Bones & All Read online

  When he was done with her belly he reached back and grabbed her long purple fingers, and the crunching started. He inched down the sofa, still sitting on his heels, as he munched on her legs. I wanted to look away, but I never did.

  When he was finished he rocked back on his heels and let out a belch that would have registered on the Richter scale. “Pardon me,” he muttered as he drew a grubby yellow handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his mouth. “You got nothin’ to worry about,” he said as he stuffed the kerchief back in his pocket. “I never eat ’em live.” At no point had he turned to look at me. Somehow he just knew I was there.

  He reached around him, gathering the scraps of her clothing and stuffing them into one of the bags we’d brought the groceries home in. Her brown leather shoes stood neatly where her feet had been, awaiting their next outing like it would ever happen. The man glanced at me, then reached over and slid them behind the floral dust-flap.

  When I finally spoke my voice sounded like I’d borrowed it. “I thought I was the only one.”

  He shrugged. “Everybody does.” He pulled something out of the crumpled afghan on the sofa and jingled it in his hand. It was a tangle of Mrs. Harmon’s jewelry, the rings that had been on her fingers and the locket of cream and pink enamel around her neck. Cupping the jewelry in a dirty hand, he got up to the sound of creaking bones and settled himself in the armchair beside the sofa. He made as if to dip his hand into his shirt pocket, then decided against it.

  “Here,” he said. The stranger leaned forward, and I held out my hand to accept the little pile of jewelry. Then he drew a tarnished silver flask out of his shirt pocket and tipped it. I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he gulped. Washing her down. I’d only known Mrs. Harmon for an hour, but in that moment I missed her like I’d known her all my life.

  I went to the mantelpiece and untangled the rings from the chain, laying the jewelry out piece by piece in front of the old pictures Mrs. Harmon had remembered her husband by. A dashing Douglas Harmon in soft focus regarded me with a benevolence I didn’t deserve.

  “Listen here. High time we introduced ourselves. Name’s Sullivan.” The man got to his feet and held out his hand. His eyes were pale blue under his shaggy gray eyebrows. “Sully, for short.”

  Before I had a chance to refuse him he glanced down at his fingers—stained red, especially around the cuticles—and thought better of offering his hand. He went into the kitchen and ran his hands under the faucet, glancing over his shoulder at me. “Well? Don’t you got a name, girl?”

  I’d never met anyone who talked like him before. He must have been from somewhere south, someplace rural, like West Virginia. “Maren,” I said.

  “Nice name. Never heard it before,” Sullivan said as he dried his hands on Mrs. Harmon’s dish towel. His fingers still weren’t what I would have called clean. For all I knew, though, whiskey might have been way more effective than Listerine.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  He lifted a hoary eyebrow. “You mean how did I know about you?” I nodded, and Sully paused, as if he were deciding how to answer. “I just know,” he said.

  “You saw me … this morning, on the bus … and you knew? Just like that?”

  “I knew it was you,” he said.

  “You said, ‘Everybody does,’” I said. “Like there are others.”

  “What, like we stick together or somethin’?” Sully laughed as he pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table, where Mrs. Harmon had savored her eggs and bacon a few hours before. “Get together for poker on Thursday nights?” He laughed again, a big jolly laugh, like I could close my eyes and picture a gin-swilling, chain-smoking Santa Claus—except he was so lean I could see his bones poking through his shirt. “You’re on your own, and you always will be. That’s the way it’s gotta be, get it?”

  I leaned in the doorway and folded my arms. “That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  “Missy, you got a lot to learn. You may be dangerous to a whole lot of people out there, but that don’t mean there ain’t a whole lot of people who can hurt you just as bad. Can’t come near your own kind, not if you wanna keep your face.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You just said I should stay away from you.”

  “Ah, but I ain’t like you, and you ain’t like me. You got a pulse, and I ain’t been a teenager since the nineteenth century. That’s how we can sit down for a meal together, see?”

  I felt my belly rumble at the mention of dinner, but something he had said made me stop short. “How did you know?” I asked. “That I … that I eat…?”

  “Who else you gonna eat, at your age?” He chuckled, and I smiled.

  “Are you really that old?”

  The old man clucked his tongue. “I seen it all, but I ain’t anywhere near a hundred.”

  “Have you met a lot of us?”

  “Here and there,” he said with a shrug. “But like I said, it’s best not to make friends.”

  It wasn’t just Sully’s ear—he was missing most of his left index finger too. He saw me looking at it and held out his hand to me, waggling his digits as if he were a young girl expecting me to admire her engagement ring. “Lost it in a bar fight,” he said. “Bit it clean off, the bastard. Swallowed it before I could get it back.” He got up from the table and started opening cabinets. He took out a skillet. “You hungry? I’m gonna make us some dinner.”

  “You’re still hungry?”

  “I’m always hungry.” Sully grabbed a bunch of onions and potatoes from a bowl on the counter and dropped them on a chopping board. “Git over here and make yourself useful. I’m gonna show you how to make a hobo casserole.”

  I picked up a knife and chopped an onion in half. “What’s in a hobo casserole?” I couldn’t resist. “Hoboes?”

  When he laughed he threw back his head and actually slapped his knee. “Nah, nah. Just whatever you got to hand.” He opened the refrigerator and poked through one of the produce drawers. “Let’s see if she got some ground beef in here … ha! Got some carrots too.” Sully turned on the oven—“Four hundred,” he said over his shoulder—and pulled the meat out of the wrapper with his bare hands. I could still see the blood around his cuticles. I’d have to try not to think about it.

  I watched him find his way around the kitchen, pulling down two tins of baked beans and fiddling with the electric can opener. Leaving the meat and vegetables to cook, Sully homed in on the Tupperware cake box, pulled off the lid, and leaned in for a sniff. “Mmm, what’s this?”

  “I think it’s carrot cake.”

  “Made her own frosting too. Cream cheese. Looks mighty tasty.” He replaced the lid and looked at me. “What were you doin’ with her, anyway?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “She asked me to help her with her groceries, and then she invited me in for breakfast.”

  “Then she got tired and told you to make yourself at home, is that it?”

  I didn’t know why I felt so guilty all of a sudden, especially after what I’d just seen him do. “She was nice to me,” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The man gave me a look I couldn’t read. “Never said you did.” He mixed the ingredients together in a casserole dish, sprinkled the top with shredded cheddar, and slid it into the oven.

  The clock on the mantel chimed six as Sully brought his pack in from the living room, propped it against the refrigerator, and drew a long ropelike object out of the opening. At first I did think it was a rope, but then he pulled out the thick, silvery knot of Mrs. Harmon’s chignon and laid it out on the calico place mat with a sort of reverence, and I realized what the ropelike thing was made of. There were all sorts of hair woven into it, red and brown and black and silver, curly and kinky and slippery-straight. I never knew something could be so grotesque and so beautiful at the same time.

  Sully laid the end of the rope across his knee, gently pulling a lock of Mrs. Harmon’s hai
r out of the chignon and into two, then four, even pieces. “Been workin’ on it for years,” he said, glancing up as he began to weave in the first piece. “That brimstone look of yours ain’t so pretty. Here’s the first thing you need to know about old Sully: I ain’t gonna change my ways to suit ya.” He shrugged. “Anyhow, it’s kinda poetical, when you think about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Makin’ somethin’ useful, somethin’ lovely, out of somethin’ that’s done and gone. A hundred years ago they used to make bracelets outta corpses’ hair, d’you ever hear that?”

  I shook my head.

  “A widow wore her husband’s hair all the rest of her days.” The coil twitched as Sully began to weave in the pieces. “Somethin’ lovely,” he said again, softly, as if to himself. “Somethin’ to remember him by.” His hands were rough and gnarled, but when he worked in the locks he did it deftly. “Gotta keep my hands busy,” he said. “‘Idle hands do the devil’s work,’ that’s what the preacher used to tell us in Sunday school when I was a boy. And anyhow, it’s better than whittlin’ out the same damn chess pieces over and over like some folks do.”

  “It would be all right,” I ventured, “if you played chess.”

  He scoffed. “What am I gonna do, play against myself?”

  For a minute or two I watched him weave the silver pieces into the strands that were already there. “What are you going to do with it when it’s finished?”

  He shrugged. “Who says it’ll ever be finished?”

  “But I don’t see what the point of it is, if you’re not going to finish it.”

  “Can’t you say the same for livin’? Just goes on and on, and no reason for it.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Suddenly the days and weeks and months stretching out before me looked even bleaker than they had yesterday or the day before.

  “Here,” Sully said, pulling another few feet of rope out of his sack and offering it to me. “Give it a good tug. Plenty strong enough to hang a man.”

  I hesitated, partly because I didn’t really want to touch it but also because I was afraid I’d tear it in half and he’d be angry with me. “Go on,” he said. “It won’t break.”

  So I grabbed it with both fists and pulled, but it was as he’d said. I bet I could have climbed it to the ceiling like that rope we had in elementary school gym class. “How did you learn to do that?”

  “My daddy was a rope-maker.” He paused, then added quietly, “Among other things.” He flicked his wrist, and the rope of hair leapt and twitched like a snake. I jumped, and he laughed at me. “Now,” he said. “Tell me about your first one.”

  I traced my finger along the quilting of Mrs. Harmon’s calico place mat. “It was my babysitter.”

  “You remember?”

  I shook my head.

  He pulled out his flask and took another gulp. “Your mama found you?”

  I nodded. “What about you?”

  Sully chuckled to himself. “Ate my own granddad while they were waitin’ on the undertaker.” He licked his lips and tossed me a look as he screwed the cap back on the flask. “Saved my daddy near three hundred dollars.” After a moment he asked, “Why you on your own? Your mama left you?”

  “How did you know?”

  He shrugged. “That’s why you’re here?”

  I nodded.

  “Let me guess,” he sighed. “You went over there thinkin’ you were gonna make some kind of a bargain. Then you got there and saw there was no way in hell you were gonna ring that doorbell.”

  I hated that this man, a complete stranger, had me all figured out. It had been easier to leave my grandparents’ yard thinking I might go back, but he was right. I couldn’t go back. There could be no asking forgiveness for what I’d done.

  “Listen here,” Sully went on. “You ain’t never gonna feel nothin’ other people ain’t been through a million times before.” He frowned, remembering something. “I wanted to say goodbye to my mama. Slept in the woods for weeks, waitin’ for my chance.”

  I drew a deep breath and tried to push all thoughts of Mama out of my head. “Wasn’t it hard? Sleeping outdoors and finding all your own food and stuff?”

  “Nah. It ain’t hard once somebody shows you how to shoot, and how to forage, and how to start a fire. I had a bow and arrow, and I used it to catch my supper. Rabbits, squirrels. My granddaddy, he taught me all that.”

  “But wasn’t it hard to fall asleep outside?”

  “Your mama never took you campin’, I can see that.” He laughed. “Why sleep under a ceiling when you got a sky full of stars out there?” He gave a backward nod toward the kitchen window.

  “Do you always sleep outside?”

  “Not in a built-up place like this. You’re liable to get taken in by the cops and charged with vagrancy. It don’t matter if you ain’t stole nothin’, or camped on public land. If we were in the woods, I’d have cooked up that casserole on an open fire.” He sighed. “Ain’t nothin’ better in all the world than the smell of woodsmoke. If we was out in the woods, I’d find us a clearing and show you how to see the pictures between the stars.”

  I thought of Jamie Gash, and winced.

  “But you set me off on a tangent, Missy. Like I was sayin’: I’d come back and watch my mama through the kitchen window. Tryin’ to get up the courage. I was gonna do it while my daddy was away.”

  “Did you?”

  He shook his head. “I had my chances, and I let every one of ’em pass. I knew she would’ve jumped like a rabbit at the sight of me, and the more time that went by, the more scared she’d have been.” His eyes were on his place mat, but I could tell he was seeing his mother’s face, framed in the kitchen window. “That’s the worst part,” he said finally. “When your own kin are afraid of ya.” He cocked his head and eyed me for a moment or two. “How old are you, Missy—sixteen, seventeen?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “That’s young,” he said. “But then, you’re never too young to be on your own. I left home when I was fourteen.”

  “Fourteen!”

  Sully shrugged. “What else was I gonna do? My daddy didn’t want me home no more.”

  “Was it because of…”

  “Nah. My daddy always used to say I wasn’t right, but he never knew why. Aside from my granddad, I never did it in the house.”

  “And they never knew it was you?”

  He shook his head. “I was keepin’ watch over the body—that’s how they used to do it back in the old country, you’d never leave the corpse alone in the room—but I told them that I’d had to take a leak and when I came back the body was gone. Everybody was terrible upset, but nobody blamed me. I was only ten, they said, I didn’t know no better. My aunt took it into her head that he got up and wandered out of the house.” He began to laugh, a low, rumbling chuckle at first, then a full-on howl. “She went knockin’ on doors all up and down the road for miles, askin’ had anybody seen her dead daddy.” His laughter lifted me up somehow, and it made me forget who we were even as we were laughing about it. I laughed too. He laughed until he cried, and then we sat there for a few minutes in a comfortable silence, Sully dabbing at his eyes with his knuckles.

  I thought of something. “Did you ever meet another girl who…?”

  There was a soft, rasping sound, like sandpaper on wood, when the old man ran his hand over his stubbly cheeks. “Knew a couple of women,” he said. “Long time ago now.”

  “How did you meet them?”

  He shrugged. “Same way I met you.”

  “What sort of people did they eat?”

  Sully cocked his head and squinted at me. “Eh?”

  “I mean, did they eat people who were kind to them, or people who were mean to them, or…?”

  “Mix of both, I reckon.”

  I made one more attempt: “Do you know what happened to them?”

  He shrugged again. “Like I said, Missy: I went my way, they went theirs.”

  The white
cat ambled into the kitchen. I’d forgotten all about him, and I hoped he hadn’t been in the room while Mrs. Harmon was getting eaten. Catching sight of the rope of hair, the cat sat on his haunches and began to bat at it. “Shoo!” Sully waved his hand. “Git! Go on!” Puss wasn’t deterred until the man put out his boot and nudged him in the side. “You ever have a cat?”

  “My mom said we couldn’t have a pet. We moved a lot.”

  “Never liked cats.” He sniffed. “Cats are only out for themselves.”

  I smiled. “Like most people, I guess.”

  Sully didn’t answer. Puss had lost interest in the hair rope, but he had no intention of leaving us alone. He sat there on the linoleum, swishing his tail and looking from me to Sully, like he was part of the conversation.

  “Dumb cat,” Sully muttered. “Shoo!”

  “I think he’s hungry.” I got up and opened a tin of cat food, and Puss rubbed against my legs as I spooned it into the bowl on the floor.

  “That’s it, y’see. Cats are only out for themselves.”

  Satisfied, Puss wandered out again, and for a few minutes I watched Sully weave. Mrs. Harmon had a lot of hair for an eighty-eight-year-old. “You really only eat people who’re already dead?”

  He nodded. “After a while I could kind of sniff it on somebody, if they was gonna die soon, or see it in their faces. Don’t ask me how—it ain’t a smell or a look I could describe to nobody. I just know.” He dropped the hair rope in his lap, plucked an apple out of Mrs. Harmon’s fruit bowl, pulled an army knife out of the chest pocket of his red flannel shirt, flicked it open, and began to peel off the skin in one long, twirling piece. “Used to feel like a vulture, parkin’ myself outside somebody’s house, but I don’t think like that no more.” He jabbed his knife in the air at me, making his point. “Can’t help what you are, Missy. That’s rule number one.”

  Sully cut a wedge out of the peeled apple and offered it to me on the tip of his knife. I was still a little grossed out at the thought of Mrs. Harmon on his hands—not to mention the hair of God only knew how many dead people—but I didn’t want to offend him, so I took it.

  “You heard of them islands in the South Pacific?” I nodded. “Some of them island tribes eat their dead, and it’s a sacred thing. They make a feast of it.” He cut another slice and popped it in his mouth, talking as he chewed. “The dead man would’ve eaten his granddad’s liver right off the spit, his daddy’s pickled tongue, and his mama’s heart in a stew, and now it’s his turn, and if what’s left of him could sit up off of that table and talk he’d tell you he’d want it no other way. He learned a lot of things over a long life, and his children think they can know them things too if they take him apart and eat him.”