Episode 35: Alone

Home has never felt so far away.

I am hiding in an outhouse with the door locked, behind and slightly uphill from the mean, low-slung house. My mother doesn’t really know where I am, only that I’m on a sleepover. She didn’t check out the host or the location. There is only one dirt road leading to this house. It continues past it and ends at the town dump.

In fact, I’m probably only three long blocks from home. It feels like midnight and I’m afraid to go alone. I open the outhouse door and peer down at the house. The rooms are dark. I creep back down the shallow hill and finally am standing in the entryway again. There is a grubby phone here, and a multitude of phone numbers written on the walls. The boys in the room to my left have stopped laughing and are silent.

My friend Susie is in the double bed in the living room, still weeping.

Although I’ve known her a little while, I am unprepared for the abject poverty in which her family lives. The house is reminiscent of Junior’s place but more squalid, the interior a collection of the flotsam and jetsam of their lives. The walls are filthy, and the furniture broken down, with cigarette burns in the cushions. The house sits in a low gully behind Royal Carlock’s mansion and stables. It smells of long-term water damage and urine.

The parent’s room is right off the living room, where Susie’s bed is, and at first I’m confused about the large metal washtub at the foot of their bed, which sags like a swaybacked horse. The tub is similar to the one we wash Folly in.

I quickly realize that the washtub is the interior toilet, as several members of the family make their way to it and express their fluids. A quiet horror is rising in my chest.

I have no memory of eating here. All signs indicate this would be a bad idea. Then relative quiet is lost as all hell breaks loose in the form of Susie’s drunken mother. She staggers out of the bedroom and proceeds to viciously beat Susie with a wide belt, hollering expletives, while Susie screams as she is chased through the roundabout of living room, kitchen, and bedroom. Finally, Susie’s mother catches up to her, pinning her to the bed and beating her in earnest.

First, I find myself standing in the entryway, dizzy, listening to Susie’s brothers laugh through their bedroom door. Then I bolt outside and make my way to the outhouse, where I cower for 30 minutes. I might have chosen a better, less pungent place to hide, but I don’t know the property well enough. The house is settled in a thin valley dense with darkness and there are no streetlights.

The night is inky black and there is no moon to help light the way. Too afraid to find my way home, I go back to the house and slip into bed beside Susie. She is sniffling and perhaps beginning to fall asleep. Her mother is snoring heavily from the other room.

Where is my compassion? At this age, do I have any? Rather than try to comfort Susie, I turn my back to her and concentrate on not touching her. I am afraid to.

As soon as it is light, I get dressed and run all the way home.

We never play together again.

When my mother hears an edited version of the night, she says, “Why didn’t you just call me?”

Well, no need to read Tobacco Road anyway, one reason my mother later gave in an interview for coming to Cabin John.