Angelhead Read Online Free Page B

brick homes lined up straight as tombstones.
    All the kids are inside watching TV as usual,
Batman
and
Romper Room
. They’re lounging around on the shag carpets of their homes, mothers in kitchens, talking on phones, twisting cords around fingers, smoking cigarettes at kitchen tables, having kicked off one of those furry slippers to scratch their calves absentmindedly with their painted toenails.
    Houses sit quietly. There’s a siesta-like hush. Cars inch by on the streets, rolling through stop signs. Music in the distance. Someone washing a car. The tops of trees in the woods sway softly.
    S—who is thirteen and quiet and a star student at an increasingly dangerous school—is heading to a friend’s house on the other side of the woods, in Powhatan Park. He walks into the woods, shade falling like a curtain, then stops. He starts turning over logs, looking for bugs for a science project that his father, who has high hopes for S, has promised to help him with. He’s wearing shorts and sneakers, thick glasses. He’s skinny, clumsy, and trips over a stump, stumbling forward.
    It’s warm and gray, wind blowing in from the nearby Chesapeake. Green leaves and branches on the ground, across the path. The world is empty, desolate. The world is his.
    He could spend all day out here on an empty afternoon like this, looking at bugs and spores, moss and mushrooms and fungi.
    He opens his fly, pisses. He is smiling, pissing in the empty woods, pissing on a
natural habitat
full of
specimens
. He zips up, but slowly, unconcerned, convinced he’s alone.
    He digs a hole, sifts earth through his fingers, looking for life, feeling the coolness in his hands. He hears something, looks around, nothing. He sighs, leans against a tree, looks up at the tree tops, branches dividing the sky. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes—everything blurs.
    A gang of boys ride up on bikes, white kids he doesn’t know, has never seen, like a pack of ghosts, out of nowhere. They’re filthy, spotted in dirt, holes in their clothes, some kind of lower-middle-class urban horde. They say,
Look ahere,
say,
What the fuck,
say,
Ho-ly ssshhhit.
There are ten, twelve of them.
    Or he does know them, knows them well. They surround him.
Come on,
he says, palms up, pleading with half a smile bending his face.
    It’s some older kids—seventeen, eighteen years old, maybe drug dealers, a satanic cult (a popular notion since
Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Carrie,
and
The Omen
have made their way to
The ABC Saturday Night Movie
). They look dead, these kids, look like zombies, skeletal shadows in trenchcoats.
    They ride up on motorcycles, but he doesn’t hear them until the engines are whining loudly, nasally, beside him.
    A group of black kids walk up, quietly, ducking behind trees until they snatch him by the arms. Black kids from the projects a half-mile away.
    Or it’s some of those Vietnamese—or are they Cambodian?—immigrants that work for minimum wage at the seafood docks downtown. Those people are nuts, S knows, scared of everything, scared of America, driving their boats up on sandbars because they don’t understand the English channel markers, talking that gibberish my father mimicked,
Heyro, you wan scarrops or free, four fish.
They have orange-handled fish-gutting knives. Someone told him they eat dog.
    No. One man, white, slender, a pedophile. He walks up, a serial killer spending one single day in the city. It is just terrible luck straight out of a movie.
    He has a mustache, a beard, is clean-shaven. He has long hair, is balding, is going gray. He’s wearing a coat, a T-shirt with something written on the front, he’s bare-chested, all hair and big pink nipples.
    It is the black man, the exercise guy, who lives on top of the school. He’s hunting children in the late-afternoon warmth. His mental impairments have affected his frontal lobe and thus his moral judgment.