Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [86]
“We’ll aim it at the roof this time,” Garvey told us. “Get it on the roof itself. Then we’ll be able to climb over the top by pulling up on the rope.”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Aunt Raylene had come up behind me while we were all looking at Garvey. She grabbed one hook out of my hands and the other from Grey. “You trying to kill one of these children?” She looked up then and saw the holes the hook had gouged in her wall.
“Oh my Jesus!” Her left hand snaked out and slapped first Grey, then Garvey. “You digging holes in my house! You planning to just walk off and leave it like that, I suppose. No matter that it’s gonna let the rain in and rot my wall.” The chain dangling from one fist knocked against the skirt of the print dress she’d worn to go into town. “I’m surprised you an’t killed each other already. No.” She shook her head and spat snuff juice to the side. “No. What’s surprising is that I an’t killed you already.”
“It an’t that deep a hole,” Grey tried to tell her. “It an’t gonna let the rain in.”
The color rushed into Aunt Raylene’s face, and her eyes went glassy. I thought for a moment how Uncle Beau said Aunt Raylene moved out to the river after she got in trouble on the carnival circuit and cut a man up for trying to mess with her. Now she looked like she was going to swing one of those hooks at Grey’s belly. The other kids took off at a run, and Grey stumbled back out of her reach.
“Aunt Raylene,” he pleaded, sweat breaking out on his face, “Aunt Raylene, now, Aunt Raylene, wait ...”
“You crazy little bastard,” she hissed at him. She caught his arm in one hand and shook him back and forth like a fish on a pole. “All of you. Don’t you know what this is?” She waved the tines up close to Grey’s face. “You think this is a big old fishhook? Well, it an’t. It’s for trawling, for dragging. You go down in the river and they’ll use something like this to pull you up in chunks. Pull you loose from the junk in that deep mud. Pull you up in pieces, you hear me? Nasty slices of you, little boy, for your mama to cry over.”
Aunt Raylene’s tale didn’t really scare us. When I tried to imagine my flesh in pieces it was like a cartoon, completely unreal, but in the night stringy terrible pieces of meat loomed in my dreams. The hooks got in my dreams too, dripping blood and river mud. Maybe it hadn’t been fish parts I’d cleaned out of them. It could have been anything. I made up stories about where those hooks had come from, who had lost them, until Patsy Ruth got nightmares. She dreamed that she had drowned in the river and the morticians had to sew pieces of her back together to look like somebody. Only they had to sew different people’s pieces together just to make up one reasonable body to bury to show her mama. When she told Aunt Alma, Alma told me to stop making up such gruesome stories.
Aunt Raylene put a lock on her cellar door to keep all of us away from the hooks, and everyone seemed to forget them. But a few weeks later, I started to dream about them again. This time their razor points whistled when the wind blew, and the steel edges reflected light where there was none. I would wake up from those dreams with my teeth aching, my ears throbbing as if there were a wind blowing on me, stinking, cold, and constant. I wanted one of those hooks, wanted it for my own, that cold sharp metal where I could put out my hand and touch it at any time.
I started going over to Aunt Raylene’s place every chance I got, hanging out and being helpful.