“How was she today?” I asked Teardrop. “Did you hole up in your shell or did you keep an eye on her?” I looked over at him, a sharp, angry look. And I could see one of his shiny, wet eyes looking at me. And it melted me. My tone was angry and I knew it. “Sorry,” I said to Teardrop.
It was quiet for a while. I didn’t expect anyone to speak. I was used to quiet.
But then my mother reached out and I took her hand. She looked at me, squinting as if I were very, very far away. Her eyes were glassy. “Be sure to get every bit out. All of it.”
She meant the contents of the gull’s stomach. This was what killed the gulls, blockages. “I will.”
As the wind grew strong and the trailer shuddered, I boiled water, soaked the gull, pulled its feathers. I opened its stomach, bloated with bits. I listed the items aloud to Teardrop, “A pen cap, a bit of mesh netting, candy wrappers, a bobbin, caps—two red, one green, no blue—the small head of a doll.” It was all bright and densely packed. A small cosmos. A failed ecosystem. “Do you think we’re all doomed?” I asked Teardrop.
His head was slightly out of his shell and I could tell he was worried—about the storm, about my mother, maybe the contents of the gull’s stomach, and being doomed. It was hard to tell with Teardrop.
“Let’s say a few words.” I bowed my head. “We’re sorry for this loss. We’re thankful for Luck.”
That was that.
I prepared the gull for the pan and began cooking it.
The trailer smelled of propane and the meat starting to take heat. My mother moaned and kicked in her dreams. The sky broke and the rain pounded down on the roof. The short trees kicked. It grew darker and darker though still day. The lightning was bright and searing. The thunder got louder, clapping overhead and shaking the air. Sharp winds battered us and everything trembled. Teardrop’s shell rocked against the flooring. I picked him up and sat on the pallet that I’d set up next to my mother on the sofa, holding him close.
I sang a bit to Teardrop and my mother—who loved my singing—and to the storm itself. I sang to our harvest too. I wanted it to want to stay put in the storm. I wanted it to feel at home with us.
When the gull was fully cooked, I pulled some meat for my mother, but she wouldn’t wake. I mashed some meat into Teardrop’s mash and set it outside of his shell. He poked out and nibbled.
I ate some myself, quickly, as if it could all be taken away.
I looked out on our lot. The rains weighted the caps. Water puddled then pooled.
Night descended.
I tried to sleep but was fitful and restless. I was terrified of what might happen next, and, sometimes, overcome with the need to know, I would get up and throw on the floodlight to check on our lot. The caps were kicked up by the wind. They were rising with the water and scattering. Some of red’s lot was in ours. And ours was mostly in green’s.
I kept an ever-watchful eye on my mother, waiting for the fever to break. It didn’t. She tried to get up to go to the bathroom, but she said that the pain was now gnawing her hip. I fitted myself under her arm. “I’ll get you there,” I said.
But she said, “No, get me the pan.” And she peed in the pan. I helped her situate and clean up and lie back down.
I tipped the pee pan into the toilet.
And just then the wind died down for a moment so I stood still and listened. And I heard the fake baby from Red Lot crying. It lasted only a moment. But in that moment, I was sure that the fake baby was as real as any real living being. I was sure that the fake baby was part of me. It was like the fake baby was my own cry—sent out of my body and voiced by its little lungs and throat and mouth hole.
And I wasn’t just my father’s Lucky lazy sperm and my mother’s Lucky wobbly egg and my DNA, stuttered and toppled.
I was as blur-made as the fake baby. I was part of everything else and everything else was part of me—or it had been, at some point, or it would be, at some point.
And I was Teardrop—in his shell. And I was my father—wherever he was.
I was the old man and the fake baby and the fake baby’s parents.
I was the storm.
And I was my mother—as her body was dying—because something in me was dying with her.
And I was already dead a little because I was the gull.
And they were all me.
For that moment.
Then the wind roared in again. And the thought was consumed by noise. Eaten.
It was all wind and storm and thunder and the rattling of the trailer and the gusting of things pitching wildly around in our lots.
I moved to the window in the front of the trailer and looked out. I saw the old man. He was whipped by the wind, soaking wet. But he just stood there, as if asking the storm to carry him away.
In the dead middle of the night, the electricity failed. I said, “It’s OK, Teardrop. It’s OK. We expected this.”
I put Teardrop on my chest. His weight felt good. I held him. I said, “It’ll pass. And we won’t lose our whole harvest. We won’t. And storms sometimes kick up more things from the gulf’s pit-stomach. And we might do OK, all things considered. Are you listening? Do you hear me?”
But then, an hour later, my mother’s breath went shallow. I settled Teardrop on my pallet and propped a flashlight in the corner of the sofa so I could see her. Thin faced. Her eyes were closed but not all the way and so I could see her wet blue irises darting under the lids. I put my hand on her stomach, then to her burning cheek. Her eyes kept flitting, mad as moth wings. I shivered then too, but who wouldn’t?
“I’m getting the medicine!” I was loud because the storm was loud. “I’ll put it in your mouth. You won’t be in pain.” But, in truth, I knew she couldn’t really hear me. She wouldn’t be able to take the medicine. It was too late. “Mama,” I said. “Mama, you’re going to be OK. You just need to burn through the fever to the other side.”
And then she stopped breathing.
I put my hand on her chest. She took a rattled breath in and out.
Then nothing again.
Then another breath.
And quiet.
“Keep breathing,” I said to her. “In and out. Keeping going. Please.”
The storm was giving up, going quiet. The rain was lighter. The lightning had passed.
She took a few more breaths with long lulls and then finally the lull went on and on and on. And I knew she’d taken her last.
“No,” I said. “No, don’t go.” I was shivering hard now, inside and out. “Teardrop,” I said, “we can’t let her go!” I rubbed her arms and her legs, her hands and feet. I knew she would grow cold, and I wasn’t ready for that.
Morning light tilted in the windows. And I was tired. My body was slack. I put my head on her chest.
“Teardrop,” I said, “she has left us and we’re alone.”
I picked up Teardrop and went outside. It was quiet, windless. Our lot was wrecked. Our harvest was just a scrim of floating blue caps. The rest had been washed away, scattered and blurred with green and blue and bags and straws and buckets and the whole lot of it. Plus, the limbs and brush from the short trees and the parts of our trailers that were ripped clean off.
The old man wasn’t in his yard and he wasn’t looking out from his door.
The man from the Red Lot—with the fake baby strapped to his back—was gathering their caps. The woman was using a rake, making piles and picking through them.
But I couldn’t tend to my own lot. I had to take my mother to the bury-man.
And I had to do it fast or someone might find all my strewn blue caps and, if that someone was allowed to also collect blue caps, I could lose my whole season. Or a poacher could come and take it all and sell it on the unseen markets.
The bury-man lived out beyond the tarp fields. But I didn’t want to leave Teardrop, not alone, not now, after everything. In times of trouble, people could get excited and loot a trailer they thought was empty. They’d eat a turtle. They would.
I took all of our money with me for fear of looters, but I would also need much of it for the burial. I put Teardrop in a sack and carried him on my back. And I wrapped my mother in the fire-engine sheet and I carried her, cradle-like, in my arms. She was light. So strangely light. As if made of airy bones.
I trudged uphill. I was desperate to go to the shore to see what had been hurled up from the pit-stomach. But I knew that would be wasteful. I needed to bury my mother and then go back to collect my harvest, as fast as possible.
I walked quickly through uprooted lots. Whole rows of trailers were bashed. Splintered, hobbled. Harvests lost. Where before there were always color-coded lots, now there were just swirls of color like the innards of the gull’s stomach—everywhere.
When I started uphill through the tarp fields, they were a mess too. Plastic sheeting had flown all around. There were no paths, no stacks, only swirls of plastic. I had to tromp them down and push through. I had no free arms so I was pushing through with my head and shoulders. Hunched over my mother’s body, I was soon surrounded by the mess of it, hemmed in all around. And my mother wasn’t as light as she’d first seemed.
The workers shouted to each other. I couldn’t see them at first. I only heard their voices. But eventually I got my head above it all and I saw them grabbing corners and shaking the tarps out. It would be forever before they were sorted and laid out to dry again.
Finally, I was high enough to look back at the distant shore. It was clotted with what the pit-stomach had offered. I couldn’t see what, exactly, but it was a lot—thick and wild. Pickers moving among it. It called to me. The memory of my mother’s voice was in my head, You never know what you might find out there.
Hope, that’s what she meant. And curiosity is just a form of hope.
Not now, not yet, I said back to her in my head. You need to be cared for and put in a safe place forever.
There was a road. I followed it to the bury-man’s house.
I’m not sure why I was surprised, but there was a line of people with their dead. And off to one side, amid the mounds, a fresh open pit being filled.
The bury-man had put up tents to move through the line faster. I was sent to someone other than the bury-man himself. This man was lean and bent at an angle so his upper body cocked off to the left. “You want to watch?”
I did. “Yes.” I took Teardrop from the sack to let him walk around a bit inside the tent. I didn’t ask if this was OK and the man didn’t seem to notice.
“You’ve got the money for this?”
“How much is it?”
He told me and it wasn’t too far off from what I’d figured.
“I have half now and I’ll have the other half later, after the season.”
“This season? There will be no season, not after the storm’s wreckage.”
“I’ll have the money.” But if someone stole my blue caps, I wouldn’t. I had to move fast.
He accepted this because he knew that bury-man had a way of getting people to pay their debts. I didn’t want to owe bury-man—not anything, ever.
The man worked quickly on my mother’s body, which wasn’t fully rigid yet. He spun her body in clear plastics and adorned the exterior in caps, cut bottles to cuff her arms and hands, straws to show off her long, thin neck.
“And her eyes?” the man said. “You want old kinds of caps, right?”
“I do.”
It would cost me more, but he covered her eyes with old caps—the shiny tin types—and her eyes were protected and they glinted.
And he said a few words. “She will be returned to the earth and brought back anew.”
I wasn’t so sure about this.
“Are you ready?”
My hands lighted over the caps and bottles and straws. “Goodbye,” I said and then my voice choked off. I picked up Teardrop, and he seemed to say his goodbyes too.
I nodded to the man that he could take her.
He tarped her body then, with great efficiency. He called to others, and they carried her out. Laid her to rest in the fresh pit, I guess. I didn’t follow.
I knew that I needed to get back to my lot. But I felt weak and blotted out. I felt ill made, a blur. I felt erased. Teardrop was back in the sack but I had it attached to my chest now. I wanted him near my heart, which felt skittish and light. It pattered but was dim.
Someone will steal my blue caps.
Someone might already be stealing my blue caps. …
And, yet, I was drawn to the shore—what I might find out there. Curiosity, hope. I couldn’t help it. It was downhill, and as I swam through the tarp fields—shoving my body forward, kicking as hard as I could—I didn’t think about anything else but what might be there.
Anything …
Curiosity, hope …
As I got close, I started to run. I passed the bashed trailers and upended lots and kicked through the debris until I could hear the gulf itself. Luck … Luck … Luck.
I had found a fresh-dead gull. My mother had died. But Teardrop and I survived the storm. And the trailer wasn’t bashed. What did this mean for my Luck? Was it gone? Was it sluggish, wobbly, and toppled?
I got to the shore and it had already started to take on the stink of rotting fish and sea creatures. They were laid out—so many dead. Some jellied, some big ribbed, some snouted and whiskered, some with fins, some with suckers. They were splayed amid the bounty of air conditioners, slides and playhouses, pet cages, big yellow tubs. … Ziplocks and chip bags and water bottles bobbed and swayed with the waves and foam, gliding in and out, in and out. The gulf still knew how to breathe. And the pickers were already jumping and running, dismantling and dragging off and packing up what they could.
I climbed on the hood of a dryer. I opened the sack on my chest. I took Teardrop out and I showed him what there was to see. We turned a small circle. It was chaos and loss and opportunity. And the shiver of just before was constant inside of me. I missed my mother and my father. I let myself miss them for a few minutes then I told myself to stop. Because I was changing. I had to. I was becoming someone else.
And then I heard it.
It was a very soft sound. A gurgle. A sputter.
I hopped off the dryer. “Do you hear that, Teardrop? Do you hear it?”
Teardrop heard it too. His head was upright in the light salt breeze. He was gazing around with his wide eyes and curved beak.
I followed the noise. It grew louder. Gasp and gasp again.
And then, a cry—sharp and bleating.
I moved around the grille of a bus and there, in a dip in the sand, was a baby. Wet and surrounded by foam.
I knelt down beside it, a knee on either side of its bare feet. It was naked. I set Teardrop in the sand beside me. “Is it real?” I asked. Its face was not a blur. Its fingers were not one unit. Each of its toes had a toenail all its own. It had boy parts. “Or is it just very high quality?”
Teardrop nestled into the sand. He missed sand, I knew.
I pinched the baby’s nose and he didn’t like it. He shook his head.
“Luck,” I said. “Tell me, Luck. Is this a gift or a curse?” There was no need to save a fake baby. It would weigh me down with the burden of love. A real baby was precious, a small, strange miracle, but it would eat and grow and eat, leaving less for me to survive on, less to pay back the bury-man.
I picked up the baby. I just stared. The baby took in my face. He didn’t cry. And I remembered again what I’d thought before my mother died—when I dumped the pee pan and the storm went soft for a moment.
“Do you have something inside of you that makes you who you are?” I asked the baby.
But then I looked around at everything that would become something else. Each of us is borrowed from others, every bit of us, recycled. “Or … ,” I whispered, “are you part my mother? Part my gone father? Part the old man? Part gull? Part storm?”
I looked down and Teardrop wasn’t there—only his sand prints. Then I saw him headin
g back to the gulf, as quickly as I’d ever seen him move. Maybe in saving him, I’d trapped him.
I knew he would die out there.
And I let him go. But I knew then, I am part Teardrop. He is part me. We are made of each other. And he’ll die out there in the gulf’s pit-stomach and, when he does, I will die a little too.
And I think this is why I feel like I need the baby—because the baby is alive.
Quick, just like that, I put the baby under my shirt, cupping his rump, and headed home.
The baby’s skin was soft against my stomach’s skin.
But no, that wasn’t quite right.
It was more like this—the baby’s skin was soft, and then, the very next second, the baby’s skin was also my own skin.
Big, Dark Hole
Jeffrey Ford
The school and its fields that are the basic setting of this story don’t exist anymore. They were turned into a housing development about forty years ago. I suppose most of the teachers, if not all, are dead. The principal, Mr. Torey, who had a habit of rubbing his throat like the ghost of a hanged man, collapsed in the 15 ITEMS OR LESS aisle at the King Kullen grocery store five years after I graduated from high school. A guy who’d been in the math class I’d failed twice and had failed along with me (I forget his last name but his first name was Jeeb) told me about Torey’s demise at a party one night while we were sharing a joint in the basement of this girl’s house. He told me Torey suddenly leaned against the checkout counter, like he’d been punched in the gut, and on his way to the floor croaked, “Why?”
Sewer Pipe Hill lay at the edge of the woods, a pregnancy of naked dirt that rose out of the ground and was a perfect launching spot to test out racers. We made go-carts with bicycle training wheels, old baby-carriage wheels, the wheels from shopping carts, and wooden milk cartons with one side banged out for a seat, rope for steering, and two-by-fours rescued from the dead witch’s shack deep in the woods where the sassafras grew. When we took the boards from her partially dismantled home, we set what was left standing on fire and ran like only we could through the trails and over the fallen trees, through the sticker-bush tunnels.
A Cabinet of Curiosity Page 7