by Lucy Taylor
At thirteen ignorance isn’t something you readily admit to, so Jimmy and I remained silent.
“Why the Chinks did,” he growled. “They don’t teach that in school?” He shook his big head in dismay at the gaps in our education. “You know why they invented them, no?”
Except for the buzz of mosquitoes and the glug of bullfrogs down by the water, the evening was pin drop still. The Captain lowered his voice as though getting ready to divulge a dangerous truth. “Why, to scare off demons, of course! Mogui they’re called in Chink lingo.” He pronounced it ‘maw gwey.’ “Like tapeworms they are, wriggling around in your head, plantin’ evil ideas. Dem Chinks first tried to get rid of the mogui by burning green bamboo that crackles and pops, but the mogui just howled with laughter. So the Chinks stirred gunpowder into the mix to make a helluva hullabaloo, and dat’s how we come to have firecrackers.”
Jimmy, who was usually so quiet you’d forget he was there, suddenly piped up, “You been to China, Captain? You seen them mogui?”
The Captain leaned closer, waggling the five fingers on his right hand and the three that remained on his left. “Sure I have! Been to Shanghai and Fuzhou and all dem little no-name villages in between where they make firecrackers the traditional way—wrap the powder in paper rolls skinny as chopsticks and tie ’em together in chains half a mile long. Dem tings go off, it sounds like the Battle of Xiaoting! You watch close when they explode, you can see the mogui flyin’ back to hell where dey come from. They never fly in straight lines, either—dem evil spirits are afraid of straight lines, that’s why the Chinks build their roads crooked—they fly in spirals and corkscrews and look for someplace to hide—” He tapped his temple, shaking loose a droplet of sweat that rolled down to his jaw and dripped onto the grass. “—dat’s when they start lookin’ to find a way into your head!”
Goose bumps rippled up my arms when he said that.
I glanced at Jimmy and saw, to my irritation, that he was lapping this up, his blue eyes big as dimes. I wanted to ask him where he thought somebody like the Captain would get money to travel to China and learn about demons, for Christ’s sake—did Jimmy think he made millions of dollars selling this shit?—but I also knew from observing the adults in my life, that people will believe just about anything if they want to badly enough, no matter how it flies in the face of what deep in their hearts they know to be true.
“How them mogui decide whose head to live in?” Jimmy asked, taking it all so seriously that I wanted to punch him.
A few seconds ticked by while the Captain’s expression mimed grave consideration of the question. Finally he said, “Dem mogui can tell when a man wants to do bad tings. They know when he’s weak.”
The Captain’s small, squinty eyes roved the purpling dusk over the lake. I couldn’t tell if he was looking for mosquitoes or mogui or what, but at that moment, I sensed something important, something I filed away deep within me as truth: the Captain was talking about himself, no one else. It was his brain that festered with evil, and whether that meant it was mogui infesting his head or just his own wicked nature, I figured it didn’t much matter.
I looked at Jimmy, who was doing his part to scare off the mogui by lighting a sparkler and spinning it. “C’mon, let’s get out of here!”
“What, Marcus, you scared of them mogui?” Jimmy said, the red sparks shooting off into the dark.
“I tink he is,” said the Captain. “I tink he scared the mogui want him.” He looked directly at me, baring his overlapping gray teeth in what passed for a grin, making me feel he was stripping me bare—seeing not just a shy, scrawny kid, but the murky secrets, the half-formed inclinations of the man I would someday be.
And even though I knew I was too old to believe in demons, my throat went dry and my stomach clenched. I pictured the mogui like tiny winged worms, skinny as shoelaces, flying in zigzags as they tried to nest in your hair or burrow through your skull. Without thinking, I reached up and probed my head for suspicious fissures, wondering if even now vicious mogui, tiny as nits, might be lurking there and if they were, how would I know until I did something terrible?
I jumped to my feet. “Fucking bullshit, that’s what this is!”
The Captain grunted a laugh, heaved his bulk up from the chair and leaned into me, so close that I could smell the bourbon on his breath and the Ben Gay that he rubbed on his knees. He jabbed my forehead with the boney nub of his missing index finger—poke-poke between my eyes. I felt something pass between us, something that later I would remember as both repugnant and seductive, like the nasty cover of a porno mag glimpsed in a stranger’s hands on a street corner, repulsive and shameful and utterly alluring. A dark tickle streamed from that maimed hand into me, and a red thread of pain and excitement pinged its way up my spine. I could feel my face turning crimson while something else, much worse than a blush, was happening lower down.
The Captain’s voice was a gritty whisper, meant just for me. “Dem mogui know what you want, boy. I do, too. I can smell it on you.”
My hands fisted with fury. I wanted to smash in his leering, lopsided old face. How could he know anything about me, when I barely even knew myself? My longings were blurry and furtive, hidden even from me.
My anger, however, was murderously clear.
“Fuck you!” I shouted and shoved him away as Jimmy gasped in horror. Jimmy still idolized the Captain, thought he was some kind’a traveling magician who knew about foreign countries and dark scary stuff, but I knew different now. I saw him then for what he was, a fucked up old freak, and I hated him with something I’d never experienced before, a violent rage and the itch to inflict harm that can only be provoked by abject humiliation. Even now, when the mutilated finger was no longer touching my skin, that black tingle in my forehead reverberated. Liquid, like an oily filth, seemed to be filling my skull. I backed away from the Captain, then I started to run. I yelled out, “C’mon, Jimmy!” thinking he’d follow me like he always did, but I never looked back to check. By the time I stopped running, I was already half-way back home.
And Jimmy was nowhere in sight.
««—»»
TONY’S FIREWORKS EMPORIUM turns out to be in a cinderblock roadhouse that must have been a low-rent drinking establishment at one time. Beer decals cover the grimy windows and a jukebox with an Out of Order sign taped to the front stands just inside the doors. The proprietor blows onion breath in my face and tries to sell me on attending a Demo Show tomorrow night. “Bring the kids, learn ’em how to use firecrackers without blowing off a hand or a finger!” He barely listens as I describe the Captain, but as I’m leaving, he cups his crotch like a lost friend and says, “Hold on there, I did see this t-shirt might interest you.”
“A t-shirt?” I figure he’s trying to sell me some crap, and when he plops a meaty paw on my shoulder, I have to fight the knee-jerk reaction to deck him. “Last year, ‘bout this time,” he goes on, oblivious to how close he just came to spitting out teeth, “my grandkids was visiting from Mobile. Brats the bunch of ’em, but I love ’em to death. Oldest boy come in here wearin’ a shirt’s got KablAM! on the front. Said he bought it at a tent a few exits up. Brolin Road, I think it was. Pissed me the hell off him spending his money when I’d’a gave him one ‘a my awesome “It’s Blow Shit Up Day” t-shirts for free!
“You wanna see one? I got ’em in all colors and sizes,” he says, rummaging around under the counter as I bolt out the door.
Exits flash past on 55 South, a gaudy smear of fast food outlets, gas stations and mini-marts until finally, near a sprawling development of tract houses on the outskirts of Brookhaven, I spot the Brolin Road exit. Beyond it, a circle of colorful pennants flap outside an orange and yellow tent and a trio of signs spaced a few hundred feet apart exclaim, in ascending order: GREAT DEALS—BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE!—FIREWORKS! Adrenalin sparks through my veins and my blood pressure soars into heart attack territory as I screech off the exit and park on the edge of a litter-strewn lot.
This time of night, there’s only three other vehicles, one of which is a white van with Galaxy Pyrotechnics on the side that obviously belongs to the vender. Most fireworks sellers put in a 24/7 shift in their tent, grabbing a few hours sleep on a cot rather than having to pack up all the inventory every night and unpack it again the next morning. Besides, there’s always a few customers who trickle in—insomniacs, night shift workers, people half-pickled who decide now’s the time to stock up on Whistling Moons or Glittering White Willows.
Pretty names, right? Almost romantic, like a perfume some painted-up crone in a high-end boutique spritzes at women as they walk by. Not really what you’d expect to call objects whose sole purpose for existing is to explode.
I park in a dark corner of the lot, well away from the other cars. Before I get out of the Ram, I reach under the passenger seat and check the hidden compartment I installed there years ago. It slides out at the flick of a lever, revealing the shiny black Glock 17 .9mm. Take it with me? My first impulse is no—after all, I’m only checking things out, and besides, after all these years, no way would the Captain recognize me as Marcus Bujeau, that angry, insecure kid who freaked out when he talked about demons.
But as I continue to stare at the tent through the mosquito-speckled windshield, an undercurrent of nausea roils my gut, and I change my mind—in addition to the nightmares that plague me the week of the Fourth, sometimes I also get hunches. And I remember those KablAM! t-shirts well—Jimmy and I’d each bought one that last July; he had his on the night he went missing. I tuck the Glock under my belt, concealing the bulge under my loose-fitting work shirt. I can feel the metal gouge into the small of my back as I stroll toward the tent.
««—»»
The night Jimmy vanished, I thrashed awake, convinced I could feel the nip of needle teeth and hear the whir of spidery wings nesting in the furrows of my brain. In my confusion, I remembered only that the mogui-demons feared fireworks and knew there was only one place close by where I could get some.
Back at the Captain’s tent, I could hear the rumble of his deep, drunken snores; my mouth filled with a loathing that clung to my tongue like decay. I snuck into the tent, struck a match, and began lighting and throwing the fireworks. Within seconds, the roof of the tent was ablaze, the air thick and unbreathable with the reek of gunpowder and sulphur. I staggered outside, dodging fireballs and screaming aerial repeaters, and watched the silhouette of the Captain stumbling about inside the tent, blinded and burning in a scorching cascade of color.
I woke up the second time that night terrified that the dream had been real and that I’d actually blown up the fireworks tent with the Captain inside.
But the next day, when I returned to the spot by the lake where the tent had been pitched, only an oval of trampled grass and holes for the tent poles remained.
Later, I went over to Jimmy’s house, where his mother, frowzy and tipsy at ten in the morning, assured me that “he’s just off someplace, he’ll turn up.” When, two days later, he still hadn’t shown up, I told my parents I thought he’d been grabbed by the man who ran the fireworks tent, but nobody listened. Jimmy had a reputation as a wild child who split when his parents were fighting, but always came back sooner or later. For a while, suspicion focused on Jimmy’s father, a belligerent boozer who was mean with his fists, but that ended when the old guy woke up dead one morning after suffering a massive stroke.
Before long, Jimmy’s absence was as taken for granted and as little mourned as his father’s.
And Captain KablAM never again set up his tent outside Metairie, which in my mind was proof of his guilt. I vowed to myself that when I got older, I’d hunt him down. Make him tell me what happened to Jimmy. I liked to imagine that when I got through with the superstitious old fuck, I’d crack his skull open and laugh when the mogui went flying out along with his brains.
Now, of course, I suspect Jimmy wasn’t the only boy who fell prey to the Captain.
During the week leading up to the Fourth, I watch for Amber Alerts, do a daily computer check on the NCMEC, the National Center for Abused and Exploited Children, keep track of the activities of organizations like EquuSearch. What I’ve found chills me, but confirms my belief that those demons the Captain talked about where truly a reflection of his own damaged soul. There’s always at least one boy in the ten-to-thirteen range who goes missing, always in the Gulf States, sometimes in a location leading me to believe I’ve missed the Captain by only a few miles and the shittiest of luck. It’s like a sadistic game of hide and seek that I invariably lose, that sometimes drives me to waste precious time suppressing my frustration and rage in a bottle.
There was the Knox boy, who vanished on July 3, five years ago, from a swimming hole in Magnolia Springs, Alabama. The year before that, it was twelve-year-old Roy Dobbs Smith, missing from Denham Springs, Louisiana. Prior to that, fourteen-year-old Dorian Panaga, whose body turned up in a landfill outside Judsonia, Arkansas. Last year, I almost exhaled, I thought nobody had died, until I picked up a paper at a truck stop outside Spanish Fort, Alabama, and saw a picture of dozens of volunteers on foot and half a dozen riders from EquuSearch who were combing the woods looking for eleven-year-old Curtis May, big for his age, who’d disappeared on a wooded trail between his mom’s trailer and a bait store. Never found little Curtis, so far as I know.
Occasionally, after a boy goes missing, I’ll get a lead—somebody remembers seeing Captain KablAM selling out of a tent on this road or that, or someone claims to have bought fireworks from him and can describe his KablAM t-shirt, but no one can ever pin down an exact location or time, and nobody knows his real name. The Internet hasn’t helped. Whatever the Captain’s been doing all this time, he hasn’t been posting on facebook or Twitter; he’s got no presence online. He’s like a mogui himself, elusive and greedy, emerging from hell to play its terrible games before vanishing back into my nightmares.
««—»»
I mull over these things as I make my way past a handful of cars grouped within the arc of the sodium lights. Inside the tent, it’s stuffy and stinking of sulphur and sweat and greasy fried food. Cluttered tables display an eye-popping confusion of canisters, tubes, and boxed assortments of fireworks—everything from the relatively innocuous poppers and snappers and smoke bombs to major firepower like the Saturn Missiles.
I don’t know what I’m expecting when I go up to the counter, but it’s not this: a plump bottle blonde, wearing tight cut-offs and a red halter top with a pink visco fuse looped around her neck as adornment. She’s in her early twenties and fat in a fleshy, sensual way that goes well with the heavily tattooed arms and glossy, fuscia-lipsticked mouth underneath a slender black nose ring. Settled back in a chair, bare feet up on a stool, she’s reading a copy of US Magazine, a can of Red Bull at her elbow.
When I finally pull her attention from the starlet-of-the-week’s latest pregnancy, she sighs and heaves herself onto her feet, looking annoyed when I inquire about the t-shirts with KablAM on the back. “Kaboom? Naw, we got nothin’ like that. This is your basic one-stop shopping fireworks store. You go to Walmart for your clothing needs, know what I’m saying?”
Before she can go back to her magazine, I give her a description of the Captain. She looks monumentally bored, fussing with a display stand of mortar tubes, but when I tell her the Captain worked out of Metairie years back, something flickers across her face.
Then she says in a flat voice, “Nope, never been to Metairie and don’t know no kabob dude either. People don’t stay put in this business. Maybe this guy’s moved on, y’know what I’m saying?” She glances over to where a tall, gangly guy is ripping the cellophane off a box of aerial repeaters and lunges forward like she going to vault over the counter to get at him. Her screech fills the tent. “Hey, you opened that, fella, you just bought it, y’hear!” Rolls her stoned-looking green eyes. “Man, this fireworks business sucks, you know what I’m saying?”
I can feel the Glock scrape the bones at
the small of my back. “You sure that name’s not familiar?”
She picks up the copy of US, shakes it at me like you’d threaten a dog with a rolled-up newspaper. “Look, mister, I’m just helping out here while my boyfriend grabs a few z’s at home. He’s the fireworks expert, been at it his whole life. Me, I’m not into this pyrotechnic shit the way he is. I’m actually a body piercing technician.”
“Your boyfriend, when’s he gonna be back?”
“When he gets here. Who knows?”
But she smiles as she says it, displaying bad teeth and a small silver stud driven through the tip of her tongue.
««—»»
Heading back to my truck, I feel frustrated, discouraged, the ‘hunch’ I thought I was having probably no more than gas from the chicken fried steak I scarfed down earlier in a diner outside McComb. What I really want to do now is head down the road, but maybe I ought to stick around, come back later and talk to Body Tech’s boyfriend.
Before I can consider this further, a patchwork of shadows reconfigures itself ahead to my left, well beyond range of the lights. My hand slides toward the gun, until I see it’s a kid, maybe ten or eleven years-old, with shaggy wheat-colored hair and the kind of vacant expression you’d expect to see on an adult who’s done time. He’s leaning up against the saggy chain-link fence dividing the lot from the road. When he catches me looking, his fingers close over something hidden in his hand.
I nod to him and continue on toward my truck, but the image is hard to dispel—the scruffy, lonely-looking boy, just the kind of child that predators look for. Is he Body Tech’s kid? Did he come here with the cellophane shredder? What’s he doing out here by himself?