Linda Boroff
Chums
I can’t recall how I found myself at Katy Johnson’s house on that sunny, early autumn day in Minneapolis. It must have been sheer habit that had propelled my feet, unbidden, to the home of my fifth grade best friend, a route I had taken countless times.
Caught in an avalanche of memories, I gazed about in disbelief. “This is Katy Johnson’s house,” I announced to George, who nodded politely. The location meant nothing to him of course. He was my insurance agent, an older man I sometimes dated. We had flown here from Santa Cruz to indulge a sudden whim to revisit my childhood home.
I had not seen Minneapolis since I was fifteen, when my family had hurriedly departed one morning in the wake of my father’s business collapse and foreclosure. That Hemingway insight about going broke slowly and then suddenly defined our experience.
For years, my father, a contractor, had clawed and clung to the precipice of solvency, slipping ever downward, pulled by the inexorable gravity of financial ruin. One morning we had awakened to a peremptory knocking at 7 a.m. and been served with eviction papers by two laconic sheriff’s deputies with coffee on their breath.
My familiar home, with its lush lawn and clipped shrubbery, was now the property of strangers; it no more belonged to us than did the moon. The unthinkable unspooled as I tried to find some hopeful interpretation for my chatterbox younger sister, PattyAnn, stunned for once into silence.
As we dressed, numbly obedient, a team of moving men with faint Norwegian accents arrived and began hauling our furniture out onto the lawn. Curious, sleepy neighbors stared from their windows, and one or two crossed the street to offer sympathy in their Minnesota vernacular: “You’ll pull out of this, Saul, you betcha,” they assured my father, slapping his shoulder. But he only shook his head, mumbling about bookkeeping errors and disloyal bankers.
The ordeal of my father’s decline had begun when I was eleven amidst a long-forgotten recession. The slowdown had been mild, but protracted enough for thrifty homeowners to postpone their new projects. That had done for my father; his crews sat idle while he borrowed, and then borrowed more. The second mortgage had sealed our fate.
My father had encumbered our house to capitalize an awning company, and, after that failed, a company that sold cedar closets, whose inventory was finally sold off at a steep loss. Unwanted hollow closets had filled our basement with their astringent scent. Finally, just one remained. Within, my father’s once snappy Army Air Corps pilot’s uniform drooped round-shouldered from its hanger, trapped in this dark, earthly coffin. I imagined that it missed the streaming golden sun and swelling clouds it had once seen from the cockpit. Perhaps it even missed the Japanese Zeros swarming and firing at it.
Our decline was beset by false hope, patronizing lectures, and grudging family loans. Creditors’ phone calls came at dinnertime; opportunistic pawnbrokers gobbled up my mother’s jewelry, and the bank sent notices of mortgage arrears worded as elegantly as Elizabethan death sentences.
A divorcee in my thirties now, with a child in grammar school, I worked as a copywriter in a Silicon Valley software company. I was good at my job, and the salary was generous if not lavish. After a car accident while commuting, I had gotten to know George, my insurance agent, who was divorced for the second time and nosing around for dates.
George knew my family story, as I knew his, and after a moment he put his arm around me. He was bored, of course. There was nothing distinctive about Katy’s neighborhood of charmless houses, basic shelter built before the Depression. With real estate values on the rise, though, I would not have been surprised to find prices high.
“Look at it this way,” George said. “If your house hadn’t been foreclosed, you and I would never have met.”
The gray stucco façade of Katy’s house loomed up as always, the window frames still painted that vaguely alarming blood red. The radically pitched attic had contained a trove of toys and games belonging to Swedish children long gone. Some dated back to the time of Napoleon, Katy’s mother had told us.
Katy and I prowled the attic insatiably, escaping our narrow, parochial world to frolic in a past that both lured and frightened us. In fairy tale books, trolls in peaked red caps lurked under bridges; their muscular, distorted bodies and outsized hands reached up to capture heedless children crossing above. We cuddled a velvet rabbit leaking ancient gray straw from its seams; its agate eyes gazed back at us wonderingly. A century ago, some child had whispered her secrets into its ragged ears. A rosimaled box was neatly packed with tiny wooden soldiers in painted uniforms, their dark brows scowling above blank, fearless eyes and stern scarlet mouths. The soldiers clutched needle-bladed bayonets, while officers sported handlebar moustaches, tall black hats and curved, silver wooden sabers. The Swedish army, Katy said, was once feared throughout Europe.
On the front stoop, she and I scattered jacks or tightened our roller skates with rusty keys. As best friends, we poured out our secrets by the hour. Our fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Empey, was a pretty, youngish woman with a streak of inexplicable cruelty. She had threatened to flunk Katy, a smart, obedient child, who worried constantly now, sometimes crying in the cloakroom. I, on the other hand, was rebellious and openly bored, sneaking the adult novels I read into class. I believe now that Mrs. Empey’s dislike of me fueled her sadistic treatment of my friend.
Back in fifth grade, my family was still living well. Turbulent financial magma was shifting ominously under our feet, but we, like the sybaritic Pompeiians, were unaware of our onrushing fate. Katy and I would take turns visiting each other after school, often staying for dinner. Her hair was a buttery blonde, her eyes wide and clear blue. Her full cheeks and quick, infectious grin contrasted with my sullen mouth, ringed brown eyes and dark, straight bobbed hair. My mother, Faye, doted on my younger sister and grew PattyAnn’s hair into long curls bedecked with braids, ribbons and barrettes. PattyAnn, who lacked my academic precocity, had carved out her own terrain as a charmer, with fluttering lashes, feigned pouts and dimpled, flirty smiles.
My father photographed his family with a complex German camera or took 8 MM color films of our picnics and birthdays. A natural model, PattyAnn posed and cavorted while Faye watched with greedy pride. Sometimes she could not contain her delight and chewed at her fingertips. When it was my turn to have my picture taken, my mother would often insert PattyAnn beside me. There were few pictures of me alone.
That last afternoon, Katy had begged me to hurry over; she had a special secret to share with me alone. I instantly dropped my untouched homework and sprinted the eight blocks to her house, Faye watching me with a resigned, irritated head shake.
Out of breath, I knocked at the scuffed front door of Katy’s stucco-sided bungalow, and she yanked it open with a gleeful little hop, drew me into the shabby living room, and put a plump finger to her lips.
“Don’t say a word.” I nodded, shivering a little, my own lips parted.
At the far end of the living room, Katy’s mother, Inger, sat hunched close to the stunted mahogany television set, watching “Queen for a Day.” She was a slender, quiet, drained-looking woman. Her light brown hair, silvering at the temples, was coiled around her head in a braid, also shot with gray. She perched on the edge of a worn maroon sofa with fat, threadbare arms. A front window admitted a wan patch of shrinking afternoon sun onto the braided rug.
On the black-and-white screen, an agitated audience of women was roiling like a panicked fish baitball. Contestants onstage were down to the semifinals, each competing for the title with her heartbreaking tale of need and misfortune.
Katy’s mother crossed and recrossed her legs. She leaned in toward the screen at an angle so acute that she sometimes lost her balance, tipped forward and barely caught herself. She craned her neck, as if at the unveiling of a mummy or the opening of a treasure chest. Paying no attention to us, she puffed deeply on her cigarette with unsteady hands, rolling the ash in a cracked ashtray between her stained thumb and forefinger. Her other hand clenched a linty wad of tissue with which she blotted her reddened eyes.
The contestants’ requests were modest: a wheelchair for a polio-paralyzed child; money to pay the gas bill for a family freezing in their trailer. A bed for a child who had to sleep on the floor. But a bounty of luxury appliances and furniture donated by the sponsors awaited to usher the Queen into plush domesticity. Winning would heal, empower, and transform a contestant into American royalty. After each woeful plea, the arrow of a large applause meter bounced and bounded with a life of its own, measuring the volume of clapping that would determine the winner.
As the competition narrowed and grew scorching, an endless chain of advertisements arrived to torment the television audience, glued to their screens: housecleaning products, cooking utensils, insurance plans. Models as slender as serpents coiled and contorted in girdles and pointed bras.
The studio audience squirmed and hugged themselves, twisting handkerchiefs. Some pulled their own hair; others simply sat frozen, tears rolling down their cheeks. Deep furrows etched the forehead of the tuxedoed host, his eyebrows elevated and quivering with sincerity. His black, brilliantined hair was slicked to his skull, But a pert, mischievous mustache proved he was not above flirting with his downhearted contestants. He had heard every misfortune and tragedy that can afflict our species, and yet, his smile was quick and broad; he had the power to deliver surcease, to relieve pain and bring hope.
“Now, now, you promised not to cry,” the host gently admonished a woman sobbing juicily into the microphone; he chucked her double chin. Beautiful models bracketed him; their bright satin dresses and high heels contrasted cruelly with the dowdy, hangdog contestants. Their smooth, shining hair swung in synchronous perfection with every move, and their smiles framed flawless teeth. A royal attendant held a velvet pillow stacked with small white envelope containing prizes.
A plush, overstuffed throne awaited the Queen, and a crimson velvet cape with a monstrous gold and ruby clasp. A model held the cape wide to embrace the winner. On a dainty table sat the crown, a towering mesh tiara of diamonds that Katy and I agreed was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen.
“My mom wants to go on the show,” Katy whispered.
“How come?”
“Because they make people rich,” Katy said. “Like you are.”
I shifted uncomfortably, forbidden to talk about my father’s business.
“What’s your secret?” I asked. I had nearly forgotten my purpose here.
Katy drew close and whispered in my ear. “The neighbors have two foxes.”
My eyes widened in disbelief. I had never seen a live fox.
“Red foxes. Our neighbor bought them this morning. I heard him and my father talking about it. They’re in a cage. But I’m not supposed to wander into people’s yards, so we’ll have to sneak over there.”
“Okay!”
“We can’t let my father catch us. We have to do this before he gets home from work or we’re in trouble. The neighbors don’t get home till six. I know how to get into their backyard from the alley. Mr. Travers told my dad he wants to breed them and sell their skins. He says fox fur is really valuable and he can get rich.”
“He’s going to skin them?”
“Yes, but we’re going to save them. We’re going to open the cage and let them go.”
“Your dad will kill you.”
“Not if he doesn’t find out.”
“Okay.” My heart pounded at the thought of Katy’s dad. His anger would be something terrible. I took short breaths, and felt a flush rising from my neck to my face.
“We have to make our plan. Come upstairs.”
I glanced at the television. Katy’s mother was lighting a new cigarette from the still burning stub of the old one. A sobbing woman stood before the microphone: her husband had fallen off the roof and broken his back. He needed a special hospital bed so he could come home.
We made our way unnoticed to Katy’s upstairs bedroom. The wall beside the staircase was covered with photos and paintings, dominated by a large framed portrait of Katy’s paternal grandparents, who had left Sweden for Minnesota while still in their teens. They had taken jobs on a farm, working very hard, and had finally saved enough to buy their own farm in the unforgiving north near the Canadian border. Several of their many children had died.
The couple in the portrait seemed to scrutinize me each time I passed, as if they knew I did not belong here. The woman’s pale blonde hair encircled her head in a halo of braids, as thick as a rope. She was very pretty and looked as if she had trouble keeping her full lips pressed together without smiling, but the man beside her had no such problem. His mouth was a straight line, and his eyes were hard. There could be no reason for him to smile, ever.
Katy’s grandmother, Greta, had rebelled from the beginning, hating farm life with its arduous, unrelenting chores, its six-month winters; its death-bearing diseases that lurked in every injury, every season. One day, after her husband had beaten her, Greta had run away to Minneapolis to become a flapper. A flapper, Katy explained, was a girl who cut her hair, smoked and flirted, danced the Charleston, wore short skirts and drank gin.
She and I paused at the landing and studied the portrait, as if it could come alive and start spinning stories of speakeasies and gangsters in pinstripe suits chewing on cigars. “I would like to be a flapper,” I said. “It sounds like fun.”
“Me too,” said Katy. We swung our legs out at the knees and snapped our fingers. Greta’s husband had come to Minneapolis and brought her home, beating her even more severely than her own father had back in Sweden. “So she stayed put and had my dad. But she ran away again and my grandpa beat her even harder than he had the first time.”
“Did she die?”
“No, but she went to an insane asylum. And then my grandpa ran off to drive a truck with whisky in it. It was prohibition.”
“What’s prohibition?”
“People couldn’t drink. It was against the law.” Katy rolled her eyes. “You don’t know anything, Ariel.”
“My parents hardly ever drink,” I said. “Sometimes they have a glass of wine if it’s a Jewish holiday.”
“My dad drinks a lot,” said Katy. “When he gets drunk he…” she stopped.
“He what?”
“I can’t tell you. But it’s evil.”
I did not know what to reply to that. I thought of gentle Inger downstairs, watching her gaudy crucible with such intensity. I could not imagine my father lifting his hand to anybody.
My mother was another story entirely: Faye chased me through the house and sometimes managed to swoop and grab her prey with long talons, blood red like those of an eagle or an owl. But my mother was plump and weak, while I was tall and athletic like my father. Her blows were ineffectual. I sometimes imagined hitting her back, one delirious smack—and then quickly asked god for forgiveness. As long as you were truly sorry, you would be forgiven by the white-bearded patriarch in his sandals and robe.
Katy’s father, Olaf, was a preoccupied, handsome, taciturn man with dark hair that hung in a careless lock over his forehead. He was lanky and shockingly strong; last summer the we had watched him carry an oaken chest of drawers upstairs on his back. His arm muscles had bulged and his gray T-shirt was blotched with sweat.
Katy told me that Olaf was an artist, who had worked very hard to learn the Swedish style of cabinet making. Olaf’s boss, also Swedish, charged high prices for the custom cabinetry that Olaf made. But he paid only a skimpy salary, barely enough to support the family. To work so hard and be treated so meanly provoked a fury in Olaf.
“What happened to your dad when his father ran off to drive the truck?”
“He went back to live on another farm. There was nobody to take care of him.”
“Your poor dad.”
“Don’t feel sorry for him,” Katy said and leaned in close. “I hate him.”
“You shouldn’t,” I responded reflexively, shocked. My own father flew kites and fed squirrels and sang cowboy songs, accompanying himself on a harmonica: A cowboy fell in with evil companions and shot a man dead in a bar over a woman. He was hunted by marshals and fell in a hail of bullets out on the prairie among thick chaparral, whatever that was. I imagined the handsome, doomed cowboy, his blood flowing red into the sand. He knew that he would lie there alone, forever, and his bones would finally turn to dust. I wept secretly into my pillow.
Katy’s mother Inger had come from a small town near the farm where Olaf grew up. Olaf had fought in the war, winning a medal at the Battle of the Bulge. When he returned, the government gave the young couple money to put down on the house they now lived in.
Aside from dispensing discipline, Olaf ignored Katy. Her younger brother Jamie was his favorite. Olaf was teaching Jamie how to build things, and they spent Saturdays in the garage. Each tool had its own purpose, and Jamie had to learn to use it. The tools were old and hand-made with precision. They had great value, and we girls were not allowed to touch anything in the garage.
Katy’s mother worked hard maintaining the house and made the family’s clothes. The dinner plates were painted with people in quaint costumes, and each plate had its own saying in Swedish at the bottom among green leaves curled over a trellis. Katy translated one of the sayings: “We grow too soon old and too late smart.”
Katy’s mother sat with her back straight, eating dutifully, as if it were another kitchen chore. She spoke only to admonish the children or to mention an important happening or upcoming event. She lifted her eyes to her husband, who acknowledged her and granted permission to speak with a upward nod or a slight lift of his brow.
Mealtimes at my house were noisy events, full of bickering. People interrupted and shouted above each other. The dinners were dominated by my mother, redheaded, noisy and officious, proud of her recipes and kitchen hegemony. To me, my mother was a hen, pecking at any excuse. She feinted at me, wing upraised, as if to deliver a blow. I sometimes hated her and felt deep guilt at these sinful emotions.
Although Katy and I attended the same grammar school, an economic gulf lay between our neighborhoods. Katy’s neighborhood was older and poorer than mine: Balding, patchy yards separated homes of stained, weary stucco or exhausted wood. On the lawns, thin blades of sparse grass barely struggled up out of winter’s freezing mud each year. No new construction was visible. The neighborhood had withdrawn and shrunk into its dinginess, passively accepting its exclusion from the brash postwar building boom.
My own neighborhood epitomized the boom. Near the shores of a sparkling lake, the air vibrated with hammering, mechanical saws and the thud of pilings driven deep. With business good, my father built his family a new multi-bedroom, ranch-style home. We drove in his midnight blue Buick Riviera to watch the construction.
My mother had grown up in a Brooklyn apartment project during the Depression; now she lived in a palace. The house curved, spacious and recumbent around a prominent corner facing the street. It sat on two lots, with a third lot dedicated solely to a garden and a playground for me and PattyAnn,
In the backyard, lilac bushes heavy with fragrant dark and light purple blossoms soared above the bleeding hearts imploring at their feet. Why did the hearts bleed, I wondered fingering the velvet, puffy red blossoms. Had something hurt them long ago? The fence was covered with trumpets of sapphire morning glories. White lilies of the valley bordered the garage, dizzying you with their perfume. Vivid carnelian geraniums burst from window boxes. Evergreen hedges, sculpted with geometric precision, concealed the foundation.
The interior too was sumptuous, with thick cocoa-colored carpets, blonde oak cabinetry and dining room furniture upholstered in raw silk. A giant picture window facing the street was framed by lined curtains of duchess satin, with giant roses lying amid a tangle of leaves. A matching sofa was upholstered in embroidered pink rose satin. On the walls of the children’s rooms cavorted characters carved and painted to order from fairy tales and Disney movies.
The lawn sprang to life magically one afternoon as rolls of sod arrived on trucks and unfurled into a rich carpet of brilliant grass. A handyman cared for our ebullient vegetable garden that brought forth giant tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, melons, lettuces and plump yellow ears of corn until the autumn frost finally braked its plenty. I brought bags of vegetables from the garden to Katy’s family. “We grew too much,” I said to her mother, who smiled at me with stained teeth.
“Nobody’s starving here,” Katy’s father had growled, but he hefted the vegetables admiringly. “Back on the farm we grew tomatoes even bigger than this,” he said.
Katy’s younger brother James had his father’s regular features beneath a light brown crew-cut. He sometimes joined in playing with us. One afternoon, PattyAnn and I accompanied Katy and James to see the movie “Old Yeller.” The brother and sister had sobbed loudly at the dog’s rabid demise, their grief so intense that an usher finally had to calm them. Sniffling and hiccupping, they sipped water from paper cups as the movie credits ran.
Now, Katy and I stole from the rear door of her house and wove through her backyard down a pebbled alleyway. The ground was choked with weeds, some of which had grown into woody stalks. Gray-green bushes extended into the dusty, stony roadway, reaching out aggressively to grab at anyone who tried to pass, so that Katy and I had to push them aside and duck beneath them, or walk hunched over. Sometimes we stopped and untangled their clutching, unrelenting branches from our sweaters and hair.
The neighbor’s yard was large and the grass was not as sparse as it was in Katy’s yard. We entered through the bushes and looked around. A rusty swing set hung silent and still. A rotting playhouse sagged.
“Their kids grew up,” whispered Katy. “I wish we had a playhouse like this. I would live there.” I nodded. I often thought of having my own small house in the backyard that I could escape to, away from my mother.
We spotted a rectangular, elevated cage at one end of the yard.
“That must be the foxes’ cage,” I said, and Katy jumped up and down with anticipation. We approached, looking around, our hearts pounding.
As we got closer, we heard an uninterrupted, ferocious buzzing that turned out to be flies. Something had driven the flies to a crazed euphoric state. We brushed them from our arms, our hair and peeked into the cage.
The foxes had fought to the death. Too shocked even to scream, we stood paralyzed, unable to take in the horror or to look away. They had attacked each other, and there had been nobody to stop them. Trapped, the foxes had fought to the death. Both of their throats had been ripped out and the flies were gorging with hysterical energy. The foxes must have been dead for quite a while because some of their blood was turning brown.
The narrow fox muzzles, nearly identical in life, had assumed differing postures in death: one still bore a snarl while the other gaped as if in surprise, its narrow tongue lolling daintily; its black-edged paws implored the sky.
Katy and I breathed silently in the presence of such overwhelming horror. We didn’t know these things could happen. I thought of the war and an image of people with their throats ripped out invaded my mind. I thought of Katy’s grandmother in the insane asylum, beaten until her blood ran. My mind seemed to be working outside of my conscious control, throwing images at me like weapons.
“Oh the poor little foxes,” Katy finally began to sob. I was too shocked to make a sound at the sight of such needless, and yet unpreventable, predestined pain and death. I looked away, trying to erase the swelling, burgeoning images, but Katy could not move her eyes, as if she had to memorize every detail.
“Don’t look anymore, Katy,” I said at last. But her grief was uncontrollable; comforting the foxes was impossible. They were beyond anything a veterinarian could do. They were beyond help, beyond pity, beyond life and trapped in death. I was most horrified at the desecration of the flies.
I had a deep sense that I was in the presence of the full impact of evil—not that the foxes had fought; they could not help that. It was in their nature. But the neighbors, greedy for the pelts, had neglected to care for them; to take proper precautions and separate them. The cage was very small. I imagined the foxes fighting with nowhere to hide or run or retreat. Nobody had cared for their lives or their agony, even god.
The neighbors were wicked and stupid, and that was the truth of mankind. It was why there was war and why my father could not sleep at night. The plane in front of him in the B-24 squadron, flown by his friend, had exploded from a direct hit right before his eyes. The crew had had burned alive. Only hours before, the young men had been playing cards, my mother had told me.
A piece of metal had pierced my father’s wrist from the explosion, and he had continued to fly the plane one-handed, his arm dripping blood, until the co-pilot could take over, and my father could wrap his wrist with a quickly soaked bandage, not even feeling the pain of his injury because what he had just seen overrode a mere wound of the flesh. Nothing could help because the sight, the pain was inside him now, forever.
That was why he paced the rooms and hallways of his magnificent, encumbered and doomed kingdom. When he borrowed money on the house, my mother had screamed, “We’re going to lose it. How could you do that? Why don’t you just get a job? Sell shoes.” The words must have stung like shrapnel. They cut him and let out his heart’s blood like the teeth of the foxes had pierced their skin and vessels. Like the cowboy in the songs, my father bled, knowing that we were doomed to lose our home; it would explode and disappear and we ourselves would wander now, lost.
I glared at my mother. “Shut up!” I said. My parents both turned to me in shock. Faye gasped, approached and slapped my face, hard with her red-tipped wing. I thought I had deflected her rage, but it didn’t work.
“You let her talk to me that way?” Faye shrieked at my father. He looked back at her uncomprehending. He was far away, his spirit bending and flexing under the stress like a metal rod. Perhaps he was back in the cockpit, the indifferent, undeniable, terrible truth of war piercing his mind. And now his postwar dream of a beautiful home and a peaceful, secure future was exploding too, and he was helpless before its inevitable demise.
I took my father’s hand and stood at his side. I would never again beg Faye’s forgiveness, I told myself; never try to please her or fear her tread in the hallway. I would shut out her voice, blind myself to her favoritism. My love for her, if it had ever existed, was dead now, like the foxes. I looked at PattyAnn, but she only sat twirling one of her curls and staring vacantly at the floor, waiting for the battle to play itself out, as it always did. This was not her war. Faye took PattyAnn desperately in her arms and PattyAnn responded with a hug. My father and I, the outcasts, stood wordless, as if imprisoned, alone, in a glass bubble. We could see out but not leave. The bubble encased us and went where we went. I have been trying to find an exit all my life.
“We’d better go,” I said, but Katy was already getting down on her knees.
“We have to pray for the foxes,” she sobbed, batting away flies.
“Why? We can’t help them. They’re dead.”
“Oh you,” Katy sobbed. “We have to pray for their souls. We have to pray for… ourselves.”
I got on my knees now too, for the sake of Katy, who was murmuring to her god with desperate sincerity, her hands tightly laced, arms extended. I pretended to pray, but it was an empty gesture. I had no faith that prayer would have any effect whatsoever. The bleak reality of violence and death was far more powerful than any outcome that prayer could effect. Prayers went out to an infinite, indifferent emptiness beyond the boundaries of the universe. But watching Katy gave me an unaccountable feeling of comfort, even trust. Perhaps in her goodness lay a way out of my plasticene prison.
For five minutes, I scanned the yard fearfully for adults while Katy finished her prayer. The tears were drying on her cheeks and she seemed serene. She had given her anguish to her god and that had brought her relief, while I felt only the bleakest despair. I envied her.
“Nothing can bring back life,” I tried, “but at least they are not in pain anymore.”
“How do we know that?” Katy said suddenly.
“If you’re dead you can’t feel pain.”
“That’s what we tell ourselves. But maybe you just can’t … cry. Maybe you’re still in pain when you die.” I could think of nothing to contest this. She gazed at the foxes, and her face crumpled again.
“The flies are the worst,” I said bitterly. I could not get the sound of their joyous buzzing out of my ears, my brain. The foxes couldn’t stop the flies from siphoning up their helpless flesh and lifeblood with their obscene, ghastly mouthparts.
“We could get some insect spray,” said Katy. “We have some in the garage. That would kill the flies.” I thought it would give me pleasure to watch the flies squirm and die under the spray. But I couldn’t face the thought of spraying the foxes’ death wounds with poison. And the flies too would die in agony. There was nothing to be done.
Katy and began to walk back. We didn’t watch for the neighbors now. We didn’t care who saw us.
“Jamie and me are going to a meeting tonight,” Katy said. Or I would ask you to dinner.”
“That’s okay,” I replied. But in truth, I could not bear the prospect of seeing my mother, with the memory of the foxes so fresh and vivid. I could tell my father what happened, but I didn’t want to upset him. He had so much worry on his shoulders. No, I would have to hold the memory of this mangled flesh inside me forever like a spike.
“What kind of meeting are you going to?” I asked, though I was not really interested.
“It’s a club for kids called Chums,” Katy said. “My father wants us to join it. The grown-ups are having a meeting too.”
“What’s their club called?”
Their club is the Ku Klux Klan,” said Katy. She spelled it for me, noting the capital Ks.
“What a funny name,” I said. “What is the club for?”
“It’s for the white people,” Katy said. We were walking toward her house, kicking up dust in the alley. When we got to her backyard, Katy stopped and rubbed off the dust with leaves from her shoes, so I did too.
“Just for white people?” It seemed strange. I didn’t press the question because Katy obviously didn’t know either. I was just glad that she was not crying anymore. That she would have something to distract her from the horror we had seen.
“Try to have fun,” I said. “I’ll go home now. Are you going to tell your mother about the foxes?”
“No,” said Katy. “I’m never telling anybody. They would know we had been here, and I would get in trouble. They might not let me see you anymore because you’re Jewish. Chums are not supposed to be friends with Jewish people.”
This hit me like a brick; the air left my lungs and I could not draw another breath for a moment. Then the realization rose to my chest: I was to lose my best friend. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll still be friends with you. I don’t care what my father says.” Katy set her chin and took me by the hand. It stung that Katy’s strong, handsome father didn’t want me to be her friend. “I have another secret to tell you,” Katy said.
“Okay.”
It’s why I hate my father. When he gets drunk he hits my mother.”
“Why does he do that?”
“And he puts his hand up my dress,” Katy said. She shuddered. “That’s what I hate him the most for.”
I shook my head, everything around me grew blurred and unreal. I could not believe that Katy’s father would do something so strange and wrong. “Tell him to stop!”
“I don’t dare,” Katy said. “He says he’s just playing around. You don’t know what he’s like when he’s been drinking.”
“Can you tell your mother so she’ll tell him to stop?”
“I don’t think I had better,” Katy said. “He might hit her. She always tries not to make him mad.” We could find no way out of this, any more than we could return life to the foxes. Something terrible could happen if we tried. Katy’s parents might attack each other like the foxes. Life itself was a cage like the fox cage, and we were trapped within it: me with my mother; Katy with her father. The only time you got out was when you died. We had no choice but to stay. Maybe someday we would be able to leave and not have to be afraid. But as we stood facing each other, that day seemed very far off.
“Bye then,” I said.
“Bye,” Katy replied and turned away. I never visited her house again, nor did she come over. We spoke rarely if at all, and at some point while I was in junior high, her family moved. I heard a rumor that her father beat her.
