"The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls pg. 35-37
The house we rented had been built by a mining company. It was white, with two rooms and a swaybacked roof.
There were no trees, and the desert sand ran right up to the back door. At night you could hear coyotes howling.
When we first got to Midland, those coyotes kept me awake, and as I lay in bed, I'd hear other sounds--Gila
monsters rustling in the underbrush, moths knocking against the screens, and the creosote cracking in the wind.
One night when the lights were out and I could see a sliver of moon through the window, I heard a slithering noise
on the floor.
"I think there's something under our bed," I said to Lori.
"It's merely a figment of your overly active imagination," Lori said. She talked like a grown-up when she was annoyed.
I tried to be brave, but I had heard something. In the moonlight, I thought I saw it move.
"Something's there," I whispered.
"Go to sleep," Lori said.
Holding my pillow over my head for protection, I ran into the living room, where Dad was reading. "What's up,
Mountain Goat?" he asked. He called me that because I never fell down when we were climbing mountains--sure-footed
as a mountain goat, he'd always say.
"Nothing, probably," I said. "I just think maybe I saw something in the bedroom." Dad raised his eyebrows. "But it was
probably just a figment of my overly active imagination."
"Did you get a good look at it?" he asked.
"Not really."
"You must have seen it. Was it a big old hairy sonofabitch with the damnedest-looking teeth and claws?"
"Yes! Yes! You've seen it, too?"
"Better believe I have. It's that old ornery bastard Demon."
Dad said he had been chasing Demon for years. By now, Dad said, that old Demon had figured out that it had better
not mess with Rex Walls. But if that sneaky son of a gun thought it was going to terrorize Rex Wall's little girl, it had by
God got another think coming. "Go fetch my hunting knife," Dad said.
I got Dad his knife with the carved bone handle and the blade of blue German steel, and he gave me a pipe wrench,
and we went looking for Demon. We looked under my bed, where I had seen it, but it was gone. We looked all around
the house--under the table, in the dark corners of the closets, in the toolbox, even outside in the trash cans.
"C'mere, you sorry-ass old Demon!" Dad called out in the desert night, "Come out and show your butt-ugly face, you
yellow-bellied monster!"
"Yeah, c'mon, you old mean Demon!" I said, waving the pipe wrench in the air. "We're not scared of you!"
There was only the sound of the coyotes in the distance. "This is just like that chickenshit Demon," Dad said. He sat
down on the front step and lit up a cigarette, then told me a story about the time Demon was terrorizing an entire town, and
Dad fought it off in hand-to-hand combat, biting its ears and sticking his fingers in its eyes. Old Demon was terrified because
that was the first time it had met anyone who wasn't afraid of it. "Damned old Demon didn't know what to think," Dad said
shaking his head with a chuckle. That was the thing to remember about all monsters, Dad said: they love to frighten people,
but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run. "All you have to do, Mountain Goat, is show old Demon
that you're not afraid."
