The rain smelled like tilled earth, moss, incense, and ozone. With her hands buried deep into pockets, drops pattering on the broad hat brim, Patty began walking down the side street. Down Boundary Street.
Boundary Street.
The fact that Pine Deep had a street with that name was a big part of the draw for her. There’d been one in New York, though try and find it on a map. GPS couldn’t. Uber drivers back in the city could, though, which was weird.
The street wasn’t on MapQuest, Google Maps, or GPS here, though. She’d had to ask, and the first five people she’d stopped when she first arrived didn’t know. It was a guy with a lot of skin art, a flannel shirt, and a lumbersexual woodsman’s beard who gave her directions. Boundary Street was just off the main drag, which made her wonder why the other people didn’t know.
Maybe it was because this part of town was new, built since the Trouble. Maybe nobody bothered to tell the people at Google Earth about it. Or however that worked. She didn’t know and really didn’t care. It was here, that’s what mattered. And, sure, there were some sideways mentions of it in the kind of downbeat indie documentaries hipster filmmakers concocted for their thesis. Strange, but then there were a lot of strange things in life, Patty knew. She was one of them. Monk sure as hell was another.
At times, when she was really drunk, Patty wondered if Boundary Street wasn’t on the map because it was more a state of mind. Not always a good one, but that spoke to perspective. The kind of place that Tom Waits had to be talking about when he said you couldn’t find it unless you started out with bad directions. Maybe every big city had a place like Boundary Street.
Probably. After all, the debris has to wash up somewhere.
It was home to her in New York, and now it was home to her here.
She passed a small knot of drenched twenty-somethings huddled under an awning. Short skirts, push-up bras, makeup applied with a trowel, and a lot of money wasted at the hair salon during the rainy season. Patty hated them and feared them. Every single one of them was prettier than her. Prettier and younger, and there wasn’t a single person on the street who didn’t know it.
Patty had one really good trick, though. Most Americans can’t read an Asian face worth a damn, and she went full Vietnamese as she passed. Eyes that said exactly nothing, mouth that offered no emotion, teeth locked together to create the wax mask. It had been foiling white people for thousands of years and it gave these women nothing to go on. No lever for the scorn in their eyes.
Even so, they shared conspiratorial grins as she passed, but Patty could see shadows lurked in their eyes. Trying to fool each other that this—whatever tonight’s plan was—was still a good idea. The Joker grins were plastic but necessary, because none of them had reached the point where fiction was going to buffer them from the realities of life down here. The shadows in their eyes told Patty that they were each feeling it. The Boundary Street vibe. That look must be similar to what young zebras showed when they realized that being a young, tough herbivore didn’t mean a whole lot to the tawny cats smiling at them from the dark shadows beneath the trees.
She walked on.
Seeing the women started Patty thinking. The Fringe had become a destination, drawing people from New York, Philly, and elsewhere. It was a place you wanted to find, because art and music and acceptance were exploding there. But Boundary Street? No. People who came to Boundary Street seldom understood how they got there. It was not even the real name of the street, though it’s what everyone called it. Somebody—an artist, maybe, or a drunk—made up a bunch of street signs and glued them over the official ones. The department of streets kept taking them down, but they were always back up a day or so later. After a while, the town stopped trying.
Pine Deep didn’t try to do much else down there, either. Took so long to get the gutters clean that people used persistent items of trash as meeting points. The rain washed some of it away, but even Mother Nature wasn’t trying all that hard.
Patty Cakes was chewing on all of that as she aimed herself in the direction of the package store. Morty’s Cold Beer. The wind drove the rain at her like needles, opening raw spots on her cheeks and nose. It made her eyes hurt. On nights like this the wind was hungry for blood.
She walked along, listening to the clicking of her heels in the hope that the beat would conjure a song in her head. Music was everything to her. She had an iPad crammed with songs, and if that ever failed her it was linked to Pandora, Amazon Prime, Sirius, and Spotify. There wasn’t enough music in the world for Patty. Music kept the doors locked and shades drawn; it kept the monsters in their closets.
There were plenty of monsters. Always monsters.
Beer helped, too.
The window was crammed with beer signs and they painted the wet pavement in Christmas colors. Corona blue and Budweiser red, Stella orange and Heineken green. Patty paused outside, looking up and down the street. To the left of Morty’s were three clubs in a row. The Bonesman’s Blues, named after a local ghost legend. Hopalong, which was a gay cowboy place. And the lesbian bar, Tank Girl. To the right was a piercing place, a queer bookstore, and the inevitable Starbucks. Nondescript EDM pulsed out through the open club doors and was crushed by thunder and rain.
Closer to this end of the block was a storefront that always seemed to be rented out for some kind of twelve-step. Everyone she could see through the window looked bent over. Like people at a kid’s funeral. She couldn’t tell if they were crying or reading or praying. She turned away. Whatever was going on over there hurt to look at.
“Beer,” she said to the night.
The neon signs glowed with happy colors. It’s safe in here, they seemed to say.
So she went in.
INTERLUDE TWO
THE LORD OF THE FLIES
It was so sad that Theresa Minor died.
Gracie Thompson said it to everyone she knew, because she was the kind of person who said those things. The neighbors on the block, all of whom liked Gracie, nodded and murmured meaningless things. They said they were sorry for her loss. Much less so for Theresa, who few of them liked and no one respected.
Very few of them ever mentioned the Boy.
Owen.
They all knew his name, but they mostly called him “the Boy.”
Did you hear about the Howard’s cat? It went missing, just like the Bucker’s dog. I heard the Boy was hanging around the yard.
Someone said the Boy was looking in Janie Cooper’s window. Stan Simmons saw him all hunkered down on a limb of that old olive tree outside her room, and her not even thirteen.
The fire inspector’s been asking about the old Anderson place. Poor Lyddie burned to death—God bless her soul. She used to have the Boy mow her lawn but fired him when he stole some stuff off the clothesline. Bras and underpants and stuff. Then the house burns down? You can’t tell me there’s no connection.
And on and on.
The Boy.
Now he sat alone in the middle of the front row of the Lensky Funeral Home’s smaller viewing room. Sitting there like a lump. Pale and blotchy. Smelling of things no one wanted to put a name to. Didn’t matter that his clothes were clean and he looked like he’d washed. The smell was always there. An earthy, wormy thing.
No one sat near him. Not for four rows behind him. And no one on the front two rows on the other side of the aisle. They didn’t want to meet his eye, even if they weren’t aware of that need.