“Are you sure?” I asked, hoping she was right.
“Pretty sure. Nobody ever comes back from there.”
“From where?”
“Where he went.”
“Where’d he go?”
“The Deep South,” she said, and laughed.
“If you say so,” I told her.
“And I do,” said she.
By then, we were almpst within earshot of the crossing guard, so we stopped talking.
Though the subject of Jimmy’s trip came up quite a lot after that, I never learned any more about where he’d gone. “Deep South,” was about it.
I had my suspicions, but I kept them to myself.
Anyway, the grandmother died last year. She passed suddenly. Very suddenly, while in a checkout line at the Super M grocery market. As the story goes, she was bending over the push-bar of her shopping cart and reaching down to take out a can of tomato sauce when all of a sudden she sort of twitched and tooted and dived headfirst into her cart—and the cart took off with her draped over it, butt in the air. In front of her were a couple of little tykes waiting while their mother wrote a check. The runaway cart crashed through both kids, took down the mother, knocked their empty shopping cart out of the way, kept going and nailed an old lady who happened to be heading for the exit behind her own shopping cart. Finally, Slim’s grandma crashed into a display of Kingsford charcoal briquettes and did a somersault into her cart.
Nobody else perished in the incident, though one of the kids got a concussion and the old lady broke her hip.
That’s the true story of how the grandmother died (with the help of a brain aneurism) and that’s how Slim and her mother ended up living by themselves in such a nice house.
Side by side, Rusty and I climbed the porch stairs. I jabbed the doorbell button with my forefinger. From inside the house came the quiet ding-dong of the chimes.
But nothing else. No footsteps, no voice.
I rang the doorbell again. We waited a while longer.
“Guess she’s not here,” I said.
“Let’s find out.” Rusty pulled open the screen door.
“Hey, we can’t go in,” I told him.
Stepping in front of me, he tried the handle of the main door. “What do you know? Isn’t locked.”
“Of course not,” I said. In Grandville, back in those days, almost nobody locked their house doors.
Rusty swung it open. Leaning in, he called, “Hello! Anybody home?”
No answer.
“Come on,” he said, and entered.
“I don’t know. If nobody’s home ...”
“How’re we gonna know nobody’s home if we don’t look around? Like you said, maybe Slim passed out or something.”
He was right.
So I followed him inside and gently shut the door. The house was silent. I heard a ticking clock, a couple of creaking sounds, but not much else. No voices, no music, no footsteps, no running water.
But it was a large house. Slim might be somewhere in it, beyond our hearing range, maybe even unable to move or call out.
“You check around down here,” Rusty whispered. “I’ll look upstairs.”
“I’ll come with you,” I whispered.
We were whispering like a couple of thieves. Supposedly, we’d entered the house to find Slim and make sure she was okay. So why the whispers? Maybe it’s only natural when you’re inside someone else’s house without permission.
But it wasn’t only that. I think we both had more on our minds than checking up on Slim.
I was a nervous wreck, breathing hard, my heart pounding, dribbles of sweat running down my bare sides, my hands trembling, my legs weak and shaky as I climbed the stairs behind Rusty.
Over the years, we had spent lots of time in Slim’s house but we’d never been allowed inside it when her mother wasn’t home.
And we’d never been upstairs at all. Upstairs was off limits; that’s where the bedrooms were.
Not that Slim’s mother was unusually strict or weird. In those days, at least in Grandville, hardly any decent parents allowed their kids to have friends inside the house unless an adult was home. Also, whether or not a parent was in the house, friends of the opposite sex were never allowed into a bedroom. These were standard rules in almost every household.
Rusty and I, sneaking upstairs, were venturing into taboo territory.
Not only that, but this was the stairway where Slim’s grandfather had met his death. And at the top would be the bedrooms where Jimmy had done many horrible things to Slim, her mother and her grandmother.