So, life as their King has been going OK, I guess. But, I really don’t know why I’m being cool to that dickhead, Terrance. He killed my Momma, for crying out loud! Well, I know he didn’t. Not really. But what he said Momma had to do to get them pills… I could actually be Terrance’s son!
Nah, the math don’t add up. Besides, I can grow a full, manly beard already, and that little shit-sniffer has the face of a rat with alopecia.
My pecker’s twice as long, too! I’m sure of it.
Speaking of peckers, I’m none too certain that Mr. Twerp-pants didn’t actually catch a case of the tetanus. There seemed to be less frolicking and fucking going on in Joyce’s shanty before the dust-up, but it’s been quieter than an absent moon since then. So, his dick may in fact have fallen off!
Poetic justice, as Momma would have said. She was always coining them pretty phrases. Poetic justice, indeed.
Terrance has taken to prolonged absences lately, just like Papa used to. I saw him one time sleeping in one of my hotrods in The Used Car Lot. He was laid up in the backseat, a blanket of holes draped over him. I had gone there to check on my treasure chest that I stashed in the trunk of one of them cars a while ago. I also keep the box of Twinkies in the same trunk. I’ve learned if I eat just one (which is so damn hard!) then I don’t have to worry about shitting my pants. So, sometimes I come here without Sam, even though he can make my cars fly. I just don’t want to share those Twinkies. I’ve shared so much with these Out-of-Towners I think it’s fair to keep one or two things from them.
So, anyway, I know Terrance has been shacking up over there. He’s gone right now, too. So’s Sam. Not really sure what Sam gets up to besides his patrolling, which he takes very seriously, but he’s gone a lot, too. Seems the four of us don’t keep much account of each other anymore. That’s probably the reason Joyce has seemed so sad lately. Even when four people form a family they may never know each other, or even like each other. And when four people share a home, like the one we’ve made of Monster Island, it’s still pretty easy to get lonely, I guess. I mean, I don’t get lonely. A king wants for nothing. But Joyce… poor Joyce. Right now she’s just sitting in front of her shack, writing or doodling away again, lost in whatever it is she’s creating. But her shoulders slump and her skin smells of sorrow. I’m far too much a man to sit in her lap anymore, but sometimes we curl up together and hold each other. Sometimes, especially lately, when Terrance is gone, she calls me into her shanty and we lie next to each other and one of us reads aloud. That’s when it’s easiest to smell her skin. That metallic scent drowned out by a hidden layer of sadness. That sadness—I want to take it away. I want to wash it off every inch of her and watch it dissolve into the grey earth.
Right now she’s just scrawling away and all the trash mountains are sighing.
Take that orange life vest off… a whispering voice on the wind says. You’re too big for it. Take it off and come to bed. Come to bed. Come to bed…
“What are we doing out here, kid?” Terrance asks.
I’m leaning against a rusty old refrigerator sticking out of Lowe’s Mountain at a particularly acute angle. There’s a light breeze, slightly warm, slightly familiar. Terrance kicks at cans at the foot of this mountain. Beneath me as he always has been, a no good dirty can-kicker.
“I thought you could teach me more hunting secrets, Twerp-pants,” I tell him, spitting out the jibe quickly enough that he doesn’t notice it.
“I taught you everything I know,” he says, kicking the last can away, standing in a clear circle of grey dirt. He’s distant, distracted, distraught. He’s a dick. That’s another D-word, so I figured I’d throw that in there! But he seems a bit beside himself. A little slow to react or think. He’s been lagging behind me the whole walk.
Earlier, I’d jarred him awake by shaking the hotrod he was sleeping in at The Used Car Lot. I yelled, “The monsters are coming! The monsters are coming!” and shook the holy shit out of that car and he jolted from his slumber and banged his useless skull good against the roof of that rusty automobile. I let out a good cackle at that, but Terrance just sat there rubbing his scalp with his four-fingered hand, looking unamused. He didn’t do anything but scowl at me, of course, because we all know by now that I own that rat-faced fucker, and he knows it more than anyone.
After a few minutes of my laughter he just rolled over, ready to reenter dreamland and escape my rule, but I wouldn’t allow it. I shook the car again and in a serious voice told him to get out, that we’re taking a walk. He grunted, sighed, sat up, spat out the windowless window, and got out.
Now, here we are at Lowe’s Mountain. In this warm breeze. The grey clouds overhead pulse a dark purple here and there with heat lightning.
I’m leaning against this crooked tooth of a fridge and Terrance squints at me. “I’ve got nothing left to teach you,” he says in a quiet enough voice. A voice free of insult or innuendo.
“Come on, Twerp-pants! Don’t sell yourself short,” I say, crossing my arms.
Terrance looks down into the dirt, puts his hands in his pockets. “Are you actually… I mean…”
“What is it, Twerp-pants?” I ask, this time letting him hear the slur. A smirk twists my lips.
He looks up, and even from all the way up here I can see the red in his eyes, the hollow of his cheeks. Boy, that is one ugly looking motherfucker. Actually, I guess he’s not much of a fucker at all these days. Guess that can do something to a man’s essence.
“Are you sleeping with Joyce?” he asks, matter-of-factly.
“What?” I guffaw.
“You’re… you’re just a kid… and she’s been like a…”
“Come on, spit it out,” I order.
The grey clouds flash and rumble. The grey clouds twitch and shimmy. From up here, I see lighting kissing the cracked world beyond the walls of my Kingdom. There’s a hundred glowing spider legs setting down and dissolving all over, over and over again.
Then I feel the mountain beneath me dance, and a warm wind tongues my ear.
I know what’s happening. And just as I understand what’s happening, the dry fingers of a warm gust try to flick me down Lowe’s Mountain. It doesn’t work. I hold onto that rusted old fridge and push away from it and hear metal on metal and wind fighting against opposing winds and I decide to run up and over the mountain and escape westward, toward The Swill Alps, rather than running down the way I came from. Behind me, a whirlwind picks up ancient boxy TVs and crushes them together, like skulls clacking.
On the other side of the mountain, I’m sucked into the beginnings of an avalanche, and I fall and tumble and chunks of metal flay my back, arms, and legs, while hunks of wood slip splinters into my palms, beneath my fingernails. The deluge slides over me and it grows dark and I just tumble and twirl in a mass of trash, one with it, until finally I hit the bottom and, fortunately, inertia throws all that trash over and past me. I stand and stumble over the mess as a metallic cyclone grows out of the mountain down the path, so I sprint opposite of it, completely lost now, unaware of where I’m running. I’m just running and the sky is pulsing and there’s nothing but clanking, crashing, clacking, creaking, cracking, and clanging in my ears. Nothing but the hot exhalation of God’s Breath swirling about me. My feet kick into a flood of garbage and I leap over tumbling washing machines and sidewinding couches. I’m moving with fluidity, moving with total control of my body, athletic and spry. My land cannot defeat me. My land can only test me. And I’m winning. I’m always winning.
Just then, I see a horse—a big old horse coming straight at me with furious white teeth grinning, hooves sparking, its mane aflame. A horse. In my Kingdom. A goddamned horse. My Kingdom for a horse!
That horse trots and storms and barrels toward me, its nostrils flaring, the sound of thunder beneath its hooves, and, before I can zig, it zags and rumbles right into me.
All this wind and I can’t catch any of it in my lungs. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t! Above me, tin cans, paper,
plastic bags, and jagged pieces of wood churn in the grey air, backlit by phosphorescent clouds, the bellies of long extinct fishes.
Then: blackness.
They’re standing over me again—silhouettes, dark wraiths. Just like that first time I hid from them under The Cellar Door—the place I was trying to find just now as God huffed and puffed and tried to blow my Kingdom down. But I didn’t know where I was running. I was a human cyclone, just tearing over the trash in my path, aimless.
They’re standing over me again, but it’s different. Terrance isn’t with them and instead of disgust on Joyce’s face and sad anger on Sam’s, they look concerned.
“What happened?” Joyce asks, kneeling down, placing a hand to my forehead.
Sam pauses, takes cue from Joyce, and kneels down also, placing his enormous hand on my shoulder and squeezing gently. “What happened, Clyde?” he asks in his slow dumb voice.
“What do you mean what happened?” I snap at them, shoving Sam’s hand away and sitting up into blinding white strips of pain. All those lacerations on my body from sharp aerial objects. And all because someone told me to take off my trusty life vest. Though I can’t recall who that someone was—Momma? Joyce?
In any case, I’m cut up all over. Not just my torso.
I wince and cry out and Sam again puts a hand to my shoulder.
“Clyde, what happened?” Joyce asks, lifting my shirt, inspecting the cuts.
“Goddamned God’s Breath!” I shout at her and wince again. My eyes tear up.
Joyce drops my shirt down, looks at big old Sam. He shrugs.
“What? What is it?” I ask.
“There was no… God’s Breath, Clyde. There was some thunder and lightning, but not much more than usual,” Joyce says.
“No. No God’s Breath, Clyde. No God’s Breath,” Sam tells me, shaking his head sympathetically as if he’s informing me my pet gopher just died.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I ask, scuffling up from the dust. I scan my surroundings. To my left: giant glistening trash mountain. To my right: giant glistening trash mountain. Straight ahead, at the end of the winding grey path: giant glistening trash mountain.
All: undisturbed.
The pathway is even clear, the way Joyce and me keep it.
“But…” I say, no longer interested in my pain.
“Are you feeling OK?” Joyce asks, placing her hand to my forehead. I brush it off.
“It was God’s Breath! It was!” I tell them. “I ran over so many mountains and away from so many cyclones! I did! The only thing that stopped me was… was…”
“Was what?” Sam asks.
“A horse,” I say, squinting up at the behemoth. His planet-sized head moves out of my vision and I’m paralyzed by the sight. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.
I’m shaken from my trance by Sam who’s shaking my shoulder with one big hand and holding something kind of large out in his other hand: it’s half of a horse.
A merry-go-round horse. With chipped gold and red and brown paint. And big white teeth.
“This horse?” Sam asks.
Wide-eyed, I stare in disbelief.
“No! No! A real horse!” I say.
Joyce wraps an arm around my shoulder. “Come on,” she says, “we better get you back to the camp and lie you down.”
I wriggle from her embrace and say, pointing at the sky, “If there was no God’s Breath, then how the hell did that happen?”
Joyce slowly looks up and as she does her face seems to melt downward. Sam takes cue and slowly looks skyward, too.
“My god,” Joyce says, placing her long fingers against her quivering lips.
“Mmm…” Sam says. “Pretty.”
The sky, for the first time since I was a dumb little baby, is blue. Bright blue. God-affirming blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. It’s the sky. The true-blue sky. And not just in a dumb old magazine.
We stood quiet for a time, a light warm breeze—the last remnants of God’s Breath, I’m sure—passing over us. Then we trudged up the nearest trash mountain and gazed out upon the world aglow in the sun’s unadulterated white light. It was true, the sky was blue, and it went on forever. It went past the walls of King Clyde’s Kingdom, out into The Great Beyond, pushing into God’s Open Mouth. The shattered earth out there seemed to go on much further than before under this new radiance, and I understood it to mean that God had decided to no longer sigh her deathly sighs because she knows King Clyde cannot be vanquished. Not even by God, herself.
“Clyde,” Joyce says with alarm, snatching my shoulder to steady herself atop the garbage peak. “Where’s Terrance?”
I was relishing in the fact that Terrance had slipped their minds among the commotion and the vision of a brand new sky. But now I’m soured and I don’t answer. Sam playfully kicks an old gas stove and it launches off the mountain and crashes hard down below. He laughs and claps his hands, which sound enough like thunder that I worry the clouds are rolling back in.
“Clyde?” Joyce asks, forcefully.
“I don’t know!” I snap. “God’s Breath started up and—”
“There was no God’s Breath,” Joyce says, firmly.
“There was! Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m not calling you anything, but I think maybe… well, maybe you hit your head or something and… maybe you dreamed it.”
“And maybe Terrance’s diseased dick has made you a deaf, dumb, and blind cunt!” I shout. “It was God’s—”
Joyce silences me, leaving warmth in the shape of a handprint across my cheek after slapping me.
“I’m not in the mood for any of your goddamned games today, Clyde. Where’s Terrance?”
With all the lacerations over my body, like lashes from God’s tongue, I hardly register the pain of her strike. But I feel my eyeballs shrink and my chest tighten and sink back into itself, all the same.
I don’t rub my cheek and I don’t say anything, either.
“Fine,” Joyce says. “I’m going to find Terrance. You come back to the camp and we’ll do something about those cuts. You must have gotten them falling down one of these trash heaps.” She starts, carefully, down the slope, stepping sideways. Halfway down she looks up and says, “Come along, Sam,” and he starts down after her, much less graceful and more like a loping ox (the ones I’ve read about).
“Sam,” I say sternly, and he stops mid-lope.
“Yeah, Clyde?” he asks.
“Stay right there,” I order.
Conflicted, Sam looks down at Joyce, now on the pathway, then back at me. Then back at Joyce.
“Sam,” I say and he looks back at me, remaining in place.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Joyce says. She throws her hands up in the air, pivots, and starts walking away from us, down the grey path, metallic mountains leaning over her on either side.
When she’s a good thirty yards down the way I skip down the mountain, past Sam, and land on the grey dirt below. I take off after Joyce, keeping my distance, and when I notice Sam isn’t following I turn and call him to me. In just a few heavy-footed, giant bounds, he’s walking beside me and we follow Joyce around that mountain, past this mountain, around the bend, then between two trash hillocks then up the way where the mountains get larger and the pathway is littered with papers, cardboard, shredded plastic bags, and heavier stuff like radiators and clunky electric generators. Joyce moves beyond all this trash until she stops, dead in her tracks, and stands slack-armed like a scarecrow nearly come loose of its scaffolding.
As we close in, I see that Joyce is standing next to an old rusty fridge speckled in bird shit, its top door missing.
Then a giant gush of air nearly knocks me to the ground, but it’s only Sam running past me. He makes a short, guttural, wounded cry, quickly kneels beside Joyce, and effortlessly heaves the old fridge up, flinging it off into Lowe’s Mountain where it lands with a thud and sinking crunch.
Joyce doesn’t move.
Sam k
neels back down and runs his hands over Terrance’s collapsed chest. His hands stop before they can touch the head nearly crushed flat. Terrance’s obliterated face. You’d hardly know it was a man at all. And, after all, it hardly was a man at all.
I step between Sam and Joyce and peer down with them at the monstrosity. As I’m staring down upon the once-and-never Terrance, I hear, “Oooh, that’s a good year,” and Papa’s mustachioed face appears atop Terrance’s mangled body, winking at me. He’s holding out a shiny penny. He wants me to take it. I yelp and jump back, my hands instinctively grabbing at Joyce’s and Sam’s shoulders as I do. They catch me and bring me back to them.
“There there,” Joyce says, drawing me close to her.
“Why are you always clinging onto Momma like that?” Papa asks and I start to cry even harder and pull away from Joyce but she tightens her grip, keeps me close to her, pets my head, and shushes me.
“That’s not…” I mumble.
“Shh… it’s OK, Clyde. It’s OK,” Joyce says, gently.
“That’s not my dad…. That’s not Papa!” I shout and push Joyce away.
I run up the mountain, shouting, “That’s not my dad!” but, halfway up, the compulsion departs and soon my tears turn to small laughs and once I’m atop the mountain, surrounded by the bright blue sky, I laugh even louder and point down at that mangled mess of meat and shout again, “That’s not my fucking dad!”
Joyce and Sam look up at me with big, sad, obeying eyes. “And you,” I yell, pointing at Joyce, “are not my mom! You’re not Momma!” I bend over in a fit of laughter and nearly fall down the mountain, but instead, I jump and twist away from them and run back to Monster Island, laughing and singing an old song Momma used to sing to me: “Blue skies, smiling at me! Nothing but blue skies… do I see!”
PART THREE
The Sun My Destiny Page 14