“Hi,” I mustered.
“Hi, Cullen. You look great,” Alma said.
“So do you, Alma.”
“Thanks.”
What I noticed about Alma Ember is that she didn’t seem nervous at all. I guess that is what the world does to you. Or what growing up does, anyway. She seemed quite comfortable to be riding in the backseat of a seventeen-year-old’s car with a bunch of high schoolers who I’m sure she’d told herself she’d never see again. I, on the other hand, couldn’t think of a time when I’d been less comfortable. Lucas could tell this from the way my eyes shot at him through the rearview mirror, so he tried his best to distract us all by talking about almost getting bitten by a snake that day while helping Mr. Branch build a fence.
Soon after, we pulled into one of the few functioning drive-in movie theaters in the country and all got out to get some food. I bought Alma a small popcorn and a Diet Coke and bought the same for myself, feeling a little embarrassed to order a diet drink, but not embarrassed enough to drink a real Coke, which I found and still find to be too syrupy. She kissed me on the cheek to say thank you, and I believe that I felt something quite like the feeling one gets when he drives over a steep hill on a country road. From that small moment forward, I began to grow more and more confident and less and less like the usual me.
I couldn’t stay focused on the movie long enough to gain any sort of interest, because Alma Ember had set her popcorn aside and opted instead to nibble on my left earlobe. While that was quite enjoyable, I felt overcome with an uncertainty of what to do with my hands. So I just continued to eat popcorn as Alma Ember continued to cannibalize my left side.
When one suddenly feels a young woman’s hand crawling up under his shirt, he instantly pictures her having an argument with her ex-husband, who he imagines is much larger and stronger than he is. He sees himself eating supper with Alma Ember in Pizza Hut when this large man rushes through the door, picks her up with one arm, and smashes his face in with the other. He sees Lucas Cader jumping through the window to pick up a chair and break it across the giant’s back. Soon Mena Prescott is on top of the checkout counter doing a cheer that spells L-U-C-A-S and Lucas Cader is holding Cullen Witter’s head as red trickles down from his hairline and his eyes go glazy. He dies there, on the dirty, burgundy carpet of Pizza Hut, for a few sessions of mediocre sex with a used-up college dropout who does nails on the weekend for extra cash.
I could have very easily walked Alma Ember into her house that night and walked myself out the next morning, but I didn’t. I didn’t even leave the car. Alma kissed me on the mouth, backed up, looked let down, and then crawled out of the backseat. Mena Prescott could not stop giggling, and Lucas told Alma to have a nice night.
“That was awkward,” Lucas said, driving back across town to my house.
“Very,” Mena added.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I knew what they meant.
“I mean, she was ready to take you home, Cullen,” Lucas said.
“You think?” I asked. I knew he was right.
“Uhhh. She was all over you all night, you dork,” Mena butted in.
“She must be really desperate.” I laughed.
“You didn’t like her?” Lucas asked.
“She’s okay. A little too serious, though.”
“Too serious?”
“Yeah. I just wanted to watch a movie and eat some popcorn. That’s all.”
“Cullen. You’re the only guy in the world who would say what you just said, do you know that?”
“Yes, Lucas, I am aware.”
“Maybe you just need to date younger girls, you know, ones that aren’t so ready to get married and all that shit,” Mena suggested.
“Maybe I’m leaving Lily in a year and can probably find someone much better!” I yelled.
“Cullen Witter, folks! He lives in the future, only he does it today!” Lucas shouted out the window as we passed an endless span of trees, grass, and nothingness.
Gabriel wasn’t in his room when I got home, so I sat down on his floor and watched an old movie on his TV. Mine had been broken for a week. It took me less than fifteen minutes to fall asleep on his floor. When I woke up I had done that thing where you accidentally roll over on one arm and it goes completely dead in the middle of the night, but since you’re asleep you don’t know and so it just lies there under you all night and when you eventually wake up, it feels like there’s no arm there at all. In the mirror I noticed that the side of my face that had somehow been firmly planted into the wooden floor was solid red and had two creases running horizontally across it. I brushed my teeth. I took a long shower. I washed one side of my face better than the other, thinking that I might wash away the redness. I stepped out of the shower and onto the rug, which rested just beneath the bathroom heater. I lifted my head, closed my eyes, and let the hot air rush across and over my face and down my body, not drying me but warming me enough to regain feeling all over, as if I were riding in a hot air balloon. When I went into the kitchen, my parents were eating breakfast together and talking about bills. I fixed a bowl of Cheerios and sat down beside my dad. He looked over at me and grinned.
“You slept on that floor all night, huh?”
“Yes, I did. And a better night’s sleep I can’t remember!” I shoveled a spoon full of cereal into my mouth as Dad breathed hard in the place of saying, Ha! Ha!
“Where’s your brother?” my mom said as she sat down across from me.
“Haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon,” I replied.
“Oh, how was your date, Cullen?” Dad asked.
“Boring.”
“That’s a shame. You’ll find the right person one day,” Mom added.
Book Title #76: This Popcorn Tastes Like People.
It was three hours later and after calling everyone we knew and driving around town twice that we decided to call the police. It was a Thursday when my brother, the Left Hand of God, disappeared. It was on this same Thursday that John Barling appeared on national television to talk about the Lazarus woodpecker and how it had come back from the dead. Lucas Cader had been sitting beside me on the couch all day and into the night, jumping up the same way I did every time the phone rang and shaking or tapping his feet just as I was. Mena Prescott had brought over some food for everyone that evening and had stayed only long enough to reassure me that everything was going to be all right, long enough to tell me that these things happen all the time. I’m not sure why, but I wouldn’t talk to anyone but the police for that entire day. Not to my parents. Not to Lucas. I couldn’t make myself speak. I wasn’t crying. I was just silent, sitting there with my eyes glued to the TV screen, listening to my parents being interviewed by two cops in the dining room. When Lucas crawled onto the floor and fell asleep, I simply let my body fall over onto the now-empty couch and followed his lead, until I was woken up for my turn with the police.
When one has just been questioned by a policeman about the last time he saw his little brother, he walks quickly to the driveway, hops into his mother’s green Toyota Corolla, drives five miles to the banks of the White River, and jumps into the water after stripping down to his boxer shorts. Under the water, he screams “FUCK” over and over as water fills his mouth and his nose begins to burn.
Lying faceup on the riverbank with water flowing over my feet and between my toes, I began to imagine that the Lazarus had swooped down and landed beside me on the mud. It approached me very slowly but with the full intention of getting as close as possible. Its beady black eyes and long, white bill kept me from noticing that it stood a good two feet off the ground.
“What do you want?” I asked the bird.
“I want to help you, Cullen Witter,” the bird said back, in a voice that sounded quite similar to that of Woody Woodpecker.
“Help me do what?”
“I want to help you find your brother,” it said, expanding its huge wings and then tucking them back into its sides.
“You
know where he is?” I asked the bird.
“I do. And now I’m going to be famous. I’m going to be the first bird to ever find a missing child. I’m going to be on TV!”
“Cullen!” I heard a shout from above me. It was Lucas.
“Down here!” I yelled back.
“What are you doing?” Lucas asked, looking down at my mostly naked body lying half in the mud and half in the river.
“I needed to cool off.”
“Feeling better now?” Lucas asked, maneuvering his way down the rocky little hill that led to the riverbank.
“Not really.”
“At least you’re talking,” he said, sitting down on a big rock that was half-buried in the mud.
“Any news?” I asked.
“Nope,” he answered.
“Lucas, he’s dead.
I know he’s dead.”
“Cullen, look at me,” Lucas said sternly.
I looked up and could barely see him for the sun in my eyes, but noticed the tear streaming all the way down the side of his face, down his neck, and stopping at his shirt collar.
“Your brother is not dead.”
“Yes, he is,” I said, sitting up.
“Screw you, Cullen,” Lucas yelled before punching me in the face and walking back up to his car.
Dr. Webb says that losing a child will oftentimes bring about the end of a marriage. In the two weeks following my brother’s vanishing off the face of the Earth, my parents seemed to be closer than ever. My dad had stayed at the house every night, refusing to go on any out-of-town runs or to stay away from my mother for more than a couple of hours at a time. They also became very protective of me around that time, not letting me stay out late or go out of town or even hang out at Lucas’s for very long.
I mentioned the punch to Lucas on one such occasion that I was allowed to hang out at his house, and the conversation went a little like this:
“Lucas, you punched me in the face. You maniac.”
“I was upset. Sorry.”
“It didn’t hurt anyway,” I said, laughing.
“Cullen, you still have a black eye.”
“That’s not from you. I slipped and fell on a rock right after you left. It was the damnedest thing!”
“Dork,” Lucas said, drawing back his fist and pretending to swing at me again.
Those two weeks were mostly uneventful save for the massive forty-man search party that the police department somehow coaxed into hiking through the woods all around Lily and canoeing down the river. After searching for four days in a row, they had found nothing. In those two weeks, Lucas and I had nearly searched all of the surrounding area ourselves, had kayaked down the river twice, getting out to search random sandbanks and things like that. We found nothing. On the Thursday following Gabriel’s disappearance, my family and Lucas all drove to Little Rock, stopping in every small town on the way to post photocopied MISSING posters with my brother’s school picture on light poles, park benches, and pay phones, and in the windows of stores. We did the same in Little Rock.
Here’s the problem with a fifteen-year-old boy going missing: No one thinks he has been taken. Especially Gabriel, who looked to be my age. Everyone in town, though they didn’t say it, was thinking the same thing: Gabriel Witter has finally run away from his family. That, or he went hiking through the woods and either got lost or got eaten by a bear. Here’s what I knew: My brother was taken from me. He did not run away, because he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He would never. And he’d never gotten lost in his life.
Two weeks to the day after waking up on my brother’s bedroom floor, I knocked quickly and nervously on Alma Ember’s front door. Her mother opened it, and her eyes were wide and surprised to see me standing at her door at nine in the morning.
“Cullen Witter!”
“Hi, how are you?” I said to her, my hands in my pockets.
“No. How are you?”
“Oh. I’m fine.”
“Have they found anything yet, baby?” she asked with a hand lightly touching my shoulder.
“No, ma’am. Still nothing.”
“Well, I know something’s got to turn up sooner or later.”
“Yeah.”
This is what my life had become in just two short weeks. It now consisted of about a hundred of these same exact conversations a day with everyone I happened to see around town. The monotony of it made me want to disappear too. After a few seconds of silence, Alma’s mother finally stepped aside and invited me in. She asked if I was there to see Alma. I said I was. She turned her head slowly, put a hand up beside her mouth, and yelled, “ALMA! CULLEN WITTER IS HERE FOR YOU!” like she was sitting in the stands of a football game. Alma entered the room, and I suddenly remembered why I had thought to turn down her street and walk up to her door.
“Cullen! Hey!” She hugged my neck. I was getting a lot of hugs around that time.
“Hey. I thought you might wanna do something. I was bored.”
“Uhh. Sure. Let me put on some shoes.”
When we got into her car (I no longer trusted myself to drive), I looked over at her and she looked very nervous and very quiet.
I said, “Alma, if it’s okay with you, can we try not to talk about my brother today? At all?”
“Okay, Cullen.”
“Okay?” I asked.
“I understand,” she said, and then kissed me on the cheek.
For lack of anything else to talk about, it took only half an hour before Alma Ember and I were lying half in and half out of the White River in the very place that I had talked to an overly confident woodpecker, made out with Laura Fish, and been knocked out cold by my best friend. When I rolled over onto a sharp rock and yelled in pain, Alma Ember mistakenly thought that I was in the vocal throes of passion and continued to flail about on top of me, only pressing my back deeper and deeper into the jagged rock that was nearly at my spine. Finally I had to do the only thing I could think of and powerfully lifted Alma Ember up and back so that she went flying into the water. I stood up, felt my back, and brought forward a hand filled with bright red. Alma began to say things like “You bastard,” and “What the hell are you doing?” until she noticed the blood in my hand and I turned around to show her the large, deep cut.
A really awkward phone call home to my parents, a trip to the hospital, seven stitches, and two and a half hours later, I found myself sitting on Alma Ember’s bed. I was completely naked save for a pair of gold-toed socks and a cross necklace that I’d found in my brother’s room. Alma Ember wore even less than that. After she showed me what being a good wife had taught her—her words, not mine—I fell asleep under the watchful eyes of a dozen or so porcelain dolls.
When one wakes up alone in a partially married woman’s childhood bedroom as her mother is vacuuming the carpet and smiling, he thinks about turning into some sort of liquid that could melt right into the bed and seep into the floor and under the house. When he realizes that he is still very naked and covered only by a thin white sheet, he closes his eyes as tightly as possible and prays for God to make a tornado rip through the house and carry the woman away so that he may slip out and make it to his afternoon shift at work. Alma’s mother begins to whistle as she vacuums right beside where his face is resting, and then she turns off the vacuum with her foot. She looks down at Cullen Witter as he looks up at her with dread and shame. She leans down, kisses him on the forehead, and continues on with her vacuuming until she exits the room, still whistling the same tune.
“How was it?” Lucas Cader asked me as he hopped up onto the counter at Handy Stop that afternoon.
“Don’t be a perv,” I said back.
“I can’t believe you just went over there like that. Crazy.”
“I know. I was bored.”
“I wouldn’t say bored so much as you were a little bit—”
“Don’t say it, Lucas,” I said. He said it anyway before hopping down from the counter and grabbing a bag of Doritos.
“We
should go to that town meeting tomorrow,” he said with a mouth full of chips.
“Why? They haven’t even found the damn thing yet.”
“Because. It’s something going on here. Lily has an event. We have to go.”
“You can go. I can’t be around all those people. Too many ‘I’m so sorry’ faces.”
“Come on. Don’t you want to meet the famous John Barling?” Lucas asked sarcastically.
“Oh yeah. I wonder if he’d sign my imaginary autograph book with his imaginary pen from his office where he writes articles about imaginary birds,” I joked.
“It could be real, don’t you think?”
“I think I don’t care. I’m tired of seeing posters for that bird in the place of posters for my brother. I’m tired of reading articles about that bird instead of ones about my brother, and I’m tired of hearing John Barling’s voice on the radio and seeing his face on the TV when he is talking about that bird instead of talking about my brother.”
“Shit,” Lucas Cader said quietly.
“Shit, indeed,” I replied.
Book Title #77: Praying for Tornadoes.
CHAPTER SIX
Benton Sage
Benton Sage found his reception to be somewhat lukewarm when he returned to Atlanta that humid June morning. His father leaned against a wall, arms crossed and eyes glaring at the floor as if to indicate that he did not wish to be spoken to. His mother hugged his neck in a way that suggested he needed a hug very badly. And his sisters, the twins, kissed each of his cheeks before saying, “Welcome home, brother,” and walking toward the escalator.
Benton would learn later that day that Reverend Hughes wished to see him as soon as possible. Benton assumed that he had already been given another, better mission to serve his church. In Reverend Hughes’s large office, the sun filtering through the stained glass heated up the room to a sweat-inducing temperature. Benton wiped his forehead clean as Reverend Hughes began to speak.
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