Edsel appeared from around in back of the tent. “There’s no place to plug in the TV,” he complained.
For dinner they roasted hot dogs over a fire an hour and a half in the making because of tiresome quarrels about the proper kindling; the type, the size of the twigs; how to stack the wood; how much newspaper to use; repeated laments that no one had remembered to buy charcoal or lighter fluid; and so on, ritual as much a part of their outdoor meals as the actual eating.
“Only nine left,” warned Maryse, tossing her drained dinner can of Weightlesse into a handy trash bin.
“Life can be hard out here on the range,” commented Dallas.
In the orange firelight their rapt faces were the same color as the wieners. “Isn’t this cozy,” Dot remarked. It didn’t seem to be a question that required a response. She looked at each in turn and, sighing, got to her feet and trudged back into the tent.
“What’s eating her?” asked Maryse.
“Menopause,” said Trinity.
Edsel pointed a mustard-smeared chin at his father and asked, “Dad?”
Long pause. “Yes?”
“Can we go back?”
Dash pretended to look puzzled. “Go back where?”
“Home.”
“You know home is what we’re always moving toward.”
“I mean where we lived for a while with Poly and Minerva. Can we go back there someday?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
Edsel considered this information and then asked, “Are there dero there now?”
“Yes. Probably more than we can guess.”
“With guns?”
Dash looked at his son. “Yes,” he said.
Dallas poked irritably at the ash-encrusted embers with a sharp stick. “Too bad we don’t have any fucking marshmallows.”
The fire crackled and a horde of sparks was sucked helter-skelter up the flue of the night. Trinity was remembering a different campfire in Pennsylvania the summer after Zoe was born when she was sent away to learn how to socialize with other girls by making fun of Fatty Franny and singing the same dumb songs every night and weaving strips of smelly leather into bracelets no one would ever wear and shining a strong flashlight into a latrine hole and discovering a big green turd. That was the summer she ran away for the first time and met the boy with the speckled tube.
“Look at that sky,” Dash exclaimed, craning backward. “The mobile of time wheeling over our heads.”
“God’s dandruff,” muttered Dallas.
Dash stared back at him. “Go on. That’s good. Give me another one.”
“Shit.”
“Frankly, I don’t think you’re in any position to be shitting anybody.”
Dallas scrambled to his feet. “I don’t need this.”
“You need whatever I decide to give you.”
Dallas turned abruptly and started away, hands balled at his sides. At the edge of the firelight he spun around, glaring at Maryse. “We were out in the country, lost for days and days. We fell asleep under a big tree and sometime in the middle of the night all the branches lit up like they were made of glass with wire inside and an army of chuckling dwarves rushed in and stuck a needle in Dad’s eye and carried him off and we never saw him again. They sent a robot to take his place but Mom had already remarried a bail bondsman from Albuquerque. Everyone was very happy. Zoe grew up and went to Harvard.” Then he was gone into the dark. They heard an animal cry and a second in response. “Coyotes,” offered Maryse, but no one laughed.
Dash tossed a paper plate into the flames. “He’s not mine,” he said. Trinity watched the thick paper blacken and curl as if there might be signs in the shape of the ash. Maryse fussed with Mignon’s blanket. Zoe was now locked in the truck cab and could occasionally be heard beating on the dash with an empty Hires can. The father looked into the fire, then up at the glittering sky. He went into the tent where his wife lay as if dead on her cot on top of the unzipped sleeping bag, arms folded over her stomach. He stood there until her eyes met his and in them were neither questions nor answers but sharp facets of light glimpsed for the first time, the deeps of a stranger. The others, outside in the dark, he knew who they were—poisoned spawn. “Guess I’ll check out that road for a ways, see if there’s a store open somewhere,” he said. She seemed to regard him across a hazy uncertain distance. “You are,” she said softly. It seemed to be a statement of some kind. He was going to ask if she wanted anything but instead turned and went out to the car, jangling the keys in his pocket.
Dallas crouched behind a tree, watching the red taillights go bouncing away down the dusty gravel road. He pulled the revolver out of his jeans and slumped against the ribbed trunk, cradling the gun in both hands. He couldn’t look at it enough; it gave him the same clear pleasure as peering through a telescope into the Hostetler bedroom. Edsel was beside him in an instant. “Whatcha got?”
“Nothing,” said Dallas, twisting his body away, the revolver suddenly too large to get back inside his pants.
“Show me.”
“None uh your business. Ouch!” He was tearing hair in his groin.
“I’m gonna tell.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am, you’ve got a gun, and I’m gonna tell.”
Dallas shifted about, displayed an upraised pair of empty magician’s hands. “See, nothing there.”
Edsel lunged forward, grabbing for Dallas’s fly. “Whatcha got in there?”
“Oh, all right, you little shit.” He produced the revolver with a ceremonial flourish. “Happy?”
“Wow!” Edsel reached out greedily.
“No, no, you have to promise not to tell.”
“Okay, I promise.”
“No, you have to mean it. This is the biggest secret you’ve ever had to keep.” He seemed to consider the trickiness of the situation for a moment. “What if I let you shoot it?”
Edsel’s eyes widened. “You won’t.”
“Yes, I will, but we’re gonna have to be extra careful, sneak far enough away from here so nobody will hear it. Promise?”
Edsel’s head bobbed in solemn agreement.
Out by the fire the girls in lambent silhouette passed a joint back and forth. “This way,” Dallas whispered, pushing off into the snarled undergrowth. Edsel kept his head down and stayed close to his brother. These woods were thick and dark and crawling with red marble eyes to spook you and slimy tails to wrap around your ankle and raking claws and dripping teeth. He was sure something was following them, but every time he glanced around it was only a tree offering to shake hands. A chorus of crickets paused in midconcert in eerie salute to their passing. Dallas began making choking noises in his throat like someone either having a heart attack or turning into a monster. He wanted to make Dallas stop but was afraid if he touched him it wouldn’t be his brother anymore. When they came out of the trees Edsel kept right on as though he were still dodging branches, slapping away leaves. He didn’t stop until he hit asphalt. Then he dared to look back. The eyes had to stay there in the woods, out in the open they’d explode like Occupant eggs in water.
They followed the empty rolling highway uphill and down—a novel experience for longtime flatlanders—until Dallas judged a comfortable distance had been inserted between themselves and the unwanted notice of inquisitive ears. He pointed theatrically to a diamond-shaped Warning S Curve sign. He assumed a shooter’s crouch in the middle of the road. The barrel wavered between his hands. Edsel’s face crinkled into an anticipatory wince. There was a flash and a crack, the sound of an ax splitting a dry plank. They listened, staring somberly at one another, pondering the mystery of that long, long echo down to the final faint fuzz tone that passes for silence at the human level. Punched into the metal sheet of the sign was a perfect round hole they touched with reverent fingers, a genuine manifestation of the wonder about which the universe itself was constructed.
“Now can I?” pleaded Edsel. “Can I? Let me do it, please.”
&
nbsp; Dallas positioned him out on the road, demonstrated the grip, the stance, how to squeeze the trigger as if milking a tit. The gun spit and jerked in his arms and the shot went wide, but Edsel was as thrilled as if he’d made the metal ring. He’d entered grown-up land where the power was and you stayed up as late as you liked and smoked cigarettes no matter what doctors said and stuck your dick into girls and there was no school. “Wow!” he exclaimed, giving up the weapon reluctantly. They took turns until all the chambers were empty and a second hole (Dallas’s) had appeared in the sign. On the way back Dallas cautioned, “Now remember, this is our secret. Don’t tell anyone, not Mom or Dad or the girls, because if you do, something bad will happen.”
“What?”
“Try me and see.”
Several steps in musing silence. “I want one, too.”
“When you’re older.”
“I am older.”
“Tell, and you’ll never get one.”
Two yoked disks of brilliant light sailed up over the ridge at their backs and down upon them. They bolted for cover, squatting behind a rotten log until the car, sputtering like a sick beast, hurried past.
“I think that was Dad,” said Edsel.
Boldly Dallas stepped out onto the pavement, planted his feet, and brought up the revolver in both hands, police academy style, aiming into the dark slot between the fading coals of the taillights. He fired. Click! Click, click, click, click.
Inside the Bug Dash hunched cursing over the rattling wheel. The shimmy in the steering column was getting worse, the muffler noise growing louder, the configuration was breaking down. Even the kid in the paper hat at the checkout had laughed, watching him chug into the lot. If he had had a weapon, he might have drilled him on the spot, rifled the cash drawer for kicks. He bought a sixer of cold Bud, downed two in quick succession as if gulping cans of soda water. It was one of those cotton-candy nights with humid darkness packed in around you deep and dense, emotion leaking in a slow faint hiss. There was a queer tightness arching across the roof of his mouth. As he drove, the only radio station kept cycling in and out, an open forum on modern virginity. He had to shift into first on some of these unexpectedly steep hills, but the downslopes he took at speed, coming up out of his seat on the drop, running his own juices through the internal combustion. He missed his turn and had to double back. “Where the hell’s the goddamn sign?” In the dark the camp road looked like the approach to the local dump. Gravel crunched like nuts beneath the tires, popped against the belly of the car. He bounced along down a winding tunnel of pine. Up ahead the tent glowed peacefully, like a paper lantern. The fire was dead, there was no one in sight. He swung the car around, lone high beam raking the hedge, a stand of elegant poplar, a couple of umber picnic tables, and stopped, coming to rest with ordained finality upon the incomprehensible spectacle of some fleshy creature struggling there on the dewy grass, insensate, unholy, many-limbed. The thing rose up, and out of its unfolding reared the startled heads of Trinity and Maryse, deer eyes flashing gold in the bright auto light. For one protracted instant Dash was aware of the serrated outline of each separate black leaf hovering in formal suspension over this scene and the finely particled nature of the cloud of pale dust drifting serenely past the window and the hood of night enclosing all and it was not he who thought, who acted, but a disconnected foot out of mazy dream that hit the accelerator, raced the engine, sent the deadly mass of a car hurtling through space and into a tangled wall of trunks and branches. He awoke against a glass of crushed foliage and the noise of an alarm clock that really someone should heed. When he lifted his head off the wheel, the horn stopped blowing. He touched his face and in the smoking light marked fingers slick with blood. He yanked on the handle beneath his elbow, pushed hard against the door, it wouldn’t budge. He pulled himself over into the passenger seat, heaved his shoulder into that door, branches tearing, scraping at the paint. He covered his eyes with his hands and stumbled out through the bushes, shouting, “I’ll kill you, so help me God, I’ll fucking kill the both of you!”
Dot stood there barefoot in the clearing, trying to fathom the sight of her husband staggering away from their wrecked car like a drunken bully with a torn shirt and bloodied face. “What in hell is going on? I thought we were under attack.”
He stalked on past her. “All right, where are they?”
“Where are who? What’s happening here?”
“Your daughter. Your daughter and her goddamned…her goddamned…”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Did you see them? Do you know what the two of them were doing out here in the dirt?”
“Go wash your face. You look like a lunatic.”
She never saw his hand, only the stars bursting over her head, the shower of sudden light, breaking, cascading, as she reeled away from this private vision of the Perseids.
Down the road ran Edsel, shouting, breathless.
“Don’t you ever hit me again,” she hissed at her husband. He moved toward her. “Don’t touch me. You don’t know what’s coming down on you, you pathetic fool.”
“Guess what?” Edsel cried.
She swung around on her son. “What the fuck do you want?”
Used to that tone of voice, Edsel looked immediately at his father. “Guess what Dallas has got?”
Dot drew the back of her hand across her mouth, examined what stuck to the skin.
“Dallas has got a gun.” And without waiting for a reaction. “Can I get one, too? He said I could. Can I?”
“What?” shouted Dash, incredulous. “What?” He looked back and saw his eldest son sauntering in out of the night as casually as a hayseed reveler just returned from or about to rejoin a noon picnic. “What gun?”
Dallas’s eyes blinked once. “So you told, you little fucker.”
“Don’t hit me.” Edsel ducked behind his mother’s legs. “Don’t let him hit me.”
“Where’d you get a gun?”
“I found it.”
“Found it where?”
“Out on the road. Before we left home.”
“Out on the road, huh. Well, let me see this mysterious gun you just happened to find out on the road.”
Dallas stared at the hand extended toward him. “No,” he said, and with careful feline movements started to edge away.
Dash took a step, then another, arm outstretched straight as a board. “Let me have it.”
Dallas shook his head. “I said no. It’s mine. Nobody else gets it.”
“Okay, we all know whose it is, give it up now before there’s something to regret.”
Wary as scorpions, father and son sidled about one another in awkward dance, the gap between as constant as if each were attached to either end of a long pole, the gun barrel steady as a compass needle on the magnetized stone of Dash’s chest.
“C’mon, Daddy Dick, Zero Time, mess with this you wanna make it happen so bad.” The language already harsh and exotic on Dallas’s mutating tongue because something was happening, upward sweeping toes to scalp one-instant-you’re-you-the-next—backtracking without a glance the ball of the foot (the fin? the paw?) finds the spot that is always correct, slumbering eyes awakened and vigilant now in skin knitting into glassy carapace for the corrosive atmospheres of acid moons where silicon-based sinew tugs against gravity strong enough to warp light. They were on his planet now, there would be no more mistakes. Howling, he raised a claw. Dash leaped. He pulled a trigger. Dot screamed. And surprised at finding himself yet hostage to provincial laws of nature, Dallas was pitched violently onto his back, an ingot of pain hardening in his ribs, paternal fingers grasping at his throat. Fascinated, he observed his own hand, the one clutching the gun, describe a series of furious arcs down into the burred prominences of a head as constant and familiar as the sun in the sky. He wielded the barrel like a brick, the only sound that of the wind in their lungs and the disquieting crack of metal on bone. They clung fast to one another, legs thrashing in the dirt like the tai
ls of archaic monsters. Then Dash’s teeth found the flap of an ear and closed. A bolt of red shot across Dallas’s temple. The gun tumbled easily from his hand. Still gripping him by the neck, Dash sat up atop his son’s heaving body. The fist broke across Dallas’s face like a wooden bat. When it came again exactly the same, Dallas got scared because he knew it was never going to stop. The light turned fuzzy and dark as meat, arrriving in quick sporadic bursts because somewhere a bulb was loose—he could see into the twisted sputtering sign of its filament, understood it was his special task to tighten the threads before the circuits blew, and somehow managed to free a leg and topple his rider and insert a knee and jerk sharply upward until Dash screeched like his daughter and fell away to roll about in the clotted earth, arms plunged to the elbow in the shadows of his groin as if seeking there the promised alembic on the map at journey’s end. Dallas jumped to his feet and ran, and the road ran with him, curling off into the night where all is born and still aborning and a fire without heat or light consumes in an instant the apparitions of this world and the folly that waxes fruitlessly in the vain benedictions of its hectic star.
M31 Page 18