Tell a Pitiful Story

When we found Jimmy Hickey face down in the weeds by the pond, we didn’t say anything. It was winter and we were wearing snow pants and the snow pants made zipping noises along the cattails until we stopped short beside his body and then everything was quiet. The landscape shaded brown and tan where it punctured the white snow; it was the time of  year when the sky turned gradations of silver-pink and blue around five o’clock when our mothers were preparing dinner in our houses, and we were out colonizing the as-yet undeveloped territories of New Gillingham. Back in our homes, odors of roasting potatoes and sautéing spaghetti sauces lifted from hot stoves, but here, by the pond, everything smelled cold and mulchy.

There were lots of ponds in our town – Trout Pond, Crocker Pond, Dawes Pond, Rabbit Hill Pond, Witch Pond, Joe’s Rock, Turnpike Pond, not to mention the lakes with their elaborate event pavilions and the reservoirs where the leaf peepers congregated in winter. But this pond was different, like an extension of the marshland, like the marshland got to a low point in the land and said, I’m done. I’m hanging out here for a while. The pond was our first find, not far off the road, but secluded enough to give us cover, and it became our ground zero. Where we made our blood pacts and shot the shit.

In summer, we’d sometimes find half-empty beer cans high school kids left behind, but in winter the pond was ours alone.

Jimmy was almost fully covered by rushes, his lower half sunk in a drift of snow. His body twisted over itself and we couldn’t see his face. He looked like Aaron Devereaux’s sister’s Raggedy Ann doll that we left out in the rain because she wouldn’t let us roast ants in her Easy-Bake Oven. We knew it was Jimmy because he was wearing the knockoff New England Patriots Starter Jacket he never took off, and we got close enough to see “Doug Flutie” scrawled in black Sharpie across his left shoulder. Jimmy had tried to fool us all into thinking he’d met Flutie and got his autograph, but Gordon Cho had uncovered the truth when he found a signed football in Sportsworld and it didn’t look anything like the childish scrawl Jimmy had used. We smelled nothing more than plant matter decomposing. Aaron Deveraux broke a dry branch off a nearby bush and poked Jimmy with it. Then, he scratched the jacket with the stick so the nylon screeched. Jimmy was dead, but we didn’t say anything. Gordon Cho threw up.

We knew we should tell the authorities. Three years ago in Mrs. Brown’s third grade class we had made up rap songs reminding us what to do when you’re candy-lured by a stranger in a van, or when your house is on fire, or when your big brother’s friend offers you a joint, and now Sean O’Brien hummed a snippet of the bridge of one as we stood around Jimmy. Somewhere to our left we could hear the faint hum of traffic on 495, 18-wheelers rumbling past our dads in their sedans on their way home from work. Gordon Cho grabbed a handful of snow and shoved it in his mouth to clean out the vomit. Be quiet already, Aaron Devereaux said as Gordon made wet, gargling noises.

Sean O’Brien sat down and then we all sat down and let the snow dampen the nylon of our pants. What a fucker, Aaron Devereaux said.

Of course we knew we should tell. We thought about how our parents would look if they heard about our dead bodies turning up somewhere. We thought about the funerals and the weeping cheerleaders and the newspaper articles that would be written about us. The whole town would mourn if we were gone. Probably they would build some municipal building and name it in our honor. But this was Jimmy.

Someone said, I wonder how long it would take them to find him. And then we weighed all the variables and took bets. And then someone said, let’s do it. Let’s see how long it takes. Gordon said, that’s not right. But we said, the highway’s right there. How long could it take? And so it was settled. We wouldn’t tell.

On the way back from the pond we passed Jimmy’s house. We were walking along 1A, in the historical district where houses wore plaques like nametags, announcing the dates they were built. Jimmy’s house was what our parents called an eyesore. It was white, but the paint was peeling. It had a turret, but some of the decorative curl-i-ques were long missing. On the front porch a scruffy mutt, some kind of terrier with wiry hair, was sniffing around the piles and piles of wood that were stacked floor to ceiling along the rails, but we didn’t try to call it over. From the top of the woodpile, a chubby cat eyed us. That’s how his dad makes his money, you know, Sean O’Brien said. That’s all firewood he sells.

Aaron Devereaux said Jimmy’s dad had run off with some woman and that’s why the piles were stacked so high. Remember, Aaron said, the time we saw Jimmy’s dad cuss him out at the ice cream stand? Fat fuck, he said. Then the dog lifted his leg and pissed on a stack of firewood and we all laughed. I heard that house was haunted, Sean O’Brien said. I heard it was condemned, said Gordon Cho. None of us had ever been inside, but we imagined it only got worse. Stacks of newspapers in the rooms, cat pee. The dog ran off the porch towards us and then changed its mind and circled the old plastic kids’ picnic table in the yard. We watched him wrap his jaws around a naked Barbie doll and shake her all sideways. When he ran up to us with the doll in his mouth, we started walking again for home.

There was something about Jimmy that made him different from the rest of us, different even from the other kids who sat alone at lunch, who walked to school or who showed up in the same shirt a few days running. Jimmy was a loose cannon. He would clam up for days, and refuse to answer the teacher’s questions, and then suddenly, blammo, there he was behind you, pulling your pants down in front of everyone and laughing like a maniac. His eyes were narrow and his cheeks were ruddy, like the blush on a baby doll. Sometimes after school we’d see him get a ride from the Candella brothers who, with their soft metal haircuts and red eyes, were in high school, and worked at their father’s auto shop—the Mustang Farm—out on the town border, and who we all assumed were the ones who had graffitied Mary Gives Good Head on the side of St. Mary’s last year. We gave Jimmy a wide berth when we could, which is hard when you’re trapped in the same classroom.

In fourth grade we went on a field trip to a wildlife refuge where we collected swamp algae and microbes to examine under a microscope when we got back to school. Jimmy wandered off the trail and when Mr. Nutt found him, his forearms were cut up all over in neat little half-inch marks from his wrists to his elbows. He wouldn’t say what happened. Mr. Nutt called off the field trip and sent us back to school, but they never found anyone in the woods or any sign of a knife. Jimmy spent the whole bus ride back singing “Talk Dirty to Me” at the top of his lungs and the bus driver kept her eyes pointedly on the road. When we told him to shut up, he put one hand over his crotch and made a gesture like jerking off with the other.

Probably we should have wondered who killed Jimmy. It had been clear from the angle of his body, and the way the brush lay over him, that he hadn’t died a natural or even accidental death. Probably we should have worried about who killed him, and whether they might come after us next, like in the movies. We should have wondered.

But we didn’t. It was like we already knew, and it didn’t involve us. It was a world apart from us, so we didn’t have to talk about it.

We expected someone to announce Jimmy’s disappearance, but no one did. Usually when a kid went missing in our area it was all over the news. Ice cream stores and the waiting areas of restaurants would be flyered with black and white photocopied images of the kid’s school picture (inevitably some cowlick or goofy glasses) and a hotline number to call. Nightly news programs always showed the neighbors organizing search parties and tying yellow ribbons around tree trunks. But no one seemed to notice Jimmy was gone.

After we got home that night, we didn’t call each other. We didn’t get out our bikes or our basketballs for the next couple of days. There were no marathon games of capture-the-flag or stick-the-gum-in-Katie-Conrad’s hair. And nobody said anything about Jimmy.

Then at Mass on Sunday we saw Jimmy’s mother with her kids. His father wasn’t there, but that didn’t prove anything, because none of us had ever seen him in church before. Jimmy’s two-year-old brother was banging a pink plastic teapot against the pew. His older sister, Dawn, was wearing a funny purple turtleneck dress that made her look like the big grape from the Fruit of the Loom commercials. She was reading a book with a soft-focus picture on the front that we knew was a he-man supporting a swooning, half-clad woman because she read the same book at lunch and at every recess. She seemed to be trying very hard to ignore her other sister, Opal, who was Jimmy’s twin, and who was different in the head. Dawn read her book while Opal licked her snaggleteeth loudly. She read throughout the Mass, even in line to get communion. Our parents side-eyed her and clicked their tongues. Although they wouldn’t dare say anything about Mrs. Hickey at church, we knew that they would talk about her in the car ride home. How could she let Dawn read such inappropriate material in the house of God? Wasn’t it so sad about Opal, but you’d think her mother could be bothered to clean the Oreo off her fingers if she was going to let her touch the Bible, for Christ’s sake.

During the homily Opal began to make a noise that sounded like a sea lion. Mrs. Hickey cradled Opal into her arms like a baby, even though she must have weighed as much as we did. She placed one hand on the side of Opal’s cheek and shushed her. She took off her flannel shirt and gave it to Opal to fondle. Opal put a corner of the shirt in her mouth and sucked on it like a nursing baby or a kitten would. Finally Mrs. Hickey climbed out of the pew with Opal in her arms and we could see the lines of her black bra through her thin t-shirt and when she walked past our pews we smelled the menthol cigarettes she smoked. We tried to find signs of worry in Mrs. Hickey’s exit, but she appeared as she always did: worn out and haggard with not enough hands for every kid who needed one. We waited but she and Opal never came back, and eventually Dawn led her little brother out the pew and toward the back door.

After Mass while our parents were socializing on the church steps, we gathered around an elm tree by the road. We’re not going back, Gordon Cho said and we all nodded. Our little sisters were playing a game where they pretended to be magical cats, and they scampered around our feet, interrupting our conversation in pastel flashes. After what he did to my sister, Aaron Devereaux said quiet enough for Jenny not to hear and then spat at the base of the tree and where his spittle landed made a little opaque puddle of white. We all looked over at Jenny who yelled, What? and put her hands on her hips. Nothing! Aaron said and spat again. Then we all spat at his puddle, trying to see who could get closest to hitting his spit. That drove the girls away until our parents were ready to take us home.

That fall, Sean O’Brien had written a report on the Great Depression and discovered a hobo code used for information and warnings: messages scrawled in chalk or coal, arrows, and shapes and little silly drawings used to tell fellow travelers where to go and who to run from. When we heard about the code we knew we had something. We copied and reworked the signs for our own ends, in notes we passed to each other in class or stuck in mailboxes. If we wanted to talk about a girl we thought we had a chance with, we would write her initial and then a sort of square u that meant, in the hobo code, you can camp here. If one of us wanted to rag on the other, we would reply, with a dot inside a square floating over waves: bad water. We told each other to keep quiet or hit the road. School was a series of cross-hatches, jail, and home was a triangle with eyes beside it, safe camp. When Jimmy was alive, we referred to him as a triangle with waving arms. The shape meant unstable. Watch your back. Man with a gun.

Once Jimmy was gone, things changed. It was as though a low-grade fever had been relieved. Our classmates wondered where he had disappeared to, but we didn’t say a word. It wasn’t that we meant to hide Jimmy’s death forever, but once you start testing yourself it’s hard to stop. It was like the time Sean O’Brien stopped eating candy for a month just to see if he could do it, and then the month was up and he never went back. Somehow things just seemed better and we didn’t want to jinx it.

Then at recess one day we took a ball from the equipment shed out into the drizzle, past the baseball field and toward the fence, where we started a small pick-up game of dodgeball. We threw hard, at fronts and backs, angling for bruises. Across the field, Gordon Cho’s little sister was turning penny drops with her girlfriends, her skirt bunching down around her waist for brief moments before she thudded to the ground. Aaron threw a ball that leveled Gordon, catching him between the shoulder blades and knocking him flat on his stomach. Gordon lay there in the crabgrass panting for what seemed like a long time, watching Tina and the other girls. Then finally he said, You know if they find his body everyone will feel sorry for him. He’ll be some kind of hero or tragic case or something. We were quiet, and then Aaron said, “Mmmhmm,” just like the Black ladies on that show 227 that our mothers sometimes watched. And it was settled. None of us would say anything after that.

A couple of months before we found Jimmy in the rushes, he’d been suspended from school for a week. We all knew it had something to do with Aaron’s little sister Jenny, who was then six. Jenny stopped talking around the same time Jimmy was sent home. Something spooked her so much she just clammed up. She brought a big china doll with corn-silk hair and quarter-sized glass eyes to school and at recess she would sit out on the far edge of the baseball field just staring at the doll. She wouldn’t even talk to the doll, but it seemed like she was trying to communicate with her mind. We all wondered what she was trying to say.

Aaron said that his sister wouldn’t even tell him what happened, but he finally got it out of Jenny’s best friend who was there. Katie said that one day at recess Jimmy had stood in front of Jenny on the swings and put his hands out to bang her knees and make her slow down. Then Jimmy told Jenny that he wanted to be king and he wanted her to be queen and he wanted them to go behind the school and make little princes and princesses together. He stuck out his tongue and wiggled it. Then, he pulled down his pants and started touching his junk, and that’s when Katie ran and got the recess monitor.

When Aaron found out, he wanted to beat Jimmy up, but we wouldn’t let him. We didn’t want him to get in trouble, is what we said, but the truth is, we didn’t want Aaron to get his ass kicked. Ours wasn’t the kind of school where kids took things outside. Girls wrote each other nasty notes, and once in a while crude graffiti would show up on someone’s desk, but for the most part things sorted themselves out. Jimmy had been kept back a grade and was a half a head (a big head) taller than Aaron. None of us wanted to see Aaron get a beat down from someone like Jimmy, who would probably fight dirty anyway. Who knows what Jimmy would do to him.

And eventually Jenny got better. Aaron puffed himself up and became a sort of bodyguard. For a few weeks, he sat out there on the edge of the field with her and kept Jimmy at bay, and she started talking again soon after. And the rumors died down, mostly, within a month.

It was Aaron’s idea to bring the signs to the Hickey house. As on every Saturday morning, we were sleep-drunk and full of pancakes, draped around the rattan couches and gray carpet in Sean O’Brien’s family room, which was bordered with a stencil of geese, and which smelled of Christmas potpourri year-round, cinnamon and clove. We had been watching Rambo cartoons, snorting at the little parachutes that invariably appeared during every battle, no matter how explosive a plane or helicopter crash.

Then Aaron said, guys, I have an idea. At first it was like he was bringing back the bet again, the dare we had found ourselves beholden to. Upping the ante. How close could we get to actually telling without giving anything away? But the reason we went along wasn’t the bet. Even though we sometimes wanted to forget all about Jimmy, we knew we had gotten mixed up in something bigger than ourselves, and there was something we were bound to see through.

It was past midnight on Saturday when we crept up to Jimmy’s house. The streetlight in front of the yard was bright enough that it made the trees appear frozen in the light of a camera flash. None of the house lights were on. The plastic picnic table on the lawn was now upended, the Barbie nowhere in sight. We snuck onto the porch and grabbed a bundle of branches, smaller than logs, bigger than kindling. We tried to be as silent as possible, but we shouldn’t have worried; the dog didn’t bark.

You guys know that house is evil, Aaron had said. As if the house caused Jimmy’s death. Somewhere in the back of our heads we might have thought that Jimmy’s death could have nothing to do with his wacko family or his dirty porch or that reason everyone crossed the street when they got to the house. But we pushed that thought away. It was easier to think of him as marked. Bad things happened in his house, bad enough to make him wrong and his family wrong. Dawn and Opal, Mrs. Hickey and the toddler boy, Jimmy himself were tainted. They lived the deep sadness of the afflicted. Our lives, in contrast, seemed like honey.

Sean O’Brien extracted the longest sticks from the bundle and we laid them diagonally across the lawn in three long lines. As we worked, we whispered about Mrs. Hickey.

Why do you think she hasn’t said anything? What is she involved in? Drugs? I bet she ran him off herself.

Maybe she beats him.

She’s probably scared someone will find out.

What if she snapped? Or his dad? Or a man friend. And she let it happen?

Maybe she never said anything, cause she knows who it was. I don’t know. She doesn’t SEEM like the violent type.

What about Dawn?

What about her?

Dawn’s too busy sleeping with her romance novel to do anything else. Yeah, I bet she humps it in her sleep.

Or that old dog of hers, that’s why it’s not barking.

We lay two horizontal lines straight across the others. A modified pound sign.

Crime committed here. Not safe.

The next night we went back to the Hickey house to check on the yard. None of us was sure what we were looking for, but we had a feeling we would find some sort of sign.

Gordon Cho said he thought what we had done was like an exorcism, and that we had to be careful because sometimes Satan pretended he was exorcized when really he wasn’t. Aaron Devereaux said it wasn’t an exorcism and Gordon said it was and then Aaron said that if it was really an exorcism we should have used holy water and salt and shit, but Gordon said it was just important for us to be humble. Sean O’Brien said maybe it was more like a housecleaning, like when his mother went to the astrologer once a month to get her aura cleansed.

We knew there was a chance we would be spotted so we waited until it was past one. When we finally snuck into the yard, we saw that our branches had been rearranged to form a heart shape on the lawn. The heart was scraggly and open at one end, as though it was leaking. Beside the heart was a duffel bag.

We looked at each other. Gordon whispered, it could be a trap. We grabbed the duffel bag and ran.

In Aaron Devereaux’s backyard, underneath the second-floor deck, we regrouped. Aaron perched on his father’s lawnmower and Sean on the snow-blower, the duffel bag resting meaningfully between them. You can open it, Aaron, Gordon said.

Aaron kicked the duffel bag but nothing moved. Finally he crouched down and unzipped the side. Still nothing happened. He shook out the bag’s contents onto the ground and we gathered around to examine our findings. The bag was full of clothes – shirts and jeans and underwear that we recognized as belonging to Jimmy. Then a piece of paper fell out. Sean read it out loud.

Dear Jimmy, it read. Listen. I know I can’t keep you here. My God knows how I try, but loving you is a thankless task. You been this way ever since you came out of my body. But I’m your only Ma. So here’s some clothes so that way I can know you’re warm wherever you are. I beg you quit whatever you’re playing at with the sticks and get your ass home. And tell your father to quit interfering. Opal needs her brother.

Sean stopped reading and looked around. She doesn’t know, he said.

She’s just pretending, said Aaron. It was her. You know there’s something wrong with her.

There’s something wrong with all of them.

The Quadrantid meteors were out that night, and past the edge of the deck we could occasionally see a brief dash of white light, falling. Do you really think she believes he’s alive? In the quiet we heard Aaron’s father emit a sharp burst of snoring that sounded like a motor gunning. Sean was startled off the lawnmower and we all cracked up. I keep thinking about her bra that time in church, said Gordon, is that bad?

Over the next few weeks we returned to Mrs. Hickey’s house often. Each time we left a different sign. Woman living alone. There is nothing to be gained here. Be ready to defend yourself. The second night Mrs. Hickey left a paper bag full of matchbox cars. The third night she left a blanket illustrated with dinosaurs wearing different kinds of hats. She didn’t communicate with us again until the fourth night, which was a month after we’d started. By this time we understood ourselves to be emissaries of Jimmy’s from beyond the grave. No one talked about exorcism anymore. We wanted to see what Mrs. Hickey would leave us. Maybe we got big heads. We were obviously the recipients of some kind of grace.

On the last night we left the sign for danger, and when we returned, we didn’t find anything. Several nights went by with no communication. We were confused. Finally, a week later, there was another message. Not a heart but two overlapping rectangles.

Afraid.

It seemed crazy that Mrs. Hickey could have left us the sign. We didn’t believe that she could have found the hobo language, deciphered our secret code. But someone had, and so we grew gun-shy. We couldn’t reassure Mrs. Hickey that Jimmy was all right, but now we couldn’t tell her the truth either. None of us knew how she would react, so we gave it up. We stopped the signs at school, too. It was like before. We didn’t say anything. We just stopped.

A month passed.

In late February, The Frost Elementary held its annual talent show. Mrs. Hickey showed up with Opal and the little boy to watch Dawn sing. It occurred to us that, although we had been communicating, none of us had actually seen Mrs. Hickey since that day in church. She looked gaunter than ever; her bones seemed to fold together as she sat down in front of us. Her face was pale, and a vein on the side of her forehead bulged bluely. She gave no sign of recognizing anyone.

Maybe it was this vacancy that made us bold. It was hard to reconcile the warm, sad voice of that first letter with her crazy appearance. This Mrs. Hickey was nothing more than the oddball that Aaron had warned us about, and we grew mean in the presence of her weakness. As Jenny Devereaux and Tina Cho lip-synced “The Next Time I Fall in Love,” Tina dressed in a blazer and cotton-ball mustache, Opal rocked her Grover doll back and forth in time to the music. Gordon Cho impersonated Opal’s snaggleteeth, biting his lower lip and letting a thin line of drool slide down his chin and land on the upturned collar of his polo shirt. We laughed, pretending to be boys who knew nothing.

Then Dawn came on the stage. She was wearing her gray plastic glasses, and was carrying a bouquet of cattails and forsythia branches. She was wearing some sort of a dress made out of an old sheet. It was shaped like a prom dress but it was covered in brown and yellow splotchy flowers. She sang a song that sounded like it was from the 1960’s, about the streets of London. There was a line about the sun not shining. She didn’t have a beautiful voice. It wasn’t even pretty.

At first we giggled into our hands. Then Aaron swooned like the woman on the cover of Dawn’s books into Gordon’s arms. After that Sean snorted and then we all heaved until Mrs. Hickey turned around and looked at us.

We’d been in trouble before. Our parents had locked us in our bedrooms for digging holes to China in their backyards. Our friends’ parents had called our parents on the phone, reporting our foul mouths. We had felt our fathers’ arms wrap around our shoulders, tasted the bitter suds of a bar of Dial. We knew the gaze of deep disappointment an injured parent was capable of inflicting upon a guilty child. In fact, we were masters of bucking up our chins, hardening ourselves against remorse. We were kids. We were supposed to be stupid and disrespectful.

If Mrs. Hickey had turned such a look upon us, we might have cut out our laughter for only as long as her eyes were on us, and then returned to our foolishness again. But she didn’t. Mrs. Hickey looked through us as though we were not there. All around us, Dawn’s voice was growing louder and she was singing about crying rain and forgotten heroes. Her voice was pitched off-key and it trembled so that it sounded as though she was about to burst into tears. Still, Mrs. Hickey stared through us as though we ourselves were ghosts, until we trembled with a deep awareness of the blood rushing into our ears. Dawn was singing up to the ceiling, shaking her cattails and forsythia so that flower buds and milkweed fell to the stage. But Mrs. Hickey’s eyes didn’t register her daughter’s passion. They looked as dead as we might have imagined, if we could have brought ourselves to imagine, how Jimmy’s eyes looked. And we didn’t know what to do with that gaze.

Gradually Dawn’s voice quelled. She moved into the last chorus and stood motionless for a smattering of applause. After she exited the stage, a dance song with a thudding calypso beat boomed from the speaker, breaking Mrs. Hickey from her spell. Her eyes focused and brightened, and she cast them on each of us, slowly, in turn. Then, she smiled a faint, human, smile, and shifted back to watch the stage.

And then the first week of March, Jimmy was reported missing. We heard our parents say Jimmy’s dad had shown up to ask his mom for money, and that’s how she realized Jimmy was really gone. Soon after, Gordon was walking across the town common when Mrs. Hickey came out of the library and confronted him. She shook him and started talking about her little boy and the messages he’d sent, and how she knew he was out there somewhere, alive, and had he heard from Jimmy, he must have heard from Jimmy, he was Jimmy’s age, her little boy, her little boy. After that our parents wouldn’t let us go out by ourselves and told us to stay away from Mrs. Hickey and her house. At school, kids whispered their parents’ talk of putting Dawn and Opal and the little boy in foster care.

And now, the thing inside us all that connected us to something larger seemed too big. Like the story about Pop Rocks and soda mixing up in your insides and making you explode. Or inhaling a breath as deep as you can until it starts pressing up against your heart. It wasn’t exciting anymore. It wasn’t something we could contain.

The Saturday after the news reports were broadcast, we made our way past the yellow-ribboned trees that lined Route 1A and headed for the pond. Gordon carried the blue duffel bag. The snow was melting, and the roadside was thick with mud, so our shoes splashed and made deep suction sounds. We trudged through the marsh, skirting the pond’s perimeter, pulling back brush and hitting each other in the face with brambles, until it started to smell like our school dumpsters in late spring: hot bruised apples, decaying in their peels, rotten eggs, and shit. Gordon saw the flash of red in the trees.

We backed off, then. None of us wanted to know what Jimmy’s body had become. At the edge of the clearing, we opened the blue duffel bag and took out some clothes, the toys, the blanket. Sean and Gordon spread the blanket across two trees so that the dinosaurs flapped in the wind. Aaron threw a red T-shirt into a branch and Gordon dumped the matchbox cars in the direction of Jimmy’s legs. We saved some shirts to scatter by the roadside when we left, the neon ones. It was a bright day, and we could see the sun glinting off the bits of metal and illuminating the colorful cloth. The trees were still bare, but we figured the high school kids would be coming soon. Or maybe you could even see the stuff from clear across the water, from the new development being built on the far side of the marsh. Someone would see it and come looking. There was so much stuff. It took time to lay it out. It was like a yard sale by the pond.