by Shane Jones
“Well, okay,” says Jug. “Good start. Weird. But discussing your childhood opens you up to the person you are now,” he says repeating the words from a training manual. “Everyone see how that’s good? You build on that.”
Crumb and Tony check for more donuts and if the orange light is still lit on the coffee urn. With a swirling club the guard tells them to turn around.
Before Jug asks his first question, Pants says more. He speaks quickly, racing over the top-half of his words. Black robes walked into the mine. They tore the robe off Mom, and from where he was, his body flat, dirt in his mouth, trembling against the dirt, he watched them act in a way he had never seen before. He could have done something. He made fists.
Curl, straighten, curl, straighten. His big toe is a pumping valve. Concentrate with calm. The crystal sinks deeper and his ripped skin shrieks along a fuse behind his ears. Finally maxed out.
He sits up in the white plastic chair so straight it’s freakish. He describes a man’s measured punches through Mom’s hands which moved like they were cleaning fog off a windshield. They took turns falling on her, pushing her body into the dirt, fucking her into deeper plateaus. The first man went back. Pants floods the room with words, eyes wet, the veins in his neck worm-thick and making even self-proclaimed tough-guy-Tony wince. His body needs to move. Usually he can jog in his cell where he imagines the beach and Harvak at his side. The worst part wasn’t that he didn’t stop the men, but that his dick got hard against the dirt and he slithered and he screwed the ground. His fists became caresses. Pete whispers into his hands cupped over his nose and mouth What the fuck, dude and Crumb defense-mechanism-laughs while shaking his head no.
“I returned to the mine and replayed what happened to Mom who never reported or said a thing about what happened to anyone and I would lay in the dirt and rock and push into it and I was messed up back then because I thought, I really believed that I would die from such thoughts, like a force would reach down and yank every crystal from my body like a spine or something and leave me there like that and I’ve thought afterward and being here in the prison I could have done something, banner, banner, banner, that Mom is so sick now cause of what happened and I didn’t do anything, but I was a good boy, I didn’t do anything wrong, and now Mom is sick cause of me and I just need to help her cause I’m good.”
Pants stands and kicks the chair backward and it flips, the soldered metal glob where the legs sprout from hits the guard’s knees and he falls into a crossed-leg sitting position with a comical Uhf. Everyone else slides their chair back by extending their legs. Pants curls and uncurls his big toe. His foot is a puddle. Down the hall come extra guards. Pants keeps talking. He says he formed The Sky Father Gang to find answers on how to increase count, have Mom live forever, have Mom always be Mom, Mom as a god, until he stops, the inmates squeezing their fists looking back and forth, the guard rubbing his knees and standing with the cross in his mouth, the other, outside guards, wielding expandable batons turning the nearest corner, and Pants says to Jug who sits upright, eyes wide, a wet spot of sweat, or is it piss, it can’t be piss, jesus, pooling from his stomach and through his khakis, “I wanted to save her but I didn’t do anything” and tears stream from his eyes, “I could have done something but I didn’t,” and he readies, for the batons to open at the back of his knees, a ray of pain.
26
Behind rain clouds the sun looks like a giant daytime moon. The heat wave ignores the rain and refuses to leave. Holding old umbrellas, the elderly move through their daily tasks purchasing food from vendors and trading crystals they once worshiped for YCL, all the while worried – heads looking up, then left, then right, then down again and at their feet trudging through the muddy streets.
The truck drivers don’t care about the sky or sun because they can get more work done in the rain. They dress in slick green rain robes. They wear crystals around their necks that dangle so low under their work shirts the chain links knot in their chest hair. Their heads are hooded by their rain robes and they drive fast. Tires spin smooth spitting water backward, the rain glistening off metal hoods, doors, the roofs of the trucks that enter and leave the mine a dozen times daily.
Senior driver, Skip Callahan, drives shirtless. He wears a yellow crystal headband instead of a green necklace. He has plenty of chest hair. Today, he’s the lead truck in a line of ten making its return trip back into the mine. The first produced a few blue crystals, one green, lots of yellow, and a half of a dark red looking thing, all of it dumped in a field for workers to sift through. Men from the city once told Skip they’d be interested in buying the mine and Skip told them to get fucked. He slapped a fat face belonging to a politician named Sanders who rubbed his cheek while three others stood stunned. Skip knows other mine workers are potential sell-outs because of their personalities. They’re willing to sell to save themselves from some unknown crushing. The sky thunders and the rain falls faster from cracks of lightning.
Skip loves the rain. He loves to work. He blasts the radio – a country song picked up via a city signal with lots of banjo and violin – and smokes cigarettes he rolls himself. His truck is immaculate. On both driver and passenger side floors is a square of torn cardboard he replaces when muddied. The glove box contains homemade cleaning supplies that slosh inside mason jars and a spiraled branch of dirty cloths covered in engine grease. The wind pulls the rain to the side as his truck bounces down the road. In the pale light, royal disc of sun above, two hands gripping the steering wheel, he grins white teeth.
Last night Skip sat in the dark of his bedroom with his hands balled up against his chest, an all too common crippling depression. His mother, who was extraordinarily healthy for her count (such skin), recently died from a truck accident. The villagers stood around slack jawed and terrified (that’s going to happen to me one day) and watched her expel colors while Skip came running down the street, slowing as he saw the damage. He was told by a teenager that she was “hurt” in an “accident” and Skip thought he could help her, that maybe she had sprained a wrist or bruised a hip, anything but zero. He tried pulling her from the truck but that made her body worse, bend in unimagined ways, colors gushing from her chest. People winced and turned away. Since the accident he’s found it hard to function outside of work. Work is his everything now. In the bedroom, Skip tried to concentrate on an image that made him feel joy and that was driving. There, he could move his hands. Using two flashlights, he created headlights on his bedroom wall and pushed his right foot forward into a pillow.
He drives, cigarette in his mouth, a long turn downward, foot resting on the brake pedal. He squints through the rain and sees two shadows in the distance, small and blurry, and so low to the ground Skip thinks they’re either turtles or rocks. But as the truck straightens out from the end of the curved road, he notices it’s two animals, dogs maybe, running directly at him. He tosses his cigarette out the window. The left side of his body gleams with rain. He extends his foot into the brake pedal. Too hard and the tires will dig up the hard crust the hot rain has created. The driver behind Skip flashes his lights and another in the pack blasts his horn. Shitheads, thinks Skip, and tries to slow the truck more but the front tires lock and skid.
He eases off the brake as the two dogs enter the headlights. He turns the wheel to the left, toward the towering wall of dirt, and the trucks behind follow in a motion smooth and centipede like. Skip is having difficulty seeing through the windshield. The combination of heat and rain and truck speed turn the headlights into smeared pearls. His CB radio crackles with hey bud-e, we-with, you, every-thing okay, up-there-hey-oh-what-is-dat-whoa-um-Skip-easy-there-Skip-care-full.
Ugly is the sky above the wall.
“What,” says Skip into the rain-slashed windshield. He hits the wipers bar up but it’s already all the way up.
Out the passenger window a dog runs past, legs caked in mud, tongue out, exposed teeth. One eye looks yellow, the other black. Keeping up with the dog is a child on al
l fours. A girl in red shorts. Blond hair cascades the length of her arms. She’s incredibly fast and combined with how fast Skip is driving the dog and the girl blur past.
“Stop it or I’ll –” says Skip, momentarily looking into the side mirror to see them vanishing into the rain. Then he concentrates back on the road and says, “Holy mother wow was that what,” before driving the final section of the road down.
He reaches the bottom of the mine. The drivers circle around his truck. Crisscrossing headlights illuminate mine workers who wear black shorts, no shirts, and jog with wheelbarrows dirt-brimmed with crystals. Tonight’s late-night undocumented batch will be sold to the city and used for engagement rings, special occasion earrings, displayed in New Age yoga studios, given to the hospital-sick for positive energy. They have their own crystals, but they don’t have these crystals. Some will be sold to parents for their children who play a game called Lyfer, trade the crystals back and forth in a test of who can maintain closest to a hundred, the brightest colors worth extra. They hurry between the ringing bells of classes to lie about what they hold behind their backs and to trade furiously as teachers watch. Skip listens to the roar of truck engines shifting gears as he tries to comprehend what he just saw.
Ken Horgan, a rat-like man whom Skip has seen several times bleeding from the head after work shifts, rolls his window down. His neck turned back and up, eyes squinting in the rain, he says, “Whole-e-shit. Was that a werewolf?”
Skip drives a loop around the trucks. Gas pedal floored, the truck buckles through shifting gears. He heads back up and out of the mine on the road he just descended. Ugly is the sky coming over the wall. Skip wants to help because he is a person hardwired to help. He couldn’t help his mom. Tires roll over the hand-prints over paw-prints. Ken Horgan says from the pit of the mine, standing in the rain with eyes like a rat being flicked with water, “COME BACK AND TELL ME WHAT THAT WAS SKIP I’VE NEVER KNOWN A HALF DOG PERSON BEFORE LET’S HAVE DINNER AND TALK ABOUT IT BUDDY.”
Halfway to the house they stop because Hundred has something in his paw. He’s been running on three legs. Remy, covered in mud, sits in the road and cradles him in her lap. The rain lets up to a spit. Steam places the village in a cloud and the lower half of the city disappears. She pulls out a triangle of dark crystal from his paw. Blood splatters across her fingers in a Z. His eyes break as his spine twists. Remy tries to say something like, “stop” but it comes out as “hop.” He runs from her arms with impossible strength and Remy follows until they both enter the house.
“Hey, hop it.”
“…”
“Hop it now.”
They run up the stairs and down the hall, doors slamming shut behind. They jump into the tub. Remy turns the water on as Hundred play-bites her forearms. She laughs and can’t believe he wants to be in the tub, he hates baths, but he seems to be loving it, barking and leaping and smiling the way dogs sometimes appear to be smiling. She slaps his body with both hands. More blood from his paw, a stream of numbers entering the water. He acts wild, his eyes bigger than all dog eyes combined.
Thud thud thud on the front door with a three second pause before another thud thud thud. They ignore it.
As the water splashes over her legs, rises above her stomach, the mud from Remy’s skin and Hundred’s hair washes off in black goops that she finger-paints on the tub’s walls. Hundred eases into a calm state, but something is off. Remy has witnessed a transformation. Good, bad, she doesn’t know yet, but something has happened. He’s not acting happy anymore. She can’t stop staring at the way he’s moving, not like a dog, but like a bug on its back, trying to flip over and right itself. It’s like he’s trying to move inside himself or leave his own body.
“You okay?”
Hundred barks twice and turns his head to the thudding.
“Who’s that?”
Before the water reaches her chest, Hundred leaps from the tub and leaves a wet slide of mud and dark goo extending out the bathroom, down the stairs, and to the front door where the thudding just won’t stop.
“Hey, open up.”
Hundred stretches his front legs up on the door and barks.
“I don’t care what it is you’re doing. I’ve known crystal heads before and it doesn’t bother me, I just want to know if you are all right. Name is Skip and I work in the mine. I said, HELLO?”
Remy stays in the tub. Blood hangs from her feet. She sits back with the water at her chin and crosses her left foot over her right knee and inspects her foot. The air wobbles. She doesn’t feel like herself anymore and that’s a good thing. It’s her birthday and later tonight Dad will shoot a single firework into the sky. Pressed into her skin are dark crystals. Thud thud thud. She picks one out and blood pours down her leg. They look black. Scared, where is Mom and Dad? What is this? She squeezes the crystal back in. A flash of heat travels from her foot to her head followed by a desire to run. The liquid retracts back inside her. Lifts her. She breaths in bursts and closes her eyes where she sees a body being carried to the mine where burned. Mom cried at the kitchen table this morning because when you guess how many are inside, you guess how many days you have left. Remy doesn’t think about her lowering count because now she’s at the opposite end of that thought. Here in the pink tub, the discovery of black crystal is an escalating number widening her veins, making her believe, making her become everything – plant, bird, horse, dirt, sun, Mom – alive.
There’s one last series of knocks at the front door and then just Hundred barking, proud of himself for fighting off the knocks.
Skip Callahan stands shirtless in steam and rain. He only wanted to help. He turns and checks his idling truck. What was that? He walks back to his truck and looks at the fence. The city, like the sun, is way closer than yesterday. What’s happening? The buildings are fanning out around them like cards. I don’t want to die. People are walking the edge of the city. Some are using binoculars. Skip turns his back, lowers his pants, and jiggles his big body.
25
Lying under his sheet, he lifts his pelvis and builds a tent with his knees. He’s coming down from peaking on black crystal and the beating he took at the health meeting. They hit his legs with sticks until he fell. He thinks about the letters from Mom and with his right hand rubs his stomach and shoots a beam of light from his bellybutton. Through the sheet and around the prison bars and into the village the light travels until it rests in triangular form on her bedroom floor. She dips the black crystal into the light. Twin horses rise on their back legs and kick holes in the ceiling.
24
As they struggle to position the table Z. stands on it and shouts at the sun. His face is dark with shadows and sweat. His green robe is strapped tight by his arms. Everyone is excited by this new project. Once the table is in proper place, according to Z., they sit down.
Trucks, wagons, bicycles, the few cars in the village, become a fat U shape of traffic forced to flow around them. A man driving a truck who is shirtless and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette lays on the horn. He reverses his truck and accelerates before stopping inches from the table. Arnold tells Skip easy, says to keep his cool. He reverses and accelerates again and again. It’s a tactic to psyche the Brothers out that doesn’t work. Skip is drenched from the rainstorm, his eyes crazed, his hair matted to his forehead in the shape of a bird’s gray wing.
“Easy, Skip, easy,” says Arnold. “Look like you’ve seen Royal Bob!” Arnold waits for someone to laugh but no one laughs.
Red globs stretch then drip from the rim of the sun.
“Skip, come on now,” says Ricky. “No need, no need.”
“I got this,” says Z.
Everyone stops and looks at Z. who somehow appears more natural standing on a table as opposed to sitting. He runs the length of it, huffing dramatically, moving his arms robotically, legs like pistons, and everyone leans back as he leaps from the edge of the table and lands in a crouched position on the truck’s hood. His feet crumple metal. He screams
at Skip with a pointed finger and says he’s trying to enjoy his dinner and Skip, head down, head filled with images of a dog-child, and not really looking at Z., he hates Brothers Feast, but still looking up slightly just enough to see him, dislike him, holds up a hand and mouths okay. When Z. walks back across the table he glances in Bobby T.’s direction, shrugs his shoulders, and smirks like a child reaching into a drawer.
“S-s-s-sorry, Bobby T.,” he says. “I’m s-s-s-stressed.”
He dance-walks, hips humping in the direction of the sun, and the Brothers, not knowing what to do exactly from this new behavior, drum the table.
“Hey,” says Bobby T., “it’s been hard.”
Which is true. Z. has wrecked his mind trying to define the jailbreak in reverse. He’s close. They’re close. The time spent defining the jailbreak doesn’t matter because once it’s completed no one will ask how long they spent working. You’re remembered for your actions not your planning. People who are remembered are remembered forever because they travel in memories, from old to young, and what’s greater than that. What’s greater than living forever and not being alive to see the consequences.
“I’m this close,” says Z. and holds his thumb and pointer finger a quarter inch apart before sitting back down. “That means really close,” he adds.
A bag of hot air in the sky moves like an ameba. The Brothers have dinner by candlelight at the table in the street. Inside the bag, the ameba, thousands of tiny things are moving and it’s only Z. who looks up, smiling and admiring the strangeness of this sky creature.
“SMART ASSES,” someone says. It’s one of the mine workers. “We should sell and be done with this nonsense. They will take over no matter what, just look at the buildings, you dolts.” A crowd of Brothers Feast supporters including Ken Horgan shoves the mine worker away, down the street, as he continues to shout backward over his shoulder about the end of times, their imminent destruction resulting in nothing but city.