Soldier. Son. Scout.
John13 looked out across the water. There was a white hot line of light between him and the sun. Like it was pointing at him.
“I want to apologize,” his father said, an hour later.
“I want a coke,” John13 said.
His father put the heel of his hand on the cooler, held it down.
He said it again: “I want to apologize.”
John13 looked up to him.
“Okay,” he said.
“You don’t even know what for.”
He had eight beers in him now.
“The Mosley,” John13 said, looking away. “I know.”
“You should be out—” his father said, so unable to form the words that he just held his hand out to the high-schoolers, their music, their fun.
“I know,” John13 said. “I will. September.”
His father shook his head no.
“You have the rest of the summer,” his father said. “To do whatever you want. Whatever a boy your age should be doing.”
John13 looked at him. There was a finality in his voice that hadn’t been there before. Like he was preparing for something, talking himself into it.
“We should get Mom,” John13 said, urgently, standing enough to rock the boat.
His father smiled, an early bottle rocket glinting off his beer can.
“She doesn’t know about this.”
John13 flinched when the bottle rocket exploded. His father’s face was slack now, a mask, strings tied from his cheeks to his mind, so he could imitate a smile.
John13 went cold all over.
There was nowhere to run out here. Nowhere to go.
His father looked up to the puff of sparks. “You didn’t even ask for any fireworks, James.”
James. His real middle name.
John13 shook his head inside his head: no.
“What are you doing?” he said, his voice cracking down the middle, so that he could feel it in the underside of the back of his jaw.
“You’ll thank me next year,” his father said.
“No.”
His father flipped the lid of the cooler back then.
It was the Mosley.
John13 felt himself breathing hard. Like it was from far away.
“Dad.”
His father’s eyes were wet, the beer in him rising.
“See,” his father said. “Look at yourself, son. It’s . . . I don’t know. Unholy. It’s just wires and—”
“No.”
John13 was crying now, down the back of his throat.
His father hooked his chin back towards the ramp, said something else about the high-schoolers. Maybe the same thing.
John13 didn’t look. It didn’t matter.
“No,” he said again.
Now his father’s voice was cracking, too. But he was laughing at the same time. “I mean, James, shit. I expected to have to tell you to quit or—or else go blind.” He smiled, cracked a new can open. “I guess this is the sixties, though, right? Maybe you’ll just go deaf.”
Across the lake, all the running lights were fading off for the show. It was like candles in a church, a strong wind blowing through the open doors, sweeping across the pews, up to the altar. The cooler.
“Dad—” John13 finally got out, standing now, reaching.
His father smiled, gave him the beer. It was a ritual; John13 could see his father trying to hold his shoulders, his head, just like his father had stood when he’d offered the beer.
“Drink,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”
John13 held the can, looking down at it.
“Please,” he said, or tried to.
“Take one,” his father was saying. “Your mother’ll never know. You’re almost a man now.”
John13 held the yellow can to his face, his lips, and let the beer crash into his mouth. After he swallowed, he pursed his lips and looked over to his father—is this enough?— then retched over the side.
His father smiled, patted him on the back, guided the can out of his hands.
“I know you hate me now,” he said.
John13 looked up at him through the bangs he was going to have to cut off for school. He shook his head no. His father was crying now, wrapping John13 up in his arms, pulling him close.
“I want everything for you,” he said.
“I have it,” John13 said.
“You don’t know,” his father said back. “I wish you didn’t ever have to grow up.”
“Dad.”
“I wish it didn’t have to be like this.”
His sweat was acrid, his jaw rough, nonregulation.
John13 tried to pull away, couldn’t.
Son, Scout, Soldier. James.
He tried to pull away again then, and his father held him closer, closer, his thick body racked with sobs, the can at John13’s lower back crunched, the beer slipping down the seat of his pants, and he saw his father for a moment the way he wanted to see him, on his drills, every motion efficient and sure—pure—his hands steady and right, because the world depended on them.
But he wasn’t that person. Just on the radio.
“Dad . . .” John13 said, and his father held him out at arm’s length, appraising him, looking for himself in his son, the muscles on one side of the back of his neck twitching, so that his head kept jerking that way.
“. . . son,” he said, then kept one arm on John13’s shoulder, used the hand of the other to tip the cooler up to the edge of the boat, his eyes apologizing already at a furious pace.
John13 took one step back, away, and for one crystal moment the cooler—the Mosley—was perched on the aluminum lip of the boat, and John13 was making deals at a furious pace: that if it would just float in there, he would never hurt any living thing again, and he wouldn’t think wrong thoughts, about anybody, and more, and more. But then it started leaning over into the water, turning all his promises the other way, inside out, until they were threats. He moved towards it without even meaning to, never saw the back of his father’s military hand approaching.
It unhinged him, slapped him back into the other side of the boat, and the Mosley slipped into the lake.
Neither of them looked at it, just at each other. John13’s left nostril leaking blood.
“You’re growing up, now,” his father said. “Can you feel it?”
John13 smiled, looked over at the shore. Some of the high-schoolers had a bonfire going, the sparks trailing up into the sky.
“Yeah,” he said, toeing a lifejacket.
His father smiled, then, extended a hand—something you do for a man—and John13 smiled back, but it was a different smile altogether.
“Do quickly what you have to do,” he said.
sd His voice was different, even. He could feel it, hear it, and then he was diving into the water after his radio, making no splash at all.
It was hanging eight feet under the boat, strung out from receiver to headphones, the headphones tangled in the hinge of the cooler, the cooler bobbing just under the surface.
John13 held the receiver hard to his chest, screaming bubbles, and then the fireworks exploded over the water, and it was all color, no sound. Beautiful with no oxygen, the surface of the lake on fire. Independence Day. He screamed, kicking for the boat, his eyes burning, but the slack he made in the headphone cord loosened the headphones from the hinge of the cooler. It corked back up, disappeared—his father, lifting it out, thinking it was him, John13. That he would be attached.
He wasn’t. He was sinking, unable to let go.
Seventy-five feet. John13 reeled the headphones down to him, shoulders jerking when his eardrums burst, but he was going to die anyway, it didn’t matter. The last thing he did was cup the headphones over his ears, to staunch the blood, to hear, and then before he could say stop, it was days later.
The head of his bed was against the window, and it wasn’t his window, wasn’t his bed. The hospital, his mother talking to him. She sounded li
ke her mouth was full of tinfoil. She was stroking his hair.
He was alive, the Mosley polished on the top shelf of the closet. Unmossy.
“Dad?” he said, when he could, and his mother explained how John13’s father was living on base now, with one of his friends. That he might be there for a while. That it wasn’t his fault, John13’s.
John13 nodded.
He was alive.
Every time he opened his mouth, his jaw, his ear popped, the drum in there stretched too tight now, but trying to heal.
“It still smells like gunpowder,” one of the nurses said.
Like fireworks.
John13 stood at the window watching the base kids shoot off what they had left over, and flinched with each explosion. They were too far away to hear, but there was something.
It was behind the base, looming: a thunderstorm.
The barometer was dropping, and he could feel it now. In his inner ear.
“Gonna rain,” he said aloud, to nobody.
That night he stayed awake to watch the lightning play on the white walls, and then he was still awake when the storm broke.
It was two months until September.
The clouds were beautiful.
He was alive.
SEVENTEEN16 April 1999, Verdon, Nebraska
Amos was carrying a dead girl across the pasture. Her mouth kept falling open, but he could usually nudge it shut with his chin before she said anything.
It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Whenever he got to a flat enough place to see his shadow, the wind was making his hair look like a woodcutting he had seen once, where the sun had been behind the hero’s head, with just a narrow ridge showing where the head stopped, the light started. Only that ridge was gone now, had been sliced away.
He felt expansive, large, like he was flying, just very close to the ground. It was always like this before a storm.
Already the rain was coming down in pellets, in tablets, in capsules.
Now he was cutting baking soda and Vitamin C and trucker speed into what was left of the Dilantin.
It was the absolute perfect balance.
Amos smiled so big he almost tipped forward, spilled the girl.
When he pulled her close she tried to bite onto his neck but he angled his jaw up and away, shook his head no to her.
The dead don’t understand.
It’s one of the first things you learn.
But they don’t understand when they’re living, either.
Amos laughed to himself.
At the edge of town, he had to set her up on the cinderblock fence then follow her up, over.
When he padded down on the other side, his legs absorbing the extra weight of her, a giant dog exploded from the porch, frothy lines of saliva arcing around its head like the whiskers of a Chinese dragon.
Amos was entranced, could have watched the dog approach for days, but there was the girl to think about.
He turned around so the dog wouldn’t bite the girl, and the dog hit him in the back, all its slow-motion catching up to it at once. It threw all three of them against the fence, scraping the girl’s face against the rough cinderblock. After Amos had gone to such great pains to keep her pretty for her mom and dad. Now you could see her teeth through her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to her, his eyebrows up in what felt like an upside down V of concern, then, with the dog pulling at his left elbow, already spinning him around to go for the throat or the belly, he whispered for the girl to wait, rose to meet the personal test this animal was trying to be, for him. Rose to thank it in kind.
Because the teeth were what you had to watch, Amos sacrificed his bandaged right palm to catch the top jaw, a tendon rubberbanding up the backside of his forearm, then got his left fingers around the other jaw and brought the dog down on its side until he could work his feet up into the mouth he was holding open. After that, it was easy: he just wrenched the mouth open wide with his leg muscles, until the skin tore, then the muscle, then the skull, the dog’s new smile gaping and permanent.
It still wasn’t dead, but it was close enough. When the skull had tried to close back in place on each side, it had probably pinched some brain in there, severed it from whatever the dog was trying to think.
Amos squatted, watched the dog pedals its paws into the lawn. He lifted the dog’s thick head and the lower jaw stayed on the ground.
Amos giggled.
He lifted it again, again, loved that goofy expression.
The storm, the girl said though, bringing him back, and Amos stood, collected her.
She was right. They didn’t have long here.
Amos’s first thought was to leave her on the lawn furniture couch, to keep the cushions from blowing away—they’d be good for forts, later—or maybe arrange her on the stone bulge of the cellar, so it would look like an alter, but then he saw the treehouse. Her treehouse.
Yes.
It was old but it was good.
He set her up there, followed to make sure it would work.
It was perfect, had been a fort a few years ago.
Amos propped her up on the outer halfwall, so she could see into the living room, then he looked into the house with her, and then the sky took a deep breath, held it.
Amos and the girl peered up, waiting.
First one hailstone hit the ground, then ten thousand, like they’d been in a canvas tarp up there, and somebody had finally pulled the string on it.
And then it was over. Car alarms all over town screaming. Speckled eggs shattered in their nests. Amos remembered being young-young, thinking ducks and birds were filled with eggs, that they had to be so careful about ever bumping into anything. That they would bleed yolk if they did.
Now now now, though, Amos told himself, tapping his temples on both sides. Stay in the now only. No falling backwards anymore. It was too easy.
It was the Dilantin, he knew. It pulled down the walls keeping yesterday back. Looking backwards was no help, though.
But he had discipline. Had had it surgically implanted.
He made himself look into the living room with the girl, be only in this one place instead of trying to straddle decades like a walking suicide.
The living room, that living room.
It was Indian, right?
This was the girl’s treehouse, so this was the right address. You don’t take treehouses with you when you move. But still. The living room was a Mr. Rogers living room, clean and neat, no oil paintings of chiefs, no sweetgrass braids on the speakers. And there were no cars in the backyard. And also there was a yard.
But there were train tracks right on the other side of the fence that would be thunder at night, shake the windows in their frames, roll baseballs out from behind the refrigerator.
And the dog had been bigger than any dog should have been. And meaner.
It’s all right, the girl told him, and Amos sat back, pinkied some more Dilantin up from his pocket, inhaled it.
It’s all right.
Amos grabbed onto the top of the treehouse’s halfwall, no discipline at all, and fell the hell back through time. But it wasn’t his fault. He’d heard that before was the thing. What she’d said, he’d heard it before, just like that.
It was the year before Father had found him. A day with bleachers. The wind blowing but not like this, just gentle, to wick the sweat from your face.
Baseball. A diamond made of chalk.
A kid in the outfield all of the sudden screaming.
Amos was just eleven, was waiting for Coach to wave him home, but now Coach was looking to the outfield.
Everybody was.
One of the high school boys vaulted over the fence, never spilling his coke, and trotted out ahead of everybody, then stepped back himself, his coke sloshing over the edge now.
There was something on the ground. In the grass. Trying to move, trying to struggle through.
Amos looked down to it and a shrieking filled
his head.
It was a turtle, just with no shell.
Not a turtle that had been cracked open on the road by a car tire and had the bad luck to live, but one that had been born naked, just like this. Wrinkled and green and leathery, too skinny, its neck the wrong kind of long, but not a baby anymore either. It had been like this for years already. And now it was turning itself in.
“It’s all right,” Coach had said, and stepped forward with his cleats, put the turtle out of its misery in a way that made Amos straighten his own back.
He hadn’t been able to finish the game after that, couldn’t stop crying, had to sit in the dugout all through the next inning until he got in trouble for drinking all the water.
“No!” Amos told the girl, it wasn’t all right, and, to keep her standing there while he went back for her brother, he founds the tools all the way on their shelf in the shed with the flappy door and nailed her hands to the top of the halfwall. She didn’t even bleed. That’s how he knew she’d wanted him to do it.
On the way out of the yard, he stopped to inspect the dog again.
Its one eye was watching him. Its tail whapped against the ground.
Amos petted it, joked with it, pulling its tongue out so it could lick its own eye, and then lightning hit a pole across the pasture to remind him what was coming, what kind of day it was here in the neighborhood.
He melted over the fence, inhaled some more Dilantin for the strength he would need to cross the elevated railbed again, and collected the boy from the maroon Monte Carlo’s trunk. It was an Indian car, already a feather on the mirror and everything.
On the way back, the boy kept crying—something was coming out of his eyes anyway—so Amos finally broke down and gave in and caved, zero discipline, told the boy about his first ever concert, how perfect it had been. Def Leppard, and Amos made his voice like a chant, rising and falling, to lull the boy into the coliseum.
Def Leppard was big, then, he said. The biggest. Hello America. Rise up, gather ’round, Amos knew all of them. They were all he had in his basement. And the crowd, God. Throngs of people you could unzip from neck to crotch, to let the sheep they were in secret slump out steaming at your feet, their blank stares thankful.
This was going to be Amos’s first time, solo.
In line to get through the doors Amos had stood by Father and shifted from foot to foot, trying to hold his lips in no particular manner. Because this could be another lesson. They might leave the concert halfway through, drive to a woman gagged and bound in a storage unit on the other side of town. Meaning she would be his first.
All the Beautiful Sinners Page 10