Good Blood. K. C. Pastore
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I got home from the church that morning. The chain only brought me bad luck, a sign of the malocchio, the embodiment of a curse itself. It was just too dangerous to carry around.
I couldn’t sleep too well after finding that letter. I wondered why somebody put it there and who exactly it was supposed to be for. Family is everything? Part of me wondered if Hog slid it in there. But, that couldn’t be right. I’d seen the kid’s hand writing, and it was shit-in-ditches, comparatively. He’d be the one to write something like that though, especially after all of that talk about his brother starting a business and all of his snooping around to keep an eye on everyone.
I awoke from a dream in the middle of the night. In it I was a dangling from a grape vine, hanging on the tip of a cluster of grapes, a grape among grapes. The other grapes were Angelo, Nicky, Dad, Grandma, and Popi was at the top, by the stem—a little cluster of grapes trapped, tiny, under leaves in the middle of an eternal row of vines and clusters—stuck.
I guess I never thought too much about everybody else’s family. Our street filled up like little clusters of grapes along a path. Maybe I kind of opened up to the world a little bit that moment. We were just one cluster in a very big interconnected vineyard. That’s what it felt like at least. And it felt far from good.
I heard some kind of noise, so I rolled onto my side and faced the window. The sound was so slight that I didn’t know where it came from, if it was in my room or a mile away. That’s when the hot fear exploded through my veins. All my muscles seized, and my eye darted around the room. The curtains fluttered with an incoming breeze. The sound was clearly steps, shoes gliding along the concrete beneath my window. It was a man I could tell, by the pattern and weight of the steps. They moved slower and slower. And I knew, without a shadow of a doubt—it was him, finally coming to get me—Frankenstein’s monster. He would come for me I knew it. He had come to reward me for my sin. I thought for a moment about grabbing that crucifix and just launching it straight out the window, but I couldn’t, I had to see him first, see him with my own eyes.
My eyes were zapped of all moisture. I managed to blink, but only one eye at a time so that I could stay aware and ready for his entry into my room. Wait. That wasn’t logical. I was upstairs and he was outside.
A dog’s yip from down the street echoed between buildings and houses. The steps stopped. Only a whisper of wind could be heard. I waited. Nothing. Nothing.
I managed to pull the covers off of my legs. I needed to make sure that he wasn’t there, that he had moved on down the street. I quietly moved my legs over the edge of the bed. I thought for a second that he might be under my bed, but knew that it was impossible. I stepped onto the floor and toe-heeled steadily toward the window . . . into the ominous light. My finger resting on the sill, I slowly bent toward the open air, praying ever so fervently that he would not be standing down there looking up at me.
Chapter 6
“I found one!” Charlotte’s voice echoed across the field. Her arm waved like a white flag of surrender—embarrassingly swooping side-to-side.
I trudged through dewy field, making my way to see Charlotte’s treasure and holding Grandma’s Polaroid Swinger high above my head so that it wouldn’t even graze the tops of the grass. My wallet-size leather pouch, which I’d slung across my shoulder, already contained three arrowheads. I had all the luck that day.
Charlotte opened her grasp to reveal a finely-shaped triangle with little scalloped ridges on the sides.
“Yep, sure looks like one to me.” I took the treasure, cleaned it off on my shorts and handed it back to Char. “Okay, hold it out like this.” I snapped a picture and tossed the artifact into my satchel. When the camera spit out the black rectangle, I handed it to Char. “Here. You can peel it.”
Char gently pulled back on the black film. “O-o-o-h. Perfect!”
I tucked the photo in my satchel with the arrowhead itself.
Covert’s field was the best place for these types of expeditions. There used to be a lot of Indian camps down there, along the Mahoning River. Beneath that very field rested an ancient Indian burial city, so they said.
It’s always best to go searching for arrowheads there just after it rains. The water raises up from the ground all of those buried treasures.
The high sun glistened off the meandering river. The roar of a distant truck upon a gravel drive had Charlotte peering toward the echo’s epicenter.
“That’s probably the guy who lives in the log cabin we passed on the way down.” I remarked.
The man’s name was Richie Covert. His family had lived down in those wild parts since the crash. That is how the bridge there got its name, Covert’s Crossing. People didn’t frequent those parts though, only if they needed to go to Hillsville or Edinburgh or, God forbid, Youngstown. The only reason that I personally knew the area was because Dad used to take Nicky and Angelo out to those parts for hunting. That was back when Angelo hunted. Angelo and I were great pals, but I honestly couldn’t understand his indifference to nature. He avoided the woods. So Nick and Dad were the only ones who’d go out there.
They never brought me. The way I found the place was by following Nicky one morning. He was going to check his traps. Of course, my trailing Nicky lasted only for about three miles, which is actually successful given that Nicky had the ears of a hound and the sense of an Indian. He found me right at the break of the field and the forest after my foot had busted a small stick.
I think I followed Nicky down because I thought it would lead me somewhere. After that quite remarkable three-mile stalk, I considered the possibility of working for intelligence in the national government. Then of course, just before dawn broke, Nicky found me trailing him—due to the stick. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew I was trailing him all along.
At the time of that incident, Nicky was walking on the open tracks, and I followed him about three feet into the woods. We’d just made it to the part where the tree-line left of the tracks panned out into more sparse patches; meanwhile, the tree-line right of the tracks grasped onto an over-grown, cliff-like region. I was on the right side, heading for the scraggly cliff. I remember being pissed with myself for choosing to sneak along that side of the tracks. But now, in retrospect, how could I have known that I was walking into such a splendid trap?
After I cracked that stick, I slipped down onto my side and yet remained nearly upright, given the steepness of the hill. I watched Nicky stop, set down his bag, and just stand there for like five minutes. Then he slowly turned around and came straight toward me. Nick never made any fast movements. He stayed completely calm most of the time. On the other hand, Angelo must have gotten all of the energy in the family. He always flipped around like a bass out of water. Angelo always had to be doing something, anything—some kind of project or plan. Nicky wasn’t like that at all.
Nicky came right up to the bush. He reached straight through it and grabbed my arm. With one motion, he yanked me out right onto the gravely tracks. He turned back around and picked up his bag.
“Come on,” he said reluctantly, while he continued his walk.
We hiked down the tracks side by side. I balanced on one of the rails—walking on a tight-rope.
“Nicky! Don’t I look like the lady over Niagara?”
“Uh-huh,” he agreed without looking.
I wasn’t real sure if he was annoyed or indifferent—not to the Niagara thing, but to me being there, in general.
We started into the tall grass. The low clouds hung in the sky, tempted to spit. The blue morning-light breathed behind the gray Pennsylvania sky, like a secret color, a more hopeful depth.
That’s when Nicky told me that this field was exceptionally good for arrowheads. He said that a lot of Indians fought in a war here and that you could find lost arrowheads everywhere. We cut our way through the kind-of African savanna. He told me it was an Indian burial ground too. I thought I heard the rumble of an elephant stampede in the distance.