“I love it,” he said without looking up, and I wondered whether he was being sarcastic.
“Really?” I said. “That’s rare, I think. Liking school? What grade are you in?”
“Ninth.”
“Lots of friends?”
Now he looked up, and I saw something change in his face. Maybe it was my interest in talking to him, or maybe it was the thought of someone he knew, but he smiled a little and set his fork down. And Ernest, too, set his fork down. When I turned to look at Ernest, I recognized a look I hadn’t seen in so long; it was a look of confusion and wonder.
“I love people,” he said, in a voice not quite his own. “I’m in drama at school. I like to act. My drama teacher is a really cool dude. He rides a motorcycle. I’d love to get a motorcycle someday.”
Ernest stabbed his chicken with his fork. I wondered whether he would react to Wyatt’s motorcycle comment, but he didn’t appear to be listening. “Motorcycles can be dangerous,” I told him. “Our son had one for a while, but we never liked it. Get a car when you’re old enough to drive.”
He bit his lip. I wasn’t sure if he agreed or what he was thinking, but he remained quiet.
“Wyatt told me he does impersonations,” I said to Ernest. “He said he does a Frenchman.”
“A what?” Ernest said. “A Frenchman? You do impersonations, son?”
Wyatt leaned forward over his plate and glared at Ernest. “That is correct, monsieur,” he said in a French accent. “I can speak like Inspector Clouseau, monsieur. Tell me, what is it you do?”
Ernest brought a bite of chicken to his mouth and looked at Wyatt. I saw his face turn, and wondered if he caught the similarity to Ray-Ray’s impersonations.
“I’ve been all over the world,” Ernest said. “I was like a tawodi, a hawk. I traveled to Germany, Mexico, Canada. I’ve been to the West Coast and all the way up to Bangor, Maine. I was born in ’thirty-nine.”
“Trippy,” Wyatt said, nodding. “The good old days. The radio days. Some great music back then, eh?”
Ernest looked confused.
“Hey,” Wyatt said, “I’ll be right back, cool?”
He excused himself from the table, and I started taking the dishes into the kitchen. I rinsed them off in the sink and put them in the dishwasher. Back in the living room, Wyatt was showing Ernest a stack of records.
“My friends all like Scandinavian death metal,” Wyatt was saying. “It’s garbage, all modern music. I say to them, ‘You kids need to appreciate good music.’”
“What do they say?” Ernest asked.
“Nothing. I tell them to remember the roots. Muddy Waters, I say. Give me vintage jazz. Give me big band. Give me blues.”
Ernest took his hands out of his pockets. “And Sinatra?”
Wyatt puffed on an imaginary cigarette. “He swings, daddio. My favorite swinger.”
He was really warming up to us, becoming more talkative and comfortable, which was entertaining.
“I like your saddle shoes,” Ernest told him.
“Were you in the big war, sir?”
“The big war?”
“World War II.”
Ernest paused. “I was born in ’thirty-nine. I was too young.”
“What about Vietnam?”
“Vietnam? No, I was stationed overseas in Europe.”
“I want to hear all about it,” Wyatt said. “I want to hear everything.”
I was surprised at how quickly Ernest answered the questions, all from memory. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, since that was such a big part of Ernest’s life, but it was so long ago, and he rarely, if ever, mentioned it anymore. I felt a surge of hope.
For a while I listened to the two of them talk about old movies—Rio Bravo, The 39 Steps, East of Eden. They talked more about music. Wyatt said he had alphabetized his records by artist, including a set of old 45s, all of which he’d either found in record stores or antique shops or been given by grandparents. He mentioned some names that sounded familiar: Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, Count Basie—the list went on. I found it all so strange, this obsession with these old records, and wondered why they were so important to him that he needed to show them to us.
“You like the oldies, cha-cha-cha?” he asked Ernest. “What about the hard stuff? The Jesus Lizard?”
“What the heck are you saying?” Ernest said.
“Rancid? Skunk Anansie?”
“What?”
“Okay, Pops, maybe mellow is your taste. I have Elliott Smith.”
Ernest stared at the album covers while Wyatt unpacked a spiral notebook that had all the records listed by artist, album, year, and record label, an entire catalogue he’d spent hours on, claiming he wanted to be a serious collector of vintage music.
“I only keep my top eight with me,” Wyatt said. “I have forty-three records total. The rest are at my aunt’s house in Kansas. She enrolled me in dance lessons last year, and I had to practice the Charleston with her while my cousins watched. They’re all squares.”
Ernest burst into laughter. It was the first time in months I had heard him laugh.
Ernest turned and looked at me, his eyes wide. “Is the record player working?” he asked. “Let’s give this a listen. What do you think?”
He handed me a Dean Martin album. For the first time in many years, I turned on the turntable, blew the dust from it, then removed the record from the sleeve and put it on the turntable. I put the needle on the record and heard the scratching sounds I hadn’t heard in many years. The music began playing.
We listened to it for a moment, the horns and piano. It made me think of Italian restaurants from many years ago.
Wyatt said, “Would you dance with me, Mr. Echota?”
Ernest looked at me possibly for help. I laughed a little.
“Dance?” Ernest said to him. “Right now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m old, son.”
“Age means nothing. I just want to dance with you, sir.”
“We’re both males.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“I’m in bad health,” Ernest said. “My back is sore. I’m sure my colon is ruptured.”
Wyatt looked at me, then began browsing through his records, rearranging them, showing them to Ernest, then organizing them in his sack. It was Wyatt’s vehemence, I think, that brought Ernest to fall into a type of trance, staring at the boy.
WHEN IT WAS TIME FOR BED, I didn’t need to tell Wyatt to brush his teeth. In the bathroom he removed his toothbrush and toothpaste and brushed. He even flossed, leaning as far as he could over the bathroom sink to study his gums and teeth in the mirror, rinsing and gargling with mouthwash, closing the medicine cabinet when he finished.
“I’ve learned to be fastidious about my hygiene,” he said. “I’ll need to be up by seven to get ready for school.”
“I’ll make you breakfast,” I told him.
I bid him good night as he closed his bedroom door. Then for a moment I stood in the hallway, listening at the door. I heard the squeak of the bed. I heard him move around under the covers. Then I stepped lightly down the hall and into our bedroom.
Ernest was standing at the window beside our bed, looking outside. I saw his shadowy reflection and asked him what he was looking at, but he didn’t respond. I put on my nightgown and got into bed while he continued to gaze out the window.
“Ernest,” I said, and he leaned forward and put his hands on the window. His face was close to the glass, as if he saw something.
“Ernest,” I said again. “What is it?”
“I had some moccasins when we were first married,” he said. “Do you remember them? My father made them for me before he passed.”
“You remember the moccasins?”
He half-smiled into the window, and I felt like a miracle was occurring. Something had jarred his memory. I could barely breathe in my astonishment.
“That boy gives me a good feeling,” Ernest said. “That boy, Wy
att. It’s Ray-Ray.”
His words overwhelmed me. I sat up and turned to him. “What are you talking about, Ernest?”
“It’s Ray-Ray,” he said again, still staring out the window. “He’s come home.”
Edgar
SEPTEMBER 2
The Darkening Land
IN THE EARLY-MORNING FOG I left the motel room and took a train to the Darkening Land. I kept hearing Sonja’s voice over and over: Come home, Edgar. Mom and Papa want to see you, Edgar. What the hell are you doing, Edgar. I wasn’t going home though, at least not now. I didn’t want them to worry about me, and if I called them, they would worry. They would harass me about not going to rehab. Then they would threaten to drive back out and have another intervention, which I didn’t want. I thought I could handle everything on my own. I wanted them to feel proud of me, not ashamed, so I thought I could find a job and show them I was doing okay. Maybe I wouldn’t go home to the bonfire, or maybe I would. All I knew was that I needed to leave Albuquerque for a while.
Everyone I saw on the train looked dead, but I knew they were all sleeping. I saw their bodies slumped, mouths open. Outside the world flew by. I wasn’t able to see anything except fog. In the window I saw my smoky reflection. I leaned against the cold glass and tried to sleep. A man a few rows in front of me stood from his seat. His spine was badly crooked, and he bent forward, craning his neck to look back at me. I noticed that his eyes were bulging, and blood trickled from the side of his head. “The suffering, the suffering!” he yelled, coughing dust and smoke.
Another man and presumably his wife were in a seat across from me. The man was sleeping, and I could see mosquitoes covering the man’s face. Just then he woke, swatted them away, and blew his nose into a handkerchief. “I don’t feel well,” he told his wife.
“You’re pale,” she said. “You have no color. Your face is empty and dead.”
“I don’t feel well,” he kept saying.
He was so ashen and eaten by sickness, it was impossible to tell how old he was. By the time we pulled into the station, I wasn’t feeling well either. At some point during the trip I had developed a headache in my right temple. The longer I was on the train, the worse I felt. I had the taste of battery acid in my mouth. I sat and waited while others got their bags and exited. I had my own bag, which I slung over my shoulder as I walked off the train.
Attempts to call Rae from the station proved pointless. I couldn’t get a signal on my phone. The station was empty and dim, with no windows open and only a janitor sweeping the floor. Above us, a light buzzed and flickered. As I headed for the door, I recognized, surprisingly, a guy named Jackson who was a friend from childhood. He had thinning blond hair and wore glasses that magnified his eyes. He squinted at me, and for a minute I wondered if he recognized me.
“Edgar,” he said. He pointed at me, the way we pointed at each other as a gesture of greeting back in school. I approached him, and we shook hands.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, and he laughed.
“You don’t know? Well, finally, somebody from back home is here.”
“I got on a train,” I said. “I was in Albuquerque and needed to get out. I don’t know. I left, and here I am.”
“You look different, Chief. We used to call you Chief, remember? Everyone goes through a metamorphosis, I guess. We change appearance, don’t we?”
“My hair’s gotten longer since the last time you saw me,” I said.
“It was always long, Chief. I probably look sick from all this heavy air. The sun never comes out here.”
He invited me to stay with him. I agreed, and we walked to his car, a battered thing smelling of rotting food and cigarette smoke.
I knew Jackson in high school, back when he was a misfit. Maybe we were both misfits. For a while we would shoot hoops together. He couldn’t jump very well, sat on the bench. In ninth grade I was one of the taller kids and could touch the rim. I could shoot a fadeaway jumper and decent baseline shot, but by my sophomore year I’d injured my shoulder during a game and was done for good. People said I could’ve gotten a college scholarship in basketball or football. I was a good cornerback in football until that shoulder injury. The coach, a white man, compared me to Jim Thorpe. “You even look like him,” he used to say. I made three interceptions in one game, but after that injury I quit all sports, no matter how much people encouraged me.
“Remember when I got suspended for bringing my twenty-two to school?” Jackson asked on the drive.
“Who brings a rifle to school? Fucking nutcase.”
Jackson was still proud of that. I always thought he was criminally insane, but others called him a genius.
In the car, he wanted to hear about what I’d been up to. I told him about Rae and how she left me. “I don’t know if she’s kicking me out of the house or what.”
“You’re here now, Chief.”
“I guess so.”
“I got a job for you. You’re Sac and Fox tribe, right?”
“Cherokee.”
“I was thinking you were Sac and Fox, like Jim Thorpe. What difference does it make?”
I looked at him, unsure what he meant by that.
“We can get around all that,” he said. “I mean, we have this software in development you can help us with. It’s a sports game.”
Jackson jerked the steering wheel, swerving to miss something in the road. The sudden jerk jarred me, and I held the dashboard. “Goddamn,” he said.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Wolf, I think. Or bobcat.”
I felt a sudden and overwhelming fear. Where was I? We drove down a street with little traffic. The world was gray-blue, with snowy fog. Bare trees without leaves lined both sides of the road, though it wasn’t winter. The houses we passed were all older wood-frame houses, with porches and maples and oak trees in yards. I noticed a sign: BEWARE OF AIR QUALITY.
“Where are we,” I said.
“The Darkening Land.”
“Stop saying that. I mean the name of the town.”
“It’s the Darkening Land,” he said again. “Don’t worry. Are you worrying? Do you need to go to the hospital, Chief?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The hospitals here are failures. People can’t breathe here. There’s coughing and disease. I’ve been through six surgeries to correct a broken rib with too much pain. They gave me hardly any pain meds. I wanted the good shit, morphine or fentanyl. The doctors ended up removing the rib while I watched.”
I looked at him.
“I was stabbed in a public toilet,” he continued. “I won’t tell you the details. It was a restroom in a park. I thought the guy wanted sex, but he stabbed and robbed me. Turns out he was a skinhead.”
“You got pain pills at your house?” I asked.
“I wish.”
While holding the steering wheel with one hand, he pulled up his shirt with his other and showed me. I saw a mass of scars on his side. He didn’t want to talk about it further and quickly changed the subject. “People keep themselves entertained in weird ways around here. They play all kinds of games around town. Gaming consoles aren’t keeping them satisfied anymore. But with real-life games, you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Kids are spending twelve, fifteen hours a day playing. Adults, too.”
“What do you mean, real-life games?”
“The new games are augmented reality. That’s what we’re working on developing right now for the game: holograms. Images. What’s real and what isn’t. Structure and chaos. You can be a big help, especially with the sports game.”
“Where the fuck are we?” I said again, more to myself than to Jackson. I had a metallic taste in my mouth. I was still nauseated, and the road was in bad shape, full of potholes, jarring the car every time we drove over one.
“The images are a distraction,” Jackson went on. “People find real-life games more interactive. They get people
out of their homes and communicate more in society. Remember those zombie campus games college students used to play?”
“No.”
“Some students were zombies and some were humans, and they went around trying to shoot each other. It’s like that here, but everywhere, with more people. We’ll have to get used to it. Nothing we can do about it, Chief.”
I questioned everything he was telling me. I wondered if he’d become a compulsive liar or if he was trying to make me paranoid; either way, something was off about him.
He glanced at me, then turned up the radio, but there was no music. There was static, only static.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER WE PULLED into his place, a small brick house with a front porch and flickering yellow porch light. The yard was in need of being mowed, part weeds, and wet from humidity or rain. The air felt heavy as I got my bag from the trunk.
I decided right then I wouldn’t stay long. I felt as though I was in some alternate universe. It reminded me of the black-and-white horror movies Papa used to watch before we had cable TV. His yard was washed out, and everything felt distorted, hazy with movement. I saw the ancient tree in his yard with cracked tree bark that resembled the faces of the dead. I saw insects crawling all over the bark. The insects buzzed, twitching their antennae.
I followed Jackson into his rotting house and asked for water to drink. The living room was warm and bare, with a few paintings on the wall of tanks and aircraft. I noticed model airplanes around the room—on the TV, on shelves, and one in pieces on the dining room table, which Jackson pointed at as we walked past. He said he was working on airplane models and other projects for his work involving holograms.
He showed me my room in the back, with a single bed and small TV and a window that looked out at the backyard. A desk fan was on, humming quietly. I put my bags on the bed and lay down.
“I’ll be back with a glass of water,” Jackson said.
I kicked off my shoes and closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was there again, standing over me with the glass.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. He sat on the edge of the bed. “All the emptiness and isolation is crippling around here. I feel empty inside with no one to talk to. The place drains me of joy. Every day is gray, like Sunday—you know the song. But you’ll get used to it.”
The Removed Page 6