Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  After the old man’s brain got wholly melted from the meth and the moonshine and from The Book, he stopped the cellar services.

  “T’aint needed no more,” was his excuse. “The Book says we’s done with that now.”

  I think he was just too wasted to care anymore, and if those Star Things and Elder Gods and Night Gaunts he was always talking about gave a shit, they didn’t show it to us. The Book said they never really paid us much mind, anyway, and that to them the way we served They That Had Been and They Who Were Coming was just ignorant, that we were to them as inconsequential as the microscopic parasites that rode the worms feasting on the fly-blown corpses they also ignored beneath the cataclysm of their passing. The joy of The Return, according to The Book according to the old man, the only joy for man, any man, every man, on The Day of The Return, was oblivion. Anything less would be beyond imagination, and even The Book wouldn’t or couldn’t say anything particular about human survivors. We prayed for an exalted, ignoble and ignored, quick death.

  ***

  So, I just stood there in the basement leaning on my shovel, listening to my brother beat the crap out of our father, and staring at all that ruined money and the skeletonized remains of one of my childhood classmates from the days I went to school to sit in a classroom feeling like the worst kind of hillbilly I am. Sharon Lebanon disappeared when we were in the 8th grade, her folks moved away a few years later, and she slipped away from my memory, but her bones brought a sharp pain to my many-times-broken heart. I instantly recognized her sweater for no other reason than it had been hers. It was a cardigan thing with a belt, I think they called them “Shetland” sweaters like the pony. It had a geometrical pattern. I remember she’d been so proud of that sweater. She’d seen ones like it worn by Hollywood movie stars on TV and in those magazines I sadly remembered she’d always seemed to carry, always seemed to be pouring herself over and into their pictures, the pictures, the pictures of what she’d known she’d never be. I bet her nice room in her nice house was covered with photos she’d clipped from these magazines and taped up like talismans, like portents, like signs of what could be. She’d saved up her lunch money for a solid year and ordered it from the Sears Roebuck, and I could see her wearing it while she waited at the bus stop in the winter’s mornings, steam from her warm breath pluming away from her mouth. I could see her wearing it on warm spring mornings when nobody needed a jacket or a sweater, could see her wearing it as she walked barefoot down the dirt trace to town in the summer, hot and sweaty and just like a picture in a magazine. Its Sears synthetic fibers hadn’t deteriorated much in eleven years. Sharon had, but the sweater hadn’t.

  Tobias came stomping down the stairs from behind me.

  “Asshole cocksucker,” he announced. “Fuckin’ useless perverted toothless piece of shit.”

  He was talking about the old man. It had become a theme.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked Tobias.

  “Fuckin’ bleedin’, man,” Tobias answered. “Sittin’ there in his fuckin’ Laz-E-Boy recliner, crying like a bitch, and bleedin’.”

  “Did he say anything?” I asked.

  “How’n fuck should Ah know?” He answered my question with a question and I hate that.

  “Did yah know about any of this?” I asked him.

  “About the money or about Sharon?” Again with the question for a question, and I wasn’t liking it any better.

  I gently poked her little pelvis under the sweater.

  “Any of it?” I was trying to give him a chance to be truthful.

  “No,” he lied.

  I poked around little bit more and adjusted my grip on the shovel handle.

  “Then why yah ask? How’d yah know her name?” I wanted to know.

  “Why’d Ah ask what?” Tobias was having a lot of trouble answering me straight on. “Know whose name?”

  “I asked you if yah knew about any of this,” I explained to him. Again. And I looked at the little girl corpse and ruined money as a demonstration. Again. “Yah asked me, about the money or about Sharon?’ If yah didn’t know about this, if yah didn’t know about her, why’d yah ask which one?”

  “Why’d Ah ask which-un one what?” These questions were painful to endure.

  “Why’d yah ask me which one—Sharon or the money?”

  Tobias stood there blinking, blinking and thinking, while he tried to imagine what he’d say next. He knew it was too late but he was trying. The shovel in my hands hit his nose flat, splitting it open before he could frame his next stupid question. Tobias sat down hard on his ass next to the pile of worthless cash and what was left of Sharon Lebanon.

  “Yah fuck,” I told him. “Yah fuckin’ knew, didn’t yah?”

  “Glub?” Tobias answered through his already blackening, swelling lump of a nose and the gushing bright blood. “Glub glum glub?”

  “Stop answerin’ my questions with more questions, you peckerwood asshole,” I told him and smacked the top of his head with the flat blade of my shovel. It made a dull ringing sound and vibrated in my hands, kind of like a bell if a bell was a shovel.

  “Ooowww,” Tobias moaned and at least that sounded like a statement. We were making progress.

  ***

  I thought about Sharon Lebanon for a second. A flood of quick memories followed my recognition of her sweater: Sharon on the school bus sitting next to Deb Skinner and talking about boys; watching her dance with another boy at an 8th grade sock-hop about 6 weeks before she disappeared; Sharon in 5th grade crying when she got 2nd place in the science fair because she had worked on her project entirely by herself and the winner, Little Fat Mike Tullman from town had so obviously gotten help from his father, a machinist down to the county Parks & Recreation Department. I remember thinking it wasn’t fair. I hadn’t gotten any help from the old man, of course, but my project sucked. I can’t even remember what it was, maybe some last minute thing with lima beans or food color or something. I couldn’t believe Sharon had been in my basement this whole time. And I had almost forgotten about her. I’d almost forgotten her name.

  Tobias was curled on his side on the dirt floor.

  “Anything else Ah need to know about?” I asked him, ready to kick him if it even sounded like he was going to ask another question.

  “Nobe,” he straightforwardly answered me. “Nuh-ting else.”

  I looked down on the little corpse and damned if it didn’t appear as if there were tooth marks on the long bones of her little legs. The old man hadn’t always been toothless; before the meth fucked up his mouth, he’d had quite a set of choppers.

  “Yah sick motherfucker,” I told him.

  “Imb inna Book,” he whined.

  I kicked him for that. Hard.

  ***

  I was standing in the kitchen sort of leaning on my shovel. I can’t imagine how lonely it would be for someone to not have blood kin, people who aren’t just like you but are actually part of you and you are a part of them. As much as I hated every single one of my family, I couldn’t imagine my life without them.

  We’d talked about blood a lot amongst each other.

  “Ain’t no gotdamn joke,” the old would preach at midnight services. “It’s jest true. Blood is thicker’n water and thicker’n mud an’ that means they ain’t no kind of bindin’ or no kind of holy oath that’ll put yah closer to no other human in this world or any other world than the blood yah share in yah veins. That’s why I married your mother and that’s why the blood inside yah boys is holy.”

  That last part doesn’t make a lot of sense, but the first part rang true. Even monsters have mommies. I always wondered where ours, our mother, had gone. We, Tobias and I, talked about blood a lot, but we never talked about mothers. That’s kind of weird, I think.

  I remember standing there in the hallway and being just a little kid but still having this vision of how we are as a family, how we are like a silver ring or a group of interlocked silver rings and no matter which ring you set to follow
out of the group, you always loop back and find yourself tangled up in someone else’s silver ring. That’s the family for sure. The reason the rings are silver is that gold don’t tarnish. Says so in The Book. Tarnish is a kind of corruption. Corruption is what keeps us pure, keeps us welded tight. It said so in The Book.

  Tobias was still moaning. I was sitting in the sick heart of the rancid rat’s nest we called our home and I was just sick of us all, tired and sick and bored and infuriated and deeply saddened by our lives. There I was surrounded by illness, decay, and deviance with a pile of rotten cash and the corpse of my childhood sweetheart down in the basement and I just didn’t know what to do anymore.

  ***

  “Lem has a girlfriend, Lem has a girlfriend,” Tobias chanted while he danced circles around me.

  I lunged at the gadfly, narrowly missing a grab at his winter coat.

  “Shut up, you fuckin’ li’l brat,” I tried to command.

  “Lem and Sharon, sitting in a tree, F-U-C-K-I-N-G,” Toby sang as he dodged a punch-kick combination. “First comes love, then comes marriage. Then comes Lem pushing on a baby—OW!”

  Tobias rubbed his thigh where my boot had left the beginnings of a good-sized welt. I was able, in general, to land only 1 blow in every 6 attempts, so I tended to make them count when I could. It was the same strategy the old man used to raise us boys on beatings.

  All the way to home, Tobias limped in front of, behind, and alongside me in a manner both mocking and defiant though he made no further vocalization. I scowled, though not at my brother’s teasing. In fact, I scowled because I did not have a girlfriend in general and that Sharon Lebanon was not my girlfriend specifically. Tobias’s teasing reminded me of that fact and, since I truly wished that Sharon was my girlfriend, that the we truly were f-u-c-k-i-n-g, in love, getting married, pushing baby carriages, and since I knew that something like that was never ever going to happen, Toby’s teasing ignited a slow red fire in my head and in my heart that, once smoldering, would be hard to dampen. What had started as love was already becoming rage.

  “I HATE HER,” I roared at my brother as if that would stop the mockery.

  We slammed into the house, dumped our coats and tattered schoolbooks onto the jumbled pile of clothing, hunting gear, odd bits of wooden things, odd bits of metal things, and trash that piled by the back door, the kitchen door. Walking into the house was walking into a wall of overheated, moist air heavy with the odors of butane gas, piss, stale cigarette smoke, rotten food, old grease, and unwashed bodies. Those smells were just one of the reasons I would remain without a girlfriend; among many other things, the way those smells clung to us was off-putting to our peers. We jealously suspected that other households hid secrets just as foul as our own; the usual backwoods foulness of abuse, madness, and violence. The only difference, we hoped in our impotent squalor, was that other households merely applied Lysol to the stink with more vigor. And for that, we hated those other households and the children reared in those households for having the luck, if not the blessing, of good hygiene and the USDA food-group pyramid and something to kill 99% of all germs. We could have accepted and lived with the foul secrets, for foul secrets were part of all the life we’d ever known, but good food and clean clothes would have made a difference and to be denied such simple amenities infuriated the both of us.

  “Where’s the fat bitch?” I asked my brother as he looked inside the barren refrigerator.

  “Probably stuffing her fat face,” Toby snickered.

  “I’d like to know with what first,” I said. “An’ if it ain’t someone’s stank pecker, if it was some kind of human-like food, then I’d like some, too.”

  “Fat chance,” Toby laughed. “Get it? ‘Fat’ chance?”

  I reached behind to idly swat at and miss my younger brother.

  “I get it, asswipe.”

  “Got any money?”

  “You wish.”

  “No shit, I wish.”

  “Well, shit in one hand and wish in the other. Watch which one fills up first.”

  “Quit trying to talk like the old man. It don’t suit you.”

  “Well, what are we going to do?”

  I closed the refrigerator door. My stomach was knotted with hunger and shame, my feet burned in my stinking boots and unwashed socks, my hair hung in greasy, knotted ropes across my crusted eyes. I honestly didn’t know how much more of this I could take. Later, I would be just as sadly surprised to look back and see just how much more it had been.

  ***

  I came wobbling into the room for living, the living room, the room for not watching broken TVs dry and spent and just damn exhausted in ways I’d never been dry or spent or exhausted before, in a way that told me I was done, I was well shet of this life, and I knew. I just knew.

  “I’m leavin’, Pa,” I told the old man. “I’m leavin’ here for good.”

  That roused him and his head twisted away from his imaginary TV programs and his dead eyes searched the room for the sound of me.

  “You ain’t leavin’ nowhere, boy,” he screeched to me. “You cain’t leave. You ain’t got it in yah. Ain’t no leavin’ in The Book.”

  “The Book,” I sneered and his milk-filled eye-sockets locked onto me from the sound of my voice, a sound and a voice not either of us ever heard before. “They ain’t no Book. That’s just one more a your lies, the line of dirty lies you been stuffin’ in our heads afore we was even old enough to know the difference. They ain’t no damn Book. There’s that book you wave around and holler ‘bout, but there ain’t no BOOK.”

  The old man’s head snapped around as he took to fumbling and groping and clawing under his dirty crotch.

  “Ain’t no Book, is it? Ain’t no Book? Then what’n all holy hell is this?”

  And he held something up in his hooked hands, a pile of something, a wad of something that looked to be something that looked like it was maybe a book, maybe a dictionary or volume 9 of an encyclopedia nobody read or cookbook or any damned thing had been once been some kind of book afore he took to sittin’ on it all day and all night watching his empty TV with his empty eye-holes. Who knew how much piss had dribbled through cotton and denim and corduroy and Laz-E-Boy stuffing over the years and onto that stained leather and wad of dirty paper, how much piss and liquor it had soaked in, had swallowed up to arrive at such a sorry state. If it had once been a Book, a leather-bound and gilt-lettered Book, it wasn’t no Book anymore. It was just another ruined thing in a ruined house of ruined folk.

  “Ever’things inna Book here,” he cackled. “Ever’thing that ever was and ever’thing that’ll ever be. It’s all inna Book, and you leaving here just ain’t in it.”

  He opened the sodden mass and, since I reckon he’d memorized the foul thing, he run his finger down a sticky page.

  “My name is inna Book. Yer ma’s name was inna Book. Even yer retard brother’s name inna Book. Your name, mister, your name ain’t inna Book. Every damn thing we ever done is inna Book, every damn thing. But, not you leaving, nossir. Nossir. You ain’t leaving in The Book at all, at all, Not even one per gotdamn cent.”

  He stabbed at a place there on the ruined page.

  “Read it yerself. If you ain’t leaving inna Book, it means you cain’t do nothin’ about it, means you ain’t even been outside The Book, and how can you leave a place if you ain’t never been no where?”

  It almost made sense. I looked over his shoulder quite as you please to see what he was pointing at. My mouth fell open. I still don’t know or much care if the old man was crafty or crazy, bluffing or blasting scattershot in his wet-brain, but my mouth fell open like cat’s mouth falls open in the cartoon pictures when the cat sees the mouse driving a steam-shovel. The only thing I could read, clearly read, the only thing on every sodden, rat-chewed page, the only word that filled every messy, nasty paper was my name. Not the name they’d given me. Not Lemuel Josiphat Beane, not the name I’d used to go to school with, not the name that floated through
the air around me like some swarm of busy, biting bugs, but my real name. The name that told me who I was and why The Day of The Return would be a joy for someone such as I, how from wind-ravaged peaks I would hold The Book aloft in Welcome as the sand scoured me down to clean bone, bone to be reformed and reborn in ways both pleasing and enraging to Those Who Were Coming.

  It wasn’t a regular name, neither. It wasn’t any Fred or Bill or Lucian or Michael-on-a-Cross. It wasn’t even human, but I saw it and I recognized it and I could say it my head as clear as clear could be. Clearer. I could have said it aloud, could have screamed it aloud and blown that house to bits, could have started the mudslide that started the end of the Earth, but I held my voice. I held it like I’d hold one of those nuclear bombs.

  I snatched the dirty thing from the old man’s dirty claws. He tried to snatch it back, but couldn’t I was so fast. He made those wanting, those scared and lonely wanting noises in his throat, but I was way past giving him my attention. I was just staring and reading my own true name like it was spelled out electrical. I put that name in my mouth, and I said it out loud, real soft-like, trying it out. I sounded fine, just fine to me, and it fit my mouth and it fit me like something store-bought.

  The old man’s whimpering dried up when he heard me whisper my own true name.

  I said it again. I said it louder. I prized apart some pages, and I could see my name everywhere in that Book. Every page, loud and bright, my real name.

  “What’re you doing?” he spoked.

  “Imma reading my name to you, old man. Imma telling myself what you never told me. Imma cutting through the lies and the shit and blood you’ve been spilling, and Imma telling you what’s in your gotdamned Book. How you like it? How’s it sound now, you gotdamned wretch?”

  “Oh, my lord,” he whispered.

  “Your lord, what you been thinking ain’t no lord, no lord got nothing to do with it, got nothing to do with me no more, no how,” and I knew that Book just set me free that very minute.