Anyway, church told ‘em not to go but they went anyways.
Only a third of ‘em kids survived the trip out, before they even made it anywheres.
Most that did survived’er sold into slavery.
A few made it home, though.
Backwards and upside-down.
RAIN AND FIRE
It lightly rains at the hushing blue dusk.
“How’d you know it was gonna rain?” Lizzy asks, holding up a section of the tent. She’s standing over Chris as he fishes two fingers into the mud for a metal stake, the last and most ornery of the bunch. She’s still watching the sky and, before he can answer, adds, “I love it when it rains while the sun’s still out.”
He finds the stake and steadies it. Specks and globs of mud fly up in all directions as he hammers the stake deep into the soil with a rock he found earlier. The poles of the tent now firmly planted, he circles the tent and straightens bits of it, brushing off clumps of dirt with mud-covered hands and causing it to smear worse.
“I uh…mosquitoes. They seem to know when a rain’s comin’.”
The sky remains relatively open besides the large, roaming dark cloud directly overhead. The sun’s only partly visible over the tree-line on the west horizon. The cool drizzle progressively washed away any of Lizzy’s resentment leftover from the humidity.
The rain ends just after the blanket of darkness.
Next to the sparse light of the old, rusty fire-lit lantern, Chris digs to a deeper, drier level of dirt at the base of the fire pit, then erects several pieces of dry wood into a teepee-like triangle. He slides as many chunks and sticks in along the bottom and, once finishes, he opens the duffle bag next to Lizzy’s old stump. She’s since moved to a beach chair in front of the fire pit.
“Still dry,” he says of the newspaper. There’s a flicker of the lantern and Lizzy catches a joyful, childish glimmer in Chris’ eyes. He walks back, gets on his knees and close to the wood pyramid at the base of the fire pit, stuffing bits of newspaper into the crevices. His entire body is splattered with dirt, an especially thick coat of it on his arms, legs, and knees.
“I missed camping…”
“Is that catsup plant poisonous?” Lizzy asks, not paying much attention to Chris’ enthusiasm for the outdoors.
“’Catsup’?” Chris stops before lighting the newspaper, looking over to Lizzy. It takes a moment. “Oh, kudzu. No, you ain’t gotta worry.” He changes the subject. “You know, the first time I metcha was when I was camping my way up tha’ Appalachian trail.” He flicks open his Zippo lighter and snaps his finger until the flint catches and a tiny flame emerges. He sticks it under each protruding end of the newspaper, saying distractedly, “Only reason I even stopped by was to tell your daddy I was awfully sorry to hear yer mama passed.”
Chris stops himself.
Though he doesn’t look over to Lizzy, she can see hesitation in him.
“How well did you know my mommy?” Lizzy asks twice once the initial attempt is dulled by Chris’ loud blowing. The newspaper was catching, many of the small flames following into the heart of the wood pyramid.
“I knew her…before you’er even born. Before yer daddy even met her…”
Chris pretends to pay more attention to the fire even as it’s evident he only need let it take its course.
Lizzy knew that her father was not her biological father; everyone knew and no one made mention of it, accepting that her mother had died tragically and that David was her father. She seldom asked questions anymore, something that had become so infrequent that she hadn’t asked a question in a long while. Every answer her father had ever given her was remembered in full detail and compiled into a list she recalled only when she was at her most lonely.
At this moment, she rubs the tired lion on the hairclip always stuck in the front of her hair, the one she remembers fondly as the one her mother had given her, and asks the only question she ever seemed to ask anyone:
“What was she like?” Lizzy asks Chris for the umpteenth time.
“Uh, she was awesome and pretty…” Chris repeats, subdued.
Chris is reciting what he’s told her before; after one last exhale on the steadily growing fire, his eyes fill with a gentle sadness. He rests his elbow in the dirt just outside the pit, leans on his side, and props his tilted head in his hand. Lizzy can see the fire reflected and flickering in his eyes as he stares through it.
And, for the first time, Chris tells Lizzy (most of) the truth about her mother:
THE BIRTHMOTHER
I metcher mama at a bar in Florida.
What was she doing there?
Yer mama liked to drink before she had you.
[quick to amend his previous statement]
But don’t get me wrong. Of course she did, who doesn’t drink when they’er in their twenties. Which – if you ever touch a’ alcoholic drink – it better be when yer in yer twenties.
I met her. Her friends liked my friends. Naturally, her and I became friends.
[thinks a moment]
We used to hang out every so often, usually when she was lonely.
Were you like boyfriend and girlfriend?
No, pickle, it wasn’ like that. More like friends that saw each other when our other friends weren’t around.
We likt each other but we knew we weren’t gonna date an’ get married.
I remember yer mama in two ways.
Don’t take it like yer mama had a split personality.
She liked to have a good time. And yer mama…she had a wild streak. I remember seein’ it in her eyes, especially. It’s somethin’ I see in yer’s when yer havin’ a lot of fun, getting’ yerself worked up.
What does it look like?
It…looks…like…best words I can think of are “wild abandon.” You know what that means?
[lizzy nods]
She’d work herself out and be loud and funny. Her hair was always a mess, too. ‘Least when I saw her, ‘cause she’d always be rockin’ out to somethin’. She had fun. I knew a lot of people – ‘specially there – people that didn’t know how to have fun or didn’t want to or I dunno what.
But yer mama, she knew.
[pause] What was the other side?
I saw her gentle. I never got ta see her mad or anxious or nervous or anything – not really. Just this…man, this calm. This gentleness in some moments.
Eh, I was a loser back then anyway. I made money but I was’a douchebag – at least headin’ down the wrong path. Yer mama knew it. I’m act’lly pretty similar to the way I was then ‘cept on a different path. A better one. With you and yer daddy and uncle.
Pernicious, tha’ path I was on.
MISTAKES IN THE DISTANCE
Once they’ve roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, Lizzy has a text conversation with her father on Chris’ prepaid cell phone. She summarizes the previous two days, reminds him she’s safe and having fun, repeatedly asserts that Chris is taking good care of her, and describes the massive size and scale of her love for him.
She hands the phone back to Chris, and David texts him several questions.
Within a few minutes of handing the phone back, exhausted Lizzy falls asleep in the beach chair. Chris struggles to lift her, dragging her feet in the dirt as he carries her into the tent and lays her on a sleeping bag. She wakes briefly when Chris takes the hairclip out of the front of her hair. Her eyes flutter as he removes the clip and positions her head on the pillow, and she’s back asleep within seconds.
Backing out of the tent quietly, Chris carefully zips the door closed inch-by-silent-inch. He pokes the fire a few times, collapsing some of the top wood and releasing a stream of embers into the air. With an extra two pieces of wood tossed on top, he searches the duffle bag several minutes before finding the lighter fluid and the binoculars. He fills the lantern with the fluid and re-lights it.
It takes almost twenty minutes before he reaches the post again, examining the purple stuffed animal once more.
> “If’n you wanna protect yerself, yer gonna need ta put up a charm,” Chris had told April Mae during the last of their few late-night camping trips.
“Like what?” she asked, curious.
“Um…what do you find lucky?”
“Nothing…‘cept…” she trails off, embarrassed.
Chris isn’t familiar with the look of embarrassment on a woman so he pesters on.
“What? D’you forget? You ain’t got nothin’ lucky?”
“I do but…it’s stupid.”
The soggy stuffed animal is an elephant with tiny white tusks, a long purple trunk the length of its body, and enormous ears. It hadn’t been there longer than a few days, he decides before pressing on down the second path to the right. Another fifteen minutes and he sees distant lights.
He extinguishes the lantern in his hand and continues the last few steps in a thick darkness, his arms outstretched to prevent himself from walking face-first into anything. The square, yellow lights in the distance grow with each step but he stops forty yards out.
And he inhales deep, bringing the cold metal of the binoculars to his eyes.
A large portion of the gap between Chris and the distant, square yellow light is jumped in an instant. It’s a window and through the glass, a man stands with his shirt off: potbelly but not overweight; bald top with a ring of brown hair; and…
Chris tries to make out more details but the man leaves whatever room he had just been in. Another light in another room turns on and the man enters. His face is tiny on such a big, round head. A child runs into the room behind him and he lifts the little girl up, letting her rest on his arm while he…
The man, his child in tow, ducks in and out of view. The room is large but only one window has the shade drawn. Chris checks the other windows but finds all of them dark.
And with that, Chris turns to head back.
CHRIS E.L. GIBBERTS – AGE 11
They’re camping.
April Mae and Chris E.L. Gibberts.
Finally alone.
“Does your daddy know yer here?” she asks excitedly, crouching down. She has a battery-powered lantern with a bright white glow while Chris’ is fire-lit. April Mae turns hers low, then off, and she takes a seat facing Chris, her legs crossed and back straight, sitting on the un-rolled sleeping bags that cover the hard ground.
“My daddy’s bin’ dead since I’s four.”
The only light is the low flicking of the fire inside a tiny iron lamp between Chris and April Mae. The tent is an eerie dark blue when reflected in the lamp light, their shadows stretched across from one another and up into a point.
“How old’er you, kid?”
“Fifteen,” Chris lies.
He’s not even eleven and a half.
“Really? Cause yer dressed like a twelve year old,” she says, smiling.
Another button-up tucked into slacks, his only “dress up” outfit. It was what he wore to every mass so – if it looked good to God then it should like good on a secret date. Also, in the past year he had grown (quite painfully) into a much larger boy than most his age, 5’6 and 120 lbs. His hair’s short, which makes him look older, but he can’t grow facial hair and his clothes look like something a mother would hand-pick. Chris takes her statement as a good sign, because even twelve was older than eleven, and April Mae was sixteen.
She goes on goading him.
“Is yer mama gonna come out here lookin’ for you?”
“My mama can’t move ‘round much without my help these days,” Chris says, and it’s the truth. Since his mother and the minister had stopped holding private bible sessions, she had become withdrawn, eating more, hissing more often, and she had a wooden spoon she would bang on anything from a trashcan to his bare rear-end, something she had been doing much, much more often.
“Why can’t she—”
“I like your hair,” Chris interrupts; he’s done with questions.
April Mae’s hair is in a disorderly bob after maneuvering through a brushy forest with only a lantern. The stars had been gorgeous across the canvas of the sky but the thick forest blocked their view, a few slivers of moonlight peaking through the boughs.
“And your dress,” Chris adds quickly while April Mae pats the sides of her hair, insecurely. She had been about to say something – Chris could see it on her tongue, words to disregard his statement as nice but untrue – as she gently sweeps it back into a more orderly style.
“This?” she asks, looking down at the thin sundress.
Chris sits up and fixes her left strap, which had twisted.
April Mae fidgets, startled at Chris’ approach, but as he carefully fixes the strap and returns to his seat, beaming at her, she lets it slide. Her face remains, however, in a state of constant scrutiny – she watches Chris’ eyes (which never leave her face), and his smile (which never leaves his face), and his posture (which looks as if he’s perched), and then around at all the stuff he had brought with him.
“Where’d you get this tent?”
“It was my daddy’s. I found it behind the house. And I brought some comics and some cheese…” Chris turns around and fishes in a book bag behind him.
“Cheese?” April Mae eyes up the mound of plastic-sealed, yellow American cheese Chris pulls out.
“I read tha’ girls like red wine and cheese but I could only get some of my mama’s grape juice – I didn’ find no wine.”
There’s a Transformers thermos full of a red liquid and Chris pours the dark red juice into two plastic cups.
“Sorry, it’s a bit warm,” he tells her.
She lifts her cup and Chris doesn’t follow, just staring at her.
“It’s called a cheers,” she says.
He stares at her, still not understanding.
“You lift up yer cup and say somethin’ nice,” she continues.
“Oh,” and Chris lifts his glass up, quoting, “‘With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls; for stony limits cannot hold love out.’”
There’s a pause while they both hold their cups up: Chris holds it up because she hadn’t explained that you drink after a cheers; she continues because she’s unsure what he just said or what it means, eyeing him up as if he just confessed something inappropriate.
“Huh?” she asks.
“It’s uh…about meetin’ up with some’un even though…it seems like it ain’t likely to happin. It’s from some…faggy…book,” Chris looks down, ashamed.
“Oh…it was pretty. Did you bring any of ‘em books I always see you readin’ in church?”
“No,” he answers cautiously, keeping a distance between her and his books.
“Maybe bring ’em next time,” and she lifts the cup to her mouth. Chris is surprised by her reaction, keeping his cup in the air until she uses her empty hand to lift the bottom of his cup towards his face.
They both drink from their cups, immediately wincing at the taste.
“What kinda grape juice is that?” she asks, grimacing.
Both look at the mysterious liquid, swirling the cup.
“It’s my mama’s. She said it was made’a grapes. And it was in a large juice box she keeps on top’a the fridge but I’m tall ‘nuff I can reach it now,” he says, proud. “I dunno why she doesn’t keep it in the fridge, though.”
a brief interlude about the seven devil nation
The Return
On the afternoon I returned to Sensei Ki-Jo’s hillside house, it had been a week since I left.
Steve and Travis congratulated me on surviving.
Sensei Ki-Jo gave me a nod from his rocking chair in-between puffs on his pipe of Hacker and, that evening, we shared a massive feast together while I explained all about the ceremony; even Sensei Ki-Jo seemed happy by my return, something astounding considering the torture he had put me through.
***
They flew me in a private jet to Australia.
Actually, we took a helicopter from here to a plane, then went far out
of our way to some ritzy five-star hotel in Johannesburg. The Marquee Chanteuse. We got a room and they pampered the shit out of me. That woman, Charne – she was older, probably late-fifties, kind of strange and snotty – it seemed like that was how she lived on a daily basis. Massages and spa shit.
I don’t usually like that kind of stuff but since I had just been through shit and lived in a forest for years, most of that time being tortured…
[wink to Sensei Ki-Jo, who nods graciously]
Suffice it to say it was nice.
So they flew me to Australia in a private jet that had a gold-lined interior.
The first day, Charne had been quiet. She had that thin guy with her but I think he’s her assistant, or lover, something. It’s weird because he was her equal most of the time but she’d turn on him all of a sudden and make him sound like a servant, like he was beneath her.
I guess they could have been married.
But the second day, when they went with me to Australia, she spoke at length about the Seven Devils on the flight. Apparently they’re everywhere. Some actively work for the greater good, some keep quiet and hide, some are politicians, and everything in-between.
The whole point is to exist as a network for the greater good.
We refueled in Sydney then flew somewhere north.
We get to the airport and Charne hands me a wrap of cashier’s checks, probably about forty grand worth. And then her and that spindly fellow – Albert, he gave me an address and then they both got back on the plane and left.
The address was to a hair salon in Monto, Queensland – wherever the fuck that was…which, as it turns out, is in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Bus and train and so on.
Finally I just rent a car with a GPS. Get to Monto and it’s fucking desolate. Agricultural, beautiful, but desolate – the town was maybe a block long and it seemed like one block surrounded by residential housing surrounded by hours of empty land.
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