The Amulet

CHAPTER ONE-3

(But I didn’t see any collar on it—)

She was sixty, after all, even if Dr. Isham said she didn’t need glasses. Old eyes play funny tricks, especially in the dark.

But it wasn’t quite as dark now. Even though the sun wasn’t due to come up for hours, there was a faint rim of half luminescence lying low across the horizon behind her, silhouetting ­the random trees and houses with cut-paper sharpness. Even the places where her flashlight beam didn’t touch, Arlene could half-see shapes, near-colors…and that soft, almost strangled little squelching sound was louder.

Much louder, as in almost on top of her, yet Arlene detected no movement, no breathing, heavy or otherwise. Running her pale tongue over her rough lips, she slowly panned her flashlight in a half-circle before her. Nothing but tree trunks, fallen branches, leaves, an old shoe…two shoes—filled with stockinged feet, toes up, but tilted away from each other in a bottomless “v”.

Gripping her bags in her left hand until her swollen knuckles protested, Arlene trained her right hand toward the legs attached to the feet. Tight jeans, the paint ’em on your body kind, with zippered ankles. Hands, resting on the thighs, dirt-rimmed nails peering out from chipped paint over the moons. Blackish streaks on the tops of the hands—a liquid shimmering black that turned another color altogether when Arlene’s light hit them. The saffron beam jiggled a little as it played over the slumped torso; the metallic threads running through the cheap, tight sweater; the forward-lolling head with the jagged, moving, leaking parts in the bleach-blond hair—the parts no comb had made in that frizzled curtain of curls.

The torn furrows in her flesh dripped blood, producing a most unpleasant squelching sound.

THREE—Ma

“Shit.”

Anna paused in the doorway between the living room and the dining room, bags in one hand, her house keys in the other. Before her, the dining room table was as it had been when she had gotten up that morning, as it had been when she and Ma had gone to bed at seven the night before. Anna’s beige mug rested next to the two-day-old newspaper Ma had found at her FmHA job, their two place mats askew near the middle. Ma’s purse sitting open near the place opposite to where Anna sat. The only difference was that Ma was sitting at her usual place, the kitchen door, her thin arms crossed, pointy elbows resting on the edge of the table. From Ma’s tone of voice alone, Anna could guess that the older woman wasn’t over last night’s funk, but as if to bring the point home to Anna, her mother’s face was scrunched up like a tear-crumpled Kleenex, all creases between her eyes, around her thin-lipped mouth, and under her wobbling chin.

Not bothering to actually look at Anna, or acknowledge her presence, Ma repeated, “s**t. s**t, s**t, s**t!”

Uncertain what to do, Anna just stood there, trying out scenarios in her mind. If I ask her what’s wrong, she’ll say, “You,” or “Everything,” but if I ignore her, she’ll start raging that I never pay attention to her. If I try and make breakfast myself, she’ll start in on how I’m not doing this or that right, or how I waste water filling the coffee pot, or something. Christ, she’s had all morning to think of something that I’m bound to do wrong. But if I just stand here, she’ll­—

Anna’s mother got up with a flurry of pink flannel and jerking limbs. She and Anna were within five pounds of the same weight, but she managed to make her pounds look and act smaller, swifter, the way a horse seems leaner and thinner than a cow, even if they’re the same size. Ma stomped into the kitchen. Through the open doorway to the basement below, Anna heard the floor joists protest uselessly. Over the whine and pop of the floor, Anna gradually made out words. Her mother was mumbling just loud enough to taunt, without making herself completely clear.

“…control…always trying to live my life through me…won’t work this time…she wants her little Anna, she can have her…old bitch.”

Anna didn’t realize she’d lost her grip on her bags until they fell to the floor with a muted thump. Instinctively, she tried to make herself as insignificant as Ma always told her that was, but Ma was already storming back into the dining room, eyes blazing behind her oversized wire-rimmed glasses, wisps of permed, pale-blonde hair shaking around her heart­-shaped face, the furrow between her eyes as lethal as a sharpened dagger.

“Goddamn fuckin’ clumsy bitch.”

Anna knew that the challenge had been given—she either had to take what was coming, or try to stand up for herself. Dammit, I stood up to that Von Kemp yahoo, and he was armed and in a car that could’ve rammed me. She’s only got her tongue.

“What’s wrong?” Neutral enough, Anna hoped, as she dimly wondered where the cats were.

“What’s wrong?” Ma mocked Anna, making her voice higher and more nasal, in scathing imitation of her child. She jabbed at the air, the table, and Anna with one pink-nailed forefinger as she shouted, “That’s what’s wrong—look at the damned table!”

Anna looked. She had to move her head to see what Ma was talking about. At the right angle, the shine of the overhead light picked up a faint sheen of moisture on one of the plastic place mats. Ma’s place mat—the one that didn’t have a white smeared streak where a portion of the stylized pattern of farm fields and a far-off house and barn had rubbed off. As Ma sputtered, “Look what your damned cat did,” Anna realized what had happened, and cursed herself for not taking the time to push the cats into her bedroom before she had left the house that morning. Mouth, their female tiger cat, had a bladder problem. Sometimes, when she was excited or upset, she dribbled. And Mouth was wont to climb on the furniture, including the table. But I couldn’t put her in the bedroom—Bruiser doesn’t get along with her. And if I put Mouth in the bathroom and shut the door, Ma yells because she’s not sure if I’m in there or what, and Ma doesn’t want the cats in her room.

Anna made a break for the kitchen, mumbling, “I’ll go wipe it up,” but Ma blocked her way, lean arms crossed, elbows pointing out like the narrow ends of billy clubs. Anna backed up, intending to circle the table and edge into the kitchen behind Ma, but when she was halfway around the table Ma shifted position to further block her way. Shaking, Anna tried to squeeze past Ma anyhow, but her big bust got in the way, for Anna couldn’t press her right arm close enough to her body. When the elbow of her jacket grazed Ma’s pink nightgown, Ma pushed her into the small easy chair that sat near the opposite side of the kitchen doorway.

As her face hit the rounded back of the chair, hard, Anna told herself, Don’t cry out, for Chrissakes—she’ll only get angrier. My god, what has happened to us? We were actually happy here, just a couple of years ago.

“Get up and clean off that table.”

Later on, Anna wasn’t sure if it was the tone of Ma’s voice—more metallic than usual—or the cumulative effect of having that same voice shout out so many orders, curses, and insults over the past two years, the years of the old lady—

(“I wanted a daughter, a human being, not you!” “You clumsy moose, can’t you do anything without—” “You’re just like the old lady, just fuckin’ like her—and her crazy old man—”)

—but whatever it was, something in Anna snapped.

“No way.” Pressing herself into the chair, the cat dander on the throw tickling her nose, Anna looked up at her mother, whose fore­head furrow grew impossibly black and deep, like a widening cleft in her very skull. Ma glared down at Anna.

“No, what?” One good thing, Ma wasn’t ripping skin off her lips, or tearing strips of skin off the sides of her fingernails, hurting herself in a seething rage that often boiled over to splatter her daughter. Anna slowly shifted until she had her feet on the floor and one hand stationed on the left armrest before saying, “I’m not cleaning up something you could have cleaned yourself. You know Mouth has accidents. A little cat pee won’t hurt anything.”

“Yes it will!” Ma pounded the table with her fist, shouting, “It hurts me! I’m sick of always cleaning up after the f*****g cat! Isn’t it enough I had to pick up after the old lady almost all my life? Now it’s pick up after them! Not when I’m picking garbage to eat while they—” she pointed in the direction of Anna’s room “eat fancy f*****g cat food!”

“But they eat garbage, too. That beef from when they get done grinding at—”

“Screw that! That’s not what I’m talking about!”

“What are you talking about, then? We just don’t always find cat food, that’s all—”

“f**k finding the cat food!” Ma bellowed, kicking at Anna’s legs with her house-slippered bare feet, unconsciously mimicking the actions of her own mother when Ma was a girl. Ma’s thin toes hung far enough out of the yellow scuffs for the bones of her toes to connect ringingly with Anna’s tibia, but Ma didn’t feel the connec­tion, for she kept on screaming, “Can’t you understand I’m tired of it all? Tired of waking up to find cat piss on the f*****g table, tired of going garbage picking, tired of playing nursemaid and playmate to that crazy old lady, tired of listening to the old lady ask why her little Anna won’t come see her, just tired of it all!”

Anna didn’t know what to say. She never did know what to say when Ma started on an “I’m tired” tirade. It wasn’t as if Ma was the only one suffering in the house; at least she’d been married once, and had had a kid, which was enough to make her less of an object of ridicule. Anna was twenty-nine and had never so much as dated, or even been able to pay a guy to take her someplace. Not that there was any guy poor enough in town to need to accept date money from someone like Anna Sudek, descendant of the embarrassment of Ewerton. And after years of going without male companionship, Anna no longer wanted it or needed it—it was simply easier to give up the search without ever having really begun it in the first place. Even if it meant not being able to sweet-talk any of her former classmates into hiring her now.

Ma above all should have realized just how damned hard it would be for Anna to get anything more than menial jobs, despite her degree. No jobs would be forthcoming to Anna Sudek, any more than they were forthcoming for her mother, Tina Miner Sudek.

It was as if what had happened fifty-some years ago had oc­curred yesterday. People who had actually been there were mostly gone, but the memory lingered on, thanks to the oft-told tales. And with the memory came the smoldering rage that someone had dared to give Ewerton a bad name, had dared to do something embarrass­ing—and that the Miner-Sudek clan still had the audacity to remain in town.

Not that Anna and her mother actually wanted to remain in Ewerton. While free to go in one sense, they were chained in other, less obvious ways. Lack of money, for starters. Ma had managed to break free of town when she was a teenager­—had made it all the way to neighboring Wright County, in fact—but her divorce had sent her scuttling back home, Anna in tow, to the bitter sanctity of the old lady’s house, to be her unpaid slave. And when things got to be too much there, she and Anna had pooled the money Anna had earned doing work study in college (said education paid for by Uncle Sam, thanks to Anna’s unacknowledged-at-EHS intelligence, and ability to supplement her grant with scholarships) with the little money she had, and moved halfway across town, to this ticky-tacky house on Wilkerson Avenue, close to the smelly paper mill.