Malerman, Josh - Carpenter's Farm by Malerman Josh

Author:Malerman, Josh [Malerman, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

19

I’m walking the streets of Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, early morning, contemplating the change I saw in Ever (I’m days away from following him downtown yet), writing my friends, feeling crazy, worried about Oliver, worried about them all, when Tracy wakes.

She sits up, understands she’s outside, sees Oliver’s farmhouse from a distance. A voice speaks over her right shoulder.

“Don’t turn around to look at me. If you look at me I’m going to thumb your eyes out. I’m serious. I can’t be looked at. Not by you. Okay?”

“Connie…” Tracy says. But she does not turn around.

“And please don’t call me that. Not anymore. You need to hear this. All of this. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Tracy is terrified. Memories of Morris by the fire, the old man in the upstairs bedroom.

How did she get outside?

“When you and Ever left,” Connie says, “we tried to put ourselves back together again. Okay? Me, Karen, and Rodney. The three of us knew something was wrong and we must have been served the right combination of indiscretion and deduction, because we knew to speak only to each other about it. We could tell Morris and Baum had no intentions of changing back. Okay? Do not look at me. I’m serious, Tracy. Do not turn around right now. The face you see will haunt you and the face I see will destroy me. Okay? Karen and I talked about it first. On the back deck. We drank coffee and tea and the boys went inside and she said, ‘We have to change back.’ There was no discussion about what she meant, there didn’t have to be. I’m curious, now, how long it would’ve taken me to come to the same conclusion, but I like to believe I would’ve got there on my own. And yet, that was many people ago. Okay? I’m not the same person Karen brought this up with on the deck. But I remember that person and she means something to me and that’s partly why I won’t let you turn around. I have too much respect for that girl for you to see what she’s become.”

“Connie…”

“Enough with that. You’re still in shallow waters. You must’ve retained enough of the old you to get all the way back out here. The fact that Ever isn’t here tells me that he did not. Okay. Then Karen said, ‘We can’t speak to the others about this.’ I’m not sure how she immediately knew it would be dangerous to do so. Again, it must have been from something she ate. Caution? I don’t think so. Something more nuanced than that. Intuition. I can’t remember if I have a memory of Karen having had good instincts before coming here or not. It doesn’t matter. She said we weren’t to talk about it with the others and I agreed wholeheartedly. Obviously Oliver is dangerous. And the rest of us? Well, you could see it in their faces, that next morning, after you drove off and we all waved like Laura Ingalls Wilder, you could tell Morris wasn’t going to give up what he’d got for anything.

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