The house Boomer was rebuilding was two hundred years old. It was a compact two-story constructed out of termite-mutilated wood and peeling blue paint, a mile back from the road on a few acres of spindly gum trees. When I crept my Honda up the gravel I saw tons of scaffolding, power tools, and ladders that looked like they’d been left in the rain for weeks.
He’d become “Boomer” because in kindergarten the only words he ever said were, “no,” “yes,” and “boom.” In the south there is no such thing as autism or Aspergers.
No, you are “touched” which, according to my third-grade teacher, means that, “An angel from Jesus” came down and presumably dipped its glowing E.T. finger into Boomer’s brain and turned him into an asshole who kicked over our Lincoln Logs while shouting “Boom.”
However those of us who were in the same town and Little League and shopped at the same Wal-Mart knew that Boomer was eerily smart and could trick any adult ever since he had learned to do it with his frantic drunk meth-head parents. He was in control of every situation, .
By high school, that werido had turned into a beautiful brick house. He looked like Clark Kent, if Clark Kent had a Dirty South moustache/goatee combo, a Camo Dernhart hat, and spit dip on the carpet in the back of Ms. Lee’s 11th-grade English class. I admit by then I only hated the guy out of jealousy and, occasionally, awe. Half the girls at Summit High School dreamt of sleeping with him, and the other half did, including Elyse Patko, the hottest, witchiest thing I’d seen in seventeen years of life. His jokes had evolved to become hilarious social sadism mixed with the unbridled rebellious sneer of the delightfully mentally ill. He was a revered mechanic down at the Citgo on Highway 64 and basically taught auto shop, and was the only self-made high school senior I had ever seen. I imagined that he would be the Lynrd Skynrd roadie lookalike to get a full ride at MIT since he was so amazing at AP Calculus and Chemistry the teachers didn’t even make eye contact with him. And fucking of course he played the guitar like he invented it.
But he sucked at English, and I started letting him copy off me during vocab quizzes, and he started paying me wads of oily twenties to write papers for him. Before too long we used to get high and listen to Led Zeppelin at lunch in my Honda. I mocked his redneck uniform sponsored by Wrangler and Nascar. He accused me of dressing like a heroin vampire.
Nobody other than me knew about the house. One night, as the summer of our senior year approached, he came roaring up high speed in his dented Chevy pickup and walked, smiling, up to my porch. It was a particularly moonless night. There was a storm wind in the air, and our faces were only illuminated in flashes of orange from the embers of our cigarettes.
“I done bought that house out yonder off Yates property.” He looked up into the black night sky as he spoke.
“That’s cool, I guess, if you like living in haunted shacks.” I took a swig off a bottle of vanilla extract. (Since I was a teenage squatter in the South, it was the cheapest and easiest way to get hammered.)
“Naw, man, I’m gonna fixer up good. She’s gonna be beautiful.” This was a different voice then I had ever heard out of Boomer. It wasn’t the southern deadpan of a savant; this had power at the edges. This was a voice charged up by love. We let the wind blow into us for a few minutes, listening to the leaves rubbing together in the gusts.
That night, I had the most horrific nightmare of my life. It was a Calculus problem. It gnawed at my mind like a rat with razor teeth. I couldn’t follow it, but for some reason I had to, but as I began to figure it out, I was filled by the most disgusting dread;, still I worked and worked though it for an eternity, and then I came to the solution that there never was a solution and never would be. I woke up sweating and so shaken that my fear wouldn’t leave me until I stood staring at myself in the bathroom for a full fifteen minutes.
When Boomer had been missing for weeks, all I said was that I didn’t really know him which, from a certain view point, was true; once he dropped out of school and started building that house, when you looked in his eyes it was like somebody’d turned off the light.
When I hadn’t seen him myself in a month, I figured I’d kept the secret for long enough.
I stared through the heat waves at the house; haphazard plastic curtains billowed from the windows like the molting feathers of a dead bird. I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing. The lawn was a forest of crabgrass and right there, right there in sweltering broad daylight, were two-foot pillars of black shadow wandering around and ducking behind trees.
I made a break for the house. Inside, only the pink insulation was up on the walls; in the kitchen was a card table covered in electric sanders and nail guns, all with the cords wrapped neatly around them. They were covered in dust. Above me was a hideous scratching. I followed it up the stairs to the archaic birch door at the top. The only room with a ceiling.
I told myself to stop being a pussy and kicked open the door. Boomer was naked, sweating, emaciated, on all fours, and scribbling a gigantic chalk equation on the floor boards: a mass of wild digits and symbols that spread numerical tentacles up the wall. He didn’t even notice I was there.
I talked at him for about half an hour. Finally he paused, kneeled, wiped the sweat from his eyes and said, “Just let him leave.” He looked through me to something in the corner as he said it. I wheeled to see a solid all-black mass leaning in the corner. It had a face. I have nightmares where it makes a noise like a short sharp dog bark.
I came to an hour later, after rear-ending a car a hundred miles away in Pathko County.
The sheriff told me I looked like the devil had touched me.
I blurted out: “I fucking hope not.”
