Thumbsucker

by Walter Kirn

  Grandma clicked to an upside-down slide of Dr. March and Aunt Jean, Mike’s older sister, racing a catamaran across Lake Erie toward a bank of glorious orange clouds. Grandma adjusted the slide but got it sideways. “Who cares,” she said. “I don’t know why I bother. You boys won’t ever meet these people anyway.” She coughed, and the cough sounded forced to me. An act.

  “I’m gray,” she said. “I’m gray and clammy. Feel me.”

  She took Joel’s hand and pressed it to her forehead.

  “Maybe you need something salty,” Joel said. “Peanuts?”

  “Nuts clog the small intestines,” Grandma said. “What I need is ginger ale or Gatorade.”

  “We’re not allowed to drink pop at home,” Joel said.

  “Gatorade has minerals. It’s a health drink.”

  “All we have is water and milk,” Joel said.

  Grandma swayed forward, shuddered, spread her knees, and vomited into the slide-projector box. She ran a finger around inside her mouth to clean out the extra, then shook the finger dry. She sank back into the couch and shut her eyes, her hands closing on her lap like curling leaves.

  “That venison smell’s in the carpeting,” she said.

  “We don’t notice,” Joel said.

  “It’s inside you. You’re immune.”

  Grandma bent forward as if to vomit again but nothing came out except a gassy burp. “I caught that one just in time,” she said, patting and rubbing her chest. “I swallowed it. One of you boys go find Max. I need my bucket.”

  An hour later, the guest room was a sick room. Following Grandma’s whispered directions, I set a Lysol-sprayed bucket beside the bed, plugged in a humidifier, and stocked the nightstand with Dixie cups and Gatorade, which Audrey had bought on her way home from the hospital. I also put out tissues, Tylenol, and a True Detective magazine retrieved from under the Horizoneer’s front seat. Grandma sat up on a pillow, reading it. She’d let down her hair, a staticky gray horse’s tail that shocked me with its length.

  “I need a TV,” she said. “My shows are starting. There’s a portable in the motor home. Go get it.”

  “Grandpa drove to the pharmacy,” I said.

  “When he gets back.”

  “We have a radio.”

  “I hate the radio,” Grandma said.

  “St. Paul has an oldies station.”

  “I hate the oldies.”

  I was fetching a fresh box of Kleenex from downstairs when Mike came in wearing a camouflage jumpsuit and holding the new compound bow he’d been sent as a demo model for the store. He’d darkened his face with mud and grease, which made the whites of his eyes jump out. A hunting knife with a sawback blade hung from a leather strap on his right hip.

  “Great day,” he said. “She’s out there.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “The doe I’ve had my eye on since September. I like to have one picked out before the season starts. Makes it more meaningful. More one-on-one.”

  I told him about Grandma’s vomiting.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Out buying Aspercreme and magazines.”

  “Magazines about murder?”

  “And detectives.”

  “Believe me, it’s not the detectives she likes to read about. The woman has a fixation on random violence.”

  Mike clomped up the staircase and I followed him, picking up chunks of boot mud from the runner and slipping them into my pocket. Audrey emerged from the sick room with Grandma’s bucket and Mike looked down at its contents.

  “That’s just spit. There’s nothing but saliva in that pail.”

  “I realize that,” Audrey said in a low voice. “Just talk to her. She wants her boy’s attention.”

  I stood in the doorway next to the bucket as Mike stepped into the room and said, “It’s me.” Grandma lay on her side in bed, a heating pad folded underneath one cheek. She looked weaker than she had five minutes ago.

  “Don’t worry, honey,” she said. “I’m feeling fine. Everyone’s been so kind, so understanding …” Suddenly, she sat up and held her stomach.

  “Mom, it’s okay,” Mike said. “You’re safe. We love you. The only reason I wasn’t home today was that I had to get ready for the season.”

  Grandma sat back. “It comes up, but then it stops.” She blew her nose into a crumpled tissue, then carefully dabbed away the afterdrips. She opened the tissue and inspected it.

  “You’re letting yourself get all wound up,” Mike said. “Those magazines, are they a good idea, Mom? Why not let Audrey find you a good book to read?”

  Grandma lifted her glass and sipped some Gatorade, massaging her throat to help the liquid go down.

  “I’ll leave,” she said. “I’m in your way. I’ll go. I’m interrupting your blood sport.”

  “Suit yourself. I warned you what I’d be doing before you came.”

  “You can’t even put it off until next weekend. Can’t even wait a week.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. The other hunters would get the jump on me.”

  “Fine, we’ll stay in the camper. Just send the kids out. Have your fun and act like we’re not here.”

  Grandma swung a pale leg out over the mattress and Mike stepped forward to help. She waved him back. She planted one foot as if testing the floor for firmness, then let out a long, sighing belch. I grabbed the bucket. By the time I got into position, she’d splattered everything, including Mike’s boots. He looked down at them and sighed.

  Mike left the house at three in the morning. The smell of the bottled buck scent he’d rubbed on drifted into my bedroom, preventing me from falling back to sleep. I turned on the radio beside my bed and listened to Ron Ben Strong, a local evangelist, brief his flock about a government satellite whose mission, he said, was to spy on Christians’ houses and track the titles of the books they read. Like the rest of my family, I wasn’t religious, but I’d started to envy people who were. They seemed to know just what and whom to be afraid of.

  After a breakfast of eggs and venison sausage that I only managed to eat two bites of, Joel and I went to the motor home. I knocked. From visiting a nursing home that Audrey worked in once, I’d learned the old people needed their privacy because they were always fussing with their bodies, dealing with ingrown nails and corns and such. I was already feeling pangs of indigestion and I didn’t want to walk in on something sickening.

  Grandpa showed us inside with a gesture that seemed too sweeping for the tiny space. Grandma waved to us from her fold-down bed in the sleeping compartment behind the bathroom. A magazine lay open on her lap and a cigarette in an ashtray on the sheet sent up a blue plume.

  “I just learned something important,” she told Joel, tapping a finger on her magazine page. “If you’re being assaulted in a lonely place and there’s no one around to hear you scream, scream anyway. It breaks the attacker’s momentum.”

  “Okay,” Joel said.

  “Assault is a crime of momentum,” Grandma said. “And it’s not just the blacks you have to be afraid of now. It’s the Europeans, too.”

  “Hush, Alice,” Grandpa said.

  “He needs to know this.”

  “He doesn’t need to know it now. Hush up.”

  We passed the morning playing along with game shows on the motor home’s portable TV. On the first show, the object was to guess the prices of ordinary household items. Grandpa’s guesses were all dead-on, as if he’d priced the items only yesterday, but Grandma’s guesses simply made no sense. She priced a gas barbecue at a thousand dollars, a Mr. Coffee at three, a wok at ninety. I wondered when she’d last been in a store. I could only conclude that Grandpa did all their shopping.

  As Grandpa prepared our lunch on the small stove, I realized that the Horizoneer was growing on me. He whipped up our macaroni and cheese in no time, maneuvering in the miniature kitchen like an airline pilot in a cockpit. We ate at a table with an inlaid checkerboard, and without getting up from his revolving stool, Grandpa was
able to open the refrigerator and get us bottles of Coke. Compared to the compact, convenient motor home, the house I’d grown up in seemed huge and wasteful—an echoey shell that I frequently felt lost in.

  “Coffee, Justin?” Grandpa asked.

  “No thanks. Don’t drink it.”

  “It’s good. It’s time to start.”

  We drank the coffee out of plastic mugs whose bottoms were weighted so they wouldn’t spill. The first sip burned my tongue. The second soothed it. By the third sip, I wanted another cup. It was that way with everything I liked.

  “It’s nice in here,” I said. “I like this life.”

  “We’ll take you boys on a trip sometime,” said Grandpa.

  “Fat chance,” Grandma said. “Our son would never let them. They’d see we were fun, not the creeps he makes us out to be.”

  Grandpa refilled my cup. “Don’t listen to this. She’s not herself this week. There’s a sedative that she’s run out of and no one in Minnesota seems to carry it.”

  “They carry it,” Grandma said, “but not in capsules. I only take capsules. My throat’s too tender for pills.”

  She squeezed her neck and made a choking face. Then she reopened her murder magazine. “Everyone listen up: I have a quiz. Which are deadlier, pistols or blunt instruments? It’s not what you’d think, so take a little time.”

  Mike seemed to be hiding something at dinner that night. He was too considerate, too gentle. His cheeks were rosy from scrubbing off the buck scent and he grinned between bites of greasy venison loaf. The film of smoke on the kitchen’s picture window distorted the snowflakes that had started falling.

  “Grandma gave us tips on crime,” Joel said.

  Mike spread fried onions over his slab of meat. “I’m glad you spent time visiting together. Mom and Dad have their quirks, but they’re good people. I think that camper helps. Mom feels secure in it.”

  “Can we sleep out in the motor home?” Joel asked.

  “Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” Mike said. “Give your parents some privacy tonight.”

  “That might be nice,” said Audrey. “I think I’d like that.”

  Mike’s smile broadened. “I got my doe tonight.”

  Audrey’s mouth tensed.

  “I aimed straight down at her. Easy shot. I bull’s-eyed. Strong, clean chest shot.”

  “Where is it? Did you bring it home?” Joel said. My little brother loved dead animals. When Mike plucked ducks, Joel collected the chopped-off wings and ran down the driveway, flapping them and leaping.

  “The deer’s still out there. It bolted. Then the sun set. I’ll find it tomorrow,” Mike said. “She left a blood trail.”

  “You’ll find it tonight,” said Audrey. “Jesus Lord …” She stood up with her plate and scraped it into the garbage can.

  “Fine,” Mike said. “I’ll get a sleeping bag and track the thing at first light.”

  “The thing,” said Audrey.

  “The animal, then.”

  “Just stop it.”

  “The precious Bambi.”

  My grandparents were right: life was nicer in the Horizoneer.

  With Grandpa drinking bourbon sours and Grandma woozy from a sleeping pill, it was like a party in the motor home. To make up for dinner, which I hadn’t touched, I shoveled down ice cream during our game of Scrabble. Grandma won by making nonsense words, including “plip”—a sound like plop, she claimed—and “clasque,” which she said she’d forgotten the meaning of. Outside, the snow had turned to slush and sleet, and I thought of Mike in the forest, tracking the doe. The sleet would erase the trail and soak his sleeping bag, but facing difficulties in the woods was Mike’s idea of fun.

  After the game we popped popcorn in a popper whose foil lid rose like a chef’s hat during heating. Grandpa gave Joel and me pillows and wool blankets and we lay down in the aisle head-to-toe. Scattered popcorn hulls pricked my legs and back, and I was convinced I hadn’t fallen asleep yet when suddenly I woke and noticed traffic lights in the small round window overhead.

  The camper was moving, with Grandma at the wheel. Wearing only a flannel nightgown, a cigarette stuck in her mouth like a lit fuse, she stared at the fast-sweeping windshield wipers, eyes glazed. Grandpa was still on his stool at the table, his head down on the checkerboard, passed out.

  I stumbled past him to the camper’s passenger seat. Through the sleet-blurred glass I saw a town: rows of unfamiliar stores, all closed.

  “Where are we? Where are we going?” I asked Grandma.

  “Sometimes those pills have the opposite effect. They jazz me up,” she said. “They make me restless.”

  The town petered out and we drove along through cornfields on a muddy, potholed country road. The gusting dashboard vents blew Grandma’s hair back and pinked the tip of her nose. “We’re lost,” she said.

  “This might be Wisconsin. Did you cross a bridge?”

  “I might have. I wasn’t looking down,” she said.

  She couldn’t tell me how long she’d been driving or in what direction she’d set out. The fields grew flatter and went from corn to soybeans, indicating that we were headed west. We passed a few cars and another Horizoneer, which honked its horn in late-night solidarity.

  Grandma eyed my reflection in the windshield. “We’ll go to New York. You’ll meet the other Cobbs. We’re quite a clan out there—we have position. No one says boo to us; we protect our own. Your father thinks it’s too dull, too sheltered there. Well, he can afford to—he’s a great big man. Women and children can’t risk that attitude.”

  I turned on the motor home’s AM radio and listened for a clue to our location. Stations came in from everywhere: crop news from Omaha, polka from North Dakota, a Bible show all the way from Colorado. We were out on the plains, where all the signals cross.

  “I think we need to turn around,” I said. I rooted around in the glove compartment, looking for a map, but all I found were empty asthma inhalers and a crime magazine whose cover showed a woman bound and gagged with black electrical tape.

  Grandma’s head began to droop and sway; I braced myself to snatch the wheel from her. The only other vehicles on the road were pickups driven by hunters in orange caps. They steered with one finger, smoking and drinking coffee, and when the motor home drifted under forty, one of them honked at us and shook his fist.

  All of a sudden, Grandma was fast asleep and I was pressed tight against her, steering us. I felt the Horizoneer’s bulk, its sluggish tonnage, and I called out for Grandpa. Joel woke up instead. He cleared his throat, said, “Don’t,” and fell asleep again.

  Keeping us straight required constant adjustments. There were crosswinds to fight and high spots in the highway. Our speed was a steady forty-three, governed by Grandma’s wedged-in throttle foot. In time I got the hang of things. My pride rose. I managed to get settled on the seat and nudge Grandma’s foot off the pedal with my own. I’d always suspected that I knew how to drive.

  Moments later I heard Grandpa waking. I pumped the brakes and eased us toward the shoulder. He staggered forward, lost his footing, and ended up sideways in the passenger seat as I brought the vehicle to a stop. I waited for him to acknowledge my heroics but he was groggy and didn’t have his glasses on.

  I had to explain the situation for him. All my finest moments went unwitnessed.

  “The woman gets confused sometimes,” he said.

  “She said she was driving to Buffalo.”

  “She’s delicate.”

  “Mike says she’s faking.”

  “He knows better than that. Your grandmother’s nerves aren’t her fault. She struggles with them. The people who should have loved her weren’t always kind to her. Tough neighborhood. Tough family. Tough men. It wasn’t a tea party, Irish Buffalo.”

  Grandpa took Grandma’s hand and tugged her upright. Waking up, she muttered a string of curses—not the four-letter words that I was used to, but the ugly, peculiar ones you seldom hear.

  “We kn
ow,” said Grandpa, smoothing her tangled hair back.

  “Cunt hole,” said Grandma. “Prick.”

  “It’s me. It’s Max.”

  I excused myself, opened the door, and stepped outside. After so much venison and tension, the retching was a relief. It came in waves. And though I might have been able to swallow it back, I let it come up until it was all gone—not just the food but the desire for food, whatever that space was that the food had filled.

  They were gone—to Florida, they told me, to join a convoy of other Horizoneers—when Mike returned with the gutted doe that morning. After I helped him unload it from the station wagon, he slit the tendons of the doe’s back legs and threaded baling twine between the bones and hung it from a rafter in the garage.

  I watched with gritty, tired eyes, my mouth still raw and sour from stomach acid. I knew better than to tell Mike where I’d been all night and turn him against his parents even more. My adventures had never interested him anyway. With Mike, there was no way to get around the feeling that everyone’s in the middle of his own life and at the edge of everybody else’s.

  “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” he said. “She ran for almost two miles, I don’t know how. I only wish Mom and Dad were here to see this.” He ran a hand along the doe’s stiff flank, leaving a trail of fluffed-up, muddy fur. In the sticky cavity where the organs had been I saw a white spider walk across a rib.

  “Those two have their ups and downs,” Mike said. “I realize that. They sure do love you kids, though. That’s what matters.”