We walked home in the night, the moon risen, and came in, my Ma and I, and for a moment just stood there listening to the empty rooms that were supposed to house Levi who was here bound for his own good. We waited to hear him and as we waited, I felt the dimensions of our small farm kitchen to be changing. Tightening.
Mama cleared her throat. I’ll boil some potatoes.
I nodded and went to sit but couldn’t move yet. I was hearing something. A cry.
Full moon as it was, I felt the light shift its weight and undershade everything like a sunny wound, as if some unearthly presence no one would mistake for God or one of his angels had come to stand in that kitchen door.
My leg in its deadness throbbed. I sat staring at that cracked doorway as if waiting for some miraculous darkness to interrupt the strange brightness of the night when Levi come through the back door and scart us both into paralysis.
I meant no trouble, were the first words out of his mouth. But I got this, and to us he held a baby child, no more than a day old, still bloody from its own sinful origin.
Mama saw Levi with a baby and threw her hands out, splashing her freshly filled water pot and wetting everything, including this feral thing. Where’d you get it? She shouted in a whisper and put the pot down.
Found it, Levi held out the bundle and stuck his lower lip out a little as if still convincing himself of the reality of the thing.
What do you mean you found it, and Mama took that child from Levi.
By the big cottonwood, just lying there, Levi said as Mama laid it down in the middle of the water stained wood table.
I heard it crying when I was bringing the horses in, Levi said and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. It stinks, he said, a wonder nothing ate it yet.
We all stood, then, around that child who we saw then was awake and we looked at its small eyes, lined with the plump swell of birth.
There was a silence as one of the thing’s small hands reached up into the heavy air and tried to grasp it and, failing to bring anything to its small mouth, let out a cry. This small maw made us all stop and look at one another and it was in this moment a cloud finally darkened the moon outside like the old eye was turning away from our unholy creche.
IV
Haley
+
Jeremiah.
= Love
On my notebook. History class. He leans over and writes it. Grinning.
Jeremiah
And then after Levi and six weeks of working fences, slinging barbed line from a coil until his borrowed gloves had worn through, and two months of working outside in the new heat and two months of being lonely as a dead man would, he figured she would be missing him so then—then he decided to go. Back North. One bus ride later. She wasn’t home her mother said, but wouldn’t he like to come in for a nice chat anyway? No thanks, but another day, for sure. He did like Haley’s mom. At least she seemed to care what happened to him. Even if Haley didn’t. He left and took another bus to the Home.
Jimmy’s car wasn’t there so he went in and found Duke, who said All right, All right, Chill Out Man, let me see if I can find her. Her mom said she was going to a party? Okay.
Taylor was there, too. With pills. Taylor was into pills now and said, Man, if anyone needs one of these things it’s you, dude. A Real Chill Pill. Take it. Just swallow it. Jesus don’t chew, what are you fucking six years old?
Handed him a beer, washed it down.
Levi had said he was Dead. Dead to all who knew him. Already gone to that eternal burning place. And he said this, and Jeremiah knew there was no grief. Maybe quiet, secret grief his mother kept folded like she did her own mother’s kerchief in her apron pocket. But no real mourning to stand in for his absence.
Duke was making calls and talking way too long.
Jeremiah kept nudging him, Ask Ask, if he knows where she is.
Duke pushed him away and Taylor kept him there, sitting him down. Dude, just give it a minute. The pill. Give it a minute and it will start working.
Levi said he was Dead and then to Get Dead. Levi his friend. A kid like him that liked trouble. A scrapper. Had said he should have told them if he didn’t want to be dead. But he didn’t. He never tried. I was up here too busy being among the wicked. Inside the wicked. He saw now that he’d had a chance, a door that had been open but that he’d never thought to look for and now it was closed. Now that they knew he had been alive and hadn’t been trying to redeem himself he was truly dead to them. Dead to everyone and everything.
He was sweating. It was a hot night. Hot especially in the Home. Even with the swamp cooler on high. He drank a cold beer fast. Duke got off the phone.
Found her. He grinned.
Jeremiah jumped up. Okay, let’s go. Let’s go, let’s go.
Dude, chill, I mean I found where she’s going to be. Later tonight. Let’s just get some pizza, hang here, preparty a little and then we’ll head out.
Jeremiah drank another beer. He sat on the couch and fingered the spot on his cheek where Levi had punched him, the same spot where Levi’s father had hit him that day after Emma. A red puff that had hurt to touch both times, but he had kept rubbing it this second time. Feeling it. Even after it stopped hurting, he missed the tenderness and touched it anyway.
Smudging his cheekbone until he was back under the cottonwood tree with Emma. He was watching her tell him how righteous their sin had been. It was like she was blind or something and he had been fascinated. He had watched her plan their lives together like they lived on some other planet. Not here, but not there, either. A place with her rules. Her God that she professed to know so well. He had not said anything because there had not been any reason to. He didn’t want to tell her she was right, because she wasn’t, but he didn’t want to tell her she was wrong either. He didn’t want to say No, here is what’s going to happen. They will find out. I will be exiled or maybe even kilt and you will be married to my Pa. Maybe he didn’t say anything because he wanted what she said to be true. He wanted her world to be the right one, the one where they could love each other in some Celestial light that would raise them above the power of man. Of men. Even good men like his Pa.
His Pa was a good man.
My Pa was a good man, he said aloud.
Duke looked up. Dude, what are you talking about?
My Pa.
Duke laughed. You’re rolling. You’ve just been like spacing out. Here, drink it down. And he handed Jeremiah another beer.
Besides, man. The dude was not a good man. He practically left you for dead.
No, dead was Manti’s father. A body. Dead was a body. A body that spoke in blood and asked forgiveness from the river under the earth.
Dead was him, but with a body unspeaking. Unspoken for as of yet. A body too late to ask forgiveness because he didn’t know to claim his life. Didn’t know to show up and state his aliveness. Out twice now. Lost twice now.
There’s no going back, he said.
Dude, you don’t want to go back. We’ve been over this. We’re going to start a business. Make sweet cash. Get the honeys, J-dogger, the honeys! And speaking of, you have got to let this girl go, let’s go do something else, go to another party, find you another ass to get all weird over. Besides, I think she might be getting around.
Duke spoke so fast.
What?
I don’t know, man, but I seen her with this other guy of late. Some douche from Southside.
No. Jeremiah looked at him. No. He looked down. There was a river of light now below his feet, slinking around the torn-up sofa. No. Let’s go. Is it time to go?
Dude, it’s been like ten minutes since we sat down. CHILL. OUT. Drink your beer. You haven’t even fucking touched that beer.
It was so hot. So definitely hot. Like he was already there. Burning in hell. He tried to focus on the label of the beer can. Read the fine print. Before he went back down South, before she said she’d needed a break, one of those nights at her house, she had made fun of him. H
e was trying to start something, and she was trying to read a book for English class, for a test, and she said, Jesus, just ’cause you can’t read doesn’t mean I don’t want to. As soon as she said it, she felt bad, put the book down, tended to his wounds which he played up for her attention.
But now he felt it. How mean that was.
I can read, he said aloud.
Whatever, man. Duke tipped the beer can in Jeremiah’s hand up toward his mouth. Duke, it was Duke. Duke feeding him beer. Not Levi. Duke had never been there. Duke didn’t know any of them.
He would talk to her tonight, they would make up and she would be so sad that he’d gone away, so glad he was back. He’d hold her but then too he would write Emma a letter. Tomorrow he’d write her a letter and say, Maybe you were right. Maybe we were meant to be together in the Celestial light. I’m alive, that’s how he’d start the letter.
I’m alive, he said aloud.
Okay, let’s get you outta here. Some air. We’ll drive around a little. Maybe go shoot some stop signs. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, country boy?
Duke’s hand pulled him up by the elbow. He stuffed another full beer can into his other hand. Roadies.
The road. Pink and hardened sand. Two boys on horseback. Coming to help bury the sinner.
Outside the night air was even hotter. Like the loft of the barn in desert summer. He got in the back seat. Rolled down the windows. He could see one star.
So many stars and they’d hold hands and spin so that it looked like that thing. That old toy they had before the Prophet thought they were a distortion of God’s creation.
Kaleidoscope. That was the word for it.
Spinning until they let go and fell back on the grass of his Pa’s lawn. Him and his sisters. Spinning and singing. Watching the stars keep going round and round even as he lay still until they would eventually stop and look set as ever in their places.
As if they’d never left.
He was there in the desert grass looking up and then he was inside a house.
It was hot, so hot. Bodies were shoving past him in a thin hall, bare skinny shoulders, tattooed forearms.
Watch it, asshole.
At the end of the hall, a kitchen, a lamp hanging over a table. Red cups everywhere. He could feel Duke on his arm. Duke was saying something but then he saw past the table and the bodies around it to the darkness and the stars and the light reflecting back on the glass of a patio door. Past the door he saw yellow.
Yellow. Haley. He was looking for Haley, so they could get out of the heat. Get some place cool. So he could explain to her everything. So she could explain.
So many bodies. Crowd of wickedness. He swam through them.
He finally found her, grabbed her arm. Hey, he said. Hey, look, and he showed her what Taylor had given him. He went to grab her some pills from the baggie and dropped it, and when he looked up she was gone.
Gone and it was so bright under the lamp.
He would find her again and tell her everything this time. About then and now and the great forever. He would tell her he forgave her. That he knew a way to undo all of their sins. He moved to the back door.
Steady man, he heard Duke say.
I’m going to tell her.
What? What are you going to tell her man? Man, don’t say I love you, just don’t. Not a good move right now. You got play a little hard to get, you know?
He reached to the shiny glass of the door, to get past it. To the cool air. The dark. Yellow.
He pushed out and sucked in a breath, like he was getting ready to dive in the swimming hole at home. He waited for the cool to wash over him. But it was hotter. There was no breath. The night hugged around him. Not stars but lights. Wicked city lights. He saw her again in that color he had first seen her in.
He reached out and touched her yellow dress.
Haley.
Not Haley. Another girl, she smiled at him. He couldn’t breathe. He felt the weight of it. What was it? Tucked in the front of his pants. He remembered. Duke had put it under his seat and Jeremiah had reached under from the backseat and grabbed it. He let its heaviness center him. Prophet.
He stood on two feet. So many lights out there. A city view, the house on a hill. So many and each one glittered until it split into a million vertical fragments. It was beautiful. He wished his sisters were there.
What was that song?
Hey, you should sit down, you don’t look so good.
Who was this girl in yellow?
Haley?
What?
You’re not her.
No, probably not, but sit down, I’ll go in and get some water for you.
You are not Haley. He pushed at the yellow.
Her red cup spilled, he had something sticky and orange smelling on his hand. He wiped it on his forehead but it was warm, too. Not cold. Not like the ice that still rattled in her cup. He reached for it.
What the fuck?
She was so loud, this girl. He could hear Duke now, he could hear Duke saying his name from inside.
It was so hot. Hot like hell. He was there, already.
You are not fucking Haley, he yelled. Did he? He wanted to yell but his voice was dry. Gone. Nothing he was saying was coming out. Or was it? The lights seemed to pulse, like they were getting closer. Glittering. He spun around and watched them spin too.
Ring around the rosie . . .
Then he saw her. At the edge of the glow from the kitchen behind him, leaning against a cement wall, staring at him. A cigarette in one hand. The butt glowed when she breathed in and it looked like a small eye of the hellish snake the Prophet had warned him about. Why hadn’t he seen it that first day?
That cool fall day in the parking lot. He hadn’t known then that it would get this hot.
Talk, he would talk to her. He put his hand under his T-shirt and felt the skin on his stomach as cool and damp. Talk. He would show her Duke’s gun maybe. She didn’t want pills but this she would like. She would want to hold it. Together they could shoot at the millions of lights and make them fall from the sky like the fireworks they’d watched on New Year’s. They would laugh. Hold hands. He would get her to see everything.
She met his eye and turned away, talking to someone, a shadow in the darkness. He walked toward her, he felt himself smiling. As he walked, he could feel another weight in his pocket. A rock from the roadside maybe, he had collected them for years. Always there, a weight bumping his leg then and now. But each step toward her he felt lighter.
Even as he remembered it was his knife, not a rock, he felt lighter. Like they were already home. Lights, lights.
He saw the beams of the city lights behind her swell and ebb like each was its own heartbeat. He could see now, they were definitely closing in.
Pocket full of posies . . .
Her name. He knew it. Yellow.
Yellow, he said.
She didn’t turn, he saw the cigarette move to her face. The edge of her turned-away face. No, Haley.
Haley.
His voice sank in the heat. The air between them was so hot, it had burned up his sound again. Like in a dream.
Behind her, now, he could see the lights orange and pulsing, and now flowing into one current, enclosing them.
Haley.
She still didn’t look.
Haley. He said it as loud as he could. Haley, look.
But still she didn’t turn. Didn’t hear him. The lights, the heat muted him.
Haley.
He was right there, and she didn’t even see him. He felt the gun now in his hand like magic, he held it out to her. A golden arm. The river now at his feet again.
Haley!
She still didn’t look.
Haley!
Didn’t see. He was a ghost to her. Dead like Levi had said.
He opened his mouth to scream but then he felt the gun in his hand. Substantial and sure in all this melting air, this watery brightness. The trigger a lighter. Flick. Like when she lit his fi
rst cigarette the day he met her. Flick. I’m Haley, she’d said.
Haley. Turn around. Look at me. I’m here. He could hear his voice waver between his world, and hers. The orange lights now red. A current around them.
Haley. It’s time to come back with me, to the fresh air, the cottonwoods, the breeze, the creek, the blue sky, the red stones, the birds and the crickets and the voices of someone calling their own. Then you’ll understand.
Haley look at me. Look at me. LOOK at me. I am alive.
HALEY.
Haley. Look.
Haley.
Flick, pull. CRACK.
The lights drew back into their fixed and angry places as she finally turned to him. She turned right before she fell.
But she did not fall through the earth. She landed instead on the cracked cement of the patio where grass was growing through.
Haley.
He let his body fall and his knees land on the cement too. No. He crawled to her and knelt. He saw the red opening up on the back of her shirt. White, not yellow. Now red.
No. He had meant to talk to her. Not this.
A blood moon spilling, becoming a river right there on the patio.
Why so much? His Pa had told him: You go wash that blood out then, and as you do, you remember that that’s sinner’s blood, spilt by the sinner to atone for the earthly sin of adultery, and you remember that good.
He put his hands in it. He couldn’t clean it up. He didn’t want to this time.
So are you not afeared of death then, boy?
He was not. Not anymore. He was already Dead.
I can’t let her go without me. He looked up from the blood and saw the lights had converged again around him. Stars and faces all shone on him, screamed their luminations soundlessly at him.
Something told him he should go. Out into the night.
It’s time to get out now.
But he couldn’t let her back there without him. He had to be with her. To show her. To teach her. To protect her. He had to be with her. He pulled his knife from his pocket and opened it, gripping the blade with his palm.
His hand opened for him like a fish gill, but he didn’t feel it. He reached his bleeding hand to the wet flow of her back; their blood would run together now. He closed his eyes but still could not smell the creek. What if she leaves?
Strange Children Page 20