Spooky

Things came easily for me as a child. Math was simple. Reading was, too. I knew how to read before any of my classmates. Even in Kindergarten I was knocking through Sally Dick and Jane while the rest of the class was struggling to sound out the words.

My closest friend then was Billy Connors. Billy was a good kid who just lived down the street. We played football in each other’s yards, climbed trees, rode bikes everywhere in a time where you just told your parents you were going to go play on a Saturday morning and all they said was to be home in time for dinner. We spent time getting pennies flattened on the railroad tracks, building forts in bushes, sneaking into neighborhood pools where we knew no one was home. We’d come home muddy or wet or skinned up from failed bike jumps, and all our parents would tell us was to get cleaned up for supper.

It sounds bucolic and made up, especially from the perspective of the world today. But it existed. All that really happened. It was a safer time. A better one in many aspects. But there were the bad moments, too. Kids being kids. Kids being mean to other kids. It’s happened since the beginning of the world.

Billy and I were lined up to go in to school one cold morning. They made us line up and wait. Back then the teachers were probably chain smoking in the teachers lounge, staunching themselves for another day of chaos.

Billy was wearing a knit cap his mother made him. It was ugly. It was so ugly. It might have been the ugliest hat anyone ever owned. Blue in a couple hues, red, some kind of baby puke yellow and brown. It looked like his mom had kept running out of colors and just subbed in with whatever she had left. The end result was a hat that looked like it had been washed in the wrong temperature. And then a dog shit on it.

Billy got teased pretty good. Especially by Lon Martin and Kevin Parks. Guys who were also our friends most of the time but had a pretty good mean streak when they let loose. It wasn’t much of a surprise that one morning they decided to just grab that hat off Billy’s head and play keep away with it. Laughing, taunting while Billy tried to grab it back. I apparently had a little mean streak too. I joined in.

“Lon, Lon. Throw it here,” I shouted.

“Don’t throw it to him,”Kevin shouted. “He’s just gonna give it back.”

“I won’t, I won’t,” I shouted. “I promise.”

I could see Billy getting more and more upset but kept at it with Lon and Kevin. Until the teacher on outside duty spotted what was going on, Billy’s face red, tear-streaked.

She snatched the hat out of Lon’s hand and marched the three of us into our classroom. Mrs. Summers, our teacher, quickly began to mete out a punishment. Lon, Kevin and I were to stand in a corner through first recess while everyone else played outside.

I immediately shifted to defense. I begin to spin the truth like a desperate press secretary.

“I was trying to get the hat back,” I said. “I was going to get it and when I did, I was going to give it back to Billy. Kevin knows.”

“Told ya,” Kevin said to Lon, both of them snarling at me.

There are a lot of names for what I was in that moment. Shitweasel is my favorite. In that moment, and embarrassingly others too, I was definitely a shitweasel.

Lon and Kevin stood in the corners at recess. I played with my friend Billy at recess. Good spin. I was trying to be a good guy. A hero. The rest of the kids bought it. Somewhere in the middle of it, the praise and adulation from my classmates, I began to buy it, too.

I moved away to a different state two years later when my dad’s job was transferred. Billy and I traded penpal letters at first. It faded quickly.

By the time I was in high school, no one really remembered me from those days. Not even Billy. And I barely remembered them.

Years passed. Almost two decades. College. Early career. Life. The normal route of middle class suburban white kids. Nothing out of the ordinary. Interchangeable names but the same path as everyone else.

And then Billy showed up in my dreams. 

At first it was subtle. Something on the edge of a memory. Not a memory. Just a sense. Sensation. Familiar but distant.

Then he started talking. Conversations. One of the last times I saw him was shortly after we moved, when we went back to my hometown to pick up a kitten from a litter his cat Trixie had. We got the runt of the litter. He was a little black fluff ball that lived from when I was in second grade until my senior year in college.

We got him on Halloween. So I named him Spooky. And he was my favorite pet I’d ever had.

Billy started talking about Spooky in the more recent dreams. How he was okay, and I shouldn’t worry and that I’d see him again one day.

The dreams both comforted me and disturbed me. They didn’t happen weekly or even monthly but regularly enough to call the recurring. And they went on for almost two years.

I wound up back in my old hometown. I didn’t want to be there. A family trip to celebrate my great aunt’s 90th birthday. It was torture. I needed to get away. Just get some time to myself to breathe. I escaped, claiming I needed to get the car serviced before I headed back. But I just went for a drive. I knew where I was going all along even if I didn’t admit it to myself. Thirty minutes later, I parked in front of our old house. It looked so much smaller than I remembered. Even with the addition one of the parade of owner since us had added on the back.

I got out and walked down the street, ticking off a mental checklist of the former neighbors as I went. Mr. and Mrs. Kroblin, The Holts, Old Lady Rittman, Mrs. Brownloe, and then the Connors. I was surprised when Mrs. Connors walked out the front door. Her hair was almost white now, but other than that she looked just the same.

“Mrs. Connors?” I asked, approaching up the driveway. It startled her. She didn’t know who I was. Clearly she wasn’t interested in talking with a stranger.

“May I help you?” she asked politely, but distantly. Her eyes looked over her shoulder and up and down the street. Some neighbors were out a few houses down. She waved to them and they waved back. It made her relax a little.

“Mrs. Connors, I’m Charlie Maddox,” I said. “I used to live just down the street when I was little.”

She smiled for the first time and completely relaxed. “Oh, my goodness. Charlie Maddox. I didn’t recognize you. You’ve grown up so.”

“It happens,” I said, smiling, trying to be amusing, disarming. She laughed. 

“Yes, yes it does,” she said. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Just in town to see some family. Thought I’d visit the old neighborhood.”

“How wonderful,” Mrs. Connors said. “Homer will be sorry he missed you,” she added, referring to Mr. Connors.

“Does Billy still live in town?” I asked finally. I should have known something was off before I asked. Just the fact that Mrs. Connors hadn’t even mentioned him. I think I knew but didn’t trust that I knew.

Mrs. Connors entire demeanor changed. Her body sagged. Her face aged to instantly match her white hair. An old lady replaced the vital woman in a moment.

“Billy passed away,” she said. Saying it made it fresh again. A tear formed in the corner of her eye.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Connors,” I said, a stab at empathy. More guilt. I felt like I’d done something wrong, even though I really hadn’t. At least I didn’t think I had. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay, dear. How could you?” she said, reaching out and patting my hand, comforting me now when I felt like I should be comforting her. I felt even guiltier, because I really didn’t feel anything. Billy was a long distant memory to me. The last time I’d seen him we were both seven. I was approaching thirty. 

“What happened?” I asked, instantly regretting it. I didn’t need to know what happened. It was none of my business. And I didn’t need to put the poor woman through reliving it again. But I did.

“Leukemia,” she said. “He first got it in high school. He fought so hard. It even went into remission for awhile. But it came back. He died just about two years ago now.

“Two years ago?” I asked.

She nodded and looked at her feet, trying to hide her tears, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I’m really sorry,” I repeated. I searched for something to say. Anything. It was all going to sound trite but I let fly with the best I could come up with. “We had a lot of fun when we were kids. He was probably my best friend when we lived here.”

Mrs. Connors smiled as best she could and took a deep breath, nodding some more. “You boys were wonderful friends. It’s a shame you couldn’t grow up together.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

Mrs. Connors gave me a hug and told me to say hello to my parents and enjoy my trip. I told her to say hello to Mr. Connors, then watched her drive off, and stood there awhile looking at the house, remembering the football games on the lawn, and the bike jump ramps we built on the sidewalk right there and the nights catching fireflies in the summer.

I knew I’d be seeing Billy again. Soon.

It wasn’t that night. Or even the next. It took two weeks after I’d gotten back home.

The setting was familiar but changed. It was my first grade classroom, but altered. The same small wooden desks. Mrs. Summers in her ill-fitting polyester dress. The bank of windows along the north wall. My classmates all gathered at the tables. Most that I didn’t recognize because I didn’t remember many of them. Dream stand-ins that my brain used to fill the scene. Aside from Billy.

“Come sit down, Charles,” Mrs. Summers motioned to a seat nearest her. 

I did as instructed. Right across from Billy.

He was in the middle of struggling with a sentence in reading group. One word. “What.” He was trying to sound it out. He got the w sound but the h was causing the hang up. He tried to piece it together for what seemed hours.

The rest of the kids in the group squirmed, impatient. Mrs. Summers threw them stern looks. It froze all but one. The boy sitting next to Billy. It was driving him insane. He knew the answer. Why couldn’t he just tell this idiot what the word was so they could get things moving. 

“Charlie,” Mrs. Summers said, sternly. “Hold still.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, sitting next to Billy now as he struggled with the word “what.”

I saw Billy’s hands were shaking. I saw him sweating. There was panic in his eyes.

All I felt was irritated.

“It’s “what”, I finally blurted out.

“Charles,” Mrs. Summers snapped but I wasn’t having it.

“How do you not see that? How do you not know that? It’s “what”. Everybody knows that. Scamper knows it.” I pointed to the cage on the window ledge that held Scamper, the class hamster.

The rest of the kids started laughing.

Billy started crying.

“That is enough, Charles!” Mrs. Summers roared. “All of you.”

But the damage was done.

And then it stopped. The students, Mrs. Summers, Scamper, the clock on the wall. They all stopped. All except Billy.

He stood now. The tears gone. He was still a boy but he carried himself like an adult.

“I thought you were my friend,” he said. “I thought you were my best friend.”

“I was your friend,” I said. “I am your friend.”

Billy said nothing more. He just stared at me. Through me. The pain in his eyes. The betrayal. Patient. Waiting.

In the distance I heard a thrumming sound. A pounding. It started out muffled. Then it grew, slowly until it was finally almost deafening.

I could hear my breath growing, gasping. Panic set in. And Billy just looked at me, emotionless. Waiting.

And then the pounding stopped. And everything went quiet.

“I’m really sorry, Billy,” I finally said, weakly. 

“I know,” Billy said, and he smiled. Forgiving. Accepting. The way a parent smiles at a child who knows they’ve done wrong. Except the rolls were reversed.

And then a hum that turned into a purr. Billy reached down at his feet and picked up the little black cat rubbing against his legs.

“Spooky,” I said, shouted, reaching out to touch him, pet him. Just one more time.

Billy pulled back, out of reach.

“Not yet,” he said, my heart sinking, my turn to shake. “Not yet,” he said again. “But one day.”

Then he smiled.

And I finally woke up.