Mark Gozonsky

The Enemy in Your Backyard

What was Aunt Erica writing in her notebook? He imagined a note, in her wholesome cursive:

David: industrious.

That would be good, for now. Later she could make it better. She could make up something his character did that was more interesting than asking for twist-ties to keep the garbage bags closed. That’s what David had just asked Uncle Bert for, which is why Uncle Bert had said he was very industrious. David’s character in the story, whatever his name was, could demonstrate industriousness by inventing something, or building something, or… well, that was up to Aunt Erica. She was the writer. David was just the nephew staying with her family that summer because his mother was in the hospital.

The character could look different than David, but he still had to be a boy. A boy who didn’t have red hair: That would be a big enough change for David. His mother could still be in the hospital, or maybe she would already be dead, and the story would show how the boy in the story was getting on with his life. Aunt Erica could decide about that. David couldn’t tell her what the story should be about, because that would be cheating, like looking up a crossword puzzle word in the dictionary. His mother never let him help her by doing that. She said it was cheating if you didn’t figure it out on your own.

It was possible the note Aunt Erica was taking was not about David at all, but rather about her son, Peter, who was eating buttery green beans with his fingers; or about her daughter, Linda, sipping milk with both hands grasping the tall glass. You weren’t allowed to ask Aunt Erica what she was taking notes about. Peter was a year older than David and Linda was a year younger, so David fit right in, supposedly.

She could also be taking a note about Uncle Bert, with his hands clasped across his big belly, supplying his own answers to his question of who were other industrious people in history.

“Well, Benjamin Franklin, of course. And Ghandi. People don’t often think of Ghandi as having been industrious, but he was.”

David’s own father, Mel Bartner, had kept David’s older brother Marco around the house for the summer, supposedly because Marco could drive and therefore run errands. But David was just too much. Dad said he was sorry about this, but he said it as if David had tried to return something without a receipt to a Bartner’s Bargains store.

So yesterday, Marco had driven David up from leafy New Jersey to Aunt Erica and Uncle Bert’s house in the middle of even leafier Massachusetts, with a stop at the hospital to say goodbye, for now, to Mom. For a long time on the trip up, David looked out the car window and saw his mother in the hospital, looking like she came from another planet, or was going to one soon.

“How long do you think she’s going to live?” David asked Marco after the Tappan Zee Bridge.

“I think she’s going to get better,” Marco replied. He must have needed to believe this in order to be able to drive. David did not believe it at all. He felt sure his mother was going to die soon, and it would be like an atom bomb going off. David looked out the window and wondered if he would recognize any of the trees he was passing now on the car ride home, which would be when his mother was right about to die. He made his father promise to get him before then.

When they pulled into Aunt Erica and Uncle Bert’s driveway, Aunt Erica was out the screen door and down the porch steps with a plate of cookies before Marco turned off the engine. She had David’s mother’s wide eyes and pursed mouth, but with brighter red lipstick and darker eye makeup. Peter and Linda were trailing behind her. Peter looked like a dog that couldn’t decide whether to bark or wag its tail but couldn’t do both at the same time. Linda looked like she had been hiding in a freezer. Uncle Bert was at work. He was a gynecologist.

“You must be starving after that trip,” Aunt Erica said. “Or did you stop along the way? These are peanut butter pinwheel cookies, they’re from the Maida Heatter cookbook, my favorite. Her recipes are insanely difficult but if you follow them exactly the results are out of this world. Have as many as you like, I have more in the freezer. Marco, are you staying over? You’re welcome to. Maybe that would be good. It would give your father a chance to catch his breath a little. What do you think? You’re more than welcome.”

Marco had one cookie in the driveway, then said he had to be back in New Jersey before it got dark.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Aunt Erica said. She went into the house, then came back out carrying two full grocery bags glistening with aluminum foil. Marco was already behind the wheel, with the motor running.

“Lasagna,” she said. “Stuffed shells. Some chicken parmesan. It’s all frozen, it won’t go bad. For you and your father. When you need it, it’ll be there.”

“Thank you,” Marco said, looking like he would dump it all out as soon as he got around the corner.

“Don’t go yet,” Aunt Erica insisted. That’s when she took out her little black notebook and started writing.

“I have to go,” Marco said.

“Not yet,” Aunt Erica commanded, and there was no further argument. She wrote with precise strokes, glancing up at the car now and then.

“You can’t ask her what she’s doing,” Peter said, his voice sliding around like someone learning how to play trombone.

Linda said something too, but David couldn’t understand her. It was like she was speaking under her breath in a language too difficult and obscure to bother learning.

“All right,” said Aunt Erica finally. “I know you want to get going, don’t let me keep you. Drive safely. Send my love.”

“I will,” Marco said, looking not at Aunt Erica but at the glove compartment of the car.

***

When Uncle Bert got home he gave David two jobs: mowing the lawn and updating the encyclopedia. “It will help you settle in to have some work to do around here,” Uncle Bert explained, with a cheerfulness David had never seen in him before. Uncle Bert had always been a brooding, sarcastic man, but this summer he was changed, as though he discovered his own sun shining inside of him. How round he was, like a blimp, except now his size didn’t make you feel sorry for him. Now Uncle Bert seemed like he was exactly as big as he wanted to be.

David did not get the impression that Uncle Bert really cared in the slightest about who David was or how he felt, except insofar as David provided Uncle Bert the opportunity to feel expansive and thoughtful after dinner, kept the yard tidy, and provided evidence that he was a Good Person. This was okay, though, because it was such an improvement over how Uncle Bert used to be. David remembered Uncle Bert exploding in rages on previous summer’s visits: “I TOLD you not to get any CEREAL on the kitchen FLOOR!” He remembered that brownish face turning bright red, that curly black hair looking like it was about to catch on fire.

But this summer Uncle Bert was dismissing such things with a little chuckle, and a twinkle in his eye. It’s true that Peter and Linda shot up out of their chairs after dinner as soon as Uncle Bert gave the signal, in the form of a droll comment such as, “Well I think that’s just about all the hearty goodness we can stand for one evening.”

Bam! They were up and out of their seats before Uncle Bert could lean back and give a contented sigh. But cleaning the table was their job, and not something David had to worry about.

Nor did he have to worry about the inquisition that followed, because David was prepared. When you spent three hours a day updating the World Book Encyclopedia, you had a lot of facts at your fingertips, and that’s what Uncle Bert was after.

“Is that a fact?” Uncle Bert commented, after David had finished telling him about the latest developments in Antarctic exploration. “Tell me more!” So David filled him in on the latest developments in anti-terrorism.

“It’s a scary world we live in nowadays,” Uncle Bert opined after his briefing. “Though of course I don’t have to tell you that. You already know.”

David wondered if Uncle Bert was referring to his mother’s illness, or to the general risk everyone ran in being alive on the planet, or to a combination of both overlaid with David’s newfound expertise as encyclopedia updater. The answer, he decided, was none of the above. But David liked the job anyway. To update the encyclopedia, you took little adhesive tabs indexed to the current year’s Year in Review and added those tabs to the regular edition of the encyclopedia. Uncle Bert had several Year in Reviews stacked up, waiting for updating, as if he had known all along that David would arrive one day to serve this purpose. When David was updating the encyclopedia he felt like he was bringing the world up to date, and everything made sense, even famine, pollution, and torture.

***

Taking care of the yard was a more problematic chore than updating the encyclopedia, because there was some strange stuff back there. David had to inspect the lawn carefully before mowing it. He got down on his hands and knees and inspected between each blade of grass, or as close to that as he could, because once or twice a week when he was watering the garden and the plants, he would find a rusty nail. The first one was a small spike, so rusted it was almost crumbling. The next two were each about two inches long, also in advanced stages of decomposition — but still, if you went over them with a power mower: Did you really want rusted nail fragments spraying around the backyard, and possibly hurtling towards you?

David looked around the yard for clues where the nails could be coming from. Probably they were from the wobbly fence on the south side of the yard, facing neighbors who had a girl his age who wasn’t friends with Linda. That counted in her favor. This girl wore a blue bandana over her wavy blonde hair and she had a well-developed figure for her age. Thinking about her made David feel sad about his mom, which he did not want to feel more than he already did. So even though he saw this girl — Susie, he heard her parents call her — watching him scout for nails, he did not say hi.

He thought Aunt Erica should know about the nails. The first one he just tossed into the trash can, pretending it was a hand grenade that exploded as soon as the lid was closed. The second, littler one, he did show to Aunt Erica, who was out on the porch tending to her hybrid coleus plants. Aunt Erica wrote a gardening column for the local newspaper on topics such as outdoor propagation of African violets, and butterfly attraction. It was the gardening column that had given her so much confidence in her writing ability that she had quit her job as Uncle Bert’s office manager and started taking creative writing classes at one of their many prestigious local colleges.

When David showed her the second rusty nail, he thought for sure she would have a lot to say about its brownish-orange color; or its rough and crumbling texture; or the manner in which he held it between his thumb and forefinger, away from his body, as though it were kicking and screaming or could bite him. But he couldn’t tell her about these things himself, because that would be cheating. So he just said, “Aunt Erica, I found a nail.”

She turned her face from a coleus plant whose flowering stalk she’d been about to snip. Aunt Erica had a perpetually wry expression, as if she saw the humor in everything, as if things and events in her life were pancakes she could flip over and pour syrup onto make them taste better. David’s mom liked red lipstick, too, but she had reader’s eyes. She took things in.

David had hoped the nail would elicit one of Aunt Erica’s exuberant comments. Something about his watchfulness would have been good — for example, that he was prepared for danger. Or she could have commented on how the nail had ended up so far from its reason for existence. Instead of holding two pieces of wood tight and safe together, now the nail was by itself, and dangerous. There was so much she could have said -— but it was okay that she just said, “Put it in the trash.” It was even better to save her thoughts and feelings for her story about David, where they would last.

Another thing he noticed weird in the backyard was what looked liked poison ivy. There was just one tender shoot, poking up between some azaleas. It had leaves of three so David let it be, but he got his face as close to those three leaves as he could without them touching him. The leaves were teardrops with serrated edges, like steak knives. He pointed it out to Aunt Erica, and this time he got a better response.

Aunt Erica wrote her next column about the poison ivy. The title was “The Enemy in Your Backyard.” She mentioned David in the column. He was “her keen-eyed, sensible nephew.” David read this article until it was tattooed on his soul, although not to be vain he also read all the other stories an equal number of times, including an article about a local garlic festival, and another about the oldest librarian in the state.

It felt so good, he wanted more. Yes, he was keen-eyed. Yes, he was sensible. But how was he going to be able to live in the world after his mom was dead? How could he be alive and not her?

David got letters from the hospital. He looked at the handwriting but didn’t read the words. His mother’s handwriting was round and neat but he could also see where the letters shook sometimes now where they never did before. He involuntarily took in words like “hospital” and “better” and then skipped to his father’s short note at the end, written in all capital letters, pressed down hard on the paper, like his father was trying to carve his words into stone.

***

It was comforting to watch baseball at night, after dinner, all of them together, except for Aunt Erica, who used most of baseball time for writing. She went into her office, an off-limits room next to the dining room. Everybody else got a big bowl of vanilla ice cream and listened to the announcers ponder the significance of check swings, short leads off of first, and anecdotes preserved from dugout banter originally uttered in the 1930s. Uncle Bert sank into his recliner, offering predictions. When they did not come true, he had no comment. When they did, he’d clap his hands and say, “What did I tell you? I should bet on these games. I’d make a million.” Uncle Bert did not require anyone to justify these pronouncements. He was as happy with himself as a rainbow with a pot of gold at both ends.

Peter liked to get up and imitate the batter’s stances, getting down into a crouch or standing bolt upright, but the effect was spoiled because he always had the same googly-eyed expression. David doubted that Peter would be able to hit a beach ball if you tossed it to him underhanded. David doubted that Peter would be able to hit Jupiter.

Linda sat there lapping up her ice cream. She always made it last until the end of the game. She would take tiny sips of melted ice cream soup. She didn’t watch the game. She stared into her bowl and waited, like she was counting up to a hundred.

Aunt Erica would sometimes come out in time for the last innings, because she liked the home team’s reliever, Mountain Henry. He stared in from the mound. That’s all he did, was stare — and throw strikes. He had the most intimidating stare David had ever seen. His cheekbones were the Great Wall of China. His mouth had never spoken and would never speak the words, “I forgive you.” Nobody could touch Mountain Henry. Peter just sat in his chair. Linda dotted ice cream with the tip of her tongue. As soon as Mountain Henry jogged in from the bullpen, Uncle Bert said, “And that’s the ball game.”

He left the room. Aunt Erica stayed and stared back at her favorite player.

“He’s very handsome, don’t you think?” she’d say, every game, as if she’d never said it before.

***

David decided he needed to give Aunt Erica more material for her story. He felt shy about asking her if he could read what she was writing, but it was on his mind a lot. He wondered how the other people in the family could just sit around and not wonder about it. Didn’t they want to know what she was writing? She was Peter and Linda’s mother, she was Uncle Bert’s wife. Didn’t they want to know what was on her mind, how she felt about things? What if she was writing about them? Didn’t they want it to be good?

He asked if he could go to the library, where the oldest librarian in the state worked. That librarian was really old. His face looked like dry land where it hadn’t rained in a year. He still had stiffly-combed steel-colored hair. His ears looked puffed out, as if they had grown to three times their normal size. His eyes rolled back and forth a little, like they were trying to catch a glimpse of something that kept disappearing. The librarian’s name was Vernon Lansing.

“I want to read books about boys,” David told him.

“What kind of boys?” Vernon Lansing asked him, eyes bobbing, his voice like a song from World War I.

“I don’t care,” David said, challenging Vernon Lansing to read his mind if he was such a great librarian.

The librarian brought him David Copperfield, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Johnny Tremaine, and Old Yeller. David didn’t read any of them. He just kept them around the house, so Aunt Erica would get the idea. What he did decide, though, from the covers and what was written about them on the back, was that a boy in a story should have adventures. To have adventures, he was going to need friends.

So one day he went with Peter to the junior high school yard near their house, to play stickball against the big green wall across from the tennis courts. There were five other boys there, all being happy — shouting “Hey, batter batter!”, kicking dirt, running after balls. The other boys were glad to have Peter join, because that made the sides even, but they said David would have to wait for another kid to show up.

This was not David’s idea of an adventure, so he went off to explore the school yard. It was shaped like a giant “L,” all grass except for the tennis courts and a jogging track. There was a mom giving tennis lessons to a little chubby boy on one of the tennis courts. The boy kept missing and the mom kept yelling, “Good try!” David ran away from that. He got into the middle of the yard, where there was nothing, and he thought he might have to stand there and feel sad until he saw a boy on a bicycle being chased by a dog.

David ran so fast to catch up to them, the air passing by his face brushed away the tears he had accidentally started crying while he was just standing there. He felt the wet sides of his eyes working like wings to make him go faster. Soon he was close enough to the dog to yell at it, “Chase me instead! Look! I don’t even have a bike!” It was a German shepherd, brown and black, sprinting after the boy on the bike like a boulder rolling down a mountain. The boy on the bike was crying hysterically, which made David feel great, because he was going to save him. David ran in a zigzag, waving his arms in big circles so the dog would notice him.

It didn’t work. The boy on the bike rode further away and the dog kept chasing it. David stopped running and watched as the boy suddenly stopped pedaling. Oh no, David thought. The boy had realized it was no use and had given up. He was going to let the dog attack him. It was going to be horrible and David would have to watch. The dog closed the distance to the boy in exactly the time it took for David to try to make a deal with God.

“Let me be the boy on the bike,” David prayed, just as the dog leaped up on the boy and licked his face.

“Good job, Ranger!” David could hear the boy shout. He could also hear the boy’s laughter, which sounded like he was cannonballing into a pool. David watched from his distance as the boy and his dog squirmed around together on the ground, then he walked back to the baseball game.

A boy with curly black hair was pitching to a boy much shorter than David, so he had to wait for that boy to ground out before grabbing the bat.

“It’s not your turn,” said the boy who was supposed to be up next, who was taller than David. Since this other boy was taller, David asked him what he was going to do about it.

“Oh, go ahead if you want,” this boy said. David waited patiently for the boy to call him a name, but he didn’t, so David had to go ahead and bat. The boy who was pitching threw the first pitch twelve feet outside.

“Throw it so I can hit it,” David told him, waiting for the pitcher to say make me.

Instead the pitcher threw the next pitch at David’s head, which was good enough. David dropped the bat and stalked towards the mound.

The pitcher said, “I was just playing” and when David kept coming at him, “I’ll throw good now, I promise.” David kept coming, and the pitcher’s fist was still somewhere out behind his own shoulder when David landed his first punch in the boy’s face. That was a good one, and the second one was good, too. The other boys jumped on his back, and he shook them off. None of them could hurt him. He was like King Kong.

***

“It might be better if you don’t play with those boys for a while,” Uncle Bert told him later. That was his whole punishment. And he wasn’t supposed to leave the house by himself, because the other boys were planning on getting back at him. Peter whispered to him, “We have slingshots” so David whispered back, “I have a knife.”

The next day, David updated the encyclopedia. There were changes in Canada and changes in the Canal Zone. There were also changes in Cancer but when he reached that entry he closed the book and went to the backyard. If he found a rusty nail he was going to write his mother’s name with it on his arm. Instead he found a black spider that wouldn’t bite his finger, so he squashed it with his foot. There was a whole city of pill bugs underneath a flat rock. The workers, the queen pill bug, and the little babies. Some of them clenched themselves into little balls, others kept scurrying around. David thought about killing them, and then about not killing them. He put the rock back down, as gently as he could.

Aunt Erica was out food shopping, Uncle Bert was at his office, Peter was making model airplanes, Linda was Linda. David opened the door of Aunt Erica’s writing room. No alarms went off. There were some bookshelves and a cabinet, and a painting of a boat on a beach. He walked to her desk. It was a folding table with brown legs and a puffy gray plastic top. In the middle was a spiral notebook. There was no lock, no strand of hair laid across the top. The notebook looked like it wanted someone to read it. Aunt Erica left it right out in the open.

There was her round, clear handwriting, like the posters of cursive letters on the wall in school. But she wasn’t writing about David. She was writing about Mountain Henry. David quickly got an upset stomach, sweaty palms and a headache. He stopped reading, closed the notebook, centered it back where it had been, and walked as quietly as possible out of the room.

He read Johnny Tremaine until Aunt Erica came home. He helped her carry the groceries from the car, even though that wasn’t his job. Then he asked if he could borrow a pen and paper, and she said he surely could.

 

Author Bio

Mark Gozonsky has recently published fiction in Two Hawks Quarterly, Switchback, and Corium. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughters. Read more about him at markgozonsky.com.