchen door till he’s sugar-sick.

  He chews and chews, but the cake doesn’t get any smaller. He can feel pebbles of cooked flour and egg sticking between his cheeks and gums, under his tongue. It begins to fill his whole mouth. Each time he bites down, there’s a little more.

  He opens his eyes, confused, and sees the woods around him, the snow that buries his feet. He is naked but for his jeans, and shivering.

  And then he knows.

  The bridge of his nose begins to sting, his eyes to burn. Salt water blurs his vision. He starts to cry, because he can’t stand it anymore. Because he knows from one instant to the next that this dream is the same as all the others, even though it’s sweet: he is choking.

  When he opens his mouth to spit the cake, it’s blood. It spills salty and hot across his chin, across his collar. It pools in his shoulder bones, pours down his arms, bare chest, his jeans and bare feet. Snakes of blood, squeezing tight. His lungs scream for air.

  He reaches into his mouth, scraping cake and blood from his airway. He falls to his knees, one hand clawing his mouth, the other disappearing to the elbow in red snow.

  And he sees the deer at the edge of the woods, watching. Their antlers rattle and knock, soft sounds as though they’re speaking. His eyes are wild, pleading, but the animals don’t come any closer and they don’t help him.

  And he thinks, Goddammit. If this demon is coming, let it come now. I’ve had enough. Let it come. I won’t fight it anymore.

  At the back of his throat, his fingers catch in a mess of fibers. He pulls, and it comes up from his gut with a sliding-backwards feeling, like he is pulling his own insides out, flipping himself like a sock. He pulls and pulls, and more of it comes. It is black and sticky, wound in a bundle. It tangles in his fingers, and he pulls.

  When it finally slides free of his throat, when he can at last suck the breath his lungs scream for, he opens his hand to see what he’s caught.

  He blinks and stares. He thinks of Evie’s face tipped toward his car window, blue eyes, dark mouth, and he thinks, No, not you…

  It is hair. Long and dark and sticky, like bloody black rope.

  The breath he’s just sucked rushes from him. He folds over into the snow and sobs, the tail of hair clutched tightly in his fist.

  16

  E

  Alex was all loose energy, elbows bobbing as he talked, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his denim vest. Sunny looked away with a bored expression on her face. Evie smiled when she reached their perch on the hill.

  “Last day, bitches!” Alex chirped when he saw Evie.

  “Don’t call us bitches, you tool,” Sunny snapped at him.

  He started. “I didn’t mean, like, bitches.”

  “Then why’d you say it? What the fuck do you think it means?”

  Evie groaned silently, her smile fading. These two bickering was exactly the opposite of how she wanted the last day of school to start.

  “Sup, Ev,” Alex mumbled, taken down a few notches.

  “Hey,” she said back. “Hey, Sunny.”

  Of course, Ré wasn’t with them. He’d been gone when she got up, the strange night washed away without a trace. Not that she was surprised. She glanced back toward the parking lot, but he wasn’t there either. She’d already checked.

  Sunny said nothing, but flicked her eyes to the parking lot too. She crossed her arms over a loose black tank top printed with a pale rib cage that could’ve been a photo of her own bony body. She looked beautifully scary, as always, and skinny as a clothes hanger. She could probably wear a bunch of plastic bags and still look ridiculously cool.

  Evie felt short and sloppy by comparison, in cutoffs and a loose plaid shirt, dark hair hanging lifeless and uncombed at her shoulders. She’d been avoiding the mirror that hung from her bathroom door, not wanting to see her shape in it, the skin between her hip bones gone tight over the thing inside her.

  “So guess what?” Alex said. “My dad is letting me have a grad party.”

  “Really?” said Evie. “That’s cool.”

  “Totally.” Alex’s feathery hair swung with his nodding head. “It’s too perfect. It’ll be just like a bush party, only you won’t have to piss in the woods!” He nudged Sunny, smiling hopefully. It was a strong selling point—poison oak and peeing on your own shoes were two big reasons bush parties always kind of sucked. “And the best part is, no chance the cops will bust it up.”

  “Really? Why not?” Evie asked.

  Sunny smirked at her, making her feel stupid, and Alex just laughed, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s kind of
a no-cop zone, that’s all,” he said, not actually explaining.

  “Sounds like fun,” Evie replied lamely.

  She’d never been to Alex’s house. Never even seen it. She’d only sat in a car outside Sunny’s—a big Victorian on the nice side of the river—a handful of times. And she’d been inside Ré’s just that once, before the lake. Evie felt again like she barely knew her own so-called friends. Shaun had asked for all her attention, and she had just given and given.

  At the bottom of the hill the first bell rang, but still no Buick.

  “Last day of school for-evah!” Alex announced. He stood and stretched out his long arm theatrically. “After you, ladies.”

  Evie couldn’t help but smile at his chivalry, even if Sunny was unimpressed.

  Sometime during third period, Evie noticed the Buick in the parking lot, but still no Ré in the halls. It was a pretty huge school—the only public high school for miles—but still, if you wanted to find someone, it was usually pretty easy.

  Then again, if you didn’t want to be found, that was easy too.

  Evie stood before her empty locker, half feeling like she wanted to just step inside and close the door. Maybe spend the summer there. But then there were hands on her shoulders, shaking her lightly, and a long arm draped around her.

  Alex beamed. “E-vie! Sup. We did it! It’s fucking over, dude.”

  She smiled at him—he looked so happy she could practically feel his mood pushing her own out of the way. He really was a lot like Shaun.

  “You coming to the Olympia?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Is that where everyone’s going?” Ré, she wanted to say.

  “Yeah, of course,” he said. And then, “I don’t know. It’s over, man! Who cares?”

  Alex seemed to have forgotten that they still had exams to write, but she wasn’t going to point it out. Instead, she let him drag her out to the parking lot, her bag heavy over her shoulder.

  They burst out into the bright sun, and chaos exploded. The parking lot was jammed with kids and cars, engines running, music blasting, bumpers edging through the crowd. People were shouting and laughing, horns honking, sunlight smashing into everything, making her squint. Alex threw himself into the fray like it was his natural habitat, and Evie picked her way along behind him, letting him break the waves.