Sleeping with Ghosts (Luke)

Maybe he should be wondering what Naif is doing back in their pig huts, especially after the last time, questioning the tilt of his head, the predatory curve of his smile and the strange way that he slurs through his questions. Instead, Scutcher’s eyes are immediately drawn towards the glinting flicker encircling his finger. Noreen’s ring. Naif’s hands must be quite small for the way it fits so easily; she had such delicate fingers, he doesn’t have to think too hard to recall them, to recall the ghost of her touch. In the garden, weeding, that day in the Lexington’s kitchen with the smell of raw pastry lightly tickling their noses. Everytime he shuts his eyes. Chewing on his lips, Scutcher never strays from staring at the ring, even when a mosquito settles onto the back of his hand, drawing deep into the skin and pulling out blood.

How badly do you want it?

Almost as much as he still wants her. Not even just in a sense of the word that means red heat, racing heart and fingers aching to touch. Just…to know that she is in the world, smiling somewhere to someone even if it isn’t him. That badly. Like every drop of blood, shred of tissue and scrap of bone is pointless if he can’t have it. Scutcher would have asked for it for longer up there on the roof, begged Naif for it he had to- but everyone had been shouting, Naif and Tallow and him too, and by the time he’d managed to find Noreen’s nameplate after Tallow had tossed it Naif had gone. He’s thought about calling round Elias’ farm and he’s wanted to- but that one hundred and ninety four dollars keeps him from going. But now it’s in front of him, the stirring is there again, like the rise of the tide that he’s about to drown in.

So bad.

It’s easy to argue that the ring belongs nowhere near Scutcher; he isn’t family, her husband or her lover and so many people keep telling him that Noreen probably never even liked him let alone loved him. Why should he care anyway? Whatever she called out and begged of him were the last rambles of a brain deprived of blood- the way that old Ma Cotton who used to run a general store in town went crazy and banned all the boys in the neighbourhood from going inside because she was convinced they were ‘rubbin’ theys damn dirty dicks all over my stock when my back is turned’. The ban lasted a week and then they found her dead- seventy five years old standing up, propped against her window which everyone agreed was one of the best deaths district ten would ever give a person. His promise isn’t amounting to much either, not when he has his sister for the red heat, racing heart and fingers aching to touch. There’s a look she gets in her eye sometimes, flickering up to look at him that seems to say, “I’m gonna make you forget all about her,”

All Scutcher has said is a simple statement- factually accurate- about a bunch of pigs from his farm being dead but there it is again, the laughter. It’s always the same, small but cruel laughter that could come from a thousand people but is always so achingly familiar, at some hidden joke that he’ll never get the real meaning of. They’re gone Scutcher…and he knows that. Knows because he killed most of them, a knife right through the neck before tossing them onto the pile with the rest of the carcasses while the smouldering ash of their lives dances on the air like moths rising up towards the sun. “They’re dead and gone… thing's aren't gonna be like they were… not now… not ever… ‘cause death is the final thing… death is the only thing… brings us all together… brings us…” Naif goes on, but it isn’t the words that cause him to shiver, it’s the way that he says them, drawing in close so that Scutcher can see every pore on his face, every bead of sweat like morning’s dew on a blade of grass. He can see the strange, hungry look in Naif’s eye which reminds him of starving men sucking the marrow from pigeon bones in the street and of foxes circling hen houses and feels for a moment like the bone and the chickens. About to be eaten alive.

He’d back away from the feel of hot breath on his face, but for the metal wall behind him. “I don’t…” he tries to start, to tell Naif he doesn’t understand. But quite truthfully he isn’t trying his hardest, can’t concentrate on the words when he’s beginning to feel as hemmed in and as trapped as he is. It might be different in district six where the towns are small and grey, like how he remembers Naif telling them up on the rooftop but in District Ten a boy has to have open fields and places to walk, meadows and gardens and the scent of lavender far stronger than the scent of bodies. A boy has to breathe.

He’s eighteen and by now he’s seen a lot of things in District Ten. Beautiful things, like summer stalks of corn taller than a grown man with their yellow heads turned towards the sun. He’s seen the bronzing of trees in the autumn, as though they were rusting over in reds and burnt gold. And the silver moon of winter, so high and so blinding. It’s impossible not to see it and love it, but there’s always the dark in things. The dust bowls that get kicked up on the dirt tracks, half rotted goat carcasses left at the place where they’ve fallen away from the herd. Children scrabbling in the mud outside of their farms for scraps of tin to trade for grain. And the lingering smell of death rising from an abattoir that never seems to go away. Even when the lavender is up.

But the light and the shade is always so inherently Ten that even the strange on the darkest days can seem familiar. It doesn’t come in alien metal tubes that men inject right into the skin. Their vices run deep, drinking and the hot waves of anger that burst out in brawls through the ends of fists, and the secret primordial urges that reduce them to animals but whatever runs through Naif Malloc is synthetic and unnatural. As enthralling as it is horrifying. “What are you…” gets caught up in his throat as the boy goes for his arm, winding the rubber tight around the skin but he’s too slow and too wrapped up in watching the droop of his eyelids, the unfathomable meaning behind them to pull away.

Panicking, Scutcher hisses as the needle goes in, trickery from far beyond the district lines sinking into his flesh. It stings for a sharp second, nauseating and dizzying until, like how he imagines it must be to die, that begins to fade. It’s the incision in the main carotid artery that drains a pig of life, the feeling of a rope around his neck. It’s the point when he comes with a grunt, clutching close at Tallow to make the moment last like fisting at a handful of smoke, that instant they used to call the little death, so she told him once. Only, this time, it feels as though time has slowed if not stopped altogether and he’s cupped in the palm of the moment. Trapped inside a labyrinthine paradox of being both empty and full up at once, of being more alive and more dead than he’s ever been before.

He could shed his body if he wanted to, peel away the heavy skin and bones and tissue and just float. But he’s penned in right now, slipping down the walls until his head hits the straw of the pig huts and he either laughs or whimpers. More alive and more dead. Scutcher straddles the precipice of both and it’s funny because he tried that once before and had to be cut down from a length of rope when all along the secrets of it all were encapsulated in a strange metal tube. “Cyrus…Cyrus come in here… please… don’t stay out there…” The visions he was promised don’t seem to be materialising, though Naif is calling out to his dead. If anything, just seeing the pig hut, the straw and the boy in front of him is difficult enough. But that doesn’t matter because it doesn’t even ache anymore in that lingering way like a wound that won’t heal over. It’s just lightness and darkness and a rushing flood of warmth.

“Shhh…”

In a way, it’s like she’s dying all over again as his brain can’t hold onto the memory of her touch, but the hum and the fuzz of his brain like television static keeps Scutcher from bleeding all over again. He keeps his eyes shut though, clinging on tight to the last traces of the lavender as the world seems muffled, wrapped up in some coarse winter blanket. The calls of, “Scutcher…”barely registers at first, he’s in a different world where there is no responsibility, no cries for help that he just can’t answer. “Scutcher help me… please come here… please…” stifled as the words are in his ears, Scutcher forgets the way he used to talk before the heavy rush of hormones, body odours, bodily secretions, acne and hair in odd places, unwanted erections, skid marks and spoiled sheets and thinks the voice is a girl’s. It’s Her voice- though the individual is unimportant. Whatever happens, whatever piled bones, twisting thorns and crippling sorrow life can throw at him, there will always be a her-with smiling eyes and a gentle touch, the soft smell of her and the way her hair catches in the light- from cradle to the grave; mother, sister, lover, wife (hah!), daughter (hah! hah!) and when she’s gone he aches for her, when she calls out to him asking for his help he has to give it or die because he can’t. Tallow, Momma, Noreen? What is it? Are you hurt? You have to tell me how to help; I can’t figure it out on my own.

He can smell Naif Malloc’s innards on the air ever so faintly- they’re better meals than the Tansy’s will have and he can spare them, tossing them up quite carelessly onto the straw like that- but at what cost? Hauling himself up into a sitting position like it’s the most difficult thing in the entire world, Scutcher’s can’t stop his head from swinging- not that he wants to anyway, its fine the way it is. “Nnn…” he starts and laughs because he can’t quite get the Aif out right at first, “Nnnn…Naif? What’re you…” Crawling over to him comes next and that’s pretty hard too, but in a way it’s not hard at all. Because everything is warm and everything is easy when it’s wrapped up tight in a coarse winter blanket.

Tallow’s never told him about stuff like this. Alcohol, yes, because he’s seen first-hand and she’s never had to tell him about cigarettes because they’ve always snuck tobacco from their fathers supply- eleven and eight years old, poking their heads out the window, trying not to get smoke in their eyes while she sits curled up on the window frame with her foot in his face to get him to laugh. And then it got to be like she was the drug; their secrets saved for late at night like snorting things and chewing on strange fruit behind dumpsters and up alleyways. He shouldn’t want it- even he knows that- but he needs it. It’s gonna wreck the both of them the way it gets all consuming, trying to push his sister back into his veins where she belongs. And it’s different from Noreen, more like…the earth beneath his feet when Noreen was always the brightest star in the sky. More like masturbatin’ than fucking, she told him once with a smile wrapped around a cigarette, sheets tossed over her and not covering any of the parts that count, we’re the same person, see. And it ain’t nobody can have a problem with that. Yes, he liked that analogy very much. Because it meant he got to have both of them, Noreen and Tallow, without feeling guilty over promises.

Both of them and neither of them really. Because Noreen is dead and loving Tallow is all wrong.

He should go find her, though. Show her this- he always loves it when there’s something he can show his sister that she hasn’t seen before- because he’s sure she couldn’t know, because she wouldn’t hide something so wonderful from him. Naif can push the black liquid into her veins too and he can imagine up her own little death. It’ll help her, with her worry and her sadness which she carries around far heavier than he does, because she’s smarter. Sometimes he’s jealous of that, angry that she has no idea how lucky she is to be able to understand all the time but not now. The fuzz and the warmth and the nothing else is much much better.

So he starts to crawl out of the huts, not thinking about what his parents would do, how he would tackle the yard or what anyone would say because his parents don’t count and the yard is just a speck- less than a speck in the grand scheme of things, outside of the hold wide universe. On his way out though he notices the shimmer of Naif’s eyes and it looks…beautiful, rolling down his cheek like raindrops down a window pane and he smiles and presses his thumb to it quickly before taking it away. “It rained on yer face, Naif,” Scutcher says with a throaty laugh.

The flash of gold from Noreen’s ring pierces even the soft fuzz as Naif holds it out to him, Scutcher’s slack jawed, lazy eyed expression crinkling up into a smile- as much as his relaxed muscles and nerve endings will let him. This was always meant to happen, he can only feel, the hand of fate orchestrating this moment. Something led Naif to district ten, guarding Noreen’s ring on his finger, led him to the pig huts on the Tansy farm at exactly the same moment it led Tallow and Scutcher down to the exact hut he was staying in. The ring would be safe with Scutcher, it would finally be home after the wilderness, district six and the games arena. Reaching out to take it, he feels that it’s grown warm on Naif’s hand, he can imagine that it’s still warm from Noreen’s skin- kept close since she got it, clenched in a fist when she trembled in fear, brought up to her face when she wiped away sleepy dust from her eyes in the mornings, knotting through her hair, held against her body.

“Thank you,”Scutcher breathes in little more than a whisper, all at once overwhelmed with Naif’s generosity. But there is poison running through it as he steps towards him, cracks in the kindness and a dark undercurrent to whatever gentle words he’s saying. Stepping into him, he brings with him the stale smell of vomit and a cold shiver like frost on the fields running the length of Scutcher’s spine. “Naif…” he blinks and for one minute he thinks he’s about to get another hit of the black stuff from his needle, which would be totally okay because while he’s still got the buzz and the drifting happiness, it’s nothing compared to the early rush, the toe curling, tingling first sensation. That or he’s about to hurt him, the way that his father draws in close, bringing with him the scent of tobacco and turpentine, eyes narrowed and mouth full of some new lesson or some new thing that he’s done wrong.

What he isn’t expecting, though- honestly, the thought would never have occurred to him not even if he’d had a million years to guess- is for Naif to press up against him the way that Tallow does when they’re alone and the way Noreen does when he’s dreaming. What the hell is this? Is the only coherent thought he can conjure up in the fog as Naif’s lips brush up against his neck. “Naif…” And it’s all wrong, the square lines and jutting angles of the boy- not quite the skeleton he was when they found him the first night but still scrawny and scratchy as though to touch him would give someone a paper cut. There’s no drag of hair and warmth, breasts pillowed against his chest- just bones. Like pushing against a cold wall. Like embracing something long dead.

“Let’s be together, too, Scutcher… you and me… we can look out for each other…” It sounds hauntingly familiar, but all wrong. Privately, he’s always thought it would be nice to have a friend, one that wasn’t his sister or a pig or a girl he wanted to kiss so badly he could hardly stand half the time. Sometimes they’d go past the farm when he was younger, laughing boys heading back from a fishing hole with minnows caught in jars of water, catching the light like stained glass windows and he’d wonder what that was like. But those were the same boys who ran away from him in the school yard or flicked ink at his back when they got bored in class. It would have been nice to have a friend, but this isn’t how it’s supposed to go, and it isn’t what Naif means at all.

“I don’t need…I already got…” Even in the stifling heat of the evening Naif’s hands feel dead, bones and brittle twigs that sneak underneath his shirt like spiders crawling into cracks in the wall. Scutcher’s hand comes up against Naif, half a rough push, half to steady himself. He’s trapped like this, against the metal of the of the pig huts, caged in with someone’s hand in his pants. Naif kisses him on the mouth and Scutcher clamps his lips together, eyes wide, blood going cold, wanting for all the world for this to be over. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, when the heat makes him shiver and his heart is beating but not in a good way; beating in the strange panicky bursts like a sudden stress, a panic attack, drawing his knees up into his chest and trying to block out the earth. That’s when Tallow can soothe him with a touch and her words, gently wrap a hand around his fists and help get his breathing back to normal. Naif won’t do that though, pushing into him like a pin piercing skin.

“You’ll feel so good… you’ll be mine… we’ll be together…” Despite himself, he lets out a guttural ‘uh’ that comes from deep inside of him, whole body stiffening as he feels a hand close around his cock, the drugs already making his skin feel strange and light as though he could just peel it off if he wanted to.

“You and me… I’ll teach you so much, Scutcher…”

The district is sparsely populated when you get down to the numbers of it, they are spread out across fields and farms growing up free range- though still undeniably imprisoned. The noise from town never reaches the Tansy farm, but at night it’s never exactly silent out here either. There are cicadas screeching from the cornfields and animals- foxes probably- making love or fighting in the darkness, filling up the world with pure emotion. In the darkness, the knuckles on his hand swelling with the promise of pain when the drugs have worn off, Scutcher feels as though Naif is no different from a one eyed reynard howling in agony. He shouldn’t have hit him, comes the twisting guilt when he spits blood onto the earth, like planting a seed ready to blossom forth in crimson. Scutcher only wanted to get him away, so the strange coursing coldness would stop and he could breathe again. But the pig huts are still heavy with feeling, even the metal walls bowing towards it and his lungs heave painfully. “I...Naif I shouldn’t’ve…” Lying in the straw he’s a broken bird, just a kid…why was Scutcher ever afraid… like the baby sparrows that would sometimes roost in the guttering of their house and fall out of the nest onto the dirt below. Some birds could make it, Scutcher and Tallow would poke in the dirt for worms and crush them into paste beneath rocks to feed the chicks on the ends of twigs but others were snapped and bent, head lolling as they tried to snatch at the last desperate moments of life. Running a guilty hand through his hair, over and over, he wants to say sorry but he can’t make the words come, pushing back the sobering memory of his father and the smashing plate. It’s different… If he hadn’t…then I wouldn’t have had to… I just wanted Naif to get off.

And he did it alright, got Naif off easily- because he’s strong like Noreen, in the shadowy cloud of a drug induced vision told him he was. Too strong, were her exact words. His face, the crying for him to stop takes the power out of his justifications. Scutcher won’t forget that.

I had to.

Scutcher won’t forgetter his laughter, either, cutting into the night. If Scutcher spent his whole life being afraid of things he didn’t understand then he wouldn’t ever leave the pig farm for fear of slipping into the murky tunnels of human emotion but the laughter is as chilling as it is unfathomable. “You f—king miserable c—t. You f—king dogYou f—king bitch, you motherf—king prick… you… you..” he spits, caterwauling like any fighting animal but that in itself isn’t frightening. There’s fire behind is words, but standing over him, it feels small to Scutcher. Pitiful even. “You’re mine now, you’re not anyone else’s, you can’t leave… f—king hitting me… who do you think you are?” He holds up the needle but there’s no power behind it- if he wants to hit and hurt Scutcher then he can. It won’t make him Naif’s anymore than Scutcher belongs to his father. It’s the softness and the smiles, the scent of lavender or lemon disinfectant that shackles one person to another- kindness keeping them tighter than any chain. Who do you think you are? Naif asks, and he doesn’t tilt his head and look to the ground the way he has done his father all his life. Maybe now he never will. I’m Scutcher Tansy, the tilt of his head seems to say, and I aint yours. I aint....I aint afraid of you... so do your worst.

It’s tempting fate because that’s exactly what Naif Malloc does, and so beautifully too. “You make one move…You so much as take one step, and I’ll let the whole world know that you’re a miserable sister f—ker. That’s right—I’ll let everyone know that you and Tallow do something you’re not allowed to do.” Scutcher takes a step back, feeling his innards hit the floor and his mouth open. No. Tallow and Scutcher have always oscillated wildly in their vigilance, sometimes she’ll go days without coming to his room, frightened of creaks in the hallway while others she’ll fan out like a child making snow angels on the earth on the floor of the smoke room and it isn’t until their clothes are back on that anyone will notice that the door is barely shut, let alone bolted but when you get away with something for as many times as they have now, even the little things like brushing hands for a second under the table at dinner, the consequences of being caught begin to feel like little more than a faint dream. “That you touched her… you defiled her… how could you Scutcher? You know what people will say? You know what they’re going to do when they find out? They’ll say that Scutcher boy needs to be sent away. You know why? Because you raped her. You, big and strong… and stupid. Too stupid. Everyone will say you need to go away…” It’s not a dream anymore, all too easy to picture- inevitable. They’ll take one look at Tallow, fifteen years old, thin as a stalk of hay and pretty (miss distirct ten no less) and one look at Scutcher coarse, stupid…a man (with prior incidents, to boot) and that will be all the story anyone needs. He’s trembling now more than he ever was when Naif was pushed up against him, breathing on his neck. “And you’ll never see Tallow… or your Ma… or Pa… or any of these useless f—king pigs… ever again…”