“I thought you had your marching orders,” Evan said, following him.
“I don’t listen to Leona. She’s just the hired help. You take orders from servants, my daddy says, and you end up a shit frog. We got them in the spring house. You ever see a shit frog? They go from the stable to the river, but they still can’t get it off them.” Theron grabbed the laundry rope with both hands and clung to it, letting his knees go slack. “You gonna take more pictures?”
“I don’t know,” Evan said, but he lifted his camera again, snapped some more of the boy, and then of the river, and the house, and the tire swing, and the Lucky Sack hanging on the willow. He looked all around, through his camera, as if trying to see something else worth photographing, when he seemed to freeze. He lowered the camera and turned to face Theron.
Theron shivered a little bit because of the man’s look, all cold and even angry, maybe.
“Where are the lines?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Kid, if you got a phone, where’s the pole? Where’re the lines? If the line’s down, you got to have a line in the first place, kid. What kind of game is this?”
Theron didn’t have an answer, not yet anyway. He said, “Dang.”
From the shed, a series of shouts, cusswords as strong as Theron had ever heard from the boys at Isthmus.
The stranger named Evan turned around at the sound, took in the whole landscape, the house, the river, the shed, the springhouse, the laundry rope, the bay, the boats, the way the grass was new and green and damp. He walked over to the Lucky Sack, and Theron shouted, “Mister! Evan! Hey!”
But the man had already opened the sack, his face turning white, and he looked at Theron, his eyes all squinching up, and Daddy began screaming at the top of his lungs from the shed, and Old Moses, the horse, started thumping at the wood.
“You sick fucks,” Evan said, weeping, “you sick fucks, you said it was a cat, you sick…” But the sobbing took him over, racking his body, the convulsions of sadness shaking him.
Theron blurted, “It’s bad luck to look in the Sack, mister.”
“Who is it, you sick fuck, what is this?”
Theron tugged at the red bandanna around his neck. “It’s private.”
“Listen, you.” Evan raised both fists and brought them down on the boy, knocking him to the ground.
Theron was angry, and knew he shouldn’t, but told him anyway because he hated keeping the secret. “It’s the first girl I ever kissed. It’s the part of her that’s sacred. It’s the part that made me a man!”
But then Mama was there, behind the man, and hit him with the back of the hoe, just on his skull, and the glasses flew off first, and then his hands wriggled like nightcrawlers, and he crumpled to the ground.
3
Milla held on tight to Mama’s skirt, her brown eyes wide, her hair a tangly weedy mess. She looked like an unmade bed of a baby sister; when Theron got up from the ground, he went and lifted her up. “It’s okay, it’s just fine, Milla-Billa-Filla,” he said as he bounced her around. She was only three, and she looked scared. Theron loved her so much, his sister. He had prayed for a brother when the birthing woman was in their house, but when he had seen Milla in the shed, lying there in his mother’s arms, while the birthing mother screamed as Daddy tied her to the mast, he knew that he would love that little girl until the day he died, and protect her from all harm.
Mama said, in her tired way, “Ronny, why’d you bring him down here?”
Theron kissed his sister on the cheek and looked up to his mother. He was always frightened of his mother’s rages, for they, like the hurting season, came in the spring and lasted until midsummer. “I—I don’t know.”
“That ain’t good enough. And don’t lie to me, or you shall eat the dust of the earth all your days and travel on your belly.”
“All right. I guess because I wanted Daddy to stop hurting for a while. I want us all to stop hurting for a while, Mama,” and then he found himself crying, because he didn’t like the hurting season, and he didn’t completely understand the reason for it.
For a moment, he saw the temper begin to flare in his mother’s eyes, and then she softened. She bent down, dropping the hoe at her side, and gathered him up in her arms, him and Milla both, hugged tight to her bosom. “Oh, my little boy, you may be a man now, but you will always, always be my little boy.” She threatened to weep, too, and Theron figured they’d be the soggiest mess of humans in the county, but Mama held back. Daddy was silent in the shed, no doubt exhausted.
Theron thought it might be the right time to ask the question he’d had on his mind since he first discovered about the hurting season. “Why, Mama?”
“Ronny?”
“Why does it have to be us?”
“You mean about the season?”
“Not just the season,” he said, drying his tears, “but us here, and them,” he looked across the bay to Tangier, “over there. We don’t mix.”
His mother reached over to his forehead and traced her finger along the brand that had been put there, a simple X. He felt her nail gently trace the lines of the letter. “It’s our mark,” she said, “from the beginning of creation. Passed through the fathers to the sons.” Theron looked at Milla. “What about the daughters?”
“Uh-huh, that, too, but no birthing, no creation. Our womb must not bear fruit. You remember the scripture.”
He did: “And your seed shall not pollute your womankind, but shall be passed through the women of the land to bring your sons and daughters into lesser sin. And of your daughter, the fruit of her womb shall be sewn shut, and neither man nor beast may enter therein. Behold, you and your seed shall sin that the world may be saved.”
But when he told the lines to one of the boys in Isthmus, the boy laughed and said he knew the Bible by heart and that wasn’t in it. But in the hide-covered Bible that Leona kept above the bread box, it was right there, in Genesis.
The man on the ground began to stir, his hands twitching.
“I’m gonna take him to the shed,” Theron said, pulling away from the warmth of his mother’s arms.
4
The man was heavy.
Dragging him through the mud was made more difficult because of the way he was moving, for his legs kicked a bit, and Evan was groaning, but the blood had stopped from the wound on the top of his skull. Theron felt muscles in his arms and legs begin to plump with this effort. He was sore from riding, too, which didn’t help. He smelled the spice and meat from the stewpot and felt crazy hungry, but dinner would wait until after the important work.
When he reached the shed, Evan looked up at him, although the glasses had fallen somewhere along the way. Theron could tell by the way he was squinting that he wasn’t seeing much right in front of his face.
“It’s okay, mister,” the boy said, “don’t worry.”
Evan, scrunching up his face, not quite sure where he was, coughed up some spit, which dribbled down the side of his chin. “Uh-awh,” was the noise he made.
Theron rapped on the shed door, not wanting to let go of the man’s shoulder with his other hand.
“Daddy,” he called, “open up, Daddy!”
The door opened inward, and his father seemed to know what to do. He bent down on one knee, cradling Evan’s face between his hands. His father’s face was slick with greasy sweat, and there was blood around his eyes where he’d driven the fish hooks beneath the lids. He brought his face close to Evan’s and kissed the sputtering man on the lips.
Theron knew then that he had done the right thing, for it would mean that Spring would come fast now, and that Daddy didn’t have to suffer through the hurting season alone. While he kissed the man, Daddy brought the oyster boat hook with its length of chain down beside their lips, and began pressing its rusty point into the man’s forehead to carve the X of their mark upon him so that the transfer of hurting could begin.
5
Laundry dried by three, with Leona taking it down, and
laying it out across the basket. Milla was playing on the tire swing, head first through it, her small fingers clutching desperately at the black sides as she twirled around. Mama was napping, and the horses had calmed after the first wave of screeching. Theron sat out on the dock, twiddling his toes in the icy water, and soon, Daddy came and sat down beside him.
“Give him some rest,” Daddy said, but the pain was gone from his eyes, for the first time since Winter Festival.
“No more storms, I reckon,” Theron said, feeling the weight of his father’s arms around his shoulders. A bird was singing from one of the trees, and there were ducks bickering out on the river. Across the bay, the solitary Tangier, so close, so distant.
“You may be right.”
“Daddy?”
“Boy?”
“Why does it have to hurt?”
“What do you mean?”
“This life. Why does there have to be a hurting season?”
His father had no reply.
That was what disturbed him about life, the very mystery of it, the deepness of its river, where on the surface all was visible, but beneath, something tugged and grabbed and drowned, and yet the current flowed, regardless.
“Look there.” His father pointed off toward Tangier.
Theron squinted but could see only the island and the emptiness beyond it.
“The curvature of the earth,” his father said. “Why does it go in a circle? Who knows? It’s for God to decide. But we have our task here. We follow the rituals so the circle remains unbroken.”
Theron was fourteen, a man now, he had been kissed, he had helped his father with the serious work of life, he had the mark, but he thought, looking at the eastern horizon, that one day he would go beyond Chite and Tangier and even Isthmus, and see the places that the Yankee had seen, in some yonder springtime. He would take what he knew of his task, of his mark, and show the world what it meant.
I am Infinite, I Contain Multitudes
1
First off, I’ll tell you, I saw both their files: Joe’s and the old man’s. I had to bribe a psych tech with all kinds of unpleasant favors, but I got to see their files. I want you to sit through my story, so I’ll only tell you half of what I found. It was about Joe. He had murdered, sure, but more than that, he had told his psychiatrist that he wanted only to help people. He wanted only to keep them from hurting themselves. He wanted to love. Remember this.
It makes sense of everything I’ve been going through at Aurora.
Let me tell you something about Aurora, something that nobody seems to know but me: it is forsaken. Not just because of what you did to get there, or how haywire your brain is, but because it’s built over the old Aurora. Right underneath it, where we do the farming. I heard this from Steve Parkinson, right underneath it is the old Aurora. I saw pictures in an album they keep in Intake. It used to be a dusty wasteland. Yes, the old Aurora was smack dab underground. Back then they believed it was better, if you were like us, to never see the light of day, to be chained like animals and have your food shoved to you in a slot at the bottom of your door. Back then, they believed that nobody in the town outside the fence wanted to know that you were there. But that’s not why it’s forsaken. You will know soon enough.
There was a town of Aurora once, too, but then it was bought out by Fort Salton, and ‘round about 1949 they did the first tests.
I heard, from local legend, that there were fourteen men down there, just like in a bunker at the end of the war.
They did the tests out at the mountain, but some people said that those men in Aurora, underground, got worse afterward.
I heard a story from my bunkmate that one guy got zapped and fried right in front of an old-timer’s eyes. Like he was locked in on the wrong side of the microwave door.
The old-timer, he’s still at Aurora; been there since he was nineteen, in ‘forty-six. Had a problem, they said, with people after the war. He was in the Pacific, and had come back more than shell-shocked. That’s all I ever knew about him, before I arrived. You can safely assume that he killed somebody or tried to kill himself or can’t live without wanting to kill somebody. It’s why we’re all here. He’s about as old as my father, but he doesn’t look it. Maybe Aurora’s kept him young.
He was always over there, across the Yard. He knew everything about everyone. I knew something about him, too. Actually, we all pretty much knew it.
He thought he was Father to us all. I don’t mean like my father, or the guy who knocked your mother up. I mean the Father, as in God The.
In his mind, he created the very earth upon which we stood, his men, his sons. He could name each worm, each sowbug, each and every centipede that burrowed beneath the flagstone walk; the building was built of steel and concrete and had been erected upon the backs of laborers who had died within the walls of Aurora; the sky was anemic, the air dry and calm; he could glance in any direction at any given moment and know the inner workings of his men as we wandered the Yard, or know, in a heartbeat, no, the whisper of a heartbeat, where our next step would take us. There was no magic or deception to his knowledge. He was simply aware; call it, as he did, hyperawareness, from which had come his nickname, Hype. He was also criminally insane by a ruling of the courts of the state of California, as were most men in Aurora.
I watched him sometimes, standing there while we had our recreation time, or sitting upon the stoop to the infirmary, gazing across the sea of men. His army, he called them, his infantry: they would one day spread across the land like the fires of Armageddon.
The week after Danny Boy got out was the first time he ever spoke to me.
2
“Hey,” he said, waving his hand. “Come on over here.”
I glanced around. I had been at Aurora for only four months, and I’d heard the legends of Hype. How he called on you only after watching you for years. How he could be silent for a year and then, in the span of a week, talk your head off. I couldn’t believe he was speaking to me. He nodded when he saw my confusion. I went over to him.
“You’re the one,” he said, patting me on the back. You couldn’t help but look him in the eye, he was so magnetic, but all the guys had told me not to look him in the eye, not to stare straight at him at any point. They all warned me because they had failed at it. They had all been drawn to his presence at one time or another. He was pale white. He kept in the shack at all times. His hair was splotchy gray and white and longer than regulation. His eyes were nothing special: round and brown and maybe a little flecked with gold. (“He milks you with those eyes,” Joe had told me.) There were wrinkles on his face, just like with any old man, but his were thin and straight, as if he had not ever changed his expression since he’d been young.
“I’m the one? The one,” I said, nodding as if I understood. I had a cigarette, left over from the previous week. I offered it to him.
He took the cigarette, thrust it between his lips, and sucked on it. I glanced around for an orderly or psych tech, but we were alone together. I didn’t know how I was going to light the cigarette for him. They all called me Doer, which was short for Good-Doer, because I tended to light cigarettes when I could, shine shoes for one of the supervisors I’d ass kiss, or sweep floors for the lady janitors. I did the good deeds because I’d always done them, all my life. Even when I murdered, I was respectful. But since there was no staff member around, I couldn’t get a light for the old man.
Hype seemed content just to suck that cigarette, speaking through the side of his mouth. “Yeah, you know what it means, but you’re it. Danny Boy, he would’ve been it, but he had to pretend.”
He drew the cigarette from his mouth and held it in his fingertips, “He is of a certain breed of sociopath, you must’ve recognized that. He had to perform for his doctor and the board. He studied Mitch over in B—the one who cries and moans all the time. Mitch with the tattoos?”
I nodded.
“He studied him for three years before perfecting his technique. Let
me tell you about Danny Boy. He was bom in Barstow, which may just doom a man from the start. He began his career by murdering a classmate in second grade. It was a simple thing to do, for they played out in the desert often, and it was not unusual for children to go missing out there. He managed to get that murder blamed on a local sad little man. Later, dropping out of high school, he murdered a teacher, and then, when he killed three women in Laguna, he got caught. The boy could not cry. It was not in him to understand why anyone made a fuss at all over murder. It was as natural to him as is breathing to you.” He paused, and drew something from his breast pocket. He flicked his lighter up and lit the cigarette. Although we weren’t supposed to have lighters, it didn’t surprise me too much that Hype had one. As an old-timer he had special privileges, and as something of a seer, he was respected by the staff as well as by his men. It’s strange to think that I was suitably impressed by this, his having a lighter, but I was. It might as well have been a gold brick, or a gun.
He continued, “Danny Boy is going to move in with one of the women who work in the cafeteria. She’s never had a lover, and certainly never dreamed of having one as handsome as Danny Boy. Within six weeks, he will kill her and keep her skin for a souvenir. Danny Boy would’ve been it, but he wasn’t a genuine person. You are. You know that, don’t you?”
“What, I cry, so that makes me real?”
He shook his head, puffing away, trying to suppress a laugh. “No. But I know about you, kid. You shouldn’t even be here, only you come from a rich family who bought the best lawyer in L.A. I assume that in Court Ninety, he argued for your insanity and you played along ‘cause you thought it would go easier for you in Aurora or Atascadero than in Chino or Chuckawalla. Tell me I’m wrong. No? How long you been here?”
“If you’re so smart, you already know.”
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