I check the book out with Rosa who enters it in her ledger and tells me it’s due back in five days. I thank both her and Petunia, wave to them, and skip off to The Used Car Lot where I’ve been spending a lot of my nights lately.
6
After I killed that no-good Out-of-Towner, Momma wouldn’t let me fall asleep on her lap anymore or come into their tent at night and curl up with her. Papa would often bitch and complain when I came to their tent to claim (falsely) that I’d heard the monsters beyond the wall snarling and was scared. He’d bitch and complain but Momma would draw me near and hold me and I’d fall asleep to her heartbeat long after Papa stormed out of the tent and went wherever he went when he wasn’t around.
In my later years, I liked it best when he wasn’t around and when I learned how to make him go away, I probably pressed my luck a few too many times.
“Why are you always clinging onto Momma like that?” he asked one day when we were sifting through a trash heap, shortly before I murdered the Out-of-Towner in the blue sundress with the light reddish hair. He’d kick at the epidermis of the rubble mountain and watch it tumble down the slope then glance at the spot he’d just kicked at, pretending to be searching for something. At that time we were looking for an Allen wrench, which was something I’d never seen or heard of so I wasn’t really sure what we were looking for. But Papa said he’d found a bedframe he wanted to put together for Momma. He said it had been tossed out almost entirely whole within its original box. It had the wood frame, the bolts and screws, and even the instructions, but it was missing the Allen wrench needed to put it all together. He said he could have just nailed the thing together or found some other way, but he really wanted to put that bedframe together properly. According to instructions. Just for Momma.
The bedframe was a rare thing, being new, and I imagine if he’d put it together properly, Momma would have loved it.
“Son, why are you always hanging onto Momma like that? You’re twelve years old,” he said.
“Huh?” I asked, turning my attention away from the garbage tumbling down the mountain. I squinted at him even though it was overcast, as usual.
“You’re a big boy, son. You need to grow up. You need to grow up real soon. One day I’m not gonna be here to protect you. Hell, Momma isn’t always gonna be here to protect you, either. Not that she could do much for you. Do you understand that?”
I kicked some garbage down the slope, looked back at him and nodded.
“Good,” he said and started down the other side of Mount Ikea, populated with collapsed dressers and broken bedframes.
“What’s an Allen wrench look like, Papa?” I asked, following behind.
“It’s a little piece of metal, no longer than my middle finger, shaped like an L.”
We scoured at least two whole mountain ranges that day, finding nothing. When the sun began setting behind The Swill Alps, he said we should turn back. That Momma was probably cooking us something good for dinner. This was a regular joke of his. He knew we’d go back Home where our tents were, sit with Momma and eat cockroaches out of the jelly jars we kept them in. We’d drink boiled water and try to come up with things to talk about, but mostly we’d sit in silence, those fat insects crunching between our teeth, their gut-goo spattering over our tongues and sliming our throats.
Of course, having grown up spotting pennies from my father’s shoulders I had acquired quite a keen eye. I counted at least seven Allen wrenches that day. And I kicked all seven away.
7
Yesterday I spent the night in my hotrod that has the tree going through the passenger seat all the way through the roof and up into the closed-off sky. I read the war book until it got too dark then I talked to the tree, who is my gal anytime we’re in the car together. I told her I miss Momma and that I’m sorry Papa never talks to me from the grave. Momma still does but it’s not the same. I can’t sit in her lap or put my hands around her waist and sleep. All I can do is finger her lock of hair and run my hands over her grave marker and the dirt that buried her. Beneath that dirt I know she’s just a skeleton like Rosa and Petunia, and that makes me very unhappy. Momma was bigger than that. She was bigger than life. She was flesh. She was softness. She was everlasting light in an overcast sky. She was a sun large enough to burn clouds and scare away monsters.
So, last night I slept in my hotrod again after reading and talking to my gal. I woke up with a big fat harvest moon dangling beneath the clouds and blinding away the horizon beyond the eastern ranges. It was the most beautiful burnt-orange hue I’d ever seen. I started crying, even. That moon last night was outdoing the sun. It was showing the sun up. It was telling the sun that a cold rock could be just as meaningful—just as easy to worship. And I put my hands together and I prayed to it. I asked it to raise my mother from the grave. I said it out loud. I screamed at the giant moon on the horizon, “GIVE MY MOTHER BACK!” and added, “PLEASE!” I pounded on the dashboard and punched the steering wheel and cried. All in the middle of the night.
“Don’t cry, lover,” my gal said. “Everything is going to be just fine.”
I leaned over and kissed her and held her and we screwed and fell asleep in the brightest patch of moonlight that’s ever existed in the history of time. And it shined right on me, King Clyde The Destroyer.
This morning I paid for it. My dick was all rubbed raw and painful.
But that’s the price of comfort.
So, earlier I pretended I was an airplane for a while, flying over all this shit, until that got old. Then I went to The Library and looked at old magazines with naked ladies showing all of their stuff and I pulled on my junk for a while. I made Rosa and Petunia watch because I like being watched when I’m yanking on my wang. I always make them watch. Sometimes up to three or four times a day. You should see the look on their faces when I shoot all that white stuff all over The Library. I leave it to them to clean up because this is my Kingdom and they are my loyal servants.
Anyway, now it’s time to work.
I know what you’re thinking: You ain’t got no job!
But you’re wrong, see. My job is living. It’s a hard life. Were you born in a dump? Were you born in a dump after the world burned down? Are you living off of Protein Beans and boiled water?
If you were, you’re likely an Out-of-Towner and I will one day gnaw on your goddamned bones and stuff my nose into your marrow. I’ll eat your fucking face off! I don’t have a choice. It’s me or you. And in the end, it’s always King Clyde the Destroyer!
So, right now I’m mining. That’s work. You try mining massive garbage mounds without causing an avalanche and burying yourself in broken furniture parts, plastic bags and bottles, box fans, air conditioners, toilet seats, styrofoam, tires, splintered wood, and thousands of bones of long-extinct animals. Not only that, it’s hot work. Even under a cloud-filled sky. Besides the thick gloves, big rubber boots, and life vest I wear daily, when I’m mining I have to wear some kind of cloth around my mouth.
Because it’s hard, dangerous work, I don’t often mine these heaps. Usually I would only do it when searching for something specific. Like today.
One day I expect I’ll find one of everything but to this day I’ve yet to find a gun. I’ve read about them so much and they hold so much mysterious power of destruction. Given there are at least three Out-of-Towners traipsing through my Kingdom with at least two giant, rabid hounds, I know I really could use such an instrument of easy annihilation. And Sun’s The Art of War advises to take advantage of, and use smartly, all available weaponry.
It seems fruitless, however. I’ve never seen a gun, and, not only haven’t I seen a goddamned gun, but I’ve never come across anything that said “bullets” on it. Even if I find a gun, what would I do with it?
I repeat that wise refrain of mine: You never know.
So I dig through garbage using an ancient device called a shovel.
I just shoved aside an ancient washing machine and watched it tumble down the long
slope and break open when it hit the grey earth. After that, I shovel some decayed paper products and plastic away. Beneath that, there’s a box. A beat-up cardboard box. That’s not too unusual, although most cardboard in this day and age has deteriorated and collapsed. This box, however, is mostly intact. In fact, it’s still taped shut. On the side is a black outline of a tubular monster in a giant cowboy hat, a scarf around its neck. It’s terrifying and hideous. Above it, some fanciful print reads: “Hostess Twinkies, 300 ct., 12,750 grams.” I pull the box out of the hole and toss it down the slope where it tumbles into the busted-up washing machine below.
I guess you do eventually find one of everything. And sometimes even three-hundred! From my reading I know about Twinkies. Everyone said they’d outlast the Protein Beans. Well, they won’t outlast King Clyde the Destroyer!
For four hours I sprinted over and around all the garbage ranges of the southeastern portion of my Kingdom. I leaped and hooted and hollered and sang! I haven’t sung in a long time but I was singing, boy, I tell ya! I was really letting loose! I was just making shit up and it sounded glorious! Better, even, than the stuff Momma used to sing to me, though I did sing some of her songs, too. I ran to The Used Car lot and vroom-vroooomed then I went to The Library, panting, and pulled on my wang nine times—a new record! Then I ran back to The Memory Palace and plotted out the next several weeks in my most current calendar, which has those pictures of cats that remind me of Dante.
Poor Dante!
I also remembered to check when God’s Breath returns, and, boy, let me tell ya, it returns soon! Batten down the hatches, matey!
Then I ran to The Drinking and Washing fountain and filled my canteens, shaking and anxious the whole time—why does everything take so long? Then I sprinted over countless mountain ranges to get to Dante’s Inferno where I hastily boiled my canteens. To cool them off I buried them for twenty minutes in the grey earth, during which I ran around the circle of bones, waving my arms and screaming, stopping every few minutes to push my fingers into the bones, pick something up and scream at it then toss it back, like it scared the bejeebus out of me!
Then I felt a monster ravaging my guts. A tubular monster in a giant cowboy hat with a scarf around its neck.
I ate thirty Twinkies this morning. I couldn’t help myself! I left them, untouched, all night long, devising plans on how I might make a ceremony out of eating my very first Twinkie in my whole damn life.
But, when I woke, I saw that box next to me, still taped up, and I ripped it open, grabbed one of those golden spongy things, tore the plastic from it, and shoved it, whole, into my mouth.
My god.
My god, the sensations that ran through my whole body. It was pure electricity! I couldn’t get enough. So I stuffed another in my mouth, its cream center melting down my throat in a much more heavenly way than Protein Bean juice does.
Before I knew it, I’d eaten thirty golden, delicious, heavenly, creamy Twinkies!
And then I was running.
Boy was I running!
I was so fast! I scaled mountain ranges quicker than those extinct mountain goats ever could have.
But that cowboy-hat-wearing bastard sure started boxing my guts around.
I’ve spent the last two hours, after four hours of pure exhilaration, shitting everywhere! Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I was terrified for my life! I have latrines dug throughout the grounds and I was hitting all of them! I only ate 1,275 grams of Twinkies and yet I’m certain I’ve shitted at least 12,750 grams of shit!
There’s shit everywhere!
How am I still alive?
Holy shit!
Holy shit!
I’m praying to God! I’m praying to the sun! I’m praying to that cold rock in the night sky called Mother Moon!
Spare me!
I survived. Don’t worry. Of course I survived, for I cannot be vanquished!
However, I’ve been out of commission the last few days. I’ve lain out in the broken backseats of broken cars in The Used Car Lot just counting dead trees, sipping on boiled water, and sleeping. My whole body feels hollowed out and I promised myself I’d never eat another golden, delicious Twinkie no matter how long I live—even if it’s for all eternity!
But during my time convalescing, I heard voices. Not voices in my head like a madman, but voices out in the yonder of my junkyard Kingdom. Over the tops of refuse ranges their voices tumbled. There were occasional howls from the hounds followed by the men yelling at them to shut up. There was the raucous clattering of metal and trash being rifled.
The Out-of-Towners are still here!
8
Papa was laid out on his back, at the foot of a massive trash heap called Office Max Mountain, his skull crushed beneath the weight of a metal filing cabinet. I looked down upon him from halfway up the slope. I took a breath then looked down the grey path to the left and down the grey path to the right. I looked up into the overcast sky and those fucking birds were circling. I turned, walked up to the summit, old tin cans trickling down the slope beneath each footfall. I clambered over other filing cabinets and broken chairs. At the top, I looked down on Papa again, that big black metal box obliterating his head, erasing his face. His body perfectly still. He looked so small.
From my back pocket I pulled my trusty slingshot, loaded a cats-eye marble, and stretched the rubber band taught. Releasing the band, the marble whizzed into the grey sky and, THUNK, knocked one of those fucking birds for a loop. Quickly, I loaded another marble, fired, and, THUNK, brained a second bird before it could get away. In rare form, I fired off a third marble before I even realized it, and a third bird twirled, lopsided, to the trash planet below.
I found the seagulls on the other side of the mountain range, all in a twenty-foot radius, digging their beaks into the grey earth and squawking. They made circles in the dirt and screamed, their brains falling out of their faces. Stepping to each, I stomped my big rubber boot onto their hollow skulls and ended them. I didn’t have time to play games. There was no time for the The Wibbly Wobbly Floundering Gull Extravaganza.
I had three whole birds. I was twelve years old. And I had to get back to Momma.
9
They’re in the northwestern corner of the junkyard, a place I rarely go to. It’s known as Monster Island and I’ve abandoned it even though my folks’ colony dug a second well in that corner. The Out-of-Towners are sitting around a big fire about thirty feet from the well. They’re drinking from tin canteens and chatting. Their two large hounds are tied to a stake stuck in the ground. They sleep, heads on their paws.
Behind them, behind the well, is the hole in the wall (wide open) that Momma and Papa had boarded up when I was a baby. They said it’s how the Out-of-Towners got in. It’s how they invaded their land and slaughtered all the men and made off with the women. Where they went, no one knows. But somehow they came from out there—The Great Beyond.
It’s how the monsters got in, as well. At least one of them. I saw it.
I was eleven and I’d come here to gather water when I noticed the boards we had used to patch up the hole in the wall were splintered and broken away. I stopped dead in my tracks, standing atop a nearby pile of garbage, trying not to make a sound even as bits of refuse cascaded down to the grey earth below.
The thing was human-shaped, but its spine stuck out like a V and its arms were too long. It was permanently hunched over and moved in almost sideways strides, always leading with its left foot. Its skin was orangish and covered in a painful-looking bouquet of sores. Its eyes were black. Long, sickly white strands of hair protruded from its mostly bald scalp.
When it got to the well, it drew up the bucket, leaned over, and drank thirstily, slurping and gurgling and gulping the whole time. Scared as I was, I smiled, expecting the monster to keel over right there as the unboiled acid water burned through its throat and stomach. Instead, it grunted and wiped its mouth with long-nailed fingers and dropped the bucket back into the well, drew it up,
and once again guzzled, the water splashing all over its chin and down its hollow chest. It was completely naked. It had no tits, but no dick, either, and I couldn’t tell if it had the gash between its legs like Momma and all the ladies in those magazines and my playing cards.
Maybe this is what happens when you get tetanus, I thought.
As it drew a third bucket of water, I pulled a cats-eye marble from my pocket and loaded my trusty slingshot. Suddenly, it dropped the bucket back into the well, loped over to the hole in the wall and slid through it on its belly. Twilight drew over the land precisely at that moment.
I waited a few minutes and when I was sure it wasn’t coming back I started, carefully, down the slope but was stopped in my tracks again when another body awkwardly came through the hole. Its arms were at its sides and its head was bent at an odd angle. I realized it was wearing a gasmask and wondered if the Out-of-Towners and monsters were somehow working together. My fears seemed to be confirmed when that ugly bastard from before came through the hole after the first body. That body lay in the dirt, unmoving. Grabbing it by the back of its aviator jacket, the monster dragged the body over to the well and propped it against it. I was sure the Out-of-Towner was a man. He rested there against the well, head dropping to the side. Letting out small grunting noises and chirps, the monster drew the bucket from the well and set it next to the man. Next, it kneeled and gently removed the Out-of-Towner’s gasmask.
The Sun My Destiny Page 4