by Andrew Smith
In a cupboard above the stove, in racks that clamped the bottles and jars so they would not topple out when the van was moving, I found a bottle that said KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY on it. The top of it had been sealed with black wax. I picked it up.
I looked at Mel again as she lay motionless in my bed.
Although it was cold, without putting on warmer clothes, I slipped outside the van, into the dark Iowa night.
Lonely Thing in the Night
I marveled at all those brilliant stars and planets, at the calloused face of the moon.
Growing up in the hole, I felt as though everything real was always segregated away from me, always on the other side of walls and barriers. It was why my father worked so hard to build his flawed model.
But now that I was outside, I looked up at the sky—at the moon—and became finally aware that everything was all inside one room now.
My room.
I felt like it was a simple matter to reach my hands up and touch that cold and lonely satellite.
I walked over to the front steps of Henry A. Wallace Middle School and sat down on the damp and freezing concrete. In the world before the hole, they should never have built schoolrooms inside walls, I thought, because behind walls, all you were left with were models and rules.
There was probably a rule against barefoot kids in Wolverines basketball clothes drinking whiskey at Henry A. Wallace Middle School. And despite the fact I expected that it was bound to not be how I thought it would be, I wanted to try the whiskey anyway, hoping that it might change something inside me, that it would force me to grow up and stop thinking about all the things I could not control.
It was hard to open.
There was a tab in the wax that when I pulled it cut a band around the circumference of the bottle neck. That alone took me several minutes to figure out. I struggled with simply trying to twist off the top to the point where my hand became sore before I discovered that little tab.
I was shivering in the cold, cursing myself for coming outside barefoot, practically naked, when I could have been back inside the van with Mel. But I also felt strangely alive in a way I don’t think I had ever experienced before.
The bottle had a cork stopper in it, and when I removed it, the smell of whiskey wafted up, sweet and warm, stinging my nostrils, setting fire to the night. I set the cork down on the step next to me and raised the bottle toward the moon, the way I’d seen my dads raise bottles when they drank together.
“Here’s to you, lonely thing in the night.” Then I pointed the bottle to the van and said, “Here’s to you, Mel. I’m sorry if I’ve gotten you into something we may not be able to get out of.”
And I added, “I love you, Mel. I am so fucking in love with you, I think it might kill me.”
Then I took a swallow.
My dads must have had concrete lining inside their throats. The whiskey seemed like a living organism, because it clawed at my insides as though it were fighting against my swallowing it. And then when it hit the bottom, it sprang up like a protesting rabbit in a snare.
I coughed, and the smell of the whiskey seared the insides of my nose.
I no longer felt the cold, though, so that was a good thing.
The whiskey stopped burning by the time I’d taken my third swallow. It had transformed into something sweet, reminding me of the desserts Louis, who was Mel’s father, cooked for us down in the hole. But it also made me experience a confused mixture of so many things: I was very relaxed; my body felt so good, like I was sleeping in the most comfortable bed I had ever slept in; and everything—the school, the van, my naked arms and legs, the number 42, wolverines, the cheer team, hot dogs—had somehow become so astoundingly funny.
Maybe the cheer team gave people whiskey.
I wanted to wake Mel up, to explain to her how happy I was about everything. I imagined staying up with her until sunrise and telling her everything that I’d been afraid of, and how I was now willing to release those things and make them into fiction. But there was still that small and possibly sensible part of me that warned against ruining our journey right here and right now, on this cold night.
I took another swallow and corked the bottle.
Then I said:
“The Birds is not true.
“Bigfoot does not exist.
“Johnny and Ingrid were the last people from earth to visit the moon.
“Yellow bass are not yellow.
“Those were not human bones I saw.
“I will find my fathers.
“All stories are true the moment they are told.”
And I thought, I should go back inside now. I am not afraid.
This is hard to explain, but when I stood up, it felt as though the “me”—the ghost or spirit of who I was, the thing that was occupying the awkward and self-willed body of a wet-dream-plagued sixteen-year-old boy—was left behind, separated, still seated on the steps of Henry A. Wallace Middle School.
I had to wait a moment for the contents to get back inside the package.
I laughed. It was funny, after all.
Then the ground tilted slightly beneath my feet, and I took a couple of crooked steps backward to keep the package from tipping over and cracking his goddamned head open, spilling his contents on the concrete steps. That was funny too.
I turned back toward the van.
Something moved down the street, just beyond the fenced-in end of the schoolyard.
It was something big, and it was coming toward me very fast.
It was one of the monsters.
A Number 42 Midnight Special
I had broken my own goddamned rules about going outside.
I had nothing to defend myself with, and the thing was closer to the van than I was. There was no way I could get back inside now. What would happen to Mel?
She would never even know why I was gone.
I ran up the steps and entered the school, trampling through the broken crumbles of glass where I’d shattered the door earlier with Mel. I felt the jagged pieces cut into my feet, but it didn’t hurt. And my blood slipped like oil beneath each step I took as I ran down the dark hallway.
The Last Dance of the Year!
At the end of the hall, just at the door to the gym, I glanced toward the front. The Unstoppable Soldier had followed me into the school. I could see its shadowy form and hear its clattering feet as it scrambled down the hall after me.
I was not afraid, which may have had something to do with the whiskey. I was more angry at myself because I’d put us in a position where Mel might end up alone, and the thought of that made me feel desperate and sad. And it wasn’t as though I didn’t have a plan. I knew exactly what I was going to try to do, even if it may have been completely stupid.
I yelled, “Fuck you, fuckbucket!”
I went inside the gym and ran as fast as I could for the door at the back—the one that opened onto the stairwell down to the boys’ locker room—aiming to get myself inside the caged-in area where the basketball team’s lockers were.
The place was so dark now; all I could see were bands of gray up above where the ground-level narrow windows allowed just the faintest moonlight inside. I ran right into a bench at full speed, bashing my knees and ending up with my belly on the floor and my face in an ancient Iowan boy’s cast-off dirty socks or something.
I was breathing so hard I couldn’t hear if the thing had managed to follow me down into the locker room.
My head spun. I got up and felt my way down along the bench to the basketball cage. And I thought, Iowans before the hole weren’t dumb; they built steel cages inside locker rooms to keep their basketball teams from being eaten by enormous bugs, right?
“That’s right!” I said.
I found the door to the cage and slammed it shut behind me. Now I only had to hope that bugs were too stupid to know what doorknobs did, because the one on the cage would not lock, and it was the only thing between my contents and me and the thing that
wanted to eat a number 42 midnight special.
I only first started to feel the hurt when I sat down on the concrete floor and hid behind the bank of lockers. My feet were bloody and slashed, and my knees throbbed. I calmed my breathing and tried to listen for any sign of the creature.
Water dripped from one of the rusted showerheads.
And outside, I heard it.
Tick-tick, tick-tick.
The thing was coming downstairs.
Tick-tick, tick-tick.
Everything was suddenly so loud. The creaking of the door hinge as the Unstoppable Soldier pushed its way inside the locker room was as loud as a car crash, and then came the sizzling buzz of the creature’s excited wings and the clicking mechanisms of every jointed appendage on the monster as it moved along, hunting for me.
Tick-tick, tick-tick.
Tick-tick, tick-tick.
I pulled my legs in to my chest, trying to make myself as small as possible behind the cold metal wall of lockers.
Tick-tick, tick-tick.
Then, absolute silence that seemed to last an eternity. It was more than silence—it was a smothering vacuum of nothingness. And maybe it was just the whiskey, but I found myself facing the realization that there is nothing more effective at getting a sixteen-year-old boy to stop thinking about his penis than the impending prospect of his being eaten by a freakishly gargantuan bug.
That, and the terrorizing explosion of sound when the Unstoppable Soldier slammed its massive spiked arms into the steel mesh of the cage.
I gasped a little scream.
And the thing kept thrashing, pounding and pounding itself against the cage.
I had to look.
I peered around the edge of the lockers. In the dim gray light, I could make out the shape of the monster on the other side of the cage’s meshed steel bars. It flailed and pounded its triangular head against the cage. The front two arms of the thing—the spring-loaded, tooth-lined bear traps the Unstoppable Soldiers used to capture their prey—had gotten caught inside the narrow openings of the steel cage. The thing was trapped and angry, and it bashed and bashed its face and mouth uselessly against the steel.
I curled up behind the metal boxes, shivering.
The bashing and clanging got louder and louder, wildly violent. This must have been the sound of the dying Titanic. This is what you hear before you die.
I shook like I was being electrocuted, without end, inhaling chopped hiccups of terror.
The Unstoppable Soldier braced its four hind legs against the cage and kicked.
The noise was so loud it hurt; I could feel the vibrations shudder through every bone in my body.
The thing kicked and thrashed.
The two front arms tore away from the bug’s thorax, and the rest of the creature went flying back into the same pile of dirty clothes I’d landed in only moments before. The outside segments of the arms flexed and twitched spastically, still caught in the cage bars like some ghastly trophy, spraying wild, gushing splatters of fluid. Some of the goop landed on my legs and splashed in my hair.
The rest of the now armless monster rolled around, kicking at the air and hissing, spurting pus-like globs of its innards everywhere.
At that point—and, again, maybe this was due to the whiskey—I decided that I would never have another wet dream as long as I lived.
The arms stuck in the basketball cage stopped twitching and relaxed.
Drip-drip.
The thing on the floor also stopped moving, surrounded by a glistening lake of snot gravy. The smell was disgusting. I had to puke. I did it in an open locker.
Maybe it was the whiskey.
So, what do you do when you’re barefoot, inside a cage in a moldy, dungeonlike boys’ locker room, and there’s a presumably dead monster that had just been trying to eat you spewing a fountain of frothing, milky snot all over your only path out?
I waited.
I watched the thing on the floor.
It had to be dead, I thought; it wouldn’t be pretending, just to lure me out of the cage. Bugs aren’t smart enough for those kinds of things.
Besides, all its contents had pretty much ejaculated out of the holes where its arms used to be.
Cautiously, on stinging feet, I approached the bars of the cage. I wondered if there had ever been any human beings who’d been so close to the spiked death-trap arms of an Unstoppable Soldier and lived to tell about it. I was fascinated and disgusted, all at the same time. This was like living inside The Night, that horrible scene captured by Max Beckmann.
I actually touched one of the spikes on the monster’s severed arm. It felt like the point of the sharpest, hardest knife I had ever felt.
The arm twitched at my touch.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled.
“Hey!”
I watched the thing on the floor to see if it moved at the sound of my voice.
“You’re fucking stupid!”
Motionless. No self-esteem issues.
I wrapped my fingers through the meshed bars on the cage and shook it, rattling and clanging.
The thing was clearly dead, but that didn’t make me any less nervous about going outside the cage. I opened the door and stood there for a moment.
The Unstoppable Soldier must have had nearly twenty gallons of goop inside its body. The gut soup smelled like rotting meat, and I could feel heat rising from it. The nearest dry spot on the concrete floor was at least fifteen feet away from the cage. I did not want to walk through the stuff barefoot, so I closed the door and only had to look through a few of the lockers before finding a pair of white Wolverines basketball socks and shoes that fit me.
Maybe they had at one time been worn by the boy named Julian Powell too.
Names and faces.
I stepped outside the cage and into the puddle of guck. When I took a second step, my shoe made a sickening slurping noise and then a sound like I was walking through warm egg yolks. Certain the thing really was dead, I took off running for the door out of the locker room, but my feet slipped in the viscous slop, and I fell down onto my hands and knees, barely saving myself from planting my face in the unstoppable goo.
Feeling it on my hands and legs was worse than I could imagine. The stuff was hot and slimy, wriggling with wormy coils of unnamable horrors, and it smelled so foul I could almost taste it. I slipped again trying to get to my feet and caught myself with my right forearm. When I managed to get up, snotty ropes of the stuff hammocked down from my arms and legs.
My stomach turned, but it had already been emptied once.
Carefully, walking on tiptoes, I made it through the miserable lake.
I felt around blindly in the locker room and found a towel and a discarded T-shirt lying on the floor. Gagging, I used them to wipe myself off, and then I left Henry A. Wallace Middle School.
I abandoned the sloppy shoes I’d found on the front steps next to the bottle of whiskey that was still sitting exactly where I’d left it when I took off running from the Unstoppable Soldier. I had no idea how much time had passed since I’d left the trailer, but I had no intention of staying outside any longer. So I picked up the bottle, and, staggering, I took two more big swallows of the stuff before opening the door on our van.
Inside smelled safe—like Amelie, soundlessly asleep in my bed, with the lingering scents of soap from the shower and the food we’d shared for dinner.
I took a deep breath and thought about what I might tell her, or might not. I put the whiskey back inside the cupboard and took off my shirt. Then I wrapped myself up in the covers on the small bed—the one Mel had been sleeping in—and fell rapidly into a deep and dreamless black void.
Edsel and Mimi
In all his life, Breakfast had never seen anyone as old as Edsel and his wife, Mimi.
They must have been a hundred years old, Breakfast thought.
Edsel and Mimi lived inside Doc Sawbones’ Field Amputation House of Horrors!, and it was Edsel who’d come running o
ut after he spotted Breakfast and Olive walking together beside the fake river-mouth battlefield of the Battle of Hampton Roads Thrill Ride!
“Wait! Don’t run off! Wait!” Edsel shouted and ran as fast as he could, which was actually slower than Breakfast’s normal walking pace.
“Oh my gosh! Olive! A person! Another real live person!”
Olive jumped up and down and stroked Breakfast’s thigh.
Edsel was out of breath by the time he caught up to Breakfast and Olive. He doubled over, panting, like he was staring at his feet, which were gnarled and shoeless. The old man wore greasy work pants that were frayed and threadbare, held tight to his waist with a knotted electrical extension cord. He had no shirt, and every inch of the exposed skin on his body had been covered with tattoos—smudged drawings, as far as Breakfast was concerned, since the boy did not know what tattoos were. Breakfast was fascinated by the image of the rattlesnake that coiled around Edsel’s forearm. Breakfast had no idea what the purpose of the drawings was, especially ones like the car with flames coming out of its wheels and the skull with a knife underneath its jaw and fiery flames spewing from its eyes.
He thought, Maybe the old man lived at a time when everything in the world had been engulfed in flames.
“Where did you come from?” Edsel, who still had not raised his face to look at the two, asked.
“Over yonder.” Breakfast pointed.
That was when Edsel, who was actually not a hundred, but more approximately sixty-five years old, looked up and, for the first time, clearly took in the image of Breakfast and Olive.
“You’re naked,” Edsel, who had lived the majority of his life before the hole when people were inhibited about such things as nudity, pointed out.
“I’m wild. Rich and wild,” Breakfast said. “And me and Olive don’t like to wear nothing. What’s the point?”
“But you’re a person, and she’s a chimpanzee,” Edsel said.