by Andrew Smith
But I still felt bad for Mel. I hoped she didn’t feel sick.
I imagined getting a period felt like being hit in the balls, which was probably the worst thing that I’d ever experienced. It happened to me one time, when I was fourteen, and I will never forget it. Mel and I were playing a game where we stood at opposite sides of the hole’s rec room. The game involved throwing bags that were filled with small pebbles at a target in the middle of the floor. I got too close to the target, and Mel overestimated her throw and hit me in the balls with her little bag full of rocks.
I dropped.
I screamed and cried. My guts convulsed in tightening spasms of agony.
I thought I was going to die.
Mel thought I was going to die.
She ran and got Dad and Wendy, who was a nurse, besides just being the SPEAKER OF THE RULES. Dad laughed about it and said welcome to the club. If I could have spoken, I would have told him I did not want to be in that fucking club, but all I could do was moan and cry. Wendy made me unzip my jumpsuit so she could look at my balls. Everyone in the rec room was standing over me, looking at my balls, including Mel. Like I said, this was not something anyone who’d been born after the hole would think was any big deal at all, but Wendy got angry at Mel for looking at my balls.
At least I was happy Dad was there. I will explain: Ever since I was eleven, Wendy had been talking about having me circumcised because, she said, all boys in her family always got circumcised. I was terrified she might have brought along something sharp while she was in the neighborhood. Dad would not let her circumcise me. He said no after-the-hole boys would ever go through that again.
Still, I couldn’t tell if she had a clamp and a knife.
I couldn’t see anything, because of all the tears and stuff.
In any event, Wendy told me I would be fine; then she made a rule about Mel never looking at my balls again, and also not playing games that involved getting hit in the balls either.
At that time I was very envious of Mel for not having balls.
I hoped Mel didn’t hurt like that. I honestly hoped nobody ever felt anything as bad as getting hit in the balls with a bag of small rocks.
It was a fun game, though, up until that point.
I can’t remember who won. Mel did, probably.
Next to the racks where we’d found Mel’s boots, far in the back of the dark Walmart building, was a place called INFANTS & TODDLERS. It was full of very small, soft, and colorful things.
I watched as Mel lifted a yellow outfit that looked like an Eden jumpsuit, only miniature, and with built-in foot coverings. And even though I suppose we’d seen each other as infants or toddlers, it was hard for me to imagine that human beings came in such small sizes. I could tell she was thinking the same thing, and it was frightening and lonely.
Mel said, “Do you think there are people out here somewhere?”
“I’m positive there are.”
Mel put down the little yellow suit.
I said, “We should go before it gets dark.”
We carried our finds through the maze of walls and shelves up toward the broken front doors of the Walmart. I could see the van outside, and it made me feel better, as though we were anchored to something safe and predictable—a little mobile hole without so many rules. To the right of the doors, set back in a little alcove, was a counter with a sign over it that said MCDONALD’S.
I hadn’t noticed it when we came inside.
In front of McDonald’s was a low counter with a bank of machines resting on top of it. Above the counter, covered in filth, hung a wide sign. Most of the sign was obscured with muck, but on the far left was a picture of something that looked like a kind of giant layered cake with dots on it. The sign said BIG MAC VALUE MEAL next to the cake thing.
“What do you think that is?” Mel asked.
“I have no idea.”
I leaned over the counter and looked inside the McDonald’s.
There were bones scattered on the floor. I saw two human skulls, which I do not want to draw, sitting among other bones in the soupy muck of the floor. I had seen plenty of pictures of human skulls. I even built a little one that went inside Breakfast, my visible man science assembly project, so there was no doubt what I saw there.
Mel must have noticed that I jerked back in shock. I couldn’t help it.
She said, “What is it?”
I shook my head.
“Nothing. It just smells really bad in here.”
I was becoming such a liar.
The One-Month Lifespan of an After-the-Hole Cicada
I suppose I’d spent most of sixteen years wondering what exactly happened to the others—Dad, Robby, Connie, Louis, Shannon, and Wendy—after coming to the hole.
I knew it changed them. That was obvious. Maybe the people they were before the hole really did come to an end, and who they became inside the hole were quite possibly no longer recognizable as humans to the people they had been. After all, each of them could straddle time, while Mel and I were stuck on one side of that immeasurable rift. I found myself thinking about this more and more as I spent those first days away from the hole—that maybe the reason Dad and Robby retained any optimism or humor at all was that for all these years they dared to risk themselves by stealing away.
The rest of our little society were all resigned to the permanence of our drudgery, or, worse yet, utterly without hope, and even worse than that: angry.
Maybe the one-month lifespan of an after-the-hole cicada was all it took to shrug off all that.
I really wanted to find my father. I had so many things I now realized I needed to say to him.
And I never wanted to go back to the hole, no matter what happened to Mel and me.
• • •
The last Christmas inside the hole—the one that came only a few months ago—turned out to be something like an after-the-hole Max Beckmann painting.
One day, I will try to paint it if I can.
Wendy, as usual, transformed into a tornado about one week before the holiday; and my mom, Shannon, was so depressed and sick she spent days in bed, not speaking to anyone. She shut herself away from everyone, inside the quiet dark of her room.
I had never seen a tornado, but one did tear the roof from Shannon and Wendy’s house when I was wearing infant-size clothes, and in the spring fourteen years later—the year I got hit in the balls by a bag full of rocks—another tornado thundered past the hole, just over our heads. We could all feel the rumbling of its power and hear the chaos of the tornado’s rage. This was how Wendy could be at times, especially, for whatever reasons I will never understand, at Christmastime, when she would consistently enforce her holiday-observance rule.
So, by mid-December, Wendy insisted the boys bring a wood-burning stove down into the hole. She said she had lived too long without a fire on Christmas, and there would be no peace in the hole unless Dad and Robby fetched the woodstove from her and Shann’s old house and lowered it down into the hole.
My two fathers tried to reason with Wendy, suggesting that nobody wanted to die of carbon monoxide asphyxiation, which I thought was a compelling argument. But Wendy would not listen to them. She told Dad and Robby—the boys—to bring down the stove’s chimney pipe, as well, so that they could run it up through the hatch in the entry room, just so we could have a real fire on Christmas. She said that was all she wanted; she didn’t care if anyone else gave her any gifts, which I knew wasn’t entirely correct, on account of the fact that everyone was so scared of Wendy nobody would dare not give her a gift.
Christmas was her rule, after all.
In the end, my dads had no choice but to accede to my grandmother’s demands.
They were both angry about Wendy’s lack of reason. They got even, though, Robby told me. Robby and Dad had smashed through the French doors on Wendy’s old house with a tow truck and driven it into the great room, where the wood-burning stove was located. It made sense, Robby said, since the stove wei
ghed three hundred pounds, and they had to use a winch to move it, and then to lower it down the hatch, as well. Robby said the entire west wall of the house collapsed after that, but Wendy, who was never going to leave her empire of the hole, would never know anything about how the boys had driven a truck through her living room.
So Wendy got her woodstove. The boys put it right in the center of the floor in the round entry chamber to Eden—the hole.
Dad and Robby ran the stove’s chimney pipe up to the hatch, which would have to be opened if the stove was in use, but that would not happen until Christmas morning. Then, a few days before Christmas, Dad and Robby went hunting for our holiday meal and also to kill a pine tree and drop it down the hole.
That was the thing about Christmases that always saddened me—the killing of the trees. It was one thing—a justifiable one—to kill food for our family, but trees were beautiful, and I could see no purpose in their killing as a means to celebrate a holiday that was supposed to reflect generosity, kindness, and love.
I didn’t understand any of it.
There was a chapel in the hole. Wendy used to take me there on Sundays after I turned eleven—this started just after the incident with Mel and me in the bath. Wendy told me Bible stories that she remembered, ones about circumcision and God and Jesus and floods and leprosy, and all because I had been observed getting an erection. I think the intent was to make me a better boy, but it only ended up confusing me.
The part about the circumcision actually made me sick with worry.
Wendy told me she thought I should be circumcised before I got too much older.
I had to talk to my father, who told me the best way to deal with Wendy was to smile and nod at her, like you agreed with what she was talking about even if you weren’t listening to her at all; and that there was nothing wrong with getting an erection; and, also, that he had decided a long time ago to disregard anyone who suggested cutting off part of your penis was a good thing to do.
I was so relieved.
After Wendy started making me go to church with her, my first waking thought every morning would always be to wonder, Is this going to be the day when part of my penis gets cut off?
I loved my dad so much.
So my two fathers brought a dead tree—circumcised at its trunk—down into the hole. They set it up in the same room with the woodstove. The entry chamber was our new Christmas Hole. They also brought down a wild pig they’d shot. Wendy, who’d asked for a goose or a turkey, was disappointed.
That night, as we lay in our beds, talking like we usually did, Dad sighed and said, “Wendy has been disappointed with me ever since I was about fourteen years old.”
“I got hit in the balls with a bag of rocks when I was fourteen,” I said. “To me, that was very disappointing.”
“These things have a tendency of embedding powerful memories, son.”
I asked, “Why did Wendy not like you when you were just a kid?”
“I think she liked Robby better. She wanted Robby to be your mother’s boyfriend.”
I laughed. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Well, outside of church, it is.”
“I know. What can I say?”
“I bet it’s just because you’re not circumcised.”
My dad laughed too, and I said, “Merry Christmas, Dad.”
And Dad said, “Ho-ho-ho, Lucky.”
• • •
Christmas morning came.
It was time to light a fire in Wendy’s woodstove.
Wendy rang a Christmas bell outside Dad’s and my door at a ridiculously early hour. We were both very much asleep. Wendy went from room to room, ringing her bell, calling everyone out to the official routine—the ordeal—of Wendy’s Christmas.
I did not get dressed. I came out to the kitchen shirtless and in boxer underwear, a protest to the death of the tree and the ringing of the bell. When Wendy told me to get some clothes on, I smiled and nodded, like Dad had told me to do, and then I did not get some clothes on.
We all gathered in the kitchen, just like any other non-Christmas morning.
Mom was silent. Connie and Louis looked placidly content. Robby, in a T-shirt, boxer shorts, and socks, said good morning and sat next to Dad. Wendy never said anything about how Robby dressed or didn’t dress, but then again, as I found out, she preferred Robby to Dad. I think Wendy preferred Robby to me, too.
Robby and Dad lit cigarettes.
For some reason I could not understand—and still can’t—I kept staring across the kitchen table at Mel, who looked especially beautiful that morning. I thought about devising some way to innocently brush my foot against hers, but there was no innocence to my thoughts at all. Maybe it was just that I was excited about the gift I’d gotten her, about seeing her reaction when she opened the present. It was a silly thing, in all honesty, because she knew what I’d gotten her, and I knew what she’d gotten me, too. We’d made square-knot bracelets for each other. Robby had taught us how to make them after he brought back colorful thread from one of his and Dad’s trips outside the hole.
As long as I could remember, Robby and Dad always wore such bracelets they’d made for each other. I thought it was something a dang hippie would probably do, like coming out to a family Christmas breakfast in your underwear.
In any event, I did not brush my foot against Mel’s that morning, innocently or otherwise, because I did not want to face the prospect of having any discussion with Wendy about an inevitable new rule prohibiting getting an erection under the kitchen table during Christmas breakfast with the family when you are only wearing boxers.
Louis, who had been roasting the pig since before Wendy got out of bed, cooked pancakes and eggs for everyone. And before we could finish our breakfast, Wendy told the boys to start the fire, so we could all gather around the dead tree and open our Christmas presents.
Disaster was just moments away. It was as ubiquitous as the smell of the pig roasting in Louis’s oven.
Dad worked at getting the kindling inside the stove’s belly to catch a flame, and Robby climbed up the ladder to open the hatch, in order to save us all from dying from Christmas-morning carbon monoxide asphyxiation. The rest of us sat on the curved benches around the wall of the entry/Christmas chamber, with Wendy at the twelve o’clock position, nearest the tree. Every year Wendy would distribute the gifts, one at a time, so we could all watch the person opening each gift like it was some kind of show.
The fire caught.
Wendy said, “I finally have a fire after all these years!”
There was no joy in her voice. She was simply narrating the successful outcome of one more of her rules.
But I was almost fooled into thinking this Christmas was going to be nice. The fire was pretty, after all. It smelled good too—wild, the exact opposite of the sterile predictability of everything inside the world of the hole.
Then Robby opened the hatch. It was sleeting outside. Within seconds it was sleeting on all of us.
Robby said, “Holy fuck, it’s sleeting!”
But we already knew that.
Connie, who was Mel’s mother, said, “Fuckbucket!”
Nobody dared move, however.
It was also windy outside, and the wind that came in through the mouth of our entry hatch made a wet and slushy whirlpool of despair inside our Christmas hole. I looked at Mel. Our eyes laughed a silent chuckle to each other that seemed to say, Fuck Christmas.
Robby was drenched, up on the ladder in his underwear. And I was drenched, freezing in my underwear on a bench facing a dead tree, while my dad tried to extinguish the fire so Robby could shut the hatch without killing us all.
I stood up, hugging my arms across my chest. “It’s fucking freezing, Grandma.”
That was probably the wrong thing to say, considering everything that was happening.
And it turned out that my father was going to have a difficult time putting out the fire in Wendy’s stove, because after I said what I’d said a
bout it being fucking freezing and all, Wendy said, “Nobody here knows how to do a single goddamned thing right!”
And then Wendy began picking up presents and stuffing them into the belly of her wood-burning stove, which, fortunately for the rest of us, began giving off a relatively decent amount of heat, despite the fact that it was fucking cold and we were all getting wet and slushy.
So that was Christmas in the hole.
• • •
This is what my Max-Beckmann-after-the-hole painting would be called: Last Christmas in the Hole. There are two families here, huddled in a hole, where they have been hiding for a very long time. A ladder extends beyond the top of the image, so you can’t tell where it leads to—if it is potentially a means of escape, or merely the method by which the people were brought here. In the center of the image is a bleak crematory, its smokestack rising up, off-parallel to the ladder. Inside the doors of the crematory are bright flames and charred skeletons. There is a dead boar stretched out in a pool of blood on the floor in front of the crematory, its black eyes frozen open, tongue lolling from its mouth. Up on the ladder is a man with clear skin; you can see all the organs and musculature inside his body. He has wings and is smoking a cigarette. Beside the crematory, a woman and girl sit together on a curved bench. The woman is dressed all in white, her eyes are closed, and her hands are folded on her lap, while the girl next to her looks across the front of the crematory at a pale young boy. There is a determined look in the girl’s eyes, which at times appears to be an expression of love and at others seems to be a challenge, a competition. The boy is standing, barefoot and shirtless, nearly naked, wrapped like Jesus in nothing more than a small rag that ties at his hip. The boy has a frightened expression. He stares down at the gates of the crematory, where the tools of a mohel rest beside the pool of blood: a Mogen clamp, a milah knife. It is the day of his circumcision. There is a spiny black tree that rises behind the smokestack, and four shadowy figures: a woman with a black mask covering her face, a smoking man with his hands and feet tied together, a woman holding a stringed instrument that looks like a mandolin, and a weeping Asian man, seated, with a rabbit on his shoulder.