Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
By Cory Doctorow
9
He was sitting on their mother the next morning. He was naked and unsexed by desiccation – all the brothers, even little George, had ceased going about in the nude when they’d passed through puberty – sullen and silent atop the white, chipped finish of her enamel top, so worn and ground down that it resembled a collection of beach-China. It had been a long time since any of them had sought solace in their mother’s gentle rocking, since, indeed, they had spared her a thought beyond filling her belly with clothes and emptying her out an hour later.
The little ones woke first and saw him, taking cover behind a stalagmite, peering around, each holding a sharp, flat rock, each with his pockets full of more. Danny looked at each in turn with eyes gone yellow and congealed, and bared his mouthful of broken and blackened teeth in a rictus that was equal parts humor and threat.
Bradley was the next to wake, his bat in his hand and his eyelids fluttering open as he sprang to his feet, and then Alan was up as well, a hand on his shoulder.
He crouched down and walked slowly to Davey. He had the knife, handle wound with cord, once-keen edge gone back to rust and still reddened with ten-year-old blood, but its sharpness mattered less than its history.
“Welcome me home,” Davey rasped as Alan drew closer. “Welcome me home, motherfucker. Welcome me home, brother.”
“You’re welcome in this home,” Alan said, but Davey wasn’t welcome. Just last week, Alan had seen a nice-looking bedroom set that he suspected he could afford – the golems had left him a goodly supply of gold flake, though with the golems gone he supposed that the sacks were the end of the family’s no-longer-bottomless fortune. But with the bedroom set would come a kitchen table, and then a bookcase, and a cooker and a fridge, and when they were ready, he could send each brother on his way with the skills and socialization necessary to survive in the wide world, to find women and love and raise families of their own. Then he could go and find himself a skinny redheaded girl with a Scots accent, and in due time her belly would swell up and there would be a child.
It was all planned out, practically preordained, but now here they were, with the embodied shame sitting on their mother, his torn thumb gleaming with the wire he’d used to attach it back to his hand.
“That’s very generous, brother,” Danny said. “You’re a prince among men.”
“Let’s go,” Alan said. “Breakfast in town. I’m buying.”
They filed out and Alan spared Davey a look over his shoulder as they slipped away, head down on his knees, rocking in time with their mother.
Krishna grinned at him from the front porch as he staggered home from Kurt’s storefront. He was dressed in a hoodie and huge, outsized raver pants that dangled with straps and reflectors meant to add kinetic reflections on the dance floor.
“Hello, neighbor,” he said as Alan came up the walkway. “Good evening?”
Alan stopped and put his hands on his hips, straightened his head out on his neck so that he was standing tall. “I understand what he gets out of you,” Alan said. “I understand that perfectly well. Who couldn’t use a little servant and errand boy?
“But what I don’t understand, what I can’t understand, what I’d like to understand is: What can you get out of the arrangement?”
Krishna shrugged elaborately. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“We had gold, in the old days. Is that what’s bought you? Maybe you should ask me for a counteroffer. I’m not poor.”
“I’d never take a penny that you offered – voluntarily.” Krishna lit a nonchalant cig and flicked the match toward his dry, xeroscaped lawn. There were little burnt patches among the wild grasses there, from other thrown matches, and that was one mystery-let solved, then, wasn’t it?
“You think I’m a monster,” Alan said.
Krishna nodded. “Yup. Not a scary monster, but a monster still.”
Alan nodded. “Probably,” he said. “Probably I am. Not a human, maybe not a person. Not a real person. But if I’m bad, he’s a thousand times worse, you know. He’s a scary monster.”
Krishna dragged at his cigarette.
“You know a lot of monsters, don’t you?” Alan said. He jerked his head toward the house. “You share a bed with one.”
Krishna narrowed his eyes. “She’s not scary, either.”
“You cut off her wings, but it doesn’t make her any less monstrous.
“One thing I can tell you, you’re pretty special: Most real people never see us. You saw me right off. It’s like Dracula, where most of the humans couldn’t tell that there was a vampire in their midst.”
“Van Helsing could tell,” Krishna said. “He hunted Dracula. You can’t hunt what you can’t see,” he said. “So your kind has been getting a safe free ride for God-knows-how-long. Centuries. Living off of us. Passing among us. Passing for us.”
“Van Helsing got killed,” Alan said. “Didn’t he? And besides that, there was someone else who could see the vampires: Renfield. The pathetic pet and errand boy. Remember Renfield in his cage in the asylum, eating flies? Trying to be a monster? Von Helsing recognized the monster, but so did Renfield.”
“I’m no one’s Renfield,” Krishna said, and spat onto Alan’s lawn. First fire, then water. He was leaving his mark on Alan’s land, that was certain.
“You’re no Van Helsing, either,” Alan said. “What’s the difference between you and a racist, Krishna? You call me a monster, why shouldn’t I call you a paki?”
He stiffened at the slur, and so did Alan. He’d never used the word before, but it had sprung readily from his lips, as though it had lurked there all along, waiting to be uttered.
“Racists say that there’s such a thing as ’races’ within the human race, that blacks and whites and Chinese and Indians are all members of different ’races,’” Krishna said. “Which is bullshit. On the other hand, you –”
He broke off, left the thought to hang. He didn’t need to finish it. Alan’s hand went to his smooth belly, the spot where real people had navels, old scarred remnants of their connections to real, human mothers.
“So you hate monsters, Krishna, all except for the ones you sleep with and the ones you work for?”
“I don’t work for anyone,” he said. “Except me.”
Alan said, “I’m going to pour myself a glass of wine. Would you like one?”
Krishna grinned hard and mirthless. “Sure, neighbor, that sounds lovely.”
Alan went inside and took out two glasses, got a bottle of something cheap and serviceable from Niagara wine country out of the fridge, worked the corkscrew, all on automatic. His hands shook a little, so he held them under the cold tap. Stuck to the wall over his work surface was a magnetic bar, and stuck to it was a set of very sharp chef’s knives that were each forged from a single piece of steel. He reached for one and felt its comfort in his hand, seductive and glinting.
It was approximately the same size as the one he’d used on Davey, a knife that he’d held again and again, reached for in the night and carried to breakfast for months. He was once robbed at knifepoint, taking the deposit to the bank after Christmas rush, thousands of dollars in cash in a brown paper sack in his bag, and the mugger – a soft-spoken, middle-aged man in a good suit – knew exactly what he was carrying and where, must have been casing him for days.
The soft-spoken man had had a knife about this size, and when Alan had seen it pointed at him, it had been like an old friend, one whose orbit had escaped his gravity years before, so long ago that he’d forgotten about their tender camaraderie. It was all he could do not to reach out and take the knife from the man, say hello again and renew the friendship.
He moved the knife back to the magnet bar and let the field tug it out of his fingers and snap it back to the wall, picked up the wine glasses, and stepped back out onto the porch. Krishna appeared not to have stirred except to light a fresh cigarette.
“You spit in mine?” Krishna said.
Though their porches adjoined, Alan walked down his steps and crossed over the lawn next door, held the glass out to Krishna. He took it and their hands brushed each other, the way his hand had brushed the soft-spoken man’s hand when he’d handed over the sack of money. The touch connected him to something human in a way that made him ashamed of his desperation.
“I don’t normally drink before noon,” Adam said.
“I don’t much care when I drink,” Krishna said, and took a slug.
“Sounds like a dangerous philosophy for a bartender,” Adam said.
“Why? Plenty of drunk bartenders. It’s not a hard job.” Krishna spat. “Big club, all you’re doing is uncapping beers and mixing shooters all night. I could do it in my sleep.”
“You should quit,” Alan said. “You should get a better job. No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.”
Krishna put a hand out on Alan’s chest, the warmth of his fingertips radiating through Alan’s windbreaker. “Don’t try to arrange me on your chessboard, monster. Maybe you can move Natalie around, and maybe you can move around a bunch of Kensington no-hopers, and maybe you can budge my idiot girlfriend a couple of squares, but I’m not on the board. I got my job, and if I leave it, it’ll be for me.”
Alan retreated to his porch and sipped his own wine. His mouth tasted like it was full of blood still, a taste that was woken up by the wine. He set the glass down.
“I’m not playing chess with you,” he said. “I don’t play games. I try to help – I do help.”
Krishna swigged the glass empty. “You wanna know what makes you a monster, Alvin? That attitude right there. You don’t understand a single fucking thing about real people, but you spend all your time rearranging them on your board, and you tell them and you tell yourself that you’re helping.
“You know how you could help, man? You could crawl back under your rock and leave the people’s world for people.”
Something snapped in Alan. “Canada for Canadians, right? Send ’em back where they came from, right?” He stalked to the railing that divided their porches. The taste of blood stung his mouth.
Krishna met him, moving swiftly to the railing as well, hood thrown back, eyes hard and glittering and stoned.
“You think you can make me feel like a racist, make me guilty?” His voice squeaked on the last syllable. “Man, the only day I wouldn’t piss on you is if you were on fire, you fucking freak.”
Some part of Alan knew that this person was laughable, a Renfield eating bugs. But that voice of reason was too quiet to be heard over the animal screech that was trying to work its way free of his throat.
He could smell Krishna, cigarettes and booze and club and sweat, see the gold flecks in his dark irises, the red limning of his eyelids. Krishna raised a hand as if to slap him, smirked when he flinched back.
Then he grabbed Krishna’s wrist and pulled hard, yanking the boy off his feet, slamming his chest into the railing hard enough to shower dried spider’s nests and flakes of paint to the porch floor.
“I’m every bit the monster my brother is,” he hissed in Krishna’s ear. “I made him the monster he is. Don’t squirm,” he said, punching Krishna hard in the ear with his free hand. “Listen. You can stay away from me and you can stay away from my family, or you can enter a world of terrible hurt. It’s up to you. Nod if you understand.”
Krishna was still, except for a tremble. The moment stretched, and Alan broke it by cracking him across the ear again.
“Nod if you understand, goddammit,” he said, his vision going fuzzily black at the edges. Krishna was silent, still, coiled. Any minute now, he would struggle free and they’d be in a clinch.
He remembered kneeling on Davey’s chest, holding the rock over him and realizing that he didn’t know what to do next, taking Davey to their father.
Only Davey had struck him first. He’d only been restraining him, defending himself. Alan had hit Krishna first. “Nod if you understand, Krishna,” he said, and heard a note of pleading in his voice.
Krishna held still. Alan felt like an idiot, standing there, his neighbor laid out across the railing that divided their porches, the first cars of the day driving past and the first smells of bread and fish and hospital and pizza blending together there in the heart of the Market.
He let go and Krishna straightened up, his eyes downcast. For a second, Alan harbored a germ of hope that he’d bested Krishna and so scared him into leaving him alone.
Then Krishna looked up and met his eye. His face was blank, his eyes like brown marbles, heavy lidded, considering, not stoned at all anymore. Sizing Alan up, calculating the debt he’d just amassed, what it would take to pay it off.
He picked up Alan’s wine glass, and Alan saw that it wasn’t one of the cheapies he’d bought a couple dozen of for an art show once, but rather Irish crystal that he’d found at a flea market in Hamilton, a complete fluke and one of his all-time miracle thrift scores.
Krishna turned the glass one way and another in his hand, letting it catch the sunrise, bend the light around the smudgy fingerprints. He set it down then, on the railing, balancing it carefully.
He took one step back, then a second, so that he was almost at the door. They stared at each other and then he took one, two running steps, like a soccer player winding up for a penalty kick, and then he unwound, leg flying straight up, tip of his toe catching the wine glass so that it hurtled straight for Alan’s forehead, moving like a bullet.
Alan flinched and the glass hit the brick wall behind him, disintegrating into a mist of glass fragments that rained down on his hair, down his collar, across the side of his face, in his ear. Krishna ticked a one-fingered salute off his forehead, wheeled, and went back into his house.
The taste of blood was in Alan’s mouth. More blood coursed down his neck from a nick in his ear, and all around him on the porch, the glitter of crystal.
He went inside to get a broom, but before he could clean up, he sat down for a moment on the sofa to catch his breath. He fell instantly asleep on the creaking horsehide, and when he woke again, it was dark and raining and someone else had cleaned up his porch.
The mountain path had grown over with weeds and thistles and condoms and cans and inexplicable maxi-pads and doll parts.
She clung to his hand as he pushed through it, stepping in brackish puddles and tripping in sink holes. He navigated the trail like a mountain goat, while Mimi lagged behind, tugging his arm every time she misstepped, jerking it painfully in its socket.
He turned to her, ready to snap, Keep the fuck up, would you? and then swallowed the words. Her eyes were red-rimmed and scared, her full lips drawn down into a clown’s frown, bracketed by deep lines won by other moments of sorrow.
He helped her beside him and turned his back on the mountain, faced the road and the town and the car with its trunk with its corpse with his brother, and he put an arm around her shoulders, a brotherly arm, and hugged her to him.
“How’re you doing there?” he said, trying to make his voice light, though it came out so leaden the words nearly thudded in the wet dirt as they fell from his mouth.
She looked into the dirt at their feet and he took her chin and turned her face up so that she was looking into his eyes, and he kissed her forehead in a brotherly way, like an older brother coming home with a long-lost sister.
“I used to want to know all the secrets,” she said in the smallest voice. “I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water, your eyes won’t sting, and if you wash your fingers afterward with lemon-juice they won’t stink.
“I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I’d taken – a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination: To be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew enough secrets, I’d be like them.
“I don’t want to learn secrets anymore, Andrew. She shrugged off his arm and took a faltering step down the slope, back toward the road.
“I’ll wait in the car, okay?”
“Mimi,” he said. He felt angry at her. How could she be so selfish as to have a crisis now, here, at this place that meant so much to him?
“Mimi,” he said, and swallowed his anger.
His three brothers stayed on his sofa for a week, though they only left one wet towel on the floor, only left one sticky plate in the sink, one fingerprint-smudged glass on the counter.
He’d just opened his first business, the junk shop – not yet upscale enough to be called an antiques shop – and he was pulling the kinds of long hours known only to ER interns and entrepreneurs, showing up at 7 to do the books, opening at 10, working until three, then turning things over to a minimum-wage kid for two hours while he drove to the city’s thrift shops and picked for inventory, then working until eight to catch the evening trade, then answering creditors and fighting with the landlord until ten, staggering into bed at eleven to sleep a few hours before doing it all over again.
So he gave them a set of keys and bought them a MetroPass and stuffed an old wallet with $200 in twenties and wrote his phone number on the brim of a little pork pie hat that looked good on their head and turned them loose on the city.
The shop had all the difficulties of any shop – snarky customers, shoplifting teenagers, breakage, idiots with jumpy dogs, never enough money and never enough time. He loved it. Every stinking minute of it. He’d never gone to bed happier and never woken up more full of energy in his life. He was in the world, finally, at last.
Until his brothers arrived.
He took them to the store the first morning, showed them what he’d wrought with his own two hands. Thought that he’d inspire them to see what they could do when they entered the world as well, after they’d gone home and grown up a little. Which they would have to do very soon, as he reminded them at every chance, unmoved by George’s hangdog expression at the thought.
They’d walked around the shop slowly, picking things up, turning them over, having hilarious, embarrassing conversations about the likely purpose of an old Soloflex machine, a grubby pink Epilady leg razor, a Bakelite coffee carafe.
The arguments went like this:
George: Look, it’s a milk container!
Ed: I don’t think that that’s for milk.
Fred: You should put it down before you drop it, it looks valuable.
George: Why don’t you think it’s for milk? Look at the silver inside, that’s to reflect off the white milk and make it look, you know, cold and fresh.
Fred: Put it down, you’re going to break it.
George: Fine, I’ll put it down, but tell me, why don’t you think it’s for milk?
Ed: Because it’s a thermos container, and that’s to keep hot stuff hot, and it’s got a screwtop and whatever it’s made of looks like it’d take a hard knock without breaking.
And so on, nattering at each other like cave men puzzling over a walkman, until Alan was called upon to settle the matter with the authoritative answer.
It got so that he set his alarm for four a.m. so that he could sneak past their snoring form on the sofa and so avoid the awkward, desperate pleas to let them come with him into the shop and cadge a free breakfast of poutine and eggs from the Harvey’s next door while they were at it. George had taken up coffee on his second day in the city, bugging the other two until they got him a cup, six or seven cups a day, so that they flitted from place to place like a hummingbird, thrashed in their sleep, babbled when they spoke.
It came to a head on the third night, when they dropped by the shop while he was on the phone and ducked into the back room in order to separate into threes again, with George wearing the pork pie hat even though it was a size too big for his head and hung down around his ears.
Adam was talking to a woman who’d come into the shop that afternoon and greatly admired an institutional sofa from the mid-seventies whose lines betrayed a pathetic slavish devotion to Danish Moderne aesthetics. The woman had sat on the sofa, admired the sofa, walked around the sofa, hand trailing on its back, had been fascinated to see the provenance he’d turned up, an inventory sticker from the University of Toronto maintenance department indicating that this sofa had originally been installed at the Robarts Library, itself of great and glorious aesthetic obsolescence.
Here was Adam on the phone with this woman, closing a deal to turn a $3,000 profit on an item he’d acquired at the Goodwill As-Is Center for five bucks, and here were his brothers, in the store, angry about something, shouting at each other about something. They ran around like three fat lunatics, reeking of the BO that they exuded like the ass end of a cow: Loud, boorish, and indescribably weird. Weird beyond the quaint weirdness of his little curiosity show. Weird beyond the interesting weirdness of the punks and the goths and the mods who were wearing their subcultures like political affiliations as they strolled by the shops. Those were redeemable weirds, weirds within the bounds of normal human endeavor. His brothers, on the other hand, were utterly, utterly irredeemable.
He sank down behind the counter as George said something to Fred in their own little shorthand language, a combination of grunts and nonsense syllables that the three had spoken together for so long that he’d not even noticed it until they were taken out of their context and put in his. He put his back against the wall and brought his chest to his knees and tried to sound like he had a belly button as he said to the woman, “Yes, absolutely, I can have this delivered tomorrow if you’d like to courier over a check.”
This check, it was enough money to keep his business afloat for another 30 days, to pay his rent and pay the minimum-wage kid and buy his groceries. And there were his brothers, and now Ed was barking like a dog – a rare moment of mirth from him, who had been the sober outer bark since he was a child and rarely acted like the 17-year-old he was behaving like today.
“Is everything all right?” she said down the phone, this woman who’d been smartly turned out in a cashmere sweater and a checked scarf and a pair of boot-cut jeans that looked new and good over her designer shoes with little heels. They’d flirted a little, even though she was at least ten years older than him, because flirting was a new thing for Alan, and he’d discovered that he wasn’t bad at it.
“Everything is fine,” he said. “Just some goofballs out in the street out front. How about if I drop off the sofa for six o’clock?”
“KILLED HER, CUT HER UP, SLICED HER OPEN,” George screeched suddenly, skidding around the counter, rolling past him, yanking the phone out of the wall.
And in that moment, he realized what the sounds they had been making in their private speech had been: They had been a reenactment, a grunting, squeaking playback of the day, the fateful day, the day he’d taken his knife and done his mischief with it.
He reached for the phone cable and plugged it back into the wall, but it was as though his hand were moving of its own accord, because his attention was focused elsewhere, on the three of them arrayed in a triangle, as they had been on the hillside, as they had been when they had chanted at him when the knife grip was sure in the palm of his hands.
The ritual – that’s what it was, it was a ritual – the ritual had the feel of something worn smooth with countless repetitions. He found himself rigid with shock, offended to his bones. This was what they did now, in the cave, with Davey sitting atop their mother, black and shriveled, this was how they behaved, running through this reenactment of his great shame, of the day Danny died?
No wonder Darrel had terrorized them out of their home. They were beyond odd and eccentric, they were – unfit. Unfit for polite company. For human society.
The phone in his hand rang. It was the woman.
“You know, I’m thinking that maybe I should come back in with a tape measure and measure up the sofa before I commit to it. It’s a lot of money, and to be honest, I just don’t know if I have room –”
“What if I measure it for you? I could measure it for you and call you back with the numbers.” The three brothers stared at him with identical glassy, alien stares.
“That’s okay. I can come in,” and he knew that she meant, I won’t ever come in again.
“What if I bring it by anyway? I could bring it by tomorrow night and you could see it and make up your mind. No obligation.”
“That’s very kind of you, but I’m afraid that I’ll be out tomorrow evening –”
“Friday? I could come by Friday –” He was trying to remember how to flirt now, but he couldn’t. “I could come by and we could have a glass of wine or something,” and he knew he’d said the exact wrong thing.
“It’s all right,” she said coldly. “I’ll come by later in the week to have another look.
“I have to go now, my husband is home,” and he was pretty sure she wasn’t married, but he said good bye and hung up the phone.
He looked at his solemn brothers now and they looked at him.
“When are you going home?” he said, and Edward looked satisfied and Fred looked a little disappointed and George looked like he wanted to throw himself in front of a subway, and his bottom lip began to tremble.
“It was Ed’s game,” he said. “The Davey game, it was his.” He pointed a finger. “You know, I’m not like them. I can be on my own. I’m what they need, they’re not what I need.”
The other two stared at their fat bellies in the direction of their fat feet. Andrew had never heard George say this, had never even suspected that this thought lurked in his heart, but now that it was out on the table, it seemed like a pretty obvious fact to have taken note of. All things being equal, things weren’t equal. He was cold and numb.
“That’s a really terrible thing to say, George,” is what he said.
“That’s easy for you to say,” is what George said. “You are here, you are in the world. It’s easy for you to say that we should be happy with things the way they are.”
George turned on his heel and put his head down and bulled out the door, slamming it behind him so that the mail slot rattled and the glass shook and a stack of nice melamine cafeteria trays fell off a shelf and clattered to the ground.
He didn’t come back that night. He didn’t come back the next day. Ed and Fred held their grumbling tummies and chewed at the insides of their plump cheeks and sat on the unsold Danish Modern sofa in the shop and freaked out the few customers that drifted in and then drifted out.
“This is worse than last time,” Ed said, licking his lips and staring at the donut that Albert refused to feel guilty about eating in front of them.
“Last time?” he said, not missing Felix’s quick warning glare at Ed, even though Ed appeared to.
“He went away for a whole day, just disappeared into town. When he came back, he said that he’d needed some away time. That he’d had an amazing day on his own. That he wanted to come and see you and that he’d do it whether we wanted to come or not.”
“Ah,” Alvin said, understanding then how the three had come to be staying with him. He wondered how long they’d last without the middle, without the ability to eat. He remembered holding the infant Eddie in his arms, the boy light and hollowed out. He remembered holding the three boys at once, heavy as a bowling ball. “Ah,” he said. “I’ll have to have a word with him.”
When Greg came home, Alan was waiting for him, sitting on the sofa, holding his head up with one hand. Eli and Fred snored uneasily in his bed, breathing heavily through their noses.
“Hey,” he said as he came through the door, scuffing at the lock with his key for a minute or two first. He was rumpled and dirty, streaked with grime on his jawline and hair hanging limp and greasy over his forehead.
“Greg,” Alan said, nodding, straightening out his spine and listening to it pop.
“I’m back,” George said, looking down at his sneakers, which squished with grey water that oozed over his carpet. Art didn’t say anything, just sat pat and waited, the way he did sometimes when con artists came into the shop with some kind of scam that they wanted him to play along with.
It worked the same with George. After a hard stare at his shoes, he shook his head and began to defend himself, revealing the things that he knew were indefensible. “I had to do it, I just had to. I couldn’t live in that cave, with that thing, anymore. I couldn’t live inside those two anymore. I’m going crazy. There’s a whole world out here and every day I get farther away from it. I get weirder. I just wanted to be normal.
“I just wanted to be like you.
“They stopped letting me into the clubs after I ran out of money, and they kicked me out of the caf?s. I tried to ride the subway all night, but they threw me off at the end of the line, so I ended up digging a transfer out of a trash can and taking an all-night bus back downtown.
“No one looked at me twice that whole time, except to make sure that I was gone. I walked back here from Eglinton.”
That was five miles away, a good forty minute walk in the night and the cold and the dark. Greg pried off his sneakers with his toes and then pulled off his grey, squelching socks. “I couldn’t find anyone who’d let me use the toilet,” he said, and Alan saw the stain on his pants.
He stood up and took Greg by the cold hand, as he had when they were both boys, and said, “It’s all right, Gord. We’ll get you cleaned up and changed and put you to bed, okay? Just put your stuff in the hamper in the bathroom and I’ll find you a change of clothes and make a couple sandwiches, all right?”
And just as easy as that, George’s spirit was tamed. He came out of the shower pink and steaming and scrubbed, put on the sweats that Adam found for him in an old gym bag, ate his sandwiches, and climbed into Adam’s bed with his brothers. When he saw them again next, they were reassembled and downcast, though they ate the instant oatmeal with raisins and cream that he set out for them with gusto.
“I think a bus ticket home is about forty bucks, right?” Alan said as he poured himself a coffee.
They looked up at him. Ed’s eyes were grateful, his lips clamped shut.
“And you’ll need some food on the road, another fifty or sixty bucks, okay?”
Ed nodded and Adam set down a brown hundred-dollar bill, then put a purple ten on top of it. “For the taxi to the Greyhound station,” he added.
They finished their oatmeal in silence, while Adam puttered around the apartment, stripping the cheese-smelling sheets and oily pillowcases off his bed, rinsing the hairs off the soap, cleaning the toilet. Erasing the signs of their stay.
“Well,” he said at length. “I should get going to the shop.”
“Yeah,” Ed said, in George’s voice, and it cracked before he could close his lips again.
“Right,” Adam said. “Well.”
They patted their mouth and ran stubby fingers through their lank hair, already thinning though they were still in their teens. They stood and cracked their knuckles against the table. They patted their pockets absently, then pocketed the hundred and the ten.
“Well,” Adam said.
They left, turning to give him the keys he’d had cut for them, a gesture that left him feeling obscurely embarrassed and mean-spirited even though – he told himself – he’d put them up and put up with them very patiently indeed.
And then he left, and locked the door with his spare keys. Useless spare keys. No one would ever come to stay with him again.
What I found in the cave,
(he said, lying in the grass on the hillside, breathing hard, the taste of vomit sour in his mouth, his arms and legs sore from the pumping run down the hillside)
What I found in the cave,
(he said, and she held his hand nervously, her fingers not sure of how hard to squeeze, whether to caress)
What I found in the cave,
(he said, and was glad that she hadn’t come with him, hadn’t been there for what he’d seen and heard)
What I found in the cave was the body of my first girlfriend. Her skeleton, polished to a gleam and laid out carefully on the floor. Her red hair in a long plait, brushed out and brittle, circled over her small skull like a halo.
He’d laid her out before my mother, and placed her fingernails at the exact tips of her fingerbones. The floor was dirty and littered with rags and trash. It was dark and it stank of shit, there were piles of shit here and there.
The places where my brothers had slept had been torn apart. My brother Bradley, his nook was caved in. I moved some of the rocks, but I didn’t find him under there.
Benny was gone. Craig was gone. Ed, Frankie, and George were gone. Even Davey was gone. All the parts of the cave that made it home were gone, except for my mother, who was rusted and sat askew on the uneven floor. One of her feet had rusted through, and her generator had run dry, and she was silent and dry, with a humus-paste of leaves and guano and gunk sliming her basket.
I went down to the cave where my father spoke to us, and I found that I – I –
I found that I couldn’t see in the dark anymore. I’d never had a moment’s pause in the halls of my father, but now I walked falteringly, the sounds of my footsteps not like the steps of a son of the mountain at all. I heard them echo back and they sounded like an outsider, and I fell twice and hurt my head, here –
(he touched the goose egg he’d raised on his forehead)
and I got dizzy, and then I was in the pool, but it didn’t sound right and I couldn’t hear it right, and I got my clothes off and then I stood there with them in my arms –
(his hand came back bloody and he wiped it absently on the grass and Mimi took hold of it)
Because. If I put them down. It was dark. And I’d never find them again. So I bundled them all up and carried them over my head and I waded in and the water had never been so cold and had never felt so oily and there was a smell to it, a stagnant smell.
I waded out and I stood and I shivered and I whispered, “Father?” and I listened.
I heard the sound of the water I’d disturbed, lapping around my ears and up on the shore. I smelled the sewage and oil smell, but none of the habitual smells of my father: Clean water, coalface, sulfur, grass, and lime.
I picked my way out of the water again and I walked to the shore, and it was too dark to put on my clothes, so I carried them under one arm and felt my way back to the summer cave and leaned against my mother and waited to drip dry. I’d stepped in something soft that squished and smelled between my mother and my father, and I didn’t want to put on my socks until I’d wiped it off, but I couldn’t bring myself to wipe it on the cave floor.
Marci’s eye sockets looked up at the ceiling. She’d been laid out with so much care, I couldn’t believe that Davey had had anything to do with it. I thought that Benny must be around somewhere, looking in, taking care.
I closed my eyes so that I wasn’t looking into the terrible, recriminating stare, and I leaned my head up against my mother, and I breathed until the stink got to me and then I pried myself upright and walked out of the cave. I stopped and stood in the mouth of the cave and listened as hard as I could, but my father wasn’t speaking. And the smell was getting to me.
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