“Wha… what?” she asks, slowly rolling over to look at me here in this rickety doorway.
“They’re here. Get the fuck up. Get up!”
“Who’s here, Clyde? What the hell are you going on about?” she asks, pushing herself up on an elbow and fingering the hair away from her eyes.
“The monsters. The monsters, goddammit! What have I been telling you? Get up. Get up. Get up!”
She finally sits up, lethargic as ever.
“Get to The Cellar Door. Take Sam. He’ll guard it for you.”
“What? Where are you going?” she asks as I turn away from our little home.
I pivot back toward her and tell her I’m going to get the monsters.
“Sam!” I shout as I run toward the nearest trash mountain, Walmart Ridge. “Sam! Watch Joyce! Watch over Momma!”
I scale the garbage slope expertly, no longer worried about tetanus even without my life vest or the big old rubber boots I grew out of years ago. I scale the garbage and land on the other side and quickly run to the wall where I’ve placed two steel drums. I leap atop one, grab the one next to it, and heave it over the wall. Then I pull myself up and over and land for the first time on earth I cannot claim as mine. A silvery pain shoots up my left leg and I fear the touch of foreign soil has poisoned me but soon realize it’s just a sprained ankle. Limping, I grab the steel drum I’d tossed over and walk along the wall dragging and banging on the metal barrel while growling. I growl and I spit and I squeal and I yell. And I bang the goddamned drum.
In my peripheral, the dry land stretches out into nothingness. I can’t even be certain if it falls into God’s Open Mouth or just ceases to exist. Or worse, goes on forever.
Banging on the steel drum I’m dragging beside me, I can’t help but look into that abysmal land. Its impossible distances ebb and flow, coming at me and withdrawing only to fly back at me, turning my stomach. I lose balance, drop the steel drum and trip over it, howling like a monster. The land… the giant cracked earth wants to suffocate me, show me how small I am. I’m not even a Protein Bean. I’m smaller. An ant. A fleck of phlegm in a giant Petri dish.
My breath. I’m having a hard time breathing. I need to shout and scream and growl. I need to let the monster out. But I can’t breathe. Inside my chest, my heart’s turning itself inside out. Sweat rips out of the pores on my forehead, at the temples.
This is not my land.
This is not my Kingdom.
In a wave, my breath comes back to me. I stand and bang on my drum and scream and scream and scream. Suddenly, that land that seemed impossibly wide is rising like a cupped hand ready to sweep the crumbs off the flat table of Earth. It’s coming right at me, obliterating God’s Open Mouth and shutting out the big old beautiful blue sky. A giant wall of land rising into the sky like a tidal wave. It’s coming right at me, knocking the sun from its rightful throne. Knocking Hades from the sky.
I scream.
I bang the drum and scream.
I scream and collapse as the earth comes at me, attempting to swallow me whole.
I collapse against the wall shouting, “Oh, god! Please! Please! Let me in! Let me in!” while I bang on the drum and the wall.
The breech. I don’t see it. They’ve covered the hole back up! Where’s the breech? Where’s my way back in?
Darkness begins to overtake me and my lungs once again reject the air I need.
Then, beside me—right beside me—a sudden gash of brightness. A radiant portal of light and safety.
A vision: a young girl. A young girl in a blue dress. A young girl in a blue dress with yellow flower print. This young girl’s face is hidden deep behind a gasmask. She comes through the light. She comes through the light and holds out her hand. In her hand, a dandelion gone to seed. I take her hand. I take her hand and the dandelion disintegrates and white flecks float all about us, lifting us. A wish. A wish granted before asked. I take her hand and we float up into the bright white light. Up, up into the bright white light, swirled in dandelion dust. Then: darkness. My face. My face is buried in her exposed ribcage. My face is buried in her exposed ribcage and I’m gnawing away at her slippery entrails. My face lacerated by snapped rib bones. My mouth full of blood. My mouth full of blood and life. I swallow. I swallow it all. I eat the life inside her. I take the gasmask from her face. I take the gasmask from her face and it’s Joyce. It’s Momma. It’s Grace. It’s Momma. It’s Joyce. It’s Joyce. It’s Joyce.
“It’s Joyce, Clyde. Come on. Wake up. Snap out of it,” she says, lightly smacking my face.
I come to, cradled in Momma’s lap. She’s sitting up against the well, petting my head, brushing the hair out of my face. She wipes the tears from under my eyes. Sam hands her a canteen and she feeds me, like Momma used to feed me the bottle after she’d no longer offer me her breast. When she stopped offering me her breast. For a time. Joyce feeds me the canteen and I feel my heart unclench and a coolness leak throughout my body, relaxing me from the infectious heat that the outside world injected into me.
“What the fuck were you doing out there, Clyde?” Momma asks, pulling the canteen from my slickened lips.
“The monsters,” I tell her, weakly.
“There were no monsters out there. Just you,” she says, handing the canteen to Sam who stands over us, blocking out the sun.
“Why… why did you cover the hole back up? I forbid—”
“No one covered it back up. Look, it’s as wide open as ever. If you’re so afraid of the—”
“No! It was closed. I was out there… I couldn’t get back in. Because you… you two locked me out. You locked me out of my own Kingdom,” I try to say forcefully, but feel the breath over my tongue wavering lightly.
“I didn’t cover it back up,” Sam offers, blinking his big dumb eyes at me.
“Grace,” I say, though I don’t know why.
“Yes, that’s right. You kept calling out for Grace. Why were you calling out for Grace, Clyde? Why were you calling out for my daughter?”
“Grace,” I say again and slip back into darkness.
“Where’ve you been? You should be resting after that… panic attack or whatever it was you had,” Joyce says from the dank mattress. Again, she’s refusing to leave the comfort of bed, the escape of sleep, when she should be getting as far away from here as she can.
“It wasn’t a panic attack,” I snap back at her.
“Whatever. You’ve been gone for days. Again. Where were you?” She sits up in bed, her hands over her round belly, her back resting against the rickety plywood wall.
“I was looking for this,” I say, holding out a square of fabric like a gift that might shatter in the slightest breeze.
Hesitating, she takes it from me. “What’s this?” she asks, unfolding the tattered, browned dress. She holds it out in front of her, awaiting an explanation.
“It’s a dress,” I offer, a little terrified.
“I can see that. It’s not much of one, though.” She lets the dress fall into her lap and clasps her hands atop her belly.
“You don’t—you don’t recognize it?” I ask, my gaze bouncing between Joyce and the nearly shredded dress.
“Recognize it? It’s garbage, Clyde. Why would I recognize it? Besides, it’s a bit small for me, don’t you think?”
“Look again,” I order.
Clearly annoyed, she pinches the fabric between thumb and forefinger, lifts it and studies it for a few seconds before dropping it again.
“Is this some kind of test? Because I’m really not in—”
“It’s not a goddamned test!” I shout, exasperated. “How can you not recognize it?”
“I don’t know what’s going on here, Clyde, but you’re getting on my last nerve.”
“Grace.”
“What?”
“You don’t recognize… Grace?”
“Clyde… if you don’t get to the goddamned point, I’m going to pluck out your eyes with my thumbs. Now, spit it out.”
“You’re not making any sense. Even less than usual.”
“No… you’re right. That’s… that’s not Grace.”
“Good. Now you’re coming back to reality.”
“That’s Grace’s dress. Joyce, that’s Grace’s dress.”
“Don’t be sick, Clyde,” she says, sneering. But she picks the dress up again, examines it.
“It is. It’s Grace’s dress.”
Shaking her head, looking at the blue dress gone brown with blood and years, she says, “This was not Grace’s dress.”
“It was.”
“It’s not even blue, Clyde. For Christ’s sake, what are you trying to do here?”
“Look… at the flowers on it.”
“It’s not even blue, Clyde.”
“It’s from all the blood. That’s just the blood.”
“OK,” she says in a huff, tossing the dress aside and standing from the bed. “I’ve had enough.”
“Are you leaving now?” I ask, anxious.
“I’m getting the fuck away from you.”
“But are you leaving?”
“What?”
“Are you gonna grab Sam and get out of my Kingdom?”
“Jesus, that’s what this is all about?”
“It’s about Grace, Joyce. It’s about that dress. It’s about what I did to her when I was still a child. When she was still—”
Joyce’s familiar, iron-hot handprint imprints my face yet again. How many times has she slapped me since her arrival? Not enough, surely.
“You shut up about my daughter. You don’t say another goddamned word about her, you understand me?”
“I’m trying to explain why you have to go. You need to run, Joyce. You need to run for the sake of our son. It was me that killed Grace, Joyce. She came here when I was a kid and she was a kid and I cut off her arms and legs and—”
“Shut up!” she screams, banshee-like, and shoves me with impressive force. I fly backward and land on the mattress. She storms away, her feet pounding the earth.
Perhaps this is it. Perhaps Momma is finally going to leave me.
34
“That thing,” I say, pointing up at the sun and the orange dummy follows my finger and looks right at it. “That thing is where God intends to throw you. Eventually. You’re a monster and monsters burn in Hades.”
“Hades?” Dylan asks, squinting his big black eyes at me. We’re standing atop Costco Mountain, which is comprised mostly of oversized plastic containers and shredded tires.
“Yeah. It’s another word for Hell,” I explain. “You know, where murderers like you go. Where all monsters go.”
“The… sun?” he asks and the bastard actually has a touch of sarcasm in his voice.
“Yes, the sun, dumdum. You think Hell is so far away? It’s not so far away.”
“But… it always goes… away… at night.”
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it? And every night I pray for its return. Imagine a world without a sun. I can’t even begin to. Where would God throw you and all the fucking Out-of-Towners if the sun suddenly disappeared forever? What a fucking nightmare.”
“Nightmare.”
“Yes. A nightmare.”
“Clyde?”
“Yes, Dylan? Damn, I knew I should have never named you. You won’t go away, will you? You won’t leave this place now that I’ve named you?” I ask, kicking a massive plastic Cheezy-Puffs container down the hill. Beneath it, I find a crank with the pedals still attached and the bike chain nearby. I stick those items under my arm and keep looking.
“I am… your brother. I am… not going… anywhere. And… Momma named me…”
“Same difference.”
“The difference is… the same.”
“Joyce doesn’t believe me,” I say, scanning the trash for more parts.
“About… the sun?”
“No. About Grace. She thinks I’m just trying to scare her. Or, that I’m just losing my mind.”
“Did you?”
“Lose my mind? I’m as sharp as a tack, my friend. That’s a phrase our lovely mother invented, by the way.”
“No…. Did you… kill… that little… girl?”
“Yes.”
“Are… you sure?”
“It’s haunted me my whole life. She was the first other person I’d ever seen. There was never supposed to be anyone else but me and Momma… and Papa. I did it. I did something horrible. You think I’d let it haunt me if I didn’t do it?”
“You have… a wonderful… imagination. Just like… Momma… always… said.”
“Says,” I correct him. “She still talks to me sometimes.”
“Not… me.”
“Really?” I ask through a surprised laugh. “Ever since I brought you back to her she can’t shut up about you. I thought you were her favorite now.”
“Are you… sure… you killed… Grace?”
“I’m sure.”
“You didn’t… dream it?”
“Now you sound like Momma.”
“Did… Momma… ever mention your… ugly act… ever again? After?”
“Um… I don’t…” I say.
“Did… Papa… ever mention… your ugly act… ever again?”
“No… I don’t—but Papa never really had much of anything to say to me.”
“Did… neither have… a word about… such a terrible thing… again?”
I think about it. I think about the time after they caught me clinging to her limbless torso, slickened in body fluids, and full up on blood and human meat, and I am not sure. I remember us Playing House. I remember us watching Don’t Eat the Body. I remember us hunting for pennies and Protein Beans. I remember Papa’s fists. And Momma’s backhands. I don’t recall ever talking about the murder of Grace again, though. Then again, I rarely thought about it, myself. And I never brought it up again. It seems to me we all wanted to forget it happened.
“I am not… just… your brother… Clyde,” he says, kneeling and pushing trash around with clawed hands as if he’s also looking for something.
“We don’t talk about that,” I tell him. “We don’t ever talk about that.”
“Momma… could never love me… the way she loved… you.”
“It’s not my fault you were born dickless.”
“What… will… you do… if they don’t leave?”
“I don’t know.”
“What… will… happen to your… son… if they stay?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him, turning my attention away from him. “Oh, goody,” I say, finding a tire rim and handlebar.
I’ve spent the last few hours teaching Sam how to ride a bike. I mined all the pieces from my Kingdom’s mountains and put together one hell of a bicycle if I do say so myself. Of course, Sam looks like a goddamned bear on a tricycle, but he’s so happy, even though he’s fallen off it a hundred times before finally finding his balance. As usual, that big dumb grin of his practically takes over his whole goddamned head, despite the pain each fall causes his wicker-like bones. He’s been riding all the way to the wall because it’s a straight shot, here, from Dante’s Inferno. It’s no longer recognizable, God’s Breath having blown it all away long ago, but I think that splintered yellow thing over there might be a femur. Unfortunately this is a place that ceased to exist with the entrance of the Out-of-Towners, what with all the cooking and lounging and living now happening almost exclusively at Monster Island. But it was named and so it shall forever be Dante’s Inferno. Same with The Memory Palace.
When I was over there, tossing our chairs back into the garbage heap, rolling up the throw rug, and gathering up my kitty calendars and photo album, Momma kept making the tsk-tsk sound but I ignored her. Momma said, “Mothers always get replaced by prettier, younger versions of themselves,” and I said, “Ah, Momma, come on. Joyce isn’t prettier than you,” and that seemed to m
ollify her for a bit but she spent the rest of the time muttering about hanging those dirty fucking rotten Out-of-Towners on the other side of the wall, skinned alive and left out for the monsters. I just said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” to that.
Now Sam’s riding his bike around the mountains, evading debris in the pathways like a champ. He stops right beside me, grinning and breathing hard, his bicycle groaning under his weight.
“Did you see that?” he asks in his slow voice.
“I did, Sam. You did real good, son. Real good. Wait, let me take a look at something here,” I say, kneeling. I pull something from the back of the bicycle frame.
Just then, the back wheel zips off and the frame of the bike snaps. The earth quakes when Sam’s big ass slams into it. Quickly, he stands, the bike in pieces all around him. Looking down at it, he starts to gather the useless pieces in a lame attempt to put it all back together again but realizes it’s no good. His bottom lips quivers and his shoulders shake.
I pat him on those mammoth shoulders and say, “It’s OK, big guy.”
“It is?” he asks, his eyes round and wet.
“Sure. But… you know…”
“What?” he asks, expectantly.
“That was the last bicycle in all The Kingdom.”
“But… but you can fix this?” he asks.
“No, pal. I’m sorry. That one’s bashed to smithereens. You’ll never ride another bike again. Unless…”’
“Unless what?”
“Well, you know where there are more bikes? Brand new, shiny, super strong bikes that could hold up under a mountain like you?”
“Where?” he asks, rubbing his eyes.
“Out there,” I tell him, pointing. “Out there beyond them walls. Out in The Great Beyond. You’ll just need to get Joyce to show you. You just go out there and keep walking, far far away from here.”
“You… want me to go?” he asks, a tiny catch in his throat.
“It’s not about what I want, Sam. I’m just saying, if you ever want to ride another bike…”
“You… you can’t fix this one, though?”
“No!” I shout. Sam’s still holding broken pieces of the bike in his large hands. I slap his hands and he drops the trash back to where it came from and we walk Home.
The Sun My Destiny Page 17