Assurance

The perils of childhood had proven as ineffectual on Jude as a hard rain after a lengthy drought.  Lessons learned for Jude’s friends came in the swift but substantial swat of a father’s hand over bare skin, but Jude’s parents were kindly and forgiving.  His mother was a special kind of professional who stuck people with pins and lit candles for them.  Jude’s father had been a lawyer for as long as young Jude could remember.  More recently, his father had found what he called “Spirit” and had made the decision to travel the world to gain insight.  Thus, it was Jude and his mother more often than not, and since his mother couldn’t control him she had long ago determined it wasn’t necessary.  “You’re fine, Jude,” she often said.  “You’re just a growing boy.”  But he was a growing boy of the lippy, tyrannical, tantrum-throwing variety.  It was for this reason that some people, or rather most, were inclined to hurry out of the little boy’s way as he cycled down the sidewalk on his red three-wheeler, and it was also why, despite her most sincere attempts at friendship and bonding with other mothers, Jude’s own mother spent so much of her time alone.  His father- the last anyone had heard from him- was spending a great deal of time “learning” from a group of “enlightened” people in Colorado and it seemed one of the only ways in which they “made merry” and “let their hair down” was by making organic soap to sell at the market.

Every night, Jude would lay in his bed, his legs itching with the readiness to move, and his mother would secure the leather straps around his ankles and arms.  She did this with a smile, and would beam at Jude when her work had been finished with perhaps too great a sense of pride or- perhaps- relief.  “Well,” she would say breathlessly, “you know why we have to do this every night, of course.”

“But, ma, it wasn’t my fault!”  Jude, for his part, truly believed this.  Nothing was ever his fault.  He was a cute, precocious little boy.

“Now, now, Jude.  I have an eye for lying.”  His mother’s mind would, at this point, flash to a number of memories.  There was the plague of missing pets that had recently struck the neighborhood.  The tent missing from the garage when she had been packing for the Native American camping trip.  The many accupuncture needles that seemed, inexplicably, to have vanished into thin air.  And then, of course, there was the yelping that had- until very recently- syncopated the darkness of night as she lay in bed trying to sleep.  In her mind she often relived the experience of coming upon his little setup, a quarter of a mile through the woods, where the little dog or cat of his choice hung by its front paws inside the tent and he pricked it with her needles or beat it with sticks.

“But you told me I’m fine,” he would say, struggling.  This was their conversation every night, and her role in this was to continually eat her words- or justify them.  “I’m an angel.  That’s what you always say.”

“Yes.”  Her hand on his cheek.  “Yes, I know.  And you are, Jude.  An angel.  A wonderful little boy.  But these… tendencies.  Jude, they’ll only get you in trouble.  I have to be sure that you’ll never do it again.  It’s wrong.”

“I was just having fun.”  It was the first time Jude had ever said this.  It was an August night, only weeks before he would be back in school, which brought it’s own set of worries for her.  Amanda’s hair had still not grown back- at least not quite right.  Jude’s grandmother had assured her that he had only set her hair on fire, that it shouldn’t affect it’s growth at all.  And then there were the counselors employed after the math class incident, the image of Amanda’s flaming head seered into the students’ collective memory.  Now he said it was fun.  Torturing little animals?  Setting fire to little girls?  His mother shook her head.

“Just relax, Jude,” she said, kissing his forehead.  She had no idea how uncomfortable it all was for him.  She hadn’t been tied up in bed since her wedding night, and then there had been other physical discomforts that she had to grin and bear so that handcuffs almost tickled.  “It’s not fun,” she continued.  “It’s not fun, at all.  Good little boys don’t do those things.”

“They don’t?”

His mother was exasperated and angry.  “No, Jude,” she said curtly.  “They don’t.”  She walked to the bedroom door and peered back at him.  “God punishes people corresponding to their wrongs, Jude.  I don’t want that for you.  I can only imagine the punishment in mind for doing the things that you’ve done.”  Her eyes floated to the ceiling where, from her constant stares, Jude had come to believe God must live.  In  the lights that descended from the ceiling fan.  Where God dwelt.
Jude was terribly afraid of God and said He didn’t exist.  Still, he knew that, of course, God was there.  Just above the bed.  “Would God burn down the house?” asked Jude.  He thought of his chances if the house burned to the ground and of his hope, if any, of escaping alive.

His mother was distant, silent for a moment.  Then: “He might,” she said.  “Love you, Jude.”  She closed his door.  This was their night time ritual.  Later she would wish that she had meant it when she said she loved him, or that she wouldn’t have tightened the belts quite as much, or that she had at least read him a bedtime story.  For now, she retired to the back porch and stared at the path he took into the forest.  She pulled the small, loosely rolled package from her breast pocket and lit it, sucking in a bit of thick smoke.  She tilted her head back and stared up at the dark sky where light had punched little holes in the universe that expanded above her.  The sky took on a hazy, fuzzy look in her mind and she smiled, finally alone.  She imagined she was in Colorado making soap with her husband.

Jude, in the meantime, had strained his neck and was staring at the far wall of his bedroom with nasty thoughts in mind.  In the light filtering through the open blinds of the window he could see it inching across the wall- nothing but a common house spider, but it was smaller than Jude and so vulnerable.  There was something about it that excited him beyond measure, and almost more frantically he struggled against his bonds.  I wish, he thought eagerly.  I wish…  He knew that there were other things in the world, intangible things.  There were forces in the world that responded to wishes and prayers.  Some called the force God, and that was fine.  He didn’t personally believe that God would help him now.  Nonetheless, something did.

He became aware of the belts around his wrists and ankles tightening, and in the next second they eased up.  He looked at his left wrist and saw, unbelievably, that the belt was being pulled and releasing him from its grasp.  The process continued with his left ankle, then his right, and his other wrist, until he was standing on his bedroom floor free of constraint with his eyes leveled on the spider as it inched slowly up the wall.

Like a fox he stepped gingerly across the room and leaned close to at the look the spider which had frozen in place.  “You shouldn’t be here,” said Jude.  The thing had pressed itself against the wall, its legs splayed, and seemed to know that death was approaching.  Gazing at it.  Coldly calculating and imagining what fates the spider deserved for no other reason than its terrible luck.  The spider thought of its recent conquests- the fly, the moth that flew into the funnel shaped web in the corner of Jude’s front porch where this particular spider had often seen him lighting matches to watch them burn.  “You shouldn’t be here,” said Jude again.  “Did you know that?”

The spider regretted its most recent kills, if only because suddenly she knew what fear was, what dread felt like.  She moved slowly to the side to escape Jude’s fingers as they grasped her most available leg.  ”I’m waiting for someone,” the spider managed to squeal.  “Let go of my leg!”  But Jude pulled the spider away from the wall and she immediately found the presence of mind to swing up and bite the thumb which held her.

Jude winced and dropped her to the floor.  She scampered into shadow and watched him.  “Son of a bitch,” said Jude.  He had heard his father say just this thing very often.  He stuck the thumb in his mouth.  Then he looked at the floor, searching for her.  “You’re waiting for someone?” he muttered.  “Who?”

“Someone.”  The spider’s voice floated up from the darkness, though he couldn’t isolate it.  He walked to the door and turned on the lights.  It flooded the room from exactly the place where God dwelt, as if God had been asleep and now opened His eyes, the better to see and know.  Jude looked around his bedroom, but against the pale carpeting it took little time to find the spider which had bit him, the spider that cowered in a corner, backed up with the sudden realization that it had been spotted.  Jude smiled with delight.  “Why did you bite me?”

”I was scared,” said the spider.  “You want to kill me.”

“I will kill you,” corrected Jude.  He approached the spider slowly, hands outstretched as if he was preparing to fight a pack of lions.  He knelt down in front of the spider.  “Are you scared now?”

The spider was silent for a moment.  The lights flickered.  Jude had become accustomed to this.  Up and down the street people were relaxing in the cold chill of air conditioning units, and if it meant the occasional flickering of lights, that’s what it meant.  He didn’t notice the screams outside, he didn’t notice the light vibration that rattled the pipes in basements up and down the street, or which caused the picture of his grandmother- the same picture on her Real Estate business card- to slide off the wall and shatter on the floor.  He didn’t notice these things, but his mother did and as chaos erupted up and down the street she tossed her joint into the wind and ran around to the front of the house.  A woman in her bathrobe was running down the street, screaming with abandon.  “Get out of here!” she screamed at Jude’s mother.  “They’re coming!  Get the hell out of here!”  On her heels was a car that honked its horn frantically.  “Come on, lady!  Move!”

Jude’s mother had noticed it, as had everybody else that summer.  Spiders.  Everywhere she turned, in every cupboard, closet, under every couch, and even in the sheets.  Small black house spiders that scampered to dark corners when in danger but which otherwise seemed to be simply waiting for something or someone.  Now, it seemed, the wait was over.  Jude’s mother saw the smaller ones first, as big as cars and running with speed toward her, followed by larger ones as large as old, towering trees.  They moved with purpose and as they did smaller house spiders flooded the streets and crawled up onto the backs of their larger counter parts.  As they approached her house, Jude’s mother screamed with terror and fled in the general direction of every other resident fleeing the once quiet, safe neighborhood.  And the giant spiders seemed to follow until a small scream seemed, impossibly, to shatter the chaos.  The lead spider, as large as any of the houses on the street stopped and issued a strange, alien noise which the rest of the spiders responded to.  They marched back to Jude’s house.

Jude had cornered his tiny friend and found a pair of his mother’s tweezers.  He was systematically removing legs and the spider, in agony, was crying such a high-pitched squeal that it seemed the world beyond his window had gone completely quiet.  He was absolutely focused and pulled first one leg, then the next, preparing for the grand finale.  He had dug up a box of matches and was very excited at the possibilities they afforded him.

And then there was a crash and as he looked to the side of his bedroom he saw the window shatter and, horrified, he saw a pair of large, hairy legs reaching through the window.  They fastened on him and carried him into the night, holding him by the scruff of his pajamas and staring at him.  The large spider had been searching for just such an opportunity.  There was nothing he quite liked more than torturing hateful little boys.

Petrified- too scared to scream- Jude breathed heavily and looked first at the spider and then at the street below him, and then back at the hole in the side of his house from which he had been extracted.  The lights flickered again, but unmistakably the eye of God stared out of his bedroom at him.  It seemed to wink.
“Oh dear,” said the spider.  ”Are you scared?  Have I scared you?”
Jude began to cry.  “Yes,” he said.  “Yes, I’m scared.  Please let me go.”
The spider seemed to think for a moment.  “In exchange for a leg or two, I might consider it…”