Powber

Powber

Jimmy Borden was seven, and he had no friends. He had parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and a brother named Tommy, who was thirteen, but none of them were really his friends. His father George was a lawyer, and he worked long hours. Sometimes he had to spend several nights in a hotel when he was in the middle of a complicated case. When he was home, he and Jimmy’s mother Ellen drank cocktails and yelled at each other about things Jimmy didn’t understand.
He only saw his grandparents, aunts, and uncles in the summertime, at the big vacation house on Cape Cod which his great-grandfather had built. They were nice enough, but they were always busy doing grownup things and they didn’t have time to play with him. And Tommy liked to hurt him.
He never hit Jimmy, but he poked him in the stomach hard enough to hurt. He gave Jimmy Indian sunburns, wedgies, and noogies. He made a V with two fingers and threatened to gouge Jimmy’s eyes out. He pulled Jimmy’s hair. And he said mean things.
“Mommy and Daddy never meant to have you. I was the only child they ever wanted. Mommy says you were an accident,” Tommy told him once.
“I’m not an accident, I’m a boy!” Jimmy said.
“No you’re not. You’re a mess, like throw-up. You’re ugly, and you stink.”
“I do not either! I just had my bath!”
“Yeah, and you peed in the water, just like you always do.”
Jimmy’s lower lip began to tremble, because what Tommy said was true. When he first got into the bathtub, the warm water always made him pee a little, because it felt so good. But he didn’t think anyone knew about that.
“It’s like when you were a lit-tul, ti-ny bay-bee,” Tommy went on, in a nasty sing-song voice, “and Mum-my was chan-ging your dir-ty di-dees. She called you Moby Dick, because you used to pee right in her face, like a whale spouting.”
“I’m not Moby Dick, I’m James Franklin Borden,” Jimmy said, forcing the tears back.
“Nuh-unh. You’re Little Pee-Pee Piss-Pot, and Mummy thinks you’re disgusting. So does everybody else.”
Jimmy didn’t understand why Tommy was so mean to him, because he loved his older brother. Jimmy was small for his age, and shy. The kids at his school picked on him as if they could smell his fear the way dogs can. But Tommy wasn’t afraid of anything. He was big and strong and smart, and Jimmy followed him around whenever he could. Up until a year ago, Tommy had been kind to him, teaching him how to catch and throw a ball, climb trees, and make things like kites and balsa-wood airplanes that actually flew. At the Cape Cod house Tommy had taken him out fishing in their grandparents’ dinghy, showed him how to bait hooks with squid, helped him reel in the fish he caught, and taught him the difference between keepers – fish that were good to eat, like scup and flounders – and trash like sea robins, puffers, and sand sharks. But fishing made Jimmy feel a little sick, because the keepers struggled wildly on the bottom of the dinghy and bled a lot from the gashes the hooks made in their mouths when Tommy ripped them out. And he killed the trash fish by picking them up by their tails and slamming their heads against the dinghy’s side before tossing them overboard. Jimmy once asked him why he couldn’t just take the hooks out and release them while they were still alive.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Tommy had said, “or I’ll knock your brains out like I do with the trash fish because you’re trash, too.”
That was the first time Tommy had been mean to him. He started calling Jimmy “Little Me-Too,” and he pushed him away, hard, whenever Jimmy started following him. The pokes and the noogies and the wedgies started, and although Tommy still kept from hitting him with his own fists, he’d grab Jimmy’s hands and slap his face with them, saying “Hey! Stop hitting yourself, stupid!”
Jimmy started avoiding his brother whenever he could. It was easy enough during the day, because Tommy was in his first year at a prep school, and Jimmy went to the elementary school on the other side of town. But at night Tommy kept up the torment. He short-sheeted Jimmy’s bed, he drizzled warm water onto Jimmy’s wrist as he lay sleeping, hoping to make him wet the bed (sometimes it worked) and once he shook him awake and told him he had to get up and get dressed because Mummy and Daddy didn’t want him any more, and they’d given him to the Grendells, who had no children of their own.
Jimmy knew the Grendells. They were ugly and old, and their big, tumbledown place down the street was dark and scary-looking, like a haunted house. He didn’t really believe that his parents would give him to the Grendells. For one thing, they hated children. Whenever they were sitting on their front porch and kids were playing nearby, Mr. Grendell would get up and yell at them to stop making so much noise or he’d call the police.
But Tommy had been right about some of the other things he’d told Jimmy, so he could be right about the Grendells, too. One afternoon when his mother was driving him back from school, he asked her if she and his father were going to give him to the old couple. His mother laughed. “Good heavens, wherever did you get such a silly idea?” she said. She smelled of cocktails, even though his father was off on one of his sales trips.
“Tommy told me.”
“Oh, he was just teasing. Stop picking your nose. If you need a Kleenex, there are some in my purse. Sit up straight, stop slouching!” The car swerved a little, and almost ran into another car. “Dammit!” she yelled, hauling their car back into its lane. “Now look what you made me do! We could have been killed!”
Jimmy didn’t cry. He felt angry instead. She wasn’t being fair, and it looked like she really did love Tommy better than she loved him. But he didn’t say anything to her. He sat up straight for the rest of the way home, he ate his supper (liver and onions, which he hated) without complaining, and he helped with the dishes. Tommy ate an hour after he did, so Jimmy had plenty of time to get into his hidey-hole and talk to Powber.
He’d found the hidey-hole by accident. The house was almost as old as the Grendell place, but not quite as tumbledown, and it had a tower at one end, which made it look a little like the castle in his picture book about King Arthur and his knights. The tower stood taller than the second storey of the main house, but Jimmy’s father said its top room, the one under the pointy roof, stole heat during the winter, and brown bats lived in it. Jimmy had seen the bats flying in and out of its one slit of a window, and he liked them. His teacher said bats were wonderful creatures who ate bugs that killed plants, so nobody should be afraid of them. But George said they carried rabies, like mad dogs, and he hired an exterminator to get rid of them one summer while Jimmy and his mother and brother were at the house on Cape Cod. When Jimmy got home, the bats were gone, and his father had sealed off the slit window and boarded up the door that led from Jimmy’s bedroom to the final flight of stairs.
But one chilly Sunday morning that fall, Jimmy opened his closet door to get his sweater down from the top shelf, and he felt a cold draft coming from over his head. He put on his sweater, and then he dragged his bedroom chair into the closet and stood on it, so he could climb onto the shelf. At its left end, there was a square opening in the wall, as if whoever had built the house had used a plank that was too short when he was finishing the closet. The opening was big enough for Jimmy to go through, but it was dark on the other side. Jimmy went back down and got his Cub Scout flashlight. He clambered back up to the shelf and turned it on. The light it cast was weak and yellow, and he remembered that he hadn’t changed its batteries since the last time he had used it, staying up past his bedtime to read his King Arthur book under the covers. But he was too excited to go all the way down to the kitchen to get new batteries from the drawer where his father kept them. As he had hoped, the opening gave onto the topmost flight of stairs, but it was a long jump down to the nearest step, and he wanted to keep both hands free in case he stumbled as he landed. But that would mean putting down the flashlight and jumping into the darkness.
He hesitated, wondering what to do, and a little growly voice spoke. “It’s all right, James Franklin Borden. Go ahead and jump. You’ll be O.K.”
“Who are you?” Jimmy asked.
“I’m your friend. I like you.” The growliness in the voice made the last words sound like “I’m like you.” But that made sense, too, Jimmy thought. People got to be friends because they were like each other.
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Powber.”
“Power?”
“No, Powber! With a B!” The growl in the voice deepened, like a dog beginning to get angry. Jimmy was afraid of dogs, big ones, anyway, and for a moment he thought of climbing down off the shelf, closing the closet door, and going to find his mother. He could tell her he’d had a bad dream. She might take him in her lap and hug him and tell him that dreams weren’t real, so they couldn’t hurt him. But she might not. It depended on whether or not she’d started drinking her cocktails. A few days before, his father had caught her drinking one as she made breakfast, and they’d had a scary fight.
“Your mother won’t help you,” the voice said. “But I will.” The growl had changed into a cat’s purr. Jimmy liked cats. His grandparents had two Siamese named Mitsey and Bitsey, and when Jimmy was staying at the big house on Cape Cod, they sometimes spent the night with him, climbing up on his bed and settling down on either side of him. Their purrs were a sort of cat lullaby, he thought, because he always went to sleep right away, and he never had bad dreams.
“I’m not a cat,” said the voice. “I’m better than a cat.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking?”
“I know everything about you.”
“Do you live inside my head?”
“Of course not. There’s no room for me in there. I live in the round room at the top of the tower. Come on up. Don’t be afraid.”
So Jimmy turned off the flashlight and set it aside. The jump was scary, but he landed without hurting himself, and climbed the stairs. A little light came in through cracks between the boards that covered the window, and at first Jimmy thought the room was empty.
“Where are you?” he asked.
A pile of dirt in the middle of the floor shifted as if a breeze was blowing on it, and then lifted into the air, spinning like a little dust-devil.
“I’m right here,” said the voice. “Can’t you see me?”
Jimmy looked closely at the dust-devil and saw something that might have been a person inside it, staring at him out of a pair of slanty orange eyes, like the ones in a Halloween pumpkin.
“Are you Powber?” Jimmy said.
“Who else would I be?” said the voice. “I’m not your drunken mother Ellen or your stupid father George, and I’m certainly not your mean brother Tommy.”
“Are you real?”
“As real as you are.” The vortex stopped spinning, but Powber was still there. He had long, skinny arms, long, skinny legs and a long, skinny body, all made out of dust and dirt. His fingers were long and skinny, too, with fingernails that looked like claws. His mouth was a black slice shaped like a smile, and it didn’t move when he said, “You’d like to hurt Tommy, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Jimmy whispered.
“Say it louder.”
“Yes! Yes! I hate him! I want to hurt him real bad!”
“Okey-doke,” said Powber, and disappeared.

When Tommy didn’t come home on Monday afternoon, Ellen Borden first thought that there might have been some special school event he’d forgotten to tell her about. She called the principal’s office and was put straight through. Mr. Kemper said that he’d been about to call her himself. Tommy hadn’t gotten on the bus with the rest of the boys, and a quick search of the school’s buildings and grounds had come up empty. Kemper cautioned against panic. “I’m sure he’s here somewhere, Mrs. Borden. Your son does like to pull pranks. Mostly they’re harmless, but occasionally he goes a bit too far. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Tommy!” Ellen said hotly. “He’s a wonderful boy!”
Her words were a little slurred, and Kemper wondered if she had been drinking.
“Please, Mrs. Borden, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that there was anything wrong with Tommy,” he said. “I just want to suggest that…”
She cut him off. “When he’s at school, he’s the school’s responsibility! If anything has happened to him, my husband will sue Farnsworth School for everything it’s worth!”
She hung up and called the police. Two days later, a search team found Tommy’s body behind the school cafeteria, stuffed head first into a dumpster with the rest of the day’s trash. His eyes were missing. There was a deep hole in his stomach, but it wasn’t a knife or bullet wound. His scalp had been torn half off, and it hung down to cover his eyeless face. The medical examiner concluded that those injuries had been inflicted before he was killed. No one had heard him screaming because he had been gagged with his underpants, held in place by his school necktie, which was knotted around his head. The cause of death was massive head trauma: the back of his skull had been shattered. But there was no sign of a hammer, a rock, or any other blunt instrument. There were compression marks and abrasions around his ankles which the medical examiner couldn’t explain. He remarked to his assistant that it looked as if someone had picked the victim up by the ankles, swung him up in the air, and bashed his head against the pavement. But that was improbable, unless the killer had been a weight-lifter or a professional wrestler, for Tommy weighed a hundred and five pounds.
When she got the news, at first Ellen Borden refused to believe that Tommy was dead. “You must be talking about some other child,” she told the woman detective, Sergeant Price. “Nobody would kill my Tommy. Everyone loves him!”
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Borden. But killers aren’t like normal people. I promise you we’ll find whoever did this terrible thing and make sure he’ll never do it again.”
That was no consolation to Ellen. She shook her head violently, crying out, “No! No! No!” Then she began to rake her cheeks with her fingernails, wailing and sobbing uncontrollably. Sergeant Price tried to restrain her, and she struck out wildly, slapping away the policewoman’s hands and running for the door. The two male cops who had accompanied the sergeant blocked the door, and Price said, “You don’t want to go out there, Ma’am. There’s a crew from Channel Six, and a lot of newspaper reporters. Why don’t you just sit down? Your husband’s on his way.”
Ellen stopped wailing, though tears continued to stream down her cheeks, mixing with the blood from her fingernails. She allowed Sergeant Price to lead her to the living room couch, and she sat down on it. Price produced a clean handkerchief and tried to give it to her so she could wipe her face, but she ignored it. She hugged herself, rocking to and fro a little, and making a low, moaning noise. George came in and sat next to her. He put his arms around her and said, “Oh, my God, Ellen, this can’t be real!”
That set her off again. Her screams were deafening, and George couldn’t calm her down. Sergeant Price keyed the microphone on her shoulder and said something terse and clipped. She waited for an answer, broke the connection and told George that a doctor was coming to give Ellen a sedative.
“Don’t you dare try to drug me!” Ellen yelled to George. “That’s just like you – oh, Ellen’s being silly, let’s just give her a tranquillizer, and everything will be O.K. Potatoes.”
Jimmy had come down the stairs, and he heard her last sentence. “O.K. Potatoes” was what she always said when something bad had happened to him and she was trying to reassure him. “I’ll tuck you into bed for the night, and I promise, in the morning, everything will be O. K. Potatoes.” But it had been a long time since she had tucked him into bed. Nowadays it was as if she only had room in her heart for Tommy. But now Tommy was dead.
He went up to her and said, “Mummy? Don’t cry. It’ll be O. K. Potatoes now, really truly, I know it will. Tommy’s gone, so I’ll be your only child. I’m better than Tommy, anyway. He was mean.”
Ellen went dead quiet. She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. Her eyes were as red as Powber’s. “You’re a monster,” she whispered.
“I am not!” Jimmy said. “Tommy was a monster! I’m glad he’s dead!”
George jumped up from the sofa and yelled, “Go to your room! And stay there!”
“I won’t! You can’t make me!”
“We’ll see about that,” said George. Jimmy had never seen him look so angry. He grabbed the boy by the arm and hauled him up the stairs so roughly that Jimmy stumbled and wound up being dragged, his heels bonking against the risers. George shoved him into his room and slammed the door. “Take off your pants and underpants,” he hissed. “You have been very bad, and you have to be punished, so you’ll learn never to be bad again.”
“Please, Daddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be bad.”
“It’s too late for sorry,” George said, still in a snaky hiss. “Go on, pants off. Now!”
Terrified, the boy obeyed, and his father sat down on the bed, bent him over his knee, and gave him a hard spanking. Jimmy howled with pain, but George told him to shut up and take his punishment like a man. He didn’t stop until Jimmy’s bottom was red, and so sore he couldn’t sit on it. Even pulling his pants and underpants back up hurt.
“No supper for you tonight,” George said. “You’ll stay in this room until I’ve decided you’ve learned your lesson.”
“Daddy, please, please, don’t make me stay here!” Jimmy blubbered. “I want to be with you and Mommy!”
“I told you to shut up!” George shouted. He slapped Jimmy across the face so hard that the boy fell backwards and bumped his head on the floor. But George didn’t even check to see if he was all right. He stomped out of the room and locked the door behind him.
Jimmy’s head hurt, and he felt dizzy, but he was all cried out. He lay staring at the ceiling of his room, hating his father with everything in his being. He hated his mother, too, for calling him a monster. But Ellen hadn’t hit him.
“Tommy was right, James Franklin Borden,” the growly voice said. “Your mother really did love your brother better than she loved you. And your father hates you. Next time he gets angry, he’ll probably kill you.”
Powber hovered in the air above him. He was longer and bigger than he had been in the hidey-hole, and even though he was floating, he looked solider.
“What can I do?” Jimmy asked him.
“What do you want to do?”
“You know.”
“I do, but you have to say it.”
“I want to make them die.”
“No problem,” said Powber.

George Borden went first. He was driving home after having a few drinks with his associates to celebrate the winning of a law-suit, and he lost control of his car. It veered across the center line of the highway, and hit a tractor-trailer truck head on. The truckdriver survived, but the back of George’s skull was caved in, and he died instantly. There were bruises on his buttocks that puzzled the medical examiner, but he didn’t bother to note them in his report, because the alcohol level in the dead man’s blood was well over the legal limit. Just another drunk driver.
Ellen Borden collapsed during George’s funeral, almost falling into his open grave. The ceremony had to be stopped, and an ambulance was called. On the way to the hospital, the EMTs tried to revive her, but her heart had stopped, and she was pronounced dead on arrival. The autopsy revealed a long history of alcohol abuse, which had weakened her heart muscle and clogged her aorta. The doctor who performed the autopsy thought to himself that the poor woman had been a heart attack waiting to happen, even before the traumatic stress of losing her oldest son and her husband, one right after the other. She was buried next to George.
Jimmy had not attended either funeral. His grandparents felt that the shock of his parents’ deaths had been bad enough for him, and watching their burials might cause him permanent psychological damage. So he stayed home in the care of his youngest aunt.
Aunt Louise wasn’t married, and didn’t really like children very much, although she’d been charmed by the handsome Tommy, who always spoke very politely to grownups. Jimmy was a skinny little scrap of a boy with arms and legs that were too long for his body. He had a hard stare which he leveled at her whenever she spoke to him, and he answered her questions in monosyllables, when he answered at all. She’d been told that he was still grieving, but he showed no emotion at all. He was creepy, she thought to herself.
“I am not creepy,” Jimmy said, in a growly little voice.